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

with relative ease, send the novel to his publisher one chapter at a time (Heppenstall,
Intellectual 46).
Because Saturnine is, unlike To the Lighthouse, a mid-war novel with a more
conventional sequel, its ending is not only imbued with the spirit of the middle, but is
itself a sort of middle. It takes place during the war, but so does its composition,
precluding a conventional ending for perhaps the most archetypal of conventional
narrative events. Not only does Heppenstall leave the war—and Frobisher’s
relationship to it—unresolved, but they fundamentally cannot be resolved in this
novel, due to its parasitical relationship to an unfolding reality and its textual
relationship to a novel that had not yet been written. The ending of Saturnine
corresponds both to the middle of the real war and the middle of a larger
fictional(ized) story of which The Lesser Infortune would become the second half, a
return to mental breakdowns in an uncertain world, though this time without the
destabilizing formal effects of Frobisher’s visions and delusions.
We might also read into Saturnine’s war-torn production and ending the
temporary death of British modernism. It is largely Frobisher’s disintegrating
personality that gives Saturnine its modernist character. Through Frobisher’s
disintegration, the novel foregrounds not only the modernist themes of the
disintegrating of the traditional self along with traditional Europe, but also gives us a
narrator of almost Beckettian unreliability. Sequences in which a friend of Frobisher’s
shrinks, in which Frobisher follows a man who turns out to be himself, and in which
Frobisher dies and visits the afterlife are easily read within a modernist-realist
framework as the delusions of the narrator.
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