Context
Reading B. S. Johnson
Christopher Sorrentino
B. S. Johnson’s work invites you to confront the checkered history of metafiction, or the self-reflexive, or any of the different and probably equally serviceable terms for art that gapes at itself. I once considered this kind of work to be not only sui generis but also either (a) at the margins of commerce, (b) at the cutting edge of creativity, or© (and this was particularly dear to a young writer yearning to be nobly obscure) both. Not even Moonlighting and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off could knock that bright idea out of my head (though a few years of noble obscurity certainly dulled its lustre), but now metafiction’s everywhere: movies, TV, video games (necessarily), even books—a boom that demands its reevaluation.
I don’t mean the backlash this newfound popularity has bred. The prevailing sentiment is that metafiction’s a kind of trick; an escape from the supposedly more stringent discipline of naturalistic or realistic fiction. That’s not new, but the current variation on the idea finds its fullest expression in some reviews of Dave Eggers’s recent memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which suggest that the only legit excuse for a book’s blatant assertion of itself as a thing, for its author’s obtrusive authority over the text, is the sort of traumatic grief Eggers experienced after the one-two punch of his parents’ successive deaths. In other words, postmodernism (so-called) is so inhuman it may be deployed to hold powerful emotions at bay.
This idea seems as unattractive (it appears that the book is being—hesitantly—praised for a technically creative elision of the truth) as it is implausible. But (maybe) the reviewers can’t be blamed 100%: the roots of their midget opinions, the severest excesses of this metafiction boom, can be seen in the commercials that shrug and wink as they disclose their attempt to defraud. For a more drawn-out instance of the superfluousness metafiction’s arrived at, you could have watched Get Real, a wretched program I viewed a few times this past fall. The characters clumped around their Restoration Hardware house kibitzing away at the audience, but the self-reflexivity was shoehorned into a standard fix-it-all-before-the-credits family drama (and a prudishly moralizing one at that); it was just a selling point (though I believe the show was axed).
Considering all this, I don’t blame—though I don’t agree with—dour critics for their tendency to see all of this overbearing technique as a cheap gimmick. I do agree that it’s hard sometimes to believe that metafiction ever meant anything at all other than Look-Mom-No-Hands. What H.R. Jauss writes of as the "aesthetic distance" separating innovative work from its audience’s "horizon of expectations" has been bridged, and the new metafiction (by which I mean, if I haven’t been clear, its instances in all media) allows that audience to fill in narratological blanks as automatically and easily as it does with more conventionally conventional forms.
Here I think it’s important to remember a few things: one is that just because the "metafictional" now looks familiar, that doesn’t mean that the "conventional" is suddenly privileged; or that it has been conclusively proven to be the natural form God (or Ian Watt) intended for the novel (or what have you) to take. I’d also remind those bemoaning the gimmickiness of it all that the designation of something as metafictional really is just a matter of degree. A book with chapter divisions, a lap dissolve in a movie, a fade-out on a record—all are metafictional; i.e., not only are they patently neither life nor a barroom anecdote nor a campfire sing, but they aren’t even trying to appear to be. A third thing to remember: the Staggering Genius technique-as-repression theory has it backwards: metafiction’s treatment of the interrelationship between author/characters/audience as permeable and even co-dependent, and its failure to adhere to formal conventions, was once an attempt at truth.
Which brings us to B. S. Johnson. Before his 1973 suicide at thirty-nine, Johnson was a leading light of the British avant-garde. His work was daring and innovative, not merely because of the techniques he developed and his adventurous sense of form, but because to an extent probably unprecedented up to that time, he appeared in his books, both as the disembodied, authoritative, obtrusive narrator familiar to readers of metafiction, and as "the actual character of the artist, living and working at his art," as Morton P. Levitt puts it. This was not a blind of some sort, but characteristic of Johnson’s conviction that one could embrace the novel, its artifices and opportunities for formal innovation, while rejecting "fiction," which he thought of as "lies."
