some timely distractions from essay writing.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/may/21/1
Thursday, September 18, 2008
Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Multiple Narratives
The way in which Lord Jim is narrated is rather fragmented, even with Marlow as the principle narrator of the story. There is the omniscient narrator who introduces the story, for one, and within Marlow's own storytelling there are several narrators too with their own viewpoints and stories to tell, not least Jim himself. Beyond that, Marlow's narrative is split up further by the letter to the unknown sympathetic listener; the perspective in the letter is arguably different from that offered in Marlow's earlier speech, since it happens later in time, taking into account the events that happened since then.
- Yingzhao (296 words)
Ack, I nearly forgot about this...
*SPOILER (BEYOND CHAPTER 30) ALERT*
(But I've only skimmed the remaining chapters because I'm too busy freaking out over a big pres I've got tomorrow aaaaaah so apologies if I misconstrued anything.)
Part of the point I'd intended last week (lost in pruning) is that Conrad's portrayal of women reads to me as if he were even more of a misogynist, a reading underscored by Lord Jim. I've only read three Conrad works and in each the fate of the 'heroines' is to pine for their dead love for the rest of their "soundless, inert li[ves]," (331) even where they were (and often) the cause of that death. Conrad's misogynism is fairly documented, and in Gestures of Healing, Clayton notes that Marlow might not have "lied" - "the Intended can be equated with the Horror." (84) To continue my lost point: in missing this entirely and seeing her only as the positively-portrayed "refined, European woman," (14) Achebe performs an act of misogyny parallel to the racism he accuses Conrad and his admirers of, one that is "such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely undetected." (19)
If arguing Achebe's concern is mainly for African benefit, not women - nor Asians - all the more he should understand the limits of Conrad's own concerns. Jim gives us a stellar opportunity to put ourselves in Achebe's shoes: Conrad's portrayal of Asians is considerably 'high[er]-res' than his Africans - corresponding to the depths of his relative experience - and I feel he does us "beggars" a greater disservice. The good Dain Waris is so due to his "European mind," (213) Jim gets his heroic end at the relatively complex but ultimately vengeful hands of Doramin, rinse and repeat. Drawn in finer strokes, we are thus decisively cast as inferior even to a flawed specimen of whiteness - but that doesn't make Conrad any more a "bloody racist" (19) than the average 19th/20thC European: ala Althusser, we cannot escape from our contextual ideology.
(As a non-word-counted aside - I'm not harping on and on about Achebe because I'm anti-anti-racism, I just think that it's flawed for him to criticise Conrad and negate Darkness out of his and its context - I mean, I devoted an entire term paper last semester to slamming Michael Bay (for Transformers (2007)) as a "bloody racist" - but unlike Conrad, Bay is working within a historical context (i.e. ours) where he should 'know better.')
(But I've only skimmed the remaining chapters because I'm too busy freaking out over a big pres I've got tomorrow aaaaaah so apologies if I misconstrued anything.)
Part of the point I'd intended last week (lost in pruning) is that Conrad's portrayal of women reads to me as if he were even more of a misogynist, a reading underscored by Lord Jim. I've only read three Conrad works and in each the fate of the 'heroines' is to pine for their dead love for the rest of their "soundless, inert li[ves]," (331) even where they were (and often) the cause of that death. Conrad's misogynism is fairly documented, and in Gestures of Healing, Clayton notes that Marlow might not have "lied" - "the Intended can be equated with the Horror." (84) To continue my lost point: in missing this entirely and seeing her only as the positively-portrayed "refined, European woman," (14) Achebe performs an act of misogyny parallel to the racism he accuses Conrad and his admirers of, one that is "such a normal way of thinking that its manifestations go completely undetected." (19)
If arguing Achebe's concern is mainly for African benefit, not women - nor Asians - all the more he should understand the limits of Conrad's own concerns. Jim gives us a stellar opportunity to put ourselves in Achebe's shoes: Conrad's portrayal of Asians is considerably 'high[er]-res' than his Africans - corresponding to the depths of his relative experience - and I feel he does us "beggars" a greater disservice. The good Dain Waris is so due to his "European mind," (213) Jim gets his heroic end at the relatively complex but ultimately vengeful hands of Doramin, rinse and repeat. Drawn in finer strokes, we are thus decisively cast as inferior even to a flawed specimen of whiteness - but that doesn't make Conrad any more a "bloody racist" (19) than the average 19th/20thC European: ala Althusser, we cannot escape from our contextual ideology.
(As a non-word-counted aside - I'm not harping on and on about Achebe because I'm anti-anti-racism, I just think that it's flawed for him to criticise Conrad and negate Darkness out of his and its context - I mean, I devoted an entire term paper last semester to slamming Michael Bay (for Transformers (2007)) as a "bloody racist" - but unlike Conrad, Bay is working within a historical context (i.e. ours) where he should 'know better.')
creeping twenty feet underground: the politics of representation
Jim’s willingness to stand trial after abandoning the Patna, and his habit of running away from areas where the story of his role in the Patna might circulate, work together to comment on the politics of representation.
After his ‘abandonment’ of the Patna and the consequent loss of his seaman’s certificate, Jim slides away from public view, hopping from shore to shore in order to avoid re-encountering traces of his unhappy past. Instead he locates himself in places where knowledge of his disgrace has not yet circulated. In the words of Michael Valdez Moses, Jim seeks the places “where narration lags behind the event” (64). When Jim’s story is narrated by others, he becomes defined by his representation within that narrative. Jim does not want to be defined by the shameful narrative of his past, seeking instead a clean slate where he can “rewrite” his story.
Ashamed as he is of his actions following the non-sinking of the Patna, Jim does not shirk from the public or from legislative judgment. “Do you not think you or anyone could have made me if I…I am – I am not afraid to tell?” asks Jim (112). This ‘telling’ constitutes an act of agency – when he speaks for himself Jim can at least try to bring out the nuances of his subjective experience on the ship, an agency that is denied him when his story is related by a third party.
To me, Jim’s escapist tendencies derive not so much from a desire to forget/deny his actions on the Patna, but rather, the desire to tell his own story in his own words, to define himself in his own narrative. This desire is not dissimilar to post-colonial writers and such who “write back” against colonial inscriptions.
(293 words, excluding reference)
* Quote from Moses taken from:
Moses, Valdez Michael. "Disorientalism: Conrad and the Imperial Origins of Modernist Aesthetics. from Modernism and Colonialism. Ed.Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses. London: Duke University Press, 2007.
After his ‘abandonment’ of the Patna and the consequent loss of his seaman’s certificate, Jim slides away from public view, hopping from shore to shore in order to avoid re-encountering traces of his unhappy past. Instead he locates himself in places where knowledge of his disgrace has not yet circulated. In the words of Michael Valdez Moses, Jim seeks the places “where narration lags behind the event” (64). When Jim’s story is narrated by others, he becomes defined by his representation within that narrative. Jim does not want to be defined by the shameful narrative of his past, seeking instead a clean slate where he can “rewrite” his story.
Ashamed as he is of his actions following the non-sinking of the Patna, Jim does not shirk from the public or from legislative judgment. “Do you not think you or anyone could have made me if I…I am – I am not afraid to tell?” asks Jim (112). This ‘telling’ constitutes an act of agency – when he speaks for himself Jim can at least try to bring out the nuances of his subjective experience on the ship, an agency that is denied him when his story is related by a third party.
