Quixotic Conrad: Betrayal, Conversion, and Flight

Abstract

In Notes on Life and Letters, Conrad develops an idiosyncratic definition of conversion as an ironic double of betrayal. This chapter connects betrayal (particularly as unmasking) to critique, and conversion (as a form of positive transformation) to postcritique, and explores how conversion reveals a potentially postcritical Conrad. Secondly, through a reading practice structured by Gilles Deleuze’s thinking on betrayal and lines of flight, it makes a series of leaps, or flights, to show how Conrad’s ironic narrative in Lord Jim explores hopeful possibilities of affiliation and conversion. In so doing, it makes a case for recuperating irony, not only as the signature style of destabilizing and deconstructing, but also as a means hopefully to maintain or create solidarity and commitment across classes and cultures.

Not all betrayals are conversions , but all conversions are, from one point of view at least, betrayals: if to convert is to change religion, a fundamental view of the world, or a deeply felt affiliation, then for those we leave behind, such apostasy must be seen as a failing of fidelity. This means that a consideration of betrayal and conversion must resist the temptation to construct these concepts as binary opposites. As well as arguing that betrayal and conversion are central to Conrad’s oeuvre, I will argue that thinking about betrayal and conversion through Conrad should be about resisting binaries. I will also argue that reading Conrad through betrayal and conversion can be a form of postcritical reading that itself resists a binary opposition between critique and postcritique,¹ which though it generates much heat, impedes our ability to determine what postcritical reading might be, where it differs from critique, and where it depends upon it. Yael Levin has written in Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism, a book that exemplifies (implicitly) many of the concerns and approaches of postcritique, that “Conrad’s writing upends these binaries.”² Finally, I suggest that Conrad’s view of conversion should be considered as the hopeful side of his much discussed engagements with betrayal and close my argument by presenting a brief case-study of how we might re-read Conrad in this light. But this reading of Conrad is not only postcritical because it challenges binaries and looks for hope in Conrad’s writing. Whereas Rita Felski suggests postcritical reading is attentive to the question “What does literature know?,” this chapter is postcritical because it reflects on how literature can help us to think. It attempts to use these insights to reflect on the possibilities and limits of conversion, particularly in relation to Conrad’s use of irony not only to destabilize identity and beliefs, but also to explore the dynamics of continuity in the wake of conversion and change. In doing so, I want to propose that thinking through Conrad requires moments where we allow the text to change the development of our thought and direct us along an unforeseen path. I don’t regard this as surrendering agency to the text, but rather as a “line of flight” as described by Gilles Deleuze. It is worth noting that this is not a particularly novel process, but rather one that is often submerged by the conventions of academic writing and argument, which tend to conceal rather than reveal points at which a literary text has changed the direction of one’s thought. Essays often present an argument as something that has already happened, a route that is mapped in advance, rather than something that is emerging, whose turns and departures are shaped by contingency. It is also important to note that my view of the text is not a rehashing of New Critical notions of the text in itself. Often as not, argumentative lines of flight occur when we read someone else’s interpretation of the primary text in which we are working.

There are dynamics of betrayal and conversion that are implicated in the act of writing as well. Felski writes, “Works of art do not only subvert but also convert,”³ while Deleuze asks, “What other reason is there for writing than to be traitor to one’s own reign, traitor to one’s sex, to one’s class, to one’s majority? And to be traitor to writing?”⁴ In ordinary language when we betray our feelings, we reveal them, and writing, particularly in the mode of narrative, is deeply committed to such forms of revelation.⁵ Deleuze’s account of writing as self-betrayal (encompassing various levels of self) might be read as both self-revelation and self-conversion. On the other hand, Conrad presents writing as a process of conversion by drawing on a scientific metaphor: “for me, writing—the only possible writing—is just simply the conversion of nervous force into phrases.”⁶ Conrad’s life involves two crucial self-conversions (or apparent conversions): his decision to become a sailor in the English merchant navy, and his choice to leave the sea behind and write. A recurrent theme of Conrad studies is the extent to which he regarded these decisions as betrayals.⁷ What is less well studied is the way in which Conrad thought them through as conversions, and most significantly, the ramifications linking conversion to imagination and the writing of fiction specifically.

