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

necessarily after anything else, and which has naturally something else after it; an end
is that which is naturally after something itself, either as its necessary or usual
consequent, and with nothing else after it; and a middle, that which is by nature after
one thing and has also another after it” (1450b). Aristotle, then, insists on the
naturalness and necessity of the existence of beginnings, middles, and endings, as
well as their relationships to one another. Kermode, on the other hand, argues that this
relationship is not necessary or natural, but instead a product of human psychology
and social arrangements. Kermode suggests that life takes place entirely “in the
middest,” and that to make sense of this muddled middle, people “need fictive
concords with origins and ends, such as give meaning to lives and to poems” (7).
What was naturalness and necessity in Aristotle, then, becomes a set of artificial
constructs in Kermode. Nevertheless, while for Kermode beginnings and endings are
fictive, the middle is real. Without beginning and ending, the middle becomes all of
reality. Kermode turns our attention to middles almost as much as endings, but in so
doing he perhaps expands the middle so far as to negate the possibility of making the
middle an object of study.
Where Kermode focuses on the power of endings to shape meaning, Said
turns to beginnings, and in so doing, makes the middle almost invisible. Said defines
the beginning as “making or producing difference” (Said xiii). Said ties the beginning
closely to the intention, “an appetite at the beginning intellectually to do something in
a characteristic way” (Said 12). That is, the beginning is for Said the beginning from
the writer’s perspective—the beginning of writing or conceiving of a text—rather
than the beginning of the text itself from the reader’s perspective. However, Said
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