Is it that Lord Jim suddenly picked up in the last 100 pages, or did I suddenly discover how to read it, adopt a new and more fruitful outlook? Both explanations may be true (they are in no way mutually exclusive), but the latter is definitely true. Yesterday, instead of working on my own writing I was reading my way through the archives of a very nice and witty book blog, Obooki's Obloquy, and I came across a post on the writer Karel Capek, a Czech writer best known nowadays (at least Stateside) for inventing the now-classic sci-fi plot of robot rebellion against mankind. (Well, someone had to invent that; why not Mr Capek?) Mr Obooki quotes from an essay by Mr Capek called "Instead of Criticism" (a brief but potent item available in full via GoogleBooks), which argues for the creation by literary elites of a more popular and entertaining literature than it has heretofore deemed fit to manufacture. The words that struck me most are bolded:
Let me just say a word here on the eternal youth of the people. The people remain a boy who lets himself be enchanted by heroism, by great and unshaken characters, by simple passions, by a strong and perhaps even fantastic plot. Their enjoyment of literature is a fierce participation, a co-activity with everything that is going on. They don't want to analyse anything but to live with something, to live through something extraordinary.If I am nothing else, I am a die-hard analyst of literature -- or at least would like to be. But there's another, deeper level in the onion of myself -- and it was this part precisely that thrilled to Capek's words -- that understands analysis to be something of a half-measure. What we want out of literature and storytelling is precisely participation, identification. After a certain age, however, we get that heady sensation so very rarely that we're forced to invent other things to do with a story. But the novels and films I recall loving most in my adulthood -- Light in August, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer -- have been the ones that have blown right past the analytical mindset, left it clean behind and gone on ahead.
And then I sat down again to read Lord Jim: and either it had picked up or I had learned how to read it. Or both.
Spoilers follow for this novel from the year 1900. Lord Jim is the story, as narrated (primarily) by Marlow (whom we will remember as being the narrator-protagonist also of Heart of Darkness), of a sailor who, though idealistic and believing himself to be brave, commits in a moment a single but terrible act of cowardice: he, along with his crewmates, abandons a ship in peril, leaving behind a bevy of passengers. The ship and passengers somehow survive, however, and Jim's cowardice is thereby exposed to the world. The aftermath is something like a reversal of Kurtz in Heart: with Marlow's aid Jim finds a posting as a trading company's agent in the midst of some "primitive natives," but their influence upon him is beneficent rather than malign and corrupting, and he assumes noble (though rather vague) responsibilities of leadership over them.
The section I read most fruitfully were the final passages, describing Jim's downfall from his exalted position. A gang of renegades and pirates, led by the despicable and vividly portrayed (and presumably ironically named) Gentleman Brown, comes to loot the lovely little community that Jim has built around himself, and quickly finds himself outnumbered and besieged. Jim, reflecting on how his own life was nearly permanently mangled by a single reckless choice, sees in Brown's mode of life the repercussions of a similar choice (in consequence of following too closely Brown's self-justifications); and it seems that this misidentification with Brown leads Jim to spare the life of Brown and of his men: he lets them go. But in departing Brown ambushes a group of the natives, killing among others the beloved son of a local chieftain. Revealed through this error as something less than divine, Jim offers himself up, in a mode of suicidal expiation, to the wrath of the aggrieved father, who shoots him to death. The End.
My next selection (3b) is a novel by Conrad's contemporary, and occasional collaborator, Ford Madox Ford: The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion, published in 1915. The typeface is considerably larger. I've really got to get cracking if I want to catch up to Meredith's prodigious intake.
No comments:
Post a Comment