BS Johnson

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Bryan Stanley Johnson (born February 5, 1933 in London , † November 13, 1973 in Islington , London, known by his author name BS Johnson ) was an English writer and filmmaker.

Life

Johnson came from a London working class family. He left school at 16 to work as an accountant. He self-taught himself Latin in the evenings and passed the entrance exam to King's College , London. He majored in English and graduated with a bachelor's degree .

After graduating, he started writing. His novels are about his life as a writer and from book to book they become increasingly experimental and unorthodox, both in content and form. In his first book Traveling People (1963), although written comparatively conventionally, Johnson changes the narrative perspective or narrative technique in each chapter . The pages in Albert Angelo (1964) contain holes that are supposed to represent the stab of the murderer's knife and at the same time allow a glimpse into later book pages. Johnson also breaks the flow of the narrative to discuss his technique, preferences, and sources as a writer. The Unfortunates (1969), on the other hand, is available unbound and packaged in a box; 25 of the 27 sections can be read in any order and combined again and again by the reader. In House Mother Normal (1971) Johnson adheres to a strictly chronological narrative style, the thoughts and experiences of his characters overlap and mix from sentence to sentence.

In addition to his novels, Johnson also wrote poetry, short stories, plays and screenplays, wrote reviews as a critic and made several experimental films.

Johnson suffered from the fact that his books could not celebrate commercial success. Suffering from depression and troubled by family problems, he committed suicide at the age of 40. At the time of his death, he was almost unknown, only afterwards did a cult develop around his books.

His last published novel Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry (1973) was made into a film in 2000. The Johnson biography Like a Fiery Elephant by Jonathan Coe in 2005 was awarded the Samuel Johnson Prize.

Reception in Germany

Although a large part of Johnson's literary work is available in the form of a seven-volume work edition published by Schneekluth Verlag between 1989 and 1993 in German and also the novels Alberto Angelo and Christie Malry's double-entry bookkeeping as well as the prose volume Mit Your Memoirs, they appeared in paperback well enough early (the latter 2005 also as an audio book), Johnson must still be regarded as a largely unknown author in German-speaking countries.

In the scientific field, too, Johnson's work has so far hardly met with any echo. However, a study on BS Johnson ( The Subject Rising against its Author. A Poetics of Rebellion in Bryan Stanley Johnson's Oeuvre ) by Georg Olms Verlag is currently (November 2008) announced.

In the field of German-language literature, Johnson's traces also seem very few and far between , but the writer Arthur Missa devoted himself to the writer's work in the prose piece Keeping up with the Johnsons in his book Formenverfuger / Formenverfüger (2008) .

Books

Novels

  • Traveling People (1963)
  • Albert Angelo (1964)
  • Trawl (1966)
  • The Unfortunates (1969)
  • House Mother Normal (1971)
  • Christie Malry's Own Double Entry (1973, German Christie Malry's double entry bookkeeping )
  • See the Old Lady Decently (1975)

Short stories

  • Street Children (1964)
  • Statement Against Corpses (1964, together with Zulfikar Ghose )
  • Aren't You Rather Young To Be Writing Your Memoirs? (1973, Ger. You're pretty early on with your memoirs )

Poems

  • Poems (1964)
  • Poems 2 (1972)

Movies

  • 1967: You're Human Like the Rest of Them
  • 1970: Paradigm
  • 2000: Christie Malry's bloody bookkeeping ( Christie Malry's own double-entry )

Awards

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Johnson, BS
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Johnson, Bryan Stanley (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British writer
DATE OF BIRTH February 5, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH London
DATE OF DEATH November 13, 1973
Place of death London Borough of Islington