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  • “All So Morbid”:The Gothic in Conrad’s Lord Jim
  • Mark Alan Williams (bio)

In his June 1917 “Author’s Note” to Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad claimed to be “puzzled and surprised” by a woman’s complaint that his book was “all so morbid” (vii, ix). While Conrad admitted that her judgment provided “food for an hour’s anxious thought,” he dismissed the woman’s perception, by denying “anything morbid in the acute consciousness of lost honour” and assuring his readers that Jim was “not the product of coldly perverted thinking,” nor “a figure of Northern Mists either” (“Author’s” ix). He stated that Jim was a man he’d seen “pass by” on a roadstead, “appealing,” “one of us” (“Author’s” ix). But these arguments surely do not answer the woman’s charge. For throughout Lord Jim, Conrad persistently juxtaposes Jim’s solid, healthy good looks with his elusive mind and untrustworthy behavior. Charlie Marlow even once declares that it was precisely Jim’s familiar, wholesome appearance which made his internal weakness “a thing of mystery and terror” (Lord 46): to then appeal to Jim’s appearance as re-assuring proof of his sound nature—much less the sound nature of the novel—rings hollow. In truth, Conrad’s rebuttals were bound to lack substance. Whatever morbid was intended to suggest—gloom, melancholy, disease, disturbance, death—Lord Jim is “all so morbid” by any definition (“Morbid”; “Author’s” ix). The novel offers a dark vision of a world rife with horror and death, a broad observation to which Conrad’s “Author’s Note” offers no rebuttal. That an hour’s anxious consideration from Conrad on the possibly morbid nature of Lord Jim produced only these tenuous and myopic arguments against such a reading suggests that just such a reading is in order.

Late in Lord Jim, Marlow abruptly interrupts his narration of events on Patusan to pose a dark question: “How do you shoot a spectre through the heart, slash off its spectral head, take it by its spectral throat?” (Lord 296). By the [End Page 1] time this anguished question breaks through the surface of the tale, Marlow’s audiences have become so used to the Gothic strains of Conrad’s prose that this chilling supernatural metaphor may entirely escape notice. Just more Marlovian melodramatics, perhaps. But the darkness of the question is quickly surpassed by the gloom of Marlow’s answer. He says of killing this specter,

[i]t is an enterprise you rush into while you dream, and are glad to make your escape with wet hair and every limb shaking. The bullet is not run, the blade not forged, the man not born; even the winged words of truth drop at your feet like lumps of lead. You require for such a desperate encounter an enchanted and poisoned shaft dipped in a lie too subtle to be found on earth.

(Lord 296)

In this passage, at least, the aforementioned specter is fear, not a literal ghost. Jewel is afraid because of what she can’t know about Jim, what Marlow calls her “invincible ignorance,” and she is looking to Marlow to “exorcise” her anxiety with words (Lord 296).

This brief interaction with Jewel mirrors Marlow’s basic project in all of Lord Jim. The novel’s compiled narrative details and enacts Marlow’s “desperate encounter” with fear and uncertainty (Lord 296). The oft-told story Marlow brandishes is his attempt at managing the fears and uncertainty arising from the events of Jim’s life. Hoping to “exorcise” these haunting doubts, he imbues his tale with unearthly elements, subtle fictions (Lord 296). This doubt is figured throughout the narrative by pervasive Gothic elements such as the specter. Conrad’s language in this passage, mixing as it does metaphors of dreams and ghosts, is indicative of his utilization of the Gothic and the liminal—together, the liminoid, as explained below—to express this uncertainty and its accompanying horror. Lord Jim should be read as a liminoid Gothic novel, trappings and all: hauntings; dark sins against humanity; deserted, sinister, enchanted locations; rituals; and, most importantly, the Un-Dead.1 All are characteristic of the liminal and the Gothic...

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