Alan Burns — Europe After the Rain [1965], Dreamerika! [1972], The Angry Brigade [1973]

Alan Burns’s intriguing and original fictions have not had the pleasure of a second life in the manner of fellow British brains Ann Quin or B.S. Johnson. His first novel (barring Buster in New Writers 1), is Europe After the Rain, a classic postwar novel probing the randomness of evil: bleak staccato prose limning a scorched wartime landscape. His efforts in the cut-up field are what set him apart from other novelists, however. His fourth novel (or fifth counting Buster) is a splendid example of the cut-up-collage technique at its most meaningful and potent. Having previously considered the technique a passé relic of sixties pomo excess, Burns has proven to me that an explosion of meaning can be compressed into each page with creative and playful juxtapositions of text and newspaper clippings. Dreamerika! nods to Kafka’s Amerika (which Kafka wrote without having visited—Burns moved to America in the 70s, after publishing this novel), except this is ‘A Surreal Fantasy’ involving the namesake of the Kennedys, satirising the rampant reign of corruption and capitalism after the peace-love dream of the sixties died. Described in the blurb as a ‘novel of lies, surreal-biography, fantasy-history, fusion of fact and dream’ Dreamerika! resembles (and is as successful as) Ann Quin’s similarly satirical Tripticks, J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, and Michel Butor’s demented road trip Mobile, and its surreal text mingles in perfect sync with the cut-out headlines and paper pages, the prose having a more “ordered” feel than in a novel such as Babel while still retaining an original weirdness. Burns followed this with a more conventional effort (in terms of prose), The Angry Brigade. Here he tried to write a novel that had more mass appeal to provide shoes for his children. Parting from his mentor and regular publisher Calder, Burns released this novel that uses straightforward “spoken” accounts to recreate a fictitious protest faction that balloons into violence and murder. An inventive look at the poison that can infect well-meaning causes and lead to the sort of fascist madness that makes our planet such a shameful waste of skin. These three novels represent the range of skill Burns brought to his full-length works: as with B.S. Johnson or Ann Quin, no novel is a mere retread of the previous. Each seeks to break new ground and open up new avenues in fiction and makes the whole enterprise seem effortless. Burns’s marvellous novels are in dire need of republication (one, Babel, is available on demand from Marion Boyars, the rest are all unattainable even in the used market).

Bibliography:

Novels:

Buster (in New Writers 1), John Calder, 1961.

Europe After the Rain, John Calder, 1965.

Celebrations, Calder & Boyars, 1967.

Babel, Calder & Boyars, 1969.

Dreamerika!: A Surrealist Fantasy, Calder & Boyars, 1972.

The Angry Brigade, Allison & Busby, 1973.

The Day Daddy Died, Allison & Busby, 1981.

Revolutions of the Night, Allison & Busby, 1986.

Gabriel Josipovici — The Present [1975]

Gabriel Josipovici has been working in the minimalist modernist mode (minimomode?) since the late 1960s, producing over five decades a stream of short novels where the narrative position is continually being skewed, time, place, and even character are equally untrustworthy, and the story seemingly falls into the interstices between everyday conversation and trivial dramas. In a Hotel Garden and Conversations in Another Room flaunt Josipovici’s use of the novel-of-dialogue technique, caulked with assisting prose whenever required, exploring alongside writers like Manuel Puig and Ariel Dorfman this Barthesian notion in the 1980s, punching against the intrusive narrator and allowing the reader to ‘construct’ the novel alongside the writer—a technique that makes for ‘pageturning’ works that spit on real ‘pagetuners’ that lard their pages with boring description and nonsense learned in writing classes. Contre-Jour is a sneaky novel that makes tremendous use of the (usually tired) technique of a second-person address to an unnamed listener. The speakers and addressees are unnamed apart from mother, daughter, father, and the subtitle A Triptych After Pierre Bonnard clues the reader in to the sleights-of-hand at play. Josipovici’s style evolved into the ‘90s with the atypical breakless ramble Moo Pak, presented in the form of a literary essay or dérive, drifting from philosophy to peevish contemporary commentary to longer musings on the late life of Jonathan Swift, and Proust, encompassing a breathtaking range of literary history. More recent works include Everything Passes: a short prose work that is a curious and haunting rumination on loss, the passing of time, the abandonment of family, and people who like to write Rabelais criticism. Making use of strangely effective repetitions, blank space, conspicuous absence of invading overarching narrator, tagless dialogue, the novel is richer upon re-reading. Only Joking is a novel (almost) all in dialogue, a fast-moving noir-of-sorts, comedy-of-sorts, thriller-of-sorts, and sort-of-sorts. Similar in tone to Gilbert Adair’s A Closed Book, another cunning (almost) all-in-dialogue novel, this one concerns a cast of characters whose relations to one another and place in the plot is only learned as the novel progresses, creating intrigue and setting up a world from what is omitted. This brings us to The Present: three characters inhabiting fluctuating realities in the same London flat. As the blurb outlines, the novel aims to explore “that feeling of being becalmed, adrift in a present cut off from past or future, when the imagination churns furiously and at random, re-arranging compulsively a handful of elements into story after story,” which sums up the effect of this short novel perfectly. Each novel from Josipovici is an intelligent and original tussle with the form, and mixes seeming simplicity with re-readable complexity, producing works that engage at the superficial and theoretical levels, a rare feat for an experimental novelist. About ten novels from Josipovici remain out of print—an omnibus is desperately needed to keep this vital and prolific author in our purviews.

