Lord Jim

by Joseph Conrad

  IV

  The structure of Lord Jim proves deceptive, particularly on first reading. The novel begins in the third person (almost certainly a hangover from its origin as a short story), continues in the first person with Marlow and, despite charting Jim's progress from the world of the Patna inquiry to Patusan, ends with Marlow still unsure as to whether Jim has exonerated himself in his own eyes. The first four chapters are presented by an omniscient narrator who recounts Jim's history up to his exile in Patusan but withholds the ‘fact’ of his deserting the Patna. That this narrator offers an incomplete summary of Jim's life – not, for instance, extending to Gentleman Brown's arrival in Patusan – implicitly questions the nature of authority: what does it mean – indeed, is it possible – to claim to know another person? At this point, Marlow takes up the story as an involved narrator, assuming the role of ‘an ally, a helper, an accomplice’ (VIII). In the light of the compositional history of Lord Jim, the transition from third- to first-person narration involves a further questioning of authority: that between the author and the text. The Gentleman Brown episode was not, in fact, part of Conrad's original conception of this run-away novel.10 Described by Conrad as a ‘most discreet, understanding man’,11 Marlow immediately redirects the narrative away from the ‘well-known fact’ of Jim's transgression as it concerns the Court of Inquiry: ‘Its object was not the fundamental why, but the superficial how, of this affair’ (VI). Instead, Marlow's interest centres on Jim himself: his concern is the felt, subjective experience behind the objective, outward facts, or what we might today term the situation's psychology and its meanings.

  The reader, listening over the shoulders, as it were, of Marlow's after-dinner audience, receives the fruits of a lengthy personal inquiry involving a diverse roll-call of characters drawn from the maritime fraternity who, in their words or deeds, directly or indirectly pass comment on Jim. In the novel's first half, these include the Patna's European crew, Captain Brierly, the Malay helmsman, Bob Stanton of the Sephora, the French Lieutenant, Chester, Mr Denver and a host of minor characters, before Marlow calls upon Stein to ask his advice. Marlow's narration is both composed of and provides a forum for competing interpretations of Jim. The narrative's apparently random shape typifies the experimental and formal concerns of Modernism shared by Conrad's friends and contemporaries including Henry James and Ford Madox Ford.

  Jim's exile from the sea after his trial is characterized by itinerancy: each spell of employment is cut short by a reminder of the infamous Patna affair, when ‘he would throw up the job suddenly and depart’ (I). His certificate cancelled, Jim has been expelled from the maritime community whose laws he has broken. Himself first and foremost a merchant seaman, Marlow fashions Jim's transgression in social terms: ‘The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind’ (XIV). Appropriately, the Patna half of the narrative is dominated by the social consequences of Jim's jump and the practical necessity of continuing to live in society (though Jim remains markedly an outsider in Patusan). But Marlow is forced to admit that his young friend requires something beyond practical help: ‘I had given him many opportunities, but they had been merely opportunities to earn his bread’ (XIX). In the eyes of the marine fraternity, Jim's desertion of his ship brands him a coward; to him, the incident is a wasted opportunity to save 800 people single-handedly, to show his mettle and shine in the world's eyes: ‘My God! what a chance missed!’ (VII). Hardly surprisingly, Marlow recognizes that Jim, engaged in the workaday world – as a ship chandler's water-clerk or as manager of a rice-mill – is an aspiring hero with no stage for his desired actions: his ‘adventurous fancy was suffering all the pangs of starvation’ (XIII).

