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

cause and which effect. Any attempt at all-embracing consistency
would be dishonest (and I believe that it is always so in life and that all
novel-writing is dishonest in its degree). I can but play upon the
surface and hint at underlying depths wherever I am aware of them.
Nevertheless, I am certain that all things do cohere within a
pattern, that anarchy and chaos are conditions not to be found in nature
and that, if one were possessed of the necessary technique, the whole
of a man and a man’s life could be read clearly from a single hair of
his head, as some claim to read it in the palm of his hand.
(Heppenstall, Saturnine 93)
Frobisher describes the narrative middle as both inherently chaotic and inherently
ordered. Rather than a single episodic novel, his story could be several, more
traditionally formed novels, based around the plot. These multiple novels, bound
together, create, in one sense, a relative chaos, because one cannot a single plot line in
Frobisher’s story. It is the binding together of the novels, in Frobisher’s view, that
makes his story episodic: these are not merely episodes of a single story, but episodes
of multiple novels. However, they are bound together between beginning and end—
that is, in the middle—and through this binding of multiple narrative lines there is
created a complex symbolic structure.
Furthermore, this middle is not simply a middle of the finished narrative
product, but a middle of both life (that is, lived narrative) and writing. Frobisher
abdicates responsibility for creating narrative coherence both on behalf of himself as
narrator and on behalf of Heppenstall as author. Narrative coherence is, instead, a
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