But what is essential to this reading of Conrad is that it attempts to be a “traitor to its own reign,” that is to betray (reveal) where a turn or leap has occurred. “There is always betrayal in a line of flight,”⁸ and what I want to show is that Conrad’s conversion can be read productively in combination with Deleuze’s betrayal. For Deleuze a line of flight is a creative movement that disrupts conventions of thought, action, and institutions.⁹ In this context, “flight” (fuite) has nothing to do with defying gravity, but refers to evasion and escape, and also “flowing, leaking, and disappearing into the distance.”¹⁰ There is no doubt that Conrad presents the conversion as a process of disruption, nor that his former life on the sea permeates his writing with both fluid metaphors and images of subjects lost in mists or to the horizon. Likewise, his understanding of the contingency of relations and of identity place him on terrain that is similar to Deleuze’s.¹¹ For Deleuze, great literature pushes language out of dominant ways of thinking and into new possibilities of thought and affiliation. But a potential problem with Deleuze’s formulation is that the modernist literature he privileges arguably betrays elitist affiliations that while they might be minority in terms of numbers are not so in terms of power.¹² This chapter will describe a line of flight that makes two leaps, emerging from Conrad’s non-fiction writings and fiction respectively. It does not argue that Conrad anticipates Deleuze, but rather marks points of intersection between them, and uses the notion of the line of flight as betrayal to mark a point of departure in thinking about betrayal and conversion in Conrad.¹³ Most particularly it will show how Conrad’s engagement with the popular mode of romance and sense of quixotic conversion navigates the problematic dynamic between elitism and minority that troubles Deleuze’s aesthetics.

Betrayal and conversion can also be mapped onto critique and postcritique. If we refer to Felski’s sense that critique is animated by tendencies to “interrogate, unmask, expose, subvert, unravel, demystify, destabilize,”¹⁴ we might add to that list the word “betray.” Not in the sense of betrayal as treachery (although more on that shortly), but in the sense of revealing mentioned above. Critique’s urge to expose what is hidden in a text, whether it be power or artistry, for example (or both), sharpens even more clearly into betrayal in deconstructive critique, which drives at the ways in which texts in a sense betray, both revealing and turning against, themselves. Conversely, postcritique can be associated with conversion, as evidenced by the widely quoted (approvingly and disapprovingly) assertion by Felski:

We shortchange the significance of art by focusing on the “de” prefix (its power to demystify, destabilize, denaturalize) at the expense of the “re” prefix: its ability to recontextualize, reconfigure, or recharge perception. Works of art do not only subvert but also convert; they do not only inform but also transform—a transformation that is not just a matter of intellectual readjustment but one of affective realignment as well.¹⁵

This sense of art’s power to convert aligns with Felski’s examination of the uses of literature, and in particular the claims that reading texts changes us, and that this exposure, the text’s power to convert, brings potential positives as well as negatives.¹⁶ I will argue that Conrad’s explorations of conversion prioritize affective realignment before intellectual readjustment insofar as the impulse toward change emerges not from critical analysis but from emotional imperatives that resist critical understanding.

The origins of my interest in conversion and Conrad lie in an examination of the role of Don Quixote in Conrad’s autobiography and fiction. Conrad’s fiction is full of quixotic figures (not least Jim from Lord Jim ), and Conrad himself presents his decisions to change the direction of his life, firstly by becoming a sailor, and secondly by leaving his career in the Merchant Navy to write, as quixotic. H. Porter Abbott has discussed how Conrad represents these decisions as conversions, which challenge a gradualist notion of character and its development that Abbott connects to modernity,¹⁷ but what he does not acknowledge is that Quixote connects to Conrad’s thinking about conversion in general, the actual conversions he depicts in his own life, and tropes of romance and imagination with which Quixote is indelibly associated. The first leap will highlight the resonances between Conrad’s presentation of Quixote and the conceptualization of lines of flight themselves, moving into territory defined by Conrad’s fiction rather than non-fiction to consider the figure of Jim in Lord Jim . Jim’s betrayal of naval codes of duty and responsibility prompts a sustained flight that ends in conversion, where Jim’s affiliation shifts from whites to Malays. Deleuzian readings of Lord Jim have set up the possibility that this conversion can be read as a redemption of Jim’s previous failings,¹⁸ while also concluding that Jim’s flight ultimately ends in failure.¹⁹ My second leap will challenge this perception, arguing that although Deleuze’s lines of flight resonate with Lord Jim, they cannot account for its hope. Rather, hope emerges from Conrad’s ambivalent engagement with fiction in general and romance in particular, which highlights, for good and ill, the significance not only of attempts to break with the past, but also with the past’s resurgence. I will argue that the failures that prompted Jim’s flight are not redeemed; it is the flight itself that is redemptive, because it establishes the conditions of hope’s possibility.

