Humanity in J. Conrad’s and W. Somerset’s creativity

Content

INTRODUCTION

PART I. ENGLISH NARRATIVE IN THE CONTEXT OF THE EDWARDIAN LITERATURE

1.1 The main representatives of the prose writing in the first half of
the twentieth century

1.2 The similarity and difference of themes and genres of the leading
literature representatives

Conclusion to part I

PART II. HUMANITY AS THE MAIN PHILOSOPHICAL AND LITERARY PROBLEM IN THE
WORK OF THE WRITERS BFORE THE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

2.1 The Moral Sense in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim

2.2 “Human Bondage” and it’s moral duality

Conclusion to part II

GENERAL CONCLUSION

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION

William Somerset Maugham (pronounced ‘mawm’), CH (25 January 1874 – 16
December 1965) was an English playwright, novelist and short story
writer. He was one of the most popular authors of his era, and reputedly
the highest paid of his profession during the 1930s.

Joseph Conrad (December 3, 1857 – August 3, 1924) was a Polish-born
British novelist, one of the most important and respected writers of the
late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. Conrad’s works emerge
out of the confluence of three literary currents prominent in the Europe
of Conrad’s time: Romanticism, particularly in the works of Polish
novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz; realism, which flowered in Russia in the
works of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky; and modernism, which emerged
as the dominant literary aesthetic of the twentieth century.

Conrad’s works draw on the symbolism of the Romantics and the
psychological acuity of the realist and modernist schools. Despite these
affinities, Conrad defies easy categorization. Conrad saw in Western
colonialism the failure of the “civilized world” to fulfill its moral
responsibilities. He witnessed and then documented through his fiction
how the “white man’s burden,” or the West’s responsibility to the rest
of the world, became clouded by selfish ambition through its quest for
colonial domination.

Born and raised in Poland, Conrad spent part of his youth in France and
the majority of his early life at sea; only in his mid-thirties would he
settle down, in England, to start a career as a writer, writing not in
Polish or French, but in English, his adopted third language. Like the
Russian emigre Vladamir Nabokov, Conrad is regarded as a master prose
stylist among authors in the English literary canon. His knowledge of
languages and cultures, gleaned not only from his European experiences
but also from his decades spent as a sailor at sea, can be seen in the
haunting style of his prose and the enormity of the themes which he
constantly brings to the surface. His works inspired writers throughout
the twentieth century.

Our work is devoted to the analysis of the novels by William Somerset
Maugham and Joseph Conrad. The plots of there novel generally revolve
around the subject of marriage and lay emphasis especially on its
tremendous importance in the lives of the nineteen century women.

While making our research we used the works of such linguists as Vinokur
G.O., Suvorov S.P., Arnold I.V. and many others. During our work we used
the works on the translation theory of such linguists as Levitskaya
T.R., Fiterman A.M., Komissarov V.N., Alimov V.V., Shveytser A.D.,
Garbovskiy N.K., Dmitrieva L.F., Galperin I.R., Arnold I.V., Yakusheva
I.V., van Deik, Kolshanskiy and others. We used also the articles from
the the periodical editions.

The aim of our work is to reveal W. Somerset Saugham’s “Of Human
Bondage” and Joseph Conrad’s “Lord Jim”: plot structure and character
analysis.

The hypothesis: in our investigation we suppose to prove that the
literature can reflect humanity problems such as problem of morality and
human relationships on example of W. Somerset’s and J. Conrad’s
creativity.

The aim and hypothesis have defined the next tasks:

– to research the main representatives of the prose writing in the first
half of the twentieth century;

– to investigate the similarity and difference of themes and genres of
the leading literature representatives;

– to research The problem of humanity in the work as a leading
Inclination of W. Somerset and J. Conrad;

– The Moral Sense in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim;

– Human Bondage” and it’s moral duelety and “Human heart” in the symbol
of new wave of human evolution.

Object of research in the given work is W. Somerset Saugham’s and Joseph
Conrad’s creativity.

Subject is W. Somerset Saugham’s “Of Human Bondage” and Joseph Conrad’s
“Lord Jim”: plot structure and character analysis.

Concerning the aim and the tasks we have used such method as a
descriptive one, the method of the experience, the contextual method and
the comparative method. These methods weren’t used as the isolated
methods, they were used in their complex to satisfy the aim and the task
in the best way.

PART I. ENGLISH NARRATIVE IN THE CONTEXT OF THE EDVARDIAN LITERATURE

1.1 The main representatives of the prose writing in the first half of
the twentieth century

Literature in 20th century begins with a serie of movements, some of
them contradictory between them, as Symbolism, Decadentism,
Impressionism and, in Hispanic literature, Modernism, The Generation of
’98 [21, 121]. During the two first decades , two literary conceptions
are imposed to writers: Those writers for whom literary work is the
expression of a cultural experience and fall in intellectualism; and
writers who, in view of the chaos of the time and the dissatisfaction of
bourgeois world, see literary work as an adventure, as an irrational
experience. In the thirties, some historic and socioeconomic facts,
affected literature. It will express the search, through the action, of
ethical values. After the World War, writers will insist in the same
attitudes: moral crisis and tecnical experimentation.

Coinciding the beginning of the new century with Queen Victoria’s death
in 1901, Britain seemed to start a new period that wasn’t seen
immediately, because the short reign of Edward VII (1901-1910) was the
continuity of the previous period. English society was divided in social
classes: wealth was held by a few people thanks for the Industrial
Revolution. The poor were still poor, although by the Educative Act of
1870 some instruction was guaranteed. The first threats for Britain
appeared with anglo-boer war to become evident in 1914 with the
beginning of the First World War.

In ideas, changes were more spectacular. In the beginning of the century
Einstein’s relativity theory becomes true, and in 1905 Freud’s new
theories started to be renewal in human interpretation. Nothing could be
like before, because art and ideas wished to advance quickly. Even in
picture, for example, Cubism and Dadaism broke all imaginable visual
molds: Modernism crystallized as a global result of all possible desires
of change and renovation. In fact, every intellectual, political or
artistic movement tries to broke with the past and fix new directions to
follow. Modernism, not only wished to broke with the past, but also
abolish them. However, it wasn’t possible; in ideas world always exists
something “already invented” where we resort to and in this way,
Modernism had to create its own tradition, looking for affinities in the
past history [21, 127].

In literature, it was the Ullyses (1922) by James Joyce the work that
produced the true impact because of its new character and its perfect
style and the scandol of its publication. The woman would have an
important paper in the society and this would have an excellent
representant in Virginia Woolf (1882-1941). She belongs to an artistic
and intellectual circle in Bloomsbury. Woolf was a writer with a lot of
sensibility and wrote a beautiful poetic prose in the shape of novels
like Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse.

Prose poetry is usually considered a form of poetry written in prose
that breaks some of the normal rules associated with prose discourse,
for heightened imagery or emotional effect. Arguments continue about
whether prose poetry is actually a form of poetry or a form of prose, or
a separate genre altogether. Most critics argue that prose poetry
belongs in the genre of poetry because of its use of metaphorical
language and attention to language.

Other critics argue that prose poetry falls into the genre of prose
because prose poetry relies on prose’s association with narrative and
its reliance on readers’ expectation of an objective presentation of
truth in prose. Yet others argue that the prose poem gains its
subversiveness through its fusion of poetic and prosaic elements.

As a specific form, prose poetry is generally assumed to have originated
in 19th-century France.

At the time of the prose poem’s emergence, French poetry was dominated
by the Alexandrine, an extremely strict and demanding form that poets
such as Aloysius Bertrand and Charles Baudelaire rebelled against.
Further proponents of the prose poem included other French poets such as
Arthur Rimbaud and Stephane Mallarme.

The prose poem continued to be written in France and found profound
expression, in the mid-20th century, in the prose poems of Francis
Ponge. At the end of the 19th century, British Decadent movement poets
such as Oscar Wilde picked up the form because of its already subversive
association. This actually hindered the dissemination of the form into
English because many associated the Decadents with homosexuality, hence
any form used by the Decadents was suspect.

Notable Modernist poet T. S. Eliot wrote vehemently against prose poems,
though he did try his hand at one or two. He also added to the debate
about what defines the genre, saying in his introduction to Djuna
Barnes’ highly poeticized 1936 novel Nightwood that this work may not be
classed as “poetic prose” as it did not have the rhythm or “musical
pattern” of verse. In contrast, a couple of other Modernist authors
wrote prose poetry consistently, including Gertrude Stein and Sherwood
Anderson. In actuality, Anderson considered his work to be short
fictions—in the current term, “flash fiction.” The distinction between
flash fiction and prose poetry is at times very thin, almost
indiscernible.

By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept by Canadian author
Elizabeth Smart, written in 1945, is a relatively isolated example of
English-language poetic prose in the mid-20th century. Then, for a
while, prose poems died out, at least in English—until the early 1950s
and ’60s, when American poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Jack
Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Russell Edson, Charles Simic, Robert Bly
and James Wright experimented with the form. Edson, indeed, worked
principally in this form, and helped give the prose poem its current
reputation for surrealist wit. Similarly, Simic won the Pulitzer Prize
in Poetry for his 1989 collection, The World Doesn’t End.

At the same time, poets elsewhere were exploring the form in Spanish,
Japanese and Russian. Octavio Paz worked in this form in Spanish in his
Aguila o Sol? (Eagle or Sun?). Spanish poet Angel Crespo (1926-95) did
his most notable work in the genre. Giannina Braschi, postmodern
Spanish-language poet, wrote a trilogy of prose poems, El imperio de los
suenos (Empire of Dreams, 1988). Translator Dennis Keene presents the
work of six Japanese prose poets in The Modern Japanese Prose Poem: an
Anthology of Six Poets. Similarly, Adrian Wanner and Caryl Emerson
describe the form’s growth in Russia in their critical work, Russian
Minimalism: from the Prose Poem to the Anti-story. The two best-known
examples of this literary form in Russian are Gogol’s Dead Souls and
Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow-Petushki.

In Poland, Boles?aw Prus (1847-1912), influenced by the French prose
poets, had written a number of poetic micro-stories, including “Mold of
the Earth” (1884), “The Living Telegraph” (1884) and “Shades” (1885).

The form has gained popularity since the late 1980s, and literary
journals that previously disputed prose poetry’s contributions to both
poetry and prose currently display prose poems next to sonnets and short
stories. Journals have even begun to specialize, publishing solely prose
poems/flash fiction in their pages (see external links below). Some
contemporary writers who write prose poems or flash fiction include
Michael Benedikt, Robert Bly, Anne Carson, Kim Chinquee, Richard Garcia,
Ray Gonzalez, Lyn Hejinian, Louis Jenkins, Campbell McGrath, Sheila
Murphy, Naomi Shihab Nye, Mary Oliver, David Shumate, James Tate, and J.
Marcus Weekley, Ron Silliman, and John Olson.

