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Under a cloud: Silence, Identity, and Interpretation in Lord Jim

DANIEL HANNAH

It is certain my Conviction gains innitely the moment another soul will believe in it (Lord ii)

The function of Lord Jims opening epigraph from Novalis is twofold: it immediately establishes the texts concern with intersubjective exchange and simultaneously places a gap between statement and narrative that invites the readers analytic involvement. The novel following this epigraph is chiey concerned with communications of convictions regarding Jims identity and the gaps or silences surrounding these communications. In the novels epistemological schema, the social silence of ones private, open-ended, and publicly inaccessible conception of oneself functions as an interpretive space. This gap invites others speculations about the self, speculations that open out aspects of the subject unavailable to the self but that also dene and, consequently, distort ones image in the public domain.1 Correspondingly, on an aesthetic level, Joseph Conrads novel, through its numerous levels of narration, examines the parallel silence of the author, removed from the text and subject to the reading publics interpolation. While in both cases, silence proves an inevitable barrier to understanding, the novel, building on the epigraphs communicative optimism, also suggests that silence in the social world may offer a space for interpretive agreement. Potential correlation between ones private and public selfconstructions, between the authors and readers versions of the text, can only be located in an uncertain, unnalizable exchange across silencea nod, a smile, an elliptical gap. In a characteristically Conradian move, Lord Jim opens out a space for the construction of meaning and identity in the destructive elementto use Steins famous formula from the center of the novelthat threatens to dissolve the possibility of intersubjective exchange (Lord 212).
Conradiana, vol. 40, no. 1, 2008 Texas Tech University Press

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By foregrounding a dualistic model of silence as both the realm of inaccessible, internal conceptions of the self and meaning and also the uncertain medium for both conrmation and negation of these constructs, I am seeking to call into question current critical paradigms concerning the ambivalent or paradoxical nature of silence in Conrads writing. In his recent work on Conradian language and narrative, Michael Greaney attests to Conrads ambivalent conception of silence and Lord Jims brilliant transvaluation of ideas of moral and narrative failure, in which embarrassing jumps, breaks, silences, gaps, and inconsistencies are transformed into the very language of modernist ction (5, 97). Similarly, Richard Pedot argues that Conrads paradoxical treatment of silence can be traced in Lord Jims dramatization of the enigma of rhetoric, its modernist awareness of the radical instability of (literary) language, an awareness of the nothing it is writing about (185, 194).2 For each of these critics, the tensions underpinning Conrads treatment of silence are ascribed to the contradictions and inconsistencies of ambivalence and paradox, the waverings of a writer on the uncertain cusps between Victorian realism and modernist experimentation. But Conradian silence, in which doubt and the exigency of interpretation go hand in hand, can, I would like to suggest, be more productively imagined through the lens of Schlegelian romantic irony. Anne Mellor denes romantic irony as a philosophical conception or artistic program in which the universe is perceived as chaos, a never-ending becoming, and in which the ironist strives to afrm and celebrate the process of life by creating new images and ideas in spite of an awareness of the inevitable limitations of his own nite consciousness and of all man-made structures or myths (45). Silence, in Lord Jim, occupies this chaotic, uncertain, yet afrmative space, and, furthermore, through the placement of crucial gaps in the narrative, Conrads novel insists on the readers involvement in this romantic-ironic exploration of silence. Readers are called on to ll the novels various layers of absence or structural silence: the central lack of details surrounding Jims crucial jump from the Patna; the gaps that mark transitions between different narrative voices (the third-person omniscient narrator, Marlow as storyteller, Jim as confessor, Marlow as letter-writer); the largely absent presence of Marlows auditors and addressees; and the ellipses and paralipses that punctuate Jims spoken and written stammerings.3 Thus, Lord Jim, preguring the work of Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, seeks, through such structural silences, to teach its readers to ght against language, invent stam-

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mering, to trace a line which will make language ow between [ . . . ] dualisms, between self and other, between author and reader (Dialogues 34). The opening four chapters of omniscient narration in Lord Jim immediately establish the novels concern with the borders between private and public identity and textuality. Here Jims heroic conviction that he is a man destined to shine in the midst of dangers is revealed and traced to his imaginative entrancement with the sea-life of light literature, a fascination that, paradoxically, isolates him from others and challenges the heroic merging of private and public identity he feels destined to act out (Lord 6). In the opening chapter, Jim is able to forget himself, to silence the babel of two hundred voices onboard a training ship, through his imaginary acts of heroism, in which he is always an example of devotion to duty and as uninching as a hero in a book (Lord 6). When he is awakened from this vision to an actual opportunity for public heroism, his imaginative vision of the storm as a brutal tumult of earth and sky, that seemed directed at him leaves him paralyzed: He stood still. It seemed to him he was whirled around (Lord 7). While Jim remains assured that when all men inched [ . . . ] he alone would know how to deal with the spurious menace of wind and seas, we soon learn that he rises to the position of chief mate without [him] ever having been tested by those events of the sea that show in the light of day the inner worth of a man, the edge of his temper, and the ber of his stuff (Lord 9, 10). It is in this context that readers are called to respond to his cry of pain concerning the chance missed in the Patna incident when Jim jumps from the supposedly sinking ship (Lord 83). Jims jumpa visible, narratable act unlike the earlier instance of frozen passivitysignals the irruption of an image of himself, at odds with his sense of heroic destiny, into the readable domain of the public. But the jumpwhich remains unnarrated and obscure for at least one hundred pagesalso foregrounds the unstable position of the reader in Conrads text. The opening images of Jim privately engulfed in light literature encourages readers to both reexively identify with Jim as a fellow reader and to assume an assured interpretive position, a sense of broad perspective in which only the omniscient narrator and reader participate in the protagonists heroic imaginative life hidden from public view (Lord 6). In the wake of the unnarrated jump, readers, like Jim, are forced to grapple with assumptions and speculation. Conrad goes on to contrast Marlow and Jim as author-gures in their responses to the audiences of their narra-

