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.