Conrad links conversion to Don Quixote most clearly in his essay “A Happy Wanderer,” an essay on C. B. Luffman’s 1910 book, Quiet Days in Spain. Though purportedly a review, it is clear from the outset that Luffman’s journey through Spain has prompted a literary recollection more intimately connected to Conrad than the book he is reviewing. He begins the review not with a reference to the book or its author, but with a striking description of the convert:

Converts are interesting people. Most of us, if you will pardon me for betraying the universal secret, have, at some time or other, discovered in ourselves a readiness to stray far, ever so far, on the wrong road. And what did we do in our pride and our cowardice? Casting fearful glances and waiting for a dark moment, we buried our discovery discreetly, and kept on in the old direction, on that old, beaten track we have not had courage enough to leave, and which we perceive now more clearly than before to be but the arid way of the grave.

The convert, the man capable of grace (I am speaking here in a secular sense), is not discreet. His pride is of another kind; he jumps gladly off the track—the touch of grace is mostly sudden—and facing about in a new direction may even attain the illusion of having turned his back on Death itself.²⁰

Alongside key Conradian motifs, notably the leap which may also be a kind of fall and saving illusion, betrayal is allusively taken up at the very start of the review. What Conrad means by betrayal here refers to a sense of revealing rather than of a failure to remain loyal to an affiliation. But it is difficult to ignore alternative senses, especially in the context of the numerous betrayals that characterize Conrad’s fiction, and Conrad’s revelation of a shared secret is also potentially a betrayal of those who share that secret with him. Conversely, betrayal of values or affiliation in Conrad’s fiction often involves revelation or unveiling. Jim’s leap from the Patna, for example, is a betrayal of the trust placed on Jim, of his code and duty of care for the ship’s passengers. But it also betrays, that is, reveals, something about Jim—a cowardice which in turn is also a betrayal of the values by which Jim, up till that point, has used to define himself.

Betrayal is multifaceted in Conrad, a prism whose angles refract and reveal patterns of interdependency and opposition. Conrad’s allusion to betrayal in his review sets up a comparison between conversion and betrayal, not as binary opposites but as concepts whose opposite normative implications obfuscate their close relation. Both conversion and betrayal involve a change of affiliation and a realization that something fundamental about ourselves or the world is other than how we imagined it previously. Yet as I have discussed, betrayal also involves the discovery or revelation of hidden truths, secrets, and even previously unknown aspects of our selves. Conversion also involves revelation, in the form of new discoveries, new faith, new conceptions of our selves and our relations, but a key difference in the two terms revolves around how we judge the transformation. Betrayal implies apostasy. It is a negative transformation. Conversion implies the opposite: a positive change, discovery of the truth, the welcoming of a new believer into the fold, but viewed from the perspective of those left behind, it is quite simply a betrayal. A key difference between the two words is a difference thus of perspective or of affiliation.

Conrad himself plays tacitly on this contrast in his review of Luffman when he betrays “the universal secret,” the discovery of “a readiness to stray … on the wrong road.” Conrad’s description frames conversion from the perspective of those (us, he suggests) who did not or could not choose to convert (as I will discuss later this is key to Lord Jim , since Marlow is exactly this kind of person). Yet it is clear that this conversion is no straightforward betrayal. Indeed fidelity, the choice to stay on the “beaten track,” seems to be the wrong choice.²¹ It appears as a cowardly repression of our productive urge to stray, which leads only to the discovery that our road is sterile and lifeless. However, Conrad’s depiction of conversion from the perspective of those left behind is disingenuous. He is (as he often does) laying claim to an affiliation he does not fully feel or endorse:

The most illustrious example of a convert, that Flower of chivalry, Don Quixote de la Mancha, remains for all the world the only genuine immortal hidalgo. The delectable Knight of Spain became converted, as you know, from the ways of a small country squire to an imperative faith in a tender and sublime mission. Forthwith he was beaten with sticks and in due course shut up in a wooden cage by the Barber and the Priest, the fit ministers of a justly shocked social order.²²

Conrad has more in common with the convert. He identifies himself as a Quixote figure twice in A Personal Record ,²³ and in relation explicitly to his decision to become a sailor, one of the two conversions Abbott identifies as the key moments in a modernist conversion narrative that reworks Augustinian tropes to challenge modern character and identity.²⁴ Linking conversion to Quixote also connects conversion to ideas of fiction, the novel, and romance. Widely taken as inaugurating the turn from romance to the novel, and heralding the rise of realism, Cervantes’s iconic character has come to symbolize the prioritization of fiction and idealism over reality and pragmatism. Indeed, this is quite close to the way that Conrad himself describes Quixote in A Personal Record :

