ABSTRACT
This chapter shifts critical attention from the culturally entangled interpretive remembering process to the audience-storytelling (or reader-text) dynamic and its various impacts on the act of memory in Lord Jim . It will discuss how Marlow's audience – initially a group of smokers on a verandah in an Eastern port and then a privileged reader in London – and Conrad's targeted English readers influence the remembering and recounting of Jim's experiences. It also discusses how Conrad struggles to transgress the boundaries of text by opening up the remembering work to contemporary readers. He refuses to offer a definitive conclusion to Marlow's question that “was I so very wrong after all” at the end of the written letter. Through the discussion of how different communities shape the act of memory in this narrative, this chapter argues that the remembering of Jim's experiences turns into an imaginative cultural practice that continuously involves external interests, desires, and expectations. In other words, memory is not simply a process of searching for an authentic representation of the past.
