Humanity in J. Conrad's and W. Somerset's creativity
Humanity in J. Conrad's and W. Somerset's creativity
Content
INTRODUCTION
PART I. ENGLISH
NARRATIVE IN THE CONTEXT OF THE EDWARDIAN LITERATURE
1.1 The main
representatives of the prose writing in the first half of the twentieth century
1.2 The similarity
and difference of themes and genres of the leading literature representatives
Conclusion to part I
PART II. HUMANITY AS THE MAIN PHILOSOPHICAL AND
LITERARY PROBLEM IN THE WORK OF THE WRITERS BFORE THE FIRST HALF OF THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY
2.1 The Moral Sense in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim
2.2 "Human Bondage" and it’s moral duality
Conclusion to part II
GENERAL CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INTRODUCTION
William Somerset Maugham (pronounced
'mawm'), CH (25 January 1874 – 16 December 1965) was an English playwright, novelist and short story writer. He was one of the most popular authors of his era, and reputedly the
highest paid of his profession during the 1930s.
Joseph Conrad (December 3, 1857 – August
3, 1924) was a Polish-born
British
novelist, one of the most important and respected writers of the late
nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. Conrad's works emerge out of the
confluence of three literary currents prominent in the Europe of Conrad's time:
Romanticism,
particularly in the works of Polish novelist Henryk
Sienkiewicz; realism, which flowered in
Russia in the works of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor
Dostoevsky; and modernism, which emerged as
the dominant literary aesthetic of the twentieth century.
Conrad's works draw on the symbolism of the Romantics and the
psychological acuity of the realist and modernist schools. Despite these
affinities, Conrad defies easy categorization. Conrad saw in Western
colonialism the failure of the "civilized world" to fulfill its moral
responsibilities. He witnessed and then documented through his fiction how the
"white man's burden," or the West's responsibility to the rest of the
world, became clouded by selfish ambition through its quest for colonial
domination.
Born
and raised in Poland, Conrad spent part of his youth in France and the majority of
his early life at sea; only in his mid-thirties would he settle down, in England, to start a career
as a writer, writing not in Polish or French, but in English, his adopted third
language. Like the Russian émigré Vladamir Nabokov, Conrad is
regarded as a master prose stylist among authors in the English literary canon.
His knowledge of languages and cultures, gleaned not only from his European
experiences but also from his decades spent as a sailor at sea, can be seen in
the haunting style of his prose and the enormity of the themes which he
constantly brings to the surface. His works inspired writers throughout the
twentieth century.
Our
work is devoted to the analysis of the novels by William Somerset Maugham and Joseph Conrad. The plots
of there novel generally revolve around the subject of marriage and lay
emphasis especially on its tremendous importance in the lives of the nineteen
century women.
While making
our research we used the works of such linguists as Vinokur G.O., Suvorov S.P.,
Arnold I.V. and many others. During our work we used the works on the
translation theory of such linguists as Levitskaya T.R., Fiterman A.M.,
Komissarov V.N., Alimov V.V., Shveytser A.D., Garbovskiy N.K., Dmitrieva L.F.,
Galperin I.R., Arnold I.V., Yakusheva I.V., van Deik, Kolshanskiy and others.
We used also the articles from the the periodical editions.
The aim of our
work is to reveal W. Somerset Saugham’s "Of Human Bondage" and Joseph
Conrad's "Lord Jim": plot structure and character analysis.
The hypothesis:
in our investigation we suppose to prove that the literature can reflect
humanity problems such as problem of morality and human relationships on
example of W. Somerset’s and J. Conrad’s creativity.
The aim and
hypothesis have defined the next tasks:
- to research the main representatives of the prose
writing in the first half of the twentieth century;
- to investigate the similarity and difference of
themes and genres of the leading literature representatives;
- to research The problem of humanity in the work as a
leading Inclination of W. Somerset and J. Conrad;
- The Moral
Sense in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim;
- Human Bondage" and
it’s moral duelety and "Human heart" in the symbol of new wave of
human evolution.
Object
of research in the given work is W. Somerset Saugham’s and Joseph Conrad's creativity.
Subject is W. Somerset Saugham’s "Of
Human Bondage" and Joseph Conrad's "Lord Jim": plot structure
and character analysis.
Concerning the
aim and the tasks we have used such method as a descriptive one, the method of
the experience, the contextual method and the comparative method. These methods
weren’t used as the isolated methods, they were used in their complex to satisfy
the aim and the task in the best way.
PART I. ENGLISH NARRATIVE IN THE CONTEXT OF THE
EDVARDIAN LITERATURE
1.1 The main
representatives of the prose writing in the first half of the twentieth century
Literature
in 20th century begins with a serie of movements, some of them contradictory
between them, as Symbolism, Decadentism, Impressionism and, in Hispanic
literature, Modernism, The Generation of '98 [21, 121]. During the two first
decades , two literary conceptions are imposed to writers: Those writers for
whom literary work is the expression of a cultural experience and fall in
intellectualism; and writers who, in view of the chaos of the time and the
dissatisfaction of bourgeois world, see literary work as an adventure, as an
irrational experience. In the thirties, some historic and socioeconomic facts,
affected literature. It will express the search, through the action, of ethical
values. After the World War, writers will insist in the same attitudes: moral
crisis and tecnical experimentation.
Coinciding
the beginning of the new century with Queen Victoria's death in 1901, Britain
seemed to start a new period that wasn't seen immediately, because the short
reign of Edward VII (1901-1910) was the continuity of the previous period.
English society was divided in social classes: wealth was held by a few people
thanks for the Industrial Revolution. The poor were still poor, although by the
Educative Act of 1870 some instruction was guaranteed. The first threats for
Britain appeared with anglo-boer war to become evident in 1914 with the
beginning of the First World War.
In
ideas, changes were more spectacular. In the beginning of the century
Einstein's relativity theory becomes true, and in 1905 Freud's new theories
started to be renewal in human interpretation. Nothing could be like before,
because art and ideas wished to advance quickly. Even in picture, for example,
Cubism and Dadaism broke all imaginable visual molds: Modernism crystallized as
a global result of all possible desires of change and renovation. In fact,
every intellectual, political or artistic movement tries to broke with the past
and fix new directions to follow. Modernism, not only wished to broke with the
past, but also abolish them. However, it wasn't possible; in ideas world always
exists something "already invented" where we resort to and in this
way, Modernism had to create its own tradition, looking for affinities in the
past history [21, 127].
In
literature, it was the Ullyses (1922) by James Joyce the work that produced the
true impact because of its new character and its perfect style and the scandol
of its publication. The woman would have an important paper in the society and
this would have an excellent representant in Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). She
belongs to an artistic and intellectual circle in Bloomsbury. Woolf was a
writer with a lot of sensibility and wrote a beautiful poetic prose in the
shape of novels like Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.
Prose
poetry
is usually considered a form of poetry
written in prose that breaks some of
the normal rules associated with prose discourse, for heightened imagery or
emotional effect. Arguments continue about whether prose poetry is actually a
form of poetry or a form of prose, or a separate genre altogether. Most
critics argue that prose poetry belongs in the genre of poetry because of its use of metaphorical
language and attention to language.
Other
critics argue that prose poetry falls into the genre of prose because prose poetry relies on prose's
association with narrative
and its reliance on readers' expectation of an objective presentation of truth in prose. Yet others argue that the
prose poem gains its subversiveness through its fusion of poetic and prosaic
elements.
As a specific form, prose poetry is generally
assumed to have originated in 19th-century France.
At the time of the prose poem's emergence, French poetry was dominated
by the Alexandrine, an extremely
strict and demanding form that poets such as Aloysius Bertrand and Charles
Baudelaire rebelled against. Further proponents of the prose poem
included other French poets such as Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé.
The prose poem continued to be written in France and found
profound expression, in the mid-20th century, in the prose poems of Francis Ponge. At the end
of the 19th century, British Decadent movement poets
such as Oscar Wilde picked up the
form because of its already subversive association. This actually hindered the
dissemination of the form into English because many associated the Decadents
with homosexuality, hence any form used by the Decadents was suspect.
Notable Modernist
poet T. S. Eliot wrote
vehemently against prose poems, though he did try his hand at one or two. He
also added to the debate about what defines the genre, saying in his
introduction to Djuna
Barnes' highly poeticized 1936 novel Nightwood that this work
may not be classed as "poetic prose" as it did not have the rhythm or
"musical pattern" of verse. In contrast, a couple of other Modernist
authors wrote prose poetry consistently, including Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson. In
actuality, Anderson considered his work to be short fictions—in the current
term, "flash
fiction." The distinction between flash fiction and prose
poetry is at times very thin, almost indiscernible.
By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Canadian author Elizabeth
Smart, written in 1945, is a relatively isolated example of
English-language poetic prose in the mid-20th century. Then, for a while, prose
poems died out, at least in English—until the early 1950s and '60s, when American
poets such as Allen
Ginsberg, Bob Dylan,
Jack Kerouac, William
S. Burroughs, Russell
Edson, Charles
Simic, Robert Bly
and James Wright experimented
with the form. Edson, indeed, worked principally in this form, and helped give
the prose poem its current reputation for surrealist wit. Similarly, Simic won
the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for his 1989 collection, The World Doesn't End.
At the same time, poets elsewhere were exploring the form in
Spanish, Japanese and Russian. Octavio Paz worked in this
form in Spanish in his Aguila o Sol? (Eagle or Sun?). Spanish poet Ángel Crespo
(1926-95) did his most notable work in the genre. Giannina Braschi,
postmodern Spanish-language poet, wrote a trilogy of prose poems, El imperio de
los suenos (Empire of Dreams, 1988). Translator Dennis Keene presents the
work of six Japanese prose poets in The Modern Japanese Prose Poem: an
Anthology of Six Poets. Similarly, Adrian Wanner and Caryl Emerson describe the
form's growth in Russia in their critical work, Russian Minimalism: from the
Prose Poem to the Anti-story. The two best-known examples of this literary form
in Russian are Gogol's Dead Souls and Venedikt Erofeev's Moscow-Petushki.
In Poland, Bolesław Prus
(1847-1912), influenced by the French prose poets, had written a number of poetic micro-stories, including
"Mold
of the Earth" (1884), "The Living Telegraph" (1884) and "Shades" (1885).
The form has gained popularity since the late 1980s, and literary
journals that previously disputed prose poetry's contributions to both poetry
and prose currently display prose poems next to sonnets and short stories.
Journals have even begun to specialize, publishing solely prose poems/flash
fiction in their pages (see external links below). Some contemporary writers
who write prose poems or flash fiction include Michael Benedikt, Robert Bly, Anne Carson, Kim Chinquee,
Richard Garcia, Ray Gonzalez, Lyn Hejinian, Louis Jenkins, Campbell McGrath, Sheila Murphy, Naomi Shihab Nye, Mary Oliver, David Shumate,
James
Tate, and J. Marcus Weekley, Ron Silliman, and John Olson.
