Religion in Lord Jim

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In his 1982 book, Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels, J. Hillis Miller echoes the same belief that many critics have held since the first publication of Lord Jim in 1900. Says Miller, the book "reveals itself to be a work which raises questions rather than answering them. The fact that it contains its own interpretations does not make it easier to understand." The enigmatic quality of Conrad's difficult book, found both in its complex narrative structure and in its capacity for yielding several conflicting interpretations, is inevitably part of any discussion about the work. Conrad was an acknowledged master at his art, and Lord Jim was written when the author was in the strongest, most experimental phase of his career, so the reader can surmise that this enigma was intentional. In fact, by examining Lord Jim in light of its religious references and themes, Jim's spiritual journey, and his ambiguous, messiah-like death, one realizes that Conrad is ultimately encouraging readers to examine their own beliefs.

A reader might be struck by the overwhelming number of religious references that Conrad includes. The book is positively saturated with religious words, which manifest themselves in a number of ways, from a number of people. When Jim is first introduced, the omniscient narrator says that Jim has "the patience of Job," a biblical character from the Old Testament whose faith was tried by God through a number of brutal trials. God is also mentioned directly many times in the novel. Even those who are not particularly devout, such as Chester, the slimy opportunist who tries to get Marlow to have Jim work for him on one of his colonial projects, invoke the name of God. This is true even when telling stories that are morally suspect: "the Lord God knows the right and the wrong of that story." Devils are also mentioned several times, such as when Conrad talks about the depths the lazy seamen will go to when trying to find easy work: "They ... would have served the devil himself had he made it easy enough." Marlow says to his audience at one point, "I am willing to believe each of us has a guardian angel." Even descriptions of the coarse German captain of the Patna occasionally reference the divine: "The German lifted two heavy fists to heaven and shook them a little without a word."

These are but a handful of the religious references that are scattered throughout the book, underscoring the book's theme of beliefs. These references are particularly apparent during the descriptions of the ill-fated Patna. The steamer is carrying a large group of Moslem pilgrims, "Eight hundred men and women with faith and hopes," who "at the call of an idea ... had left their forests, their clearings, the protection of their rulers." Indeed, through his language, Conrad depicts a war between good and evil, believers and non-believers. When he describes the lighthouse that the Patna passes, he notes that it was "planted by unbelievers on a treacherous shoal" and that it "seemed to wink at her its eye of flame, as in derision of her errand of faith." However, derision is not enough to stop the Patna and its devout passengers from reaching their destination, and Conrad gives an early indication that the ship is being protected by a higher power: "The nights descended on her like a benediction." The word benediction is a religious term used to denote a blessing. This is an odd way to describe a nightfall at sea, so it becomes one of the obvious cues that Conrad uses to...

(This entire section contains 1924 words.)

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underscore the religious tone of the story.

Later on, the reference is more direct. When Jim sees that the ship has beaten the odds and is still floating, he notes that the "sleeping pilgrims were destined to accomplish their whole pilgrimage" and remarks that it "was as if the Omnipotence whose mercy they confessed ... had looked down to make a sign, 'Thou shalt not!' to the ocean."

The figure of Jim is juxtaposed next to this highly religious, almost miraculous incident. Jim has become a naval officer because he hopes to be a real hero someday, putting his life at risk for the benefit of somebody else. However, Jim is human, which means he is flawed. When the moment comes when he can prove his heroism, he panics, and, for whatever reason—Conrad makes it unclear in the end as to why Jim acts the way he does— deserts the ship, taking a symbolic fall from heroism to shame as he jumps into one of the lifeboats, leaving the eight hundred passengers in his care to go under on the partially sunken ship. Jim feels the effects of his actions right away: "There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well— into an everlasting deep hole." The use of the word everlasting is particularly telling. In the Christian sense, Jim has "fallen" from grace, and fallen souls, if not redeemed, will be cast into an eternity of hell, another everlasting deep hole. From this point on in the story, Jim embarks on a spiritual journey, which Conrad paints in biblical terms at times. When Marlow is discussing the stormy night following Jim's trial and subsequent expulsion from officer service, Marlow uses some curious terms: "The downpour fell with the heavy uninterrupted rush of a sweeping flood, with a sound of unchecked overwhelming fury." For Marlow, these sounds call "to one's mind the images of collapsing bridges, of uprooted trees, or undermined mountains." This type of description evokes images of the flood that God calls forth in the Old Testament to wipe the earth clean of sinners.

Of course, the analogy is not a perfect one. Jim is not Noah, the one virtuous man whom God spared from the flood. Also in the Hebrew Bible, the Flood occurs long after the Genesis of Man, whereas in Lord Jim, Jim does not experience his genesis into his new life until he reaches Patusan, where "he left his earthly failings behind him." This reliance on certain biblical events in an unconventional order prevents the story from becoming a true allegory, a type of story in which many characters, settings, and events have a symbolic quality within the context of one greater theme. Jim is not Christ and attempting to label him as the Christian messiah while labeling the other aspects of the story as Christian symbols is a futile enterprise.

