Nearly everybody grows up with ideals; few of us can even try to live up to them. Adulthood is tough enough without that little fact thrown in. Joseph Conrad puts us on a very dark journey by examining how one young man’s failure to measure up costs him everything he had.
The result is a gripping read of probing psychology and cultural displacement that simultaneously raised the bar for naturalistic adventure fiction at the dawn of the 20th century.
At the root of everything is the man called Jim. Is he a hero, a coward, or just, as we are often reminded, “one of us,” a man stuck in the middle who can only ever see himself at opposing ends of the bell curve of human conduct? Conrad keeps us wondering.
So does the novel’s narrator, a sea captain named Marlow who first encounters Jim at a port town, struggling to keep his composure at a public hearing as his part in a scandalous episode at sea is laid bare:
“I didn’t know what he was playing up to – if he was playing up to anything at all – and I suspect he did not know either; for it is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.”
Lord Jim the novel, like Jim himself, is dominated by the Patna, a rusting, dilapidated vessel pressed into service ferrying 800 Muslim pilgrims. This episode alone takes up a third of the book. Jim gets a job as a mate, daydreaming away his days and night as he crosses the peaceful Pacific. Then one night the boat hits something underwater, a half-submerged wreck perhaps. Jim steals off in a lifeboat with the rest of the white crew, leaving the pilgrims to drown.
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| A steamship from the early 1900s. On the Patna, passengers are crowded on an open deck with only a half-dozen lifeboats available. "Look at dese cattle," sneers the captain. Image from https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-titanic-of-the-west-bdd0e83e5ca3 |
For Jim, the consequences come after making shore: loss of his sailor’s certification and lingering ignominy regarding what he left behind. He spends the rest of the novel trying to get past his disgrace, unable to because it has become the rootstalk of his entire self-identity.
The details of what happens with the Patna are too good to reveal here; suffice it to say the situation calls into question Jim’s burden in multiple ways. Later on, Marlow reflects on another character’s suicide, calling it a triumph of ego over sense. Conrad inhabits an inflection point in Western culture; on the verge of world war, notions of nobility and honor were coming into open conflict with a practical humanism.
Conrad was not a religious man, in Lord Jim he reflects on the unsettling idea of whether redemption is even possible in a post-Christian world. The answer is probably not, certainly not here. This would make for heavy reading were it not for Conrad’s descriptive flair, his awesome scene-setting set loose in the tangerine vistas of the Far Pacific:
The shores made on each side of the river a dark smudge, in which one could detect hints of columnar forms and shadows of twisted branches high up.
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| Joseph Conrad was a Ukrainian-born product of Polish nobility who made himself one of British literature's greatest authors only after learning English in his late 20s. An internationalist outlook runs through his fiction. Image from https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2014/05/joseph-conrad-s-crystal-ball |
Lord Jim is a great book not for its message – at bottom too basic and bleak to warrant its sprawl – so much as for its lived-in depth, a sense we are really there with Marlow on a steamy veranda amid casuarina trees or aboard a creaking brigantine sailing placid under a crepuscular sky. Conrad really engages you as a reader, and while he plays with the narrative structure, and allows the story to drift quite a bit into anecdote and conjecture, the book remains wholly engaging on its margins.
The use of Marlow as a framing device is truly inspired; the character made appearances in two earlier Conrad works, but more as an active player. Here he is the one telling the story, in the guise of explaining it to unnamed companions at some vague gathering some years after the events he describes. It is all a bit mysterious.
Framing devices in which the main story is gradually introduced by secondary characters have been with us as long as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, but they seemed to take on a special quality by the late 1800s. Henry James used one famously (and rather annoyingly) in The Turn Of The Screw, while Willa Cather employs hers beautifully in My Ántonia, as a reverie that gently calls attention to mankind’s shared ephemerality.
Conrad is doing something different with his framing device here. In his Preface, he points out its unlikely nature, Marlow talking for hours and hours about this strange fellow. He insists it works because the story is interesting and then adds waggishly: “If I hadn’t believed that it was interesting I could never have begun to write it.”
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| Peter O'Toole played Jim in a 1965 adaptation directed by Richard Brooks. Stiff and overlong, the film offers exotic cinematic flavor and some fine supporting performances to almost make up for a patchy script. Image from https://www.cinema.ucla.edu/events/2011-05-16/lord-jim-1965 |
Conrad is employing that other literary device of the time, the unreliable narrator. Marlow is an odd fish. The motive of his obsession with Jim is never clear, not even, he tells us, to himself. Is it fatherly? Homosexual? Perhaps even predatory?
