Somebody Telling Somebody Else A Rhetorical Poetics Of Narrative

CHAPTER 7

“I affirm nothing”

LORD JIM AND THE USES OF TEXTUAL

RECALCITRANCE

135

JIM’S CHARACTER AND EXPERIENCE AS AN INSTANCE OF

THE STUBBORN

I

N THIS CHAPTER, I return to the phenomenon of textual stubbornness, but

this time with a focus less on event and more on character and character

narration. Joseph Conrad’s participant-observer narrator Marlow wants des-

perately to gain interpretive mastery over the eponymous protagonist of Lord

Jim, but, despite both his desire and his considerable efforts, he is unable to

achieve that mastery. Furthermore, although Conrad does often communicate

to his audience more than Marlow communicates to his narratee, that addi-

tional communication does not include information that allows the audience

to understand Jim’s character as well as it understands Marlow’s. Conrad, in

other words, has his participant-observer narrator set out on a quest to under-

stand and come to terms with the nature and experiences of his protagonist,

but he does not allow that narrator to succeed in the quest or his audience to

succeed where the narrator fails. Consequently, Conrad’s protagonist remains

a stubborn character for Marlow and for the authorial and actual audiences.

Since the audience in effect joins Marlow in the quest to plumb the depths of

Jim’s character, Jim’s stubbornness becomes closely tied to the readerly dynam-

ics of the whole progression. Furthermore, that stubbornness becomes crucial

to the ethics of both Marlow’s telling and Conrad’s telling. More generally,