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

Ben Winsworth

doi:10.4000/angles.4322

Abstract

B. S. Johnson’s infamous ‘book in a box’ The Unfortunates (1969) is more than an experiment in form. The unbound signatures of the novel we are invited to shuffle into any order before reading are not only expressive of Johnson’s belief in the random nature of existence, but more specifically, as his friend Zulfikar Ghose noted, the randomness that is in the nature of cancer. The box of tricks aspect to the novel has often occluded the human story contained within it: the death of the narrator’s/Johnson’s friend Tony from cancer, and his attempt to fulfil his final promise to ‘get it all down mate’ and so write with unflinching honesty about the experience and its aftermath. Critics have either tended to dismiss the story of the lives contained within The Unfortunates as mundane and boring, or as failing to match up to the radical format of the text. However, in this article I will be reconsidering the relationship between form and content, arguing that the narrator’s melancholy observation of life and descriptions of the slow and painful death of his friend are more than an adequate match for the structure/non-structure of the novel. Tony’s physical disintegration and the narrator’s depressive state of mind, as he reflects back upon the death of his friend and its consequences, find an ideal habitat in the fragmentary nature of The Unfortunates. I will also be attempting to show how the more formal, physical aspects of the novel — the box, the first and final part, the unnumbered signatures — facilitate the dynamics of grief in providing a space for Johnson’s interior monologues to take whatever experimental shape and direction they choose, while also working to hold and contain the emotional and intellectual conflicts within them and thus guard against complete disintegration. I shall be arguing that within this particular interplay there is a movement towards integration that, while it doesn’t give Johnson any wholly positive insights, is at the very least a gesture towards the therapeutic for both himself and the reader.

Highlights

9 That process is troubled by an almost obsessive agony running through the novel about not being able to write about these things — to get it all down — as if Johnson is in some senses challenged by his own creed of truth-telling. Once again it is the acknowledgement of failures in this area that makes the attempt a success: those moments of break down, of silence, the white spaces in the narrative, which illustrate the difficulty of Johnson’s task as he tries to fill the emptiness left by the absence of his friend
In one passage Johnson notes that Tony and June have bought a tape-recorder and how Tony said they “recorded conversations, tried to write things as well, poems, against this unwelcome shortfall” (‘So he came to his parents’, 3)
Johnson may “have” Tony’s voice, but it is a disembodied voice that only works to emphasise the death of the speaker

Summary

Introduction

Physical breakdown of Tony’s body, as well as the random nature of cancer in terms of its metastasis and development,5 it signals the emotional and technical difficulties inherent in both remembering and writing that plague the body of the narrative itself, in whatever order or different orders we choose to read it.

Results

Conclusion