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.