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

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