Jim’s Line of Flight: Ontology Slips

‘To be human is to be intended toward the other.’

–Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

The nature of Lord Jim, the protagonist of Conrad’s eponymous novel, remains inexplicable and inscrutable even after his seemingly willful death. Marlow strives to find an explanation for the meaning of the “proud and unflinching glance” Jim throws in his dying moments, but the narrator remains insistently indeterminate on this point to the end:

And that’s the end. He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic. . . . He goes away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct. Is he satisfied— quite, now, I wonder? We ought to know. He is one of us—and have I not stood up once, like an evoked ghost, to answer for his eternal constancy? Was I so very wrong after all? Now he is no more, there are days when the reality of his existence comes to me with an immense, with an overwhelming force; and yet upon my honor there are moments, too, when he passes from my eyes like a disembodied spirit astray amongst the passions of his earth, ready to surrender himself faithfully to the claim of his own world of shades.

Who knows? He is gone, inscrutable at heart.

(253)

One might argue that in the end Marlow’s empathic desire to understand Jim is gratified, that even the romantic mission of Jim’s existential journey is melodramatically accomplished, through his final, fatal choice of reconciliatory action, because Jim’s death and his willingness to take responsibility for the death of Dain Waris are believed to undo all the wrongful deeds Jim has done before, including his jumping from the ship, Patna. Indeed, readers like Tony Tanner suggest that the death signifies a safe escape from the complexity of life (55). But the complexity of the character and also the recondite task of the narrator are not so simply resolved in this novel since the reader experiences the unfinalizable nature of Lord Jim throughout. Regarding this abstruse subject, J. Hillis Miller suggests there to be “something suspect in Marlow’s enterprise of Interpretation. . . . If so much is at stake for himself, he is likely to find what he wants to find” (29). The narrator’s indeterminacy and his personal preference in telling the story entail various possible meanings, yet they incline the readers toward skepticism in interpreting Jim’s action as well as in ascertaining the narrative. As critics often point out, we confront narratorial uncertainty and suspicion though Marlow seeks to control his own narrative of the seaman’s exilic passage.¹ Geoffrey Harpham also holds that the writer represents “a crisis of the center, of centrality itself,” and he never places “anything substantial at the very center” (59). Miller also mentions that “thematically and structurally Lord Jim is an example of this absence of origin, center, or end” (219). Due to this absence, Marlow’s narrative constantly slips out of his own control. By the same token, Fredric Jameson astutely notes that “the empty slot in a system occupied by the figure of Lord Jim” should be “a system that proves to have been the absent center of the narrative” (243). While we grapple with the acentric character and narrative, we confront an epistemological impasse or dilemma in unraveling the tangled threads laid bare through the path of Jim’s escape or existential flight because the incessantly slipped signifier of the character propagates countless and indefinite numbers of interpretative possibilities. Granted such a myriad of epistemological potentiality in interpretation, the epistemological study on the part of critics puts much more significance on individual subjects or on the idea of subjectivity, such as the protagonist Jim and his representative narrator Marlow, or on how we read them in the text, rather than on how the different characters are relationally involved and connected. Thus to clear away even the least bit of haziness in reading the modern text, I will pursue an ontological, existential explanation regarding the fundamental nature of the Conradian figure, granted such obscurity and uncertainty in...