On Lord Jim
Bought a hardback copy of Lord Jim recently. We analyzed it my senior year of high school with a good teacher. It deals with issues that are personal to me because, like the title character Jim, I had concerns about behaving cowardly and inappropriately in the West and may have moved to Southeast Asia for a while in part to escape from my past. I had been ostracized, or at least seemed to be, in the U.S.
The author, Joseph Conrad, is best known for his long “short” story Heart of Darkness, which I taught as a college professor. Some intellectuals say its treatment of Africa is racist. I disagree. The story seems to me to be mainly about the insanity of the character Kurtz, and the notion that someone as egomaniacal as he was needs to actually be killed. It seems to me to be one of the best fictional arguments against imperialism. It is the same as the idea of Apocalypse Now, which basically transfers the plot of Conrad’s story to the Vietnam War.
Conrad must have been extremely intelligent. English was not his native language, but he became one of the best English-language writers in history. Towards the end of the novel: “He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic,.. and the poor girl is leading a sort of soundless, inert life… while he waves his hand sadly at his butterflies.”