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

the causal element: the middle is “that part of narratives that comes after the
beginning and before the end” (Miller, Reading Narrative 61).
Aristotelian causality—at least in its strong form—is dead, and, without it,
Miller’s middles threaten to become infinite: as causal and thematic connections
multiply, “[a] narrative tends to continue forever as an indefinitely displaced middle”
(107). That is, if we imagine beginning and ending as points defining a narrative line,
the line itself is the middle—yet that line defines a narrative trajectory that need not
be confined by beginning and ending. Miller’s infinite middles, however, highlight a
further problem with Aristotle’s definition: beginnings and endings as Aristotle
defines them do not actually require middles. Imagine beginning and ending, instead
of being two infinitesimal points, as instead two connected line segments. In
Aristotle, these segments are actions, but we can also imagine each as a chapter, a
scene, a paragraph, a sentence, even a word. Two such segments may be connected
without a similar segment comprising the middle. Cause and consequence, as well as
narrative segmentation, requires only two parts. The middle, to the extent that we still
insist on retaining the concept, becomes, rather than the something between two
points, the point of division between two somethings. Once again, however, the
middle is of an entirely different nature from beginnings and endings. It always
threatens to expand until it consumes the entire text and beyond, and to contract into
nothing.
However, despite this tendency to subordinate the narrative middle to
beginning and ending or to conflate it with the text as a whole, the narrative middle
seems ready to emerge as a distinct object of study. More recently, Caroline Levine
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