It used to be said that prose poetry was impossible in English because
the English language was not so strictly governed by rules as was the
French language. This seems not to be so strictly held in the
twenty-first century.

Rapturous, rhythmic, image-laden prose from previous centuries, such as
that found in Jeremy Taylor and Thomas de Quincey, strikes 21st-century
readers as having something of a poetic quality. Using figurative
language to provoke thought, it invites a reader into unusual
perspectives to question what is traditionally thought of, as in Richard
Garcia’s “Chickenhead.”

Flash fiction is fiction of extreme brevity. The standard,
generally-accepted length of a flash fiction piece is 1000 words or
less. By contrast, a short-short measures 1001 words to 2500 words, and
a traditional short story measures 2501 to 7500 words. A novelette runs
from 7501 words to 17,500, a novella 17,501 words to 40,000 words, and a
novel 40,001 words and up. In theater script and poetry writing,
vignettes are short, impressionistic scenes that focus on one moment or
give a trenchant impression about a character, an idea, or a setting.
This type of scene is more common in recent postmodern theater, where
adherence to the conventions of theatrical structure and story
development are jettisoned. It is particularly influenced by
contemporary notions of a scene as shown in film, video and television
scripting. Unlike the traditional scene in a play, the vignette is not
strictly linked in with a sequential plot development but establishes
meaning through loose symbolic or linguistic connection to other
vignettes or scenes. Vignettes are the literary equivalent of a
snapshot, often incomplete or fragmentary. In poetry, in the quintain
form, they can relate to a short descriptive literary sketch or a short
scene or incident from a movie or play. The use of vignettes is suited
to those plays in which theme, image, emotion and character are more
important than narrative, though this doesn’t mean that a vignette is
out of place as an element in a more narrative play.

1.2 The similarity and difference of themes and genres of the leading
literature representatives

The term English literature refers to literature written in the English
language, including literature composed in English by writers not
necessarily from England; Joseph Conrad was Polish, Robert Burns was
Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe
was American, V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, Vladimir Nabokov was
Russian. In other words, English literature is as diverse as the
varieties and dialects of English spoken around the world. In academia,
the term often labels departments and programmes practising English
studies in secondary and tertiary educational systems. Despite the
variety of authors of English literature, the works of William
Shakespeare remain paramount throughout the English-speaking world.

This article primarily deals with literature from Britain written in
English. For literature from specific English-speaking regions, consult
the see also section at the bottom of the page.

Early Modern period

The Elizabethan era saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in
the field of drama. The Italian Renaissance had rediscovered the ancient
Greek and Roman theatre, and this was instrumental in the development of
the new drama, which was then beginning to evolve apart from the old
mystery and miracle plays of the Middle Ages. The Italians were
particularly inspired by Seneca (a major tragic playwright and
philosopher, the tutor of Nero) and Plautus (its comic cliches,
especially that of the boasting soldier had a powerful influence on the
Renaissance and after). However, the Italian tragedies embraced a
principle contrary to Seneca’s ethics: showing blood and violence on the
stage. In Seneca’s plays such scenes were only acted by the characters
[18, 123]. But the English playwrights were intrigued by Italian model:
a conspicuous community of Italian actors had settled in London and
Giovanni Florio had brought much of the Italian language and culture to
England. It is also true that the Elizabethan Era was a very violent age
and that the high incidence of political assassinations in Renaissance
Italy (embodied by Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince) did little to calm
fears of popish plots. As a result, representing that kind of violence
on the stage was probably more cathartic for the Elizabethan spectator.
Following earlier Elizabethan plays such as Gorboduc by Sackville &
Norton and The Spanish Tragedy by Kyd that was to provide much material
for Hamlet, William Shakespeare stands out in this period as a poet and
playwright as yet unsurpassed. Shakespeare was not a man of letters by
profession, and probably had only some grammar school education. He was
neither a lawyer, nor an aristocrat as the “university wits” that had
monopolised the English stage when he started writing. But he was very
gifted and incredibly versatile, and he surpassed “professionals” as
Robert Greene who mocked this “shake-scene” of low origins [23, 145].
Though most dramas met with great success, it is in his later years
(marked by the early reign of James I) that he wrote what have been
considered his greatest plays: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King
Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest, a tragicomedy that
inscribes within the main drama a brilliant pageant to the new king.
Shakespeare also popularized the English sonnet which made significant
changes to Petrarch’s model.

Modernism

The movement known as English literary modernism grew out of a general
sense of disillusionment with Victorian era attitudes of certainty,
conservatism, and objective truth. The movement was greatly influenced
by the ideas of Romanticism, Karl Marx’s political writings, and the
psychoanalytic theories of subconscious – Sigmund Freud. The continental
art movements of Impressionism, and later Cubism, were also important
inspirations for modernist writers.

Although literary modernism reached its peak between the First and
Second World Wars, the earliest examples of the movement’s attitudes
appeared in the mid to late nineteenth century. Gerard Manley Hopkins,
A. E. Housman, and the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy represented a few
of the major early modernists writing in England during the Victorian
period.

The first decades of the twentieth century saw several major works of
modernism published, including the seminal short story collection
Dubliners by James Joyce, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and the
poetry and drama of William Butler Yeats.

Important novelists between the World Wars included Virginia Woolf, E.
M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse and D. H. Lawrence. T. S. Eliot
was the preeminent English poet of the period. Across the Atlantic
writers like William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and the poets Wallace
Stevens and Robert Frost developed a more American take on the modernist
aesthetic in their work.

Perhaps the most contentiously important figure in the development of
the modernist movement was the American poet Ezra Pound. Credited with
“discovering” both T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, whose stream of
consciousness novel Ulysses is considered to be one of the century’s
greatest literary achievements, Pound also advanced the cause of imagism
and free verse, forms which would dominate English poetry into the
twenty-first century.

Gertrude Stein, an American expat, was also an enormous literary force
during this time period, famous for her line “Rose is a rose is a rose
is a rose.”

Other notable writers of this period included H.D., Marianne Moore,
Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, William Carlos
Williams, Ralph Ellison, Dylan Thomas, R.S. Thomas and Graham Greene.
However, some of these writers are more closely associated with what has
become known as post-modernism, a term often used to encompass the
diverse range of writers who succeeded the modernists.

The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain tendencies in
post-World War II literature. It is both a continuation of the
experimentation championed by writers of the modernist period (relying
heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators,
etc.) and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist
literature. Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is
difficult to define and there is little agreement on the exact
characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature. Henry
Miller, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S.
Thompson, Truman Capote, Thomas Pynchon

Modernist literature is the literary expression of the tendencies of
Modernism, especially High modernism.

Modernism as a literary movement reached its height in Europe between
1900 and the middle 1920s. Modernist literature addressed aesthetic
problems similar to those examined in non-literary forms of
contemporaneous Modernist art, such as Modernist painting. Gertrude
Stein’s abstract writings, for example, have often been compared to the
fragmentary and multi-perspectival Cubism of her friend Pablo Picasso.

The Modernist emphasis on a radical individualism can be seen in the
many literary manifestos issued by various groups within the movement.
The concerns expressed by Simmel above are echoed in Richard
Huelsenbeck’s “First German Dada Manifesto” of 1918:

“Art in its execution and direction is dependent on the time in which it
lives, and artists are creatures of their epoch. The highest art will be
that which in its conscious content presents the thousandfold problems
of the day, the art which has been visibly shattered by the explosions
of last week … The best and most extraordinary artists will be those
who every hour snatch the tatters of their bodies out of the frenzied
cataract of life, who, with bleeding hands and hearts, hold fast to the
intelligence of their time.” [3, 136]

The cultural history of humanity creates a unique common history that
connects previous generations with the current generation of humans. The
Modernist re-contextualization of the individual within the fabric of
this received social heritage can be seen in the “mythic method” which
T.S.

Modernist literature involved such authors as Knut Hamsun (whose novel
Hunger is considered to be the first modernist novel), Virginia Woolf,
T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, H.D., Dylan Thomas, Paul Laurence Dunbar,
Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, James Joyce, Hugh MacDiarmid, William Faulkner,
Jean Toomer, Ernest Hemingway, Rainer Maria Rilke, Franz Kafka, Robert
Musil, Joseph Conrad, Andrei Bely, W. B. Yeats, F. Scott Fitzgerald,
Luigi Pirandello, D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Jaroslav Ha?ek,
Samuel Beckett, Menno ter Braak, Marcel Proust, Mikhail Bulgakov, Robert
Frost, Boris Pasternak, Djuna Barnes, Patricia Highsmith and others.

Modernist literature attempted to move from the bonds of Realist
literature and to introduce concepts such as disjointed timelines.
Modernism was distinguished by an emancipatory metanarrative. In the
wake of Modernism, and post-enlightenment, metanarratives tended to be
emancipatory, whereas beforehand this was not a consistent
characteristic. Contemporary metanarratives were becoming less relevant
in light of the implications of World War I, the rise of trade unionism,
a general social discontent, and the emergence of psychoanalysis. The
consequent need for a unifying function brought about a growth in the
political importance of culture.

Modernist literature can be viewed largely in terms of its formal,
stylistic and semantic movement away from Romanticism, examining subject
matter that is traditionally mundane a prime example being The Love Song
of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot. Modernist literature often
features a marked pessimism, a clear rejection of the optimism apparent
in Victorian literature. In fact, “a common motif in Modernist fiction
is that of an alienated individual–a dysfunctional individual trying in
vain to make sense of a predominantly urban and fragmented society.” But
the questioning spirit of modernism could also be seen, less
elegaically, as part of a necessary search for ways to make a new sense
of a broken world. An example is A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle by
Hugh MacDiarmid, in which the individual artist applies Eliot’s
techniques to respond (in this case) to a historically fractured
nationalism, using a more comic, parodic and “optimistic” (though no
less “hopeless”) modernist expression in which the artist as “hero”
seeks to embrace complexity and locate new meanings.

However, many Modernist works like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land are
marked by the absence even of a central, heroic figure. In rejecting the
solipsism of Romantics like Shelley and Byron, such works reject the
notion of subject associated with Cartesian dualism, collapsing
narrative and narrator into a collection of disjointed fragments and
overlapping voices [7, 121].

Modernist literature often moves beyond the limitations of the Realist
novel with a concern for larger factors such as social or historical
change. This is prominent in “stream of consciousness” writing. Examples
can be seen in Virginia Woolf’s Kew Gardens and Mrs Dalloway, James
Joyce’s Ulysses, Katherine Porter’s Flowering Judas, Jean Toomer’s Cane,
William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and others.

Modernism as a literary movement is seen, in large part, as a reaction
to the emergence of city life as a central force in society.
Furthermore, an early attention to the object as freestanding became in
later Modernism a preoccupation with form. The dyadic collapse of the
distance between subject and object represented a movement from means to
is. Where Romanticism stressed the subjectivity of experience, Modernist
writers were more acutely conscious of the objectivity of their
surroundings. In Modernism the object is; the language doesn’t mean it
is. This is a shift from an epistemological aesthetic to an ontological
aesthetic or, in simpler terms, a shift from a knowledge-based aesthetic
to a being-based aesthetic. This shift is central to Modernism.
Archibald MacLeish, for instance, said, “A poem should not mean / But
be.”

