Lord Jim – Ted Prokash
May 12, 2025
What is art. What is good? It’s simple. You know it when you see it, when you hear it, when you read it. When are you denizen to the vast empire of a creator of worlds? You will know it when you’re in it. It’s the inverse of how you know God. A reflection of faith. You read the great ones like you read the Bible.
I had approached Conrad as a young person (read: stupid) and it was like missing by inches a poison arrow in the African brush. A portent of meaning in a quick wind whistling over my head. I read him better in my middle period, if you will. Mid-period. More recently I went back into the bush with Nostromo and it was revelatory. Nostromo reads like the golden plates Bolaño dug up in the Mexican desert that made him write 2666. Shortly thereafter I picked up a Conrad collection called Tales of the Sea. A sea-salty tome with a corny painting of a ship on the cover and all his seafaring works in very, very small print. Tales of the Sea leads off with Lord Jim. In the first couple pages I knew I was very much in it.
How do you know…how do you know…oh, you just know. Like I don’t know what the Velvet Underground are doing exactly, but I know no one else sounds like that. Conrad is like Lou Reed if he had lived a hundred years ago as a world adventurer instead of being a mutant ass-licker from New York City. Conrad only learned English in his 20s aboard British merchant ships, and it’s been opined that his writing in a relatively new language accounts for his idiosyncratic word usage. It all adds to the sense of some alien or divine perception working to impart some terrible wisdom. Conrad is desperately trying to tell you something. In the same way that the days are long but the years go fast, Conrad writes long sentences filled with phrases that land like punches. A fighter that only throws haymakers, but he throws them incessantly. He never gets tired.
In this book he’s telling us about Jim, but of course he’s telling us about ourselves.
As a young man, Jim embarks on a life of high adventure on the high seas. His heart is swoll with the noblest, bravest intentions of valor under moral duress. On his maiden voyage he commits an act, a split-second non-decision, that he cannot reconcile. He is ensuingly chased by his conscience and the public’s devotion to gossip to the far-eastern ends of the world, ending up in an obscure Malaysian backwater where he becomes benefactor to a bevy of heathen souls. This is the plot. The desperate writhings of a heart full of darkness and terrible lightning.
Conrad’s varied powers of alarming insight and meticulous, almost hallucinogenic description are apparent throughout. Knowing I just had to write something on this book, I noted passages that particularly knocked me on my ass. And what follows is but a small sample of those.
Conrad’s power of characterization, often hilarious and grotesque. Here he describes the reaction of a village chief whose faction has been vanquished by Jim’s daring:
It is said that at the intelligence of the successful storming of the hill he flung himself, face down, on the bamboo floor of his audience-hall, and lay motionless for a whole night and a whole day uttering stifled sounds of such an appalling nature that no man dared approach his prostrate form nearer than a spear’s length.
Sounds like modern beta cuck behavior has an ancient precedent.
Describing a European long in the village who has fallen out of favor. A knack for painting cravenness to its most disgusting degree:
The man was too insignificant to be dangerous, though he was as full of hate as he could hold. He called me ‘honorable sir’ at every second sentence, and had whined at my elbow as he followed me…to the gate of Jim’s compound. He declared himself the most unhappy of men, a victim, crushed like a worm, he entreated me to look at him. I wouldn’t turn my head to do so, but I could see out of the corner of my eye his obsequious shadow gliding after mine, while the moon, suspended on our right hand seemed to gloat serenely on the spectacle.
Here he paints a picture of the academic:
The “man of letters”: one can almost see him, grey-haired and serene in the inviolable shelter of his book-lined, faded, and comfortable study, where…he had conscientiously gone over and over again the round of his little thoughts about faith and virtue…
Here, some hard, Hemingway type-stuff. Jim is defending his household against some mutinous natives with spears who have snuck into an outbuilding and lay in ambush. They don’t know they’re stepping to a man who has spent his last years in a torturous purgatory, just praying for the chance to prove his valor:
He told me he was experiencing a feeling of unutterable relief, of vengeful elation. He held his shot, he says, deliberately. He held it for the tenth part of a second, for three strides of the man–an unconscionable time. He held it for the pleasure of saying to himself, that’s a dead man! He was absolutely positive and certain. He let him come because it did not matter. A dead man, anyhow. He noticed the dilated nostrils, the wide eyes, the intent, eager stillness of the face, and then he fired.
This next passage is jarring. It so reminds me of beating my head every day against the prevailing moronism at work. Jim sees clearly a plan to pacify the warring village factions, but now has to get through the people’s heads what is best for them:
But to see that was nothing. When he got his idea he had to drive it into reluctant minds, through the bulwarks of fear, of selfishness. He drove it in at last. And that was nothing. He had to devise the means. He devised them–an audacious plan; and his task was only half done. He had to inspire with his own confidence a lot of people who had hidden and absurd reasons to hang back; he had to conciliate imbecile jealousies, and argue away all sorts of senseless mistrusts.
It’s like trying to get people to read your book.
Oh, and how about the discourse surrounding your book:
Men drifted off the verandah in pairs or alone without loss of time, without offering a remark, as if the last impression of that incomplete story, its incompleteness itself, and the very tone of the speaker, had made discussion vain and comment impossible. Each of them seemed to carry away his own impression, to carry it away with him like a secret…
But Joe was not just a describer. He was capable of hellacious insights into the soul of man. Here, a little ditty on man’s propensity to justify his most evil actions. This Brown had just slaughtered a passel of villagers for no personal gain, an act of pure malice and spite:
Thus Brown balanced his account with the evil fortune. Notice that even in this awful outbreak there is a superiority as of a man who carries right–the abstract thing–within the envelope of his common desires. It was not a vulgar and treacherous massacre; it was a lesson, a retribution–a demonstration of some obscure and awful attribute of our nature which, I am afraid, is not so very far under the surface as we like to think.
And a rare example of Conrad’s powers distilled into two brief sentences. The shit has all gone down at this point, and these are the last words Jim has with the love of his life:
“For the last time,” she cried menacingly, “will you defend yourself?”
“Nothing can touch me,” he said in a last flicker of superb egoism.
And to end with a banger. It seems that every great writer is orphaned by their homeland. Conrad’s home land had literally ceased to exist. On going home, then, wherever that may be:
Say what you like, to get its joy, to breath its peace, to face its truth, one must return with a clear conscience…the fact remains that you must touch your reward with clean hands, lest it turn to dead leaves, to thorns in your grasp. I think it is the lonely…those who return not to a dwelling but to the land itself…it is those who understand best its severity, its saving power, the grace of its secular right to our fidelity, to our obedience. Yes! few of us understand, but we all feel it though, and I say all without exception, because those who do not feel do not count.
Damn. Those who do not feel no not count.
Conrad is all about it. Pathos, moralism. The extent to which we are blind to the struggle between good and evil that is going on at all times inside each one of us. It’s probably why you have the shits all the time.
And then the arbitrary nature of our legends. To be made heroes or villains by the switching of the wind. Too much time on open water for the old boy, probably. All those long queasy voyages at the mercy of forces beyond his control. Too much time to think. Too much time sitting mute among a circle of primitive people. Probably gets on a man’s nerves. Probably starts to make him paranoid. Probably, after a while, you get the notion they’re thinking about eating you.