The (w)hole affect

creative reading and typographic immersion in Albert Angelo

David James

pp. 27-37

in: Philip Tew, Glyn White (eds), Re-reading B. S. Johnson, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Abstract

For readers it is often said that they will go on reading the novel because it enables them […] to exercise their imaginations, that that is one of its chief attractions for them, that they may imagine the characters and so on for themselves. Not with my novels […]; I want my ideas to be expressed so precisely that the very minimum of room for interpretation is left. Indeed I would go further and say that to the extent that a reader can impose his own imagination on my words, then that piece of writing is a failure. I want him to see my (vision), not something conjured out of his own imagination. How is he supposed to grow unless he will admit others’ ideas? If he wants to impose his imagination, let him write his own books. That may be thought to be anti-reader; but think a little further, and what I am really doing is challenging the reader to prove his own existence as palpably as I am proving mine by the act of writing.