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

middle) of the veracity of the Time Traveller’s tale. To the extent that epistemology is
at issue here, it is the Victorian epistemology of suspense, modeled on scientific
experimentation, as defined by Caroline Levine: “the experiment always implied a
narrative of suspense: experimenters might mobilize the most convincing hypotheses
about the hidden facts of the world, but they were always required to wait to see how
the world would respond” (Levine 6). This is, then, the epistemology of the detective
story, plot-driven and subject to resolution. The Time Traveller’s oral narrative is thus
a sort of anti-modernist narrative, a complete fantastical tale that must either be
accepted or rejected in its whole by the characters in the first-level narrative—and
preferably based on concrete evidence. Furthermore, their skepticism exists primarily
to anticipate and refute objections to the Time Traveller’s oral narrative. If there is a
modernist poetics at work here, it is in the beginning and ending, rather than the
middle—and the power of that middle largely serves to override the epistemological
problems, such as they are, of beginning and ending.
Lord Jim’s oral narrative has greater claims to a modernist poetics than The
Time Machine’s, yet it remains a relatively weak candidate for a modernist middle.
From the beginning of his oral narrative, Marlow calls Jim’s tale “mysterious,” and
this mystery is not resolved by the “naked fact” of Jim’s abandoning the Patna, but
instead created by it. We may contrast the objections to the verisimilitude of the Time
Traveller’s story to John Attridge’s interpretation of Lord Jim, in which Jim’s leap
from the Patna violates both standards of professional conduct and “classical
verisimilitude”—that is, it cannot be connected to a maxim that connects his actions
to a standard causal explanation, creating “the modernist opacity at the heart of the
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