His was a very noble, a very unselfish fantasy, fit for nothing except to raise the envy of baser mortals. But there is more than one aspect to the charm of that exalted and dangerous figure. He, too, had his frailties. After reading so many romances he desired naïvely to escape with his very body from the intolerable reality of things.²⁵

It is absolutely crucial that this description of Quixote comes from Conrad’s autobiographical account of his own choice to pursue fiction. A Personal Record opens with “A Familiar Preface,” an introduction to the autobiography that frames it explicitly as an exploration of Conrad’s “literary life,”²⁶ and the autobiography proper begins with Conrad working on his first novel, Almayer’s Folly (1895). Equally significant is that Conrad identifies himself directly with Quixote, and at a key moment in his autobiographical narrative: when he describes his first encounter with an Englishman at the Furca Pass in the Alps: “Was he in the mystic ordering of common events the ambassador of my future, sent out to turn the scale at a critical moment?”²⁷ It is unclear precisely to what future Conrad refers at this point. The chapter itself connects the Furca Pass episode to his conversion to British sailor,²⁸ but within the wider narrative of the whole autobiography, it is clearly also presented as a formative moment in the movement toward Conrad’s conversion to a writer.

Conrad’s view of Quixote is always ironic. At the Furca Pass, the comparison to Quixote is made by his tutor, who disparages Conrad’s desire to go to sea, calling him “an incorrigible, hopeless Don Quixote.”²⁹ Yet the young Conrad is “vaguely flattered” at the comparison, and in his review of Luffman, he shows clear approval for (and empathy with) the “delectable Knight.” Nevertheless, Conrad’s approval is always counterpointed by the “justly shocked social order” as represented by “the barber and the priest,”³⁰ who in the Furca Pass incident stand in for Conrad’s disapproving family. Conrad suggests that right is on the side of those wielding sticks perhaps. Or perhaps Conrad’s overall tone renders his qualifying adjective “justly” ironic, entangling the notion of justice itself in intimations of social violence. This reading seems to fit with the skepticism about society that Conrad expresses in the letter to Cunninghame Graham (whom it is also worth noting Tony Tanner called “Conrad’s Quixote”):³¹

Man is a vicious animal. His viciousness must be organised. Crime is a necessary condition of organised existence. Society is fundamentally criminal—or it would not exist. Selfishness preserves everything—absolutely everything—everything we hate and everything we love.³²

Conrad’s ironic treatment of society’s justice in his review resonates with his understanding of society as criminal and man as vicious in this letter. Yet there seems to be little in his letter to Cunninghame Graham that is ironic. The tone here is markedly different from his light-hearted evocation of the Barber and the Priest. Indeed, this is one of several of his statements that could be used to argue against a Conradian politics of hope. However, the Barber and the Priest retrospectively ironize Conrad’s hopeless depiction of human viciousness and society’s criminality, not overwriting it, but providing us with an absurd double. This is a de Manian ironic dédoublement perhaps,³³ or, as Linda Hutcheon has observed about irony, a double-vision where opposing interpretations are both affirmed and denied.³⁴ Paul Armstrong, has written on the pedagogic function of specifically Conradian irony, arguing that his purpose is to cultivate “a sense of irony in the reader” to destabilize univocal perspectives.³⁵ Irony is useful as it both breeds caution and, by undermining the status quo, digs the foundations for change. Yet Armstrong also sees irony as potentially debilitating of both action and sympathy.³⁶ We might wonder whether Conrad’s extreme stance in this letter to Cunninghame Graham aimed at provoking a response. Did he want to hear a counter-argument that might convert him away from his skeptical assessment of humanity?³⁷

In any case, using irony places aesthetic and literary values (openness to interpretation, complexity, sophistication) over clear commitments or conclusions. This is consistent with a logic applied throughout the review of Luffman, where Conrad is setting aesthetic judgments (the “delectable Quixote” and his “sublime mission,” the trope of irony) alongside and against different forms of realism, including his view of the realities of (vicious and criminal) social or political justice. Even “secular grace” can be read as an appeal to grace as an aesthetic, rather than spiritual, quality. Later in the review, Conrad contrasts Quixote with political realists like Theodore Roosevelt, who for Conrad is the “sane lineal successor of the Barber and the Priest, and a sagacious political heir of the incomparable Sancho Panza (another great Governor).”³⁸ Increasingly the ability to hold conflicting stances in tension is regarded as a necessity. Derrida in his writing on democracy to come describes his hope that we will learn to make “non-binary judgments.”³⁹ Similarly, Dipesh Chakrabarty has argued that conflict between political and planetary concerns in the epoch of climate change require us to “inhabit the tension but not resolve it.”⁴⁰ Armstrong ends his analysis of Conradian irony by suggesting that Conrad “signals his respect for the reader” with a “generous acknowledgment of our capacity to develop an understanding of the inescapable contradictions of skepticism and commitment.”⁴¹ One might substitute the word “hopeful” for “generous” here, I think.

