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

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

Marlow's narrative alternately presupposes a hierarchy and an absolute gulf that separates European from native consciousness in the novel. Even the least sympathetic or thoughtful Europeans, such as the German captain or the second engineer of the Patna, possess the capacity to evaluate and to judge. The same cannot be said of the Malay helmsmen. Marlow's audience is expected to share this attitude: this is why his listeners do not baulk or express incredulity at hearing of the younger helmsmen imply that he felt no anxiety or fear during his two days aboard an abandoned ship that was likely to go down at any moment. Whereas all the Europeans on the ominously still Patna reveal "their extreme aversion to die" (63) by panicking-following a conventional view, let us say that the anticipation of (one's) death is a capacity unique to humans-the young Malay is unable to foresee or imagine such a prospect. If what he says is true, and Marlow gives us no reason to think otherwise, we must infer that the young Malay is unable to comprehend any event that is not immediately in view, evoking yet again the figure of an animal circumscribed in its access to the world. Like the animal, the Malay lacks the faculty of imagination.6 How else are we to gauge the young Malay's assertion that, adrift at sea for several days with little hope of rescue, "he thought nothing" (60)?

The older helmsman's testimony is equally preposterous: /HJi? jerked back his spare shoulders, and declared it never came into his mind then that the white men were about to leave the ship through fear of death. He did not believe it now. There might have been secret reasons. He wagged his old chin knowingly. Aha! secret reasons. He was a man of great experience, and he wanted that white Tuan to know-he turned towards Brierly, who didn't raise his head-that he had acquired a knowledge of many things by serving white men on the sea for a great number of years-and, suddenly, with shaky excitement he poured upon our spellbound attention a lot of queer-sounding names, names of dead-and-gone skippers, names of forgotten country ships, names of familiar and distorted sound, as if the hand of dumb time had been at work on them for ages. They stopped him at last. (60-61)

Nothing the old Malay says helps the judges make sense of the events on the Patna. Marlow underscores the essential poverty of both Malays with this surreal image of the ship after it had been abandoned by its European officers and crew: "So these two lascars stuck to the helm of that ship without steerage-way, where death would have found them if such had been their destiny" (61). Marlow would have us believe that is where they remained-eyes "glitter[ing]" blankly, hands still "closed over the spokes"-until the French gunboat chanced upon the Patna some days later (17).

Given the Malays' ontologically stupefied relation to the world, one would have thought them hardly worthy of representation. But Marlow's decision to give them such prominence begins to make sense if situated within a more general thesis about the relation between existential vacuity and historical backwardness. It makes sense if seen in terms of the connection Marlow makes between the senseless "immobility" (60) of the steersmen on the Patna and the historical "immobility" (151) of the inhabitants of Patusan in the latter parts of the novel. Immobility in the first case refers to an incapacity for autonomous reflection and in the second to the absence of progressive temporal development.7 Defined thus, this combination of individual and collective shortcoming bars the native world from proper access to the terms of narrative. When the old Malay helmsman pours forth without self-consciousness the names of many dead seamen and ships, Marlow dismisses this prodigious feat of memory as an expression of "dumb time" (61)-as distinct, presumably, from historical time.