‘The Mind Has Fuses’: Detonating B. S. Johnson

Abstract

The phrase ‘the mind has fuses’, which sparks the following reflection about the particular nature of B. S. Johnson’s writing, is taken from a moment in The Unfortunates (‘Then they had moved’: 5). Johnson is recalling his friend Tony Tillinghast, encountering the feeling of his loss, the sudden irruption of memories of his early death, triggered during a journey to Nottingham to report on a football match. ‘I fail to remember, the mind has fuses’, he writes, in a simple line, its own paragraph. This is a registering not simply of the inability to remember, but of a short-circuiting, as if the mind, faced with something traumatic, will blow, like a fuse box. That something in this particular incidence is a hazily recalled report of his friend’s distress at the fact that he would not live to see his son grow up, a source of pain that Johnson’s mind can’t bring near. And yet he will return to it again and again. If one of the qualities of Johnson’s writing is a sometimes irascible sense of impasse, of the discovery of sometimes incontrovertible limits, it would seem that it is always charged with this sense of affective overload, a fusing that might make the lights go out altogether: cutting through the page (as in Albert Angelo 149–53, where the hole reveals the fatal wound that killed Christopher Marlowe) or militantly finding the ultimate point of exchange (as in the terroristic ledger economy of Christie Malry, where the accountant’s double entry bookkeeping spirals into the ‘just’ recompense of mass murder).