Though it can be used to launch dialectical thinking by framing opposing views, irony is not necessarily dialectical or even deconstructive. Irony typically relies on one view being privileged, the other denigrated. It creates a hierarchy between the explicit and the implicit where the unspoken or the indirect is elevated. This gives it an affinity with Felski’s formulation of critique. Yet there is a form of queer ironic self-fashioning that speaks to Conrad’s irony: Mariana Valverde has considered justice as a kind of queer irony which opens our ability to recognize the contingency of our deeply held convictions, opening the way for change. For Valverde, ironic “queer voices” help us to acknowledge “fiction that we cannot just yet do without.”⁴² Read in this light, Conrad’s ironic self-fashioning as “an incorrigible Quixote” implies that it is not romance and fiction that he “cannot just yet do without,” but skepticism and (political) realism. The narrative that Conrad constructs around Quixote is one in which he takes a courageous leap into romance rather than away from it, a leap that parallels Quixote’s own turn away from a reader of fiction to a creator. This kind of irony is a conversion to the aesthetic, the imaginary, the consciously illusory that opens the way for change. The realities from which the convert turns away are death, the status quo, and political realism. Conrad’s conversion is a commitment to fiction, to romance, and to ironic uncertainty, but in a spirit of hope.

The whole plot of Lord Jim is structured around flight. If Jim is a sailor who betrays the code of honor on which his craft depends, his response to this betrayal is to flee, moving from port to port around the South China Sea whenever he is confronted with the reality of his failure. With the help of friends, he eventually finds a place to rest, on an obscure island, Patusan in the Malay Archipelago. Jim becomes an icon of white colonialism, leading his adopted community to new levels of security and significance in the politics of the island. But Jim’s story ends in betrayal, when his trust is betrayed by a fellow Englishman, Gentleman Brown, who murders the son of the Bugis chief with whom Jim has made his alliance. Jim’s narrative proceeds through a sequence of literal and metaphorical deterritorializations (for Deleuze, the disruptions of power prompted by lines of flight).⁴³ His identity and heroic aspirations are undone when he discovers he has leapt to safety from the Patna, a ferry carrying Malay pilgrims that the white crew believes is doomed. Where Jim imagined himself to be a hero of the “light holiday literature”⁴⁴ that inspires his decision to take to the sea, his leap from the Patna redefines him as a rogue and coward. The authority of white colonialists is eroded by the transparent betrayal of the maritime code upon which trust of the industry depends. This leads to the suicide of the unimpeachable Captain Brierly, who presides over Jim’s trial. Jim’s subsequent flight from port to port represents symbolically his unsettled self, and Jim himself symbolizes the hollow justification of Empire along lines of racial or cultural superiority. But Jim’s settlement in Patusan represents his realization of his heroic ideal, though through another kind of conversion, from the hero of boy’s tales of adventure on the sea to the “hero” of white colonialist adventure. Previous engagements have argued that Patusan represents a reterritorialization that affirms Jim’s status as a western imperialist.⁴⁵ Soonbae Kim in particular focuses on the fictional influence on Jim’s line of flight: his ideal stems “not from real life experiences or from genuine insight of his own,” resulting in “quixotic pretendership.”⁴⁶ Kim gets right Jim’s fictional inspirations and quixotic flight,⁴⁷ but as I will show, gets wrong the value Conrad ascribes to fiction.

This becomes clear when we reflect on the striking resonances between Conrad’s review of Luffman, his letter to Cunninghame Graham, and Lord Jim . Laurence Davies observes that, in the letters and fiction of 1898–1902, Conrad grapples with “problems of location and identity, political, moral, metaphysical, psychological [that] may be beyond solution, but the problem of dealing with them artistically is not.”⁴⁸ Davies tacitly identifies a hopeful commitment to aesthetic ways of thinking. Yet I think Conrad is doing more than this: he is applying the artistic as a way of living within these problems. He writes to Cunninghame Graham:

