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

violation of the unity of action, but as a violation of Conrad’s narrative method in
favor of genre writing. Leavis is somewhat vague as to the exact point at which the
“good Conrad” of the first part gives way to the romance of the second part (Leavis
190), but later critics have been more willing to identify the beginning of the Patusan
episode, rather than the ending of the Patna episode, as the novel’s dividing point.
When we begin to consider the Patusan episode as distinct from the rest of the novel,
the middle is squeezed to a point or spot, a fissure in the text that can only be detected
by examining what lies on either side. Accounts of the nature of this fissure have been
varied. Albert Guerard, in 1958, is already able to speak of Lord Jim’s “alleged
formal weakness: its apparent break into two separate novels, with the second one
inferior to the first,” countering that “[t]he most remote place and unrelated
circumstance discovers, in us, the character with which we set out” (167). For
Guerard, then, what can be characterized not only as a break between parts of a novel,
but a break between novels, is unified by character—and the disjunction itself serves
to confirm this unity of character. The break here is primarily a break in the action.
Regardless of the persuasiveness of Guerard’s argument that Lord Jim is a unified
artistic object by virtue of being a character study, it is clear that Guerard, like Leavis,
is motivated to read into the novel the formal unity demanded by New Criticism.
Once again, we are reminded of the importance of Miller’s approach to middles,
which helps us to read the digressions and differences in the text’s middle as
something other than a challenge to the unified textual object that must either be
resolved through analysis or condemned as an irredeemable flaw in the object. I
would argue, however, that Lord Jim’s status as a unified textual object—one that is
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