And Self says he did have a structure in mind when he sat down to write the book. "Umbrella overall has the structure of an umbrella," he says. "It's tightly furled to begin with, it opens out, it shelters, and then in ... a rather harrowing scene, the umbrella, like Audrey, is blown backwards as she relapses into this encephalitic coma." Self adds that working with several different timelines at once means he absolutely must have a clear idea of what he's doing.
Umbrella has no chapters, few paragraph breaks — there's almost nowhere for the reader to pause and reflect on what's going on in the narrative. You just have to soldier on. "This is one of the paradoxes of modernism," Self says. "There are two main techniques that I employ in Umbrella that people think of as distinctively modernist, and they're techniques that writers will be severely warned off on their creative writing programs, where in fact they'll be largely taught to write terse, Hemingway-esque sentences ... in the simple past, you know, with a third-personal narrator."
Modernist fiction, Self says, gets rid of the third-person, past-tense narrator. "Instead, everything is in the continuous present. The paradox of modernism is, writers make the decision to work with the continuous present, and to work with ... stream of consciousness, as it's called, for emotional reasons, and the main emotional reason is verisimilitude. I mean, this is what surprises people: Life is not in the simple past." Thinking and speaking, he adds, are happening now, not in the past — and all at once, in a grand mix-up. "And in order to try and express that on the page, stream of consciousness and continuous present are, to my way of thinking, very, very powerful techniques."
Book Reviews
'Umbrella' Is A Twisted Modernist Masterpiece