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

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Even as “Time Passes” serves an important function in the novel’s overall narrative structure, it also represents a certain level of emancipation of the middle from beginning and ending: a middle that exists in some ways apart and by itself, a prominent and distinct textual object. “Time Passes” is clearly different in style and content from the surrounding text. If Lord Jim and The Golden Bowl’s middles shift the form or direction of the narratives that come before into the different forms or directions that come after comes after, it is “Time Passes” that is different both from what comes before and what comes after. This difference, along with its greater prominence as a separate section of the text, invites readers to examine “Time Passes” not only as a corridor joining beginning and ending, but as a substantial narrative episode—if not a complete narrative. The title, “Time Passes,” in itself meets Abbott’s simple definition of a narrative: “the telling of an event” (261). 11 By contrast to this complete clause, the titles of the opening and closing sections of the novel, “The Window” and “The Lighthouse,” consist of nominal phrases that refer to objects—like the vertical blocks of Woolf’s “H.” The titles in and of themselves do not suggest a narrative, and may be interpreted as subjects or objects of narrative actions—or of any other sort of discourse. “Time Passes,” on the other hand, suggests a narrative function for the novel’s middle, a change of state compatible with the idea that this middle constitutes a narrative function. However, more restrictive definitions of narrative require not only an the telling of an event, but an event involving human agents: “where there is no implied human interest (narrative events neither being 11 Prince’s definition is similar to Abbott’s, if a bit more complex: “The representation (as product and process, object and act, structure and structuration) of one or more real or fictive events communicated by one, two, or several (more or less overt) narrators to one, two, or several (more or less overt) narratees” (58). 109
produced by agents nor experienced by anthropomorphic beings), there can be no narrative, for it is only in relation to a plan conceived by man that events gain meaning and can be organized into a structured temporal sequence” (Bremond 390). The use of an abstract subject in the title of “Time Passes” suggests a middle that exists outside of the traditional narrative realm of action taken by human agents. It does not simply shift the point of view among a largely existing cast of characters; instead, it vacates the scene and the novel itself of these characters. The result is a middle that not only disrupts the novel’s status as a traditionally unified narrative, but disrupts the basic building blocks of traditional narrative itself. Some critics have even interpreted “Time Passes” as poetic, rather than narrative, discourse. Nevertheless, its position in the middle of a novel means that it is inevitable if many, if not all, readers will interpret “Time Passes” as narrative. As Abbott argues, when we label a text a narrative, “[n]arrative tolerates non-narrative, because the latter can sit on top of it. Narrative operates as a platform” (Abbott 261). That is, it is incorrect to argue that “Time Passes” is not a narrative because we can identify part or all of its discourse as non-narrative. Instead, its departures from traditional narrative discourse can (perhaps even must) be read as challenges to or expansions of the traditional bounds of narrative. This disruption of the human center of narrative at the novel’s middle is made starker by the novel’s historical and technical position at the center of modernism (rather than at the middle of a transition into the modernist period). In making Woolf and To the Lighthouse central to his seminal study of the “stream of consciousness” technique, Robert Humphrey not only makes Woolf central to perhaps the defining 110
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ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH
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BRITISH MODERNIST NARRATIVE MIDDLES
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Dedication To my wife Pat, my disse
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Table of Contents Dedication ......
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necessarily after anything else, an
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eginning. That is, a modernist midd
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and Mario Ortiz-Robles have brought
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Princess Casamassima. The former is
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choice of McHale’s definition is
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In examining modernist middles, I w
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“is to overlook the other fundame
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evolution of capitalism strikes me
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spatial and temporal confines. On t
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narratives in Beckett’s Molloy, c
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Johnson mark an end to Britain’s
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period somewhat peripheral, a parti
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is oriented around endings (Jim’s
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eal world, yet the novel explores i
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Ulysses, the second half of In Tran
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Modernist texts may also contain mi
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chapters), and the end as Marlow’
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potentially be used to highlight ep
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middle) of the veracity of the Time
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Jim’s actions within a causal nar
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to Patusan midway through the novel
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violation of the unity of action, b
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which mass culture will be articula
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Jameson shows how the difference be
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genres, connected by multiple middl
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it does in Jameson’s reading. How
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text, since only a vast rupture req
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actually see Jim make the deal with
Page 66 and 67: for interpreting his own life and t
Page 68 and 69: garners an enthusiastic response fr
Page 70 and 71: circular encasement, which has the
Page 72 and 73: text’s initial questions are begi
Page 74 and 75: Chapter 2: Modernist Points of View
Page 76 and 77: it seems that the marriage plot is
Page 78 and 79: centering his novels within his pro
Page 80 and 81: singular, centered focalization—a
Page 82 and 83: inn. The lovers will return to Char
Page 84 and 85: consciousness itself seems to contr
Page 86 and 87: created, in part, by the use of mul
Page 88 and 89: epistemological problem: how do the
Page 90 and 91: observation leads immediately and i
Page 92 and 93: ineffectiveness” (Kafalenos 125).