It used to be said that prose poetry was impossible in English because the English
language was not so strictly governed by rules as was the French language. This seems
not to be so strictly held in the twenty-first century.
Rapturous,
rhythmic, image-laden prose from previous centuries, such as that found in Jeremy Taylor and Thomas de Quincey, strikes
21st-century readers as having something of a poetic quality. Using figurative
language to provoke thought, it invites a reader into unusual perspectives to
question what is traditionally thought of, as in Richard Garcia's
"Chickenhead."
Flash fiction is fiction of extreme brevity. The standard, generally-accepted
length of a flash fiction piece is 1000 words or less. By contrast, a
short-short measures 1001 words to 2500 words, and a traditional short story
measures 2501 to 7500 words. A novelette runs from 7501 words to 17,500, a
novella 17,501 words to 40,000 words, and a novel 40,001 words and up. In theater script and poetry writing, vignettes
are short, impressionistic scenes that focus on one moment or give a trenchant
impression about a character, an idea, or a setting. This type of scene is more
common in recent postmodern theater, where
adherence to the conventions of theatrical structure and story development are
jettisoned. It is particularly influenced by contemporary notions of a scene as
shown in film, video and television scripting. Unlike the traditional scene in
a play, the vignette is not strictly linked in with a sequential plot
development but establishes meaning through loose symbolic or linguistic
connection to other vignettes or scenes. Vignettes are the literary equivalent
of a snapshot, often incomplete or fragmentary. In poetry, in the quintain form, they can relate to a short descriptive literary
sketch or a short scene or incident from a movie or play. The use of vignettes
is suited to those plays in which theme, image, emotion and character are more
important than narrative, though this doesn't mean that a vignette is out of
place as an element in a more narrative play.
1.2 The similarity and difference of themes and genres
of the leading literature representatives
The term English literature refers to literature written in the English language, including
literature composed in English by writers
not necessarily from England;
Joseph Conrad was Polish, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was
American, V.S.
Naipaul was born in Trinidad, Vladimir Nabokov was
Russian. In other words, English literature is as diverse as the varieties and
dialects of English spoken around the world. In academia, the term often
labels departments and programmes practising English studies in
secondary and tertiary educational systems. Despite the variety of authors of
English literature, the works of William
Shakespeare remain paramount throughout the English-speaking world.
This article primarily deals with literature from Britain written in English.
For literature from specific English-speaking regions, consult the see also
section at the bottom of the page.
Early Modern period
The Elizabethan
era saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in the field
of drama. The Italian
Renaissance had rediscovered the ancient Greek and Roman theatre,
and this was instrumental in the development of the new drama, which was then
beginning to evolve apart from the old mystery and miracle plays of the Middle Ages. The Italians
were particularly inspired by Seneca
(a major tragic playwright and philosopher, the tutor of Nero) and Plautus (its comic clichés,
especially that of the boasting soldier had a powerful influence on the
Renaissance and after). However, the Italian tragedies embraced a principle
contrary to Seneca's ethics: showing blood and violence on the stage. In
Seneca's plays such scenes were only acted by the characters [18, 123]. But the
English playwrights were intrigued by Italian model: a conspicuous community of
Italian actors had settled in London and Giovanni Florio had brought
much of the Italian
language and culture to England. It is also true that the
Elizabethan Era was a very violent age and that the high incidence of political
assassinations in Renaissance
Italy (embodied by Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince) did little to
calm fears of popish plots. As a result, representing that kind of violence on
the stage was probably more cathartic for the Elizabethan spectator. Following
earlier Elizabethan plays such as Gorboduc by Sackville & Norton and The
Spanish Tragedy by Kyd
that was to provide much material for Hamlet, William
Shakespeare stands out in this period as a poet and playwright as yet
unsurpassed. Shakespeare was not a man of letters by profession, and probably
had only some grammar school education. He was neither a lawyer, nor an aristocrat
as the "university wits" that had monopolised the English stage when
he started writing. But he was very gifted and incredibly versatile, and he
surpassed "professionals" as Robert Greene who mocked this "shake-scene" of low
origins [23, 145]. Though most dramas met with great success, it is in his
later years (marked by the early reign of James
I) that he wrote what have been considered his greatest plays: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony
and Cleopatra, and The Tempest,
a tragicomedy that inscribes
within the main drama a brilliant pageant to the new king. Shakespeare also
popularized the English
sonnet which made significant changes to Petrarch's model.
Modernism
The movement known as English literary modernism grew out of a
general sense of disillusionment with Victorian era attitudes of
certainty, conservatism, and objective truth. The movement was greatly
influenced by the ideas of Romanticism,
Karl Marx's political
writings, and the psychoanalytic theories of subconscious - Sigmund Freud. The
continental art movements of Impressionism, and later Cubism, were also important inspirations
for modernist writers.
Although literary modernism reached its peak between the First and
Second World Wars, the earliest examples
of the movement's attitudes appeared in the mid to late nineteenth century. Gerard
Manley Hopkins, A. E.
Housman, and the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy represented a
few of the major early modernists writing in England during the Victorian period.
The first decades of the twentieth century saw several major works
of modernism published, including the seminal short story collection Dubliners by James Joyce, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and the
poetry and drama of William
Butler Yeats.
Important novelists between the World Wars included Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse and D. H. Lawrence. T. S. Eliot was the
preeminent English poet of the period. Across the Atlantic writers like William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and the
poets Wallace
Stevens and Robert
Frost developed a more American take on the modernist aesthetic in
their work.
Perhaps the most contentiously important figure in the development
of the modernist movement was the American poet Ezra Pound. Credited with
"discovering" both T. S. Eliot
and James Joyce, whose stream of consciousness novel Ulysses is considered to be
one of the century's greatest literary achievements, Pound also advanced the
cause of imagism and free verse, forms which
would dominate English poetry into the twenty-first century.
Gertrude
Stein, an American expat, was also an enormous literary force during
this time period, famous for her line "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."
Other notable writers of this period included H.D., Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, William
Carlos Williams, Ralph
Ellison, Dylan
Thomas, R.S. Thomas
and Graham Greene. However,
some of these writers are more closely associated with what has become known as
post-modernism, a term
often used to encompass the diverse range of writers who succeeded the
modernists.
The term Postmodern
literature is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War II
literature. It is both a continuation of the experimentation championed by
writers of the modernist period (relying heavily, for example, on
fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, etc.) and a reaction against
Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature. Postmodern literature,
like postmodernism as a whole, is difficult to define and there is little
agreement on the exact characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern
literature. Henry
Miller, William
S. Burroughs, Joseph
Heller, Kurt
Vonnegut, Hunter
S. Thompson, Truman
Capote, Thomas
Pynchon
Modernist literature is the literary expression
of the tendencies of Modernism,
especially High
modernism.
Modernism
as a literary movement reached its height in Europe between 1900 and the middle
1920s. Modernist literature addressed aesthetic problems similar to those
examined in non-literary forms of contemporaneous Modernist art, such as
Modernist painting. Gertrude
Stein's abstract writings, for example, have often been compared to
the fragmentary and multi-perspectival Cubism of her friend Pablo Picasso.
The
Modernist emphasis on a radical individualism can be seen in the many literary manifestos
issued by various groups within the movement. The concerns expressed by Simmel
above are echoed in Richard Huelsenbeck's "First German Dada
Manifesto" of 1918:
"Art
in its execution and direction is dependent on the time in which it lives, and
artists are creatures of their epoch. The highest art will be that which in its
conscious content presents the thousandfold problems of the day, the art which
has been visibly shattered by the explosions of last week ... The best and most
extraordinary artists will be those who every hour snatch the tatters of their
bodies out of the frenzied cataract of life, who, with bleeding hands and
hearts, hold fast to the intelligence of their time." [3, 136]
The
cultural history of humanity creates a unique common history that connects
previous generations with the current generation of humans. The Modernist
re-contextualization of the individual within the fabric of this received
social heritage can be seen in the "mythic method" which T.S.
Modernist
literature involved such authors as Knut Hamsun (whose
novel Hunger
is considered to be the first modernist novel), Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Dylan Thomas, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, James Joyce, Hugh MacDiarmid, William Faulkner, Jean Toomer, Ernest Hemingway, Rainer
Maria Rilke, Franz
Kafka, Robert
Musil, Joseph
Conrad, Andrei
Bely, W. B. Yeats, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, Luigi Pirandello, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine
Mansfield, Jaroslav
Hašek, Samuel
Beckett, Menno
ter Braak, Marcel
Proust, Mikhail
Bulgakov, Robert
Frost, Boris
Pasternak, Djuna
Barnes, Patricia
Highsmith and others.
Modernist
literature attempted to move from the bonds of Realist literature and
to introduce concepts such as disjointed timelines.
Modernism was distinguished by an emancipatory metanarrative. In the
wake of Modernism, and post-enlightenment, metanarratives tended to be emancipatory,
whereas beforehand this was not a consistent characteristic. Contemporary
metanarratives were becoming less relevant in light of the implications of World War I, the rise
of trade unionism, a
general social discontent, and the emergence of psychoanalysis. The
consequent need for a unifying function brought about a growth in the political
importance of culture.
Modernist
literature can be viewed largely in terms of its formal, stylistic and semantic movement away
from Romanticism, examining
subject matter that is traditionally mundane a prime example being The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S.
Eliot. Modernist literature often features a marked pessimism, a clear
rejection of the optimism apparent in Victorian literature. In fact, "a common motif in
Modernist fiction is that of an alienated individual--a dysfunctional
individual trying in vain to make sense of a predominantly urban and fragmented
society." But the questioning spirit of modernism could also be seen, less
elegaically, as part of a necessary search for ways to make a new sense of a
broken world. An example is A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle by Hugh
MacDiarmid, in which the individual artist applies Eliot's techniques to
respond (in this case) to a historically fractured nationalism, using a more
comic, parodic and "optimistic"
(though no less "hopeless") modernist expression in which the artist
as "hero" seeks to embrace complexity and locate new meanings.
However,
many Modernist works like T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land are
marked by the absence even of a central, heroic figure. In rejecting the solipsism of Romantics
like Shelley and Byron, such works reject the notion of subject
associated with Cartesian
dualism, collapsing narrative and narrator into a collection of
disjointed fragments and overlapping voices [7, 121].
Modernist
literature often moves beyond the limitations of the Realist novel with a
concern for larger factors such as social or historical change. This is
prominent in "stream of consciousness" writing.
Examples can be seen in Virginia Woolf's Kew Gardens and Mrs Dalloway, James
Joyce's Ulysses,
Katherine Porter's Flowering Judas, Jean Toomer's Cane, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, and others.
Modernism
as a literary movement is seen, in large part, as a reaction to the emergence
of city life as a central
force in society. Furthermore, an early attention to the object as freestanding
became in later Modernism a preoccupation with form. The dyadic collapse of the
distance between subject and object represented a movement from means to is.
