Difference between revisions of "Lord Jim (Joseph Conrad, 1900)"

Latest revision as of 11:09, 6 April 2018

Joseph Conrad. Lord Jim. Pub. 1900. Ed. Allan H. Simmons. Penguin's Classics, 2007. Print.

• published serially in Blackwood's 1899-1900
• Good for: combination of protomodernist narrative form with serialization (see Hughes and Lund 1991) and the serial bildungsroman; problematizing 3rd person omniscient narration; 155ff Stein the collector and Charles Darwin, Black 2000, imperial underpinnings of knowledge projects;

Reading notes

• 6: why the short précis of the story?
  • stabilizing an unstable, fragmented, obscure narrative?
• 7: repeating that he was generally liked -- why? This plural locus of character evaluation?
• 29 so far the reading tends to be in the metaphorics of the story, Jim's sense of advenuture and Marlie saying "before the end is told"
• 31 Patna captain keeps getting compared to objects, objectified
• 49 significant objects in the figurative patterning of the novel too, people being compared to their luggage on 61 or Brierly's pocketwatch as an indicator of his forethought in his suicide here
• 81 "he wanted me to know he had kept a distance": how differently narratorial mediation functions here in the narrative fabric than formal mediation of different media in Dracula
• 82 Marlow's description of Jim's "burlesque" trial -- Eliot is supposed to be more didactic than this proto modernism?!
• 87 the regularity of the serialized chapter breaks gives Marlow's narrative momentum, the reader (or I) want to keep going
• 108 in "collating" the Australian boarding party man's account with Jim's, Marlie performs something if the same diegetic narratorial/organizing function Mina Harker does in Dracula just with oral stories rather than documents
• 203

There was something occult in all this, no doubt; for what is the strength of ropes and of men's arms? There is a rebellious soul in things which must be overcome by powerful charms and incantations.... perhaps the souls of things are more stubborn than the souls of men.

• Good narratological perspective from Woloch 2003 344:

Lord Jim...thematizes the conflict between the one and the many in the parable of Jim's cowardly abandonment of the pilgrims aboard the Patna. Marlow's inability to communicate adequately with Jim or to coherently narrate Jkm's story is directly related to the impossibility of comprehending the mass of humanity whom Jim abandons, and who are so incompletely registered in the narrative himself. As Marlow writes, in an image that concisely grounds Comrad's Impressionism in this social crisis: Jim, the endangered protagonist of the novel, is "blurred by clouds of men as by clouds of dust."

Class Notes

• revising conventions of the C19 bildungsroman (David Copperfield (Dickens, 1850), The Mill on the Floss (1860))
• memory and its layers - people can't stop telling this story of Jim and the Patna
  • the novel and storytelling and community building in this dispersive community
  • Marlow is a storyteller, stages Walter Benjamin's distinction between that and the novel
  • Marlow as Conrad's alter ego, he's an "insider" in a way Conrad never was
• He didn't realize he needed Marlow for the first bit
  • third person -> Marlow -> shift into the written document he's made (amorphous narrative)
  • the contingency of third-person narration: "Perhaps it would be after dinner" (27)
    • In Heart of Darkness you know there's a person telling a narrative, but here the 3rd person narrator can't be a person or character, it's a disembodied being (like Bleak House (1853))
• to set up a chronology of the narrative would be difficult in this novel
• 73 issues "beyond a court of inquiry" - an issue for a novel then
• the inconceivability of another person's mind, which is dramatized by Marlow's intervention on 28 - any 3rd person omniscient narrator is doing something you can't do - something impossible
• 45: "essential disclosure as to the strength, the power, the horror of human emotions" - what's the problem with what Jim does?
  • Brierly on 46: Jim's story kills him, Marlow gives us to understand he couldn't stand Jim's example
    • why is it so traumatic? Perhaps because Jim doesn't really choose, the frightening thing is that agency goes out of it in a moment of crisis. It makes sailors face the romantic delusions they tell themselves.
    • Brierly commits suicide over this disconnect: it's not about cowardice but about being out of control, or of morality being built on sand
  • the spectacle of the trial is the public part of what's hard to bear
• bureaucracy of British merchant marine - oral exam for certificates (Jim's is invaliadated) - it's British law by extension but not criminal, he can't have a position of command on a British ship ever again
  • in this culture this is of huge importance - fixed standard of conduct (vs. moral superiority) - the intersection between these is at issue here
  • 41 - "the doubt of the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct"
    • metaphysical implications
    • psych. dimensions
    • actual material circumstances
      • there's a court case and they're sailors is important, "one of us"
• part of Brierly's horror is that romanticism in Jim he's partly responsible for - Stein later talks about moderating Jim's romance
• 77 the old Malay succeeds where young handsome Jim fails
  • unsettling racism but also the helmsman is super important (he has a job to do)
  • you're dead without his hands: troublingly racist and because they don't fit the easy "we can discount them" - the helmsman can't not be an agent
• the nature of the crime is not that it's linked to some abstract concept of human value - Brierly says Muslim pilgrims and rags are all the same
• 86 "I jumped...it seems" narratives are worth studying in part because it's helpful to understand causality
  • seeming lack of causal agency describing gradualism because we don't have access to that
  • tellability: worth presenting in a story, has a point
  • narratability: ability to render events in a narrative sequence
  • how do we access things that aren't narratable because of their scale, like Darwinian evolution or climate change? Charles Darwin, Griffiths 2016
    • most narratives of climate change are false or misleading because their scalar shifting entails oversimplification
    • a lot of Victorian writers took Darwin in a progressive way for reassurance, reframed not as chaos but as an upward teleological trajectory
  • if you're saying the novel is about psychology then Jim's decision is paramount but at the social-systemic level less so
    • it's a narrative black box - you know the change but not what happened so non-narratable
• Narration as navigation, narrating as triangulating - "delayed decoding" - Ian Watt and Attridge
  • seeing -> understanding, reproducing the cognitive effect - the "yellow dog" bit
• Stein
  • based on Alfred Russell Wallace (maybe)
  • 158-9 "This is nature - the balance of colossal forces"
  • man as humans but also Jim who's jumped out of place
  • world ordered in objects - collector -- Benjamin
    • magic circle - abstracting from system of relations
    • Marlow is also a collector - methodological affinity - "I want to make you see him"
      • Marlow interested in Jim as a person or a speciment, more both, specimen for us but also all that bildung; fitting Jim into the world
  • Benjaminian collector vs. Wallace/Darwin collector (commercial) - explaiing systematically/ geographic dispersal
    • there's more than one imperative for collecting
• The whole second half of the novel is translated and mediated in a letter
• Brown and Jim: "common guilt, secret knowledge" (296)
  • does it boil down to racism? Brown is the first racial "us" to show up
  • 292 "You've been white once" - assumes you can stop (Has Jim?) -- also a recognition, if you condemn Jim's failure you fall into Brown's logic, no way to differentiate (but there are gradations of dirt)

Theme tracking

Shakespeare allusions

• 44 "there's some sort of method in his raving" (doctor to Marlow abt Patna engineer, Hamlet)
• 64 Jim paraphrases "the readiness is all" (Hamlet)
• 79 make angels weep (measure for measure)
• 84 this might be too far but Jim's histrionic "Ha, ha, ha!" Recalls Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy
• 116 "loved too well" othello
• 138 "and that's true too" Lear
• 178 "the country, for all its rotten state, was not judged ripe for interference" hamlet and lear with ripe
• 182 green and gold half crown complete Shakespeare
• 258 "ever-undiscovered country" hamlet