Seeing Otherwise

Abstract

“Idealism,” Jeremy Hawthorn explains, “is a form of overestimation of the self: the idealist imposes his own mental images on the world in preference for the real nature of that world” (Language, 47). Hawthorn’s account of Jim’s character reaffirms the substitutive power of a self-perpetuating fiction: “the real nature” of the world recedes before the wondrous imaginings of the mind. It is precisely within such a moment of imaginative reflection that Jim is described to us during his watch on board the Patna, before the fateful collision:

At such times his thoughts would be full of valorous deeds: he loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary achievements. They were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality. They had a gorgeous virility, the charm of vagueness, they passed before him with a heroic tread; they carried his soul away with them and made it drunk with the divine philtre of an unbounded confidence in itself. There was nothing he could not face. He was so pleased with the idea that he smiled, keeping perfunctorily his eyes ahead. (LJ, 20)

Throughout these deep imaginings, Jim “perfunctorily” keeps his eyes ahead as his duty requires. What he sees, however, is not the sea but the hidden truths of his heroic existence. The “idea” born of his immersion in romantic sea literature overshadows the truth of his physical surroundings. Following a long line of characters from Dante’s Paolo and Francesca through Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, Jim’s objective reality is usurped by the projection of an imaginary alternative born in romantic fiction.