But this institutional heterogeneity—not merely a shift between two narrative paradigms, nor even a disparity between two types of narration or narrative organization, but a shift between two distinct cultural spaces, that of “high” culture and that of mass culture—is not the only gap or discontinuity that Lord Jim symptomatically betrays. Indeed, we will have occasion to isolate the stylistic practice of this work as a virtually autonomous “instance” in its own right, standing in tension or contradiction with the book’s various narrative instances or levels—just
