B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates

 Of all the "experimental" and "avant-garde" novelists of the twentieth century, B.S. Johnson's work has lasted in a way that others' simply has not. (Who rests in Robbe-Grillet's mean flattery now?) And I can't help the feeling that his books succeed for reasons largely if not wholly unrelated to their formalistic experiments and convention-breaking eccentricities. 

The things one most remembers from Albert Angelo, say, are the hideously realistic portrayals of life as a substitute teacher in working class England—not the pieces of paper cut out from the text. But then again, I have to ask myself—did I only pick up the book in the first place because of its formalistic experiments?

The Unfortunates—his famous "book in a box"—is no exception. It was an icily affecting gut-punch of a book. But I can't tell, having finished it, whether it altered the experience of reading it in a meaningful way to have the sections of the book presented as a series of little booklets, which could be re-shuffled at the reader's pleasure. 

The inside of the box insists that the sections of the book can be read in any order. Indeed, Johnson's "instructions" suggest that these sections will arrive in an entirely randomized sequence to begin with. 

But I did what probably most indolent readers do—I just sat down and read the sections in the order they arrived. And I can't shake the feeling that this was the only proper order in which one could read them. 

The final section I read (of the randomized sections, that is, before the section marked "Last") had the most sustained treatment of Tony's illness and death. It also referred to incidents from the other sections (like the colleague who hanged himself) that would have made no sense if I had read this section earlier. 

Surely, then, Johnson in fact meant us to read this section last? And the placement in which it arrived was not so random after all? 

But perhaps it was truly random. Perhaps if I had started anywhere else in the loose-leaf booklets, I would have developed the same subjective impression that I had stumbled upon a pre-ordained order; and that this was the only possible way to read the book. 

Maybe that is the point. One of the themes of the novel, after all, is the way the brain seeks to impose meaning on fundamentally chaotic and meaningless events. 

There is no purpose or sense behind Tony's death at a young age from cancer. There is no way to justify it; no meaning to be extracted from his suffering and untimely death—just "chaos," as the narrator puts it. "All is vanity and nothingness," to quote James Thomson (a.k.a. Bysshe Vanolis). And yet the brain strives to impose a meaning. 

And so, consistent with the book's theme, perhaps that is all my brain has done here. Perhaps I really did receive the book's sections in a randomized order, and any reader would impose the same subjective impression of pre-ordained purpose on any other order in which it might have arrived. 

To quote Joan Didion: "We live entirely by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience."

And so, to that extent—maybe the formalistic experiment here does actually advance the theme? Maybe it is necessary to the novel's integrity? Johnson also suggested at one point that the loose-leaf sections enhance the sense of human fragility that the book's story of cancer diagnosis and death is meant to convey; and I can see his point. 

"How can I place his order, his disintegration?" as the narrator asks in the section labeled "First." The rest of his memories of Tony are meant to be random—because memory assaults us in a non-linear fashion in this way. Plus, there is no "order" to cancer—and that is the novel's point.

Cancer's prognosis (as anyone experiencing it themselves or through a loved one knows) proceeds in a jagged manner—the lines of progression and deterioration are never straight or clear. It has "cliffs of fall," to borrow a phrase from G.M. Hopkins—not just smooth inclines or declines. 

And so, perhaps, a linear narrative could not have worked here. And thus, maybe Johnson's experimental approach to form here was actually necessary after all. 

And yet—I just still don't think that pre-set order was quite random. The only way to know for sure would be to purchase the New Directions edition in multiple copies and test whether they all arrived in the same order mine did (by the way—my copy also had a duplicate section; it would be interesting to know if this error was repeated throughout the print run). 

But c'mon. That penultimate section in which Tony sickens and dies. It was the only one that could be read second-to-last. Suppose I really had followed Johnson's advice and re-shuffled the order before reading it, and ended up finishing the book with the chapter where he does little more than have sex with his girlfriend Wendy. 

It just wouldn't have held together as well. 

I keep coming back then to my original suggestion: the magic sauce that makes Johnson great actually has nothing to do with his "avant-garde" or "experimental" qualities. It has to do with authorial traits that would have come through just as indelibly if he had used more conventional narrative formats. 

The greatness of B.S. Johnson lies in his outrage. He's one of the only people who ever wrote who seems as angry about things as they deserve. (Things like mortality, God, cancer, the English class system.)

Likewise with The Unfortunates. What truly makes this volume a masterwork is not that it comes in a box and can be read in any order. It's that—regardless of order or form—it includes passages that treat so passionately and aptly with the universal and timeless themes: death, despair, decay, and—most of all—the rank injustice of fate.