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

himself. In an episode that resembles in many ways Freud’s account of the double in
“The Uncanny,” Frobisher splits in two, narrating, eventually, his own thoughts in the
third person. The result is a doubling of the division of self implied by first-person
narration, calling attention to and even pathologizing the novel’s conventions.
Meanwhile, the differences between mental and physical worlds and between fabula
and syuzhet are confused if not collapsed entirely, as the contents of Frobisher’s mind
take on physical form and Frobisher-as-character takes over narration and thus
control of at least one level of reality. While the later episode of Frobisher’s “death”
provides what is for Frobisher an intellectually comprehensible split between physical
and astral body, the middle of Saturnine splits both physical body and consciousness
in two, without explanation. It breaks the novel in two just as it breaks the self in two.
It represents the crisis of Frobisher’s madness, just as it represents a crisis of the
novel that attempts to depict, simultaneously, a physical reality and a reality of the
consciousness, with all of the unreal implications the latter implies. What’s more, its
pathological view of the self and uncertainty about the role and nature of narration are
never fully overcome. This account of life, narrative, and the self as inevitably,
confusingly, pathologically divided is echoed in the continued uncertainty of the
Second World War, suggesting that endings and the clarity they bring are at best
provisional in the face of the uncertain middle. Whereas Between the Acts emphasizes
this point most clearly at its ending, Saturnine does so at its middle.
Saturnine’s episodic structure serves to release the novel from a particular set
of conventions that bind the middle tightly to beginning and end, but Heppenstall,
unlike J. Hillis Miller, does not see this freeing of the middle as a path to truth. Miller
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