Anatomy of an Obsession: Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs

Abstract

B.S. Johnson is remembered for his experimental novels, but his critical writings have fallen into oblivion over the past three decades (a tendency mitigated by the recent publication of a monograph devoted to his work and a biography). This is all the more regrettable as the introduction to Aren’t You Rather Young to Be Writing Your Memoirs expresses a very idiosyncratic theory of the novel penned in a paradoxical, even contradictory, ars poetica. To Johnson, the novel is not the vehicle of fiction but truth, and his faithfulness to this single idea makes him argue in favour of an ethics of truth (as opposed to what has come to be more acceptable as an ethics of truths, over the last decade). By hankering after a naturalist, objectivist ideal, Johnson privileges an ethics of a deontic type, and this may help us situate his oeuvre in a period of transition (the 1960s and ’70s) and see him more as a belated Modernist than a proto-Postmodernist.