BSJ3

Copyright © 2017 The B.S. Johnson Society Distributed in association with Lulu Press The B.S. Johnson Journal ISSN 2056-3949 For more information contact: bsjjournal@gmail.com No article may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without the permission in writing of the publisher, editor or author. Cover image courtesy of the Johnson Estate BSJ The B.S. Johnson Journal Issue 3, Spring 2017 BSJ: The B.S. Johnson Journal Editorial This journal is dedicated to fans, friends, fellow-travellers and finally scholars of the writer B.S. Johnson. It aims to host the best in Johnsonrelated research alongside original essays, interviews and creative pieces, spreading the word of Johnson far and wide. We thank our readers and contributors both for their patience in our bringing to you BSJ3. This issue is devoted to the issue of Truth and, fittingly, it is also a fiction special. Alongside three high quality peerreviewed academic papers from Hodgson, Sibley and Hadley, we have a creative works section packed with so many innovative and insightful works we’ve had to separate it into a poetry and a prose section. Prose writers Page, James, Berry, Terry and Davies show us that the legacy of formal experiment lives on, with the spirit of Johnson equally visible in the poetry of Birchenough, Znaidi, Chapman and Goar. Essays from Norledge and Tew deal with the fate of physical text; archival and otherwise, and reviews of those currently “writing as though it mattered” are brought to us by Riley, Clemens, Connolly and Darlington. Overall, this may be our strongest BSJ journal yet. If you wish to contribute something to a future issue of BSJ: The B.S. Johnson Journal we would love to hear from you. Send us an email at bsjjournal@gmail.com. Thank you for reading. The Editors: Joseph Darlington Mark Hooper Melanie Seddon Philip Tew Karen Zouaoui Copy Editor: Kate Connolly Contents Peer-Reviewed Academic Papers Reading “Truth” in the Muthos and Mimesees of B. S. Johnson’s “Disintegration” Episode…………………………………………………...5 Andrew Robert Hodgson A Physical Tangible Metaphor: Form, Content and Naturalism in B.S. Johnson…………………………………………………………………….33 Ed Sibley “Fuck All This Lying”: The Effectiveness of B. S. Johnson’s Formal Experimentation in the Creation of a Readable Truth……………………58 Scott Hadley Essays B.S. Johnson, Leicester, Pornography, Poundworld & Me………………85 Philip Tew The B.S. Johnson Archive: “What a Pity it is Not Possible for You All to Read the MS!”……………………………………………………………91 Joanna Norledge 1 Prose Правда [Pravda]…………………………………………………………97 Jeremy Page You Pig and Other Pieces……………………………………………….105 Alaska James Lesson Plan………………………………………………………………113 Richard Berry 24…………………………………………………………………………122 Philip Terry and James Davies Poetry The Reef and Other Poems………………………………………….....…214 Sue Birchenough B. S. Johnson’s Box of The Unfortunates and Other Poems…………….220 Ali Znaidi Amongst Dying Flowers………………………………………………....222 Tim Chapman 45 and Other Poems …………………………………………………......226 Jim Goar 2 “Writing as though it mattered” - Reviews Sebastian Groes’ British Fictions of the Sixties: The Making of the Swinging Decade……………………………………………………………………231 James Riley Simon Barton’s Visual Devices in Contemporary Prose Fiction………233 Ruth Clemens Vanessa Guignery, ed. The B.S Johnson – Zulfikar Ghose Correspondence…………………………………………………………..236 Kate Connolly Nick Sousanis’ Unflattening……………………………………………...238 Joseph Darlington Contributors………………………………………………………………241 3 4 Reading “Truth” in the Muthos and Mimesees of B. S. Johnson’s “Disintegration” Episode Andrew Robert Hodgson Université Paris III Sorbonne-Nouvelle. 0 – Proposition In this essay I will approach dominant critical avenues surrounding the texts of B. S. Johnson via what appears to be a staging ground of access, that is the “Disintegration” episode of Albert Angelo (1964). As a prominent interaction in this episode is that between “truth” and “lies,” by observing the inconsistencies of dominant critique, I will re-open a view of the textual space, and in doing so perhaps find a subtler approach to “truth” in Johnson’s writing. I will work to uncover function and form interactions with modes of “truth” in the “Disintegration” episode of B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo, and perhaps find there a textual, rather than figure, anchoring. The textual innovations of B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo are a much returned to element of discourse within critique of post-war experimental writing. According to Glyn White, it is “the novel of his which we can least afford to forget since it contains a full complement of striking experiments, offers its own bludgeoning response to conventional criticism and can be seen to prefigure many of Johnson's later developments” (1999, 143). To read further of said “striking experiments,” is to return incessantly to both the functional positioning and formal praxis of that novel’s 5 “Disintegration” episode, which takes up the third, or fourth depending on reading, “act” of the novel. The episode stands as a well put to use textual clé, the “unlocking” textual centre of Albert Angelo-at-large. And yet current critique, as will be tested below, that hinges upon the aesthetic positioning of “Disintegration,” gives the sense of circling an unstable critical paradox. The wider novel tends to be classified, in the words of Nicholas Tredell, “in accordance with Aristotelian aesthetics” (50). An aesthetic derived from Aristotle’s Poetics I, by which the “Disintegration” is defined, as Tredell writes, as the “moment,” by which the “arc” of Albert Angelo undergoes an Aristotelian “reversal,” or “rupture” (50). And yet that rupture is said to disintegrate the text, as an extra-textual “reversal” of fiction, to the real-world; to dissolve from the fictional Albert Albert to, not a text-B. S. Johnson, but B. S. Johnson-proper. The aesthetic schema that enables the “Disintegration” is given both textual and real-world potency, and yet that potency appears to incessantly fall critically to an appendage of Johnson’s biography. To relate a postulation typical of Philip Tew’s critique, “Disintegration” includes the “real names” of the “real people” factoring as “fake people” with “fake names” in the rest of the novel: “this offers an authenticity and accuracy of the emotional referent of Albert by insisting that his loss and anguish represent Johnson's own” (2002, 25). If this reversal of fiction to real-world is the actionable movement of that section, then “Disintegration” can perhaps not be said to arrive at a rupturing revelation of “truth” as a text, but rather text appears utterly occulted by the spectre of the writer-figure Approaching this critical paradox raises two dichotomous points that, despite my attempts, cannot be reconciled. The first: the “Disintegration” has been qualified as a recognisable progression within 6 Aristotle’s framework, thus maintaining the fictive nature of its presence. This, in Aristotle’s view, would then inherently append the “truths” of text to the “beauty” of its aesthetic, “artistic,” “completeness”; in a text famed for a disintegrating, incomplete, “ugly,” “breaking off.” Indeed, if it is held to “break” to the “real-world,” then it “breaks” with Aristotle’s aesthetic project. In such this qualification of Johnson’s aesthetic appears flawed; a misfire, or inadequacy, that begs observation. The second problematic: it appears generally held this nonAristotelian, yet Aristotelian-framed, disintegration of text to “real-world” must disintegrate to Johnson-proper. Description of textual aesthetic then becomes problematic, as Albert Angelo is critically ascribed a thin veil by which Johnson “mimetically” tricks the reader, then “diegetically” reveals the farce. If this is so Tew is quite right to write that the “expression” project of Albert Angelo “cannot be understood solely in such aesthetic and formal terms” (2014, 24). Yet, if only it could be so “solely” stated it could still indeed be termed aesthetic, but critically the truths of text appear dissolved in this rupture. If it is held that the truths of text are sublimated by Johnson’s fragmented reportage in “Disintegration,” then critical approach appears imprisoned in reliance on truth as that ratifiable by the Electoral Roll and Jonathan Coe’s brilliant, but seemingly blindingly so, biography, Like a Fiery Elephant (2004). Tew’s position is itself a problematic dismissal to be found in an essay apparently describing a “Johnsonian aesthetic,” but is given privilege by the framing of this irreconcilable dichotomy; that text indeed gives writer. Lawrence Phillips also argues that this is the case: “‘Disintegration’, turns inwards by attempting to write the author directly into the text as a form of commentary that reveals anxieties, traditionally repressed in the novel genre, over textual truth. Such textual 7 interventions, in which the literary becomes explicitly and self-consciously autobiographical, represent something of a non sequitur in fictional terms” (178). This position is again problematic. In divorcing “Disintegration” from the wider novel as an almost para-textual addition, it becomes difficult to reconcile claims of “truth” in the text of a novel with the suppression of a whole section from it as an “autobiographical,” “fictional non sequitur.” But where beyond “He” can “writing” become “text”; re-form? There seems no space afforded for such a transmutation, and as Johnson stated in 1963, the artifice of claims of Johnson-proper to textual prerogative are indeed just that, an artifice. My basic problem was that of all novelists: how to embody truth in a vehicle of fiction. Truth, that is, as a personally observed and experienced reality, and not of course autobiographical literalness. (1963, 25) There appears some critical cognitive dissonance at play here, by which in many current understandings of Johnson the first problematic of this essay can be maintained alongside, or perhaps even begets, the second. But one appears rather to dismantle the other, and vice-versa. Indeed, the critiques discussed here are locked in that which in these pages I attempt to move beyond: beyond modernistic reflections of “Johnson’s life in the sixties and in the years before he enjoyed success” (indeed if the sixties cannot be seen as Johnson’s heyday, it might be termed utterly impossible that he enjoyed anything much in the decades following). To move beyond where Tew pegs the defining moment of Johnson’s textual aesthetic: his suicide (2014, 34). To move beyond critique that appears compromised by being too close its subject. In review of the novel for the Times Literary Supplement in 1964 Thomas Hinde (pseudonym for Sir Thomas Willes Chitty) wrote that this break, “far from making for greater honesty, sets up the author as an 8 additional barrier between the reader and the book’s subject” (680). Then the book’s subject is not its author but something else hidden behind his demanding presence. This is not drawn from a document given, by Jonathan Coe, to narrate for the critic in the 21st century a dominant thrust of the temporally-native culturally anti-Johnson. But while lauding Johnson, Hinde states this authorial imposition is the obstacle to approaching the truths of the text. The “Disintegration” is not a text event of readerly revelation, nor writerly statement of ownership, but “in the way”; not to circulate within, nor debate with, but crash against. From this position, how can Johnson’s intervention be seen to convey, rather than “truths,” anything but the “lies” he has committed to text? And subsequent readerly suspicion of the writer’s own apparent “truths,” resulting in the failure of his “personal truth” “expression project”? To such an end I endeavour beyond the framing of the “Disintegration” as what Johnson called the “solipsistic truth” that he found within his “own small voice” there (Aren’t, 1973, 22): a voice that must here be broken first out of, and then critically broken up. Probing these two problematics in criticism leads to the sense that “Disintegration” is due a reappraisal; of both its functional positioning, and its formal praxis. To this end, pivoting on the points raised above, via muthos, and, mimesees, I here approach the clé itself and try to glance a way by which these two elements may interact anew; be re-understood. The episode, thus, is not here held as a key that opens doors, but rather as oblique doorway itself. A doorway to which I here apply a crowbar, to enter both into, and out of, the figure-singularity held as destabilising “rupture” of the fiction of Albert Angelo. By this unfolding of what has become both all too mechanical, and all too human, rather than textual – both an absence, and too strong a presence – truths, not perhaps new, but afforded a new re- 9 understanding, might be sought. With this purpose in mind, I here attempt to arrive at the “truths” of the matter. I – Muthos & Mimesees According to Johnson’s own stated schema, “form follows function” (Aren’t, 1973, 116), then first to approach the plotted position of this “Disintegration.” According to Vanessa Guignery in Ceci n’est pas une fiction (2009) there is “une puissante métalepse qui ouvre la dernière section” (25),1 the break-off preceding the section an “interruption brutale de la phrase et de l’exclamation grossière que du jeu typographique des majuscules à la taille croissante” (25).2 To re-enact this visually: -------- OH, FUCK ALL THIS LYING! (1964, 163) From mid-line dash, to capitals, comma of hesitation, the rising “fuck,” and larger-than-text exclaimed imperative of “lying”: in Guignery’s approach it is perhaps that the sentence itself arbitrarily raises the arc of Aristotelian tragedy to climax for the ensuing emotion-eliciting drop. Johnson is thus like a pugilist finally not pulling his punches, announcing with the linguistic haymaker of “FUCK,” the truth will now be broached. As Tredell writes in apparent accord: for what follows “we have the sense, as it approaches, of matters building up to a climax. It is the moment which, in accordance with Aristotelian aesthetics, fuses anagnorisis and perepeteia: the truth about the fictive illusion is recognised as its fortunes are suddenly reversed. But this abrupt fracture is, in a sense, a continuation, an extension, a forcing to a “a violent metalepsis that opens the last section”. “brutal interruption of the sentence by a coarse exclamation which also games typography by both appearing in caps, and increasing in font size”. 1 2 10 limit, of what has gone before” (50). If these two accounts are read together, then this “puissante métalepse” opens a continuation, on Aristotle’s account, to the “end” of the text, or rather a Gérard Genette-esque dragged on; or the de-potency of a Sarturnalian permitted reversal of established meaning. These potentialities each indicate a similar pushing of the limits of that already textually established, thus for the reader, expected. In this the stated “truths” of the episode – citing of factual names, places and professions – cede to text, become an element of the episode’s technical visage rather than utter text disintegration for both writer, and reader. The real world does not appear to have been brought to either. Then, to test the placement of a Johnson Aristotelian aesthetics. In “Disintegration” Johnson writes, “--------so an almighty aposiopesis” (1964, 165). Positioned within chuntering space between broken off statements, the term seems to describe the formal mode of the “Disintegration” itself rather than its functional positioning. Thus, the section stands perhaps as a break in speech rather than plot, or fictive reality; it is maintained within the poetic structures of the text as implied by its featuring as a third, or perhaps fourth, “act” in the contents page. It appears to not designate this section of the book as a break within this structure, but rather describes the closer-tospeech text of the section itself, in which the large dash and unstructured breaks between each segment, and their shifting subjects of discourse mimetically conveys a tripping train of thought, thus tripping glossolalia. The broken language here is then communicative of an equally broken rhetorical judgement process. It is not the section itself that perhaps presents a rupturing “almighty aposiopesis,” but indeed a plotted continuation in Johnson’s poetic project: a “break” event always intended to be arrived at. Therefore, the “aposiopesis” present is a repurposed textual “technique,” as 11 Johnson would call it, rather than indicative of a disintegration of the book’s act-aesthetics.3 This then finds relevance as an element of poetic “form,” rather than a wholesale dissolution of novelistic structure; it is at essence derivative of the muthos of the novel. To continue on terms of function, the in-text presence of this terminology, coupled with the writer’s awareness of the same line drawings equated to the poetics of Aristotle via Gustav Freytag, perhaps shores up Tredell’s statements. As demonstrated by Johnson in conversation with Alan Burns regarding Trawl (1966): The design is a line that climbs a steep incline, then falls at a sudden point, then collapses. This was drawn on paper. The shape of the book’s construction is the shape of a trawl. (Johnson in Burns & Johnson, 87) This deviates from the gradual incline, peak, and gradual fall given by general variations on Freytag’s five-act “pyramid,” or Aristotle’s more ambiguous three-act “beginning,” “middle,” and “end” (importantly, perhaps, for Albert Angelo, “teleute” (termination), is used rather than “telos” (end)). Further, Johnson works specifically on this established aesthetic in his shorter piece published stand-alone, but included in Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing your Memoirs? (1973), Everyone Knows Somebody Who’s Dead (1973). In this text Johnson appears to write a short story by the schema offered by the XLCR Plotfinder that follows from “Title,” to “Conflict,” to “Abortive Efforts,” to “Solution,” to “Resolution at the end” (Everyone, 1973, 127). As David John Davies writes of Albert Angelo that novel too “is formally laid out in sections – prologue, exposition, development, disintegration, and coda – as if to mock the expectations of what a novel is expected to do” (74). Then the terminology 3 Mirrored in its positioning as an “act” on the contents page, I might speculate that a trip to the British Library would yield this same structured plotting in early manuscripts of the text. 12 and structures present of an Aristotelian influence are rather that to be pushed against, or parodied; to indeed game genre expectations readerbrought to text. Just as Albert struggles to integrate his Greek students in his class, Johnson struggles to integrate Aristotle’s aesthetic in the novel, before perhaps relinquishing the attempt. The application of failure to this aesthetic gives a sense of a slipping mask of coherency in novelistic reality. Then behind this slipping mask may be glanced an adjacent aesthetics, away from an Aristotelian artifice, that properly dictates the text’s structural function. Johnson indeed often appears to look elsewhere for plotted movement within his novels. If in Imagination on Trial (1981) Johnson raises the spectre of the narrative line drawing, it displays a causal relationship, or perhaps rather Jungian synchronicity, with the concerns of plot as an Ariadne’s Thread, and the parody of the perfected aesthetic of William Hogarth’s “Serpentine Line” in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759) (414), a text Johnson’s affinity for is oft repeated. Further, as Honoré de Balzac appropriates the image, yet lies it on its side as epigraph for La Peau de chagrin (1830), the line itself becomes the swirling vortex of plot leading, indeed as Ariadne’s Thread, to some potential revelation, the “imperative of truth” to reassign a phrase from Joseph Darlington (103); which indeed is a line to potentially be lost. II – The Plasticity of Aesthetic Clearly, the line drawings of Johnson’s books do not always refer to a continual thread to be pulled: in House Mother Normal (1971) the narrative thread appears rather characterised by Jean Tardieu’s story of line Dix variations sur une ligne (1951), in which the line crosses each page at varying plotted highs and lows, and concludes with the phrase “tout 13 commentaire est inutile” (188),4 akin to the “nevermind” that concludes many of the segments of Johnson’s House Mother Normal. These shifting short lines apparent too in the separate chapter-chunks of Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969) echoing the somewhat more contingent single pages of Marc Saporta’s Composition no. 1 (1962). Further, Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973), which appears rather a zig-zag line tumbling downwards akin indeed to the coiling line illustrated by Corporal Trim’s stick in Tristram Shandy. And yet, another graphic appears in text, of an account sheet of credits and debits, and describes the aesthetics of plotted story of that text closer to the double-entry page graphic of James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), in which the credits and debits of Leopold Bloom’s day, 16 June 1904, are shown settled to zero, and yet the plot is not yet over. As Joyce thereafter writes; “did the process of divesture continue?” (632) That is, into minus. For Christie Malry the divestiture indeed appears to do so, as his “account” is “closed” (Christie, 1973, 187), and society pervades. Then, if the graphic, visual presence of plot is what is being followed in story, that dictates the situational pitch in which each segment is to be received, does Albert Angelo-at-large indeed follow the predictable curve of Aristotle in which “Disintegration” becomes a climax, or a terminating denouement, or the vortex of Sterne-Balzac in which it becomes a tapering off, or something else? Bernard Bergonzi writes that until “Disintegration,” which stands again as a “brutal interruption of the fictive illusion,” the reader has been walking a direct route over a “consistent surface” (206). White agrees, stating that the “Disintegration” section “breaks out of that novel’s previously more conventional narrative twenty pages from the end” (2014, 156). Again, there is this Aristotelian reversal. If a correlative is to be traced 4 “all talk is pointless”. 14 in Václav Havel’s reader-orientated visual representations of writerly genre in Antikódy (1964), the schema evoked is that of realismus (unpag.) A predictable straight line of lower-case letters to which, perhaps, a reflexive question mark must be cut in. Thus Albert Angelo is presented visually so: realis? The “Disintegration” here present as the imperative of the text, thus indicative of what it supercedes; the “absent imperative” (103), to again reassign Darlington. It is a textual “imperative” that is indicated reflexively: Albert is not “real,” these things are not “true,” I can’t believe “you” (reader) invested so much, “you” (reader) must be quite “mad.” Then its structural position works to throw its form concerns upon the wider text as a whole. It positions an interaction of “truth” and “lies” central to the wider text; the diegetic dissolves the mimetic. The shadow of the disintegratory question mark breaks, and then hangs heavy upon both that “realism” to “truth” generated textually, and suspended within reader commitment to a fictive reality. This perhaps speaks of a “failure” of the novelistic dynamics of the first sections, and “Coda,” but too a “failure” of the questioning “truth” implosion present in “Disintegration”; it perhaps induces a moment of what Guignery calls “stupéfaction” in which the thread that leads both forward (155),5 and back, is lost. The question mark, this “failure” to “truth,” then, would be the plotted imperative, which appears indeed so, and yet this schema when equated to text mode seems a too easily arrived at 5 “Stupefaction”. 15 “teleute” of text-meaning. This schema sets “?” as inaccessible mechanism; a soporific no-go zone. Then the crowbar: when “Disintegration” is not held in such exclusive singularity, in the wider text of Albert Angelo, the only consistency of surface present is a consistent inconsistency. To refer to Hinde: the narrative varies between first person, third person and second person, and between perfect and present perfect tense. And certainly there is a section in dramatic form without narrative, another of dialogue in conventional form with italicized thoughts, and elsewhere thoughts are bracketed by a new (to this reviewer) typographical mark […] there are pages of poetry,6 pages printed in parallel columns so that the reader is unsure which to read first, facscimile reproductions of each side of a fortune-teller’s hand-out, an extract from an eighteenth-century lecture on menstruation and neat, rectangular holes in two of the pages so that three lines of a later page can be read through them. The section begins with four English compositions on sex and violence, written no doubt by Albert’s pupils, and ends with nineteen English compositions on what they think of Mr. Albert (608) As Johnson makes comment in the “Disintegration” section itself: “--------Is about the fragmentariness of life, too, attempts to reproduce the moment-tomoment fragmentariness of life, my life, and to echo it in technique, the fragmentariness, a collage made of the fragments of my own life, the poor odds and sods, the bric-à-brac” (1964, 167). To refer to Coe, by the time of its writing “Johnson’s dissatisfaction with traditional novelistic ‘plots’ was already complete by this stage, and the narrative of Albert Angelo is entirely fragmentary and episodic” (16-17). In that Albert Angelo is here phrased, “fragmentary,” “episodic,” “remembered” instances of Johnson’s “own life” 6 This use of a new typographical mark used as method of semantic destabilisation echoing the invention of the “point d’indignation” [¡¡] by Raymond Queneau in Le Chiendent (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1933), p. 240. 16 the text seems to depart from the arcs of Aristotle or his scholars’ extrapolations, to quote Poetics I: “[among] simple plots and actions the episodic ones are the worst. By an 'episodic' plot I mean one in which the episodes [come] one after the other without regard to likelihood or necessity. This sort of thing is done by bad poets because of themselves [i.e. they are bad poets], and by good poets because of the actors; for when they are making competition-pieces and drawing out the plot beyond what it can stand, they are forced to twist the continuity time and time again” (83-85). Then here it must be considered whether Johnson is a “good poet” pushing the limits of narrative to, to some extent, transcend these limitations thus attaining the aesthetic perfection of the arc – which above it is stated is not primarily his project – or a “bad poet,” committed to a “bad aesthetics” of “ugliness.” This is not to begin to argue a polarising dualism, of aesthetic and anti-aesthetic, but begin to open up a clearer prism of observation away from “is,” or “is not.” To speak further of a misalignment of “artistic truth” with writerly interjection: it speaks of writerly frustration with the processes of writing rather than textual claims to potentials of “truth.” Indeed, within this depiction of frustration, for Joseph Darlington “the idea of ‘truth’” is “part of Johnson’s personal journey through class-consciousness,” and, “if ‘truth’ does take the position of an absent imperative then each of Johnson’s narratives represent an ideological allegory journeying towards that imperative” (103). Then there is a wider aesthetic interaction with “truth” there after all, and it is functionally essential: shouting “lies” reflexively uncovers the absent “truths” of text. But it is again rather personal, rather than formal; for Johnson rather than Albert, with little room for further 17 presences in the textual field (i.e. reader(s), or editor(s), or typesetter(s), or critic(s), or…(s)).7 To follow this textual positioning of the writer, Robert Bond states “the fictive conversion of Bryan Johnson into Albert Albert is held up as a depersonalising veil; a mirage of ‘lies’ which is soon [in ‘Disintegration’] rent” (38). Johnson then “rents” the veil and passes to text, which is therefore closed off as an enterable field for these further text-figures as it is here positioned as a pulpit, not an environ. Elsewhere, David James refers to the episode as “sado-masochistic,” in which the textual moment is “fundamentally self-reflexive. For typography also becomes a means of directing questions back upon the author’s own ability to provoke his audience into reading creatively” (29). The rise of the sentence prefiguring “Disintegration” raised by Guignery is then a large arrow pointing to the textual imperative: Johnson. Re-integrating, though perhaps impoverishing, the reader, James ressurects Wayne C. Booth’s “Implied Author” contra Wolfgang Iser’s “implizite Leser,” by which power-in-text is again recentred to real-world-Johnson, and typographic variations enforce this readerly submission in what James calls a “poetics of agitation” (34). Then the sentence precluding the “Disintegration” episode, described above as arbitrarily raising the Aristotelian arc-aesthetic, is a train track to which the reader is enforced to adhere for the subsequent crash that follows. To refer once again to James, “Johnson raises his vocal temper to one of simultaneous agitation and inducement. His closing refrain sanctions our absorption in the text on the condition that we remain alive to the estranging imposition of typography’s sudden, unforeseen rearrangements” (33). The 7 Indeed, for some time the quality checkers at Johnson’s distributors had somewhat of a monopoly on textual participation, impounding copies of Albert Angelo for the “faulty” holed pages. 