Aidan Higgins and the sixties

Balcony of Europe, published in 1972, may be an unusual novel, and not a wholly successful one, but it is revealing about the sixties, and, not less to the point, is an intriguing sign of a literary-historical moment. It's mainly set in beach-culture Spain circa 1968 (just before the onslaught upon those beaches of the Northern European mass leisure industry), and describes a relatively brief affair between an Irish painter (a version of Higgins himself one assumes) and a young American Jewish woman who is married to a slightly older American writer. It's haunted by and dependent on a slew of masculinist modernist texts: Joyce's Portrait of an Artist most obviously, but also Malcolm Lowry, Faulkner, Hemingway, Paul Bowles and so on.
It's beautifully written, and the modernist sentence here begins to move towards autonomy in the direction later taken by Iain Sinclair. That is, the style (the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter) has become detached from any clear cut character-based project: the novel's characters don't come to life as they say, there's no real sense of what kind of person the hero (Dan Ruttles) is, and not much more of Charlotte his sexy, charismatic love object.
Yet it's not as if the gist of an authorial intention isn't apparent: the novel wants to represent this affair against the backdrop of European history (especially the Holocaust and the Cold War under US hegemony) as a kind of passive resistance to the horrors of the twentieth century. And that is where it reveals a mood we can call sixties, since the characters, all somewhat rootless international bohemians, seem to live in an atmosphere of freedom and opportunity, a lack of regard for questions of money and career and respectability, which is at least superficially is bequeathed to them by the cultural modernisms that inhabits them and that they ceaselessly discuss. They have turned an aesthetic commitment to cultural modernism as a form of resistance to bourgeois orthodoxies and norms into hedonistic, self-exploratory adventures in the private sphere (mainly sex but also alcohol and drugs), that is, into lifestyle. They exist, so to say, historically between Le Bateau-Lavoir and Benidorm.
And it's lifestyle's alienation from literary aesthetics that means that the sentence in particular breaks free from meaning and intent at the level of the text itself and that wonderfully crafted sentences, paragraphs, chapters barely invoke the fictional world they purport to describe. So, from another literary-historical perspective, this is écriture produced spontaneously, outside the world of literary theory, and perhaps all the more revealing of the historical forces that tended towards the text-fetish because of that.