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

Ulysses, the second half of In Transit features highly prominent deviations from the
focalization in ordinarily-formatted prose of most modernism—including a splitting
of the text into two separate columns. But unlike these two novels, and also unlike
Saturnine’s more ambiguous splitting of the self, once In Transit has passed its
middle, the stable story that characterizes much of modernism as well as realism is
gone. After the middle, various ontological disruptions occur, as the main character’s
male and female selves walk off into their own stories, and the novel engages in
various genre parodies. A short section in In Transit’s middle dramatizes this leap
from epistemological uncertainty into ontological multiplicity. The middle of In
Transit also marks the boundary between modernism and postmodernism. As in Lord
Jim and The Golden Bowl, the middle holds two very different approaches together
into a single novel, creating both continuity and disjunction between the dominant
experimental modes of twentieth-century fiction.
Modernist middles, and middles in general, are a varied breed. In long-form
narrative in particular, they are subject to the various constructions of both author and
reader. However, middles in general—and in particular the prominent modernist
middles read here—also serve to structure narratives for both readers and writers.
Any definition of middles must be both provisional and tentative, but I argue that a
middle is not simply the piece of a narrative between beginning and end, but that
prominent piece or gap between beginning and end that structures the narrative,
transforming or redefining it in plot and form, and bridging, separating, and
binding—even creating—the beginning and ending, thus making a single story of the
often disparate and incongruous elements of narrative.
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