Jack Scott - The Athletic Revolution

I used to look at American college sport with a kind of awed reverence. It was so serious, so professional and so smothered in hype and ‘pageantry’. I wondered why our British university sporting system was so puny by comparison. After reading ‘SportsWorld’ by Robert Lipsyte, I had begun to develop a slightly more critical understanding of the system. That author led me to this book, which was published four years earlier. I found it engaging, unusually perceptive in its diagnosis of the system’s problems and, in some ways, prophetic in describing many features of sport as it exists today in 2019.



The author, a student athlete who later became an athletic director, academic and a radical campaigner, knows his subject matter intimately and is unimpressed with what he has encountered. Much of this book focuses on college sport and professional sport and the idea that they have been hijacked from their rightful controllers, the participants, in order to serve the interests of others. Here Scott is appealing to a far earlier, historical version of sport played for sport’s sake:

“‘So long as a sport is true to itself, the only purpose of the organisation of it is the enjoyment of the players; as soon as the interests of the spectators are allowed to become predominant, corruption has set in and the essence of the game has been lost’ (H.A.Harris Greek Athletes and Athletics). The essence of athletics (participation) is more important than the accident (spectator viewing). Once athletes are paid for competing in a country with a private-profit economy, the accident will usually become the essence, for the prime concern now is for the owner(s) to make a profit, and this is done by attracting spectators and landing lucrative radio and television contracts. The activity is then no longer conducted primarily for the benefit of the athletes, but for the owners to make a profit. And if past experience with other sports is any indication, owners will do whatever is necessary to make their profit.” p97



By the 1960s and 70s, and to a far greater degree today, what Scott would regard as malign influences had corrupted the game and destroyed its essence:

“But let’s be honest about it. A lot of competing and even contradictory values have found their way into intercollegiate competition. The felt need to gratify spectators has especially taken our minds off the players. The need for revenues has, in some cases, taken our eyes off the values of amateurism. A craving for institutional recognition has kept us from recognising the participants. In lots of ways - some of them minor, some major - we have lent credence to the notion that we pay lip service to the values of sport, as we so often pay lip service to peace, to improved race relations, and to academic values.” p30-31

Far from being an exemplar of virtue in society, sport has become an unwitting and much feted mirror for much that is wrong with the world. It’s true that Scott’s book can be misty eyed about sport in times gone by and the historical material contained in the book is where it is at its worst; chapter 13 being a prime example. However, he does have a point about the unusual position college sports programs occupied in the 60s and 70s and still do today. Much of this has to do with the shift from participant focus and leadership to spectator-led focus and leadership. Universities and alumni funding serious sports programs want, and require, success to justify their expenditure. As such, the focus shifts from the well being of the athlete and their development to the well being of the program and its development. This is part of the creed of sports that is prevalent in modern culture: no individual is more important than the team and winning is more important than everything else. But why is it like this? What of the damage that premature professionalism does to the individuals and institutions involved?



Sport, in this corrupted, spectator focussed, profit generating form, has very few of the original virtues that are claimed for it. From it’s very conception, what place does a quasi-professional sports program have in an institution purporting to hold itself to the highest intellectual and academic standards? As the much quoted Dave Meggyesy writes, ‘“The cynicism and hypocrisy of the university’s commitment to football: at the same time the Chancellor was claiming to be guided by the highest religious and educational principles, he was hiring football players to gather money and prestige for the university” (p60). What do other students make of this privileged class of students with dramatically different goals and rules governing their student life? What effect does this have on the academic culture of an institution? Robert Lipsyte’s comment on the sports scholarship program gets to the heart of this hypocrisy, “the conventional SportsWorld wisdom, that most of these young men would never have a chance to attend college without basketball, is absolutely true. And a condemnation of the educational system that barely needs comment.” (p126, SportsWorld). Indeed, the descriptions of college recruitment practices contained in the book are immoral and meaningless in almost equal measure. Nothing suggests that this kind of rule bending and exception seeking has abated today. Sport occupies an outsized and outlandish position within some universities. The coaches are paid more than all the other staff, the department’s facilities are newer and more expensive than everyone else’s, women’s sport is passed over in favour of men’s, ‘major’ sports are preferred to those deemed ‘minor’ and all this madness is sometimes financed out of tuition fees! School spirit, alumni influence, good PR and the positive values that sports instils are all trotted out as justifications. None of them really ring true. George Orwell seems cynical about the values sport teaches, writing, “[Football] has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.” The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell 1903-1950. Anyone who’s been to a British football match would be hard pressed to deny his allegations outright!



