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

Thus, after a tile falls from the roof to strike Frobisher in the eye, Chapter Ten
concludes, “I died instantly and without pain” (114). What follows is a near-death
experience that is both more radical and less radical than Frobisher’s earlier
supernatural visions. It is more radical in that the journey into Frobisher’s mind has
taken Saturnine completely beyond the natural world. Yet, it is, especially after it has
been resolved that Frobisher has not died, less radical in that it creates a clear
separation between the spiritual or mental realm on the one hand and the physical
realm on the other. In taking modernist rendering of the mind of its protagonist out of
the real world, Saturnine flirts with postmodernism, but it also hearkens back to
Medieval near-death visions, while resolving the cognitive instability that plagues
much of Saturnine for both reader and protagonist.
Frobisher begins by describing the otherworld landscape, and in doing so he
offers a rare narratorial intervention. Addressing the reader directly, in the manner of
a meditation instructor, the narrator implores, “Imagine if you can a world in which
every object is of animal nature. […] The land itself is animal. No veins of coal or
mineral run through it. It is like yeast. […] Imagine, moreover, that all this is real and
yet is not physically discernible to a physical eye” (115). The narrator’s description
takes the form of a challenge: can the reader create for himself an improbable
imaginary world whose characteristics are described in physical terms, yet cannot by
physically seen. It is not enough to imagine something that we cannot see in ordinary
life—we must imagine something that, even if it actually exists, cannot be seen in a
literal sense: we must imagine a sort of spiritual sight, our imagination’s imagination.
Frobisher also insists, however, that this is not an imaginary realm, but a real one.
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