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Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

Volume 18 Number 2, August 2017

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The Integration of Imagination and Real Life in Lord Jim   

By

 

Christie Gramm

                                                   

Abstract                                                            

The narrative structure of Lord Jim utilizes such devices as paralipses, analepses and prolepses to describe the way in which repression creates gaps in consciousness.  As a work of meta-fiction,  the novel self-consciously points to its art as a means of integrating the dissociated psyche. What differentiates the novel from other works which concern alienation, such as “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” or “The Metamorphosis,” is that it points to a means of identifying and reclaiming the psychic principle which, in the process of conceiving an alternate identity, forgot itself.                                       

The narrator, Marlow, allows that the story he tells “has nothing to do with [the main character] Jim, directly” (39).  An indirection, the name ‘Jim’ is an alias, a “monosyllable” created prior to the time when the title ‘Lord’ was added to the name (10). The object of Marlow’s quest is to understand the consciousness which created the alias. As a result, Marlow trains one eye on Jim, while the other is focused on “somebody or something past [Jim’s] shoulder” (30).

       As a boy, Jim read stories which shaped his ambition to live a life of adventure on the high seas. Yet, when he does  embark on a career at sea, he finds it to be “strangely barren of adventure” (14). Undeterred by the quotidian world around him, Jim continues to live life onboard ship as he imagines it, “living in his mind . . . the sea-life” of  “light literature” (11). Regardless of what is actually happening around him, Jim sees himself:

saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line . . . He confronted savages on tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas, and in a small boat upon the ocean kept up the hearts of despairing men—always an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book.  (11)           

     Ever since he was "quite a little chap," Jim loved “the adventurous freedom of his thoughts”  “and the success of his imaginary achievements” (76, 21). Carried away by these adventures, Jim “forgot himself” (76). As an adult, Jim continues to spend most of his time in his imagination, and he does not clearly distinguish between his inner world  and the extant world. While Jim sees himself as “a hero in a book,” one of the differences between Jim’s inner “secret truth” and the world around him is that in contrast to his imagined deeds, his actual actions are not heroic. For example, rather than “saving people from sinking ships,” Jim abandons the Patna, and is himself in need of rescue. Later, after leaping from the Rajah’s stockade, he is stuck in a muddy hole,  and  again,  needs to be rescued. When such details contradict the expectations of “a hero in a book,” they drop into a crevasse – forgotten at the bottom of “an everlasting deep hole . . .”  (88). The novel’s leitmotif of  chasms (holes, wells, fissures and abysses) represents the repression which allows  Jim to maintain his heroic self-image, and hide those  things which “must be buried” (144). Jim’s illusion  is like that of the moon – a reflective body which gives  the impression of producing its own light (186, 242). However, rather than being the source of illumination,  Jim’s imagined  adventures are a reflection of a consciousness that was eclipsed when he “forgot himself” (11, 76).  According to Marlow, Jim’s illusion is like “black magic” “upon  a corpse” (87). As part of the novel’s burial motif, the “corpse” suggests the identity that is buried beneath the alias.

     The notion that Jim has forgotten himself is analogous to the  concept of dissociation  in which aspects of the psyche are rigidly compartmentalized. Jeremy Hawthorn has examined the way in which such conceptual isolation allows many of Conrad’s characters to maintain an idealized self-image (Hawthorn 212). As a result of rigid compartmentalization, one part of the psyche is not conscious of the other, and  “mental operations do not adjust themselves very well to each other” (The Secret Agent 192).  Such dissociated mental states correspond with the description of Jim’s thoughts  as “a network of paths separated by chasms that could not be traversed” (101). Jim’s mental state has the effect of a prison, where he is

like a creature that, finding itself imprisoned within an enclosure of high stakes, dashes round and round, distracted in the night, trying to find a weak spot, a crevice, a place to scale, some opening through which it may squeeze itself and escape . . . . The unintelligent brutality of an existence liable to the agony of . . . uncontrollable rushes of anguish . . . filled him with a despairing desire to escape at any cost.             (29,15)                                  

      Jim uses his imagination in an attempt to escape a “brutal existence.”  Yet,  he remains a prisoner of his imagination: “a captive in every sense” (213, 198). “Alone in his cell,” Jim is  “cut off from [other men] by a space that could not be traversed, by an obstacle that could not be overcome, by a chasm without bottom” (83).  Jim has  “no dealings but with  himself” (255). His “hidden reality” does not have an external existence; what he is wanting is “some reality, something tangible he could meet” (172,  226 ). Isolated from the broader context of both his psyche and the world at large, Jim’s heroic conceit is a fragment: one of a network of disconnected paths, which  offers “bits of vivid and vanishing detail, giving no connected idea of the general aspect of the country” (62). Extracted from the whole, Jim’s imaginary identity is like a butterfly that has been taken out of nature and pinned to a board. For Jim, the childhood conceit obscures other faculties that make up the whole psyche, such as critical judgment. According to William Martin, the aim of Marlow’s narrative is to make “a whole out of various fragments,” such that disconnected plots are integrated to form a coherent portrait of the whole story (Martin 13). 

      The “vanishing details” of  Jim that Marlow glimpses through mists are “misleading,” and “never any good for purposes of orientation” (258). However, the fragments offer  clues to the whole that has been forgotten, and are thus a necessary part of the puzzle Marlow must solve. They offer  “identifiable traces” of a consciousness  that has been “left behind” (Ferguson 57, Miller 45) and which ultimately lead to the meaningful context from which the “Jim-myth”  has become detached.       

