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

it, welcome it) the ball spun lazily slowly inevitably off his boot in a
lazy parabola as some would say looping up and clear of the still
stooping Edson’s now upreaching arms to bounce once before
crossing the line into the back of the United net. That leaves the goalie
in a very strange position, posture. (“The pitch worn” 8-9).
The farcical goal here is subordinated to the narrator’s consciousness, but specifically
to his consciousness as a writer. The choice of the narrative to follow the writer’s
consciousness results, in turn, in a split between the apprehensions of the narrator and
the apprehensions of the reader: the reporter knows what has happened from the
exclamation “Christ! No!” but the reader must wait for the italicized words to be
written in the notebook. Knowledge of impressions is here explicitly dependent on
the writer’s ability to formulate expressions.
Furthermore, the expressions are dependent on the writer’s ability both to
find, in the moment of writing, the right word, but also on the writer’s ability
determine the story. The narrator’s hesitations (represented by white space in the text)
and revisions (“demon chance gremlin trog”) bring together in-the-moment
consciousness with writerly retrospection: once again, Johnson calls attention to the
difficulty of capturing, of reifing, the flow of time when every point of view
inevitably imposes its own temporal flow. The narrator’s mind reaches for language
of a religious nature for even this anti-climax (“demon,” “unholy”), an attempt to
dramatize the absence of drama and tie the ephemeral to the eternal. The most crucial
narrative choice made by the narrator, however, is not linguistic or metaphorical.
Rather, it is the authoritative decision he makes to determine that this moment is the
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