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

this passage to be a matter of metaphorical selectivity. Storms sometimes rage on the
Isle of Skye, but not always. At the moment of greatest despair, the location to which
the primary narrator is confined appears most out of step with broader events in
Europe. Narrative events are not causal, but arbitrary. “Time Passes,” pointedly
refuses to narrate the battles of World War I, even as this and other narrative events
return with a vengeance. These events are still confined to the occasional bracketed
passage and the realm of poetic inference. Instead, the narrator of “Time Passes”
insists on continuing to look at the broken mirror of nature, while also maintaining
the novel’s limited geographic scope. The novel marks the limits of its narrator’s
capacities for representation in a modernist stream-of-consciousness framework, but
also transcends this framework with new narrative strategies, including non-narrative
discourse. Similarly, the section ends with the collective return to lyric comforts in
the face of representational failures: “[Mr. Carmichael brought out a volume of
poems that spring, which had an unexpected success. The war, people said, had
revived their interest in poetry.]” (134). The seasons return, and so do their traditional
metaphorical connotations: spring is renewal. But here, metaphorical renewal is
related only to a renewal of metaphors.
Section seven continues the return of the seasons, but they lack their previous
narrative solidity. Instead, the various levels of narrative are mashed together into a
vision of chaos:
Night after night, summer and winter, the torment of the storms, the
arrow-like stillness of fine weather, held their court without
interference. Listening (had there been any one to listen) from the
148