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

Johnson’s intent, however, is not to produce a writerly novel in the Barthian
sense—a novel that allows the reader to impose upon it different narratives. The
“FIRST” and “LAST” sections; the absence of achrony, emphasized by the relative
ease with which many of the events can be logically ordered in time; the fact that
each section is a non-arbitrary narrative episode; and the verisimilitudinous, 29
concretely specific content of the narrative all suggest that The Unfortunates is no
more writerly than a typical modernist work. That is, while the novel calls attention to
the thing-ness of the book—to its ontological status—the poetics of this device is
epistemological rather than ontological. Because the ontological status of the book
serves as a metaphor for memory, cancer, and other themes of the novel, it calls
attention to the meaning of the events in the novel, rather than disrupting, permeating,
or destabilizing the diegetic world, which remains in a highly stable fabula. Neither,
however, can we easily classify The Unfortunates as a readerly novel, since its
unconventional form alone makes it particularly difficult to read, and its individual
sections do their best to avoid telling conventional stories about Tony’s life.
Furthermore, changes in the novel’s syuzhet from reading to reading are not the
products of the reader’s decisions, imagination, or interpretive framework, but instead
by a form that fixes the syuzhet according to pre-determined laws, though not into a
pre-determined order.
29 Prince defines verisimilitude as, “The quality of a text resulting from its degree of conformity to a
set of ‘truth’ norms that are external to it” (Prince 103). In Johnson’s case, the truth norms are those
of rigorous nonfiction—or, rather, of Johnson’s very literal interpretation of the word “truth.” We
may contrast this to Genette’s examination of vraisemblance in 18th-century French discourse,
where verisimiltude more closely resembles Aristotelian probability. Genette finds the norms of
truth in “generic conventions [that] function as a system of natural forces and constraints” (Genette,
“Vraisemblance” 242). Johnson attempts to locate his truth norms outside the realm of discourse.
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