British Experimental Fiction

(This post is also available at The Reading Experience.)

For American readers, in considering the development of "experimental" fiction during the 1960s and after, we are most likely to focus mainly on American writers- the postmodernists and their successors (the latter probably less well-known than the first generation of postmodernists such as John Barth or Robert Coover.) In this domain of English-language fiction, British writers have been less dominant, with fewer "name" writers or specific groups inclined to develop experimental forms or challenge stylistic norms, to the point that many readers (and critics) no doubt assume that postwar British fiction did not really produce a notable contingent of experimental writers of fiction.

Joe Darlington's The Experimentalists (2022) informs us that the view that British fiction ought not to encompass such a practice was (and likely still is) an article of belief within British literary culture itself. The Experimentalists unequivocally confirms the existence in 1960s England of not just a few barmy writers dabbling in experimentation here and there but a quite cohesive group of writers seriously committed to experimental writing who recognized each other as fellow travelers on the experimental path and, for a few years, at least, established a network of reinforcement that attempted to instill some respect for experimental writing in the staid confines of a stuffy literary culture. But the resistance was considerable. In that literary culture in the early 1960s, "many readers and writers had sourced on literary experiment and sought a return to Victorian values" Indeed, "writers like C..P. Snow, Angus Wilson, and Kingsley Amis trod a path that. . .would later [be] describe{d} as 'neo-Victorian,' novels about moral conflicts, usually involving an institution of the establishment such as universities and government departments." Experimentalism was "decadent" and un-British.

This situation was especially frustrating to B.S. Johnson, probably the best-known of the British experimentalists. (Darlington also includes lengthy discussions of Anthony Burgess and Angela Carter, although neither of them were really part of the self-identified group of experimental writers, for whom Johnson, as well as, perhaps, Ann Quin, stand as the representative figures.) If there was a revolutionary voice among the group, ready to defend the cause to the unconverted, it was Johnson, which, as a result, gave him a reputation for being strident and, at times, unpleasant, even to his ostensible friends and allies. Johnson was also arguably the most financially successful of the experimentalists, although Quin's Berg (1964) also did quite well, even though his experiments were probably the most audacious--in particular, his infamous The Unfortunates (1969), the "book in a box," consisting of separately bound sections which can be shuffled in any order the reader wishes. The failure of the experimental movement to extend itself much beyond the early 1970s strongly contributed to Johnson's suicide in 1973, which unfortunately kept his published legacy fairly small: six published novels during his lifetime, plus one posthumous novel, as well as some poems and nonfiction.

Johnson's suicide, of course, followed shortly on that of Ann Quin, whose experimental ambitions were perhaps as bold as Johnson's but whose mental fragility ultimately prevented her from fully realizing those ambitions (four published novels, plus a posthumous book containing a novella and some stories (see my review of the latter). Her Berg may have been the first novel to really call public attention to the rise of a new experimental novel in the U.K., but she was never really able to follow it up with work that was equally successful, either commercially or critically. Her story as cumulatively told by Darlington is a pretty sad one. Although the nature of her mental illness seems never to have been quite diagnosed, she lived a life marked by periods of restless exploration followed by a collapse into confusion and uncertainty Her work may have been the attempt to integrate her psychological experience in a way that avoided conventional expression but that achieved its own artistic order nonetheless. Both the formal devices she employed and many of her characters seek a more adequate means of organizing an unstable reality.

Darlington's account includes numerous other writers either loosely or more directly allied with an emergent movement of which Johnson and Quin are the most visible representatives. Among them are Brigid Brophy, Alan Burns (a close friend of Quin's and author of The Angry Brigade), Giles Gordon, and Maureen Duffy. (Most of these writers are also discussed in Francis Booth's Amongst Those Left: The Experimental Novel 1940-1980, published in 2012. Booth's book is much longer and more discursive than Darlington's, but it also features such writers as Anna Kavan, Nicholas Mosley, and Rosalind Belben, all of whose work surely has some salience to postwar British experimentalism.) Darlington also devotes substantial attention to Eva Figes and Christine Brooke-Rose, the latter of whom surely belongs on any list of important 20th century experimental writers in any language. These discussions of writers such as Figes and Brooke-Rose (and obviously Quin) underline the centrality of women writers to the British experimental movement of the 1960s, a phenomenon that significantly contrasts with the postmodern episode in American fiction during the same period. Almost all of the major figures associated with the initial wave of postmodernists were male, although in their immediate wake (70s and 80s), notable women experimental writers certainly did begin to assert themselves. Women seem to have been at forefront of literary experiment in the U.K., and most of them saw their commitment to experiment in fiction as closely connected to their noncomformity as feminists.

In general, the British experimentalists saw their unconventional fiction as a manifestation of their broadly radical politics much more directly than the American postmodernists did. This is a conceptual difference that continues to characterize approaches to experimental fiction. For those, like many of the British writers, the disruptiveness to established practice represented by experiment in the literary work is analogous to the disruptiveness of dissenting political views. And while there were politically-charged fictions offered by the American writers (Coover's The Public Burning, for example), for the most part American experimental fiction in the 1960s and 70s devoted its ambitions primarily to challenging the hegemony of unexamined literary conventions per se. This distinction between what might be called the aesthetic mode and the political mode doesn't necessarily imply a difference in quality or scale of experiment, although it does suggest a divergence of motive in the pursuit of experimental goals. Perhaps the main reason the British experimental movement faded from public view after the early 1970s (aside from the loss of Quin and Johnson, which was admittedly crushing) is that, once the topical concerns and political causes many of these writers embraced began to seem dated, so did their work.

However, it is also the case that the American postmodern movement crested at about the same time, although arguably the American writers had more successors who continued to write adventurous fiction that followed the model the first-wave postmodernists established. There are certainly current British writers writing unconventional fiction (Ansgar Allen Paul Griffiths, the writers published by Grand Iota press), but, along with the admirable service the books by Booth and Darlinger provide by highlighting these writers and this period in British fiction, they also remind us that the attention that was given to experimental fiction in the postwar era was short-lived, and British fiction since then has not really been a notable source of experimental writing. Of course, we are also currently in a period in which mainstream literary culture is arguably less hospitable to experimental fiction than it has been in a century.

The Experimentalists is a well-written and informed book that chooses to tell a story about British experimental fiction briskly organized through narrative. For this reason, it should serve as a very effective introduction to readers less familiar with the writers and the movement it chronicles. For those already familiar with some of the figures included, it illuminates the cultural context in which the movement rose and fell and clarifies the relationships among the various writers in a way that confirms that they did share a collective ambition to revitalize literature by developing new literary techniques during what they perceived to be a period of stagnation in British literature. But the story Darlington tells is inescapably elegiac, as a group of gifted writers with admirable intentions are ultimately defeated (as a group, at least) by an indifferent literary establishment, but also their own human weaknesses.