The Post-War Experimental Novel by Andrew Hodgson;

Author:Andrew Hodgson; [Hodgson, Andrew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350076860
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2019-09-11T00:00:00+00:00

So hungered, she must wait in rage

Until bird-racketing dawn

When her shrike-face

Leans to peck open those locked lids, to eat

[…]

Spike and suck out

Last blood-drop of that truant heart.147

Both draw comparison of desire to dominate another on the one hand and the enforced yielding of self-sovereignty on the other to the macabre practices of the shrike bird. An animal which lures with a soothing song, then subsequently with its long sharp beak stabs its prey,148 shakes it to break its neck, then impales it on a long thorn to be eaten at a later date. The killing of more than it can eat a show of personal potency. This interplay of allure, control, malice, insanity, incarceration, killing and blood-drinking as magnified beyond necessity to carnival at the core of such a social institution as marriage, or love, displaces the intimacy of connection held high there within a sense of the beloved. This reframes love and sex as forms of intimate connection with another as entirely disingenuous modes of humanization, and they take on more a sense of mourning elements indeed stolen from the self.

In this, the reader is led to a textual space pockmarked by the interrelation of people filling virtual roles in which the thefts, the attacks, come from the peopled milieus of the protagonists’ interacting textual community that appear as a flock of circling shrikes at their prey. This is a trope common to the peopled environments of the experimental novel, where the protagonist is consistently presented as a consciousness under siege. While in Brophy’s In Transit, it is a name, a gender, a set of normed behaviours that are imposed on the narrator by interactions with others in the airport departures lounge; the type of drink one must buy at the bar, which toilet to enter, in Figes’ Nelly’s Version (1977) it is the oppressive persistence of a supposed ‘son’, of a house that is supposedly her own, neighbours who are supposedly her neighbours, who attempt to force the amnesiac international woman of mystery protagonist into the role of housewife ‘Mrs Nelly Dean’. As Laing and Cooper write, ‘in the atomised, massified, or serialised crowds which enclose us, our reality as subject remains abstract, since our practical impotence paralyses us, and our reality as object resides in the other’.149 The terror here is not within a ‘Kafkaesque’ of labyrinthine corridors, and offices, and bureaucrats, and paperwork, it is not the ‘horror of a topography of obstacles’ that drives narrative and progressively confronts reader,150 but a turn on the star of the show by the cast and crew. And it is not just the peopled milieus of these fictions that appear as shrikes, but to return to the second iteration of Lamson’s train track, Topor’s protagonists are also his ‘victims’ in which both the writer and reader too become an enemy of the protagonist, too further additions to the flock circling. Thus, the book itself, like the camera in the Michael Powell film Peeping Tom (1960) singles out one figure in the crowd, and in so doing becomes the weapon of that figure’s torture, often their demise.

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