lord jim - conrad's fable of judgment

"Lord Jim": Conrad's Fable of JudgmentAuthor(s): Paul KintzeleSource: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Winter, 2001-2002), pp. 69-79Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3831636Accessed: 14/11/2010 15:31

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Lord Jim: Conrad's Fable of Judgment

Paul Kintzele

University of Pennsylvania

i n his brief 1917 "Author's Note" to Lord Jim, Conrad recalled, with mild bewilderment, the

anecdote of a friend returning from a trip to Italy, where he encountered a woman who had

expressed a strong dislike for Conrad's novel: "'You know,' she said, 'it is all so morbid.'"1 Con-

rad's response to this blunt criticism is curious; rather than question what "morbid" means in this

context, he instead questions whether the woman was Italian, or even European, because, as he

states, "no Latin temperament would have perceived anything morbid in the acute consciousness

of lost honour." He concludes, referring to his title character, "I can safely assure my readers that

he is not the product of coldly perverted thinking" (Lord Jim, p. 44). The disclaimer parallels a

similar attempt at palliation in the "Author's Note" to The Secret Agent, in which Conrad states

that, in writing the novel, "I have not intended to commit a gratuitous outrage on the feelings of

mankind."2 The first-time reader, upon encountering such odd assurances, might wonder whether

their author knows or simply hopes that they are true. In any event, Conrad always proved himself

to be a far better artist than literary critic, and his reassuring words, written years after the fact,

offer an interesting glimpse into his motivations, but do not do justice to the psychological and

moral complexities of his work ? work that can explore "lost honour" without entirely concealing from view the morbid, the perverse, the outrageous.

Contemporary critical theory, especially French philosophy and psychoanalysis since the rise

of Existentialism, has shown a similar ? but not nearly as repressed ? interest in the morbid, the perverse, and the outrageous; however, reassurances and disclaimers are to be found here as

well. Jacques Derrida has founded his career on non-foundationalism, but, especially since the

late 1980s, he has repeatedly emphasized the ethical and political dimensions of his work; for

example, in a forum gathered to discuss the place of Deconstruction in legal theory, he stated,

"Nothing seems to me less outdated than the classical emancipatory ideal."3 Jacques Lacan, as is

1. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, eds. Cedric Watts and Robert Hampson (Penguin, 1986), p. 44. Further references to Lord Jim will be made parenthetically in the text.

2. Joseph Conrad, "Author's Note" to The Secret Agent, ed. Martin Seymour-Smith (Penguin, 1984), p. 43. 3. Jacques Derrida, "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority,'" Deconstruction and the Possibility of Jus?

tice, eds. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld, and David Gray Carlson, trans. Mary Quaintance (Routledge, 1992), p. 28.

Paul Kintzele, "Lord Jim: Conrad's Fable of Judgment," Journal of Modern Literature XXV, 2 (Winter 2001-2002), pp. 69-79. ?Indiana University Press, 2002.

70 Journal of Modern Literature

well known, devoted an entire seminar to the Ethics of Psychoanalysis, and in a later seminar on

the Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, he formulated an ethics of the drive that bears

no small resemblance to Kant's formal ethics.4 Conrad's own negative capability, his capacity for

creating characters and scenes that draw fundamental ethical categories (justice, right, duty, good) into question at one level while holding fast to them at another, affiliates him with those critical

philosophies that flourished later in the century that his provocative fiction inaugurated. At the

same time, Conrad's fiction maintains connections ? both implicit and explicit ? with philoso?

phers and authors who preceded him, figures as various as Hegel, Novalis, and Carlyle. Lord Jim,

an especially potent novel that showcases Conrad's critical and exploratory method, can yield new

insights when examined from the perspective of later writers and in the context of earlier ones.