Alongside the bizarre and questionable existence of these microcosms within universities, what about the wellbeing of the athletes populating these programs? One would expect that the universities are, at least, fulfilling the duty of care they hold; helping young men and women to shape and develop their professional sports career. On the contrary, this book details a life of authoritarianism, exploitation, medical abuse and, potentially, a damaging psychological hangover. First, it is worth pointing out that college sports is not a reliable pathway to a job as a professional athlete in the same way gaining a degree is a decent path to getting a job. Very few make it to the big time but all student athletes are required to make huge sacrifices. These are mostly for the benefit of the university as the NCAA limits what athletes can be paid. Academic success and education, the reasons that universities claim to exist, must be made subservient to the demands of the team and the coach. This usually involves stunting an athlete’s academic ambitions, if she or he has them, or cheating of a type most students would be expelled for indulging in. Dave Meggyesy writes in ‘Out Of Their League’,

“By the time I graduated, I knew it was next to impossible to be a legitimate student and a football player too. There is a clear conflict and it is always resolved on the side of the athletic program. Nearly every major university in the country has an employee within the athletic department who supposedly provides athletes with tutorial assistance. At the University of Texas, he is known as the brain coach while at Berkley he has the the more prestigious title of academic coordinator. Whatever he is called, his task is always the same: to keep athletes eligible by whatever means necessary, even if it involves getting them an early look at exams, or hiring graduate students to write their term papers or to take finals exams for them.” (p58)

Viewed cynically, the situation amounts to universities hiring, and in some cases bribing, athletes to attend their schools. These students have no right to be there academically and the university must cheat to keep them eligible. They are paid artificially low wages, prevented from taking their studies as seriously as their sport and have a very low probability of making as a professional athlete calling into question the purpose of all their extertions for their school and the existence of the program itself.



On top of this, the athlete's training and medical regimen may well be designed to maximise their sporting performance rather than benefiting them personally. This is an inexplicable dereliction of a school’s usual responsibility to its students. Equally shocking to me was the incident outlined in the book where black athletes were asked to sign forms promising to put their sporting commitments to the university above the civil rights movement! According to Scott, the college sports program seeks to control and infantilise the athlete. This finds expression in what the athlete may do, wear, how they groom themselves, the company they keep, their politics and the food they eat. Jim Calkins, former captain of football at the University of California 1969, explains his frustrations with the system and culture:

“When I first came to California I’d do anything for the coach. I’d take what he said as the word, without question. Now, I’ve come to the conclusion that I better start saying something. That’s been part of the problem. You see so many black athletes speaking out now. But the white players are gutless. They don’t want to take a stand. They are so entrenched in the system and so full of all this super-patriotic stuff. So the coach is all-dominant, all-powerful. I’ve never seen one player call a coach a bleephead like they call us all the time. And nobody ever questions their training methods, the way they run us into the ground, the drugs they give us.  Sometimes I look inside myself and think I won’t be leaving with my dignity because of what I had to go through. The most degrading thing is being treated like a child. I was programmed to act and function in a certain way. And they talk about learning things from football. I don’t think I learned a thing. The attitude is that you’re getting paid to play football so you can’t gripe. If that’s the way they want it, fine. BUT I SAY TO THEM, YOU DON’T PAY ENOUGH.” (p165)



I recently watched a series following a Junior College team in America called ‘Last Chance U’. On the evidence of this documentary, little has changed culturally and in terms of attitudes to players. I would recommend it as a fine example of the brutal and impersonal nature of American football culture. Of course, lip service is paid to concepts like personal development and athlete well-being but the ambience is much more redolent of race horses being put through their paces or prime cattle being fattened up for sale. The player is a commodity, whose value will rise if they perform and who must be dropped if they do not.