Characteristics of Modernity/Modernism

· Free indirect speech

· Stream of consciousness

· Juxtaposition of characters

· Wide use of classical allusions

· Figure of speech

· Intertextuality

· Personification

· Hyperbole

· Parataxis

· Comparison

· Quotation

· Pun

· Satire

· Irony

· Antiphrasis

· Unconventional use of metaphor

· Symbolic representation

· Psychoanalysis

· Discontinuous narrative

· Metanarrative

· Multiple narrative points of view

Thematic characteristics

· Breakdown of social norms

· Realistic embodiment of social meanings

· Separation of meanings and senses from the context

· Despairing individual behaviors in the face of an unmanageable future

· Sense of spiritual loneliness

· Sense of alienation

· Sense of frustration

· Sense of disillusionment

· Rejection of the history

· Rejection of the outdated social system

· Objection of the traditional thoughts and the traditional moralities

· Objection of the religious thoughts

· Substitution of a mythical past

· Two World Wars’ Effects on Humanity

Conclusion to part I

We came to a conclusion that Literature in 20th century begins with a
serie of movements, some of them contradictory between them, as
Symbolism, Decadentism, Impressionism and, in Hispanic literature,
Modernism, The Generation of ’98. During the two first decades , two
literary conceptions are imposed to writers: Those writers for whom
literary work is the expression of a cultural experience and fall in
intellectualism; and writers who, in view of the chaos of the time and
the dissatisfaction of bourgeois world, see literary work as an
adventure, as an irrational experience.

Modernism crystallized as a global result of all possible desires of
change and renovation. The prose poem continued to be written in France
and found profound expression, in the mid-20th century, in the prose
poems of Francis Ponge. At the end of the 19th century, British Decadent
movement poets such as Oscar Wilde picked up the form because of its
already subversive association. This actually hindered the dissemination
of the form into English because many associated the Decadents with
homosexuality, hence any form used by the Decadents was suspect.

The term English literature refers to literature written in the English
language, including literature composed in English by writers not
necessarily from England; Joseph Conrad was Polish, Robert Burns was
Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe
was American, V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, Vladimir Nabokov was
Russian.

PART II. WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM’S “OF HUMAN BONDAGE” AND JOSEPH
CONRAD’S “LORD JIM”

2.1 The Moral Sense in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim

Lord Jim (1900), Joseph Conrad’s fourth novel, is the story of a ship
which collides with “a floating derelict” and will doubtlessly “go down
at any moment” during a “silent black squall.” The ship, old and
rust-eaten, known as the Patna, is voyaging across the Indian Ocean to
the Red Sea. Aboard are eight-hundred Muslim pilgrims who are being
transported to a “holy place, the promise of salvation, the reward of
eternal life.” Terror possesses the captain and several of his officers,
who jump from the pilgrim-ship and thus wantonly abandon the sleeping
passengers who are unaware of their peril. For the crew members in the
safety of their life-boat, dishonor is better than death [8, 183].

Beyond the immediate details and the effects of a shipwreck, A breach of
this novel portrays, in the words of the story’s narrator, Captain
Marlow, “those struggles of an individual trying to save from the fire
his idea of what his moral identity should be. . . .” That individual is
a young seaman, Jim, who serves as the chief mate of the Patna and who
also “jumps.” Recurringly Jim envisions himself as “always an example of
devotion to duty and as unflinching as a hero in a book.” But his heroic
dream of “saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a
hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line,” does not square with
what he really represents: one who falls from grace, and whose “crime”
is “a breach of faith with the community of mankind.” Jim’s aspirations
and actions underline the disparity between idea and reality, or what is
generally termed “indissoluble contradictions of being.” His is also the
story of a man in search of some form of atonement once he recognizes
that his “avidity for adventure, and in a sense of many-sided courage,”
and his dream of “the success of his imaginary achievements,” constitute
a romantic illusion.

Jim’s leap from the Patna generates in him a severe moral crisis that
forces him to “come round to the view that only a meticulous precision
of statement would bring out the true horror behind the appalling face
of things.” It is especially hard for Jim to confront this “horror”
since his confidence in “his own superiority” seems so absolute. The
“Patna affair” compels him in the end to peer into his deepest self and
then to relinquish “the charm and innocence of illusions.” The Jim of
the Patna undergoes “the ordeal of the fiery furnace,” as he is severely
tested “by those events of the sea that show in the light of the day the
inner worth of a man, the edge of his temper, and the fibre of his
stuff; that reveal the quality of his resistance and the secret truth of
his pretences, not only to others but also to himself.” Clearly the
Patna is, for Jim, the experience both of a moment and of a lifetime.

This novel, from beginning to end, is the story of Jim; throughout the
focus is on his life and character, on what he has done, or A story not
done, on his crime and punishment, his failure of nerve as a seaman. It
is, as well, the story of his predicament and his fate, the destiny of
his soul—of high expectations and the great “chance missed,” of “wasted
opportunity” and “what he had failed to obtain pretences.,” all the
result of leaving his post, and abdicating his responsibility. Thus we
see him in an unending moment of crisis, “overburdened by the knowledge
of an imminent death” as he imagines the grim scene before him: “He
stood still looking at those recumbent bodies, a doomed man aware of his
fate, surveying the silent company of the dead. They were dead! Nothing
could save them!”

For Jim the overwhelming question, “What could I do — what?”, brings the
answer of “Nothing!” The Patna, as it ploughs the Arabian Sea (“smooth
and cool to the eye like a sheet of ice”) on its way to the Red Sea, is
close to sinking, with its engines stopped, the steam blowing off, its
deep rumble making “the whole night vibrate like a bass ring.” Jim’s
imagination conjures up a dismal picture of a catastrophe that is
inescapable and merciless. It is not that Jim thinks so much of saving
himself as it is the tyranny of his belief that there are eight-hundred
people on ship — and only seven life-boats. Conrad’s storyteller,
Marlow, much sympathetic to Jim’s plight, discerns in him an affliction
of helplessness that compounds his sense of hopelessness, making Jim
incapable of confronting total shipwreck, as he envisions “a ship
floating head down, checked in sinking by a sheet of old iron too rotten
to stand being shored up [16, 121].” But Jim is a victim not only of his
imagination, but also of what Conrad calls a “moral situation of
enslavement.” So torn and defeated is Jim, that his soul itself also
seems possessed by some “invisible personality, an antagonistic and
inseparable partner of his existence.”

Jim’s acceptance of the inevitability of disaster and his belief that he
could do absolutely nothing to forestall the loss of eight-hundred
passengers render him helpless, robbing him of any ability to take any
kind of life-saving action—”. . . I thought I might just as well stand
where I was and wait.” In short, in Jim we discern a disarmed man who
surrenders his will to action. The gravity of Jim’s situation is so
overwhelming that it leaves him, his heroic aspirations notwithstanding,
in a state of paralysis. His predicament, then, becomes his moral
isolation and desolation, one in which Jim’s “desire of peace waxes
stronger as hope declines . . . and conquers the very desire of life.”
He gives in at precisely the point when strenuous effort and decisive
actions are mandated, so as to resist “unreasonable forces.” His frame
of mind recalls here Jean-Paul Sartre’s pertinent comment, in The Age of
Reason (l945), “That’s what existence means: draining one’s own self dry
without a sense of thrust.” [12, 128]

Everything in Jim’s background points to his success as a career seaman.
We learn that, one of five sons, he originally came from a parsonage,
from one of those “abodes of piety and peace,” in England; his vocation
for the sea emerged early on and, for a period of two years, he served
on a “‘training-ship for affairs of the mercantile marine.’” His station
was in the fore-top of a training-ship chained to her moorings. We learn
that, on one occasion, in the dusk of a winter’s day, a gale suddenly
blew forth with a savage fury of wind and rain and tide, endangering the
small craft on the shore and the ferry-boats anchored in the harbor, as
well as the training-ship itself. The force of the gale “made him hold
his breath in awe. He stood still. It seemed to him he was whirled
around. He was jostled.” We learn, too, that a coaster, in search of
shelter, crashed through a schooner at anchor. We see the cutter now
tossing abreast the ship, hovering dangerously. Jim is on the the midst
of certitude.

Point of leaping overboard to save a man overboard, but fails to do so.
There is “pain of conscious defeat in his eyes,” as the captain shouts
to Jim. “‘Too late, youngster. . . . Better luck next time. This will
teach you to be smart.’”

This incident, related in the first chapter of the novel, serves to
prepare us for Jim’s actions later on the Patna, and also suggests a
Danger in kind of flaw in Jim’s behavior in a moment of danger. Early on
in his career, then, Jim had displayed a willingness to “flinch” from
his obligations, thus revealing a defect in the heroism about which he
romanticized and which led him to creating self-serving fantasies and
illusions. “He felt angry with the brutal tumult of earth and sky for
taking him unawares and checking unfairly a generous readiness for
narrow escapes.” Jim, as a seaman, refuses to admit his fear of fear,
and in this he shows an inclination to escape the truth of reality by
“putting out of sight all the reminders of our folly, of our weakness,
of our mortality.” Clearly the episode on the training-ship serves both
as a symptom and as a portent, underscores an inherent element of
failure and disgrace in Jim’s character that, in the course of the
novel, he must confront if he is to transcend the dreams and illusions
that beguile him, and that he must finally vanquish if he is to find his
“moral identity.” His early experience on the training-ship makes him a
marked man [16, 132]. It remains for his experience later on the Patna
to make him a “condemned man.”

That nothing rests secure, that, in the midst of certitude, danger
lurks, that peace and contentment are at the mercy of the whirl of the
world, are inescapable conditions of human existence. These daunting
dichotomies, as we find them depicted in Lord Jim, are forever teasing
and testing humans in their life-journey Conrad sees these dichotomies
in the unfolding spectacle of man and nature. To evince the enormous
power of this process Conrad chooses to render time in a continuum which
fills all space. Time has no end, no telos; it absorbs beginnings and
endings—the past, present, and future not only in their connections but
also in their disconnections.

Conrad’s spatial technique is no less complex, and no less revealing,
than his use of time. Hence, he employs spatial dimension so as to
highlight Jim’s sense of guilt in jumping from the Patna

Conrad expresses it in his Author’s Note, is Jim’s burden of fate. And
wherever he retreats he is open to attack from some “deadly snake in
every bush.” Time as memory and place as torment become his twin
oppressors.

