10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 J ens e lze Imperial Representations - Romantic Dis / Enchantments - Modernist Aesthetics: Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Lives of Adventure Lord Jim is one of Joseph Conrad’s most explicit engagements with the chronotopes of the imperial adventure novel� Conveniently located at the turn of the twentieth century, it has at the same time been regarded as the “modernist novel’s inaugural text” (Seeley 495) and as such was considered notoriously resistant to adventure and its tendency to privilege “action” (Zweig 11) or generate a “reading for the plot” (Brooks)� Rather than simply offering a modernist rejection of adventure, however, the novel’s observation of the possibilities and limitations of adventure is actually so comprehensive that it can almost be said to offer a philology of adventure in its own right� In this contribution, I will look at the text through the prism of competing visions of adventure, the different lives, as it were, that adventure leads in Conrad’s novel, culminating in an implicit modernist identification of adventure with the possibilities and dangers of uncertain life� I will begin by looking at the novel’s evocations of imperial romance, a genre that was immensely popular in the late nineteenth century and even assisted in the recruitment for maritime and colonial service� In the largely mapped-out world of late-nineteenth-century commercial seafaring, however, this genre provided an ideological indoctrination rather than plausible templates for heroic self-realisation, which is registered in the catastrophe that dominates the first half of the novel. In the second part of the novel, the scripts of romance once again play out in the imperial space of a remote island, offering the protagonist a classically adventurous chronotope to actualise his fictionally inculcated ideals of self and conduct. Despite these favourable conditions and the protagonist’s transformative world-making, his desire for individual self-realisation remains nonetheless frustrated, leading to the romantic disenchantment that the self can never fully realise itself in the external world� Through this Flaubertian structure, however, the novel does not suggest a fundamental absence of adventure in modernity� Instead, the ending of Lord Jim, with the disruptive and deadly intrusion of the buccaneer Gentleman Browne, suggests that adventure is present in the world but that - akin to Robert Louis Stevenson’s quasi-aestheticist take on romance - it must be best understood not primarily as a narrative formula but more radically as the irruption of contingency and uncontrollable life� Using Giorgio 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 238 J ens e lze 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 Agamben’s Heideggerian take on The Adventure, I will link this notion of adventure to Conrad’s defamiliarising impressionistic aesthetics of darkness� Conrad’s writing - in Lord Jim and beyond - can thus be understood to offer a vision of adventure that animates the dangers and possibilities of being that are typically obscured by the social and epistemological frameworks through which we translate uncertain life into stable forms and meanings� Imperial Representations Very early on in the novel, the protagonist’s desire for adventure is established as the principal drive for his turn towards seafaring: “after a course of light holiday literature, his vocation for the sea had declared itself” (Conrad, Lord Jim 7)� Critics agree that this light holiday literature indubitably refers to the adventure novels by authors such as Frederick Marryat, G� A� Henty, or H� Rider Haggard that had been immensely popular with young(er) English readers since the 1880s� Jim, then, goes to sea, primarily because he dreams of “valorous deeds” and of a “stirring life in the face of adventure” (ibid�)� As Fredric Jameson argues, Jim is a prime example of “bovarysme” (200), of imagining self-realisation towards a sphere of romantic ideals in terms of pervasive fictional examples. Jim is not exceptional in this regard, as all his fellow young seamen seemed to be trained on a similarly heroic diet: when aboard his training ship, a chance to recommend oneself suddenly appears, all the “Boys rushed past him” (8) to the task, eager to exert their heroic energy� The strange pervasiveness of adventure for a whole profession resonates with the status of adventure in Medieval Romance when, as Erich Auerbach notes in Mimesis, “an entire class, in the heyday of its contemporary flowering, should regard the surmounting of such perils as its true mission, in the ideal conception of things as its exclusive mission” (135)� Jim, part of a similarly flowering profession in the context of the late nineteenth century, explicitly distinguishes himself from those seamen who “live on such a small allowance of danger and toil” (Conrad, Lord Jim 13) and pities them for failing in their actual mission� As Jim’s bovarysme implies, popular adventure fiction was indeed historically important in the recruitment of boys for colonial and maritime service� By offering exotic landscapes suitable for heroic conduct, this kind of fiction tapped into adolescent desires for romantic self-assertion that could be channelled towards a commitment to imperial service� In this imaginary work, imperial romance provided a direct continuity between Dreams of Adventure and Deeds of Empire, as Martin Green’s classic title suggests� Green emphasises the importance of these publications for recruitment when he insists that the Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Lives of Adventure 239 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 popular writer “Marryat was often said to be the best recruiting officer the British Navy had” (5)� Yet, imperial adventure did not only serve as a tool for recruitment, but it also provided a pleasurable imperial education that included character formation and ideological inculcation� For one, the typical situations featuring in the genre helped prepare for a range of conceivable situations and settings� Joseph Bristow argues in Empire Boys that, along with other popular formats of the age, adventure provided a “practical survivalist education” (21) and helped to convey modes of military conduct that were vital for cultivating social discipline more broadly but especially for the sea-faring and imperial professions of the time� Similarly, Andrea White explains that adventure fiction espoused an “ideology of duty, discipline, honesty, obedience, and responsibility” (56)� By providing attractive models of heroic comportment, the genre offered a pleasurable introduction to the basic forms of conduct to be further cultivated in the schools of the merchant navy, which were considered “character-factories” (Puxan-Oliva 8), and