Metonymic Brigid Brophy: failures <italic>In Transit</italic>.

Brigid Brophy is not easily situated in postwar British literary history. The work of this public intellectual of the 1960s does not fit comfortably on either side of divisions between ‘experimental’ or ‘realist’ postwar literary fiction that have been used by some scholars to understand both the aesthetic distinctions between texts and how postwar writers understood themselves. Recent years have seen a wellspring of new interest in Brophy’s novel <italic>In Transit</italic> (1969), in which the author’s efforts to realise in literary form ‘ambivalence’ as ‘essence’ reveal a new way of understanding the development of the British novel of the postwar period. In this novel preoccupied with the textual and graphic nature of literary character – and indeed all discursive positions – metonymy is both a common trope and a structuring principle. Employed as a heuristic, metonymy reveals that narratorial decisions about pronouns have ontological effects. Brophy’s metonymic principle illuminates a shift in understandings of the relationships between indexical language and the materiality of its referent in postwar British literature, including the perhaps unexpected aesthetic and political affordances of ostensible ‘failures’ of integration, determinacy, and memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]