Where Romanticism stressed the subjectivity of experience, Modernist writers
were more acutely conscious of the objectivity of their surroundings. In
Modernism the object is; the language doesn't mean it is. This is a shift from
an epistemological
aesthetic to an ontological aesthetic
or, in simpler terms, a shift from a knowledge-based aesthetic to a being-based
aesthetic. This shift is central to Modernism. Archibald
MacLeish, for instance, said, "A poem should not mean / But
be."
Characteristics of Modernity/Modernism
·
Free
indirect speech
·
Stream of
consciousness
·
Juxtaposition
of characters
·
Wide use
of classical allusions
·
Figure of
speech
·
Intertextuality
·
Personification
·
Hyperbole
·
Parataxis
·
Comparison
·
Quotation
·
Pun
·
Satire
·
Irony
·
Antiphrasis
·
Unconventional
use of metaphor
·
Symbolic
representation
·
Psychoanalysis
·
Discontinuous
narrative
·
Metanarrative
·
Multiple
narrative points of view
Thematic
characteristics
·
Breakdown
of social norms
·
Realistic
embodiment of social meanings
·
Separation
of meanings and senses from the context
·
Despairing
individual behaviors in the face of an unmanageable future
·
Sense of
spiritual loneliness
·
Sense of
alienation
·
Sense of
frustration
·
Sense of
disillusionment
·
Rejection
of the history
·
Rejection
of the outdated social system
·
Objection
of the traditional thoughts and the traditional moralities
·
Objection
of the religious thoughts
·
Substitution
of a mythical past
·
Two World
Wars' Effects on Humanity
Conclusion to
part I
We came to a conclusion that Literature in 20th century begins
with a serie of movements, some of them contradictory between them, as
Symbolism, Decadentism, Impressionism and, in Hispanic literature, Modernism,
The Generation of '98. During the two first decades , two literary conceptions are
imposed to writers: Those writers for whom literary work is the expression of a
cultural experience and fall in intellectualism; and writers who, in view of
the chaos of the time and the dissatisfaction of bourgeois world, see literary
work as an adventure, as an irrational experience.
Modernism crystallized as a global result of all possible desires
of change and renovation. The prose poem continued to be written in France
and found profound expression, in the mid-20th century, in the prose poems of Francis Ponge. At the end
of the 19th century, British Decadent movement poets
such as Oscar Wilde picked up the
form because of its already subversive association. This actually hindered the
dissemination of the form into English because many associated the Decadents
with homosexuality, hence any form used by the Decadents was suspect.
The term English literature refers to literature written in the English language, including
literature composed in English by writers
not necessarily from England;
Joseph Conrad was Polish, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American,
V.S. Naipaul was born in
Trinidad, Vladimir
Nabokov was Russian.
PART II.
WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM’S "OF HUMAN BONDAGE" AND JOSEPH CONRAD’S "LORD
JIM"
2.1 The Moral Sense in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim
Lord Jim (1900), Joseph Conrad’s
fourth novel, is the story of a ship which collides with "a floating
derelict" and will doubtlessly "go down at any moment" during a "silent
black squall." The ship, old and rust-eaten, known as the Patna, is
voyaging across the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea. Aboard are eight-hundred
Muslim pilgrims who are being transported to a "holy place, the promise of
salvation, the reward of eternal life." Terror possesses the captain and
several of his officers, who jump from the pilgrim-ship and thus wantonly
abandon the sleeping passengers who are unaware of their peril. For the crew
members in the safety of their life-boat, dishonor is better than death [8,
183].
Beyond the immediate details and the
effects of a shipwreck, A breach of this novel portrays, in the words of the
story’s narrator, Captain Marlow, "those struggles of an individual trying
to save from the fire his idea of what his moral identity should be. . . ."
That individual is a young seaman, Jim, who serves as the chief mate of the Patna
and who also "jumps." Recurringly Jim envisions himself as "always
an example of devotion to duty and as unflinching as a hero in a book."
But his heroic dream of "saving people from sinking ships, cutting away
masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line," does not
square with what he really represents: one who falls from grace, and whose "crime"
is "a breach of faith with the community of mankind." Jim’s
aspirations and actions underline the disparity between idea and reality, or
what is generally termed "indissoluble contradictions of being." His
is also the story of a man in search of some form of atonement once he
recognizes that his "avidity for adventure, and in a sense of many-sided
courage," and his dream of "the success of his imaginary
achievements," constitute a romantic illusion.
Jim’s leap from the Patna generates in him
a severe moral crisis that forces him to "come round to the view that only
a meticulous precision of statement would bring out the true horror behind the
appalling face of things." It is especially hard for Jim to confront this "horror"
since his confidence in "his own superiority" seems so absolute. The "Patna
affair" compels him in the end to peer into his deepest self and then to
relinquish "the charm and innocence of illusions." The Jim of the Patna
undergoes "the ordeal of the fiery furnace," as he is severely tested
"by those events of the sea that show in the light of the day the inner
worth of a man, the edge of his temper, and the fibre of his stuff; that reveal
the quality of his resistance and the secret truth of his pretences, not only
to others but also to himself." Clearly the Patna is, for Jim, the
experience both of a moment and of a lifetime.
This novel, from beginning to end, is the
story of Jim; throughout the focus is on his life and character, on what he has
done, or A story not done, on his crime and punishment, his failure of nerve as
a seaman. It is, as well, the story of his predicament and his fate,
the destiny of his soul—of high expectations and the great "chance missed,"
of "wasted opportunity" and "what he had failed to obtain pretences.,"
all the result of leaving his post, and abdicating his responsibility. Thus we
see him in an unending moment of crisis, "overburdened by the knowledge of
an imminent death" as he imagines the grim scene before him: "He
stood still looking at those recumbent bodies, a doomed man aware of his fate,
surveying the silent company of the dead. They were dead! Nothing could save
them!"
For Jim the overwhelming question, "What
could I do — what?", brings the answer of "Nothing!" The Patna, as
it ploughs the Arabian Sea ("smooth and cool to the eye like a sheet of
ice") on its way to the Red Sea, is close to sinking, with its engines
stopped, the steam blowing off, its deep rumble making "the whole night
vibrate like a bass ring." Jim’s imagination conjures up a dismal picture
of a catastrophe that is inescapable and merciless. It is not that Jim thinks
so much of saving himself as it is the tyranny of his belief that there are
eight-hundred people on ship — and only seven life-boats. Conrad’s storyteller,
Marlow, much sympathetic to Jim’s plight, discerns in him an affliction of
helplessness that compounds his sense of hopelessness, making Jim incapable of
confronting total shipwreck, as he envisions "a ship floating head down,
checked in sinking by a sheet of old iron too rotten to stand being shored up
[16, 121]." But Jim is a victim not only of his imagination, but also of
what Conrad calls a "moral situation of enslavement." So torn and
defeated is Jim, that his soul itself also seems possessed by some "invisible
personality, an antagonistic and inseparable partner of his existence."
Jim’s acceptance of the inevitability of
disaster and his belief that he could do absolutely nothing to forestall the
loss of eight-hundred passengers render him helpless, robbing him of any
ability to take any kind of life-saving action—". . . I thought I might
just as well stand where I was and wait." In short, in Jim we discern a
disarmed man who surrenders his will to action. The gravity of Jim’s situation
is so overwhelming that it leaves him, his heroic aspirations notwithstanding,
in a state of paralysis. His predicament, then, becomes his moral isolation and
desolation, one in which Jim’s "desire of peace waxes stronger as hope
declines . . . and conquers the very desire of life." He gives in at
precisely the point when strenuous effort and decisive actions are mandated, so
as to resist "unreasonable forces." His frame of mind recalls here
Jean-Paul Sartre’s pertinent comment, in The Age of Reason (l945), "That’s
what existence means: draining one’s own self dry without a sense of thrust."
[12, 128]
Everything in Jim’s background points to
his success as a career seaman. We learn that, one of five sons, he originally
came from a parsonage, from one of those "abodes of piety and peace,"
in England; his vocation for the sea emerged early on and, for a period of two
years, he served on a "‘training-ship for affairs of the mercantile
marine.’" His station was in the fore-top of a training-ship chained to
her moorings. We learn that, on one occasion, in the dusk of a winter’s day, a
gale suddenly blew forth with a savage fury of wind and rain and tide,
endangering the small craft on the shore and the ferry-boats anchored in the harbor,
as well as the training-ship itself. The force of the gale "made him hold
his breath in awe. He stood still. It seemed to him he was whirled around. He
was jostled." We learn, too, that a coaster, in search of shelter, crashed
through a schooner at anchor. We see the cutter now tossing abreast the ship,
hovering dangerously. Jim is on the the midst of certitude.
Point of leaping overboard to save a man
overboard, but fails to do so. There is "pain of conscious defeat in his
eyes," as the captain shouts to Jim. "‘Too late, youngster. . . .
Better luck next time. This will teach you to be smart.’"
This incident, related in the first
chapter of the novel, serves to prepare us for Jim’s actions later on the Patna,
and also suggests a Danger in kind of flaw in Jim’s behavior in a moment of
danger. Early on in his career, then, Jim had displayed a willingness to "flinch"
from his obligations, thus revealing a defect in the heroism about which he
romanticized and which led him to creating self-serving fantasies and
illusions. "He felt angry with the brutal tumult of earth and sky for
taking him unawares and checking unfairly a generous readiness for narrow
escapes." Jim, as a seaman, refuses to admit his fear of fear, and in this
he shows an inclination to escape the truth of reality by "putting out of
sight all the reminders of our folly, of our weakness, of our mortality."
Clearly the episode on the training-ship serves both as a symptom and as a
portent, underscores an inherent element of failure and disgrace in Jim’s
character that, in the course of the novel, he must confront if he is to
transcend the dreams and illusions that beguile him, and that he must finally
vanquish if he is to find his "moral identity." His early experience
on the training-ship makes him a marked man [16, 132]. It remains for his
experience later on the Patna to make him a "condemned man."
That nothing rests secure, that, in the
midst of certitude, danger lurks, that peace and contentment are at the mercy
of the whirl of the world, are inescapable conditions of human existence. These
daunting dichotomies, as we find them depicted in Lord Jim, are forever teasing
and testing humans in their life-journey Conrad sees these dichotomies in the
unfolding spectacle of man and nature. To evince the enormous power of this
process Conrad chooses to render time in a continuum which fills all space.
Time has no end, no telos; it absorbs beginnings and endings—the past, present,
and future not only in their connections but also in their disconnections.
Conrad’s spatial technique is no less
complex, and no less revealing, than his use of time. Hence, he employs spatial
dimension so as to highlight Jim’s sense of guilt in jumping from the Patna
Conrad expresses it in his Author’s Note,
is Jim’s burden of fate. And wherever he retreats he is open to attack from
some "deadly snake in every bush." Time as memory and place as
torment become his twin oppressors.
