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

mind as she does so. These events are, however, narrated retrospectively, from a point
ten days later, when Maggie has further come to understand her own actions and
motivations as well as Charlotte’s and Amerigo’s. When Book Second begins,
therefore, we have jumped from an evening in which crucial events have taken place,
to a day when Maggie reflects on those and subsequent events. Thus, Charlotte and
Amerigo’s affair remains the key unnarrated action once we have passed the absent
middle, but the narrator has shuffled it off to the side. The narrator’s shift in
focalization, indeed, makes it impossible to narrate this action retrospectively. The
absent middle has skipped over this crucial moment not through a leap forward in
time—for not only have we already passed the moment before the middle, but the
narrator’s access to characters’ memories assures the reader that a moment of the
fabula so missed may yet be recovered in the syuzhet. The tools of modernism, with
its access and obsession with thoughts, memories, and reconstructing the past, would
still leave this moment open to narration. To close it off, then, James shifts the rules
by which these tools are deployed. James’s rendering of consciousness, which in the
novel’s first half serves to give the reader access to multiple impressions of the
novel’s situation, with Fanny’s speech to further fill in the gaps, in Book Second is
used to close us off from objective knowledge of most of its characters’ thoughts and
actions. Instead, these are all filtered through Maggie’s consciousness. In contrast to
Warhol, however, I argue that we should not consider this simply as an
epistemological problem for the reader attempting to analyze the main drama.
Instead, this method gives the reader a more complete view of the drama within
Maggie’s consciousness, to the point where many critics have argued that Maggie’s
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