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

for Freud, the uncanny is as much an effect of syuzhet as fabula. In Saturnine, the
attention drawn by the text to the syuzhet itself, as well as the narrator’s matter-of-fact
relation of events that undermine our sense that the double might have a real physical
existence, push against the effect of the uncanny. Instead, the novel concretizes
Freud’s notion of the uncanny double and holds it up for the reader’s analysis, but,
like Frobisher’s pursuit of his double, the reader’s pursuit of the uncanny here is both
inevitable and something of an epistemological dead end.
As Frobisher follows himself through darkness—his increasingly delusive
state is reflected in the returning nightfall—he finds his way to an archway and a door
with two musicians. Frobisher’s Doppelganger tips a musician as he enters. Frobisher
observes his other self closely:
The man I was following looked at the musicians, peering into their
cynically cheerful, vaguely dirty faces. The one who had stopped
playing, the one with the mandolin, coughed and then ignored him,
pushed his cap on his head and started strumming again. My man
stood close to the two of them for a moment longer, opened his mouth
to ask a question, was about to turn and go away and then at last
moved up to the door in the archway, pushed it open and went in. I
followed. (74)
The material detail here, attending to apparently unimportant actions and physical
traits, is in keeping with the style of narration of the entire novel, but at odds with the
darkness of the scene. The narration would be much more plausible with the “man”
replaced with “I,” particularly as it implies that Frobisher knows what his other self
196