ABSTRACT
Introduction On the brink of the new century, in 1900, Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim sees the light: a story about lost honor and the attempt to win it back. Jim, a sailor with an honest appearance, embarks on a hardly seaworthy ship, the Patna, which is to transport several hundreds of pilgrims. In mid-voyage, when the ship takes in water and appears to be sinking, the crew decides to abandon ship – and the 600 or so sleeping pilgrims with it. Although Jim aspires to be a hero, “and live[s] the sea-life of light literature,” he also, in a moment of confusion, leaves the ship with the officers. They reach land – the pilgrims too. The ship miraculously stayed afloat, and when the pilgrims tell their side of the story this differs from the account provided by the crew: that the time and means were not there to do anything for their human cargo. The officers are able to steer clear of prosecution, but Jim is not. In fact, he does not want to flee, “from no man – from not a single man on earth.” The hearing attracts a lot of attention, and even in the remotest sea ports Jim is known as a man who broke the code of honor, as someone not to be trusted, as a man “with a soft spot.” After this episode, he becomes a trader in faraway Patusan, where he rises to a position of trust – he becomes Tuan (Lord) Jim – among the local population. His past haunts him when a pirating rogue, Brown – a man who is everything Jim does not want to be – refers to common ground between both of them when he asks Jim whether he himself does not understand that when “it came to saving one’s life in the dark, one didn’t care who else went – three, thirty, three hundred people.” Jim’s judgment errs again when he misapprehends Brown’s intentions, a mistake that costs the lives of some members of the local population. In an attempt to redeem himself, Jim this time chooses death; thus for a second time abandoning those who have put their trust in him. He has failed to see how the inlanders, including the wife he found among them, need him. In the words of the story’s narrator, Marlow, Jim went “away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct.” In Conrad’s novel, a lot of the virtues that militaries deem important are, sometimes by default, present: loyalty, courage, and, in abundance, honor. Yet
above all, it can be read as a tale about integrity: Jim’s acts are not those of the man he is in his own eyes, or wants to be. That failure to live up to his own high principles, and not his lack of courage per se, is his essential flaw. In a quintessentially “modern,” yet somewhat puzzling phrase, we could say he fails to be “loyal to himself.”