Besides the immediate and obviously negative consequences of demanding athletes change their politics or personal beliefs in order to play sport there are longer term outcomes to be considered too. The level of control and authority invested in college sports programs leaves scant room for personal development and education; the very things both college and sport are supposed to be providing to those who participate. As John Dobroth, a student athlete at UCLA, writes, “My question is, in what part of a young man’s life is he free to fail? Not social areas. Not scholastic. Not athletic. If you are insulated from failure, you can’t take credit for success. Are we sure we know the way for people to live, compete and dress? If we are, let’s not pretend we believe in freedom or dissent.”(p47). A system mentioned in a paper written by two of Scott’s students at Berkeley certainly seems superior if personal development, rather than victory, was to be made the central criterion of school sport. Fogliani and Smith, student athletes, describe, “Mr George Davis, a highly successful football coach at St Helena High School, allows his players to determine starting lineups by a democratic vote. He believes if athletics are to be educational, i.e., to create responsible and aware individuals who can make decisions in life and society, then they must be given the power and freedom in athletics to begin developing the ability to make decisions democratically and behave responsibly.” (p72). The authors certainly seem to have a point but perhaps such systems don’t work in practice.



Equally, if not more, disturbing are the longer term effects of a group of people who have been given special treatment for the entirety of their adolescent and young adult lives. From skipping class and not making grades at high school, to a lavish recruitment process that probably gives the impression you can do whatever you want as long as you are good at sport, to yet more faked papers and grades at college the potential damage to the recipients psychology and system of values is obvious. A recent Netflix series, ‘QB1’, follows highly rated high school quarterbacks and is a perfect example of the kind of exceptions to the rules that are made for talented, young athletes.



It is also a perfect example of their commodification and commercialisation. A book like ‘Friday Night Lights’ shows the dangers of this practice. At the end of the book, it details the lives of the former high school football stars who gave everything to their football program. Not one of them made it professionally and several seemed to be struggling with the redundant sense of entitlement they had been left with once their playing careers were over. Furthermore, even if athletes do make it to the very top of their game, it could be argued that they have been irreparably damaged in the process. Jeff Benedict and Armen Keteyian’s biography of Tiger Woods may provide some supporting evidence for this theory.



In all of this, there is the sense of children cheated out of their childhood by adults who should know better but place what can be extracted from a child in terms of performance above balanced development and education. It would be seen as a form of abuse if it weren’t for the fact that this practice is so revered and celebrated by society. The victims are often enthusiastic participants in their own maltreatment. The whole structure screams out that athletes receive a bad deal even though the rhetoric surrounding college sports is that these are the luckiest and most privileged members of their age group. Randy Smyth writes about an athlete who questioned the coach and was kicked off the team, “The price an athlete pays to compete - being bought by slave wages, being shortchanged in the classroom, and having his personality controlled by coaches” (p74). It doesn’t seem too far from the mark. Dave Meggyesy also writes about the corrupting effect such professionalisation has on student athletics, “Like most of the other players, I had been introduced to a system of rewards - psychological and material - and I played mainly for them. The intrinsic joy of physicality got shunted into the background. Even now, after playing for 14 years, I can’t really say if there is any basic worth to the game. I just can’t separate the game from the payoffs - approval, money, adulation.” (p59). Many colleges seem to have taken sports away from those amateurs who practiced them for their own enjoyment and benefit and turned them into money spinning, prestige generating enterprises designed to serve boards of governors, coaches and alumni but not those students who play the game. As such, it’s hardly surprising that these groups seem to end up getting more out of college sports than the average participant.