To me, Jim’s escapist tendencies derive not so much from a desire to forget/deny his actions on the Patna, but rather, the desire to tell his own story in his own words, to define himself in his own narrative. This desire is not dissimilar to post-colonial writers and such who “write back” against colonial inscriptions.
(293 words, excluding reference)
* Quote from Moses taken from:
Moses, Valdez Michael. "Disorientalism: Conrad and the Imperial Origins of Modernist Aesthetics. from Modernism and Colonialism. Ed.Richard Begam and Michael Valdez Moses. London: Duke University Press, 2007.
Lord Jim: A Romantic Hero in a Modernist Text
We often think of Lord Jim as a modernist novel and it's fragmented narrative, modernist metaphor and disillusionment. However, one critic has called Lord Jim a "modernist romance", in that the two modes of the modern and the romantic clash.
One considers how "disillusionment" and "idealisation" are handled in the play. Its publication in 1900 also marks a turning point between the 19th century and the 20th, and men have to negotiate both modes of understanding. Perhaps, the reason the narrative is fragmented is because Marlow's rational ways of understanding can never grasp the romantic mentality of Jim. Stein says that Jim is a "romantic" and hence cannot survive in the modern Western materialist world of the Empire. It is only in the world of Patusan that Jim can be his romantic self, where he can be viewed as wise, a savior, engage in fights and make a difference.
If Jim is the romantic hero, what does he over reach for? Perhaps his stubborn reaching for the romantic ideal in a world that no longer values such romantic qualities such as anti-rationality, extreme emotions of fear, idealism, heroism and imagination.
So perhaps what I'm trying to say is we should remember that works in itself do not fall into neat categories of "modern" simply because of the context in which we study them, but to also consider the way different literary movements had to write "against" the aesthetic influence of the period before.
One considers how "disillusionment" and "idealisation" are handled in the play. Its publication in 1900 also marks a turning point between the 19th century and the 20th, and men have to negotiate both modes of understanding. Perhaps, the reason the narrative is fragmented is because Marlow's rational ways of understanding can never grasp the romantic mentality of Jim. Stein says that Jim is a "romantic" and hence cannot survive in the modern Western materialist world of the Empire. It is only in the world of Patusan that Jim can be his romantic self, where he can be viewed as wise, a savior, engage in fights and make a difference.
If Jim is the romantic hero, what does he over reach for? Perhaps his stubborn reaching for the romantic ideal in a world that no longer values such romantic qualities such as anti-rationality, extreme emotions of fear, idealism, heroism and imagination.
So perhaps what I'm trying to say is we should remember that works in itself do not fall into neat categories of "modern" simply because of the context in which we study them, but to also consider the way different literary movements had to write "against" the aesthetic influence of the period before.
"one of us"
Conrad, at the end of his note at the end of the novel, calls Jim "one of us". Marlow himself repeats this phrase throughout his recountings. The immediate reading of this would be to see Jim as a kind of everyman, whose moral dilemmas are somehow universal, and are ours as well. Yet it must be noted that by being "one of us", Jim is not "one of them". He is not one of the prilgrims sleeping below deck on the Patna, nor is he one of the indigenous Malays at Patusan. Jim's socio-cultural affinities are not hence not as universal as we might expect; he is more of an every-European that an everyman.
Conrad does not claim to offer any point of view other than an European one, and we can perhaps blame Conrad for being racist (again) or Orientalist. But Conrad consciously delineates the cultural and linguistic difference between Jim (and Brown) and the Malays. He is, as is Jim and Marlow, sharply aware of the dialectics of Us and Them, of Self and Other. For as much as we try to dissolve the binaries that keep man and man at bay, we will never be able to fully enter the mind of another. Yet in the brief moments of human connection, like when Marlow and Jim make eye contact in the courtroom, where truly universal issues like justice and honour arise, is there "truth disclosed in a moment of illusion", and then might Jim truly become "one of us" - not simply a character, but human in shape and form.
Conrad does not claim to offer any point of view other than an European one, and we can perhaps blame Conrad for being racist (again) or Orientalist. But Conrad consciously delineates the cultural and linguistic difference between Jim (and Brown) and the Malays. He is, as is Jim and Marlow, sharply aware of the dialectics of Us and Them, of Self and Other. For as much as we try to dissolve the binaries that keep man and man at bay, we will never be able to fully enter the mind of another. Yet in the brief moments of human connection, like when Marlow and Jim make eye contact in the courtroom, where truly universal issues like justice and honour arise, is there "truth disclosed in a moment of illusion", and then might Jim truly become "one of us" - not simply a character, but human in shape and form.
On Heroism and Lord Jim
“I need a hero!”—Bonnie Tyler
Not wanting to touch too much on what I will be presenting on tomorrow, I’ve chosen to talk about the nature of heroism and how Lord Jim problematises the notion of heroism in the novel. Jim, at the outset of the novel, covets an opportunity to be a hero. “He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts….He confronted savages on tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas… always an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book.” (47) (emphasis mine). However, Jim’s idealism and imagination is let down by his inability to control himself in the face of death, and in one fell swoop, he ‘jumps’, indelibly blotting out his chance to have been a “hero” that stuck to his duty. My impression is that Conrad problematizes the ability of the individual to adhere to the ideals of a romantic tradition of valour and heroism in a modernist age that is sceptical of neat categorisations and prototypes.
We also see a problematisation of heroism, as defined by society, in this case the colonial European ideal, as seen in character of the French lieutenant and the French crew that saved the ship. His adherence to duty in the saving of the Patna did not make him a hero, in his own devotion to his duty on board the Patna. The French complained of the discomfort of doing his duty rather than the supposed heroism that accompanied such a step of rescuing the Patna’s Orientals. Moreover, precautions were taken in the midst of performing their duty, so that the tug boat would not be sucked in with the ship. Therefore, the suggestion that there is little heroic about colonialism, the “duty” of the White Man to his colonised subject of saving them from themselves?
Not wanting to touch too much on what I will be presenting on tomorrow, I’ve chosen to talk about the nature of heroism and how Lord Jim problematises the notion of heroism in the novel. Jim, at the outset of the novel, covets an opportunity to be a hero. “He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts….He confronted savages on tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas… always an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book.” (47) (emphasis mine). However, Jim’s idealism and imagination is let down by his inability to control himself in the face of death, and in one fell swoop, he ‘jumps’, indelibly blotting out his chance to have been a “hero” that stuck to his duty. My impression is that Conrad problematizes the ability of the individual to adhere to the ideals of a romantic tradition of valour and heroism in a modernist age that is sceptical of neat categorisations and prototypes.
We also see a problematisation of heroism, as defined by society, in this case the colonial European ideal, as seen in character of the French lieutenant and the French crew that saved the ship. His adherence to duty in the saving of the Patna did not make him a hero, in his own devotion to his duty on board the Patna. The French complained of the discomfort of doing his duty rather than the supposed heroism that accompanied such a step of rescuing the Patna’s Orientals. Moreover, precautions were taken in the midst of performing their duty, so that the tug boat would not be sucked in with the ship. Therefore, the suggestion that there is little heroic about colonialism, the “duty” of the White Man to his colonised subject of saving them from themselves?