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tives: Jim operates as the monologic author, denying Marlow an active interpretive role in his narration of the Patna incident; in contrast, Marlow, like Conrad, seeks an active dialogue with his audience, inviting his listeners and later one privileged reader to ll in the gaps (Lord 338). Crucially, Jims passage, in these opening chapters, from isolated reader to interpretable text, is marked by a clash between concepts of silence as a source of certain afrmation and as a center of uncertain speculation. The descriptions of Jims devotion to the success of his imaginary achievements climax on the eve of the collision: They were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality (Lord 20). This hidden reality detaches him imaginatively and, he assumes, morally from the increasingly agitated skipper and rst-mate: The quality of these men did not matter; he rubbed shoulders with them, but they did not touch him; he shared the air they breathed, but he was different (Lord 2425). Conrad symbolically links Jims condence in the legitimacy of his imaginary heroics with the security he perceives in the silent sea. On the night of the Patnas collision, Jim is penetrated by the great certitude of unbounded safety and peace that could be read in the silent aspect of nature, and in the serenity of the night, his soul becomes drunk with the divine philter of an unbounded condence in itself (Lord 17, 20, emphasis added). The security of the sea is disturbed by the jolt of the Patnas collision as the silent aspect of nature becomes a source of vague danger: They could not understand; and suddenly the calm sea, the sky without a cloud, appeared formidably insecure in their immobility, as if poised on the brow of yawning destruction (Lord 26). The unbounded silence of the sea, now poised and insecure, heralds the uncertainties that are to be raised with relation to Jims silent private self by the Patna incident. Much like Kirylo Sidorovitch Razumovs progression in Under Western Eyes, Jims self-conception moves from a silent unbounded sense of potential achievement to a constricted awareness of his public interpretability, of the (mis)readability of his silent self (Lord 20). But the novels sudden shift from an omniscient to a limited perspective also raises the possibility of an unbounded version of Jim silenced beyond the narratives borders (Lord 20). As the novel moves into a rstperson oral narrative addressed to a singular audience, representative of the many times, in distant parts of the world, Marlow showed himself willing to remember Jim, the readers role in lling these silences becomes intrinsically linked to the novels interrogation of private and public identity (Lord 33).

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Jims uncertain positioning between language and silence becomes the focus of the courtroom in chapter 4, the chapter in which Marlow enters the novel as an observer at the Patna inquiry. Jim attempts to tell honestly the truth of this experience in response to questions [that] were aiming at facts (Lord 28). These questions, however, also come to him poignant and silent like the terrible questioning of ones conscience (Lord 28). Thus, Jims answers respond to two audiences: one that aims at attaining supposedly objective truths about the incident and one that internally interrogates his subjective experience. In court, he is anxious for his audience to understand that the incident was composed of both facts, which were visible, tangible, open to the senses, occupying their place in space and time, and something else besides, something invisible, a directing spirit of perdition that dwelt within, like a malevolent soul in a detestable body (Lord 3031). But the legal realm of facts is also the realm of language, where words must illuminate inexpressibility and silence (Lord 28). Thus, Jims answers appear very loud, as if they are the only sound audible in the world (Lord 28). While he is initially revolted by the prospect of translating the incident into language, he come[s] round to the view that an accurate translation is possible: only a meticulous precision of statement would bring out the true horror behind the appalling face of things. [ . . . ] He wanted to go on talking for truths sake, perhaps for his own sake also (Lord 3031). In court, however, Jims efforts are frustrated by leading questions in which he is checked brutally and forced to answer by yes or no (Lord 31). Marlow, in contrast, appears to offer a sense of extralinguistic identication, as Jim nds in his eyes not the fascinated stare of the others but an act of intelligent volition that seems to access his silent, incoherent, and endless converse with himself (Lord 3233). Recalling the intersubjective exchange of the epigraph, Jims conviction that speech was of no use to him any longer is conrmed by the impression that Marlow seemed to be aware of his hopeless difculty and, in turn, this conrmation leads Jim to turn away resolutely (Lord 33). By making this extralinguistic conrmation of linguistic redundancy, this silent afrming of silence, the founding moment for Jim and Marlow, Conrad ironically undercuts subsequent efforts to convert such understanding into a verbal dialogue. In a revealing simile, the narrator likens this rst glance to a nal parting, alluding to the irredeemable nature of such prelinguistic communication and preguring the disruptive effect that language will bring to their rst verbal meeting (Lord 33). Ironically, the description of

