B.S. Johnson

B. S. Johnson was an ‘archiving author’, very much concerned with the loss of truth in the process of transforming ‘memory’ to ‘history’, and acutely aware of the inherent instability of language as a means for communicating such truth. This dissertation takes the work of Johnson as a starting point by which to probe the boundaries of archival theory and examine the assumptions that underpin the archival processes of selection and appraisal, arrangement and description and providing access. The author argues that narrative forces both internal and external to the record undermine our ability to locate truth in the archive, and considers proposals for highlighting this to future users.

Recent studies about multimodality in the novel and so-called liberature and fiction making use of visual devices all agree in considering Tristram Shandy as one of the main precursors of experimental writing. This article focuses on the use of black and blank pages in contemporary fiction. Four novels are discussed in which the authors have resorted to blank and blank pages: B.S. Johnson's House Mother Normal, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper, and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.

This paper discusses two contemporary novels from a narratological perspective. The Unfortu- nates by B.S. Johnson and S. by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst demonstrate inapplicability of narrative most commonly theorised as a representation of events. Instead, due to their unconventional usage of typography, multimodality and/or transmediality, they provoke daring attempts at reconceptu- alisations of this fundamental concept of modern narrative theory and novel studies. In addition, the two novels exemplify an increasingly common trend in contemporary fiction of undermining the traditional understanding of the novel as a monomodal (exclusively verbal) work and self-contained, printed entity.

Conventional narrative fiction has been defined over the centuries with a linear structure and lack of visual intrusions. In a standard novel, each page looks more or less the same as the others, connected by the uniformity of page design to avoid distractions on the reader’s side. This article analyses the way in which Laurence Sterne made the reader self-aware through the use of unconventional visual devices in his novel 'Tristram Shandy' (1759–1767) and transformed the act of reading into a physical dialogue between author and reader. In addition, it examines its influence on the graphic dimension of contemporary works concerned with the unconventional form of the novel, such as B.S. Johnson’s 'The Unfortunates' (1969), Mark Z. Danieleweski’s 'House of Leaves' (2000) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s 'Tree of Codes' (2010).

La tecnología digital ha cambiado la forma en que nos relacionamos con los objetos y, en concreto, con los libros, que han ido perdiendo presencia y visibilidad a lo largo de su evolución. El flujo de información acelerada e intangible que nos rodea ha transformado nuestra manera de entender la
lectura y su materialidad. Estamos tan acostumbrados a absorber el contenido dinámico de los medios digitales que ya no prestamos atención al objeto que los contiene. En comparación, pasar la página y manejar la palabra impresa parecen acciones condenadas a caer en el olvido.
Aun así, en un entorno digital tan cambiante e inmaterial, ¿puede el libro físico convertirse en una herramienta para reinventar la experiencia de lectura? Desde el año 2000, se ha venido desarrollando una tendencia literaria bautizada como “la estética del libro físico”, que considera el
desafío impuesto por la tecnología electrónica como una oportunidad para experimentar e innovar en el ámbito tradicional del libro y el diseño editorial. Novelas como "House of Leaves" (2000) de Mark Z. Danielewski o "Tree of Codes" (2010) de Jonathan Safran Foer se apropian de algunas características asociadas a la tecnología digital y construyen una relación íntima entre lector y objeto. A través de estos ejemplos, la comunicación analiza las posibilidades del libro como elemento fundamental en el proceso narrativo, un objeto multimedial e interactivo que el lector debe
manipular para activar la experiencia de lectura. ¿Qué papel juega el diseño del libro en la literatura? ¿De qué forma se puede recuperar, en la era digital, la experiencia física de lectura a través del objeto? Estos casos nos ayudan a entender que el libro no está obsoleto ni sentenciado a desaparecer, sino que es necesario examinar sus cualidades y observar no sólo la evolución en las formas de leer, sino también la influencia de la materialidad y el diseño del libro en la representación y el proceso de lectura. En un mundo de información fluida e intangible, la forma del libro físico se convierte en una pieza fundamental para la reinvención de la literatura.

In his 1964 novel Albert Angelo, B.S. Johnson declares that to refuse to take his use of non-conventional typographical techniques seriously, or to dismiss them as gimmicks, is to miss the point of them as signs which communicate what he has to convey. Where such typographic techniques are taken seriously as a mode of communication in the novel, questions also emerge about how they might affect the reading process and the reader’s interpretation of the text. In Brian Castro’s Drift and the novels of B.S. Johnson, areas of non-conventional typographic layout encourage the foregrounding of the spatial form of the printed page so that it constitutes an enigma which invites the reader to view it as meaningful. The diegetic content and context of these typographic layouts facilitate a connotative reading of them as metaphorical. Where the non-conventional layout disrupts the space of the codex on a global level, the significance of the layout is informed by its broader connection to the themes of the narrative. In other examples, locally differentiated areas of typographic layout reveal a tension between the spatialisation of the page and sequential language. This is resolved by a multimodal reading of the tangible visual form of the typographic layout in conjunction with extended sequences of metonymies and literary metaphors which constitute a subtext through the narrative.