Oh Lordy Jim..
"[T]he horror, the horror" - Heart of Darkness
Here are just some characteristics of modernism that I gleaned from the first 30 chapters:
1. There is an “emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity in writing … an emphasis on how seeing (or reading or perception itself) takes place, rather than on what is being perceived” (Klages, 165)
This is evident in the way Marlow sees/reads Jim’s reactions and the focus on seeing and perceiving: “I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions” (Chap. 5), “He drew up his heavy eyelids. Drew up, I say – no other expression can describe the steady deliberation of the act” (Chap. 13), “I strained my mental eyesight …” (Chap. 19)
2. There is a “blurring of distinctions between genres” (Klages, 165)
I found the first 30 chapters to be like an interview (?) and a captain or rather water clerk’s log all mixed in one. Does this count?
3. And obviously, there is “an emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives”, which I suppose is the root of my confusion/frustration with the text.
The sudden bridge in chapter 4:
“And later on, many times, in distant parts of the world, Marlow showed himself willing to remember Jim, to remember him at length, in detail and audibly” – It moves from Jim at trial to how Marlow would remember him, to Marlow’s memory of setting his eyes on Jim for the first time at the inquiry and then back to the inquiry and so on and so forth.
In addition there seems to be reluctance on Jim’s part for his story to be told: “His voice ceased” (Chap. 13), he leaves a lot hanging – “It was as if I had jumped into a well – into an everlasting deep hole…” (Chap. 9)
(300!)
P.S.: I got the characteristics of modernism from Literary Theory: a guide for the perplexed. Klages, Mary.
P.P.S.: My version of the text is terrible compared to the “toilet paper” text, so only chapters provided, my apologies!
Here are just some characteristics of modernism that I gleaned from the first 30 chapters:
1. There is an “emphasis on impressionism and subjectivity in writing … an emphasis on how seeing (or reading or perception itself) takes place, rather than on what is being perceived” (Klages, 165)
This is evident in the way Marlow sees/reads Jim’s reactions and the focus on seeing and perceiving: “I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions” (Chap. 5), “He drew up his heavy eyelids. Drew up, I say – no other expression can describe the steady deliberation of the act” (Chap. 13), “I strained my mental eyesight …” (Chap. 19)
2. There is a “blurring of distinctions between genres” (Klages, 165)
I found the first 30 chapters to be like an interview (?) and a captain or rather water clerk’s log all mixed in one. Does this count?
3. And obviously, there is “an emphasis on fragmented forms, discontinuous narratives”, which I suppose is the root of my confusion/frustration with the text.
The sudden bridge in chapter 4:
“And later on, many times, in distant parts of the world, Marlow showed himself willing to remember Jim, to remember him at length, in detail and audibly” – It moves from Jim at trial to how Marlow would remember him, to Marlow’s memory of setting his eyes on Jim for the first time at the inquiry and then back to the inquiry and so on and so forth.
In addition there seems to be reluctance on Jim’s part for his story to be told: “His voice ceased” (Chap. 13), he leaves a lot hanging – “It was as if I had jumped into a well – into an everlasting deep hole…” (Chap. 9)
(300!)
P.S.: I got the characteristics of modernism from Literary Theory: a guide for the perplexed. Klages, Mary.
P.P.S.: My version of the text is terrible compared to the “toilet paper” text, so only chapters provided, my apologies!
What were you trying to do Conrad?
We keep coming to this discussion of whether the native is given a voice or not. If he’s given one, we criticize it as the author attempting to ventriloquize or speak for the native. If the native isn’t given a voice, then we turn around and say the native is a subaltern. So what does the native have to say so that he doesn’t appear ventriloquized? In line with this is the description of the East or basically, foreign lands. If the author describes it positively, he runs the risk of exoticization. If he describes it as being in a bad state, then we say he’s being all white and pompous. How much is the author of literature in that era trapped? This is all an outcome of last week and us trying to verify whether Conrad is racist or not. I feel like I’m reading for clues to either exonerate him or incriminate him.
Which is what I was doing when I was reading the bit about the pilgrims in chapter 2- are the Muslims being typically portrayed as dogmatic followers of the faith? Conrad keeps reiterating how they all have abandoned everything just for the sake of going
OR is Conrad suggesting that their faith saved them? Even the “screw-pile lighthouse, planted by unbelievers…seemed to wink at her (
Abjection
If abjection in Kristevian terms (I totally just made that word up) means to throw off aspects of oneself onto a figure, also simultaneously throwing it under the public gaze, then Marlow is certainly guilty of this. In HOD we see how he gets disturbed by thinking about the river as being connected to the Thames, and therefore just a different part of a whole--implying that people are not so very different as our cultures and societies leads us to believe, but perhaps are all the same. If so, then interior qualities such as the desire for chaos, violence and the carnivalesque get abjected onto the native Others in the novel. We see this most clearly in Kurtz, who lets his inner beasts run free, horrifying and at the same time fascinating Marlow, as a white man who outdoes the natives in barbarism.
I think the same happens in Lord Jim, but very differently. Marlow, as narrator, is free to shape the narrative and hence reader perceptions of Jim. In Chapter 26, he sees Jim as "a figure set up on a pedestal, to represent in his persistent youth the power, and perhaps the virtues, of races that never grow old, that have emerged from the gloom...like a shadow in the light." (201 of my Signet edition) He valorizes Jim as a symbolic figure of heroism and virtue. I'm not sure if this is a reverse kind of abjection, but it certainly seems that Marlow's reading of Jim is shaped by this and perhaps then, symptomatic of his own desire to be likewise or at least to be able to throw his humanist aspirations onto someone else, however unworthy he may be. It is of course also significant that Jim is seen here as symbolic, a kind of empty signifier perhaps, who gets filled in slowly by various narrative accounts.
(300 excluding pointless asides :))
I think the same happens in Lord Jim, but very differently. Marlow, as narrator, is free to shape the narrative and hence reader perceptions of Jim. In Chapter 26, he sees Jim as "a figure set up on a pedestal, to represent in his persistent youth the power, and perhaps the virtues, of races that never grow old, that have emerged from the gloom...like a shadow in the light." (201 of my Signet edition) He valorizes Jim as a symbolic figure of heroism and virtue. I'm not sure if this is a reverse kind of abjection, but it certainly seems that Marlow's reading of Jim is shaped by this and perhaps then, symptomatic of his own desire to be likewise or at least to be able to throw his humanist aspirations onto someone else, however unworthy he may be. It is of course also significant that Jim is seen here as symbolic, a kind of empty signifier perhaps, who gets filled in slowly by various narrative accounts.
(300 excluding pointless asides :))
Jim in Limbo
Edvard Munch, The Scream, 1895.
This picture aptly conveys my general frustration with reading Conrad. With Heart of Darkness I found him excessively verbose, and although Lord Jim had a few bits of beautiful, poetic passages that I really loved, still, like Yuen Mei quipped, I kept getting lost in all the dialogue. My personal feelings aside, the second reason why this picture relates to Lord Jim for me is because of the overwhelming sense of crippled-ness in the text.
