‘It is from weakness unknown, but perhaps suspected, as in some parts of the world you suspect a deadly snake in every bush – from weakness that may lie hidden, watched or unwatched, prayed against or manfully scorned, repressed or maybe ignored more than half a lifetime, not one of us is safe.’
(Marlow in chapter 5)

Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything!
(Marlow, appalled at the inadequacy of legal procedures to capture the complexity of life, Chapter 4)

‘We never know what a man is made of.’
(Captain Brierly’s first mate, Mr Jones, after Brierly commits suicide, Chapter 6)

I was doomed to be the recipient of confidences, and to be confronted with unanswerable questions.
(Marlow feeling sorry for himself, Chapter 34)

It was a lesson, a retribution – a demonstration of some obscure and awful attribute of our nature which, I am afraid, is not so very far under the surface as we like to think.
(Marlow reflecting on the massacre which ends the book and its connection to fundamental human nature, Chapter 44)

Lord Jim was Joseph Conrad’s next publication after Heart of Darkness (1899). Like Heart of Darkness it was first published as a serial in Blackwoods Magazine, in this case from October 1899 to November 1900, and then published in book form. However, Lord Jim is a lot longer than Heart of Darkness (around 80,000 words and 313 Penguin pages compared to Heart’s 38,000 words and 111 pages) and uses the same techniques of a story-telling narrator who mingles a main narrative with numerous flashbacks, to much more complex effect.

My review divides the text into three parts. These aren’t in the book, which is simply divided into 45 chapters, but, as you read it, there is very obviously a part one (aboard the Patna), a part two (in Patusan), a few chapters at the end concluding the narrative, which I’ve labelled part 3. And I suppose the first four chapters, told by an omniscient third-person narrator, amount to an introduction.

Plot summary: Introduction

The first four chapters are told by an omniscient third person narrator and give a potted biography of the central protagonist. Jim (last name never mentioned) is a sound-looking young man from a country parsonage who trains to be a merchant sailor, gets his seaman’s license, gets work aboard various ships out East till he is injured by a falling spar. Not fully fit, he gets a job aboard a notorious old steamer, the Patna, 1,400 tons, captained by a fat and foul-mouthed German captain and owned by an unscrupulous Chinese. It describes the fateful voyage of the steamship Patna, up to and including its accident before cutting away to the courtroom where an official enquiry into the accident is being held. At the end of the fourth chapter we are introduced to Charles Marlow, captain in the merchant marine, and his interest in Jim’s case. In the courtroom he is described as:

A white man who sat apart from the others, with his face worn and clouded, but with quiet eyes that glanced straight, interested and clear. (Chapter 4)

All this is preparation for what follows.

Plot summary: part 1

Setting

It’s after dinner out East somewhere, in the imperialist 1890s. On a veranda half a dozen professional white men have dined well and, as it gets dark, they call on one of their number, Charles Marlow, the only seaman among them, to give them one of his famous ‘yarns’, and so he does.

The Patna

The core of the story is simple. Several years ago there’d been a scandal among seaman out East about an old rustbucket of a ship, the Patna, which was contracted to carry 800 pilgrims to Mecca and which, en route to Aden, struck some underwater obstacle, split the hull and began taking water. It was the middle of the night, the pilgrims were all asleep, and the drunken cowardly crew panicked and fled the ship in a lifeboat. A squall came up at just that moment and the survivors, once the lifeboat was picked up next day and brought to Aden, insisted they saw the ship go down, quickly and mercifully drowning all the pilgrims.

The scandal derived from the fact that the ship very much did not go down, but remained half afloat, despite the holing and the squall, which merely blew it out of sight of the crew in the lifeboat. The next day the Patna was spotted by a French warship who cabled her up and towed the stricken ship to Aden, where all the pilgrims were successfully unloaded.

An official enquiry was held but the captain of the Patna, an obese German named Gustav, skedaddled, and the chief engineer had an alcoholic collapse and was confined to hospital. Therefore the main witness and accused in the case was the young mate, 23-year-old Jim, who cut a defiant but forlorn figure in the courtroom.

Marlow, captain of a merchant vessel, happened to be in the port where the public enquiry was being held and went along out of curiosity. He was intrigued by the character of this Jim fellow and, after bumping into him in the crowd outside when the court recessed for lunch, invited him to dinner at the Malabar Hotel where he was staying.

The Malabar Hotel confession

After dinner they go onto the terrace of the hotel and there follows Marlow’s very long, very intense account of the interview he held with Jim, not exactly like a police interview but more like a therapy session, or maybe a Catholic confession – but very long and exhaustive. Although he teases out of Jim all the unflattering details, Jim is so young and woebegone that he is pitifully grateful for being given the opportunity to get everything off his chest.

‘Last night already you had done me no end of good. Listening to me – you know… I’ve thought more than once the top of my head would fly off… You have given me confidence.” (p.142)

Marlow is motivated because, as he tells his listeners on the veranda, he is a connoisseur of people (he repeatedly describes Jim as ‘too interesting‘ to ignore). Which explains why he is so fascinated by, and comments on, every single remark, gesture and expression which crosses Jim’s face, analysing and re-analysing everything Jim says and even the silences when he stumbles, hesitates or falls silent. An approach which explains why just this first section lasts about 100 densely-packed pages.

The factual content of this vast text goes into more detail about events, retelling it in nailbiting real time, putting the reader on the edge of their seat:

The ship hit something, the forward bulkhead gave and started flooding with water; when Jim went down to check the main bulkhead protecting the rest of the ship he saw it bulging with the pressure and bits falling off the rusty iron. Back on deck the captain and three white crew were wrestling to free the lifeboat while Jim stood back, detached from them and stricken with conscience. He saw one of them, George, keel over as if in a faint. Finally, the three crew members release the boat and descend rapidly into the sea (all this without warning the sleeping pilgrims) and yell up for their mate, George to join them

The jump

And this is the big thing, from Jim’s perspective and for the entire moral framework of the book. Jim was not a coward. Jim realised his responsibility to the 800 innocent pilgrims. Jim realised someone ought to stay on board to organise an evacuation, no matter how chaotic, no matter there weren’t enough lifeboats for the entire 800. As he heard the cowardly crew yelling up from the darkness (it is pitch black night) below him, urging ‘George’ to jump, all these responsibilities flashed through his mind and yet…

The next thing Jim knows he is in the boat, he has jumped (p.88). While his mind is still processing this fatal step, a squall comes up and sheets of rain hide the Patna from view and, when it passes, they can’t see the ship’s lights and assume it sank.

In the pitch dark it takes a while for the others to realise Jim is not George and, when they do, they are not only furious at having lost their comrade, but also there’s much muttering about whether Jim will betray them when they eventually are rescued, with a strong undertone of menace.

Jim stays up all night gripping the boat’s tiller in fear of his life. Next day the boat is picked up by a passing ship, a ‘Dale Line steamer’, and taken to Aden where they discover to their horror and chagrin that the Patna didn’t sink but has been towed there, too. Then, a few days later, they are compelled to attend the enquiry, which is where Marlow comes in.

Romantic imaginings versus bitter reality

The point to grasp, the central theme of this long dense novel, is the discrepancy between Jim’s fond fantasies and the bitter reality of his actions. Again and again Marlow brings out the way that Jim, from his boyhood, revelled in romantic stories of the sea and imagined himself to be a brave bold sailor, a doughty captain, a swashbuckling buccaneer in the mode of Raleigh and Drake. As he underwent his training, as he served on various ships, as he took the crappy job on the Patna, all the time he reassured himself that when push came to shove, when the crisis arrived, he would be the hero, he would be the man of resolve, he would save the day.

And yet, in the event, when the crisis came, it was this very imaginative faculty which undid him. As he stood wavering on the bridge he imagined all too vividly the remaining bulkhead bursting, the water flooding in, the realisation and panic among the pilgrims, the screams of men, women and children as the gushing water frothed around them, a great confusion of brown bodies all screaming in their death agonies and…next thing he knew he was in the boat. Again and again he insists to Marlow that he never made a conscious decision. The thing just happened. He leaped and, with that one action, undid the entire basis of his self image, the heroic fantasies he had nurtured all his life.

