Trotter, Alan (2015) Bodies of work: BS Johnson's pages, Alasdair Gray's paragraphs, and ...

279 Pages·2015·0.91 MB·English

Trotter, Alan (2015) Bodies of work: B.S. Johnson’s pages, Alasdair
Gray’s paragraphs, and interventions into the anatomy of the
book. PhD thesis.

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BODIES OF WORK
B.S. Johnson’s pages, Alasdair Gray’s
paragraphs, and interventions into the
anatomy of the book
ALAN TROTTER
Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the
Degree of PhD in English Literature
SCHOOL OF CRITICAL STUDIES
UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW
July 2015
Abstract
This thesis is made up of five parts: a critical dissertation, a video essay, a novel and two
short stories. The first part, the dissertation, is on what it terms body texts: literature that
makes deliberate, creative use of its form. This is literature that can’t be considered as
simply (to use Genette’s definition of a literary work), ‘a more or less long sequence
of verbal statements, more or less endowed with significance,’ [Paratexts, p1] but is
inseparable from its incorporate existence, whether that existence is physical or digital.
Using the work of B.S. Johnson and Alasdair Gray – as authors who have creatively
occupied typesetting and production to create fiction that extends beyond the purely
verbal – the dissertation considers the antagonistic responses that can often attend
to formal devices (such as Johnson’s) and how small departures from convention, for
example the formatting of paragraphs (in the work of Gray), can have a meaningful
aesthetic impact on the work. It considers the difficulties that can accompany attempts
by the author to occupy the paratext of their work; how the rise of digital reading
environments both encourage formal experimentation, by introducing new capacities
to the work, and discourage it, by creating a marketplace in which a work is expected to
be disembodied and transposable; and it argues for the pleasures of the body text. It also
positions these concerns in the context of my own creative work, including in some of
the fiction included in the thesis.
There is then a video essay, B.S. Johnson vs. Death, made using footage from Johnson’s
film work. Following this is the novel, Muscle, and the two short stories: ‘Shark’ and ‘The
Brain Drawing the Bullet’, a digital short story created to be read in a web browser.
i
Contents
BODIES OF WORK, a dissertation
1 An area on which I may place any signs
16 The parts of the shoe
25 Typographical mucking about
31 Ah, it’s so easy to disobey a dead person
34 Thinking is a pain because it joins everything together
43 A respite, a quiz
45 Body texts
55 Coming toward a conclusion
59 Solipsism
70 Bibliography
77 B.S. Johnson vs. Death, a video essay
79 Muscle, a novel
256 Shark, a short story
272 The brain Drawing the Bullet, a short story
ii
Author’s declaration
I declare that, except where explicit reference is made to the contribution of others,
this thesis is the result of my own work and has not been submitted for any other
degree at the University of Glasgow or any other institution.
___________________________
___________________________
iii
Acknowledgements
My supervisors: Michael Schmidt and John Coyle.
The Arts & Humanities Research Council. The John W. Kluge Center.
Staff and students at the University of Glasgow and the Library of Congress.
Deborah Andrews, Ranjit Bhatnagar, Sam Binnie, Anna Gerber, Britt Iversen,
Gillian MacKay, Stefanie Posavec, Jessie Price, David Trotter, Iain Trotter, Sam Winston.
(Everyone else, too, who took the time to talk to me about my work or theirs,
who helped either my research or, by kindness, my well-being.)
Kate Nevens. And my parents.
Thank you all so much.
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BODIES OF WORK
An area on which I may
place any signs
B.S. JOHNSON WAS BORN IN 1933. I can’t help but think of him in the first few years of
his life (a chubby, swaddled pink globe) being already more himself, more perfectly B.S.
Johnson than he could ever be again. Before he read Beckett and Joyce; before he decided
that the conventional novel was moribund and that to tell a story was to lie; before he
wrote his own seven novels, his poetry, his journalism (arts, and also sports journalism)
or any of the countless chastisements (private and public) to agents, publishers, unions
or anyone else who failed to live up to his standards in their dealings with him; before
he ever stood behind or in front of a television camera, or first lamented the failure
of an outwardly unexceptional love affair as if it were a breaking wheel to which he
had been lashed; before his first depressive thought of suicide; before any of the things
we might typically think of as defining, as being particularly him, a baby-B.S. Johnson
seems like the ideal B.S. Johnson because he was always infantile. His appetite stayed
childish, immoderate and unrefined, and kept him boyishly plumped (earnestly, in the
profoundly earnest The Unfortunates, he writes, ‘Deep in my heart I know that I love
chips’ [‘Here comes’, p1]). The personal attacks that his letters are full of are petulant and
1
spiteful. And in his solipsism, and in the absoluteness of his own convictions – the way
they encircled themselves in their own logic until no one could criticise a novel but
that novel’s author, or rather (only this more specific formulation seemed to hold), no
one could criticize a B.S. Johnson novel without being B.S. Johnson – and in his need for