Things seem to always hit a wall and fail here. Jim is a kind of cripple himself, having been injured by a falling spar. In Chapter 7, "[S]uch an overwhelming sense of his helplessness came over him that he was not able to produce a sound" (77). The sense of crippled-ness and things failing in the narration culminate to a point of frustration that screams silently out of the text, like the scream you can almost hear in Munch’s painting.
But this picture also evokes a sort of limbo/liminal zone that figures in the text also occupy. The sea-farers occupy a liminal “existence between sky and water” (16), and the Patna is a mixed identity ship. Also, the narrative opens in medias res, and things are not revealed to readers in a linear fashion, even though it is narrated through a third-person omniscient narrator. Jim is also constantly in limbo between dream and reality. He is so caught up in his hero fantasies that he goes into a hissy fit when Marlow potentially insults his character.
Relating this to modernism, perhaps all this silent screaming/crippled-ness stand for the modernist frustration/disillusionment with rapid technological progression and increasing social ills.
(276 words)
What should we do?
Although having finally reached chapter 30 (yay!), I find myself still asking many questions about Jim. In fact, I'm not even sure if I got some of the facts right, its all very messy. But to get to the point, I think Jim is quite fickle because it is as if he cant decide what to do all the time, and sometimes I find myself getting really irritated by him. So in an attempt to understand his character, I tried to imagine myself in his dilemma, and I realized that if I had chosen to play romantic hero and tried to save the people instead of jumping off, it would only be because I fervently and totally believed that it was morally and socially right to fulfill my duty as officer. Yet the modernist narrative techniques in this text and many others suggest that there is no way of ever fully understanding Jim, and by extension no way of ever knowing the truth or what-is-right.
But if there are no universal truths how can we believe? And if we can't believe, how can we act 'appropriately' on this belief? In other words, since there is no universal truths or values, what justifies anyone's actions (e.g even the seemingly correct French officer's act of fulfilling his role by staying aboard the Patna and seeing it through the storm)? How can we resolve this conflict? Is this one of the issues that the novel is rising as well? I'm not sure.
But if there are no universal truths how can we believe? And if we can't believe, how can we act 'appropriately' on this belief? In other words, since there is no universal truths or values, what justifies anyone's actions (e.g even the seemingly correct French officer's act of fulfilling his role by staying aboard the Patna and seeing it through the storm)? How can we resolve this conflict? Is this one of the issues that the novel is rising as well? I'm not sure.
Do You Know Lord Jim?
“I know my own mind”.
In those five words, Jim thwarts the attempts made by Marlow, the unknown narrator and the author himself, in a bid to understand and “grasp” Jim. Uttered assuredly by Jim, those words encapsulate the enterprise of reading, interpretation and representation.
The entire novel has Marlow recounting the past to his avid listeners, and in the process of narrating, Marlow embarks on a quest on reading and interpreting Jim for himself, and for others. The frustration for Marlow, (and us), lies having to “read” through a flurry of past actions, events and words, and interpret them, in order to understand Jim and the fascination that Marlow has of him. Jim, when excited, is usually fails to string together a coherent thought or sentences, instead, his actions are more “revealing” to Marlow. Following the opening quote, it is Jim, and only Jim, who can “know” his own mind, for language encounters its limits in this novel. (Note the excessiveness of language and the manner in which Marlow narrates- it is never linear in its progression to the end.)
Conrad, however, complicates things when Jim is shown to doubt himself. The incident of Patna, where he jumps off the ship is one such incident where Jim, doesn’t seem to fully understand his actions and himself. Readers then, are given privy, to a representation of Jim’s psyche as he starts to come to term with his actions; “There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well- into an everlasting deep hole…”
A question then arises- how are we to understand others, if we don’t understand ourselves? It is with this question in mind, that the hypocrisy of the colonial enterprise comes to fore- particularly under its flag of a “civilizing” mission.
(298 words)
In those five words, Jim thwarts the attempts made by Marlow, the unknown narrator and the author himself, in a bid to understand and “grasp” Jim. Uttered assuredly by Jim, those words encapsulate the enterprise of reading, interpretation and representation.
The entire novel has Marlow recounting the past to his avid listeners, and in the process of narrating, Marlow embarks on a quest on reading and interpreting Jim for himself, and for others. The frustration for Marlow, (and us), lies having to “read” through a flurry of past actions, events and words, and interpret them, in order to understand Jim and the fascination that Marlow has of him. Jim, when excited, is usually fails to string together a coherent thought or sentences, instead, his actions are more “revealing” to Marlow. Following the opening quote, it is Jim, and only Jim, who can “know” his own mind, for language encounters its limits in this novel. (Note the excessiveness of language and the manner in which Marlow narrates- it is never linear in its progression to the end.)
Conrad, however, complicates things when Jim is shown to doubt himself. The incident of Patna, where he jumps off the ship is one such incident where Jim, doesn’t seem to fully understand his actions and himself. Readers then, are given privy, to a representation of Jim’s psyche as he starts to come to term with his actions; “There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well- into an everlasting deep hole…”
A question then arises- how are we to understand others, if we don’t understand ourselves? It is with this question in mind, that the hypocrisy of the colonial enterprise comes to fore- particularly under its flag of a “civilizing” mission.
(298 words)
Misguided idealism in Conrad's texts
Reading Lord Jim made me think about one similarity that it has with Heart of Darkness—the theme of misguided idealism. This is apparent in the character of Jim who constantly envisions himself living out his heroic aspirations. In fact, he is even described as frequently having thoughts “full of valorous deeds” and that “he loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary achievements (25). At one point, Jim even sees “himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurricane” (13-14). However, this is shown to be highly ironic when he abandons the supposedly sinking Patna. Brought to the test, Jim falls short of his romantic and heroic projections of himself.
This misguided idealism can also be found in HOD in the characters of Marlow’s aunt and the Intended. For example, when Marlow tells his aunt of his decision to join the Belgian company, she sees him as “something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle” and this suggests how she genuinely believes in the religious moral rhetoric behind colonialism. There is a very ironic use of Christian-inflected terms here and Marlow’s aunt is a case in point of misguided idealism! Misguided idealism is also seen in the Intended who continues to believe that Kurtz is a benevolent humanitarian on a civilising mission in Africa, largely due to the fact that Marlow withholds Kurtz’s true depravity from her.
However, despite both texts having the theme of misguided idealism, in HOD, it is more a critique of the misguided idealism of colonialism. While some remain misguided about the true intentions of the colonial enterprise, others continue to perpetuate others’ misguided idealism. In LJ, it is more a critique of one man’s character and his overly-romanticised visions of himself.
(295 words)
This misguided idealism can also be found in HOD in the characters of Marlow’s aunt and the Intended. For example, when Marlow tells his aunt of his decision to join the Belgian company, she sees him as “something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle” and this suggests how she genuinely believes in the religious moral rhetoric behind colonialism. There is a very ironic use of Christian-inflected terms here and Marlow’s aunt is a case in point of misguided idealism! Misguided idealism is also seen in the Intended who continues to believe that Kurtz is a benevolent humanitarian on a civilising mission in Africa, largely due to the fact that Marlow withholds Kurtz’s true depravity from her.
However, despite both texts having the theme of misguided idealism, in HOD, it is more a critique of the misguided idealism of colonialism. While some remain misguided about the true intentions of the colonial enterprise, others continue to perpetuate others’ misguided idealism. In LJ, it is more a critique of one man’s character and his overly-romanticised visions of himself.
