“The Ghost of a Fact”: The Crisis of Fictionality in Lord Jim
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This paper examines a meta-critique of imperialism in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim by analyzing the relationship between fictionality, displacement, and trauma in the novel. As critics have noted, Lord Jim appropriates racialized stereotypes of Westerners and the Other. Yet the novel not only represents colonialist ideals or narrative forms, but also registers their fictionality. Conrad’s novel depicts such virtues as truthfulness, honor, courage, and strength that are commonly attributed to white sailors in eastern ports like Jim. In doing so, Conrad registers the ways in which the ideals of virtuous Westerners amount to fictions in the sense that modern literary historians understand them: they are narratives that gain validity solely by virtue of their credibility. Moreover, the fictions of Western superiority, Conrad suggests, have ambivalent effects on imperialist rule. If these narratives serve to justify and maintain Western hegemony around the globe, they also threaten it by generating anxiety and trauma due to their fictionality. The Patna accident and Jim’s romance instantiate the perils of imperialist fictions, for both provoke a traumatic experience of self-loss and self-doubt for all those who believe in white people’s virtue and honor. By examining Conrad’s critical engagement with fictionality, I propose in the conclusion to read Lord Jim as a naturalist novel that exemplifies compulsion to narrate.
Abstract
This paper examines a meta-critique of imperialism in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim by analyzing the relationship between fictionality, displacement, and trauma in the novel. As critics have noted, Lord Jim appropriates racialized stereotypes of Westerners and the Other. Yet the novel not only represents colonialist ideals or narrative forms, but also registers their fictionality. Conrad’s novel depicts such virtues as truthfulness, honor, courage, and strength that are commonly attributed to white sailors in eastern ports like Jim. In doing so, Conrad registers the ways in which the ideals of virtuous Westerners amount to fictions in the sense that modern literary historians understand them: they are narratives that gain validity solely by virtue of their credibility. Moreover, the fictions of Western superiority, Conrad suggests, have ambivalent effects on imperialist rule. If these narratives serve to justify and maintain Western hegemony around the globe, they also threaten it by generating anxiety and trauma due to their fictionality. The Patna accident and Jim’s romance instantiate the perils of imperialist fictions, for both provoke a traumatic experience of self-loss and self-doubt for all those who believe in white people’s virtue and honor. By examining Conrad’s critical engagement with fictionality, I propose in the conclusion to read Lord Jim as a naturalist novel that exemplifies compulsion to narrate.
참고문헌 (26)
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