The specificities of the Patna episode were to come out during a
well-attended Official Court of Inquiry that takes place for several
days in early August 1883. Most of the details, in the form of remarks
and commentaries, are supplied by Marlow in his long oral narrative,
especially as these emerge from Jim’s own confession to Marlow when they
happen to meet after the proceedings, on the yellow portico of the
Malabar House [13, 178]. Humiliated and broken, his certificate revoked,
his career destroyed, Jim can never return to his home and face his
father—”‘I could never explain. He wouldn’t understand.’” Again and
again, in his confession, Jim shows feelings of desperation and even
hysteria: “Everything had betrayed him!” For him it is imperative to be
identified neither with the “odious and fleshly” German skipper, Gustav,
“the incarnation of everything vile and base that lurks in the world we
love,” nor with the chief and the second engineers, “skunks” who are
extensions of the captain’s coarseness and cowardice.

But that, in fact, Jim does jump overboard—”a jump into the unknown”—and
in effect joins them in deserting the Patna ultimately agonizes his
moral sense and impels him to scrutinize that part of his being in which
the element of betrayal has entered. By such an action he feels
contaminated, unclean, disgraced. How to separate himself morally from
the captain and his engineers is still another cruel question to which
he must find an answer. In this respect, Jim reminds us of the tragic
heroes in ancient Greek drama whose encounters with destiny entail both
risks and moral instruction. “We begin to live,” Conrad reminds us,
“when we have conceived life as a tragedy.”

How does one “face the darkness”? How does one behave to the unknowable?
These are other basic questions that vex Jim. He wants, of course, to
answer these questions affirmatively, or at least to wrestle with them
in redeeming ways, even as he appears to see himself within a
contradiction—as one who can have no place in the universe once he has
failed to meet the standards of his moral code. Refusing to accept any
“helping hand” extended to him to “clear out,” he decides to “fight this
thing down,” to expiate his sin, in short, to suffer penitently the
agony of his failure: “He had loved too well to imagine himself a
glorious racehorse, and now he was condemned to toil without honour like
a costermonger’s donkey.” Jim’s innermost sufferings revolve precisely
around his perception of his loss of honor, of his surrender to
cowardice. The crushing shame of this perception tortures Jim, without
respite. “’I had jumped—hadn’t I?’ he asked [Marlow], dismayed. ‘That’s
what I had to live down.’”

Jim’s moral sense is clearly outraged by his actions. This outrage
wracks his high conception of himself, compelling him in The “idyllic
time to see himself outside of his reveries that Conrad also associates
with “the determination to lounge safely through existence.” What clouds
Jim’s fate is that such a net of safety and certitude has no sustained
reality. Within the serenity that seemed to bolster his thoughts of
“valorous deeds” there are hidden menaces that assault his
self-contentment and self-deception and abruptly awaken Jim to his
actual condition and circumstances [13, 186]. In one way, it can be
said, Jim is a slave of the “idyllic imagination” (as Irving Babbitt
calls it), with its expansive appetites, chimeras, reveries, pursuit of
illusion. Jim’s is the story of a man who comes to discern not only the
pitfalls of this imagination but also the need to free himself from its
bondage. But to free himself from bondage requires of Jim painstaking
effort, endurance. He must work diligently to transform chimeric, if
incipient, fortitude into an active virtue as it interacts with a world
that, like the Patna, can be “full of reptiles”—a world in which “not
one of us is safe.”

Conrad uses Jim to indicate the moral process of recovery. Conrad
delineates the paradigms of this process as these evolve in the midst of
much anguish and laceration, leading to the severest scrutiny and
judgment of the total human personality. Jim pays attention, in short,
to the immobility of his soul; it will take much effort for him to
determine where he is and what is happening to him if he is to emerge
from the “heart of darkness” and the affliction within and around him to
face what is called “the limiting moment.” It is, in an inherently
spiritual context, a moment of repulsion when one examines the sin in
oneself, and hates it. His sense of repulsion is tantamount to moral
renunciation, as he embarks on the path to recovery from the romantic
habit of daydreaming.

In the end Jim comes to despise his condition, acceding as he Moral does
to the moral imperative. He accepts the need to see his

imperative to “trouble” as his own, and he instinctively volunteers to
answer questions regarding the Patna by appearing before the Official
Court of Inquiry “held in the police court of an Eastern port.” (This
actually marks his first encounter with Marlow, who is in attendance and
who seems to be sympathetically aware of “his hopeless difficulty.”) He
gives his testimony fully, objectively, honestly, as he faces the
presiding magistrate. The physical details of Jim’s appearance
underscore his urge “to go on talking for truth’s sake, perhaps for his
own sake”—”fair of face, big of frame, with young, gloomy eyes, he held
his shoulders upright above the box while his soul writhed within him.”
Marlow’s reaction to Jim is instinctively positive: “I liked his
appearance; he came from the right place; he was one of us.” In striking
ways, Jim is a direct contrast to the other members of “the Patna gang”:
“They were nobodies,” in Marlow’s words [13, 192].

It should be recalled here that Jim adamantly refused to help the others
put the lifeboat clear of the ship and get it into the water for their
escape. Indeed, as Jim insists to Marlow, he wanted to keep his distance
from the deserters, for there was “nothing in common between him and
these men.” Their frenzied, self-serving actions to abandon the ship and
its human cargo infuriated Jim—”‘I loathed them. I hated them.’” The
scene depicting the abandonment of the Patna is one filled with “the
turmoil of terror,” dramatizing the contrast between Jim and the other
officers— between honor and dishonor, loyalty and disloyalty, in short,
between aspiration and descent on the larger metaphysical map of human
behavior. Jim personifies resistance to the negative as he tries to
convey to Marlow “the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare recital
of events.” Jim’s excruciating moral effort not to join the others and
to ignore their desperate motions is also pictured at a critical moment
when he felt the Patna dangerously dipping her bows, and then lifting
them gently, slowly—”and ever so little.”

The reality of a dangerous situation now seems to be devouring Jim, as
he was once again to capitulate to the inner voice of weakness and doubt
telling him to “leap” from the Patna. Futility hovers ominously around
Jim at this last moment when death arrives in the form of a third
engineer “clutch[ing] at the air with raised arms, totter[ing] and
collapsing].” A terrified, transfixed Jim finds himself stumbling over
the legs of the dead man lying on the bridge. And from the lifeboat
below three voices yelled out eerily—”one bleated, another screamed, one
howled”—imploring the man to jump, not realizing of course that he was
dead of a heart attack: “Jump, George! Jump! Oh, jump. . . . We’ll catch
you! Jump! . . . Geo-o-o-orge! Oh, jump!” This desperate, screeching
verbal command clearly pierces Jim’s internal condition of fear and
terror, just as the ship again seemed to begin a slow plunge, with rain
sweeping over her “like a broken sea.” And once again Jim is unable to
sustain his refusal to betray his idea of honor. Here his body and soul
are caught in the throes of still another “chance missed.”

The assaults of nature on Jim’s outer situation are as vicious at this
pivotal point of his life as are the assaults of conscience on his moral
sense. These clashing outer and inner elements are clearly pushing Jim
to the edge, as heroic aspiration and human frailty wrestle furiously
for the possession of his soul. What happens will have permanent
consequences for him, as Conrad reveals here, with astonishing power of
perception [12, 93]. Here, then, we discern a process of cohesion and
dissolution, when Jim’s fate seems to be vibrating unspeakably as he
experiences the radical pressures and tensions of his struggle to be
more than what he is, or what he aspires to be. Jim, as if replacing the
dead officer lying on the deck of the Patna, jumps: “It had happened
somehow. . . ,” Conrad writes. “He had landed partly on somebody and
fallen across a thwart.” He was now in the boat with those he loathed;
“[h]e had tumbled from a height he could never scale again.” “‘I wished
I could die,’” he admits to Marlow. “‘There was no going back. It was as
if I had jumped into a well—into an everlasting deep hole.’”

A cold, thick rain and “a pitchy blackness” weigh down the lurching
boat; “it was like being swept by a flood through a cavern.” Crouched
down in the bows, Jim fearfully discerns the Patna, “just one yellow
gleam of the masthead light high up and blurred like a last star ready
to dissolve.” And then all is black, as one of the deserters cries out
shakily, “‘She’s gone!’” Those in the boat remain quiet, and a strange
silence prevails all around them, blurring the sea and the sky, with
“nothing to see and nothing to hear.” To Jim it seemed as if everything
was gone, all was over. The other three shipmates in the boat mistake
him for George, and when they do recognize him they are startled and
curse him. The boat itself seems filled with hatred, suspicion,
villainy, betrayal. “We were like men walled up quick in a roomy grave,”
Jim confides to Marlow.

The boat itself epitomizes abject failure and alienation from mankind.
Everything in it and around it mirrors Jim’s schism of soul, “imprisoned
in the solitude of the sea.” Through the varying repetition of language
and images Conrad accentuates Jim’s distraught inner condition,
especially the shame that rages in him for being “in the same boat” with
men who exemplify a fellowship of liars. By the time they are picked up
just before sunset by the Avondale, the captain and his two officers had
already “made up a story” that would sanction their desertion of the
Patna, which in fact had not sunk and which, with its pilgrims, had been
safely towed to Aden by a French gunboat, eventually to end her days in
a breaking-up yard. Unlike the others, Jim would choose to face the full
consequences of his actions, “to face it out—alone for myself—wait for
another chance—find out. . . .”

“Jim’s affair” was destined to live on years later in the memo-Fear vs.
ries and minds of men, as instanced by Marlow’s chance meeting honor. in
a Sydney cafe with a now elderly French lieutenant who was a
boarding-officer from the gunboat and remained on the Patna for thirty
hours. For Marlow this meeting was “a moment of vision” that enables him
to penetrate more deeply into the events surrounding the Patna as he
discusses them with one who had been “there.” The French officer, at
this time the third lieutenant on the flagship of the French Pacific
squadron, and Marlow, now commanding a merchant vessel, thus share their
recollections, from which certain key thoughts emerge, measuring and
clarifying the entire affair. The two men here bring to mind a Greek
chorus speaking words of wisdom that explain human suffering and
tragedy. In essence it is Jim’s predicament that Conrad wants to
diagnose here so as to enlist the reader’s understanding, even sympathy.
“‘The fear, the fear—look you—it is always there,’” the French officer
declares. And he goes on to say to Marlow—all of this with reference to
Jim: “‘And what life may be worth . . . when the honour is gone. . . . I
can offer no opinion—because—monsieur—I know nothing of it.’”

For Conrad the task of the novelist is to illuminate “Jim’s case” for
the reader’s judgment, and he does this, from diverse angles and levels,
in order for the reader to consider all of the evidence, all the
ambivalences, antinomies, paradoxes. If for Jim the struggle is to
ferret out his true moral identity, for the reader the task is to
meditate on what is presented to him and, in the end, to attain a
transcendent apprehension of life in time and life in relation to
val-ues.1 Jim is, to repeat, “one of us,” and in him we meet and see
ourselves on moral grounds, so to speak.

