Accident as Form

Abstract

This chapter argues for the 1960s and 1970s collage novel as perhaps the clearest manifestation of the period’s attraction to indeterminacy, and attempts to chart some of the often artistically inspired cross-currents that inform some of the experimental novels of the period. The chapter examines Alan Burns’s 1969 Babel, also touching on Tom Phillips’s ‘dispersed narrative’ A Humument (begun in 1966), and J. G. Ballard’s 1970 Atrocity Exhibition. These works share as central concerns juxtaposition and formal discontinuity, whereby an idea of errancy is sculptural and generative, allowed its own narrative presence and formal ordering power. As such these texts display an interest in the mechanisms of dispersed attention as an aesthetic value—a certain skittishness assumed in the reader—and so these contingencies of production and consumption become constitutive of the genre, and folded into the distinctive character and affective potency of late modernism itself.