Steve R's Reviews > Lord Jim

Conrad is an amazing writer for many different reasons. His irreverent lack of attention to chronological narration comes close to replicating actual human memory. His ability to delineate the salient features of even minor characters with startling detail and real insight is uncanny. His ability to write long adjective-filled sentences which get closer and closer to something ineffable he is trying to describe often takes one’s breath away. He used his considerable experience as a merchant seaman going around the world at the height of the European extension of imperialist powers to provide a real insight into the motivations of empire and race. His psychological understanding of variant human characters, motivations, emotional constructs and aspirational strengths and weaknesses shows real insight into the human condition. But it is his analysis of the situation mankind finds itself in: that is, into the meaning of life, which is most important.

Conrad’s writing frequently has this yearning to go from the specific to the general. In this novel, when Jim is let off to take a canoe up the river to Patusan and thus begins the second major phase of his life, the natural environment is used to show how Conrad was thinking: Jim had left ‘…the sea with its labouring waves forever rising, sinking, and vanishing to rise again – the very image of struggling mankind – and faced the immutable forests rooted deep in the soil, soaring towards the sunshine, everlasting in the shadowing might of their tradition, like life itself.’

Prior to the pivotal disappointment in himself which occurred on the Patna, Jim was still quite young and, as Marlow remembers when he was that age, quite idealistic: ‘There is such a magnificent vagueness in the expectations that had driven us both to sea, such a glorious indefiniteness, such a beautiful greed of adventures that are their own and only reward!’
Unfortunately, since ‘in no other kind of life is the illusion more wide of reality’, Jim had to come face to face with acute disappointment and abject personal recrimination.

Drifting from port to port for several years, he seeks to find a comfort which was forever eluding him as chance invariably brought up his experience on the Patna and forced him to move on. This happened more than ten times, and Marlow observes that each of these attempts ‘were equally tinged by a high-minded absurdity of intention which made their futility profound and touching.’ Jim had yet to realize Marlow’s realization that ‘the wisdom of life … consists in putting out of our sight all reminders of your folly’. Real human contact in order to assuage one’s moral pain is impossible, since ‘it is as if loneliness were an absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand.’

Jim also lacked that knack of most people of almost unconsciously accepting the meaningless of all their endeavours since, as Marlow observes, ‘it is extraordinary how we go through life with our eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dismal thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome.’

What about love? There was a woman in Patusan, but Marlow bitterly comments that in this case, as in others, it amounted to ‘stories of opportunities: episodes of passion at best, or perhaps only of youth and temptation, doomed to forgetfulness in the end, even if they pass through the reality of tenderness and regret’. Not very uplifting. Though they became very close, ‘There was nothing light-hearted in their romance; they came together under the shadow of a life’s disaster, like a knight and maiden meeting to exchange vows among haunted ruins.’

Jim’s fate is both totally irrational in its workings and absolutely inescapable in its finality. The manner in which Cornelius twisted the psychopathic Brown into his senseless yet murderous action was as unforeseen as was Jim’s grim journey from his hut to Doramin’s stockade to give himself up for, as Marlow put it, ‘The dark powers should not rob him twice of his peace.’

As idealistic and romantic as humans can be, fate precludes any real chance at any final contentment or satisfaction. The best we can hope for is to go ‘through life with our eyes half shut’. One can see Conrad penning this work over a century ago with a wistful, resigned countenance, sadly shaking his head as he recognizes the limits of all human ambition.

Highly recommended.


Previous review:
After working on ships for many years, Conrad retired to England and became one of the quintessential novelists of his (or of any) time. What he observed during those years at sea was a world at the highest peak of imperialist expansion and racial subjugation. The western European nations basically took over virtually all the rest of the world, exterminating aboriginal races and essentially enslaving native ones within the confines of their economic and political structures. They didn't see themselves as conquering heroes riding to power, but rather as leading lights who were destined to bring the backward peoples of the world into the true dawn of civilization. It was all for their own good. And it was a duty assumed on the basis of the fact that they were white, male, Christian and most commonly, English. Kipling's poem The White Man's Burden aptly summarizes this concept of noble self-sacrifice which these dominating but myopic racists saw when they looked in the mirror.

But what Conrad saw when confronted with this archetype were ordinary men: weak, self-conscious, ambitious but ultimately flawed. As Marlowe says of Jim repeatedly throughout this work: 'He was one of us'. He was white. He was Christian. He was male. He was English. Thus, he was destined to go out and rule the world.

Jim's fatal jump off the Patna puts paid to this archetype, and the novel as a whole describes the attempt of the idealistic paragon of the vision to re-connect with the deeply flawed nature of the individual. In other words, can a human face be found under the trappings of imperialistic rule? That the Malay tribesmen regard him as 'Tuan' Jim (i.e., Lord Jim) by the end is one of the most impressive plot constructions designed to show redemption of character I've ever read.

But it is a personal, not a cultural redemption. With every debacle like Vietnam or Afghanistan, western powers are shown to be just like Jim: inherently flawed and thus, more intensely human.
The colour of one's skin, one's faith, one's language and one's nationality only makes one different. It does not make one either worse or better. It is a testament to his insight that Conrad saw this while imperialism was at its height. Critics who call him a racist and/or an apologist for imperialism have never truly thought about his characterizations of Jim, of Kurtz and of Almayer.

Highly recommended.