(295 words)
crumbling conrad
Last week we talked about collapsing binaries in HOD. This week, I found it almost impossible to ignore the (and this is of course completely subjective) deeply ingrained theme of failed establishments. Before the dust of one crumbling framework can settle, another one pops up (or rather, down).
Crash 1: Take the repeated allusion to ships for instance—how many of them are damaged, derelict, sinking? If a ship can indeed be said to represent human conquest of the sea/unknown, then we can read these ships as floating and failing institutions of sorts.
Crash 2: The maritime industry is also a failed establishment: firstly because officers onboard the Patna are described as debased, alcoholics, violent, morally questionable (leaving pilgrims to drown is just mean, bordering on blasphemous), and secondly because even the team of inquirers set up as a watchdog system to oversee the former can be read as itself flawed and indicative of internal contradictions—Captain Brierly defects to be on Jim’s side, arranging for him to run away.
Crash 3: Language as a stable institution pretty much also crumbles in the text. Words like “water” or “cur” generate much misunderstanding and violence, characters seem unable to find the words to say (terms like “magnificent vagueness” and “glorious indefiniteness” cue this), and French is left untranslated (something which should trigger ideas about authenticity and the limited capacity of language as a conveyor of meaning).
Crash 4: Patusan, arguably, is de-established place, a backwater. Even its political structure crumbles since the people want to overthrow the rajah, and later on Jim (since men try to assassinate him).
Why all the anti-establishmentarianism? Perhaps a modernist desire to resist absolutism or reflect the increasingly fragmented and unstable quality of a world that is going to the dogs is in play here.
(298words)
Crash 1: Take the repeated allusion to ships for instance—how many of them are damaged, derelict, sinking? If a ship can indeed be said to represent human conquest of the sea/unknown, then we can read these ships as floating and failing institutions of sorts.
Crash 2: The maritime industry is also a failed establishment: firstly because officers onboard the Patna are described as debased, alcoholics, violent, morally questionable (leaving pilgrims to drown is just mean, bordering on blasphemous), and secondly because even the team of inquirers set up as a watchdog system to oversee the former can be read as itself flawed and indicative of internal contradictions—Captain Brierly defects to be on Jim’s side, arranging for him to run away.
Crash 3: Language as a stable institution pretty much also crumbles in the text. Words like “water” or “cur” generate much misunderstanding and violence, characters seem unable to find the words to say (terms like “magnificent vagueness” and “glorious indefiniteness” cue this), and French is left untranslated (something which should trigger ideas about authenticity and the limited capacity of language as a conveyor of meaning).
Crash 4: Patusan, arguably, is de-established place, a backwater. Even its political structure crumbles since the people want to overthrow the rajah, and later on Jim (since men try to assassinate him).
Why all the anti-establishmentarianism? Perhaps a modernist desire to resist absolutism or reflect the increasingly fragmented and unstable quality of a world that is going to the dogs is in play here.
(298words)
Tuesday, September 16, 2008
Cryptic Creepy Crawlies
Stein’s room was filled with “horrible miniature monsters, looking malevolent in death and immobility, and his cabinet of butterflies, beautiful and hovering under the glass cases of lifeless wings” (167). The “[c]atacombs of beetles” and “graves of butterflies” sets the stage for the discussion of Jim (168, 175).
Pondering over an “extraordinary perfect specimen” of a butterfly he had chanced upon and captured after surviving an ambush by his adversaries, Stein draws references between butterfly (masterpiece) and Man (amazing, but not a masterpiece).
There are obvious parallels between the butterfly and Jim. Both are associated with death. The butterfly was found and caught after a killing, while Jim was known for the Patna incident. Both are extraordinary and rare. Both are admired by their respective collectors (Stein - entomology and Marlow - human specimens).
One can draw references between the studying of the butterfly to the study of Jim. However, Marlow and Stein talked in coded terms and “avoided pronouncing Jim’s name” (177). It seems to me whether Jim should be a beetle (unsavory image) and “creep twenty feet underground and stay there” (165) or “fly high with a strong flight” like the butterfly (172).
The discussions on being a romantic, of Absolute Truth and Beauty as “elusive, obscure, half-submerged” (178) suggest a pained nostalgia of the departure of Victorian values and perhaps, literary style (butterfly as a Victorian symbol too). The prospect of preserving the dead (tradition and culture) with the dead (literature?), similar to what entomology does, is not a satisfying one. However, there are no other options, giving rise to an immense pessimism of loss and mortality, themes closely associated to modernism, and the Empire (through Stein).
(283)
Words, facts, words, facts, let's call the whole thing off...
This is something I found rather amusing. We’ve just ploughed through scores of words, reading accounts, “facts” about Jim’s life, adventures and misfortunes (and some other characters along the way) but we are not closer to knowing who the ‘real’ Jim is. I, as the reader, was drawn to his character, like the way Kurtz did, into wanting more, more what? More facts about him to satisfy my curiosity but “as if facts could explain anything” right? Anyone can talk about anyone or anything, describing events, personalities, trivia etc. but all this excess talk does not tell us who the person is – an entire novel was dedicated to Jim but he remains “inscrutable at heart”.
Maybe the text or the character of Jim is not meant to be understood. The complex and intense alteration to a person after a ‘life-changing’ event cannot be explained or interpreted. By positing that “he is one of us”, Conrad has removed the centre from the author, the narrator or even the reader. It is a rejection that all positions are mere interpretations since that implies that there is a truth or centre in which meaning exists in fixity. Rather the text has become “infinite” in as much as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations.
In the modernist world, literature, speech and writing, it seems, is a battle of interpretations. Authors, critics, us students of Literature, need (and distress!) to communicate and the greater the need, the greater the snowball effect of overflowing words. Language is at once superfluous, excessive and full of poverty because language trivializes the individual’s experience, it makes the unique common and reduces the individual to a definition - a “fact”. So perhaps Lord Jim should remain “inscrutable at heart”
(294 words)
This is something I found rather amusing. We’ve just ploughed through scores of words, reading accounts, “facts” about Jim’s life, adventures and misfortunes (and some other characters along the way) but we are not closer to knowing who the ‘real’ Jim is. I, as the reader, was drawn to his character, like the way Kurtz did, into wanting more, more what? More facts about him to satisfy my curiosity but “as if facts could explain anything” right? Anyone can talk about anyone or anything, describing events, personalities, trivia etc. but all this excess talk does not tell us who the person is – an entire novel was dedicated to Jim but he remains “inscrutable at heart”.
Maybe the text or the character of Jim is not meant to be understood. The complex and intense alteration to a person after a ‘life-changing’ event cannot be explained or interpreted. By positing that “he is one of us”, Conrad has removed the centre from the author, the narrator or even the reader. It is a rejection that all positions are mere interpretations since that implies that there is a truth or centre in which meaning exists in fixity. Rather the text has become “infinite” in as much as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations.
