‘For recuperation’: elegy, form, and the aleatory in B.S. Johnson's<i>The Unfortunates</i>

Jordan, Julia

doi:10.1080/0950236x.2014.925495

Cited by 6 publications

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“…In a sympathetic survey of Johnson's novelistic output in the Spectator in 1991, Jonathan Coe spoke of The Unfortunates as "a sustained lament in the tradition of Lycidas" (for the elegiac nature of The Unfortunates, cf. also Tredell 1985, andJordan 2014). Thus, a central impetus appears to have been the promise to his friend faithfully to record his life and his dying:…”

Section: The Unfortunates As a Prose Elegymentioning

confidence: 99%

16. B. S. Johnson, The Unfortunates (1969)

Gurr¹

2017

Handbook of the English Novel of the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

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The chapter discusses The Unfortunates as arguably the central example of an experimental strain in 1960s British writing, characteristic of Johnson's role as the most outspoken critic of what he regarded as the pointlessly anachronistic mainstream of predominantly realist fiction. The novel is also characteristic of Johnson's oeuvre in that it follows his highly idiosyncratic insistence that 'fiction is lying' and that the only reasonable task for the novel is the truthful, autobiographical representation of thought processes. All the novel's central concerns -cancer, memory, and urban topographies -are characterized by non-linearity and resistance to representation in conventional fiction. The text thus continues Johnson's preoccupation with the materiality of the book and comes in 27 separately bound sections which, apart from those marked "First" and "Last", are unnumbered, inviting readers to read them in any order, thus suggesting the random nature of memory, disease and life in general.

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Section: The Unfortunates As a Prose Elegymentioning

confidence: 99%