in which, more than just practical knowledge of the trade, a particular form of conduct had to be learned and rehearsed� Due to such educational possibilities, these exotic stories increasingly “arrived with the blessing of authorities” (White 57) who were advocating “manly activities abroad” (43). Ideologically, adventure-fiction also directed the readers’ attention and desire towards an embrace of the English prerogative and duty of bringing civilization to the world, which further amplified the visions of adolescent possibilities of individual romantic self-assertion into a broader, potentially historical and civilizational force� In the context of such ideological and educational possibilities, adventure fiction became acceptable reading in Sunday schools where it was seen as a tool to advocate the missionary importance of imperialism (Bristow 21)� Coinciding with the emergence of adventure fiction in the 1880s, race became an increasingly important factor in late Victorian Britain’s dealings with the empire, as a sense of “ethnocentric” cultural superiority gradually transitioned towards a more “racialized conception” of society (Lorimer 16)� Therefore, the “racial stereotype of the English gentleman” (Puxan-Oliva 51) and his authority and responsibility became more central to the discussion and the management of empire, a shift that is also mirrored in the increasing importance of “English racial superiority” (Dryden 11) in imperial romance� Bristow also assumes that an important lesson to be learned from adventure fiction was that it placed the young adventurer at the “top of the racial ladder and at the helm of all the world” (21)� Many scholars therefore agree that these fictional texts were serving primarily didactic ends and were “promoting an ideology of patriotic heroism 240 J ens e lze 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 and Christian dutifulness compatible with imperialistic aims” (White 54)� These didactic ends pertained not only to character formation but also to the distribution of knowledge about the imperial world� Closely allied with ‘travel writing’, nineteenth-century adventure stories paradoxically “purported to be informational” (42)� In distinction to the medieval tradition of adventure that often severed its relation to reality, colonial adventure fiction aspired to be perceived as “primarily factual” and was “demanding more credibility than other fictions” (41). A great part of adventure fiction’s appeal, for example, lay in providing accurate geographical information to its readers: “Part of the particular pleasure afforded by the genre was that it concerned real places with geographically verifiable names, not airy habitations without names” (45)� As White adds, the genre therefore had educational components that were increasingly demanded by its readers and publishers: “Essential ingredients of adventure fiction: at least a pretension to informal education and inspiration” (51)� To aid this didactic ambition, popular colonial adventure fictions followed highly formulaic patterns, in which a young man leaves for “untamed worlds, grows up and comes home” (Bruzelius 212)� The transgressive and syntagmatic enchantment of the world that adventure promises as an exploration of the unknown is in the genre templates of imperial romance actually pacified into an ‘informational’ relation to the world and into a paradigmatic story about male adolescence in which encounters with the potential unknown are always predictably patterned, rehearsed, and disenchanted� 1 When Jim finally enters the world of seafaring, he comments how the places he traversed were strangely prefigured by adventure fiction to the point that they were “regions known to his imagination”, resulting in the fact that he now “found them barren of adventure” (Conrad, Lord Jim 10)� Medieval adventure was also somewhat formulaic and related to an imaginary confirmation of class membership, but it had no such functional and disenchanting relation to reality but was, as Auerbach suggests, “raised above all earthly contingencies” (136-137)� Margret Bruzelius even argues that in its familiar formula “[a] dventure provides pleasure because of its certainties - in that sense, it is no adventure at all” (213)� Imperial adventure, then, thrived upon the transgressive and tense energies of adolescence but channelled them into “thrilling adventures in tropical locations where they prove their manliness, assert English racial superiority, and plunder the land of its riches” to eventually offer a “reassuring picture of English superiority” (Dryden 4)� The dynamics 1 For a comprehensive discussion of the “paradigmatic” and the “syntagmatic” in the history of the novel from Flaubert to modernism, see Mahler� Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Lives of Adventure 241 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 of colonial adventure are, therefore, intricately related to the twin principles of “transformation” and “classification” (7) that Franco Moretti described for the Bildungsroman and that made it into such an effective form of normative character formation. Given that adventure fiction propagated character types, ordered and mapped the spaces of the earth, plotted individual realisations, and reproduced racial hierarchies, it helped to reduce the complexities and uncertainties of the imperial encounter - but also of life more broadly - into fixed narrative paradigms. Imperial romance, then, offered a literature that belonged to what Jacques Rancière calls the “representational regime” of literature that was interested in “the valorization of resemblance” and of legitimating “hierarchies” (19)� Apart from the disenchanting familiarity that (literary) education in the genre of adventure fiction provided, the South Sea in Lord Jim is depicted to chronically and completely lack the enchanted chronotope necessary for the experience of proper adventure� The narrator explicitly argues that the “eternal peace of Eastern sky and sea” (Conrad, Lord Jim 12) is utterly devoid of the insecurities, tempests, and disasters that adventurous spirits require to assert themselves heroically� Calm seas and “[m]ailboats moving on their appointed routes” (272) undermine any possibility of adventure and signify an infrastructure of modernity that has pervaded into the very last corner of the earth. The shipping routes of the South Sea are fixed commercial structures rather than liminal spaces of adventure� In these spaces of safe passage and benevolent nature, the conduct of most seafarers was never appropriately tested� Living up to adventurous conduct simply meant an execution of racial superiority: “they loved short passages, good deck-chairs, large native crews and the distinction of being white� They shuddered at the thought of hard work, and led precariously easy lives, always