B. S. Johnson's "introduction" to aren't you rather young to be writing your memoirs?

the memoir between life and literature

Jared McGeough

pp. 132-142

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

Abstract

Written in its final form six months before his suicide, B. S. Johnson's "Introduction" to his collection of short prose Aren't You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs? is a composite; a manifesto and a memoir of his literary experimentation. It is a hybrid text in which Johnson attempts to compress his literary output into a single essay. Taut with desperation and a desire to be understood, it makes formal demands for an open-minded reading public and offers a methodological treatise. The very existence of this introduction complicates Johnson's claim that he writes to "exorcise … the burden of having to bear some pain, the hurt of some experience: in order that it may be over there, in a book" and not in his mind (AYRY 19). I read Johnson's memorial exorcism as a performative moment in which he undertakes an analysis of his own work, a radical movement, a turning over and turning back. Johnson uses the "Introduction" in such a way that it "will not let us shelter in the interiority of a psycho-biographical approach" (Rajan 2002: 172).