The specificities of the Patna episode
were to come out during a well-attended Official Court of Inquiry that takes
place for several days in early August 1883. Most of the details, in the form
of remarks and commentaries, are supplied by Marlow in his long oral narrative,
especially as these emerge from Jim’s own confession to Marlow when they happen
to meet after the proceedings, on the yellow portico of the Malabar House [13,
178]. Humiliated and broken, his certificate revoked, his career destroyed, Jim
can never return to his home and face his father—"‘I could never explain.
He wouldn’t understand.’" Again and again, in his confession, Jim shows
feelings of desperation and even hysteria: "Everything had betrayed him!"
For him it is imperative to be identified neither with the "odious and
fleshly" German skipper, Gustav, "the incarnation of everything vile
and base that lurks in the world we love," nor with the chief and the
second engineers, "skunks" who are extensions of the captain’s
coarseness and cowardice.
But that, in fact, Jim does jump
overboard—"a jump into the unknown"—and in effect joins them in
deserting the Patna ultimately agonizes his moral sense and impels him to
scrutinize that part of his being in which the element of betrayal has entered.
By such an action he feels contaminated, unclean, disgraced. How to separate
himself morally from the captain and his engineers is still another cruel
question to which he must find an answer. In this respect, Jim reminds us of
the tragic heroes in ancient Greek drama whose encounters with destiny entail
both risks and moral instruction. "We begin to live," Conrad reminds
us, "when we have conceived life as a tragedy."
How does one "face the darkness"?
How does one behave to the unknowable? These are other basic questions that vex
Jim. He wants, of course, to answer these questions affirmatively, or at least
to wrestle with them in redeeming ways, even as he appears to see himself
within a contradiction—as one who can have no place in the universe once he has
failed to meet the standards of his moral code. Refusing to accept any "helping
hand" extended to him to "clear out," he decides to "fight
this thing down," to expiate his sin, in short, to suffer penitently the
agony of his failure: "He had loved too well to imagine himself a glorious
racehorse, and now he was condemned to toil without honour like a
costermonger’s donkey." Jim’s innermost sufferings revolve precisely
around his perception of his loss of honor, of his surrender to cowardice. The
crushing shame of this perception tortures Jim, without respite. "’I had
jumped—hadn’t I?’ he asked [Marlow], dismayed. ‘That’s what I had to live
down.’"
Jim’s moral sense is clearly outraged by
his actions. This outrage wracks his high conception of himself, compelling him
in The "idyllic time to see himself outside of his reveries that Conrad
also associates with "the determination to lounge safely through
existence." What clouds Jim’s fate is that such a net of safety and
certitude has no sustained reality. Within the serenity that seemed to bolster
his thoughts of "valorous deeds" there are hidden menaces that
assault his self-contentment and self-deception and abruptly awaken Jim to his
actual condition and circumstances [13, 186]. In one way, it can be said, Jim
is a slave of the "idyllic imagination" (as Irving Babbitt calls it),
with its expansive appetites, chimeras, reveries, pursuit of illusion. Jim’s is
the story of a man who comes to discern not only the pitfalls of this
imagination but also the need to free himself from its bondage. But to free
himself from bondage requires of Jim painstaking effort, endurance. He must
work diligently to transform chimeric, if incipient, fortitude into an active
virtue as it interacts with a world that, like the Patna, can be "full of
reptiles"—a world in which "not one of us is safe."
Conrad uses Jim to indicate the moral
process of recovery. Conrad delineates the paradigms of this process as these
evolve in the midst of much anguish and laceration, leading to the severest
scrutiny and judgment of the total human personality. Jim pays attention, in
short, to the immobility of his soul; it will take much effort for him to determine
where he is and what is happening to him if he is to emerge from the "heart
of darkness" and the affliction within and around him to face what is
called "the limiting moment." It is, in an inherently spiritual
context, a moment of repulsion when one examines the sin in oneself, and hates
it. His sense of repulsion is tantamount to moral renunciation, as he embarks
on the path to recovery from the romantic habit of daydreaming.
In the end Jim comes to despise his
condition, acceding as he Moral does to the moral imperative. He accepts the
need to see his
imperative to "trouble" as
his own, and he instinctively volunteers to answer questions regarding the Patna
by appearing before the Official Court of Inquiry "held in the police
court of an Eastern port." (This actually marks his first encounter with
Marlow, who is in attendance and who seems to be sympathetically aware of "his
hopeless difficulty.") He gives his testimony fully, objectively,
honestly, as he faces the presiding magistrate. The physical details of Jim’s
appearance underscore his urge "to go on talking for truth’s sake, perhaps
for his own sake"—"fair of face, big of frame, with young, gloomy
eyes, he held his shoulders upright above the box while his soul writhed within
him." Marlow’s reaction to Jim is instinctively positive: "I liked
his appearance; he came from the right place; he was one of us." In
striking ways, Jim is a direct contrast to the other members of "the Patna
gang": "They were nobodies," in Marlow’s words [13, 192].
It should be recalled here that Jim
adamantly refused to help the others put the lifeboat clear of the ship and get
it into the water for their escape. Indeed, as Jim insists to Marlow, he wanted
to keep his distance from the deserters, for there was "nothing in common
between him and these men." Their frenzied, self-serving actions to
abandon the ship and its human cargo infuriated Jim—"‘I loathed them. I
hated them.’" The scene depicting the abandonment of the Patna is one
filled with "the turmoil of terror," dramatizing the contrast between
Jim and the other officers— between honor and dishonor, loyalty and disloyalty,
in short, between aspiration and descent on the larger metaphysical map of
human behavior. Jim personifies resistance to the negative as he tries to
convey to Marlow "the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare recital
of events." Jim’s excruciating moral effort not to join the others and to
ignore their desperate motions is also pictured at a critical moment when he
felt the Patna dangerously dipping her bows, and then lifting them gently,
slowly—"and ever so little."
The reality of a dangerous situation now
seems to be devouring Jim, as he was once again to capitulate to the inner
voice of weakness and doubt telling him to "leap" from the Patna. Futility
hovers ominously around Jim at this last moment when death arrives in the form
of a third engineer "clutch[ing] at the air with raised arms, totter[ing]
and collapsing]." A terrified, transfixed Jim finds himself stumbling over
the legs of the dead man lying on the bridge. And from the lifeboat below three
voices yelled out eerily—"one bleated, another screamed, one howled"—imploring
the man to jump, not realizing of course that he was dead of a heart attack: "Jump,
George! Jump! Oh, jump. . . . We’ll catch you! Jump! . . . Geo-o-o-orge! Oh,
jump!" This desperate, screeching verbal command clearly pierces Jim’s
internal condition of fear and terror, just as the ship again seemed to begin a
slow plunge, with rain sweeping over her "like a broken sea." And
once again Jim is unable to sustain his refusal to betray his idea of honor.
Here his body and soul are caught in the throes of still another "chance
missed."
The assaults of nature on Jim’s outer
situation are as vicious at this pivotal point of his life as are the assaults
of conscience on his moral sense. These clashing outer and inner elements are
clearly pushing Jim to the edge, as heroic aspiration and human frailty wrestle
furiously for the possession of his soul. What happens will have permanent
consequences for him, as Conrad reveals here, with astonishing power of
perception [12, 93]. Here, then, we discern a process of cohesion and
dissolution, when Jim’s fate seems to be vibrating unspeakably as he
experiences the radical pressures and tensions of his struggle to be more than
what he is, or what he aspires to be. Jim, as if replacing the dead officer
lying on the deck of the Patna, jumps: "It had happened somehow. . . ,"
Conrad writes. "He had landed partly on somebody and fallen across a
thwart." He was now in the boat with those he loathed; "[h]e had
tumbled from a height he could never scale again." "‘I wished I could
die,’" he admits to Marlow. "‘There was no going back. It was as if I
had jumped into a well—into an everlasting deep hole.’"
A cold, thick rain and "a pitchy
blackness" weigh down the lurching boat; "it was like being swept by
a flood through a cavern." Crouched down in the bows, Jim fearfully
discerns the Patna, "just one yellow gleam of the masthead light high up
and blurred like a last star ready to dissolve." And then all is black, as
one of the deserters cries out shakily, "‘She’s gone!’" Those in the
boat remain quiet, and a strange silence prevails all around them, blurring the
sea and the sky, with "nothing to see and nothing to hear." To Jim it
seemed as if everything was gone, all was over. The other three shipmates in
the boat mistake him for George, and when they do recognize him they are
startled and curse him. The boat itself seems filled with hatred, suspicion,
villainy, betrayal. "We were like men walled up quick in a roomy grave,"
Jim confides to Marlow.
The boat itself epitomizes abject failure
and alienation from mankind. Everything in it and around it mirrors Jim’s
schism of soul, "imprisoned in the solitude of the sea." Through the
varying repetition of language and images Conrad accentuates Jim’s distraught
inner condition, especially the shame that rages in him for being "in the
same boat" with men who exemplify a fellowship of liars. By the time they
are picked up just before sunset by the Avondale, the captain and his two
officers had already "made up a story" that would sanction their
desertion of the Patna, which in fact had not sunk and which, with its
pilgrims, had been safely towed to Aden by a French gunboat, eventually to end
her days in a breaking-up yard. Unlike the others, Jim would choose to face the
full consequences of his actions, "to face it out—alone for myself—wait
for another chance—find out. . . ."
"Jim’s affair" was destined to
live on years later in the memo-Fear vs. ries and minds of men, as instanced by
Marlow’s chance meeting honor. in a Sydney café with a now elderly
French lieutenant who was a boarding-officer from the gunboat and remained on
the Patna for thirty hours. For Marlow this meeting was "a moment of
vision" that enables him to penetrate more deeply into the events
surrounding the Patna as he discusses them with one who had been "there."
The French officer, at this time the third lieutenant on the flagship of the
French Pacific squadron, and Marlow, now commanding a merchant vessel, thus
share their recollections, from which certain key thoughts emerge, measuring
and clarifying the entire affair. The two men here bring to mind a Greek chorus
speaking words of wisdom that explain human suffering and tragedy. In essence
it is Jim’s predicament that Conrad wants to diagnose here so as to enlist the
reader’s understanding, even sympathy. "‘The fear, the fear—look you—it is
always there,’" the French officer declares. And he goes on to say to
Marlow—all of this with reference to Jim: "‘And what life may be worth . .
. when the honour is gone. . . . I can offer no opinion—because—monsieur—I know
nothing of it.’"
For Conrad the task of the novelist is to illuminate
"Jim’s case" for the reader’s judgment, and he does this, from
diverse angles and levels, in order for the reader to consider all of the
evidence, all the ambivalences, antinomies, paradoxes. If for Jim the struggle
is to ferret out his true moral identity, for the reader the task is to
meditate on what is presented to him and, in the end, to attain a transcendent
apprehension of life in time and life in relation to val-ues.1 Jim
is, to repeat, "one of us," and in him we meet and see ourselves on
moral grounds, so to speak.
