Lord Jim (4 page)

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.

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.

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