Brown instinctively loathes Jim at first sight, seeing him (ironically enough, as Jim, too, is a moral outcast) as a representative of the world that ‘he had in the very shaping of his life contemned and flouted’ (XLI). Given Brown's ‘satanic gift of finding out the best and the weakest spot in his victims’ (XLII), his parley with Jim inevitably yields ‘a vein of subtle reference to their common blood, an assumption of common experience; a sickening suggestion of common guilt’ (XLII). The very clichés Brown uses to explain his predicament recall the Patna incident: ‘There are my men in the same boat—and, by God, I am not the sort to jump out of trouble and leave them in a d–d lurch’ (XLI). But the identification is misleading. Brown will condemn Jim for the very charity he extends, ludicrously castigating him for not having ‘devil enough in him to make an end of me’ (XXXVII). The parody ‘gentleman’, reputedly ‘the son of a baronet’ (XXXVIII), condemns the sense of fair-play that defines Jim's gentlemanliness.
In his conversation with Jewel, Jim unconsciously recalls the French Lieutenant's view of humanity: ‘“Are they very bad?” she asked, leaning over his chair. “Men act badly sometimes without being much worse than others,” he said after some hesitation’ (XLIII). The positioning of this statement, just before the violent end to Jim's reign in Patusan, offers a timely reminder of the contest between chivalry and stoicism in the novel. With the massacre of Dain Waris and his men, Brown balances ‘his account with the evil fortune’ (XLIV), and Jim's day in Patusan is over. Determined to face the consequences of his action rather than flee, he submits to Doramin and certain death. This suicidal visit, ensuring death before dishonour, inverts the pattern of the first half of the novel: in the Patna episode, Jim's self-image was overwhelmed by his instinct to survive; here it is rescued, even if paradoxically, at the expense of life itself.
Jim's pursuit of honour lost leads by way of chivalric romance to the archetypal death of the hero. In seeking to defend ‘the honour of the craft’, Marlow's narrative has led to its fictional source in medieval chivalry. Lord Jim thus evaluates and, more importantly, re-evaluates the ideal of heroic service on which the honour of maritime service depends. The chorus of Romantic motifs surrounding Jim's death virtually drowns out the voice of Jewel, urging him to fight. Like the future of Patusan itself, where the Rajah's men are already becoming more assertive, her claims are swept to the margins of a narrative whose focus Jim dominates. Conrad's account of writing the conclusion – pulled off in a twenty-one-hour stretch – captures this mood: ‘A great hush. Cigarette ends growing into a mound similar to a cairn over a dead hero. Moon rose over the barn looked in at the window and climbed out of sight. Dawn broke, brightened. I put the lamp out and went on, with the morning breeze blowing the sheets of MS all over the room. Sun rose. I wrote the last word’ (Collected Letters, vol. II, p. 284). Implicit in the first half of Lord Jim is the question ‘What must Jim do to be saved?’ Following Stein's injunction, ‘to the destructive element submit’ (XX), the answer the second half provides is fashioned in chivalric and egotistical terms: by accepting death on his own terms, through an act of sacrifice, the hero transcends death, raising himself above the common mortal condition to achieve immortality in legend and story.
To Marlow, who elegizes his friend, Jim's death is none the less the supreme instance of his ‘exalted egoism’: ‘He goes away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct. Is he satisfied—quite, now, I wonder? We ought to know. He is one of us’ (XLV). Despite Marlow's – and, indeed, the novel's – insistent appeal to community, the Romantic ‘I’ struggles to bond with the romanticized ‘we’, leading one to suspect that Marlow's doubts about ‘the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct’ (V) remain. Such inconsistencies are integral to the novel's effect: the generically split narrative returns social codes to ritual meaning and, together with Marlow's poetics, ensures a perspective that can register ambiguities that evade the categories of official ideologies. In a final twist, the subject seems to escape its narrator, whose moral relativism is alien to the absolutism of myth and romance.
VI
Although written for an English audience at the close of the nineteenth century, the novel has resonated internationally, perhaps nowhere more than in Conrad's original cultural context. It was during the composition of Lord Jim that Eliza Orzeszkowa, a novelist and feminist, took Conrad to task for deserting Poland for financial gain abroad (Najder, ed., Conrad Under Familial Eyes, pp. 178–93). What the financially strapped Conrad, whose work at the time sold a couple of thousand copies, made of her claim that he wrote ‘popular and lucrative novels in English’ (p. 187) can only be imagined. However groundless, the charges none the less added a biographical inflection to the theme of betrayal in Lord Jim, as certain critics stretched to locate echoes of Patria and Polska in Patna. More to the point, sales of the novel rose markedly during the First World War, when the themes of conscience, duty and heroism were vividly present in public and private life. And half a century after its publication, the themes of Lord Jim would become a rallying-point for Poland during her resistance to German occupation during the Second World War. As Józef Szczepański records, Conrad became ‘the standard-bearer of his young compatriots’ (Najder, ed., Conrad under Familial Eyes, p. 277).
