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: JOSEPH CONRAD'S LORD JIM : A QUOTE-BASED COMMENTARY : : This research work is a quote-based commentary, which tries to bring into the light and explain the main character's inner thoughts and feelings. The paper is based on the 1993 Wordsworth Clics Edition of Jospeh Conrad's 1900 book, Lord Jim. : Establishing the author as one of the first English modernists, Lord Jim is the story of a non-heroic character in the quest of redemption and heroism. Marlow, the same narrator of Heart of Darkness, introduces us into the story and the main character's fears and hopes. As Marlow said "He existed for me, and after all it is only through me that he existed for you. I've led him out by the hand; I've paraded him before you" (Conrad, Joseph: Lord Jim, p.141), which is exactly what he did until the last page of the novel. : Right from the very beginning we learn about Jim, later called, Lord Jim or Tuan Jim, who tries "to smash, to destroy, to annihilate" (p.7) by all means his past, even "by the simple and appalling act of taking his life." (p.8) : As Marlow goes on with the narrative, Marcel Proust's madlenain from Dans la Recherche du temp perdut, crosses our mind. Jim experiences exactly the same feeling as Proust's character, who remembers his childhood joy just by having a madlenain, with the only difference that the sea, Conrad's equivalent of the madlenain, triggers into Jim's mind a secret shameful past. Jim is so obsessed by his past that he wants it to be erased from his memory (and not only), "disappearing… into the past, as if falling into an abyss" (p.11). : He is ashamed of living in a world of brave sailors, his life long dream, and the agony of such feeling "filled him with a despairing desire to escape at any cost". (p.8) Although he wants to hide from the eyes of the world, he cannot abandon the sea-life, which is like a spell, a "bewitching breath" (p.8) that eventually will give him the chance of redemption. : In charge of "Patana" a ship full of Muslim pilgrims on their way to the holy ground of Mecca, Jim takes the wrong decision of leaving the ship with the rest of the coward crew when faced with imminent sinking. They don't even inform the poor penger of the danger they're in, although they submitted to white men's supposed supremacy: "Below the roof of awnings, surrendered to the wisdom of white men and to their courage, trusting the power of their unbelief and the iron shell of their fire-ship, the pilgrims of an exacting faith slept on mats, on blankets, on bare planks, on every deck, in all the dark corners, wrapped in dyed cloth, muffled in soiled rags, with their heads resting on small bundles, with their faces pressed to bent forearms: the men, the women, the children; the old with the young, the decript with the lusty - all equal before sleep, death's brother." (p.12) But in this quiet night, the reader has the feeling that something bad is going to happen. It's like the peaceful atmosphere is just a prelude to a tragedy, "the invincible aspect of the peace" (p.13) where one "cared of nothing that could happen to him to the end of his days". (p.13) : An interesting fact that has to be mentioned is the gender of the ship. "Patna", the cause of his downfall, is addressed as "she", thus giving the reader the impression that at times the characters are talking about a long lost love, as someone or something they should have never left. : As the danger approached "and suddenly the calm sea, the sky without a cloud, appeared formidably insecure in their immobility, as if poised on the brow of yawning destruction" (p.17) the crew's courage was gone and found themselves fleeing for their life. : But those "white men" (p.12) were just simple ordinary men, who would do anything to save their own life in the face of danger, or in the case of the German captain even more: "You would let a good man die sooner than give him a drop of shnaps". Thus it's not surprising that the pack of drunkards, which Jim joined, left the supposed sinking ship: "The quality of these men did not matter; he rubbed shoulders with them, but they could not touch him; he shared the air they breathed, but he was different…". (p.16) Yes, indeed, in a way Jim was different, but although he had the courage to face his folks on the shore when trailed for his deeds, nobody can forget that he embarked on the escape boat, leaving the other pengers at fate's mercy. : But every action has a reaction, every good deed opposes a bad one. Thus, although Jim deep down is a good man, he has his flaws, his ups and downs. And