Editions:

Hardback, Gollancz, 1975.

Bibliography:

Novels:

The Inventory, Michael Joseph, 1968

Words, Gollancz, 1971.

The Present, Gollancz, 1975.

Migrations, Harvester Press, 1977.

The Echo Chamber, Harvester Press, 1980

The Air We Breathe, Harvester Press, 1981

Conversations in Another Room, Methuen, 1984

Contre-Jour: A Triptych After Pierre Bonnard, Carcanet Press, 1986

The Big Glass, Carcanet Press, 1991

In a Hotel Garden, Carcanet Press, 1993

Moo Pak, Carcanet Press, 1994

Now, Carcanet Press, 1998

Goldberg: Variations, Carcanet Press, 2002

Everything Passes, Carcanet Press, 2006

After and Making Mistakes, Carcanet Press, 2009

Only Joking, CB Editions, 2010

Infinity, Carcanet Press, 2012

Hotel Andromeda, Carcanet Press, 2014

Short fiction:

Mobius the Stripper: Stories and Short Plays, Gollancz, 1974

Four Stories, Menard Press, 1977

In the Fertile Land, Carcanet Press, 1987

Steps: Selected Fiction and Drama, Carcanet Press, 1990

Heart's Wings & Other Stories, Carcanet Press, 2010

Raymond Federman — The Voice in the Closet / La Voix Dans Le Cabinet De Debarras [1979]

Perhaps Federman’s most challenging formal experiment, if not his most audacious, this short prose work was published in 1979 in a French/English paperback alongside Maurice Roche’s inscrutable French short Echos. For over four decades, Federman strove to tell and retell, construct and reconstruct, his life, exploring and exploding metafiction in a manner unlike any other writer of the period, resulting in a corpus of nonpareil novels that constitute some of the best of postmodernism (and some of the best novels, period). This opens: “here now again selectricstud makes me speak with its balls all balls foutaise sam says in his closet upstairs but this time it’s going to be serious no more masturbating on the third floor” and continues in one unbroken stream-of-conscious ‘sentence’, incorporating much of the self-conscious matter that perforates his long novels alongside attempts to place himself inside the head of little Federman, locked in a closet by his mother to avoid being taken to the camps in 1942, an incident illumined in more detail in his last novel Shhh: A Story of a Childhood. This short splurge of words can be read as Federman’s sincere attempt to formalise that pivotal moment in the young man and writer’s life: his mother, by choosing to “save” him in this manner, set in motion a re-birth of sorts for Federman, and his extraordinary life, lived in loud colours, is the homage he made to his mother’s sacrifice, and to his sisters (to whom this work is dedicated). The task of attempting to find a formal expression for his life’s experiences has also provided Federman with scope for despair and difficulty, but has yielded pyrotechnical masterpieces like Double or Nothing and Take It or Leave It. The last word(s) from Ray:

I am back again in the actuality of my fragile predicament backtracked into false ambiguities smelling my hands by reflex out of the closet now to affirm the certainty of how it was annul the hypothesis of my excessiveness on which he postulates his babblings his unqualifiable design as I register the final absence of my mother crying softly in the night my father coughing his blood down the staircase they threw sand in their eyes struck their back kicked them to exterminate them his calculations yes explanations yes the whole story crossed out my whole family parenthetically xxxx into typographic symbols while I endure my survival from its implausible beginning to its unthinkable end yes false balls all balls ejaculating on his machine reducing my life to the verbal rehearsals of a little boy half naked trying to extricate himself as he goes on formulating yet another paradox

Editions:

Paperback, Coda Press, 1979.