So if Jim is not Noah or Christ, who is he? At one point, after his near-death in the marshy Patusan creek, he becomes Adam, as Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan notes in her book Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper: "He wakes up, covered with mud and 'alone of his kind' as Adam was when he was created." Just as Adam was pure and seems alien to modern, "fallen" humans, so does Jim appear to the natives of Patusan, although for different reasons: "He pelted straight on in his socks, beplastered with filth out of all semblance to a human being." This view of Jim as something other than a normal human is perpetuated as he begins to live among the Bugis Malays and leads the battle to destroy the camp of their rival, Sherif Ali. After this, the natives "called him Tuan Jim: as one might say—Lord Jim." The villagers create a legend around Jim, which, by the time Marlow visits him, "had gifted him with supernatural powers." The natives think that Jim has performed miracles, perhaps Christ-like to the reader, such as carrying heavy cannons "up the hill on his back—two at a time." In fact, the natives view Jim with "a strange mixture of familiarity and awe."

Once Conrad establishes the religious undertone of the book and then paints Jim as a religious messiah, he stays true to the fate of most messiahs and has Jim die at the ending of the book. However, even the way that Jim dies points to the religious theme. The last part of the book, which details the events that lead up to Jim's death, deviates from the rest of the narrative. For the majority of the book, Marlow narrates Jim's tale to a group of friends, based on what he has heard from Jim or experienced himself. But when Marlow ends his portion of the tale, Conrad finishes the story by using several, sometimes disparate accounts from various narrators. As Paul B. Armstrong notes in his article, "Monism and Pluralism in Lord Jim" for the Centennial Review: "considered as a group, the readings do not fit together. And because they are finally irreconcilable, they frustrate Marlow's attempt to develop a coherent, comprehensive view of Jim as much as they aid it." This narrative method evokes an image of the Bible, which was also written by several authors, who sometimes contradict each other in their telling of certain events. The events surrounding the death of Christ in the New Testament have been particularly scrutinized, since there is no one account that tells the events in chronological order, from beginning to end.

Conrad mimics this style, especially at the end, turning the events surrounding Jim's death into legend, as he paints Jim as a Christ-like figure. When he is faced with imminent death, as Christ was, Jim does not flinch from his destiny and instead chooses to conquer by submitting: "There was nothing to fight for. He was going to prove his power in another way and conquer the fatal destiny itself." As Ross C. Murfin notes in his book, Lord Jim: After the Truth, "Christ's 'new' law of self-sacrifice" is "at the heart of the Judeo-Christian faith." Like Christ, Jim ultimately dies for somebody else's sins. Christ died for the sins of all humanity, including his enemies', as Jim dies for the actions of Cornelius and Brown, the enemies who seal Jim's fate when they kill Dain and force Jim to make good on his promise to be accountable for the death. "I am come ready and unarmed," Jim says, when he presents himself to Dain's father, who immediately kills Jim. Says Erdinast-Vulcan of Jim, "He perishes, like a true biblical or mythical hero, by his own word."

In the end, many readers, like Marlow, walk away confused, feeling, as Marlow felt at one point, that Jim stands "at the heart of a vast enigma." It appears that Conrad has deliberately structured his story so that it negates a decisive interpretation. Even in this essay, where an abundance of religious references, Jim's spiritual journey, and the narrative method surrounding Jim's ambiguous death have been used as support to show Conrad's religious undertone, one cannot pin Conrad down to an overall guiding thematic structure—which is exactly how Conrad wanted it. Jim's life and death will hold different meanings for different readers, just as Marlow, Jewel, and Tamb' Itam all elicit widely different interpretations. Whether one views Jim as a redeemed human, a religious messiah, or a foolish romantic, in the end it is only relevant to the individual reader. The meaning of Jim's life, like the meaning of life in general, is ultimately beyond human explanation. The important thing is to be true to one's individual beliefs, religious or otherwise, as Jim is true to his beliefs in the end and so dies a fulfilled man—even if most of those left behind do not agree with or understand his actions.

Source: Ryan D. Poquette, Critical Essay on Lord Jim, in Novels for Students, The Gale Group, 2003.

Juxtaposition: Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness

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Lord Jim was begun immediately after Conrad had finished writing 'Youth' in the summer of 1898, dropped for a time, taken up again after he had written Heart of Darkness, and finished in the summer of 1900. 'My first thought', he says in the 'Author's Note' to the Collected Edition, 'was of a short story, concerned only with the pilgrim ship episode; nothing more'. But later he perceived that

the pilgrim ship episode was a good starting-point for a free and wandering tale; that it was an event, too, which could conceivably colour the whole 'sentiment of existence' in a simple and sensitive character.

Signs of this change in conception may be discerned, though not where we might expect to find them—in a thinness of material or an untidy linking of an illogical second part. Rather are they apparent in a certain muddlement throughout, an uncertainty of the final impression intended by Conrad.