      Jim’s role in the novel has been the subject of much interpretation. For example, Rex Ferguson compares the difficulty of ‘reading’ Jim to reading fingerprints. Like tracing  the  outline of a bas relief, Jim is variously “visible and a blind spot at the heart of the novel” (Ferguson 57).  Difficult for Marlow to see, Jim is glimpsed “through a rent in the mist in which he moved and had his being” (100). Jim is  obscured by fogs and veils through which his “boyish head” can be seen in “a mysterious light” (100). With a tendency to evaporate into abstraction,  he is at once a literal character and one who has symbolic significance for Marlow (44). Symbolic of youth, he is “set up on a pedestal for all the races who never grow old,” representing “all whose youth – in its day – resembled his youth,”  “like a symbolic figure in a picture” (200, 104).   

     With regard to his symbolic method, Conrad wrote  in a letter to Barrett H. Clark: “The symbolic conception of a work of art has this advantage, that it makes a triple appeal covering the whole field of life . . . gaining in complexity, in power, in depth and in beauty” (CL6 211).  However, Conrad does not view his work as the illustration of ideas. He wrote that “there is something more than mere ideas in these stories. I modestly hope that there are human beings in them too” (Last Essays 110). Even as a symbolist, Conrad regards fictional characters whose primary purpose is to represent an idea as reductive; for instance,  he describes "The Kreutzer Sonata" as a story in which “an obvious degenerate not worth looking at twice, totally unfitted not only for married life but for any sort of life is presented as a sympathetic victim of some sort of sacred truth . . .” (CL4 116). As a result of Conrad’s multivalent symbolism, which tends toward human beings, Jim’s  role changes over the course of the novel. The portrait that began as a static conceit-- a butterfly pinned to a board, “created by fancy on a canvas, upon which, after long contemplation, you turn your back for the last time”  --  eventually becomes a living being who is capable of movement and change (249).[1]

     In addition to Jim’s shifting visual effect, his voice also has multivalent significance. Even when Jim is obscured by fog, or vanishes as if “blown to atoms,” Marlow can still hear “the ghost of a shout,” as  “the mists rolled into the rent, and his voice spoke—” (88, 101). What Marlow hears is not limited to the literal words of direct speech. The phrase, “his voice spoke”  is more general  than ‘he spoke,’ suggesting a sensibility,  akin to ‘the voice of youth.’

      Marlow’s shifting views of Jim underscore the ambiguity of Jim’s role, for  even after narrating extensive interactions with Jim, Marlow is not sure whether he actually exists, stating “it was difficult to believe in Jim’s existence” (164, 187).  Furthermore, Marlow allows  that once Jim enters the realm of Patusan  “it would be for the outside world as though he had never existed,” to which Jim replies: "Never existed—that's it" (176). The assertion that he never existed is a meta-fictional comment that is related to the way in which Jim is modeled on “a hero in a book.” 

     Adding to a sense of Jim’s equivocal status is his relationship to the novel’s scenes of frenetic action. Allan Simmons  observes that Jim is “conspicuously absent” from scenes which are ostensibly about him,  populating  these scenes without actively participating in them (Simmons 36). He is  relatively passive  in the midst of dramatic action, standing off to one side -- “apart from the noisy crowd of boys,” (13) standing still in the midst of “great scurrying about and shouting,” (11) or  falling asleep at the height of the action (193).  Simmons points out that in such scenes, Jim is  more acted upon than actor: he is pushed, “jostled,”  “whirled around” and  knocked down without knowing who hit him (36).  In one scene, Jim is unaffected by gravity, and able to fly, coming to rest on the ground  without any impact (192).  These sequences retain the “vagueness” and “divine philtre” of  the adventure stories Jim read as a boy,  and are indicative of  the voice that is “speaking aloud inside [Jim’s] head” (21, 70).

     The variability of Jim’s active/passive presence in the novel is a reflection of the vagaries of the relationship between  Jim’s  imagination and the extrinsic  world. The narrative preserves the disjunctions in Jim’s experience  by depicting parallel points-of-view : the inner context in which  Jim sees himself  “saving people,” is contrasted with the way the outside world sees him – as a mere water clerk. In Zabel’s terms, this strategy “imposes the processes and structures of psychological experience  . . .  on the form of the plot” (Zabel 14).  

      Jim is attached to his inner fantasy world because it offers a sense of protection (134).  He believes that the world cannot enter into his secret inner life,  that real men “cannot touch him” (24).  However,  contrary to this belief, the extrinsic world does intrude upon his fantasies and when it does,  he is abruptly jolted out of his reveries. For instance, the appearance of the fat skipper  “tears him out of his immobility” (87). When  Jim sees the skipper, “as though seen for the first time in a revealing moment,”  he is repulsed by the skipper’s “obscene” “greasy flesh” (22). Subsequently, Jim’s perception  of the extrinsic world is followed, in the same sentence, by another abrupt shift in register and point- of-view, in a philosophical comment regarding the subject of salvation: “in our own hearts we trust for our salvation, in the men that surround us, in the sights that fill our eyes, in the sounds that fill our ears, and in the air that fills our lungs” (22). The  coarse diction of  ‘greasy flesh’ reflects a visceral, concrete perspective, which is  juxtaposed with the abstract  idea of ‘salvation,’ and between these  thoughts everything lies: “everything vile and base in the world.” Paralipses reflect the  chasm in Jim’s thoughts into which unconscious  things fall.

     The purpose of the novel’s unusual narrative structure is to describe the way in which unconscious material may become conscious. It does this by syntactically associating Jim’s disconnected thoughts. For example, the two sides of a gap are juxtaposed in the contrast between  Jim’s distrust of the evil skipper and the  non sequitur of a preacher counseling  trust in salvation.  The subject of evil is both raised and deflected, outlining a gap in coherence, with  “greasy flesh”  on the one side, a reassuring rationalization on the other, and the elided details -- “everything” -- in the gap.

