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

it and then, after a break in the text, into a suppositionally-constructed memory of the
time Tony spoke about the tower: “But they were building it at that time, Tony
pointed it out to us as a new landmark which would be useful to us in finding our way
about the city, only my second visit, and her first, Wendy’s.
We must
have come up this hill, there, past here, and on, he leading, Tony, we two lovers, like
Merlin in the tale, we were besotted, or illfated, at least I was [...]” (“Up there, yes”
1). Architecture leads to voice, which leads to the past, which leads not to
illumination of Tony, but a reading of Tony in his importance to the narrator and,
particularly, to the most emotionally salient aspect of the narrator’s life—here the
failed love affair that was the primary subject of Johnson’s previous novel, Trawl.
The narrator, however, protests that the opposite is true: “Very much in love with her,
yes, Wendy, then. As not now, in this city memories are not now of her so much, but
only of her in relation to him. So his death changes the past: yet it should not” (“Up
there, yes” 1). Here, “the past” is conflated with the narrator’s memory of the past,
and so the unifying force of Tony as subject of both memory and novel inevitably
distorts that past, even as it may seem to the reader that it is the solipsism of the
narrator’s memory that distorts Tony’s past.
A further gap, then, moves the narrator from a speculative past—what must
have been—and ruminations on Wendy and the nature of memory to a purer narrative
of his second visit:
He had booked for us at a guesthouse, boarding house, private hotel, I
forget which gentility it was known by, at which his parents had once
stayed, and which he therefore had some slight cause to recommend,
244