In terms of plot there are undoubtedly two parts to the story: the defection of Jim and the disaster after he seems to have rehabilitated himself; certainly the second part has been added. But, as we have seen, and as I hope to show here in more detail, they are intimately connected. It is, indeed, difficult to imagine the first part alone as a satisfactory story—certainly as a story by Conrad; the account of a cowardly leap for safety alone could hardly be enough; it demands development.

The general lines of the story are given in miniature in the first chapter. Jim, having developed a romantic view of himself as one who will meet crises with calmness and determination, is not shaken in this faith by his failure to reach the cutter of his training ship when it puts out to effect a rescue. In the main crisis of the first part of the novel the failure is repeated under circumstances where he offends most unequivocally against 'the obscure body of men held together by a community of inglorious toil and by fidelity to a certain standard of conduct'. His crime is described in terms which are reminiscent of some passages of 'Heart of Darkness'—in terms of what, in that story, is called 'sordid farce'.

It was part of the burlesque meanness pervading that particular disaster at sea that they did not come to blows. It was all threats, all a terribly effective feint, a sham from beginning to end....

There is a flavour of shameless farce about all the weaknesses and crimes of which Conrad writes at this time; his mean characters are all horribly comic.

Jim's offence is one upon which the Court of Enquiry can have no mercy. But he insists on what, to many of the spectators, seems like trying to brazen it out. Brierly's question: 'Why eat all that dirt?' sums up the feeling of most of them. His hope, however, is that he can rehabilitate himself; as in his first failure in the training ship, he is still sure that at bottom he is ready for any emergency, that he has only been betrayed by circumstances. He will not accept his weakness and stay in a place where men know his story, and so he is driven farther and farther eastwards in the search for a refuge where he can start with a clean sheet and establish himself as a trustworthy man.

Finally, in the jungle settlement of Patusan, he rises to be 'Lord Jim', one whose authority and honour are never questioned and on whom all the natives are dependent. It seems that he has successfully isolated himself from his past, in a place where

The stream of civilization, as if divided on a headland a hundred miles north of Patusan, branches east and south-west, leaving its plains and valleys, its old trees and its old mankind, neglected and isolated.

But, despite the fact that he has achieved 'the conquest of love, honour, men's confidence', his past comes in search of him. Gentleman Brown and his crew of cut-throats penetrate the 'wall of forests' which shuts Jim in his isolation. Physically the people of Patusan are more than a match for Brown, but mentally Jim is helpless before this man who combines with his ferocity 'a vehement scorn for mankind at large and for his victims in particular' and who 'would rob a man as if only to demonstrate his poor opinion of the creature'. Everything that Brown says recalls Jim's past weakness, undermines his certainty that he has put behind him a cowardice that was only momentary.

He asked Jim whether he had nothing fishy in his life to remember that he was so damnedly hard upon a man trying to get out of a deadly hole by the first means that came to hand—and so on and so on. And there ran through the rough talk a vein of subtle reference to their common blood, an assumption of common experience; a sickening suggestion of common guilt, of secret knowledge that was like a bond of their minds and of their hearts.

Jim finds that 'his fate, revolted, was forcing his hand'. We remember the 'unforeseen partnership' with Kurtz which Marlow accepts in 'Heart of Darkness'; but here there is an explicit weakness in Jim to which the partner appeals, and he confronts this appeal under circumstances which make his actions of vital importance for all the inhabitants of Patusan. He speaks no more than the truth when he says: 'I am responsible for every life in the land'. Unable to disown Brown, he brings disaster on the village, takes the death of the chief s son on his own head, and is killed as punishment.

In enlarging the simple story of the pilgrim ship episode, however, Conrad makes a more significant addition than the second half of the story; he introduces Marlow, who, although he does not appear as storyteller until the fifth chapter, is the person to whom we naturally look for commentary and judgment. Judgment we find in plenty—but, far from clarifying the moral issues, Marlow's reflections only succeed in making them more confused.

We remain at the end, I believe, uncertain as to what our verdict on Jim is meant to be. Many views are put before us. The elderly French lieutenant's is clear:

But the honour—the honour, monsieur! ... The honour ... that is real—that is! And what life may be worth when .. . when the honour is gone—ah ça ! par exemple—I can offer no opinion.

This discourages Marlow; he feels that the lieutenant has 'pricked the bubble'. Yet at times he seems to see Jim as expiating his fault by taking on himself the punishment for the disaster to the village, finally re-establishing his honour. At other times a totally different verdict seems to be presented, as in the conclusion:

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.

We remain uncertain whether Jim's moment of panic is one which can be expiated or whether, in the judgment of Marlow the seaman, it has placed him for ever beyond the possibility of forgiveness, uncertain, indeed, whether he is to be blamed for hoping that his weakness can be forgotten or for being so morbidly conscious of it.

The reason for this uncertainty is clear; it is because Marlow, Conrad's mouthpiece, is himself bewildered. As in 'Heart of Darkness', which Conrad wrote while recasting the novel, Marlow plays a greater part than might at first be thought. We may reasonably wonder whether the feelings which brought 'Heart of Darkness' to birth may not be the chief cause why Lord Jim developed from a simple short story into a complex novel, for there are many resemblances between the relationship of Marlow and Kurtz and that of Marlow and Jim.

