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