Empresses of enjoyment
Like Karain's 'spot of land', Patusan is the stage of a parodic ritual of economic affiliation: it is in the name of Queen Victoria's commercial interests that Stein is introduced as the 'spiritual son' of an old Scotsman 'with a patriarchal white beard' (124) to another strong-willed female ruler, the Wajo Queen.
These two feminine figures also loom in the background of 'Karain', which ends on another strange symbolic ritual. One of the white gunrunners, Hollis, looks for 'a charm, a cure' to soothe Karain's anxiety (TU 79) – just like Marlow for Jim. In his box of personal things he finds a gilt sovereign, one of those innumerable bric-à-brac produced by the British Empire to celebrate Victoria's jubilee. In order to give a more personal turn to his rather grotesque present he inserts the coin in a piece of leather: 'I'll give him something that I shall really miss... I shall make him a thing like those Italian peasants wear, you know' (84). He then passes it around Karain's neck who is thus 'named' a citizen of the Empire of Trinkets. If it is true that Hollis has 'invented the West' here (GoGwilt 60), we must not overlook the caustic treatment of the scene which undergoes a strange visual and virtual distortion: it is as if Victoria's effigy were a hologram changing shape according to the angle of vision.
Why is the cure effective for Karain? Not for the commercial value of the coin but because the image of the Great Queen calls up the memory of another figure, the idealised woman of his dreams who spoke 'in the language of [his] people in the silence of foreign countries' (69). The superposition of the two images therefore suggests that the lost mother has been replaced by a globalised imperative to enjoy issued from a more prosaic economic mother and her shower of trivial objects. If for Karain the white man's fetish operates as a saving fiction against the anxiety of being thrown in global space, the invention of the West is exposed for what it is, a cheap compensation formation, a disguise staged by Her Majesty's economic ambassadors. After all, the British sailor is but another agent of commercial industrialism, just like Jim in Patusan.
The inquiry on the Patna affair actually serves as the progressive revelation of the truth about the whole shipping business. In terms of the economy (which concerns the regulation of flows) and material interests, the mass of pilgrims has been treated just like the abandoned bark of pitch-pine, another cargo of raw material in which the Patna is supposed to have collided. Conrad's writing, however, is careful to give a different treatment to that crowd. We are told that it is 'at the call of an idea' that the pilgrims left their remote countries.
Passing through suffering, meeting strange sights, beset by strange fears, upheld by one desire... they had left their forests, their clearings, the protection of their rulers, their prosperity, their poverty, the surroundings of their youth and the graves of their fathers. (LJ 14)
And the novel's gaze does not hesitate to dive into the human cargo, to stop for a close-up isolating a father and son figure, or a throat 'bared and stretched, as if offering itself to a knife' (LJ 16) – as if indeed about to be sacrificed.
The shadow of sacrifice inevitably calls up the horror of Jewel's mother's story: a story of women's experience, which, however minimally treated by the novel, reveals the orientation of Jim's desire obeying the call of another idea, the appeal of his 'Eastern bride': the idea of death which as Wallace Steven says, is 'the mother of beauty' (355). The grave of Jewel's mother dominates the whole scenery of Patusan and it is her memory, we are told, that Jim has espoused (165): a shadow, not an effigy on a gilt coin.
The poetical unconscious
It is now time to return to another most ambivalent scene in 'Karain', where a woman's desire is at stake. After wandering for two years in the company of Pata Matara who wants to murder his sister – she has betrayed the tribal code of honour by eloping with a Dutch trader – the final act has come. Karain is supposed to shoot the Dutchman but instead he kills his brother in arms, Pata Matara: why should Conrad suddenly subvert the revenge plot? I would suggest that this is because Karain's acte manqué both betrays and tells the truth about an unconscious preference for the feminine figure of his dreams over the tribal code of honour. Incarnated by Pata Matara (a name which unmistakably bears resonances of Pater and Mater), the code demanded no less than the death of the young woman who had dared defy the customs of her community.