There is an 'unforeseen partnership' not only between Jim and Gentleman Brown but also between Jim and Marlow. 'Why I longed to go grubbing into the deplorable details ... I can't explain' Marlow says, and wonders:

Was it for my own sake that I wished to find some shadow of an excuse for that young fellow whom I had never seen before?

A relationship is quickly established between them. When Jim explains his hopes of regaining the respect that he has lost, Marlow says:

... it was I... who a moment ago had been so sure of the power of words, and now was afraid to speak, in the same way one dares not move for fear of losing a slippery hold.... It was the fear of losing him that kept me silent, for it was borne upon me that should I let him slip away into the darkness I would never forgive myself.

Just as in 'Heart of Darkness' Marlow feels the power of nightmares which his previous experience and standards have not made him ready to understand, so here he is appealed to by Jim in ways for which he is not prepared.

I was made to look at the convention that lurks in all truth [Marlow says] and on the essential sincerity of falsehood. He appealed to all sides at once—to the side turned perpetually to the light of day, and to that side of us which, like the other hemisphere of the moon, exists stealthily in perpetual darkness, with only a fearful ashy light falling at times on the edge. He swayed me. I own to it, I own up.

It is his own security for which Marlow fears; when he goes for information to one of Jim's fellow officers, it is because he hopes to learn of a redeeming motive for his offence.

I see well enough now [he says of this incident] that I hoped for the impossible—for the laying of what is the most obstinate ghost of man's creation, of the uneasy doubt uprising like a mist, secret and gnawing like a worm, and more chilling than the certitude of death—the doubt of the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct.

It is obvious enough that Marlow is disturbed because Jim, a fellow English seaman, has not been true to the standards by which they all live.

I was aggrieved against him [he says], as though he had cheated me—me!—of a splendid opportunity to keep up the illusion of my beginnings, as though he had robbed our common life of the last spark of its glamour.

But this alone is not sufficient to account for the disturbance of mind in which he is plunged. Jim has also raised doubts of the finality of the very standards themselves; he has suggested the possibility that there are hidden depths of feeling against which they are powerless. Marlow—and, as we shall see in a minute, Brierly—cannot cast Jim out as an offender and forget him, and this is not merely because he is a fellow Englishman, but because he seems to cast doubt on the values by which they could condemn him. Marlow speaks thus of the courage which Jim so signally fails to display:

... an unthinking and blessed stiffness before the outward and inward terrors, before the might of nature, and the seductive corruption of men—backed by a faith invulnerable to the strength of facts, to the contagion of examples, to the solicitation of ideas. Hang ideas! They are tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the back-door of your mind, each taking a little of your substance, each carrying away some crumb of that belief in a few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently and would like to die easy.

Marlow would seem here to be at one with Winnie Verloc of The Secret Agent in her belief that life does not bear looking into very closely, and he continues with the direct implication that such courage is only possible for fools:

This has nothing to do with Jim, directly; only he was outwardly so typical of that good, stupid kind we like to feel marching right and left of us in life, of the kind that is not disturbed by the vagaries of intelligence and the perversions of—of nerves, let us say.

He goes on to reminisce about 'that good, stupid kind' and about how moved he is when a boy whom he has taken to sea for his first voyage greets him after many years, now grown into one 'fit to live or die as the sea may decree', just as, in the voyage into the heart of darkness, the Marlow of that story clings for a moment to the manual of seamanship as the relief of something tangible in the midst of nightmare. The nostalgia for the normal, for the reliance on simple duties and uncomplicated virtues, is the same, and in both cases the relief can only be temporary.

The feeling of insecurity is deepened by the story of Brierly's suicide. That impeccable captain has felt the same apprehension as Marlow: '... the only thing that holds us together', he says, 'is just the name for that kind of decency. Such an affair destroys one's confidence'. We might feel the conclusion to be extreme, for in any group of men there will be some who will betray the faith reposed in them, but we know that, all the time he is enquiring into Jim's case, he is also sitting in judgment on himself and finding a verdict of 'unmitigated guilt'. Marlow speculates that, in his case too, it is the awakening of some idea:

... the matter was no doubt of the gravest import [he says] one of those trifles that awaken ideas—start into life some thought with which a man unused to such a companionship finds it impossible to live.

We are given no hint of what the 'idea' is, except that it is not a commonplace worry about drink, or money, or women, but the effect of what we are told about Brierly is to reinforce Marlow's own obliquely expressed conviction that the virtues of seamanship—all of which Brierly possesses in superabundant measure—are still vulnerable to 'ideas'—that they are not enough in themselves and can easily be imperilled.

For all those issues with which Brierly's virtues can deal, the judgment on Jim is certain, but, in Marlow's words, Jim's attempt to explain his deed gives the impression that

he was only speaking before me, in a dispute with an invisible personality, an antagonistic and inseparable partner of his existence—another possessor of his soul. These were issues beyond the competency of a court of enquiry.

