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

change his wish into reality. Told by the Guardian that a return to the physical world
“does not rest with me,” Frobisher concentrates on a happy moment from his past (an
encounter with an old laborer named Sykes) and, as a result, “became aware of the
earth and could see it from a great height” (122). Frobisher undergoes a final trial, a
largely undescribed encounter with accusers who “waited with infinite patience for
me to accuse myself” (123). Thinking again of the Guardian’s words, “Now I
understood. He meant that it depended upon myself. With a cry like that of one
emerging from an anæsthetic, I lost consciousness and sped towards my body” (123).
This final blending of physical and spiritual experience, in which what may be
happening in the physical world serves as simile for otherworld events, serves as a
final reminder of the epistemological problems created by this encounter. Frobisher
willfully interprets what may be authentic spiritual experience—but may be simply a
dream or even his final delusion—and, in so doing, makes his will the determinant of
his own narrative, and thus of life and death.
Perhaps the most important interpretive question posed by Saturnine is the
level of authority we should prescribe to the conclusion of Frobisher’s near-death
vision. Are the Guardian’s words—and Frobisher’s interpretation of them—the
correct way of interpreting the self’s place in the world (at least, the world of this
novel)? Are the epistemological uncertainties of the novel’s middle and the Freudian
splitting of the self superceded by the ontological certainties of this ending-of-themiddle
and the spiritualist rejoining of the soul and the body? I have already
suggested that the ending which follows somewhat unsettles the matter, while the
relationship of narrator to character points to a continued split of the self. However,
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