    There are  suggestions that  the novel’s narrative  gaps allude to taboo subjects, as when  the topic of “the marital relations of seamen” is  broached and quickly dropped (120). Paralipses capture the way in which  the ‘elephant in the room’ is ignored. Hawthorn elucidates  Conrad’s use of variants of the word ‘thing’  as  placeholders, to connote suppressed content, as in the following (Hawthorn 215, 219-20): 

           There are things . . . by which some of us are totally and completely undone.               (38)

The facts . . . had been visible, tangible, . . .  they made a whole that had features, shades of expression, . . . and something else besides, something invisible, a directing spirit of perdition that dwelt within, like a malevolent soul in a detestable body.                                                                              (29 )

Before the idea of going home [Jim] would become desperately stiff and immovable as if looking at something unbearable, . . .  something revolting                                                             (169 emphases added). 

       In these passages, Jim associates home with “something unbearable” and “something revolting,” and the body with something detestable. Like the association between  the skipper’s flesh and  evil things, the reason  these connections are not made  clear is because they are not clear to Jim,  whose  point-of-view is preserved as thoughts which are disconnected from the context of the body  which is ossified -- as “cold [as]stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck” (77). What has been repressed is  entombed in the insensate body, disconnected from conscious thought.       

     A further telling example of paralepsis occurs when Jim attempts to explain why he left the refuge of Stein’s house. The following ellipses are in the original:

‘That morning [Stein] slipped his hand under my arm. . . . He, too, was familiar with me.’ [Jim] burst into a short laugh, and dropped his chin on his breast. ‘Pah! When I remembered how that mean little beast had been talking to me,’ he began suddenly in a vibrating voice, ‘I couldn't bear to think of myself . . . I suppose you know . . .’ I nodded. . . . "More like a father," he cried; his voice sank. ‘I would have had to tell him. I couldn't let it go on—could I?’

 ‘I preferred to go,’ he said slowly; ‘this thing must be buried.’(144)                                                                    

    This passage  exemplifies  the  mental state which causes Jim to “hesitate in his speech,” and to “interrupt himself in his disjointed narrative” (29, 90). His halting explanation elides the connections between these thoughts: “he slipped his hand under my arm;” “he, too, was familiar with me;” “that mean little beast;” “I couldn’t bear to think of myself;”  “this thing must be buried.”  Stein’s kindness prompts a  memory of an  unspecified  “beast,” an association which results in Jim’s inability to think consciously about himself, and which is the proximate referent of  the “thing” that  must be buried. Jim’s explanation circumscribes the  gap which contains the connection between a familiar touch on the near side, “that mean little beast” on the other, and concludes with a quavering admission that he “couldn’t bear to think of [himself].” Following the first ellipsis, the  non sequitur “he, too, was familiar with me” does not define “familiar” or explain the previous incident -- to which ‘too’ refers.  Rather, Jim’s erratic explanation is further disrupted by his burst of nervous laughter, thus capturing the  disjointed texture of displacement and repression.

      In addition to paralepsis, Lord Jim  utilizes prolepses and analepses  to capture the way in which repression creates  gaps in memory and coherence. For instance, when Jim relates the Patna episode to Marlow, Jim doesn’t remember his leap from the ship; his narration of events comes up to the edge but stops short of recognizing the jump itself (Simmons 41). Jim’s  narration  outlines the gap that has replaced the event by moving forward in time, past the jump, and  then looking back at the far side of the elision. Jim  confirms the elided version of events  by reassuring himself that he “remembers everything,” thus “marrying repression and reflex with intention”(LJ  29; Martin 232). The novel captures the elisions in Jim’s thought process with the eventual aim of  bridging the gaps in chronology (“mending the clock”) created by repression (192).

 

       In an effort to understand the enigma which the “Jim-myth” presents,  Marlow consults  Stein, and together they  conclude that the problem is that Jim “is young . . . . The youngest human being now in existence” (167).  Although  Jim is nearly six feet tall, Marlow regards Jim  as a “manageable little child” and “listens to him as one would to a small boy in trouble” (130, 88). Their relationship is that of a man to a boy, and Marlow  relates to Jim with “the feeling that binds a man to a child,” as “an old man helpless before a childish disaster” (101, 88). Yet, while Jim is frequently referred to as childlike, the historical period of childhood is largely absent from the novel. As David Miller points out, “children have almost no place in the Conradian landscape.  Conrad’s characters are denied a space in which to grow up. The absence of children and childhood from his writing is telling – the ‘not being there’ almost becomes a presence” (Miller 45). The idea of a glaring omission – the paradox of an absence so conspicuous that it  reads as a presence – is echoed in Ferguson’s description of Jim  as both “visible and a blind spot”  at the heart of the novel.

      Initially, Marlow and Jim stand on opposite sides of a gap which separates youth and maturity. In their opposition,  Marlow is expressive, while Jim is inarticulate; Marlow thinks, and Jim feels; Jim is romantic, Marlow is pragmatic. As mutually exclusive sensibilities, they are antagonists: when one feels better, the other feels worse; when Jim is inspired, Marlow is disheartened (76). In comparison to Jim’s boyish naiveté,  Marlow sees himself as a jaded adult:  “no longer young enough to behold at every turn the magnificence that besets our insignificant footsteps in good and in evil” (141). 