The effect of muddlement which is so commonly found in Lord Jim comes, in short, from this—that Marlow is himself muddled. We look to him for a definite comment, explicit or implicit, on Jim's conduct and he is not able to give it. We are inevitably reminded of the bewilderment with which the Marlow of 'Heart of Darkness' faces Kurtz. By appealing to 'that side of us which, like the other hemisphere of the moon, exists stealthily in perpetual darkness' he confronts Marlow with 'issues beyond the competency of a court of enquiry' and thus shakes the standards by which he would normally be judged.

Here, as in the short story, the experience of Marlow goes far beyond that of the man whom he cannot disown. Kurtz is only a 'hollow man', Jim himself is, by comparison with Marlow, naïve, a romantic thinking in the terms of a boy's adventure story.

But the muddlement goes farther than this. I have so far begged the question by saying 'Marlow, Conrad's mouthpiece'. In fact the confusion seems to extend to Conrad's conception of the story, and this reveals itself in some of the rhetoric given to Marlow. A good deal of this is imprecise and some is little more than a vague and rather pretentious playing with abstractions. It is in these terms that he speaks of the approaching catastrophe:

Magna est veritas et... Yes, when it gets a chance. There is a law, no doubt—and likewise a law regulates your luck in the throwing of dice. It is not Justice, the servant of men, but accident, hazard, Fortune—the ally of patient Time—that holds an even and scrupulous balance. . . . Well, let's leave it to chance, whose ally is Time, that cannot be hurried, and whose enemy is Death, that will not wait.

There are many such passages, and they give the impression rather of a man who is ruminating to obscure the issue than of one thinking to clarify it. But they are not 'placed'—Conrad, that is, does not so present them that we see them as deliberate, part of the portrayal of a man who is bewildered. They come rather from his own uncertainty as to the effect at which he is aiming. There is, very clearly, a conflict in his own mind; he raises the issue of the sufficiency of the 'few simple notions you must cling to if you want to live decently', but he does not, throughout the book, face it consistently.

Lord Jim is, at bottom, concerned with the same preoccupations as 'Heart of Darkness' and other works of this period, but Conrad has chosen to treat them in such a way that he inevitably feels more directly concerned. As he says in the concluding words of the 'Author's Note': 'He was "one of us".' The uncertainty which remains even at the end of the book as to what judgment we should pass on Jim and the passages of imprecise rhetoric are, I believe, an indication that his feelings are too deeply and too personally involved for him to stand above the bewilderment in which he places Marlow. The fixed standards of the simple sailor are those which, above all others, Conrad finds it difficult to treat with detachment. He was too aware of the depths of treachery and cowardice of which men are capable not to cherish whatever seems to provide a defence against them, and at times we have the impression that, just as much as Marlow, he is himself fighting to retain a faith in the efficacy and total goodness of the 'few simple notions'.

Source: Douglas Hewitt, "Chapter III: Lord Jim," in Conrad: A Reassessment, Rowman and Littlefield, 1975, pp. 31-39.

The Verbal Failure of Lord Jim

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One does not have to read far in Lord Jim to observe Conrad's difficulties in making speech idiom read true. A Yankee deserter who is the crack marksman of Brown's derelict pirates, keeping his eye on a human target, says unconvincingly, "This there coon's health would never be a source of anxiety to his friends any more"; and later, when there are no further victims to shoot at, he pronounces the calm of Patusan to be "on-natural." The difficulty of rendering Jim's British idiom, however, Conrad seems to have turned into an asset rather than a liability. Jim is sometimes limited to a mere inept stutter, the mixture of pretense and modesty that is after all pretty much the base of his character. When Marlow proposes the Patusan venture to him, the young man speaks his gratitude in as embarrassingly stilted (and unauthentic) a manner as that of the Yankee deserter's phrases: " 'Jove!' he gasped out. 'It is noble of you! ... What a bally ass I've been,' he said very slow in an awed tone... 'You are a brick,' he cried next in a muffled voice... 'I would be a brute now if I...'" The halting is more extreme here than elsewhere because Jim is deeply moved at being given a second chance in life, but hardly ever is he eloquent.

If his words sound unreal during times of strong emotion, so is Jim himself excessive as a romanticist. He does not speak so all the time, fortunately; in fact, he generally speaks rather little. Also informative are the verbal anomalies associated with Jim (these are sometimes auditory errors); they suggest an index to "the subtle unsoundness of the man" that so puzzles Marlow, who knows Jim best of all. Three incidents that come early in the novel show Jim as a victim of verbal confusion. Individually, they are errors that anyone might make, especially in the context of emotional tension in which they occur. Collectively, however, Jim's misunderstandings lead one to see them as symptomatic of a kind of inattention or failure on his part—almost, in a sense, as if language has come to mean something different to him from what it does to anyone else. Marlow's first encounter with Jim, on the steps of the courthouse where the Patna hearing is being conducted, is marked by a verbal-auditory error that dramatizes Jim's shame, as well as his belligerence, over his desertion from the ship. An acquaintance of Mar-low's remarks of an ugly forlorn dog belonging to some Malay native, "Look at that wretched cur." Jim overhears the phrase and, already stinging from the shame of public disgrace, thinks this is a further insult directed toward him. Assuming Marlow to be his accuser, "He made a step forward and barred my way. We were alone; he glared at me with an air of stubborn resolution. I became aware I was being held up, so to speak, as if in a wood."