Near the end of his oral narration, which takes up the large middle section of Lord Jim, Marlow

pauses briefly over the question of justice, which he treats in his usual ironic-pessimistic manner:

"Truth shall prevail ? don't you know. Magna est veritas et... Yes, when it gets a chance. There

is a law, no doubt ? and likewise a law regulates your luck in the throwing of dice. It is not Justice

the servant of men, but accident, hazard, Fortune . . ." (Lord Jim, p. 279). Although this passage reflects on, and laments the absence of, what could be called divine justice, Lord Jim is also a novel

that interrogates the question of justice as it is enacted in human affairs, and examines the particu? lar judgments that necessarily comprise it. Like Conrad's other major novels, Lord Jim continually

pushes the reader to choose, to make a judgment, while at the same time it undermines the very conditions whereby a judgment would be possible. Although one of the obvious effects of such a

narrative strategy is a kind of suspension or readerly impalement (so that the image that concludes

the novel, that of Stein's butterfly collection, is a reflection of the reader's position ? pinned to the

text, yet petrified, paralyzed), Conrad's examination of justice bears a critical potential as well: in

one of the well-known twists in the narrative, Marlow's prefatory letter to the "privileged reader," Conrad satirizes the use of the term "justice" when it merely operates as the rhetorical cover for a

system of domination. In ventriloquizing his reader's viewpoint, Marlow writes:

'You contended that "that kind of thing" [that is, colonial endeavor] was only endurable

and enduring when based on a firm conviction in the truth of ideas racially our own, in

whose name are established the order, the morality of an ethical progress. "We want its

strength at our backs," you had said. "We want a belief in its necessity and its justice, to

make a worthy and conscious sacrifice of our lives...." (Lord Jim, p. 293)

So while Conrad on the one hand takes a rather skeptical approach to justice, one that might teeter

on the brink of nihilism, at the same time he takes pains to satirize and critique the way in which

the concept of justice is yoked violently into racial discourse. Also present in his statement is

another frequently used word in Lord Jim: "conviction" ? a word that compactly signifies a cluster

of fundamental concerns in Conrad's novel, centering around idealism, belief, and judgment. In a gesture typical of a novelist whose goal is to "make you see,"5 Conrad converts a character

trait ? idealism ? into an external correlative by linking a pure whiteness to Jim, who is "appar-

4. See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, trans. Alan Sheridan (Norton, 1981), p. 242. 5. Joseph Conrad, "Preface" to The Nigger ofthe "Narcissus" (Penguin, 1988), p. xlix.

Kintzele: Lord Jim: Conrad's Fable of Judgment 71

elled in immaculate white from shoes to hat" (Lord Jim, p. 45) at the very beginning of the novel

and who becomes a "tiny white speck" (Lord Jim, p. 291) at the conclusion of Marlow's narrative.

The whiteness associated with Jim alerts the reader to the racial whiteness that underpins the

rhetoric of colonialism, but as it is also an extreme whiteness ("immaculate"), it becomes an index

of Jim's fear of the stains of failure or self-interest. Jim is a realization of Hegel's notion of the

"beautiful soul," who values his purity, his romantic self-image, above all worldly entanglements and imperfections. About the beautiful soul, Hegel writes, "It lives in dread of besmirching the

splendour of its inner being by action and an existence; and, in order to preserve the purity of its

heart, it flees from contact with the actual world, and persists in its self-willed impotence_"6 The

only hope for the beautiful soul, as for Jim, is to negate the separation that it has falsely posited between itself and the world; the beautiful soul must realize its own complicity in the fallen world

over which it laments. It is unclear, however, whether Jim manages to utter the equivalent of the

contrite statement of recognition from which the beautiful soul recoils: "I am so."7 Indeed, through his relentless pursuit of isolation, anonymity, and punishment, Jim appears to want more to regain his unsullied self-image than to establish a new form of contact with the world.

The question of Jim's complicity with the world and with others is most forcefully played out in the affair of the Patna. Just as in the episode of the drowning men in Chapter 1, when the

moment of crisis comes, Jim is the victim of a fatal hesitation. Conrad implies that Jim's flaw is

his imagination. If judgment is the faculty of mind that links together theory and practice, Jim's

imagination obstructs that link by excessive self-representation, by conjuring up either a soothing stasis or a paralyzing fear. As Marlow says of Jim in the midst of the seemingly hopeless turn of

events on the Patna, "His confounded imagination had evoked for him all the horrors of panic, the trampling rush, the pitiful screams . . ." (Lord Jim, p. 108). After his terrible miscalculation, Jim decides that the only honorable course of action is to submit to the judgment of the court, even

though all of his shipmates have fled. Again, at the end of the novel, after Jim has miscalculated

regarding Gentleman Brown's promise to make a peaceful departure, he submits to the judgment of Doramin, who without hesitation shoots him through the heart. The drama of Lord Jim, from

Jim's point of view, is one of misjudgment and atonement.