Paperback, Station Hill Press, 1985.

Paperback, Stacherone Books, 2002.

Bibliography (English works):

Novels:

Double or Nothing, Swallow Press, 1971.

Take It or Leave It, Fiction Collective, 1976.

The Voice in the Closet, Coda Press, 1979.

The Twofold Vibration, Indiana University Press / Harvester Press, 1982.

Smiles on Washington Square, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1985.

To Whom It May Concern, FC2, 1990.

Aunt Rachel’s Fur, FC2, 2001.

My Body in Nine Parts, Stacherone Books, 2005.

Return to Manure, FC2, 2006.

Shhh: The Story of a Childhood, Stacherone Books, 2010.

Short Fiction:

More Loose Shoes and Smelly Socks, Six Gallery Press, 2005.

The Twilight of the Bums (with George Chambers), Stacherone Books, 2008.

The Carcasses (A Fable), BlazeVox, 2009.

Curtis White — Metaphysics in the Midwest [1988]

Anti-mainstream, anti-middlebrow, anti-corporate culture critic Curtis White, author of The Middle Mind and The Science Delusion, continues to entertain in his non-fiction with contrarian and iconoclastic views. Before becoming a culture critic, White was a practitioner of rumbustious comedic fictions leaping over the boundaries of historiography and good taste, as evidenced in this second collection of short stories. The stories are set in Illinois, where White was raised and professored, where now he raises and professors, and each mingle local history, cultural references, taboos, and surreal humour with varying degrees of success. The titular story concerns a Professor Feeling, a crazy scholar of metaphysics who each night visits a boy called The Commissioner to talk about baseball. In ‘A Disciplined Life’ an Italian immigrant finds himself locked up prison upon arriving in America, and his wife and chlild housed in the prison warden’s home. In ‘More Crimes Against the People of Illinois’, an office typist attempts to perpetrate a rebellion by baring her breasts in the office, before being arrested for her protestations of office prostitution. ‘Howdy Doody is Dead’ finds a puppet seeking vengeance on his evil double. ‘Critical Theory’ describes a road trip between Horkheimer and Adorno in America after fleeing from the Nazis. White captures the vernacular of the region and sends it up at the same time in bawdy stories like ‘The Order of Virility’ and ‘Malice’. These summaries fail to capture the sort of freewheeling antics at play in White’s often cruel and sexually lurid stories, so take a dip into the White waters. His strongest works are the novels Memories of My Father Watching TV, with the rare boast of a David Foster Wallace blurb, and Requiem, which I consider his masterpiece.

Editions:

Hardcover, Sun & Moon Press, 1988.

Paperback, Sun & Moon Press, 1989.

Bibliography:

Novels:

Anarcho-Hindu, FC2, 1995.

Memories of My Father Watching TV, Dalkey Archive, 1998.

Requiem, Dalkey Archive, 2001.

America’s Magic Mountain, Dalkey Archive, 2004.

Short fiction:

Heretical Songs, FC2, 1981.

Metaphysics in the Midwest, Sun & Moon Press, 1988.

The Idea of Home, Sun & Moon Press, 1993.

Madeline Gins — What the President will Say and Do!! [1984]