I don’t know why I’m telling you all this today. It’s that I don’t want you to believe me indifferent. I’m not indifferent to what concerns you. But my concern is elsewhere, my thinking follows another path, my heart wants something else, my soul suffers from another kind of impotence. Do you understand? You who devote your talents and your enthusiasm to the cause of humanity, you will understand no doubt why I must—I need to—keep my thinking inviolate as a final act of fidelity to a lost cause. It’s all I can do. I’ve thrown my life to all the winds of heaven, but I have kept my way of thinking. It’s a little thing—it’s everything—it’s nothing—it’s life itself. This letter is incoherent, like my life, but the highest logic is there nevertheless—the logic that leads to madness.⁴⁹

Despite the contrast between the near despair of his letter and the amused irony of the review, there are significant similarities to his review of Luffman—the metaphor of the road or path, the concern with politics, the rhetoric of life and death. Conrad’s “other path” is an alternative, not better, to Cunninghame Graham’s political activism. Fiction may appear to be throwing one’s life to the winds, but it is also a way to perpetuate himself, to keep “his way of thinking,” even if it is a “logic that leads to madness,” as it did for Quixote. Commitment to fiction is an affirmation of the unreal, a kind of enlivening derangement, where “the highest logic,” alongside life, persists in spite of (or because of) incoherence. There are also important differences between this letter and the review of Luffman. Conrad’s avowed impotence in the letter matches more the “arid way of the grave” than the joyous abandon of conversion, and Conrad’s “fidelity to a lost cause” appears to involve an injunction against conversion rather than an argument in favor of it. But this is because Conrad has already converted, throwing his “life to all the winds of heaven.” In the letter to Cunninghame Graham, Conrad, I want to suggest, has converted to fiction, and is now committed to it. In the review of “A Happy Wanderer,” he is more comfortable (though not unironically). Yet in this context, the notion of fidelity also highlights the sense that in every conversion there is a kernel of consistency. Conrad suggests that a part of this way of thinking antedates his conversion. I want to suggest that, if Quixote represents romance and fiction, his significance in Conrad’s account of his life before becoming a writer marks the point of fidelity. Conrad sees himself, like Jim, as formed in dialogue with romance.

He also forms himself politically in dialogue with another Quixote, Cunninghame Graham. In his letter to Cunninghame Graham, Conrad seems close to Jim, who also throws his life to the winds, until he finally settles in Patusan and becomes the heroic figure he has aspired to be. And though Jim’s wanderings are more nautical than terrestrial, the image of the wanderer on a path brings together his letter to Cunninghame Graham, his review, and Lord Jim. Conrad writes in his 1917 Author’s note of his inspiration for Jim, “One sunny morning in the commonplace surroundings of an Eastern roadstead, I saw his form pass by—appealing—significant—under a cloud—perfectly silent.”⁵⁰ Conrad ends his review of Luffman with an extended metaphor that also recalls the end of Lord Jim :

How better can we take leave of this interesting Vagabond than with the road salutation of passing wayfarers: “And on you be peace! . . . You have chosen your ideal, and it is a good choice. There’s nothing like giving up one’s life to an unselfish passion. Let the rich and powerful of this globe preach their sound gospel of palpable progress. The part of the ideal you embrace is the better one, if only in its illusions. No great passion can be barren. May a world of gracious and poignant images attend the lofty solitude of your renunciation!”⁵¹

Conrad’s depiction of Luffman recalls Jim’s “wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct.” His pronouncement, “There’s nothing like giving up one’s life to an unselfish passion,” recalls both his throwing his life to the winds and also challenges the racist pronouncement (discussed in more detail shortly) of a “privileged” reader of Marlow’s narrative that “giving your life up to them … was like selling your soul to a brute.”⁵² Jim’s death both contradicts and affirms the privileged man, though in a sense very different from what the privileged man intended. After a catastrophic mistake, Jim submits himself to the justice of the Bugis chieftain Doramin and is executed. Marlow’s evaluation of the event communicates his lack of understanding of Jim:

And that’s the end. He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic … it may very well be that in the short moment of his last proud and unflinching glance, he had beheld the face of that opportunity which, like an Eastern bride, had come veiled to his side … He goes away from a living woman to celebrate his pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct.⁵³

Conrad’s review of Luffman offers us a way to read Lord Jim against the grain of Marlow’s narrative. We might say that Jim unveils his heroic opportunity (which is like an Eastern bride, according to Marlow) with a betrayal of his living (Malay) wife. He has also betrayed the racial and racist imperative articulated by the privileged man to endure in the name of civilizing progress. Jim instead submits himself to the “brutal” justice of the Malay (Bugis) chief.