By the time this very long confession-cum-therapy session has ended, all the other guests at the hotel are long gone to bed and on impulse Marlow makes Jim an offer: he’ll write him a letter of recommendation to a friend out East and help him do a bunk to avoid the findings of the enquiry. But Jim is offended:

‘You don’t seem to understand, he said incisively; then looking at me without a wink, ‘I may have jumped, but I don’t run away.’

Intense scrutiny

Several things are important. First, the book is so enormously long, dense and chewy because Marlow makes a mountain out of every word, hesitation, gesture and flicker from Jim, freighting them all with huge and portentous significance.

Hyperbolic language

Two, Conrad is very prone to hyperbole, to interpreting relatively mundane actions with extreme words like horror, madness, vengeance, Fate etc. Sentences like this occur hundreds of times:

I knew too much already to hope for the grace of a single uplifting touch, for the favour of hinted madness, of shadowed horror.

At around the same time (the later 1890s) Sigmund Freud was paying exorbitant attention to the dreams, memories and verbal slips of his patients, freighting them an immense load of psychological and, above all, sexual significance. Conrad’s Marlow subjects Jim and his story to the same kind of hyper-intense scrutiny except that, instead of sex, Conrad detects in every word and phrase signs of the horror, despair, futility and madness which he sees everywhere, in everything, on every page.

Trust a boat on the high seas to bring out the Irrational that lurks at the bottom of every thought, sentiment, sensation, emotion.

Digressions

Third thing is that, being a discursive, after-dinner narrator means that Marlow is free to jump around in time, frequently interrupting the great Malabar Hotel Confession scene with memories of people he talked to at the time or later, in the same port town or miles away, inserting facts and perspectives on Jim’s account which he only learned years later and sometimes rambling right off the main story altogether.

For example, he not only tells us that one of the officials who sat on the Board of Enquiry, Captain Montague Brierly, shortly afterwards committed suicide (which is odd and distracting enough in its own right), but spends some pages retailing the account of the captain’s last movements given by his first mate, a Mr Jones. And not only this, but this digression involves some Conradian pondering on Jones’s appearance, character, motivation and style of talking.

Again, some years later he meets one of the French officers who went on board the abandoned Patna, supervised its cabling up and towing to Aden, and this passage includes nearly as much circumstantial detail about this man’s appearance and manner as he does about Jim’s.

Again and again the flow of Jim’s story is interrupted by digressions like this which not only take us to other times and places, but dwell on and analyse other people.

Other characters

Thus although the basic narrative consists of this intense colloquy between Marlow and Jim, it digresses so often onto the subsidiary stories of others that it slowly builds up into a kind of matrix of secondary characters, which themselves shed light not only on the factual content of the narrative, but 1) build up the sense of the wider world of ships and crews and ports, painting a broader picture of ‘Conrad’s world’, as well as 2) shedding direct or indirect light onto the central theme of how we humans are so often undone, undermined from our best intentions by the perversity of events, Fate, call it what you will.

Secondary characters mentioned or described, sometimes at length, in part one, in include:

– ‘that unspeakable vagabond’, Antonio Mariani, owner of Mariani’s billiard-room and grog-shop near the bazaar. It’s typical that Marlow hears Mariani’s version of events ‘a long time after’, ‘when he came on board one day to dun my steward for the price of some cigars’.

– the (unnamed) engineer of the Patna, an alcoholic who goes on a three-day bender before the official enquiry and ends up in the local hospital with powerful delirium tremens. It is here that Marlow, playing the detective, visits him to shed more light on Jim’s actions. The man insists not only that he saw the ship go down but, in his delirium, insists that it was full of reptiles, monsters, threatening him. He howls so loudly that the other inmates of the ward yell at him to shut up. (Chapter 5)

– Captain Montague Brierly, captain of the Ossa and one of the three men on the Board of Enquiry, catches up with Marlow after the first adjournment and spends a couple of pages lamenting how beastly the trial is and how demoralising it is for everyone in the merchant service that Jim has ‘let the side down’. He echoes Marlow’s insistence on the standards of behaviour demanded by ‘the craft’.

‘We’ve got all kinds amongst us – some anointed scoundrels in the lot; but, hang it, we must preserve professional decency or we become no better than so many tinkers going about loose.’ (Chapter 6)

– Mr Jones, first mate of the Ossa, vividly describes the last time he saw Captain Brierly on the bridge of the Ossa before Brierly committed suicide by jumping overboard, only a week or so after the Board of Enquiry. Jones describes Brierly’s concern that his pet dog be locked in the bridge so it didn’t follow him overboard, then expressed his contempt for the replacement captain appointed by the Company. (Chapter 6)

– An elderly French lieutenant. He is third lieutenant of the Victorieuse, flagship of the French Pacific squadron and the French gunboat which finds the Patna marooned and adrift. He’s one of the party who boarded the abandoned Patna. One afternoon in Sydney, after they have met ‘by the merest chance, in a sort of cafe’, he tells Marlow that he stayed on board the Patna for the entire 30 hours it took to haul it to the nearest English port, Aden, going on to say how impressed he was when the boats of two other British ships in the harbour took off all the 800 pilgrims in just 25 minutes (pages 107 to 116).

– Deckhand of the Sephora, a completely different ship which also got into difficulties and sank, who describes watching a member of that crew (a completely different crew), little Bob Stanton who looked like a bearded gnome, go back onboard to try and rescue a maid who refused to leave the sinking ship. She refused and they both drowned, an anecdote which sheds oblique light on Jim’s story (p.116).

– Selvin, chief mate of Marlow’s own ship, who nurses a fiery jealousy of his mousey wife which can drive him into homicidal rages (p.121).

– The Australian Captain Chester sees Jim stagger off after the enquiry’s verdict and asks Marlow whether he could persuade him (Jim) to come in on his dodgy scheme of buying a knackered old steamer to collect guano off a remote reef. Marlow says no and the digression could have ended there but, in Conrad’s hands, it has barely even begun. Because Conrad now bolts on the completely unnecessary detail that this Captain Chester has already secured one backer, a decrepit old captain named Robinson. Conrad then adds the lurid detail that this man acquired the nickname ‘Holy-Terror Robinson’ because he was involved in a scandal where he and six others were shipwrecked on Stewart Island and when, some months later, a Royal Navy ship spotted him on the shore, he was the only one left – with the result that there was lots of muttering about cannibalism. The relevance to Jim is that Chester admires the way Robinson didn’t care a fig for what others thought, rejected all accusations and got on with his life just fine, the total opposite of Jim, who is visibly shattered by the court’s verdict that his master’s certificate be taken away (pages 124 to 130). Then, later on in the narrative, Marlow tells us that the knackered old ship which Chester chartered to head out for this guano-deep island went down with all hands in a hurricane (p.135).

Hopefully these examples demonstrate how the net effect of hearing about, seeing and reading the stories of all these other characters is to build up the impression of a whole world, the world of the merchant marine in the 1890s, Conrad’s world, the world of ‘the craft’ – and to provide foils, comparisons and contrasts for Jim’s behaviour, never bluntly direct, but numerous sidelights and oblique angles.

Malabar Hotel second night

Next day Marlow attends the conclusion of the public enquiry and hears the magistrate read out their verdict: the German skipper (who has long since disappeared) and Jim (sitting humiliated in court) are to lose their seaman’s licenses.

After the court breaks up and empties, Marlow is temporarily delayed but then finds Jim down at the dockside and invites him back to his hotel room. He realises that the poor man has just lost the only profession he had, has nowhere to go, and is the talk of the town. Marlow, very compassionately, gives him refuge for one long day, not bothering him with talk but sitting and quietly writing letters and leaving Jim in silence as it gets slowly darker toward evening and then a tropical storm breaks out.

