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)