Page 94 and 95: shall have everything’” (266).
Page 96 and 97: can to the sheer unspeakable narrat
Page 98 and 99: induce me” (277). Fanny, then, re
Page 100 and 101: and the objective world. Instead, M
Page 102 and 103: ‘Sure. Nothing will. Good-night,
Page 104 and 105: It was not till many days had passe
Page 106 and 107: which a story unfolds, and perhaps
Page 108 and 109: When Amerigo arrives, Maggie’s co
Page 110 and 111: accomplish, who she will meet, what
Page 112 and 113: Chapter 3: “Time Passes”: The M
Page 114 and 115: narrative force towards modernist m
Page 118 and 119: technique of modernist narrative, b
Page 120 and 121: ground of any rival solutions to Li
Page 122 and 123: summary and scene” (Genette, Narr
Page 124 and 125: Window,” and the ending section,
Page 126 and 127: presentation in “Time Passes.”
Page 128 and 129: where things happen. Events are mad
Page 130 and 131: has promised James that they will g
Page 132 and 133: For Lucio Ruotolo, however, this na
Page 134 and 135: eginning, middle, and end together
Page 136 and 137: integral to the musical and dramati
Page 138 and 139: spring from the narrative problem o
Page 140 and 141: who creates a mind for inanimate ob
Page 142 and 143: own thoughts nor that of any charac
Page 144 and 145: language, and thus subject to the c
Page 146 and 147: Lighthouse,” and narrations of th
Page 148 and 149: in so far as her presence helps the
Page 150 and 151: anthropomorphizing narrative—but
Page 152 and 153: In the initial description of summe
Page 154 and 155: they find “something out of harmo
Page 156 and 157: upper rooms of the empty house only
Page 158 and 159: like to be up here at dusk alone ne
Page 160 and 161: armistice, but it follows so immedi
Page 162 and 163: y the narrator, allow a world unpop
Page 164 and 165: Furthermore, passages like this fun
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(“narrated monologue”) as “a
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Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast are arguab
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unclear whether time flows forward,
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conventions of modernist and tradit
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middle by making itself markedly di
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Lighthouse’s primary narrative pa
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served to marginalize experimental
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the author’s other novels. Alick
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himself. In an episode that resembl
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unity between time story time and n
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accept the lying perspective as par
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cause and which effect. Any attempt
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died on October, 1938” (7). Frobi
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middle of fundamental change; the u
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However, like the stories Macmann a
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which takes Saturnine to the edge o
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Aspic, to thank him for his kindnes
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Whereas Genette’s discussion of h
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problems of the self, but instead p
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sees in the faces. But here we can
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narration. Frobisher has entered a
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Frobisher is reassured both by the
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strode on. He said, with his eyes n
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analyze mental states from outside
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journey up. But meaning emanates fr
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death vision, in which life is self
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Thus, after a tile falls from the r
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objection to realism: yes, an objec
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esulted in a doubling—or repetiti
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The ending Frobisher comes to with
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though the novel’s return to epis
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andom order. However, each memory r
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middle therefore randomizes the nov
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created by a formal device that rep
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final section resolves the scenario
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that each of the novel’s sections
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inadequate to me for such a narrati
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narratives. This fundamental differ
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turned into a thing. In fact, as Jo
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unburden the author’s memory. How
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Instead, the middle of The Unfortun
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By contrast, the second type of sec
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at both. This particular failure is
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as knowing it, as he did not know o
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had been so full-fleshed, the whole
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had talked, Tony” (“That was th
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epudiation of its own central moder
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narrator/rememberer. Johnson mainta
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etrospective, an attempt to think i
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it, welcome it) the ball spun lazil
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worn” 9-10). The image finds the
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like a miracle, though he still cou
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By contrast, when the narrator firs
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memory: a mixture of the ordered an
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Chapter 6: Indivisible Form, Divide
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ecause postmodernism concerns the n
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in the diegetic reality of the nove
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section one LINGUISTIC LEPROSY Alle
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In Transit’s musical subtitles al
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they are perched between or represe
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performative in a Butlerian sense,
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the chorus describe themselves as a
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lamentable incident which I am now
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social component of thought only th
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identity, which remains unitary and
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not an effort to give the narrator
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Novelist 33). That is, Pat-the-narr
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primarily with classifying Pat’s
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now irrelevant, replaced by the pur
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etween reader and author. When Pat
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consequences for the entire world o
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world presented to the reader in Se
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of Pat’s own life, and by forgett
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evolutionaries find that another gr
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However, Brophy is not entirely don
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masculinity. Its manifestations are
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to violate. In Transit’s postmode
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ontological—shifts to consider de
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However, I would argue that we read
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Conclusion Modernism and narrative
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approximately half of the narrative
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little attention in the past, littl
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Brophy, Brigid. Don’t Never Forge
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1989. 162-185. ---. “Periodizing
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Johnson, B. S. The Unfortunates. Ed
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Political in the Novels of Virginia
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Said, Edward. Beginnings: Intention
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ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH MODERNIST ... - DRUM

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