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

By contrast, when the narrator first hears that Tony has cancer, the narrator
does give his reactions: “[...] he wrote to say he was in hospital for the removal of a
tumour in the neck, on the neck, and would not therefore be at home when I came:
but I could see him in hospital, if I cared to, and I did, it worried me, shocked me,
thinking the obvious, yes, I cared to very much, when I heard” (“Just as it seemed” 5).
More details of the cancer (June tells the narrator it is in Tony’s collarbone) follow.
The narrator is equally forthcoming with his less sympathetic reactions: “No, he
couldn’t read, in the circumstances, and I could never understand why, all through his
illness, that it deprived him of his ability to read [...]” (“Just as it seemed” 7). In
general, Johnson does not spare himself, shows himself to be, though a devoted
friend, self-interested in his dealings with Tony, impatient when Tony is no longer
able to edit his novels. All these emotions are rendered retrospectively—they are facts
to be remembered, just as the letter from Tony and the day of the phone call from
June are facts to be remembered. But, in the moment of death (or, rather, the delayed
moment of the notification of death, when death is apprehended), emotional facts are
entirely absent. It is impossible to tell whether it is the narrator, remembering that
phone call at some indeterminate time during a day in his dead friend’s hometown,
who declines to examine his own reactions at that crucial moment, or whether it is the
writer, transforming a day of remembering into a novelistic expression, who chooses
to elide the emotional content of this memory. Ultimately, though, the effect is one a
narrated mind that obsessively attempts to fix the inconsequential (the day of the
week) in order to avoid looking to deeply at the consequences of death.
263