Essay: Exploring Józef Teodor Konrad Korzenioswki’s Epic Novel “Lord Jim”: A Tragic Journey of Redemption.

Józef Teodor Konrad Korzenioswki was born in December 1857 in Berdichev of Polish parents. His father, a poet and translator, and his mother were exiled for nationalist activities and died when he was a child. Never out of print since its publication in 1900, ‘Lord Jim’ in some sense requires little introduction. It is one of the high points in the development of the English novel, marking the transition from the Victorian novel of social concern to the Modernist experiments with form that culminated in the writings of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. ‘Lord Jim’ confirmed Conrad’s authorial genius and ushered in his greatest create phase. The novels that followed included the great trio of political novels: ‘Nostromo’ (1904), ‘The Secret Agent’ (1907), and ‘Under Western Eyes’ (1911). Conrad grew up and was educated informally in Lemberg and Cracow, which he left for Marseilles and a career at sea in 1874. After voyages to the French Antilles, he joined the British Merchant Service in 1878, sailing at first in British coastal waters and then to the Far East and Australia. In 1886, he became a British subject and received his captaincy certificate. In 1890, he was briefly in the Congo with a Belgian Company. After his career at sea ended in 1894, he lived mainly in Kent. He married in 1896 and had two sons. Conrad began writing, in his third language, in 1886. His first novel, ‘Almayer’s Folly’ (1895) and ‘An Outcast of the Islands’(1896), were immediately hailed as the work of a significant new talent. He produced his major fiction from about 1897 to 1911, a period that saw the publications of ‘The Ni**er of the Narcissus’ (1897), ‘Heart of Darkness’(1898-9), ‘Lord Jim’ (1900), and the political novels ‘Nostromo’(1904), ‘The Secret Agent’(1907), and ‘Under the Western Eyes’(1911). Considered ‘difficult’, his writing received considerable critical acclaim, but not until 1914 after the appearance of ‘Chance’ did it win a wide public. The dazzling narrative experiments and thematic complexities of Conrad’s earlier fiction are largely absent from his later writings, pitched 2 to a more popular audience. Fame saw the offer of honorary degrees and a knighthood (both declined) capped by a triumphal publicity tour in American in 1923. In the addition to novels, Conrad produced short stories, plays, several, essays and two autobiographical volumes, ‘The Mirror of the Sea’ (1906) and ‘A Personal Record’(1908-9). Conrad died in August 1924 at the age of sixty-six. Published at the height of Empire, when the British Merchant Service dominated the world’s shipping trade, ‘Lord Jim’ is a very British novel. It tells the story of a young English officer in the Merchant Service who disgraces himself before becoming the benevolent ‘virtual ruler’ of a remote Malay state. The English narrator, Marlow, is one of Conrad’s most celebrated and enduring creations. To Virginia Woolf, ‘Conrad was compound of two men; together with the sea captain dwelt that subtle, refined, and fastidious analyst whom he called Marlow.’ Through Marlow, Conrad brings an English perspective to bear upon social codes of comportment and inclusion, together with the public and private responsibilities these entail. Coming after ‘Youth’(1898) and ‘Heart of Darkness’(1899), ‘Lord Jim’ completes a trilogy of Marlow narratives. The novel is shaped by its concern with the life-giving properties of danger, the dark voids that gape under the most polished of surfaces and the problem, once these have been perceived, of going on living. In his ‘Author’s Note’, Conrad identified his subject as ‘the acute consciousness of lost honour’. Marlow views it as one of ‘those struggles of an individual trying to save from the fire his idea of what his moral identity should be’ (VII). Published in the same year as Freud’s ‘Interpretation of Dreams’, the novel shares Freud’s concern with identity, questioning whether the self is ultimately public or private property. Before turning his hand to fiction, Conrad was a sailor and officer in the British Merchant Service from 1878 to 1894, passing the examinations up to the rank of Master Mariner, or, in layman’s terms, ship’s captain. Some seventy years after Nelson’s victory at Trafalgar had ensured that Britannia ruled the waves, and at a time when the sea had become ‘a national obsession’, Conrad saw the world from the decks of British trading ships, the workhorses of Empire. His was the last great age of sail. By the time ‘Lord Jim’ appeared, steamships-swifter, larger and more technologically advances- had taken over, reflecting Britain’s industrial revolution in the nineteenth century, the Age of Steel. 