In the final paragraph of his Author’s
Note, Conrad is careful to point out that the creation of Jim "is not the
product of coldly Jim’s function perverted thinking." Nor is he "a
figure of Northern mists." In Jim, Conrad sees Everyman. In short, he is
the creative outgrowth of what Irving Babbitt terms "the high seriousness
of the ethical imagination," and not of the "idyllic imagination,"
with its distortions of human character. In other words, this is the "moral
imagination" which "imitates the universal" and reveres the "Permanent
Things." In Jim we participate in and perceive a normative consciousness,
as we become increasingly aware of Jim’s purposive function in reflective prose
and poetic fiction, aspiring as it does to make transcendence perceptible.2
Conrad testifies to the force and truth of the principles of a metaphysics of
art when, in the concluding sentence of his Author’s Note, he writes about his
own chance encounter with the Jim in ourselves: "One morning in the
commonplace surroundings of an Eastern roadstead, I saw his form pass
by—appealing—significant—under a cloud—perfectly silent. Which is as it should
be. It was for me, with all the sympathy of which I was capable, to seek fit
words for his meaning. He was ‘one of us.’"
A man of "indomitable resolution,"
Jim strikes aside any "plan for evasion" proffered to him by a "helping
hand" like Marlow’s. Nothing can tempt him to ignore the consequences of
both his decisions and indecisions, which surround him like "deceitful
ghosts, austere shades." Any plan to save him from "degradation,
ruin, and despair" he shuns, choosing instead to endure the conditions of
homelessness and aloneness [12, 104]. He refuses to identify with any schemes
or schemers of a morally insensitive nature. The "deep idea" in him
is the moral sense to which he somehow hangs on and the innermost voice to
which he listens.
Unfailingly Conrad reveals to us the
nature of Jim’s character and will in a "narrative [which] moves through a
devious course of identifications and distinctions," as one critic
observes.3 Thus in the person of Captain Montague Brierly we have a
paragon sailing-ship skipper, and an august member of the board of inquiry,
whose overarching self-satisfaction and self-worth presented to Marlow and to
the world itself "a surface as hard as granite." Unexplainably,
however, Brierly commits suicide a week after the official inquiry ended by
jumping overboard, less than three days after his vessel left port on his
outward passage. It seems, as Marlow believes, that "something akin to
fear of the immensity of his contempt for the young man [Jim] under
examination, he was probably holding silent inquiry into his own case."
Jim will not go the way of Brierly, whose juxtaposition to Jim, early on in the
novel, serves to emphasize the young seaman’s fund of inner strength needed to
resist perversion of the moral sense. Unlike Brierly, Jim will not be unjust to
himself by trivializing his soul.
Nor will Jim become part of any business
scheme that would Jim’s destiny conveniently divert him from affirming the
moral sense. A farfetched and obviously disastrous business venture ("[a]s
good as a gold-mine"), concocted by Marlow’s slight acquaintance, a West
Australian by the name of Chester, and his partner, "Holy-Terror Robinson,"
further illustrates in Jim the ascendancy of "his fine sensibilities, his
fine feelings, his fine longings." Jim will not be identified with the
unsavory Chester any more than he would be identified with the Patna gang.
Marlow himself, whatever mixed feelings he may have as to Jim’s weaknesses,
intuits that Jim has nobler aspirations than being "thrown to the dogs"
and in effect to "slip away into the darkness" with Chester. Jim’s
destiny may be tragic, but it is not demeaning or tawdry, which in the end sums
up Marlow’s beneficent trust in Jim.
In a state of disgrace, Jim was to work as
a ship-chandler for various firms, but he was always on the run—to Bombay, to
Calcutta, to Rangoon, to Penang, to Bangkok, to Batavia, moving Man "wants
from firm to firm, always "under the shadow" of his connection to the
Patna "skunks." Always, too, the paternal Marlow was striving to find
"opportunities" for Jim. Persisting in these efforts, Marlow pays a
visit to an acquaintance of his, Stein, an aging, successful
merchant-adventurer who owns a large inter-island business in the Malay
Archipelago with a lot of trading posts in out-of-the-way trading places for
collecting produce [11, 123]. Bavarian-born Stein is, for Marlow, "one of
the most trustworthy men" who can help to mitigate Jim’s plight. A famous
entomologist and a "learned collector" of beetles and butterflies, he
lives in Samarang. A sage, as well, he ponders on the problems of human
existence: "Man is amazing, but he is not a masterpiece . . . man is come
where he is not wanted, where there is no place for him. . . ," he says to
Marlow. He goes on to observe that man "wants to be a saint, and he wants
to be a devil," and even sees himself, "in a dream," "as a
very fine fellow—so fine as he can never be. . . ." Solemnly, he makes
this observation, so often quoted from Conrad’s writings: "A man that is
born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. . . . The way is to
the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands
and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up."
Marlow’s meeting with Stein provides for a
philosophical probing of some of the fundamental ideas and life-issues Conrad
presents in Lord Jim. The human condition, no less than the kingdom of
nature, is the province of his explorations. His musings on the mysteries of
existence ultimately have the aim of enlarging our understanding of Jim’s
character and soul [12, 128]. These musings also have the effect of heightening
Jim’s struggles to find his true moral identity. Inevitably, abstraction and
ambiguity are inherent elements in Stein’s metaphysics, so to speak, even as
his persona and physical surroundings merge to project a kind of mystery; his
spacious apartment, Marlow recalls, "melted into shapeless gloom like a
cavern." Indeed Marlow’s visit to Stein is like a visit to a medical
diagnostician who possesses holistic powers of discernment—"our conference
resembled so much a medical consultation—Stein of learned aspect sitting in an
arm-chair before his desk. . . ." Stein’s ruminations, hence, have at
times an oracular dimension, as ". . . his voice . . . seemed to roll
voluminous and grave—mellowed by distance." It is in this solemn
atmosphere, and with subdued tones, that Stein delivers his chief pronouncement
on Jim: "‘He is romantic—romantic,’ he repeated. ‘And that is very
bad—very bad. . . . Very good, too,’ he added."
The encounter with Stein assumes, almost
at the mid-point of the novel, episodic significance in Jim’s moral destiny,
and in the final journey of a soul in torment. Stein’s observations, insightful
as they are, hardly penetrate the depths of Jim’s soul, its conditions and
circumstances, which defy rational analysis and formulaic prescriptions. The
soul has its own life, along with but also beyond the outer life Stein images.
It must answer to new demands, undertake new functions, face new situations—and
experience new trials. The dark night of the soul is at hand, inexorably, as
Jim retreats to Patusan, one of the Malay islands, known to officials in
Batavia for "its irregularities and aberrations." It is as if Jim had
now been sent "into a star of the fifth magnitude." Behind him he
leaves his "earthly failings." "‘Let him creep twenty feet
underground and stay there,’" to recall Brierly’s words. In Patusan, at a
point of the river forty miles from the sea, Jim will relieve a Portuguese by
the name of Cornelius, Stein & Co.’s manager there. It is as if Stein and
Marlow had schemed to "tumble" him into another world, "to get
him out of the way; out of his own way." "Disposed" of, Jim thus
enters spiritual exile, alone and friendless, a straggler, a hermit in the
wilderness of Patusan, where "all sound and all movements in the world
seemed to come to an end."
The year in which Jim, now close to thirty
years of age, arrives in Patusan is 1886. The political situation there is
unstable—"utter insecurity for life and property was the normal condition."
Dirt, stench, and mud-stained natives are the conditions with which Jim must
deal. In the midst of all of this rot, Jim, in white apparel, "appeared
like a creature not only of another kind but of another essence." In
Patusan, he soon becomes known as Lord Jim (Tuan Jim), and his work gives him "the
certitude of rehabilitation." Patusan, as such, heralds Jim’s unceasing
attempt to start with a clean slate. But in Patusan, as on the Patna, Jim is in
extreme peril, for he has to grapple with fiercely opposing native factions:
the forces of Doramin, Stein’s old friend, chief of the second power in
Patusan, and those of Rajah Allang, a brutish chief, constantly locked in
quarrels over trade, leading to bloody outbreaks and casualties. Jim’s chief
goal was "to conciliate imbecile jealousies, and argue away all sorts of
senseless mistrusts." Doramin and his "distinguished son," Dain
Waris, believe in Jim’s "audacious plan." But will he succeed, or
will he repeat past failures? Is Chester, to recall his earlier verdict on Jim,
going to be right: "‘He is no earthly good for anything.’" And will
Jim, once and for all, exorcise the "unclean spirits" in himself,
with the decisiveness needed for atonement? These are convergent questions that
badger Jim in the last three years of his life.
During the Patusan sequence, Jim attains
much power and influence: "He dominated the forest, the secular gloom, the
old mankind." As a result of Jim’s leadership, old Doramin’s followers
rout their sundry enemies, led not only by the Rajah but also by the vagabond
Sherif Ali, an Arab half-breed whose wild men terrorized the land. Jim becomes
a legend that gives him even supernatural powers. Lord Jim’s word was now "the
one truth of every passing day." Certainly, from the standpoint of heroic
feats and sheer physical courage and example, Jim was to travel a long way from
Patna to Patusan. Here his fame is "Immense! . . . the seal of success
upon his words, the conquered ground for the soles of his feet, the blind trust
of men, the belief in himself snatched from the fire, the solitude of his
achievement." If his part in the Patna affair led to the derision that
pursued him in his flights to nowhere, fame and adoration now define his
newly-won greatness. The tarnished first mate of the Patna in the Indian Ocean
is now the illustrious Lord Jim of the forests of Patusan.
The difficult situations that Jim must now
confront in Patusan demand responsible actions, which Conrad portrays with all
their Concrete complexities and tensions. There is no pause in Jim’s constant gestures
wrestle with responsibilities, whether to the pilgrims on the Patna or the
natives in Patusan. The moral pressures on him never ease, requiring of Jim
concrete gestures that measure his moral worth. Incessantly he takes moral
soundings of himself and of the outer life [15, 211]. The stillness and
silences of the physical world have a way of accentuating Jim’s inner anguish.
He is profoundly aware that some "floating derelict" is waiting
stealthily to strike at the roots of order, whether of man or of society.
