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

shares with Aristotle the connection between beginnings and a discrete (if not
necessarily whole) text. Said’s concept of difference at the beginning resembles
Aristotle’s assertion that the beginning is that which does not necessarily come after
anything else. However, whereas Aristotle views the separation between the
beginning and everything that comes before it as natural, for Said this separation is
produced by the beginning itself. The narrative with a discrete beginning, middle, and
end is not quite, as it is for Kermode, artificial, but it is created rather than chosen in
accordance with natural order.
This very sense that the beginning of a text must be produced becomes for
Said a key element of modernism: “one of the chief characteristics that Joyce, Yeats,
Conrad, Freud, Mann, Nietzsche, and all the others share in common has been a
necessity at the beginning for them to see their work as making reference, first, to
other works, but also to reality and to the reader, by adjacency, not sequentially or
dynastically” (Said 10). The modernists, then, create their beginnings in large part out
of pre-existing material, but reject teleology in this relationship—that is, their
beginnings reject the idea of a natural beginning. Teleology and hierarchy—the ways
in which Aristotelian beginnings, middles, and endings, form natural narrative, and
by which Kermode’s fictive beginnings and endings produce meaning for the
middle—are struck down in Said’s modernism. If, as Said argues, the intention
produces a characteristic way of doing or thinking, then I would argue the middle is
where this intention is continued or carried out. Yet, if the modernist text suggests
that there is no hierarchy to this intention—that the text is adjacent rather than
subordinate to or “after” its predecessors, the middle may be similarly adjacent to the
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