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

Jim therefore looks to Stein to extend the narrative with a shift in how the narrative
discourse creates meaning from the raw material of the story.
As Marlow ruminates on Stein’s ends-directed view of life, his desire to
follow the dream, Marlow sees the middle as a place of disconnection from ends:
Yet for all that the great plain on which men wander amongst graves
and pitfalls remained very desolate under the impalpable poesy of its
crepuscular light, overshadowed in the centre, circled with a bright
edge as if surrounded by an abyss of flames. When at last I broke the
silence it was to express the opinion that no one could be more
romantic than himself. (Conrad 130).
Here, at the center of Lord Jim, a center which seems to shine a new light on Jim by
overtly identifying him as a romantic and by using Stein to express a romantic
philosophy, Marlow defines the center as a place of darkness. Here in the center, the
light of the dream is completely shut out. When one is most assuredly in the middle,
narrative loses its guiding direction, purpose and causation overshadowed by—what?
There may be an overshadowing object—the sheer weight of life, perhaps, of middle
age, or of those graves and pitfalls—but the rest of the passage suggests not a
shadowing object, but simply a distance from the edge whence the light comes. The
metaphor also seems to defeat any notion of origins, or any clear path. This is not
Marlow’s river leading to the heart of darkness, but a directionless plain encased by
the light of death. One passes, perhaps at the middle of one’s life, but also perhaps at
any time in one’s undirected wanderings, through a center (for all except for death is
in the middle) from which the ends cannot be seen. Once again, life is figured as a
62