In the course of relating the events in
Patusan, where he was visiting Jim, Marlow speaks of Jim’s love for a Eurasian
girl, Jewel, who becomes his mistress. Cornelius, the "awful Malacca
Portu- guese," is Jewel’s legal guardian, having married her late mother
after her separation from the father of the girl. A "mean, cowardly
scoundrel," Cornelius is another repulsive beetle in Jim’s life. The
enemies from without, like the enemy from within, seem to pursue Jim
relentlessly. In Patusan, thus, Cornelius, resentful of being replaced as
Stein’s representative in the trading post, hates Jim, never stops slandering
him, wants him out of the way: "‘He knows nothing, honourable sir—nothing
whatever. Who is he? What does he want here—the big thief? . . . He is a big
fool. . . . He’s no more than a little child here—like a little child—a little
child.’" Cornelius asks Marlow to intercede with Jim in his favor, so that
he might be awarded some "‘moderate provision—suitable present,’"
since "he regarded himself as entitled to some money, in exchange for the
girl." But Marlow is not fazed by Cornelius’s imprecations: "He
couldn’t possibly matter . . . since I had made up my mind that Jim, for whom
alone I cared, had at last mastered his fate. . . ." Nor is Jim himself
troubled by Cornelius’s unseemly presence and the possible danger he presents: "It
did not matter who suspected him, who trusted him, who loved him, who hated
him. . . . ‘I came here to set my back against the wall, and I am going to stay
here,’" Jim insists to Marlow [15, 213].
The concluding movement of the novel, a
kind of andante, conveys a "sense of ending." Marlow’s long
narrative, in fact, is now coming to an end, confluent with his "last talk"
with Jim and his own imminent departure from Patusan. The language belongs to
the end-time, and is pervaded by deepening sorrow and pity, and by an implicit
recognition "of the implacable destiny of which we are the victims—and the
tools." A poetry of lamentation takes hold of these pages, and the
language is brooding, ominous, recondite. Concurrently, the figure of Cornelius
weaves in and out and gives "an inexpressible effect of stealthiness, of
dark and secret slinking. . . . His slow, laborious walk resembled the creeping
of a repulsive beetle. . . . " We realize that Marlow and Jim will never
meet again, as we witness a twilight scene of departure. Having accompanied
Marlow as far as the mouth of the river, Jim now watches the schooner taking
Marlow to the other world "fall off and gather headway." Marlow sees
Jim’s figure slowly disappearing, "no bigger than a child—then only a
speck, a tiny white speck . . . in a darkened world."
At the end of the novel, Jim finds himself
a prisoner and ultimately a victim of treachery as he fights against invading
outcasts and desperadoes who, for any price, kill living life—cutthroats led Man’s
moral by "the Scourge of God," "Gentleman Brown," a supreme
incarnation of evil that Jim must confront. Conrad renders the power of evil in
unalleviating ways, even as he sees man’s moral poverty as an inescapable
reality. Indeed, what makes Jim’s fate so overpowering is that he never stops
struggling against the ruthless forces of destruction that embody Conrad’s
vision of evil. What Jim has accomplished in Patusan by creating a more stable
social community will now be subject to attack by invaders of "undisguised
ruthlessness" who would leave Patusan "strewn over with corpses and
enveloped in flames." If Jim’s inner world, in the first part of the
novel, is in turmoil, it is the outer world, in the second part of the novel,
that is collapsing "into a ruin reeking with blood." What we hear in
the concluding five chapters of Lord Jim is the braying voice of universal
discord, crying out with a merciless conviction that, between the men of the
Bugis nation living in Patusan and the white marauders, "there would be no
faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace."
The last word of the story of Jim’s life
is reserved for one of Marlow’s earlier listeners, "the privileged man,"
who receives a thick packet of handwritten materials, of which an explanatory
letter by Marlow is the most illuminating. A narrative in epistolary form
provides us, two years following the completion of Marlow’s oral narrative,
with the details of the last episode that had "come" to Jim. What
Marlow has done is to fit together the fragmentary pieces of Jim’s "astounding
adventure" so as to record "an intelligible picture" of the last
year of his life [15, 218]. The epistolary narrative here is based on the
exploit of "a man called Brown," upon whom Marlow happened to come in
a wretched Bangkok hovel a few hours before Brown died. The latter was thus to
volunteer information that helped complete the story of Jim’s life, in which
Brown himself played a final and fatal role.
The son of a baronet, Brown is famous for
leading a "lawless life." He is "a latter-day buccaneer,"
known for his "vehement scorn for mankind at large and for victims in
particular." We learn that he hung around the Philippines in his rotten
schooner, which, eventually, "he sails into Jim’s history, a blind
accomplice of the Dark Powers." Their meeting takes place as they face
each other across a muddy creek—"standing on the opposite poles of that
conception of life which includes all mankind." This encounter is of
enormous consequence, as Jim, "the white lord," contends verbally
with the "terrible," "sneering" Brown, who slyly invokes
their "common blood, an assumption of common experience, a sickening
suggestion of common guilt. . . ." The conversation, Marlow was to recall
in his letter, appeared "as the deadliest kind of duel on which Fate
looked on with her cold-eyed knowledge of the end." Brown, with his "satanic
gift of finding out the best and the weakest spot in his victims," seems
to be surveying and staking out Jim’s character and capability. Jim, on his
part, intuitively feels that Brown and his men are "the emissaries with
whom the world he had renounced was pursuing him in his retreat."
Perceiving the potential menace of Brown
and his "rapacious" To underesti- white followers, Jim approaches the
entire situation with caution; he knows that there will be either "a clear
road or else a clear fight" ahead. His one thought, as he informs Doramin,
is "for the people’s good." Preparations for battle now take place
around the fort, and the feeling among the natives is one of anxiety, and also
of hope that Jim will somehow resolve everything by convincing Brown that the
way back to the sea would be a peaceful one. Jim is convinced "that it
would be best to let these whites and their followers go with their lives."
Unwavering as always in meeting his moral obligations, he is primarily
concerned with the safety of Patusan. But he underestimates the calculating
Brown, again disclosing the propensity that betrays him. Quite simply Jim does
not mistrust Brown, believing as he does that both of them want to avoid
bloodshed. In this respect, illusion both comforts and victimizes Jim, as the
way is made clear for Brown, with the sniveling Cornelius at his side providing
him with directions, to withdraw from Patusan, now guarded by Dain Waris’s
forces.
Brown’s purpose is not only to escape but
also to get even with Jim for not becoming his ally, and to punish the natives
for their earlier resistance to his intrusion. When retreating towards the
coast his men deceitfully open fire on an outpost of Patusan, killing the
surprised and panic-stricken natives, as well as Dain Waris, "the only son
of Nakhoda Doramin," who had earlier acceded to Jim’s request that Brown
and his party should be allowed to leave without harm. It could have been
otherwise, to be sure, given the superior numbers of the native defenders. Once
again, it is made painfully clear, Jim flinches in discernment and in leadership,
naïvely trusting in his illusion, in his dream, unaware of the evil power
of retribution that impels Brown and that slinks in humankind. That, too,
Brown’s schooner later sprung a bad leak and sank, he himself being the only
survivor to be found in a white long-boat, and that the deceitful Cornelius was
to be found and struck down by Jim’s ever loyal servant, Tamb' Itam, can hardly
compensate for the destruction and the deaths that took place as a result of
Jim’s failure of judgment. Marlow’s earlier demurring remark has a special
relevance at this point: "I would have trusted the deck to that youngster
[Jim] on the strength of a single glance . . . but, by Jove! it wouldn’t have
been safe."
Jim’s decision to allow free passage to
Brown stems from his concern with preserving an orderly community in Patusan:
he did Moral pride not want to see all his good work and influence destroyed by
violent acts. But clearly he had misjudged Brown’s character. Neither Jim’s
honesty nor his courage, however, are to be impugned; his moral sense, in this
case, is what consciously guided his rational conception of civilization. But a
failure of moral vision, induced perhaps by moral pride and romanticism, blinds
him to real danger. When Tamb' Itam returns from the outpost to inform Jim
about what has happened, Jim is staggered. He fathoms fully the effects of
Brown’s "cruel treachery," even as he understands that his own safety
in Patusan is now at risk, given Dain Waris’s death and Doramin’s dismay and
grief over events for which he holds Jim responsible. For Jim the entire
situation is untenable, as well as perplexing: "He had retreated from one
world for a small matter of an impulsive jump, and now the other, the work of
his own hands, had fallen in ruins upon his head." His feeling of
isolation is rending, as he realizes that "he has lost again all men’s
confidence." The "dark powers" have robbed him twice of his
peace.
To Tamb' Itam’s plea that he should fight
for his life against Doramin’s inevitable revenge, Jim bluntly cries, "‘I
have no life.’" Jewel, too, "wrestling with him for the possession of
her happiness," also begs him to put up a fight, or try to escape, but Jim
does not heed her. "He was going to prove his power in another way and
conquer the fatal destiny itself." This is, truly, "‘a day of evil,
an accursed day,’" for Jim and for Patusan. When Dain Waris’s body is
brought into Doramin’s campong, the "old nakhoda" was "to let
out one great fierce cry . . . as mighty as the bellow of a wounded bull."
The scene here is harrowing in terms of grief, as he women of the household "began
to wail together; they mourned with shrill cries; the sun was setting, and in
the intervals of screamed lamentations the high sing-song voices of two old men
intoning the Koran chanted alone." The scene is desolate, unconsoling,
rendered in the language of apocalypse; the sky over Patusan is blood-red, with
"an enormous sun nestled crimson amongst the tree-tops, and the forest
below had a black and forbidding face." Jim now appears silently before
Doramin, who is sitting in his arm-chair, a pair of flintlock pistols on his
knees. "‘I am come in sorrow,’" he cries out to Doramin, who stared
at Jim "with an expression of mad pain, of rage, with a ferocious glitter.
. . . and lifting deliberately his right [hand], shot his son’s friend through
the chest."
At the end of his explanatory letter
Marlow remarks that Jim "passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart,
forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic." Such a remark, of
course, must be placed in the context of Marlow’s total narrative, with all of
the tensions and the ambiguities that occur in relating the story of Jim’s life
as it unfolds in the novel. Nor can Marlow’s words here be construed as a moral
censure of Jim [10, 156]. What exemplifies Marlow’s narrative, in fact, is the
integrity of its content, as the details, reflections, judgments, demurrals
emerge with astonishing and attenuating openness, deliberation. There is no
single aspect of Jim’s life and character that is not measured and presented in
full view of the reader. If judgment is to be made regarding Jim’s situation,
Conrad clearly shows, then affirmations and doubts, triumphs and failures will
have to be disclosed and evaluated cumulatively.
No one is more mercilessly exposed to the
world than Jim. And no one stands more naked before our judgment than he. The
scrutiny of Jim’s beliefs and attitudes, and of his actions and inactions, is
relentless in depth and latitude. He himself cannot hide or flee, no matter
where he happens to be. Marlow well discerns Jim’s supreme aloneness in his
struggles to find himself in himself, to master his fate, beyond the calumnies
of his enemies and the loyalty and love of his friends—and beyond his own
rigorous self-judgments. The anguish of struggle consumes everything and
everyone in the novel, and nothing and no one can be the same again once in
contact with him. In Jim, it can be said, we see ourselves, for he is "one
of us," he is our "common fate," which prohibits us to "let
him slip away into the darkness."
