Lord Jim is also famous for its intricate narrative structure mediated by the voice of these speakers. Besides, the plot itself is made up of multiple layers of reports, both oral and written, produced by a great variety of witnesses and speakers. Conrad always makes clear the fact that Jim is evolving in a fictional universe. In Lord Jim the mythical allusions play a particular role in that they serve as a backdrop, or even a standard, against which Jim’s character, his thoughts and actions, are measured.
It comes therefore as no surprise to find his novels replete with mythological references. His father, Apollo Korzeniowski, was a poet who translated, among others, Vigny, Hugo, and Shakespeare (and Jim has in his possession “a half-crown complete Shakespeare”, 143). I suggest that Conradian irony is a powerful tool for self-evaluation and creation, and that although irony risks alienation, it can also be used as a way to connect to others and enlarge the perimeters of the communities in which we find meaningful exchange.Īlthough Joseph Conrad was born in the eastern part of Europe, he was fully aware of the classical literary background of the West. The result is a sense of the self as divided and multiple but itself contingent upon wider communities that change and fragment depending on context. This conversational compatibility, as Rorty might have it, emerges from a close examination of Conrad’s language and technique: particularly his use of irony and complex narrative construction. In particular, Conrad’s sense of burlesque and of the fine line between tragedy and comedy sound an unsettling note throughout his work, which enables the kind of ironic self-questioning which Rorty advocates, but which is not a feature of his style. This is because Conrad’s scepticism and awareness of cruelty soften the Rortyian tendency towards rhetorical utopianism. Additionally, I suggest that the conversation between Rorty and Conrad produces an outcome more convincing than that communicated by their voices in isolation. Furthermore, I suggest that Marlow is an effective vehicle for Rorty’s thought, because his narratives not only communicate a Rortyian ironism founded on contingency and ethnocentrism, but also promote attendance to suffering, the keystone of Rorty’s liberal politics. By putting Conrad in conversation with Richard Rorty, and particularly by considering Marlow as a vehicle for Rorty’s philosophy of liberal ironism, I argue that Marlow is a multifaceted aspect of Conrad’s divided self. Joseph Conrad’s narrator Marlow, who features in ‘Youth’ (1898), ‘Heart of Darkness’ (1899), Lord Jim (1900), and Chance (1913), has been read as both a mouthpiece for Conrad and a distancing strategy which shields Conrad from some of the questionable elements of these four texts.
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