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

is no wonder that Frobisher as narrator imagines his novel as four or five, with a web
of meaning that is beyond his control. In Saturnine, narration is not power.
While the doubling of the split between narrator and character certainly
complicates matters, as does the ambiguous symbolic function of Frobisher’s double,
this doubling very closely follows Freud’s description of pathological doubling in
“The Uncanny”:
By slow degrees a special authority takes shape within the ego; this
authority, which is able to confront the rest of the ego, performs the
function of self-observation and self-criticism, exercises a kind of
psychical censorship, and so becomes what we know as the
‘conscience’. In the pathological case of delusions of observation it
becomes isolated, split off from the ego, and discernible to the
clinician. The existence of such an authority, which can treat the rest
of the ego as an object – the fact that, in other words, man is capable of
self-observation – makes it possible to imbue the old idea of the
double with a new content and attribute a number of features to it –
above all, those which, in the light of self-criticism, seem to belong to
the old, superannuated narcissism of primitive times. (Freud 142-143)
In addition to Frobisher’s narcissistic self-narration, we have here the mingling of
fantasy and reality, frequent element in Freud’s uncanny (Freud 140). On more than
one occasion, Frobisher shows an interest in Freudian analysis, including a tentative
self-diagnosis of a “castration complex” (Heppenstall, Saturnine 11). In one sense,
then, we see in this scene not psychoanalysis as a solution to the epistemological
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