(Re)-acknowledging B. S. Johnson's Radical Realism, or Re-publishing The Unfortunates

Abstract

B. S. Johnson (1933-1973) committed suicide after a short career as a novelist marked both by literary experimentation and critical controversy.2 Subsequently, in Britain his work is available only second-hand; the substance and texture of his work lost to later generations by his continued absence from British bookshops. Autumn 1999 brought the republication by Picador of The Unfortunates (1969), Johnson's so-called book-in-a-box, with further plans to retrieve most of his work. This re-emergence provides a new potential co-ordinate for English studies, with an opportunity to re-inscribe a strand of the intellectual history of the post-war period. In Johnson one can perceive traces of a range of sociologically-inspired and late modernist formal experiments in both the arts and literature, the vestiges of a Zeitgeist quite different from that purveyed as a rejection of modernism by the Angry Young Men. Johnson's writing contains parallel elements to the work of the Independent group at the ICA, gendered readings of a postcolonial awareness like that of Doris Lessing, and even the ersatz existentialism of John Fowles, but there remain essential differences often elided. Those disparities noted are commonly ones detrimental to Johnson's overall reputation. Patricia Waugh, in © CS 2001