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

“She was going down, down, head first under me. . . .” (69). These words of Jim’s are
followed by a description of Jim by Marlow: “He raised his hand deliberately to his
face, and made picking motions with his fingers as though he had been bothered with
cobwebs, and afterwards he looked into the open palm for quite half a second before
he blurted out—” (69). Then Jim speaks again: “ ‘I had jumped . . .’ He checked
himself, averted his gaze. . . . ‘It seems,’ he added” (69). The jump itself is an absent
middle, the unnecessary, unrecoverable term between cause and consequence—filled
up, as the novel as a whole is, by Marlow’s voice. Watt, in fact, finds the cause of
Jim’s jump complete in this passage: “it can most plausibly be explained as a reflex
action” (Watt 313). Thus, we have in the sequence the cause of the reflex action (the
command to jump) and the result of that reflect action (had jumped), but we do not
have the action itself. Marlow speaks to Jim, at least in part, to get beyond the facts of
the inquiry—but, at the most crucial moment, Jim can provide only disconnected
facts, for which Marlow, his hearers, the readers of the novel, must all provide causal
connections. There are no sense impressions of the jump, so Marlow provides his
own, gestural moments to the face, reflexive motions again that seem aimed at
removing the impediment to the impressions of the senses. If the absence from the
record of the cause of the Patna’s bulging hull points to a concern in Lord Jim with
beginnings, and questions of fate, as well as Marlow’s need to provide the Patusan
episode as coda to Jim’s life (and the Gentleman Brown episode as coda to the
Patusan episode) points to a concern in Lord Jim with ends, Jim’s missing jump
points to a concern with middles, particularly in their capacity to disappear from
sight, to escape both comprehension and narrative necessity. Similarly, we do not
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