Conrad's novel is bracketed by two distinct choices that Jim makes. In the first instance, Jim

must decide whether he will go down with the Patna or whether he will jump with the rest of the

crew. To Jim, he must jump, for the romantic prestige he longs for is worthwhile only if he is still

alive to enjoy it. The mordant twist that Conrad adds to this drama of survival is that the ship does not sink; Jim is thus tormented by the retrospective fantasy that he could have survived and

attained a heroic status. Moreover, the question of whether to jump from the Patna recalls the

earlier scenario in the novel in which Jim fails to jump from a training ship into a cutter headed

to the scene of an accident; however, in this situation, the path to heroism lies in not jumping.

By creating a repetitive structure in the narrative, Conrad subtly suggests that Jim is trapped in a behavioral loop, one that he escapes only through his self-sacrifice at the end of the novel.

When Jim is presented with a final choice ? fight for escape with Jewel and Tamb' Itam, or face

Doramin's judgment ? he chooses to submit, but it is not clear whether this is finally the coura-

geous, heroic act that he has been longing to accomplish, or whether it is simply another form of

6. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford, 1977), p. 400. 7. Hegel, Phenomenology, p. 405.


jumping. It seems that Jim would rather accept death than the incompleteness or imperfections of

human existence.

But if Jim is a judging character in the novel, he is also judged ? not only by the naval court

and Doramin, but by the narrator, Marlow, who takes it upon himself to resolve the enigma of

Jim's character. Marlow's interview with Stein in Chapter 20 is a crucial episode in this regard, one that presents a convergence of several key phrases and motifs. Despite his pointed refusal to

read Freud or to familiarize himself with psychoanalytic concepts,8 Conrad was remarkably adept in creating the atmosphere of a consultation in this chapter, in which the thickly-accented Stein

plays a role not unlike that of Freud; Marlow says that Stein was "an eminently suitable person to

receive my confidences" (Lord Jim, p. 192). Stein's pursuit of entomology requires the meticulous-

ness and mercilessness that are also essential in the Freudian analyst; his butterfly display cases,

rather like Freud's prominent display of ancient artifacts in his own consulting room, offer proof of his formidable analytical skills. Marlow broaches the subject of Jim by stating that he has a

"specimen" (Lord Jim, p. 198) for Stein; this lightly ironic turn of phrase allows Marlow to frame

the discussion as a mutual analysis of Jim, but what surrounds this question is the larger issue of

Marlow's own fascination with Jim, who, to use the psychoanalytic term that the situation calls for,

has the status of a symptom ? he is the absent cause of Marlow's anxious interpretive activity.9 The

talk revolves around him, but Marlow and even Stein are hesitant to approach him directly: "We

avoided pronouncing Jim's name as though we had tried to keep flesh and blood out of our discus?

sion, or he were nothing but an erring spirit, a suffering and nameless shade" (Lord Jim, p. 201). At the same time, Marlow's reluctance to explain Jim suggests the more fundamental meaning of symptom, the one elaborated by Lacan: the unavoidable by-product, or, more precisely, the

secret support, of the symbolic order. Hence Marlow's oscillating, owning-and-disowning attitude

toward Jim: on the one hand, Jim is "under a cloud," but on the other, he is "one of us" (Lord Jim,

p. 351).

This dialectic of externalization and appropriation that belongs to the symptom has a particular and general application in Lord Jim: in particular, Jim discloses through his escapism the element

of Orientalist fantasy that operated in the colonial ideology of the West, but more generally he

discloses the proposition later advanced by Lacan that reality exists only by means of some fantas-

matic support. It is important to read Lord Jim at both of these levels: on the one hand, Jim's self-

deluded romantic ideals are the delusions of the West writ large; on the other hand, Jim stands for

a kind of ineradicable obscurity that is at the kernel of the subject. Marlow waxes grandiloquent as

he considers the spectacle of Jim before the naval inquiry: it was, he claims, "as if the obscure truth

involved were momentous enough to affect mankind's conception of itself (Lord Jim, p. 112). In addition to the possible reference to Freud, Stein's name also bears significance in its literal

German meaning, as Marlow sees in Stein the solid ground on which he can finally pass judgment on Jim. Just as Jim had earlier referred to Marlow as a "brick" (Lord Jim, p. 178), that is, a solid

support in the midst of his turbulent affairs, now Marlow turns to Stein to offer advice as to what

8. See Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle, trans. Halina Carroll-Najder (Rutgers University Press, 1983), p. 460.

