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

Instead, the middle of The Unfortunates must be encountered as something
that can neither be written nor read. Generally, it cannot be written by the reader
because the fabula is stable. This stability is important, I believe, to Johnson’s
personal goals in writing the novel, to and his concept of truth—the memories are
Johnson’s, not to be tampered with by the reader, and to be re-created as accurately as
possible. Generally, the novel also cannot be read, because of the unfixed nature of
the syuzhet means that no individual act of reading is a reading of the novel self, but
instead of the novel in a particular reified state. This, too, is important to Johnson’s
project of accurately recording his state of mind when remembering Tony. Johnson’s
memories simply do not take the form of a fixed narrative syuzhet. The very temporal
nature of a syuzhet imposes a temporal structure on Johnson’s memory of Tony that,
for Johnson, simply does not exist beyond its original containment within a visit to
Nottingham and subsequent containment within the book’s box. That is, the state of
mind did seem sequenced—even anachronically sequenced—and even to the extent
that such a sequence existed on a particular real day in the author’s life, that sequence
is not recoverable. The unfixed syuzhet of The Unfortunates, as opposed to any of its
possible read syuzhets, is not enacted by reading the novel. Reading the novel,
instead, allows the reader to infer a syuzhet that must be conceptualized not in a
temporal sequence with any particular order (even if provisional or arbitrary), but as a
thing, a reified narrative that contains the possibility of any number of sequences, but
does not itself have a sequence. The Unfortunates is a narrative whose middle has
been turned as nearly as possible into a noun.
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