What is the societal effect of this love of sports, winning and the profit motive? One possible interpretation focuses on fascination with sports as a symptom of a deeper malaise. The book quotes Philip Goodheart and Christopher Chataway as they write, “The growing passion for sport may be seen as a sad commentary on the inadequacy of the societies we have created. It is only because millions of people are not effectively involved in the societies in which they live and work that they identify themselves so passionately with the participants in some sporting ritual. As work becomes even less satisfying, and as the feeling of being a cog in an impersonal machine spreads farther, the ranks of eager spectators are sure to swell.” (p170-2). Taken in the context of a 21st century middle class in the US and Europe where wages have stagnated as costs have risen while at the same time sports spectatorship and sponsorship deals have soared, this seems remarkably prophetic. For some reason this quote also made me think of a film called ‘All This Mayhem’ that documents the careers of two supremely talented skateboarding brothers. Unable to fit into an increasingly commercialised and professionalised skateboarding scene, the pair became sidelined. One ends up in jail; the other ends up dead from an overdose. Is this the result of a feeling of worthlessness because they were discarded from a sport they loved? Or is it, conversely, the result of having too much money and success too early in their lives without enough guidance or support? I’m not entirely sure but the story definitely made me think about whether the professionalisation of skateboarding was an unmitigated good in a way that a fawning MTV Cribs interview with Tony Hawks never would.



Against this examination of all the most negative aspects of collegiate sport, some of my old idolisation remains. I love to watch sport, loved to play sport when I was younger and still do today. In my younger years, the more serious and competitive the sport, the better. Part of me still thinks: what’s wrong with people who love sport coming together and focusing on that in an obsessive way, if that’s what they want to do? As I passed through school and graduated to college sport, my interest in reaching the highest level in sports began to wane. Much of this was down to a lamentable lack of talent. However, it did afford me the opportunity to play quite a lot of lower level, intramural sport, which have been the most memorable and enjoyable sporting periods of my life. While still quite competitive, there was very little coaching, no authoritarianism or discipline and a focus on team spirit and making do with what you had in terms of personal rather than recruiting or maximising performance. Perhaps I have been biased by my experiences but this is the character of sport that I feel fits more comfortably into an academic institution and culture. The key traits of amateurism seem better preserved. Nonetheless, as the 2019 Ivy League admissions scandal shows, sport is still afforded a special position and that privilege is both abused by unscrupulous participants in the system and, in and of itself, an abuse of an institution purporting to uphold the highest standards of academia. It seems nonsensical to me to have academia and serious, proto-professional sport co-existing in the manner of the US system and Scott does a wonderful job of showing why that’s the case.



If children are absolutely crazy about sport and that’s all they want to do, should parents encourage their passion? Should they attempt to limit it in the belief they are acting in the child’s best interest? There’s obviously no easy, all-encompassing answer to these questions. For me, it feels more honest to take the highly risky decision to try and make a career in sport with open eyes. If an 18 year old turns professional straight after school, or joins a professional organisation as a trainee, then at least they will not be underpaid by their college whilst involving themselves in academic studies everybody knows are a sham. They won’t get anything out of the classes they are forced to attend and know won’t matter at all so long as they keep performing in their sport. If a program is about sports more than academics, what place does it have in a university? That having been said, high school and college sport seem such an integral part of American culture it is almost impossible to see them meaningfully reformed. I think this says a lot about how much society cares about education and personal development. They’re concepts that get paid a lot of lip service and must be name checked in prospectus’ and mission statements. But the true aims and culture that lie behind these pleasantries seems to be, ‘win at all costs and by any means necessary’. It’s parallels can be seen in finance, real estate, music, almost any industry you care to look at.



So does this mean it’s the lifeblood of our capitalist system, perhaps even the lifeblood of a system of evolution and Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’ that drives the entire world? I feel conflicted about this question. On the one hand, competition certainly appears to produce the best outcomes and the fastest progress. But isn’t this analysis somewhat simplistic? Competition is brutal and encourages cheating and foul play. While it may drive us to better performance it may also drive us to morally questionable decisions. Are the best outcomes always to be bigger, faster, more dominant? Could they be a bit more nuanced? As a society we say we value concepts like equality, fairness and justice but a quick glance at the world, and the world of sport especially, would give a confusing picture that’s hard to square with those principles. In the same way that a book like ‘Crime and Punishment’ eloquently shows that a narrow, nihilistic self-interest won’t function in practice because of the conscience and, for Dostoevsky, probably the soul. Perhaps it is equally ludicrous to see society as a merciless march in pursuit of better scores, quicker times, record breaking teams and players, more profit, higher GDP growth? Or perhaps it is nothing more than that?