as Marlow tried to explain to his fellow listeners “I am willing to believe each of us has a guardian angel, if you fellows will concede to me that each of us has a familiar devil as well.” (p.22) “He [Jim] looked as genuine as a new sovereign, but there was some infernal alloy in his metal.” (p.29) The devil within him made Jim jump from aboard of his ship into the rescue boat, but his guardian angel tries to make peace with his heart and mind by finding Jim a special task to perform before his redemption. : An interesting recent movie, called The Matrix raises the following question: What if things are not as they seam to be? What if reality is just a dream? Based on the above mentioned ideas if we bring together Lord Jim and The Matrix we have to ask ourselves if Jim really was what he seemed to be: “… the kind of fellow you would, on the strength of his looks, leave in charge of the deck – figuratively and professionally speaking.” (p.28) He turned out not to be! : Jim wants to be special, wants to be a hero. Marlow gives us the impression that Jim is in some kind different than ordinary men when stating that “he was altogether of another sort” (p.50-51), until in the end when Marlow has to admit that Jim “is one of us” (p.207) Unable to understand Jim’s actions, Marlow tries to elucidate Jim’s intricate mind: “for it is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.” (p.51) : Before the trial Jim pretends that his time of being a hero has just begun: “It is all in being ready. I wasn’t; not-not then.” (p.51) He is not able to understand that the one opportunity to find his heroic path he has been given on the deck of Patna showed him how non-heroic his actions are. Until the end of the novel the reader still hopes that this will change, only to realize that he was just a romantic parson’s son, unable of heroic deeds. : Jim is a proud man, convinced that he did wrong, but not out of cowardice. His ability to lie himself, and hide behind the truth is amazing: ”’Do you think I was afraid of death?’ he asked in a voice very fierce and low. …‘I am ready to swear I was not – I was not… By God – no!’” (p.55) It’s more like he tries to convince himself rather than his interlocutor, Morlow, of his justfulness. The truth is that Jim was not ready for the heroic acts he had dreamed for so long, as Marlow puts it so clearly: “He was not afraid of death perhaps, but I’ll tell you what, he was afraid of the emergency.” (p.56) : Referring to the sinking of Patna, Marlow tries to unwrap Jim’s innermost feelings: “At first he was thankful the night had covered up the scene before his eyes, and then to know of it and yet to have seen and heard nothing appeared somehow the culminating point of an awful misfortune. ‘Strange isn’t it?’”. (p.71) All of the crew members that have escaped lived to believe that the steamboat really sank, even pretending that they saw her sinking. “She was gone! She was gone! Not a doubt of it. Nobody could have helped. They repeated the same words over and over again as though they couldn’t stop themselves. Never doubted she would go. The lights were gone. No mistake. The lights were gone. Couldn’t expect anything more. She had to go…”. (p.73) That never happened and ashore they had to flee, leaving Jim to face the inquiry. Probably deep down in their souls they had wished it did sink, thus saving them of so much trouble. : Jim’s first regrets of his actions appear on the escape boat when “it seemed to me that I must jump out of that accursed boat and swim back to see – half a mile – more – any distance – to the very spot.” (p.72) Again his heroic mind is ready to face any danger and swim “any distance”. But for what? To see the pilgrims’ corpses floating and thus rest his soul that he did the right thing when he abandoned the ship. A pathetic hero! : The moment he had jumped for his life into the rescue boat a black cloud has shaded his pride and dreams, exactly like the darkness he found himself into just after the jump: “’I didn’t think any spot on earth could be so still,’ he said. ‘You couldn’t distinguish the sea from the sky; there was nothing to sea and hear. Not a glimmer, not a shape, not a sound’.” (p.72) And in that darkness he lost everything: “Everything was gone and – all was over”. (p.72) : When in the escape boat, nothing mattered anymore. It's like Jim was ashamed of his actions: "No concern with anything on earth. Nothing mattered… No fear, no law, no sounds, no eyes - not even our own, till - till sunrise at least." (p.76) In the dark night he tried to forget that he existed, he tried to forget who he really