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

that temporal relationship is itself a temporal process—the narrator and the reader
must mentally (and, in the reader’s case, physically) scan the history of their
encounters in order to conceptualize the narrative.
This is, of course, true of all narratives, even if The Unfortunates brings a
particular complexity to the process. However, The Unfortunates (or at least its
middle) has a syuzhet that lacks a fixed sequence, even if any individual act of
reading the novel does. Its narrative middle has been reified or nominalized, a
sequence of events and memories of events turned into a thing. This “conceptual
reification,” as Langacker calls the nominalization contained in “a nominalized verb
like chirping, consumption, destruction, chanting, or breaking” (Langacker 86). To
say that cancer destroys Tony’s body is to think of the effects of the disease with a
temporal profile—to think of them at some relative point of time, through some
relative period of time, to think of the temporal relationship between Tony and the
cancer. To speak of the destruction of Tony’s body by cancer, however, is to
conceptualize that whole relationship—including its temporal profile—as a thing,
which can in turn be put into cognitive relationships with other things.
Likewise, The Unfortunates itself nominalizes its story—it conceives it not as
a temporal relationship, but as a thing, and object that can be mentally manipulated as
an atemporal whole. The fact that each section of the novel comprises a more
traditional (verbal) narrative emphasizes that the novel is not simply a noun—not
simply a collection of words or abitrarily marked-off sequences of words—that can
be manipulated by the reader. Instead, The Unfortunates is a narrative whose middle
has been reified—Tony’s life, the narrator’s act of remembering that life, has been
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