Modern Language Review

The past few years have seen a significant upsurge in serious scholarship on the loose grouping of experimental novelists that assembled in Britain in the 1960s. Julia Jordan’s monograph joins recent works such as Kaye Mitchell and Nonia Williams’s edited British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Carole Sweeney’s Vagabond Fictions: Gender and Experiment in British Women’s Writing, 1945–1970 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), and Hannah van Hove and Andrew Radford’s edited British Experimental Women’s Fiction, 1945–1975: Slipping through the Labels (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021). It provides perhaps the most significant and substantial justification yet for the continued presence of the writers it considers on syllabuses and publishers’ lists.

The first part of the book, on ‘accidental forms’, conducts a wide-ranging survey of late modernist and avant-garde literary production, covering works by J. G. Ballard, Samuel Beckett, Brigid Brophy, Alan Burns, Eva Figes, Zulfikar Ghose, Gabriel Josipovici, Nicholas Mosley, Tom Phillips, Muriel Spark, Stefan Themerson, and Denis Williams. In this part, Jordan looks at the place of accident in these writers’ works—first in a chapter on accident as an evental experience, then as a formal determinant often taking place at the intersection of the verbal and the visual, and finally as a mode of critique, directed at literary realism and the material conditions that underpin its cultural normativity. The last of these chapters, with its focus on Ghose and Williams, is particularly welcome as a contribution to the field. Avoiding the ethnocentric tendencies that plagued earlier renderings, Jordan stresses the fact that Britain’s late modernist moment of the 1960s was a product of a diverse literary culture, centred on London as former imperial metropolis and continuing broker of international literary reputations. At the same time, Jordan’s focus on literary experiment shows how writers such as Ghose and Williams used formal play as a way of critiquing traditional literary categories, while also troubling and resisting categorization tout court.

The second part of the book takes the form of closer case studies of the three writers who came to define this experimental scene: Christine Brooke-Rose, B. S. Johnson, and Ann Quin. At one point in her chapter on Johnson, Jordan reveals one of her book’s animating questions: ‘Does form’s relentless recuperation of the jagged, the spontaneous, or the accidental in narrative raise questions about the efficacy of experimental or avant-garde writing?’ (p. 118). One of the great strengths [End Page 381] of the chapters in this part is the way they turn this question on its head: if certain formal norms arise in the novels of Brooke-Rose, Johnson, and Quin, they do so through their focus on errancy, uncertainty, and indeterminacy, recalibrating the novel into a medium that can articulate the value of these marginalized states.

One of Jordan’s strongest claims is for a late modernism defined not temporally or intertextually, but by its ‘thematic and philosophical concern with, and compositional and formal use of, accident, error, and indeterminacy’ (p. 2). Jordan’s final chapters push this definition to two further ends: first, through a comparison of Alexander Trocchi with one of his contemporary legatees, Tom McCarthy; and then, in a short Conclusion, turning to the act of reading and how it is challenged and changed by the oblique strategies of the writers that Jordan takes as her subject. These two nodes of expansion—to contemporary literature through McCarthy, and from the aesthetic object to aesthetic experience—compound Jordan’s argument, and the power of her critical intervention. Developing the ideas of her first monograph, Chance and the Modern British Novel: From Henry Green to Iris Murdoch (London: Continuum, 2010), Jordan’s work secures the place of authors such as Johnson and Quin in the archive of experimental literary production, and as a resource for retrieval and further experiment in the...