Marlow himself is highly articulate and persuasive, and once he wins Jim's confidence the troubled young man unburdens his problems to him. Significantly, however, most of the incidents Jim recounts are couched in Marlow's words. One exception, however, is the second instance of Jim's verbal misunderstanding. It takes place when Jim goes below deck to investigate the bulkhead of the disabled Patna which may at any moment give way and flood the ship. Returning past some of the native passengers, Jim is stopped by one of them.

“The beggar clung to me like a drowning man," he said, impressively. "Water, water! What water did he mean? What did he know? As calmly as I could I ordered him to let go. He was stopping me, time was pressing, other men began to stir; I wanted time— time to cut the boats adrift. ... He would not keep quiet: he tried to shout; I had half throttled him before I made out what he wanted. He wanted some water—water to drink; they were on strict allowance, you know, and he had with him a young boy I had noticed several times. His child was sick—and thirsty. He had caught sight of me as I passed by, and was begging for a little water. That's all."

Needless to say, the potential panic of this scene is explanation enough for Jim's mistake, just as the misunderstanding of the epithet "cur" is not unusual, given the circumstances in which it occurs. Yet these two errors, told in the same order in Marlow's narrative as they are given here, prepare for Jim's fatal mistake of the Patna, which significantly is in part a verbal (or auditory) one.

Once the German captain and his deserting crew ineptly launch their life boat, Jim becomes more intensely aware than ever of the danger of panic among the native passengers. The ugly irony that rouses Jim from his inaction (really his refusal to help the deserters with their boat) is the collapse of the third engineer, apparently from a heart attack, on deck; Jim stumbles over the man's legs. Inasmuch as it is the "dead" man (he in fact stands once more, then collapses for good) who rouses Jim back to life, Jim in some respect assumes the engineer's identity. This must be the explanation for his erroneous response to the deserting officers' calls to their compatriot. "With the first hiss of rain, and the first gust of wind, they screamed, 'Jump, George! We'll catch you! Jump!' The ship began a slow plunge; the rain swept over her like a broken sea; my cap flew off my head; my breath was driven back into my throat. I heard as if I had been on the top of a tower another wild screech, 'Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!' She was going down, down, head first under me ..." Jim again is the narrator, rather than Marlow, but he breaks off for a moment with the strain, and Marlow remarks his vague gesture of sweeping away cobwebs with his hand, before Jim concludes his account: "I had jumped." His instant of cowardice can thus be viewed partially as a verbal error, but it is not so easily explained away as the "cur" and "water" mistakes. The less serious, more believable ones, however, lead up to the fatal, less justifiable error. Jim's rigid non-participation in the act of desertion, i.e. the actual lowering of the lifeboat, is not enough to relieve him of moral responsibility. The dead man stirs Jim back to life, and for a moment Jim assumes the dead man's identity and makes his cowardly escape in George's name.

One further auditory error by Jim occurs while he is in the lifeboat; it may be taken to be the nightmare effect of an ill conscience, and in a milder sense is comparable to the pink toads which the hospitalized crewman, in his D.T.'s, imagines to be under his bed. Jim's apprehension of the deserted pilgrims is less fantastic: while on board the lifeboat he imagines he hears shouts from the "sinking" Patna, even though the other deserting officers say they hear nothing—regardless of the firm conviction of all the deserters that the ship's passengers are indeed drowning. "I was relieved to learn that those shouts—did I tell you I had heard shouts? No? Well, I did. Shouts for help ... blown along with the drizzle. Imagination I suppose. And yet I can hardly ... How stupid ... the others did not. I asked them afterwards. They all said No. No? And I was hearing them even then! I might have known—but I didn't think—I only listened. Very faint screams—day after day."

Jim's auditory errors are in keeping with his halting, boyish manner of speech. Marlow's comment on the young man's verbal mannerisms is informative: "He had confided so much in me that at times it seems as though he must come inpresently and tell the story in his own words, in his careless yet feeling voice, with his offhand manner, a little puzzled, a little bothered, a little hurt, but now and then by a word or a phrase giving one of these glimpses of his very, own self that were never any good for purposes of orientation." Here we see the necessity of Marlow to "speak" for Jim: because Jim lacks a sense of verbal continuity and direction. More than once, Marlow notes Jim's lack of eloquence. Jim does not reveal, for example, what he said to Jewel once he did recover his voice after her heroic act of revealing the would-be assassins. "He did not tell me what it was he said when at last he recovered his voice. I don't suppose he could be very eloquent."