18 shift present is then formal, from a lying mimetic Albert to an honest diegetic Johnson; again Johnson-proper is, can be, the only truth. The power here is then indeed Johnson’s, as too is the text-space, where the reader appears a begrudged passenger who has bought the wrong ticket. 8 And thus, the text-space can be characterised in James’ reading of Iser, where in the show down between i-Author and i-Leser, “readerly emotion circulates with aesthetic form” (30). Here-in perhaps lies the “Disintegration” episode’s function-sited formal-use, but not how James intends. 9 Indeed, these positionings of Johnson’s entrance “through the veil” appear to discount the potentials of the text-as-is and are thus deeply problematic; this critical approach indeed equates “truth” with a ratifiable real in names and places that can be checked on the Electoral Roll. And yet, according to Patricia Waugh in such textual instances, the author attempts desperately to hang on to his or her ‘real’ identity as creator of the text we are reading. What happens, however, when he or she enters it is that his or her own reality is called into question (133) Then this speaks not of a renting of the text, but, reflexively, a renting reflection upon real-world reality. It would thus be reductive to claim the fragmentariness of the “Disintegration” episode “directs” the reader to the truths of Johnson-proper. Indeed, if, as Waugh states above, Johnson’s claims of authentic-life as opposed to Albert’s inauthentic-life, drag that presence into the fictive halo of the text, rather than breaks it, this is not the “renting of the veil” at play, but a projected element of the textual veil itself. This, to return, chimes with Aristotle who states: 8 As regards this theoretical duality courted here by James there are a number of problematics to be probed, but alongside the potentials for an Aristotelian dub step, this must rest as food for further thought. 9 This writer-reader interaction will be a core discussion in the latter parts of this essay. 19 so it is clear on these grounds that the [tragic] poet must be a maker of his plots rather than [merely a maker] of verses, particularly if he is [considered] a maker in terms of his mimesis and if what he represents is actions (praxeis). And indeed even if it turns out that he is making [his work] out of actual events, he is none the less a poet - a maker: for nothing prevents some actual events from being the sort of things that might probably happen, and in such a case he is the maker of those events (83) The “events” are not “reported,” but mutate in inclusion, to the “probable” without the stable prejudice of “I” which, following a text of interchanging “I”s, “you”s and “he”s, cannot be held reliable; text-Johnson is just as “probable” as Albert. Both of these split strands of Albert Angelo are, in tandem, equally readable. According to Waugh, in this intrusion both characters are equally established as “verbal constructions, words not beings” (26). In this approach, the text becomes an out-, rather than in-, folding frame, here it perhaps finds its referential “truthfulness” to what is perhaps the “truthfully” perceived nature of experience. When held in unity, experience appears a coherent project of present existence, a pushing on past anterior and a pulling on future projection; suspended there stabilised (figure of Albert). And yet here it is reflected as a “probable” iteration in response to an “impossible” question, in form it is “mimetically” fragmented, slipping, insubstantial; unstable (figure of text-Johnson). If the imposition of “Disintegration” creates a stumbling, rupturing, re-writing of the text it follows, that had apparently felt so united before the reader’s arrival at this “drop,” the fragmentary form of the episode speaks not simply of an immediacy of communication for Johnson, but a further textual technique of reflection on experiential life as having the appearance of fig. Albert, but consisting of fig. text-Johnson. As an element within the muthos 20 of Albert Angelo this appears here a successful poetic device, and indeed, mimetic rather than diegetic. Dethroning Johnson-proper to some extent here, the veil renting seems less in the rupturing vein of “the horror! the horror!,” no “true” face of God is here witnessed; no answer found. But, as posited above, the form of this episode appears mimetic of a failing to grapple with the essential incompleteness of human life; the text on the page embodies a failing rhetoric, a frustration with a transient sense of stability and a recurring sense of instability. This is perhaps what Waugh implies in writing: “Johnson’s discovery is that the ironic consequence of writing is its annihilation of what it attempts to ‘represent’” (99), this Waugh prescribes as the romantic fall into “solipsism” Johnson too takes claim of. However, the framing of this essay offers this intrinsic “failure” of “the truth” as the mimetic aspect of the text itself; and in such in its failure, the text succeeds. And this does not appear to hinge on a closing off, an “intense internalisation” that results in an imprisoning narcissistic subjectivity (99); the effects of this “Disintegration” are shared. The eccentric isolation of the English writer in the post-war does not correlate with monopoly of access to, or frustration with, experience. Thus how solipsistic, personal, can this concern to truth be? To refer to “Disintegration,” Johnson writes: ------fuck all this lying look what im really trying to write about is writing not all this stuff about architecture trying to say something about writing about my writing […] Im trying to say something not tell a story telling stories is telling lies and I want to tell the truth about me about my experience about my truth about my truth to reality about sitting here writing looking out across Claremont Square trying to say something about the writing (1964, 165) This is not a circumstantial truth, but developing the frustrations of Johnson, an attempt to get at the absent imperative of life, which according to 21 Zulfikar Ghose “had betrayed” Johnson (24), where text in the middle of the interaction paradoxically appears impossibly rendered. It becomes apparent text here has betrayed Johnson too, despite attempts to push against what Brion Gysin and William Burroughs call the “lie junk” of both text and experiential life, against which, similarly, they try to break text to try to innoculate their “addict reader” (41). Therefore, to turn a postulation of Waugh’s on its head, “style” here is a “consequence” of the reception of “reality” from a writerly position (25), before being relayed back as a “consequence” of this “style,” which elicits a disintegration of the completeness of reader received “reality.” To refer to Albert Angelo: “so that’s another shifting of reality, in the course of the book I’ve come to see differently events I believed to be fixed who knows what else will have shifted by galleyproof stage” (1964, 170). The writer then too experiences the rupturing breakdown of the “Disintegration.” III – The Existential Praxis of Muthos & Mimesees Following this vein, Johnson cannot be considered a “good” Aristotelian poet, and these aesthetic concerns here seem upended, or alien – indeed “disintegrated.” But, if in this context Johnson is not a “good” poet, this does not make him a “bad” one. If the “Disintegration” stands as a plotted “tonic” of a consistent project of disintegration, it is not a singular upending of these act-aesthetics, but the situational plotting by which the wider aesthetics of “ugly” disintegration find opening. It is “ugly” because it is concerned with not the united, but the in-disarray. To refer back to both the text techniques listed by Hinde and Johnson’s own statements of intent, though these elements may pass as reader-acceptable epistolary texttechnique in the course of reading, the “Disintegration” section is clearly 22 not the first broken moment of that text. It is not then by the perfect aesthetic of a serpentine line, nor vortex, nor arc, that artistic truth is found, nor should this be held as a “failure” of novelistic reality, or the real’s truths, but within the experiential processes of text immersion of both writer and reader in the text-in-disarray, which must be regarded as a wholly “otherly” aesthetic relation. This experiential process thus elicits its own “impossible truths” that slip fluidly within the extra and intra interactions of and with the text, which Tredell equates to the concerns of a Sartrean existentialism. Albert raises the question of whether God exists, and, if He does, what form He takes; he suggests, however, that these questions are unanswerable, and that, in the face of the human predicament, all you can rely upon is dignity. The discourse which constructs Albert here draws upon the popularised versions of existentialism, associated perhaps particularly with Sartre (61) The associations of a Sartrean existentialism hinging on the “angst” of a lack of “He” as God is a somewhat disconcerting reduction of œuvre. 10 Indeed the “He” implied here, but missing, appears Johnson-proper, but the concept of the “unanswerable,” and an attempt at a compromise in a personal “dignity,” which, in this text, appears very much “undignified,” does indeed seem to be the mode in which both Albert, and text-Johnson are “constructed.” Further, if, as posited by Johnson, the “truths” of the text concern the “human condition […] is about frustration” (1964, 167), then both the processes of the text, and the state of said condition is not so straight-forward as “construction” or “progression.” Rather, to refer to Sartre, both Johnson and the reader here become both “producteur et 10 Indeed, Sartre’s seminal text Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (1952), from which much of a Sartrean aesthetics might be drawn puts much stake on a “bon dieu” entity. 23 destructeur à la fois” of both the protagonist, 11 and the writer’s textprojection (1947, 213). And this comes with ease to the English according to Sartre: les écrivains anglais s'occupent à faire de nécessité vertu et, en renchérissant sur la singularité de leurs mœurs, tentent de revendiquer comme un libre choix l'isolement qui leur a été imposé par la structure de leur société (1947, 205)12 The isolation imposed upon the writer in England, writes Sartre, brings to the fore an immediacy that creates a more necessary, and reflective depiction of wider être-au-monde than elsewhere. This interaction elicits a textual characteristic “un peu revêche” (1947, 204),13 which indeed describes the tone of the “Disintegration.” In this “surly,” broken attempt to approach the unanswerable, the irreconcilable, the functional position of the “Disintegration” there is elicited a reader-praxis mimesis of essential confusion within the fragmentary nature of extra-textual experiential life itself: the defining tone of both experiential life and this text appears here indeed “frustration” – a failing, tripping, aposiopesis. This Tew appears to agree with, writing that “Johnson’s obsession with real life” finds footing as an “objective correlative to uncertainty and dissatisfaction, of the kind described by Sartre” (2001, 78). If “truths” of text are pursued in the “Disintegration” episode in this mode via the section’s form, clarity may be offered in reference to Violence (2008), in which Slavoj Žižek writes that beyond the reductive paradigm of “truth” and “lies,” these concepts are far too self-separating; an approach much greyer is necessary. For Žižek the “producer and destroyer at the same time”. “the English writers make a virtue of necessity, and making the most of what is their norm, try to claim their isolation as free choice, though it has been imposed by the structure of their society”. 13 “somewhat surly”. 11 12 24 question of “truth” is rather one of discerning a difference in “the truth,” and “truthfulness,” which are two very different concepts. He gives the unsettlingly detached example of a rape victim: the very factual deficiencies of the traumatised victim’s report on her experience bear witness to the truthfulness of her report, since they signal that the reported content “contaminated” the manner of reporting it (4) The veracity of the subject’s statement is in its fragmentation, inaccuracy, confusion, jumbling and falsehoods, its “aposiopesis” to recall the concerns of form raised above. An account that is entirely accurate and unfragmented, presents a cold report of “the truth,” and in such is not “truthful.” It is language, writing, rendered in ink on paper, that stands here as the “depersonalising veil” to be “rent.” Typographical variation then does not direct the reader to Johnson, but to the inadequacies and inconsistencies of the novel itself as both a fictional, and cultural, world-building object; the disunity of linguistic communication. To read the two split strands of Albert Angelo, to follow the directions of text-Johnson, gives Albert as lie, and Johnson as truth; and yet functionally both here appear balanced, if dysfunctionally interlocked, in text. And so where within this text may truth be found: Albert’s story stand-alone is too complete to be truthful, thus appears as “the truth,” and text-Johnson’s incursions are a story too fragmented and incomplete to be “the truth,” it appears more “authentic” in its “truthfulness,” but in its incompleteness is all proposition ripe for interpretation, rather than reliable “true” account. Then isolated, the “Disintegration” might be preferred as more “authentic” to “truth” than Albert Angelo-at-large, and yet it has function within the wider text; the “truthfulness” of the episode opens “the truth” of the wider novel. By this continual process the novel Albert Angelo is locked in a slipping ouroboros 25 of disingenuous “message,” and chaotic, incomplete “break”; a Tartarus of incomplete aporias. Therefore, the form of both interlocking strands within Albert Angelo present a plural mimetics; mimesees that unlock one another in their equally incomplete inadequacy. In this sense the “Disintegration” is not a “rupture,” but, in the words of Sartre, an “instant fatal” (1952, 9).14 As discussed above, it causes “l’enveloppement réciproque et contradictoire de l’avant par l’après,” 15 in a realm where figures that the reader has come to attempt to rely on are dissolved as “true,” and stabilise in their instability (1952, 9). This forces a destabilisation of the steady artifice before, and this is not personal, but socio-textual, a shared disruption. There is a chiming with what Michel Sicard writes of Sartre’s aesthetics: “cette esthétique accroche le social, tente d’assigner ses realités matérielles” (141),16 giving a participatory, compositional rather than hermeneutic, status to the reader. The reader therefore indeed has a textual position, perhaps despite Johnson’s claims, and that interaction is where a more complex, indeed “essential” (in Sartrean terms), not answer (hermeneutic interaction), but predicament (compositional interaction) of truth is conjured. If then truth cannot be found, thus should not be looked for, as a product of a transcendental textual unified beauty, nor “solely” in the fact-checked statements of Johnson’s imposition, but a procedural generation of episodic “brokenness,” the “Disintegration” indeed stands as functional tonic of what Tew calls a Sartrean “anguish” (2001, 78). That is, as Blanchotean opening text “centre” that implies it does not break the thread of muthos, but activates this brokenness in the text that has gone before, as too perhaps within the “fatal instant”. “the reciprocal and contradictory envelopment of the before by the after”. 16 “this aesthetic clings to the social, tries to indicate its concrete realities”. 14 15 26 reader’s perceptions of the unity of their own summed experience. The stupefying aspects of the section do not cause the reader to lose the thread, but throws its continuous flow of peaks and troughs into jagged, broken relief; fragments the artifice of a whole. The functional schema of Albert Angelo can then perhaps be characterised by Havel’s aesthetic rendering E?X?I?S?T?E?N?C?I?A?L?I?S?M?U?S (unpag.) Within which I have maintained the imperative of the “Disintegration” in bold. The implication is that these “extra-textual” disintegrations do not act as connective tissue for the “intra-textual” episodes, but are an imposing overwriting of Albert’s procedurally rendered life. The reader thus is offered two novels within one binding, one attempting to override the other. The “Disintegration” the palimpsest conclusion, “Coda” the conclusion of the other – and these dual strands are dysfunctional as mutually interlocking – one a supposed work of “lies,” the other a supposed attempt at “truth” – they do not “unlock” each other, but in that they uncontrollably slip within one another, both ostensibly fail. The distinction of their opposition is vague, entirely rooted in the reliability of text-Johnson telling the reader it is so. And this might indicate a clearer base from where Albert Angelo aesthetically derives, which only takes a pass to the novel’s first page to uncover. On said page is printed in English a tract from Samuel Beckett’s L’Innommable (1953), written contemporary to Beckett’s courting of Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s Les Temps modernes, this allows a segue from the aesthetic of a mid-Sartre to a laterBeckett. To refer to Johnson’s Beckett quotation: “when I think of the time I’ve wasted with these bran-dips, beginning with Murphy, who wasn’t even the first, when I had me, on the premises, within easy reach, tottering under my own skin and bones, real ones, rotting with solitude and neglect” (1964, 27 5). Here Beckett decries the challenge and energy spent mustering artificial people to act as flimsy interlocum for his own frail body, and the recurring slip between the “artificial” and the “authentic” in L’Innommable perhaps more distinctly evokes Havel’s existential aesthetic schema. Beckett’s narrator watches the characters of the writer’s past novels march before him and, akin to text-Johnson, insists that he must be true by reflection in their falsity: ces Murphy, Molloy et autres Malone, je n’en suis pas dupe. Ils m’ont fait perdre mon temps, rater ma peine, en me permettant de parler d’eux, quand il fallait parler seulement de moi, afin de pouvoir me taire. Mais je viens de dire que j’ai parlé de moi, que je suis en train de parler de moi. Je m’en fous de ce que je viens de dire. C’est maintenant que je vais parler de moi, pour la première fois (28)17 This returning moment is echoed in the “Disintegration,” and, as Daniel Albright writes following that cited in Johnson above, it acts as an “allegory of artistic frustration”; the product of a fascination with “psychic authenticity and vivid presentation of the physical world,” that Beckett sought but “instead he found himself immersed in artificiality” (2). It is within this derivation text-Johnson becomes critically mistaken for Johnsonproper, and yet, just as Beckett’s narrator states of himself, despite the apparently “true” claims of the “author”-in-text, the narrator, just like the characters, equally “n’est pas vrai” (17). Then, this echo removes Albert Angelo from the strictures of an inadequately ascribed Aristotelian artifice, and, a real-world incursion that must be followed back through a privileging 17 These Murphys, Molloys and Malones, haven’t fooled me one iota. They’ve wasted my time, spoilt my isolation, in having me speak for them, when I should just speak for me, or even just keep shtum. But I just said I’m talking about me, that I was speaking of myself. But, I don’t give two fucks what I just said. Now, I’m talking about myself, this time for real. 28 of Johnson-proper by his text-presence’s claims of retaking the pronoun. It establishes the text within an aesthetic of inadequacy, of frustration, of failure; to reiterate it speaks of Albert Angelo as scaffolded on an aesthetic of the text-in-disarray. A reading here seemingly unlocked by entry into the generative formal build of the “Disintegration.” The “Disintegration” episode itself then is the “unseen imperative” of that aesthetic, the “unseen imperative” in text function, which, by readerly praxis, in an “instant fatal” reinvents the meaning of the book itself; opens up this vying of its internal “novels.” It realigns the thread going both back, and forth. In this light, can the episode be viewed as rupture, a “punching through”? A separate, or alien place within the wider text? Or diegetic dissolution of fiction? It appears not. The “Disintegration” appears rather a deftly placed mimetic moment within the muthos of Albert Angelo, that splits the novel into a number of fractals of text and experience. It is within this progessively mounting splitting that, beyond the concerns of “truth” and “lies,” the text breaks up into a space of incomplete elements that pass each other as ships on their respective horizons, erratically slipping along a fractured scale of “truthfulness” to “the truth.” IV - Teleute In this essay I have demonstrated that truth should perhaps not be looked for in the “Disintegration” episode as an object to be arrived at; not in biography, nor text-message, but in reader-praxis interaction with a plotted formal disruption of narrative, which procedurally reinvents the narrative ground of Albert Angelo as a whole. In such, the state of “truth” found in this clé for textually approaching Johnson elicits not a truth mode, or truth 29 object, but a predicament of truth, in vying states of the stable and the unstable as perhaps reflective of this same interaction in lived life. Works Cited Aristotle, Poetics trans. George Whalley (Québec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1997) Albright, Daniel, Beckett and Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) Beckett, Samuel, L’Innommable (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1953) Burroughs, Willian, & Gysin, Brion, The Exterminator (1960) (San Francisco: Dave Haselwood Books, 1967) Bergonzi, Bernard, The Situation of the Novel (London: Macmillan, 1970) Bond, Robert, “Pentonville Modernism: Fate and Resentment in Albert Angelo”, Re-reading B.S. Johnson eds. Philip Tew and Glyn White (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007): 38-50. Coe, Jonathan, Like a Fiery Elephant (London: Picador, 2005) Darlington, Joseph, ‘“A Sort of Waterfall”: Class Anxiety and Authenticity in B. S. Johnson’, BSJ: The B. S. Johnson Journal, Summer 2014: The Issue with Institutions: 69-109. Davies, David John, “The Book as Metaphor: Artifice and Experiment in the Novels of B. S. Johnson”, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Vol V No 2 (1985): 72-76. Ghose, Zulfikar, "Bryan", Review of Contemporary Fiction 5.2 (Summer 1985): 2334. Guignery, Vanessa, Ceci n’est pas une fiction : les romans vraies de B. S. Johnson (Paris: Presses Universitaires de la Sorbonne, 2009) Havel, Václav, Antikódy (Prague: Odeon, 1964) Hinde, Thomas, “Author as Obstacle”, The Times Literary Supplement, 6th August 1964, issue 3258: 680. James, David, “The (W)hole Affect: Creative Reading and Typographic Immersion in Albert Angelo”, Re-Reading B. S. Johnson eds. Philip Tew and Glyn White (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007): 27-37 Johnson, B. S., Albert Angelo (1964) (London: Panther Books, 1967) ---. "Anti or Ultra?", Books and Bookmen (May 1963): 25. ---. Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? (1973), in Well Done God! Selected Prose and Drama of 30 B. S. Johnson eds. Philip Tew, Julia Jordan, Jonathan Coe, (London: Picador, 2013): 1-140. ---. in Burns, Alan & Johnson, B. S., “B. S. Johnson”, Imagination on Trial eds. Alan Burns and Charles Sugnet (London: Allison & Busby, 1981): 83-94. ---. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry (1973) (New York: New Directions, 2009) Joyce, James, Ulysses (1922), (London: Penguin, 1973). Phillips, Lawrence, “B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo and the Consequences of London”, Re-reading B.S. Johnson eds. Philip Tew and Glyn White (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007): 175-188. Raymond Queneau in Le Chiendent (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1933) Sartre, Jean-Paul, Qu'est-ce que la littérature ? (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1947) ---. Saint Genet, comédien et martyr (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1952) Sterne, Laurence, Tristram Shandy (1759) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965) Sicard, Michel, “Sartre et les arts”, Obliques nº 24-25, (Paris: Éditions Borderie, 1981) Tardieu, Jean, “Dix variations sur une ligne”, Le Professeur Froeppel (1951) (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2003): 179 188. Tew, Philip, B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001) ---. “B. S. Johnson”, Review of Contemporary Fiction (Spring 2002 Vol. 22, Iss. 1): 7-52. ---. “Early Influences and Aesthetic Emergence: Travelling People (1961), Albert Angelo (1964), Trawl (1966) and The Unfortunates (1969)”, B. S. Johnson and the Postwar: Possibilities of the Avant-Garde ed. Martin Ryle and Julia Jordan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014): 17-34. Tredell, Nicholas, Fighting Fictions: The Novels of B. S. Johnson (London: Paupers Press, 2010) Waugh, Patricia, Metafictions: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction (London: Methuen, 1984) White, Glyn, "Recalling the Facts: Taking Action in the Matter of B. S. Johnson's Albert Angelo", Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 5.2 (Autumn-Winter 1999): 14362. ---. “The Sadism of the Author or the Masochism of the Reader?”, B. S. Johnson and the Postwar: Possibilities of the Avant-Garde ed. Martin Ryle and Julia Jordan (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014): 153- 166. Žižek, Slavoj, Violence (London: Profile, 2008) 31 32 A Physical Tangible Metaphor: Form, Content and Naturalism in B.S. Johnson Ed Sibley BS Johnson said of The Unfortunates that it represented a solution to the problem of the ‘technological fact of the bound book’ (AYRY, p.25). This ‘technological fact’ was an insurmountable obstacle that stood between Johnson and the truthful, representational effect he hoped his book would produce. Andrew Gibson notes that ‘Johnson was obsessed by the idea that the experience of the book is, in the first instance, material, and that the material experience of a thing determines the experience that follows it’ (p.94). The problem with a conventionally bound book is that the fact of pagination necessarily trammels the experiences the book can provide, and much of Johnson’s formal experimentation was directed at the ends of mitigating this problem. The most extreme example of this experimentation was The Unfortunates, a book ostensibly about death and memory, which presents its subject matter in the form of a book-sized cardboard box containing twenty seven unbound and unordered pamphlets. One is marked ‘FIRST’, another ‘LAST’, and the rest are to be shuffled like playing cards and inserted between these two bookends. In this way, an element of chance is introduced into the discourse, foregrounded for the reader by the theatrical act of shuffling, which produces a version of The Unfortunates that will be unique to them. It also means that the usual authority that an 33 author reserves over their text is here diminished, although this has proved contentious. Johnson claims in the introduction to Aren’t You Rather Young To Be Writing Your Memoirs that ‘the whole novel reflected the randomness of the material: it was itself a physical tangible metaphor for randomness.’ (p.25) Johnson wished to represent the action of memory in this book, a memory which seemingly worked at random, without placing events into their proper order or following any obvious relationship between subjects. ‘This randomness was directly in conflict with the technological fact of the bound book : for the bound book imposes an order, a fixed page order, on the material.’ (p.25) This order is at odds with the way in which memory is experienced. Johnson wished use the form of the novel to crystalize his experience and the best way that he could find to accomplish this, he says, was by employing the device of the unbound shuffleable novel. The Unfortunates is a repudiation of the device of the ecstatic flashback that is a trope of modern fiction, where remembered events play out in the mind of a character like a masque or a brief cinematic interlude. There is no adequate simile for the experience of reading The Unfortunates. It is not like looking through a photo album. It is not like watching a film or reading a diary. The reader experiences the events of the book in an arbitrary order, drifting from scene to scene at randomly determined points. In that respect, the book seeks to enact the way that memory is experienced in reality. As Jonathan Coe puts it, ‘the marriage between form and content in The Unfortunates has an inexorable logic.’ (p.230). Johnson himself did not consider the book an unmitigated success. ‘I did not think then, and do not think now, that this solved the problem completely… It was still a better 34 solution to the problem than the imposed order of a bound book.’ (AYRY, p.25-26). The Unfortunates was not well received by the press. Criticisms revolved around this issue: That the novel does not create the impression that its subjects have been well observed. The writer has somehow been derelict in his duty to by failing to sufficiently flesh out its characters. It is too interior, too focused on the failures of its speaker. One writer in the Times claimed that ‘this technical self-absorption … is finally at the expense of other lives: Tony and June, Wendy and Ginnie, blow away like loose leaves in the wind.’ (Quoted in Coe, p.269) But to claim that the characters of Tony and June feel thin and insubstantial is a dreary criticism. They fail to become three-dimensional characters because Johnson’s speaker cannot imaginatively reconstruct them. They are not the focus of the text. The focus of the text is on the speaker himself, and on his act of recollection. Of course Tony and June seem thin and unreal. This is not a flaw in the book; it is its central tragedy. Philip Tew makes this observation: ‘Significantly, the narrator proceeds to rimind himself that, although throughout these random chapters Tony is often exemplified in each textual unit as a confidant, man of letters, advisor on novels, fellow poetry editor, with, thinker and critic, Johnson cannot recall any of their conversations or Tony’s words’ (2001: p.41). The Unfortunates represents the extreme end of this kind formal experimentation, but it does belong to a tradition of fiction broken down in to fragments. The fiction of fragments is often concerned with memory or retrospection. Slaughterhouse Five, another novel notable for its disruption of the time-sequence, was written because Kurt Vonnegut felt he needed to write a book reflecting his experience of life as a World War Two survivor. 35 His narratological experimentation was likewise necessitated by a set of moral concerns: He wished to deconstruct the heroic narrative of war, which he considered indefensible and vapid. Instead, Slaughterhouse Five describes the life of a survivor who is never able to escape the war, forced to endlessly relive his wartime experiences throughout his later life. Vonnegut’s chosen conceit is that of time travel, but the effect for the reader is much like the disorientation of The Unfortunates. Billy Pilgrim “has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941,” (p.19) in a similarly abrupt, arbitrary manner to the way in which Johnson’s recollections come unbidden in a nonsense order. Vonnegut’s deployment of the time travel motif is not a focal point of the novel’s narrative content; it is something the reader is simply asked to accept at the outset of the book and never given an explicit justification within the narrative itself. These books prefer not to think of themselves as Beckettian voices in darkness, preoccupied with their own fictionality, but rather as the products of real human beings reflecting on their experience. The account of human experience thus produced is hoped to be more genuine than that produced by conventional narrative fiction. Both novels are at pains to assert their realness. In Slaughterhouse Five Vonnegut’s own voice appears throughout the novel, claiming at one point about a character mentioned in passing: “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book” (p.206) and opening with the declaration that “all this happened, more or less.”(p.1) Johnson’s novel is eminently concerned with its own realness, containing a huge variety of small sensual details drawn from life. In the bottom of the box in which the book is packaged is the text of the match report Johnson wrote on the day that The Unfortunates is set. This tangible reproduction of a text that was genuinely produced on the day recorded in 36 the novel seems to foreground the idea that this book, although it is a novel, is not fiction. Johnson claims to “write truth in the form of a novel” (AYRY p. 14) and although the veracity of this assertion is perhaps questionable, it seems to be in line with his general need for his novels to be regarded as non-fictional - not made up but drawn from life. In the final section of The Unfortunates he says the following: “The difficulty is to understand without generalization, to see each piece of received truth, or generalization, as true only if it is true for me, solipsism again, I come back to it again, and for no other reason. In general, generalization is to lie, to tell lies” (Johnson, U, Last, p.26) . 18 There is a Gordian knot at the heart of this, which is that generalizations are only ever true for the person making them, and yet to write without generalization is a seemingly impossible task. Johnson’s narrator is frustrated by “how I try to invest anything connected with [Tony] now with as much rightness, sanctity, almost, as I can, how the fact of his death influences every memory of everything connected with him.” (U, At least once, p.1) A potted example of this is the section in which the speaker describes a morning with Tony in his Islington flat:“He would heave himself from that black divan, and wash as much as he thought appropriate, how can I know how much he washed, and he little ate if at all for that breakfast I had prepared for us. I sentimentalize again, the past is always to be sentimentalized, inevitably” (U, I had a lovely flat, p.2). Here, the speaker’s recollection is interrupted as he catches himself narrating something he cannot have known. The image of the “black divan” and the 18 NB Given the unorthodox format of The Unfortunates, a page reference by itself would be of little use in locating a quotation. In this paper, each citation will be accompanied by the first few words of the signature to which it refers. Additionally, where my quotations include Johnson’s characteristic mid-line breaks I have approximated their length to reflect their appearance on the page. 37 idea of someone washing “as much as he thought appropriate” seem somehow stuffy and novelistic when reassessed after the mid-line about face. The implication is, perhaps, that that novelistic sentiment leads not only to falsehood but also to bad prose. The “fact of [Tony’s] death” becomes a generalizing presence in the narrative, and is therefore a hazard to be negotiated. In the above example, the speaker moves into a conditional tense to describe how Tony “would” do some trivial thing. Part of the struggle at the heart of the novel comes from this tension, between the need on Johnson’s part to record faithfully and truly his experience of recollection, and the tendency of the mind to generalize or falsify when configuring events into narratives. The speaker feels that “the mind arranges itself, tries to sort things into orders, is perturbed if they are not sorted, are not in the right order, nags away.” (U, Southwell, p.1) The form of the book, then, is partly effective because it refuses this “order”. The speaker is here talking specifically about the act of memory, but it does not stretch the sense of the passage to interpret this tendency to “sort things into orders” as referring to the act of making plots, or arranging narratives in the traditional sense. Again, the format of the novel allows Johnson to avoid any falsifications emerging from the generalizing tendency of plot-arrangement. Johnson would have us believe that the voice we hear in the text is literally and empirically his, but this is a “problematic reading in an age that is sceptical of any ontological universality” (Tew: 2001, p.4). Barthes says that “the modern scriptor is born simultaneously with the text, is in no way equipped with a being preceeding or exceeding the writing… the fact is (or, it follows) that writing can no longer designate an operation of recording, 38 notation, representation, ‘depiction’.” (p.145) And yet these are the things that Johnson’s speaker sets out unequivocally to do. For all that The Unfortunates seems to court chaos and unpredictability, it does so strictly on its own terms. Johnson claims that “I want my ideas to be expressed so precisely that the very minimum of room for interpretation is left. Indeed I would go further and say that to the extent that a reader can impose his own imagination on my words, then that piece of writing is a failure.” (AYRY p.28) How, then, can it be said that there is anything truly chaotic or untrammelled present in the narrative? Every section of the novel must be read. No matter how the text is read, Tony still dies somewhere in the middle. We might imagine a kind of dialogue here: Barthes declared that “we know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the message of the author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash.” (IMT, p.146) Johnson would contend that he is disinterested in this kind of sentiment. His chief concern is to communicate something of his experience to the outside world. Johnson’s commitment to pure representationalism – of trying to create descriptions of the world, and of his experience of the world, that are above all accurate – permeates all layers of his work, and in this way he attempts to overcome, or to sidestep, the limitation of the Barthesean scriptor which cannot represent reality. Barthes’ articulation of the limitations of the scriptor is something that Johnson would surely agree with in terms of the traditional novelistic model author. However, Johnson’s strategy is devised with this limitation in mind, in an attempt to sidestep it. In other words, he attempts to do something that ought otherwise to be impossible. 39 Barthes might account for this eventuality thus: “Did he wish to express himself,” he says, “he ought at least to know that the inner thing he seeks to ‘translate’ is itself only a ready-formed dictionary,” (p.146) by which he means that this inner thing that Johnson wishes to exorcise out of his head is simply another one of these polyphonic “multi-dimensional spaces” and no more “original” than any other linguistic artefact. It is every bit as susceptible to the blending and clashing of heterodox meanings and associations as anything else. The kind of steely grip that Johnson wishes to keep on the interpretative possibilities of his text clearly untenable; rather, it is a kind of megalomaniac delusion. This comes across when he declares, somewhat ludicrously, that “If [the reader] wants to impose his imagination [on Johnson’s text], let him write his own books.” (AYRY p.28) There seems to be a kind of logjam, here. Although of course we are free to read Johnson’s texts in whatever way we please, it would be helpful if there was some framework in which to read them that did not move so utterly against the grain of his own ideas, especially considering that Johnson is often so keen within his texts to explain his reasoning, often performing the common postmodern foible of including within his text neat potted models of the whole text which enable him to suggest something about the way that he would like it to be understood (see comments on white space below). The speaker of the novel cannot take any credit for the pacing and order of the novel, and for the inevitably pleasing juxtapositions that arise from the shuffling of the unbound signatures. Prior to rereading the book for this essay, I reshuffled my copy and found that the signature that appeared before the “Last” section ended with a description of Tony and June’s house, which was “agreeably situated at the end of a bus-route from the city” (U, Then he was doing research, p.6), making a cadence with the 40 beginning of the narrative when the speaker arrives in Nottingham. In the final lines, the speaker eats a cheese bun, commenting on “the crispness and the soft dough and the clinging cheese. Ah.” (p.6) Again, there was something powerful about this small qualitative experience having the last word, as it were. It felt apt to end on a single pleasurable sensation when so much of what had gone before was concerned with mercuriality and hollowness. Perhaps these observations have more to say about the way in which I derive pleasure from texts than they do about Johnson’s scheme. Perhaps I am being what Eco would call a bad empirical reader. At the very least, I would contend that any shuffling of The Unfortunates is likely to contain some of these kinds of moments of powerful correspondence or correlation, some of which will read like novelistic effects. The book lays itself open to chaos but in doing so it courts serendipity. One consequence of this is that the book becomes obliquely resistant to criticism. A kind of philosophical problem seems to emerge from the fact that the version of the novel discussed in one piece of criticism will necessarily be different to any other one. It is so unlikely as to be virtually impossible that any two readers in the novel’s entire history have ever read the same version. To ignore this fact is to miss the purpose of the whole exercise, but it does in itself pose certain questions. Does it make sense to refer to the text as “non-linear”? Does it fit into a wider tradition of reader-constituted or randomlyconstituted fiction In her brilliant essay “The Unfortunates: Hypertext, Linearity and the Act of Reading,” Kaye Mitchell says “It is my contention that no text that is intelligible is truly non-linear, and that all texts are, to some degree, interactively constituted in the act of reading,”(p.59) that is, born out of an interaction with a kind of Barthesian scriptor of the sort that Johnson 41 claimed not to believe in. “The Unfortunates, then, is not substantially more fragmented or disorderly than any other text, nor does it cede control of meaning to the reader any more radically or democratically than any other text;” (p.59) Rather, the veracity of the unfortunates is, then, the truth of all texts, i.e. the requirement that they be at least partially constructed by the reader and, requisite to this construction, that they be understood as purposive; this is not a truth pertaining only to The Unfortunates, although it is a truth which is foregrounded by The Unfortunates (p.60). Mitchell points at one area of criticism that has dealt with these kinds of questions in recent history: Hypertext fiction. Generally read on a computer screen, hypertext fiction takes advantage of the ability of a computer to structure information according to choices made by a reader along parameters established in advance by a writer. Ilana Snyder says “Hypertext encourages reader to move from one text-chunk to another, rapidly and nonsequentially. Hypertext differs from printed text by offering readers multiple paths through a body of information.” (p.127) Although this description has connotations of some kind of high-tech process, normally hypertext fiction takes its structural cues from the choose-your-ownadventure books that became popular among children in the 80s, in which at the end of a page the reader would have to make a choice, based on limited information, about where the story would go next. What different writers choose to do with this structural idea is tremendously diverse. Snyder continues “We ‘read’ hypertext by navigating through it, taking detours to ‘footnotes’, and from those ‘footnotes’ to others, exploring what in print culture would be described as ‘digressions’ as long and complex as the main text” (p.127). In this way, narrative hypertext has as its precursor in printed texts such as Pale Fire or House of Leaves, in which the narrative can be 42 said to emerge from the interaction between the “core text” and the digressions from it. The main thing that hypertext fiction has in common with The Unfortunates is that it can direct the reader through its discourse in a way that is specific and relevant to its content. As an example of a piece of hypertext literature, I wish to look at A Kiss by Dan Weber. It takes the form of a cyclical poem and must be read in an internet browser. It begins with “the moment of: a kiss.” On the first page of the poem, the reader is given six options: “a minute before the kiss / a minute after the kiss / to the left of the kiss / to the right of the kiss / zoom out from the kiss / zoom in to the kiss”. One option is chosen and then the reader is presented with another short section of text, sometimes prose, sometimes verse, sometimes a list, and then another six options. Each option leads to another piece of text and another set of choices. Eventually, the reader reaches a stage in which each option leads back to the start. This provides a kind of cadence: The option might read “a recurring daydream” or “a treatise on duality” and yet both will return to the moment of the kiss. The relationship between the option and the text that follows it is consistently loose, and so the return to the initial moment of the kiss is always a surprise but rarely feels like a non sequitur. The poem seems to move constantly, from detail to detail and association to association, continuously outwards and away from the moment of the kiss, until with a bump it moves back towards it. The particular strength of this type of fiction is the way in which the reader’s mode of interaction with the text performs a function which has an analogue with its content. The form of A Kiss models the erotic impulse: A constant movement, a list of associations that never reaches an end in the same way that the erotic impulse is never fulfilled, and at the same time it is 43 characterised by the place in which it takes place, the feelings associated with the person who is its object, the memories associated with that person and those feelings. The trivia and recollections that surround the kiss become a part of it. Time seems to stop; the end of the kiss, or the fulfilment of the impulse, is deferred. The moment of the kiss is never encapsulated or comprehended fully, but experienced vicariously. In this way, the cyclical nature of A Kiss enacts the thing that it seeks to describe. As well as structuring the content of the poem, the hypertext device implicitly comments on that content. It contains not only details about an experience, but, with the complicity of the reader, it arranges them in the same way that these experiences are encountered in life – following one another in an order that is at once willed and arbitrary. If a metaphor functions by synthesising elements of disparate experiences into a new one, then a similar process can be said to be at work in the formal arrangement of A Kiss. Its form is a metaphor for something that is described in its content. It is neither physical nor tangible, presented as it is on a website, but the form becomes a metaphor for the content in much the same way as happens in The Unfortunates. This effect is immensely powerful and yet would be impossible to achieve if the poem were presented in a traditional printed format, except perhaps by some baroque system of cross-referenced index cards. The hypertext element of the poem is not some cosmetic feature. It is central to the strategy by which it produces its effects. Although The Unfortunates was written some thirty years before the invention of digital hypertext fiction, it nevertheless has some elements in common with it: Particularly, the way in which the content of the narrative is relayed to the reader according to some system that is devised so as to suggest something additional to that content. The key difference 44 between the systems of A Kiss and The Unfortunates is that the final arrangement of the latter is not constituted by the reader in any meaningful way – one might pedantically argue that the reader in shuffling the text is complicit in its composition, but if the book is shuffled in the way that Johnson seems to intend then this shuffling might just as effectively be done by a machine or a computer algorithm. However, this is apt because the process being modelled in A Kiss is one in which the conscious mind has agency, whereas the process being modelled in The Unfortunates – that of memories coming unbidden in response to stimuli – is not. Another respect in which the non-linearity of The Unfortunates is atypical of the medium is that each concretisation of most non-linear texts contains a different story, a different sequence of represented events. In The Unfortunates, the story is the same every time. What changes is the plot, the order in which the events are related. But even here, the reader is certain to see everything. In Tristano, for example, the shuffling process undertaken before the book is printed excludes certain paragraphs and chapters, changing the fundamental makeup of the work. Moreover, the randomisation in The Unfortunates happens only once, at the outset of the story, rather than occurring continuously within the narrative or adapting in any way to the reader’s progress. Glyn White notes that “randomness… for the reader immediately gives way to specificity” (p.115). The reader is inclined to think not of the chaotic flux that leads to one particular version of the book, but rather of the specificity of the version they find themselves reading. In The Unfortunates, “the number of possible combinations of the unbound chapters is finite; the fabula is directed in its scope and sequence; it is the sjuzet which is apparently undecided in its sequence, but not in its scope” (Mitchell, p.59). Chaos has been admitted into the text, but strictly 45 on Johnson’s own terms. In this respect it seems that even the tag of “nonlinear” is of limited use when trying to describe the operation of The Unfortunates. For one thing, the novel is definite in its scope and content, and although the parts may be read in any sequence they must nevertheless all be read, and in this way there is a definite line to be drawn through the text. This line is of a definite length and has a definite start and end point. The defining feature of Johnson’s strategy is not that his text is non-linear but that it is shuffled; that its contents are transposed into a different order each time the book is read. In The Literary Work of Art19, Roman Ingarden performs a thought experiment in which he tries to determine at what point a text becomes a literary work by changing the order of its parts. He claims that “it is … enough, eg in a drama, to reverse the order of acts or to jumble up individual scenes in order to change the drama into a grotesque play of disconnected situations.” (p.307-308). The point he goes on to make is that when a sentence, or a scene, or a statement by a character, is stripped of its context, then not only does it become harder to parse but it actually loses its descriptive power, because without the proper contextual information the words that constitute an utterance cannot be definitively understood. He claims that “If, as a result of transposition, interconnected sentences are missing up to a specific phase of the work… the corresponding objectivity cannot be fully constituted.” (p.308) Although Ingarden’s thought experiment is intended to determine at what point a literary work ceases to be a literary work, he inadvertently describes exactly the kind of crisis faced by Johnson’s speaker, whose memory is inadequate as a surrogate for his dead friend. His memory has gaps, “the mind has fuses” (U, Then they had moved, p.5), much like Ingarden’s unconstituted objectivities. Johnson’s 19 A text also referenced by Mitchell. This paragraph builds on some of her ideas. 46 speaker’s memories ring hollow, seem pointless and futile, and ultimately he is unable to relive the experiences that he remembers. Their corresponding objectivity, the real experiences from which memories are made, cannot be recovered. All of this is foregrounded by the random nature of the ordering of scenes, which turns the task of piecing the story together into a kind of game, whose object is to experience and comprehend the characters of Tony and June. Of course, such a task is impossible in any story, but the random arrangement of the text draws the focus onto this impossibility. Julia Jordan says that “To embrace chance is to commit to those very subversive capabilities that eventually lead to the failure of its representation,” or in other words that too much randomness in a story eventually ceases to have a useful function – even the representation of randomness itself. One might imagine a narrative so fraught with random input that the content of the narrative becomes gibberish. On the other hand, the issue with attempting to “represent” randomness, particularly with the limited tools available to Johnson, is that randomness implies flux, but words on a printed page are static, even when shuffled. The demon of pagination has only been partly exorcised by Johnson’s scheme. However, Jordan also contends that “the randomness is in fact perfectly weighted in terms of fulfilling its stated aim: to provide a mimetically truthful explanation of how memory is experienced randomly.” (p.110). The key phrase here is “mimetically truthful”, as opposed to “absolutely truthful”, implying that she believes that the effect of the random shuffling of the book is sufficient to create the effects that Johnson intended – an awareness of the unreliability of memory, etc. – through a process of mimesis, if not of direct transposition. In one interview, Johnson did give a response that 47 would seem to support this argument when he said he was concerned with “truth as a personally observed reality, and not of course autobiographical literalness” (Tew: 2001, p.3). Mitchell arrives at a different conclusion in her essay. She asserts that; an energetic shuffling will ensure only that we don’t know exactly in what order what is to come will come. In any case, the pressing awareness here of the inevitability of mortality is such that we always really know what is to come and can, at best, succeed in deferring it. This novel … is primarily about as well as being engaged in such acts of deferral (p.56). This is certainly also true. The fact of Tony’s death may permeate everything, but there is always something else to discuss, some fragment of recollection or observation of a shop window. This idea of using discourse as a kind of bulwark against the bitter fact of mortality also features in Johnson’s next novel, House Mother Normal. Much of the discussion of The Unfortunates focusses on this infusion of chance into the narrative, and whether this element of randomness really achieves the effects that Johnson desired. It is worth remembering, however, that each section of the narrative is, within itself, not random. Each storylet is a physical object, separate from the rest of the book, and less has been said about the material experience of reading a novel composed of these small paper artefacts. Glyn White says that “the effect of reading these sections is very different in physical terms from reading a novel. In working through our individual order of sections, finishing and leaving behind these fragile items, much less distinguishable from one another than any grouping of novels, we whittle the text away, have done with it, time and time again.” (p.116) Although the content of each of these “fragile items” is not random, they nevertheless enact a 48 metaphor for the process of forgetting. The signatures individually lack the robustness one normally associates with the feeling of a book, and they are largely indistinguishable from one another at first glance. It would be difficult to recall an index of them, just as it is difficult to recall an index of one’s own memories. This sense of fragility also derives from the fact that each page of the novel is pitted with white space; gaps and elisions that give the prose a moth-eaten look. One of Johnson’s favourite devices is that of white space. Both The Unfortunates and House Mother Normal make extensive use of it. The Unfortunates begins “But I know this city!” Following this, there is half a line of empty space before the speaker begins describing the fixtures of the station. Several lines later, the word “Tony,” appears for the first time, alone in an island of blank space. Further down the page, the white space is used differently: “The mind circles, at random, does not remember, from one moment to another, other things interpose themselves, the mind’s The station exit on a bridge, yes, of course[.]” What is extraordinary about these gaps is the stark difference between their expressive content. The gap that follows “But I know this city!” feels jubilant: The gap is an intake of breath, a moment of excitement at this unqualified sensation of recognition. The gap preceding “Tony,” would seem to indicate a distraction. Johnson’s pleasure in the fixtures of Nottingham Station has been interrupted by something. The city has some connotation that cuts his excitement short. Then it comes to him. “Tony.” Again, there is a gap where the speaker has nothing to say. This brief period of silence gives us some notion of what he is experiencing. This gap is like that of the first line, in that it follows a realisation and charts the period before the raw sensation of memory can be transmuted into language. 