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

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not an effort to give the narrator an identity—it is a desire to make Pat not the narrating consciousness, but a narrated character, someone about whom stories can be told. Pat’s declaration of manhood is followed by decisive action: “I walked not towards the exit-strait, though it was now empty, but, firmly and quickly, to the stairs” (114). This is followed by the novel’s last piece of first-person narration until the CODETTA: an “INTERLOO” equating this decisive action (and decisive gendering) as the narrator’s suicide: And in hurling myself from top to bottom of them I shall be destroyed. For, triumph, triumph! I have attained (or had handed to me on a chatter-platter) my suicide; and this, which I, being at the time in my bright mind, address to my Reader-coroner, is my suicide note. Yours In Quest, P. (Sir)(Knight Errant) (114-115) This INTERLOO, like many of the novel’s interludes, seems to come from a different narrative perspective than the primary narration. That is, the narrator speaks directly to the reader as reader, clarifying the difference, even in first-person narration, between Pat-the-narrator and Pat-the-character. Tense, however, confuses what would seem to be a strong retrospective voice, for the narrator “shall be destroyed” by an action taken, seemingly, in the past. How can a character, retrospectively narrated, be the engine of suicide for a future narrating-self? Any pretense of a logical relationship between character and narrator is essentially broken. Instead, narrator fluidly takes on the gender of the character, and anticipates the genre role-playing which will dominate the next section of the novel. But by thus becoming a character, by 289
ecoming definable, the first-person narrator is destroyed. Whether the third-person narrator who follows is, in some sense, the same narrator is uncertain. Brophy’s non-fictional writings give us some insight into the relationship between consciousness, fiction, and the shift both to a third-person narrator and to postmodern techniques. In a 1963 essay, “The Novel as a Takeover Bid,” Brophy argues that the novel goes beyond a mixing of discourses in the consciousness, beyond the epistemological problems tackled by modernism and detective fiction. The novel, with its demand that we submit, for hours and days at time, to a world and point of view not our own, is a temporary threat to identity itself: “The novel doesn’t stop short at taking you out of yourself: it puts the author in your place. It forces you to become the author” (Don’t Never Forget 99). True immersive storytelling, which Brophy values immensely, does not simply upset the consciousness epistemologically with questions of what is happening in the story, what is the solution to the mystery, what is the point of view of this or that character or narrator: it removes and replaces the very identity that would ask these questions. Novel-reading is for Brophy an ontologically-transformative experience. It doesn’t just change how we exist in the world: it removes both ourselves and the world and replaces them with the author. This author, as Brophy argues elsewhere, is “in position not of Ego, but of God” (Prancing Novelist 56). This marks a fundamental distinction between character and narrator which much stream-of-consciousness and autobiographical modernism may seem to elide. People, however, would often prefer to be replaced by a character than by a god: “People are not ‘characters’. They may pretend to be, perhaps in the hope of becoming as popular as the characters in Victorian fiction” (Prancing 290
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ABSTRACT Title of Document: BRITISH
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BRITISH MODERNIST NARRATIVE MIDDLES
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Dedication To my wife Pat, my disse
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Table of Contents Dedication ......
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necessarily after anything else, an
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eginning. That is, a modernist midd
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and Mario Ortiz-Robles have brought
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Princess Casamassima. The former is
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choice of McHale’s definition is
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In examining modernist middles, I w
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“is to overlook the other fundame
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evolution of capitalism strikes me
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spatial and temporal confines. On t
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narratives in Beckett’s Molloy, c
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Johnson mark an end to Britain’s
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period somewhat peripheral, a parti
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is oriented around endings (Jim’s
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eal world, yet the novel explores i
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Ulysses, the second half of In Tran
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Modernist texts may also contain mi
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chapters), and the end as Marlow’
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potentially be used to highlight ep
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middle) of the veracity of the Time
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Jim’s actions within a causal nar
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to Patusan midway through the novel
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violation of the unity of action, b
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which mass culture will be articula
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Jameson shows how the difference be
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genres, connected by multiple middl
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it does in Jameson’s reading. How
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text, since only a vast rupture req
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actually see Jim make the deal with
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for interpreting his own life and t
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garners an enthusiastic response fr
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circular encasement, which has the
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text’s initial questions are begi
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Chapter 2: Modernist Points of View
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it seems that the marriage plot is
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centering his novels within his pro
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singular, centered focalization—a
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inn. The lovers will return to Char
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consciousness itself seems to contr
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created, in part, by the use of mul
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epistemological problem: how do the
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observation leads immediately and i
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ineffectiveness” (Kafalenos 125).
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shall have everything’” (266).
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can to the sheer unspeakable narrat
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induce me” (277). Fanny, then, re
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and the objective world. Instead, M
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‘Sure. Nothing will. Good-night,
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It was not till many days had passe
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which a story unfolds, and perhaps
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When Amerigo arrives, Maggie’s co
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accomplish, who she will meet, what
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Chapter 3: “Time Passes”: The M
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narrative force towards modernist m
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Even as “Time Passes” serves an
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technique of modernist narrative, b
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ground of any rival solutions to Li
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summary and scene” (Genette, Narr
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Window,” and the ending section,
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presentation in “Time Passes.”
