The journey to Patusan: The education of Jim and Marlow in Lord Jim

Abstract

Inevitably, the attempt to isolate a significant incident, dialogue, or minor character in the most complex and subtle novels leads to oversimplification and distortion. Rather than review the considerable literature that reduces the extraordinary structure of Lord Jim to the significance of a few of its parts, let me begin this chapter by clarifying one of my critical premises. The meaning of a work of fiction inheres in our perception of the gradually developing and continuously changing pattern as it emerges through the process of reading, as well as in our apprehension of the completed pattern that clarifies the preceding flux. The criticism of fiction has tended to be more comfortable with addressing the completed ‘event’, as if a novel could be perceived in its totality like a painting or sculpture. But fiction is the most linear of art forms and exists for the reader primarily within the duration required to complete the act of reading; the memory of the infinitely detailed fictive world fades as the reader’s consciousness is invaded by other experiences. It is not enough to discuss a novel in its moment of stability after its ending has apocalyptically clarified every preceding detail with proleptic (and prophetic) meaning. If we are to do justice to the complexity of a novel, we must ‘report’ on the crucial process between reader and novel during which tentative patterns of meaning are proposed, tested, transformed, and/or discarded.