49 The mid-sentence gap, though, is surely the most evocative. The sentence describes the failings of the mind and its inability to follow a thread “from one moment to another,” but the thought doesn’t lead anywhere. The form enacts the content as another thought, a more mundane one about the “station exit,” interposes itself. The gap here carries an air of defeat. There was insight to be had but it has been aborted, and all that is left is some empty observation about the place. What is happening in this gap? It is unclear, but it seems that the speaker is grasping for a way to describes what it knows. Its consciousness is withdrawn, away from the plane of the page, into some ante-linguistic space. We can infer this but we cannot experience what the speaker is experiencing: We can only guess at it. This is an instance of the hollowness of communication that pervades the work. In both The Unfortunates and House Mother Normal, space is directly correlated to time. The narrative voice in the former literally exists in time; it doesn’t hover outside of space making abstract comments about what it remembers. It is speaking, giving voices to thoughts as they emerge from its mind. At the bottom of the first paragraph Johnson writes the word “him,” referring to Tony. However, this word is kerned differently to the rest of the paragraph. The gaps between the letters are much larger, and this gives the word a strange acoustic quality. It could be rendered as a groan, spoken with a shudder, or artificially elongated with a kind of wistful quality. This tactility of voice gives the speaker a feeling of closeness to the reader, a certain breathiness that compliments the confessional, unornamented quality of the prose. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given Johnson’s stated attitudes towards interpretation and authorial authority, we are given a cue as to how we are to understand this feature of his prose. When 50 describing the sound of Tony’s voice, the speaker claims that it is full of “unnatural pauses, unsyntactical, which gave his words curious emphases and dramatizations, bathos,” (U, Then they had moved, p.3). This could well be a description of the prose of The Unfortunates itself. He explains his attachment to the device of the mid-line break in the introduction to Aren’t You Rather Young: “Trawl (1966) is all interior monologue, a representation of the inside of my mind but at one stage removed; the closest one can come in writing. The only real technical problem was the representation of the breaks in the mind’s working; I finally decided on a stylized scheme of 3 em, 6 em and 9 em spaces.” (p.23). His justification for this scheme of spaces holds true for Johnson’s other work. The narrative mode of The Unfortunates is very much like the mode of Trawl, and House Mother Normal is likewise composed of interior monologues, although they are not presented as explicitly belonging to Johnson himself. The idea of the “inside of my mind” recalls “the inside of his skull” at the end of House Mother Normal, and is, perhaps, a conscious allusion to it. There is something characteristically smug about the way that Johnson solves “the only real technical problem” associated with “a representation of the inside of my mind” that is “the closest one can come in writing.” One wonders if he is being disingenuous. House Mother Normal presents the reader with a sequence of interior monologues delivered by old people in a kind of nightmarish retirement home run by the titular House Mother. These are not exactly like streams of consciousness – they are more, perhaps, what David Lodge calls a “stream of talk”. Lodge describes how in the middle of the 20 th century “the stream of consciousness gives way to a stream of talk, but it is without the reassuring gloss of the classic novel’s authorial voice… The ‘modern’ 51 note of disillusion, fragmentation and solipsism persists.”(p.81) These monologues are ordered according to a simple principle, a far cry from The Unfortunates’ elaborate collage. Each of House Mother Normal’s speakers is given a score out of 10 which describes the extent to which their mind has degraded. The monologues are presented in reverse order, so the book starts with the most mentally capable patient and ends with the least. Each narration takes place in the same period of time. Each section is 21 pages long and each line corresponds to the same instant in all 8 monologues. Time moves at a fixed rate in this novel but human thought does not. As the chapters progress and the speakers become less and less lucid, the amount of white space on the page increases until in the last few chapters the discourse is reduced to single words floating about by themselves on otherwise blank pages. There is an act of deferral at work here, too, although a different sort to The Unfortunates’. In House Mother Normal, language’s main function is to occupy space, and to fill time. Insofar as the speakers seem to enjoy their fleeting moments of recollection, the white space which gradually invades the page represents an undesirable state of blankness. Often there is a suggestion that the white space is time in which the speaker is unable to think because they are suffering. One speaker suffers from shooting pains, which send his thoughts silent for pages at a time, punctuated by moments of fantastic invective like “city of galloping / knobrot.”20 (p.92) The empty space here invokes the sensation of a shooting pain that blanks the mind as it happens. This speaker’s efforts to distract himself from his agony are futile. “I shall try again to remember my first fuck,” he says, hoping the image will give him surcease of pain. “The first Given the precise nature of the time scheme in this novel, I have represented Johnson’s line breaks with a ‘/’ in the same way that I would if I were quoting verse. 20 52 is the one you never forget, they say. / They are not right in my case…” (p.88). The final speaker is so far gone in her dementia that her section is nearly entirely blank, punctuated occasionally by small jumbles of letters that rarely resemble words. Eventually over dozens of lines she manages to squeeze out a handful of words in a cogent order: “I am / terrible, Ivy / / Now I can every / word you say I am a prisoner in my / self. It is terrible. The movement agonises me. / Let me out, or I shall die. / / / / / / No, I do / not get any / lighter, Ivy, / I in- / tend / not / to get / any- / thing / any / more / / / / / no / mor” (p.175) The implication, of a consciousness trapped with neither the means to communicate with the outside world nor the means even to comprehend her predicament, is horrifying. The inescapable antecedent of House Mother Normal is the Beckettian monologue – the speaker in The Unnameable, for instance. The speakers in House Mother Normal are voices talking in darkness, one of the classic modes of modernism, itself a strand of art broadly uninterested in representationalism, concerned more often with the experience of consciousness. And yet, for all that House Mother Normal seems to belong to this tradition, the effect is surprisingly naturalistic. Johnson is keen to emphasise at the start of House Mother Normal that its characters are NERs, which means that they have no existing relatives, are “orphans in reverse.” (p.5) They receive no visitors and are too old to have essentially any contact with the outside world. They interact only with themselves and with the House Mother. Surely, this must be the closest possible real-world correlative of a Beckettian voice – isolated, devoid of agency, in possession of a potential for articulacy that is thwarted by the unreliability of memory or sensation. Whilst Beckett’s characters exist in a state of quandary, 53 finding that their “self-questioning undercuts and notion of solidity and fixity,” (Tew: 2001, p.152) Johnson’s speakers are eminently concerned with what is concrete, and what they know, which in this book is normally the activities of the House Mother, and their own aches and agues. It is the plausible reality of Johnson’s speakers that makes them so compelling, and that is their distinguishing feature. Of all the human beings in the world, NERs are unique in that they are alive, but in possession of literally nothing else. Their bodies are useless, their memories are useless. They have nowhere to live except inside their ailing consciousness, waiting dispassionately for nothing, and over the course of the novel we see even this capacity for thought peeled away. Expression in a novel is not something which happens only within the content of the scene being described. Narrative consists of more than a narrative voice and a constituted objectivity. The arrangement of voices, the curation of sequences of events, the extent to which the twin demiurges of plot and story are given their due obeisance – each of these things are necessary parts of the composition of a long piece of writing, and all of them entail decisions that must be made. It is possible to ignore these issues and passively emulate the commonplace narrative strategies of the age, of which there are a great many. However, it is better to interrogate these things, and therefore to allow the form of the novel to adapt itself to reflect its content. Johnson attested to hate criticism for its own sake. His distaste for the academics in their ivory towers is scattered all over The Unfortunates and Aren’t You Rather Young. Towards the end of Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry, the character of Christie holds a conversation with Johnson. The following exchange takes place: “‘Your work has been a continuous dialogue with form?’ ‘If you like,’ I replied diffidently.” (p.166) 54 It is true to say that this continuous dialogue with form was something Johnson was engaged with, but that was not the end in itself. This dialogue came about because he did not want his novels to behave according to the bankrupt parameters of the form. In the Aren’t You Rather Young essay, he says that “film must usurp some of the prerogatives which until then had belonged exclusively to the novelist.” (p.11). He describes how Coronation Street is the supreme vehicle for a story, and that accordingly the novel need not bother with it any more. It should do the dignified thing, like poetry had done, and “concentrate on the things it was still best able to do.” (p.11) He delineates these as “the precise use of language, exploitation of the technological fact of the book, the explication of thought.” (p.12). I wonder if different answers to this question were possible. It must be stated, however, that Johnson’s articulation of the possibilities of the novel are very much contingent on the technological fact of the novel as it existed in 1969. These days, he might argue that the medium best suited to “the precise use of language” and “the explication of thought” is the hypertext of the internet. It is a disservice to the man to claim that Johnson’s interrogation of the material substance of his chosen form is his chief virtue, the main source of his value as a figure in literary history, because much of what makes his writing great is also present in his less formally innovative earlier works. The sentiment that the novel form should be used only with an understanding of where that form fits in its broader cultural context is acceptable, but I think Johnson may have been somewhat reductive in terms of what things the novel was still allowed to do. Or, that strictness might have been his greatest strength, the thing which forced him to perform the experiments for which he is mostly remembered today. 55 Works Cited Balestrini, Nanni. Tristano. London: Verso, 2014. Print. Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text trans. Stephen Heath. London: HarperCollins, 1977. Print. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Print. Calvino, Italo. If on a winter’s night a traveller, trans. William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace International, 1981. Print. Coe, Jonathan. Like a Fiery Elephant. London: Picador, 2004. Print. Eco, Umberto. Six Walks in the Fictional Woods. USA: Harvard University Press, 1994. Print. Gibson, Andrew. Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas. London: Routledge, 1999. Print. Johnson, B. S. Aren’t You Rather Young To Be Writing Your Memoirs. London: Hutchinson & Co, 1973. Print. ---. Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry (London: Picador, 2013) Print. ---. House Mother Normal. London: Picador, 2013. Print. ---. The Unfortunates. London: Picador, 1999. Print. Jordan, Julia. Chance and the Modern British Novel. London: Continuum, 2010. Print. Ingarden, Roman. The Literary Work of Art trans. G. Grabowicz. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973. Print. Iser, Wolfgang. Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1989. Print. Lodge, David. After Bakhtin. London: Routledge, 1990. Print. Mitchell, Kaye. ‘The Unfortunates: Hypertext, Linearity and the Act of Reading’ in Rereading BS Johnson ed. Philip Tew and Glyn White. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007. Print. Nabokov, Vladimir. Pale Fire (London: Penguin, 2000) Print 56 Saporta, Mark. Composition #1 (London: Visual Editions, 2011) Print. Snyder, Ilana. ‘Beyond the Hype: Reassessing Hypertext’ in Page to Screen: Taking literacy into an electronic era ed. Ilana Snyder. London: Routledge, 1998. Print. Tew, Philip. ‘B.S. Johnson: A Critical Reading’, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001. Print. Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five (London: Vintage, 2000) Print. Waber, Dan, A Kiss. 2013. Web. June 2014: <http://www.logolalia.com/hypertexts/a-kiss.html> White, Glyn. ‘Reading the graphic surface: The presence of the Book in prose fiction’ Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008. Print. 57 Fuck All This Lying: The Effectiveness of B. S. Johnson’s Formal Experimentation in the Creation of a Readable Truth Scott Manley Hadley I always with I one starts from same character are one starts with I (7) one and I share the one always So begins Bryan Stanley Johnson’s third novel, Trawl. It features an autobiographical protagonist attempting to order his thoughts and memories whilst travelling as a “pleasuretripper” (134) on board a deep sea fishing boat. It is a text deeply focused on the self, written in a stream of consciousness style and boasting a conspicuous openness to sexuality, a tendency towards digression and repeated admonitions against its form. It is a self-involved book, its intention to consider the protagonist’s entire past, hence the opening: the “I” of the writer/narrator is the focus from the very first word. Johnson did not write about himself because he was an egotist (though this may have been a factor), but because the key conceit of his output was the evocation of truth, and the person he knew best and was thus able to most accurately render in prose was himself. 58 Johnson’s motto was “telling stories is telling lies” (176), a concise soundbite condensing a somewhat confused intellectual position. For although Johnson did not want to be a liar, he did want to be a novelist, and as much as he tried to avoid the alleged indiscretions of plot and fictionalisation, even in his most personal texts he conceded this ultimate goal in pursuance of literary cohesion. The following essay will discuss Johnson’s formal experimentation within current critical contexts and, by exploring his shifting definition of “truth”, argue that Johnson’s prose evidences a preference for emotional honesty over objective reconstruction: a “personal sense of subjectively experienced history” (73), to use Joseph Darlington’s wording, or – David James’ phrase – “experiential truth” (29). By focusing on Johnson’s openly autobiographical novels, Albert Angelo (1964), Trawl (1966) and The Unfortunates (1969), this essay will consider Johnson’s diffuse methods, including reflection upon the various essays he wrote justifying his formal choices. Johnson wished to be a writer of truth; he wanted to honestly and openly explore lived experience, hence the swift gravitation towards evocations of his own life. His desire for “truth”, and what he meant by the term, altered as his career progressed, but from page 163 of Albert Angelo, he made his overall intentions explicit. Breaking out of a narrative constructed through an array of experimental devices with, “OH, FUCK ALL THIS LYING!” (163), Johnson exposed his fiction and began his attempts to make amends. The critic Philip Tew wrote, in reference to contemporary reviewers’ shock at the word “fuck”, which occurs again before the text resumes following a chapter break on 167: “The double, desperate profanity repeated across two sections evokes such a fundamental mood and sense of purpose, 59 is so bald and raw that few other words would suffice contextually” (116). Tew defends the word’s suitability due to the violent assault Johnson is committing against the normative expectations of literature, but he ignores the word’s significance as vernacular slang and thus the exact sort of language a working class Londoner would use to express outrage at the state of contemporary fiction. The content of Johnson’s prose is as important as its form, and this word speaks far more of emotion than more reserved, less charged, language. Johnson wanted to push language to evoke “truth”, and this intrusion is a simple and early example showing this being achieved. 1. Fuck All this Lying Albert Angelo is largely about identity. The eponymous protagonist is a man in his late twenties who wishes to become an architect, but (for financial reasons) works as a supply teacher, a role Johnson was familiar with. self-defines by the career that he wants, not by the job that he has. Early in the text, Albert he recalls explaining this to his mother: I am an architect, not a teacher, and I will not tie myself to a term’s notice even though it does mean the insecurity and constant changing of schools involved in supply work. She does not understand. (23) Key to Albert’s sense of self is identifying as an architect. Though it could be argued that he has the potential for architectural success at the novel’s opening, it is clear that as someone who teaches, Albert is a teacher. His mother, he thinks, “does not understand”, but neither does he. An architect 60 designs buildings, a teacher teaches: Albert only does the latter, thus his parents, who identify him by his actions rather than his hopes, do not see him as he sees himself. Albert’s self-image is rooted in the assertion of a future identity, whereas acquaintances, colleagues, family members and school children all define him by his present: he is a teacher. Where these notions of Albert’s identity diverge is their relation to time – Albert, emotionally, optimistically, ties his sense of self to a future he is certain (though not guaranteed) to latterly inhabit, whereas other people (i.e. all people except him) only witness his existence through his external and provable life. Their opinions of Albert are not tarnished by his emotional denial of a life he does not want to lead. In the above quotation, the repetition of “not” is significant, and in the remainder of the paragraph it reoccurs, as do other negative words such as “never” and “less”. Albert selfidentifies by distancing himself from his actions, rather than defining himself by proof. He denies an applied title, but offers no evidence, other than hope, to support his asserted other. His sense of truth is informed by emotion, not reality. This sets a dangerous precedent. Albert’s identity as an architect is, however, formally supported by the text’s focus on architecture. All descriptions of place are rooted in buildings, and though this is perhaps unexceptional for an urban novel, the structures Albert exalts are indicative of the novelist’s wider aesthetic interests. The Hammersmith flyover is described as “a fine piece of architecture” (21), and Albert remarks of post-war residential buildings, “Some of the tower blocks are very good in their own right” (40). Neither of these would have been popular opinions, for, as Johnson wrote, “The weight of prejudice against anything new is enormous and deeply rooted.” (396) Johnson liked the new and approved of technological change, but more 61 significantly he believed that form must be appropriate to function. His architect-protagonist is most impressed by functionalist architecture, as Johnson himself was21, because he felt this to be more appropriate for the modern world. Johnson also believed that the format of books should match their content, i.e. (James) “certain visual devices could intensify the reader’s sense of involvement” (33), so Albert Angelo includes a photocopy of a flyer, dialogue presented as script, a letter, a poem, a series of descriptions of Albert written as if by children, and changes between first, second and third person in the prose sections. The purpose of each device is to aid believability in the “truth” of Albert. David Leon Higden argues that “Johnson and Albert Angelo believe art’s primary task is to shape, to form, even to subjugate life and facts into a pattern.” (19) Higden states this as if justification for Johnson selecting architecture as the focus of Albert’s aspiration. Of all the creative arts, it is architecture that requires the most in depth understanding of practicality. An architectural design is useless unless it considers utilities, costs, land areas, local laws and practical safety. The artistic value of architecture is only assessed in a real, public, sense once a designed building has been constructed, and for a design to reach this stage it must follow rigid, real world, rules (i.e. patterns). In contrast, Johnson’s construction of art relies on destruction of rules, disintegration of tradition and – such as the physical hole through pages 149-152 of Albert Angelo and the unbound structure of The Unfortunates, it is Johnson’s departure from these rules that critically and culturally defines his oeuvre. Cutting holes through pages and not binding chapters is the architectural equivalent of not including windows: 62 an act that will be noticed and remarked upon, likely functioning as a distraction from any merits of the building. 22 If Albert tried to be an architect in the same manner as Johnson tried to be a novelist, he would fail, for it is harder to innovate architecturally than literarily, especially from the outsider position that Albert occupied. Johnson understood the fallibility of an ordered, wholly fictional, evocation of experience, and proved that a novel does not need to conform to normalised physical forms to be fit for purpose. It is when Albert Angelo disintegrates – as we are about to see – that it elevates itself, whereas a building that disintegrates as part of its architectural design would never be constructed as anything other than a hugely expensive piece of performance art. Avatar-architect for real-writer is an ultimately unsatisfying switch, because Johnson was able to break fundamental rules as a rising novelist, unlike a real or imagined aspiring architect. Johnson wanted his readers to understand and believe in Albert, and the myriad formal techniques the novel contains represent attempts at achieving what amounts to a traditional verisimilitude 23. This was doomed to fail for the simple reason that the fictional avatar was too distinct from the writer he represented, and too far from the truth that Johnson wanted to tell. Albert was not real, Albert’s narrative was not Johnson’s truth. Thus, Johnson – playing the role of emotional, honest, trapped novelist – screamed an obscenity in block capitals and opened a new section: ‘Disintegration’. 63 2. Trying to Say Something Johnson thrust himself into the heart of his writing in 1964 with all the subtlety of “a firy elephant”24 (160) and debunked the majority of Albert Angelo as “lying”. This evocative, emotionally-charged verb, synonymous with childhood accusations and simplified notions of “good” and “bad”, makes a profound impact, particularly when contrasted with the phrase “trying to say something”, which is repeated four times on page 167 alone. “Lying” is the opposite of saying something, posits Johnson: there is no value in words unless they are true. “[I]f I start falsifying in telling stories then I move away from the truth of my truth which is not good” (168). By this point, a long way through a fictionalised novel, he had already falsified a lot. Yet by acknowledging this distance from “[his] truth” and “disintegrating” the text, he believed he was crafting richer honesty; he was, in Krystyna Stamirowska’s wording, “telling the truth about the telling of a story and its inherent difficulty.” (282) Johnson defined what he was trying to write as “the truth of my truth”. The “my” creating a problematic sense of inconsistency – it is not, as may perhaps have been presumed, a figurative, universal truth, nor even a literal truth 25, but his truth, a private, personal, socio-historical one. And by rendering it through the fictionalised cipher of Albert, Johnson believed himself intrinsically diminishing that honesty. Turning personal experience into words is a translation already from thought and memory, but this is transmuted further from its origins when placed inside a fictional character. By making Albert Angelo more literary, 64 Johnson damaged the overarching intention of his work, which was recreating in literature the life he had lived. The authorial incursion serves to redeem the novel. “I have to write, I have to tell the truth, it’s compulsive,” (168) he stated, and by following this compulsion, Johnson became, in a more abstract sense, “true” to himself – like a more successful Albert, elevating the textual Johnson-novelist to the position to which he aspired. Because of the ‘Disintegration’, Johnson became comfortable with himself as a topic for literature, and a few pages later (170-173) he catalogued the novel’s “lies”, detailing the substitutions of names/locations/events he made and (for some) the reasons why he did so. In including this purging confessional, Johnson lifted the apparent shame he felt as a result of “lying”, and with this reveal of an unveiled self, he developed the courage to extend his textual presence further, hence his following two novels. As Johnson wrote in 1965, “Why ‘invent’ characters when you know yourself much better?” (392), a statement he would rigidly adhere to during the composition of Trawl. He doesn’t refer to a simple idea of self, related merely to action and motivation, but a deeper sense of understanding – how he feels, how he felt and how he expects to feel. The true self that Johnson wished to evoke possessed a much firmer emotional resonance than the fictional selves he included in Travelling People and Albert Angelo – when he began writing Trawl, what he sought to capture was not solely experience, but the felt response to experience. Emotion – for Johnson - cuts through traditional sentence and chronological structures, because in Johnson’s prose emotion ties memories together more strongly than geographic or chronological proximity. The reoccurrence of feeling powers the reader through Trawl and the uncontrollable nature of our thoughts is the message behind the physical structure of The Unfortunates. 