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

text, since only a vast rupture requires such insistent bridging. Nishihara thus
highlights the crucial importance of the middle to both Lord Jim’s structure and its
poetics. That is, the middle is the part of the text that insists that incoherence is
coherence, that a violation of ordering principles can itself be a fundamental quality
of the narrative. The middle holds these contradictions together. While I have so far
largely explored this middle as an invisible and even unfixed division between two
halves, a division of the text rather than a segment of text, I will argue that Lord Jim
actively works to shift the direction and genre of the narrative through a particular act
of interpretation: Stein’s analysis of Jim as a romantic, an act of interpretation that
results directly in an attempt to shape Jim’s narrative through action. That is, Stein
models the epistemological problem of Lord Jim (and Jim himself) as a single text,
serving as the primary diegetic agent for the simultaneously divisive and unifying
action of the novel’s middle.
Marlow’s interview with Stein, then, is an episode at the novel’s center in
terms of chapters, which not only provides the plot-level mechanism that moves the
novel’s action to Patusan, 4 but it also is directly concerned with the shaping of a
narrative and its system of meaning in the middle. Before moving to a discussion of
this episode, however, I would like to take one last look at the novel’s multiple absent
middles (that is, transitions that have no textual content of their own) by way of
examining Jim’s jump from the Patna itself. Jim hears a call from the boat, “Geo-o-oo-orge!
Oh, jump!” (Conrad 69). Jim then describes his assessment of the ship’s state:
4 Baxter sums up the Stein episode’s importance as a transition, with a nod to the prominence of this
view in the critical literature: “Jim’s itinerancy is brought to an end through Marlow’s consultation
with Stein. This consultation is often and rightly seen as providing a pivot between the first and
second parts of the novel, moving Jim from a life at sea to a life inland” (110).
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