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 :))