The tone and content is very different from the long night of the Confession. Now it is full of pregnant silences and the ominous symbolism of approaching darkness. Finally, after much stilted dialogue, Marlow explains that he’s written a letter of recommendation of Jim to an old friend, Mr Denver, who owns a rice mill in another country. Jim thanks Marlow for listening to him and giving him some confidence back. He vows to start over with ‘a clean slate’.

Intermezzo: Jim’s jobs

1) Six months later Marlow, docked in Hong Kong, gets a letter from Denver, a confirmed anti-social misanthrope (characteristically, Conrad gives us a pen portrait), saying Jim is turning out very well, very companionable, good worker. He (Denver) wonders what Jim did to abandon the sea, which tells us that Denver is utterly in the dark about the Patna incident. All is well.

But a few months later Marlow gets back from a voyage to find another letter saying Jim has absconded from Denver’s employ. In the same pile of letters is one from Jim himself explaining why: by a far-fetched coincidence the drunken second engineer from the Patna turned up in this distant place and also got a job at Denver’s mill. The engineer didn’t blab but he established a greasy rapport with Jim about ‘our little secret’, the suggestion of their exact moral equivalence, which Jim found impossible to bear.

2) So Jim moved on and got a job with a ship chandler’s company called Egstrom & Blake. Marlow calls in at the relevant (unnamed) port, calls in on the shop and he and Jim have a catch-up. Jim explains why he left Denver and says he’s doing OK as the runner to the two owners, Egstrom & Blake. He claims to be able to put up with the way the owners notoriously bicker and fight all the time, though Marlow secretly thinks he must find it all very humiliating.

A few months later Marlow calls by and is upset to discover Jim has done another bunk. Egstrom explains that some captains came by and were jawing in the shop in Jim’s presence and the Patna case came up and one of the old captains said what ‘scoundrels’ the Patna‘s crew had been and Jim froze. When the captains left, Jim gave Egstrom his notice despite all the latter’s reassurance and pleas. Marlow has to explain that Jim was one of the ‘scoundrels’, which Egstrom, like Denver, did not know.

3) And so Jim fled from job to job until he became notorious. He works for the Yucker brothers in Bangkok where Schomberg, the keeper of the hotel where he boarded, ‘a hirsute Alsatian of manly bearing and an irrepressible retailer of all the scandalous gossip of the place’, would tell anyone who cared to hear, all about Jim’s story. Jim leaves this berth after he gets into a fight with a drunken Dane who whispered something at him and who Jim threw off the veranda into the river (p.152).

4) Marlow takes Jim away with him in his ship. By now, as we can tell, he is heavily involved in Jim’s life, and next places him as a ‘water clerk’ with another ship’s chandler named de Jongh, ‘with his little leathery face’. (Chapter 13).

Plot summary: part 2

Stein

This big book enters part two when Marlow turns for advice about what to do with Jim to Stein, ‘a wealthy and respected merchant, lead partner in Stein & Co, ‘an eminently suitable person to receive my confidences about Jim’s difficulties as well as my own.’

Stein is an old hand, a German trader with a long and colourful life story in his own right, which (of course) Marlow gives us in full. He had in his time been merchant, adventurer, sometime adviser of a Malay sultan who he always referred to as ‘my poor Mohammed Bonso’ because he was assassinated at the end of a tumultuous eight-year civil war. We hear that Stein inherited his position from a venerable old Scot named Alexander M’Neil who was well in with the local tribe, which was ruled by a tough old woman queen. Nowadays he is owner of a trading firm in the Malaysian islands.

Marlow discusses Jim’s case with Stein who says he runs a trading post on the remote island of Patusan, forty miles up the river in the interior. The current factor or head of the trading post is a Portuguese named Cornelius, who is giving an unsatisfactory performance. Stein says why not send keen young Jim to replace Cornelius? And so is comes about.

Patusan

Jim comes to thank Marlow for getting him the post, takes some last minute equipment, including Marlow’s service revolver (although, characteristically, he forgets the ammunition) and sets off on one of Stein’s ships.

What follows is, once again, chopped up into a mosaic of accounts which Marlow only pieces together over the following years. Roughly speaking there are three elements or phases:

1. Jim arrives and discovers the trading post not some isolated cabin but embedded in a native town, which itself consists of various quarters or neighbourhoods, which are supervised by a couple of competing native rulers. I.e. he finds himself thrown into a complex political situation which it takes him some time to understand.

2. A full two years later, when much has happened in this complex situation, Marlow makes his only visit, staying for 4 weeks. and getting introduced to all the major players, interspersing his account of his trip with flashbacks to Jim’s arrival and the incidents which follow. In other words, you have to be on your toes to keep track of the multiple timelines involved.

3. Finally there is the disastrous denouement of the book – maybe I should call it Part 3 – which is conveyed in a completely different manner, because it consists of letters sent to one of the men who listened to Marlow’s account on the veranda. Yes, I’ll make that part 3.

The politics of Patusan

Briefly, Patusan is is divided between three communities each with their own rulers. The main town is ruled by a native Sultan but the real power resides with Rajah Allang, the worst of the Sultan’s uncles, ‘the governor of the river, who did all the extorting and the stealing, and ground down to the point of extinction the country-born Malay’. (Chapter 22).

On his initial arrival Jim is promptly arrested and imprisoned in this man’s compound. In a bizarre touch the Rajah gives him an ancient broken clock to fix. It is only on the third day that he plucks up the guts to jump over the wooden stakes which ring the compound, run down to the estuarine river which is at low tide, and make a great leap across it, landing in the mud on the other side before, after some exertion, making it up onto dry land, hurrying threw the settlement on the other side and throwing himself on the mercy of the Sultan’s rival, Doramin.

Two things: Conrad makes much of this leap, making it into a Leap To Freedom and directly comparing it with the ill-fated lap Jim made from the bridge of the Patna, his leap into shame and guilt.

Second, who is Doramin? Well, Doramin is the leader of the community of Bugis, settlers from abroad who have lived and thrived her for generations. He is an old man now and very fat (he can’t stand up unaided) but led his people in the long civil war which wracked the island. It was during this that he became close friends with Stein, and gave him a silver ring as token of their friendship. When he briefed Jim, Stein had given him this ring as proof of his (Stein’s) trust and told him to contact Doramin. This is why Jim knew he had to escape from the Rajah’s captivity, and why he leapt across the river into the Bugis side and made his way to Doramin, who recognised the ring and did, indeed, treat him well, and protect him from the Rajah.

We are introduced to his tiny wife and his son, Dain Waris, who is the apple of his father’s eye.

But there’s a third element in this uneasy ethnic rivalry. Up on top of a nearby mountain is the base of Sherif Ali, an Arab, leader of a band of ‘wild men.’

The battle of Sherif Ali’s compound

To cut a long story short, once Jim had got cleaned up, fed and water, found his feet and won Doramin’s trust he persuades him to let him lead his men in an assault on the hilltop base of Sherif Ali. As you can imagine this is described at length with many flashbacks and accounts from other people which Marlow splices together but, in brief, Jim supervises the hauling up the neighbouring hill of some of Doramin’s antique cannons, then orchestrates a dawn attack, with cannons firing from one hill onto Sherif’s compound at the same time as Doramin’s best warriors attack, led by Jim.

Lord Jim

Suffice to say that Sherif and his men flee and Jim establishes himself as the Power in the Land. He fortifies Stein’s compound and establishes himself as the White Man who will bring peace and justice to the town. In this capacity he judges cases and complains between Doramin and the Sultan’s people and gains the trust of the people and the two suspicious rulers. He is awarded the title tuan or Lord Jim. He acquires Tamb ‘Itam, a Malay servant who becomes a loyal bodyguard.

Cornelius

However, there is a big fly in the ointment. Jim has been sent to replace Stein’s current factor, the Portuguese Cornelius. Stein knows he is lazy and corrupt, routinely stealing the supplies Stein sends him to sell.

Initially Cornelius helps Jim but, when he realises the Englishman has been sent to replace him, becomes resentful and then starts to scheme and plot against Jim. He certainly refuses to pack up and leave. He can’t. He is too embedded in the place’s politics. He had worked hard to build up a position of trust and refuses to be thrown out and start again somewhere else. Also he has a daughter.