3 ‘Lord Jim’ is framed by works that bear witness to this transition: the romance of sail, celebrated in ‘The Ni**er of the Narcissus’(1897), gives way to the commercial functionality of steam in ‘Typhoon’ (1902). The area of the world with which Conrad’s writings are most commonly associated is the Malay Archipelago, and an early reviewer even pronounced that he might become its Kipling. The history of Europe’s involvement in the Eastern seas is, by and large, an economic one: since the sixteenth century at least, the highly lucrative spice trade proved irresistible. The novel’s geographical setting thus allows history to be visualized. As Marlow exclaims of his maritime predecessors, the early Dutch and English adventures: ‘Where wouldn’t they go for pepper!’(XXII). When he goes to Patusan, Jim, an Englishman, replaces Cornelius, ‘a Malacca Portuguese’, as the agent of Stein, a German. ‘Lord Jim’ is, famously, two novels in one; the psychological drama of the Patna episode gives way to the exotic romance of its Patusan sequence. Reflecting the divided obligations of the hero, to society and to himself, the genres of literary Modernism and Romance are forced into a correspondence that questions their individual logic and coherence. In his ‘Author’s Note’, Conrad confessed that his original intention was to write a short story based on the pilgrim-ship episode; he only belatedly recognized its potential as a ‘good starting-point for a free and wandering tale’, and the novel grew far beyond his or his publisher’s expectations. Serialized in fourteen issues of the conservative and widely read monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (October 1899 – November 1900), the final version runs to more than 130,000 words. While Conrad conceded that the novel’s division into its Patna and Patusan halves was its ‘plague spot’, Blackwood’s literary advisor, David Meldrum, defended the work’s expansion, arguing that it transformed ‘Lord Jim’ into ‘a more important story’, even ‘a great story’. The novel’s epigraph, a translated aphorism from the German Romantic poet Friedrich Lepold, Baron von Hardenberg, who wrote under the pen-name Novalis, has obvious relevance for the relationship between Jim and Marlow, and, more generally, for the theme of community in which the reader, too, is implicated: ‘It is certain my conviction gains infinitely, the moment another soul will believe in it.’ The claim might also be seen to voice the concerns of an emergent author, writing in his third language (after Polish and French) for an English readership. To Marlow, the character-narrator 4 whose perspective is simultaneously challenging and perceptive, Jim remains ‘one of us’but he also recognizes that ‘of all mankind Jim had no dealings but with himself’ (XXXVI). As Marlow is often viewed as Conrad’s alter ego, his, for Marlow, too, is looking for a faith, not for the self-ideal of his romantic ‘very young brother’ (XXI) but for ‘the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct’ (V), thrown into doubt by Jim’s transgression. Jim’s attempts to redeem himself in his own eyes are thus entangled with Marlow’s need ‘to keep up the illusion of my beginnings’ (XI) and reaffirm the social claims of solidarity. They are also intimately related to the lateVictorian search for moral certitudes in a universe recently deprived of transcendent meaning. If God, as Nietzsche declared, was dead, substitutes were quickly sought out. 5 Chapter 2 Psychoanalytic literary criticism emerges specifically from a therapeutic technique which the Viennese neurologist Sigmund Freud developed for the treatment of hysteria and neurosis at the end of the nineteenth century. A description of the cure, which one of Freud’s patients ingeniously called ‘the talking cure’, gives an idea of the unusual origin of this approach to literature. The therapy evolved from the initial observation that patients were relieved of their neurotic symptoms by recalling the memory of certain events and ideas related to infantile sexuality. During the cure, which consists of an interchange of words between a patient and an analyst, the latter draws the patient’s attention to signs of forgotten or repressed memories, which perturb his or her speech. But, for the therapy to work, the patient must obey the fundamental rule: namely, he or she must say everything that comes into his or her mind, ‘even if it is disagreeable, even it is seems unimportant or actually nonsensical’. Their unfamiliarity comes from the fact that they both reveal and conceal something which is repressed or