Lord Jim's enduring fascination stems, in part, from its quintessentially human subject. Albert J. Guerard attributed the novel's universality to the fact that ‘nearly everyone has jumped off some Patna and most of us have been compelled to live on, desperately or quietly engaged in reconciling what we are with what we would like to be’ (Guerard, p. 127). Published at the twentieth century's dawn, Lord Jim is a Janus-faced novel whose hero is situated between social inheritance and individual aspiration. Eighty years after its publication, Ian Watt claimed: ‘Jim does something which no other hero of a great twentieth-century novel has done: he dies for his honour’ (Watt, p. 356). Conrad's themes – the nature of honour, the power of friendship, the responsibility of privilege, the fragility of courage, the need for forgiveness, the bond and boundary between self and community – offer an enduring commentary on human experience. Jim is, after all, ‘one of us’, fated, as we are, never to be seen clearly and perhaps only glimpsing the workings of our own natures.
Writing in 1903, Conrad asserted that ‘Both at sea and on land my point of view is English, from which the conclusion should not be drawn that I have become an Englishman. That is not the case. Homo duplex has in my case more than one meaning’ (Collected Letters, vol. III, p. 89). The story of Jim narrated by Marlow, Lord Jim is, famously, a duplex novel. This dualism suits a tale that depends on contrasts and on Marlow's doubts. Whilst confirming that Jim achieved greatness, ‘as genuine as any man ever achieved’ (XXIV), Marlow wonders ‘as if it were our imagination alone that could set loose upon us the might of an overwhelming destiny’ (XXXVI). Jim's quest to regain his lost honour is an odyssey of self-discovery. In the interplay of public and private selves, he wins glory at the expense of social cohesion. The interrogation of his Romantic identity uncovers chivalric ideals on which collective experience depends, while subjecting that identity's restrictions and necessities to question.
Allan H. Simmons
NOTES
Works cited in the text of the Introduction can be found in Further Reading.
1. Virginia Woolf, ‘Joseph Conrad’, in The Common Reader (London: Hogarth Press, 1942), p. 286.
2. Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 4.
3. Jacques Berthoud, ‘Introduction’ to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. viii.
4. Notes on Life and Letters, ed. J. H. Stape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 19.
5. The Mirror of the Sea, in Dent's Collected Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1946–55), pp. 54–5.
6. A Personal Record,
in Works of Joseph Conrad, p. 87.
7. Cited in Norman Sherry, Conrad's Eastern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), p. 62.
8. See also William Blackburn, ed., Joseph Conrad: Letters to William Blackwood and David S. Meldrum (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1958), p. 86.
9. Jean Renoir, Renoir: My Father, trans. Randolph and Dorothy Weaver (London: Collins, 1962), p. 157.
10. J. H. Stape, ‘Lord Jim: The “Problem” of Patusan’, in François Gallix, ed., Lord Jim /Joseph Conrad (Paris: Editions Ellipses, 2003), pp. 43–55.
11. Author's Note to Youth, in Works of Joseph Conrad, p. x.
12. Richard Curle, ‘Joseph Conrad: Ten Years After’, Virginia Quarterly Review 10 (July 1934), p. 431.
13. Deirdre Le Faye, ed., Jane Austen's Letters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 335.
14. Stape, ‘Lord Jim’.
15. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen, 1981), p. 219.
Further Reading
LETTERS
The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, with Owen Knowles (vol. VI), J. H. Stape (vol. VII) and Gene M. Moore (vol. VIII), 8 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983–).
Conrad's Polish Background: Letters to and from Polish Friends, ed. Zdzislaw Najder (London: Oxford University Press, 1964).
A Portrait in Letters: Correspondence to and about Conrad, ed. J. H. Stape and Owen Knowles (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 1996).
BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES
Batchelor, John, The Life of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).
Knowles, Owen, A Conrad Chronology (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990).
Najder, Zdzislaw, Joseph Conrad: A Life, trans. Halina Carroll-Najder (1983; revised edn London: Boydell, 2007).
Najder, Zdzislaw, ed., Conrad under Familial Eyes, trans. Halina Carroll-Najder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Ray, Martin, ed., Joseph Conrad: Interviews and Recollections (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990).
Stape, J. H., The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (London: Heinemann; New York: Knopf, 2007).
REFERENCE
Knowles, Owen, An Annotated Critical Bibliography of Joseph Conrad (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1992).
Knowles, Owen, and Gene M. Moore, Oxford Reader's Companion to Conrad (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Sherry, Norman, ed., Conrad: The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973).
CRITICAL STUDIES
Berthoud, Jacques, Conrad: The Major Phase (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
Gordan, John D., Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1941).
Guerard, Albert J., Conrad the Novelist (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958).
Lothe, Jakob, Conrad's Narrative Method (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Moser, Thomas C., Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957).
Najder, Zdzislaw, Conrad in Perspective: Essays on Art and Fidelity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Simmons, Allan H., Joseph Conrad (London: Palgrave, 2006).
Stape, J. H., ed., The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Watt, Ian, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (London: Chatto & Windus, 1980).
Watts, Cedric, Preface to Conrad (London: Longman, 1990; 2nd edn 1993).
