Palgrave have recently released a new book of essays, Experiments in Life-Writing, edited by Lucia Boldrini and Julia Novak. The book is the product of a fantastic conference that Lucia and Julia organised at Goldsmiths back in 2015 on the intersection of fiction with auto-biographical and biographical writing.
I have a chapter in the book on B.S. Johnson, particularly looking at the influence of Samuel Beckett's prose on his 1966 'non-fiction novel' Trawl. I argue that although Trawl frequently adopts the syntax, tone, and humour of Beckett’s prose—particularly the “trilogy” of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable—it ultimately moves beyond imitation to experimentation. Johnson pushes Beckettian style to breaking point by demonstrating how its trademark cynicism and despair are unsuitable for narrating personal memories, particularly Johnson’s traumatic childhood experience as a wartime evacuee. Johnson chooses autobiography, I argue, to extract the experimental novel from the ‘cul-de-sac' he felt Beckett had reached after How It Is (1964).
