Getting out from within the shuffle
The resurrection of B.S. Johnson’s ‘The Unfortunates’
In the 1960s and ’70s, when, like every other art form, the meaning and importance of the novel was being thrown into question, British writer B.S. Johnson pioneered new approaches to exploring the configurations and functions of fiction. In his unique 1969 narrative The Unfortunates (New Directions) finally published in May for the first time in the United States, Johnson pursued the question of how creating a novel that would not be bound by conventions might necessitate a book that would not even be bound between covers.
Often cited in the pantheon of the most “novel” novels, The Unfortunates comes in a “book box” containing 27 pamphlets of different lengths (some of which are only single pages), each with a dingbat-style mark to identify the sections. The author’s bio is on a wrapper around the booklets. Three epigraphs to the novel (two from Samuel Johnson, one from Laurence Sterne) can be found inscribed within the interior frames of the box. One brochure is marked “First” and another “Last,” but, beyond those mere directives, the reader is invited to pick up these pieces in any order. A “Note” on the inside of the New Directions box (fashioned by book designers the Senate) explains: “If readers prefer not to accept the random order in which they receive the novel, then they may re-arrange the sections into any other random order before reading.”
The unusual structure of Johnson’s book may remind adventurous readers of such kindred textual experiments as Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch (translated into English in 1966), which offered a “hopscotching” sequence of chapters to produce a second story, or Marc Saporta’s card deck of loose-leaf pages, Composition No. 1 (translated into English in 1963), which was an inspiration for Johnson. Johnson’s story proves to be as emotionally affecting as it is formally alluring. Appropriate to a story housed in a container resembling a “memory box” or reliquary of the kind sometimes kept by mourners – or a form of coffin – The Unfortunates is narrated by a writer whose mind becomes flooded with memories when, traveling to cover a soccer match for the Observer newspaper, he confronts the fact that this assignment has brought him to the city of his friend Tony who has passed away from cancer.
Remembrance and the randomness it inspires are the central preoccupations of The Unfortunates. The narrator recalls of the novel Aspects of Love, “it was the title I coveted,” and his collected thought-fragments about his lost friend could easily merit that same title. After all the pages are removed from the box, the reader finds Johnson’s write-up of the sporting event, the inspiration for and the oblique elegiac touchstone to the author’s reveries.
The New Directions publication of The Unfortunates marks a very important milestone in the recent resurgence of Johnson’s work. After his suicide at age 40 in 1973, the author of seven novels once praised by Samuel Beckett and Anthony Burgess (including Travelling People, Trawl, and Albert Angelo as well as stories, essays, and a collection of personal writings teasingly entitled Aren’t You Rather Young to be Writing Your Memoirs?) was invoked occasionally by academics and experimental writers. The much-lauded 2004 biography of Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, by Jonathan Coe (who also contributes an introductory pamphlet to The Unfortunates), played an essential part in bringing Johnson back into a broader readership. It’s not just prose writers who’ve discovered Johnson: Auteurs and Black Box Recorder singer-songwriter Luke Haines composed the soundtrack for the 2000 film version of Johnson’s novel Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, and a song called “B.S. Johnson” appears on the Pernice Brothers 2006 album Live a Little.
For all the potential permutations of the passages in The Unfortunates, any way you rearrange it, Johnson’s story is a melancholy meditation on both loss and a language of memory “tripped equally by association and non-association” that fluctuates between fact and fiction, past and present. “I fail to remember,” says the narrator in a most telling sentence, “the mind has fuses.” There are no strangers to estrangement in any of Johnson’s works, but this narrator is like a 20th century Hamlet stranded in a Midlands city which serves as its own kind of Yorick’s skull. The Unfortunates is, finally, a book about getting out from within the “shuffle,” whether it’s as an intellectually and stylistically bold author assembling an idiosyncratic work that will stand out amidst other books, or as a character within that very book contemplating the nature of a friend’s shuffling off this mortal coil.
Published: 07/02/2008
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT
