B.S. Johnson: breaking through the walls of fiction

The book as an architectural structure, and the book as a human body, are two pervasive conceptual metaphors underlying liberatic works. The material rhetoric of these conceptual metaphors goes hand in hand with ways of structuring discourse, and this sometimes involves the visualisation, or literalisation, of spatial conceptualisations of linguistic forms. The relation “between the spatialized form of the language and the conceptual system, especially the metaphorical aspects of the conceptual system” (Lakoff and Johnson 2003: 138) is translated into, or reflected in, the physical shape of the text. This is because these two conceptual metaphors structure the way we speak about texts in general. Literary works seen as material embodiments of ideas must be close to architecture, the most material of arts, and the one, moreover, which requires the audience to actively move in and around the architectural object. Since many writers who have resorted to the rhetoric of materiality draw explicit parallels between them, let me mention two of them who are particularly relevant to my subject. One is B.S. Johnson, a British novelist well known for his unconventional exploitation of the technological space of the book. The other is William H. Gass, an American philosopher, essayist and writer who is deeply preoccupied with “habitations of the word.”

In the “Introduction” to a collection of short texts, Aren't You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs?, B.S. Johnson points out that writers can learn much from architects insofar as in writing, just as in designing buildings, artists should consider their goals and available means. As Johnson explains, the “architecture of the book” needs to be connected with its subject matter. Repeating the dictum of Louis Sullivan, “the father of modernist architecture” he declares that “form follows function” (B.S. Johnson 1973: 16). Johnson insists that his “formal innovations” in typography, and the structure of his books, are the result of the search for adequate expression. He claims that he uses the means available to him as a writer (not a book designer or visual artist), but he also admits that sometimes the novelist must “borrow, steal or cobble” from other media in order to invent “forms which will more or less satisfactorily contain an ever-changing reality” (16–17).