unconscious, and which tries to return. Since, according to psychoanalysis, there is a continuity between pathological and normal occurrences, what began as a therapeutic technique gradually developed into a theory of the human psyche and of human culture whereby everything- from the most anodyne to the most important occurrence- is meaningful and calls for interpretation. “Psychoanalysis studied neurotic symptoms in conjunction with dreams, jokes, and ‘psychopathology of everyday life’ –that is, mistakes of all sorts, such as slips of the tongue or of the pen, bungled actions, forgettings (for example, ‘the forgetting of proper names’)- as well as art, literature, and religion, with a view towards establishing the laws of functioning of the ‘mental apparatus’.” (Waugh, 199) Psychoanalytic literary criticism first developed as a type of ‘applied’ psychoanalysis. Uner this heading, Freud and his collaborators- Otto Rank, Theodor Reik, Wilhelm Stekel, and Ernest Jones, among others- ventured into the study of literary works, as well as into anthropology, sociology, and religion during the first decades of the twentieth century. It emerged from Freud’s general idea that creative writings are the product of 6 unconscious processes, and that it is possible to understand how the mechanisms of the psychical forces operate in them. Approaching literary works in psychoanalytical terms in this vein consists in diagnosing the psychical health of the writer, the artist, or the character, by treating his or her work as a symptom of sexual frustrations and repressions. In adopting this primarily biographical approach, one inevitably comes up with repertoire of symbols and themes relating to the creator’s life (attachment to the mother, fear of castration, ambivalence towards the father, narcissism, etc.), which are believed to have motivated the creation of the work. The repertoire of themes is not necessarily the matter of individual writers. ‘Lord Jim’ (1900), Joseph Coonrad’s fourth novel, is the story of a ship which collides with “a floating derelict” and will doubtlessly “go down at any moment” during a “silent black squall.” The ship, old and rust-eaten, known as the Patna, is voyaging across the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea. Aboard are eight-hundred Muslim pilgrims who are being transported to a “holy place, the promise of salvation, the reward of eternal life.” Terror possesses the captain and several of his officers, who jump from the pilgrimship and thus wantonly abandon the sleeping passengers who are unaware of their peril. For the crewmembers in the safety of their life-boat, dishonor is better than death. Beyond the immediate details and the effects of a shipwreck, this novel portrays, in the words of the story’s narrator, Captain Marlow, “those struggles of an individual trying to save from the fire his idea of what his moral identity should be. . . .“ That individual is a young seaman, Jim, who serves as the chief mate of the Patna and who also “jumps.” Recurrently Jim envisions himself as “always an example of devotion to duty and as unflinching as a hero in a book.” But his heroic dream of “saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line,” does not square with what he really represents: one who falls from grace, and whose “crime” is “a breach of faith with the community of mankind.” Jim’s aspirations and actions underline the disparity between idea and reality, or what is generally termed “indissoluble contradictions of being.” His is also the story of a man in search of some form of atonement once he recognizes that his “avidity for adventure, and in a sense of manysided courage,” and his dream of “the success of his imaginary achievements,” constitute a romantic illusion. 7 Jim’s leap from the Patna generates in him a severe moral crisis that forces him to “come round to the view that only a meticulous precision of statement would bring out the true horror behind the appalling face of things.” It is especially hard for Jim to confront this “horror” since his confidence in “his own superiority” seems so absolute. The “Patna affair” compels him in the end to peer into his deepest self and then to relinquish “the charm and innocence of illusions.” The Jim of the Patna undergoes “the ordeal of the fiery furnace,” as he is severely tested “by those events of the sea that show in the light of the day the inner worth of a man, the edge of his temper, and the fibre of his stuff; that reveal the qual- ity of his resistance and the secret truth of his pretences, not only to others but also to himself.” Clearly the Patna is, for Jim, the ex- perience both of a moment and of a lifetime.