was. : As soon as he regains his senses, Jim is already thinking of his dreams of being a hero compared to his cowardly actions. Thus the thought of suicide crosses his mind, hoping for an easy ending. “All this seemed very hard to bear. I was cold, too. And I could do nothing. I thought that if I moved I would have to go over the side and…” (p.73) And in the end it is an easy death that he would choose, refusing to fight both for his life and his friends. : Deserted people, either on an island (like in William Golding's Lord of the Flies) or in a boat, loose their hope while madness and wilderness makes their way into the human's heart: "There is something peculiar in a small boat upon the wide sea. Over the lives borne from under the shadow of death there seems to fall the shadow of madness." (p.76) They start feeling insecure and lonely as if "there was a villainy of cirstances that cut these men off more completely from the rest of mankind". (p.76) : As any other human being, Jim needs understanding and compion. He finds his opportunity for confession in Marlow's approach. Becoming desperate, Jim fights Marlow: "'Don't you believe me?' he cried. 'I swear!… Confound it! You got me here to talk, and… You must!… You said you would believe.'" (p.82) : Like a mediaeval Japanese samurai, Jim is obsessed that he lost his honour: "And what life may be worth when… the honour is gone" (p.93) Losing his honour he also lost his chance of becoming a hero. But Jim still hopes that he will be given another chance, thus he refuses Marlow's offer to flee, stating that: "I may have jumped, but I don't run away." (p.97) He tries and wants to be an honourable man, at least now after the unforgivable mistake, hoping that "Some day one's bound to come upon some sort of chance to get it all back again. Must!" (p.112) Marlow noticed his desire to make up with his own past, and says that "I seemed to perceive dimly that what he wanted, what he was, as it were, waiting for, was something not easy to define - something in the nature of an opportunity." (p.126) He was actually waiting for an opportunity to redeem himself, to make peace both with his soul and past. : Wondering from one place to another, fleeing from his past as soon as people found out who he really is, at a point Jim was "in Bangkok, where he found employment with Yucker Brothers." It is the same city that had sheltered Gentleman Brown in his last days on earth, the place where, in a hut, Marlow found out about Jim's end. Irrelevant for the contents of the papers I extracted this quote only because when I read the novel I was living and teaching English in Thailand. : Jim admits that he is not perfect, but just a human with a great desire of becoming a hero: "Man is amazing, but he is not a masterpiece" (p.130). Nobody's perfect, but every man "wants to be a saint, and he wants to be a devil - and every time he shuts his eyes he sees himself as a fine fellow - so fine as he can never be… In a dream…" (p.133) But at the middle of the novel, when Marlow discusses with his friend Stein about Jim's case we really find out who Jim was: "I understand very well. He is a romantic." (p.133). Not a hero! : When Marlow talks about returning home after he had finally succeeded to see Jim settled down in Patusan, "a remote district of native-ruled state, and the chief settlement bears the same name" (p.138), we must have in mind the fact that Conrad himself was not an English native. Thus when the author writes about returning home he must have thought about himself too: "… but it seems to me that for each of us going home must be like going to render an account. We return to face our superiors, our kindred, our friends - those whom we obey, and those whom we love; but even they who have neither, the most free, lonely, irresponsible, and bereft of ties - even those for whom home holds no dear face, no familiar voice even they have to meet the spirit that dwells within the land, under its sky, in its air, in its valleys, and on its rises, in its fields, in its waters and its tree - a mute friend, judge, and inspirer. Say what you like, to get its joy, to breath its peace, to face its truth, one must return with a clear conscience." (p.139) We notice the melancholy in Conrad's voice, thus making us think of our own homeland. : But Jim is young, and all his actions are in the tone of his age: "Youth is insolent; it is its right - its necessity; it has got to ert itself, and all ertion in this world of doubts is a defiance, is an insolence." (p.148) He wants to challenge the world, his destiny in the search of his heroic