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

Chapter 6: Indivisible Form, Divided:
The Middle as Leap from Modernism to Postmodernism in
Brigid Brophy’s In Transit
The Anglo-Irish novelist Brigid Brophy’s 1969 In Transit: An Heroi-Cyclic
Novel begins where The Waste-Land ends: with the cross-cultural, multi-linguistic
disintegration of language. It ends, in postmodernist fashion, with an explicit nod to
the Baroque, with an address to the reader that puts into question the relationship
between narrator and reader, fiction and reality. The novel’s middle both dramatizes
the transition from the end of high modernism, with its linguistic dance between order
and chaos, to the simultaneously iconoclastic and traditionalist meta-storytelling of
postmodernism, while also serving as the glue that binds these two narrative modes
into a single novel. Brophy’s novel, written in the age of counterculture and nascent
postmodernism, dramatizes this transition through its themes of gender and genre as
well as language, linking a late modernist beginning to a postmodernist end with a
leap across ontological boundaries. By shifting from modernism and postmodernism
through an actual textual middle, Brophy takes her readers with her across the chasm
between modernist and postmodernist approaches. This shift goes beyond a change in
narrative direction or a change in formal approach to the narrative (though it is both
of those): it is an upending of the very ontological status of the story being narrated
and the world in which it takes place. In making this profound shift, Brophy builds on
the structurally-important middles of modernist novels, showing both the limitations
267