Conrad’s “serried circle of facts” in Lord Jim

I

Of the Patna and Patusan sections of Lord Jim, F.R. Leavis concluded about sixty years ago that the first section worked well but that, in its reliance on romance, the second section “has no inevitability—nor does it develop or enrich the central interest, which, consequently, eked out to provide the substance of a novel, comes to seem decidedly thin” (190). Critics since have often disagreed with Leavis on the issue of structure, and have suggested various ways by which to understand Conrad’s complex narrative. In one such rejoinder, Robert F. Haugh argues that, on the contrary, “a second look at Lord Jim will reveal the fruit of Conrad’s deliberation [the revising of the short story into the novel]: integral elements of structure which provide the inevitability, the rightness, for Patusan” (137). There is indeed a unity of structure, a “design,” to the novel, contends Haugh, and while the “dominant figure in the design is the jump from the ‘Patna,’” there are actually three “progressive” jumps in the novel (137): “And each jump, because of the changed circumstances surrounding it, because of Jim’s maturity, and because of Conrad’s sense of dramatic progression, takes on new meaning. The jump resembles a recurring musical figure, with minor figures in the design giving depth and complexity” (Haugh 137). The first jump occurs on the training ship—or, more precisely, Jim’s failure to jump from it and get into the cutter sent to rescue the sailors tossed into the sea during the gale. The second jump is from the Patna. The third is in Patusan, which actually involves two specific jumps: Jim’s jump over the wall of the fort, and Jim’s jump into the mud. Conrad thereby not only carefully crafted the novel but provided a distinctive harmony between and within the two different sections. While the notion of Jim’s “maturity” is debatable, there is a unity inferred through repetition of actual or symbolic jumps in this novel (Haugh 137). And those jumps, I would suggest, are part of a larger pattern of repetition. From the framed structure of the novel, to the iteration and/or mirroring of scene, action, and character, to the fact that by novel’s end Jim finds himself not literally but symbolically back where he started, Conrad emphasizes repetition, seemingly ad infinitum, in Lord Jim. Along with the various jumps, this emphasis on repetition suggests a circularity—or, circles within circles—to the novel, with Stein’s silver ring therefore functioning as a controlling metaphor, one that helps unify the disparate parts of the novel.

Although the story involves Jim’s efforts to move forward—that is, to put the fact of his jump from the Patna behind him and manifest the heroic ideal he has of himself—he essentially wanders in circles. Discussing Conrad’s use of circles in Victory and elsewhere, Douglas Kerr suggests the pitfalls inherent in both circularity and linearity:

Circulation is repetitive and predictable; it has no issue and in the end always returns upon itself. Encirclement is a kind of paralysis, a denial of narrative and change, though it may also be a sanctuary and an escape. Natural time is circular, the succession of nights and days and of seasons. But historical time is linear. Linearity implies movement from one thing to another, change (including the economic or political possibility of change of ownership), the possibility or promise of development and progress, but also of violence, instability and loss.

(349)

That which is associated with the circle often seems stilted, then, even dangerous because there is no real, forward movement, and while there may be something ostensibly positive associated with that which is linear, “straight lines,” too, can turn out to be dangerous, for they can, apparently, be part of a larger circle (Kerr 350):

It is always unsafe to put your trust in straight lines if you’re a Conrad character, for what in Conrad looks like a straight line almost invariably turns out to be a circle in the end. The refusal of most of his...