life. : Not long after his arrival in Patusan - "one of the lost, forgotten, unknown places of the earth" (p.202) - we almost have the impression that we are reading about a different Jim: "There was nothing within sight to compare him with, as though he had been one of those exceptional men who can be only measured by the greatness of their fame; and his fame, remember, was the greatest thing around for many a day's journey." (p.170) Exceptional character, fame, greatness. Jim possessed none of these things before going to Patusan. But will he be able to keep all these great qualities for the rest of his life? The end of the novel will give us the right answer. : On the island Jim pretends to live a very pionate love story, but "for the most part we look upon them as stories of opportunities: episodes of pion at best, or perhaps only of youth and temptation, doomed to forgetfulness in the end, even if they p through the reality of tenderness and regret." (p.172) And it is so true for Jim who will part with his beloved wife so easily when he feels like the time for him to be a hero has come. It's not that he hadn't got a conscience. "He had a conscience, and it was a romantic conscience." (p.173) : And like most women who cannot let go, and think, as Metallica puts it so clearly in its latest album "St. Anger", that "control is love, love is control": "he was imprisoned within the very freedom of his power". (p.177) Jewel, the person whom he loved, relied her existence too much on Jim, thus for her the end was only suffering. "Her tenderness hovered over him like a flutter of wings. She lived so completely in his contemplation that she had acquired something of his outward aspect, something that recalled him in her movements, in the way she stretched her arm, turned her head, directed her glances." (p.177) Jim confesses to Marlow "that if I went away from her it would be the end of everything somehow" (p.187). And it was exactly as he had said. The moment he left her for Doramin's house, after Dain Waris's death, everything ended. His life, his dreams for heroism, his love for Jewel. : Jim is not able to fully understand Jewel's desires, and neither is she: "He [Jim] could see my face [Jewel's], hear my voice, hear my grief! When I used to sit at his feet, with my cheek against his knee and his hand on my head, the course of cruelty and madness was already within him, waiting for the day. The day came!… and before the sun had set he could not see me anymore - he was made blind and deaf and without pity, as you all are [white men]. He shall have no tears from me. Never, never. Not one tear. I will not! He went away from me as if I had been worse than death. He fled as if driven by some accursed thing he had heard or seen in his sleep…" (p.218) The sad thing is that Jewel lived for Jim, but Jim lived for his own dreams. At a point, Jewel exclaims: "He was false" (p.219), but "… suddenly Stein broke in. 'No! no! no! My poor child!…' he patted her hand lying pively on his sleeve. "No! no! Not false! True! true! true!' he tried to look into her stoned face. 'You don't understand. Ach! Why you do not understand?… Terrible!' he said to me. 'Some day she shall understand.'" (p.219) I doubt that Jewel will ever have the emotional capability to understand Jim as Stein did. : But although Jim seems to have found what he was looking for and thus heal his wounds, he will never be able to leave the island. Patna's still haunting him. "I've been only two years here, and now, upon my word, I can't conceive being able to live anywhere else. The very thought of the world outside is enough to give me a fright; because, don't you see… I have not forgotten why I came here. Not yet!" (p.190) The outside world means the recollection of his flaws, and he will forget them only in death. : In Patusan Jim encounters and befriends most of the colorful natives: "The immense and magnanimous Doramin and his little motherly witch of a wife, gazing together upon the land and nursing secretly their dreams of parental ambition; Tunju Allang, wizened and greatly perplexed; Dain Waris, intelligent and brave, with his faith in Jim, with his firm glance and his ironic friendliness; the girl, absorbed in her frightened, suious adoration; Tamb' Itam, surly and faithful; Cornelius, leaning his forehead against the fence under the moonlight… They exist as if under an enchanter's wand. But the figure under all these grouped - that one lives, and I am not certain of him. No magician's want can immobilise him under my eyes." (p.206-207). It can be clearly noticed from Marlow's narrative that