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Marlows silent gaze also pregures his eventual unwillingness to return Jims romantic self-construction as he looks at [him] as though he could see somebody or something past [his] shoulder (Lord 33). In chapter 6, Jim confronts Marlow for having called him a cur, a misinterpretation caused by his overhearing an isolated word, cut off from the context of the speaker, the addressee, and the intention (Lord 46). In the Malabar interview, Jims return to this initial confusion, acknowledging how he made a confounded ass of [himself] but emphasizing that such an admission does not mean [he] admit[s] for a moment the cap tted, further demonstrates his insistent denial of a dialogic context for his speech (Lord 81). Correspondingly, in the interview itself, the fact that Marlow is not in a merciful mood does not deter Jim in his lengthy, monologic account: on two occasions Marlow launches ironic arrows in Jims direction, sarcastically questioning truths in the narrative, and on both occasions the perdious shaft[s] land unnoticed (Lord 84). Similarly, Jim seeks to dictate the nature of his audiences responses, frequently insisting on Marlows belief: Dont you believe me? he cried. I swear! [ . . . ] Confound it! You got me here to talk, and [ . . . ] You must! [ . . . ] You said you would believe!; Youve got to believe that too; You doubt me? [ . . . ] How do you know how I felt? [ . . . ] What right have you to doubt? (Lord 13031; 132; 135). Jims neglect of actual audience response and his underlying construction of an ideal third-person listener (what Mikhail Bakhtin, in his late writing, refers to as a superaddressee4) give his narrative the characteristics of a confessional monologue rather than the dialogue required for his social self-construction. With regards to his elusive jump from the Patna, Jims monologic, as opposed to Marlows dialogic, stance leaves the interviewer and interviewee facing across opposed gulfs of silence.5 While Jim can recall in detail the incidents preceding and following his jump from the Patna, he narrates the jump itself as an action of peculiar passivity, leaving the crucial moment and its signicance in relation to his private self shrouded in incommunicable silence. Just as the thirdperson narration moves from description of the collision to that of the legal postmortem, Jims narrative moves from description of the pressure placed on him to jump to a recognition of the fact that he had jumped as if it were the action of another person: I had jumped [ . . . ] It seems (111). As Frederic Jameson notes [t]here is no present tense of the act [Jims jump], we are forever before or after it, in past or future tenses, at the stage of the project or the consequences (264). In nar-

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rating the aftermath of this impulsive jump, Marlow imagines Jims impenetrable internal dialogue on the boat as he tried to explain it away to the only man who was capable of appreciating all its tremendous magnitude (Lord 82). As Marlow notes, only Jim is capable of completely understanding the silent actions of his impulses, and the description of physical isolation on the lifeboat mirrors the isolation he senses in Jims confession. The silence of these central actions, however, also encourages Marlows active interpretive involvement in the narration of Jims story. While Jim fails to name the impulses that led to the jump, he is condent in the uncharacteristic quality of that action: He didnt know. It had happened somehow. It would never happen again (Lord 111). In opposition, Marlows attempts to speak out about Jim question the depth of his self-knowledge, suggesting that external observers might offer a greater understanding of the signicance of the actions on board the Patna (Lord 33). In his oral and later written narratives, in his interviews with the French Lieutenant, Stein, and Jewel, Marlow tests his observations of Jim through dialogues that always hover around uncertain silence. Narrating his rst encounter with Jim, Marlow claims that years of enlisting sailors had led him to trust his instinctive identication with characters similar to his own: I liked his appearance; I knew his appearance; he came from the right place; he was one of us (Lord 43). Through the choruslike return of the phrase he was one of us, Marlow launches an appeal to, in Stanley Fishs terms, an interpretive community capable of returning his tentative version of Jim, willing to silently assent to the communal label (Lord 43). But as Fish notes, the bonds uniting an interpretive community are unnalizable and forged through an uncertain interpretation of others: The only proof of membership is fellowship, the nod of recognition from someone in the same community, someone who says to you what neither of us could ever prove to a third party: we know (173). Marlows appeals to an interpretive us bring the unstable, often inexpressible, ties between author and reader to the foreground of Conrads text (Lord 43). Determining the membership of Marlows us has, however, proved a source of critical contention. J. Hillis Miller and Suresh Raval emphasize the terms colonial British and ethnic underpinnings; Jacques Berthoud and Robert Hampson identify the group with a code of seamanship; and Thomas Moser and John Batchelor contend that the exact nature of the group addressed through the phrase seems to alter throughout the text, suggesting that classication of the groups mem-

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bership is beyond the point as the novel opens the us up to the inscription of Conrads readership in the text (27; 57; 65; 124; 1112; Lord 87). While this nal point is important, Batchelors and Mosers arguments still beg the question about the grounds of the readers identication with Marlow. Marlows us initially appears to encompass those whose very existence is based upon honest faith, and upon the instinct of courage but Jims involvement in the Patna incident destabilizes Marlows interpretive condence in this grouping as he nds himself seeking, for Jim, some convincing shadow of an excuse (Lord 43, 50). The phrase one of us registers, then, Marlows movement between identication with and detachment from Jim; at the same time, the phrase draws together a membership based more on silent, instinctive recognitions than any qualication of its prerequisites (honest faith, courage) (Lord 43). Marlow, as we shall see, shores up the uncertainties that plague this grouping and enlists the interpretive alignment of his audience by making silent uncertainty a dening feature of Jims career, and by imbuing that silent uncertainty with his own sense of instinctive identication and moral, critical detachment. In his account of Jims confessions, Marlow acknowledges unuttered truths and claims it is his ability to ll these gaps that qualies him as a suitable audience: I would have been little tted for the reception of his condences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses between the words (Lord 105). Accordingly, he tests his audiences participation in the exclusive group of us by repeatedly appealing for similar readings of silent gaps in his own narrative: I dont pretend to explain the reasons of my desireI dont think I could; if you havent got a sort of notion by this time, then I must have been very obscure in my narrative, or you too sleepy to seize upon the sense of my words; I suppose you will understand that by that time I could not think of washing my hands of him (Lord 152, 152, 200). Underpinning this narrative of Marlows silent attachment to Jim and the ideal readers silent recognition of that relation is Marlows notion of a bond of uncertainty that draws him into Jims story: it seemed to me that the less I understood the more I was bound to him in the name of that doubt which is the inseparable part of our knowledge (Lord 221). While recognizing the doubts underlying his own narrative, Marlow suggests these only replicate the subjects lack of self-awareness: He was notif I may say soclear to me. He was not clear. And there is a suspicion he was not clear to himself either (Lord 177). Despite acknowledging the uncertainties surrounding Jims case, Marlow still questions the gen-

