Is it possible to go beyond what B.S. Johnson already accomplished in his second novel, 1964's Albert Angelo? Or does the story of the novel as literary form end there? Clocking in at only 180 pages (in the New Directions edition), the book is nonetheless the perfect distillation of every major experimental technique developed in twentieth century fiction, plus a new one thrown in for good measure. It may be the quintessential avant-garde novel that can never be transcended.
How did he do it? What were his sources? Johnson cites Beckett as an influence, featuring a quote from The Unnamable as an epigraph. But the influence of Joyce is just as discernible, if not more so. Johnson borrows from Ulysses the device of shifting between forms, genres, and registers with each chapter—one section in prose, another drama, another verse, another stream-of-consciousness. But the book doesn't just stop with Joyce. It is also compounded of equal parts Donleavy, postmodern metafiction, and pure sui generis Johnson.
J.P. Donleavy claims to have invented the technique of shifting between first- and third-person narration to describe the same characters. His 1955 novel The Ginger Man recounts the exploits of Sebastian Dangerfield at times from the standpoint of an omniscient narrator, and at times in the first-person "I"—moving between them so artfully than one is scarcely disturbed in reading it. And as much credit as Donleavy gave Joyce for his influence, he was insistent that this device was his own invention.
However that may be, though, B.S. Johnson manages to go Donleavy one better. Here, the first six sections of the novel manage to cycle through six different changes of perspective, all so seamlessly I didn't even notice what was going on until the third or fourth round. Not content merely to move between the first and third person, Johnson starts with the first, changes to the second, then the third, then the first-person plural, then second-person plural, third-person plural—you get the idea.
Having exhausted all the devices of modernism, however, Johnson also foresees some of the postmodern. Specifically, he himself as author also intrudes on the narration—in spectacular form in the novel's closing part. Having written what may seem at first to amount to a standard early-career novel for any budding intellectual—a thinly-disguised autobiographical account full of self-pity and dealing more-or-less obviously with one's own professional struggles and romantic disappointments—Johnson appears as authorial narrator at the book's close to fess up that this is indeed precisely what he is doing.
Yeah, okay—he says in effect—this character stands in for me. His vocation for "architecture" stands in for mine for poetry and prose. His misery at his substitute teaching job and longing for release from drudgery is my own. You got me—Albert Angelo, c'est moi!
And then there is the experimental Johnson touch that may never have been attempted elsewhere: his manipulation of the physical format of the book itself. Johnson is not just pursuing innovations in prose and style and narration, that is to say; he is also forcing his publishers to print copies of the book that feature holes cut in several pages, so that the reader can glimpse slightly into the future.
What really makes this novel sing, however, is not just its avant-garde quality. It is that it's also so effective as the sort of semi-autobiographical self-pitying early-career novel that it confesses itself to be. As such novels go, this is among the best in the genre. Stripped of conventional plot development and resolution, it displays exactly what it is like to be a suffering substitute teacher (a "supply" teacher in UK terminology), and the book is as often hilarious in its portrayal of this profession as it is morose. The book can be read with total indifference to its experimental techniques, therefore, and still move one.
Why then did Johnson feel the need to clothe his story in experimental dress? Partly it's that, with the progression of time, it has become more and more difficult to assume a truly naive posture with regard to art—to achieve the full suspension of disbelief required. In reading an early-career self-pitying novel, we often wonder: is this character just the author—or a slightly-idealized conception of the author? Johnson is the first to simply tear through the page, force his way out, and cry: Yes, I'm caught—it's me!
Johnson's later novel—the equally outstanding Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry—deploys similar metafictional devices: the author periodically intruding to tell us to be patient, the novel won't go on for that much longer; characters likewise announce things like "I'm the comic relief!" Johnson even offers a quote from a Hungarian literary scholar at one point that explains the reason for all this artistic self-consciousness: the novel in modern times, he writes, "necessarily regards itself ironically. It denies itself in parodistic forms in order to outgrow itself."
It is harder, that is to say, for people in modern times to simply immerse ourselves in a fictional reality without skepticism. Half our minds are always turning to try to consider how the author or creator may be pulling our strings and otherwise manipulating events and emotions. Even in the domain of pop culture, no one talks anymore about TV dramas the way they once did about soap operas. Instead of blaming the characters for every twist and turn in the plot that we may not like—we now blame the screenwriters.
It has therefore become a kind of philistinism—a sign of a certain out-of-touchness—in modern and postmodern life to still process art naively—that is to say, as if it were real. In Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy, one of his more amusing observations is that the two characters tracked throughout the novel via the view from the jalousie window (a double-meaning of the book's title that gets lost in translation) talk about a novel they are reading as if the characters were people they knew. They get angry and dismayed at the actions of these fictitious people as if they were their own choices, not those of the author.
The joke is in part that Robbe-Grillet's book is itself the most self-conscious of novels, even as it is populated by unselfconscious consumers of art. At one point, he says of one of his characters that he has a tendency to over-explain things. "He performs this exhaustive inventory with a concern for exactitude which obliges him to mention a number of elements that are ordinarily understood without being referred to[.]" (Howard trans.) Which is of course a self-consious and self-parodying nod to Robbe-Grillet's own idiosyncratic and thoroughly excruciating style of narration.
Both Johnson and Robbe-Grillet were writing long ago at this point—but I think we can say our culture has moved only further in that direction since then. Social media is rife with debates over the structure of pop cultural content in a way that assumes a responsible creator. Even superhero movies have to throw in the occasional self-conscious wink and nod to the audience (we know this is all silly, just humor us a while, will you?). And if some of us still occasionally process art naively, it seems that the younger we are, the harder it is to do so, and the easier it is to enter into a spirit of artistic self-awareness.
A case in point: I was carving pumpkins this past weekend with my family and it came time, after we had fully scooped and scraped the gourd's pulpy innards, to decide on what face we would draw on its outer skin. I stared at it for a while, trying to think of something clever. I wanted to transcend the conventions of the form. I wanted to go beyond the usual snaggletoothed grin. What could we put on this pumpkin that would really stand out?
My three-year-old nephew beat me to it. "We should put a pumpkin on the pumpkin!" At once, the scales fell from my eyes. Brilliant! It was so meta! It was worthy of B.S. Johnson.
Perhaps it has come to a point, then, where we cannot even regard a jack-o-lantern from the standpoint of artistic naivety. The carved pumpkin must become a commentary on the carved pumpkin itself. And, as the kids say, I'm here for it.
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