love that was just as absolute, that was uncomplicated and devotional: in these ways also
1 In a letter to an American publisher who had declined one of his books he wrote, not untypically,
‘TRAVELLING PEOPLE, my first novel, won a Gregory Award: the judges for which were Herbert
Read, Henry Moore, Bonamy Dobrée and TS Eliot: what did you say your name was, mate?’ The
letter’s opening line, to a man he’d never met, or even directly corresponded with, is, ‘You ignorant
unliterary Americans make me puke.’ [Coe, p191]
1
An area on which I may place any signs
he was childish until the end, the sad, early end (one of the ways he never grew up was
in this unhappy, literal sense: that he killed himself at the age of forty).
Of this complicated, volatile man and prolific artist (particularly prolific
considering the unnatural shortness of his career) what has survived? What do we talk
about when we talk about B.S. Johnson? His novels, principally. More particularly, what
happens with the best remembered of his novels is that the most visible and transgressive
assault on the conventional form of the book becomes a synecdoche for the book itself.
So The Unfortunates is known not for being a novel about memory and the loss of a friend
to cancer but for the physical fact of its twenty-seven boxed, loose, shuffle-able sections.
Albert Angelo is known for the holes cut in two of its leaves, so that from page 149 the
reader can see through (is made to see through) to a section of a paragraph on page 153.
By the same process of the part standing for the whole, this process of reduction, B.S.
2
Johnson is just this: the man who put one book in a box, and cut holes in another.
In May 1964, Johnson wrote several pages of notes for reviewers. Albert Angelo was about
to come out (it was his second novel) and the notes were to accompany advance copies
of the book being sent out by his publishers.
In Albert Angelo, Albert is an ‘architect manqué’ (as he’s dismissively called by a
deputy headmaster [p29]), devising buildings that will never be made while begrudgingly
earning a living as a supply teacher in East London. Albert’s other preoccupation, besides
his art, is with a woman who has abandoned him, and he spends his time in cafes with
his friend Terry, the two eating and drinking and lamenting together (‘Mostly we talk
about women: and mostly about this cow Janine who’s done Terry down, as Jenny did
me down’ [p52]). There is also an undertow of tension in the book: a suggestion that
Albert’s class played a part in the death of their previous teacher and that Albert is now
in line for similar mistreatment at their hands. (Albert seems more oblivious to these
intimations, or at least less convinced of their seriousness, than we, the readers, are.)
2 So for example there is a Times review (which we’ll come back to) of Like a Fiery Elephant, Jonathan
Coe’s excellent, comprehensive biography of Johnson, titled ‘Writer in a Hole’. [Coren] Or there’s
this judgement of Johnson from a 2013 Telegraph article: ‘he’s likely to be known, if at all, as the man
who cut holes in the pages of his novel Albert Angelo to give the reader a glimpse of a forthcoming
chapter, or as the writer of The Unfortunates, a box of unbound signatures.’ [Martin]
2
An area on which I may place any signs
Finally, though, it’s not just the pupils that get Albert. They do – in a two-page coda to
the novel they find Albert walking beside a canal, and throw him in, killing him – but
before that Albert is crushed in a collapse of the fiction itself. He sits, uninspired, at
a drawing board and in the middle of a paragraph, when a voice erupts into the text
‘— oh, fuck all this LYING!’ [p163]
After this ‘almighty aposiopesis’ [p164] begins a section called ‘Disintegration’
in which the new narrative voice angrily, energetically attempts to expel all pretence
(‘Jenny’ becomes ‘Muriel’, the name of the woman who left Johnson, and Albert’s
architecture is revealed to be a stand-in for poetry): as Johnson would later put it,
it breaks through the ‘disease of the objective correlative to speak truth directly if
solipsistically.’ [AYRYTBWYM?, p22]
This is the novel Johnson attempted to explain to reviewers. This is some of what
he wrote:
Various unconventional devices are used in ALBERT ANGELO for effects which
I felt I could not satisfactorily achieve by any other means. Thus a specially-
designed typecharacter draws attention to physical descriptions which I believe
tend to be skipped, do not usually penetrate sufficiently; to convey what a
particular lesson is like the thoughts of a teacher are given on the right-hand side
of a page in italic, with his and his pupils’ speech on the left in roman, so that,
though the reader obviously cannot read both at once, when he has read both
he will have seen that they are simultaneous and enacted for himself that they are
simultaneous; when Albert finds a fortuneteller’s card in the street, it is further
from the truth to describe it than simply to reproduce it; and when a future event
must be revealed, I can think of no way nearer the truth than to cut a section
through those pages intervening so that that event may be read in its place but
before the reader reaches that place.
To quote from ALBERT ANGELO:
– A page is an area on which I may place any signs I consider to commu-
nicate most nearly what I have to convey: therefore I employ, within the
pocket of my publisher and the patience of my printer, typographical tech-
3