9. For detailed discussions on the concept of the symptom, see Slavojzizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (Verso, 1989). ?izek writes, "This, then, is a symptom: a particular, 'pathological', signifying formation, a binding of enjoyment, an inert stain resisting communication and interpretation, a stain which cannot be included in the circuit of discourse, of social bond network, but is at the same time a positive condition of it" (p. 75).


he should do. The interview with Stein also contains perhaps the densest weave of associations

around the metaphor of light, a metaphor to which Conrad returns repeatedly throughout the novel.

The treatment of light in Lord Jim always emphasizes its proximity to darkness, and this emphasis on chiaroscuro nicely anticipates^/w noir: as Marlow describes Stein's study, "Only one corner of

the vast room, the corner in which stood his writing desk, was strongly lighted by a shaded reading

lamp, and the rest of the spacious apartment melted into shapeless gloom like a cavern" (Lord Jim,

p. 192). On the one hand, such light seems to be a simple trope for rational knowledge, for enlight-

enment, a pool of conscious clarity in a sea of unconscious obscurity. But Stein's revelations come

to Marlow only once Stein steps out of the light, "passing out of the bright circle of the lamp into

the ring of fainter light ? into shapeless dusk at last. It had an odd effect ? as if these few steps had carried him out of this concrete and perplexed world" (Lord Jim, p. 199). And it is only from

this obscurity that Stein delivers his enigmatic solution to the problem of "how to be," a solution

that seems to dissipate once it is brought back into the light:

'"A man that is born fails into a dream like a man who fails into the sea. If he tries

to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns ? nicht

wahr? ... No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with

the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up. So if you ask me ? how to be?"

'His voice leaped up extraordinarily strong, as though away there in the dusk he had

been inspired by some whisper of knowledge. "I will tell you! For that too there is only one way."

'With a hasty swish-swish of his slippers he loomed up in the ring of faint light, and

suddenly appeared in the bright circle of the lamp. His extended hand aimed at my breast like a pistol; his deep-set eyes seemed to pierce through me, but his twitching lips uttered no word, and the austere exaltation of a certitude seen in the dusk vanished from

his face-The light had destroyed the assurance which had inspired him in the distant

shadows. He sat down and, with both elbows on the desk, rubbed his forehead. "And yet it is true ? it is true. In the destructive element immerse."' (Lord Jim, p. 200)

What is the nature of Stein's counsel? What is the "destructive element"? Since we view nearly all of the events in Lord Jim through Marlow's eyes, we remain in the "circle of light" with him

while Stein shuffles into the darkness from which he speaks. If we take the tropology of light as

a representation of consciousness, then it would seem that, for a brief moment, Stein is able to

speak from, or for, the unconscious. Stein's ethical theory echoes Lacan's reading of desire and

drive: the one who, according to Stein's metaphor, "tries to climb out into the air" is the desiring

subject, one who always aims at something other, something beyond, or something concealed. To

"submit" to the "destructive element" then, is to become the subject of the drive, to renounce the

metonymy of desire, the chimerical hope for transcendence or fulfillment, for a self-destructive

consistency. And consistency is self-destructive because, in Kant's terms, it is non-pathological, that is, entirely staked on an unalterable rule or maxim of conduct. A pathological act is an act of

self-preservation ? it negotiates between means and ends, it exchanges one object for another, it

flows with the symbolic. In contrast, the non-pathological act freezes the symbolic, as it were, by

taking it literally; it takes only ends into account. If, according to Lacan, the status of the drive is


ethical, it is an impossible ethic, as indeed Kant's is often reproached for being. Stein's injunction to "follow the dream ? and so ? ewig ? usque adfinem" (Lord Jim, p. 201) thus reveals the prob? lem with Jim's romantic dreams: he wants them to remain unrealized ? that is, to remain dreams.

To follow them "usque adfinem" is thus to destroy their status as dreams and to destroy the self

that is founded on them; if the status of the drive is ethical, it is also suicidal. The only survivors

are those onlookers who give way and compromise the inflexible commands of the drive and so

live to tell the tale.

