Jocelyn Brooke’s The Image of a Drawn Sword: A Paradoxical Narrative of Dislocation

Abstract

This essay seeks to understand the unsettling effects of Jocelyn Brooke’s novel, The Image of a Drawn Sword (1950), on its audience. Abandoning his characteristic semi-autobiographical mode, Brooke opted for heterodiegetic narration to explore the mental, perceptual and communicative dislocations experienced by Reynard the protagonist, a few years after WWII. Paradoxically, this narrative of dislocation presents a smooth surface and exploits the rhetorical force of internal focalisation, chronological telling and building up of narrative tension to place the reader in a cognitive and emotional situation mirroring the protagonist’s. As Reynard emerges into an Army camp near his village in Kent, diegetic uncertainties increase while transtextual tectonics destabilise the reader’s expectations and jeopardise aesthetic and ethical positioning in relation to the text. Though focused on individual dislocations, the novel also undermines the pastoral ideal by locating the camp and impending military action in the heart of rural Kent, and revealing the militarisation of the English countryside.