on the verge of dismissal, always on the verge of engagement” (12)� For these seafarers, the allegedly adventurous spaces of the South Sea offered privileges in a colonial division of labour that provided them with the living conditions and authority that they could never acquire at home� The spaces of adventure for them were spaces of racial privilege and exotic desire� When Jim and his crew encounter their first challenge aboard the vessel Patna that carries 800 pilgrims to Mecca, they fail utterly and eventually abandon the ship to what they expect to be a hopeless disaster� Jim’s failure of conduct aboard the Patna upends the system of racial superiority, because he, an Englishman, subsequently joins the marginal and unprincipled group of Europeans and non-Europeans that have deserted the ship: his jump from the ship down to the lifeboat is a literal fall from grace for the English gentleman and resonates with fears of de-evolution that widely circulated in Britain at 242 J ens e lze 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 the turn of the century� This scene is also a disastrous incident for the informal imperial technologies of government that, in the absence of complex bureaucracy and direct state rule, relied almost exclusively on the effectiveness of gentlemanly conduct and Christian duty� Jim’s behaviour, in spite of his training and his identity as a young middle-class Englishmen and as a parson’s son, suggests the precarious “flimsiness of an ideological creed supporting an entire system of imperial government” (Puxan-Oliva 52)� On the level of narrative form, the action of the adventure aboard the Patna and its effects are slowly revealed over dozens of pages through a multiplicity of perspectives and voices that comment on the incident and on Jim’s comportment� The oft-celebrated polyphony - and heteroglossia - of these passages is further complicated by a complex anachrony through which events are only precariously recuperated� This modernist process is highlighted by Jim’s own self-reflexive and hesitant narrative in which his consciousness tries to come to terms with his inexplicable failure� This results in a highly fragmented narrative of “human stuttering and stammering” (Kavanaugh 162) that is “ordered not by the logic of causal […] sequence but by the unpredictable movements of memory and the will to speech” (Levenson 183)� In keeping with the failed heroic conduct, the whole account is highly deconstructive of the plots, temporalities, and narrative voices of imperial adventure and suggests a widely celebrated priority of textual production over worldly action: Jameson even argues that “the first half of Lord Jim is one of the most breathtaking exercises in nonstop textual production that our literature has to show, a self-generating sequence of sentences for which narrative and narrator are mere pretexts” (207)� This complex textual proliferation in the novel is a far cry from the representational plots of imperial romance that had informed the protagonist� From the perspective of Jim’s fictionally rehearsed bovarysme, the challenge of the Patna-adventure was not only that it was more threatening than anticipated but also that it was notoriously unspectacular� Volker Klotz notes that one of the central functions of adventure fiction is to (re)create the readability and tangibility (“Ansehnlichkeit”) of the world by offering visions of straightforward sovereignty and antagonism that challenge the impersonal and reified complex machinations of capitalist modernity, in which agency is often difficult to locate (22-25). The scene aboard the Patna does not succeed in providing this sort of tangibility: it lacks storms, villains, and even people crying for help, as the pilgrims are mostly asleep under deck� The contingency of the situation is so extreme that it is utterly mundane rather than enchanted: a log of wood has probably hit the ship, but it went completely unnoticed� What must be activated in this scene are the abstract protocols of conduct that Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Lives of Adventure 243 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 in this particular version literally replicate rather than challenge the modern vision of man as part of a complex machinery of social relations and require passivity to boot� Such a situation cannot properly resonate with the scripts of imperial representation on which Jim was brought up� Jim’s response, therefore, points to a discrepancy between disenchanted worldly experience and fictional mastery. Rather than getting the chance to finally perform the “valorous deeds” that “were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality” (Conrad, Lord Jim 18), he experiences reality, including his own physical self, as unresponsive to the familiar scripts of adventurous self-actualisation� He encounters himself as an inscrutable other - as consisting of a vulnerable body and of nerves - whom the ideals and discourses of imperial conduct cannot control and who responds to the uncertainty of the situation almost independently: “’I had jumped […] it seems’” (86). The first part of the novel, then, offers a disenchanted vision of the self and of the world in which the possibilities for adventure are notoriously marginalised, even as imperial representations of romance proliferate discursively� Romantic Dis / Enchantments After the public trial through which the Patna-incident is reconstructed, Jim’s certificate as a mate is cancelled. From then on, he seeks to escape the judgments of civilization by taking on short term employments as a water clerk in various port towns of the East that he abandons as soon as he suspects that someone might have associated him with the incident� This middle part of the novel takes up the episodic and paradigmatic structure that is typical of popular romance but turns it into a picaresque meandering, into the motivated escape from situation to situation� At the exact middle of the novel, Marlow - a captain at sea and the intradiegetic narrator of this part of the story - and Stein - a former adventurer turned businessman - resolve to end Jim’s paradigmatic peregrinations� Stein and Marlow are enthusiastic about the “romantic” Jim and they set out to help him to find a place to redeem himself and to get the “clean slate” (142) he so desperately craves� They select a place that is off the grid of empire, where Jim does not have to fear the recognition by civilization that has provoked his previous escapes� By virtue of its isolation, this place is also sufficiently endowed with possibilities for heroic and adventurous self-assertion. With the region of Patusan - a fictional location typically located on North Eastern Borneo - they choose a place that is literally off the map, unlike the real-world locations that feature in imperial romance� This