ABSTRACT
In the fourth chapter of Charles Dickens's David Copperfield (1850), the young protagonist is confined to his room as a punishment for not knowing his Latin grammar. I A contrast emerges between a painful experience oflanguage as an oppressive system of regulations and an escapist literary fantasy fixated on the figure of a ship's captain. This conjunction of themes anticipates the subject of Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim (1900). In David Copperfield, the linguistic failure ironically becomes the occasion of a literary reverie, one that restores the hero's dignity through his identification with a character that is above language and all its travails. Turning to Conrad's Lord Jim, we find a similar set of ambitions but a far less happy outcome. The story of Jim is that of a boy who grows up to live out his fantasies of heroism at sea, fantasies that had been nourished by 'the sea-life oflight literature'. 2 However, when his ship seems destined to sink during a storm, he joins his less conscientious crewmembers and abandons her, leaving eight hundred people to die. Jim finds the subsequent loss of dignity impossible to bear and during the inquiry that follows he becomes painfully aware ofthe inadequacy of language to express the real horror of what he had felt that night. Although he fails in his efforts to rehabilitate himself through words in the eyes of others, he partially recovers his honour in heroic action on the Malayan island ofPatusan. Finally, he pays the greatest price of all in order to keep a promise that he makes there. His self-imposed death at the novel's close attempts to bridge the gulf that his life has opened up between language and the world.