2.2 "Human
Bondage" and it’s moral duality
From a moral perspective the Official
Court of Inquiry literally takes place throughout Lord Jim. Jim never ceases to
react to charges of cowardice and of irresponsibility; never ceases to strive
earnestly to prove his moral worthiness. He seems never to be in a state of
repose, is always under pressure, always examining his tensive state of mind
and soul. Self-illumination rather than self-justification, or even
self-rehabilitation, is his central aim, and he knows, too, that such a process
molds his own efforts and pain [15, 83]. He neither expects nor accepts help or
absolution from others, nor does he blame others for his own sins of commission
or omission. His character is thus one of singular transparency, acutely
self-conscious, and vulnerable.
Jim’s moral sense weighs heavily on him
and drives him on sundry, sometimes contradictory, lines of moral awareness and
behavior. In this respect he brings to mind the relevance of Edmund Burke’s
words: "The lines of morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematics.
They are broad and deep as well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand
modifications."4 Gnostic commentators who view the moral
demands of this novel as confusing or uncertain fail to see that the lines of
morality, even when they take different directions and assume different forms,
inevitably crystallize in something that is solid in revelation and in value.5
Clearly Jim’s high-mindedness and
character are problematic, and his scale of human values is excessively
romantic. Thus heromanticizes what it means to be a sailor, what duty is, even
what cowardice is. The fact is that he is too "noble" to accommodate
real-life situations. In essence, then, Jim violates what the ancient Greeks
revered as the "law of measure." And ultimately his pride, his lofty
conception of what is required of him in responsible leadership and duty, his
high idealism, mar the supreme Hellenic virtue of sophrosyne-. Jim’s
conduct dramatizes to an "unsafe" degree the extremes of arrogance,
and of self-delusion and self-assertion. Above all his idealism becomes a
peculiar kind of escape from the paradoxes and antinomies that have to be faced
in what Burke calls the "antagonist world."
In the end, Jim’s habit of detachment and
abstraction manifestly rarefies his moral sense and diminishes and even
neutralizes the moral meaning of his decisions and actions. His self-proclaimed
autonomy dramatizes monomania and egoism, and makes him incapable of harmonious
human interrelations, let alone a redeeming humility. His moral sense is
consequently incomplete as a paradigm, and his moral virtues are finite. And
his fate, as it is defined and shaped by his tragic flaw, does not attain true
grandeur. In Jim, it can be said, Conrad presents heroism with all
its limitations [14, 147].
Despite the circumstances of his moral
incompleteness, Jim both possesses and enacts the quality of endurance in
facing the darkness in himself and in the world around him. Even when he yearns
to conceal himself in some forgotten corner of the universe, there to separate
himself from other imperfect or fallen humans, from thieves and renegades, and
from the harsh exigencies of existence, he also knows that unconditional
separation is not attainable. He persists, however erratically or skeptically,
in his pursuit to reconcile the order of the community and the order of the
soul; and he perseveres in his belief in the axiomatic principles of honor, of
loyalty, prescribing the need to transcend inner and outer moral squalor. His
death, even if it shows the power of violence, of the evil that stalks man and
humanity, of the flaws and foibles that afflict one’s self, does not diminish
the abiding example of Jim’s struggle to discover and to overcome moral lapses.
Jim can never silence the indwelling moral sense which inspires
and illuminates his life-journey. Throughout this journey the virtue of
endurance does not abandon him, does not betray him, even when he betrays
himself and others. He endures in order to prevail. In Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
portrays a fitful but ascendant process of transfiguration in the life of a
solitary hero whose courage of endurance contains the seeds of redemption. Such
a life recalls the eternal promise of the Evangelist’s words: "He that endureth
to the end shall be saved."
The major character of the novel, Philip, spends most of his life
in two places, which become the dominant settings for the book. From the time
he becomes aware of the world around him until his adolescence, Philip is found
in Blackstable and its neighboring town of Tercanbury. Even after he goes
abroad to study, he keeps coming beck to Blackstable during the holidays and
whenever he feels the need for a change.
In the process of establishing his
identity, Philip visits London twice and spends the major part of his mature
years in that city. Returning back from Heidelberg, he goes to London to become
a clerk in the company of Chartered Accountants. When he realizes he has no
aptitude for accounting, he returns……
Philip Carey - an orphan with a
clubfoot. He is the protagonist of the novel whose story Maugham traces from age
nine to thirty.
William Carey - the uncle of Philip and
the vicar of Blackstable. He is self-centered and rigid in his views.
Mildred Rogers - Philip’s antagonist on
one level. Selfish, shallow, and flirtatious, she successfully lures Philip
with her charms.
Thorpe Athelny - a boisterous
journalist. He is a loving family man who becomes Philip’s friend, philosopher,
and guide.
Mrs. Carey - the kind and gentle
wife of the vicar. She loves Philip and helps him fulfil his desires.
Mr. Perkins - one of Philip’s
well-wishers. He is the scholarly headmaster of King’s School.
The novel is the story of Philip Carey.
The story opens with his mother dying after childbirth. The nine-year-old
Philip is taken by his uncle to Blackstable. After spending a few initial years
at the Vicarage, the boy is admitted to King’s School at Tercanbury. Having a
clubfoot, he is ostracized and becomes introverted, but his intelligence and
his aptitude for studies help him academically. Unable to bear the humiliation
and taunts of his fellow students and the rigid norms of school, he finally
quits and goes to Germany. In Germany, Philip learns new languages, is
introduced to philosophy, and discovers the beauty of nature. His stay in
Heidelberg expands his vision of humanity and life. He graduates and starts
planning his future.
After talking to his uncle, Philip decides
to go to London to become a clerk; however, he discovers after a few months
that he is more inclined toward art than accounting. Taking financial aid from
his aunt, he leaves for Paris to study. The city gives him an insight into the
world of artists and their struggle to exhibit their talent. At the end of two
years, he also discovers that he lacks the potential to be a great artist. As a
result, he leaves Paris and returns back to Blackstable.
Philip decides to take up his father’s profession
of medicine and enrolls as a student in St. Luke’s hospital. He does not,
however, pursue his goal in earnest because of a waitress named Mildred [8,
121].
The major theme of the novel is that the
submission to passion is human bondage, while the exercise of reason is human
liberty. Philip Carey loves Mildred passionately and, in trying to possess her,
traps himself in her bondage. His freedom is curbed, his education is
disrupted, and his fortune is lost. All his reasoning, power, and intelligence
are eradicated by his passion for Mildred.
There are several minor themes in the
novel. The first is that inappropriate love can be destructive. In spite of her
many weaknesses, Philip loves Mildred and showers his affection and money on
her. He even sacrifices his education and limited resources to please her. In
the process, Philip wastes the important years of his life following a woman
who is not deserving of his love. It is definitely a destructive relationship
for Philip, one that keeps him in bondage [8, 128].
The mood of the novel is serious, but not
gloomy. Maugham, with irony and cynicism, presents the struggle of a lonely
protagonist and the turmoil in his mind.
William Somerset Maugham, the youngest
child of Mr. and Mrs. Robert Maugham, was born in Paris, France on January 25,
1874. At the time of his birth, his father was working as a lawyer for the
British Embassy in Paris. In 1882, his mother died of tuberculosis. His three
brothers went to study in London, and William was sent to a clergyman attached
to the British Embassy. When his father died two years later, there was no one
to look after him in Paris. As a result, h e was sent to Kent to live with his
uncle, Henry Maugham. Since his uncle and aunt were childless, they found it
difficult to care for him. William, at the age of ten, was a lonely and unhappy
child. His life at King’s School in Canterbury was no better. Frail and
sensitive, he felt isolated from the other boys because of his stammer.
Maugham was smart, but the rigid school
discipline and the taunts of his classmates made him leave school before he
could complete his education. He left for Germany with the help of his uncle.
Of Human Bondage is semi-autobiographical.
In it Maugham reveals his childhood, his student days in Heidelberg and London,
and his philosophy of life. It was not, however, his first autobiographical
attempt. In the Artistic Temperament of Stephen Carey, Maugham retold much of
his first twenty-four years of life. The protagonist, however, was sent to
Rouen instead of Heidelberg and studied music instead of painting. The novel
did not come up to Maugham’s expectations and was not published. [10, 183]
The novel opens with the scene of a dying
woman attended by a doctor and the nurses. She has just delivered a stillborn
child, and her condition is critical. At her request, the nurse brings her
first-born child, Philip, to her bedside. Mrs. Carey caresses him, tenderly
touches his feet, and bursts into tears. The doctor advises her to rest, and
the boy is taken away by the nurse to his godmother, Miss Wilkens. Shortly
afterwards, the woman dies.
Philip is brought back home to meet his
uncle, William Carey, the brother of Philip’s father and the vicar of
Blackstable. The Vicar informs the boy that he would be accompanying him to
Blackstable to live there. Even though William Carey and his wife are kind and
childless, the prospect of having a boy under their roof does not really delight
them. Their means are limited, and Philip’s father had left behind only 2000 pounds for the boy, which had to last him until he was old enough to earn his own living.
Philip, though disturbed by the thought of
leaving his home, is reconciled to the situation. As a mark of remembrance, he
picks up his mother’s favorite clock, visits his mother’s room, and prepares to
depart. As he journeys with his uncle to Blackstable, he forgets his sorrows
and enjoys the countryside scenery. When they reach Blackstable, everything
about the place and its people seems strange to Philip.
In these opening chapters, Maugham conveys
the poignancy of Philip’s situation through clear descriptions and short
conversations. It is a touching scene when his mother calls him to her bedside
before she dies. They obviously had a close relationship, as evidenced by her
tender touches, by his taking her favorite clock as a remembrance, and by his
trying to feel her presence left in her room. Because Philip has a clubfoot,
she has probably been particularly gentle and patient with her first-born son
[10, 187].
The loss of his mother and her baby are
made all the more tragic when Philip finds out he must leave home. Because he
is now an orphan at the age of nine, he must go to live with his uncle, William
Carey, and his wife in Blackstable; unfortunately, they are not particularly
pleased about raising the child, and Philip is not pleased about going. He does
not want to leave his home and the memories of his mother. He goes into her
room to vent his emotions. Hiding his face in her clothes, he tries to breathe
her into his being by touching and smelling the things that belonged to her. In
these first chapters, Maugham does an outstanding job of presenting Philip as a
sensitive and intelligent child who craves affection and sympathy.
Philip shows his innocence when he looks
with curiosity at all the sights on his way to Blackstable; he is struck with
wonder at the vision and temporarily forgets his sorrow and loneliness. He is
almost eager to see a new place. After all, as a handicapped child he has been
closely watched and protected. He has not experienced much of the world.
At Blackstable, Philip finds the ways of
his uncle and aunt quite different. Although they are kind, he is not
comfortable with them, and they feel strange with a child in the vicarage.
