‘Make of Them What You Will’: The Short Prose Pieces of B.S. Johnson

Abstract

B.S. Johnson’s ‘Introduction’ to his 1973 collection of short prose Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? has been described by Jonathan Coe as not only ‘one of the last important things he wrote’ (it is dated 5 May 1973, and Johnson died in the November of that year) but also ‘probably the most famous and frequently quoted item in the Johnson oeuvre: a belligerent critique of the conservatism of modern British writing and an impassioned apologia for his own methods’ (Coe 2005: 13). As a literary form, Johnson writes, the conventional, old-fashioned ‘nineteenth century novel’ is ‘exhausted, clapped out’: ‘No matter how good the writers are who now attempt it, it cannot be made to work for our time, and the writing of it is anachronistic, invalid, irrelevant and perverse’ Qohnson 1973: 14). One reason for this is that ‘present day reality’ differs markedly from ‘nineteenth century reality’: ‘Then it was possible to believe in pattern and eternity, but today what characterises our reality is the probability that chaos is the most likely explanation’ (ibid.: 17). Since ‘Life is chaotic, fluid, random’, Johnson asserts, ‘telling stories really is telling lies’ (14). Approvingly quoting words attributed to Samuel Beckett, he argues that the role of the artist is to find a literary form that ‘admits the chaos, and does not try to say that the chaos is really something else’. Artists must try ‘to find a form that accommodates the mess’ (17). Johnson then discusses the literary techniques adopted in each of his own first six novels in turn, before offering a list of that very small band of contemporary British writers he feels are ‘writing as though it mattered, as though they meant it, as though they meant it to matter’ (29).