Study Guide to Lord Jim and Other Works by Joseph Conrad

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645422914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Joseph Conrad, Polish-British writer known as one of the greatest novelists to write in the English language. As a master prose stylist of nineteenth and twentieth-century modernism, Conrad's works shaped and inspired English narrative fiction. Moreover, his novels' anti-heroic characters inspired many other authors. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Joseph Conrad's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&AsThe Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

INTRODUCTION TO JOSEPH CONRAD

 

TO THE READER

Nothing can take the place of the rich and rewarding experience of reading a truly great piece of literature. On the other hand, without certain basic information (a vocabulary and a frame of reference) the most intelligent reader will be handicapped; he will not be able to enjoy what is before his eyes. I have attempted to provide that vocabulary and that reference. The purpose of this book is to bridge the gap between the experience of the reader and the experience recorded by that romantic, enigmatic “sea dreamer,” Joseph Conrad.

The easiest error for a reader to make when he first approaches Conrad’s novels is to mistake them for adventure stories only. It is true that all of Conrad’s novels have exciting plots, filled with human interest, but they contain much more. To read Conrad for his plot only is to miss the greater part of the enjoyment and the significance that lies waiting in each of his novels. The sensitive reader is immediately struck with the wealth of descriptive detail and an abundance of figurative language, both of which are drawn from Conrad’s sea experience. Any consideration of Conrad’s novels, then, must include an examination of his descriptive and figurative language.

I have attempted to include in my summary at least the more important descriptions and figures, placing them in the context of the action of the novel, just as Conrad originally placed them. By this arrangement I hope to emphasize, as I believe Conrad was emphasizing, the importance of these figures to his works.

A second difficulty lies in Conrad’s novels - his deliberate ambiguity. Often, he refuses to have his characters agree on the meaning of an event or an idea. At the opening of Heart of Darkness Conrad says that Captain Marlow is about to tell one of his “inconclusive” tales, and he is right. Conrad is making a point with all of his deliberate ambiguity: the world around us is far less clear and precise than we would have it.

Conrad’s two eccentricities, his superabundant figurative language and his ambiguity, are joined in a single key image that occurs in all three of the stories I describe; this image is the shadow. Often the shadow is accompanied by such images as mist, fog, cloud, darkness, and blackness; and it is opposed by various images of light: candlelight, moonlight, sunlight, and lightning flashes. Through this central image, the shadow, Conrad comments on the world around him and on the people in it. If the world of light, daytime, and consciousness exists on the surface in Conrad’s thinking, then the world of darkness, ambiguity, and shadow exists beneath the surface, beneath the conscious level of things, exists in the subconscious itself.

Conrad had a deep understanding of men because of his extraordinary sensitivity. He carefully chooses believable motives for the actions of his characters; in this way he reveals his skill as a psychologist of behavior. When Conrad pushes beyond this kind of psychological thinking, however, when he explores the depths and shadows of the subconscious itself, he is thinking as an artist. So he uses the tools of an artist to tell of his discovery; Conrad discovered the shadows in each of us.

BIOGRAPHICAL INTRODUCTION

The important influences on Conrad’s character had been established by his seventh year. From his father he inherited a passionate, romantic nature; from his mother, delicate health. Both played an important part in his development as a writer. Had it not been for his poor health which prevented Conrad from continuing his career as a seaman, he might never have settled down to the long and laborious job of writing novels. The talents he inherited from his father now came into play.

EARLY YEARS

Conrad was born in Poland on November 21, 1857, but he spent much of his childhood in Russia. His father had been arrested for his patriotic activities in behalf of Polish independence by the Russian police who even then had political authority in Poland. In the summer of 1862, Conrad accompanied his parents into exile in northern Russia; he was then a boy of four. There his mother died of consumption when he was only seven, in April, 1865. Conrad and his father lived in grim retirement. His father, a talented man of letters, had for years been translating French and English authors into Polish. One of the translations, that of Victor Hugo’s The Toilers of the Sea, arrived when Conrad’s father was ill in bed. Conrad read the entire translation to his father from the galley proofs. It was his first experience with the sea. Conrad’s introduction to Shakespeare and English literature was also through one of his father’s translations. His father had been working on a translation of Shakespeare’s play, Two Gentlemen of Verona. Conrad read the translation in manuscript as it was being done, at first without his father’s knowledge, later with his permission. Conrad was only eight years old when he had these rich literary experiences.

