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Pure Exercise of Imagination: Archetypal Symbolism in Lord Jim
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Extract
Although there is an obvious virtue in a plot which moves directly through time and space, the final justification of form is how well it conveys the author's theme, his vision of life. Conrad experimented with form: we must keep in mind his habitual refusal, beginning with Lord Jim, to follow a straight time sequence. In Lord Jim, Marlow the narrator is responsible for the complexity of time shifts which characterizes both the Patna and Patusan episodes. And the fact that the plot does break into two discrete actions makes the form of Lord Jim a special problem. Thematically, this break is compensated by a myriad of small parallelisms in action and image. While enlightening, the binding quality of such parallelisms (much noted by critics recently) goes only part way toward remedying the split. A more satisfactory approach to the problem is to assume that the two episodes represent the necessary embodiment of Conrad's conception. I would say that, in Lord Jim, Conrad came the closest he ever did in his attempt “to render the highest kind of justice” not only “to the visible universe” as he affirms in the Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” but also to the invisible universe within. In the same preface, Conrad asserts that “the artist descends within himself, and in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal.” And “his appeal is made ... to that part of our nature which . . . is . . . kept out of sight.” In Lord Jim, Conrad's aim and his triumph was to explore the world of the imagination more thoroughly than he had in Heart of Darkness or ever would again.
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- Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1964
References
1 P. 36 of the Rinehart edition, edited by Robert B. Heilman. Page references will hereafter be given in my text.
2 P. 182, “Well Done,” in Notes on Life and Letters, Medallion Edition of Conrad's works (same pagination as the Dent Uniform Edition).
3 The extent to which Conrad wished the telling of the story to form a psychic parallel to the action is indicated in one of the breaks in Marlow's narrative (at the beginning of Ch. xxxiv): “Marlow swung his legs out, got up quickly, and staggered a little, as though he had been set down after a rush through space. . . . Marlow looked at them all with the eyes of a man returning from the excessive remoteness of a dream” (p. 277).
4 Pp. 218–219, Symbols of Transformation, Harper Torchbooks. This two volume edition was printed from the same plates as the one-volume Bollingen edition. It is a revision Jung made in 1952 of the book he had originally written in 1912.
As indicated in n. 3, Marlow's sympathy with Jim often causes him to react as we imagine Jim has. In any case, one of his exchanges with Jewel presents a parallel with Jung's connection of mother, water, and emotions: “‘My mother had wept bitterly before she died,‘ she explained. An inconceivable calmness seemed to have risen from the ground around us, imperceptibly, like the still rise of a flood in the night, obliterating the familiar landmarks of emotions. There came upon me, as though I had felt myself losing my footing in the midst of waters, a sudden dread, the dread of the unknown depths” (p. 271).
5 P. 226, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters, Vol. i, ed. G. Jean-Aubry (New York, 1927).
6 “He is, as it were, only a dream of the mother, an ideal which she soon takes back into herself, as we can see from the Near Eastern ‘son-gods’ like Tammuz, Attis, Adonis, and Christ” (Transformation, p. 258).
7 P. 7, “Aion,” in Psyche and Symbol, a selection from the writing of Jung made by Violet S. de Laszlo for Anchor Books.
8 P. 270, “On the Psychology of the Trickster-Figure,” Vol. ix, Part i. of the Collected Works (London, 1959).
9 For an analysis of the sinister imagery frequently associated with Conrad's women, see Part ii of Thomas Moser's Joseph Conrad, Achievement and Decline (Cambridge, Mass., 1957), especially pp. 83–86. My own case will be that although Jewel's relation to her mother figures negatively, her relation to Jim is as positive as he will let it be.
10 Cf. Dorothy Van Ghent's treatment of this description, pp. 235–237. The English Novel, Form and Function (New York, 1953).
11 Ch. xxxiv ends with Cornelius' oft expressed, “No more than a little child.” Ch. xxxv ends with Marlow's being rowed out until Jim is “no bigger than a child.” Because of Jim's regression and rebirth, we have the paradox of the childish hero. Like Baldur he may be reluctant to leave his mother and grow to maturity.