This, I want to suggest, is a sign of Jim’s radical conversion, which is paradoxically also “a final act of fidelity to a lost cause.” Marlow cannot understand Jim because by subordinating himself to Malay power, Jim betrays the racist ideal of white superiority upon which his success in Patusan (and the historical colonial project) has been built. Jim’s death is a conversion that acknowledges a justice and sovereignty that is not European. It is also an acknowledgment that he has not saved or raised up the Malay community he lives in, but rather that his whole conception of himself and his ability to be as he desires, depends upon that community. Tellingly, it is the Malays who report Jim’s end: “They say that the white man sent right and left at all those faces a proud and unflinching glance.”⁵⁴ Their narrative grants Jim the heroic death that fulfills his chivalric aspirations, enabling him to actualize his self-ideal while also acknowledging that his romance is a “lost cause.” Yet that a European colonizer can give up his life to “them” might frame one kind of politics of hope, a utopian ideal where romance itself is converted so that the powerful acknowledge the rights and capability of those with less power.

Marlow’s inability to define Jim signals the incompatibility between Marlow’s western, imperialistic, and also modern mode of thought and Jim’s quixotic romanticism. Marlow’s resistance to Jim’s own mode of self-narration or self-creation is indicated in the opening to the last section of the novel, where he relates the end of Jim’s story in a letter to a “privileged man” as “one more attempt to deliver himself; but that too failed.”⁵⁵ The introduction of the privileged man is significant, because it marks the re-entry of the omniscient narrator who opens Lord Jim , but who disappears inexplicably to be replaced by Marlow for the vast majority of the tale. This return undermines Marlow and the privileged man—Marlow because it frames Marlow’s incomplete knowledge against the backdrop of omniscience and reminds us that Marlow is a limited character with a limited perspective, and the privileged man because his introduction is far from positive:

His rooms were in the highest flat of a lofty building, and his glance could travel afar beyond the clear panes of glass, as though he were looking out of the lantern of a lighthouse. The slopes of the roofs glistened, the dark broken ridges succeeded each other without end like sombre, uncrested waves, and from the depths of the town under his feet ascended a confused and unceasing mutter.⁵⁶

The “privileged man” represents the pinnacle of Marlow’s elite audience of white colonialists. He is symbolically affiliated with enlightenment, but his metaphorical “lighthouse” looks over an England that speaks more of stasis and confusion than progress: the “sea” of houses are frozen waves, “dark” and “sombre.” The omniscient narrator injects this symbolic critique of the privileged man as a counterpoint to Marlow’s more partial attitude, distancing the authorial voice from the colonialist elitism that both he and Marlow himself represent. The privileged man’s ideology is also “progressive.” Marlow writes:

You said also—I call to mind—that ‘giving up your life to them’ (them meaning all of mankind with skins brown, yellow, or black in colour) ‘was like selling your soul to a brute.’ You contended that ‘that kind of thing’ was only endurable and enduring when based on a firm conviction in the truth of ideas racially our own, in whose name are established the order, the morality of an ethical progress.⁵⁷

This progressivism is racist through and through, basing the “morality of an ethical progress” on the “firm conviction in the truth of ideas racially our own,” not least that “mankind with skins brown, yellow, or black in colour” are brutes. Jim’s death is precisely such a selling of one’s soul, and how we judge it revolves around our attitude to the privileged man’s ideas. Marlow’s own attitude is indicated in two ways. He submits his narrative, and Jim himself, to the privileged man’s judgment: he writes, “Perhaps you may pronounce—after you’ve read,” granting the privileged man an authority over proceedings couched in the language of legality or sovereignty. But more bizarre is the way that, in Marlow’s account, he slips between quotation and paraphrase. Marlow renders the fundamental idea in his own words, suggesting that, if he has not explicitly adopted the privileged man’s transparent racism, he has more sympathy with paternalism and the idea that “ethical progress” is related to race. Marlow asks directly (in an echo of the privileged man’s views): “the question is whether at the last [Jim] had not confessed to a faith mightier than the laws of order and progress.”⁵⁸ As well as asking the privileged man to judge Jim, Marlow is supplying us with the criteria by which he is to be judged. Progress is defined in relation to “order,” suggesting that such progress is defined by particular versions of governmentality and epistemology; “laws of order and progress” encompass not only legal order, but also the progressive ideal of knowledge and self that Abbott argues Conrad’s modernist autography challenges. Jim’s conversion matches Conrad’s presentation of his autobiographical conversions, but adds to this a further challenge to modernism’s own apparent elitism. The “privileged” audience of Jim’s story is implicated in the rejection of romance, while romance itself is connected to a more inclusive vision of humanity.

