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

objection to realism: yes, an object may be different according to different points of
view, but those points of view are in turn caused by the object itself. That is, the
spiritual realm of Luna, identified by Frobisher according to his training at the
Institute of Mystical Science, is a comprehensive reality, creating, like the omniscient
Realist narrator whom Frobisher briefly imitates, all of the perspective that the
observer requires in order to induce the correct effect. That is, it is very much like a
fictional text. The narrator’s description in physical terms the non-physical
impressions of a mystical or imaginary world within a fictional text mirrors the
relationship of focalization, a visual metaphor, and all attempts to effect “seeing”
through a text, or to describe the representative function of a text in visual terms, is
explicitly an impossible task both because there is no real “seeing” to be had, as there
is no physical world to be seen, and also because words are not sight. 24 We have in
Frobisher’s vision, then, the simultaneous collapse of both realist representation and
modernist focalization, both the consequence of the removal from the novel of
anything that may be mistaken for the real physical world.
Nevertheless, the mystical world maintains some ties to the material world. In
perhaps the first clue that Frobisher is not in fact deceased, he chooses to move on
from Luna, “not the abiding-place of the recently dead,” because “The restless will
awakened within me, and as it did so I became aware of the pain in my head” (116).
Frobisher seems to attribute this pain to the laws of Luna, but the reader can tie it to
the head injury which has apparently killed him. Furthermore, Frobisher finds himself
24
J. Hillis Miller critiques the terms point of view, center of consciousness, and focalization
along these lines: they all “evade the fact that novels are made of words” (Miller, “Henry James and
‘Focalization’” 124).
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