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

conceived, marketed, disseminated, and printed as a single novel (usually a physical
book)—is less a product of a particular critical approach than the ground on which
both Miller’s and Guerard’s approaches are founded. That is, once we view Lord Jim
as a single narrative text, we can read that text as composed of varying degrees of
unity or digression. Tautologically, Lord Jim is a single novel because it is a single
novel, with a middle that connects beginning and ending. When we divide a novel
into two or three parts, a narrative middle creates both digression and unity. That is,
the middle is what transforms these parts into a particular narrative text. Rather than
textual unity being created by the unity of Jim’s character, the unity of Jim’s
character as a source of textual unity is instead created by the unity that already exists
as soon as we consider Lord Jim as a single text. Once we view Lord Jim as a single
text, a central disruption that divides the novel into two parts becomes the middle of a
single novel, rather than a division between two separate texts.
The most famous reading of the division of Lord Jim into two parts, however,
comes from Jameson, who, like Leavis, views the break as generic. In Jameson, we
have a clear articulation of Lord Jim’s middle as a re-configuration of the narrative’s
modernist poetics. He registers
a tangible “break” in the narrative of Lord Jim, a qualitative shift and
diminution of narrative intensity as we pass from the story of the Patna
and the intricate and prototextual search for the “truth” of the scandal
of the abandoned ship, to that more linear account of Jim’s later career
in Patusan, which, a virtual paradigm of romance as such, comes
before us as the prototype of the various ‘degraded’ subgenres into
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