Books like The Unfortunates

‘How can I place his order, his disintegration?’Through fragments of a randomized collection of memories called up while wandering through a city, the reader explores the life, loves and losses of the narrator. As such a premise would remind many of Ulysses and Joyce’s incredible use of the stream-of-consciousness, B.S. Johnson (1933-1973) manages to create something unique and inventive with The Unfortunates. His story is separated into 27 packets which are intended to be read at random aside from the First and Last chapter, and allows for a creative artificial impression for the act of memory and thought. The random approach, which may initially be dismissed as cutesy and gimmicky, manages to go deeper and beyond the gimmick and explore the implied meanings we place upon order. In the Hungarian translation of the book, which was published as a regularly bound novel, Johnson included a special introduction urging the reader to still experience the chapters at random, stressing that ‘perhaps the point...of the novel in it’s original format; the tangible metaphor for the way the mind works’. By randomly selecting the order, each reader is given an opportunity for a personal experience of the novel. The form itself is a larger explanation of form. In the context of the story, we experience his memories out of chronological order, much like how we experience our own sets of memories. In the context of the form, it examines how order affects our understanding and meaning. In my own personal reading, Johnson, the narrator is a potentially fictional version of the actual author, spent much of the present eating and referring to vague moments of him and his desceased friend Tony eating in the city. It wasn’t until the penultimate packet that I actually experienced the fleshed out memory. This gives an impression that this memory was somehow of extreme importance to Johnson, and was possibly suppressed in his mind until he could properly deal with it at the end. It is a statement on the way I have been conditioned to approach novels; I noticed that the final few packets had a subtle sense of greater intensity as I typically expect the final sections of a novel to be where themes tie together and where the climax of plot should be. Had the luck of the draw given an entire different plot point near the end, the food scene would likely have seemed less crucial and the different point would have been garnished with this implied intensity. While this is a short book, much of the information is rather repetitive, which allows it to not only to seem to fit together well regardless of order, but positions the reader to different vantage points on memories. Depending on which view of an event the reader experiences first – Johnson, when in one memory, will refer to events in later or earlier memories and then have another packet pertaining directly to the memory, provides a subtly different meaning to the narrative. Sometimes you have forshadowing, sometimes just a simple revisit of an earlier idea.‘Anything means something if you impose meaning on it, which in itself is a meaningless thing, the imposition,’ writes Johnson. He draws are attentions through the form to our impressions and imposed meanings, but also dismisses them all as meaningless. Perhaps our explanations on the form don’t matter at all, and the random order serves as an elaborate distraction when all he really wants to get across is the workings of the mind. ‘How the mind arranges itself, tries to sort things into order, is perturbed if things are not worted,’ he muses as he sorts threw the mental shoebox of strewn about memories. There is plenty of evidence to support that this is the real impression he wants to get across, as the style of writing is rambling with extensive use of commas, breaks to represent a drifting mind, and a constant second guessing and correcting that reminded me of the narrator in Wittgenstein’s Mistress. ‘I fail to remember, the mind has fuses.’Rest assured, there is content to the book beyond the form and style, although the story is admittedly secondary. While that is the initial draw, be it gimmick or no, there is substance to be had from the story. This is a rather tragic book, exploring the themes of death, frailty and futility. The death of Tony is the major set of memories Johnson wrestles with, yet in digging up the past for Tony, a whole slew of other painful, and sometimes pleasant, memories are pulled to the surface. The death of Tony and the death of Johnson’s relationship with his college flame, Wendy, are eternally forged together in the imprints of his memory. While they occurred at the same time, it is the betrayal of life for Tony, and the betrayal of Wendy (while he constantly references ‘the betrayal’, he never clarifies if she actually slept around on him or if it was something else) that keep them inseparable. It seems these deaths helped to solidify his use of food as an escape as well, Tony’s life being eaten out of him by the world and cancer is countered by Johnson taking in life from the world though food. The frustrations felt, the sheer futility to stop the cancer left Johnson second-guess his life from then on out. The sportswriter scene depicts Johnson constantly questioning his choices of words and his own worth as a sportswriter, displaying his feeling of futility to actually be a good, authentic writer. He has watched his closest friend disintegrate, his relationships disintegrate, and now he notices all around him peeling paint, chipped banisters, and other aspects of crumbling architecture.While this is a novel about the death of a friend, since Johnson puts the reader into his mind it is really a novel about Johnson. We learn more about him than we ever do Tony, and we are only able to know his own impressions on the events. In the introduction, Johnathan Coe observes that the majority of interaction with Tony shows them discussing Johnson, his book, his problems with Wendy, etc. Perhaps this is the strongest argument that the book is really about our implied impressions, unique to each reader, as the book is the unique impressions of events as seen by one person. ‘The difficulty is to understand without generalization, to see each piece of received truth, or generalization, as true only if it is true for me, solipsism again, I come back to it again, and for no other reason. In general, generalization is to lie, to tell lies’. The standard novel is perceived as a generalization of themes, symbols and ideas that all readers can light upon, but this novel insists on doing away with generalizations and entering into a solipsistic viewpoint on life around us, to fully appreciate what one individual feels, to be alone in a sea of perspectives. His anger towards Christianity in the book, seeing turning to God only in the final hours as a cop-out, is an expression of ‘generalization’; it is submitting to a general idea of existence and general set of goals, ideals and morals. He feels you should face death in your own narrow viewpoints, goals, ideals and morals. The terrifying thing is that no matter how we view life though, we still are all barreling towards death and there is nothing anyone can do to stop it, ours and theirs. ‘It is difficult to think of these things without terror, the pity is easy to feel, easy to contain, but so useless’.As this is often considered a work of post modernism, my opinions and imposed meanings are essentially meaningless. Besides, don’t take my word for it (take Mike’s word in his review though!), the idea is to form your own perspectives and meanings since that is how we experience life. Well, a decent metaphor for it at least. If all this is meaningless, and this book is nothing but gimmick, it is still worth investigating. Picking packets and random was a fun experience, and the box makes a nice addition to any bookshelf, as well as a great place to store your packets, notes, pens and stash your bookmarks. While the book is rather repetitive, it is still a good, quick read, and the structure is exciting. What I enjoyed most of all was how he placed you in his lecture halls and all over campus through his memories, places I really love to be. It brought back my own memories of sweating through exams, tragically failed college romances, late-night debates and laughter amongst classmates over booze or coffee. It is impressive as well that this book came out in 1967, yet still hasn’t received much attention despite publishers like McSweeny that clamor to deliver quirky structures such as this book. That really gives further meaning to Johnson's discussion of 'old solutions to modern problems'. So open up Johnson’s box.3.75/5