“Giving Feeling Form”: B. S. Johnson’s Literary Project Melanie Jane Seddon The thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Portsmouth April 2016 ABSTRACT This thesis assesses the novels of B. S. Johnson and, building on earlier socio-cultural readings, for the first time identifies affect, mood and space as key drivers of Johnson’s work. It suggests fresh interactions with the texts via the artistic practice and philosophical thought of the late twentieth to early twenty-first centuries and reveals what more we can gain from reading Johnson now. Rather than fix this author in a canonized literary past it presents Johnson as a writer with inter-disciplinary appeal and influence. My reading champions the continued significance of Johnson’s work and endeavours to resist teleology; it dips in and out of the seven novels, at times circling back to key passages and episodes that can be assessed in multiple ways. The thesis thus follows Johnson’s practice and is palimpsestic, it is formed from multiple layers. Working with affective energies the chapters unfold to build upon each other but also stand to be read individually or even, in true Johnsonian style, at random. The reading moves in a range of directions exploring different nodes of an organic whole that constitutes the body of Johnson’s literary output. Any thesis must build momentum and therefore this thesis culminates in an extended conclusion which for the first time places Johnson at the vanguard of a spatial turn in the humanities. My final analysis suggests that Johnson’s practice advances the novel towards a model of “creative research” or project work – a reflexive adventure peculiar to the making process. This model is concerned with possibilities and processes rather than final resolution and happily accommodates Johnson’s vision of a chaotic, unknowable world. Table of Contents Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………1 A literature review………………………………..............................................................7 Contemporary engagements with B. S. Johnson’s work………......................................10 Theoretical frameworks………...…………………………………................................ 19 Thesis structure………………………………………………………………………....27 Chapter One: Affective Space……………………………………………………………… 31 The mood of the present moment……………………………………………………… 35 The affective truth of fiction…………………………………………………………… 41 Intensity and bloom-spaces……………………………………………………………. 44 Christie Malry’s chaotic world………………………………………………………… 48 The difficulty of identifying mood in the literary text…………………………………. 52 Threat and the Second World War…………………………………………………….. 54 The struggle against latency…………………………………………………………… 59 Meeting the unknowable future………………………………………………………... 64 Chapter Two: Urban Spaces……………………………………………………………….. 68 Modernist beginnings…………………………………………………………………...70 Travelling People and the recycling of form…………………………………………... 73 Albert Angelo: post-war drifting in the city……………………………………………. 82 The affective cityscape………………………………………………………………… 89 Channelling affect……………………………………………………………………… 94 De Certeau and the post-war reclamation of the streets……………………………….. 98 The transformation of space into place……………………………………………….. 100 New Brutalist practice: cohesion and honest form…………………………………… 108 Exposing literary structure……………………………………………………………. 111 Chapter Three: Different Spaces…………………………………………………………. 116 Understanding space: Foucault’s heterotopia………………………………………... 117 Counter-spaces………………………………………………………………………... 119 The heterotopic space of Trawl………………………………………………………. 122 Trawl’s anthropological rite-of-passage……………………………………………… 127 Liminal abjection……………………………………………………………………... 131 Space and the trialectics of being…………………………………………………….. 135 Christie Malry and the social production of space…………………………………… 140 Chapter Four: Inscribing Spaces…………………………………………………………. 153 Making lines and wayfaring………………………………………………………….. 155 Creating artistic space………………………………………………………………… 160 Elegiac inscription in The Unfortunates……………………………………………… 166 Narrative pathways in the city………………………………………………………... 169 Printed form and the tyranny of the page…………………………………………….. 174 House Mother Normal and isolating form……………………………………………. 179 Social structures and disengagement………………………………………………… 183 Power games and spatial struggle…………………………………………………….. 187 Chapter Five: Original Spaces……………………………………………………………. 195 The Great Mother, motherland and the matrice……………………………………… 198 Matrical form and the charting of the family tree……………………………………. 201 End of war and empire……………………………………………………………….. 209 Positioning the subject in See the Old Lady Decently………………………………... 213 Assemblage and the rhizomatic whole……………………………………………….. 