  Central to the Patna section is Marlow's meeting with the French Lieutenant in a Sydney café, ‘by the merest chance’ (XII). Involved in the Patna's rescue, the French naval officer stayed aboard her for thirty hours. His rank, uniform and scars – the ‘effect of a gunshot’ (XII), Marlow concludes – identify him as ‘one of those steady, reliable men who are the raw material of great reputations’ (XIII), and as someone whose views on duty are pertinent to Marlow's inquiry. According to the French Lieutenant, whose very personality is subsumed by his social function, human frailty is innate: ‘Given a certain combination of circumstances, fear is sure to come’ (XIII). Yet he appreciates the consequences of being found out: ‘One truth the more ought not to make life impossible… But the honour—the honour, monsieur!… The honour… that is real—this is! And what life may be worth when… when the honour is gone—ah, ça! par exemple—I can offer no opinion. I can offer no opinion—because—monsieur—I know nothing of it’ (XIII). To Marlow, the Lieutenant has ‘pricked the bubble’ (XIII). While the gulf between what we actually do and what we should do seems self-evident, a logical crux remains. The honour on which life depends for its ‘worth’ is dependent on situations that expose innate human fear and, in extreme cases, cowardice. But if honour is contingent on circumstance, what price any absolute standard of conduct? Significantly, when Marlow asks a question typical of what are called ‘shame cultures’, where chivalric modes prevail – ‘Couldn't it reduce itself to not being found out?’ – the Frenchman replies, ‘This, monsieur, is too fine for me’ (XIII).

  Sustained by conflicting visions of Jim, Marlow's narration is capable of registering the ambiguities about public and private codes of honour. For example, on Jim's response to the court's verdict he comments: ‘the idea obtrudes itself that he made so much of his disgrace while it is the guilt alone that matters’ (XVI). The issue of lost honour that provides the plot's mainspring is consequent upon Jim's feelings of disgrace at having betrayed a code of behaviour in which he continues to believe – quite a different thing from his guilt at having failed in his professional duty, for which he is duly punished by having his certificate cancelled. In essence, Jim has been judged twice: by the precepts of guilt culture, a matter of ‘face’ in society, and by a shame culture, whereby he judges himself and finds himself wanting. Honour and what the French Lieutenant calls ‘the eye of others’ (XIII) are shame culture concerns. Marlow's capacity to look beyond social formulations of Jim's (ironically, unnecessary) desertion of the Patna leads him to consult Stein, who re-envisions the problem as interior and private, sending Jim to a backwater symbolically cut off from the great world.

  If the novel's Patna half is concerned with honour, a matter of public concern, the Patusan half reinstates the claims of conscience. The narrative split thus re-enacts the predicament of Jim himself, who is divided between social duty and personal responsibility. Marlow registers this division in his altered opinion. To begin with, he argues that Jim was ‘outwardly so typical of that good, stupid kind we like to feel marching right and left of us in life’ (V). This opinion is most obviously realized in the French Lieutenant's stern, unquestioning sense of duty. But when, after his last meeting with Jim, Marlow returns to this view – ‘we must fight in the ranks or our lives don't count’ (XXXVI) – he attributes it to the Privileged Man with whom he shares the conclusion of Jim's story. By contrast, Marlow's revised opinion is that ‘Jim had no dealings but with himself, and the question is whether at the last he had not confessed to a faith mightier than the laws of order and progress’ (XXXVI). The distance between these two opinions reflects the degree to which his understanding of Jim has modified and grown, testifying to Marlow's suitability as a sympathetic narrator, while endorsing the novel's epigraph.

  Marlow's interview with Stein is pivotal to the narrative and to the enlargement of his perspective. Stein is partly modelled on Alfred Russel Wallace (1822–1913), a British naturalist whose travels in the Malay Archipelago led him, independently, to a theory of natural selection that hastened the publication of Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859). Reputedly Conrad's ‘favourite bedside companion’,12 Wallace's The Malay Archipelago: The Land of the Orang-Utan and the Bird of Paradise (1869) variously influences the novel. Occurring about ha
lf-way through Lord Jim, the Stein chapter redirects the concern with honour, advancing the claims of personal autonomy above those of code and community. By contrast with the vision of honour promoted in the Patna narrative, where it is measured in terms of service and defined by a medley of European voices, Jim in Patusan is ‘in every sense alone of his kind’ (xxvii).