In the modernist world, literature, speech and writing, it seems, is a battle of interpretations. Authors, critics, us students of Literature, need (and distress!) to communicate and the greater the need, the greater the snowball effect of overflowing words. Language is at once superfluous, excessive and full of poverty because language trivializes the individual’s experience, it makes the unique common and reduces the individual to a definition - a “fact”. So perhaps Lord Jim should remain “inscrutable at heart”
(294 words)
A blending of frames: Jim as episteme and epistemological mystery
I found Lord Jim interesting in the way it seemed to bridge literary genres and modes of knowing: on one hand, Jim’s story, taken alone, seems to fit the structure of a Romantic bildungsroman (indeed, Lord Jim is sometimes subtitled A Romance) following the rise and fall of a hero figure. At the same time, this linear narrative is fractured by the text’s layered structure and Citizen Kane-style drifting between sub-narratives and voices, as filtered through Marlow – Conrad’s modernist aspect, so to speak.
Conrad’s amalgamation of modernist forms and earlier literary genres works on many levels. It can be read as representing the conflict at the heart of the colonial project, which seeks to fit itself within an ordered grand narrative that somewhat mirrors the bildungsroman (bringing knowledge to the uncivilized, encouraging the progress and growth of man – both coloniser and colonized). This is continually defeated, however, by reality in its many facets, which breaks up this imposed narrative into the grey areas that we have seen in the texts studied so far.
This is linked to the fundamental unknowability of things, which is the question that Marlow and the novel itself grapple with. Jim remains an epistemological mystery (as both subject and object) despite his heroic trajectory – which, ironically, is triggered by a failure of knowledge: Jim thinks he knows the outcome of the Patna, but its reality eludes him. Marlow and the other characters’ fascination with Jim, Marlow’s attempts to steer the course of Jim’s life, and his attempts to frame Jim’s story in various forms of narratives, echoes our fascination with the text: he/it evades our frames of knowledge, and we try to make sense of him/it but never really succeed because he/it cannot fit within a prescribed framework (or genre) of knowing.
296 words
Conrad’s amalgamation of modernist forms and earlier literary genres works on many levels. It can be read as representing the conflict at the heart of the colonial project, which seeks to fit itself within an ordered grand narrative that somewhat mirrors the bildungsroman (bringing knowledge to the uncivilized, encouraging the progress and growth of man – both coloniser and colonized). This is continually defeated, however, by reality in its many facets, which breaks up this imposed narrative into the grey areas that we have seen in the texts studied so far.
This is linked to the fundamental unknowability of things, which is the question that Marlow and the novel itself grapple with. Jim remains an epistemological mystery (as both subject and object) despite his heroic trajectory – which, ironically, is triggered by a failure of knowledge: Jim thinks he knows the outcome of the Patna, but its reality eludes him. Marlow and the other characters’ fascination with Jim, Marlow’s attempts to steer the course of Jim’s life, and his attempts to frame Jim’s story in various forms of narratives, echoes our fascination with the text: he/it evades our frames of knowledge, and we try to make sense of him/it but never really succeed because he/it cannot fit within a prescribed framework (or genre) of knowing.
296 words
Conrad's Modernism
Conrad’s later novels (in this instance, Lord Jim), I think, show distinct differences in terms of race, between the White Man (Jim) and the community of “natives” in the fictional Patusan. For example, the reader is informed of the differences between Jim and “Jim’s own servant”, Tamb’ Itam (206): while the former is described in terms of his whiteness – “white lord” – the latter has a “complexion [that] was very dark” (206). Racial binaries here are important to the text precisely because different qualities and characteristics are affiliated with different racial terms. By virtue of his ‘whiteness’, Jim as part of a ‘more superior’ race, can become “the virtual ruler of the land” (208). Jim, in other words, becomes like a symbolic White Rajah; he is a Romantic paternalistic figure that leads Patusan to civilization. Conrad is drawing upon traditional tropes of the White Man as the father figure in colonial discourses.
Despite drawing clear racial boundaries, these differences seem to be aestheticized in a modernist manner mainly through employment of multiple narrators and achronological narration. Through different narrators who present Jim’s story differently – Tamb’ Itam, Stein, Jewel etc – the reader is not given one, single, authorial portrait of Jim. Rather, the reader is presented with competing portraits of Jim; ultimately, what the reader is left with is a composite image of Jim. To add to this ‘modernist chaos’, Conrad confuses the time sequence of events, making it difficult for readers to follow the sequence of events that happened. In the Patusan section, as in the Patna section of the novel, there are movements back and forward in time: time goes back to the “seventeenth-century” (173) history of Patusan and time fast-forwards to the date where Marlow saw “the coast of Patusan . . . nearly two years afterwards” (185).
(299 words)
Despite drawing clear racial boundaries, these differences seem to be aestheticized in a modernist manner mainly through employment of multiple narrators and achronological narration. Through different narrators who present Jim’s story differently – Tamb’ Itam, Stein, Jewel etc – the reader is not given one, single, authorial portrait of Jim. Rather, the reader is presented with competing portraits of Jim; ultimately, what the reader is left with is a composite image of Jim. To add to this ‘modernist chaos’, Conrad confuses the time sequence of events, making it difficult for readers to follow the sequence of events that happened. In the Patusan section, as in the Patna section of the novel, there are movements back and forward in time: time goes back to the “seventeenth-century” (173) history of Patusan and time fast-forwards to the date where Marlow saw “the coast of Patusan . . . nearly two years afterwards” (185).
(299 words)
Linguistic confusion symptomatic of the failure of the British colonial enterprise
I was intrigued by how Conrad’s treatment of language in Lord Jim reveals its critique of the British colonial enterprise. When Jim leaves for Patusan on board a ship, he meets a half-caste captain whose English is expressed as a verbally confused mishmash/incoherent jumble. The captain’s “flowing English” is described as seemingly “derived from a dictionary compiled by a lunatic.” The “crazy” or foolish quality of the captain’s speech stems from how unintelligibility and inarticulacy result when he attempts to pepper his language with stock phrases and clichés that he mimes/apes/mimics from the rhetoric of the British colonial civilizing mission of the “white-man’s burden.” This mental colonization of the captain by the hypocritical values and rhetoric of British colonialism results in an inappropriately inflated and highfalutin exaggerated-ness in his speech that becomes comic because the phrases are wrested out of their originally idealistic, moralistic and allegedly “noble” context and jarringly used to describe everyday, mundane administrative and official realities with which it is incompatible. The text clearly mocks the confused and inapt employment of language:
Had Mr. Stein desired him to “ascend”, he would have “reverentially”—(I think he wanted to say respectfully—but devil only knows)—“reverentially made objects for the safety of properties.” If disregarded, he would have presented “resignation to quit.” Twelve months ago he had made his last voyage there, and though Mr. Cornelius “propitiated many offertories” to Mr. Roger Allang and the “principal populations”, on “conditions which made the trade “a snare and ashes in the mouth”[…]
To me, this verbal confusion can be read as symptomatic of the social and political disorder that has resulted from British colonialism and the chaos that has ensued from the failures of its white mission in Patusan.
(291 words)
Had Mr. Stein desired him to “ascend”, he would have “reverentially”—(I think he wanted to say respectfully—but devil only knows)—“reverentially made objects for the safety of properties.” If disregarded, he would have presented “resignation to quit.” Twelve months ago he had made his last voyage there, and though Mr. Cornelius “propitiated many offertories” to Mr. Roger Allang and the “principal populations”, on “conditions which made the trade “a snare and ashes in the mouth”[…]
To me, this verbal confusion can be read as symptomatic of the social and political disorder that has resulted from British colonialism and the chaos that has ensued from the failures of its white mission in Patusan.
