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

turned into a thing. In fact, as Johnson later wrote, the novel was intended to serve as
a physical substitute for his own memory: “What matters most to me about The
Unfortunates is that I have on recall as accurately as possible what happened, that I
do not have to carry it around in my mind any more” (Johnson, Aren’t You 26).
Memory, to Johnson, is an object, something that is metaphorically carried in the
mind—and The Unfortunates is both a representation of the way memory reifies
events and a substitute for Johnson’s real-world memory of his friend.
This tension between Johnson’s desire to render both the objective and
subjective truth of what happened on both on the day of remembering and in the time
and space remembered, also serves link this very same section to another section of
present-tense narrative. As Johnson nears the center of the city, he recognizes a
domed structure: “the town hall, only they don’t call it the town hall in this city, no,
something else, city hall, no, too Americanized, what is it?” (“Cast parapet” 3). The
narrator remembers shopping in the area on more than one occasion with Tony and
his wife June, but the memory remains general, and the section soon ends with the
narrator resolving to walk uphill. Rather than taking the dome as a trigger into a
Proustian stream of memories, the narrator resolves to “make my way up there, it’s an
object, it’s an objective, it will pass the time” (“Cast parapet” 3). The narrator
maintains that the passage of time occurs in the present-day visit to the town, even as
the novel’s form disrupts this passage of time—removes it to the reader’s present—by
ending the section here. Architecture, moreover, once again serves as a metaphor for
reified memory: it is a physical object as well as a physical and mental objective:
something to be attained, something to be held. This is as true of the name of the
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