Caleb, Sam; (2024) Athletic Figures: Games and the Postwar Avant-Garde Novel. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

This thesis explores the preoccupation postwar avant-garde novelists have with games. It posits that these writers turn to such activities as source material for their experimentations with narrative form. More specifically, it is through attending to games—their dynamics, materiality, and surrounding culture—that they find not simply novel subject matter barely tapped by their modernist precursors but derive new formal strategies with which to reshape the experimental novel. Games become a means to challenge what avant-garde novelists hold to be a misconception on the part of their establishment contemporaries who, in the wake of modernism, had returned to realism as the dominant mode of literary expression. As games were taking on an increasingly prominent role in postwar societies, these writers engage with them to signal their modernity. In their writing, games become conduits into and ciphers for their anxieties over a late modernity that many cast as being in a chaotic state of flux. The thesis comprises three main chapters, each of which analyses an author through the lens of a particular game important to our understanding of the period: Alexander Trocchi and pinball; B. S. Johnson and football; and George Lamming and cricket. In recent years these authors have enjoyed a critical resurgence, and have come to be seen as pivotal to redressing our understanding of mid-century aesthetics. Building on readings of them as late modernist, the thesis puts forward that their incorporation of and experimentation with game forms within their texts becomes the distinguishing feature of avant-gardism during the period, an understanding of which is essential not only to interpretations of their texts but to a revision of the broader twentieth-century shift from modernist to postmodernist aesthetics, in other words, from redemptive formal mastery to meaningless play.

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