At the Patna trial, the prevailing attitude of all those present (except, perhaps, for Jim) is that

it is a farce; it is unnecessary, distasteful, unpleasant. The stern and egotistical Captain Brierly is especially agitated by the trial, and, in one of Conrad's boldest narrative surprises, "He com-

mitted suicide very soon after" (Lord Jim, p. 86). Conrad links Brierly's suicide to Jim's public humiliation through the fitting irony of having Brierly commit suicide by repeating Jim's gesture of jumping from a ship: although Marlow says of Brierly that "he took the secret of the evidence

with him in that leap into the sea" (Lord Jim, p. 86), it seems fairly clear that Brierly pays the price

for, and perhaps in some fashion wants to redeem, Jim's ruined idealism. Marlow asserts that

Brierly's suicide was the consequence of his unswerving egoism: "Who can tell what flattering view he had induced himself to take of his own suicide?" (Lord Jim, p. 90). Just before his visit

to Stein, Marlow recalls Brierly's advice regarding Jim: "'Let him creep twenty feet underground and stay there'" (Lord Jim, p. 191). Brierly's solution is to have Jim become, in effect, a permanent

stowaway, concealed from view but at the same time protected and preserved; indeed, Jim had

already assumed the role of a "stowaway" (Lord Jim, p. 190) during the trip in which Marlow took

him to De Jongh; even at the beginning of the novel, Jim is confined to his cabin below deck after

sustaining an injury. Even if Jim is "one of us" to Marlow and others, he is consistently placed in scenes of isolation, concealment, and confinement; like Leggatt in "The Secret Sharer," he is

present by his particular absence. Lacan writes in a similar vein by claiming that desire is the

"non-representative representative" and that the binary signifier that heralds desire (the Vorstel-

lungsreprasentanz) is "unterdriickt, sunk underneath."10 Every instance of exposure, whether at

the trial or in the frequent failures of Jim's incognito, results in flight, in a nomadic movement that

ends by depositing Jim on Patusan. Jim is the symptom of the other characters, and of the novel

itself, not only because of the way he elicits attempts at decipherment and interpretation, but also

through his resistance to, and movement away from, exposure.

In addition to its examination of the symptoms and ethical qualms of its main characters, Conrad's novel also expands into a similarly critical appraisal of law and justice. Derrida's essay "Force of Law: The 'Mystical Foundation of Authority'" is an inquiry into the structural excessive-

ness of the law ? on what the law is founded and how it is maintained, and the ways in which the

law, by its very nature, forces the experience of aporia. The essay is a patient attempt to elucidate

the ethical concerns of Deconstruction and thereby prevent the simplistic reduction of deconstruc-

tive reading to a type of sophistry or nihilism; fittingly, this ethical valence of Deconstruction

is demonstrated through a reading of the law that situates Deconstruction in the crucial interval

between the quasi-transcendental concept of justice, which is, according to Derrida, "not decon-

10. Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, pp. 218-19.


structible"11 and the worldly, systemic, calculative, distributive realization of justice, what Derrida

calls the realm of droit ? law or right. In other words, Derrida approaches the question of the

law through a two-tiered conceptual matrix: the Law and its laws. The whole question of the law

is the question of the ways in which the plurality, particularity, and heteronomy of laws relate to,

or receive legitimacy from, the generality or universality of Law itself. As Derrida writes, "An

address is always singular, idiomatic, and justice, as law (droit), seems always to suppose the gen?

erality of a rule, a norm or a universal imperative. How are we to reconcile the act of justice that

must always concern singularity, individuals, irreplaceable groups and lives . . . with rule, norm,

value or the imperative of justice which necessarily have a general form . .. ?"12

In this first part of a two-part essay, Derrida considers the split aspect of the law ? the idea of

justice that founds, and yet always remains external to, a system of laws. If we think of the well-

known iconography of justice (a woman, blindfolded, with scales in one hand and a sword in the

other), we might say that all of the conceptual turns in Derrida's essay arise from an analysis of

each of these elements: the sword (the necessary enforceability ofthe law), the scales (the distribu?

tion or calculation of droit), and the woman (who, to use Lacan's terms, is extra-symbolic, beyond