Madeline Gins, a recently expired (1941-2014) artist, architect, and poet from New York, made her mark through her architectural work with Shusaku Arawaka, husband and lifelong collaborator, and produced several books of exploratory prose and poetry throughout her bustling existence. The first, Word Rain (or A Discursive Introduction to the Philosophical Investigation of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says), has long vanished (in spite of this blogger’s frustrated attempts to procure a copy, prices fluctuating from £10 to £1000), was described by Richard Kostelanetz as a “touchstone of innovative prose”, meaning part of the “concrete” scene to emerge in the wake of John Cage. Mr. Cage, in fact, provided an acrostic blurb for this collection, spelling out the author’s name in a vertical strip across his lines of praise, alongside Robert Creeley and Ed Sanders (author of Shards of God). Is it prose, is it poetry, is it, in Sasha Sokolov’s term, prosetry? The answer is both—or neither—or the first—or the second—or a chimpanzee’s armpit. This is a book of nonsense, in essence, and as a champion of nonsense (all nonsense is comedic), I praise the chutzpah of the author and publisher for unleashing it upon the world in the name of Art. Language is twisted and womanhandled beyond recognition for the duration to satirical effect (the opening ‘Presidential Poems’ are idiotic footnoted versions of ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Star’ authored by various prezzies), and the titular centrepiece of the book comprises capitalised lines of nonsensical and hilarious things such as “FILL THE OCEAN WITH COTTON!” or “COLLECT BOTTOMS NON-DISCRIMINATORILY” or “PREVENT A CONGESTION OF TRIANGLES”, a showcase of the absurd on a par with the Pythons or other comic manglers of language. The remaining pieces are short “fictions” written in faux-medical and mathematical modes, or in the form of lists, chronologies, and instructional matter, concluding with a patience-testing although more coherent “essay” on the word THE in fiction (including examples of the word THE being used in fiction). Perhaps there is meaning to be found in that piece, or perhaps an octopus is mating within the ventricles of hope. Co-creator of the Reversible Destiny Foundation—a collective of architects and artists who take a corporeal approach in the creation of art—Gins is also responsible for designing parks and buildings, among them Bioscleave House and the Reversible Destiny Lofts (according to Wikipedia). Might one label this material, excuse me, “pretentious?” Perhaps. But the spirit of play, the pleasure in taking apart and reconstructing language, the skill in forcing the reader to re-question the act of reading: these are hallmarks of some of the most vital works of literature of our time. WtPwSaD!! is a mere curio. However, if chanced upon in some university library, or progressive artists’ commune of some sort, I would recommend having a flicker through to be amused and baffled in equal measure. Fans of the nonsensical might also like to read Kenneth Gangemi’s Corroborree: A Book of Nonsense. Or, you know, Edward Lear or Spike Milligan. Let’s ride a balloon into the purple sponge. Peace. (Read excerpts here).

Editions:

Hardcover, Station Hill Press, 1984.

Bibliography:

Fiction:

Word Rain (or A Discursive Introduction to the Philosophical Investigation of G,R,E,T,A, G,A,R,B,O, It Says), Grossman, 1969.

Intend, Tau/ma, 1973.

What the President Will Say and Do!!, Station Hill Press, 1984.

Helen Keller or Arawaka, Burning Books, 1994.

Paul West — Colonel Mint [1972]

Prolific Derbyshire-born novelist, memoirist, poet, and critic Paul West changed tense on October 18^th (2015). His vast corpus is intimidating for the newcomer, and no fervent Westites exist at present to help us navigate the five decades’ worth of fiction and non-fiction. The Review of Contemporary Fiction published an issue in 1993 on West and Alexander Theroux, after which West penned ten published novels (and various unpublished ones), however, this might help the reader to find a footing. I chose Colonel Mint as the cheapest out of print West available (a large swathe of West is oop), and this proved a fortuitous selection. West’s first two decades seem to have been spent writing verbally dextrous comic fiction of a surreal nature, from the Alley Jaggers trilogy (West’s “British” period), to novels with fantastic titles like Caliban’s Filibuster written after West’s lifelong exile to America. This hilarious and shocking comic novel concerns the titular hero: an astronaut who witnesses the sighting of an angel from a spacecraft’s window. Upon his return he is isolated and interrogated by Lew R., whose task is to expunge the sighting from Mint’s mind. Among his techniques include the assassinations of two fellow astronauts, lowering Mint into a “five-foot-high tea-chest full of thick black ooze reeking of rancid fruit, cowsheds, and drains”, a sequence of violent sexual encounters with Connie Langoustine, a series of staged hallucinatory episodes, and continual poking from a strange taser-like gizmo named the Brabazon. The star of this novel is West’s athletic style, which compliments the surreal and baffling sequence of scenes presented: in terms of humour, we are closer to the overt sexism of Terry Southern and his ilk (each male character has plentiful sex with the unprotesting Connie), however, the satirical message here is sound: the Colonel could not tell the world he had seen an angel in space, for the implications for America and the world would be too large. The novel never strikes a tone of pathos, remaining in its frenetic comic mode throughout, but West plants this pip of pathos in our heads regardless. If one can excuse the period humour, Colonel Mint is a raucous and outrageous entertainment with a point in there somewhere (never too important). West moved into historical novels for the remaining two decades. In 2003, he suffered a severe stroke, from which he recovered (an experience chronicled in his wife Diane Ackerman’s One Hundred Names for Love), publishing two non-fiction titles but not finding a home for the novels he wrote in the period. Here is the excellent obit in the New York Times. And here is West’s one appearance upon KCRW’s Bookworm. And here’s to more plundering of his works!

