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

the author’s other novels. Alick Frobisher, the novel’s semiautobiographical 19 firstperson
retrospective narrator, tells in mostly chronological order the story of an
impoverished period of his life, between the death of his uncle-in-law and business
partner Sam Thorpe in October of 1938, and his joining the military in June of 1940.
Heppenstall’s first novel, The Blaze of Noon (1939), similarly has a straightforward
first-person narration, but the erotic attention to physical detail and intellectual
analysis of the sensory impression (“l’appréhension sensorielle immédiatement
intellectualisée par la conscience”) provided by the blind masseuse who narrates the
earlier novel later prompted Hélène Cixous to declare, “il a inauguré le nouveau
roman” (Cixous). Heppenstall’s 1962 novel, The Connecting Door, meanwhile,
shows the direct influence of the nouveau roman, and particularly Robbe-Grillet. In
that novel, told in the present tense, the narrator encounters two other characters,
Harold and Atha, who turn out to be prior versions of himself—versions whose
stories are similarly take place in the present tense. In returning to a town on the
Rhine before and after World War II, the narrator encounters his own past, mixing
memory with immediate experience and splitting the self in three.
Saturnine’s narrator does not provide such an obvious extension to modernist
experiments in representing the conscious mind’s encounters with the physical world
as does the blind narrator of The Blaze of Noon. Nor does it have the present-tense
immediacy or temporal distortions of The Connecting Door. Instead, Frobisher, who
19 J.G. Bucknell, author of the only book-length study of Heppenstall, notes that Heppenstall’s belief
in writing as dramatization is “reflected in Saturnine’s construction, in which a ‘realistic’ account
of London life (drawn from Heppenstall’s own), encompassing bankruptcy, illness, collapsing
buildings, literary production, homosexual acquaintances and military service is continually
punctuated by fantastical interludes, self-reflection or metafictional ruminations” (Bucknell 40-41).
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