Jewel

Cornelius has a step-daughter. A native woman was made pregnant and had a child by a white man, a trader, who then abandoned her, so the baby girl is mixed race. Cornelius, when he arrived, fell for the attractive and loving mother and marries her, this becoming the girl’s step-father. When the mother died, he was left to bring up the girl, resenting her just as he came to dislike her step-father and be full of enduring resentment at her biological father, who impregnated her mother and then abandoned them both.

Rather improbably, given the immense world of harshly utilitarian facts about sailing, shipwrecks, enquiries and suicides which have characterised the narrative up to now, Conrad says:

Remember this is a love story I am telling you now. (Chapter 33)

Long story short, they fall in love and she becomes his woman (I’m not sure whether they get married or not). But she lives in fear that he, too, will leave, when his contract is up, when he gets some command from the mysterious world over the seas (none of the natives have ever left the island). She lives in terror of betrayal.

Jim names her Jewel.

Assassination attempts

Straying into James Bond territory, Jim learns that the Rajah is planning to assassinate him. Although he doesn’t realise it at the time, Jewel stays up night after night watching over him as he sleeps and to protect him from any assassination attempts. This passage ends with Jim confronting a pack of assassins sent to kill him, confronting them in one of the rotten outhouses, shooting one dead and uncovering the three others who were hiding. Instead of killing them as Doramin would, Jim marches them to the river and makes them jump across the muddy banks, sending them back to the Rajah.

As you might expect, once word gets round this escapade enormously increases Jim’s ‘face’, leading to folk stories that he is invulnerable to weapons, a god. All of which Jim exploits to make himself master of the place and establish peace and justice.

Marlow’s visit

As mentioned, it’s two years later that Marlow visits, for four weeks, being introduced to all the characters – the Rajah, Doramin and Dain Waris, Jewel, Cornelius, Tamb ‘Itam and so on – and, in the Conradian manner, with lots of flashbacks and interspersing of accounts from moments in that two year period which shed light on the characters or Jim’s rise; plus, of course, reflections on Stein’s adventures in the place, long before Jim arrived. As in part one, you need to keep your wits about you to keep track of all the different timelines, episodes and ramifications which throng the text.

1. Marlow has a set-piece interview with Jewel, who’s terrified Jim’s going to leave like her father, the white man who abandoned her mother.

2. And a similar interview with slimy Cornelius who says he wants compensation from bringing up Jewel, as a kind of dowry. Both echo or are based on the same technique as the epic interview with Jim back at the Malabar Hotel.

Marlow stays four Sundays, then the day of his departure is described at some length. How he gets a boat down the river with Jim to the sea to rendezvous with the ship that’s been sent to collect him. He observes how Jim has to deal with two inhabitants of the beach village who keep being pillaged by the Rajah’s people and realises how Jim’s power and implementation of justice stretches right across the island.

On the beach Jim and Marlow says goodbye and, he tells his audience (we are still on the veranda after dinner, remember, with half a dozen white professionals listening to this immensely long yarn), it is the last time he sees Jim.

Momentarily, Jim is tempted to leave with Marlow, to leap into another boat and betray a community of natives (as he did on the Patna) but this time makes the conscious decision to stay where is he trusted, where he has regained his confidence, where he can make a contribution. He knows that ‘out there’ in the white man’s world, his name is a byword for scandal and shame. Only here, in this island paradise, is he a man, is he trusted, does he have integrity. Conrad describes his last sight of him with characteristic verbosity but also great power and symbolism, starting by describing the two natives who are still talking to Jim, as Marlow’s boat is rowed out to the schooner waiting to take him back into the world.

Their dark-skinned bodies vanished on the dark background long before I had lost sight of their protector. He was white from head to foot, and remained persistently visible with the stronghold of the night at his back, the sea at his feet, the opportunity by his side – still veiled. What do you say? Was it still veiled? I don’t know. For me that white figure in the stillness of coast and sea seemed to stand at the heart of a vast enigma. The twilight was ebbing fast from the sky above his head, the strip of sand had sunk already under his feet, he himself appeared no bigger than a child – then only a speck, a tiny white speck, that seemed to catch all the light left in a darkened world… And, suddenly, I lost him… (Chapter 35)

And with that, Marlow’s epic narrative, the yarn he’s telling to the men on the veranda, comes to an end.

Part 3. The tragic climax

Marlow’s epic yarn comes to an end and Conrad describes it thus:

With these words Marlow had ended his narrative, and his audience had broken up forthwith, under his abstract, pensive gaze. Men drifted off the veranda in pairs or alone without loss of time, without offering a remark, as if the last image of that incomplete story, its incompleteness itself, and the very tone of the speaker, had made discussion in vain and comment impossible. Each of them seemed to carry away his own impression, to carry it away with him like a secret; but there was only one man of all these listeners who was ever to hear the last word of the story. It came to him at home, more than two years later, and it came contained in a thick packet addressed in Marlow’s upright and angular handwriting. (Chapter 36)

So the provenance, the nature of the text completely changes. The long speech of Marlow ends and we switch to the point of view of one of the auditors. It is over two years later when this man revives a bundle of documents from Marlow. He’s been singled out because, as Marlow writes in his covering letter:

‘You alone have showed an interest in him that survived the telling of his story, though I remember well you would not admit he had mastered his fate. You prophesied for him the disaster of weariness and of disgust with acquired honour, with the self-appointed task, with the love sprung from pity and youth…’

He is never named and the narration refers to him as ‘the privileged man’ and then by the pregnant phrase, the privileged reader.

The documents Marlow has sent the privileged reader tell the story of Jim’s final tragedy and death. It’s actually quite a complicated story, full of the usual details and descriptions. As briefly as I can, Jim is well established as the master of Patusa with Jewel his wife and the devoted bodyguard Tamb’ Itam.

Into this picture comes a notorious pirate, an Englishman, a brute ironically nicknamed ‘Gentleman Brown’. After a downward turn of his fortunes this man persuaded the crew of his ship that there easy pickings on Patusan and they set sail East to visit it. On the way they ran low on food and were desperate by the time they anchored at the mouth of the river and Brown took most of the ship’s crew in a large rowing boat up the river.

They had expected a tiny settlement they could plunder and so were dismayed to find a reception committee. Word had been passed up the river and so as they arrived near the town they were greeted with shots from the native troops lined up to greet them. Brown’s men fired back, quickly beached the boat on the mud flats and ran up to a slight mound where they build a makeshift fort from dead boughs and trunks and branches and dug in.

It was at this point that Jim tries to negotiate. The locals, led by Doramin, are all for storming the little palissade or certainly for wiping out the band of pirates as soon as they try to make it back to their dinghy. But Jim quells all this and approaches the dug-in bad guys under a flag of truce.

Here something bad and strange happens, for as he gets talking to Brown, Brown unknowingly invokes ideas of integrity and honesty and moral firmness all of which, without him knowing it, push Jim’s buttons. Conrad manipulates the dialogue so that Jim, eerily and uneasily comes to realise there is some kind of moral equivalence between himself and this hoodlum.

The upshot is that Jim agrees the pirates can leave under a flag of truce and won’t be attacked. The fly in the ointment is Cornelius who has, by now, become a ‘motiveless malevolence’, to quote Shakespeare’s description of Iago. Over the 2 days or so that the pirates are holed up, Cornelius approaches and introduces himself to Brown and explains the political situation in the town. Cornelius’s motive is to create mischief and mayhem, and knowledge of the situation makes Brown all the cockier when he comes to negotiate with Jim.

Above all Cornelius tells Brown that a cohort of native warriors has been sent back down the river, to camp on a flat sandbank at a curve in it, to ambush them on the way back. the force is led by Doramin’s much-beloved only son Dain Waris. Now Jim, having concluded his deal with Brown that he and his men can leave peacefully, doesn’t tell him about this camp because he doesn’t need to. But when Cornelius tells him about it, Brown – estimating Jim by his own morals – guesses it’s a trap.