Personally, I see competition as having both positive and negative sides. In modern sport, with its extreme professionalism and rampant commercialism, there may be more negative aspects. Some of which this book highlights. On the other hand, sport has never been so well funded, well watched and performed so skillfully by its participants. A true sporting purist might claim that anything that improves the practice of their beloved game could not possibly be bad. But again, this seems to brutish and simplistic. I’m reminded of Nietzsche's famous quote from ‘Zarathustra’: ‘man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman - a rope over an abyss’. When questions about the human condition focus on evolution, survival of the fittest and naked self interest, in short the answer that sport gives, I feel the animal side is overemphasised. A human’s conscious mind and discretion, the distinguishing attributes of the ‘Superman’, allow them to explore a world of different values and possibilities. The existence of this is recognised in sport through concepts like fairness, loyalty and sportsmanship. But, as this book describes, rarely in a way that moves beyond paying mere lip service while acting in a drastically different, more ‘animalistic’ manner in the pursuit of victory at all costs. As any experienced football defender will tell you, it pays to watch the ball and not the feet!



Given the odds of making it as a professional athlete and the security of earnings the job offers if you do make it, it’s hard not to see some negative effects in the adult involvement in highly demanding high school sports programs. Against that, some people may look back on their experiences as the happiest of their lives and not regret a moment of it. Nonetheless, I find it hard not to see some manifestations of highly competitive high school sport as immoderate, unbalanced and irresponsible. This is not to say for a minute that the young athletes are being forced into sports, quite the opposite. However, my feeling is that this youthful fervour for sports, and its potential future as a career, should be tempered rather than encouraged. But in an environment where winning is prized above everything else and rewarded so richly, this kind of idea is doomed to an early death.



At the top of the collegiate athletics system, the injustice and inequality seem even more pronounced. At top Division 1 schools, the best athletes will all be aiming for a career in professional sports. These athlete’s possess skills that carry a high market value. Even though it isn’t professional, college sport is big business. Colleges sponsorship deals can run into hundreds of millions, coaches can be paid tens of million dollars a year and the NCAA receives huge broadcasting deals for its content. In spite of college sport’s huge revenue generation, athletes aren’t allowed to enjoy any of this financial success beyond a paltry couple of thousand dollars a month. As such, the star athletes in the NCAA are playing for a hugely reduced rate and risking tens of millions of dollars of future earnings if they injure themselves. Given that college sport is awash with money and that many of these athletes come from backgrounds of social or economic deprivation, this seems grossly unfair. In a career as short and unpredictable as an athlete’s it seems deeply unjust to cap the amount a player can earn and reduce the number of years he can earn for. In essence, top college athletes play for a fraction of the market value of their skills and, one way or another, the college system takes the excess profit. Of course, the NCAA and college sports system also have a value but the current division of earnings between the governing body, schools and players seems laughable. A film called ‘Student Athlete’ covers these issues in more detail. Suffice to say, the exploitation of student athletes in this manner adds to the impression that much of top level college sport is an unfair sham that has no place within academic institutions and, arguably, no place in American culture where people are supposed to be paid a fair wage for their skills. The fact that many of these athletes are from historically disadvantaged ethnicities is a damning indictment of attitudes towards these groups and leaves a very sour taste.



The book is more like a collection of essays and chapters from the books of others than it is a coherent whole in its own right. Not unsurprisingly, the author is evangelical about his cause and the book is more a manifesto than it is a fair and balanced account of the issues. Scott doesn’t strike me as a natural writer. The book is readable but it is the ideas the text contains rather than the beauty of the prose that composes the majority of the enjoyment. The book also makes extensive reference to the work of Dave Meggyesy, a former college football star who turned pro and went on to write controversially about his experiences within the sport. He is cited too often and it weakens the arguments made by giving them the appearance of being narrowly supported and evidenced. A broader selection of source material would have helped. These minor gripes aside, I found the book very enjoyable. Partly as a historical document but more so as a collection of fresh perspectives from which to view American college sports, sport more broadly, and the places they occupy in society.