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uineness of Jims vow not to shirk his role in the Patna incident: the idea obtrudes itself that he made so much of his disgrace while it is the guilt alone that matters (Lord 154, 177). Thus, despite keeping speculative uncertainty in play, claiming he could never make up his mind about whether [Jims] line of conduct amounted to shirking his ghost or facing him out, Marlow implies Jims responses are more cowardly than heroic when he cautiously introduces an abbreviated title for this line of conduct: This was the worst incident of all in hishis retreat (Lord 197, 200). The dialogues with the French Lieutenant and Stein form crucial test cases in Marlows quest for an audience that will understand the pauses between the words in his narrative (Lord 105). Marlows encounter with the French Lieutenant is initially a source of active and afrmative intercourse. Julian Ferarro notes how the comparison of the Lieutenant to a snuffy quiet village priest and the description of his devout and priest-like concentration parallel the Frenchman with Marlow as confessor in the Malabar interview (89). Whereas Jim, however, assumes Marlow will adopt a passive, receptive role in the formation of his narrative, Marlow recognizes that, in spite of his apparent passivity, the Lieutenant is highly active in the reception and formation of their dialogue: he, in his occult way, managed to make his immobility appear profoundly responsive, and as full of valuable thoughts as an egg is of meat (Lord 145). Marlow informs the Frenchman of what had interested [him] most in this affair (Lord 144). In return, the Lieutenants response, sest enfui avec les autres [ed with the others], is a concrete revelation of Marlows suspicions concerning Jims ight: He had made out the point at once: he did get hold of the only thing I cared about (Lord 145). The Lieutenant sees Jims case as symptomatic of fears in the hearts of all humans: One is always afraid. One may talk, but [ . . . t]he fear, the fearlook youit is always there (Lord 146). This generalization appears to denitively conrm both Marlows sense of personal involvement in Jims case and his belief in the youths latent cowardice: I felt as if I was taking professional opinion on the case. His imperturbable and mature calmness was that of an expert in possession of the facts, and to whom ones perplexities are mere childs-play (Lord 14546). Ultimately, however, individualized silence destabilizes Marlows and the Lieutenants moves toward a communal interpretation of Jim. The Lieutenant conrms Marlows hopes for Jim when he states that one may get on knowing very well that ones courage does not come of itself: he claims courage comes from habitnecessity [ . . . ] the eyes

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of others and not from the latent heroism of which Jim is convinced (Lord 148). He then goes on, however, to note that the case when the honor is gone is beyond his own experience and, consequently, beyond his capacity for interpretation: I can offer no opinion becausemonsieurI know nothing of it (Lord 148). Marlow describes this interpretive stumbling block as the extinction of their common language: The blight of futility that lies in wait for mens speeches had fallen upon our conversation, and made it a thing of empty sounds (Lord 148). The dialogue, thus, concludes by acknowledging the subjectied silences that divide participants in any conversation concerning personal experience. While Stein, like the French Lieutenant, appears to offer a denitive professional opinion resembling a medical consultation, his diagnosis also offers Marlow a silence suggesting a potential space for conrming and sharing his convictions about Jim (Lord 212). Stein accounts for Jims romantic dilemma and offers what seems a contradictory solution of submitting to a destructive element for salvation:
A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people Endeavour to do, he drownsnicht wahr? [is it not so?] [ . . . ] No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.6 (Lord 212, 214)

Stein, through this oceanic metaphor, advocates a mediatory stance recognizing the strained coexistence of ones private and public identity. He suggests that all men fall into a dream of private self-realization at birth (Lord 214). Inexperienced people, or romantics like Jim, drown by trying to climb out into the air, thereby seeking to realize their dream in the alien environment of the social world, seeking the impossible revelation of ones private self in the realm of the other (Lord 214). Since mere mortals cannot walk on water, the impossible task of pulling oneself out of the necessarily isolated realm of ones internal conception results in exhaustion and eventual drowning in that lonely element. While Steins advice uses the ocean and the air to represent the split between private and public identity, what few critics have recognized is that he espouses not a choice between but interaction between these two elements. Instead of climbing out one must submit to the deep, deep sea but one must also kick ones feet to stay aoat (Lord

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214). Thus, the sea is both the source of ones life and a potentially destructive element (Lord 214). In the spirit of romantic irony, one must recognize the destructive or ctional nature of the dream while at the same time using it to keep ones head aoat, so that the air of the social world can still keep one alive (Lord 214). Steins initially condent reading of Jim is fostered in the unformed shadows of words and is destabilized by a shift from silence into nalizing language, from darkness into light: his twitching lips uttered no word, and the austere exaltation of a certitude seen in the dusk vanished from his face [ . . . ]. The light had destroyed the assurance which had inspired him in the distant shadows (Lord 214). He regretfully admits that his wish to communicate his intensely personal response to Jims story is inspired by his familiarity with the silence of solitude: There were things, he said mournfully, that perhaps could never be told, only he had lived so much alone that sometimes he forgot (Lord 214). While this slide into subjective silence recalls the empty sounds that closed Marlows interview with the French Lieutenant, the dialogue with Stein also points toward a more afrmative instance of communal silence (Lord 148). In answer to Marlows questioning of his romantic diagnosis of Jim, Stein appeals to connections between Jims private self-conception and their separate appraisals of him: What is it that by inward pain makes him know himself? What is it that for you and me makes himexist? (Lord 216). Here Marlow locates a silent conrmation of Jims imperishable reality (Lord 216). While Jims identity is silenced by the clashing claims of life and death in a material world, Steins recognition of Jims romantic core, of his delusive desire to make himself known to himself and others, brings home his existence for Marlow with an irresistible force! (Lord 216). This conrmation of Steins whispered conviction is, like the bond between Marlow and Jim, founded in silent uncertaintyits truth oats elusive, obscure, half-submerged, in the silent still waters of mystery (Lord 215, 216). This conrmation takes place as they are passing by distant mirrors in lofty silent rooms amongst eeting gleams of light and the sudden revelations of human gures stealing with ickering ames within unfathomable and pellucid depths (Lord 216). By extension, Marlow, as romantic-ironic narrator, hopes he and his readers will also gain sudden revelations of the depths of Jims character while recognizing the ongoing tension between seeing and not seeing in depths that are both unfathomable and pellucid (Lord 216). It has become critical commonplace to note the uneven narrative

