Wojciech Drąg

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. 

The article sets out to consider the tentative shape of the canon of contemporary British fiction and to examine the extent to which it has been influenced by the most prestigious of British literary prizes – the Booker. An overview of the Prize’s history and a summary of its rules and regulations (eligibility, the jury, the selection process) is followed by an assessment of its legacy, positive and negative, in promoting literary fiction in Britain. The second part of the article investigates the problematic nature of the notion of “contemporary British fiction” and considers several aspects of canonicity as well as the essential factors involved in the formation of the canon. The last part provides some empirical data arranged into four tables. It juxtaposes the results of two surveys on the teaching canon of contemporary British fiction (carried out by Bentley, and by Tew and Addis) with the information about the recognition which the canonical authors and novels have received from the Booker juries. Two of the tables seek to illustrate the prominence of British writers in critical surveys of contemporary literature and on the shortlists of the Booker. The conclusions point to the Prize’s greater potential for influencing the critical rather than the teaching canon, while conceding that there are numerous examples of authors and texts that have their place in either canon despite their lack of any Booker success.