Joseph Conrad - Lord Jim

Ever since I totally failed to grasp the appeal of Conrad as a 16 year old reading ‘The Heart Of Darkness’, I’ve been wondering what all the fuss was about. For the first 150 odd pages of this book, I couldn’t find much of a clue. The prose is dense and it’s difficult to get going with the story, told through the recollections of the mysterious Capt Marlow (same name as ‘THoD’). I felt like everything was over-wrought and his sentences are too intricate, sometimes making it hard to decipher their significance or even who’s saying what. Added to that, the characters didn’t grasp my imagination, with the exception of the repulsive Capt. Gustav.



I don’t know if it takes 100-odd pages to tune in to Conrad’s wavelength or whether I totally missed earlier references to the fact that all the passengers on board the ‘Patna’ survived; but halfway down p141 Capt Marlow’s words, “and there were no dead” brought me to a standstill. This wasn’t a book about a naval disaster but one about a personal disaster. Jim’s disaster of having his romantic ideals tested and to be found deeply wanting. What I thought was a long and rather tedious recollection suddenly became a gripping exploration of his character. It was a great moment of narrative timing.



The remainder of the book enthralled me and I finished it very quickly. It might be easy to see Jim as a patsy because he is the only one who stays behind for the trial. But, in another sense, he is the only member of the crew who displays any sense of decency or bravery because he stays. While he couldn’t live up to his ideals on the ship and jumped, he doesn’t run away from whatever may be handed down from the court. Marlow sometimes seems to think this is a foolish and pointless exercise but is Jim perhaps trying to reestablish his own self-esteem? Or to make the kind of romantic, self-sacrificial act he abjectly failed to do on the boat?



Marlow’s motivation to help Jim and his powers to do so remain murky as Jim seems to largely escape punishment and goes on to fill a succession of jobs ably before being forced to leave when his connection to the ‘Patna’ emerges. Eventually installed in his final position as a trade representative in a remote village on a remote island, he flourishes before his catastrophic encounter with Gentleman Brown and a death almost as romantic as one Jim might have imagined for himself.



Is Lord Jim a failure to Conrad and an example of something pathetic? Or is he like that to me as a reader? Personally, I felt eerily close to Lord Jim; a person living out their life motivated by half-baked or unrealistic principles, moved by currents outside their control, dogged by past trauma but often wildly narcissistic and romantic in self-conception. Perhaps Stein, Marlow’s lepidopterist friend who organises Jim’s employment, describes the condition best when he says:


‘“We want in so many different ways to be,” he began again. “This magnificent butterfly finds a little heap of dirt and sits still on it; but man he will never on his heap of mud keep still. He wants to be so, and again he wants to be so….” He moved his hand up, then down…. “He wants to be a saint, and he wants to be a devil - and every time he shuts his eyes he sees himself as a very fine fellow - so fine as he can never be…. In a dream….” p199


Jim is someone who has failed and cannot live it down. How could he when the facts of his actions seem to jar so violently with his ideas? Is the island he retreats to a kind of dream-like state, in which Jim can continue to see himself as a fine fellow? Is this pitiable, admirable or simply a matter of psychological survival? In the passages Marlow describes in conversation with him, Jim seems shell-shocked and barely able to process what has happened. He wants to escape the confusion and fear the memory of his failure provokes and, however far he goes, he cannot do that because his reputation follows him. He seems to be tossed about between his romantic ideals and the facts of his life. Conrad captures the atmosphere of this inner conflict superbly, “an air of indomitable resolution came and went upon his face like a vain passing shadow.” (p175).



