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

it does in Jameson’s reading. However, there is another element to the break in the
middle that is highlighted most strongly by a postcolonial perspective. Scott A. Cohen
argues that, “[i]n addition to the significant shift in form and tone that occurs midway
through the novel, this break registers most loudly in terms of space” (374). For
Cohen, the Patusan episode highlights Jim’s attempt to escape the globalizing
colonial space. The first part of the novel is characterized by movement and
commerce, or “traffic,” as Cohen puts it (386). Patusan, on the other hand, is
characterized by “the violence of colonial reconciliation” as well as “protopostcolonial”
potentiality, unresolved from Marlow’s (and the novel’s) imperial
metropolitan perspective (393). In Cohen’s reading, the two halves of the novel are
unified by the problem of imperial and colonial spaces: their extension, their
movements, their boundaries, but characterized by a different chronotopic perspective
on those problems. Marlow illustrates Jim’s spatial status in these two chronotopes
with geometric metaphors. First, in flight, Jim “did after a time become perfectly
known, and even notorious, within the circle of his wanderings (which had a diameter
of, say, three thousand miles), in the same way as an eccentric character is known to a
whole countryside” (Conrad 119). The circle—to be drawn on a map—encases both
Jim’s wanderings and the public knowledge of those wanderings. It is, of course, an
Eastern circle, and Jim is encased in the middle of colonial space—here easily
distinguishable from London, the center of that space. Meanwhile, in Patusan, he has
found “his new sphere” (Conrad 164). Cohen is most interested in the edges of Jim’s
circles and spheres. For my purposes, however, the metaphors suggest that Jim is
encased in the middle of a circle or sphere. As Kermode suggests that life takes place
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