distance and isolation are also explicitly related to the freedoms 244 J ens e lze 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 of fictionality and romance that many critics have noted about the whole Patusan section: three hundred miles beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines, the haggard utilitarian lies of our civilization wither and die, to be replaced by pure exercises of the imagination, that have the futility, often the charm, and sometimes the deep hidden truthfulness, of works of art? Romance had singled Jim for its own […]� (215) Jim, thus, is inserted into a re-enchanted reality which, to the Eurocentric explorer, offers a piece of ‘available’ world for what Hans Blumenberg has termed “reality as the result of a realisation” (32), a form of world-making and self-making that, to the imperial consciousness, is unobstructed by the ‘brute facts’ of modernity and social life� Jim’s “clean slate” (Conrad, Lord Jim 142) offers the possibility of an adventurous plot in which the protagonist can finally imagine the syntagmatic world-making transitions into another form of life� The mapped-out spaces of the metropolis - apparently including the trade routes of the Southern Seas where Jim failed to properly encounter adventure - on the other hand offered perpetual obstacles to ambitions for self-realisation, which is why this reality is perceived as what Blumenberg calls “reality as the experience of resistance” (33): resistant to plot, world-making, and self-assertion. When Marlow visits Jim on Patusan, he confirms the powers of world-making that he has realised on the island: “Jim has regulated so many things […]� Things that would have appeared as much beyond his control as the motions of the moon and stars” (Conrad, Lord Jim 169)� He had led the island “from strife to peace” (206), offering true world-transforming and historical events with the romantic protagonist as their driving force� As compared to the regulated spaces of the South Sea, this island is able to bring back the “lost time of true exploration” (Enderwitz 83) and the hope of adventurous self-assertion� Richard Ruppel calls Patusan a space of experimentation, with Stein and Marlow acting as the scientists of a ‘magical naturalism’: They add all the ingredients of imperial romance, isolate the space from external influence, and watch the experiment unfold, quite akin to Zola’s idea of the naturalist roman expérimental� While they are eager to help Jim, they have also been fairly desperate to prove the legitimacy and possibility of such a form of imperial and romantic conduct and to “restore the credibility of the English gentleman” (Puxan-Oliva 58)� In this isolated space, Jim goes through all the possibilities and dangers of romantic individualism and benign imperialism: he fights proper villains - such as his grotesque predecessor, the Portuguese Malay Cornelius, or the fanatic Muslim invader Sherif Ali - and is further Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Lives of Adventure 245 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 afforded with all the accessories that an imperial romantic hero must have, like an exotic colonial wife and a “noble savage” best friend (Dryden 171)� Many critics since Ian Watt and F� R� Leavis have, therefore, seen in the second half of the novel the very “romantic schoolboy adventure” that the first part, in its “three-dimensional scrutiny” (Watt 308), renounced� Watt and Leavis were dissatisfied with the second half of the novel and complained that the romance part does “not develop or enrich the central interest” (Leavis 218) established earlier� Recent critics, on the other hand, see the Patusan section largely as a (quasi-) metafictional rehearsal of the “limitations of romance” (Dryden 137-194); according to Dryden, the final catastrophe points both to the impossibilities of benign imperialism and to the “shallowness” (184) of Jim’s fictional idyll that cannot operate in the real world. Another recent critic has even read the whole section as Marlow’s desperate attempt to persuade his listeners of the ideological suitability of the colonial gentleman - the most important infrastructure of informal empire - which is the reason why the second part had to change from “an interrogating modern mode” to “a trusting, consistent, and mythical one” (Puxan-Oliva 75)� While all of these readings are highly insightful, I want to take the setting and the actions of the passage literally and focus, not on how Jim fails in the ‘real’ world because of the fictionality and shallowness of his exploits. Instead, I would like to suggest that his successful handling of the most paradigmatic adventure still leads him towards a sense of insufficiency and a rejection of the very importance of imperial adventure for his conception of self� This points to a discrepancy between romance and what Robert Louis Stevenson called the “novel of character” (“Humble” 86) and to a seeming separation between the novelistic and adventure� 2 After establishing this alleged discrepancy, I will discuss how Conrad’s modernist text reintroduces a different conception of adventure that relies on a symbiotic relation between the disruptiveness of romance and the reflexivity of the novel. Marlow’s narrative of his visit to Patusan suggests that, despite Jim’s “immense” world-transforming success, Jim seems not fully at peace� He remains inscrutable and enigmatic to Marlow, who comments on Jim’s “gloomy” comportment that alternates with manic assertions of success: “‘It was […] immense! Immense’ he cried out aloud� The sudden movement startled me […] ‘Immense! ’ he repeated for a third time, speaking in a whisper, for himself alone” (Conrad, Lord Jim 207)� His ambition for self-realisation, it seems, can find no closure through adventure, even in a setting like Patusan, where Jim 2 On the ‘anti-novelistic’ tendency of romance and Gothic fiction and the anti-romantic rejection of action in the modern novel, see Zweig 11-18� 246 J ens e lze 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 and the community have gone through the most transformative adventure plots imaginable� This is certainly related to the fact that his exploits cannot be translated into glory at home: “to Jim’s success there were no externals� Thirty miles of forest shut it off from the sight of an indifferent world” (173)� Throughout the earlier parts of the novel, success for Jim was always closely related to the narratability of adventure: “You—shall—hear—of—me” (185), he confidently shouts to Marlow as he first leaves for Patusan. This intricate relation between narratability and adventure is later rejected, which signifies a changed relationship between Jim’s subjectivity and the possibilities of adventure� Upon Marlow’s departure, Jim shouts after him to “[t]ell them”, but he quickly reverts