Lord Jim

by Joseph Conrad

  When, in Lord Jim, the Patna's European crew abandons her to her fate, they infringe the unwritten code of the sea that the captain should be the last to leave a sinking ship. Not explicitly stated in Merchant Shipping Acts, this is tacitly assumed when he signs the ship's articles, accepting full responsibility for the vessel, her cargo, crew and passengers. Inevitably, these articles have a pragmatic, mercantile purpose. They provide a safeguard against a ship's being scuttled by a crew member hoping to benefit from her cargo. Formulated as heroic duty and inspired by the chivalric notion of ‘death before dishonour’, the ethics of service are enshrined by maritime tradition in the burden of command. The Patna incident in Lord Jim thus has inevitable prolongations, personal and national, that engage with unwritten but communally understood values identifying ‘gentlemanly’ behaviour.

  Before turning his hand to fiction, Conrad was a sailor and officer in the British Merchant Service from 1878 to 1894, passing the examinations up to the rank of Master Mariner, or, in layman's terms, ship's captain. He wryly described himself as ‘a Polish nobleman, cased in British tar’ (Collected Letters, vol. I, p. 52). Some seventy years after Nelson's victory at Trafalgar had ensured that Britannia ruled the waves, and at a time when the sea had become ‘a national obsession’,3 Conrad saw the world from the decks of British trading ships, the workhorses of Empire. His was the last great age of sail. By the time Lord Jim appeared, steamships – swifter, larger and more technologically advanced – had taken over, reflecting Britain's industrial revolution in the nineteenth century, the Age of Steel. Lord Jim is framed by works that bear witness to this transition: the romance of sail, celebrated in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897), gives way to the commercial functionality of steam in ‘Typhoon’ (1902).

  The area of the world with which Conrad's writings are most commonly associated is the Malay Archipelago, and an early reviewer even pronounced that he might become its Kipling (Spectator, 19 October 1895, p. 530). The history of Europe's involvement in the Eastern seas is, by and large, an economic one: since the sixteenth century at least, the highly lucrative spice trade proved irresistible. The novel's geographical setting thus allows history to be visualized. As Marlow exclaims of his maritime predecessors, the early Dutch and English adventurers: ‘Where wouldn't they go for pepper!’ (XXII). When he goes to Patusan, Jim, an Englishman, replaces Cornelius, a ‘Malacca Portuguese’, as the agent of Stein, a German.

  But if the commonwealth of nations represented in Lord Jim reflects historical realities, it ensures, too, that all the world contributes to the making of Jim: in these international waters, a French gunboat tows a Chinese-owned Arab-chartered steamship, the Patna, deserted by her ‘New South Wales German’ skipper, to Aden, a British colonial port. Even the German captain's Bismarckian ‘blood-and-iron’ air (I) is consistent with the age's clichés about itself. His flight from the ‘damned Englishmen’ (V) and their Court of Inquiry, however, refocuses the trial as a national affair, albeit conducted beneath the gaze of the international marine community. Jim is, in effect, tried on British soil, by a British court of law.

  In the wake of Almayer's Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896), also set in the Eastern seas, Lord Jim traces an important development in Conrad's engagement with the area. In the two earlier novels, Captain Lingard's trading-station in Sambir, north-west Borneo, flies the Union Jack, but Sambir is in a Dutch colony, and the novels’ protagonists, Almayer and Willems, are of Dutch descent. In Lord Jim, Conrad realigns his national focus, casting both his protagonist and his narrator as English.

  To Marlow, Jim ‘stood there for all the parentage of his kind’ (V). This ‘parentage’ extends beyond the traditions of the maritime community to Jim's father, a country parson, and Jim's speech is larded with public-school-isms – ‘Jove!’, ‘You are a brick’ (XVII) – often enough resonant with notions of responsibility and gentlemanliness: ‘Upon my word’ (XXVI) and ‘Honour bright!’ (XXVII). Marlow, too, ensures the novel a specifically English inflection when he eulogizes ‘home’, in a claim reminiscent of one made by Stein: ‘Each blade of grass has its spot on earth whence it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from which he draws his faith together with his life’ (XXI). The insistent claim that Jim is ‘one of us’ has professional and national consequences, not least for the expectation that an officer will behave like a gentleman, and it is Captain Brierly, after all, who advocates showing ‘a stiff upper lip’ (VI). As their titles suggest, the climactic conflict between ‘Lord’ Jim and ‘Gentleman’ Brown allegorizes a chivalric contest of honour.