  Naturalist and scientist, romantic adventurer and island trader, Stein, like Jim, is uprooted, having fled his native Bavaria after the failure of the 1848 Revolution. Unlike Jim, however, he has successfully combined heroic adventure with practical ‘management’ (XX), realizing his dreams and ambitions in the world. Recognizing a fellow romantic, Stein proposes a free rein to Jim's temperament by sending him to Patusan as his agent. In his deliberately gnomic formulation:

  ‘A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns—nicht wahr?… No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.’ (XX)

  In this passage, a frustratingly intractable Conradian crux, Stein identifies Jim's romantic temperament as his ‘destructive element’, but, in a supreme endorsement of individual identity over collective responsibility, he advocates ‘submission’ to it. An entomologist keenly aware of the delicate balance of natural forces that make possible the infinite variety of life-forms, Stein lifts the narrative from a moral on to a philosophical plane. Chester's claim that one ‘must see things exactly as they are’ (XIV) is countered in Stein's ‘experiment’, which, implicitly, demands a place in the world for those who ‘see things as they aren't’, that is, for the man blessed (or cursed) with imagination.

  V

  Until Gentleman Brown and his gang arrive in Patusan Jim's success in bringing order to social chaos is reminiscent of popular, mid-nineteenth-century ‘Beachcomber Memoirs’ of G. A. Henty, R. M. Ballantyne and others – exotic accounts of European castaways, endowed with more boyish pluck than introspection, reinventing themselves on foreign shores through manly acts of heroism. Jim's very name recalls the boy-hero of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island (1883), Jim Hawkins, and perhaps suggests that Conrad is consciously re-envisioning the boys’ adventure tale. The ‘light holiday literature’ (I) that inspired Jim to go to sea in quest of heroic adventure is realized in Patusan, where, by his own definition, his success is ‘immense’ (XXVII). Incarcerated in the Rajah's stockade on arriving, he escapes to lead Doramin's Bugis to victory over the tyrannical Sherif Ali, rescuing the country from ‘endless insecurity’ (XXV). Thereafter, he dominates Patusan's political and social landscape: ‘His word decided everything’ (XXVII). In addition, he attends to Stein's trading interests and, in an obvious gesture towards chivalric tropes, earns the love of Jewel. If, as critics have suggested, the reader's attention flags during this sequence, it may be because, as Jane Austen said of her heroines, ‘pictures of perfection… make me sick’.13

  In its concern with public shame and private guilt, outsides and insides, the narrative seems to demand Patusan as an interior alternative to the world of the Patna. But, despite the echo of ‘Patna’ in ‘Patusan’, the latter's status renders their correspondence problematic. The state is located where ‘the haggard utilitarian lies of our civilisation wither and die, to be replaced by pure exercises of imagination’ (XXIX). These ‘utilitarian lies’ notwithstanding, in a novel concerned with the rituals that make private matters public, the moonlit setting and distance from ‘the world where events move, men change, light flickers, life flows’ (XXV) serve to erase history from Jim's self-imaging in Patusan, where he has ‘left his earthly failings behind him’ (XXI) and, in consequence, to complicate reparation for his actual crime. Jim acknowledges this irreconcilability when he tells Marlow: ‘“I have got back my confidence in myself—a good name—yet sometimes I wish… No! I shall hold what I've got. Can't expect anything more.” He flung his arm out towards the sea. “Not out there anyhow”’ (XXXV).

  After the psychological intensity of the Patna chapters, Marlow's frame of reference in the Patusan is at once more symbolic and aesthetic. His relationship to Jim's story alters: he becomes an observer of Stein's experiment, inevitably so since ‘to Jim's successes there were no externals’ (XXII). In contrast to the mutable outside world, Patusan, true to the tropes of colonialist discourse, remains timeless and static. The characters grouped around Jim exist ‘as if under an enchanter's wand’, becoming like figures fixed in a painting: Dain Waris is ‘intelligent and brave’; Tamb' Itam ‘surly and faithful’; Jewel ‘absorbed in her frightened, suspicious adoration’ (XXV). With its split conical hill presenting an objective correlative of Jim's divided psyche and flowers that seem ‘grown not in this world’ (XXXIV), Patusan's landscape is also enlisted in this aestheticism. Both a densely realized place of tropical moonlight and surf-swept shores and an imaginative space, Patusan simultaneously sustains a colonialist fantasy and a romantic allegory. Combining these two imaginative realms irresistibly incorporates Patusan's natives and immigrant community into the European chivalric dream. The resulting multiplicity of cultural voices has implications for the novel's conclusion, where Jewel, especially, remains ‘unforgiving’ (XLII) in her judgement of Jim's final act, in her eyes a desertion and breaking of his word. Thus Lord Jim transmits and transmutes the chivalric ideal of honour through two conflicts: within ‘us’ (Jim is ‘one of us’, yet we certainly do not desert our posts in a crisis) and between ‘us’ and ‘them’.