     The many references to the adult Jim as ‘childlike’ suggest that  aspects of the child’s point-of-view  remain in the adult. It is in this sense that Marlow’s interest in Jim is less focused on the literal period of childhood, than on an “elusive spirit,” --  “a disembodied eternal and unchangeable spirit,” (137, 169) to which he refers in the following as “it:”

 Was it still veiled? I don't know. For me that white figure in the stillness of coast and sea seemed to stand at the heart of a vast enigma. The twilight was ebbing fast from the sky above [Jim’s] head, the strip of sand had sunk already under his feet, he himself appeared no bigger than a child—then only a speck, a tiny white speck, that seemed to catch all the light left in a darkened world. . . . And, suddenly, I lost him. . .  . (169, 253; ellipses in original)

     Here the image of a child  emerges out of a darkening  ground, and then vanishes, “as if in that moment the youth within him had, for the last time, glowed and expired” (100).  This fugitive image belongs to a  “world of shades” where sunlight cannot “rob [it] of [its] reality” (313, 187). With a tendency to dissolve into mist, Marlow glimpses the object of his  investigation  through an “immaterial veil,”  as when a word or a phrase gives “one of these glimpses of his very own self,” (104; 258) or when “an unconscious grimace [tears] through the mask of [Jim’s] usual expression” (93).    

    When Marlow attempts to communicate with Jim, his efforts are “defeated by the moral simplicity of the criminal” (118). ‘Moral simplicity’ suggests a child’s naiveté, and the notion of criminality  insinuates  the child’s  inflated view of the “pitiful part” he plays in the adult world,  as when Jim views his relatively minor role in the Patna affair  as “criminal.” Other characters agree that Jim  exaggerates his culpability,  that he is “taking too much to heart . . . an empty formality . . .” (134, 132). They conclude that Jim’s error aboard the Patna is  “no worse than a child stealing  apples from  an orchard” (143). Despite the difficulty Marlow has in communicating with Jim, he is compelled  to understand the nature of Jim’s perspective. The difficulty of grasping the child’s  point-of-view is likened to looking into the bottom of a dark well, as evoked in the depth of Jewel’s eyes:

where there seemed to be a faint stir, such as you may fancy you can detect when you plunge your gaze to the bottom of an immensely deep well. What is it that moves there? you ask yourself. Is it a blind monster or only a lost gleam from the universe? It occurred to me—don't laugh—that all things being dissimilar, she was more inscrutable in her childish ignorance than the Sphinx propounding childish riddles to wayfarers. She had been carried off to Patusan before her eyes were open. She had grown up there; she had seen nothing, she had known nothing, she had no conception of anything. I ask myself whether she were sure that anything else existed. What notions she may have formed of the outside world is to me inconceivable.   (231)        

   

      The image of looking into “an immensely deep well”  describes the difficulty of understanding the child’s perspective from the vantage of the adult, whose identity is informed by education and experience. On the other hand, prior to the acquisition of  intellectual faculties and  experience, the child forms impressions without understanding their context. At “that plastic and impressionable age,” impressions  are formed without  an understanding of cause and effect, and thus early impressions are detached from their broader meaning (Victory 76). Compared to the experienced, educated adult, the child is like a “blind monster” who conceives the world in a tunnel. This describes Jim’s  inner imaginary world which is disconnected from and invisible to the outside world. While it is  difficult to conceive  this perspective, it is central to the novel’s theme of “youth” and  “naiveness” (215).[2]

     The challenge for Marlow is to understand the way in which a child forms attachments to ideas and impressions  which  are erroneous. Underestimating the child-state as merely one of weakness and ignorance fails to take into account the tenacity of the child’s will and the persistence of inherent drives and “natural instincts”  (66). Underestimating the strength  of the child --  the ‘blind monster’ --  sets the stage for anachronistic childhood assumptions to play a disproportionate and  unconscious part in adult aspirations, as in Jim’s “childlike belief in the sacred right to perquisites” (34).

     One of the ways the novel captures Jim’s invisible inner world is through the use of objective correlatives. Conrad has written that “invisible things” can be made visible through the use of objective correlatives which he  terms “potent events,” explaining that  “if once some potent event evokes before your eyes the invisible thing there is no way to make yourself blind again. There is the presence with its claim upon your earnest attention” (435).  The sense of “catastrophe” which a “potent event” incites “matches the natural obscurity of our fate [such] that even the best representative of the race is liable to lose his detachment” (Victory ii).  The term “natural obscurity” suggests  repression, and the “potent event” refers to the vehicle that allows repressed material to be recognized.

        As an objective correlative, the unseen Patna is  likened to a nonverbal child:

By this change in  position all her lights were in a very few moments shut off from the boat to leeward. It may very well be that, had they been seen, they would have had the effect of a mute appeal—that their glimmer lost in the darkness of the cloud would have had the mysterious power of the human glance that can awaken the feelings of remorse and pity. It would have said, "I am here—still here" [. . .] and what more can the eye of the most forsaken of humans say? (106)                                                                 

     Like the ship, Jim is “under a cloud”  (258). While the historical child is not the focus of the novel, when Marlow is finally able to see Jim clearly,  it is in the context of the childhood milieu, where he is  unseen by his family:   

 Here they all are [. . .] all these brothers and   sisters, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, gazing with clear unconscious  eyes, while I seem to see him, returned at last [. . .] standing disregarded amongst their untroubled shapes [. . . ] always mute, dark—under a cloud.  (258)                                                                                                                                                             

     Within the  context of his family, Jim is largely ignored, unseen by “unconscious eyes.”  Since Jim’s identity as a “hero in a book”  developed in the  relative invisibility of the early context,  the sense of not being seen is integral to Jim’s conceit. It is a central paradox of the novel that when Marlow is able to see Jim clearly it is in the context of his invisibility.

