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

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
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