(291 words)
The Captive White Man
I was immersed in Marlow’s narrative of Jim’s state of flux without an anchored centre, moving from port to port as the memories of the Patna catches up with him. And just as he seems to be anchored, figuratively and literally, the heroics of his adventures at Doramin’s Bugis stronghold throw up an analogy that provoked my thoughts on his Hollywood cinema-style road to fame á la Rambo.
Marlow describes Jim as a “captive in every sense”. He even goes as far to say that he was also “captivated” by Dain Waris. He describes Dain Waris as “open to the Western eye” but at the same time embodying the “mystery of unrecorded ages” (164). From this I infer that Dain Waris serves as perfect specimen of the cultured native, and yet a better European than most real ones. The two characters’ fascination in Dain Waris then directs our attention to their gravitation towards an amalgamation of both Occidental and Oriental categories as prescribed by Edward Said – and yet their continued “captivity” in those separate roles.
This complicates the relationship of the European and the Asian that is viewed through a lens of binary oppositions, for Dain Waris and Jim are figures in the liminal middle ground of these two polarities. And perhaps, for a way to reach the middle ground, violence must be exacted. Jim the Occidental assures himself a space in the midst of the Orientals by violence in leading the attack on Sherif Ali’s fort, and Dain Waris the Oriental gains recognition by the Occidental by being instrumental in the war effort (169).
But still, their basic differences in ethnicity render their positions in this hybrid class unequal in power. Jim the Occident-turned-Hybrid obviously holds more power over Dain Waris the Oriental-turned-Hybrid. The shackles of “captivity” remain.
Marlow describes Jim as a “captive in every sense”. He even goes as far to say that he was also “captivated” by Dain Waris. He describes Dain Waris as “open to the Western eye” but at the same time embodying the “mystery of unrecorded ages” (164). From this I infer that Dain Waris serves as perfect specimen of the cultured native, and yet a better European than most real ones. The two characters’ fascination in Dain Waris then directs our attention to their gravitation towards an amalgamation of both Occidental and Oriental categories as prescribed by Edward Said – and yet their continued “captivity” in those separate roles.
This complicates the relationship of the European and the Asian that is viewed through a lens of binary oppositions, for Dain Waris and Jim are figures in the liminal middle ground of these two polarities. And perhaps, for a way to reach the middle ground, violence must be exacted. Jim the Occidental assures himself a space in the midst of the Orientals by violence in leading the attack on Sherif Ali’s fort, and Dain Waris the Oriental gains recognition by the Occidental by being instrumental in the war effort (169).
But still, their basic differences in ethnicity render their positions in this hybrid class unequal in power. Jim the Occident-turned-Hybrid obviously holds more power over Dain Waris the Oriental-turned-Hybrid. The shackles of “captivity” remain.
Looking at Imagination in Modernism (Lord Jim e.g.s)
(page no.s are from old versh!)
· Read this (: :http://www.collegenews.org/x3052.xml
Citing Clark (2004) [assumes Flaubert and Manet are “fathers of modernism”]
1) “Modernism…movements between text and image.
2)”a novel understanding of the cultural imagination of early modernism”
3)”He shows [deliberate intent to] mix and contaminate their work: Flaubert with images, Manet with narration.”
The notion of this ‘contamination’ ; movement between text and image is something we see very often in modernist texts. The predominancy of nature; Forster’s Marabar caves, Conrad’s Congo wilderness and even in Lord Jim all accord a blurring between “text” and “image”. Taking this one step further it is then possible to see that this cultural imagination of early modernism comes from the focus on setting,landscape; natural features that are foreign to the colonizers, that there is the creation of culture through imagination exacting the senses. This focus on senses, emotions and responses to new situations suggest a focus on the inner self, the individual perception and feeling; the persona imagines what his surrounding is like and paints a picture that then affects our imagination.
“The danger, when not seen, had the imperfect vagueness or human though. The fear grows shadowy; and Imagination, the enemy of men, the father of all terrors, unstimulated, sinks to rest in the dullness of exhausted emotion” (CH2 p9)
-Here imagination becomes a force of power that allows for invocation of fear and negativity that is some what depressive; due to defamiliarization of location?
“At times his thoughts would be full of various 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” (CH3 p15)
-Imagination is used to escape and a way to pursue happiness not found in the real (colonizing, unfamiliar world)
Here Reads Everybody: Jimmegans Text
Conrad’s display of Modernist techniques of story-telling comes out in strong focus in Lord Jim: the very act of telling or narrating itself becomes foregrounded as process. Action here becomes mediated through narration: Jim’s story must be filtered through Marlow, who wrests the tale away from the monologic third-person narrator of the first four chapters, to a digressive, deliberately Bakhtinian poly-vocal site of story-telling that include the voices of people like the French Lieutenant, Egstrom and Stein. By cutting across different languages and discourses, the confluence of these social and linguistic texts in Marlow’s narrative sets up the Habermasian notion of the public sphere of discourse that is invested and interpellated through its reading of Jim’s story in a certain way. Thus, what the inquiry wants is (in a Dickensian motif) “facts” (24) of Jim’s case; and what the crowd wants to see at Jim’s inquiry is nothing less than a display or illumination of profundity that never comes.
This then interrogates the way in which Conrad’s narration is a self-conscious engagement in how we read and construct social and personal narratives. Jim’s own phenomenological view of events are such that the issues involved are “beyond the competency of a court of inquiry” (93); indeed, Jim’s own identity remains as “prodigiously inexplicable” (98) to himself as to anyone reading Marlow’s text. We are also never allowed to forget that for all its seeming incongruity with the social, Jim reads himself as if he were reading a text: he is “a hero in a book” (8). Jim’s tragedy can be read in the light of Nietzsche’s claim that we need to sustain fictions about ourselves if we are indeed to live: Jim’s own self-fashioning in Patusan points to a need (his and ours) to read, and thus own, a story that can truly be his.
This then interrogates the way in which Conrad’s narration is a self-conscious engagement in how we read and construct social and personal narratives. Jim’s own phenomenological view of events are such that the issues involved are “beyond the competency of a court of inquiry” (93); indeed, Jim’s own identity remains as “prodigiously inexplicable” (98) to himself as to anyone reading Marlow’s text. We are also never allowed to forget that for all its seeming incongruity with the social, Jim reads himself as if he were reading a text: he is “a hero in a book” (8). Jim’s tragedy can be read in the light of Nietzsche’s claim that we need to sustain fictions about ourselves if we are indeed to live: Jim’s own self-fashioning in Patusan points to a need (his and ours) to read, and thus own, a story that can truly be his.
Lord Jim , the bane of my essaying life
In the midst of essay-writing time, Lord Jim comes trotting along. Things would be much easier if it was a short text or it was written in a more comprehensible style, but no, Conrad had to make my life even more miserable by frequently losing me in the course of the narrative. And so, I am thus compelled to write a post about this horribly confusing choice of multiple narratives that render readers like me confounded.