  II

  Meticulous research has shown that Conrad drew upon local English prototypes for his portrait of Jim. His name is thought to derive from that of Jim Lingard, Olmeijer's trading partner in Berau and nephew of William Lingard, a trader-adventurer whose exploits, which included establishing a permanent tradingstation at Berau, earned him the title Rajah Laut (King of the Sea). A further source is provided by the life of Sir James Brooke, first Rajah of Sarawak, upon which Jim's benevolent rule in Patusan draws. Twenty years after the publication of Lord Jim, Conrad wrote to Sarawak's Dowager Ranee: ‘The first Rajah Brooke has been one of my boyish admirations, a feeling I have kept to this day strengthened by the better understanding of the greatness of his character and the unstained rectitude of his purpose’ (Collected Letters, vol. VII, P. 137).

  The multiplicity of perspectives on which the narrative insists includes that of the non-European world. Jim's ‘crime’ infringes a professional code of honour, but it is committed against 800 pilgrims to Mecca. Drawn from all quarters of the East, ‘dese cattle’, as the Patna's German captain calls them, they all but evade Marlow's account of the trial. Also deserted on the Patna are her non-European crew, who remain at their posts unquestioningly. Having arrived ‘amongst the native batch of all sorts brought over from Aden to give evidence at the inquiry’, the Malay helmsman, that ‘extraordinary and damning witness’, provides ‘the sensation of the second day's proceedings’ (VIII), yet his appearance is summarized in a page, and he unleashes a jumble of words mainly meaningless to its hearers. With poetic justice, Jim's ‘opportunity’ at self-redemption takes him to Patusan, where the internecine rivalries of Sherif Ali, Rajah Allang and Doramin – all eager to control the area and its economy – provide a counterpart to foreign attempts to establish hegemony in the region as personified in Stein, Cornelius and Jim. One of the ironies here is that the very title sherif recollects the region's Arab colonization, another infiltration by outsiders who brought with them their desire for expansion, their class and political structures and their religion. Significantly, Jim supports Doramin and his Bugis, themselves outsiders from the Celebes (now Sulawesi). In an age when Reuters extended its tentacles from Europe to the Far East, Patusan remains ‘beyond the end of telegraph cables’ (XXIX); exiled there, Jim is alienated from the ‘white world’, at least until the arrival of Gentleman Brown and his desperados.

  While much fiction bears an autobiographical imprint, Conrad's tales appear to be more than usually haunted by their origins. In an essay on Henry James written in 1904, he claimed: ‘Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing’,4 and in a letter to H. G. Wells of 1907, he offered a tripartite definition of ‘the perfect Novelist’: ‘Chronicler[,] Biographer and Historian’ (Collected Letters, vol. III, p. 461). A single year will serve to indicate how porous are the boundaries between Conrad's own experiences and the events he wrote about.

  On 18 February 1887, Conrad shipped in the Highland Forest for a voyage from Amsterdam to Semarang in Central Java. As first mate, Conrad's responsibilities included stowing the cargo. Unfortunately, his unfamiliarity with the vessel and his system of loading caused the ship to roll dangerously, which resulted in his being struck by a falling spar. The precise nature of his temporary disability remains unspecified: ‘“queer symptoms,” as the captain, who treated them, used to say… wishing that it had been a st
raightforward broken leg’.5 Signing off in mid-June, Conrad spent ten days in Semarang before shipping to Singapore as a passenger in the S.S. Celestial. He was admitted to the General Hospital and then recovered further at the Sailors’ Home for Officers, before finding work in August on a country ship, the Vidar, in which he made four trips as first mate between Singapore and Dutch trading-ports on Borneo and the Celebes.