So the big moment comes and Brown and his men are allowed back down into their dinghy and set off rowing downriver and Jim, Doramin, the Rajah, think the job is done. But a few hours later, as they draw abreast of Dain’s camp, Cornelius treacherously shows them an obscure offshoot of the river which Brown detours into. It doesn’t help that a tropical fog has descended and shrouded the river and its environs.

It is in these circumstances that Brown silently leads his men to a position behind Dain’s camp, line up, aim their rifles, wait till they see figures moving around and then… let fly a series of lethal volleys. Dain’s men, taken completely by surprise, fall left and right and, as Dain comes running out of his tent, he is shot clean through the forehead and dies on the spot.

Their grisly massacre performed, Brown and his men retreat to their dinghy, push off and row back down the river to rejoin their ship anchored off the coast.

Meanwhile, messengers from the massacre quickly arrive at the main town and Jim is roused by the sound of weeping and wailing and lamentation. Once he learns what has happened he is not only appalled but realises what the death of Doramin’s son means – it is the end of his rule and authority. Worse, by counselling mercy and letting Brown and his men go, Jim is directly responsible for Dain Waris’s death. And, worst of all, he knows in his conscience that it was Brown’s appeal to something broken and corrupt in his (Jim’s) own life story, it was by establishing a horrible connection of moral failure between them, that Brown was able to play on Jim’s weakness.

That moment of moral failure all those years before on the Patna has come back to haunt him again. Realising he will never be free of it no matter where he goes, Jim ignores the desperate pleas of his wife Jewel not to abandon her (like her father did, like white man always do) and the urgent recommendations of his loyal bodyguard Tamb’ Itam to flee – and instead crosses the river and walks up to the grand compound of Doramin, who, in his vast obese way, is a crushed man. And Jim stands there with no excuses while Doramin raises his treasured 18th century pistols and shoots Jim in the chest, killing him instantly.

THE END. Except that:

The last word is not said – probably shall never be said. Are not our lives too short for that full utterance which through all our stammerings is of course our only and abiding intention? I have given up expecting those last words, whose ring, if they could only be pronounced, would shake both heaven and earth. There is never time to say our last word – the last word of our love, of our desire, faith, remorse, submissions, revolt. (p.172)

Themes

Conrad’s texts overflow with mannerisms of style and approach, with clever techniques and vivid language, not to mention countless traces of the worldview of his day, the late-Victorian era, strewn throughout the story, characters and style. In other words, Conrad’s texts are almost too rich in themes and ideas. In what follows I’ve tried to marshal some obvious ones into a useful order.

Imagination

Imagination is a destructive force in Conrad. Like a male Madame Bovary, Jim had lived his youth awash with dreams and ideals picked up from popular books, in his case of manly heroism, imagining himself superior to the drunk middle-aged cynics he found himself among (‘those men did not belong to the world of heroic adventure’), imagining that, when the moment came, his true mettle as doughty hero would be revealed to an admiring world.

At such times his thoughts would be full of valorous deeds: he loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary achievements. They were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality. They had a gorgeous virility, the charm of vagueness, they passed before him with an heroic tread; they carried his soul away with them and made it drunk with the divine philtre of an unbounded confidence in itself. There was nothing he could not face. He was so pleased with the idea that he smiled… (Chapter 3)

Yet it was this very imaginative faculty which undermined him when the moment of crisis came: all-too-vividly he could imagine the main bulkhead bursting, the floods of water, the pilgrims in the hold screaming and drowning in a terrible mass of bodies and then the ship foundering and sinking amid the screams of men, women and their children.

On one level the novel is about Jim’s struggle to face the reality of who he really is, and the terrible gap between a man’s find fantasies about himself and the always disappointing and sometimes sordid reality.

Jim’s significance

Marlow knows how trivial the story is, how crazy it is to lavish 300 pages on such an incident:

The occasion was obscure, insignificant – what you will: a lost youngster, one in a million – but then he was one of us; an incident as completely devoid of importance as the flooding of an ant-heap, and yet the mystery of his attitude got hold of me as though he had been an individual in the forefront of his kind, as if the obscure truth involved were momentous enough to affect mankind’s conception of itself…’ (Chapter 8)

Conrad’s two voices

1. The third-person narrator

The first four chapters are told by an omniscient third-person narrator and are highly enjoyable, in fact I found myself mesmerised by Conrad’s long, lulling descriptions of ships and the sea, his addiction to repeating clauses with variations, often in sets of three, as rhythmic as waves on a beach.

They [the pilgrims] streamed aboard over three gangways, they streamed in urged by faith and the hope of paradise, they streamed in with a continuous tramp and shuffle of bare feet, without a word, a murmur, or a look back; and when clear of confining rails spread on all sides over the deck, flowed forward and aft, overflowed down the yawning hatchways, filled the inner recesses of the ship – like water filling a cistern, like water flowing into crevices and crannies, like water rising silently even with the rim. (Chapter 2)

Eight hundred men and women with faith and hopes, with affections and memories, they had collected there, coming from north and south and from the outskirts of the East, after treading the jungle paths, descending the rivers, coasting in praus along the shallows, crossing in small canoes from island to island, passing through suffering, meeting strange sights, beset by strange fears, upheld by one desire. (Chapter 2)

It was they that possessed him and made him their own to the innermost thought, to the slightest stir of blood, to his last breath. (p.189)

To us, their less tried successors, they [the early explorers of the Malay archipelago] appear magnified, not as agents of trade but as instruments of a recorded destiny, pushing out into the unknown in obedience to an inward voice, to an impulse beating in the blood, to a dream of the future. They were wonderful; and it must be owned they were ready for the wonderful. They recorded it complacently in their sufferings, in the aspect of the seas, in the customs of strange nations, in the glory of splendid rulers. (Chapter 22)

But, abruptly, at the start of chapter 5, we join Marlow’s first-person narrative and it’s Marlow who proceeds to narrate most of the rest of the book (excluding the last two chapters, which are guided by an omniscient narrator but in which the privileged reader is reading letters written by Marlow, so his voice still dominates.)

2. Marlow as narrator

At the very end of Chapter 4 Marlow is introduced by the omniscient narrator in the classic Conrad setting. It is after dinner and half a dozen well-fed Englishmen are sitting in darkness on a veranda in the East somewhere, puffing cigars and deciding to listen to one of Marlow’s famous long yarns (Marlow is the only seaman among them, Chapter 12). But Marlow doesn’t just tell stories, there is a mystical, other-worldly aspect to his tellings which turns them into performances, in which he ventriloquises the past.

With the very first word uttered Marlow’s body, extended at rest in the seat, would become very still, as though his spirit had winged its way back into the lapse of time and was speaking through his lips from the past. (Chapter 4)

Marlow’s Englishisms

The switch in narrator brings out lots of aspects of Marlow’s voice which I hadn’t quite realised before, chief among them that he is disconcertingly pukka, posh, English, given to defending British values of hard work and steadfastness, given to almost caricature English ejaculations.

‘I couldn’t help exclaiming, “What an extraordinary affair!”

He is concerned with the stereotypical British virtues of good form and what’s done and what’s not done, with late-Victorian values. He may question them, but he always returns to them. This gives the whole thing a peculiar almost vertiginous flavour because he actual content of his stories is so corrosively nihilistic. His stories drip with futility and despair and horror so it’s often plain weird when, after long paragraphs describing men going to pieces in the tropics, Marlow is made to say things like ‘It was all so dashed unfair’. It’s a startling gear change, a clash of worldviews, almost as if the jolly English chap phrases were bolted onto the unnerving and nihilistic narrative right at the last minute.

Jim’s Englishisms

This schizophrenia in the text is even more true of Jim. On the one hand he is the focal point of this immense 300-page narrative and Marlow and Conrad pile on his shoulders a vast freight of significance and meaning whereby his fate summarises all human nature, the plight of the human race, the cruelty of Fate and so on. There are countless passages which make Jim symbolic of the entire universe:

When your ship fails you, your whole world seems to fail you; the world that made you, restrained you, took care of you. It is as if the souls of men floating on an abyss and in touch with immensity had been set free for any excess of heroism, absurdity, or abomination. Of course, as with belief, thought, love, hate, conviction, or even the visual aspect of material things, there are as many shipwrecks as there are men, and in this one there was something abject which made the isolation more complete – there was a villainy of circumstances that cut these men off more completely from the rest of mankind, whose ideal of conduct had never undergone the trial of a fiendish and appalling joke. (Chapter 10)

And yet every time Jim opens his mouth he sounds like a character from P.G. Wodehouse.