Marlow himself does not condemn this poverty of Jim's speech: "He was not eloquent, but there was a dignity in this constitutional reticence, there was a high seriousness in his stammerings." No doubt Conrad seriously tried to capture in Jim's heroic British slang the characteristic understatement that he admired in the national character of the man. That he largely failed in this attempt gives an interesting further dimension to the novel which Conrad must not have intended, but one which adds greatly to what Conrad in effect says about Jim's failure with language.

Jim is inarticulate when expressing gratitude, and his attempts are as painful for Marlow as they are for himself: "He couldn't think how he merited that I... He would be shot if he could see to what he owed ... And it was Stein Stein the merchant, who ... but of course it was me he had to ... I cut him short. He was not articulate, and his gratitude caused me inexplicable pain." Jim's emotions are simply too extreme, whatever they happen to be, to admit verbal expression. Gratitude, humiliation, love, are among the feelings he is inept at conveying. "His lips pouted a little, trembling as though he had been on the point of bursting into tears. I perceived he was incapable of pronouncing a word from the excess of his humiliation. From disappointment too—who knows?"

When Jim leaves Patusan, Marlow puts him on board a ship whose captain employs a language symptomatic of the dilemma Jim will face. Though quite different from Jim's speech, the captain's is equally informative. The ship's master is a Westernized half-caste.

His flowing English seemed to be derived from a dictionary compiled by a lunatic. Had Mr. Stein desired him to "ascend," he would have "reverentially"—(I think he wanted to say respectfully—but devil only knows)—"reverentially made objects for the safety of properties." If disregarded, he would have presented "resignation to quit." Twelve months ago he had made his last voyage there, and though Mr. Cornelius "propitiated many offertories" to Mr. Roger Allang and the "principal populations," on conditions which made the trade "a snare and ashes in the mouth," yet his ship had been fired upon from the woods by "irresponsive parties" all the way clown the river; which causing his crew "from exposure to limb to remain silent in hidings," the brigantine was nearly stranded on a sandbank at the bar, where she "would have been perishable beyond the act of man."

This verbal hodgepodge is in keeping with the social and political disorder Jim encounters in Pa-tusan—and out of which he temporarily brings order and meaning. The disorder comes of a haphazard mixture of white and Malay culture. The half-caste shipmaster uses all the cliches of the "white man's burden" and distorts them: the net effect, via language, is to show the failure of the white mission in the Far East. That is the final judgment of Lord Jim, expressed by the unnamed recipient of Jim's papers and of Marlow's final statement about Jim. Thus the language of the half-caste is a proper index to conditions in Patusan: an ugly amalgam of western enlightenment and eastern ignorance. As Marlow observes when trusting Jim to safe passage on board the half-caste's ship, "My heart was freed from that dull resentment which had existed side by side with interest in his fate. The absurd chatter of the half-caste had given more reality to the miserable dangers of his path than Stein's careful statements."

With his departure to Patusan, Jim supposedly escapes from the white man's world and his own failure in it, an index to which is his failure with its language. Yet his parting cry to Marlow from the ship of the half-caste reiterates the verbal anomaly of Jim's good name, his repute, and his vain hope of recovering his lost honor. "I saw him aft detached upon the light of the westering sun, raising his cap high above his head. I heard an indistinct shout, 'You—shall—hear—of—me.' Of me, or from me, I don't know which. I think it must have been ofme." The ambiguity in this case may only be Marlow's failure to hear. But the mere fact that Jim still hopes to achieve heroism precedes another dimension the stature he achieves as a folk hero among the Malays of Patusan.

Jim cannot really shut himself off from the white man's world. At the time of his final departure from Marlow, who has once visited him in his native kingdom, he says, "You shall never be troubled by a voice from there again." This bravado no man can live up to, and yet it is characteristic of Jim's error that he set up this sort of verbal responsibility for himself. Shortly after, Jim tempers it with a pathetic try at one more farewell to the white world. It is revealing for what it implies about the spirit of empire and the loyalty that spirit impressed on the men it sent to far nameless places. “‘Will you be going home [to England] again soon?' asked Jim, just as I swung my leg over the gunwale. 'In a year or so if I live,' I said. The forefoot grated on the sand, the boat floated, the wet oars flashed and dipped once, twice. Jim, at the water's edge, raised his voice. 'Tell them ...' he began. I signed to the men to cease rowing, and waited in wonder. Tell who? The half-submerged sun faced him; I could see its red gleam in his eyes that looked dumbly at me.... 'No—nothing,' he said, and with a slight wave of his hand motioned the boat away. I did not look again ..."

The language Jim uses in Patusan is his own, as well as that of the natives, but he has a fresh chance to speak authoritatively, in the words of idealized romance and heroism. Yet verbal error still dogs him: in one instance, there is a curious misunderstanding of the name he gives Cornelius's step-daughter, the woman he loves. Jim calls her "Jewel," but the shrewd practical world or rumor applies a literal, rather than Jim's figurative, meaning to the name. "Such a jewel—it was explained to me by the old fellow from whom I heard most of this amazing Jim-myth—a sort of scribe to the wretched little Rajah of the place;—such a jewel, he said, cocking his poor purblind eyes up at me (he was sitting on the cabin floor out of respect), is best preserved by being concealed about the person of a woman. Yet it is not every woman that would do. She must be young—he sighed deeply— and insensible to the seductions of love." Jim of course sees Jewel's own merits as precious; contrary to rumor, she guards no fabulous great emerald.

