Spotlight on … Alan Burns Europe after the Rain (1965)

‘Alan Burns is one of the most challengingly innovative novelists in contemporary British fiction. Inspired by painters, he strives to create what René Magritte once described as the “magic of unforeseen affinities” by means of a collage, cut-up technique that he attributes to the fiction of William Burroughs. The result is a surreal assemblage of events, images, even syntactical arrangements that challenge the reader’s comfortable assumptions about what a novel is or can be. Burns possesses a thoroughly original voice.

‘Burns was born in London on 29 December 1929 into the middle-class family of Harold and Anne Marks Burns and educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School. When he was thirteen his mother died, and his older brother died two years later; both deaths profoundly affected him both emotionally and artistically. Burns has described the impact of these separations: “The consuming nature of this experience showed itself not only in the disconnected form but also in the content of my ‘work.'” The most obvious treatment of these experiences is in Buster (1972; originally published in New Writers, 1961); however, the theme of death pervades all his novels. From 1949 to 1951, Burns served in the Royal Army Education Corps, stationed at Salisbury Plain. After his discharge he traveled through Europe; he married Carol Lynn in 1954. He was called to the Bar in 1956 and practiced as a London barrister until 1959, when he spent a year as a postgraduate researcher in politics at the London School of Economics. For the next three years Burns was assistant legal manager for Beaverbrook Newspapers, “vetting [appraising] copy for libel and copyright.”

‘While walking down Carey Street on his lunch hour one day he saw, in a jeweler’s window, a photograph of a man and woman kissing, which reminded him of a photo of his mother and father on their honeymoon. Having previously felt stymied in his attempts to write, Burns describes the artistic significance of this moment: “I understood in literary terms, the value of the image because I saw that I didn’t have to grapple, as it were in essay form, with the endless complexities and significances of the love and other feelings that existed between my mother and father, and what they meant to me. I could let it all go by the board, let it take care of itself; I could, in the time-honoured phrase, show, not tell. . . . I could tell this story in a series of photographs, which is to say, a series of images, and let the stories emerge and the ideas emerge from that series of fragments, and that’s how I found myself able to write that first book, Buster.”

‘Although quite different from the novels that follow it, Buster suggests some of the fictional concerns and techniques Burns employs in all his works. Central to his fictions is the technique of fragmentation, and although Buster is more conventional than any of his other novels, it too employs a limited form of fragmentation. Events in the work follow one another rapidly, and the temporal links between incidents are implied more than they are stated. The effect is one of an associative rather than a temporal pattern of organization.

‘In Europe after the Rain the domestic theme reappears, but in a less evident way than in many of Burns’s other works. Although the narrator is the focus of the novel, the reader knows less about his family than that of the nameless girl for whom he searches. Like the children in Burns’s other works, she has been separated from her father (here by the leader of an opposing political faction), and her eventual reunion with him leads not to a new life but to a physical decline. Family is finally an ineffective alternative to the violence and chaos of this world and may perhaps even contribute to the widespread devastation.

‘As in Buster, the images of death in this second novel are compelling and abundant. Burns renders these events with detailed precision, in a thoroughly prosaic tone. The disturbing quality of a passage such as the following stems not only from its graphic nature but, more important, from the matter-of-fact manner in which the narrator relates such carnage: “Disturbed, she gave the cry, went up to the body and touched it, dragged it down as the others crowded round, clamoured for it, each one desperate for it. She wrenched off the leg, jabbed it, thick end first, into her mouth, tried hard to swallow it, could not get it down, the thicker part became less visible, there was nothing but the foot, she twisted off the protruding foot.” Critical reaction to Europe after the Rain was mixed, as it would be toward many of Burns’s later novels.

‘All of Burns’s emphasis on fragmentation, the cut-up method, surreal intrusions, and wild juxtapositions may suggest rather formidable reading. After all, Burns has admitted that he wants “to shock readers into a new awareness” and that he seeks “to work more like a painter than a writer; place images side by side and let them say something uncertain and fluctuating. This work will not be literary and will not lead to discussion or redefinition, but simply exist–like a Magritte painting.” Such remarks may give the impression of an utterly anarchic art, but this is not the case.