Philip watches in amazement as his uncle offers him only the top portion of a
boiled egg at tea, when he craves the whole thing. In spite of such peculiar
habits, Philip learns to adjust to his surroundings and tries to please his
guardians. It is important to notice several things in these opening chapters.
Although Philip’s clubfoot is not made an issue here, it is mentioned because
it becomes more important later in the novel. The interest in money is also
presented. The Careys are not well off, and they worry that the 2,000 pounds (equivalent to about $10,000 at the time of the novel) will not be enough to provide for
Philip until he is on his own. A concern about money will be seen throughout
the book, for Philip will have and lose a fortune. Finally, the British
tradition of tea is presented and will be seen frequently throughout the novel.
The plot of Of Human Bondage traces the
story of one man’s struggle for survival in a cruel world. Most of the action
is mental, as the protagonist tries to conquer his passion and replace it with
reason. There is a great deal of introductory material to establish Philip’s
background and philosophies. It is not until the book is almost half over that
the antagonist, Mildred, is introduced. The rising action of the plot is then
one misadventure with Mildred after another.
The dominant theme in the novel is human bondage.
Throughout life, Philip experiences bondage to different things, and the novel
is his fight to find freedom from the bondage. Philip is born with a physical
deformity that causes him to suffer humiliation and isolation. His clubfoot
becomes a bondage to him throughout the book. It curbs his physical activity in
school and makes him the object of criticism.
Of
Human Bondage
is a novel of adolescence, initiation, passage into adulthood,… the traditional
bildungsroman, fashionable in the first half of the XXth century. It soon
established itself as a classic and became a favorite of many readers in their
twenties, mostly men.
Of
Human Bondage
introduces the hero, Philip Carey, at eight years old, as he becomes an orphan
when his mother dies, soon after giving birth to a stillborn child. Philip is
sent to be raised by his uncle and aunt, sixty miles from London. His uncle, a
vicar, is self-centered and thinks only about fulfilling his appetites and
attracting people to his church. His aunt cares for him but is very awkward at
showing her feelings, as she never had any children of her own.
Philip
is afflicted by a handicap: a clubfoot that makes him a scapegoat in the
boarding-school where he studies until he is old enough to be ordained and
follow in the steps of his uncle. But Philip, growing up, develops different
ambitions…
He
first realizes that the almighty God who can move mountains can’t or won’t cure
his clubfoot, despite his ardent prayers. Little by little, he looses his faith
and starts to turn to philosophy to understand the world. Along the way, he
meets people who, with their perspectives on life, make him think differently;
he progressively builds his own personality. Before graduating from school, he
decides that he will not go to Oxford, despite the fact that he is clever and
hard-working enough to earn a scholarship: instead, he decides to spend some
time in Germany.
He
starts to wonder about love and gets romantic ideas and ideals, first by
observing couples and then by a first-hand experience with an older woman, a
friend of his aunt and uncle. But his frustration grows, when he realizes that
he has not experienced love as it is described in the numerous novels he likes
to read [9, 96].
Training
for some months as an accountant in London, he understands that this is not
what he is meant to do and, since he can draw, sets his mind on becoming an
artist and goes to Paris to learn the craft. The part of the book set in
Montmartre reminds strongly of Zola’s The Masterpiece. Sensing and having been
confirmed that he has no real talent, he gives up la vie de bohême after
a while and returns to London to study medicine. Surprisingly, he shows real
compassion to his patients and finally succeeds in the profession that he chose
as the last resort.
But
the turning-point of the book, from which the title derives, is his passionate
and destructive relationship with Mildred, a waitress whom he finds common,
vulgar, stupid and anemic, but whom he is desperately attracted to, against
reason and his best interest. Because of this attraction, he will compromise
his studies, loose his money and almost his sanity.
Of
Human Bondage
certainly appeals most to readers between fifteen and twenty, at the age when
one spends hours philosophizing about love, arts and the meaning of life (later
we turn to the Monthy Python to understand the meaning of life!)… The ideas
discussed by Philip and his friends probably sound familiar to many readers,
which explains why so many people are drawn to this book. I probably would have
enjoyed it more a decade ago…
The
main themes developed in the book are of course the passage into adulthood, the
opposition between passion and reason, bondage and freedom, and we see that
even if Philip is completely aware of being used and ridiculed by Mildred, he
cannot get away from her… Other minor themes treated along the way are art (how
does one define a piece of art? does art reproduce reality or is reality
defined by the painter who gives to see?), religion (must a man abide by the
law if he doesn’t believe in God, knowing that the conception of good and evil
is based on Judeo-Christianism?), etc.
Of
Human Bondage
is largely autobiographical. Somerset Maugham started of as a doctor before
becoming a novel writer, a successful play writer, and again a novelist. His
mother passed away when he was eight, a very traumatic experience in his life,
and he was raised, like Philip, by his vicar uncle. He didn’t have a clubfoot,
but was stammering. Critics have pointed out that the clubfoot however didn’t
symbolize his stammer, but his homosexuality, that was considered a handicap
back then. They also argue that Mildred’s description corresponds to a very
androgynous woman (flat chest, thin lips, etc.). Somerset Maugham is not the
first author to describe a heroine in ambiguous terms. After all, Marcel
Proust’s model for Albertine was probably a man and Poe’s Ligeia has masculine
physical features (for a different reason though: Poe couldn’t conceive an
actual woman clever and learned like his Ligeia is supposed to be: that is what
happens when one marries his thirteen-years-old tuberculous cousin!). Since I
like to get unprejudiced ideas on the books I discover, I only read the preface
afterwards and I had gotten a hint that Somerset Maugham was homosexual, not
through the description of Mildred though, but rather, when he describes the
relationships he shares with his male friends (Philip is jealous, exclusive,
enjoys to be mothered by a friend while he is sick in bed): it had seemed to me
pretty obvious then…
Conclusion
to part II
Lord Jim (1900), Joseph Conrad’s fourth novel, is the
story of a ship which collides with "a floating derelict" and will
doubtlessly "go down at any moment" during a "silent black
squall."
This novel, from beginning to end, is the story of Jim; throughout
the focus is on his life and character, on what he has done, or A story not
done, on his crime and punishment, his failure of nerve as a seaman.
It is, as well, the story of his predicament and his fate, the destiny of his
soul—of high expectations and the great "chance missed," of "wasted
opportunity" and "what he had failed to ob- pretence stain," all
the result of leaving his post, and abdicating his responsibility.
From a moral perspective the Official Court of Inquiry literally
takes place throughout Lord Jim. Jim never ceases to react to charges of
cowardice and of irresponsibility; never ceases to strive earnestly to prove
his moral worthiness. He seems never to be in a state of repose, is always
under pressure, always examining his tensive state of mind and soul.
Jim’s moral sense weighs heavily on him and drives him on sundry,
sometimes contradictory, lines of moral awareness and behavior. In this respect
he brings to mind the relevance of Edmund Burke’s words: "The lines of
morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematics.
The major theme of the novel is that the
submission to passion is human bondage, while the exercise of reason is human
liberty. Philip Carey loves Mildred passionately and, in trying to possess her,
traps himself in her bondage. His freedom is curbed, his education is
disrupted, and his fortune is lost. All his reasoning, power, and intelligence
are eradicated by his passion for Mildred.
There are several minor themes in the novel. The first is that
inappropriate love can be destructive. In spite of her many weaknesses, Philip
loves Mildred and showers his affection and money on her. He even sacrifices
his education and limited resources to please her. In the process, Philip
wastes the important years of his life following a woman who is not deserving
of his love. It is definitely a destructive relationship for Philip, one that
keeps him in bondage.
The major theme of the novel is that the
submission to passion is human bondage, while the exercise of reason is human
liberty. Philip Carey loves Mildred passionately and, in trying to possess her,
traps himself in her bondage. His freedom is curbed, his education is
disrupted, and his fortune is lost. All his reasoning, power, and intelligence
are eradicated by his passion for Mildred.
There are several minor themes in the novel. The first is that
inappropriate love can be destructive. In spite of her many weaknesses, Philip
loves Mildred and showers his affection and money on her. He even sacrifices
his education and limited resources to please her. In the process, Philip
wastes the important years of his life following a woman who is not deserving
of his love. It is definitely a destructive relationship for Philip, one that
keeps him in bondage.
GENERAL
CONCLUSION
On the basis
of above-stated we came to a conclusion, that Literature
in 20th century begins with a serie of movements, some of them contradictory
between them, as Symbolism, Decadentism, Impressionism and, in Hispanic
literature, Modernism, The Generation of '98.
During
the two first decades , two literary conceptions are imposed to writers: Those
writers for whom literary work is the expression of a cultural experience and
fall in intellectualism; and writers who, in view of the chaos of the time and
the dissatisfaction of bourgeois world, see literary work as an adventure, as
an irrational experience.
In
the thirties, some historic and socioeconomic facts, affected literature. It
will express the search, through the action, of ethical values.
After
the World War, writers will insist in the same attitudes: moral crisis and
technical experimentation.
From a moral
perspective the Official Court of Inquiry literally takes place throughout Lord
Jim. Jim never ceases to react to charges of cowardice and of irresponsibility;
never ceases to strive earnestly to prove his moral worthiness. He seems never
to be in a state of repose, is always under pressure, always examining his
tensive state of mind and soul. Self-illumination rather than
self-justification, or even self-rehabilitation, is his central aim, and he
knows, too, that such a process molds his own efforts and pain. He neither expects
nor accepts help or absolution from others, nor does he blame others for his
own sins of commission or omission. His character is thus one of singular
transparency, acutely self-conscious, and vulnerable.
Jim can never silence the indwelling moral sense which
inspires and illuminates his life-journey. Throughout this journey the virtue
of endurance does not abandon him, does not betray him, even when he betrays
himself and others. He endures in order to prevail. In Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
portrays a fitful but ascendant process of transfiguration in the life of a
solitary hero whose courage of endurance contains the seeds of redemption. Such
a life recalls the eternal promise of the Evangelist’s words: "He that
endureth to the end shall be saved."
Of Human Bondage is a novel of adolescence,
initiation, passage into adulthood, the traditional bildungsroman, fashionable
in the first half of the XX-th century. It soon established itself as a classic
and became a favorite of many readers in their twenties, mostly men.
Of Human Bondage is largely autobiographical.
Somerset Maugham started of as a doctor before becoming a novel writer, a
successful play writer, and again a novelist.
According to our aim and hypothesis of investigation,
in our work we proved the reflection of problems of human morality and
relationships on the example of W. Summerset’s and J. Conrad’s creativity.
We solved such tasks as:
- to research the main representatives of the prose
writing in the first half of the
twentieth century;
- to investigate the similarity and difference of
themes and genres of the leading
literature representatives;
- to research The problem of humanity in the work as a
leading Inclination of
W. Somerset
and J. Conrad.
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