First, let me clarify what I mean by ‘multiple narratives’ in Lord Jim. Yes, the novel is written mostly from the point-of-view of Marlow, who interestingly functions as a third person narrator retelling the story of Jim to an audience – both the listeners and us readers. Yet, within this retelling, he refers to other characters that give their own perspectives of the events that occur or of Lord Jim himself. The result is we have differing readings of the character of Lord Jim, and we never really know (or at least, I don’t know, till the part I’ve read up to) who he is. Which reminds me of the issue of the real ‘
-Yuen Mei-
Framed narrative
I found the framed narrative in Lord Jim most interesting – like Heart of Darkness, we have a shadowy third person narrator setting up the story – and for the rest of the parts, it is the voice of Marlow speaking (as though speaking directly to the reader), and within Marlow’s story, is Jim’s side of the story. I was wondering if we can draw parallels between this narrative structure which seems to be embedded and coded on several levels, with the idea of penetrating into the “heart of darkness”, of entering deep within the conscious self. And within the self, there is a repeated sense of entrapment. For example, Marlow comments on how Jim “was imprisoned within the very freedom of his power”. Also the land, “dark green foliage of bushes and creepers”, surrounds and encloses the space they are in, and could also symbolically, stand for an imprisonment of the mind. The framed narrative, not only implicates readers into the consciousness of Marlow and Jim, but also engulfs us, forces us to look inward...within the deep recesses of our own minds.
What Will We Be Accused Of?
In the Barnes and Noble Classics edition of Lord Jim, a map detailing 'Conrad's Eastern Voyages' in the 1880s is provided (liii). It retains the old/colonial names of places, such as 'Burma', 'Siam' and 'Cochin-China' (vs Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam), and quite understandably so, since it aims to represent Conrad's routes of travel as a seaman. This tiny detail jumped out at me and immediately directed my attention to the fact that Conrad's work has dated. By 'dated' I do not mean that it no longer has any relevance, but that the passing of time results in the passing of ideas, constructions, ideology, etc. accordingly.
Having said this, even though time has proven the place names no longer valid, the land which is referred to when someone speaks of 'Burma' is still present today as 'Myanmar'. Going off that (although in a very random way), today we are so conscious and quick to distance ourselves from being 'racist', whether as a writer, reader, or critic (just think of how much effort is made by postcolonial authors to not fall into the trap of 'exoticism' etc.). Does this necessarily mean, though, that 'racism' (as we know it) is a thing of the past, like the place names of 'Burma', 'Siam', and 'Cochin-China'? Or, does it simply mean that it still exists, just lurking around in disguise, masquerading with another name?
I suppose explaining how this thought came to me would be helpful- I was just thinking of how 'anti-imperialist' readings of Conrad's texts were the 'norm' until Achebe came along. In 100 years' time, will our 21st century analyses (not just of Conrad's but all texts) become merely readings that were never 'fully able to transcend the assumptions of [our time]' (Matin's introduction)?
(292 words)
Cursory Thoughts on Fetish & Its Relations to Modernism & Empire
A fetish is a synecdoche, being a mere objective indication of something much larger than itself. A fetishistic engagement allows the individual to apprehend, perhaps as libidinous cathaxis, that which has been barred from a more immediate experience, either by mental cordons set up within his own psyche or by what can be perceived to be external factors acting through his psyche to structure certain restrictions disallowing contact with the said experiences. Thus, the fetish may be said to be a condition of repression. This relation between fetish (as synecdoche) and repression may represent an approach in the understanding of Modernism and its relation to Western Imperialism.
*
Much has been said about the “resolutions” of Conrad’s narrative elements in Heart of Darkness, and I believe much of the same will be and can be said of Jim. As far as these two texts are concerned, the opacity of Conrad’s narrative is not so much the opacity of a who-dunnit, but rather that of a how-dunnit, by which is meant within Conrad’s narratives a definite investment in character psychology: Conrad’s texts are loquacious texts, employing the communicability of Marlow as storyteller to render portraits of experience. But any attempt at psychologizing is essentially flawed insofar as, within the limits of hermeneutics, any portrait is essentially an extension of a pentimento cast over by a trompe-l’oeil: complications arises out of the locquacity; and words reveal themselves as tools of evasion, rather than that of revelation – though the fine line between evasion and revelation is subtle, and what would be revealed, and what is hidden, will make itself known to the reader depending on where he stands in relation to the aspect of the portrait he wishes to see. The fetish, if you will.
(292 words)
*
Much has been said about the “resolutions” of Conrad’s narrative elements in Heart of Darkness, and I believe much of the same will be and can be said of Jim. As far as these two texts are concerned, the opacity of Conrad’s narrative is not so much the opacity of a who-dunnit, but rather that of a how-dunnit, by which is meant within Conrad’s narratives a definite investment in character psychology: Conrad’s texts are loquacious texts, employing the communicability of Marlow as storyteller to render portraits of experience. But any attempt at psychologizing is essentially flawed insofar as, within the limits of hermeneutics, any portrait is essentially an extension of a pentimento cast over by a trompe-l’oeil: complications arises out of the locquacity; and words reveal themselves as tools of evasion, rather than that of revelation – though the fine line between evasion and revelation is subtle, and what would be revealed, and what is hidden, will make itself known to the reader depending on where he stands in relation to the aspect of the portrait he wishes to see. The fetish, if you will.
(292 words)
Monday, September 15, 2008
Modernism and the Human Condition
I find Conrad's use of Marlow very useful. The novel is told in the form of a story narrated by Marlow, and within his narration are stories told by other characters, offering us multiple viewpoints, often with no linearity of events. And it is through these stories and factual accounts and external perspectives that we gain an insight into Jim. Yet, thsese are never enough for us to understand and comprehend Jim completely because, as Conrad describes, he is still seen through a "mist", forever remaining mysterious and irrecoverable.
This set me thinking about the texts we have done so far, Passage, HOD, and now Lord Jim, all of which grapple with this idea of the rational, scientific, even theoretical knowable entity, compared to a more elusive, undefinable one, which may be called the human condition. It is as though modernism and the rational thought that it prescribes is inadequate to grasp, represent and identify with the complex human condition. Yet, it is only through modernist thought, and only with using rationality and factuality and a fragmented discourse that we realise how irrational and mysterious the human condition is. Whether it is India, or the African cannibals, or Jim in this case, we sense their complexity only when set against very clear, rational thinking, which suggests that such an approach is necessary. To go one step further, it is also through this process that we know that even the propagators of modernism, or colonialism, or simply the whites themselves, though preaching rationality and anxious to be able to pin down everything, and in themselves highly complex individuals, with very non-conforming, irrational, "misty" inner states.
This set me thinking about the texts we have done so far, Passage, HOD, and now Lord Jim, all of which grapple with this idea of the rational, scientific, even theoretical knowable entity, compared to a more elusive, undefinable one, which may be called the human condition. It is as though modernism and the rational thought that it prescribes is inadequate to grasp, represent and identify with the complex human condition. Yet, it is only through modernist thought, and only with using rationality and factuality and a fragmented discourse that we realise how irrational and mysterious the human condition is. Whether it is India, or the African cannibals, or Jim in this case, we sense their complexity only when set against very clear, rational thinking, which suggests that such an approach is necessary. To go one step further, it is also through this process that we know that even the propagators of modernism, or colonialism, or simply the whites themselves, though preaching rationality and anxious to be able to pin down everything, and in themselves highly complex individuals, with very non-conforming, irrational, "misty" inner states.
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