himself' and enjoyed stalking his prey. His assertion that 'he left the track' indicates that he, too, was in danger now that he was alone in the jungle; he thought that he might never get back. But when Marlow confronted Kurtz, he recalls, 'I seemed to come to my senses, I saw the danger in its right proportion.' To Marlow, the confrontation represents coming to terms with the dark potential within himself against the background of primitive and unspeakable rites. But he did not surrender to the appeal of the wilderness precisely because he had internalized the restraints imposed by civilization.
That Kurtz achieved a 'moral victory' may very well be a necessary illusion for Marlow. But did Kurtz pronounce a verdict on his reversion to primitivism and achieve the 'supreme moment of complete knowledge'? Or is this what Marlow desperately wants to believe? Coming from a man who 'could get himself to believe anything,' how credible is Marlow's interpretation that 'The horror! The horror!' was 'an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions'? When Kurtz had enigmatically muttered, 'Live rightly, die, die…,' Marlow had wondered 'Was he -697- rehearsing some speech in his sleep, or was it a fragment of a phrase from some newspaper article?' Marlow had just remarked that Kurtz's voice 'survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart.' If Kurtz had kicked himself loose of the earth, how could he pronounce a verdict on his ignominious return to civilization or an exclamation elicited from a vision of his own imminent death? For the reader, Kurtz remains a symbol of how the human ego can expand infinitely to the point where it tries to will its own apotheosis.
Conrad takes issue with Victorian assumptions about univocal truth and a divinely ordered world. His use of Marlow's dramatized consciousness reflects his awareness that 'we live as we dream-alone,' and the concomitant awareness-seen in the development of cubism and Joyce's ventriloquy in
The process of reading Lord Jim involves the reader in the remorseless process of responding to different judgments of Jim's behavior. First, there is the judgment of the omniscient narrator, which precedes not only our meeting Marlow but our learning what happens on the Patna. Does the reader ever forget the original rigorous judgment established by the omniscient narrator in the first three chapters, a judgment that is based on adherence to absolute standards? Does not that judgment accompany the reader as he wends his way through Marlow's narrative of his own efforts to find some terms with which to understand Jim's terrible failure on the Patna when Jim, along with the rest of the white officers, abandons the native crew and passengers? And, of course, the reader must sort out the significance of Stein's oracular but hazy pronouncements. No sooner do we hear Marlow's judg- 698- ment delivered in his long monologue after he has learned that Jim has succeeded on Patusan and, at least in Marlow's eyes, justified Marlow's confidence in him, than we are confronted with Marlow's final, inconclusive judgment after Jim has failed; this judgment is halfway between the rigorous one of the absolute narrator and the empathetic one that had informed Marlow's telling.
Prior to Marlow's first words in chapter 5, the omniscient narrator in the opening chapters judges Jim by fixed standards and shows him wanting. Without any ambiguity, Conrad uses this narrator to show us that Jim's jump from the Patna is a characteristic action rather than-as Jim would like to believe and as Marlow is at times tempted to accept-a gratuitous one that just happened to an unfortunate young man.
Lost in his fantasies of heroism, Jim fails to respond to an emergency on the training ship. Because Jim has not internalized the proper responses, when he is faced with an actual chance to take part in a rescue he becomes physically and morally paralyzed: 'He stood still. It seemed to him he was whirled around.' Jim's second failure occurs when, while serving as first mate, he loses his nerve. The omniscient narrator tells us that until then Jim had never 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 fibre of his stuff; that reveal the quality of his resistance and the secret truth of his pretences, not only to others, but also to himself.'
Conrad's narrative coding continues to create a concatenation of episodes that judges Jim's moral dereliction and psychological incapacity. Each episode repeats the prior one's indictment, even while it adds another piece of evidence to the charge that Jim has not internalized the fixed moral standards of the merchant marine-the code stipulating honor, fidelity, courage, and a highly developed sense of responsibility-on which civilized life in the colonies depends. Thus Jim, after he recovers from his leg injury, throws in his lot with those who eschew the 'home service' of the merchant marine for easier employment:
They loved short passages, good deck-chairs, large native crews, and the distinction of being white… They talked everlastingly of turns of luck… and in all they said-in their actions, in their looks, in their persons-could be detected the soft spot, the place of decay, the determination to lounge safely through existence. -699-
As in the above passage, it is characteristic of Conrad to introduce parallel phrases with recurring words; within a sentence these phrases often increase in intensity as they move to an explosive conclusion; thus in the first of these sentences, Conrad's appositional phrases move from the rather neutral descriptive phrases to the morally intense and scathing indictment (in the climactic phrase 'the distinction of being white') of those who believe they are privileged on racial grounds. While Jim assumes that he will not be tarnished by the company of the kind of men who choose to work on boats like the Patna, the ironic narrator places Jim among these men with soft spots and places of decay. Conrad's adjectives here do not so much describe an internal condition as they participate in a structure of effects to give the reader a sense of Jim's moral flaw. We cannot visualize a soft spot or a place of decay any more than we can see an 'invisible halt' (italics mine) in Jim's gait.
The fourth episode or vignette that inexorably illustrates that, contrary to Jim's contention, his jump was a characteristic rather than a gratuitous action is his behavior on board the Patna; as on the training ship his mind is wooed from his duty to the 'human cargo' of pilgrims by fantasies of accomplishment: 'His thoughts would be full of valorous deeds: he loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary achievements. They were the best part of his life, its secret truth, its hidden reality.' That the words «achievement» and «secret» echo prior passages documenting his flawed nature shows how Jim is iterating his past, as he will throughout his life. Repeating the term «secret» underlines how Jim has separated himself from reality and has paradoxically created in his actions-as opposed to his dreams-a self that has no social role to play; Conrad thus gives the nuance of narcissism to Jim's self-indulgent fantasies. Living in the world of his fictions rather than in the world of actual duties and responsibilities, Jim is a hopelessly divided self unfit for his tasks.
Originally, Marlow wanted to judge Jim by absolute standards. Marlow would have liked to read Jim as if he, Marlow, were the omniscient narrator, and indeed for a brief moment Conrad teases us into thinking that we have been listening to Marlow-or at least an omniscient double of Marlow-all along. In the first moments of his monologue about Jim, Marlow aligns Jim with beetles, criminals, alloyed metal, and 'to men with soft spots, with hard spots, with hidden plague spots' as if he were going to continue the narrator's indictment.
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But the self-dramatizing Marlow soon reveals that he is vulnerable to those who, like Jim, claim extenuating circumstances, because Marlow does not sufficiently believe in himself to uphold absolute values. Marlow cannot, as Stein will advise, shut his eyes and see himself as a fine fellow, a saint. He must face the ambiguity of living in a relative world that lacks anterior concepts of order. Because of his own needs, he begins to read Jim as Jim would like him to. In Marlow's evolving sympathy with Jim as 'one of us,' in Marlow's taking up a position as Jim's apologist, in his gnawing and disturbing suspicion that he may not be able to claim a superior moral position because anyone might do what Jim did, Marlow begins to abandon the credo of the merchant marine and British imperialism and increasingly allows Jim to become a standard by which Marlow measures himself. But the omniscient narrator has taught us not to be a Jim-reader of Jim, and when Marlow becomes a Jim-reader of Jim, we back off from accepting Marlow's authority as a reader of himself. In Marlow's world, once he loses his beliefs in fixed standards, there are no sources or origins. The absence of sources and origins makes moral judgments difficult.
