Material Loss: Multimodality and Mourning in B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates and Anne Carson’s Nox
Material Loss: Multimodality and Mourning in B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates and Anne Carson’s Nox

Summary/Abstract: B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (1969) and Anne Carson’s Nox (2010) are among the most formally inventive and materially unique literary responses to personal loss. The first novel-in-a-box in English literature, The Unfortunates is a poignant account of the premature death of Johnson’s best friend Tony Tillinghast. Also contained in a box, Carson’s elegy is printed on a 25-metre-long concertinaed scroll, which contains a collage of textual and visual fragments of various artefacts connected with Carson’s dead brother.This article considers the implications of certain visual and tactile properties of both works for their representation of loss and the work of mourning, as theorized by Sigmund Freud and Jacques Derrida. It argues that both the card-shuffle structure and the scroll format accentuate the ongoingness of mourning and convey scepticism about the possibility of any closure. The article also examines the significance of encasing the contents of both elegies in coffin-like boxes and the importance of their extensive use of fragmentation.

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