Julia Jordan

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

B.S. Johnsons The Unfortunates (1969) is British fictions predominant attempt to embrace aleatorism and to subvert linear causality: the chapters are unbound, and the text invites the reader to shuffle them before reading. Narrative can be understood as a means of containing the ever-present risk of death, of disease, of loss, and has as its impetus a curative trajectory: recuperation is, perhaps, implicit in narrative. The Unfortunates, however, defiantly refuses such comfort. Johnson, this essay asserts, uses his form to cancel the consolations of narrative construction, taking the infectious chains of narrative and repudiating any doctorial/authorial urge to trace the spread of disease/narrative. The anti-linear narrative is inextricable from the type of mourning it enacts, and from the aetiology of the disease that it displays, but declines to track: a type of mourning that refuses movement through time, and the story of a disease that refuses to certify its own development. These refusals, I suggest, are embedded in the grammar and syntax of Johnsons prose. In The Unfortunates the full stops are nodal points of anxiety and loss, an expression of the novels mortal anxiety. Johnsons final, missing full stop, the novels aterminal terminus, offers a defiant refusal of recuperation of any kind.

“What Arises from This?”: The Autostereogrammatical in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon

The figure of the autostereogram recurs with frequency in Mason & Dixon. It invokes a particular mode of seeing and provides a new model by which we might read the novel and its central preoccupations: bifocularity, layering, lines, haunting, and encryption. This essay argues that Pynchons text is thus informed by an autostereogrammatical paradox, promising secretion in depth, while simultaneously celebrating the opacity of the surface.

Introduction: Avant-Garde Possibilities — B.S. Johnson and the Sixties Generation

The twentieth-century British novelist B.S. Johnson has recently been the subject of a resurgence in critical and popular interest. Johnson now often seems to dominate discussions of the post-war British experimental novel: he has been seen, as Jonathan Coe has written, as ‘the one man avant garde’ of the 1960s. This collection of essays has grown out of one of a handful of symposia on Johnson’s work in the last five years alone, and essays on his work now appear with regularity. He is beginning, too, to acquire that most concrete of canonisations: a regular appearance on undergraduate English literature syllabi. With his array of typographical and visual devices, his novel-in-a-box — 1969’s astonishing The Unfortunates — his experimental films, and his plays (all of which have received reinvigoration since the millennium through re-publication or anthologisation), Johnson looms large. There has also been renewed interest in other experimental and avant-garde writers of the period, and an awareness of the vitalising influence of the continental nouveau roman, via figures such as Christine Brooke-Rose and Rayner Heppenstall. A version of the sixties is currently in the critical ascendancy that will hopefully allow for a growing appreciation of the linguistic and formal experimentation of Alan Burns or John Berger; of Scottish ‘beat’ Alexander Trocchi, or the brilliant but still obscure Ann Quin, whose voice, as Lee Rourke has recently noted, was ‘artistic, modern, and dare I say it — ultimately European’ (Rourke 2007).

Evacuating Samuel Beckett and B.S. Johnson

In The Evacuees, B.S. Johnson’s 1968 edited collection of reminiscences of wartime evacuation, one of the contributors, John Furse, writes that: The word means ... evacuate, v.t. (-uable) empty, (stomach, etc); (esp. of troops) withdraw from (place); discharge (excrement, etc.) evacuation, n. (vacuum).