to a “[n]o—nothing […] and with a slight hand motioned the boat away” (256)� This rejection is typically read as the recognition that his exploits may never be duly acknowledged at home, that to success “there were no externals” (173), either because of his irredeemable previous failure or because of the racist diminution of his accomplishments that the letter of the so-called “privileged man” - to whom Marlow addresses the final section of the narration - implies when he states that “we must fight in the ranks or our lives don’t count” (259)� Linda Dryden is right to emphasise that Jim “stays within the enchanted world of Patusan, the only place where his heroic ego-ideal can be sustained” (176)� Indeed, upon Marlow’s departure, “[h]e stamped his foot upon the sand� ‘This is my limit, because nothing less will do�’” (Conrad, Lord Jim 254)� Jim’s rejection of tellability, however, also signals a general frustration with the relation between individual self-realisation and the imperial adventure form, which is why his insistent insularity can also be read as a reclusion from the very scripts with which he has heretofore sought to realise his self� This topological isolation from the world is later significantly intensified as Jim is drawn towards the interior of the island, at precisely the moment when an external threat invades Patusan (276)� It seems that, rather than mourning the lack of external acknowledgment for his successes, Jim has renounced his relation to the external world, as he mutters melancholically: “Yes, I have changed all that” (254). Marlow finally assumes that “of all mankind Jim had no dealings but with himself” (259)� He has become completely isolated from the temporalities of “order and progress” (ibid�), and even from the recognition he had so craved� This evokes his “romantic conscience” (235), but no longer as a desire suited to imperial adventure but as a potentially isolated perspective that challenges the idealised external forms of imperial conduct and becomes inscrutable and enigmatic� Throughout most of the novel, Jim is clearly beset by an abstract idealism, and the narrators and characters repeatedly reference it, often conflating his Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Lives of Adventure 247 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 “faithful” (255) adherence and aspiration to heroic conduct with his “romantic conscience”� Georg Lukács’s classic comments on the destiny of the novel of “abstract idealism” can perhaps help us shed some light on Jim’s enigmatic and mysterious comportment� Lukács argues that: the divergence between soul and reality becomes mysterious and apparently quite irrational; the demonic narrowing of the soul manifests itself only negatively, by the hero having to abandon everything he achieves because it is never what he wants, because it is broader, more empirical, more life-like than what his soul set out to seek� (109) Similarly, in the Patusan sections, Jim remains dissatisfied with and seems to renounce his achievements, and the movements of his soul do not correspond to his achievements in the world. Despite the quasi-fictional and enchanted setting of Patusan in which he can boast immense successes, he eventually falls prey to what Andreas Mahler terms the modern subject’s “paradigmatic disenchantment […] an unquenchable (romantic) longing for an unattainable aim, reducing all events to mere eventualities” (248)� Because this longing can never be quenched, not even by a complete real-life realisation of the scripts of imperial romance nor even by operating as a force of transformative history, Jim remains inscrutable and enigmatic for Marlow and his listeners, his self severed from the readable externalities of his world-transforming successes� Clearly, there are many - and at times competing - conceptions of the ‘romantic’ at play in the novel, but Jim’s “romantic conscience” that Marlow repeatedly references turns from a world-making ambition into a “romantic disillusionment”� 3 In Lukács’s discussion of historico-philosophical instantiations of the novel, abstract idealism and the romanticism of disillusionment follow one another as historical dominants in the novel, anachronistically synthesised by Goethe’s version of the Bildungsroman (132 ff�)� In Jim’s case, we could say that they metamorphose into one another because his idealist trajectory does not only culminate in a productive resignation in which his abstract ideal and the outer world conflict but one in which it becomes increasingly clear that an idealistically rehearsed but “purely internal reality […] enters into competition with the reality of the outside world” (Lukács 111)� Jim’s “[a]bility in the abstract” (Conrad, Lord Jim 5) with which the novel opened was finally actualised in the physical world of adventure, but even this actualisation of the abstract ideal has not led to a sense of self-realisation� From this perspec- 3 For a comprehensive discussion of the various conceptions of the romantic in the novel, see Laqué� 248 J ens e lze 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 tive, Jim’s enigma is best understood from the perspective of a concern with subjectivity and individual consciousness that effectively translates into a rejection of life and world, a process of disillusionment that Lukács discusses in terms of an overcoming of adventure: The movement of life shows a definite and unmistakable progression towards the purity of the soul that has attained itself, learning from its adventures that only it alone, rigidly confined within itself, can correspond to its deepest, all-dominating instinct; that the soul is bound to be imprisoned and ultimately destroyed in a world which is alien to its essence: that every refusal to seize a conquered piece of reality is really a victory, a step towards the conquest of a self freed from illusions� (109-110, my italics) While Jim initially longs for the conditions in which to assert himself as an expression of his abstract ideals and hopes that these conditions might be offered in the adventurous spaces of seafaring or imperial romance, the novel makes clear that, regardless of the conditions, his romantic self cannot be sufficiently realised. The realisation of the ideal may have been ideologically connected to romantic self-realisation through the narrative desire of imperial-romance plots, but the paradigmatic ideal transported by imperial romance and the romantic vision of the individual never fully harmonise� This tension becomes manifest at the moment of the worldly actualisation of the abstract ideal� Marlow registers that Jim’s adherence to this ideal has become an increasingly alienated discursive ‘formula’: “’I shall be faithful,’ he said quietly� ‘I shall be faithful,’ he repeated, without looking at me” (Conrad, Lord Jim 255)� Lord Jim, then, offers