Finally safe from recognition in Patusan, he seems to do a good job of improving the economic and political conditions of the island. Although, this interpretation could clearly be debated given its colonial characteristics! But if his reign can be seen in a positive light, is Conrad actually writing a book about Jim’s redemption from his miserable cowardice? He gains the respect in Patusan he can never have in the wider world because of his history. He is successful and happy there, behaves as a just leader and is betrayed by the cowardly actions of his predecessor in the job of agent rather than his own. He feels valiant and respectable sorrow at the death of his close friend Dain Waris, the Malay leader's son, and goes without hesitation or weakness to be shot in the chest by the aggrieved father. Here we can see Jim sacrificing himself for his romantic ideals in the way he couldn’t on the ‘Patna’ and finally laying to rest the demons that arose as a consequence of that failure. Even Marlow, who generally seems sceptical if sympathetic, sometimes seems to describe Jim in extraordinary, almost heroic, terms:


“Nevertheless, there can be but few of us who had never known one of these rare moments of awakening when we see, hear, understand ever so much - everything - in a flash - before we fall back again into our agreeable somnolence.” p148



In other passages, the way Marlow describes Jim's success on Patusan it makes it sound like a lonely and pathetic existence. Even superficial and false. I couldn’t work out if Jim was a strange type of hero or the exact opposite. In the end, I think he’s everyone - battling the facts of their cowardice as best they can to maintain their delusional self-esteem and survive. It’s well captured in the following quote:


“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.” p102


Jim’s case is an extreme one, and dramatised as well, but I felt there was something universal in the comment Conrad is making about life through the themes of ‘Lord Jim’. What are any of us playing up to? Probably just a ramshackle collection of dreams and ill-considered principles like Jim. I certainly felt empathy with him as someone who is romantic and delusional and thinks better of themselves than they really are. In some ways this aspect of humanity may be essential to its survival. Perhaps to see ourselves as we really are, or be forced to by our history like Jim, would be too much for anyone to bear. This seemed to me one of the better passages to help make sense of the person and story of Jim:


“But we can see him, an obscure conqueror of fame, tearing himself out of the arms of a jealous love at the sign, at the call 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 - and have I not stood up once, like an evoked ghost, to answer for his eternal constancy? Was I so very wrong after all?” p351


By this reckoning, Jim conquers the romantic fame he has coveted and ruined himself pursuing but, in the end, it’s an empty and senseless victory. Everything seems to reflect back on itself so, after a sudden flash of understanding, we return to finding Jim enigmatic. In the same way, we cannot understand ourselves and don’t really know the ultimate meaning of our sacred ideals of ‘conduct’ and ‘constancy’. It’s all an unanswerable riddle like life itself and that’s what I began to love about Conrad’s story and, to a lesser extent, his style. The two seem to go hand in hand, like this mysterious passage spoken by Marlow:


““But as to me, left alone with the solitary candle, I remained strangely enlightened. I was no longer young enough to behold at every turn the magnificence that besets our insignificant footsteps in good and evil. I smiled to think that, after all, it was yet he, of us two, who had the light. And I felt sad. A clean slate, did he say? As if the initial word of each our destiny were not graven in imperishable characters upon the face of a rock.” p179


Here, it seems that Marlow sees Jim as, in some way, a genuine victor against the vicissitudes of life but in precisely what way is hard to say. I liked the character of Marlow a lot, his mysterious motivations and testimony are perfect for a complex, murky tale like this; about what it means to live, if it means anything at all. The way Marlow presents this story and his relationship with Jim adds another layer of intrigue. I was reminded of books like ‘The Confessions of A Justified Sinner’ and ‘The Real Life Of Sebastian Knight’ where the reader is presented with a ‘case’ made by a more or less credible narrator. Marlow’s is credible enough, but I was left with the feeling that he barely understands the story he is telling himself. As he cryptically says himself, “it was as though I had been shown the working of the implacable destiny of which we are the victims - and the tools” p280



Jim’s life of half-baked ideals and half-compromised principles forces him to run from the society that constantly reminds him of his cowardice to a place where he can rebuild himself and his damaged self esteem. This exercise seems to raise him in Marlow’s estimation but, finally, both Marlow and the reader are plunged back into confusion by Jim’s romantic death. He has restored the myth of his principles and his pride but abandoned the woman who loves him and the life he built for himself in Patusan. Marlow compares his death to how he left him on the beach of Patusan and concludes he is, “greater and more pitiful in the loneliness of his soul, that remains even for her who loved him best a cruel and insoluble mystery.” (p334). This was a great book and, after a slow start, captured something essential for me about what it means to be a human however cruel and insoluble that can be sometimes!