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

without any particular sense of either straightness of line or digression. The serial
plot, so disdained by Aristotle, is one well-established method for doing so.
Simply avoiding a formal plot, however, was not for Heppenstall a method
that would allow his narrative to approach reality. Instead, Heppenstall employs a
particular narrative technique under particular circumstances to effect a particular
approach towards reality. Frobisher, in his capacity as narrator, addresses novel’s
apparently formless middle directly:
It seems as if I were telling four or five stories at once, but that is how
it was. I can imagine this story divided up between four or five distinct
novels. There would be the novel dealing with a business man who
crashed and upon whom a hitherto suppressed romanticism thereafter
took its revenge, causing him to suffer delusions and eventually to lose
his memory. There would be a novel dealing with the London of
before the war and during the Sitzkrieg [sic], its decadent
intellectualism, its circles of vice, the disintegration of personality later
to be remedied by a national risorgimento. There would be novels of
simpler theme, the downfall of an erotophile, the errant husband and
wife brought together by the birth of a child. More interesting perhaps
than any of these, there would be a highly atmospheric novel dealing
with experiences in a half-world of death and rebirth. But in actuality
these and other potential themes were inextricable, and I cannot
truthfully say what effect attached to what cause or indeed which was
experiments, a crossbreed of novels and games, or both. Of course, the reader of any text is free to
disrupt its linearity, as any child who has skipped to the end before reading the middle (or not) knows.
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