• ‘Dashed if I do…’
• ‘It was a dashed conundrum…’
• ‘What a bally ass I’ve been…’
• ‘By Jove…’
• ‘Amazing old chap…’
• ‘How beastly it would be to get a jab with a bally long spear…’
• ‘Confounded nonsense, don’t you know?’
• ‘Oh it was beastly!’
• ‘He was off his chump…’
• ‘I was deucedly tired…’
• ‘Glad to get rid of the bally thing…’

This and hundreds of other Bertie Wooster phrases trip from the mouth of this symbol of Nature’s wanton destructiveness in a disorientating clash of cultures and worldviews. Everyone remembers Conrad’s lush prose and complex narrative structures but they tend to forget that his protagonists often sound like Jeeves and Wooster.

Xenophobia

Alongside the bally English locutions goes a very English dismissal of all other nationalities. In his narrative Marlow takes a lofty disdain, not so much to the ‘natives’ but to all other Europeans who aren’t made of ‘the right stuff’. Here’s his opinion of the captain of the Patna:

‘You Englishmen are all rogues,’ went on my patriotic Flensborg or Stettin Australian. I really don’t recollect now what decent little port on the shores of the Baltic was defiled by being the nest of that precious bird.

‘Defiled’, eh? Marlow is casually judgemental of every non-Brit in the story, confident in the knowledge that his pukka English auditors will agree.

Comparing the two narrators

But not only is Marlow lavish of criticism, he is also incredibly prolix and profuse. A paragraph of Conrad’s narration intoxicates with its colourful imagery and beguiling rhythms. Marlow, in sharp contrast, is often prosey and long-winded.

‘Talk? So be it. And it’s easy enough to talk of Master Jim, after a good spread, two hundred feet above the sea-level, with a box of decent cigars handy, on a blessed evening of freshness and starlight that would make the best of us forget we are only on sufferance here and got to pick our way in cross lights, watching every precious minute and every irremediable step, trusting we shall manage yet to go out decently in the end – but not so sure of it after all – and with dashed little help to expect from those we touch elbows with right and left. Of course there are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar; easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife to be forgotten before the end is told – before the end is told – even if there happens to be any end to it.’ (Chapter 5)

Reading this particular passage out loud, for the first time it occurred to me that Marlow might be an old buffer, a tubby, red-faced whiskery old cove that the others invite along because they enjoy his long – his very long – and very rambling yarns after a good dinner. As he himself puts it at the start of his narrative.

‘Charley, my dear chap, your dinner was extremely good, and in consequence these men here look upon a quiet rubber as a tumultuous occupation. They wallow in your good chairs and think to themselves, “Hang exertion. Let that Marlow talk.”’ (Chapter 5)

Multiple perspectives

As already mentioned, the book is made up of the subtle and complex interweaving of multiple perspectives. Marlow circles round the central figure of Jim almost like a detective piecing together testimony from a wide range of witnesses who all saw part of the story, but never the whole.

But unlike a detective Marlow knows, from the start, that there is no such thing as the ‘truth’ of what happened. He isn’t really interested in events, he is hypnotised by the prospect of trying to reach into that unplumbable mystery, the soul of another person.

These glimpses or perspectives come in two levels or types.

1. Direct encounters with Jim

Marlow’s direct encounters with Jim. Marlow first sees Jim at the inquest, then bumps into him outside the court building, where there’s the unfortunate incident of the ‘cur’. (The man Marlow’s talking to spots a mongrel dog wandering amid the crowd and complains to Marlow about such ‘curs’ being aloud to roam free and Jim, passing by at that moment, thinks the man is referring to him.)

This gets them talking and Marlow takes Jim for dinner at the Malabar House hotel where he’s staying. These conversations are recounted with a great weight of puzzled and verbose interpretation by Marlow, who repeatedly uses the image of a fog or cloud to explain how impenetrable he found Jim.

I don’t pretend I understood him. The views he let me have of himself were like those glimpses through the shifting rents in a thick fog – bits of vivid and vanishing detail, giving no connected idea of the general aspect of a country. They fed one’s curiosity without satisfying it; they were no good for purposes of orientation. (Chapter 6)

The muscles round his lips contracted into an unconscious grimace that tore through the mask of his usual expression – something violent, short-lived and illuminating like a twist of lightning that admits the eye for an instant into the secret convolutions of a cloud… (Chapter 10)

It was one of those bizarre and exciting glimpses through the fog. It was an extraordinary disclosure. (Chapter 10)

I had another glimpse through a rent in the mist in which he moved and had his being… And even as I looked at him the mists rolled into the rent… (Chapter 11)

The mist of his feelings shifted between us, as if disturbed by his struggles, and in the rifts of the immaterial veil he would appear to my staring eyes distinct of form and pregnant with vague appeal like a symbolic figure in a picture. (Chapter 12)

My mind floated in a sea of conjectures… (Chapter 7)

2. Other voices

At a second level, there is the long list of witnesses who share with Marlow their various and fragmentary parts of Jim’s story. Their primary use is to fill in facts about various events which Marlow doesn’t directly witness (most of the story, in fact) – but Marlow is every bit as interested in their motives, in their psychology and characters, as in the light they shed on the central case history.

Marlow is a tremendous gossip. He gives the impression of knowing everyone – from the Consul to the dodgiest wharf rats, from rancid barkeepers to disreputable captains – and having a story or to tell about all of them.

He pokes and pries into everyone’s lives. Why, for example, does Marlow end up at the bedside of the mate of the Patna to witness at first-hand the man hallucinating that swarms of reptiles are attacking him? Why do we find him listening to the confession of Jones, mate of the Ossa whose captain, Brierly, in a completely unrelated event, committed suicide? Because he pops up everywhere, poking around, being in the right place, listening to so-and-so tell their tale. Because people seem to tell him everything.

The result is that Marlow’s voice in fact contains scores of other voices, he is a cacophony of characters, a plurality of personages. Through Marlow’s urbane tones we hear the gossip and chatter of all kinds of other people. I’ve listed the main ones above. Here are some more:

Ruthvel, who told me the sight was so discomposing that for some time he listened, quite unable to make out what that apparition wanted…

Jones: ‘This was the last time I heard his voice, Captain Marlow…’

One of the hands told me, hiding a smile at the recollection, ‘It was for all the world, sir, like a naughty youngster fighting with his mother.’

And not only does he bump into them, hear gossip about them, but he is able – absurdly – to repeat their immensely long conversations word for word. The mate of the Ossa sees fit not only to talk to him about the suicide of stout old, reliable old Captain Montague Brierly but does so via an improbably detailed, word-for-word reconstruction of their last conversation before the captain jumped overboard.

The whole book is like this. One enormous suspension of disbelief about how much of a long ago conversation a man could possibly remember, let alone quote perfectly.

Dubious English

For the most part Conrad’s bending of English idiom stays within limits, his deployment of unusually lush vocabulary in luxuriously repetitive phrases, stays within semantically the acceptable bounds of English usage. But from time to time he oversteps the mark and the reader is brought up short, remembering all over again that Conrad was not a native English speaker.

He accepted the disappointing course of events with a sulky obstinacy which seemed to draw more together his little yellow old face; and as he went down he glanced askant here and there, never giving up his fixed idea. (Chapter 42)

Meaning rather than story

Marlow’s focus on seeking some impenetrable inner ‘meaning’ to Jim’s life explains why he tells the story, the actual sequence of events, in such a round-the-houses way. For example, it’s only casually, a good way into his first meal with Jim, that the reader discovers, almost by accident, the single most important fact about the Patna incident – which is that it didn’t sink. The crew, including Jim, abandoned her – but she didn’t sink. The reader is left to work through the implications of this, while also still trying to follow the dinner conversation. This casual revelation of the most important fact in the book, as an almost casual aside, struck me as a mimesis of how we often actually come across information in the world – partially, obliquely, not understanding its significance at the time.

