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

Jim becomes an ideal unity, he destroys his unity as a character (and the text’s unity
as a work with the traditional verisimilitude associated with realism). Jameson’s view
of the break turns out to be almost the opposite of Guerard’s: Lord Jim is completed
not by distant action which proves the unity of character, but by completion of a
thematic system that destroys the unity of both character and action. Unity of
character does not provide unity of theme; rather, unity of theme destroys unity of
character. The fissure runs straight down the middle not of a text or of a plot, but of
the capitalist subject.
Lord Jim’s middle, then, brings together two contradictory responses to
capitalism in a single text, through a differing set of narrative conventions. These
contradictions are reflected in character, action, and poetics. Under Jameson’s
reading, Lord Jim is half modernist, half popular modern pop culture. The middle that
divides two such halves is thus different from the middles of traditional narratives,
which produce difference in the narrative primarily through plot developments—that
is, differences in action and character. What Jameson clarifies that previous critics
only seemed to sense is that differences in action and character are bound up in
differences in the novel’s approach to the problems of modern capitalism—in part by
abandoning the epistemological dominant of modernism. Jameson’s reading thus
produces a half-modernist middle: a middle that transitions the novel away from
modernism, and that does so through story as by discourse. Jameson, however, unifies
the text, somewhat ironically, around his own particular critical concern: the
contradictions of capitalism and the text’s unconscious expression of those
contradictions. Rather than accept or reject such a reading, I would argue that
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