These non-conventional typographic layouts create a formal fragmentation of the diegesis and the tangible space of the work which suggests a model of text as a tessellation, a mosaic-like tiling of language and layout. This model is exemplified by a selection of M.C. Escher’s graphic works concerned with the regular division of the plane. These works are used to illustrate the varying levels of discontinuity in the novels and the effect of cognitive processes engaged by readers to connect the sequences of metonymies and metaphors in a subtext.

B.S. Johnson is currently undergoing a considerable resurgence in academic interest in the twenty-first century. Using new archive research made possible by the British Library's acquisition of the Johnson archive, this paper traces a history of Johnson's personal struggles with class identity on his journey into the world of experimental literature. The struggle to reconcile avant-garde practice with working class authenticity is seen to present a new approach to considering one of Johnson's major concerns: "truth" in fiction.

This paper examines Jonathan Coe’s biography of British experimental writer B.S. Johnson (1933-1973), Like a Fiery Elephant, which may be called a post-biography. It shows in which ways Coe simultaneously deconstructs some of the conventions of literary biography and echoes innovative devices developed by Johnson in his novels.

The chapter discusses The Unfortunates as arguably the central example of an experimental strain in 1960s British writing, characteristic of Johnson’s role as the most outspoken critic of what he regarded as the pointlessly anachronistic mainstream of predominantly realist fiction. The novel is also characteristic of Johnson’s oeuvre in that it follows his highly idiosyncratic insistence that ‘fiction is lying’ and that the only reasonable task for the novel is the truthful, autobiographical representation of thought processes. All the novel’s central concerns – cancer, memory, and urban topographies – are characterized by non-linearity and resistance to representation in conventional fiction. The text thus continues Johnson’s preoccupation with the materiality of the book and comes in 27 separately bound sections which, apart from those marked “First” and “Last”, are unnumbered, inviting readers to read them in any order, thus suggesting the random nature of memory, disease and life in general.

For all the excesses of 1960s alternative culture, the British literary scene of the period was surprisingly dismissive of experimental approaches. This talk aims at bringing to life the history of an avant garde movement which sought to revolutionise the novel form and was largely sidelined and ignored for its trouble. Individual authors, particularly B.S. Johnson and Ann Quin, are only now being recognised for their contributions to literature, and this will be the first lecture to engage with the group surrounding them as a whole. Based on four years of original archive-based research, a picture is now emerging of a group committed to tearing down Victorian traditions and constructing in their place a new set of fictional forms.

Given as part of the Ragged Project programme, this public lecture aims to translate the research conducted for my PhD thesis into a narrative form suitable for an audience of the general public.

This paper examines the fragmentation strategies in B. S. Johnson's The Unfortunates from the perspective of the theory of the novel, realism and literary sociology. This framework facilitates an investigation into the novel's construction: ranging from the global level of text organisation, typographical construction and formal composition, down to the local level of semantic structure and syntax. Analytic conclusions suggest that fragmentation is ubiquitous, which leads to the violation of most of the novel's components, its traditional and conventional elements, with an overriding impact on the narrative. As a result, The Unfortunates maintains its narrative coherence on the basis of different textual cues and generates its semantic potentialities in an alternative way. This to say, the novel's "methodology" rests on the narrative agent, the act of narrating and meta-narration. These features contribute to what commonly passes as experimentalism of The Unfortunates.

Published in 1973, B.S. Johnson's "Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry" is a mini-masterpiece of black comedy, existential despair and terrorism. Through a mix of historical research and access to the British Library's Johnson archive, this paper presents a sustained analysis of how the 1971 Industrial Relations Act, the British terror group The Angry Brigade and a friendship with fellow experimental writer Alan Burns all came to influence the writing of the novel. I ask what effect, if any, these historical references have upon the creation of humour out of mass destruction.

In Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag claims that cancer is the perfect metaphorical descriptor for late-capitalism's unbridled consumption and wild proliferation. Cancer is a disease she suggests that disdains order; it defies the reason of science and, in so doing, accurately reflects the decentred subject of contemporary philosophy and politics. The irrationality of the disease inhibits narrativization, imbuing the stories we tell about it with an anxiety that often manifests itself in the use of metaphors of wars, battles, invasions and survivorship. In the realm of fiction, B. S. Johnson's experimental anti-novel The Unfortunates (1969) stands as one attempt to represent the arbitrariness of cancer and its ability to deconstruct the hermeneutic reliability of narrative. Famously published as a collection of twenty-seven independent sections, the novel details the stream of consciousness of its narrator as he meditates on the death from cancer of his close friend, Tony. Unable to make sense of this death in any linear or consequential manner, the text reflects in the manner (and limitations) of its construction not just the randomness of illness, but also the proliferation of empty stories that are produced to explain it. Through close examination of Johnson's representation of the male body in illness, this essay explores the impossibility of controlling meaning when it comes to the great unknown of cancer. It centrally addresses the obliquity with which the diseased and malfunctioning male body has been represented, and suggests that the narrative wreckage that constitutes Johnson's experiment is less a localized strategy and more a textual microcosm of the collective despair at the irresistible profusion of cancer.