‘At the heart of these methods of fictional disorientation is Burns’s resistance to traditional notions of the novel and his rejection of any idea of the genre as being an inflexible monolith of changeless features. “The great attraction of the novel,” he has said, “lies in its search for form. The secret may lie in the word novel itself. If it’s new, then it’s novel.” Thus the novel, in his view, is malleable and accommodating to the mutable nature of a writer’s and audience’s perceptions, and by insisting that it shares in the characteristics of painting, Burns reveals his adamant concern for hard, concrete prose, a prose that is nearly palpable and strongly visual. Scenes and chapters often have an almost independent relationship with their larger narrative, which is nowhere more obvious than in Babel.

‘Burns is also a writer of strong ideological convictions that, while deeply held, never prompt him to lapse into didactic preaching. His political beliefs and his aesthetic proclivities underscore a deeply humanist point of view. “It sounds pathetic–this avant-garde novelist wanting to change the world–but I do, I simply want to leave it a little bit better.” Burns is a champion of individual freedom and consistently attempts to reveal those forces that would stunt or limit expressions of individuality. As he explains, “Like others, I have in a way been writing and rewriting the same basic book, again and again. All that material about the recurrent father figures, and the father-State, and the absent mother, and the young man dead.” Such a characterization might imply simple repetition, yet what this description reveals is the consistency of his vision and his steadfast dedication to opposing the most destructive tendencies of human beings.’ — David W. Madden

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Further

Alan Burns Bio & Info Page
Alan Burns Obituary
Alan Burns @ goodreads
Alan Burns interviews JG Ballard
Europe After the Rain: Alan Burns and the Post-War Avant-Garde
Anna Kavan’s Ice and Alan Burns’ Europe After the Rain: Repetition With A Difference
Alan Burns, Ian McEwan, and the Lasting Legacies of Postwar British Experimental Fiction
Identity and Alan Burns
Alan Burns Biography
Buy ‘Europe After the Rain’

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Covers & Interiors

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Interview
from The Review of Contemporary Fiction

David Madden: Europe after the Rain works on the reader in strange and unexpected ways. For instance, the reader begins fearing for the girl and sympathizing with her concern over her lost father, only to discover their moral ambiguity. Were you seeking such an ambiguity?

Alan Burns: I don’t seek a quality such as “moral ambiguity” in a character (I doubt that any novelist does). I follow a character and try to find out who she is. That of course is why it is necessary to test a character, compel her to make choices, so that she reveals who she is. (When Anna Karenina decides to leave her husband for her lover, Tolstoy has her go upstairs to her child’s bedroom, see the child asleep (maybe for Anna the last time) and still go through with her flight. Thus Anna, and the reader, are put through hell: we don’t merely know about, we suffer through the experience of her “moral ambiguity.”) Needless to say I’m not making comparisons between the two novels, still less the two authors . . . Another source of “moral” and numerous other ambiguities in my characters generally is my awareness of contradictions within characters and between them. As soon as I become aware of a certain characteristic, I instinctively look for an opportunity to show its opposite. For the brave to show fear, the innocent guile, the timorous courage, and so on. An example of this is early in Celebrations where Williams is given one blue eye and one brown.

DM: Could you discuss your view of the connection between the novel and Max Ernst’s painting of the same name?

AB: Some months after I’d started writing Europe (but before I’d found a title), I chanced upon a reproduction of the painting in a book on Ernst: I instantly recognized the very landscape I was—in my way—”painting.” I knew I had a title—and a book jacket too! Beyond that, however, I can’t say that I studied the painting particularly closely, though I think I always had it somewhere at the back of my mind. It was not until I was writing the last chapter of Revolutions of the Night that I did look intensely at the Ernst painting and made as precise and passionate a word picture of it as I could. Some years after Europe was published, I saw the original at an Ernst retrospective at the Tate in London, and was disappointed to see how small and seeming-not-so-powerful it was. In reproduction it makes the impact of a colossal work of art, not so in the original.

DM: A feature I’ve noticed in this and others of your novels is a slippery quality, even a vagueness about large issues of plot or character motivation (for instance, the reasons for the father’s fall from grace) while details of appearance or descriptions are minutely and exactingly precise. Can you explain the idea or purpose behind this paradoxical method? Might this be explained in part by what you described in the essay in Beyond the Words as the “distanced technique of writing from the unconscious”?

AB: I like that phrase “slippery quality.” Elusive, yes, it’s yet another aspect of my wish to avoid any suggestion of an absolute, purportedly “accurate” statement as to what happened or where we are or what role a particular character plays in the novel. Look again, and—see, it ain’t so—the opposite may as well be true. As soon as the reader is beginning to feel secure in the world I’ve made for him, it “slips,” he slithers; me too. There’s also a strong element of doubt; that’s part of it too. Some absurdist stuff as well, yet I temper that tendency with a genuine, even passionate, humanism. With nuclear bombs around, we must be careful not to get too far gone into the irrational—and when I yap about “instinct,” I’m also aware, of the fascists’ appeal to “gut feelings” and so on . . . so it ain’t easy to get it right.