65 3. Memories […] Caught by the Filter Trawl is a novel about the self, a theme heralded by its first word, as quoted above. Located near the bottom of a mostly blank page and separated from the rest of its sentence by two dots, “I” stands out, isolated, alone. In this text the narrator and protagonist, Johnson, has physically isolated himself on board a fishing trawler. The purpose is never fully discussed, but the closest direct admission appears thus: They [the fishermen] did not seem curious as to why I was going to sea: which fortunately saved me inventing reasons: I could not just say, I want to give substantial yet symbolic form to an isolation I have felt […] by enacting the isolation in an extreme form (104) Johnson’s actions are symbolic as well as literal, time on the boat offering the opportunity to trawl through memories: a simple metaphor, but not inefficient. The physical isolation created by water, distance and lack of communication is complemented and completed by the social isolation on board. The fishermen’s lack of curiosity shows that Johnson has been viewed as so distinct from their world that his tourism is not absurd, merely the behaviour of someone intrinsically other. After stating his struggle for an expression of motive, he continues with his thoughts and creates one. Though this increases the believability of the novel’s stream of consciousness form and parallels the thematic heart of the text – by thinking through a problem a solution may be found – it simultaneously draws into focus the inconsistencies within the character. This could be viewed as a 66 further attempt at evoking truth (for real people are inconsistent), but could also be considered a lie, though not the most significant one contained within this apparently honest novel. The text presupposes the present of the writer-narrator to be on the trawler. Memories are explored with the noise of fishing machinery “CRAANGK!” (8 and many others) as a regular interruption, with seasickness a frequent distraction and brief conversations and on-board experiences affecting cogitation. This is the literary truth of the novel – that Johnson is at sea, thinking. However, as the novel was written later (completed just over two years after the voyage) (202), this is not true. In keeping with his own ideology, by telling the story of his trip reminiscing on a trawler, Johnson is telling lies. By pretending that the text is the literalised contents of his mind as he sails on cold Northern seas, the reader must make the kind of concession to literary imagery that the ‘Disintegration’ of Albert Angelo preached against. Stamirowska acknowledges that “no actual repetition of experience is possible” (277) and writes of “Johnson’s awareness of the difficulty of his position and the paradoxes his commitment to truth telling generated” (277). Johnson’s ideas about truth have been forced into a reappraisal by this very paradox, and the truth that he has elected to look towards here is one that is more deeply rooted in emotion rather than facts, or other such details. As a conceit, Trawl has a strong central image: an unhappy man, isolated from his present by his interest in his past, takes a purging journey amongst a group of strangers into storm-filled seas. There is something Classical in the motif, and echoes too of Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad and Malcolm Lowry: applying a traditional idea to 20 th-century issues of 67 wartime, sex, being a student, working in an office, drinking with friends, is a further modernisation of the form. As too is the use of stream of consciousness. But this is a literary technique; this is turning experience into story, departing from Johnson’s rule. After only one book the definition of “truth” has morphed: Johnson seeks “his truth” more than “objective truth”. This new truth is an emotional truth, he is now chasing an evocation of how things felt rather than how things happened. Johnson reminisces about a pet cat: “I called him Winkie. I expect this was because he kept blinking. I could check on that. My mother would know. When I return.” (34) Literally, this is a lie, for the text was written in London with the author’s mother only a few miles away: (34) the fact could have been checked and incorporated. In deliberately refusing to research, but by indicating the (fictional) later potential to do so, Johnson furthers the “truth” of the novel. What he is attempting to evoke is his experience on the trawler, and acknowledging his ignorance of easily checkable facts emphasises the narrator’s isolation and distance from both his past and dry land. This expands the truth as read in Trawl, while cementing the fictionalised lie. Stamirowska cites that “a state of ignorance of the future cannot be restored” (277) as another problem with writing from memory, and this device of Johnson’s is a strong attempt towards falsifying that. Not only is the fact he cites as uncheckable easily discovered when writing, but if the origin of the name of his boyhood cat had preoccupied him enough to form part of the novel he later wrote, it seems highly probable that at some point in the intervening time he had raised the question of its etymology with his mother. It is an ignorance of a lived future that occurred after the present of the narrative, cleverly masquerading as an ignorance of the past from the novel’s present. False ignorance of the past is used to hide 68 knowledge of the future following the narrative, and applying Stamirowska’s assertion to the above quotation demonstrates one of the key ways in which Johnson maintains the truth of Trawl. A further method he uses is discussion of memory. In the midst of a scene featuring impressively open sexual detail 26, the narrator breaks away to state, “I should remember, everything would help, if I could, but I cannot, no matter, I cannot recall what I cannot recall” (16). For a text structured around in-depth explorations of a protagonist’s memory, an early admission of the fallibility of mental function is significant. The blunt stating of fact, “I cannot recall what I cannot recall”, binds to the text the idea that once a memory is lost, it will not return. Trawl is not about reconstructing repressed memories, but an open evocation of known prior life, the past as experienced in the text’s present. Memories gain potency through longevity, Johnson believed. “Other memories are caught by the filter. I shall only think them, since everything must be considered, not discuss them with myself. I think I have the important thing.” (52) Johnson does not claim to be recording every previous experience, and alludes to “other memories” that are being contemplated but left out of the text. The “filter” here is authorial selection, but the metaphor – in the context of previously mentioned memorial fallibility – reminds a reader that there is a second, uncontrolled, “filter”, through which rafts of uncontemplated memories pass. The “everything” that the narrator “considers” is only what practically remains, and of this, only some memories are selected for “discussion”: the text contains only 69 what he remembered and felt to be significant. In inferring that memories that last always hold significance, Johnson created another inconsistency: as a writer searching for truth, he should have mourned the lost moments of his life. By accepting what is permanently lost and ignoring the resultant lack in his truth, Johnson presumes that the memories that remain are significant. This is another emotional, hopeful, act and lacks justification. Johnson’s inconstant definition of Truth perhaps troubled him here, because it forced him to wilfully ignore his own inconstancies. Every type of truth he sought to write resulted in the impossibility of writing a different type of truth. One cannot write how something felt whilst also objectively describing in exactitude what happened: reflection and reconstruction are diverse actions. Perhaps Johnson was trapped by an incompatible urge to do both, but his willingness to fake the present of Trawl leads a reader to understand which Johnson believed was more valid as literature, even if he was uncomfortable with having made this distinction. 4. This Does Not Have to Be a Documentary The form of Trawl, however, is harder to fault. Johnson wrote of his method, “This is all very loose. Is there no other way other way: the other ways have all been tried No other No way.” (55-56) Johnson decreed stream of consciousness to be the most effective method of accurately conveying the sense of a life. His belief that “Life is chaotic, fluid, random” (14) was best represented by long, flowing sentences and skipped punctuation, digressions and few paragraph breaks. “All the other ways have been tried”, he wrote, but so had this one, famously by James 70 Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Samuel Beckett, to say nothing of Johnson’s generation. (66) He was not creating anything stylistically new, but he was continuing the proliferation of a technique he believed to be of the utmost importance. “Joyce is the Einstein of the novel” (12), Johnson wrote, and he appropriated the earlier novelist’s development not as intellectual plagiarism, but because he felt it could not be ignored. Literature had been changed by Ulysses, Johnson believed, and prose evocations of the psyche of one person are best written like Joyce’s exploration of Molly Bloom (690). The theme of fallible memory is complemented by form: reminiscences are not written in a linear, chronological order, and when mistakes are made, it is not important: “this piece is out of order. No matter.” (66) The blasé approach to time and accuracy diminishes literal truth, but evokes further the truth of a man lost in thought. This particular quotation refers to an anecdote about a light childhood misdemeanour whilst Johnson was an evacuee. To Johnson, the order of single incidents during this time is not important. The sense of isolation, his distance from London and ignorance of the wider meanings of war are the significant themes, and a momentary reversal of time does not detract from those. Elsewhere in the book he writes, “This does not have to be a documentary. Dates are rarely important” (56), and here falls the crux of Trawl: emotion trumps time. Johnson created a dichotomy between factuality and truth, because his truth did not have to contain all available facts. As he evoked a sense of the built urban environment to ground Albert Angelo, in Trawl he created awareness of the fallibility of memory and delved into an incomplete collection of prior experiences to create a personal impression of existence. 71 Details, including times, are less important, “my father drove us in a hired Vauxhall– What interest is that?” (115). Compare this to the revelation within Albert Angelo that “it is a Morris Minor not a Fiat we park in Wellclose Square” (173) and it is clear that this kind of detail-laden, literal truth is no longer what Johnson wants. In the earlier work, he listed every business along certain streets, transposed the entire register of a school class, relying on detail to convey an understanding of life. But this is unnecessary in Trawl, because it is inner existence, a psychological, cognitive truth that is expounded, and small facts and figures are not significant. To quote Tew, “the mode and structure of Trawl is an extension of both meaning and context” (108), whereby the way in which Johnson disorders his memories and recounts them with gaps and distractions better suits to evoke the experience of trawling through personal memory. The more attuned the reader is to Johnson’s methods, the more strongly this inner existence is able to be read: repeated disorder and disconnect clarify that this is how Johnson sees memory, and foreshadows the structure of The Unfortunates. Johnson’s rules differ between books, but within each consistency is maintained: the content and its function are mirrored by the form, and the growing control of memory and reinvigorated sense of self are what constitute the conclusion of Trawl. “I make an effort to believe him: I believe him” (172) is the narrator’s response to an anecdote told by a fisherman, a sign of mental control, an ending to an exploratory novel where the intended “demons” have been purged. Johnson has recounted and reflected and has been improved. “The piece ends, coda, resolution” (174), he thinks as he listens to music over the ship’s radio, and this is true for the novel. Albert Angelo has a brief section after ‘Disintegration’, ‘Coda’, 72 where Albert is murdered. It is unsatisfying and unnecessary, as the text has already fragmented, the resolution ‘Coda’ pretends to offer has already been denied. Trawl concludes with a narrator satisfied and optimistic, a considered, literary resolution that closes the narrative and offers uplifting future possibilities: a rather traditional ending for a supposedly revolutionary novel. 5. I’ll Get it All Down, Mate Zulfikar Ghose, a poet and close friend of Johnson’s, wrote in 1985 that Johnson “could never disguise his feelings; if he felt rotten, his face showed it” (25), and nowhere in his writing is feeling more apparent than in The Unfortunates. This novel features the most drastic of his formal experiments: its chapters are individually bound and presented in a box. Johnson believed that the chaos of existence (“Life does not tell stories […] it leaves myriads of ends untied, untidily”(14)) is “directly in conflict with the technological fact of the bound book [… which] imposes an order”(14). He decreed that order in prose is false, and in an attempt to represent the chaos of consciousness he created a novel whose chapters could be (mostly) read in any order. The designated first chapter describes the decline of Tony Tillinghast, but poses the question, “how can I place his order, his disintegration?”(25), a question Johnson immediately answered with physical clarity by indicating that he could not. Disintegration is now a word associated with death, entrapment in mortality, whereas in Albert Angelo it functioned as a springboard to literary freedom. For Johnson, a lot has changed. 73 Although Tony’s disintegration could easily be ordered in a literal respect (he developed cancer, failed to respond to treatment and became more ill until he died), the truth Johnson is trying to convey is not this chronological decline, but the truth of an afternoon plagued by disordered memories in his dead friend’s old city, “the present is determined and coloured by the past” ( Stamirowska, 284). The structure is an attempt to replicate the confusion of that afternoon, where linear narratives could not apply to the emotional, reminiscing, Johnson. Like Trawl, Johnson pretends to a false present, but here there is even less sense of hypocrisy, because the reader immediately appreciates the weight of emotional honesty as it crushes any dull wish for literal, rather than literary, truth. The fallibility of memory is again a theme, but in a development from Trawl, Johnson acknowledges that what remains to him of Tony is not necessarily the most important. He recalls, “Tony came in and said he was cooking fish fingers, he said they tasted okay if they were fried, a curious thing to remember, all memories are curious, for that matter, the mind as a think of an image “p” (5) There is nothing significant revealed in Tony’s tolerance (“they tasted okay”) of fried fish fingers, and Johnson concedes that this is “a curious thing to remember”. However, by its inclusion, he imbues it with thematic and literary importance, offering a more realistic appraisal of Tony through incorporation of the trivial. As in Albert Angelo, Johnson creates truth through detail, yet also laments the failure of his memory to elevate his friend. But if everything the remembered Tony spoke was verbose academese offering insightful opinions, this would feel unrealistic and dehumanise him. Describing a man who discusses the preparation of fish fingers offers no false glamorisation, grounding the relationship of Johnson and Tony in the prosaic – eating, and 74 what is eaten – thus creating a more believable truth. As in Trawl, memories are presented that are not of intellectual or emotional interest to Johnson, but they are not dismissed, for Tony’s death has altered them. Tony and Bryan will never again chat about frozen food, thus the memory of when they did has become precious, even though the moment was not. The lack of new memories is upsetting: Johnson’s refusal to ignore this scrap shows his grief. The extract’s ending – “think of an image”, followed by a large gap then an unrelated sentence, shows that literary convention is again being ignored. Johnson leaves his metaphor incomplete, because its completion would achieve nothing, emphasising the importance of the emotional content rather than the language, an example of, Kaye Mitchell writes, “the limits of language in representing […] truth”(61). Johnson feels and expresses something he is unable to explicitly express in language. Although this initially feels like the author failing – lacking the ability to evoke what he needs to using language – it can be argued that this is Johnson excelling, using empty space in combination with the words either side to create a firm impression of emotion. Mitchell, whose essay explores in detail ideas related to hypertextuality, suggests that these blanks “wilfully diminish the authority of the author, inviting the reader to fill them in; they imply a necessary interactivity, communication as exchange, and the incompletion of any text”(61). Mitchell heaps praise on The Unfortunates and Johnson’s ideology, claiming that the book not only works as a successful piece of fiction, but that it also questions deep-rooted notions about the core of literature, i.e. that language is the most important thing. Mitchell states that, “form and content work together […] in The Unfortunates to elucidate and expand upon its central concerns” (61), and that Johnson is therefore exploring both the boundaries of textuality and the 75 emotions of his past. The language – and its absence – combine to evoke strong emotions, emotions Johnson struggled to describe on the page as much as in reality. The critic Paola Splendore, however, firmly disagrees with this assertion that emotion is central to the text, stating that “Whatever his subject, Johnson’s real subject was ‘writing’” (94). And even here, in a novel about death, The Unfortunates does explicitly discuss writing. Johnson worries about the effects of his sports journalism: Does this bloody reporting affect, destroy even, my own interest in language, sometimes I feel I have mislaid perhaps, not lost, something through this reporting, using under the pressure of deadlines the words which first come into my head, which is not good (7) Immediacy is objected to, yet in the 1960s many writers 27 were experimenting with automatic writing as an intellectually justified method of creating honest prose. Johnson, in Trawl and much of The Unfortunates, seeks the same intended effect: the exposure of (sub-)consciousness. His dismissal of immediacy as a corrupting force is diametrically opposed to writers whose works, whether deliberately or not, Trawl has much in common with. Trawl frequently reads like automatic writing, yet Johnson conspicuously criticises a methodology his work tries to represent by design. This is another discrepancy between Johnson’s ideology and his literature: in asserting that words thought at the moment of experience are not the most honest to express it, he justifies the composition of Trawl and 76 The Unfortunates (i.e. a present distinct from the present of writing), but also creates a possibility for falsehood. He risks the expansion of the breach between the “then” of the focus and the “now” of the writing by trusting more in considered than immediate language, further guaranteeing that “his” truth is artifice: a crafted, traditional verisimilitude that his essays state is not sufficient. However, when Johnson’s formal experimentation and interest in textual composition are ignored, it is possible to see great wells of emotion within his works. On a page that opens with the acknowledgement of Tony’s cancer as terminal (“They had I think done all they could for him” – even in this, “I think” prevents Tony’s imminent death being discovered without awareness of the narrator), Johnson remembers, “Tony and I talked seriously, sadly […] There was I remember great comfort for me in what he said […] This is banal. What did he actually say?” (4) Grief is hidden behind anger at the inefficiencies of memory. Referring to what lingers as “banal”, the closing question is aimed at the writer, not a reader. As it has been conceded that the memory is lost, the question is an admonition: “I fail to remember, the mind has fuses.” (5) Yet again, Johnson states that the brain is fallible. This anger at the self occurs immediately after the reveal of Tony’s hopeless condition. In a moment where a bereaved narrator could wail over a lost friend, Johnson avoids direct emotion and rages instead against memory (5). Avoidance of sentiment happens throughout, and it is the deliberate shunning of abject expressions of grief that reveals the extent of Johnson’s feeling. One of the most open comments is, “his death makes me feel guilty that I do not value every word he ever said, every moment I knew him. 77 Anyway,” (3) here sentimentality is rapidly absconded from with the turning “Anyway”. Johnson’s guilt is characterised by the present tense refusal to “value every word”: even in hindsight there is no pleasure in remembering Tony’s conversation of departmental politics, as Johnson does at this point. He is keen to show he has not become irrational – he does not want to rescind his opinion of a dull conversation, but in doing so he finds a fault within himself. He misses his friend’s conversation, but will not lie about its intrinsic value. Johnson is aware that bereavement makes people less balanced and wants to avoid bias, but his subject-changing “Anyway” shows that he not only feels guilt for his lack of caring, but also for the guilt itself. Johnson could not proudly espouse the ridiculousness of altered opinions, and wanted to dwell neither on his shame nor his inability to defend it. He didn’t want to be sentimental, desiring balance and emotionless hindsight, but this is impossible because he did care – he cared enough to write an entire novel about Tony, which more than anything in the text indicates how affected he was. A lot of critical interest has been paid to the format of The Unfortunates, but very little to its actual existence. This, and his promise to Tony, “I’ll get it all down, mate” (5), emphasises the real truth of this text: that B. S. Johnson, no matter how sombre and theoretical he tried to appear, felt deeply about the death of his friend. 6. Convention has Failed Much of The Unfortunates is an exploration of the contradictions of memory. In a chapter detailing his final visit to Tony, Johnson learns that his friend has been speaking to a local vicar. 78 I was not going to allow Tony to back out now, it would be a negation of everything he stood for, […] it upset me […] The father was I think offended, perhaps he did not know the things his son stood for, to me, everything we know about someone is perhaps not the same, even radically different from what others, another, may see or understand about them (3-4) This discussion of Tony’s ideology is centred on the author (see the repetition of “I” and “me”), and this perception of his friend as firmly nonreligious is different to how Tony’s father sees him. Johnson views deathbed conversations with clergy as a rejection of the identity Tony possessed, a signifier of his friend’s erosion by illness. The physical signs, “he was grossly altered […] his face had shrunken” (2) are nothing compared to the significance of a spiritual decline. Tony’s father wants the death to be as simple as possible, for Tony is a dying man and his son; yet for Johnson, Tony is a symbol: an intellectual, a critic who helped with the composition of Travelling People and a friend he conversed, wrote and ate fish fingers with. His relationship with Tony is so vested with ideas that he struggles to comprehend that letting the dying man speak to a vicar, if he wants to, is kinder than holding him to former opinions. Johnson is unwilling to let Tony change – it is unpleasant to see his personality (as perceived by Johnson) diminish; yet on reflection, Johnson concedes the limitations of personal opinion, emphasising that “Tony” in The Unfortunates is only accurate if considered within Johnson’s truth. His book does not claim to be unbiased, and acknowledging that his Tony could be “radically different from what others, another, may see or understand about [him]”, Johnson 79 avoids the necessity of justification, this is Johnson’s Tony, his life rendered into Johnson’s truth. With The Unfortunates, Johnson elevates a life into literature, and concedes it as an overblown tribute. It contains an entire paragraph about a whisk Tony gave him as “a belated wedding present”(1), an intrinsically boring object to consider but, as Johnson remarks, “the fact of his death influences every memory of everything connected with him.”(1) The novel is an attempt to write down “everything connected with” Tony. It is “the fact of his death” that has caused The Unfortunates to be written, as it was Johnson’s sense of isolation that created Trawl and his disillusionment with fiction that led to Albert Angelo. Johnson’s three most personal novels are written on subjects that moved him. He exposed himself to express his truth, and here that truth is how “the fact of [Tony’s] death” made him feel. Which was confused, illogical and sad. The death corrupted his memories so much that he lost control of their order and the rationality surrounding thoughts of Tony, and this is why the book is unbound. If Johnson had believed this was the best way to present all literature, he would have insisted on it for his later books, but he didn’t. He defended his book-in-abox until he died, because this format was particular to its content. He wrote, admittedly in 1965, “Each of my books is a specific solution to a specific set of problems” (393) and if this is taken as a continued literary stance, it corroborates the above assertion. One afternoon, Johnson wandered through Nottingham a mess of conflicting and uncontrollable thoughts, and the arbitrary nature with which the resultant novel may be read intends to replicate the incompatibility of emotional memories and traditional mental ordering. “The fact of [Tony’s] death” made logical comprehension impossible, and Johnson crafted a non-conventional book, 80 complete with theoretical justification, to convert his feelings into words. Stamirowska wrote that the unbound chapters and the gaps within language combine to create a “peculiarity of form [that] draws attention to the creative process itself” (285). To take this further, one can attest that the peculiarity of form draws attention to the creative motivation, which is one of memory and mourning for a dead friend, and that the gaps and the disorder show a narrator struggling to bring together into a comfortable, cohesive, whole his memories of an individual who held great emotional importance. 7. So Much about Technique and Form In a late essay Johnson stumbled upon what is still the most recurrent criticism of his work28: “in writing so much about technique and form I am diverting you from what the novels are about, what they are trying to say” (27). All of Johnson’s novels, not just those discussed above, directly consider their composition, and within each, form and technique are difficult to ignore. Visually, the dense prose of Trawl reveals its stream of consciousness style; with The Unfortunates, a reader constantly engages with the form by holding a box filled with unbound papers; and the ‘Disintegration’ of Albert Angelo is heralded by two explicit exclamations (as discussed in the Introduction) and, ten pages earlier, a hole cut through the pages of the book. Johnson acknowledged the distracting risk of these varied techniques, and reiterated that his works were “trying to say” something, this something a personal experience of emotional truth. For when Johnson tried to replicate his consciousness through stream of consciousness, changes in 28 See Bibliography and footnote 15. 81 style, violent disintegrations and unbound books, to quote Judith Mackrell, “the underlying intention [was] always deadly serious” (45). Johnson was not shy of writing about himself, or of formal experimentation, and when one reads through his techniques and theories, there exist moments of great insight and deep personal truth. A paragraph about the importance vested in a whisk and a fearlessness to admit this shows a real depth of feeling. The Unfortunates is not structured as it is to distance the reader from the (often) sentimental truth of Johnson’s grief, but to replicate the maze of disintegrated confusion of his first visit to Nottingham after Tony’s death. Trawl is not lacking in truth for the intrinsic lie of its supposed writing at sea, for it recreates the idea of Johnson’s thoughts as they happened. Albert Angelo disintegrates because Johnson was dissatisfied with speaking about himself through a fictionalising veil. He kept that veil off for the rest of his career, bravely and brazenly. He stuck to his principles (though they may not have been as solid as he believed them to be) and continued to experiment with form because he believed that as no two stories are the same, no two stories should be told using the same technique. He conveys truth through his honesty and an earnestness to be honest through form. Johnson’s prose is moving, poetical and frequently funny, and when it does something unexpected there is always a reason, even if it is obtuse. Johnson relentlessly pursued “truth”, and what is commendable is that his search for a perfect way to express it – and a perfect definition of it – lasted his entire career. 82 Works Cited Anonymous (1963) ‘Review of Travelling People by B. S. Johnson’, Books and Bookmen, 9 (8), p. 37. Coe, Jonathan (2005) Like A Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson. London: Picador. Conrad, Joseph (2007) The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and Other Stories, Simmons Allan H. and Stape, J. H. (eds). London: Penguin. Darlington, Joseph (2014) ‘“A Sort of Waterfall”: Class Anxiety and Authenticity in B.S. Johnson’, BSJ: The B.S. Johnson Journal, 1, pp. 69-109. Davies, David John (1985) ‘The Book as Metaphor: Artifice and Experiment in the Novels of B. S. Johnson’, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 5 (2), pp. 72-76. D’Eath, Paul M. (1985) ‘B. S. Johnson and the Consolation of Literature’, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 5 (2), pp. 77-81. Enard, Mathias (2014) Zone, Charlotte Mandell (trans.). London: Fitzcarraldo Editions. Figes, Eva (1985) ‘B. S. Johnson’, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 5 (2), pp. 70-71. Ghose, Zulfikar (1985) ‘Bryan’, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 5 (2), pp. 23 34. Hadley, Scott Manley (2016) Zone by Mathias Enard. Available at: https://triumphofthenow.com/2016/10/01/zone-by-mathias-enard/ (Accessed: 25 October 2016). Higden, David Leon (2014) ‘B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo as a Postmodern Counterbook’, BSJ: The B.S. Johnson Journal, 1, pp. 5-45. James, David (2007) ‘The (W)hole Affect: Creative Reading and Typographic Immersion’ in Albert Angelo’ in Re-reading B. S. Johnson, Tew, Philip and White, Glyn (eds). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 27-37. Johnson, B. S. (2004) Albert Angelo in B. S. Johnson Omnibus. London: Picador. ---. (1963) ‘Anti or Ultra’, Books and Bookmen, 9 (8), p. 25. ---. (1985) Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry. New York: New Directions. ---. (2004) House Mother Normal in B. S. Johnson Omnibus. London: Picador. ---. (1975) See The Old Lady Decently. London: Hutchinson. ---. (1999) The Unfortunates. London: Picador. ---. (1970) The Smithsons on Housing. Directed by B. S. Johnson, London: BBC. Available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UH5thwHTYNk (Accessed: 25 October 2016). ---. (1964) Travelling People. London: Transworld Publishers. ---. (2004) Trawl in B. S. Johnson Omnibus. London: Picador. ---. (2013) Well Done God! Selected Prose and Drama of B. S. Johnson, Coe, Jonathan, Jordan, Julia and Tew, Philip (eds). London: Picador. Joyce, James (2008) Ulysses, Johnson, Jeri (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. 83 Kanaganayakam, C. (1985) ‘Artifice and Paradise in B. S. Johnson’s Travelling People’, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 5 (2), pp. 87-93. Lowry, Malcolm (1975) Ultramarine. London: Penguin. Mackrell, Judith (1985) ‘B. S. Johnson and the British Experimental Tradition: An Introduction’, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 5 (2), pp. 42-64. McGonigle, Thomas (1985) ‘No Future’, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 5 (2), pp. 98-100. Melville, Herman (2002) Moby Dick. London: Wordsworth Editions. Mitchell, Kaye (2007) ‘The Unfortunates: Hypertext, Linearity and the Act of Reading’ in Re-reading B. S. Johnson, Tew, Philip and White, Glyn (eds). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 51-64. Splendore, Paola (1985) ‘B. S. Johnson’s Intransitive Performance’, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 5 (2), pp. 93-98. Stamirowska , Krystyna (2006) ‘Versions of Autobiography in B.S. Johnson’s Novels’, Salzburg Studies in English Literature and Culture, 3, pp. 277 289. Tew, Philip (2001) B. S. Johnson: A Critical Reading. Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press. Thielemans, Johan (1985) ‘Albert Angelo or B. S. Johnson’s Paradigm of Truth’, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 5 (2), pp. 81-87. Tindall, Kenneth (1985) ‘Bryan Johnson - - A Big Motherfucker of a Pisces’, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 5 (2), pp. 101-108. Tredell, Nicolas (1985) ‘Telling Life, Telling Death: The Unfortunates’, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 5 (2), pp. 34-42. Tredell, Nicolas (1985) ‘The Truths of Lying: Albert Angelo’, The Review of Contemporary Fiction, 5 (2), pp. 64-70. Woolf, Virginia (2004) Mrs Dalloway. London: Vintage. 84 B.S. Johnson, Leicester, Pornography, Poundworld & Me Philip Tew Brunel University London For many years I have devoted a significant portion of my life, especially the professional scholarly part, to the study of B.S. Johnson and his work. How did I come to this topic? During the mid to late 1960s I first read a few of his novels as they were published in a Carnegie Library in eastern Enfield where I grew up. I remember distinctly Travelling People and Trawl. Later at Leicester University I was taught by a minor American poet, Lyman Andrews, who it transpired, knew Johnson professionally. Lyman (as he was universally known) was poetry critic of The Sunday Times. On 12th November 1974 I was very much taken with Fat Man on a Beach, broadcast on the telly during my second year studying American Studies and English. The next day after another student indicated that the subject matter of the show was an acquaintance of our tutor (how they knew, I still have no idea), Lyman. I asked the latter whether I might meet Johnson or at least send him a letter, hoping a connection might be facilitated, having no sense that the broadcast was for Johnson by a full year posthumous. Regrettably my wish was to be unfulfilled, Lyman as ever hinting scurrilously at unspecified scandal, gossip remaining his stock-intrade even when there was none, his key characteristic, along with his ludicrously hard drinking. 85 Curiously another of our tutors—although he never taught me— was G.S. Fraser, who as Coe indicates was cited by Robert Graves in an edition of The White Goddess, as noted by Johnson in a review published in Coe’s excellent biography. At the time I remained mightily impressed by Johnson’s programme, having found its mordant humour appealing, its paradoxes pleasing, loving the London accent and finding an echo in its setting of one summer in childhood. As a nine-year-old I had visited Portmeirion and its beaches in Lleyn in 1963, having previously walked up Snowdon with my parents, something my father was unconvinced I could do. I made it to the top. Hence Clough William-Ellis’ village was toured with an air of youthful victory, of achievement. I had no idea until researching this short essay that one year later, after my visit, Lewis Mumford was to devote part of a chapter of The Highway and the City (1964) to the village, stating ‘Portmeiron is a gay, deliberately irresponsible reaction against the dull sterilities of so much that passes as modern architecture today.’ Perhaps he might have been touring Wales the previous summer, a whimsical thought. In the intervening years the television series The Prisoner kept the location in my mind. The summer following Johnson’s ITV broadcast I holidayed with my then fiancée (later wife, whom I divorced after five years) in a tiny cottage in a coastal village, Port Mulgrave, halfway between Staithes and Runswick Bay where we lunched occasionally whenever the rain abated enough. On leaving our cottage a drunken fisherman, confined next door to his upper bedroom by age and illness, would invariably shower us with obscenities as we passed, damp and glum. We never glimpsed more than a shadow or a twitching curtain. His middle aged daughter could be seen 86 fetching his alcohol daily, a dutiful offspring, shopping basket ever clanking. We spent one particular saturated, dismal early-closing day after a pub lunch in Whitby. Leaving our borrowed 1959 Morris Minor in a side street, we sheltered in a local, flea-bitten bookshop in a side street seeking reading material to pass the time if the weather failed to improve. It soon became evident that the second-hand stock of novels provided a literal front for whatever the oddly nervous and secretive men came out with from a back room furtively stuffed in brown paper bags or the occasional briefcase. Men of all classes entered, a busy trade, all soaked by the downpour, leaving shortly afterward, their eyes embarrassed, avoiding eye contact with my companion, each announced by the rattle of a bead curtain that concealed the rear chamber, its successive tinkling shimmies adding to the cacophonous pitter-patter of rainfall. Whispering, giggling, we soon decided the shop’s real trade was in pornography. This setting animated Chandler’s The Big Sleep, Yorkshire-style, more tame and nondescript than the West Coast, perhaps, more seedy. Among the dozen paperbacks we bought was a paperback edition of Albert Angelo, with a racy cover featuring snaps of a naked woman in an odd pose with right arm curved below her, the other above, long black gloves on each, and two others of a woman in a state of undress back and front (her suspenders showing above stockinged legs, chubby thighs, plump cheeks, dressed in a negligee) all in black-and-white in a school desk alongside a penknife, its inkwell in place. As research has since told me the covers were designed by Abis/Stribley/Sida, three graduates emerging from the RCA in 1966, which collective was dissolved about year later, after which Stephen Abis would join Panther Books as its art director. I was to 87 read our entire haul, since the weather worsened for the next few days. Our purchases were an utter surprise to the shopkeeper, a seedy, thin and balding man, tall as I recall, whom we had to call from his regular trade at the rear. Clearly no one bought books in this establishment as there were few with prices. Confused about what to charge, he scribbled in a figure on the inside covers after bartering for each one as if he might forget them. Then he added up using his stubby pencil on the back of a proverbial envelope. He demanded 22 pence for Johnson (which being about 0.05% of my monthly rent at the time means the rough equivalent would be around 11 pence today, not a huge sum for a pornographer to make even pre-internet). His inscription of the price is still visible forty years later (at the time of my first draft of this essay in 2015). On that 1967 Panther edition’s back cover (now detached from wear, kept by careful placement on my shelf devoted to Johnson aided by a red elastic band) is a photo of Chapel Market, with a toothy woman looking like my maternal grandmother, an air of premature ageing, stood beside house coats at 3and 9 pence old money. Curiously I had just been shopping in that very market in 1983 when I retrieved the novel from my shelves, having forgotten the narrative, drawn into rereading the book. I was living nearby in Noel Road where Joe Orton had been killed. Having been an unhappy supply teacher in Hackney, looked out from my chair through the room-high Georgian windows of my rented flat at the school opposite, Johnson’s book struck a chord, reanimating a lifelong interest in most things Johnsonian. As some of you may know that since I have completed a PhD in 1997 on the author, the first solely dedicated to his work, the basis of the first full-length monograph on him with a major publisher which appeared in 2001.Later I co-edited a collection on his oeuvre in 2007 with Glyn 88 White, and more recently compiled and edited a collection of a selection of the author’s writing along with Jonathan Coe and Julia Jordan, which was published as Well Done God!: Selected Prose and Drama of B. S. Johnson by Picador in February 2013 to coincide with the eightieth and fortieth anniversaries (of Johnson’s birth and untimely death). Of the volumes with which I have been associated the latter is the one of which I am the proudest, particularly as it was finished during a period punctuated by the final illness and death of my father. That volume represented the culmination of an idea Jonathan and I had hatched years previously, one which at times we judged life was conspiring to prevent. After the various digressions above, my tour through Johnson associated memories, the Leicester connection and pornography in Yorkshire, let me progress to a far more recent anecdote concerning an occasion less than a month ago (again as I write my first draft of this essay). Another unplanned shopping trip returned me to Johnson once again in September 2015, on a Saturday morning in most unlikely fashion in the Water Gardens Shopping Centre in Harlow where with my Hungarian partner on occasion we undertake our weekly shop, the large Asda first, Esquires coffee shop next, our very favourite one, to complete the initial phase of our routine when visiting this new-town. Subsequently said partner explores other stores. And either I’ll take breakfast nearby or visit the Poundworld a few yards away, a bulwark in maintaining cheap prices with its distinctive blue, orange and white sign leading to a veritable cornucopia of cheap goods, the aisles stacked full. That day I chose the latter course of action and noticed a books section I hadn’t seen previously. Looking idly I saw struck by the word Coe. A subconscious thought predicated the possibility that perhaps his Johnson biography had been remaindered as a 89 precursor to the issue of a paperback edition. While judging whether I should acquire a third copy, I refocused and saw with surprise my own name. On that bottom shelf in Poundworld were four pristine copies of Well Done God!, each a pound, naturally, reduced from the original asking price of £25. I was flabbergasted, disappointed in a way, yet snapped them up with alacrity. Amid the analgesics, vitamin pills and supplements, sweets, crisps, plastic toys, cheap stationery, cheap tools and DIY accoutrements, cans of shaving gel and hairspray, pet foods, myriad soaps, shampoos, bleaches and cleaners, and so forth lay our editorial act of recovery of a figure who might well have been bemused by these surroundings, an emporium of amazing value (that’s the tag they use repeatedly) in an American-style store set overlooking a remnant of the Essex countryside. And, Johnson certainly would not have thought a return of a single pound sufficient for the collective labour of first the author himself, and subsequently all three editors (any income for the publisher would not have been paramount in his thoughts). As I reflected on the chances of the editor of such a volume finding it in such unexpected, bizarre circumstances, I wondered whether to be amused or feel humiliated, for as I realized in a flash we’d been remaindered, probably losses incurred through lack of sales, project not viable. Johnson might have been aghast, but I think certainly he might have perceived the underlying incongruity, even a certain dark humour in my discovery, the universe determined to keep producing new ways of encountering him. 90 The B.S. Johnson Archive: “What a pity it is not possible for you all to read the ms!” Joanna Norledge The British Library With the archive catalogue now online and available to researchers at the British Library, B.S. Johnson’s wish for his readers is now a possibility. The archive contains numerous drafts of his novels, from the very first autograph draft notebooks, written in pencil and ritually begun on the 31 st December, to the typed final drafts marked-up in detail for the printers, with instructions on font, layout and explanations of his sometimes complex printing needs, such as cut out windows in pages (Alberto Angelo 1964) or unbound chapters (The Unfortunates 1969). Johnson sought to capture in his novels an authenticity of experience which he believed was missing from many other novels being published at the time. He wanted that authentic experience for his readers as well. The comment in the title above is quoted from his final novel See The Old Lady Decently (1975). He continued, throughout his writing career to maintain his acute awareness of the falseness inherent in the act of writing, and to try to counter it by being as honest and open about it as possible. It is only fitting then, that he adopted a similar attitude when it came to his archive. He kept everything and carefully documented his work. He habitually drew graphs tracking the progress of his novels. He kept a notebook tracking the articles he wrote and sent to newspapers and 91 magazines, noting if and when it was published. When reviewing Jonathan Coe’s biography, Eva Figes notes that Johnson’s “comprehensive archive” provided a rich source of information. She describes Johnson keeping anything “that might interest posterity” and suggests that his belief that he was “as important as Beckett or Joyce” drove him to act this way. Such careful documentation seems to be not only evidence of a strong organised work ethic and determination, but also shows a conscious awareness of the importance of recording the story of his career. But what about that thorny issue of truth? Figes differed from Johnson in her opinion of truth in fiction saying “the whole notion of truth is vexed: it is actually far easier to be truthful in fiction than in anything that claims to be autobiography, with its inevitable evasions and omissions” (Figes, 2004). The archive is a rich source for information and detail about Johnson’s life, work and ideas. But will we find truth there? Coe writes about his own experience of the archive thus: I had begun to see the Johnson archive – a vast construct of cardboard boxes and plastic bags, which for some years now had been shunted from room to room in Virginia’s house at my whimsical behest – as a sort of large scale version of The Unfortunates. That is, a narrative, not entirely lacking in order (remember the sections marked ‘First’ and ‘Last’), but never intended to be read in a strictly linear sequence: rather, something to be shuffled and arranged randomly by the reader, as a way of replicating the chaos of life and the unstructured human consciousness (Coe, 425). This rather romantically described state of the archive could not persist in the context of a national library. Once the archive was deposited at the British Library I was appointed as the cataloguer and began work imposing some structure to the documents, in order to make the collection accessible to researchers. However, when embarking on this task, cataloguing 92 archivists are always aware of the implications and subjective elements of the work that we do. The archive itself is a construct, knowingly collected by the writer himself. The concept of truth is just as constructed in the archive, as it is in fiction. Even today, in the archival profession, discussions persist around the ideal standard of an objective archivist and the impossibility of achieving such a status. How can we ever deliver an untainted truth, as we inevitably present through our own selves, our own minds, with all our personal history and experience influencing our perceptions unconsciously? Even Coe admits his own bias “I must admit…. I had tended to favour the most personally revelatory material, at the expense of things that seemed largely of academic interest” (Coe, 436). The role of the archivist is to be led primarily by the material in front of us, to represent the role of the creator foremost. This is why archival concepts such as “original order” become so important to our work. Sometimes the original order is non-existent or hardly there. Family members, researchers, biographers have been through the material before us, and left traces of their presence in the collection. Scraps of papers with people or works identified in a unfamiliar hand, notes from the widow noting that this linen document folder was bought in Paris and notable correspondence separated out. This archive had been through hands before mine, but nevertheless B.S. Johnson’s voice was ever present, his attitude to his work, his ordered dis-order, was discernible throughout. One of the fascinating and unique aspects to this archive is the inter-connectedness of it all. Johnson’s work drew on his life and his interests. He never let any of his words, themes or ideas go to waste, recycling and re-shaping until he had the right form for his message. One 93 example of this, amongst many others, is how his interest in architecture led him to write a novel about Albert Angelo (a struggling architect), review books on architecture and create a television documentary on the Smithsons, two contemporary architects. It is here in the archive that you can discover the true extent of these connections. Johnson experimented to stretch the novel into a format which he felt could truthfully express himself. Figes explains her shared belief with Johnson that the impact of “the advent of cinema” meant that the novel had to change. It was this conviction that led Johnson to experiment with different formats and genres, he wrote poetry, plays for theatre, journalism, radio plays, screenplays for film and television, made documentaries and edited anthologies. He sought the correct format with which to successfully express his existence and creative ideas. His work in film was very important to him and it was in this medium that some of his most creative and genre defying work was made, such as Paradigm (1969), a profound experimental film exploring the themes of language and aging. The passing of time and aging was a regular theme in Johnson’s work. The archive includes a fair bit of time passing, but as Johnson reflected, “Change is a condition of life” (Johnson, 17). B.S. Johnson is gone but his archive survives and his work has an ever increasing influence today. In the introduction to Aren’t you Rather Young to be Writing your Memoirs? he writes “what I am really trying to do is challenging the reader to prove his existence as palpably as I am proving mine by the act of writing” (Johnson, 28). Now the archive captures the essence of his existence, available to all. Every page, scribble and crumbing pinecone in this archive bursts with the vivacity of B.S. Johnson. At an event at the British Library in 2013, part of the celebration of the 80 th anniversary of 94 B.S. Johnson’s birth, his friend Philip Pacey engagingly described how talking with Johnson always left him inspired and fired up to write himself. Now, with his archive open to all, everyone has a chance to experience that infectious, provoking energy B.S. Johnson brought to the world. The B.S. Johnson Archive @ The British Library: Accessing the B.S. Johnson Archive The contents of B.S. Johnson’s personal archive, held at the British Library, can be searched through the online catalogue. The papers are available to be viewed in the Manuscripts Reading Room. You need to have registered for a Reader Pass before you can order items using the catalogue. Please consult the British Library website for further information on using the Reading Rooms and accessing manuscript and archive material. The collection consists of a wide variety of material covering all aspects of Johnson’s life and work. It has been catalogued in an archival hierarchal structure which means that papers relating to different areas of Johnson’s work have been kept together. However, Johnson’s ideas and interests permeated through his life and work, and consequently through this whole archive. There are endless opportunities for researchers to explore the various strands of Johnson’s work, from fiction, poetry and drama, to film and journalism. 95 • To access the collection you can search the online catalogue [Add MS 89001] through the website: www.searcharchives.bl.uk • Click on Browse the Collection to view the hierarchal structure of the archive and get an over view of the documents. • To view the material you need to register for a Readers Pass, for which you need to provide proof of identity and proof of address. http://www.bl.uk/help/how-to-get-a-reader-pass • You can then order the files you want to view to the Manuscripts Reading room. • NB. You will not be able to photograph or make copies of any of this archive material. Bibliography Coe, Jonathan. Like a Fiery Elephant: the Story of B.S. Johnson. London: Picador, 2004. Figes, Eva. “Everything gets worse”. The Guardian, 5th June 2004. [Web Source] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2004/jun/05/biography.jonath ancoe Johnson, B.S. Aren’t you Rather Young to be Writing your Memoirs? London: Hutchinson, 1973. 96 Правда Jeremy Page Then I went back into the house and wrote, It is midnight. The rain is beating on the windows. It was not midnight. It was not raining. - Samuel Beckett “Take pravda,” said Hilary. “Pravda?” “As a case in point.” Hilary Broughton, Professor of Language Death Studies and Jasper Clough, Professor of Life Science, had climbed the mound that overlooked the university campus and were both slightly out of breath. “Isn’t it the name of a Russian newspaper?” Hilary gazed out across the campus. Below them several hundred students went about their business, studying, drinking coffee, discussing matters weighty and insubstantial, sleeping, making various versions of love, indulging in the odd spliff. “Russian perhaps,” said Hilary, “I’ll concede that. ‘Newspaper’ is more problematic. On the face of it pravda is the Russian word for truth. Or perhaps more accurately the Russian for truth. But what truth? Whose truth?” Spring had arrived after a long, grey, wet winter, and the Downs had rarely looked so pleasing, or so it might have seemed to Jasper, had he given it any thought. 97 Hilary took a tin of tobacco from the pocket of his tweed jacket and set about rolling himself a cigarette. “When the Soviet tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia in 1968, the ‘truth’ was proclaimed as the quelling of a fascist uprising,” Hilary continued, “and as soon as a word like ‘pravda’ or ‘truth’ can be made to comfortably accommodate its own opposite – an act of the purest linguicide, I would contend – we must see the processes of language change as so advanced that language death becomes inevitable. And by ‘language death’, I mean, of course, the death of all language and all languages.” He struck a match and lit his cigarette. As usual it was beautifully rolled. Jasper surveyed the undulating downland. “I see,” he said, taking a packet of mints from his tweed jacket. His breathing had, by now, returned to normal, unlike Hilary’s, which was still a little laboured, “So language change is a necessary condition for language death,’ he went on tentatively, putting a mint in his mouth.” “The timeframe is impossible to predict,” said Hilary, “because language has never before been subjected to the pressures it faces today: the internet, 24 hour news, celebrity culture, social media, politicians, management gurus – all doing their damnedest without even realising it. But yes, eventually language change will sow the seeds of language death.” “But we won’t live to see it,” Jasper suggested hopefully. “Oh, we’ll see language death all right,” Hilary returned, carefully stubbing out the butt of his roll-up. “It’s happening all the time. But it isn’t language change that’s causing it yet. We’re a few centuries away from Armageddon.” Jasper sucked thoughtfully. “Shall we go down?” 98 Facts: 3,176 languages are officially endangered. 9.2% of living languages have fewer than ten speakers. 639 languages that once existed are extinct. “Come!” called Hilary at her first knock. The door opened a little and her head appeared. “Sorry?” “Come, come,” Hilary repeated. “In?” she asked. “Yes, in,” this with a hint of impatience, “Come in.” The ritual complete, Eleanor entered, closing the door firmly behind her. Six foot in her stockinged feet – though today she was stockingless – with auburn hair scraped into a bun whose continued existence looked precarious at best. The faux NHS spectacles. Today she was wearing a bottle green cotton mini-dress and – apparently – very little else. Hilary considered her carefully. “Sit!” he commanded finally. Eleanor held his gaze as she seated herself in an armchair by the window. Hilary rose from his desk, determined not to be distracted – yet – by the thigh she had artfully crossed over its partner for his edification. “Progress?” he asked. “Some.” He loved the way she said that: her Cornish accent just discernible, if you knew what you were listening for. Which Hilary, naturally, did. “Hmm.” He reminded himself of the facts. She was considerably less than half his age. He was a married man, who’d loved his wife Dorothy, a librarian, for many years. They had two children, now grown up, and a beagle/cocker 99 spaniel cross. They took their holidays in Italy, Umbria one year, Tuscany the next. They lived in a comfortable detached house with a large, welltended garden. He was Professor of Language Death Studies at the University of the South Downs. She was his doctoral student, researching the evolution of Cornish and the prospects for Kernewek Kemmyn in the twenty-first century. They had been involved in an intimate relationship, which she had initiated, for more than two years. He was a married man. She was his doctoral student. His house was detached. His wife was a librarian. He loved his wife. He would always love his wife. Dorothy – that was it, Dorothy. Would it be Tuscany or Umbria this summer? The children were grown up. The dog was a beagle/cocker cross. The dog was called Barney. Barney was fluent in both Cornish dialects. Eleanor was his grownup child. Green was the colour of truth. The garden was well-tended. The garden was the colour of truth. Hilary cleared his throat. “Anything else?” She shook her head and her hair fell loose. Auburn was the colour of truth. She pointed to the window. “Blinds” she commanded. Hilary closed the blinds. “More light,” she commanded. Hilary obliged. Eleanor pointed to the door. “Lock,” she commanded. Hilary locked the door. Eleanor stood, removed her spectacles and placed them carefully on Hilary’s desk. Then, grasping the hem of her dress, she pulled it up over her head and threw it into a corner. She stood 100 before him in her unstockinged feet, enjoying the helplessness in his eyes before advancing on him. “I love you, Hilary.” Those monophthongs. How he adored them. “I love you, Eleanor.” Dorothy was his wife. Barney was his dog. It would be Tuscany or, possibly, Umbria. The children were grown up. Green was the colour of truth. Or auburn was. The Russians invaded in 1968. Dorothy was a librarian. Hilary felt breathless. He loosened his tie. Fact: Tevfic Esenç (Ubykh), Red Thundercloud (Catawba Sioux), Roscinda Nolasquez (Cupeňo), Laura Somersal (Wappo), Ned Maddrell (Manx) and Arthur Bennett (Mbabaram) were the last known speakers of their respective languages “The Vice-Chancellor will see you now.” Hilary looked crossly at his watch. It was just before six o’clock and he had been summoned for five. It had been an uncomfortable wait. The Vice-Chancellor was seated behind his desk, a huge walnut affair. “Hilary!” The greeting might almost have been taken for warm and welcoming. “Vice-Chancellor,” Hilary returned warily. The Vice-Chancellor gestured vaguely at a seat across the desk from his own. Hilary sat. “Drink?” Hilary declined politely, then regretted it before he had finished explaining why not. “How’s Doris?” 