  While Jim's conquest and influence enact, perhaps dangerously, a one-man mission civilisatrice, the creation of an order from which its subjects would benefit, casting him and Jewel as ‘knight and maiden meeting to exchange vows amongst haunted ruins’ (XXXIII) ensures that their relationship extends beyond an instance of the eroticized exotic into the realm of chivalry, whereby geographical, political and sexual conditions are transfigured into the tropes of romance. It is hardly incidental that Patusan itself is repeatedly described as Jim's ‘opportunity’, sitting ‘veiled by his side like an Eastern bride waiting to be uncovered by the hand of the master’ (XXIV). Positioned between competing public and personal worlds, Jim is presented in oxymoronic terms, whereby Jim the leader is ‘a captive in every sense’ (XXVI), ‘imprisoned within the very freedom of his power’ (XXIX).

  Taking leave of Patusan, Marlow still considers Jim, clad all in white, as standing ‘at the heart of a vast enigma’ (XXXV). He has not yet solved the riddle of Jim's character as the structure of the novel tacitly promised. The novel's evolution again plays a role in complicating its meanings, for Conrad, at least briefly, seems to have contemplated closing the novel at this moment of leave-taking.14 Instead, Marlow concludes his narrative, the final chapter in Jim's life, in a letter to the sole member of his audience who ‘showed an interest in him that survived the telling of his story’ (XXXVI). The Privileged Man's strident defence of racial fault-lines – ‘giving your life up to them… was like selling your soul to a brute’ (XXXVI) – casts doubt on his suitability as recipient of these last words, but allies him with and prefigures Gentleman Brown, who will assail Jim in comparable terms: ‘You have been white once, for all your tall talk of this being your own people and you being one with them’ (XLI). By contrast, Jim's status in Patusan as resident alien, virtually a Conradian archetype, affords the reader a way of thinking through the protocols of race, not least because the novel's title, while capturing something of Jim's ambivalence in its combination of honorific ‘Lord’ and diminutive ‘Jim’, is a translation of Tuan Jim, suggesting that his very identity is multi-racially, and multi-culturally, compounded.

  According to Frederic Jameson, the Patna sequence offers ‘one of the most breathtaking exercises in non-stop textual production that our literature has to show’.15 Anecdotal and reflective, this sequence is picaresque in manner, as Marlow's chance encounters contribute
to his ever-altering portrait. By contrast, Jim's adventures in Patusan are chronicled in broadly linear fashion, the usual mode of myth and tale. This transition, moving from a fluid, even at times seemingly random, to a more punctuated formulation, stylistically demarcates Modernist and adventure narratives. Occasioned by Marlow meeting Gentleman Brown ‘most unexpectedly’ (XXXVII) shortly before he died, the episode reprises the psychological intensity of the novel's first part, reasserting the claims of the outside world and rescuing the tale for history.

  Described as ‘a blind accomplice of the Dark Powers’ (XXXVIII), Gentleman Brown disrupts Jim's idyll. A ‘latter-day buccaneer’ with an ‘arrogant temper’ and ‘a vehement scorn for mankind at large and for his victims in particular’ (XXXVIII), Brown quickly sizes up Patusan as a source of plunder, though also seeks refuge from the world and its laws. In a novel of doubles, Brown is a malign counterpart to Jim. English outcasts, the men yet stand ‘on the opposite poles of that conception of life which includes all mankind’ (XLI). Jim's actions in Patusan are motivated by reparation, Brown's by a sour sense of revenge against the world. Jim declares himself ‘responsible for every life in the land’ (XLIII), Brown that he will ‘send half of your unoffending town to heaven with us in smoke’ (XLI). As so often in Conrad's ‘exotic’ fiction, the colonial world is transformed into a site of Western conflict.