Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry: B.S. Johnson's oppositional discourse of unbelief

Abstract

This article points out the analogous nature of the novel and postmodernism as forms of oppositional discourse and suggests that it is worthwhile to consider the postmodernist novel as the oppositional discourse of unbelief, which contests the forms and conventions of our culture, in general, and of the novel itself, in particular, deliberately setting itself up in opposition to them. This is the case of Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry, where an analogy is drawn between the Double-Entry system of bookkeeping, which the protagonist applies rigorously to his experience, and the Grand Narratives of Christianity and Capitalism, which are rigorously applied to our own. Each is a manner of giving form and significance to existence in the same way as narrative itself tends towards a similar fallacious ordering of experience. Thus, Johnson alludes to a conceivable reality but at the same time contests the validity of the forms we use to give shape to it.