     Another way that the novel insinuates Jim’s point-of-view is through a narratorial perspective that could be termed the ‘voice of adventure.’ This unfocalized perspective evokes the voice that is “speaking aloud inside [Jim’s] head,”  a voice which is modeled on the tales Jim read as a boy (70). Unattributed dialogue, inserted in media res, such as “something’s up,”  and “man the cutter” (11) interjects the adventure idiom, as it occurs to Jim, irrespective of what is  happening in the contemporaneous environment. Thus, the nonlinear narrative, the absence of clear context  and the lack of attribution  in these passages reflect the way in which Jim does not clearly distinguish between inner thoughts and outer reality. The context of these interjections is Jim’s imaginative world where he is “saving people from sinking ships.”  

     Jim’s perspective is further captured through his relationship with Marlow, in the sense that Marlow  provides a voice for the inarticulate Jim.  For example, Marlow paradoxically invokes  Jim as the source of his  tropes when he likens the sound of the hissing  sea to "twenty thousand kettles," and  credits Jim with the imagery, stating, “That's [Jim’s] simile, not mine” (89).  While Marlow and Jim are initially seen as opposites, what they have in common is a rejection of  such poetic formulations  as a legitimate means of knowledge and expression. Each seems to  attribute to the other  this “deplorable faculty” (10).  Jim is unable to articulate his imagination and Marlow claims to have no imagination (169). Marlow further expresses distain for metaphoric expression when he speaks of  “home” and “the spirit that dwells within the land,” stating “I do not mean to imply that I figured to myself the spirit of the land uprising above the white cliffs of Dover, to ask me what I—returning with no bones broken, so to speak—had done with my very young brother. I could not make such a mistake” (169-170). Marlow explicitly draws the metaphor, reminds us that it is a metaphor, then  disowns it, asserting that to use such imaginative figures of speech is to err.[3] 

     Marlow obviously possesses the imaginative faculty, but he has disowned it, regarding it as not part of his ‘proper’ identity.[4] The rejection of this aspect  of himself is a means of distancing himself from a faculty which he deems  to be faulty. He seems to believe that since the poetic imagination is not reflect a valid worldview, it must follow that he has no imagination, even though his facility with  figurative language is readily apparent to the reader. The resulting diverging and converging perspectives describe a dissociative structure that is in the process of becoming integrated.

     Marlow’s assertion that he has “no imagination” is paradoxical  since, according to his own account, he is imagining the story he is telling, as when he states: “I could imagine . . . these four men imprisoned in the solitude of the sea,” and “I can easily picture [Jim] to myself in the peopled gloom of the cavernous place” (169, 97, 68). The picture he imagines is a self-referential evocation of an atmosphere (gloom) which assimilates Jim as part of the “peopled gloom.”  As  such, Marlow doesn’t so much recall Jim’s words as he conceives “the brooding rancor of his mind,” and in the process evokes a sensibility (84). For example, when Marlow  “imagines how [Jim]  must have looked at it from the hillock, peopling it with images of murder and rapine,”  it could be Jim or Marlow who is imaginatively populating the scene (97, 279). In its grammatical construction, Marlow is the agent;  from a sense perspective it could be Jim who is imaginatively filling  the space. In either case, they are “partners” (     )  who collaborate, with Jim’s “few mumbled words enough to make [Marlow] see” (96). Jim’s mumbles are punctuated by long pauses during which he is presumably preoccupied with inner visions of his “valorous deeds”  and “imaginary achievements” (21).

     While Marlow’s narration at times includes the attribution: “Jim told me,” more often, specific focalization is omitted. For instance, the lifeboat episode is a collage of first and third-person points-of-view  that are not clearly distinguished by punctuation or indention. Marlow begins with the introduction, “Jim told me,” and  then continues to narrate the episode  as if he were an immediate witness, present in the lifeboat.  The compression of their points-of-view  is most striking when Marlow reports not only what Jim is imagining, but also assumes  knowledge of Jim’s unconscious – of what he doesn’t consciously know; for instance, he asserts that  Jim  had an “unconscious conviction” that “the created terror of his imagination” was worse than the reality (33); and that [Jim’s] “confounded imagination had evoked for him all the horrors of panic . . . of a disaster at sea” (71).

      Marlow’s knowledge of Jim’s unarticulated inner visions is suggestive of an omniscient narrator, as when he states that Jim

was a gifted poor devil with the faculty of swift and forestalling vision. The sights it showed him had turned him into cold stone from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck; but there was a hot dance of thoughts in his head, a dance of lame, blind, mute thoughts—a whirl of awful cripples (77).

     However, while Marlow is privy to Jim’s inner thoughts, he is not a conventional omniscient narrator.[5]  He insists that his knowledge is limited, and when his reporting of Jim’s experience does not include the attribution ‘Jim told me,’ his evocations of Jim  arise inexplicably, “dodging into view”  without apparent  agency, as when Marlow has  “a rapid vision of Jim perched on a shadowless rock up to his knees in guano . . . .” (133, 128).  Such vivid  manifestations are not the product of a traditional omniscient consciousness who is on the outside looking in, but are more like an insular point-of-view suddenly becoming aware of itself. As Ferguson argues, when Jim is “unaccountably conjured up by Marlow,” what we are getting is “Marlow’s  Jim,” that is, the Jim of Marlow’s imagination (Ferguson 51; 57-58).