JOURNALS
The Conradian: The Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK), published twice yearly by Rodopi of Amsterdam.
Conradiana: A Journal of Joseph Conrad Studies, published thrice yearly by Texas Tech University Press, Lubbock, Texas.
L'Époque Conradienne, published once yearly by the Société Conradienne Francaise at Les Presses Universitaires Limoges, Limoges, France.
ON LORD JIM
Criticism
Batchelor, John, Lord Jim (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988).
Bloom, Harold, ed., Conrad's ‘Lord Jim’: Modern Critical Interpretations (New York: Chelsea House, 1987).
Gallix, François, ed., Lord Jim /Joseph Conrad (Paris: Editions Ellipses, 2003).
Murfin, Ross C., Lord Jim: After the Truth (New York: Twayne, 1992).
Simmons, Allan H., and J. H. Stape, eds., Lord Jim: Centennial Essays (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2000).
Tanner, Tony, Lord Jim (London: Edward Arnold, 1963).
Textual Matters
Knowles, Owen, and J. H. Stape, ‘The Rationale of Punctuation in Conrad's Blackwood's Fiction’, The Conradian 30.1 (2005), pp. 1–45.
Sullivan, Ernest W., II, The Several Endings of Joseph Conrad's ‘Lord Jim’ (London: Joseph Conrad Society (UK), [1984]).
A Note on the Texts
The copy-text for this edition is the first English edition of Lord Jim: A Tale, published by William Blackwood in London and Edinburgh on 9 October 1900. The copy-text for the ‘Author's Note’ is the preface as first published in J. M. Dent & Son's 1917 edition of the novel, the second English edition.
The extant pre-print sources of the text of Lord Jim are as follows: (1) ‘Tuan Jim: A Sketch’, 28 holograph pages, Houghton Library, Harvard University; (2) manuscript (incomplete), 357 holograph leaves, Rosenbach Museum and Library, Philadelphia; (3) 8 holograph leaves, Huntington Library, San Marino California; (4) 1 holograph leaf, British Library, London; (5) 7 typescript pages, Rosenbach Museum and Library. The manuscript of the ‘Author's Note’ is at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
Lord Jim was first published in Blackwood's Magazine, in fourteen instalments between October 1899 and November 1900. Conrad's revised serial text formed the basis for the three book versions of the first edition that appeared in 1900: the first English edition, Lord Jim: A Tale (William Blackwood and Sons, 9 October); the first American edition, Lord Jim: A Romance by Doubleday & McClure of New York (31 October); and the first Canadian edition, Lord Jim: A Tale of the Sea by W. J. Gage of Toronto (publication date unknown but entered for Canadian copyright on 10 November 1900). In addition to the serial revisions, Conrad revised the London galley proofs for the English and Canadian versions, and the typeset plates for the last ten chapters for the English edition. The most authoritative of the first editions is that published by Blackwood.
Although this is not a critical edition, emendations to the copy-text have been made to correct outright errors, to supply missing punctuation and to rationalize minor inconsistencies.
Writing to William Blackwood on 18 July 1900, Conrad suggested that the book ‘dispense with the word Chapter throughout the book, leaving only the Roman numerals’, giving as his reason the fact that ‘these divisions (some of them very short) are not chapters in the usual sense each carrying the action a step further or embodying a complete episode. I meant them only as pauses – rests for the reader's attention while he is following the development of one situation, only one really from beginning to end’ (Collected Letters, vol. II, p. 282). This desire, not met in the first English edition, has been belatedly honoured in this edition.
Instances of house-styling in the first English edition, generally involving the use of a comma or, on two occasions, a semi-colon, before an em-dash (,—and;—) have been emended by retaining only the em-dash. Thus, for example, where the copy-text text has ‘East,—’ or ‘intentions;—’ these have been amended to ‘East—’ (II) and ‘intentions—’ (XXXII).
Italics are used for foreign words and phrases in the text and the spellings and protocols of the language (French, German, Latin) followed. In the French Lieutenant sequence the single debatable instance is ‘Pardon’ (XIII), possibly an English word, but since the conversation takes place in French the French formulation is apparently intended and the word italicized.
Other editorial emendations are listed below. These derive from occasional spelling
and grammatical corrections, and, mainly, from emending or adding punctuation. Spellings and usage have mainly not been modernized (thus, for instance, in Chapter VIII, ‘unconceivable’, which appears in the OED, is retained even though contemporary usage expects ‘inconceivable’). An exception is ‘Bankok’, which has been changed to Bangkok. Conrad's use, idiosyncratic at the time he wrote, was possibly contaminated by Polish. Obvious misprints and inconsistencies of capitalization and italicization have been silently corrected.
LIST OF EMENDATIONS
The rejected reading of the copy-text appears to the right of the square bracket.
20:22
Schnapps] shnaps
20:30
Schwein] schwein
23:6
if] it
38:34
Ewigkeit] ewigkeit
40:3
moustaches] moustache
42:16
coif] coiff
43:17
shoulder;] shoulders;
44:20
D.T.s] D.T.'s
46:27
negligible] negligeable
48:23
southward.”’] southward.”
49:8
you?”’] you?”
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