AAA Band 38 (2013) Heft 1 Rezensionen Miriam Havemann, The Subject Rising Against its Author. A Poetics of Rebellion in Bryan Stanley Johnson’s Œuvre. (Echo: Literaturwissenschaft im interdisziplinären Dialog 13). Hildesheim: Olms, 2011. Dorothee Birke Few British novelists have tested the limits of form like B.S. Johnson (1933- 1973). Among his works are a novel with a hole cut into its pages (Albert Angelo, 1964) and a collection of loose pages in a box, to be assembled into any sequence by the reader (The Unfortunates, 1969). Then there is House Mother Normal (1971), written from the point of view of nine different protagonists, which features synchronized page numbers that allow the reader to locate descriptions of the same event from the perspectives of these characters, inmates of a retirement home in various stages of dementia. Johnson’s insistence on going where few or no writers had gone before did not make him exactly popular with publishers and printers. Neither did it endear him to a large readership. One might think that the one group of people it would be sure to appeal to would be scholars of literature. However, although literary histories commonly mention Johnson as a pathbreaking experimentalist in British fiction, books devoted to his œuvre are few and far between. Only since the turn of the millennium have there been any monographs on Johnson at all: so far, the count is up to three studies on his novels, one volume of articles, and Jonathan Coe’s biography Like a Fiery Elephant, published in 2005. Miriam Havemann’s book is a welcome addition to this body of research. On more than 400 pages, she has left no stone unturned: her study, originally written as a PhD thesis, covers the whole range of Johnson’s writings. It contains not only a long chapter with sections on each of his seven novels (or maybe rather ‘novels’), but also shorter ones dedicated to his short stories, poems, plays, and films. For anyone interested in Johnson’s work, the book is a valuable resource, as it provides a detailed account of this author’s versatili- AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Band 38 (2013) · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen Rezensionen AAA Band 38 (2013) Heft 1 70 ty and brings together a wealth of materials from other critics. Havemann traces the means by which Johnson, in each of the genres and media in which he worked, tried to achieve his self-avowed goal of ‘telling truth’. This endeavour always meant breaking with conventions and expectations, and Havemann successfully conveys how finely attuned Johnson was to the specific traditions of various genres and media. Her decision to sum up and analyse each work in turn, without the narrative thread that thematic clusters might have provided, is informed and justified by this interest in genre as a main structuring principle. For readers interested in particular works, this arrangement is very convenient, but it comes at the price of a somewhat repetitious structure. The theoretical framework connecting all chapters is a narratological model designed to refine ‘the author’ as a conceptual category. As such, this seems like a good idea - a study centred on one author and putting forward the thesis that his work constitutes a ‘rebellion’ of some kind does well to deal with some of the possible challenges from anti-intentionalists. Studies pleading for a ‘return of the author’ (or rather, studies showing how the concept of the author still underlies most scholarly practice) provide a sound basis for a well-informed use of the author concept. 1 Havemann, however, goes a few steps further and develops a complex system of different ‘author figurations’, based on theoretical contributions by Michel Foucault and Fotis Jannidis. These ‘figurations’ are then used as central concepts in all her interpretations. This ambitious model is also the most debatable feature of the study. It reflects a certain confusion about Jannidis’ concept of the author figuration, which refers to the sum of the different functions assigned to the position of ‘author’ in a particular discourse (Jannidis 1999: 359). In Jannidis’ article, identifying different author figurations in secondary literature at various stages in history helps to make visible the shifting roles that have been ascribed to ‘the author’. How exactly Havemann conceptualizes her own author figurations, in turn, is hard to pinpoint, as she does not furnish a clear definition. She seems to waver between conceiving of them as concepts of authorship that can be extrapolated from the text, and as agents in a model of literary communication. In her interpretations, she usually veers towards the second option, giving the impression that her main objective is a further subdivision of the narratological concept of the ‘implied author’. Typical passages read like this: “  T  he author as composer, together with the text strategist, the narrator figuration and the poetological figuration, attempts at first to imitate as best as possible the neutrality of the historical discourse (it is well possible that Johnson indeed copied them  extracts  from guide books and only modified them slightly)” (220); “The one who chooses the content and the poetological figuration here sum up what the text strategist and the 1 In particular, see the volume by Jannidis/ Lauer/ Martínez/ Winko (1999). Havemann mainly refers to one article in this collection, namely Jannidis’ (1999) “Der nützliche Autor. Möglichkeiten eines Begriffs zwischen Text und historischem Kontext.” Rezensionen AAA Band 38 (2013) Heft 1 71 composer in their function as scriptwriter, director and editor of the film practice: a poetics of accidents and randomness” (374). The preoccupation with labelling ‘author figurations’ makes the study hard to read, and it ultimately stands in the way of exploring Johnson’s ‘poetics of rebellion’. That is a pity because the question is intriguing: how does Johnson’s ‘poetological’ rebellion against “the literary industry and Neo- Dickensian literature” relate to the works’ political criticism “directed against Britain’s two-class society”? (53) Havemann is of course right to question the notion that Johnson’s experiments should be regarded (and possibly dismissed) as unpolitical l’art pour l’art. Her argument that the experimental is always political in the sense that it subverts customary reading practices is in tune with Johnson’s own views on his work, but it seems to me that this insight should have been the starting point for further analysis. Socio-political and aesthetic ‘rebellion’ may well be connected, but this study too often makes it sound as if they were the same thing. For instance, I would have liked to read a more sustained critical discussion of pros and cons for the notion that the ‘novel in a box’ The Unfortunates constitutes a ‘democratic’ experiment. In sum, the study brings together an impressive range of materials. It also offers some very complex discussions of authorship and intentionalism - discussions that show a high degree of reflection and that engage with ongoing theoretical debates. The preoccupation with narratological labels, however, in this case proves to be a stumbling stone, as it tends to obscure rather than clarify the interesting questions the study raises about the functions of form in Johnson’s work. References Jannidis, Fotis/ Gerhard Lauer/ Matías Martínez/ Simone Winko (eds.) (1999). Rückkehr des Autors. Zur Erneuerung eines umstrittenen Begriffs. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Jannidis, Fotis (1999). “Der nützliche Autor. Möglichkeiten eines Begriffs zwischen Text und historischem Kontext.” In: Jannidis/ Lauer/ Martinez/ Winko (1999). 353-389. Dorothee Birke Englisches Seminar/ FRIAS Universität Freiburg i.Br.