In other words, even though by his very gesture he loses the object of his dreams, Karain has saved the young woman from what is called a crime of honour quite common in patriarchal cultures. This strange fable, then, clearly concerns the problem of birth into an alien world cut off from cultural ties. Like Saint Julien l'Hospitalier, his Flaubertian cousin who gave himself up to the enjoyment of killing first the beasts of creation and then his own father and mother, Karain has sacrificed culture and genealogy on the altar of modernity.2
He leaves behind the mythic past even though by stepping on the white gunrunner's ship he opts for another kind of protection, this time economic. In other words: Karain bears on his shoulders the unrest and burden of modernity, correlative of women's liberation from traditional culture and the opening of a new political and poetical space.
If we now look at Lord Jim, it appears that similar forces are at stake. The story of Jewel's mother surely prefigures Jewel's own reduction from a living woman to a living dead in Stein's house. The young woman's resistance to the mourning of Jim points to one thing: she knows only too well that she has been sacrificed on the altar of his family romance with the Eastern bride, that the espousal of the mother's memory means the return to the womb and the tomb. Can we seriously believe in the 'strange uneasy romance' (LJ 169) of Jim with his Jewel/gem when we read that the story of the enormous emerald/gem is contemporary with the white man's arrival – i.e. a fictional construct where romance goes hand in hand with commercial exploitation? Patusan in this respect is old Europe dis-oriented, a projection space for the European mind's desires and fears, and a twilight fantasy on the edge of decomposition – like some sort of Far East Venice3 where Jim, unlike Karain this time, makes the choice of the mythic past.
Which leads us to one question: why should Dain Waris, the local chief's son, be gifted with a 'European mind' defined by 'a tenacity of purpose, a touch of altruism' (157)? Does not Jim betray this very tenacity and altruism when he says to Jewel that there is nothing to fight for and abandons his fellow fighters? Why does he finally deliver himself into the hands of Doramin the patriarch if not to acquire a brand new fame by means of another 'crime of honour', as if finally to restore the revenge Plot of tragedy? It is at this stage that we encounter one shadowy limit of the sovereign power of a fixed standard of conduct. It may be that the sacrificial love for the lost mother's shadow and the love of one's idealised, fixed self-image are two sides of the same coin, and certainly poles apart from the European turn of mind praised in the figure of Dain Waris.
But what is it that makes of Jim or Karain the truly Conradian figures around which so much ink has been shed – in Jim's case at least – if not their surrender to unconscious bodily impulses, their permeability to the modern affect which is fear? Unlike Conrad the man who may have felt still bound to the code by the circumstances of his life, Conrad the writer privileges the affect over the code; his true concern is with the anxiety arising when a silent blind spot contaminates the social mirror. His tales blow up structuring binaries like East/West, Europe/the Orient until the hollow kernel is glimpsed.
If it is true that Conrad's fiction anticipates the globalised world in which we live today, it is with the awareness that we cannot go back to the old order and that we have to invent new symbolic bonds to contain the invasion of the force of self-serving enjoyment: constructing some new-born idea of Europe may be the politician's task, whereas for the artist the whole endeavour will be to enhance human solidarity through the power of the written word: to open the vistas of the poetical unconscious by awakening the memory of the language.
The hub of the Conradian galaxy is, as is well known, a black hole: an enigmatic spot – a stain of fear and uneasy enjoyment. Why does Jim want to return 'to the very spot' of the Patna's wreckage, why does he want 'to see', Marlow wonders?
