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

is not only a necessary aspect of any one view of the world, but that it is a
fundamental aspect of the human mind, even, or perhaps especially, when it is turned
upon itself. Frobisher is split apart (and, on another level, Heppenstall is split apart
from his autobiographical main character), but it is the very split, and the recognition
of that split, that makes him whole. That is, at least at moments of crisis—but, more
broadly, for all minds that examine themselves—a representation of a mind unsplit is
a representation of only part of a mind. By recognizing the split, Heppenstall at least
suggests the whole person.
Saturnine’s short middle functions in a somewhat parallel manner for the
novel as a whole. Like many traditional middles, it ties the novel together with a
crisis in the plot—in this case, a low point for the directionless Frobisher. Like many
modernist middles, including, for example Mrs. Dalloway’s rhetorically satiric
encounter between Septimus Smith and Sir William Bradshaw, Saturnine’s short
middle is also a crisis of narrative technique, in which objective narration of focalized
subjective experience is stretched to the breaking point. Like the middle of Lord Jim,
Frobisher’s wanderings after himself attempt to arrest a directionless narrative and
main character and to inject that narrative with a renewed sense of meaning and
purpose. Before this middle, Saturnine lacks an anchor for its themes of madness,
spirituality, and their relationship to the material world. This middle locates and
instantiates these concerns in the crisis of personality. Moreover, Saturnine suggests
that the problems of personality are also narrative problems, that the whole of the
story is inevitably split between the real and the unreal. In the simplest of narrative
metaphors, Frobisher has completed his long road down and is about to begin his long
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