220 Formal patterning and the use of rhythm in Trawl…………………………………… 223 Form from the middle point…………………………………………………………... 229 Chapter Six: Conclusion—A spatial turn………………………………………………... 232 Thrift’s four principles of a spatial approach………………………………………… 235 A space for experimentation………………………………………………………….. 244 Creative research: a project in material thinking……………………………………... 248 Bibliography.......................................................................................................................... 256 Appendix………………………………………………………………………………….... 269 Whilst registered as a candidate for the above degree, I have not been registered for any other research award. The results and conclusions embodied in this thesis are the work of the named candidate and have not been submitted for any other academic award. Word count (excluding references): 74163 Word count (including references, footnotes and bibliography): 88651 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank the SSHLS at the University of Portsmouth for the funding I received from 2012–2015. I would also like to express a debt of gratitude to my supervisors Dr. Christine Berberich and Professor Bran Nicol for their guidance and support. DISSEMINATION: Early drafts of sections of chapters 5 and 2 first appeared in the following publications: “Reading the Matrix: B. S. Johnson’s See the Old Lady Decently” BSJ: The B. S. Johnson Journal, 2:1 Summer 2015. “The Shock of the Everyday: B. S. Johnson’s Post-War Cityscape” Studies in the Humanities 41: 1-2, Dec 2015. CONFERENCE PAPERS “Bryan Stanley Johnson: Writing as Though It Mattered.” Annual Postgraduate Conference in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Portsmouth, 15 May 2013 “Bryan Stanley Johnson: A Literary ‘Allornothinger.”’ Marginalised Mainstream Conference, Senate House, London, 12–13 September 2013. “Bryan Stanley Johnson: Writing as Though It Mattered.” MMLA Annual Conference, Milwaukee WI, 7–10 November 2013. “Form Following Function: B. S. Johnson’s Literary Project.” Literary London Conference, Senate House, London, 23–25 July 2014. “Post-war Transition: B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo.” Transitions Conference, University of Bristol, 5 September, 2014. “The Affect of the City: B. S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo.” How to Feel about Affect Conference, University of Florida, 23–25 October 2014. “The Novel as Heterotopia: B. S. Johnson’s Trawl.” Critical Spaces: Disorienting the Topological Conference, London Graduate School, University of Kingston, 5 January 2015. LECTURES “Interior Spaces: Form, Function and Architecture in the Novels of B. S. Johnson.” University of Portsmouth, 1st January 2014. 1 Introduction Telling stories is telling lies and I want to tell the truth about me about my experience about my truth about my truth to reality.1 B. S. Johnson Once upon a time is code for I’m lying to you. We experience stories as lies and truth at the same time. We learn to empathize with real people via made-up people. The most important thing that fiction does is it lets us look out through other eyes, and that teaches us empathy – that behind every pair of eyes is somebody like us.2 Neil Gaiman Commenting fifty years apart in time, writers Neil Gaiman and B. S. Johnson pull no punches when tasked with unpacking their art. Gaiman—a British writer of comic books, graphic novels, screenplays, theatre and both juvenile and adult fiction—delivered these words in a talk entitled “How Stories Last” delivered to the Long Now Foundation3 in San Francisco in June 2015. The similarly multi-modal writer Johnson, by contrast, embedded his words into the body of his 1964 novel Albert Angelo as a metafictional outburst of creative frustration. Although half a century has passed between these utterances the two writers are united in their desire to pinpoint exactly what it is that stories do and how this end is achieved. It is striking how little the view of a story’s key co-ordinates has changed. The elements identified by both writers are truth, lies, fiction, experience, and reality and what is central to their arguments (and indeed to this thesis 1 B. S. Johnson, Albert Angelo in Omnibus, (London: Picador, 2004), 167. 2 Neil Gaiman, “How Stories Last.” Long-term Thinking Seminar Series, Long Now Foundation, San Francisco, June 9 2015 https://soundcloud.com/brainpicker/neil-gaiman-how-stories-last 3 http://longnow.org/about/ The Long Now Foundation was established in 1996 to “provide a counterpoint to today's accelerating culture and help make long-term thinking more common.” The name was coined by founding member and conceptual musician Brian Eno. 2 which assesses Johnson’s approach to the novel) is not merely the consideration of these terms in isolation or binary pairs but of the relations