[the phallic] law), who is blindfolded (the aporias of rule and decision, as well as the inability to

visually reconcile force [the sword] and calculation [the scales]). But the centerpiece of the first

part of Derrida's essay is his analysis of the otherworldly aspect of justice. On the one hand, such

justice can never be realized, made concrete, in a system of laws: "Justice is an experience of the

impossible."13 But at the same time, this irreducibly spectral justice demands our attempts to serve

it: "And so incalculable justice requires us to calculate."14

Lord Jim also develops what we in retrospect can call a deconstructive reading of justice. On the one hand, the novel abounds with examples of law gone awry, in which private cynicism corrodes the proper measure of the law. Marlow continually draws our attention to the performa? tive gestures that legitimate the law, and in exposing them, he mocks their pretensions. Lord Jim,

and Conrad's work in general, performs a skeptical inquiry into the limits ? or even the lawful-

ness ? of the law. Frequently Conrad creates tension by pitting two laws against each other ? self-

preservation and duty, for example. In his pathbreaking study of Conrad, One ofUs, Geoffrey Galt

Harpham recognizes a similar motif in The Nigger ofthe Narcissus; he writes, "obedience to one

[law] may entail dereliction with regard to others. The impossibility of abiding by all lawful laws

at once constitutes the 'unlawful' aspect of the law."15

In Lord Jim, the place where this meta-judgment can take place is also a subject of discussion.

Marlow asserts that there should be a kind of shadow court that would not be entangled in corrup? tion and convention, a court that could truly judge Jim. Perhaps this court is Marlow's narrative

itself, as Marlow frequently attempts to pass judgment on his subject. But such judgment, Marlow

regretfully notes, is also doomed to fail: droit can never become justice. During the Patna trial,

Marlow refuses to take part in what he considers "a dispute impossible of decision if one had to

be fair to all the phantoms in possession" (Lord Jim, p. 111). The novel itself, then, if not a means

of producing finality, at least provides a space more capacious than the various tribunals which it

11. Derrida, "Force of Law," p. 14. 12. Derrida, "Force of Law," p. 17. 13. Derrida, "Force of Law," p. 16. 14. Derrida, "Force of Law," p. 28. 15. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, One ofUs: The Mastery of Joseph Conrad (University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 93.


depicts; the justice it offers is of a purely negative sort, a critique of justice in the name of some

larger but more elusive justice, one that can emerge only in the complexity of a narrative.

Whether in legal or personal use, "conviction" implies a moment of validation: the subjective

rising to lay claim to the objective. In a juridical context, conviction occurs when a judging faculty

(a judge or jury) affirms the truth of a certain sequence of events (defendant A abandoned ship

B); it is a bridge from the subjective to the objective. In the moral or personal sense of the term,

conviction moves in the opposite direction: in the face of doubts, contrary evidence, scoffers, one

with conviction clings to a certain belief; conviction is thus a bridge from the objective to the

subjective, a leap that attempts to reconcile two heterogeneous domains. Conviction is, in the most

fundamental sense, a performative: a sign, symbol, gesture, or code that is presumed to stand in an

equivalent relation with actual objects ? a voucher for, and an intervention in, reality. But although

legal conviction performs or produces truth, it can never purge itself of its subjective foundations,

hence the possibility that a conviction can always be overturned. (Derrida characteristically argues that the condition of justice ? that it must be routed through "the undecidable" [which is why we

will never have computers as judges, he notes] ? is also that which prevents justice from being

fully realized.)16 And although moral conviction presumes to subjugate or subsume the objective

by the sheer force of will, it can never purge itself of the subjective conditions of its judgment, or

free itself from the possibility that the objective realm ? the external world of reality, experience, and hard-earned wisdom ? may one day falsify its assertions. Conviction is a claim to finality that

can never be final.

Among the many insistently repeated verbal motifs in Lord Jim is this single word: "convic?

tion." At first glance, we may see it as yet another instance of Conrad's reliance on a worker's (or,

more specifically, a maritime) ethos of simplicity, steadfastness, and duty. However, given the

scenes of legal judgment and conviction that bracket the action in the novel, we may well take note

of the multiple meanings of "conviction," and, by extension, the anxious and ambivalent process that "conviction" performatively conceals; one might say with productive ambiguity that Lord Jim

is a narrative of conviction.