in a certain extent he wasn't able to fully understand Jim. : Although on the island Jim's actions were seen as "the reign of the white man who protected poor people" (p.229), Marlow reminds Jim that the natives from Patusan will never understand him: "you shall always remain for them an insoluble mystery". (p.191) And this is exactly what Jim wants: no one to really know who he was and is thus his choice seems logical but non-heroic: "Well, then let me always remain here." (p.191) But things in Patusan will never change, regardless of Jim's actions: "It remains in the memory motionless, unfaded, with its life arrested, in an unchanging light." (p.206) : When parting with Marlow for the last time Jim tries to voice his deepest fears, but he cannot: "'Tell them…' he begun. I signed to the men to cease rowing, and waited in wonder. Tell who?… 'No nothing.'" (p.210) I think Jim wanted to send a message to his parents, but he was afraid of not being good enough. Not yet. The last letter he has received from his family was before the Patna affair, and we have the feeling that one of the reasons he cannot go back home is that he doesn't want to disappoint his father. He tried once "to write - to somebody - and gave it up. Loneliness was closing on him." (p.256) "He was overwhelmed by his own personality" (p.213) any could write only a few words. : When Gentleman Brown threatens the peace and order established by Lord Jim the natives take action against him. Ironically, it is Jim's intervention that will shatter the natives' confidence in their master. Jim wanted to give Brown a chance, a chance he thinks has been given to him too on Patusan, but he forgets that the two of them were "standing on the opposite poles of that conception of life which includes all mankind." (p.238) Jim ready to forgive, Brown ready to avenge; "Their antagonism must have been expressed in their glances." (p.238) But Brown "had a satanic gift of finding the best and the weakest spot in his victims," (p.242) thus being able to deal a clear page out of Patusan. Jim "loved the land and the people living in it with a very great love. He was ready to answer with his life for any harm that should come to them if the white man with beards were allowed to retire." (p. 246) An it is exactly what he did, being "responsible for every life in the land" (p. 247) and if "something might happen… he would never forgive himself." (p.247) : At his son's death, Doramin "suddenly let out one great fierce cry, deep from the chest, a roar of pain and fury, as mighty as the bellow of a wounded bull, bringing great fear into men's hearts, by the magnitude of his anger and his sorrow that could be plainly discerned without words. There was a great stillness afterwards…". (p. 258) We can picture this roar in our mind if we think of Mario Puzo's film The Godfather III, mainly the scene when the main character, starring Al Pacino, cried of pain at his daughter's death on the steps of the theatre. : Then "the sky over Patusan was blood-red, immense, streaming like an open vein. An enormous sun nestled crimson amongst the tree-tops, and the forest below had a black and forbidding face" (p.259) giving the reader the feeling that more blood is going to be shed. : As Jim walked to his death to Doramin's residence "he did not look back" (p.259). Not to his woman, not to his men. All that counted was his pride, and maybe, he thought, his salvation. But "for those simple minds Jim remains under a cloud" (p.259), never to be understood. As "the ring which he [Dormanin] had dropped on his lap fell and rolled against the foot of the white man" (p.260) it was time for Jim to pay for his trustfulness in Gentleman Brown, which caused Dain Waris's death. "Then with his hand over his lip he fell forward, dead." (p.260) : In the end, for Marlow "nothing mattered, since I had made up my mind that Jim, for whom alone I cared, had at least mastered his fate." (p.203) Far away from the outside world Jim became the sole person who could decide his future, thus freeing himself from the bloody claws of society, which stranded him on the island. : Regarding Jim's story, "the last word is not said - probably shall never be said" (p.141) leaving thus the reader the chance to judge his actions for himself, but as for Marlow, "My last words about Jim shall be few. I affirm he had achieved greatness." (p.141) : Jim accepted his fate, "and with the growing loneliness of his obstinacy his spirit seemed to rise above the ruins of his existence." (p. 257) : Mihnea Simandan : July 2003

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