Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 2008).
If the introduction to this B&N Classics edition is to be trusted, the second half of Lord Jim has throughout the book's history suffered from comparison with the first. As Conrad's narrative turns from a focus on Jim's failure of nerve aboard the Patna to his ultimate redemption in the jungles of Malaysia, prior generations of critics have accused the author of departing from the "serious" realm of realistic literature to enter the lesser domains of romance and adventure.
Never mind that the shift artfully coincides with the entomologist Stein's injunction to "follow the dream," as he advises that the only cure for an excess of idealism is to plunge even further into romance—even without this, I would defend the second half of the novel on terms of literary realism as well. And that is for one reason: the character of "Gentleman Brown," who is one of the most fully plausible villains in literature.
Is he perhaps over-the-top? Excessively done? I once might have thought so, but no longer. After all, we have a Gentleman Brown in the White House.
I was talking to my sister recently, and she was telling me about an evolutionary psychologist who has posited that there are four major survival and reproductive strategies that human beings employ. I won't go through the full list, but the first is known as the "antagonistic strategy." Assuming that life is short, this strategy focuses on getting ahead at all costs, trampling down others in the process.
In Conrad's novel, Brown embodies all the worst, most disturbing, and most true-to-life features of this familiar personality type. Not only does he delight in taking revenge on others and totally discount their rights, he also believes that the mere assertion of his will is righteous in itself. Not only does he see the world in terms of a brute struggle for power, but he assumes everyone else does too.
When he discovers a man like Jim, therefore, who has won the admiration of other people, he can only assume it is because Jim has so well managed to play the same Machiavellian game. When he realizes this is not the case, he shifts to concluding that Jim is weak and of no account. He has no concept that it is possible to obtain power in its highest sense not through treachery and thievery, but through moral courage and mercy.
Jim is ultimately defeated by Brown, precisely because he does not take the antagonistic approach to life. He chooses to trust, because he does not believe that every other person is a rival and enemy. For this, he is viciously punished by Brown, who seems if anything more motivated to take vengeance upon Jim for having shown him mercy, than he would be if Jim had treated him as an adversary. He correctly perceives that Jim's mercy reveals his superiority over him, and this he cannot forgive.
If people thought this conflict with Brown was unrealistic at the time of the novel's publication - well, no one in 2015 thought Donald Trump would be the president either. Yet here he is, Brown incarnate. Sometimes life itself takes a surreal turn, and for this we need novels without realism - the world does not always obey what we wishfully consider the canons of realistic behavior.
Like Brown, Trump regards the mere questioning of his will as a violation of law. He has the desperate sadism and resentment born of the person who knows himself to be essentially small in spirit - hence his mad gloating at his invented image of a defeated enemy "whimpering like a dog" (an enemy defeated, moreover, thanks to intelligence secured by the very allies Trump just stabbed in the back).
Men such as Brown and Trump are almost inconceivably dangerous, and for the very reasons Conrad names. They are possessed of "a blind belief in the righteousness of [their] will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God." They are a menace to people who, like Jim, "d[o] not know the almost inconceivable egotism [...] the indignant and revengeful rage of a thwarted autocrat."
Worse still, the Browns of the world often go undefeated—at least on their own terms. They have perfected the skills of cunning and treachery; they are unhindered by conscience; and they are well-positioned—as Jim discovered—to take advantage of the finer moral qualities of other people.
But then, Jim is not competing on their terms, and this is precisely what the Browns cannot understand. Jim, throughout Conrad's novel, is not seeking plunder and power, but martyrdom. The opportunity he seeks - and seizes at last - is to perish for the sake of an ideal. In this paradoxical way, therefore, Brown is ultimately the instrument of Jim's greatest success.
Trump, like Brown, regards himself as a "winner" - as he will fondly tell everyone - because of the impoverished terms on which he understands success. To beat him at what he is good at and cares about is not possible. To triumph in a higher sense by preserving an ideal of honor that he cannot understand, and which he does not dream exists - that is something that can be done.
To the extent Conrad's novel traces the effort, throughout Jim's life, to preserve such an "ideal of conduct" - even when it is doomed to defeat and compromise, even when it leaves one vulnerable to the depredations of the Browns of the world - to this extent, the novel has unity. And the deprecated second half of the book ends Jim's story in the only way it could.
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Errors in this edition:
p. 19 "was dong [sic] well"
p. 179 "The heaven and the earth must not be shaken. I suppose—at least not by[...]" Replace period with comma. Cf. Project Gutenberg version.
p. 186 "an all-fired now [sic] amongst themselves" Should be "row." Cf. Project Gutenberg version.
p. 218 "equality of the sexes in point of numbers—that is." Punctuation is off. The intended text drives home the misogynistic thrust of Marlow's jibe. Cf. Project Gutenberg version, where it reads: "equality of sexes—in point of numbers, that is."
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