And instead of a straight line, the narrative is more like a shape made in the froth on the top of a takeaway cappucino which the drinker undermines when they empty a sachet of sugar into it and give it a stir. The narrative is like a froth of countless bubbles which has been stirred.

To give an early example: Marlow tells us that Old Brierly was the leading figure on the three-man tribunal which looked into the fate of the Patna.

Nothing more awful than to watch a man who has been found out, not in a crime but in a more than criminal weakness. The commonest sort of fortitude prevents us from becoming criminals in a legal sense; it is from weakness unknown, but perhaps suspected, as in some parts of the world you suspect a deadly snake in every bush – from weakness that may lie hidden, watched or unwatched, prayed against or manfully scorned, repressed or maybe ignored more than half a lifetime, not one of us is safe. (Chapter 5)

These thought bubbles, the author’s editorialising, float u away from any sense of narrative movement, floating sideways like a balloon into a world of fanciful speculation about the meaning of life. The whole book is like this, bubbles sticking to and circling other bubbles in a vast foam.

Conrad’s worldview

The permanent risk of solitary collapse…

So what worldview emerges from the book? A relatively straightforward one: the world, or ‘life’, is treacherous and cruel. You never know when it is going to get you, pounce with a cruel smile on its face, and bring you to your knees. Death isn’t the enemy – the enemy is psychological collapse: it is humiliation and despair that will get you (and count the triplet clauses):

It is only now and then that there appears on the face of facts a sinister violence of intention—that indefinable something which forces it upon the mind and the heart of a man, that this complication of accidents or these elemental furies are coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control, with an unbridled cruelty that means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest: which means to smash, to destroy, to annihilate all he has seen, known, loved, enjoyed, or hated; all that is priceless and necessary – the sunshine, the memories, the future; which means to sweep the whole precious world utterly away from his sight by the simple and appalling act of taking his life. (Chapter 2)

Lord Jim is twinned with Heart of Darkness not only because they both have Marlow as their narrator, but because they are both extended studies of the psychology of failure of one central figure. Mr Kurtz is the brightest and best Europe has to offer but unrestricted power turns him into a monster. Jim is a variation on the theme, tall (5’11”), blonde, blue-eyed, in his heart valiant and pure:

This was my first view of Jim. He looked as unconcerned and unapproachable as only the young can look. There he stood, clean-limbed, clean-faced, firm on his feet, as promising a boy as the sun ever shone on… (Chapter 5)

Surely a model white man in every respect. Jim is, as Marlow keeps telling his audience, ‘one of us’.

• His frank aspect, the artless smile, the youthful seriousness. He was of the right sort; he was one of us. (Chapter 7)
• I knew his appearance; he came from the right place; he was one of us… (Chapter 5)
• Even Stein could say no more than that he was romantic. I only knew he was one of us. (Chapter 21)

And yet it turns out that there is something… something… something nagging at Jim, wearing him away from inside, the idea Conrad returns to again and again, ‘the subtle unsoundness of the man’ (p.72) which undermines him no matter what he tries to do, intends to do, wants to do. The narrator doesn’t let this go uncommented:

It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge. (Ch 7)

… versus communal solidarity

Set against the tripwires and pitfalls of the individual life – as a bulwark against the unknown terrors and psychological collapse which haunt all Conrad’s characters, and eat away at Jim – our best protection is to cleave to the fellowship of a cause, in particular the community of European sailors or ‘the craft’ as Marlow keeps calling it.

In all Conrad’s tales of the sea, this community is made up of sailors, of the merchant marine. We know many of them are crooks and scoundrels but… at least there is a standard of behaviour people pay lip service to, aspire to, cling to. This is better than nothing. It is a guide rail in the darkness.

• ‘Haven’t I turned out youngsters enough in my time, for the service of the Red Rag, to the craft of the sea, to the craft whose whole secret could be expressed in one short sentence.’ (Chapter 5)
• ‘I wanted to see him squirm for the honour of the craft.’ (Chapter 5)
• ‘Don’t you see what I mean by the solidarity of the craft?’ (Chapter 11)
• ‘We’ve got all kinds amongst us – some anointed scoundrels in the lot; but, hang it, we must preserve professional decency or we become no better than so many tinkers going about loose.’ (Captain Brierly)
• The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind (p.121)

Marlow repeatedly declares himself and his auditors all members of this community and craft:

‘of an obscure body of men held together by a community of inglorious toil and by fidelity to a certain standard of conduct.’ (Chapter 5)

‘Hang it, we must preserve professional decency or we become no better than so many tinkers going about loose. We are trusted. Do you understand?—trusted! Frankly, I don’t care a snap for all the pilgrims that ever came out of Asia, but a decent man would not have behaved like this to a full cargo of old rags in bales. We aren’t an organised body of men, and the only thing that holds us together is just the name for that kind of decency.’ (Captain Brierly, Chapter 6)

And then there is the work itself. It may not prompt joy but the work itself enforces a kind of purity which Conrad conveys very eloquently in numerous passages:

He made many voyages. He knew the magic monotony of existence between sky and water: he had to bear the criticism of men, the exactions of the sea, and the prosaic severity of the daily task that gives bread – but whose only reward is in the perfect love of the work. (Chapter 2)

Hard work, the moral standards enforced by the craft, commitment to its values, these are what we must cling to in order to remain:

a member of an obscure body of men held together by a community of inglorious toil and by fidelity to a certain standard of conduct… (Chapter 5)

Suicide and the perils of the imagination

When he was twenty Conrad tried to commit suicide by shooting himself through the chest with a revolver. He has Marlow make the assumption that all men of sense have felt a similar impulse, at some point or another, to just give in.

Which of us here has not observed this, or maybe experienced something of that feeling in his own person – this extreme weariness of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest? (Chapter 7)

In one sense this huge, long, convoluted text repeats again and again the same nihilistic sense of futility and wish for death, suicide.

He had pricked the bubble. The blight of futility that lies in wait for men’s speeches had fallen upon our conversation, and made it a thing of empty sounds. (Chapter 13)

Mention of suicide recurs a surprising number of times, the suicide of Captain Brierly embodies it and is, somehow, an anticipation of Jim’s suicidal surrendering of himself to Doriman which he knows can end only one way, in his own death.

It may be that before and afterward his suicide attempt, Conrad found himself to be over-thoughtful, racked with anxieties and imagined terrors which the sturdy men of the sea he moved among seemed to utterly lack. Hence his admiration for the solid-as-a-rock, utterly imagination-free man, but his nagging worry that even the most solid-seeming of them may be undermined, may be rotten at the foundations.

‘Imagination’ is mentioned 17 times in the novel, and always in a bad light, as the enemy of man, as thronging his mind with perils and fears, as undermining his ability to ‘do the right thing’. Jim is a prey to fantasies and over-romantic ideas about The Sea, and about his own Bravery. In the event, at the critical moment he is overcome by unexpected fears, overwhelmed by the negative power of:

Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors… (Chapter 2)

It is because Jim’s vivid imagination foresees the bulwark giving way, the ship flooding, the screams of the drowning pilgrims, that he is carried away on a tide of panic of his own making – and jumps ship. The same ‘imagination’ which stoked his unrealistic dreams of heroic achievement fuels his panic in the fateful moments on the Patna. Either way, it is a disastrous faculty to give in to.

Jim as a universal case history

Marlow is attracted by Jim’s ‘case’ (attracted enough to speak for nearly 300 densely-printed pages about it) because he feels that Jim’s failure somehow reflects on all of us, on all men trying to keep on the right track.

Marlow refers to Jim as ‘one of us’ no fewer than eight times in the text, and once in the introduction. It is clearly an obsessive idea. Behind it lies the unexpressed notion that by penetrating into the heart of Jim’s mystery, Marlow can reveal something profound and deep about all human nature, and particularly about ‘us’, about the white professional men engaged in the craft of the sea.

