Delving into how the traumatic experience of the Second World War formed - or perhaps malformed - the post-war experimental novel, this book explores how the symbolic violence of post-war normalization warped societies' perception of reality. Andrew Hodgson explores how the novel was used by authors to attempt to communicate in such a climate, building a memorial space that has been omitted from literatures and societies of the post-war period. Hodgson investigates this space as it is portrayed in experimental modern British and French fiction, considering themes of amnesia, myopia, delusion and dementia. Such themes are constantly referred back to and posit in narrative a motive for the very broken forms these books often take - books in boxes; of spare pages to be shuffled at the reader's will; with holes in pages; missing whole sections of the alphabet; or books written and then entirely scrubbed out in smudged black ink. Covering the works of B. S. Johnson, Ann Quin, Georges Perec, Roland Topor, Raymond Queneau and others, Andrew Hodgson shows that there is method to the madness of experimental fiction and legitimizes the form as a prominent presence within a wider literary and historical movement in European and American avant-garde literatures.

PrefacePartition One - Motive: the sense something is missing1.1 A critical moment - opening a space of discourseCritical climate - historicA wound in cultural historyCritical climate - currentAttempting to access a point in the past as a synchronic, 'lived-in' space1.2 On the literature of this studyNationality, experience and social relationOn the post-war experimental novel as an 'avant-garde realism'Social engagement and the experimental novelTo plot this further in the post-war1.3 Conflicts in cultural productionContemporaneous cultural climateDominant literature as societal 'normaliser''Reactionary' VranceCase in pointThe predicament of cultural refusal1.4 Historical contextsWriting out of the 1945 eventThe new 'new'1968 as performative re-adhesionThe old new veneerEra as here presentedPartition Two - Diagnoses: the confused narrative of the post-war human2.1 The sense something is missingA mimesis of violent stupefactionImpossible confrontationsThe act of forgettingSorge and the continuity humanCycling violence2.2 Communal supplication, individual terraformingDepictions of communal, quotidian lifeCharacterisation of an immersive object spaceThe peripherals assert themselvesThe representative unstable selfTo follow the thread of an insane normPartition Three - Treatment: breaking down within the horizon of the real3.1 Creating space in textZa - UmErgodic engagementSpatial multiplicityOpen signifiers3.2 Babel, babble, xenoglossia and private languageGlossolaliaÉcrits bruts and the experimental novelQonestsansLanguage as structural reality referentSlang, idiom, argotiqueSynchronicities in the published/unpublished work3.3 Cut, shuffle, re-align, re-defineNo lie junkLiberating the pageHysterical mimesisThe response-ible readerShuffle