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

memory: a mixture of the ordered and the disordered, of the stream of consciousness
and the judgment of the writer. In so doing, The Unfortunates attempts to examine the
epistemological problems of memory and narrative as a thing, rather than as a
process—a probing of the epistemological problems related to turning events
(particularly, for Johnson, true events) into memories and memories into novels.
This middle layers memory upon memory, as it remembers a day of
remembering. It questions the accuracy of memory even as it attempts to preserve
memory as a fact in itself. It suggests that the apprehension of narratives, of stories—
of beginnings and endings—threatens to distort prior memories, yet it operates within
its own fixed beginning and ending. By giving the reader a choice in the ordering the
text, it suggests the possibility of a writerly text—a text whose form and meaning are
subject to the whims and interpretations of the reader. But the same randomness
which suggests this possibility also destroys it: the reader has no real choice, beyond
whether and how many times to shuffle the pages. The Unfortunates suggests that,
while memory is unlikely to re-create the exact chronological order of events, or even
the order of previous acts of remembering, it does preserve some of time’s original
chronological ordering. What’s more, it maintains a certain confidence that events do
happen in a particular chronological order, and that that chronological order can be
mostly (if not completely) recovered. But it is recovered as an object, not as an
experience. This is what it means for memory to be nominalized: we can gather up
what we know of our past, of our memories, we can evaluate their veracity, and we
can put them in a box—but we cannot re-create the experience of them. We know the
past, and the memories which contain it, happens in time—but we know it only in our
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