ABSTRACT
The gist of this chapter is that Joseph Conrad's novel Lord Jim in effect reveals the preconditions for the emergence of the guilt/shame distinction – and that it also confounds it. Even before the distinction comes explicitly into existence, Conrad has intuited it and overthrown it. One of the ways in which it accomplishes this seemingly anachronistic feat is through its fascination with oral and written language. Therein lies another of the dualisms which the novel invokes and confounds. The way in which Conrad seems drawn to the possibility of collapsing opposites into each other – opposites such as the stories of the Patna and of Patusan – and suggested that this is one of the reasons why guilt and shame seem (albeit anachronistically and implicitly) to emerge as distinct and yet, in the end, collapse back into each other. Questions of guilt and shame come to be entangled with the relation between writing and speech.