     The image of Jim on the island  “up to his knees in guano”  is repeated in the scene of his escape from the Rajah’s stockade, where he is “up to his chin” in slime (192). During the stockade escape, as in previous  episodes where Jim is in peril, he is oddly passive. In the midst of his leap from the stockade, he falls asleep. As if in a dream,  Jim’s escape alternates between  conscious terror and unconsciousness; he leaps “without any mental process . . . [not thinking] of anything at the time” (192). When he is unconscious, he is  able to fly, and lands “without any shock” in the mud. It is only when he realizes that he  can’t move that he awakens, and “comes to himself.” With the realization that  physical escape is not possible,  he retreats in his mind to another place and time,  to “a place where [he] had been very happy years ago” (193). Such displacement shifts attention from the terror of being trapped to a dream of escape.[6] However, his  mental escape offers only temporary respite before he is again battling  the assault of the earth:

He reached and grabbed desperately with his hands, and only succeeded in gathering a horrible cold shiny heap of slime against his breast—up to his very chin. It seemed to him he was burying himself alive, and then he struck out madly, scattering the mud with his fists. It fell on his head, on his face, over his eyes, into his mouth . . . . He made efforts, tremendous sobbing, gasping efforts, efforts that seemed to burst his eyeballs in their sockets and make him blind, and culminating into one mighty supreme effort in the darkness to crack the earth asunder, to throw it off his limbs” (192)

 

    As a way of “burying himself alive,” Jim’s leap into mud symbolizes repression – the compartmentalization of difficult material in a “roomy grave” (95). Accordingly, during Jim’s struggle in the mud, and contrary to the conventions of a storybook hero, he falls asleep: “He will have it that he did actually go to sleep; that he slept – perhaps for a minute, perhaps for twenty seconds, or only for a second . . . .” (193). He doesn’t know how long he was unconscious.  Jim’s lack of awareness of exactly how long he was unconscious  describes the way in which repression removes an event from the sequence of ‘clock time’ – from its temporal context; unconsciousness  ensures that the moment is forgotten, and the opportunity to become consciously aware is missed: “. . . the opportunity ran by his side, leaped over a gap, floundered in the mud . . . still veiled” (191).[7]  Repression creates a gap in  the chronological sequence (distorts time) which allows the dreamlike illusion of agency and escape even though Jim is trapped and can’t move. On the far side of the gap in awareness, Jim is miraculously rescued. While he is unconscious, hapless men and children run into each other and fall down, helter skelter, as if in a dream:

 

 He swerved between two houses up a slope,  clambered in desperation over a barricade of felled trees . . . burst through a fence into a maize-patch, where a scared boy flung a stick at him, blundered upon a path, and ran all at once into the arms of several startled men.                                                                                     

. . . in the midst of the greatest possible commotion and excitement, he fumbled in mud and clothes to produce the ring, and, finding himself suddenly on his back, wondered who had knocked him down. (193)

 

     Jim is under fire, knocked down by unknown assailants; then he is suddenly safe, as a victorious chorus erupts:  “. . . above the roofs of the settlement there rose a dull  roar of amazement” (193). The “vagueness” of this exciting escape is accompanied by the “divine philtre of unbounded confidence”  heard in the choric ‘voice of  amazement’ which ends in Jim’s miraculous rescue:

. . . he was safe. Doramin's people were barricading the gate and pouring water down his throat . . . . ‘The old woman," he said softly, "made a to-do over me as if I had been her own son. They put me into an immense bed—her state bed—and she ran in and out wiping her eyes to give me pats on the back  (193).[8]

   

      After Jim  falls asleep, the adventure is punctuated by the breathless excitement of a storybook narrator, who asks: “What did it mean?  . . .  what would happen then?” (191).The direct address of the reader is characteristic of  the action/adventure genre and creates a sense of momentum. Ironically, the questions imply that an external  consciousness knows what will happen  and will provide the answers. However, this voice does not provide an explanation because its purpose here is not explanation, but distraction -- from the terror of being trapped.

      Jim’s leap from the Rajah’s prison, like the Patna leap, is another failed attempt to escape his existential predicament, replacing peril with unconsciousness, trading one extremity for another, respectively landing in an “everlasting hole,” and  in the mud, where repression buries, but does not eliminate the problem. Yet, like the obscured Patna, the repressed material is “still there” -- available to consciousness, awaiting the opportunity to be revealed. Eventually, Jim does awaken in reality:

Jim's slumbers were disturbed by a dream of heavens like brass resounding with a great voice, which called upon him to Awake! Awake! so loud that, notwithstanding his desperate determination to sleep on, he did wake up in reality (223).    

     In their partnership, Marlow also struggles to replace oblivion with  consciousness. The difficulty of consciously acknowledging what has been repressed is exacerbated  by resistance, and for much of the novel,  Marlow is resistant to acknowledging what Jim reveals. For, as difficult as it is for Marlow to understand Jim, he is as much a stranger to himself, stating: “ I did not know so much more about myself” (168). Marlow’s ambivalence toward Jim can be seen in the way that he refers to his affinity with Jim in the second person, allowing that Jim “was a youngster [. . .] of the sort you like to imagine yourself to have been; of the sort whose appearance claims the fellowship of these illusions you had thought gone out, extinct, cold, and which, as if rekindled at the approach of another flame, give a flutter deep, deep down somewhere, give a flutter of light . . . of heat! . . . ” (100). Here Marlow  distances himself  from identification with Jim by not directly acknowledging (in the first person) his part in “the fellowship of these illusions”  (211).