101 “Dorothy. She’s very well, thank you, Vice-Chancellor.” “Splendid, splendid. And your research?” “Keeping me busy, you know. Languages will keep on changing and dying.” He chuckled mirthlessly. “Quite.” The sat in silence for some time, Hilary aware he was being contemplated. “You know,” said the Vice-Chancellor finally, “there comes a time when the groves of academe begin to lose their allure. Oh, it can be a very gradual thing, usually is. We find ourselves … distracted. Struggle to maintain our focus on what it is we’re here for. Do you follow?” My house is detached, my wife is a librarian, my dog is a beagle/cocker cross. I love my wife. I take my holidays in Tuscany and Umbria. My mouth is very dry. Hilary nodded, almost imperceptibly. “These are challenging times for higher education, Hilary,” the ViceChancellor went on. “We all need to be at the top of our game, alert to reputational issues. Take our eye off the ball and the game is lost, do you see?” Hilary wasn’t sure that he did. “No room in the team for anyone who’s going to drop the ball. No place for anyone who isn’t completely focussed on goal. Going forward.” “I see.” It was by now quite dark in the room, or so it seemed to Hilary. “A young man’s game, Hilary. A brave new world. The days when a senior academic could allow himself to be distracted by the tantalising 102 prospect of appetising young flesh are gone. Scandal is the worst kind of distraction, Hilary. We don’t want it and we don’t need it.” “I see.” “I knew you would. Look, you’ve had a good innings, spent longer at the crease than most. Now you’ve been bowled a googly and got yourself caught at square leg. It happens. There’s no shame in it. Well, not much. But it’s time for the pavilion steps.” I love my wife. Barney is my dog. Eleanor is from Cornwall. My mouth is very dry. I am Professor of Language Death Studies. I am short of breath. Green is the colour of truth. The Soviet tanks went in in 1968. “Of course, we’ll have no problem with an emeritus for you,” the Vice-Chancellor continued. “And you can have your name on the door of a shared office if you wish. Though it might be wise if your visits to the campus weren’t too frequent – much as we’d all love to see you.” Hilary nodded. “Persephone has your letter. You may wish to sign it on the way out. If it were done when ‘tis done, then ‘twere well it were done swiftly … and all that.” “Quickly,” murmured Hilary under his breath. “’Twere well it were done quickly.” The Vice-Chancellor rose. He was a very small man, but he seemed to Hilary a long way away across the vastness of the walnut desk. “Good-bye, Hilary. I’ve enjoyed our little chat. I couldn’t be happier for you.” He held out a hand. Hilary shook it limply. Fact: Every time a language dies, a grain of truth dies with it. 103 “It was masterful,” said Hilary, rolling a cigarette. He and Jasper once again found themselves at the top of the mound, looking down on the campus. “A load of nonsense about the groves of academe and people with their eyes on the ball, off the ball, bowling googlies, sticky wickets. Time to head for the pavilion. Every word an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness, as Beckett might have said.” “Blimey.” “Complete and utter guff. Vacuous drivel. By the time he’d finished I could almost see a man in a white coat holding up his finger.” “So that’s it? You’re going?” Hilary lit his roll-up. “Looks like it. I signed. The Professor of Language Death signs his own death warrant. Or as good as. Slain by cliché. Dismissed by the force of platitude. The brutal divorce of language and meaning.” Hilary lit up. “Have you told Dorothy?” Jasper wondered. “Dorothy can’t know the truth,” said Hilary, “She mustn’t. Gardening leave, research leave – where’s the difference? Mere semantics. I may have to take myself off to Cornwall for a while. Let things blow over.” “Cornwall? Is that wise, Hilary?” “I’m not sure it would be wise,” Hilary returned thoughtfully, “but in the light of my professional interests, I’d say it has the ring of truth about it. Wouldn’t you?” Jasper sucked on his mint. Facts: In 2010 UNESCO declared that its former classification of Cornish as ‘extinct’ was no longer accurate. It had ceased to be extinct. 557 people claimed Cornish as their main language in the 2011 census. 104 The ingredients of Jasper’s mint included sugar, glucose syrup, modified starch, stearic acid and mint oils. Hilary’s tweed jacket was made by hand in Donegal in 1997 and purchased from a draper in Killybegs. I don’t write a single word without saying to myself, ‘It’s a lie!’ - Samuel Beckett 105 You Pig and Other Pieces Alaska James YOU PIG Thoughts that linger create the rot and the sicky that you feel within your bones and your little tum. Time moves on but the thoughts remain. Hair stands on end like the days and days that there are. Like a piece of bread rubbing on an ulcer in your wet sad mouth. But these thoughts and these dreams are all you have. People go for walks to think. You dream of getting away, dream of driving a race car. But it won’t be good enough. The people who make it aren’t real. The people with the things that you want aren’t real. You hear that if you breathe a certain way then you will live forever, or if you hold your leg in a certain way then you will never get cancer. Oh just do it. What difference does it make? Do it if it makes you feel better. Where do you walk to? It’ll never be far enough. Maybe if you walk and walk and never stop everything will be okay. But don’t forget to wash your skin like they tell you to every day. Wash those teeth. HAHA It’s funny how life is never how you think it will be. Or how it should be. I’m sat outside a sea front bar drinking flat ale in the middle of a storm. My hair is dripping wet. Don’t you ever realize that you never thought it would 106 be like this? And maybe that you never knew how it should be, because it wasn’t the same as for other people. That you can never know anything because one day it might just go away. Like the bubbles in my drink don’t you think that everything could just pop and die? My mother is sat in a hotel eating dinner alone on her birthday. It is so hard to know what to feel or what is right. It is so hard to know what is right. And maybe mother I so need to be right all the time because I never feel right. I don’t know what right is. How could I when I have been told that I am fundamentally wrong. Maybe other people offend me so much because I can sense their selfrighteousness. Their self-belief and worth and compass. How do people live here? How do people live anywhere? I walked on the beach to smoke a joint because I thought the smell of the sea would mask the smell of the weed. But really I was just masking myself in another cliché. I hate writing about drugs. And then the rain came. The boy at the bar found me funny and I guess it was like a film, me coming in from the rain, drenched, with an accent. But I am not funny. I am sad. It is sad to keep squandering through life. This is so bleak. It’s so cold. It’s not a film. There is water everywhere. How can I go back. How can I start this again? Where is it ever going to end? When I try and see my future my brain crosses almost, like when your eyes cross. My handwriting just slipped into the ‘style’ of my Godmother’s. She is slowly slipping into madness. The world is too hard for the people who recognize its hardness. Oh when will the tide come in. I’m sorry mum. Somehow I know that I should be sorry even if you are wrong. Because how could you know? You’re in the same boat as me mum and if we can’t get along then perhaps we never even had a chance at all. I think my tonsils just fell down my throat. Oozed. They’re always so big. But I think I’d miss 107 them if they were gone. They’re so sad. So big and ugly and sore and sad. Diseased. So big and pink and white. Poor things. Poor things. SHAM I was never taught death and that doesn’t feel fair. Now I cannot cope with emotional stress. In a very physical way I cannot cope. My heart hurts. It feels like someone is squeezing it and it feels like it will stop. I think my cat is going to die. Is all this really worth it? Perhaps it would be better for him to die because I may be able to learn how better to cope. He could be one less thing for me constantly to fear losing. You’re right, everything is chaos. But then cannot randomness sometimes create order? It can simulate order. Is that not what I do? I am ‘dis-ordered’ yet I mimic order, or I spend every day trying to. What sweet woe is this? I have met very few people who are honestly good, but I have met many who are falsely so. The sham of existence has already been predetermined by forces beyond comprehension. Only your willingness to give up will truly set you free. The truth is I wish I didn’t feel like my body is dying and that my mind will soon unravel. It feels like all of my bones are broken. I feel like I’m being stabbed in all directions. I wonder if I’ve broken my ribs again. They say this stuff doesn’t actually damage your body but it sure feels like it. Stuff. What am I talking about? How can you find a cure for something that doesn’t exist? You know the film Pet Sematary? I feel like the sister that they keep locked upstairs whose bones are protruding from her body and wrenching her in pain. She never did anything wrong. I think about a bag that I let get stolen five years ago and feel the same regret. Would life really be much different if I had that blue wool cardigan? Maybe it would be worse. Oh, disregard. You 108 wonder why I’m tense. You did wonder didn’t you, when I lay like a corpse next to you in bed each night, those nights I can barely remember now. I find that I remember so little these days that it’s hard to prove that I’ve ever lived. Life does seem relentlessly bleak. I am trying to hold myself together. I seem to have passed caring whether or not my mind falls apart, and it will. There are seldom things I feel certain about but that is one. PLEASE, PLEASE Always on my mind. You were always on my mind. Couldn’t you just die? Oh I could. There are not words. Where are all these heartful men that wrote all of these wondersome songs? Could you ever think it? Of course you could. And that is why they are so beautiful. But it never feels as though it could ever happen to you. Or maybe I mean me. I cannot even write the word. Maybe the day that I stop waiting for it to happen it might just creep up on me. I think that has been Morrissey’s problem. Those that are never satisfied. You shouldn’t wait for life to happen, whilst it is happening. But that is easier said than done. It has occurred to me recently that time is passing and that one day, I imagine, I might wish it hadn’t. I don’t know that this possibility has ever concerned me before because I didn’t think it would happen to me. Didn’t think the passing of time might upset me. Other than because with time came no change. But now, I do feel time, and my youth, slipping away. Perhaps I might act upon it. Or perhaps I need to be content without action. Either or. I just saw a couple. 60s or 70s. Man stood in front of woman, blocking her from wind. Woman behind, arms wrapped around the chest of her husband. Keeping warm. Both with cigarette in hand. Between their fingers. Love discretely radiating from and for them 109 both. What else is there? Just saw a woman. Must have made it up. Oh, there she is again. CAMARADERIE What does it mean to look around and not know what you see? To see but not believe that it is all there is. Nothing behind or underneath or blocked from view somehow. Is that all there is? Do people believe because they want to believe? Is that what will power is? The will to live? A feeling that there must be more. It’s hard to see anyone as a friend when I seem so programmed for loneliness. I can’t remember a time without doubt, can’t remember carefree. I think maybe I enjoyed being three. Waiting for what? People look at me but don’t want anything. And you. It’s like you don’t want to spend time with me you just miss me. Like you miss me even when I am with you. Like, for you, loving someone is the same as missing someone. So many people have gone away that you confuse the two feelings as one and the same. So many people have died in your life that you treat me like I’m dead but I’m not I am alive. ALL MY LOVE People are stupid for many reasons. We are made that way these days. Stupid people hurt each other. Is it stupid to stay with someone even when they are bad? Is it stupid not to know? Chris you are stupid because it is too late now for you but it is not for him. That’s how it goes. You think that I do not know how hard it is but I do, I do. But it could have been easier. Mum 110 said it’d ruin your life if I said anything, but wasn’t it already ruined? Is it not in ruin now? Did those extra years help? I hope they did. I really do. Oh dear. You women, you’ve had lives so tough. Didn’t anyone ever spare you a thought? Did we want them to? It is so painful when your life is so transparent. When you cannot live right now, only in past times or in the future. Nothing much feels real. I wonder how real life feels for you now, poor Chris. Could you imagine yourself now, when you were a Blackpool bruiser, with your dark lipstick and boxer boots? What does it feel like now. Could you just smash in few more heads? Those emotions that a person does not usually feel physically, I do. Nostalgia courses through me. I feel appreciation in such an overwhelmingly physical way. I don’t wonder why I’m so tired. boo hoo hoo. Oh Chris, are the days long after restless nights? Does your body hurt? We must be cursed, us forgotten ladies. How long must it go on? Our brains, and our minds! Oh deplorable cruelty! You couldn’t make it up. 111 112 Lesson Plan Richard Berry Teacher: Mr. B.S. Johnson Permanent Staff Member/Supply (delete as appropriate) SUBJECT: English Literature YEAR / GROUP: 12 D1 DATE : STUDENTS WITH SEN (IEP/PSP): CIA FBI… Am I teaching kids or a bunch of initialisms? SUPPORT STAFF: This is a box on a page. I cannot think of anything useful to fill it with, so if you have something you want to fill it with, go ahead. 113 PITCH: I thought I was meant to be teaching English not music? NC / GCSE /AS/A LEVEL RANGE ‘A’ Level English Literature Class PRIOR LEARNING: I’ve had two lessons with this lot and to be frank, they know fuck all about narrative theory, let alone the truth; they seem to think the novel can only be stories. Still, to be fair, the library must confuse them- autobiographies on the non- fiction shelves… It’s like I never existed! Secondly, Mr Lewis, the muppet I am filling in for has littered his classroom with books by authors like Martin ‘I’m turning into my reactionary Dad’ Amis. The silly sod probably has the sixth formers cooing because Amis counts as ‘contemporary’ writer just by virtue of the fact he’s still alive, when in a literary sense he is most certainly dead. As for the J.K. fucking Rowling poster? This is meant to be a school, not Jackafuckingnory. The poster’s coming down even if I’m here only a week. What happened to Anna Kavan, Ann Quin, Rayner Heppenstall …English writers who should be celebrated in this country rather than reaching for the next American author, who still think it’s ‘groovy’ (if this word is still being used) to fuck up syntax. It’s American cultural imperialism gone berserk; that’s it. And don’t get me started on David Foster Wallace; Infinite Jest? Infinite shite more like; who wants to read about a load of average tennis players and a bunch of hippies taking drugs? As for the footnotes, read the infinitely (apologies for the pun) superior ‘The Mezzanine’ by Nicholson Baker, and save a few days of your life. So, you oh so trendy café latte, ciabatta chewing, ‘cutting edge’ novelists, who think they are experimenting with form, I’ve got news for you. IT’S ALL BEEN DONE BEFORE! …except better. 114 SHARED LEARNING OBJECTIVES: (including Communication/Literacy/Numeracy outcomes as appropriate) ‘To understand ‘truth’ as explored in the contemporary novel.’ Know, Understand and Be able to: …how someone has presumably been paid to draft this stupid fucking form when they could use the money instead on books and a decent architect. Students not to ask for a drink of water or if can go to the toilet especially within two minutes of being within the classroom. Students not to ask a question before I have even taken the register (sorry, that’s Year 7). Students not to ask me ‘what did the writer mean?’ Students not to ask if there is a film version of any book I mention. INCLUSIVE LEARNING OUTCOMES (Differentiation by task and resource expected): All students will: Level/Grade: The truth cannot be differentiated; there is no room for white lies or fudging, especially with kids. Perhaps ‘they’ would have me call the lesson ‘Fifty Shades of Truth,’ instead. 115 Most/some students: Level/Grade: …most will think this is a supply teacher, so we don’t really have to do much and will be hoping for the return of Mr Lewis. Some will think I am a bit odd but mildly diverting. One might be inspired to go and ‘google’ me. The proper noun ‘Google’ now being used as a verb apparently. I quite like that. TIMING : ACTIVITIES: Introduction: (sharing learning objectives) ? depends on how things pan out Explain that the rest of the lesson, and indeed any other lesson they are taught by me, or any other members of staff, may, or may not, be a total fabrication. If I refer to an author or literary theorist, what I say might be total nonsense. Teachers have their prejudices about the subjects they teach and the students they teach. Also, what they teach is through the prism of what is needed to pass an exam. 116 Starter: ? Why must it be starter, development, plenary? Why not start with the plenary? No wonder so many kids do not feel reluctant to ‘access’ lessons; they are so bloody predictable with their adherence to a strict linear narrative. Sod post modernism, modernism hasn’t even hit education yet. Development: ? Design a better school building one that makes children and staff want to enter it rather than run a mile when they clap eyes on it. The place has the feel of an open prison, not that I have been to one of those establishments, although the person pretending to me for the purpose of this article has. Modern architects have inflicted more damage than the Blitz. Essay: ‘Why have the England Football team not come remotely close to winning the World Cup since 1966? Explore. OR ‘Would I have forgiven Jose Mourinho for being an arse, because he finally brought silverware to Chelsea?’ Discuss. 117 Plenary: ? (How are students demonstrating progress in the lesson? including Communication/Literacy/Numeracy/ Where are those scissors? RESOURCES: Something called a computer. I could have some fun with this. Not quite sure how it’s going to influence writing; might make the whole process appear too easy and make anybody think they can write. If machines spell and supposedly punctuate for us, it’ll produce a generation of lazy writers. Hang on, it seems to be telling me spell colour ‘color’? Fucking machines! American cultural imperialism strikes again. 118 SUPPORT FOR INDIVIDUAL STUDENTS: (SEN, SA, SA+, G&T, BME, LAC, FSM etc.) More bloody initialisms. G and T -? Gin and Tonic? SA- easy South Africa SEN- a bank? BME? Not a clue. The highlight of the week so far was the Year Eight student who cut holes out of his copy of ‘Holes’ by Louis Sachar (commendably ironic for his age and possibly an attempt to curry favour with yours truly, or he’s a Joe Orton fan- he’ll go far) The Head, predictably, has told me to discipline him. I feel a hypocrite for sanctioning him given my track record. LITERACY DEVELOPMENT (including subject specific terminology): Tricky-does the school want me to be prescriptivist about this and tell the kids there is only the one way to spell a word, or to recognize that the spoken word is now having a considerable influence over the way we now write? Do spelling and grammar matter? I better talk to the Head Teacher about this if the miserable bastard will acknowledge my existence. I could be more awkward but I still want some supply work. HOME LEARNING: Read ‘The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy’ 119 ASSESSMENT (Including Assessment for Learning Strategies): Hang on a minute. This is someone pretending to be me, trying to imagine how I would react when presented with a lesson plan pro forma to complete, forty three years after I have died? This person has the brass neck to try and imagine my thoughts, when I, myself, would cast doubt on my own ability to accurately record what I would think? Then again, perhaps this person would possess an objectivity that I could never possess. Never mind, I’m teaching ‘Quad’ by Beckett to a Year 9 drama class next. 120 121 24 Philip Terry and Jeremy Page Read horizontally, the top paragraph of the 32 chapters of The Lovers form a short love story. Each of these paragraphs contains 32 words. Using each of these 32 ‘base’ paragraphs we have written a further 32 paragraphs per chapter, changing one word at a time until all the original words are switched, to create a vertical reading with multiple narratives. Both readings are both The Lovers. This is chapter 24. 122 24 In truth I wanted to get back on dry land, so suggested we find some shelter. ‘How about getting some tea?’ I said. ‘Let’s just stay here a bit longer,’ she pleaded. In truth I wanted to get back on dry land, so suggested we find some shelter. ‘How about getting some KFC?’ I said. ‘Let’s just stay here a bit longer,’ she pleaded. In truth I wanted to get feasting on dry land, so suggested we find some shelter. ‘How about getting some KFC?’ I said. ‘Let’s just stay here a bit longer,’ she pleaded. In truth I wanted to get feasting on dry land, so suggested we find some shelter. ‘How about getting a KFC?’ I said. ‘Let’s just stay here a bit longer,’ she pleaded. In truth I wanted to get feasting on dry philosophy, so suggested we find some shelter. ‘How about getting a KFC?’ I said. ‘Let’s just stay here a bit longer,’ she pleaded. In truth I wanted to get feasting on dry philosophy, so suggested we find some shelter. ‘How about deconstructing a KFC?’ I said. ‘Let’s just stay here a bit longer,’ she pleaded. 208 In Paris I wanted to get feasting on dry philosophy, so suggested we find some shelter. ‘How about deconstructing a KFC?’ I said. ‘Let’s just stay here a bit longer,’ she pleaded. In Paris I wanted to get feasting on dry philosophy, so suggested we find some shelter. ‘How about deconstructing a KFC?’ I said. ‘Let’s just discuss here a bit longer,’ she pleaded. In Paris I wanted to get feasting on dry philosophy. Marie suggested we find some shelter. ‘How about deconstructing a KFC?’ I said. ‘Let’s just discuss here a bit longer,’ she pleaded. In Paris I wanted to get feasting on dry philosophy. Marie suggested we find some shelter. ‘How about deconstructing a KFC?’ I said. ‘Let’s just discuss romanticism a bit longer,’ she pleaded. In Paris I wanted to get feasting on dry philosophy. Marie suggested we find some grave. ‘How about deconstructing a KFC?’ I said. ‘Let’s just discuss romanticism a bit longer,’ she pleaded. In Paris I wanted to get feasting on dry philosophy. Marie suggested we find some grave. ‘How about deconstructing a KFC?’ I said. ‘Let’s just discuss romanticism a bit longer,’ Arielle pleaded. In Paris I wanted to get feasting on dry philosophy. Marie suggested we find Morrison’s grave. ‘How about deconstructing a KFC?’ I said. ‘Let’s just discuss romanticism a bit longer,’ Arielle pleaded. 209 In Paris I wanted to get feasting on dry philosophy. Marie suggested we find Morrison’s grave. ‘How about deconstructing a KFC?’ Wolf said. ‘Let’s just discuss romanticism a bit longer,’ Arielle pleaded. Approaching Paris I wanted to get feasting on dry philosophy. Marie suggested we find Morrison’s grave. ‘How about deconstructing a KFC?’ Wolf said. ‘Let’s just discuss romanticism a bit longer,’ Arielle pleaded. Approaching Paris I wanted to get feasting on dry philosophy. Marie suggested we find Morrison’s grave. ‘How about deconstructing a KFC?’ Wolf said. ‘Let’s just discuss romanticism a bit longer,’ Arielle sniggered. Approaching Paris I wanted to get feasting on Forget Philosophy. Marie suggested we find Morrison’s grave. ‘How about deconstructing a KFC?’ Wolf said. ‘Let’s just discuss romanticism a bit longer,’ Arielle sniggered. Approaching Paris I wanted distractions, get feasting on Forget Philosophy. Marie suggested we find Morrison’s grave. ‘How about deconstructing a KFC?’ Wolf said. ‘Let’s just discuss romanticism a bit longer,’ Arielle sniggered. Approaching Paris I wanted distractions. ‘Get feasting on Forget Philosophy,’ Marie suggested, ‘or find Morrison’s grave.’ ‘How about 210 deconstructing a KFC?’ Wolf said. ‘Let’s just discuss romanticism a bit longer,’ Arielle sniggered. Approaching Paris I wanted distractions. ‘Get feasting on Forget Philosophy,’ Marie suggested, ‘or gym Morrison’s grave.’ ‘How about deconstructing a KFC?’ Wolf said. ‘Let’s just discuss romanticism a bit longer,’ Arielle sniggered. Approaching Paris I wanted distractions. ‘Get feasting on Forget Philosophy,’ Marie suggested, ‘or gym Morrison’s grave.’ ‘How about deconstructing a KFC?’ Wolf intoned. ‘Let’s just discuss romanticism a bit longer,’ Arielle sniggered. Approaching Paris she wanted distractions. ‘Get feasting on Forget Philosophy,’ Marie suggested, ‘or gym Morrison’s grave.’ ‘How about deconstructing a KFC?’ Wolf intoned. ‘Let’s just discuss romanticism a bit longer,’ Arielle sniggered. Approaching Paris she wanted distractions. ‘Get feasting on Forget Philosophy,’ Marie hors d'oeuvred, ‘or gym Morrison’s grave.’ ‘How about deconstructing a KFC?’ Wolf intoned. ‘Let’s just discuss romanticism a bit longer,’ Arielle sniggered. Approaching Paris she wanted distractions. ‘Get feasting on Forget Philosophy,’ Marie hors d'oeuvred, ‘or gym Morrison’s grave.’ ‘How about deconstructing a KFC?’ Wolf intoned. ‘C’mon just discuss romanticism a bit longer,’ Arielle sniggered. 211 Approaching Paris she wanted distractions. ‘Get feasting on Forget Philosophy,’ Marie hors d'oeuvred, ‘or gym Morrison’s grave.’ ‘How about deconstructing a KFC?’ Wolf intoned. ‘C’mon amis discuss romanticism a bit longer,’ Arielle sniggered. Approaching Paris she needed distractions. ‘Get feasting on Forget Philosophy,’ Marie hors d'oeuvred, ‘or gym Morrison’s grave.’ ‘How about deconstructing a KFC?’ Wolf intoned. ‘C’mon amis discuss romanticism a bit longer,’ Arielle sniggered. Approaching Paris she needed distractions. ‘Start feasting on Forget Philosophy,’ Marie hors d'oeuvred, ‘or gym Morrison’s grave.’ ‘How about deconstructing a KFC?’ Wolf intoned. ‘C’mon amis discuss romanticism a bit longer,’ Arielle sniggered. Approaching Paris she needed distractions. ‘Start feasting and forget philosophy,’ Marie hors d'oeuvred, ‘or gym Morrison’s grave.’ ‘How about deconstructing a KFC?’ Wolf intoned. ‘C’mon amis discuss romanticism a bit longer,’ Arielle sniggered. Approaching Paris she needed distractions. ‘Start feasting and forget philosophy,’ Marie hors d'oeuvred, ‘or gym Morrison’s grave.’ ‘How about deconstructing a KFC?’ Wolf intoned. ‘C’mon amis discuss romanticism a bit Quasimodo?’ Arielle sniggered. 212 Approaching Paris she needed distractions. ‘Start feasting and forget philosophy,’ Marie hors d'oeuvred, ‘or gym Morrison’s grave.’ ‘How? By deconstructing a KFC?’ Wolf intoned. ‘C’mon amis discuss romanticism a bit – Quasimodo?’ Arielle sniggered. Approaching Paris she needed distractions. ‘Start feasting and forget philosophy,’ Marie hors d'oeuvred, ‘or gym Morrison’s grave.’ ‘How? By deconstructing a KFC?’ Wolf intoned. ‘C’mon amis discuss romanticism a soupçon – Quasimodo?’ Arielle sniggered. Approaching Paris she needed distractions. ‘Start feasting and forget philosophy,’ Marie hors d'oeuvred, ‘or gym Morrison’s grave.’ ‘Start by deconstructing a KFC,’ Wolf intoned. ‘C’mon amis discuss romanticism a soupçon – Quasimodo?’ Arielle sniggered. Approaching Paris she needed distractions. ‘Start feasting and forget philosophy,’ Marie hors d'oeuvred, ‘or gym Morrison’s grave.’ ‘Start by deconstructing a KFC,’ Wolf intoned. ‘C’mon amis discuss romanticism un soupçon – Quasimodo?’ Arielle sniggered. 213 The Reef and Other Poems Sue Birchenough The Reef first human use in mesopotamia 3000 BC then medusa's head bled seaweed stone blood-red cures wounds and Romans thought especially from scorpions and snakes pleases mars his bad influence is nullified by red tempers and rages painted red red tames the wildness within such as sacred buildings are protected by being is one of the colours of the 5 buddhas red is auspicious policemen red is sacred his red is blood and perseverance is energy of life force should be worn by surgeons, electricians and red is passion, transmuted to discriminating wisdom it protects luggage from loss builds self-confidence creates openness, love and affection across a river safely assembly should be worn for deals involving property got you mars is god of war and energy, commander of the of the 9 planets red wards off evil thoughts of ill-wishers the gauls decorated their weapons with it stimulates the root chakra it symbolizes longevity it it's good in rituals to stop whirlwinds away wild animals and lightning hung on olive trees for a good crop it fosters administrative ability used to cure infertility it keeps was blood-red 214 was prescribed for heart problems and haemorrhages it went pale when worn in illness or if the wearer were given poison medusa head bled seaweed stoneblood-red red coral is literal transformation of wine and bread into body and blood blacksmith to the gods, hephaestus he was a criple he fell into the sea raised by thetis, mother of achilles, mermaid and was hephaestus was his mother was flung out of heaven because where he was and eurynomic, who looked like a an oceanic and third bride of zeus or flung from the heavens by zeus when he tried to rescue according to another version 215 Instructions for Writing a Poem procrastination I'm pro crastination crus ty nation crass ty nation con servatism con fabulation con vey a message con struct a strapline con stitute an argument in clipper tea stitute your al/lies where art thou when i need thee ? 