In the final paragraph of his Author’s Note, Conrad is careful to point
out that the creation of Jim “is not the product of coldly Jim’s
function perverted thinking.” Nor is he “a figure of Northern mists.” In
Jim, Conrad sees Everyman. In short, he is the creative outgrowth of
what Irving Babbitt terms “the high seriousness of the ethical
imagination,” and not of the “idyllic imagination,” with its distortions
of human character. In other words, this is the “moral imagination”
which “imitates the universal” and reveres the “Permanent Things.” In
Jim we participate in and perceive a normative consciousness, as we
become increasingly aware of Jim’s purposive function in reflective
prose and poetic fiction, aspiring as it does to make transcendence
perceptible.2 Conrad testifies to the force and truth of the principles
of a metaphysics of art when, in the concluding sentence of his Author’s
Note, he writes about his own chance encounter with the Jim in
ourselves: “One morning in the commonplace surroundings of an Eastern
roadstead, I saw his form pass by—appealing—significant—under a
cloud—perfectly silent. Which is as it should be. It was for me, with
all the sympathy of which I was capable, to seek fit words for his
meaning. He was ‘one of us.’”

A man of “indomitable resolution,” Jim strikes aside any “plan for
evasion” proffered to him by a “helping hand” like Marlow’s. Nothing can
tempt him to ignore the consequences of both his decisions and
indecisions, which surround him like “deceitful ghosts, austere shades.”
Any plan to save him from “degradation, ruin, and despair” he shuns,
choosing instead to endure the conditions of homelessness and aloneness
[12, 104]. He refuses to identify with any schemes or schemers of a
morally insensitive nature. The “deep idea” in him is the moral sense to
which he somehow hangs on and the innermost voice to which he listens.

Unfailingly Conrad reveals to us the nature of Jim’s character and will
in a “narrative [which] moves through a devious course of
identifications and distinctions,” as one critic observes.3 Thus in the
person of Captain Montague Brierly we have a paragon sailing-ship
skipper, and an august member of the board of inquiry, whose overarching
self-satisfaction and self-worth presented to Marlow and to the world
itself “a surface as hard as granite.” Unexplainably, however, Brierly
commits suicide a week after the official inquiry ended by jumping
overboard, less than three days after his vessel left port on his
outward passage. It seems, as Marlow believes, that “something akin to
fear of the immensity of his contempt for the young man [Jim] under
examination, he was probably holding silent inquiry into his own case.”
Jim will not go the way of Brierly, whose juxtaposition to Jim, early on
in the novel, serves to emphasize the young seaman’s fund of inner
strength needed to resist perversion of the moral sense. Unlike Brierly,
Jim will not be unjust to himself by trivializing his soul.

Nor will Jim become part of any business scheme that would Jim’s destiny
conveniently divert him from affirming the moral sense. A farfetched and
obviously disastrous business venture (“[a]s good as a gold-mine”),
concocted by Marlow’s slight acquaintance, a West Australian by the name
of Chester, and his partner, “Holy-Terror Robinson,” further illustrates
in Jim the ascendancy of “his fine sensibilities, his fine feelings, his
fine longings.” Jim will not be identified with the unsavory Chester any
more than he would be identified with the Patna gang. Marlow himself,
whatever mixed feelings he may have as to Jim’s weaknesses, intuits that
Jim has nobler aspirations than being “thrown to the dogs” and in effect
to “slip away into the darkness” with Chester. Jim’s destiny may be
tragic, but it is not demeaning or tawdry, which in the end sums up
Marlow’s beneficent trust in Jim.

In a state of disgrace, Jim was to work as a ship-chandler for various
firms, but he was always on the run—to Bombay, to Calcutta, to Rangoon,
to Penang, to Bangkok, to Batavia, moving Man “wants from firm to firm,
always “under the shadow” of his connection to the Patna “skunks.”
Always, too, the paternal Marlow was striving to find “opportunities”
for Jim. Persisting in these efforts, Marlow pays a visit to an
acquaintance of his, Stein, an aging, successful merchant-adventurer who
owns a large inter-island business in the Malay Archipelago with a lot
of trading posts in out-of-the-way trading places for collecting produce
[11, 123]. Bavarian-born Stein is, for Marlow, “one of the most
trustworthy men” who can help to mitigate Jim’s plight. A famous
entomologist and a “learned collector” of beetles and butterflies, he
lives in Samarang. A sage, as well, he ponders on the problems of human
existence: “Man is amazing, but he is not a masterpiece . . . man is
come where he is not wanted, where there is no place for him. . . ,” he
says to Marlow. He goes on to observe that man “wants to be a saint, and
he wants to be a devil,” and even sees himself, “in a dream,” “as a very
fine fellow—so fine as he can never be. . . .” Solemnly, he makes this
observation, so often quoted from Conrad’s writings: “A man that is born
falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. . . . The way is
to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of
your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.”

Marlow’s meeting with Stein provides for a philosophical probing of some
of the fundamental ideas and life-issues Conrad presents in Lord Jim.
The human condition, no less than the kingdom of nature, is the province
of his explorations. His musings on the mysteries of existence
ultimately have the aim of enlarging our understanding of Jim’s
character and soul [12, 128]. These musings also have the effect of
heightening Jim’s struggles to find his true moral identity. Inevitably,
abstraction and ambiguity are inherent elements in Stein’s metaphysics,
so to speak, even as his persona and physical surroundings merge to
project a kind of mystery; his spacious apartment, Marlow recalls,
“melted into shapeless gloom like a cavern.” Indeed Marlow’s visit to
Stein is like a visit to a medical diagnostician who possesses holistic
powers of discernment—”our conference resembled so much a medical
consultation—Stein of learned aspect sitting in an arm-chair before his
desk. . . .” Stein’s ruminations, hence, have at times an oracular
dimension, as “. . . his voice . . . seemed to roll voluminous and
grave—mellowed by distance.” It is in this solemn atmosphere, and with
subdued tones, that Stein delivers his chief pronouncement on Jim: “‘He
is romantic—romantic,’ he repeated. ‘And that is very bad—very bad. . .
. Very good, too,’ he added.”

The encounter with Stein assumes, almost at the mid-point of the novel,
episodic significance in Jim’s moral destiny, and in the final journey
of a soul in torment. Stein’s observations, insightful as they are,
hardly penetrate the depths of Jim’s soul, its conditions and
circumstances, which defy rational analysis and formulaic prescriptions.
The soul has its own life, along with but also beyond the outer life
Stein images. It must answer to new demands, undertake new functions,
face new situations—and experience new trials. The dark night of the
soul is at hand, inexorably, as Jim retreats to Patusan, one of the
Malay islands, known to officials in Batavia for “its irregularities and
aberrations.” It is as if Jim had now been sent “into a star of the
fifth magnitude.” Behind him he leaves his “earthly failings.” “‘Let him
creep twenty feet underground and stay there,’” to recall Brierly’s
words. In Patusan, at a point of the river forty miles from the sea, Jim
will relieve a Portuguese by the name of Cornelius, Stein & Co.’s
manager there. It is as if Stein and Marlow had schemed to “tumble” him
into another world, “to get him out of the way; out of his own way.”
“Disposed” of, Jim thus enters spiritual exile, alone and friendless, a
straggler, a hermit in the wilderness of Patusan, where “all sound and
all movements in the world seemed to come to an end.”

The year in which Jim, now close to thirty years of age, arrives in
Patusan is 1886. The political situation there is unstable—”utter
insecurity for life and property was the normal condition.” Dirt,
stench, and mud-stained natives are the conditions with which Jim must
deal. In the midst of all of this rot, Jim, in white apparel, “appeared
like a creature not only of another kind but of another essence.” In
Patusan, he soon becomes known as Lord Jim (Tuan Jim), and his work
gives him “the certitude of rehabilitation.” Patusan, as such, heralds
Jim’s unceasing attempt to start with a clean slate. But in Patusan, as
on the Patna, Jim is in extreme peril, for he has to grapple with
fiercely opposing native factions: the forces of Doramin, Stein’s old
friend, chief of the second power in Patusan, and those of Rajah Allang,
a brutish chief, constantly locked in quarrels over trade, leading to
bloody outbreaks and casualties. Jim’s chief goal was “to conciliate
imbecile jealousies, and argue away all sorts of senseless mistrusts.”
Doramin and his “distinguished son,” Dain Waris, believe in Jim’s
“audacious plan.” But will he succeed, or will he repeat past failures?
Is Chester, to recall his earlier verdict on Jim, going to be right:
“‘He is no earthly good for anything.’” And will Jim, once and for all,
exorcise the “unclean spirits” in himself, with the decisiveness needed
for atonement? These are convergent questions that badger Jim in the
last three years of his life.

During the Patusan sequence, Jim attains much power and influence: “He
dominated the forest, the secular gloom, the old mankind.” As a result
of Jim’s leadership, old Doramin’s followers rout their sundry enemies,
led not only by the Rajah but also by the vagabond Sherif Ali, an Arab
half-breed whose wild men terrorized the land. Jim becomes a legend that
gives him even supernatural powers. Lord Jim’s word was now “the one
truth of every passing day.” Certainly, from the standpoint of heroic
feats and sheer physical courage and example, Jim was to travel a long
way from Patna to Patusan. Here his fame is “Immense! . . . the seal of
success upon his words, the conquered ground for the soles of his feet,
the blind trust of men, the belief in himself snatched from the fire,
the solitude of his achievement.” If his part in the Patna affair led to
the derision that pursued him in his flights to nowhere, fame and
adoration now define his newly-won greatness. The tarnished first mate
of the Patna in the Indian Ocean is now the illustrious Lord Jim of the
forests of Patusan.

The difficult situations that Jim must now confront in Patusan demand
responsible actions, which Conrad portrays with all their Concrete
complexities and tensions. There is no pause in Jim’s constant gestures
wrestle with responsibilities, whether to the pilgrims on the Patna or
the natives in Patusan. The moral pressures on him never ease, requiring
of Jim concrete gestures that measure his moral worth. Incessantly he
takes moral soundings of himself and of the outer life [15, 211]. The
stillness and silences of the physical world have a way of accentuating
Jim’s inner anguish. He is profoundly aware that some “floating
derelict” is waiting stealthily to strike at the roots of order, whether
of man or of society.

