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

which mass culture will be articulated […]. (Jameson, Political 206-
207)
Lord Jim’s middle is for Jameson the break between two opposed cultural products of
capitalism: the modernist novel of epistemology which attempts to resist
commodification even as it reifies aesthetic experience (thus making it available as a
commodity) and the openly commodified genre fiction of mass culture—or, on the
other hand, the postmodernist fantasy that parodies such genre fiction. Thus, in
Jameson’s view, the break goes even deeper—each half of Lord Jim is not merely a
separate narrative, but a separate (if interdependent) type of novel, and the break
comes to represent a break not in the textual object alone, but in capitalism, its
cultural productions, and their ideological work. The fissure made by capitalism is
between activity and value, and Conrad creates the fissure in his novel in an attempt
to repair that fissure in capitalist society:
the union of activity and value, of the energies of Western capitalism
and the organic immanence of the religion of pre-capitalist societies,
can only block out the place of Jim himself. But not the existential
Jim, the antihero, of the first part of the novel: rather, the ideal Jim, the
‘Lord Jim’ of the second half, the wish-fulfilling romance, which is
marked as a degraded narrative precisely by its claim to have
‘resolved’ the contradiction and generated the impossible hero [...]
(Jameson, Political 255)
Although Jameson is speaking of the unity of two abstract concepts, it is worth noting
that the unity Jameson finds here inheres in a character, the ideal Jim. However, as
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