BS Johnson and the Attack of the White-Collar Working Class

Abstract

The twenty-first century has seen a much-deserved revival in interest in BS Johnson as a figure within Britain’s postwar avant-garde, often noted both for his working-class background and vociferous—even dogmatic—espousal of aesthetic innovation. However, while Johnson is often understood as both working class and a writer—not to mention a passionate socialist—he is rarely considered a “working-class writer”, part of the working-class literary canon in the same way as, for instance, Robert Tressell or Alan Sillitoe. This is due in significant part to issues of aesthetics and motifs: firstly, that working-class writing has conventionally been thought of as, by definition, a realist endeavour and so, owing to his avant-gardism, Johnson falls outside of that definition. The second reason is that Johnson’s protagonists are often white-collar workers, rather than the manual labourers commonly associated with working-class fiction. As such, Johnson’s novels are often read as reflecting his philosophical or aesthetic interests, rather than explicitly class concerns (the slight exception being 1973’s Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, itself still largely coded as a “political” rather than “class” novel). Yet these class concerns—particularly around the theme of alienated labour—are present in a number of Johnson’s novels, from Albert Angelo (1963) to The Unfortunates (1969), his infamous “book-in-a-box”. As French ultra-leftist, Gilles Dauvé, writes, ‘If one identifies proletarian with factory worker [...] one misses what is subversive in the proletarian condition.’ Johnson’s novels can therefore be read as radical reappraisals of the subversiveness of just that condition.