Marlow’s submission of Jim to judgment by the privileged man directly parallels Jim’s own submission to Doramin’s judgment. Jim is put on trial for betrayal three times: once for his jump from the Patna, once for his complicity in Dain Warris’s death, and lastly by the privileged man via Marlow’s narrative of his life on Patusan. Marlow’s need to mount this last trial suggests his inability to accept Doramin’s judgment, just as Marlow was unable to accept the judgment of the Inquiry as the “last word” on Jim. His letter to the privileged man indicates that one reason underlying this inability is Jim’s betrayal of “ideals racially” Marlow’s own. For Marlow, the romance that animates Jim is unsettling, but the clear racial dimensions with which he frames his own and his audience’s thinking opens the possibility that Jim’s is a conversion, a “confession” of new “faith” in which whites are not the sole arbiters of virtue or justice.

Jim’s sacrifice for this ideal that is at the same time the fulfillment of his egocentric desire to be a hero is, ironically perhaps given Conrad’s recurrent critiques of idealism, central to my sense of a Conradian politics of hope. As I have been arguing, it is Conrad’s redescription in his review of Luffman of the end of Lord Jim that is central to this reading, where a “shadowy ideal of conduct” becomes transvalued as “a world of gracious and poignant images.” We might read this as a form of self-justification—Conrad finding a positive outcome to his own choice to privilege the aesthetic—but the cutting ironies of Conrad’s oeuvre hardly fit the description. More important is the notion that ideals morph into the aesthetic, and that a symbolic gesture, like Jim’s sacrifice, is powerful and potentially transformative.

Jim’s story communicates the power of fictions to form and transform our identities and the world we move in. In doing so, it erodes the binary between fiction and reality, and at the same time challenges the denigration of fiction that underpins our assumptions about the world. At the end of the novel, Jim is a mystery because Marlow is unable to comprehend the world from Jim’s converted point of view. But he is also mysterious because he comes to embody the relationship between fiction and reality to which Conrad has himself committed:

Now he is no more, there are days when the reality of his existence comes to me with an immense, with an overwhelming force; and yet upon my honour there are moments, too, when he passes from my eyes like a disembodied spirit astray amongst the passions of this earth, ready to surrender himself faithfully to the claim of his own world of shades.⁵⁹

Marlow’s description of Jim’s end might be interpreted as a presentation of Conrad’s hopes and fears for his own writing. In The Secret Agent , Conrad numbers the artist amongst those figures who hope to move people to convert them, and also expresses the anxiety that the affective power of art might find no purchase upon an indifferent humanity.⁶⁰ Jim’s line of flight suggests that this anxiety was more than a throwaway line in a single novel, but rather deeply felt. Conrad’s conversion to the life of a writer was an act of faith in Jim’s reality, in the reality of fiction and its potential to move the world with “overwhelming force.” But Conrad also acknowledges the danger that such an endeavor could prove insubstantial. Set against Cunninghame Graham’s political activism, Conrad’s aspirations and approach might well seem to provoke only intangible or untraceable lines of force. Yet though his lines of flight are difficult to trace clearly, Conrad’s impact on fiction is impossible to deny. What is also clear is that Conrad’s ironic aesthetic is central to his navigation of conversion and fidelity, romance and realism. It enables a suspension between positions, and a way of keeping hold of something precious when we leap from the path or throw our lives to the winds. Conrad’s irony may possess a critical edge, undermining, demystifying, and doubling. But it also possesses postcritical commitment, because it enables the preservation of hope in the face of skeptical realism or the partial reaffirmation of romance even as we acknowledge that its ideals are complicit in illusion, imperialism, and elitism. Irony, like postcritique, is not intrinsically of the left or the right, progressive or conservative. Like postcritique, it is not a rejection of the critical, but an approach that affirms fiction’s ability both to describe and create, or to betray and convert. If as this chapter has shown, betrayal and conversion do not operate in Conrad as binary opposites, but rather accrue layers of meaning, Conrad’s lines of flight betray a concern to explore the possibilities of conversion, to leap from the majority path and pursue a minor literature that challenges power and imagines a way forward. Flight of this kind inevitably traverses tricky, even treacherous terrain. Yet what I hope to have made clear is that Conrad’s quixotic flight is a commitment not so much to pre-modernist, or even pre-modern narrative form, but rather to romance as a popular mode. Conrad ironically challenges what we might see as modernist elitism even while he deploys modernist strategies in the hopeful quest for new means of affiliation.