In the course of relating the events in Patusan, where he was visiting
Jim, Marlow speaks of Jim’s love for a Eurasian girl, Jewel, who becomes
his mistress. Cornelius, the “awful Malacca Portu- guese,” is Jewel’s
legal guardian, having married her late mother after her separation from
the father of the girl. A “mean, cowardly scoundrel,” Cornelius is
another repulsive beetle in Jim’s life. The enemies from without, like
the enemy from within, seem to pursue Jim relentlessly. In Patusan,
thus, Cornelius, resentful of being replaced as Stein’s representative
in the trading post, hates Jim, never stops slandering him, wants him
out of the way: “‘He knows nothing, honourable sir—nothing whatever. Who
is he? What does he want here—the big thief? . . . He is a big fool. . .
. He’s no more than a little child here—like a little child—a little
child.’” Cornelius asks Marlow to intercede with Jim in his favor, so
that he might be awarded some “‘moderate provision—suitable present,’”
since “he regarded himself as entitled to some money, in exchange for
the girl.” But Marlow is not fazed by Cornelius’s imprecations: “He
couldn’t possibly matter . . . since I had made up my mind that Jim, for
whom alone I cared, had at last mastered his fate. . . .” Nor is Jim
himself troubled by Cornelius’s unseemly presence and the possible
danger he presents: “It did not matter who suspected him, who trusted
him, who loved him, who hated him. . . . ‘I came here to set my back
against the wall, and I am going to stay here,’” Jim insists to Marlow
[15, 213].

The concluding movement of the novel, a kind of andante, conveys a
“sense of ending.” Marlow’s long narrative, in fact, is now coming to an
end, confluent with his “last talk” with Jim and his own imminent
departure from Patusan. The language belongs to the end-time, and is
pervaded by deepening sorrow and pity, and by an implicit recognition
“of the implacable destiny of which we are the victims—and the tools.” A
poetry of lamentation takes hold of these pages, and the language is
brooding, ominous, recondite. Concurrently, the figure of Cornelius
weaves in and out and gives “an inexpressible effect of stealthiness, of
dark and secret slinking. . . . His slow, laborious walk resembled the
creeping of a repulsive beetle. . . . ” We realize that Marlow and Jim
will never meet again, as we witness a twilight scene of departure.
Having accompanied Marlow as far as the mouth of the river, Jim now
watches the schooner taking Marlow to the other world “fall off and
gather headway.” Marlow sees Jim’s figure slowly disappearing, “no
bigger than a child—then only a speck, a tiny white speck . . . in a
darkened world.”

At the end of the novel, Jim finds himself a prisoner and ultimately a
victim of treachery as he fights against invading outcasts and
desperadoes who, for any price, kill living life—cutthroats led Man’s
moral by “the Scourge of God,” “Gentleman Brown,” a supreme incarnation
of evil that Jim must confront. Conrad renders the power of evil in
unalleviating ways, even as he sees man’s moral poverty as an
inescapable reality. Indeed, what makes Jim’s fate so overpowering is
that he never stops struggling against the ruthless forces of
destruction that embody Conrad’s vision of evil. What Jim has
accomplished in Patusan by creating a more stable social community will
now be subject to attack by invaders of “undisguised ruthlessness” who
would leave Patusan “strewn over with corpses and enveloped in flames.”
If Jim’s inner world, in the first part of the novel, is in turmoil, it
is the outer world, in the second part of the novel, that is collapsing
“into a ruin reeking with blood.” What we hear in the concluding five
chapters of Lord Jim is the braying voice of universal discord, crying
out with a merciless conviction that, between the men of the Bugis
nation living in Patusan and the white marauders, “there would be no
faith, no compassion, no speech, no peace.”

The last word of the story of Jim’s life is reserved for one of Marlow’s
earlier listeners, “the privileged man,” who receives a thick packet of
handwritten materials, of which an explanatory letter by Marlow is the
most illuminating. A narrative in epistolary form provides us, two years
following the completion of Marlow’s oral narrative, with the details of
the last episode that had “come” to Jim. What Marlow has done is to fit
together the fragmentary pieces of Jim’s “astounding adventure” so as to
record “an intelligible picture” of the last year of his life [15, 218].
The epistolary narrative here is based on the exploit of “a man called
Brown,” upon whom Marlow happened to come in a wretched Bangkok hovel a
few hours before Brown died. The latter was thus to volunteer
information that helped complete the story of Jim’s life, in which Brown
himself played a final and fatal role.

The son of a baronet, Brown is famous for leading a “lawless life.” He
is “a latter-day buccaneer,” known for his “vehement scorn for mankind
at large and for victims in particular.” We learn that he hung around
the Philippines in his rotten schooner, which, eventually, “he sails
into Jim’s history, a blind accomplice of the Dark Powers.” Their
meeting takes place as they face each other across a muddy
creek—”standing on the opposite poles of that conception of life which
includes all mankind.” This encounter is of enormous consequence, as
Jim, “the white lord,” contends verbally with the “terrible,” “sneering”
Brown, who slyly invokes their “common blood, an assumption of common
experience, a sickening suggestion of common guilt. . . .” The
conversation, Marlow was to recall in his letter, appeared “as the
deadliest kind of duel on which Fate looked on with her cold-eyed
knowledge of the end.” Brown, with his “satanic gift of finding out the
best and the weakest spot in his victims,” seems to be surveying and
staking out Jim’s character and capability. Jim, on his part,
intuitively feels that Brown and his men are “the emissaries with whom
the world he had renounced was pursuing him in his retreat.”

Perceiving the potential menace of Brown and his “rapacious” To
underesti- white followers, Jim approaches the entire situation with
caution; he knows that there will be either “a clear road or else a
clear fight” ahead. His one thought, as he informs Doramin, is “for the
people’s good.” Preparations for battle now take place around the fort,
and the feeling among the natives is one of anxiety, and also of hope
that Jim will somehow resolve everything by convincing Brown that the
way back to the sea would be a peaceful one. Jim is convinced “that it
would be best to let these whites and their followers go with their
lives.” Unwavering as always in meeting his moral obligations, he is
primarily concerned with the safety of Patusan. But he underestimates
the calculating Brown, again disclosing the propensity that betrays him.
Quite simply Jim does not mistrust Brown, believing as he does that both
of them want to avoid bloodshed. In this respect, illusion both comforts
and victimizes Jim, as the way is made clear for Brown, with the
sniveling Cornelius at his side providing him with directions, to
withdraw from Patusan, now guarded by Dain Waris’s forces.

Brown’s purpose is not only to escape but also to get even with Jim for
not becoming his ally, and to punish the natives for their earlier
resistance to his intrusion. When retreating towards the coast his men
deceitfully open fire on an outpost of Patusan, killing the surprised
and panic-stricken natives, as well as Dain Waris, “the only son of
Nakhoda Doramin,” who had earlier acceded to Jim’s request that Brown
and his party should be allowed to leave without harm. It could have
been otherwise, to be sure, given the superior numbers of the native
defenders. Once again, it is made painfully clear, Jim flinches in
discernment and in leadership, naively trusting in his illusion, in his
dream, unaware of the evil power of retribution that impels Brown and
that slinks in humankind. That, too, Brown’s schooner later sprung a bad
leak and sank, he himself being the only survivor to be found in a white
long-boat, and that the deceitful Cornelius was to be found and struck
down by Jim’s ever loyal servant, Tamb’ Itam, can hardly compensate for
the destruction and the deaths that took place as a result of Jim’s
failure of judgment. Marlow’s earlier demurring remark has a special
relevance at this point: “I would have trusted the deck to that
youngster [Jim] on the strength of a single glance . . . but, by Jove!
it wouldn’t have been safe.”

Jim’s decision to allow free passage to Brown stems from his concern
with preserving an orderly community in Patusan: he did Moral pride not
want to see all his good work and influence destroyed by violent acts.
But clearly he had misjudged Brown’s character. Neither Jim’s honesty
nor his courage, however, are to be impugned; his moral sense, in this
case, is what consciously guided his rational conception of
civilization. But a failure of moral vision, induced perhaps by moral
pride and romanticism, blinds him to real danger. When Tamb’ Itam
returns from the outpost to inform Jim about what has happened, Jim is
staggered. He fathoms fully the effects of Brown’s “cruel treachery,”
even as he understands that his own safety in Patusan is now at risk,
given Dain Waris’s death and Doramin’s dismay and grief over events for
which he holds Jim responsible. For Jim the entire situation is
untenable, as well as perplexing: “He had retreated from one world for a
small matter of an impulsive jump, and now the other, the work of his
own hands, had fallen in ruins upon his head.” His feeling of isolation
is rending, as he realizes that “he has lost again all men’s
confidence.” The “dark powers” have robbed him twice of his peace.

To Tamb’ Itam’s plea that he should fight for his life against Doramin’s
inevitable revenge, Jim bluntly cries, “‘I have no life.’” Jewel, too,
“wrestling with him for the possession of her happiness,” also begs him
to put up a fight, or try to escape, but Jim does not heed her. “He was
going to prove his power in another way and conquer the fatal destiny
itself.” This is, truly, “‘a day of evil, an accursed day,’” for Jim and
for Patusan. When Dain Waris’s body is brought into Doramin’s campong,
the “old nakhoda” was “to let out one great fierce cry . . . as mighty
as the bellow of a wounded bull.” The scene here is harrowing in terms
of grief, as he women of the household “began to wail together; they
mourned with shrill cries; the sun was setting, and in the intervals of
screamed lamentations the high sing-song voices of two old men intoning
the Koran chanted alone.” The scene is desolate, unconsoling, rendered
in the language of apocalypse; the sky over Patusan is blood-red, with
“an enormous sun nestled crimson amongst the tree-tops, and the forest
below had a black and forbidding face.” Jim now appears silently before
Doramin, who is sitting in his arm-chair, a pair of flintlock pistols on
his knees. “‘I am come in sorrow,’” he cries out to Doramin, who stared
at Jim “with an expression of mad pain, of rage, with a ferocious
glitter. . . . and lifting deliberately his right [hand], shot his son’s
friend through the chest.”

At the end of his explanatory letter Marlow remarks that Jim “passes
away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and
excessively romantic.” Such a remark, of course, must be placed in the
context of Marlow’s total narrative, with all of the tensions and the
ambiguities that occur in relating the story of Jim’s life as it unfolds
in the novel. Nor can Marlow’s words here be construed as a moral
censure of Jim [10, 156]. What exemplifies Marlow’s narrative, in fact,
is the integrity of its content, as the details, reflections, judgments,
demurrals emerge with astonishing and attenuating openness,
deliberation. There is no single aspect of Jim’s life and character that
is not measured and presented in full view of the reader. If judgment is
to be made regarding Jim’s situation, Conrad clearly shows, then
affirmations and doubts, triumphs and failures will have to be disclosed
and evaluated cumulatively.

No one is more mercilessly exposed to the world than Jim. And no one
stands more naked before our judgment than he. The scrutiny of Jim’s
beliefs and attitudes, and of his actions and inactions, is relentless
in depth and latitude. He himself cannot hide or flee, no matter where
he happens to be. Marlow well discerns Jim’s supreme aloneness in his
struggles to find himself in himself, to master his fate, beyond the
calumnies of his enemies and the loyalty and love of his friends—and
beyond his own rigorous self-judgments. The anguish of struggle consumes
everything and everyone in the novel, and nothing and no one can be the
same again once in contact with him. In Jim, it can be said, we see
ourselves, for he is “one of us,” he is our “common fate,” which
prohibits us to “let him slip away into the darkness.”