Life in the north of Russia was not ideal for raising and educating a young boy. Although Conrad’s father found it difficult to part with his son, an only child, and his only remembrance of his dead wife, he did just that, sending Conrad to live with his maternal uncle, Thaddeus Bobrowski. Bobrowski was to become a second father to Conrad when Conrad’s own father died in March, 1869.

YOUTH

Meanwhile, Conrad’s father received permission to travel from his place of exile; for a few years he and his son lived in Poland, where Conrad attended school. After his father’s death, Conrad remained in Poland, shuttling from one school to another. At the age of fifteen, Conrad announced his ambition to go to sea. His biographer, Gerard Jean-Aubry, believes this ambition reflected Conrad’s desire to leave the stifling atmosphere of his school. Jean-Aubry’s theory is supported by Conrad’s rejection of the suggestion that he attend a naval academy in Pola, the academy of the Austrian Navy. Conrad preferred to begin immediately his life as a seaman, without further schooling. Clearly, Conrad wanted to leave the oppressive atmosphere of Poland, a country under the paw of the Russian bear, his schools, and his surroundings which reminded him of his dead parents.

It was about this time that the official attitude toward the revolution of 1863 was being revised. Now, the official attitude was that the revolution of 1863 had been a mistake. Conrad’s father had been placed in exile because of his suspected activities in that revolution. The rigors of exile brought a lonely childhood to Conrad himself and an early death to both his parents. Therefore it was difficult for Conrad to remain in a society that rejected the suffering and sacrifice of him and his parents.

Conrad’s Uncle Thaddeus attempted to dissuade him from going to sea, but Conrad remained firm. These incidents from his early years reflect significantly on his later years. As we shall see (in the biographical introduction to Lord Jim), Conrad was accused of disloyalty toward his native land when he achieved fame as a novelist in England. It seems obvious, however, that the real patriot would have been repelled by the official attitude in Poland in the 1870s, which attempted to reach a compromise with the Russian overlords and to deny the revolution of 1863. So Conrad, in October, 1874, left Warsaw for Marseilles; by the time he was seventeen he was launched on a career at sea, which would last twenty years.

CONRAD AT SEA

Just as his early years shaped Conrad’s mind and personality into that of a great artist, so the next twenty years provided the experience that he would use as the subjects of his novels: the East, the sea, colonialism in Africa. When he arrived in Marseilles, Conrad began to make friends. One of these friends, M. Delestang, owned two ships, the Mont-Blanc and the Saint-Antoine. Conrad shipped on the Mont-Blanc in 1875 for a trip to the West Indies. He spent six months on this voyage. In 1876 he shipped on the Saint-Antoine, again to the West Indies. Conrad may have been involved in some gun running while he was in the Caribbean this time. If so, this experience was a preclude to a new adventure - gun running along the Spanish coast for the Carlist forces. He sailed aboard a small ship named the Tremolino, making runs between Marseilles and the Spanish coast until one day the ship was forced ashore and was dashed to pieces against the rocks. Conrad was not yet twenty. He continued this life of adventure until 1894. The following year, his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, was published.

The reader will see the way Conrad used the material from his seafaring days in Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and The Secret Sharer in a later essay. He will see, from reading the bibliography at the end, that Conrad filled the years with many novels and tales until the end came in 1924.

INTRODUCTION

There is a lot of sense in studying Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness together. For one thing, they were written within a very short time of one another; in addition, Conrad planned to make Lord Jim the same length as Heart of Darkness, but once he was in the middle of his story he decided to lengthen it. The novels’ structures are also similar: Jim travels into one of the earth’s inaccessible spots and becomes a hero, while Kurtz, in Heart of Darkness, travels into one of the earth’s inaccessible spots and becomes a monster. In both stories Conrad introduces the character of Marlow, who does most of the work of narrating for Conrad. Heart of Darkness was written in 1898, and was very closely modeled after Conrad’s own experiences in the Congo, as we have seen. Lord Jim was begun in the following year and biographical information shows a revealing and touching parallel between the character Jim in the novel and Conrad himself.