Eventually Marlow even suggests the whole thing may be made up:
‘I am telling you so much about my own instinctive feelings and bemused reflections because they remain so little to be told of him. He existed for me, and after all is only through me that he exists for you.’
Of course, Lord Jim is made up, by Conrad, but the author writes it in such a way that it feels like factual information, with long sections where Marlow admits he does not know things and can only speculate. Again, we are coming up to the modern era of literature, where clarity and truth are understood to be elusive. It plays marvelously here.
Lord Jim is a novel about the failure to attain maturity. For Jim, childish dreams of glory that occupy his mind aboard the Patna take the place of actual deeds, a fatal flaw not for of that alone, but because he can not forgive himself when his real-life inadequacy is exposed. He tries to escape the memory of the Patna by fleeing further and further south, into uncharted islands off Indonesia. Even when others know of this secret and still like Jim, he keeps running, unable to bear not only the guilt of his deed but its cosmic insignificance in the larger world.
“It is not I or the world who remember,” Marlow tells him, pleading for him to return home. “It is you – you, who remember.
Even when Jim succeeds in finding a place to call his own, where he is looked upon as the commanding hero of his dreams, he can not allow himself to let go of his bitter past. In Patusan there is a quality of dream-like idyll, a Bali Ha’i fantasy of tanned-skin admirers which seems to both establish and ridicule the whole concept of civilization as the White Man’s Burden.
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| Jim finds acceptance and leadership opportunities among the family ruling over the "Malays" of Patusan. Some think the fictional location is based on Sumatra, which Conrad visited. Above, a Sumatran family of influence circa 1900. Image from https://www.wowshack.com/a-rare-historical-look-at-old-indonesia-25-photos-taken-pre-1920/ |
Modern critics decry Conrad as an apologist for colonialism, but Jim is much too flawed a vessel, too wrapped up in his own failures, to suggest anything of the sort. Lord Jim pushes against presuppositions of white superiority in subtle ways, which is perhaps how it gets missed.
Patusan is where the novel gets a little flabby for me, not fatally but noticeably. Conrad could produce fiction of an optimistic hue, he just wasn’t much in practice four novels into his career, and it shows. Marlow notes so often that everything is on the verge of falling apart that when it does, it manages to be both anticlimactic and nonsensical.
But the journey is magnificent. Conrad reminds me of Henry James for the way he delves so deeply into such things as motivation and emotion, but with more messiness and humor.
Marlow shrugs recalling Jim’s self-exile: “It might have been flight and it might have been a mode of combat. To the common mind he became known as a rolling stone, because this was the funniest part; he did after a time become perfectly known, and even notorious, within the circle of his wanderings (which had a diameter of, say, three thousand miles), in the same way as an eccentric character is known to a whole countryside. For instance, in Bangkok, where he found employment with Yucker Brothers, charterers and teak merchants, it was almost pathetic to see him go about in sunshine hugging his secrets, which was known to the very up-country logs on the river.”
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| Conrad establishes a framing device of older British men listening to Marlow's tale at a social gathering. "They were attuned to the eternal peace of Eastern sky and sea," Conrad writes of them. "They
loved short passages, good deck-chairs, large native crews, and the distinction
of being white." Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Yorkshiremen_sketch |
Conrad never knocks Jim’s bravery nor his intelligence. We see him at times as competent, level-headed, and willing to risk his life. It is Jim’s egotism about not being heroic at all times, and him using it as a weapon against himself, that Conrad puts forward as the tragedy of his tale.
“The human heart is vast enough to contain all the world,” Marlow tells us. “It is valiant enough to bear the burden, but where is the courage that would cast it off?”
A want of hardness, too, dogs Jim’s steps. Conrad’s story puts him into contact with assorted desperadoes, who supply the novel with ample color and tension. The worst among them is Gentleman Brown, a character who is a literal reverse image of Jim, right down to having no first name the way Jim has no surname. Always on the attack like Jim is on the defensive, Brown’s bluff manner threatens to bring down all Jim manages to build.
Jim’s elitism ultimately is his flaw and his refuge: The quality of these men did not matter; he rubbed shoulders with them, but they could not touch him; he shared the air they breathed, but he was different.
Lord Jim is a fascinating introduction to the world of Conrad, an exercise in pure escapism filled with descriptive imagery and picaresque characters that presses your nose hard against the cold facts of life. Yet all the time he hits me over the head with the futility of my existence, Conrad still manages to charm me and keep me reading, a trick not many of Conrad’s modernist successors have ever mastered.
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