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

as the conventions of thought itself allow for or even demand a sort of internal
narrative, a social transaction with, seemingly, a single party. The language used by
the passage itself emphasizes the drive to internal language: the French that is lost is
“my” French (or not lost—the meaning of “disintegration” is never quite clear in In
Transit, and this, too, may be taken as a critique of modernist anxiety, where change
and commingling and epistemological difficulties are sometimes made synonymous
with loss). The words and affliction, too, are “my,” and two “I”s at the top of the
novel’s second paragraph announce the section’s solipsism.
So, by the end of Section One, we are moving toward a view of the self and its
language as socially constructed—or, rather, moving toward an exploration of the
social aspects of the construction of the self. The “I,” however, remains, and is able to
consider the social as something essential but in some crucial way separate.
Sexshuntwo begins, “I was a fine one to have declared myself out of sympathy with
lost identities. Before a cock or a contralto could reasonably have crowed thrice, and
while my system still pulsed to the informally fugal effect of that splendid closing
chorus from Alitalia” (63). Identity—defined by Alitalia and Pat’s reading of the
opera as social in nature—has become the crucial question of the novel. However, the
meaning of the word itself—much like the meaning of “disintegration” or “I,” is
definitively ambiguous. While Sexshuntwo will for the first time make gender issues
a primary theme of the novel, in the beginning of Sexshuntwo gender and identity are
two separate issues entirely:
there went missing in my own mind not, indeed, my sense of my
identity (on which I retained a clear, firm clasp throughout the
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