Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad

 Lo these many years I’ve avoided reading this book.  A dull, dusty paperback version of Lord Jim was always floating around our house when I was growing up.  The book could almost always be found sitting on the little bookshelf in the bathroom.  The type was dense and small and the pages were yellow and dry. I’d press the book shut as soon as I’d opened it and I was always opening it, trying to figure out what it was about, why it looked so boring, why that shadowy figure on the cover in black and red.

 Yet now, some decades later, the story has captured my imagination. 

 Jim had a dilemma. Jim escaped his dilemma in the second half of the book. Jim then found himself in another dilemma.  The resolution of his final dilemma was a bit recondite, but my interpretation is that he resolved his final dilemma in a manner directly opposite to the manner in which he resolved his first dilemma, with an act of self-sacrifice in the case of the final dilemma rather than an act of cowardice as in the case of his first dilemma.

 For Jim’s dilemma is indeed cowardice and the circumstances under which he commits his act of cowardice make for excellent reading and just a good story about pilgrims and voyages and shipwrecks in foreign seas. I loved the way Conrad used a narrator, Marlowe, to tell the story and I liked the dis-chronology Marlow—Conrad—used to tell us the story.  It kept me hopping, involved, made for a mystery-type of read.  The setting, 19^th century British colonialism amidst the remote islands of the Celebes Sea, the Java Sea, the Malay peninsula, the isle of Borneo and other places I had to look up on a map, also made the book intriguing.

 As for what the book is “really” all about, I don’t know.  The introduction of the edition I read (Everyman’s Library, 1992) had a somewhat helpful piece written by Norman Sherry, but there was nothing there that I could finally hang my hat on.  At times, Conrad seemed to want us to see a distinction between the romantic vision of the world that Jim had and a pragmatic vision of the world that opposed him.  To that I would add what I wrote about Heart of Darkness and the theme of civilization’s ability to tame the evil and wildness in the human soul. 

 This book demands to be read a second time if only for the story part of it.  Oh, and why did I read it in the first place, this dry, dusty paperback of my youth? Not being a student of literature,  I thought that maybe it was Conrad’s Lord Jim which had inspired Herman Wouk’s The Caine Mutiny.  There is a common thread in that both stories have the air of a psychological drama about them and include a cowardly act, but then again, Wouk’s book called to my mind everything from Conrad’s Lord Jim to Melville’s Moby Dick (Captain Queeg and Queequeg and ships and Pacific islands) and Billy Bud (a sailor who has a dilemma).

 See my notes on Joseph Conrad the person in my Heart of Darkness commentary.