Lord Jim in Around the World in 80 Books

Apr 30, 2010 Steve rated it it was amazing

Shelves: e-books, fiction, 2d-readings-the-good-stuff

I don’t know if there has ever been an out and out study of Conrad’s influence on T.S. Eliot, but I couldn’t help but feel, while reading Lord Jim that the influence goes beyond the footnote. The most famous is of course Eliot’s epigram from Heart of Darkness (“Mistah Kurtz -- he dead.”). (Lesser known is another Heart of Darkness epigram – before Pound waved it off – that got things rolling in “The Wasteland.”) However, buried deeper in the “Hollow Men” are the lines “Between the idea / And the I don’t know if there has ever been an out and out study of Conrad’s influence on T.S. Eliot, but I couldn’t help but feel, while reading Lord Jim that the influence goes beyond the footnote. The most famous is of course Eliot’s epigram from Heart of Darkness (“Mistah Kurtz -- he dead.”). (Lesser known is another Heart of Darkness epigram – before Pound waved it off – that got things rolling in “The Wasteland.”) However, buried deeper in the “Hollow Men” are the lines “Between the idea / And the Reality…/ Falls the Shadow.” These lines, which could come from a number of places (knowing Eliot) are so central to Lord Jim, and stated so prominently, that I’m certain Eliot had a copy squirreled away somewhere.

Jim is a romantic (much like Conrad must have been) who has dreams of the sea, and heroic ideas about himself. The “realities” Jim encounters will soon wreck these fixed assumptions, but Jim never abandons or adjusts his ideas regarding duty and obligation. No one is harder on Jim than Jim himself. This moral dilemma is pure Conrad, the kind of thing one encounters in a number of his stories and novels. Jim, in many ways, might be the perfect crystallization, in a character, of this dilemma (though an argument could be made for the darker Nostromo). Jim is Conrad’s flawed angel of light, his Billy Budd. It’s clear Conrad has much invested in him, so much so that plot mechanics seem secondary to the character. In fact, in my edition, before the start of the novel, Conrad says that, while believing an author should not favor (in public at least) one book more than another, he is not “grieved and annoyed by the preference some people give to my Lord Jim.” This is probably because Jim is the closest we will get to Conrad (who, as a young man, would attempt suicide) himself. Jim’s not a suicide, but he does want to lose himself after the shame of abandoning a ship full of pilgrims. This shame, this failure, creates an unbridgeable gulf in Jim. The resulting trial catches the eye of Marlow, who narrates Jim’s story.

But to say “narrates” is as simplistic as it gets. The storytelling weaves in and out, not following a linear path. Events are concealed or only partially revealed to the reader, as Marlow backs up, remembers, speculates, etc. All of this can get quite annoying – if you let it. For me, Conrad is a writer you should read aloud. He casts a spell, and at his best (and I would put Lord Jim among Conrad’s best), it’s a spell that will last. Little moments, such as a conversation with a French Lieutenant regarding Jim, struck me as modernist writing at its very best, pregnant with meaning, dense, in both image and word, as a poem. And yet, for all the misty musings, Conrad can be a writer of action. There are few writers I know that can so successfully muse over the tragic nature of man, and then write about shotgun duels on the beach. If you like that kind of range in your reading, Conrad’s your man.
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