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structure of Lord Jim, its shift from an interior, existential modernist work to a romantic, melodramatic, colonial romp. The shift of the novel to the ctional territory of Patusan has commonly been aligned with a movement from ambiguity to disconcertingly nave realism. Such a shift might seem to suggest a refutation of the romantic-ironic silence I have been locating at the center of Marlows narrative venture. Along these lines, Stephen Barza suggests that the Patusan sections narrative simplicity is accompanied by an apparently incoherent move in Marlows voice towards suddenly authoritarian, purposeful, manipulative interpretation (Lord 227). More recently, John H. Stape contends that the narrative in fact remains torn between Marlows insistence on the obscurity and doubt surrounding his image of Jim and the Patusan sections rhetoric which increasingly enjoins, perhaps even constrains, the reader to regard Jim [ . . . ] in almost unabashedly heroic terms (53). In a strange way, Barza and Stape are both right. Marlow does appear to move toward a more authoritative tone, as when he begins this half of his tale by stating I afrm he had achieved greatness (Lord 225). The greatness that Marlow afrms, however, is ironically revealed as a covert reference to Jims continuing conviction that he can successfully reveal his private self in the public domain, a greatness that remains blind to the silent instability of his newfound social appreciation (Lord 225). While Marlows tone appears less speculative and more domineering in this section, the heroic rhetoric recounting Jims career in Patusan involves a silencing of uncertainties previously on the surface of the narrative in an appeal to the ideal readers more active unpicking of Marlows irony. Thus, the afrmation of Jims greatness is accompanied by a justication of the tales newfound simplicity and brevity: Frankly, it is not my words that I mistrust but your minds (Lord 225). Marlows words in the nal section of this novel issue a challenge to the minds that he will trust, the us that he hopes will conrm his romantic-ironic account of Jims tragic fate (Lord 225, 43). Jims relationship with Jewel in Patusan becomes, for Marlow, representative of the isolating silence that continues to mark out Jims social existence, his ongoing secret desire for an impossible bridging of his private and public selves. Jewel becomes Jims ideal ear in Patusan, and Marlow refers to their love in terms of the most intimate social communion between two people: she lived so completely in his contemplation that she had acquired something of his outward aspect and their conversation is like a self-communion of one being carried on in

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two tones (Lord 283, 284). In a private meeting with Jewel, however, Marlow realizes a communicative gulf that separates the pair. Jewel mistrusts Jims silences concerning his life in the West: she recognizes [t]here is something he can never forget and she beseeches Marlow to inform her: What is it? What is it? (Lord 314, 315). It is this call for a simple nalized answer for what Marlow believes is an unnalizable trait that convinces Marlow of the pairs tragic destiny: They had mastered their fates. They were tragic (Lord 316). In Marlows eyes, Jims hopes for social realization of his complete heroic self is frustrated by the alienation he retains in his memory of the Patna incident. Earlier in the novel, at the conclusion of Jims narrative concerning his heroic exploits in the East, Marlow is faced with the notion that he seemed to have come very near at last to mastering his fate (Lord 274). Initially, this phrase reads as shorthand for the aim of social self-realization: a mastering of ones inner identity in the social realm of fate. Jims admission that he is nearly satised nally conrms the issue for Marlow: Nothing mattered, since I had made up my mind that Jim, for whom alone I cared, had at last mastered his fate (Lord 324). However, this comment is, in fact, double-edged: Jims state is at once a target for envy and a catastrophe (Lord 325). Marlow envies the freedom and sense of fulllment Jim nds in his delusional sense of social self-realization. But he also recognizes that such delusion only masks an impending catastrophe as the foundation of such selfbelief will inevitably shatter in a world in which others are ultimately incomprehensible, wavering and misty (Lord 180). It is the constant state of near satisfaction, the realization that, in spite of the isolation of Patusan, Jim can never completely satisfy his desire to overcome the apparent cowardice of his actions on the Patna, which Marlow recognizes when he claims his realization that Jim has tragically mastered his fate (Lord 324). The foreshortened references to the delusional nature of Jims greatness, once again, tests the audiences interpretive alignment with the narrator through the creation of an esoteric language (Lord 225). Jims isolated career in Patusan, however, also poses further challenges to Marlows interpretive project. In seeking to explain Jims isolation from the West to Jewel, Marlow ambiguously states he is not good enough (Lord 318). He then learns that this is exactly what Jim has already informed her. This admission, however, lacks the evidence necessary to determine Jims intentions: it is a subtle echo of the word cur in the initial confrontation with Jim, a phrase divested of its dia-