     Marlow’s initial resistance to recognizing what he and Jim have in common is due to his reluctance to being “drawn into some fatal admission about himself” that would deprive their “common life of the last spark of its glamour,” and that would rob them of the  illusion of their beginnings (85, 102).  Marlow is reluctant to reveal the truth about  beliefs that were  born out of “a moment of illusion”  (243).  Consequently, Marlow initially subscribes  to Jim’s illusion,  including the belief that Jim is mute,  in contrast to the other members of the audience at the Inquiry who recognize Jim’s apt speech. While Marlow maintains that Jim is “bound and gagged,” (27, 13) the frame narrator reports that the witnesses at the Inquiry are “enslaved by the fascination of [Jim’s] voice.” (27). Even though they see Jim clearly elevated and cogently expressive, the general response to Jim’s fascinating voice is to dig his grave. Representing the voice of repression, Brierley argues that Jim should “creep twenty feet underground and stay there!” (152). The consensus is that  Jim should “hop and flutter into some hole to die quietly” (141). Marlow shares the impulse to bury Jim  (132). However, ironically, such repression seems to give  the rejected material strength, as if the friction created by resistance fueled the energy of “madness, derived from intense egoism, inflamed by resistance, tearing the soul to pieces, and giving factitious vigour to the body” (259).   In Conrad’s description, resistance to conscious awareness  is more volitional and  muscular than it often seems: an intentional process, accompanied by  a sense of non-agency.     

      Marlow’s ambivalence can be seen in his contradictory impulses to bury and to resurrect Jim. In either case, he feels a sense of responsibility for Jim’s fate, as reflected in his assertion that he has “done something with his young brother” (169-170),  and the sense that if he allows Jim to “slip away into the darkness [he] would never forgive” himself (137). Marlow sees himself as complicit in Jim’s suppression, particularly in Jim’s inarticulateness, for which he asks forgiveness:

at the moment of taking leave [Jim] treated me to a ghastly muddle of dubious stammers and  movements, to an awful display of hesitations. God forgive him—me!  (119)

     The elliptical dash between ‘him’ and ‘me’ implies reciprocity. One way of looking at this graphic riddle is that Marlow regrets having  extinguished that part of himself which is “rekindled” through his association with Jim (100).   Having played a part in the suppression, the onus is on Marlow to “render an account” that reveals “the truth,” in order to fulfill his obligation “to speak for [his] brother from the realm of forgetful shades” (238, 243).

     The process of overcoming resistance to Jim’s meaning is fraught, and as Marlow attempts to accept Jim’s significance, he has the sense of  being “captured” by an alien sensibility that is “burrowing deep” within him (145). Eventually he is able to tolerate  the sense  of being a stranger to himself, and to allow this alien sensibility to  “capture [him] without even a show of resistance” (Slights 28; LJ 244). Marlow’s sense of estrangement reaches a climax in a scene which is evocative of a dark night of the soul. He experiences a disturbing uproar within, which he characterizes as “Jim’s emotions” (132). In this scene, Marlow’s torment is reminiscent of  Jim’s earlier “uncontrollable anguish,” as Marlow  “suffers from that profound disturbance and confusion of thought which is caused by a violent and menacing uproar—of a heavy gale at sea” (132). In the midst of intense distress, Marlow addresses the audience directly: “Some of you may know what I mean: that mingled anxiety, distress, and irritation with a sort of craven feeling creeping in—not pleasant to acknowledge, but which gives a quite special merit to one's endurance” (132).  Here  the direct address of the audience does not serve as distraction, but  draws the reader’s attention to the character’s suffering.

     Following the detailed first-person description of Marlow’s inner distress, he disowns his emotions, characterizing them as “standing the stress of Jim’s emotions” (132). As  he had done earlier with regard to his imagination, here Marlow identifies Jim  as the agent of his own inner life.  However, in this scene, the difficult  process of integration is facilitated through the aid of writing  which becomes Marlow’s “refuge:”  “Bent over [his] writing-desk like a medieval scribe,” Marlow suddenly recognizes the  characters and events he has  been narrating, as the product of his own pen, not  Jim’s imagination:

all at once, on the blank page, under the very point of the pen, the two figures of Chester and his antique partner, very distinct and complete,  dodge into view with stride and gestures, as if reproduced in the field of some optical toy. I would watch them for a while.   (133)

      Remembering  the mechanism of his own imaginative faculty, Marlow experiences these images as if he were looking through a child’s viewfinder, the image of an “optical toy” implying a child’s point-of-view.  As a key moment in the integration of the divided psyche, Marlow  recognizes the imaginative imagery he has been narrating as  his own invention.

       For Marlow, the  challenge is to embrace the faculty of imagination  without  sacrificing the faculty of rational judgment; to recognize the power of the creative imagination  without being “decoyed” by the child ego-state and its uncritical embrace of illusion (75). As a result, in the optical toy scene, Marlow no longer views the creative imagination and rational judgment as mutually exclusive faculties; in this scene, a dialogue continues between an imaginative and a realistic  way of viewing the world. However, what had been characterized as the opposition of Marlow and Jim is now  a conscious debate Marlow is having with himself, as he challenges the viability of  the characters of Chester and his partner. He both imagines these characters and evaluates their relationship to reality.  Here the faculties  are operating as one consciousness, as Marlow abruptly shouts “No!” in the voice of the  pragmatic navigator, critiquing  these portraits as “too phantasmal and extravagant to enter into anyone’s fate” (133).

