ABSTRACT
Serious earlier discussion of Lord Jim had appeared in Richard Curle, Joseph Conrad: A Study, Gustav Morf, The Polish Heritage of Joseph Conrad and Edward Crankshaw, Joseph Conrad: Some Aspects of the Art of the Novel. Jim is a Polish identity, and his story is told according to a theory of honour that is peculiarly European: a theory, ‘absolute, drastic, exalted’, that when honour is gone life is no longer worth living. To return for the moment to the way Lord Jim is seen by the writers who fall broadly under the umbrella of ‘humanism’: in Joseph Warren Beach’s early study, the chapter on ‘Impressionism: Conrad’ in The Twentieth Century Novel, Jim is seen as ‘perhaps the most vividly realized of all Conrad’s characters, subtle, paradoxical, obscure. In this view of the relationship between the modern novel and the contingent and relativist nature of modern reality, Lord Jim itself becomes the exemplary text.
