Words, facts, words, facts, let's call the whole thing off...

This is something I found rather amusing. We’ve just ploughed through scores of words, reading accounts, “facts” about Jim’s life, adventures and misfortunes (and some other characters along the way) but we are not closer to knowing who the ‘real’ Jim is. I, as the reader, was drawn to his character, like the way Kurtz did, into wanting more, more what? More facts about him to satisfy my curiosity but “as if facts could explain anything” right? Anyone can talk about anyone or anything, describing events, personalities, trivia etc. but all this excess talk does not tell us who the person is – an entire novel was dedicated to Jim but he remains “inscrutable at heart”.

Maybe the text or the character of Jim is not meant to be understood. The complex and intense alteration to a person after a ‘life-changing’ event cannot be explained or interpreted. By positing that “he is one of us”, Conrad has removed the centre from the author, the narrator or even the reader. It is a rejection that all positions are mere interpretations since that implies that there is a truth or centre in which meaning exists in fixity. Rather the text has become “infinite” in as much as we cannot reject the possibility that it may include infinite interpretations.

In the modernist world, literature, speech and writing, it seems, is a battle of interpretations. Authors, critics, us students of Literature, need (and distress!) to communicate and the greater the need, the greater the snowball effect of overflowing words. Language is at once superfluous, excessive and full of poverty because language trivializes the individual’s experience, it makes the unique common and reduces the individual to a definition - a “fact”. So perhaps Lord Jim should remain “inscrutable at heart”

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