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

middle therefore randomizes the novel’s anachronies, Genette’s term for “discordance
between the two orderings of story [fabula] and narrative [syuzhet]” (Genette,
Narrative Discourse 36). Nevertheless, it is easy to identify the two levels of
narrative: the primary narrative, the time frame from which the narrator remembers,
and a secondary time frame, which contains the narrator’s memories. 26 The reader
experiences randomized analepsis when moving from primary to secondary narrative,
and prolepsis when moving from secondary to primary narrative, with little difficulty
in distinguishing these events’ relative order in the fabula. However, distinguishing
analepsis from prolepsis within a time frame may be more difficult.
In the first motivating factor Johnson gives for the form of the novel, then,
Johnson emphasizes, in particular, how his mind worked, rather than what specifically
his mind did. To this, Johnson adds that the randomness of the novel is meant to be “a
physical tangible metaphor for randomness and the nature of cancer” (Johnson, Aren’t
You 25). Richardson’s interpretation of what he calls the novel’s “unfixed syuzhet,”
on the other hand, emphasizes the narrator’s grief: “It does not matter where he
situates the account of his lunch, or where he places his memory of hitchhiking with
his friend. The former event is utterly unimportant, and so is its placement; the latter
event can appear anywhere, just as it will appear in a different setting when it is
remembered again” (Richardson, “Unnatural Stories and Sequences”). It is not
enough, however, to say that the order of events is unimportant to the grieving
narrator: following Johnson, I would argue that the inability to recall or even
experience events in a fixed order is a crucial part of the narrator’s experience.
26 The two time frames of the two narrative levels should not be confused with dual time, which
entails “temporal contradictions” (Richardson, “Beyond” 51).
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