In fact, the primary thing one has to come to terms with when considering Johnson’s work is this repeated insistence that he was "not interested in telling lies" in his novels, that "telling stories is telling lies." This seems the sort of colorful maxim that endures to run a victory lap around an artist’s grave, and it’s bothered the few critics who’ve cared to examine Johnson’s career. We have to travel to the heart of Johnson’s sense of truth if we aren’t to dismiss this dogged (and, if interpreted literally, imperfect) refusal as silly, naïve, or both. What did he mean by this?
Johnson believed that the best way to approach the truth was to give literary form to his own reality; the reality specific to the society and times out of which he’d formed his life. To embody that reality in his work required literary invention, and such an inventive depiction contained within it both an implicit critique of society (though Johnson didn’t balk at categorically articulating such a critique), and, via the form in which the whole was presented, a declaration of faith in the evolution of the novel. Johnson wrote of the writer working that way, ". . . these aspects of making are radical; this is inescapable unless he chooses escapism," going on to quote Beckett: ". . . to find a form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now."
Did Johnson succeed? I think he did. His progression (over a little more than a decade) from his first novel, Travelling People (which Johnson eventually dismissed as a "disaster"), through the works of his maturity reveals remarkable consistency in his thematic preoccupations and concerns, though he habitually posed new formal problems for himself each time out (he’s one of those rare writers whose career is noteworthy for his never having repeated himself). After Travelling People came Albert Angelo, where Johnson felt he first had spoken "truth directly"; Trawl, probably Johnson’s most assimilable novel, an interior monologue; and The Unfortunates, notoriously published as boxed, unbound signatures for the reader to read in any order s/he liked. These novels deal more or less frankly with the author and with various aspects of his life. They are not, strictly speaking, "confessional," though each is unmistakably and radiantly genuine, and Trawl, which expresses Johnson’s acute desire for a normal life, for home and family, as he comes to grips with his feelings for Virginia (whom Johnson married), is—as with so much of Johnson—heartbreaking in light of his eventual suicide (it ends, ". . . in the far hope of that happiness, I give life one more chance: towards the chance of that future I shall voyage honestly and hopefully").
Of the later novels, two—House Mother Normal and Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry—seem to reject this insistence on "truth" with their clearly fictional premises: in the first, the minds of eight elderly charity cases and the "House Mother" who exploits and humiliates them are explored in nine corresponding segments of equal length that form a composition as synchronized as a musical score; in the second, a young man applies the principles of double-entry bookkeeping (for each debit, a corresponding credit must occur to balance the books) to his relationship with society ("CHRISTIE MALRY in account with THEM," as he enters it), increasing from minor acts of vandalism to mass murder the recompense he wreaks for his everyday abasement. These two books are, in my opinion, Johnson’s masterpieces, and I don’t believe he backed away from his principles so much as I think he became comfortable with projecting what Patrick Parrinder calls the "continuous moral vision" he sustained throughout his work on fabricated characters and situations. The truth, as Johnson saw it, became the novels’ underpinning; the novels were freed to present it through means that (if not quite the Eliotian "objective correlative" Johnson famously ditched in Albert Angelo, whose progress he interrupted with an abrupt cry of "oh, fuck all this LYING!") are less literal than the bones of Johnson’s own life while retaining the honesty he sought (Johnson returned to a more concrete use of the "truth" for his last book, See the Old Lady Decently, the only completed volume of an intended trilogy).
Throughout his work, Johnson refined a set of techniques and nurtured a cluster of recurrent motifs, establishing an overall system that links even disparate books—the encyclopedic knowledge of London; the occasional guidebook style, first employed in Albert Angelo to limn a decrepit London and later used in See the Old Lady to limn a decrepit Empire; the way Johnson’s attention to the mechanics and minutiae of everyday life and routines and related interest in dissecting social rituals could suddenly turn a gentle anecdote of his beloved quotidian into a pitiless examination of the artificial hierarchy that sustained it; his predilection for obscure words; the extension of the supercilious, unfit, and criminally complicit Johnsonian authority figures from the merely weak Mr. Coulter (Albert Angelo) through the despised Gen. Douglas Haig (See the Old Lady) the British WWI Commander in Chief who deemed the machine gun "a much overrated weapon," even as 300,000 of his men died to advance eight km at Passchendaele; the furious worldview that it is the Haigs who call society’s tune—all these hallmarks conveyed in prose that manages to be conversationally straightforward, warm, inviting, and funny.
