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

to Patusan midway through the novel, but at the end of the account of the events of
the Patna about a third of the way through the novel—making of both Patusan and
Jim’s wanderings “an afterthought” (“Phantasmagoria” 281). The Gazette review
objects to the absence of an Aristotelian unity of action. In this view, the problem
with the novel is that is has a middle: a transition that divides the text, creating a
whole that is in a classical sense unnatural. In this view, further transitions or
divisions in the text become irrelevant, and there is little point in looking for a center.
With the first violation of the unity of action, the text has ended. That is, a middle as I
understand it is an ending as the Gazette reviewer understands it—the ending of a
proper narrative. This is essentially the opposite view to Hillis Miller’s: where for
Miller digression is at the heart of what makes a novel a novel, for the Gazette
reviewer digression is anathema to narrative. The middle is, in this dichotomy, either
all or none of the narrative. The Gazette review, nevertheless, points to a plausible
narrative middle as I have defined it. However, Jim’s wanderings following the Patna
incident are one of multiple shifts in Jim’s fortune and in the narrative’s action, and it
is neither located near the novel’s center, nor is it the most often-cited division in the
text.
The Gazette’s division of Lord Jim also suggests a larger, displaced middle to
the text (a middle that ends at the text’s mid-point or center), beginning around
Chapter 14 with the inquiry’s verdict and including both Jim’s wanderings and the
encounter with Stein. It is quite possible that an erasure of this middle—Patna
followed immediately by Patusan—would have satisfied this early reviewer, making
the latter episode less of an afterthought and more of an immediate consequence of
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