2.2 “Human Bondage” and it’s moral duality

From a moral perspective the Official Court of Inquiry literally takes
place throughout Lord Jim. Jim never ceases to react to charges of
cowardice and of irresponsibility; never ceases to strive earnestly to
prove his moral worthiness. He seems never to be in a state of repose,
is always under pressure, always examining his tensive state of mind and
soul. Self-illumination rather than self-justification, or even
self-rehabilitation, is his central aim, and he knows, too, that such a
process molds his own efforts and pain [15, 83]. He neither expects nor
accepts help or absolution from others, nor does he blame others for his
own sins of commission or omission. His character is thus one of
singular transparency, acutely self-conscious, and vulnerable.

Jim’s moral sense weighs heavily on him and drives him on sundry,
sometimes contradictory, lines of moral awareness and behavior. In this
respect he brings to mind the relevance of Edmund Burke’s words: “The
lines of morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematics. They are
broad and deep as well as long. They admit of exceptions; they demand
modifications.”4 Gnostic commentators who view the moral demands of this
novel as confusing or uncertain fail to see that the lines of morality,
even when they take different directions and assume different forms,
inevitably crystallize in something that is solid in revelation and in
value.5

Clearly Jim’s high-mindedness and character are problematic, and his
scale of human values is excessively romantic. Thus heromanticizes what
it means to be a sailor, what duty is, even what cowardice is. The fact
is that he is too “noble” to accommodate real-life situations. In
essence, then, Jim violates what the ancient Greeks revered as the “law
of measure.” And ultimately his pride, his lofty conception of what is
required of him in responsible leadership and duty, his high idealism,
mar the supreme Hellenic virtue of sophrosyne-. Jim’s conduct dramatizes
to an “unsafe” degree the extremes of arrogance, and of self-delusion
and self-assertion. Above all his idealism becomes a peculiar kind of
escape from the paradoxes and antinomies that have to be faced in what
Burke calls the “antagonist world.”

In the end, Jim’s habit of detachment and abstraction manifestly
rarefies his moral sense and diminishes and even neutralizes the moral
meaning of his decisions and actions. His self-proclaimed autonomy
dramatizes monomania and egoism, and makes him incapable of harmonious
human interrelations, let alone a redeeming humility. His moral sense is
consequently incomplete as a paradigm, and his moral virtues are finite.
And his fate, as it is defined and shaped by his tragic flaw, does not
attain true grandeur. In Jim, it can be said, Conrad presents heroism
with all its limitations [14, 147].

Despite the circumstances of his moral incompleteness, Jim both
possesses and enacts the quality of endurance in facing the darkness in
himself and in the world around him. Even when he yearns to conceal
himself in some forgotten corner of the universe, there to separate
himself from other imperfect or fallen humans, from thieves and
renegades, and from the harsh exigencies of existence, he also knows
that unconditional separation is not attainable. He persists, however
erratically or skeptically, in his pursuit to reconcile the order of the
community and the order of the soul; and he perseveres in his belief in
the axiomatic principles of honor, of loyalty, prescribing the need to
transcend inner and outer moral squalor. His death, even if it shows the
power of violence, of the evil that stalks man and humanity, of the
flaws and foibles that afflict one’s self, does not diminish the abiding
example of Jim’s struggle to discover and to overcome moral lapses.

Jim can never silence the indwelling moral sense which inspires and
illuminates his life-journey. Throughout this journey the virtue of
endurance does not abandon him, does not betray him, even when he
betrays himself and others. He endures in order to prevail. In Lord Jim,
Joseph Conrad portrays a fitful but ascendant process of transfiguration
in the life of a solitary hero whose courage of endurance contains the
seeds of redemption. Such a life recalls the eternal promise of the
Evangelist’s words: “He that endureth to the end shall be saved.”

The major character of the novel, Philip, spends most of his life in two
places, which become the dominant settings for the book. From the time
he becomes aware of the world around him until his adolescence, Philip
is found in Blackstable and its neighboring town of Tercanbury. Even
after he goes abroad to study, he keeps coming beck to Blackstable
during the holidays and whenever he feels the need for a change.

In the process of establishing his identity, Philip visits London twice
and spends the major part of his mature years in that city. Returning
back from Heidelberg, he goes to London to become a clerk in the company
of Chartered Accountants. When he realizes he has no aptitude for
accounting, he returns……

Philip Carey – an orphan with a clubfoot. He is the protagonist of the
novel whose story Maugham traces from age nine to thirty.

William Carey – the uncle of Philip and the vicar of Blackstable. He is
self-centered and rigid in his views.

Mildred Rogers – Philip’s antagonist on one level. Selfish, shallow, and
flirtatious, she successfully lures Philip with her charms.

Thorpe Athelny – a boisterous journalist. He is a loving family man who
becomes Philip’s friend, philosopher, and guide.

Mrs. Carey – the kind and gentle wife of the vicar. She loves Philip and
helps him fulfil his desires.

Mr. Perkins – one of Philip’s well-wishers. He is the scholarly
headmaster of King’s School.

The novel is the story of Philip Carey. The story opens with his mother
dying after childbirth. The nine-year-old Philip is taken by his uncle
to Blackstable. After spending a few initial years at the Vicarage, the
boy is admitted to King’s School at Tercanbury. Having a clubfoot, he is
ostracized and becomes introverted, but his intelligence and his
aptitude for studies help him academically. Unable to bear the
humiliation and taunts of his fellow students and the rigid norms of
school, he finally quits and goes to Germany. In Germany, Philip learns
new languages, is introduced to philosophy, and discovers the beauty of
nature. His stay in Heidelberg expands his vision of humanity and life.
He graduates and starts planning his future.

After talking to his uncle, Philip decides to go to London to become a
clerk; however, he discovers after a few months that he is more inclined
toward art than accounting. Taking financial aid from his aunt, he
leaves for Paris to study. The city gives him an insight into the world
of artists and their struggle to exhibit their talent. At the end of two
years, he also discovers that he lacks the potential to be a great
artist. As a result, he leaves Paris and returns back to Blackstable.

Philip decides to take up his father’s profession of medicine and
enrolls as a student in St. Luke’s hospital. He does not, however,
pursue his goal in earnest because of a waitress named Mildred [8, 121].

The major theme of the novel is that the submission to passion is human
bondage, while the exercise of reason is human liberty. Philip Carey
loves Mildred passionately and, in trying to possess her, traps himself
in her bondage. His freedom is curbed, his education is disrupted, and
his fortune is lost. All his reasoning, power, and intelligence are
eradicated by his passion for Mildred.

There are several minor themes in the novel. The first is that
inappropriate love can be destructive. In spite of her many weaknesses,
Philip loves Mildred and showers his affection and money on her. He even
sacrifices his education and limited resources to please her. In the
process, Philip wastes the important years of his life following a woman
who is not deserving of his love. It is definitely a destructive
relationship for Philip, one that keeps him in bondage [8, 128].

The mood of the novel is serious, but not gloomy. Maugham, with irony
and cynicism, presents the struggle of a lonely protagonist and the
turmoil in his mind.

William Somerset Maugham, the youngest child of Mr. and Mrs. Robert
Maugham, was born in Paris, France on January 25, 1874. At the time of
his birth, his father was working as a lawyer for the British Embassy in
Paris. In 1882, his mother died of tuberculosis. His three brothers went
to study in London, and William was sent to a clergyman attached to the
British Embassy. When his father died two years later, there was no one
to look after him in Paris. As a result, h e was sent to Kent to live
with his uncle, Henry Maugham. Since his uncle and aunt were childless,
they found it difficult to care for him. William, at the age of ten, was
a lonely and unhappy child. His life at King’s School in Canterbury was
no better. Frail and sensitive, he felt isolated from the other boys
because of his stammer.

Maugham was smart, but the rigid school discipline and the taunts of his
classmates made him leave school before he could complete his education.
He left for Germany with the help of his uncle.

Of Human Bondage is semi-autobiographical. In it Maugham reveals his
childhood, his student days in Heidelberg and London, and his philosophy
of life. It was not, however, his first autobiographical attempt. In the
Artistic Temperament of Stephen Carey, Maugham retold much of his first
twenty-four years of life. The protagonist, however, was sent to Rouen
instead of Heidelberg and studied music instead of painting. The novel
did not come up to Maugham’s expectations and was not published. [10,
183]

The novel opens with the scene of a dying woman attended by a doctor and
the nurses. She has just delivered a stillborn child, and her condition
is critical. At her request, the nurse brings her first-born child,
Philip, to her bedside. Mrs. Carey caresses him, tenderly touches his
feet, and bursts into tears. The doctor advises her to rest, and the boy
is taken away by the nurse to his godmother, Miss Wilkens. Shortly
afterwards, the woman dies.

Philip is brought back home to meet his uncle, William Carey, the
brother of Philip’s father and the vicar of Blackstable. The Vicar
informs the boy that he would be accompanying him to Blackstable to live
there. Even though William Carey and his wife are kind and childless,
the prospect of having a boy under their roof does not really delight
them. Their means are limited, and Philip’s father had left behind only
2000 pounds for the boy, which had to last him until he was old enough
to earn his own living.

Philip, though disturbed by the thought of leaving his home, is
reconciled to the situation. As a mark of remembrance, he picks up his
mother’s favorite clock, visits his mother’s room, and prepares to
depart. As he journeys with his uncle to Blackstable, he forgets his
sorrows and enjoys the countryside scenery. When they reach Blackstable,
everything about the place and its people seems strange to Philip.

In these opening chapters, Maugham conveys the poignancy of Philip’s
situation through clear descriptions and short conversations. It is a
touching scene when his mother calls him to her bedside before she dies.
They obviously had a close relationship, as evidenced by her tender
touches, by his taking her favorite clock as a remembrance, and by his
trying to feel her presence left in her room. Because Philip has a
clubfoot, she has probably been particularly gentle and patient with her
first-born son [10, 187].

The loss of his mother and her baby are made all the more tragic when
Philip finds out he must leave home. Because he is now an orphan at the
age of nine, he must go to live with his uncle, William Carey, and his
wife in Blackstable; unfortunately, they are not particularly pleased
about raising the child, and Philip is not pleased about going. He does
not want to leave his home and the memories of his mother. He goes into
her room to vent his emotions. Hiding his face in her clothes, he tries
to breathe her into his being by touching and smelling the things that
belonged to her. In these first chapters, Maugham does an outstanding
job of presenting Philip as a sensitive and intelligent child who craves
affection and sympathy.

Philip shows his innocence when he looks with curiosity at all the
sights on his way to Blackstable; he is struck with wonder at the vision
and temporarily forgets his sorrow and loneliness. He is almost eager to
see a new place. After all, as a handicapped child he has been closely
watched and protected. He has not experienced much of the world.