Conrad’s persistent rejection of the “modern myth of realizability” (Mahler 253); a romantic myth that even in such a favourably adventurous setting as Patusan can only lead to eventual romantic disenchantment� While the renunciation of the outside world is a typical feature of the “romanticism of disillusionment”, most notably in Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale, Lord Jim radicalises this tendency: in Flaubert, we really had the “nonrealization of the image” (Jameson 201) that led to disillusionment as a sense of an unchanging and resistant reality that allows no self-initiated world-making and is devoid of true adventure� In Lord Jim, we find disenchantment despite immense external actualisations and historical transformations authored by the protagonist, which points to a persistent discrepancy between the paradigmatic forms and ideals of imperial romance and the novelistic demands of individual linear self-realisation� Jim seems to come to the novelistic and anti-romantic conclusion that paradigmatic “actions and adventures hinder individuality, they do not reveal it” (Zweig 10)� Into this anti-romantic Flaubertian conception of the novelistic, however, Conrad (re) Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Lives of Adventure 249 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 inserts romance, but in a way that points to a different - non-paradigmatic - effect of adventure as the perpetual excess of life over the social and narrative patterns with which it is framed� Modernist Aesthetics Jim’s isolated and insular subjectivity is in the last part of the novel again disturbed by adventure in the form of Gentleman Browne and his Crew� Browne is a violent buccaneer who wants to raid Patusan but has his ship detained by Jim and his community� After Jim has pledged for his release, Browne kills dozens of Bugis, including Jim’s local friend Dain Waris, which eventually leads to Jim’s own death at the hands of Dormain, Dain Waris’s father� Gentleman Browne’s intrusion opposes Jim’s romantic reclusion from life and adventure, but it also literally goes “beyond the wildest dreams of his boyhood” (Conrad, Lord Jim 261), beyond the visions of imperial romance and romantic realisability� Despite their difference, the plots of imperial romance and the myth of self-realisation are both forms of taming contingency through plot-making that rely on “breaking the non-discrete flow of events into discrete units, to connect them to certain meanings […] and to organize them into regulated chains” (Lotman 182)� 4 With Browne, this semanticisation of life and adventure is no longer possible in the novel� Browne is one of these “extraordinary characters […] who defined themselves not socially, but demonically, in terms of their passions” (Zweig 15)� This is why Jim’s attempt to understand him fails: because he tries to read him socially - ‘novelistically’ we could argue with George Eliot’s theory of the serious novel as something devoid of extremes of character� 5 Jim tries to define and normalise (or novelise) Browne through his social context and through a possible sympathy with his individual experience: “They were evil-doers, but their destiny had been evil too […]� Men act badly sometimes without being much worse than others” (Conrad, Lord Jim 300-301)� This inappropriate novelistic reading leads to Browne’s release and creates the novel’s final catastrophe. 4 For plot-making as a taming of contingency (“Kontingenzbewältigung”), see Warning� 5 See Eliot’s essay “Silly Novels and Lady Novelists”, published in Westminster Review in September 1856, and her poetological interlude, the famous chapter 17 of Adam Bede, called “In which the Story Pauses a Little”, for Eliot’s theory of the novel and of novelistic character� In what amounts to a manifesto of British realism, Eliot urges to avoid both idealisation and condemnation of characters and argues for the powers of sympathy that will dignify most characters upon closer scrutiny and in the context of their everyday lives� 250 J ens e lze 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 In distinction to the role of villains in imperial romance, Browne’s role in the novel points towards a conception of adventure that is not geared towards knowledge and mastery but towards adventure’s commitment to transgression and utter insecurity� While he may effect Jim’s death and with it the closure of the tale, Browne - despite his own obvious genre affiliations - is a threat to the protocols of formulaic adventure tales which, as Margret Bruzelius emphasises, are not supposed to end in the hero’s death: “we will be surprised, perhaps even feel betrayed, if the hero dies” (206)� Browne may resemble a stock figure from imperial romance, but the novel leaves him radically resistant to mastery� From this perspective, it makes sense to view him not only through the protocols of imperial romance - as a return of a form for which Jim still remains unsuitable - but as an instance of the contingencies of life� From this perspective, Jim’s servant Tamb Itam and his partner Jewel, who have fled Patusan to live with Stein and on whose reports Marlow’s narrative of the adventure largely relies, would not be exiles from the plots of imperial romance; they are rather survivors of violence, rendering the narrative a “series of survivors’ testimonies to a past traumatic event” (Yamamoto 10)� It is no coincidence that the “pace and romantic detail” (Dryden 187) with which Browne intrudes into the novel and into Patusan has been related to the work of Robert Louis Stevenson� This relation, I argue, is not only relevant because Stevenson provided successful literary examples for a return of the adventure genre� Stevenson, who is often grouped with Conrad as a transitional figure between the adventure-tradition and modernism - between the (popular) Victorian and the modernist novel - is also important because his conception of adventure was not geared towards imperial romance and the certainties in which it dealt� 6 Instead, Stevenson proclaimed an aesthetic function of adventure and romance that offered a challenge to, rather than a channel for, ideas of bourgeois self-mastery and world-making, which in turn makes his work important for Conrad’s evaluation and evocation of romance� This position can be explicitly encountered in Stevenson’s poetological comments, in which he declared how he made the fascinating, perpetual uncertainty of life into the central element of the adventure genre� In his poetological essay “A Humble Remonstrance”, published in 1884 in Longman’s Magazine in response to Henry James, Stevenson emphasised, like James himself, the centrality of experience to life and to the art of fiction. Unlike James, however, he thought that “life is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt” (85), too much so to be