Editions:

Hardback, 1972, E.P. Dutton.

Hardback, 1973, Calder & Boyars.

Bibliography:

Novels:

A Quality of Mercy, 1961, Chatto & Windus.

Tenement of Clay, 1965, Hutchinson.

Alley Jaggers, 1966, Hutchinson.

I’m Expecting to Live Quite Soon, 1970, Harper & Row.

Caliban’s Filibuster, 1971, Doubleday.

Bela Lugosi’s White Christmas, 1972, Harper & Row.

Colonel Mint, 1972, E.P. Dutton.

Gala, 1976, Harper & Row.

The Very Rich Hours of Count von Stauffenberg, 1980, Harper & Row.

Rat Man of Paris, 1986, Doubleday.

The Place in Flowers, Where Pollen Rests, 1988, Doubleday.

Lord Byron's Doctor, 1989, Doubleday.

The Women of Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper, 1991, Random House.

Love's Mansion, 1992, Random House.

The Tent of Orange Mist, 1995, Scribner.

Sporting with Amaryllis, 1996, Overlook Press.

Life With Swan, 1997, Overlook Press.

Terrestrials, 1997, Scribner.

OK: The Corral, the Earps and Doc Holliday, 2000, Scribner.

The Dry Danube: A Hitler Forgery, 2000, New Directions.

A Fifth of November, 2001, New Directions.

Cheops: A Cupboard for the Sun , 2002, New Directions.

The Immensity of the Here and Now: A Novel of 9.11, 2003, Voyant Publishing.

Short fiction:

The Universe and Other Fictions, 1989, Overlook Press.

Graeme Gibson — Perpetual Motion [1981]

Graeme Gibson was one of the novelists at the helm of the Canadian avant-garde scene of the 1960s and 1970s (there being no scene thereafter), alongside his wife Margaret Atwood, Chris Scott, Steve McCaffrey, Gail Scott, Audrey Thomas, and numerous others. His own output is slim: four novels and two non-fiction titles on birds and wildlife, plus one collection of conversations (Eleven Canadian Novelists). Five Legs from 1969 is the seminal modernist opus, utilising the then-popular stream of consciousness lark (with Communion its partner). This is Gibson’s third. A remarkable and bizarre tackling of the historical novel, Perpetual Motion concerns Robert Fraser, a man from Mad River, Ontario in possession of a mastodon skeleton obsessed with creating a perpetual motion machine in spite of his banausic (a word that recurs often in this novel) background. Mixing poetic description and close character narration, alongside a more ponderous tone (with strange shifting of tenses), the style here is unique, refusing to allow the reader to sink into the familiar furniture of the conventional historical novel and keeping him or her perplexed and concerned as the focus and timbre shifts over 280-odd pages, from 1860 to 1879. The Fraser clan is the focus, alongside the cast of oddball characters that populate the father’s life, among them the Irish creep Rochefoucault Hackett, the unprankable Eddie Shantz, and the eccentric Prof. Carruthers, whose tale of a Royal banquet inside the Iguanodon provides some the funniest material in the novel. The depressive and disturbed materfamilias, the robust daughter Annie, amd feral son Angus provide the familial baggage and heart of the matter. Set-pieces include a startling hanging scene, a mass cull of wild pigeons, and the bone-rattling finale when the machine is tested to a packed crowd. The rumbling of the industrial age, the harshness of the rural life, the bawdy backchat of the barrooms, and the psychodrama of the family are rendered vividly by Gibson’s brilliant hand in an elliptical and fabulous work. The character name Robert Fraser is reused in his final novel, Gentleman Death (perhaps mirroring the use of Felix Oswald in his first two novels), where he appears as a novelist. Praised by Annie Dillard, Alice Munro, and Timothy Findley, this novel is one of the better ways to spend six hours. Gibson retired from the fiction-writing biz in 1996 (Atwood, however, is still at large. There is no God).

Editions:

Hardback, McClelland and Stewart, 1982.

Hardback, St. Martin’s Press, 1982.

Paperback, Bantam, 1984.

Paperback, Penguin, 1988.

Paperback, New Canadian Library, 1997. Reissued 2010.

Bibliography:

Novels:

Five Legs, Anansi, 1969.

Communion, Anansi, 1971.

Perpetual Motion, McClelland and Stewart, 1982.

Gentleman Death, McClelland and Stewart, 1993.