At Blackstable, Philip finds the ways of his uncle and aunt quite
different. Although they are kind, he is not comfortable with them, and
they feel strange with a child in the vicarage. Philip watches in
amazement as his uncle offers him only the top portion of a boiled egg
at tea, when he craves the whole thing. In spite of such peculiar
habits, Philip learns to adjust to his surroundings and tries to please
his guardians. It is important to notice several things in these opening
chapters. Although Philip’s clubfoot is not made an issue here, it is
mentioned because it becomes more important later in the novel. The
interest in money is also presented. The Careys are not well off, and
they worry that the 2,000 pounds (equivalent to about $10,000 at the
time of the novel) will not be enough to provide for Philip until he is
on his own. A concern about money will be seen throughout the book, for
Philip will have and lose a fortune. Finally, the British tradition of
tea is presented and will be seen frequently throughout the novel.

The plot of Of Human Bondage traces the story of one man’s struggle for
survival in a cruel world. Most of the action is mental, as the
protagonist tries to conquer his passion and replace it with reason.
There is a great deal of introductory material to establish Philip’s
background and philosophies. It is not until the book is almost half
over that the antagonist, Mildred, is introduced. The rising action of
the plot is then one misadventure with Mildred after another.

The dominant theme in the novel is human bondage. Throughout life,
Philip experiences bondage to different things, and the novel is his
fight to find freedom from the bondage. Philip is born with a physical
deformity that causes him to suffer humiliation and isolation. His
clubfoot becomes a bondage to him throughout the book. It curbs his
physical activity in school and makes him the object of criticism.

Of Human Bondage is a novel of adolescence, initiation, passage into
adulthood,… the traditional bildungsroman, fashionable in the first half
of the XXth century. It soon established itself as a classic and became
a favorite of many readers in their twenties, mostly men.

Of Human Bondage introduces the hero, Philip Carey, at eight years old,
as he becomes an orphan when his mother dies, soon after giving birth to
a stillborn child. Philip is sent to be raised by his uncle and aunt,
sixty miles from London. His uncle, a vicar, is self-centered and thinks
only about fulfilling his appetites and attracting people to his church.
His aunt cares for him but is very awkward at showing her feelings, as
she never had any children of her own.

Philip is afflicted by a handicap: a clubfoot that makes him a scapegoat
in the boarding-school where he studies until he is old enough to be
ordained and follow in the steps of his uncle. But Philip, growing up,
develops different ambitions…

He first realizes that the almighty God who can move mountains can’t or
won’t cure his clubfoot, despite his ardent prayers. Little by little,
he looses his faith and starts to turn to philosophy to understand the
world. Along the way, he meets people who, with their perspectives on
life, make him think differently; he progressively builds his own
personality. Before graduating from school, he decides that he will not
go to Oxford, despite the fact that he is clever and hard-working enough
to earn a scholarship: instead, he decides to spend some time in
Germany.

He starts to wonder about love and gets romantic ideas and ideals, first
by observing couples and then by a first-hand experience with an older
woman, a friend of his aunt and uncle. But his frustration grows, when
he realizes that he has not experienced love as it is described in the
numerous novels he likes to read [9, 96].

Training for some months as an accountant in London, he understands that
this is not what he is meant to do and, since he can draw, sets his mind
on becoming an artist and goes to Paris to learn the craft. The part of
the book set in Montmartre reminds strongly of Zola’s The Masterpiece.
Sensing and having been confirmed that he has no real talent, he gives
up la vie de boheme after a while and returns to London to study
medicine. Surprisingly, he shows real compassion to his patients and
finally succeeds in the profession that he chose as the last resort.

But the turning-point of the book, from which the title derives, is his
passionate and destructive relationship with Mildred, a waitress whom he
finds common, vulgar, stupid and anemic, but whom he is desperately
attracted to, against reason and his best interest. Because of this
attraction, he will compromise his studies, loose his money and almost
his sanity.

Of Human Bondage certainly appeals most to readers between fifteen and
twenty, at the age when one spends hours philosophizing about love, arts
and the meaning of life (later we turn to the Monthy Python to
understand the meaning of life!)… The ideas discussed by Philip and his
friends probably sound familiar to many readers, which explains why so
many people are drawn to this book. I probably would have enjoyed it
more a decade ago…

The main themes developed in the book are of course the passage into
adulthood, the opposition between passion and reason, bondage and
freedom, and we see that even if Philip is completely aware of being
used and ridiculed by Mildred, he cannot get away from her… Other minor
themes treated along the way are art (how does one define a piece of
art? does art reproduce reality or is reality defined by the painter who
gives to see?), religion (must a man abide by the law if he doesn’t
believe in God, knowing that the conception of good and evil is based on
Judeo-Christianism?), etc.

Of Human Bondage is largely autobiographical. Somerset Maugham started
of as a doctor before becoming a novel writer, a successful play writer,
and again a novelist. His mother passed away when he was eight, a very
traumatic experience in his life, and he was raised, like Philip, by his
vicar uncle. He didn’t have a clubfoot, but was stammering. Critics have
pointed out that the clubfoot however didn’t symbolize his stammer, but
his homosexuality, that was considered a handicap back then. They also
argue that Mildred’s description corresponds to a very androgynous woman
(flat chest, thin lips, etc.). Somerset Maugham is not the first author
to describe a heroine in ambiguous terms. After all, Marcel Proust’s
model for Albertine was probably a man and Poe’s Ligeia has masculine
physical features (for a different reason though: Poe couldn’t conceive
an actual woman clever and learned like his Ligeia is supposed to be:
that is what happens when one marries his thirteen-years-old tuberculous
cousin!). Since I like to get unprejudiced ideas on the books I
discover, I only read the preface afterwards and I had gotten a hint
that Somerset Maugham was homosexual, not through the description of
Mildred though, but rather, when he describes the relationships he
shares with his male friends (Philip is jealous, exclusive, enjoys to be
mothered by a friend while he is sick in bed): it had seemed to me
pretty obvious then…

Conclusion to part II

Lord Jim (1900), Joseph Conrad’s fourth novel, is the story of a ship
which collides with “a floating derelict” and will doubtlessly “go down
at any moment” during a “silent black squall.”

This novel, from beginning to end, is the story of Jim; throughout the
focus is on his life and character, on what he has done, or A story not
done, on his crime and punishment, his failure of nerve as a seaman. It
is, as well, the story of his predicament and his fate, the destiny of
his soul—of high expectations and the great “chance missed,” of “wasted
opportunity” and “what he had failed to ob- pretence stain,” all the
result of leaving his post, and abdicating his responsibility.

From a moral perspective the Official Court of Inquiry literally takes
place throughout Lord Jim. Jim never ceases to react to charges of
cowardice and of irresponsibility; never ceases to strive earnestly to
prove his moral worthiness. He seems never to be in a state of repose,
is always under pressure, always examining his tensive state of mind and
soul.

Jim’s moral sense weighs heavily on him and drives him on sundry,
sometimes contradictory, lines of moral awareness and behavior. In this
respect he brings to mind the relevance of Edmund Burke’s words: “The
lines of morality are not like the ideal lines of mathematics.

The major theme of the novel is that the submission to passion is human
bondage, while the exercise of reason is human liberty. Philip Carey
loves Mildred passionately and, in trying to possess her, traps himself
in her bondage. His freedom is curbed, his education is disrupted, and
his fortune is lost. All his reasoning, power, and intelligence are
eradicated by his passion for Mildred.

There are several minor themes in the novel. The first is that
inappropriate love can be destructive. In spite of her many weaknesses,
Philip loves Mildred and showers his affection and money on her. He even
sacrifices his education and limited resources to please her. In the
process, Philip wastes the important years of his life following a woman
who is not deserving of his love. It is definitely a destructive
relationship for Philip, one that keeps him in bondage.

The major theme of the novel is that the submission to passion is human
bondage, while the exercise of reason is human liberty. Philip Carey
loves Mildred passionately and, in trying to possess her, traps himself
in her bondage. His freedom is curbed, his education is disrupted, and
his fortune is lost. All his reasoning, power, and intelligence are
eradicated by his passion for Mildred.

There are several minor themes in the novel. The first is that
inappropriate love can be destructive. In spite of her many weaknesses,
Philip loves Mildred and showers his affection and money on her. He even
sacrifices his education and limited resources to please her. In the
process, Philip wastes the important years of his life following a woman
who is not deserving of his love. It is definitely a destructive
relationship for Philip, one that keeps him in bondage.

GENERAL CONCLUSION

On the basis of above-stated we came to a conclusion, that Literature in
20th century begins with a serie of movements, some of them
contradictory between them, as Symbolism, Decadentism, Impressionism
and, in Hispanic literature, Modernism, The Generation of ’98.

During the two first decades , two literary conceptions are imposed to
writers: Those writers for whom literary work is the expression of a
cultural experience and fall in intellectualism; and writers who, in
view of the chaos of the time and the dissatisfaction of bourgeois
world, see literary work as an adventure, as an irrational experience.

In the thirties, some historic and socioeconomic facts, affected
literature. It will express the search, through the action, of ethical
values.

After the World War, writers will insist in the same attitudes: moral
crisis and technical experimentation.

From a moral perspective the Official Court of Inquiry literally takes
place throughout Lord Jim. Jim never ceases to react to charges of
cowardice and of irresponsibility; never ceases to strive earnestly to
prove his moral worthiness. He seems never to be in a state of repose,
is always under pressure, always examining his tensive state of mind and
soul. Self-illumination rather than self-justification, or even
self-rehabilitation, is his central aim, and he knows, too, that such a
process molds his own efforts and pain. He neither expects nor accepts
help or absolution from others, nor does he blame others for his own
sins of commission or omission. His character is thus one of singular
transparency, acutely self-conscious, and vulnerable.

Jim can never silence the indwelling moral sense which inspires and
illuminates his life-journey. Throughout this journey the virtue of
endurance does not abandon him, does not betray him, even when he
betrays himself and others. He endures in order to prevail. In Lord Jim,
Joseph Conrad portrays a fitful but ascendant process of transfiguration
in the life of a solitary hero whose courage of endurance contains the
seeds of redemption. Such a life recalls the eternal promise of the
Evangelist’s words: “He that endureth to the end shall be saved.”

Of Human Bondage is a novel of adolescence, initiation, passage into
adulthood, the traditional bildungsroman, fashionable in the first half
of the XX-th century. It soon established itself as a classic and became
a favorite of many readers in their twenties, mostly men.

Of Human Bondage is largely autobiographical. Somerset Maugham started
of as a doctor before becoming a novel writer, a successful play writer,
and again a novelist.

According to our aim and hypothesis of investigation, in our work we
proved the reflection of problems of human morality and relationships on
the example of W. Summerset’s and J. Conrad’s creativity.

We solved such tasks as:

– to research the main representatives of the prose writing in the first
half of the

twentieth century;

– to investigate the similarity and difference of themes and genres of
the leading

literature representatives;

– to research The problem of humanity in the work as a leading
Inclination of

W. Somerset and J. Conrad.

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