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where things happen. Events are mad
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has promised James that they will g
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For Lucio Ruotolo, however, this na
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eginning, middle, and end together
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integral to the musical and dramati
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spring from the narrative problem o
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who creates a mind for inanimate ob
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own thoughts nor that of any charac
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language, and thus subject to the c
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Lighthouse,” and narrations of th
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in so far as her presence helps the
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anthropomorphizing narrative—but
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In the initial description of summe
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they find “something out of harmo
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upper rooms of the empty house only
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like to be up here at dusk alone ne
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armistice, but it follows so immedi
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y the narrator, allow a world unpop
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Furthermore, passages like this fun
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(“narrated monologue”) as “a
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Mrs. McNab and Mrs. Bast are arguab
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unclear whether time flows forward,
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conventions of modernist and tradit
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middle by making itself markedly di
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Lighthouse’s primary narrative pa
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served to marginalize experimental
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the author’s other novels. Alick
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himself. In an episode that resembl
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unity between time story time and n
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accept the lying perspective as par
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cause and which effect. Any attempt
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died on October, 1938” (7). Frobi
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middle of fundamental change; the u
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However, like the stories Macmann a
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which takes Saturnine to the edge o
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Aspic, to thank him for his kindnes
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Whereas Genette’s discussion of h
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problems of the self, but instead p
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sees in the faces. But here we can
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narration. Frobisher has entered a
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Frobisher is reassured both by the
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strode on. He said, with his eyes n
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analyze mental states from outside
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journey up. But meaning emanates fr
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death vision, in which life is self
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Thus, after a tile falls from the r
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objection to realism: yes, an objec
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esulted in a doubling—or repetiti
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The ending Frobisher comes to with
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though the novel’s return to epis
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andom order. However, each memory r
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middle therefore randomizes the nov
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created by a formal device that rep
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final section resolves the scenario
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that each of the novel’s sections
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inadequate to me for such a narrati
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narratives. This fundamental differ
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turned into a thing. In fact, as Jo
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unburden the author’s memory. How
Page 246 and 247: Instead, the middle of The Unfortun
Page 248 and 249: By contrast, the second type of sec
Page 250 and 251: at both. This particular failure is
Page 252 and 253: as knowing it, as he did not know o
Page 254 and 255: had been so full-fleshed, the whole
Page 256 and 257: had talked, Tony” (“That was th
Page 258 and 259: epudiation of its own central moder
Page 260 and 261: narrator/rememberer. Johnson mainta
Page 262 and 263: etrospective, an attempt to think i
Page 264 and 265: it, welcome it) the ball spun lazil
Page 266 and 267: worn” 9-10). The image finds the
Page 268 and 269: like a miracle, though he still cou
Page 270 and 271: By contrast, when the narrator firs
Page 272 and 273: memory: a mixture of the ordered an
Page 274 and 275: Chapter 6: Indivisible Form, Divide
Page 276 and 277: ecause postmodernism concerns the n
Page 278 and 279: in the diegetic reality of the nove
Page 280 and 281: section one LINGUISTIC LEPROSY Alle
Page 282 and 283: In Transit’s musical subtitles al
Page 284 and 285: they are perched between or represe
Page 286 and 287: performative in a Butlerian sense,
Page 288 and 289: the chorus describe themselves as a
Page 290 and 291: lamentable incident which I am now
Page 292 and 293: social component of thought only th
Page 294 and 295: identity, which remains unitary and
Page 298 and 299: Novelist 33). That is, Pat-the-narr
Page 300 and 301: primarily with classifying Pat’s
Page 302 and 303: now irrelevant, replaced by the pur
Page 304 and 305: etween reader and author. When Pat
Page 306 and 307: consequences for the entire world o
Page 308 and 309: world presented to the reader in Se
Page 310 and 311: of Pat’s own life, and by forgett
Page 312 and 313: evolutionaries find that another gr
Page 314 and 315: However, Brophy is not entirely don
Page 316 and 317: masculinity. Its manifestations are
Page 318 and 319: to violate. In Transit’s postmode
Page 320 and 321: ontological—shifts to consider de
Page 322 and 323: However, I would argue that we read
Page 324 and 325: Conclusion Modernism and narrative
Page 326 and 327: approximately half of the narrative
Page 328 and 329: little attention in the past, littl
Page 330 and 331: Brophy, Brigid. Don’t Never Forge
Page 332 and 333: 1989. 162-185. ---. “Periodizing
Page 334 and 335: Johnson, B. S. The Unfortunates. Ed
Page 336 and 337: Political in the Novels of Virginia
Page 338 and 339: Said, Edward. Beginnings: Intention
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