[Because] his soul knew the accumulated savour of all the fear, all the horror, all the despair of eight hundred human beings pounced upon in the night by a sudden and violent death ... It was one of those bizarre and exciting glimpses through the fog. It was an extraordinary disclosure. He let it out as the most natural thing one could say. He fought down that impulse and then he became conscious of the silence. (LJ 71)
The whole novel revolves around that horrid thing like a luminous halo seen in a 'lurid light',4 compelling the Western eye, 'so often concerned with mere surfaces' (LJ 157) to turn and return, to overturn those surfaces. In Lord Jim as in 'Karain', Conrad produces a tale which 'turns its popular material against the assumptions of the genre' (GoGwilt 44), breaking through the polished surfaces, letting some black, shapeless, pulsating substance appear through the interstices, producing the constant revolutions of the material of language and codes on which the West is constructed.
Several critics have noted the strange detail of the 'torrent [which] wound about like a dropped thread' in the picture postcard of Karain's stage (TU 40). This dropped thread is like a shadow-line 'indicating an incompleteness in the description and an anxiety about the composition of the whole' (GoGwilt 48), something which does not fit in the epic texture and proportions of a prose otherwise so strongly reminiscent of Salambô.
The dropped thread followed by the 'flash of darkness' made by the breeze on the smooth water (40) undermines the imperial adventure story, just like the white piece of worsted which Marlow glimpses around the neck of the dying African in the grove of death. The black or white spot in the field of the visible splinters the Western perspective: it gazes at you, it concerns you and anticipates the atomisation of the surface. These strange poetic alterations affect the values of black, white, East, West, reason, madness and so on. Along similar lines the rhetoric of excess which applies to gender and racial differences5 comes as another case of insistence of the letter which betrays the artificiality of the stereotype.6
The vacillation is also manifest in the confusion of symbolic places at the moment of 'heroic' action, a true symptom which is manifest in the shifting rhetoric of pronouns – the linguistic place binding the political and the poetical unconscious. As Karain aims at Pata Matara he cries out 'Return!', a most ambivalent cry indeed since its addressee could be either the young woman, or Pata Matara with of course consequences going in opposite directions.
This confusion betrays the instability of language which throws Karain out of his safe world: his exile begins, he enters like Dante a 'very sombre and very sad' forest (TU 76). Similarly Jim's acte manqué is based on a linguistic quid pro quo: he jumps in the safety boat instead of George, the dead man called by the crew – and from the moment he has joined them 'his saved life was over' (LJ 69), he has become a living dead. In Under Western Eyes, Razumov's saved life is also over when Haldin mistakes him for whom he is not. Nostromo is killed for the robber which he is/is not. In 'An Outpost of Progress', for a brief point in space and time, Kayerts believes he has been shot while it is the reverse that has happened. The insistence of such scenes involves more than mistaken identity: they unlock the symbolic rivets of social cohesion, the very same rivets which Marlow desperately looks for in Heart of Darkness.
Where fear is concerned it appears that the cultural mapping of differences has little to say. 'Karain' and Lord Jim subtly shift the Near East of Flaubert's Orientalist fantasies to the Far East, producing a dizzying chassé-croisé of compass points. The young moon shines low in the West as the Patna glides on the surface of the Red Sea in the Near East which is itself West of Patusan, itself an Oriental melting-pot of Western fantasies. As Jim leaves for his spot of land untouched by history, he appears 'detached upon the light of the westering sun' to Marlow who looks at him from an Eastern position (LJ 146), later confirmed by his buddhist affiliations in Heart of Darkness. At another moment of parting, as the East Coast turns black and the Western horizon 'one great blaze of gold and crimson' (199), Marlow looks at Jim on the beach watching the schooner fall off. It seems therefore that no fixed standpoint is possible7 in this novel which is less Eurocentric than a European novel that vacillates, constantly reversing figure against ground.8
'Books', Conrad wrote, '[are based] on beliefs and theories that, indestructible in themselves, always change their form – often in the lifetime of one fleeting generation' ('Books', NLL 11). It is certainly the case for Conrad's idea of Europe, omnipresent and manifold in his books, hesitating between the seductions of the West and the need of a code of restraint: a value both economic and literary.