A Spectral Temporality

Abstract

In the previous chapter, I traced the manner in which the transition from chapter 4 to chapter 5 in Lord Jim marks a significant shift in Conrad’s developing aesthetic. The surrendering of the narrative to a first-person narrator signals more than an attempt at a mimetic representation, one that highlights the partialities and distortions of living memory and the social and normative constraints that are associated with subjectivity. The casting off of omniscience is also integral to an aesthetic choice, a search for a specifically literary type of glamour that is produced by an indelible slippage of binary opposites that colors the representation with an aura of mystery and, in so doing, creates a self-perpetuating reading effect. The transition from chapter 4 to chapter 5 is a transition out of a spatial and temporal presence that, once abandoned, allows for the proliferation of paradoxical conjunctions that we associate with the otherwise present. The spatial and chronological involutions that I have traced in the novel form part of the machinery that allows Conrad to achieve both aims—the mimetic and aesthetic as one.