‘I admire Beckett very much,’ B.S. Johnson told Christopher Ricks in 1964, ‘while I don’t imitate him in any sense. I look upon him as a great example of what can be done. I think personally he is in a cul-de-sac’. This paper will examine Johnson’s debt to Samuel Beckett through a close reading of Johnson’s 1966 autobiographical non-fiction novel Trawl. Johnson described the book, which is based on his 1963 voyage aboard a fishing trawler, as ‘all interior monologue’, and I will show how his narrator frequently adopts the reflexive and inward epanorthosis of Beckett’s ‘trilogy’: Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. But as his comment to Ricks suggests, Johnson was unable to follow Beckett when it came to personal content: in Trawl, childhood memories of being evacuated from London during the Blitz forces the narration away from Beckettian resignation, cynicism, and despair and into a more compassionate register. Rather than reading this as a failure to assimilate Beckett’s radical austerity of purpose, I will argue that Johnson uses autobiography as a means of extracting the experimental novel from its ‘cul-de-sac’. Whereas Malone despairs of describing ‘all this fucking scenery’, Johnson’s narration is permitted to stray into the mimetic lyricism of the travel memoir. The paper will conclude by relating the work of both novelists to the genre of autobiography by demonstrating how Johnson anticipates the ‘autographical’ reading of Beckett’s novels set out in H. Porter Abbott’s 1996 study, Beckett Writing Beckett.

Taking as a starting point Spolton‘s 1963 article "The Secondary School in Post-War Fiction", this paper seeks to unpack potential reasons for the post-war boom in school-based novels by focusing on two novels in particular, BS Johnson‘s Albert Angelo and Anthony Burgess‘ The Worm and The Ring. Identifying key political and economic factors surrounding education such as the 1944 Education Act and increased state funding, it is possible to outline the historical situation from which these novels arise. This background can then be traced through the authors‘ own biographies and the contemporary educational policies, into the works themselves.

By utilising an Althussarian approach, it can be seen how the changes occurring within the historical situation result in corresponding ideological tensions that, in turn, inform the narrative tensions existent within these novels. As writers, Johnson and Burgess were expressing the concerns that they felt as teachers. Whether it be the future of "democracy" and "civilisation", the "inhuman" teachers whose role it is to enforce such things, or the "savage" children needing to be brought into line – these novels provide a multitude of perspectives on the nature of schooling relevant both historically and contemporarily.

My first monograph is due for release on June 30th.

This book discusses British novels published during the 1970s which feature terrorists either as main characters or a major plot points. The focus on terrorism’s literary depiction provides insight into the politics of the decade. The book analyses texts from Gerald Seymour, Anthony Burgess, V.S. Naipaul, Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, B.S. Johnson, Tom Sharpe, and Eric Ambler, among others, in order to engage with the IRA, the end of Empire, counterculture and environmentalism. The book provides a brief history of terrorism as a concept and tactic before discussing British literature’s relationship with terrorism. It presents a “standard terrorist morphology” by which to analyse terrorist narratives along with other insights into the British post-war imagination, writing and extremism.

An investigation into B.S. Johnson's seminal experimental work 'The Unfortunates', and how the employment of a storyline concerned with illness interacts with the purposefully disordered narrative structure, and how each element enhances the novel's impact on the reader.

This chapter considers B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969) as a motion towards a more representative portrayal of reality, characterised by the burgeoning close synthesis between chance and order. Jenner aligns the shuffleable, open form of the novel with the concept of the aleatory, and summarises the musicological distinction between aleatoric and indeterminate composition. The chapter situates Johnson’s response to shifting perceptions of chance within the context of other avant-garde innovations, and charts Johnson’s awareness of the inherent contradictions in his approach. As well as exploring Johnson’s paradoxical approach to delineating chaos, in conjunction with the ‘truthful’ retrieval of fragmented memories, Jenner suggests a potential for meaning to spring from the chance procedures enacted by the reader.

Both published in 1973, BS Johnson’s Christie Malry’s Own Double Entry and Alan Burns’ The Angry Brigade both feature terrorists as their main protagonists. At that historical moment such a focus was undoubtedly controversial; Irish and Welsh nationalist groups were growing increasingly violent and England itself was reeling in the midst of an anarchist bombing campaign. It is these anarchists, The Angry Brigade, that provide the inspiration for Burns’ “documentary novel”. Johnson, present at the trial of the Angry Brigade alongside Burns, goes further by making a lone terrorist the anti-hero of his black-comedy. Best known as “experimental” writers, neither Burns nor Johnson had written any overtly political novels until this point.

With a conservative government in power whose Industrial Relations Act slashed trade unions’ right to strike, the atmosphere of Britain in 1973 was combative politically and tense economically. My argument is that under such conditions the excesses of the terrorist mindset become relatable and, distanced by the devices of the comedic novel, the portrayal of terrorist acts provides a sense of catharsis for the powerless reader. The hyperbolic frustrations vented in classic slapstick comedies are here expressed through the machine-gun, the spray can, and the bomb. Importantly, these novels also imply that the reader hold certain sympathies in common with the terrorists’ cause – an implication perhaps unimaginable today.