The possibility of any contemporary author with genuine literary acclaim becoming a classic writer – to the scale of William Shakespeare, Charles Dickens, or James Joyce – is extremely slim. One such author who has been all but forgotten is B. S. Johnson.
Bryan Stanley Johnson was an author, a poet, an editor, and a film-maker. In the words of his biographer Jonathan Coe, Johnson was “Britain’s one-man literary avant-garde of the 1960s”. To be sure, during the ’60s B. S. Johnson was an author worth talking about. His work was hailed as “experimental” – a term that Johnson specifically despised – due to the unusual formats in which his work was published. Therefore, to forget B. S. Johnson would be to ignore an important column of the postmodern movement.
B. S. Johnson published six novels during his short career. His aim was to continue where writers like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett had left off – no small feat. Consequently, in an attempt to revitalize the world of literature as Ulysses had done in 1922, Johnson’s work adopted novel techniques to pursue their goals. For instance, Johnson’s first novel – Travelling People – borrowed the infamous black page from Lawrence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, the purpose being to mimic a heart attack. Indeed, Johnson continually used unorthodox typographic techniques to convey certain ideas.
The second novel – Albert Angelo – continued this trait. In this instance, on pages 149-152, a rectangular hole is cut into the material text. The reader could therefore peer through the gap and see into the murderous future. Accordingly, Albert Angelo has been labelled as a metafiction – a novel which is self-conscious. This term carries more weight when the conclusion of Albert Angelo is observed. In a fit of passion, the author himself – B. S. Johnson – intrudes in the story, crying: “OH, FUCK ALL THIS LYING” . The author goes on to discredit the entirety of the novel as nothing more than a lie. It is here that Johnson voiced his paradoxical conception of fiction, that “telling stories is telling lies” to which he later added – in Aren’t You Rather Young To Be Writing Your Own Memoirs – “I choose to write truth in the form of a novel” . Johnson continued in this endeavour throughout the remainder of his career.
Another of Johnson’s novels that attracted monumental attention was his “book in a box”, The Unfortunates. The unusual presentation of this novel is worth remembering: in contrast to the traditionally bound book, The Unfortunates is a novel contained within a box. Inside are twenty-seven individually bound pamphlets of varying length. The “First” and “Last” sections are marked accordingly; however, the remaining twenty-five sections – as noted on the box – “are intended to be read in random order.” This format was an attempt to convey the chaotic nature of memory. This is truly a novel that needs to be read in order to be experienced.
B. S. Johnson is an author that cannot be forgotten. There is no doubt that authors have used similar techniques to those listed above; however, Johnson’s version of these methods adopts a style and appreciation of literature that is worth being remembered. In my opinion, Johnson is the only author who was capable of writing anything as ground-breaking as Joyce’s Ulysses or Beckett’s The Unnameable. Johnson was the next rung on the progressive literary ladder; a ladder which, it appears, has been hastily misplaced in the last decade.
Unfortunately, since his suicide in 1973, Johnson’s work has – until recently – lapsed into obscurity. Several of the novels have been republished by Picador; yet, it is still unusual for any practised reader to know the name of B. S. Johnson. I therefore make a call for any readers wishing to experience something new and exciting to seek out “Britain’s one-man literary avant-garde,” B. S. Johnson. You will not be disappointed.
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