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logic context (Lord 46). Consequently, Jim continues to occupy uncertain space between a confession of guilt and a divulgence of social disgrace: For my part, I cannot say what I believedindeed I dont know to this day and never shall probably. But what did the poor devil believe himself? (Lord 320). As Marlow notes, language is incapable of revealing the silent truths that may or may not underpin their words: Both of us had said the very same thing. Did we both speak the truth or one of us didor neither? (Lord 320). Here, in altered form, the choruslike return of the phrase one of us signals not a moment of simple identication but an instance in which the borders between truth and lie, self and other, become blurred (Lord 320). The silences undermining social identity-construction are most pronounced in Marlows epistolary account of Jims nal days. This concluding section of the novel offers Conrads clearest metatextual commentary on the parallels between author-reader and self-other intersubjective exchanges. In the Malabar interview, Jim seeks to enlist an ideal audience for his social self by denying Marlow his interpretive freedom. In his oral narrative, Marlow also seeks to enlist an ideal audience but does so by engaging in active dialogue with his listeners. The shift from Marlows oral narrative to his correspondence with the privileged mana shift echoed in the nal sections of other Conrad novels, notably Nostromo and Victoryinvolves a narrowing of audience that at rst seems to reemphasize the narrators quest for an elite interpretive community: the privileged man is the only person to have showed an interest in him that survived the telling of his story (Lord 338).7 But the entry of the privileged man as intended reader also foregrounds the potentially disruptive presence of resistant readers outside the bounds of Marlows interpretive community. The written narrative of this section tells the story of Browns disruptive entry into Patusan as a reminder of Jims repressed, silent past, his lack of authority over his public self. On a parallel level, the arrival of the privileged man as reader evinces Conrads awareness of his lack of control over the receptivity of his readers in spite of the texts inherent interpretive codes and strategies. Critics have tended to overlook Conrads moderately ironic representation of the privileged man as a precarious, limited reader of a fragmented text, a representation crucial to accounting for the silences that permeate the novels closing section. Marlows opening written address is the most prominent example of a recorded dialogue between narrator and audience in the novel and it instantly establishes that dia-

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logue as founded on misinterpretation. Marlow recalls how his reader would not admit [Jim] had mastered his fate and then reveals how the privileged man had misinterpreted his own tragic formulation of that phrase when he prophesied as an alternative fate, the disaster of weariness and of disgust with acquired honor, with the selfappointed task, with the love sprung from pity and youth (Lord 338). Marlow then outlines his readers racial prejudice, his belief in the need for a rm conviction in the truth of ideas racially our own, but stresses that such contentions are beside the point of his tale: [t]he point, however, is that of all mankind Jim had no dealings but with himself, and the question is whether at the last he had not confessed to a faith mightier than the laws of order and progress (Lord 339). But even when Marlow goes so far as to predict the privileged man[s] empty conclusions on his letterI afrm nothing. Perhaps you may pronounceafter youve readthis prediction contains within it an acknowledgment of the resistance to outright afrmation that his romantic-ironic narrative attempts to maintain (Lord 339). In each of these instances, Conrad stresses both the unsuitability of Marlows audience and the potential for agreement, albeit unwittingly, in spite of these impediments. Richard Ambrosini argues that the privileged mans disparagement of Jims achievements allows Conrad to attack the possible hostility to the news of the defeat of Marlows illusions he can expect from the larger audience (Lord 181). What I am suggesting here is that this rearguard action can be read as part of the novels wider concern with a romantic-ironic perspective that seeks to modulate opposing opinions in the silent uncertainty of its narrative venture. The letter to the privileged man outlines the multiple roles that silence will nally play in the external construction of Jim as an existing person and as a ctional character (Lord 339). The letter makes reference to three varied instances of silence in writing. First, Marlow refers to the attached fragments of Jims nal attempts at self-expression both of which subside into aposiopesis. In spite of this textual gap, Marlow condently concludes that Jim had seen a broad gulf that neither eye nor voice could span [ . . . ]. He was overwhelmed by the inexplicable; he was overwhelmed by his own personality (Lord 341). By lling in the textual gap with an interpretation of linguistic extinction, Marlow recalls the nature of the rst silent contact of the pair and again alerts the reader to the potential for silent communications through shared experience. While Marlows elect reader may be the only member of Marlows audience who was ever to hear the last words of the story,

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readers of Conrads narrative immediately revoke this claim as witnesses to Marlows last words and to the story containing the privileged man as an ironically presented character (Lord 337, 339). The reintroduction of the omniscient narrator in this chapter and the subsequent silence of this narrative frame at the conclusion of Marlows writing become a structural replication of such aposiopesis. Conrads readers must conclude the novel with their own framing judgment of Jim if Marlows narrative is to move from fragmentation to closure. Yet because Marlows interpretation of the written fragments depicts Jim being overwhelmed by his own personality, this silent communication also invokes the void upon which the romantic-ironic narrator founds his interpretation (Lord 341). The second example of silence in writing comes in the reference to the letter from Jims father, a letter which Jim never answered but which, Marlow notes, may have been the source of the sons unrecorded converse with all these placid, colorless forms of men and women peopling that quiet corner of the world (Lord 342). Here Marlow suggests a silent conversation with an absent home, an ongoing familial side to Jims existence that remains largely outside the bounds of the narrative. This silent aspect is further shrouded in uncertainty by Marlows increased detachment from his subject and the readers consequent removal from the exact dialogic context of the letter. Unlike the dialogues with the Lieutenant and Stein, Marlow is no longer in the position of eyewitness and his sources are no longer sympathetic to Jims cause. Consequently, Marlow doubts the clarity of any picture constructed in this nal narrative: It is impossible to see him clearly especially as it is through the eyes of others that we take our last look at him (Lord 339). Conrads general readership is also alerted, through this example, to the parallel possibility of more private interchanges between Marlow and the privileged man outside the text. Batchelor argues that the dramatic atness of the nal section of the novel is a consequence of Marlow simplifying his narrative for the originally serialized novels readership through Blackwoods, for the understanding of the privileged man who has the conventional white imperialist attitudes of the day (Introduction xxi). The letters allusion to unnarrated relations between Jim and his father, between Marlow and the privileged man, alerts the reader to the silent uncertainty surrounding the private, unwritten dimensions of text in general. Marlow closes the letter by invoking the silent, constant presence of Jims unwritten self-narrative: He has conded so much in me that at