Both Conrad and Jim bear a burden of guilt: Conrad for deserting his country, Jim for an act of cowardice. The external explanation of Jim’s problem is that in a moment of crisis, when he believed his ship was sinking beneath him, when his superiors in rank were taking to the life boats, Jim abandoned his ship and several hundred passengers for whom there was no room in the boats. The ship did not sink, however, and Jim’s momentary lack of courage became public knowledge; for the rest of his life, Jim lived with a terrible burden of guilt, and he attempted to atone for what he considered his horrible weakness.

Conrad also bore a brand upon his conscience for an abandonment of another kind: he was accused by his Polish countrymen of having deserted his fatherland. Conrad’s childhood was spent, in part, as a Polish exile in Russia. His father had become a political prisoner of the Russians, and his mother had died in Russia where she had gone to be with her husband. Later, Conrad lived in the Ukraine with his uncle, Thaddeus Bobrowski. He then went to school in Poland. Conrad left Poland at the age of seventeen to become an apprentice seaman on a French ship. Years later, his health broken by the time he spent in the Congo, Conrad settled in England to make his living as a writer. Does this story sound like the tale of a man who deserted his own country for success and easy fortune in a foreign land? Or does this story sound like that of a man who was forced to wander the face of the earth in search of his livelihood?

The Poles never claimed Conrad as their kinsman when he lay sick and penniless in London. However, when he finally achieved success, already middle - aged, his novel, An Outcast of the Islands, was translated into Polish and published in serial form in Warsaw. Conrad was loudly denounced by some as a deserter of his homeland, although greeted by faint praise in other quarters - Poles abroad could still serve the cause of Polish nationalism, it was claimed. The ugliness of such a charge, however unjust it was, made a deep impression on Conrad, and the memory of the event long lingered with him. When we read Lord Jim with this biographical information in mind, we can see how keenly aware Conrad himself was of the problem of lost honor and an overpowering sense of guilt.

Of course, no intelligent reader ever attempts to insist that what is essentially a work of fiction can be read as autobiography, nor does he commit the fallacy of confusing the words of Marlow, say, with those of Conrad, although they may happen to coincide sometimes. If Conrad had wanted to write an autobiography, he would have written it as such, and as a matter of fact he did (A Personal Record). The way to use this information, therefore, is cautiously, with an eye to discovering how Conrad worked as an artist, not how he lived as a man.

THE NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE OF LORD JIM

Conrad himself, in a preface to a later edition of Lord Jim, calls attention to the narrative method that he used and the objections that had been raised to it. The first four chapters are told by an impartial, omniscient, unidentified narrator. At the end of Chapter Four, Jim meets the gaze of Captain Marlow across the courtroom, an incident which provides the excuse for the impartial narrator to introduce Marlow to his readers. In those first four chapters, the narrator has given us the story of the Patna incident, and he has told us about Jim’s background: the home where he grew up, an English parsonage; his education aboard an English training ship; and his reason for being aboard the Patna, mostly by chance. In Chapter Five Marlow picks up Jim’s story, going back over the information that has been given in the first four chapters. He introduces an apparently incidental character, Captain Brierly, and tells his story. Toward the end of Chapter Six, Marlow now describes how he met Jim’s gaze across the courtroom; we are back where Captain Marlow entered the story, at the end of Chapter Four, but we have seen the Patna incident from a second viewpoint. This multiple-point of-view technique is extremely important to the way Conrad works. Now Marlow continues the narration of the story. As in Heart of Darkness, Marlow is among a gathering of friends seated on a porch (which I will call veranda I from now on) after dinner one evening. Over coffee, brandy, and after-dinner cigars, Marlow tells his tale. The narrative burden for the remainder of the story is now on Marlow. The first narrator intrudes occasionally to comment on the scene on the porch where Marlow is sitting, but for the most part we listen to Marlow’s voice for the next thirty-one chapters.

After Lord Jim was published, some critics foolishly objected to the length of Marlow’s narrative, saying that no man could say so much in a single evening, and what is more, no audience would listen for such a long time. Of course, such an objection is very much like saying that Shakespeare is a bad playwright because he has a character in his play Julius Caesar wearing a hat although the Romans never wore hats. In the preface to Lord Jim, Conrad laughingly pretends to answer such objections by pointing out that Marlow’s whole narrative could be read in three hours, whereas some Members of Parliament have been known to speak for six rather than three hours.

Marlow finishes his narrative at the end of Chapter Thirty-five. Now the fir...