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Sinopsis
Never out of print since its publication in 1900, Lord
Jim in some sense requires little introduction. It is one of the high points
in the development of the English novel, marking the transition from the
Victorian novel of social concern to Modernist experiments with form that
culminated in the writings of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Lord Jim
confirmed Conrad's authorial genius and ushered in his greatest creative phase.
The novels that followed included the great trio of political novels:
Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907)
and Under Western
Eyes (1911).
Published at the height of Empire, when the British Merchant Service
dominated the world's shipping-trade, Lord Jim is a very British novel.
It tells the story of a young English officer in the Merchant Service who
disgraces himself before becoming the benevolent ‘virtual ruler’ of a remote
Malay state. The English narrator, Marlow, is one of Conrad's most celebrated
and enduring creations. To Virginia Woolf, ‘Conrad was compound of two men;
together with the sea captain dwelt that subtle, refined, and fastidious analyst
whom he called Marlow.’1 Through Marlow, Conrad brings an
English perspective to bear upon social codes of comportment and inclusion,
together with the public and private responsibilities these entail. Coming after
‘Youth’ (1898) and Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim
completes a trilogy of Marlow narratives.
The novel is shaped by its concern with the life-giving properties of danger,
the dark voids that gape under the most polished of surfaces and the problem,
once these have been perceived, of going on living. In his ‘Author's Note’,
Conrad identified his subject as ‘the acute consciousness of
lost honour’. Marlow views it as one of ‘those struggles of an individual
trying to save from the fire his idea of what his moral identity should be’
(VII). Published in the same year as
Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, the novel shares Freud's concern
with identity, questioning whether the self is ultimately public or private
property.
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