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

Chapter 1: “The Plague Spot”: Finding the Modernist Middle in
Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim
All narratives have beginnings, middles, and ends. This we all know, or at
least have known since Aristotle. This knowledge may be purely tautological, but it is
in some sense indisputable: every narrative act must begin and end somewhere
(whether these points are determined by narrator or recipient), and there must be
something between these points. Yet, these three dimensions of narrative, unlike
dimensions in space, are not equal: we have, after all, two points and a “something,”
the space or content between those points. I begin to read, I read, I end reading.
Beginnings and ends have definition but no content; the middle between them has
content, but no definition. Any discussion of middles tends therefore to collapse into
a discussion of its defining terms, beginning and ending (typically in relation to
causality, as in Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending), or instead to expand (as in
Hillis Miller’s Reading Narrative) to cover everything but beginnings and endings.
Beginnings and endings constitute distinct topics of discussion; the middle, on the
other hand, is the text. In order to pursue the middle as a definite, distinct object of
study, I have argued for a more precise sort of middle: a central piece of text that has
a transitional or transformational function. As I have discussed in the Introduction, in
traditional narratives, this transition or transformation occurs primarily in the fabula:
that is, there is a crucial change in the story. In Victorian novels in particular, there
may be a marked change in the material and social circumstances of the characters.
32