The epigraph to the novel thus acquires an additional, if somewhat furtive, semantic determina-

tion: "It is certain my Conviction gains infinitely, the moment another soul will believe in it" (Lord

Jim, p. 41). Although the title-page attributes the phrase to Novalis, the wording is actually from

Thomas Carlyle, who cites the Novalis aphorism in Lecture II of his On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History in a passage that describes the gratitude which the prophet Moham-

med felt when his revelation was affirmed by "another soul" for the first time. The translation

significantly alters the meaning, most particularly by translating Novalis' original word Meinung

("opinion") as "Conviction," which shifts the meaning of the sentence from the epistemological to

the ethical. We may first note that Carlyle uses this (altered) quote to suggest the point that to be a

hero is to require the legitimation or validation of another: the hero needs an audience. Conviction,

although seemingly a process by which an individual simply consults his or her reason, becomes

conviction (it "gains infinitely," that is, it becomes, precisely, a conviction) only through the inter?

vention of "another soul" that seconds its legitimacy.

Taking Mohammed as one of his "heroes," Carlyle muses on Mohammed's overwhelmed ? even

terrified ? reaction to his divine appointment, his vertigo of being chosen, of being singled out and

16. See Derrida, "Force of Law," pp. 23-24.


facing the difficult prospect of having to convince others of his singularity. Carlyle writes (citing

Novalis, but not yet the passage which Conrad used):

It is the 'inspiration of the Almighty' that giveth us understanding. To know, to get into

the truth of anything, is ever a mystic act, ? of which the best Logics can but babble on

the surface. 'Is not Belief the true god-announcing Miracle?' says Novalis.17

The act of knowing (or knowing), the very experience of certainty, which one would think requires

a firm (and knowable) Ground, is here likened to a "mystic act" ? as though certainty exists as

such only when its Ground or foundation is effaced ? when it is uncertain, to be precise. This

uncertain certainty, Carlyle would argue, is self-authorizing, self-grounding, a gift from some

obscure or impenetrable origin; he writes, ". . . who of us yet can know what to call it?"18 But at

the same time, such a revelation desperately desires confirmation: it is that which simultaneously

requires, and does not at all require, consensus. Carlyle describes Mohammed's rejoicing when his

message meets with approval from "the good Kadijah" (it is here that Conrad finds his epigraph):

One can fancy too the boundless gratitude of Mahomet; and how of all the kindnesses

she had done him, this of believing the earnest struggling word he now spoke was the

greatest. "It is certain," says Novalis, "my Conviction gains infinitely, the moment

another soul will believe in it." It is a boundless favor.19

Interestingly, the context from which Carlyle takes his quote (which he translates with instruc?

tive looseness) is not what one would expect: Novalis' original aphorism deals not so much with

the "boundless favor" of another's affirmation, but with the absolute otherness that is the very condition of authority. Novalis entitles his epigram "Philol[ogie]" ? which makes Carlyle's

transposition of it into religious and heroic terms already quite curious. Novalis states that Mey-

nung ? opinion ? gains considerably ("sehr viel gewinnt") when it is confirmed ("iiberzeugt ist")

by another.20

But Novalis does not stop there; he goes on to consider the phenomenon of authority: how it

works, how it arrogates power, or, more precisely, how it arrogates power in such a way that it is not

perceived as arrogation. Authority or authorization, he says, requires not just that another confirms

it, but also requires a rhetorical veil that obscures its origins, so that prying eyes may not lay bare

its foundations ("deren Ursache nicht gleich in die Augenfallt"). But, in a circular fashion, just as

authority is established by a stroke of rhetoric, authority in turn sustains the performative force of

rhetoric: as Novalis states, "An authority makes an opinion mystical ? magical" ("eine Autoritaet

macht eine Meynung mystich ? reitzend"). Authority is mystical and creates the mystical ? it

is mystified and mystifies. Furthermore, Novalis recognizes that authority is established only

through a certain violence, the "rhetorical violence of those in controV" ("Rhetorische Gewalt des

17. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History (University of California at Berkeley Press, 1993), p. 50.

18. Carlyle, On Heroes, p. 50. 19. Carlyle, On Heroes, p. 50. 20. Novalis (Friedrich von Hardenburg), Das Allgemeine Brouillon, frag. 153, p. 269. In Schriften, vol. 3, ed. Richard

Samuel (Kohlhammer, 1960). Subsequent Novalis references are all from this fragment.


