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

unburden the author’s memory. However, The Unfortunates goes beyond traditional
and even most modernist narratives in making this reified form a present part of the
reader’s experience. The physical form of The Unfortunates is defamiliarizing in a
way that calls constant attention to the thing-ness of the book both because the
physical form of the book is so unfamiliar and because it requires more (often
awkward) physical work and grappling with the physical book in order to read. In this
sense, The Unfortunates calls attention to the fact that it (and all books) are physical
reifications of narrative.
More importantly, however, The Unfortunates creates in its form a conceptual
as well as physical reification of narrative. In the act of reading virtually any novel,
the words as physical object are scanned sequentially through time—that is, the
narrative is given a temporal profile, (re-)verbalized. Both the narrative and the act of
reading itself acquire a temporal sequence. If a reader is sufficiently familiar with a
novel’s form, the physically reified narrative (the book) will lose prominence in the
mind—the book disappears, and the reader enters the verbal narrative.
Defamilizariation, therefore, plays an important role in disrupting the process by
which narrative is conceptualized as a temporal sequence. However, The
Unfortunates provides a further, conceptual barrier to the conceptual verbalization of
its narrative. Embedded in any individual reading of the novel is the knowledge that
this act of reading has produced neither a sequence of events that matches the novel’s
fabula, nor even an series of anachronies and achronies that correspond to the novel’s
syuzhet. Instead, the act of reading The Unfortunates gives at best one of many
possible sequences or forms of the narrative middle.
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