  At the trading-post of Berau in north-eastern Borneo Conrad met the Java-born Eurasian trader Willem Karel Olmeijer, of whom he later confessed: ‘if I had not got to know Almayer pretty well it is almost certain there would never have been a line of mine in print’.6 ‘Almayer’ is a central character in Conrad's first two novels, Almayer's Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896), in which Berau provides the prototype for the fictional Sambir. Correspondences between Conrad's life and art are everywhere. For example, Captain John McWhir of the Highland Forest lends his surname, slightly amended, to the Nan-Shan's captain in ‘Typhoon’. More intricately, it is while serving as chief mate under a Scottish captain that Jim is disabled by a falling spar in Lord Jim and as ‘His lameness… persisted… when the ship arrived at an Eastern port he had to go to the hospital. His recovery was slow, and he was left behind’ (II). From here, like Conrad, Jim signs on in a country ship, the Patna. Furthermore, in Lord Jim, Stein, whose house lies on Semarang's outskirts, has business interests in its port.

  The Patna tale in Lord Jim has its origin in a maritime scandal of 1880, when the steamship Jeddah, carrying nearly 1,000 pilgrims to the Hajj from Penang to Jeddah, encountered bad weather, sprang a leak and was abandoned by her European captain and crew off Cape Guardafui on Somaliland's northeast tip, on 8 August. Rescued by a passing steamship, the crew were taken to Aden, where they reported their ship lost. Jim's counterpart in the Jeddah, her first mate Augustine Podmore Williams, did not jump but was, instead, thrown overboard by the pilgrims, giving an added inflection to Jim's cagey confession ‘I had jumped… It seems’ (IX). Like the Patna, however, the Jeddah did not sink. She was towed into Aden by the S.S. Antenor a day after being reported lost. A maritime scandal ensued, resulting in inquiries in Aden and Singapore in which the captain and first mate figured prominently. The incident had international consequences: an action for salvage in Singapore, a debate in the Singapore Legislative Assembly and a question in the House of Commons. The captain's certificate was suspended for three years; the chief officer was reprimanded.

  At the time of the Jeddah incident, Conrad was between ships, lodging at 6 Dynevor Road in London's Stoke Newington district and boning up for his second mate's examination, which he passed on 28 May 1880. He left Sydney in the Loch Etive in late August. He could not have been unaware of the Jeddah incident, widely reported and much criticized in the press. The Daily Chronicle's account includes the comment: ‘It is to be feared that pilgrim ships are officered by unprincipled and cowardly men who disgrace the traditions of seamanship. We sincerely trust that no Englishman was amongst the boatload of cowards who left the Jeddah and her thousand passengers to shift for themselves.’7 Norman Sherry speculates that Conrad probably saw the Jeddah while in Singapore in early 1883, when, coincidentally, he was involved in an inquiry into the loss of the Palestine, an incident that provided the basis for ‘Youth’. In Lord Jim, the Patna's fate is more mysterious than her model's: having struck an unidentified, submerged obstacle, she is holed and begins shipping water. The crew abandon ship, are rescued by the passing Avondale and report the Patna lost with all passengers. Hubris can hardly wait to get at them. A passing French gunboat, bound home, responds to the Patna's plight and tows her to Aden. In the ensuing professional and social ignominy, Jim, deserted by the crew, stands trial alone. The Court of Inquiry cancels the certificates of the German skipper and Jim, his first mate, finding the pair ‘in utter disregard of their plain duty’ and charging them with ‘abandoning in the moment of danger the lives and property confided to their charge’ (XIV). Jim is henceforth ‘a seaman in exile from the sea’ (I). The description is especially apt, for the sea provides the basis for his self-ideal in the heroic possibilities of service: ‘He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line’ and ‘always an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book’ (I). Exiled from the sea, he is dislocated from his conception of himself.

  In Lord Jim, the ‘plain duty’ of seamanship is expanded into a conflict between social codes and individual ideals. While the court's verdict recognizes Jim's public guilt, and deprives him of his professional livelihood, the private disgrace is what matters to him. The presence of Marlow as sympathetic narrator provides an appropriately equivocal focus of perception. Speaking with the authority of long years in the Merchant Service, yet prepared to look beyond the ‘facts’ of Jim's case that form the court's primary concern, Marlow wants to see Jim ‘squirm for the honour of the craft’, while recognizing that he ‘stood there for all the parentage of his kind’ (V).