Behauptens"). This mystified violence occupies a central position in Lord Jim, a novel bracketed

by two tribunals which, as presented by Marlow, strike the reader as arbitrary and brutal. But Jim

never seems to question those in authority, and in both cases, he submits himself to their judgment, in the first instance losing his livelihood and in the second losing his life.

Lord Jim takes up the theme of conviction on several different levels: the novel is, in large part, a narrative based on the question of conviction, not only in the sense of strongly held beliefs and

their (failed) actualization, but also in the more formal sense of the term: the novel not only stages "conviction" in its two trials (the naval inquiry and Doramin's execution of Jim at the end of the

novel), but also attempts to (and fails to) reach conviction in the literary framework: Jim remains

perpetually "under a veil," always eluding Marlow's narrative judgment, to such a point, I would

argue, that the reader is forced to abandon ready-made notions of psychologistic inscrutability and

thus turn to a consideration of the structural misfiring inherent in the very notions of judgment and conviction.

The tension in the first half of the novel is generated by Jim's lofty convictions and his inability to convert them into action ? they remain stuck at the level of the concept. But Lord Jim is also a

drama of conviction in the juridical sense of the term; it explores the (im)possibility of arriving at

some "essential disclosure" (Lord Jim, p. 84). "Conviction" thus condenses the intertwined ethical

and epistemological concerns of the novel and may suggest to us something of the negative modus

operandi of Conrad's fiction: the post-Romantic literary form implicitly demands conviction (ulti?

mately, a reconciliation between subject and world; a placation of social antagonisms), but all that

Conrad can manage to do is convict ? in the sense of accusing, making ironic, cynically exposing, and so on. The first-person possessive pronoun in the novel's epigraph ("It is certain my Convic?

tion") is thus applicable not only to Mohammed, to Jim, to Marlow, and to a sympathetic reader of

the novel, but also to Conrad himself, but paradoxically so, as his novel demands that the reader

simultaneously convict the title character and convict conviction as inadequate to its own task.

Indeed, the wry, often cynical narration of Marlow, which occupies the large middle section of

the novel, often criticizes those who claim conviction; he says of the Patna inquiry at the begin?

ning of the novel that in its very insistence on the facts of the case, it missed the "fundamental

why" (Lord Jim, p. 84) of the affair. But at the same time, Marlow himself continually founders

at the moment when a conviction is necessary. Conrad returned to this idea of conviction in his

autobiography, A Personal Record, perhaps unconsciously indicating the ambivalence of his writ-

erly ethos, the practice of negation that converts any affirmation (or Conviction) into a revelatory accusation (or conviction):

And what is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to

take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated

verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history?

(qtd. in Lord Jim, p. 353)

The interest of this passage is not only to be located in the echoes of meaning surrounding the term

"conviction," but also in the clarity "clearer than reality" that Conrad claims for his work ? this, from a writer so well known for his "adjectival insistence"21 on opacity, mystery, inscrutability.

21. F.R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (New York University Press, 1964), p. 177.


Conrad could perhaps counter this observation by arguing that to focus on the opaque, the liminal,

the paradoxical, is not to be opaque, liminal, paradoxical: his is a clear picture of the ambiguities of character and the difficulties of ethical action. Marlow describes Jewel's impossible demand to

know the essence of Jim as similar to wanting "the exact description of the form of a cloud" (Lord

Jim, p. 269). It is through just this sort of precise imprecision that Conrad extends those realistic

and naturalistic modes of fiction on which he founds his own work. In the same way, Conrad

announces the theme of heroism though the epigraph culled from Carlyle only to show that his pro?

tagonist desperately tries to fit his conduct into the heroic mould without definitive success. Heart

of Darkness, written just before Lord Jim, goes to the heart of the colonial ideal, only to find Kurtz

whispering, "The horror! The horror!" Similarly, Lord Jim explores heroism but finds at its heart

only the elusive character of Jim. The French lieutenant who boarded the drifting Patna echoes

the despairing repetition from Heart of Darkness when he exclaims to Marlow, "the honour ? the

honour, monsieur!" (Lord Jim, p. 152). The loss of honor is perhaps a nineteenth-century theme, but its treatment through the combination of acute psychological analysis with ethical and episte?

mological uncertainty marks this novel as a fitting overture to the twentieth century.

lord jim - conrad's fable of judgment

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