B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates: Revisiting the Elegy

Guignery, Vanessa

doi:10.4000/ebc.2353

ebc

2011

DOI: 10.4000/ebc.2353

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B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates: Revisiting the Elegy

Vanessa Guignery¹

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Cited by 2 publications

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“…Vanessa Guignery (2011) comments on this aspect of the novel and the ways in which Johnson works to engage the reader in an emotionally and ethically challenging experience.…”

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confidence: 99%

Getting it All Down: Disintegration and Integration in B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates

Winsworth¹

2021

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Johnson's ardent vocation to reanimate what he believed to be a genre in terminal decline, led him to make many apparently controversial statements that were, until even fairly recently, regarded sceptically by reviewers and critics. His grumbling about the logical impossibility of conveying truth in a "vehicle of fiction"; his proud boast about not being interested in "telling lies in my own novels"; and his insistence that the novelist's allegiance to truth is justified because life itself does not tell stories (1973: 14), have resulted in him sometimes being labelled as an anti-novelist pedalling an "extraordinarily perverse credo" (Arditti 1999). Perverse it may at first appear, but if we look momentarily beyond Johnson's place within the context of the avant-garde of British fiction and the work of contemporaries like Eva Figes, Alan Burns, Ann Quin and Christine Brooke-Rose, we come closer to understanding where he is coming from and attempting to go to: "The novel is a form in the same sense that the sonnet is a form; within that form, one may write truth or fiction. I choose to write truth in the form of a novel" (1973: 14). An unblinkingly straightforward statement expressing a dogged fidelity to the truth that is almost paradoxical in a writer who, like many of the experimental writers associated with him, rejected the social realism of the post-war novel. However, Johnson understood the truth to be not only the raw material of his own life, but something that manifested itself within the avant-garde's mistrust of the teleological narrative -better supplied, so he believed, by film and TV -and its attempt to recreate the arbitrary nature of existence through a radical rearrangement of form. It is that difficult and complex commitment to the idea of truth, and Johnson's struggle to harness it, that informs his own idiosyncratic take on the novel and also marks him out as having a different agenda to postmodern writers of the period like John Fowles.

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“…Vanessa Guignery (2011) comments on this aspect of the novel and the ways in which Johnson works to engage the reader in an emotionally and ethically challenging experience.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Getting it All Down: Disintegration and Integration in B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates

Winsworth¹

2021

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Material Loss: Multimodality and Mourning in B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates and Anne Carson’s Nox

Drąg

2023

Studia Litteraria

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B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969) and Anne Carson’s Nox (2010) are among the most formally inventive and materially unique literary responses to personal loss. The first novel-in-a-box in English literature, The Unfortunates is a poignant account of the premature death of Johnson’s best friend Tony Tillinghast. Also contained in a box, Carson’s elegy is printed on a 25-metre-long concertinaed scroll, which contains a collage of textual and visual fragments of various artefacts connected with Carson’s dead brother. This article considers the implications of certain visual and tactile properties of both works for their representation of loss and the work of mourning, as theorized by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida. It argues that both the card-shuffle structure and the scroll format accentuate the ongoingness of mourning and convey scepticism about the possibility of any closure. The article also examines the significance of encasing the contents of both elegies in coffin-like boxes and the importance of their extensive use of fragmentation.

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B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates: Revisiting the Elegy

Cited by 2 publications

References 8 publications

Getting it All Down: Disintegration and Integration in B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates

Getting it All Down: Disintegration and Integration in B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates

Material Loss: Multimodality and Mourning in B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates and Anne Carson’s Nox

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