Babel

by Alan Burns

Babel, Alan Burns's fourth critically acclaimed novel, contains all the hallmarks of the aleatoric style he helped to define – shot through with seemingly random newspaper headlines, poems, snatches of conversation and anecdote, which both heighten and undermine meaning, and characterized by extreme contrasts of mood and style and startling surrealist juxtapositions of images and ideas.

By turns comic and tragic, tender and brutal, religious and blasphemous, the narrative rockets from London to the United States to Vietnam to interstellar space, familiar events are constantly fragmented and reset into new patterns, and ultimately Babel becomes a cautionary tale about the tragedy arising from attempting to build Utopia.

Genres: Novels

159 pages, Paperback

First published December 31, 1967

About the author

Alan Burns published eight novels, two essay collections, a play, and a short story collection. Major works include Europe After the Rain, Celebrations, Babel, and Dreamerika! A Surrealist Fantasy. From the 1960s on, he was associated with the loosely-constituted circle of experimental British writers influenced by Rayner Heppenstall that included Stefan Themerson, Eva Figes, Ann Quin and its informal leader, B. S. Johnson.

In 1982 he co-edited (with Charles Sugnet) The Imagination on Trial: British and American Writers Discuss Their Working Methods, which the Washington Post "Book World" called "diverting, iconoclastic, and compulsively readable". The book included interviews with 11 authors (as well as Burns himself): J. G. Ballard, Eva Figes, John Gardner, Wilson Harris, John Hawkes, B. S. Johnson, Tom Mallin, Michael Moorcock, Grace Paley, Ishmael Reed, and Alan Sillitoe.

Angus Wilson called Burns "one of the two or three most interesting new novelists working in England."

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

Burns’s most successful “aleatoric” novel is Dreamerika! This, however, is a collection of dolorous and darkly funny vignettes: wonderfully unique word-sculptures that create disturbing and befuddling images and moods in the reader, written in Burns’s own “babel” style that performs impressive feats with the English language. The act of reading this becomes a trudge, even for me, who is in thrall to surreal nonsense, however, Burns’s ambitious novel and others in his oeuvre need more respect and readership. Factish.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

The two took their words together by the use of lips, he cut the word out of her nose, he would prefer her teeth. Her heart was a sound in his opinion, with infinite possibilities, her moving parts worked well. The police were involved in the business, they arrived at his office to discuss the extortion case, she knew nothing, her eye was rued inadmissible. The trial for rape was the same. The allegation was withdrawn before the offense was committed.

Uneasy dystopian (contemporary 60s-era Britain?) news items composed seemingly under the twinned signs of Cut-Up Technique and Surrealism. For maximum effect, open at random and read allowed to an unsuspecting audience.

I had a long essay here about the taxonomy of nonsense in literature (Babel's occurs at the sentence and narrative levels while maintaining thematic continuities, and wholly-sensical words and clauses), but it was lost in to the aether(net), so this will do for now.

[Thomas · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is an experimental book written using a cut up technique, a lot of the sentences or sections are cool but it doesn't really work longform and ends up just being kind of irritating to read.

[Marc Nash]

DNF'd

[Jonathan · Rating 2 out of 5]

So it turns out the only cut-up techniques I like are those practiced by Mr David Bowie.

http://youtu.be/m1InCrzGIPU