Seeing the Animal: Colonial Space and Movement in Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim

Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Summer 2004 by Krishnan, Sanjay

But there are degrees of feeling-the muffled, the faint, the just sufficient, the barely intelligent, as we may say; and the acute, the intense, the complete, in a word-the power to be finely aware and richly responsible. It is those moved in the latter fashion who "get most" out of all that happens to them ... We care, our curiosity and our sympathy care, comparatively little for what happens to the stupid, the coarse, and the blind; care for it, and for the effects of it, at the most as helping to precipitate what happens to the more deeply wondering, to the really sentient.

Henry James, Preface to The Princess Casamassima

For we shall have to ask ourselves, inevitably, what happens to the fraternity of brothers when an animal enters the scene.

Jacques Derrida, "The Animal that Therefore I am (More to Follow)"

Native Blankness

A bizarre thing happens early on in Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim (1899). A leak is discovered in the Patna, and the ship seems certain to sink at any moment, carrying to their deaths the eight hundred Malay-Muslim pilgrims sleeping on board. On deck, the suspense is heightened by the contrasting reactions of the other European officers, who unhesitatingly prepare their own escape, and the chiefmate Jim, who is overcome by panic and concern for the sleeping pilgrims. While the reader's attention is directed to the unfolding drama, something inexplicable takes place at the margin of this tableau: two Malays remain motionless at the helm of the ship. As the Europeans struggle with quiet frenzy to prepare a lifeboat for escape, the two Malays stare blankly:

[Jim] stood on the starboard side of the bridge, as far as he could get from the struggle of the boat, which went on with the agitation of madness and the stealthiness of a conspiracy. The Malays had meantime remained holding to the wheel. Just picture to yourselves the actors in that, thank God! unique episode of the sea, four beside themselves with fierce and secret exertions, and three looking on in complete immobility, above the awning covering the profound ignorance of hundreds of human beings, with their weariness, with their dreams, with their hopes, arrested, held by an invisible hand on the brink of annihilation.... These beggars by the boat had every reason to go distracted with funk. Frankly, had I been there I would not have given as much as a counterfeit farthing for the ship's chance to keep above water to the end of each successive second (60).

The helmsmen continue holding on to the wheel of a ship that has lost its steerage-way. They do not try to stop or join the Europeans in their escape; they do not try to alert the hundreds of sleeping Malay men, women and children to the emergency. How to account for such impenetrable behavior in a novel that is otherwise concerned with delineating the subtlest shades of individual responsibility and motivation?1

To my knowledge no critic of Lord Jim has pointed out an obvious if inconvenient fact: human beings do not behave in this way.2 It is inconceivable, for instance, that two English steersmen would have stared passively while their fellows made their escape. If the two Malays evidently possess the technical skill and practical judgment needed to steer a ship, why do they not react to the fact that the ship can no longer be steered? What category of sentient or mechanical being are we invited to think in terms of here? In light of their "immobility" (60), do they partake of certain attributes of the human without entirely belonging to it? Here is the anonymous narrator on the native helmsmen after the discovery of the leak: "The eyes of the two Malays glittered towards the white men, but their dark hands remained closed on the spokes" (17): the inanimate "glittered" and the limited consciousness of "closed" hands hint at a more profound existential privation.3

Their eccentric and unpredictable bearing at the official inquiry into the Patna incident some weeks later makes it unlikely that the Malay helmsmen are automatons. Nonetheless, their weird reactions suggest a fundamental limitation or flaw in their make-up. What the Malays say at the trial shockingly reveals their continued inability to grasp the significance of the events on the Patna. Asked why he stayed put at the helm of a sinking ship that could no longer be steered, the old Malay's answer is reported by Marlow as follows: "[T]here had been no order ... why should he leave the helm?" (60).4 Since the officers authorized to give such an order were openly making their escape at that very time, this reply obviously makes no sense. It would seem that the Malay can make choices but is not altogether capable of rational deliberation, which is to say that the nature of his relation to the everyday world is circumscribed in some nebulous but absolute way. This peculiar combination of capacity and incapacity puts one in mind of conventional characterizations of an animal's relation to the world. According to this view, although an animal may powerfully negotiate with or manipulate its relation to its immediate surroundings, it is barred from access to many aspects of the world. Put differently, the nature of the animal's involvement in the world is inherently impoverished.5 Because I want to track at some length the peculiarity of the native, who possesses consciousness but not reason, it may help to note at the outset that I am not exercised primarily by metaphors or similes involving animals. Instead I follow the figure of the animal as it marks some undefined opacity or lack of full access to reason in the native world. I take up this question by first examining how the animal serves Marlow's narrative agenda of highlighting the capacities he considers proper to human being: reason, interiority, and history.