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

world seemingly thrown into chaos. Also like much modernist literature, it takes the
psyche of its main character as a serious object of novelistic representation. In
allowing this representation to completely overtake the physical world in the primary
narrative—providing an apparent physical reality of its own—it builds on the
technique of “Circe.” But it goes beyond “Circe” in questioning the ontological status
of this psychical world. Frobisher’s visions may be merely the delusions of a
madman, but in the face of a physical world in the midst of an incomprehensible war,
they may also be genuine spiritual visions. Heppenstall was a man of shifting beliefs,
both spiritual and political, and Saturnine reflects that uncertainty in its ambiguous
attention to noncorporeal worlds.
Furthermore, where “Circe” and the Cave of Montesinos are clearly important
events with symbolic significance in their respective narratives, they retain a
primarily episodic character. Frobisher’s visions, on the other hand, occupy important
structural positions in the novel, both marking and effecting dramatic shifts in
Frobisher’s spiritual and psychological development. They function, in other words,
as middles, providing form, meaning, and narrative direction to an otherwise episodic
novel. The most important of these episodes, in which Frobisher is split in two,
occurs in the middle of the novel, splitting the novel itself in two. The split is
immediately precipitated by the shrinking episode and ultimately healed by
Frobisher’s near-death vision. Death and visions thus mark out the middle of the
novel—a long middle of picaresque adventures and disintegrating personality as well
as a short middle where the physical and psychic/spiritual worlds collide, a climax
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