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!