  III

  Lord Jim is, famously, two novels in one: the psychological drama of the Patna episode gives way to the exotic romance of its Patusan sequence. Reflecting the divided obligations of the hero, to society and to himself, the genres of literary Modernism and Romance are forced into a correspondence that questions their individual logic and coherence. In his ‘Author's Note’, Conrad confessed that his original intention was to write a short story based on the pilgrim-ship episode; he only belatedly recognized its potential as a ‘good starting-point for a free and wandering tale’, and the novel grew far beyond his or his publisher's expectations. Serialized in fourteen issues of the conservative and widely read monthly Blackwood's Magazine (October 1899–November 1900), the final version runs to more than 130,000 words. While Conrad conceded that the novel's division into its Patna and Patusan halves was its ‘plague spot’, Blackwood's literary advisor, David Meldrum, defended the work's expansion, arguing that it transformed Lord Jim into ‘a more important story’, even ‘a great story’ (Collected Letters, vol. II, p. 302).8

  The novel's epigraph, a translated aphorism from the German Romantic poet Friedrich Leopold, Baron von Hardenberg (1772–1801), who wrote under the pen-name Novalis, has obvious relevance for the relationship between Jim and Marlow, and, more generally, for the theme of community in which the reader, too, is implicated: ‘It is certain my conviction gains infinitely, the moment another soul will believe in it.’ The claim might also be seen to voice the concerns of an emergent author, writing in his third language (after Polish and French) for an English readership. To Marlow, the character-narrator whose perspective is simultaneously challenging and perceptive, Jim remains ‘one of us’ – but he also recognizes that ‘of all mankind Jim had no dealings but with himself’ (XXXVI). As Marlow is often viewed as Conrad's alter ego, so Jim becomes his, for Marlow, too, is looking for a faith, not for the self-ideal of his romantic ‘very young brother’ (XXI) but for ‘the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct’ (V), thrown into doubt by Jim's transgression. Jim's attempts to redeem himself in his own eyes are thus entangled with Marlow's need ‘to keep up the illusion of my beginnings’ (XI) and reaffirm the social claims of solidarity. They are also intimately related to the late-Victorian search for moral certitudes in a universe recently deprived of transcendent meaning. If God, as Nietzsche declared, was dead, substitutes were quickly sought out.

  Dramatized as an after-dinner tale that Marlow has told ‘many times, in distant parts of the world’ (IV), Jim's story emerges through the various meetings between the two men and, since Marlow is ‘always eager to take opinion on it… individual opinion—international opinion’ (XIV), it includes chance encounters with a host of characters associated with or interested in Jim's case. This penchant for opening up dual perspectives, matched by an enthusiasm for filling the work with doubles and alter egos, results in a shifting portrait of Jim, one that emerges from a process of disputatio
n and critique. Jim's ‘exquisite sensibility’ (I) is thus subject to contrasting interpretations: for the imaginative pragmatist Chester, the fact that Jim takes the court's verdict ‘to heart’ means he is ‘no good’ (XIV); diametrically opposed to this, Stein, who defines Jim as ‘romantic’ (XX), advocates sending him to ‘a totally new set of conditions for his imaginative faculty to work upon’ (XXI). Mediating between these extreme views of Jim is Marlow, for whom ‘those who do not feel do not count’. His verdict is that ‘in virtue of his feeling he mattered’ (XXI).

  No less than Marlow, the reader is thus made to take ‘a definite part in a dispute impossible of decision’ (VIII). For instance, Captain Brierly commits suicide shortly after presiding as one of the judges at the Court of Inquiry where, according to Marlow, ‘he was probably holding silent inquiry into his own case. The verdict must have been of unmitigated guilt’ (IV; emphases added). Jim gains by the comparison of the two ‘cases’: not even ‘Big Brierly’ could be certain that he would have remained at his post had he been in the Patna. But Marlow never actually states – or proves – this. Instead, the juxtaposition of the two incidents is designed to steer the reader towards this conclusion. Composed over time and through a series of chance collocations and comprised of a host of perspectives of varying authority, a delicately shaded, highly impressionistic portrait of Jim emerges. The reader shares Marlow's dilemma: ‘The views he let me have of himself were like those glimpses through the shifting rents in a thick fog’ (VI). One is reminded of Claude Monet's response to the critical reaction that greeted Impression, soleil levant (1872): ‘Poor blind idiots! They want to see everything clearly, even through the fog.’9 Marlow's repeated description of Jim as ‘under a cloud’ has both psychological and perspectival force.