So, for example, and to get back from vague philosophizing to the novels, while I go for the “slippery,” I’m concerned by your reference to vague character motivation. I’d want the father’s fall from grace to be not arbitrary or author-driven but fully motivated in the traditional sense. In fact, I suggest that his “fall from grace” is largely accounted for by the simple notion that “power corrupts”—see the heavily ironic paragraph that starts, “The father received me in his spacious and magnificent apartment” and later the (probably too bare) statement that the father was “growing senile.” Final word on “slippery”—it’s close to the “precarious” dream.

DM: There are no names for any of the characters and thus pronoun references are sometimes vague. Why are identities so deliberately elusive?

AB: I could not find the “right” names . . . something connected with Kafka’s “Joseph K.” I regret pronoun uncertainties and would want to correct them, but there it is.

DM: Don’t you think, though, that this nameless quality is exactly appropriate for this blasted place; it enhances the shadowy quality and the ambiguity that pervades so much of the book? Was this namelessness deliberate on your part?

AB: I think you put it perfectly, and I now adopt your formulation as my answer to your question (I particularly like “this blasted place”—with Lear nudging in there). “Namelessness” also reminds me of Wilson Harris—see p. 58 of The Imagination. My only quarrel is with your word deliberate, as you know. I feel the word is inappropriate, because it implies a degree of control I deliberately (!) eschew.

DM: Explain the narrator’s presence in this world of military conflict. He has access to both commanders of the warring sides, yet he is seemingly outside the fray (though it appears he destroys the reconstructed bridge at the end of chapter 11). He talks of his job, but what is it? Is he a journalist, or is his “job” or purpose more subtle and perhaps even metaphysical?

AB: The narrator’s uncertain role and status is vital in maintaining the novel’s precariousness and ambiguity. Give him a job, and the novel becomes more reportage—everything would have been watertight, rational, the reader would demand it. But I have made a contract with the reader that allows me the freedom to slip in and out of the rational. That has to be established from the start and iterated and reiterated (implicitly, by conduct) consistently throughout. A key passage reads, “I changed my life. I went among the prisoners taken to the camp for labour purposes. I wanted to make certain, I wanted to get inside, I knew the language, I wanted to learn more, suddenly . . . My work was in that place. . . .” Remember, his work at that point is assassination.

DM: John Hall in the Guardian mentions Burroughs’s cut-up tech-nique as being yours also. Was Europe written as a series of fragments “synthesi[zed and] shuffle[ed] . . . so that they form new associations and build up fresh nuclei of meaning”?

AB: Yes, that quote applies to the writing of Europe and my other novels. I had not read Burroughs then, nor heard of his “cut-up” technique. I did not actually use scissors, but I folded pages, read across columns, and so on, discovering for myself many of the techniques Burroughs and Gysin describe in The Third Mind and elsewhere.

DM: Given Hall’s quote and what I see as numerous echoes of Beckett in your work, have you or do you have affinities with existentialist thinking?

AB: I have only dipped into Being and Nothingness, but Nausea much impressed and maybe influenced me, along with Camus. As for Beckett, I delighted in Murphy, Watt, and a couple others, and Godot, Endgame, and more. However, The Unnameable I call The Unreadable. Like Joyce, Beckett extended the range of the possible. He is somewhere there in my mind when I’m working, but I don’t quite know where.

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Book

Alan Burns Europe after the Rain
John Calder Publications

‘Europe after the Rain takes its title from Max Ernst’s surrealist work, which depicts a vision of rampant destruction – a theme which Burns here takes to its conclusion, showing man not merely trying to come to terms with desolation, but combating human cruelty with that resilience of spirit without which survival would be impossible. The Europe through which the unnamed narrator travels is a devastated world, twisted and misshapen, both geographically and morally, and he is forced to witness terrible sights, to which he brings an interested apathy, without ever succumbing to despair or cynicism.

‘Upon the novel’s first publication, Burns was heralded as presenting a picture of his age and capturing the ‘collective unconscious’ of the twentieth century – in a language that can have few rivals for economy, beauty and rhythm. His austere sentences glow with intelligence, colour and force, and evoke a powerful image for the modern reader of fears every bit as relevant today as on the day when they were written.’ — JCP

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Excerpt

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