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

purgatory (like many Medieval visionaries, Frobisher is somewhere he does not
belong). The second stage resembles both purgatory, since it seems to be a holdingplace
for Frobisher before he passes on to the next stage of existence, and, as
Frobisher himself identifies, hell—but it most resembles the soul’s initial hovering
over the body before initiating the journey through the afterlife (Zaleski 45). The third
stage, meanwhile, is both a hellish apocalypse and a purgatorial absence from others.
It is also purgatorial in its relative brevity—a paragraph-long interlude before a
lengthy encounter with the Guardian. While it is therefore possible to map
Frobisher’s vision onto the Medieval vision, and it is possible—as Frobisher himself
does—to interpret the vision according to a twentieth-century spiritualist doctrine, the
vision itself is ambiguous and possibly scrambled. In fact, the bizarre landscape of
Luna could just as easily be a sort of hell or, as Frobisher unwittingly suggests, a
surrealist landscape of the post-Freudian psyche. In modernist fashion, then,
Heppenstall highlights the epistemological problems related to the interpretation of
dreams and visions. Moreover, he highlights the uncertainties and problems related to
the construction of narrative: he offers off a landscape that suggests, but does not
confirm, a narrative order prescribed by both genre and religious doctrine. Moreover,
he scrambles the relationship between this spiritual narrative and the physical world.
Finally, in playing with such fundamental narratives of endings, he plays with
beginnings, middles, and ends, suggesting that we cannot easily tell them apart and,
in a brief vision of loneliness and apocalypse, that even these endings may not be
endings, but in fact middles, uncertain crises and transitions that bring us from hazy
beginnings to uncertain endings.
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