ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

Perhaps the narrator, and not only the novelist, perceives this randomness as
reflecting the randomness of his friend’s illness and death. Furthermore, the fixed
beginning and ending to the syuzhet suggest that these events cannot be remembered
again in a different setting—at least not in the same way. The randomized form of the
middle of the novel is thus a sort of re-created transcript of how Johnson’s (that is,
both the author and narrator’s) mind worked at a particular place and time.
Crucially, the novel is also a tangible metaphor. The reader does not
experience the randomness of the middle within a text that occupies a familiar object,
such as a bound book or (as with many hypertexts) a computer screen. Instead, every
encounter with the text is awkward and unfamiliar, calling attention to the act of
randomization which the reader must aid, literally picking out sections of the text as
the narrator’s mind seems to pick individual memories at random and flit through the
day itself at random. In this physical-narrative space, events, like the sections of the
novel, are distinct enough in themselves, and it takes only a little effort at any
moment to distinguish between memory and present events, but both memories and
the day’s events seem to Johnson’s mind to pop up at random. The middle of The
Unfortunates contains the tension between the unfixedness of representation, whether
it be memory, metaphor, or novelization; yet by representing that unfixedness with an
unbound physical form, Johnson seeks to bind his novel even more closely to reality
by making it represent the narrative not only as a text but as an object. What is
represented is, however, not so much a set of “true” events that are narrated—
although this sort of reality remains important to Johnson—but the reality of the
“state of mind.” That is, The Unfortunates’ randomized syuzhet and stable fabula are
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