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

setting from the beginning of Lucy’s book, the Outline of History. Here,
epistemological uncertainty has become so extreme that it threatens to tip over into
ontological uncertainty. Nevertheless, Between the Acts maintains a stream-ofconsciousness
technique throughout. Its middle offers no particular challenge to,
disruption of, or modification of that technique.
Rayner Heppenstall’s 1943 novel Saturnine, by contrast, consists of a linear
narrative, presented by a more conventional retrospective first-person narrator with a
level of verisimilitude that caused many of its readers to regard it as autobiography,
but punctuated by moments of acute epistemological uncertainty. At its middle, there
is a moment of crisis, at which epistemological questions nearly tip into ontological
questions. However, this middle does not coincide with war. Instead, the beginning of
the war coincides with Saturnine’s end. With the coming of war, apparently at least,
the epistemological uncertainties of modernism also come to an end. The novel’s
middle, however, takes these epistemological uncertainties to an extreme, where they
threaten to tip over into ontological uncertainties, as a result of an extreme crisis.
However, where To the Lighthouse creates a middle that pushes modernist narrative
to new territory through the removal of its focalizers from its setting, and further
through the external pressures of war and death, Heppenstall pushes modernist
technique near to its breaking point through internal crisis in a focalizer which it
never leaves, a crisis which reaches its height in the novel’s middle.
At first glance, Saturnine does not appear to contain the narrative difficulties
or structural complexities typically associated with modernism, or even with some of
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