Lord Jim 301tions “weaning those ignorant millions from their
horrid ways,” he suggests that “the Company was
run for profit.” Nevertheless, Marlow’s first reac-
tion to the Congo goes beyond moral outrage: It is
horrified shock. He describes the conditions under
which native tribesmen labor to build rail lines and
roads necessary for the exporting of ivory and rub-
ber as an “Inferno” of disease and starvation, a place
where the native people are considered criminals
and enemies, where forced conscripts are whipped
and chained together in iron neck collars to carry
on the “work” of civilization: “The work was going
on. The work! And this was the place where some
of the helpers had withdrawn to die.” Describing
the operations of the El Dorado Trading Company,
he tells his companions that “To tear the treasure
out of the bowels of the land was their desire, with
no more moral purpose at the back of it than there
is in burglars breaking into a safe.” Ironically, the
one character whose words claim the highest moral
purpose is Kurtz, whose atrocities suggest a connec-
tion between the expressed desire for “humanizing,
improving, instructing” and his ultimate response to
racial difference: “Exterminate all the brutes.”
Yet although Marlow sees the native population
as victims of European greed, he scarcely sees them
as human. In Darwinian terms, Africans are an evo-
lutionary primitive, a “prehistoric man.” “Going up
that river,” he informs his listeners, “was like travel-
ing back to the earliest beginnings of the world.”
Native people are never humanized; they are always
“black shapes crouched” between trees, “black shad-
ows of disease and starvation,” “black figures,” “bun-
dles of acute angles,” “phantoms,” “creatures,” one of
whom is described as crawling, animal-like, “on all
fours toward the river to drink.” They are referred
to by Marlow variously throughout his narrative as
“ugly,” “savages,” “niggers,” “cannibals,” “specimens,”
and “rudimentary souls.” They have no names, are
given no language beyond looks and guttural cries.
They are mere background to the intertwined stories
of Marlow and Kurtz, stereotyped as savages on the
riverbank—“a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a
mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies
swaying, of eyes rolling... a black and incompre-
hensible frenzy” to whose behavior Europeans can
only react “as sane men would before an enthusiastic
outbreak in a madhouse.”
Even the one African with whom Marlow sig-
nificantly interacts, the ship’s fireman, is portrayed
in ironic rather than human terms. As a detribalized
native in European employment, the fireman is “an
improved specimen” and “full of improved knowl-
edge.” Yet his understanding of the ship’s boiler is
not knowledge in the Western sense but described
as a “thrall to strange witchcraft.” “To look at him,”
Marlow says, “was as edifying as seeing a dog in a
parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on
hind legs.” But it is the fireman’s death that forces
on Marlow a momentary awareness of our common
humanity. Although they had worked side by side
for months, the paternalistic relationship was never
between equals; Marlow describes the fireman as an
“instrument” and their “subtle bond” as a partner-
ship. “I had to look after him,” he confesses. Marlow
cannot see that an instrument is not a partner; to see
a servant is not to acknowledge a fellow human. As
the fireman dies, he looks at Marlow with an “inti-
mate profundity... like a claim of a distant kinship
affirmed in a supreme moment.” For this moment in
the text, Africa looks at Europe and finds it wanting.
Michael ZeitlerCONRAD, JOSEPH Lord Jim (1900)
Written at around the same time as one of Joseph
Conrad’s other masterpieces, heart oF darkness
(1899), Lord Jim was first published in Blackwood ’s
Magazine from October 1899 to November 1900.
In Lord Jim, the narrator, Marlow, tells the story of
the life and death of the sailor Jim. Jim is first mate
on the Patna, and in a moment of inexplicable bad
judgment, abandons the ship, along with the captain
and crew. Jim becomes the scapegoat of the group
and is stripped of his naval credentials. The novel
is divided into two parts, the first narrating Jim’s
involvement in the Patna episode and the following
humiliating trial, while the second part tells the epic
story of Jim’s subsequent success in the exotic settle-
ment Patusan and his tragic death.
Lord Jim was generally greeted with admiration
when it came out, but while critics have subse-
quently agreed that the first part of the novel con-