40 unbleached bags i'm an unbleached bag hag have you tried our everyday tea ? frankly..........I'm an every 10 minutes girl, me do I fit up the tight arse of po e try 216 A Poor Novel on a Bad Day an eternity of I confidentially to my I as if my I could care less 217 The Scream it speaks to a deep human need it speaks to a deep human need it speaks to a deep human need it speaks to a deep deep deep human need it it speaks to a need need to a deep human need it it speaks to a human human deep human need it it speaks 218 219 B. S. Johnson’s Box of The Unfortunates and Other Poems Ali Znaidi B. S. Johnson’s Box of The Unfortunates The clue is in the box, or how to reassemble (without obeying any order) the curling petals of a rose that rejected (and still reject) assemblage. Only the beginning and the end are dictated; imposed {Fate}. {Phosphate containing the seeds of bodily decay}. Hence, the clue is in the in-betweenness: Order and disorder become interchangeable terms: Crashing waves overlapping each other in a vast ocean evacuating shells with glittering backs and darker bodies: Conches lapping the coastline: Anarchic punk carnivals. Your eyes would shine against the nihilism of the foam. The untamed petals construct their death amidst sounds and furies in sync with life’s randomness. The dry petals (then) will bloom afterwards, pregnant with thorns and tattoos signifying; indexing dissidence. Hence, you’ll grasp more glimpses of truth in the box of The Unfortunates: More simulacra. More simulacra. 220 Some Sort of Lunar Philosophy The moon manifests itself in two forms, the habitual moon and what it seems to be the moon. So many things about the way you perceive the moon deeply depends on the moments when your eyes are retracing the random moonlights; {by the way, ‘what did you say the name of the moonlight was’?} Each nomenclature is a distorted reflection. Are the moonlights copyrighted during the ec[static] tides of an eclipse. In that moment, and in this one, are you still believing that the moonlights are autobiographical and chaffing and shrieking in ecstatic narcissism. But what if someone throws a pebble into the lake? What if the lake dries up, hence, the moon loses its mirror? What if an errant bird adumbrates the astrologer’s telescope adding an aleatory element to the scene? But what if you try to draw phenomenological cartographies of the moon? What if you start filling the blanks right now? 221 Sisyphean Narrativisation Life itself is to blame. Part truth, part fiction; life is a wall rife with graphic squiggles; worms eating themselves, cells destroying themselves; irrationality; a stream of consciousness manifesting itself in the use of pastiche; the small hard-shelled nuts of pistachio; edible kernels eaten while constructing empty stories about malfunctioning bodies, the more you explore, the more the tumor refuses to explode; {some sort of a Sisyphean narrativisation}. Physical pain becomes a catalogue of repressed stories, untold; traumatic collages of fragmented solipsistic taboos. Sunset; black shadows, and certainly not the chronological shockwaves, strokes. 222 Amongst Dying Flowers Tim Chapman The city opened itself like lubricated palms, Where clocks are buried in thick Soil and old paintings shimmer, Coated in thin silver. I offer myself to the horizon (as Narcissus, I gladly gave myself up for Echo). We will awake, Cold and lost on an empty and distant moon Where the moonlight meets the sea we will live Without motion and exist as dreams. We speak our last words in each breath, Recounting deathbed memories (and earth spins in oblivion), Though I bathe now in warm shallow Water I am preparing to penetrate the awesome Endless depths of the whirlpool. We oft celebrate the coming of that soulful Deep blue that fills the sky Just before nightfall and as I swim amongst icebergs 223 There are long amphibians feeding on my underbelly. That year summer was endless Amongst dying flowers Rotted trunks then winter Left a pale and stationary Calm upon the deceased. I must depart to deserts Walk bare foot from road No pen or pockets or pay Find not a way but a sculpted Wish formed mainly from eyelashes. From slumber she shook me, Sleep talking my story. I remembered my dream of midnight Fluid and void encased In vacated melodies Rustling leaves like white noise From the birth of the universe, Sky as an ever-changing psychedelic masterpiece. We have all chosen to reside Here and we frequent the table at dinner and the bed at night. Consume/escape. Slow comforts in drone paradise Where arborescent silhouettes 224 Vague and distant still soft Dance upon the plateau, I seek their mirrors. 225 45 and Other Poems Jim Goar 45. My quarry’s concrete halls arterially redistribute effigies across the worldwide conglomerate’s ever molting consumption space. Each agoraphobic production’s auto-possessing delay infuses deadlocked afterthought with drive through windows opened on mystical byways. What discount menu mustered invisible hemispheres forever concealing our subaltern shell’s proprietary sky? A fictive memory’s naturalized diabetic awaits stoplights cycling her grandfather’s blue-collar attempts at multistate transit. This overdetermined immigrant’s atmospheric encasement siphons anonymous foodstuff praised for selflessly delivering recognizable brands of nostalgic emission. 226 44. Waking vision’s seraphic hindsight acquires seams intact from blood let soil moved sufficiently by corollaries delivering fictive notes. Our compact mirror’s timeless calendar instantaneously configures its polemic in space giving my countenance the certain appearance of second nature. Whose overlooked caliphate’s underground moment designs thy true self’s everlasting surface? This restorative abatement’s serrated ampersand embraces stigmatized communities throughout an auto-replicating contour’s re-founding incision. Historical anesthesia’s gaseous conjunction selectively imposes spellbinding constraints on every animated conspirator’s postoperative body. 227 7. Humans grasp at metaphysical walls and their calcifications. Everything we hold dear is premised by deepening opacity. How to envision paraphrases budding assarts from the trees? Gravity receives feedback from within its falling influence. There is no peripatetic continuation on continental shelves or preserves. Evolution divides at the axiom of extinction. What is unborn is no less hungry for tropical-flesh-itself. Topography encircles man’s esoteric liminalities. An unfolding universe packs a lunch for all that moves away. 228 43. A recorded history’s autonomous eyewitness steadily consumes unimpeachable diktats survived by legislative roots of subsidized perdition. These duly noted trespasses link genomes towering over pupils repatriated at matriculation’s orderly accounting. During what law abiding assent did lady justice cede housebroken men their inherited cells stacked with papers demarking the dearly departed? Our divisible education’s colorblind offspring pass through racial birthrights ascribing physics whatever outrage cements my earmarked condition. Each collectively erected tenement layers transgressions on socialized bodies covered in branded submission’s impenetrable shawl. 229 8. Primitive nomenclatures construct silos above our fields of endeavor. An urbanized multitude remains entranced by indoctrination’s monotheistic spell. We expire in the shade of crystallized taxonomies blossoming from superstitious roots. Etymological motivations are catalogued to strengthen indivisible restraints. How can I isolate this pretext when every invoice cultivates prefabricated contrition? A standing army’s unbending sword hoards antiquated metaphor from the subway’s repetitive orbit. Medieval catacombs eclipse the grammar of cities where pastoral sidewalks end. 230 Writing as Though it Mattered Reviews Sebastian Groes. British Fictions of the Sixties: The Making of the Swinging Decade. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016 James Riley In Steven Soderbergh’s film The Limey (1999) Terrance Stamp plays Wilson, an aging career-criminal. Having learnt of the death of his estranged daughter whilst in prison, Wilson travels from London to Los Angeles to seek answers. Out of place and out of time, Soderbergh presents Wilson as a relic of the British sixties. Whereas his nemesis Terry Valentine (Peter Fonda) lives in comfort having cashed-in on the sixties, Wilson lacks anchorage. He prefers to think back to his youth and his daughter’s childhood. Soderbergh draws on a cinematic version of Stamp to create these flashback scenes: Wilson’s memories are clips of Stamp from Ken Loach’s Poor Cow (1967). The spectacle of Loach’s – and by extension Nell Dunn’s – social realism being drawn into a logic of nostalgia and effectively transformed into a different genre exemplifies the mythologisation of the sixties that Sebastian Groes’ new book critiques. Contentious, contested and yet endlessly fascinating, the sixties occupy a peculiar position in the cultural history of the twentieth century. The decade produced a stunning amount of work across multiple platforms but was at the same time remarkably effective at producing itself as a 231 cultural artefact. The challenge offered by the decade to any attempts at assessment relates not just to its range of its materials but also the manner its which various artistic milieus effectively elided reality and representation. To paraphrase J.G. Ballard, to habituate oneself in the sixties is to take up residence in an enormous novel. Groes establishes this from the outset of his study through the use of Guy Debord as his primary theoretical reference. Groes’ sixties are the “Decade of Spectacle” insofar as “Our understanding and interpretation […] is hypermediated and overdetermined by a thick crust of fictions.” Two readings of the word ‘fiction’ are offered here. Fiction in the literary sense as well as fiction in the mythic sense. It is by analysing the fiction produced by the likes of Maureen Duffy, Nell Dunn, Eva Figes, Ann Quin, Ballard and others that allows Groes to execute his demythologisation. However, this is an analysis that is sensitive to the complexity of the literary object. Literature is not positioned as an historical source per se; but a subtle and ambiguous conduit of contextual mediation. Hence, the suggestion is that we should not look to for the ‘truth’ behind the fiction of the sixties but for an indication of the mechanisms that stand behind the establishment of the sixties as Spectacle. This is an insightful thesis that is, in general, very-well argued. Occasionally, as in the discussion of Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), one finds the discussion slipping away from a consideration of the text’s own project and into theoretically inflected paraphrase. Similarly, whilst Groes gives the experimentalism of the John Calder stable a welcome priority, B.S. Johnson remains something of an absent presence. His works are often cited but never really take root in the book’s overall analysis. 232 Given that Johnson’s first four novels span the sixties, (1963-1969), a mapping of his compositional trajectory could have operated as a useful paradigm for the consideration of parallel shifts in the literary landscape. That said, British Fictions of the Sixties maintains an impressively wide cast-list. Its ostensible focus on epistemological shifts in realism and the line of modernist inheritance could easily function as an excellent departure point for future studies of Johnson and the sixties avant-garde. Groes’ book would be the ideal text to add to the reading list of any twentieth-century, post-1945 or indeed specifically 1960s literature course. It gives critical weight to some often overlooked if not actively neglected writers. Groes takes time to note where certain texts are now out of print and one can readily agree with his regret that fine writers such as Angus Wilson are “now hardly read or taught”. One would hope that as a successful, incisive primer, British Fictions of the Sixties will have the effect of re-stablishing these authors within the critical frame. Simon Barton. Visual Devices in Contemporary Prose Fiction. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Ruth Clemens Critical interest in visual experimentation in literature has grown significantly in the British academy, and Simon Barton's new book is a important defence of the use of these experimental visual devices. Admonishing the theory espoused by some critics that the twentieth-century resurgence of visual devices in fiction is a postmodernist symptom of what 233 Lynne Diamond-Nigh calls the 'decay of the linguistic sign' (1995: 179), Barton instead offers a vital analysis of the innovative visual device, stating the case for its resurgence as a celebratory thing. 29 For Barton, its novelty and experimentality pushes the potential of prose fiction further and showing myriad new possibilities for semiotic representation and visual innovation. The book is subtitled Gaps, Gestures, Images, foregrounding its emphasis on textual elements of movement and spatiality. He writes that his monograph is an attempt to ‘analyse, develop and discuss a critical vocabulary for the analysis of works of prose fiction containing unconventional visual devices’ (2016: 3). As Barton notes, all texts use visual devices. His study is specifically interested in the unconventional, those which that deviate from convention in order to disrupt the reading process in some way. The scope of his monograph is that which attempts to ‘analyse, develop and discuss a critical vocabulary for the analysis of works of prose fiction containing unconventional visual devices’ (2016: 3). Taking a multimodal approach, Barton identifies three different types of innovative visual devices: textual gaps, textual gestures, and visual images. He dedicates two chapters to case studies of two novels that have been previously understudied or critically ignored, especially in terms of their use of visual devices: Raymond Fedeman’s autobiographical metafictional novel Double or Nothing: A Real Fictitious Discourse (1992), and William H Gass’ Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife (1968), a novel constituted by a hybrid blend of photography and written text. Lynne Diamond-Nigh. 'Gray’s Anatomy: When Words and Images Collide’. Review of Contemporary Fiction 15(2), 1995. 29 234 Barton's use of less well-known texts in his major case study is indeed commendable, as any opportunity for experimental texts to receive a larger potential readership – especially a readership that already has a scholarly interest in unconventional visual devices – can only be a good thing. The book stresses that implied and actual readerly experience is vital to any analysis of the material, visual, or spatial facets of literature: that the reader sees the page before they begin to read it cannot be forgotten. Thus the way it looks matters, this has an effect, it affects the reader through the ways in which it meets with or deviates from their expectations. Barton is interested in the visually deviant texts, primarily because – and here I concur – deviation is more interesting, in terms of the way the reading process is disrupted. Visual Devices is concerned with the ways in which these visual devices can enhance or alter the readerly interactivity of the text. Barton states the relevance of the specific physical manifestation of the text to his conceptual framework - in this case, the presence of the book as a material artefact; the book-as-object. Although Barton recognises the different potential effects that visual devices have in new media texts, he states that his study is concerned primarily with the book. This focus on materiality is of course particularly relevant for readers of Johnson, as the interactivity and tactility of The Unfortunates that can only exist when the abstract text is presented through that technology: the physical book. Barton undertakes a survey of the literary field of prose fiction that uses innovative visual devices. Through this, he roots Johnson in the writer's specific socio-historical context, analysing the literary and critical environments that have led to specific positive and negative receptions of his work. Parallel to this, he locates Johnson's oeuvre within a canon (if one can call it that) of visually innovative works of literature, 235 tracing diachronic lines of evolution, experimentation, and similarity between networks of texts. It is evident that Barton's book is indebted to Glyn White's 2005 Reading The Graphic Surface. Barton extends his gratitude to White in his acknowledgements, and both academics are based at my alma mater, the University of Salford, an institution which continues to produce scholarship of interest to readers with a fascination for visually experimental prose fiction. Barton's book is an important defence of visual devices, which is justified in its interrogation of previous criticisms of these devices. These criticisms accuse visually innovative texts of being not serious enough (as with graphic novels such as Moore's Watchmen (1987)), or as overly academic or elitist (such as with Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000)). This double-bind is deconstructed by Barton, and instead he opens up a new space and a new vocabulary for these texts. Indeed, he continues the ongoing process of identifying a canon of visually experimental works of literature. The B.S Johnson – Zulfikar Ghose Correspondence. Vanessa Guignery, ed. London: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2016. Kate Connolly As any reader of Jonathan Coe’s biography of B.S Johnson (Like A Fiery Elephant) will know, the friendship between Johnson and Zulfikar Ghose was highly significant for both men. They met in the summer of 1959, when Ghose invited Johnson to sub-edit a Universities Writing anthology, and 236 remained close friends and collaborators for the rest of Johnson’s life. They corresponded regularly, critiquing each other’s work and providing each other with support. This volume reproduces their unexpurgated correspondence. Johnson and Ghose’s shared seriousness of purpose is immediately apparent. The focus, especially in the early letters, is predominately on literary matters, and both men demonstrate honesty and acute critical judgement. It is a testament to the strength of the respect between the two that the friendship can survive the occasional explosion from the notoriously thin-skinned Johnson in response to Ghose’s criticism. It was difficult for both of them to make a living from writing, and some of the most touching moments in the letters come when they offer each other support and encouragement through the tough times, as when Johnson writes in 1968, “...live through it, most particularly OUTLIVE YOUR ENEMIES. The thing not to do is give up, to let it stop one: just live, do and outlive.” From the mid 1960s, the letters become longer, funnier and more conversational in tone. No volume of Johnson’s letters would be complete without some truly terrible/hilarious puns, but the prize for this must go to Ghose, relating an anecdote from his supply teaching. (“I asked the class of fifth formers, “What’s the meaning of ‘fructify’? and one lout murmured, ‘Fructify Know.”) Although Johnson is the better known of the two, Vanessa Guignery’s presentation is balanced. The correspondence is prefaced by a prose piece and a poem by each of the two men in which each puts forward a perspective on the other, setting the scene and providing an insight into their close and complex friendship. 237 This volume seems destined for a select readership, and will perhaps be mainly consulted by those studying and working on Johnson. It is a rich resource for insights into his working methods and principles, particularly in poetry. A letter of November 1959, for instance, details his meticulous approach to spelling, punctuation and grammar. “I find it difficult enough to communicate without having even small things between me and the reader; so I strictly conform with what people are used to reading in the form, at least; in ideas it is a different matter, of course…” It will be a pity if these letters are not more widely read, as they provide not only an insight into the close, supportive friendship and working methods of Johnson and Ghose, but a valuable insight into the London literary scene of the time. Nick Sousanis. Unflattening. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015. Joseph Darlington B.S. Johnson’s novels and the comic book form have a surprising amount in common. Both consciously innovate in using the book as a communicative object and both are often side-lined in mainstream academic discourse. It follows that the world of comics scholarship might have a lot to add to debates about Johnson’s work. Nick Sousanis’ new book, Unflattening, is a prime example of a work offering vital interdisciplinary insights. Building from the initial capacity of “sequential art” to combine linear textual narrative with the simultaneous perception of an overall composition offered by the visual arts, Sousanis expands this formal examination to 238 incorporate theories of politics, identity and cognition; the rapid agglomeration of which results in a sublime rush of existential insights drawn across a succession of dynamic communicative modes. Where the tissue of quotations weighs down the text, the accompanying images offer an airy counterpoint – where the visuals wander into opaque metaphor, the text provides a concrete anchor. At the best moments, text and image present a total unity of communication. The book begins with an evocative image of a world dominated by flatness; “a flatness of sight, a contraction of possibilities” (6). Sightless grey automatons are pictured travelling along conveyor belts in a (borderline clichéd) metaphor for the Marcusean one-dimensional man. The way out, beyond this “flatness” is presented through reference to Edwin Abbott’s Flatland; the Victorian satirical novel in which a square discovers the third dimension. Sousanis goes on to suggest, through a patchwork of references – Bakhtin, Deleuze, Mandelbrot, Spiegelmen, Kandinsky – that culture must approach its own “fifth dimension” through collaborating “vantage points” (88). As two eyes collaborate to create depth, and as text and image communicate in different but connected manners, so, Sousanis argues, are separate disciplines destined to reunite on the road to individual and collective enlightenment. From gloomy beginnings, the text builds to a euphoric conclusion. Impressively, Unflattening manages to be both one of the best works of criticism available on the topic of “sequential art” and also a prime example of the medium in action itself. Text is neither primary nor secondary to image. Both are essential to the message; bringing together insightful argument and innovative composition in a unique and productive manner. One is left with the impression that there is considerable potential 239 for fiction and critique alike to adapt these methods to their own practice. What Johnson managed in an age of hot metal typesetting we can surely replicate, and perhaps even surpass, with the flexibility and accessibility of digital printing. In response to our increasingly visual culture, perhaps those “writing as though it mattered” should start drawing as though it mattered too. 240 Contributors Richard Berry used to be a solicitor. He was awarded an MA in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University and now teaches English at a secondary school. His doctor described this career change as “the strangest mid-life crisis” he had come across. He also a caseworker for the NASUWT; something he hopes B.S. Johnson would have approved of. Richard also sporadically appears on TV quizzes; recently captaining a winning team on Eggheads. Sue Birchenough lives in Buxton, and is a regular visitor to Manchester poetry events. She has been published in English PEN anthology Catechism, PBS press anthology No Spy Zone, Like This Press anthology Austin Bronte Shakespeare and in the Knives forks and spoons anthology Yesterday's Music Today; in Red ceilings, Street cake, Ink sweat and tears, m58, and zimZalla. Her pamphlet, Housework, is about to be published by Kfs press. She was Highly Commended in 2014 Erbacce poetry competition. Her avant object “takeaway Britain” was exhibited at the Saison Poetry Library in London over summer 2016. Tim Chapman is a poet and musician currently roaming around South East Asia. You can find more poetry on his twitter account: @nothingatlast. Ruth Clemens is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Leeds Trinity University. Her project investigates the transnationalism and multilingualism of modernist literary paratexts. Her research interests include the literature and culture of the Low Countries, the theoretical writing of Gilles Deleuze and Rosi Braidotti, as well as unconventional and abundant literary footnotes. Kate Connolly is proof-editor of BSJ: The B.S. Johnson Journal and is currently undertaking a PhD on contemporary literature. Joseph Darlington is co-editor of BSJ and Programme Leader for BA(Hons) Digital Animation and Illustration at Futureworks Media School, 241 Manchester. He completed a PhD on experimental novelists in 2014, was awarded a Harry Ransom Fellowship in 2013 and has been published in journals from Textual Practice and the Journal of Modern Literature through Cambridge Quarterly and Comedy Studies. He is chair of the Social Science Centre Manchester and his first collection of short stories, Avon Murray, is available now from Big Cartel. James Davies works include Plants (Reality Street), A Dog (zimZalla), Rocks (blart), and Acronyms (onedit). He is currently working on a number of projects including: stack, doing, snow, if the die rolls 5 then I stamp the date, changing piece, and yellow lines drawn on sheets of A4 paper and then placed in a box. He edits the poetry press if p then q and co-organises The Other Room reading series and resources website in Manchester. Jim Goar is the author of The Dustbowl (Shearsman Books, 2014), The Louisiana Purchase (Rose Metal Press, 2011), Seoul Bus Poems (Reality Street, 2010), and the chapbook, Whole Milk (Effing Press, 2006). He edits the journal past simple. Scott Manley Hadley is a writer and entrepreneur from the West Midlands. He holds a BA in English Literature from Cardiff University and an MA in Creative & Life Writing from Goldsmiths College, University of London. His “literary lifestyle” blog, Triumph Of The Now, contains articles on over 400 books, and he writes regularly for Open Pen and Huffington Post. His twitter handle is @Scott_Hadley. Joanna Norledge is an archivist at the British Library. She is responsible for the cataloguing of the Johnson papers and worked on the BFI Flipside edition of Johnson’s films You’re Human Like the Rest of Them. Andrew Robert Hodgson is Master of English at Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle. He is currently preparing a monograph on the post-war British and French experimental novel entitled Experimentalism is a Realism. Alaska James 'The breaking of a wave cannot explain the whole sea' Nabokov. 242 Jeremy Page’s latest publication is Stepping Back: Resubmission for the Ordinary Level Examination in Psychogeography (Frogmore Press 2016). He is co-editor of the online journal morphrog: poetry in the extreme and a Senior Teaching Fellow at the University of Sussex. Ed Sibley is a recent graduate from an MA Creative Writing programme who wrote my dissertation on B.S. Johnson and hypertext fiction. Philip Terry is currently Director of the Centre for Creative Writing at the University of Essex. His novel tapestry was shortlisted for the 2013 Goldsmith’s Prize. Dante’s Inferno, which relocates Dante’s action to current day Essex, was published in 2014, as well as a translation of Georges Perec’s I remember. Philip Tew is Professor of English (Post-1900 Literature) at Brunel University London and has published and edited countless texts on Johnson and other writers. His best known include the monograph B.S. Johnson: A Critical Reading and the edited collection of Johnson’s work, Well Done God! James Riley is Fellow and College Lecturer in English Literature at Girton College, University of Cambridge. He works on modern and contemporary literature, film and counterculture. Recent publications involve a multi-volume collection on the film and literature of the 1960s. He's currently at work on Playback Hex, a study of William Burroughs and the tape recorder. James is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He writes about his research and other matters at the blog Residual Noise. Ali Znaidi lives in Redeyef, Tunisia. He is the author of several chapbooks, including Experimental Ruminations (Fowlpox Press, 2012), Moon’s Cloth Embroidered with Poems (Origami Poems Project, 2012), Bye, Donna Summer! (Fowlpox Press, 2014), Taste of the Edge (Kind of a Hurricane Press, 2014), and Mathemaku x5 (Spacecraft Press, 2015). For more, visit aliznaidi.blogspot.com. 243