     Bridging  the gaps in consciousness continues in the image of a full moon rising out of a “deep fissure” which symbolizes “the spirit ascending from its grave” (186). The spirit that had been forgotten at the bottom of a deep well emerges  from the opposing walls of a chasm, as Marlow and Jim stand side-by-side, observing the moon rise from between two hill. What had once seemed an unbridgeable gap  -- a “deep fissure, the cleavage of some mighty stroke,” turns out to be “nothing but a narrow ravine” (168 ). What had been conceived as a protective moat -- the unnegotiable  rift of the dissociative structure -- turns out to be a narrow, easily forded  divide. As a consequence, consciousness of what had been buried at the bottom of an abyss allows a cohesive identity to emerge, as “the nearly perfect disc . . .  gliding upwards between the sides of the chasm, . . .  as if escaping from a yawning grave in gentle triumph.”  

     Observing this moonrise together,  Marlow and Jim are no longer opposed; they  interact flexibly, adopting the characteristics that had previously been regarded as the other’s exclusive domain, as Jim becomes the voice of judgment, while Marlow  looks on in mute admiration. Acknowledging that they are not in opposition, Marlow recognizes that Jim is “wonderfully expressive after all” (176).   Now joined in a common purpose, Marlow is finally “freed from that dull resentment which had existed side by side with interest in [Jim’s] fate . . . . There was a moment of real and profound intimacy, unexpected and short-lived like a glimpse of some everlasting, of some saving truth” (182). 

Conclusion

     When Marlow states that he has no imagination he must  include himself among those “who have starved their imagination to feed the body” (171).  On the other hand, he is compelled to return and retrace the route wherein he had rejected his imagination in order to reclaim it because  without it, there can be “no adventurer, no lover,” and no  artist (134). The  resulting reconciliation  is also a farewell – a  rejection of the false dichotomy between  pragmatic realism and imagination.

     The last meeting of Jim and Marlow is a homecoming in which Marlow recalls that Jim “had come to me from there,” and in which  he is called to account for what had become of his “very young brother” (168, 170).  As far as we know,  Marlow doesn’t have a younger brother, so  here their  association tends toward a metaphoric bond. Marlow is returning home, not in a physical sense, but to  the ground of being: the “disembodied eternal and unchangeable spirit” that “dwells within the land” (169).  In this return, the points-of-view of Marlow and Jim converge,  as Marlow is again a conduit for  Jim -- who is “speaking through his lips from the past” (31):

I don’t know how much Jim understood . . . . Had he been capable of picturesque manifestations he would have shuddered at the thought [of home] and made you shudder too. But he was not of that sort, though he was expressive enough in his way. Before the idea of going home he would grow desperately stiff and immovable, with lowered chin and pouted lips, and with those candid blue eyes of his glowering darkly under a frown, as if before something unbearable, as if before something revolting (169).

     Jim’s  refusal to return to an “unbearable” and “revolting” home is countered by Marlow’s insistent repetition that “one must return” in order to come to terms with one’s origins (169).  In going back as an adult –“winging his way back in time” -- Marlow reviews what becomes of  youth. In Jim, he discovers that if one were to live solely in a childhood conceit,  it would be as if one had “never existed”  -- consigned to a kind of living death (168, 176).  Therefore, it is necessary, according to a “terrifying logic,” that the “Jim-myth”  be “gotten out of the way,” in order for “his spirit . . . to rise above the ruins of  his existence” (308).  It is necessary to let go of the anachronistic childhood conceit   in order for the boy to mature to manhood.

     The fixed image of the hero which Jim identified with as a child is like “a picture created by fancy on a canvas, upon which, after long contemplation, you turn your back for the last time. It remains in the memory motionless, unfaded, with its life arrested, in an unchanging light” (249).  Marlow rejects the immobilized figure, in favor of  “the world where events move, men change.” No longer immobilized by a magician’s spell, the figure is returned to his context -- his place among the living --  a star “whose distant glitter disposed in retreating planes lured the eye into the depths of a greater darkness” (100). 

 

Works Cited

Conrad, Joseph. The Collected  Letters of Joseph Conrad: Vol. 7. Frederic R. Karl and Laurence Davies, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.

_____________. Lord Jim. J.H. Stape and Ernest W. Sullivan II, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012.

Ellis, Havelock. The Criminal. London:  Walter Scott, 1890.

Ferguson, Rex. “Personal Impressions: Fingerprints, Freud, and Conrad.” New Formations 79.3 (2013): 43-62.

Garnett, Edward, ed. Conrad’s Prefaces to his Works. New York: Haskell House, 1971.

Gramm, Christie. “Figure and Ground in Heart of Darkness.” Conradian 39.2 (2014): 61-79.

Greaney, Michael. “Lord Jim and Embarrassment.” Conradian 25.1 (2000):  1-14.

Hawthorn, Jeremy. “Artful Dodges in Mental Territory: Self-Deception in Conrad’s Fiction.” Conradiana 37.3 (2005): 205-231.

Kaplan, Carola M. “Navigating Trauma in Joseph Conrad’s Victory: A Journey From Sigmund Freud to Phillip Bromberg.” Conradiana  43.2 (2011): 81-92.       

Martin, William A. “‘To Grapple With Another Man’s Need’: Trauma-Shame Interdependency (masochism) in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim.” Conradiana 33.3 (2001): 231-251.

Miller, David.  “The Unenchanted Garden: Children, Childhood, and Conrad.” Conradian 31.2 (2006):  28-47.

Simmons, Allan H. "‘He was Misleading’: Frustrated Gestures in Lord Jim." Conradian 25.1 (2000): 31-47.

Slights, William W.E. “The Ethics of Readership and ‘The Anarchist’.” Conradian 38.1 (2013): 22-38.

Zabel, Morton. “Joseph Conrad: Chance and Recognition.” Sewanee Review, 53 (1945): 1-22.