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

This is an assertion he could not make of, say, the disintegration of Richard St. Hilda.
The fact of Frobisher’s apparent death and the story’s complete exit from the physical
world at last allows the narrator to confidently assert the reality of not just the
spiritual realm in general, but the spiritual realm in particular as experienced by
Frobisher. In the physical world, Frobisher’s point of view can be distorting, as
delusions, spiritual possibilities, and physical realities mix. Here there is no mixing,
and therefore no distorting, and no other possible point of view. In a sense, then,
Frobisher has led us past the boundary of the Jamesian modernist tradition.
Nevertheless, in his devotion to physical description of a landscape that is
nevertheless not physical, the narrator poses a hypothetical alternative point of view.
The paradox of a physical landscape whose most notable characteristics are not
physical leads the narrator to describe it in terms of the impression it makes on the
observer: “The effect of a typical landscape in this world is not unlike the effect of
certain paintings by the surrealists” (115). But this impression is not Frobisher’s;
instead it is used to distinguish both Frobisher and his spiritual experience from the
imaginative experience of the viewer of a work of art: “To the ordinary human
imagination, it must appear that such a landscape was ‘horrible’ and ‘eerie’. I did not
find it so, presumably because I was there by right, by necessity and in a state
consonant with its nature. In point of fact, I felt extraordinarily happy” (115). Here,
the narrator insists that his point of view in this case is not intrinsic to himself, the
result of an accumulation of past experiences, current circumstances, and natural
temperament; instead, his point of view is extrinsic to himself, something imposed by
the laws of the spiritual location. Here, Frobisher turns on its head the modernist
212