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

B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969) is British fiction’s 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 Johnson’s prose. In The Unfortunates the full stops are nodal points of anxiety and loss, an expression of the novel’s mortal anxiety. Johnson’s final, missing full stop, the novel’s aterminal terminus, offers a defiant refusal of recuperation of any kind.