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times it seems as though he must come in presently and tell the story in his own words (Lord 343). This is that account of the private self after which his tale strives and which the distorting medium of language would ultimately have relayed as one of those glimpses of his very own self that were never any good for purposes of orientation (Lord 343). Thus, the third and nal example of silence in writing addresses the existence of truth beyond language, not like the truth of the silence that engulfed Jims fragments but which could be translated by Marlow into words. In the nal section of this article, I show how readers are called on to respond to the closure of Marlows written narrative, and to the nal motions of Jims social self-construction, through an awareness of these interrelated claims on silences. Preguring the conclusion of the novel, Marlows incomplete oral narrative closes with an appeal to the audience concerning Jims relation to the veiled opportunity that had driven him from the West and into the East: still veiled. What do you say? Was it still veiled? I dont know (Lord 336). Following this question, the narrator notes how the audience remained silent, concealing the nature of their response: Each of them seemed to carry away his own impression, to carry it away with him like a secret (Lord 337). The narrator reects that such a response may stem from the storys lack of closure: as if the last image of that incomplete story, its incompleteness itself, and the very tone of the speaker, had made discussion vain and comment impossible (Lord 337). The conclusion to Marlows written narrative replicates this situation but emphasizes that, in spite of the protagonists death, closure ultimately lies in the response of the reader. The difculty for Marlow, as for Conrad the author, is that any responses will inevitably be played out in the uncertain silence that greets a solitary writer. The novel ends by invoking once more the doubt that binds Marlow to Jim and that undercuts Jims hopes for social self-realization.8 Fittingly, the nal sentence nds Stein preparing for death, wav[ing] his hand sadly at his butteries (Lord 417). Just as the initial silent contact between Marlow and Jim ended with the resolution of a nal parting, Marlows narrative ends with a nal farewell to the one character with whom he shared an understanding of Jim, the character whose advice stands as the key passage advocating romantic irony in the novel (Lord 33). As the nal sentence consigns Stein to a silent death, Marlow relinquishes his private control of the text, passing it on to the privileged man with an uncertain appeal for conrmation. In the silence of death that closes Lord Jim, Marlow, in the spirit of romantic irony, continues to

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afrm Jims lack of self-knowledge while acknowledging the abyss of unnalizable silence on which that judgment is constructed. Conrad symbolically indicates the impenetrable nature of Jims nal moments as he dies with his hand over his lips, leaving a gap that both invites interpretation and denies complete knowledge of the subject (Lord 416). In death Jim attains the comfort of a silence that cannot deny his hopes of a convergence of his private and public identities. While Marlow acknowledges his subject is ultimately inscrutable at heart, he forges through these appeals, through the ironic references to Jims satisfaction and greatness, a condemnation of Jim for his inability to recognize similar uncertainty in his own project of social self-construction (Lord 416, 225). Marlow recalls how at their nal meeting Jim had wanted him to convey a message to the West but had nally decided to send nothing (Lord 340). Silence also pervades Jims nal actions in Patusan, denying both Marlows and Jims desire for concrete, denitive constructions of his social identity. Marlow highlights the interpretive nature of Jims story and the potential for dispersed individual responses: there shall be no message, unless such as each of us can interpret for himself from the language of facts, that are so often more enigmatic than the craftiest arrangement of words (Lord 340). Thus, Jims hopes for a social selfrealization capable of overcoming the persistent fact of his involvement in the Patna episode are undermined by the representation of his nal days in the language of facts (Lord 340). Similarly, the impenetrable silence of Jims death undercuts Marlows investigation of Jims moral self-awareness. Through Marlows approach to Jim, Conrad emphasizes how external constructions of identity involve the ctional nalization, or lling in, of silences at the source of personal identity. Through Marlows encouragement of active dialogue with other characters and with his audience, Conrad shows how social constructions of identity in which others become the subject of unied classication are also forged in uncertain silence. Jim passes away under a cloud, and as Marlow notes [t]here is much truth after all in the common expression under a cloud: it is a brief phrase that, like Marlows romanticironic stance, alludes to both doubt and guilt (Lord 416, 339). Jims public life consigns him to uncertain silence (blurred by crowds of men as by clouds of dust), but it is a silence in which Marlow seeks the readers conrmation of his sense of Jims clouded conscience (Lord 216). Conrads interrogation of silence, identity, and interpretation stresses both the instability and durability of the bonds between self

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and other, between author and reader: if the text concludes under a cloud of reticent doubt, there is, Marlow suggests, much truth after all to be found in a common expression of the subjects silence (Lord 416, 339).
NOTES
1. Conrads model of private and public identity-formation resembles Mikhail Bakhtins early writings on the relationship between the subjects unnalizable I-for-myself and the nalized versions of an I-for-others (Art 1-35). For Bakhtin, as for Conrad, ethical social existence depends upon an uncertain seeking out of ones dispersed I-for-others in an impossible yet fruitful effort to pin down a complete sense of oneself (Art 1-35). See also Emerson and Morson (180). 2. Greaney and Pedot both owe something to Martin Rays seminal discussion of Conrad and silence: Ray argues that Conrads highly ambiguous attitude towards silence can be traced to the legacy of two traditionsone, stemming from Stphane Mallarm and Arthur Rimbaud, and nding in silence the promise of cathartic release from languages inadequacy; the other, descending from Blaise Pascal, treating silence as a kind of cosmic terror bringing only the annihilation of the writers achievment (49, 46). 3. Pertinent, here, is Ian Watts discusssion of gaps in Conrads impressionistic use of thematic apposition, the juxtaposition of apparently digressive episodes with important episodes in Jims life encouraging the readers symbolic deciphering (280, 270). 4. Speech 126. 5. In her Bakhtinian account of Lord Jim, Gail Fincham draws attention to the nameless and voiceless status of Marlows audience, claiming this anonymity leads to the narratives self-enclosure and narcissism: [e]laborately framed as a dialogue, it is in effect monologue (61, 66, 66). According to Fincham, Conrad constructs a double-voiced discourse in which the voice of the author can be heard ironically contextualizing the universal claims of Marlows masculinist discourse (74). In labeling Marlows narrative as monologic, Fincham neglects the important contrast between Jims confessional insistence on the belief of his audience and Marlows active, dialogic uncertainty concerning the response of his audience. Jim asserts mastery over the interpretation of the silences he places at the jumps motivational source by conning his audience to the silence of conrmation. In contrast, Marlow acknowledges the uncertainty of internal silence, not only for Jim but also for himself, and seeks to locate stable interpretation, a shared recognition of meaning as becoming, through active dialectic with his audience. 6. This brief, enigmatic passage has become possibly the most contentious in the Conradian oeuvre (Lord 214). In Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, Watt provides a useful, though somewhat oversimplied, account of critical responses to this passage up until 1980, stating that for decades literary criticism has always discovered in the passage an image of its own characteristic preoccupations (325). He argues that in the twenties the passage was seen as summarizing spir-