Which is why Marlow’s feelings are profoundly ambivalent: Jim is so very like ‘one of us’ and yet his moment of cowardice shows the inhuman temptations and failures lurking within all of us.

‘Don’t you see what I mean by the solidarity of the craft? I was aggrieved against him, 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. (Chapter 11)

This is the nagging worry that keeps Marlow returning again and again to this powerful symbol of the weakness potentially lurking in all of us, as if by repeating Jim’s story he can somehow inoculate himself against his unsoundness, against his failure… despite knowing that he never can.

Worldly wisdom

For all its pomp, Conrad’s worldview is pretty simple. What is impressive is how many ways Conrad finds to say the same thing. This is partly because almost every encounter – with the impressive cast of characters, with Jim himself, and most of all as Marlow reflects, repeatedly and at length, on the ‘meaning’ of Jim’s story – triggers lengthy ‘philosophical’ reflections or throwaway remarks which all amount to repetitions of the same three or four basic elements.

We never know what a man is made of. (Chapter 6)

It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. (Chapter 16)

It is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge. (Chapter 7)

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! (Chapter 5)

Trust a boat on the high seas to bring out the Irrational that lurks at the bottom of every thought, sentiment, sensation, emotion. (Chapter 10)

The wisdom of life, which consists in putting out of sight all the reminders of our folly, of our weakness, of our mortality; all that makes against our efficiency – the memory of our failures, the hints of our undying fears, the bodies of our dead friends (p.134)

When young, I often read novels in order to track down and isolate passages like these as Guides to the Big Questions of Life. Now I appreciate that they are artistic effects, no more intrinsically meaningful than Conrad’s descriptions of the jungle or the river or the sea are meaningful. They are colours in a painting.

To try and be more precise: they only make sense or mean something in the context of the fiction. Saying ‘Life’s a bitch’ or ‘You never really know what’s going on inside someone else’s head’ are thumping clichés. It is only in the framework of Conrad’s repetitive and incantatory prose that these expressions gain meaning and force. Red, on its own, is just red. But dabs of red in a painting by Monet or Klimt become deeply significant parts of an overall composition.

Obviously words convey meaning and so readers are free to take Conrad’s many, many ‘philosophical’ passages out of context and adopt them as t-shirt slogans or memes, but having read the same kind of negative and nihilistic thoughts, in scores of authors, thousands and thousands of times, nowadays they have hardly any emotional impact or resonance for me: I simply register them as part of the design.

Hyperbole

To read Conrad is to be plunged into a boiling cauldron of extraordinary rhythmical nihilism.

In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal – a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour… (Chapter 9)

Almost every paragraph describes some variation on the persistent theme that life is terrifying, that every situation triggers the most extreme emotions and reactions which are:

The corpse of his mad self-love uprose from rags and destitution as from the dark horrors of a tomb… (Chapter 41)

It was all threats, all a terribly effective feint, a sham from beginning to end, planned by the tremendous disdain of the Dark Powers whose real terrors, always on the verge of triumph, are perpetually foiled by the steadfastness of men. (Chapter 10)

In this assault upon his fortitude there was the jeering intention of a spiteful and vile vengeance; there was an element of burlesque in his ordeal – a degradation of funny grimaces in the approach of death or dishonour. (Chapter 9)

He must have had an unconscious conviction that the reality could not be half as bad, not half as anguishing, appalling, and vengeful as the created terror of his imagination. (Chapter 10)

No point reading Conrad if you’re not prepared to submit to vast quantities of hyperbole and emotional extremity.

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. When your ship fails you, your whole world seems to fail you; the world that made you, restrained you, took care of you. It is as if the souls of men floating on an abyss and in touch with immensity had been set free for any excess of heroism, absurdity, or abomination. (Chapter 10)

I believe that, in this first moment, his heart was wrung with all the suffering, that his soul knew the accumulated savour of all the fear, all the horror, all the despair of eight hundred human beings pounced upon in the night by a sudden and violent death… (Chapter 10)

On every page, almost in every paragraph, the same extremity, hyperbole, shrill and wailing.

I knew too much already to hope for the grace of a single uplifting touch, for the favour of hinted madness, of shadowed horror.

Therapy

You can’t help thinking that Conrad’s (early) prose works amount to an immense act of public therapy in which he obsessively described the wailing banshees of despair which thronged his mind, the futility and madness which underlies all human endeavour, and desperately tried to quell them with brave but unconvincing talk of ‘the craft’ and ‘one of us’ and so on. But anyone who’s read any Conrad knows that the banshees burst through, again and again, and talk of ‘the craft’ is weak…

If writing the texts was a form of therapy for Conrad, then his characters also find solace in talking. Marlow’s immense after-dinner interview with Marlow at the Malabar hotel is really a huge therapy session and its purpose is not just to elicit the ‘facts’ from Jim (the ‘facts’ are, after all, trivially simple), but to get Jim to utter his complex feelings in a way which (as he himself admits) he finds psychologically very helpful.

‘You are an awful good sort to listen like this,’ he said. ‘It does me good. You don’t know what it is to me. You don’t… words seemed to fail him… ‘You don’t know what it is for a fellow in my position to be believed – make a clean breast of it to an elder man. It is so difficult – so awfully unfair – so hard to understand.’ (Chapter 11)

But it’s not just the beneficial impact on the client: this huge text also vividly describes the dynamic interplay between therapist and therapee, and describes the changing moods, feelings, fleeting thoughts and impressions of the interviewer as much as the interviewee.

For Marlow’s narrative dwells just as much on his own fascination for this patient, for this type, this case, this victim, and minutely describes how his own feelings continually fluctuate from sympathy to fascination, from worry to aversion. One aspect of this is the way his questions are not neutral and supportive, but inflected with his own emotions.

‘A hair’s-breadth,’ he muttered. ‘Not the breadth of a hair between this and that. And at the time…’
‘It is difficult to see a hair at midnight,’ I put in, a little viciously I fear. Don’t you see what I mean by the solidarity of the craft? I was aggrieved against him, 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. (Chapter 11)

The therapist gets angry, resentful, contemptuous, dismissive of his patient and then, at other moments, listening to Jim bewail his sense of abandonment and loss, Marlow is continually infected with the same feelings.

‘What do you believe?’ he asked with violence. A pause ensued, and suddenly I felt myself overcome by a profound and hopeless fatigue, as though his voice had startled me out of a dream of wandering through empty spaces whose immensity had harassed my soul and exhausted my body. (Chapter 11)

The more you look, the more you ponder it, the more complicated and significant the interplay between questioner and questioned in that long evening on the terrace of the Malabar Hotel inescapably becomes.

Summary

Late-Victorian readers hoping for an adventure yarn set in the exotic Malayan islands were disappointed. More literary readers realised that Conrad was doing fascinating things with narrative, swirling it round and round to create an enormous vortex of narrative moments, viewed in sophisticated and complex timelines, bubbling with the froth of his luxuriant prose, dotted with an unending stream of solemn apothegms about life and horror and defeat.

Only a meticulous precision of statement would bring out the true horror behind the appalling face of things. (Chapter 4)

I would have trusted the deck to that youngster on the strength of a single glance, and gone to sleep with both eyes – and, by Jove! it wouldn’t have been safe. There are depths of horror in that thought. (Chapter)

When I was young I thought Conrad was offering profound insights into the nature of a Godless universe. Now I think he gives a rich and deep impression of offering profound insights into the nature of a Godless universe but is really about creating a huge, rich, dense, luxurious painting. He is a style and a manner, immensely powerful, luxuriating in despair, bewitching and persuasive but it is ultimately… only a style, a wonderful, deep and luxuriant late-Victorian style but it isn’t ‘the truth’. Nothing is the truth.

End! Finis! the potent word that exorcises from the house of life the haunting shadow of fate. (Chapter 16)

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Related links

• Lord Jim online

Conrad reviews

• Joseph Conrad reviews

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