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Former Studies

1.1 Adventure story and Sea voyage narrative

Joseph Conrad is thought to inherit the tradition ofthe authors from Robert Louis Stevenson to RudyardKipling. Owen Knowles argues as follows:[1]

Outwardly the Far Eastern settings of hisearly work fitted the taste for exotic fictioncreated by Robert Louis Stevenson and RudyardKipling and prompted many reviewersto place Conrad with those writers. (10)

Advancing this line of research, Andrea White arguesthat the novels of Conrad’s are based on the conventionof adventure stories (but at the same time hemakes a reservation):[2]

By the close of the nineteenth century, Conradwas reading and writing out of a firmlyestablished convention that went back atleast to Robinson Crusoe, one that had beencarrying on the cultural conversation aboutimperialism for over 150 years and one thataddressed the questions confronting thosewho met the Other. (64)

While he came to distance himself from “adventure yarns ”and question some of theattitudes of the genre, as we shall see, he alsoaccepted many of the conventions. (104, myitalics)

On the other hand, Robert Foulke argues that Conrad’sfictions are based on the tradition of sea voyagenarratives whose tradition began from Odyssey:[3]

After literacy spread into the middle classesin England during the eighteenth century andthe novel became the dominant genre, voyagenarratives borrowed its conventions andthose of other popular genres. Defoe, Fielding,and Smollett particularly exploited theconventions of the picaresque romance fortales about maritime wanderers, while laterScott, Marryat, Cooper, Dana, Melville, andConrad developed and elaborated the sea bildungsroman.

1.2 The paternalistic attitude: The common feature of these two genre

The common feature of these two genres, I think, is their paternalistic attitude toward their readers.  Andrea White regards the adventure story as the machinefor spreading ”practical and historical information”and ”promoting an ideology of patriotic heroismand Christian dutifulness compatible with imperialisticaims” and points out its feature as follows1:[2]

One of the great appeals of this fiction, then,was that it was delivered as truths passed onfrom one generation to the next. The personaof the speaker, a kindly and experiencedolder chap who appeared to know exactlywhat he was talking about and whose heartwas obviously in the right place, did nothingto encourage disbelief or disobedience. Thetone sustained in all of these works was of amanly chat or a kindly paternal lecture; asthe dominant, officially approved discourse,it was appropriately men speaking to othermen, or boys. (57, my italics)

On the other hand, Robert Foulke argues that whatthe genre frequently and naturally depicts is ”theanatomy of society, in which the small world ofthe ship serves as a microcosm of civilization as awhole” (11), and points out that its feature is initiationof young people:[3]

Initiation is a third important literary patterndeveloped within voyage narratives. Inits simplest form, an initiation at sea putsa young person (usually a boy until recentdecades) into an unfamiliar situation, testshis or her worth in a crisis, and rewardsthose who pass muster with full acceptanceas adults. […] The multitude of examples isnot surprising, since life at sea removes theinexperienced youngster from the familiarityof shoreside places and provides a full rangeof potential tests – storm, fire, stranding, collision,falling from aloft or overboard, disease,starvation, sinking – all threatening injuryor death. (11, my italics)

In the sea voyage narratives, the characters depicted arein the ship, a kind of microcosm of the society, they areinexperienced young men in the beginning and have toendure the hardship to be accepted as adults. Especiallyin the case of Lord Jim the paternalistic elementis superficially remarkable, because Marlow the experiencedseaman is making a story about Jim the inexperienced ex-seaman.

2 Lord Jim: the failure of education

As we saw, the recent critics regard Joseph Conrad intwo ways: (1) the author of the adventure stories and(2) the author of the sea voyage narratives.2 In myopinion, the common feature of these two genres istheir paternalistic attitude toward their readers. However,does Lord Jim have paternalistic attitude towardits readers?

According to Oxford Concise English Dictionary, ”paternalism” means:

the policy of restricting the freedom and responsibilitiesof one’s subordinates or dependentsin their supposed best interest.

Needless to say, ”their supposed best interest” is decidedby the authority or experienced people. The societyor organization has a collection of rules, codes, andmorals to follow, and under the paternalistic circumstancesthe inexperienced young people must acceptthe norms in order to be the experienced adults. Fromthe paternalistic point of view, the society or organization provides the young people with the norms andthey expect the young to passively accept the norm. Asa result, these two genres whose convention critics argueConrad uses are normative as well as paternalistic. In a way, these two genres educate people normatively.

However, I don’t think that in Lord Jim this education succeed. On the contrary, this normative education faces the flaw that John Dewey points out:[4]

What avail is it to win prescribed amounts of information about geography and history, to win ability to read and write, if in the process the individual loses his own soul: loses his appreciation of things worth while, of the values to which these things are relative; if he loses desire to apply what he has learned and, above all, loses the ability to extract meaning from his future experiences as they occur? (50, my italics)

I want to show that in Lord Jim this kind of educationfails and as a result the story contradicts our expectation the genre of the novel suggests, by looking into thestory and the frame of genre in detail.

References

1. Owen Knowles. ”Conrad’s Life”. In J. H. Stape, editor, The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Cambridge U. P., 1996.
2. Andrea White. Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition. Cambridge U. P., 4 1993.
3. Robert Foulke. The Sea Voyage Narrative. Routledge, 12 2001.
4. John Dewey. Experience and Education. Macmillan, New York, 1952.