contained in a novel, much less a tightly dramatised one� 6 For a more comprehensive analysis of both Stevenson and Conrad as transitional figures between romance and the modernist novel, see Dryden et al� Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Lives of Adventure 251 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 Coherent novelistic form would simply be unsuitable to hold this excess of “life that goes before us, infinite in complication; attended to by the most various and surprising meteors” (ibid�)� This is why Stevenson consciously and with aesthetic conviction privileges romance and adventure, even if his novels are not particularly close to the “popular formula” (White 50) of the genre� Stevenson - particularly in his South Sea tales - uses adventure, not as a form of predictable and narratively or ideologically closed representational literature but as a genre whose imaginary excess, fragmentation, and loose temporalities are to him more suitable to the proliferating unfolding of experience and baffling cultural difference that life and the world have to offer� Through romance as a genre, Stevenson argues in an earlier essay, we can rehearse to “plunge into the tale in our own person and bathe in fresh experience” (“Gossip” 61)� Similarly, Browne’s romance intrusion - albeit generic and non-novelistic - is important for Conrad’s text as a fragmented modernist novel because, “instead of celebrating the patterns of social reality and the corresponding pattern of individual experience, it celebrates the energies which disrupt the pattern” (Zweig 14)� Conrad is clearly fascinated with adventure as an irruption of uncontrollable life, but he is not actively - especially after Lord Jim - working within the chronotopes of romance in the ways that Stevenson, for example, did� Where, then, lies the adventurous conception of life and literature for Conrad? It has been noted that “Stevenson’s interest in experience, the impulses and impressions that it comprises, and its ethical and imaginative responsibilities and costs, connect him both to the immediacy of the adventure novel and to the reflective qualities of aestheticism” (Fielding 162). Without arguing for Conrad as an aestheticist - in fact, he rejected this label as he rejected all other -isms - I suggest that he also finds adventure in impressions and aesthetic reflectiveness. A certain conception of adventure can be found in Conrad, particularly on the level of the aesthetic vision of life and being, in moments when the routine preconceptions and patterns of life in his novels are reflectively challenged by the central trope of darkness� This relates to Stevenson’s romance aesthetics insofar as he also stresses literature’s capacities to engage with darkness and the unknown: “there are lights in which we are willing to contemplate even the idea of our own death” (“Gossip” 61)� While Browne is one of the most explicit enactments of the “inscrutable mystery” of darkness and “a blind accomplice of the Dark Powers” (Lord Jim 270), the trope of darkness in Conrad - both in Lord Jim and elsewhere - is not only related to such actual eruptions of violence and evil� Darkness, above all, is deeply tied to the momentary recognition of the insubstantiality of the frameworks and forms that structure our lives into predictable perceptions and chains of 252 J ens e lze 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 events, therefore blocking our perception of newness and uncertainty� As J� Hillis Miller formulates in one of the most lucid takes on this trope, “it would be an error to identify it […] with evil, if that implies the existence of some opposing principle of good� The darkness is not nothingness, and it is not limited to the depths of human nature� It is the basic stuff of the universe, the uninterrupted” (21-22)� To comprehend the visions of life and being evoked in Conrad’s imagery of darkness through the lens of adventure, I will close this chapter by relating Conrad’s aesthetics to Giorgio Agamben’s recent take on adventure� This perspective can afford us a glimpse at a modernist notion of adventure in Conrad that resists the ideologies of imperial romance, and the myths of romantic realisability and disenchanted novelistic individuality, in favour of an open and responsive relation to life and being that rejects conventions of seeing and representation and that - though in ways different from Stevenson - lets us “bathe in fresh experience”� Agamben takes his conception of adventure largely from Heidegger’s ‘event’ - Ereignis - as the moment that inaugurates a new relation to the world; one that ends the metaphysical separation between “humanity and Being” (Agamben 77) towards a more open conception of life as “an adventure that still continues to happen” (83)� Heidegger emphasises the non-objectivity of being and the world and opposes it to the metaphysical frameworks and representations that humanity - especially in modernity, which he calls “The Age of the World-Picture” - has made in an effort to objectively master the world� This metaphysical mastery over a representation of the world tended to separate humanity and its history from the infinite and unpredictable temporality of being and the world (Heidegger, Being and Time 377 ff�)� In a recent postcolonial reading of Heidegger, Pheng Cheah expounds how such ontological and conceptual separations only enabled imperial forms of representation and mastery� He points out how imperial “discursive representations enable us to determine and shape the world” (8)� Cheah focuses on cartography and how it spatialises the indeterminacy and temporal “openness that is world” (17) into a fixed spatial object, ready for mastery, often with destructive - literally world-destroying or “unworlding” (ibid�) - consequences� The representational and educational protocols of imperial romance can also be understood as an important element of such imperial world pictures� Conrad’s imperial novels persistently show the destructive consequences of such world pictures because they generate the objects and the fantasies of adventurous world-making which always negatively impact on landscapes and communities on the ground� This pertains, most explicitly, to the destructive continuities between imperial representation and colonial destruction with which Heart of Darkness abounds, highlighted in Kurtz’s de-evolution of the heroic Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Lives of Adventure 253 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 discourse of enlightenment into a call to “exterminate all the brutes” (50)� From this perspective, however, an adventurer like Stein, whose differential mastery over his imperial possessions is relatively benign, is also a problematic figure because even the taxonomic collection of exotic butterflies that he keeps in