This is not to absolve Johnson of his flaws as a social critic. His sincerity aside, Johnson was clearly without a "program": what emerges from repeated readings is a portrait of a very modern man, full of contradictory impulses. The rare overt political statement—e.g., the view expressed in See the Old Lady that the British government was "a devastating coalition of fools and criminals"—usually is an idea akin in its simplicity to those on the tabloid headline banners pinned up daily outside a newsagent’s, and his sense of injustice was offset, even undermined, by his belief that existence was chaotic and pointless. But while this repudiation of meaningfulness comes at the expense of sociological coherence, it lends the books the anarchic edge of the most prophetic fiction—the chaos, the resulting insolubility of the world’s inequities, leads away from reason and into a zone of terrifying possibility. Christie Malry is like Kafka turned inside-out, with all the dread painstakingly accounted for. It appeared over twenty years before anyone had heard of Timothy McVeigh, but in its depiction of Christie’s outsized sense of the retribution due him for his daily humiliations—he even bombs the tax collector’s office—looms an augury of the lunatic politics of resentment, of evening the score, that captivates so many.
Johnson’s subversive suggestion is that we imagine Christie in our own image. By the end, when Johnson pulls the plug ("Surely no reader will wish me to invent anything further, surely he or she can extrapolate only too easily from what has gone before?"), afflicting Christie with metastasized cancer, we have become quite fond of Christie and all aspects of his strangely fulfilling life of ill will. It sounds like fun, and Christie’s murderous rationale is disturbingly persuasive: ". . . society saw that human life was in fact a very inexpensive, plentiful and easily-disposable asset . . . Human life is cheap, dirt cheap, according to this society, judged by the way it acts, the only true test, saw Christie, despite its pious mouthings." Similarly, at the conclusion of House Mother Normal, House Mother delivers a devastating monologue that both rationalizes and convincingly exculpates her behavior, concluding: "I did not invent this system: I inherited it."
House Mother is a monster, but like the other characters in the book she is both 100% human and familiarly so—and Johnson has endowed her with his own distinctive voice. It is she who announces, "Thus you see I too am the puppet or concoction of a writer. . . . So you see this is from his skull. It is a diagram of certain aspects of the inside of his skull!" And now the pertinent question—for Johnson, for metafiction: is this a salutary reminder? Or is it "gratuitous," a "trick"? Johnson wrote, "Where I depart from convention, it is because the convention has failed." He felt that the only true basis for evaluating "experimentalism" (a term he rejected) is the question of "how less good were the alternatives," declaring caustically, "What I have been trying to do in the novel . . . has been . . . refracted through the conservativeness of reviewers. . . ." A glance at the reception his work received reveals the nineteenth-century lorgnette through which it was viewed. He was routinely accused of gimmickry; called, in effect, a fake; described as a novelist not to be taken seriously; and was memorably slammed by the hack novelist Peter Ackroyd for his "lamentably archaic experimentation" and "Very Bad Writing" [sic; Ackroyd mocks one of Johnson’s devices] in a piece so obnoxiously arrogant it’s a textbook example of the self-serving solipsism of the daily book reviewer. More recently (ca. 1995) Salman Rushdie has referred in an interview to Johnson’s "trickery" with the relieved air of one marking the passing of a dark era.
Since his death, Johnson’s reputation has been shamefully neglected, not least by a British literati which has "dropped the baton," as he put it: most of his work—several of the novels, a prose collection, plays, screenplays, and sundry collaborations—has long been unavailable. It appears that a revival of interest is astir (several books are being reissued in the U.K., a biography by Jonathan Coe is due next year, and a film version of Christie Malry is scheduled for release), but he’s yet to assume his proper place among the most important postwar writers. Johnson persistently advised his readers what they could not expect of him, and to hold him to a standard he rejected doesn’t seem honest or even particularly intelligent. In "B. S. Johnson and the Frontiers of Fiction," Robert S. Ryf concludes, "We must, in short, take him as he is." It’s the promise of Johnson "as he is" that’s central to his work, and its arbiters should heed Ryf’s advice, and take it to heart.