In teaching the girl to speak his own language, Jim educates her in his own private system of values which the outside world has had trouble understanding and which Jim was inept at expressing because of his own verbal limitations. "Her mother had taught her to read and write; she had learned a good bit of English from Jim, and she spoke it most amusingly, with his own clipping, boyish intonation." But in the end she does not really understand Jim's values, and she believes him to be a traitor for giving her his word, and then leaving her.

Jim's few verbal successes take place at Patusan, when he acts upon his own concept of chivalry, courage, and honor. The chivalry is vocal in Jim's attack on the unspeakable Cornelius for his mistreatment of Jewel.

He let himself go—his nerves had been over-wrought for days—and called him many pretty names,— swindler, liar, sorry rascal: in fact, carried on in an extraordinary way. He admits he passed all bounds, that he was quite beside himself—defied all Patusan to scare him away—declared he would make them all dance to his own tune yet, and so on, in a menacing, boasting strain ... He came to his senses, and ceasing suddenly, wondered greatly at himself. He watched for a while. Not a stir, not a sound. "Exactly as if the chap had died while I had been making all that noise," he said.

Jim's heroism is also successfully verbal on the occasion when he organizes one faction of the Patusan community against its own enemy. "Jim spent the day with the old nakhoda, preaching the necessity of vigorous action to the principal men of the Bugis community, who had been summoned for a big talk. He remembered with pleasure how very eloquent and persuasive he had been. 'I managed to put some backbone into them that time, and no mistake,' he said." In this event, as in the one in which he lashes out at Cornelius, Jim experiences deep satisfaction through his verbal success, and the action that results from it. But in neither case do we hear the actual words of these speeches, and it is characteristic of Conrad's uncertainty with Jim's speech idiom that he report only the manner and the effect.

The success of the white lord, in word and deed, is short-lived. Jim fails in the encounter with Brown and his fellow-pirate invaders of Patusan because of Brown's lucky verbal hits: what began as a debate across the river ends with Jim, who had all the initial advantage, mutely accepting Brown's accusations of dishonor. "When he asked Jim, with a sort of brusque despairing frankness, whether be himself—straight now—didn't understand that when 'it came to saving one's life in the dark, one didn't care who else went—three, thirty, three hundred people'—it was as if a demon had been whispering advice in his ear. 'I made him wince,' boasted Brown to me. 'He very soon left off coming the righteous over me. He just stood there with nothing to say, and looking as black as thunder— not at me—on the ground.'" Thus ends Jim's brief success as an orator and leader among the Malays. His old inarticulate gloom comes upon him again.

The inarticulate message Jim writes on the day of his disaster confirms the return of his old speechlessness. Addressed to no one in particular, it is his last attempt to make known the unspeakable within himself. " 'An awful thing has happened,' he wrote before he flung the pen down for the first time; look at the ink blot resembling the head of an arrow under these words. After a while he had tried again, scrawling heavily, as if with a hand of lead, another line. 'I must now at once ...' The pen had spluttered, and that time he gave it up. There's nothing more; he had seen a broad gulf that neither eye nor voice could span."

Unlike Jim, Conrad optimistically estimates his own success in mastering the English language.

The truth of the matter is that my faculty to write in English is as natural as any other aptitude with which I might have been born. I have a strange and overpowering feeling that it had always been an inherent part of myself. English was for me neither a matter of choice nor adoption. The merest idea of choice had never entered my head. And as to adoption— well, yes, there was adoption; but it was I who was adopted by the genius of the language, which directly I came out of the stammering stage made me its own so completely that its very idioms I truly believe had a direct action on my temperament and fashioned my still plastic character.

Though Conrad achieved phenomenal success in a language he did not learn until he was twenty-one, his choice of a verbal dilemma as one aspect of Jim's failure as a man cannot be dissociated from Conrad's own sense of alienation in a foreign land. Before his recognition and success, the Polish-born novelist knew long, lonely years in England, and he spoke English with a heavy accent to the day of his death. In his short story "Amy Foster," he depicts a Carpathian immigrant shipwrecked on the English coast, a refugee who is assumed to be insane because the English farmers who take him in do not know his language. It is a curious irony that Conrad should have sought to depict a sense of verbal inadequacy in a young Englishman whose speech idiom Conrad himself had not perfectly mastered, just as it is ironic on another level that Jim understands so well the code of honor expressed in books and in the literary imagination (a linguistic repository) but that he should be so inept at speaking out his sense of honor in real life and acting upon it in a practical moment of crisis.

Source: Eban Bass, "The Verbal Failure of Lord Jim," in College English, Vol. 26, No. 6, 1965, pp. 438-44.

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