Lord Jim as Modernist Myth: A Girardian Reading

Abstract

Although it is accurate to say that Joseph Conrad’s Jim in his eponymous novel Lord Jim presents a criticism of an archetype of the Romantic Genius and the gospel of individualism, it is more accurate that he presents the difficulty of mythologizing heroic individuals in a modern context. Rene Girard’s theories allow this difficulty to be examined and plotted. While Girard’s Mimetic Theory does expose the novel’s condemnation of romantic individualism, more strongly it reveals a basic understanding of the paradox of the modernist impulse in literature: narratives cannot be authentically completed to render meaningful something meaningless, yet they must be completed to re-enchant the world. At this impasse, Girard’s theories would predict that a great novel would contain the following: an object of desire, a mimetic crisis, monstrous doubling, sacrificial scapegoating and a return to social stability with the rejection of myth accompanied by an implied religious conversion on the part of the novelist. All of these things are present in Lord Jim except evidence of the religious conversion. Short of that, a Girardian analysis brings to light that Jim’s false myth is not only Jim’s falsity, but the falsity of the imperial institutions that would mythologize him.