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

upper rooms of the empty house only gigantic chaos streaked with
lightning could have been heard tumbling and tossing, as the winds
and waves disported themselves like the amorphous bulks of
leviathans whose brows are pierced by no light of reason, and mounted
one on top of another, and lunged and plunged in the darkness or the
daylight (for night and day, month and year ran shapelessly together)
in idiot games, until it seemed as if the universe were battling and
tumbling, in brute confusion and wanton lust aimlessly by itself. (134-
35)
One the one hand, the relationship between natural and human narrative is as strong
here as at any point in “Time Passes.” The chaos of the war is mirrored not only in
the specific actions of anthropomorphized inanimate objects in the house, but also in
the very jumbling of the various natural cycles which have served as both metaphors
for and alternate orders of the passage of time. The universe battles just as much of
humanity battles. On the other hand, the attempt to mirror in nature the historical
events of World War I results in a destruction of narrative altogether. Where
previously the passage of time in “Time Passes” was difficult to follow and
proceeded on multiple levels (day, season, years), at varying speeds, here that
passage, along with the symbolic order constituted in it, is explicitly destroyed. Day,
night, and seasons lose their specificity, and thus their ability to signify lyrically in an
independent manner. Without the ability to follow the passage of time, the narrator
announces her incapacity to narrate. Instead, there are only metaphors for chaos.
Instead of the return of history, of concrete historical events, with or without narrative
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