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

epudiation of its own central modernist goal of accurately representing the workings
of the human mind. As The Unfortunates piles meanings on its structure, those
meanings clash and destroy each other, and we are left with the possibility that the
only meaning of The Unfortunates’ random ordering of its sections is an absence of
meaning.
There are two further characteristics of the mind in this first theorization in
“FIRST.” Of these, interposition is clearly carried out in the novel’s form, sections of
memory interposing themselves. The physical fact of separately-bound sections
makes this interposition palpable: objects placed between each other, memories and
experiences cutting in as stacked objects rather than a story moving through time.
Notable, too, however, is the fact that the narrator’s mind frequently does not
remember. This is a novel as much about absent memories as present memories—as
though Proust’s Marcel, after the first prodding of tea and cake, were left on the
outside of his memories looking in, unable to transport himself back to his youth. The
Unfortunates contains some rich descriptions (such as further descriptions of
architecture and the condition of Tony’s body), but it refuses, even in the sections that
exist entirely in the past in which Tony lived, to transport the reader fully into
memory, leaving each memory an object to be pondered and fact-checked, a
recollection rather than a story.
“FIRST,” after one such anecdotal recollection of a trip to the Midlands town,
concerned more with the narrator’s memories of a former girlfriend by the name of
Wendy than with Tony, ends by emphasizing the importance of Tony’s talk (and the
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