Experiments in Form

Anthony Burgess on the importance of the experimental novel.

Photo by Jaredd Craig on Unsplash

Towards the end of this piece from 1975, Anthony Burgess admits, ‘I have never regarded myself as an experimental writer.’ Early in his career, this statement would perhaps have been more convincing. His first published novels are distinctly comic narratives, inspired by his travels in colonial Malaya, his return to England and his life as a school teacher in Oxfordshire. Yet, Burgess’s major influences were experimental and avant garde. He often claimed to be writing in the shadow of James Joyce’s Ulysses, and he revered the the poetic technique of T.S. Eliot and the linguistic innovation of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Even in his early novels, these influences can be seen. For example, The Worm and the Ring (1960) and A Vision of Battlements (1965) both frame their narratives around stories from the classical world, just as Joyce had done with Ulysses.

The Joycean influence can also be seen in two of Burgess’s more overtly experimental early novels: A Clockwork Orange (1962) and Nothing Like the Sun (1964). Both of these novels can be viewed as experiments in language, and use both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as models. The invented language of A Clockwork Orange and the postmodern Elizabethan English of Nothing Like the Sun show Burgess using his engagement with Joyce’s work as creative fuel.

Once the 1960s were over, Burgess had left England and begun his expatriate life in Malta, Italy and Monaco among other places. His fiction of the 1970s reflects this change in circumstances with a bolder experimental ambition. His Levi-Strauss-influenced novel MF (1971) can been seen as Burgess’s first work in an exciting period of bold creativity, which includes his pseudo-modernist novel Napoleon Symphony (1974), his twist on a ghost story in Beard’s Roman Women (1976), and his exploration of poetic Rome in ABBA ABBA (1977).

If Burgess could be characterised as an experimental novelist, his innovation was primarily linguistic. But, as he describes the work of B.S. Johnson in the article below, Burgess managed to write fiction that had ‘the surface properties that appeal to the tired reader in a railway compartment, but [also] had the courage and the devotion to the fictional art which makes a writer turn away from the obvious and the facile.’

‘On Experimental Fiction’ by Anthony Burgess (1975)

I want to say a little about the important entity known as the experimental novel. I have very sadly in mind two young British writers who considerably extended the formal scope of fiction and ended up by taking their own lives. I greatly admired the books of B.S. Johnson and Ann Quin – not only for their willingness to try new things but also for their firmly traditional virtues.

Both writers knew how to create character, to present a recognizably real world, to develop plot, to probe human motivation. Of Johnson I once wrote that he was a best-seller deliberately manqué. He could have churned out a novel every six months with all the surface properties that appeal to the tired reader in a railway compartment, but he had the courage and the devotion to the fictional art which makes a writer turn away from the obvious and the facile. Hence his restless searching after new things. He could have been popular, but he preferred to play some part in the development of the novel. I do not think his readers let him down, but I am sure that his critics did.

He lacked an American audience, which was a great pity: in America he would have found a critical response more serious and painstaking than was ever possible in England, where there are many reviewers but few critics. He took his own life in an accession of despair, a state of mind experienced by all novelists except perhaps Harold Robbins, and I think time will show that, as often happens, the despair was premature: Johnson’s oeuvre is already about to receive the serious attention that it merits. Death is frequently a force that compels such attention; the living author is a sort of frivolity.

I feel strongly about Johnson and about the entire experimental tradition, if one may use such an oxymoron, in the English novel. After all, Laurence Sterne was a great avant-garde writer, and Johnson was one of the few modern novelists prepared to learn from him (another is William Burroughs). But experimental fiction is supposed to be a monopoly of the French, who, in my view, generally take to experiment because they lack talent. Michel Butor, Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet and the rest have more intellect than solid interest in the current of life as it is lived; none of them has been able to create, as Johnson did and Sterne before him, a credible major character. James Joyce could afford to take mad risks (there is no madder risk than Finnegans Wake) because compelling three­dimensional characters of Shakespearian size stride through the thickets of formal experiment. For the sake of meeting Bloom or Earwicker one might even be prepared to read Joyce backwards. In other words, the novel develops as an art-form not through the jettisoning of the virtues we find in Fielding and Stendhal and Balzac but through adding to those virtues new elements of surprise, which means new devices for the presentation of the quiddity of time-and-space and what human souls really experience within that continuum.

I have never regarded myself as an experimental writer. Timidity or the need to pay bills has prevented me from moving too far away from received notions of plot, character, dialogue, diachronic presentation of action and so on. Perhaps as old age approaches, and it seems to be approaching now, I will be bolder. I have already written a novel on Napoleon in the shape of Beethoven’s Eroica symphony, though this reads regrettably like orthodox historical fiction, and I plan to use the medium of verse for the telling of a long story (nothing new about this, except that, since Aurora Leigh, nobody has really dared to do it). In other words, I recognize that it is not enough to make things easy for the reader. The novel is still the major literary form of our time, and talk about its moribundity is only viable if the talk refers to novelists who are happy to be stuck in the nineteenth century (I will not mention names). Novelists like B. S. Johnson were keeping the novel alive. And now Johnson is dead.

© International Anthony Burgess Foundation

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Find out more

Our latest episode of Ninety-Nine Novels, our podcast exploring Anthony Burgess’s favourite books, is out now. This week, our guest Jeanne-Marie Jackson leads us through Nadine Gordimer’s apartheid novel, The Late Bourgeois World. Listen wherever you usually get podcasts or stream below:

Burgess included many experimental novels in Ninety-Nine Novels. You can listen to our podcast episodes discussing some of these below.

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce:

Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth:

The Girls of Slender Means and The Mandelbaum Gate by Muriel Spark:

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