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itual desolation; the thirties rejected this interpretation, claiming the passage championed individuality; Morton Dauwen Zabels discussion of redemption in the forties introduced a note of unsupported optimism; this was echoed by Robert Penn Warren in the fties who read the passage as establishing an ontological dualism between the natural and the human, or evil and good; and nally in the sixties a concentration on literal difculties led to a denition of the passage as opaque or illogical, a conclusion Watt himself supports in his focus on the epigraphs revisions (326, 326, 327, 328, 329). More recent critics remain divided among those who believe Conrad supports Stein (such as Steven Barza), those who claim Stein is the target of the novels irony (such as Royal Roussel), and those who believe that Conrad does not allow the reader to decide either way (such as J. Hillis Miller). 7. Critical responses to the place of the privileged man in Conrads narrative have tended to follow this path. Linda M. Shires claims the real reader is directed towards disciplined romanticism by hold[ing] in tension a totally xed interpretation of Jim by Stein and the lack of an interpretation by the anonymous man (28). Along similar lines, Amar Acheraou reads Marlows presentation of textual fragments to the privileged man as a tacit invitation to the reader to provide a free interpretation of Jims mystery (181). Marlows letter clear[s] the way for an active privileged reader: it symbolises the failure of the Word and myth, the death of the author and emergence of the reader (Acheraou 182). 8. Critics have frequently noted the ambiguity of the conclusion to Lord Jim. Jakob Lothe emphasizes the cumulative doubt underlying the novels gradual revelation of the impossibility of understanding [Jims] motives and actions (171). Robert Hampson states that [i]n his death, either Jim has found the opportunity for complete self-realization or he has made a romantic gesture that forever saves him from confronting himself (135). Such critical uncertainty stems from the unstable oscillations of the nal paragraphs, oscillations indicative of Marlows romantic irony. While Batchelor notes how Marlow continues to offer rm indications of how we should judge, undercutting the illusion that the evidence is being presented for our judgment, he does not recognize the tragic nature of that direction, concluding that the novel is in favor of the judgment that both the inner and outer honor have been retrieved (Lord 153, 158).

WORKS CITED
Acheraou, Amar. Narrator-Narratee Dynamics in Lord Jim. In Gallix 17182. Ambrosini, Richard. Conrads Fiction as Critical Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Bakhtin, Mikhail. Art and AnswerabilityEarly Philosophical Essays. Trans. Vadim Liapunov. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. . Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993. Barza, Steven. Bonds of Empathy: The Widening Audience of Lord Jim. Midwest-Quarterly: A Journal of Contemporary Thought 25.2 (1984): 22032.

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Batchelor, John. Introduction. Lord Jim. By Joseph Conrad. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. viixxi. . Lord Jim. London: Unwin Hyman, 1988. Berthoud, Jacques. Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978. Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim. London: Gresham, 1925. Deleuze, Gilles, and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. London: Athlone, 1987. Emerson, Caryl, and Gary Saul Morson. Mikhail Bakhtin: The Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990. Ferarro, Julian. Jim, Marlow, and the Reader: Persuasion as Theme in Lord Jim. Conradian 20.1 (1995): 118. Fincham, Gail. The Dialogism of Lord Jim. Conradian 22.1 (1997): 5874. Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in this Class?The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980. Gallix, Francois, ed. Lord Jim/Joseph Conrad. Paris: Ellipses, 2003. Greaney, Michael. Conrad, Language, and Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hampson, Robert. Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity. Houndsmills: Macmillan, 1992. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. London: Methuen, 1981. Lothe, Jakob. Conrads Narrative Method. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989. Mellor, Anne. English Romantic Irony. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980. Miller, J. Hillis. Fiction and Repetition. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982. Moser, Thomas. Joseph ConradAchievement and Decline. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957. Pedot, Richard. With sealed lips: The Enigma of Rhetoric in Lord Jim. Lpoque Conradienne (2004): 18595. Raval, Suresh. The Art of Failure: Conrads Fiction. Boston: Allen, 1986. Ray, Martin. Language and Silence in the Novels of Joseph Conrad. Critical Essays on Joseph Conrad. Ed. Ted Billy. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. 4657. Roussel, Royal. The Metaphysics of Darkness: A Study in the Unity and Development of Conrads Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971. Shires, Linda M. The Privileged Reader and Narrative Methodology in Lord Jim. Conradiana 17.1 (1985): 1930. Stape, John H. Lord Jim: The Problem of Patusan. In Gallix 4356. Watt, Ian. Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. London: Chatto, 1980. Zabel, Morton Dauwen. Craft and Character: Texts, Methods and Vocation in Modern Fiction. London: Gollancz, 1957.

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