old age cannot conceptually be separated from other more destructive endeavours at scientific objectification and imperial mastery. Through such a lens, it seems improbable that with this figure Conrad offered a vision of imperial adventure that simply “did applaud the desire but condemn its disastrous consequences, both at once” (White 7)� A conception of adventure that is more attuned to the event, on the other hand, is engaged in a rejection of world pictures and metaphysics; not only because they ultimately enable imperial world-making but also because they generally cover and obscure a more direct and diverse engagement with the plurality and temporality of being� The Ereignis is not simply an event but marks an instance in which something “takes place” (Heidegger, Event 211) that inaugurates a new relation to being and disrupts the metaphysical frameworks with which we have arrested the movements of life� Through an Ereignis, a new insight into existence and being announces itself that ends the “forgetfulness of being” (141)� For Agamben, because the event inaugurates such new beginnings, “it is therefore possible that the adventure […] presents several analogies with the Ereignis” (78)� Conrad’s work is full of such announcements, in which metaphysical relations to existence are radically called into question� His conception of darkness shows that “a momentary absence of mind, a new way of looking at a familiar object, a slight change of routine may be enough to shatter the structure of a life” (Miller 14)� For Marlow, certain events have the power “to drive me out of my conception of existence, out of that shelter each of us makes for himself to creep under […] as a tortoise withdraws within its shell” (Conrad, Lord Jim 239)� He typically pulls himself back from such considerations to the conviction that “in truth, thanks to our unwearied efforts, it is as sunny an arrangement of small conveniences as the mind of man can conceive” (ibid�)� Marlow, therefore, insists on the stabilising power of mastery that makes these moments something extraordinary, an aberration to the flow of life that can be controlled by reverting to the metaphysical separation between humanity and life: “I went back to my shell directly� One must” (ibid�, italics in original)� His repeated evocation of such visions across various works clearly suggests the utter precariousness of these conceptual ‘shelters’ and ‘shells’ and a persistence of uncertain life that is increasingly difficult to be kept out. If adventure marks the event in which new relations to being announce themselves, then the moments of darkness in Conrad are intricately connected to such a conception of adventure, because they aim to shatter established rela- 254 J ens e lze 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 tions to being and existence and open new - if often initially disturbing - ways of relating to the world� The exploration of Jim’s unpredictable and inscrutable individuality, of course, can also be comprehended through such a form of adventure that points to the uncertainty of fixed patterns in the engagement with the contingencies of life� Jim’s jump off the ship, therefore, prompts Marlow to reflect on “the most obstinate ghost of man’s creation, of the uneasy doubt uprising like a mist, secret and gnawing like a worm, and more chilling than the certitude of death - the doubt of the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of conduct” (41)� He implies that there is no sovereign metaphysical power that stabilises life and being but, as the scene aboard the Patna has shown, this vision of conduct is a man-made discourse that is always potentially evaded and exceeded by life� Without focussing on the dimension of adventure, a recent Heideggerian reading of Lord Jim has linked Jim’s jump explicitly to a rejection of Western metaphysics and its withdrawal and detachment from being towards “an opening up for what is yet unthought and unsaid” (Magrini and Schwieler 153)� In Conrad, such openings and events often arrive in moments of fear and uncertainty, but they can also offer a more vital insight into the contingency of the forms that separate humanity from being� Instead, they point towards a more open and less instrumental “being together of humanity and Being”, and towards a life “devoted […] to an adventure that is still in progress and whose outcome is difficult to predict” (Agamben 82). If adventure for Agamben is related to the event as an opening towards new relations to being, adventure is primarily a question of aesthetics, of ‘properly’ seeing the world� Conrad’s impressionistic theory of literature, commented upon in the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1895), aspires to “make its appeal through the senses […] to reach the secret spring of responsive emotion […]� My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel - it is, before all, to make you see” (259)� This form of seeing aspires to provide “impressions without interpretations” (Miller 19). The first step to such vision is the dissolution of the conceptual frames that separate humanity from the movements of life, which gestures towards one of modern literature’s prime tasks: defamiliarisation, of providing “vision” instead of “recognition”, of depicting elements of the world as if “perceived for the first time” (Shklovsky 10). Conrad’s impressionism is deeply indebted to this task when it dissolves familiar forms into un-captured impressions, shapes, and unfamiliar and abstract forms, as when Jim’s stable and white imperial form disappears from Marlow’s view to be engulfed by the enigmatic nature of his personality and the darker forces Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Lives of Adventure 255 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 of life: “the white figure […] appeared no bigger than a child - then only a speck, a tiny white speck […]� And suddenly, I lost him …” (Lord Jim 257)� 7 Yet, Conrad’s aesthetics of adventure is not only related to exposing a deeper lack of substance, of horror, or of fear but the dissolution of familiar forms and ontologies is also related to possibility, to “encouragement, consolation […] in joy, in hope, in uncertain fate” (“Preface” 261)� This can result in a positive relation to uncertainty - a giving over to being - that overcomes the myth of self-realisation and accepts the “abandonment to a ‘world’ of which it never becomes master” (Heidegger, Being and Time 326)� On the other hand, such a perspective can also be used critically and turned into the political capacity to effect what Cheah calls the “persistent opening of other worlds” that is always already possible by virtue of “the openness of the world” (18)� This links an aesthetic notion of adventure to the function of imaginary literature more broadly� In The Fictive and the Imaginary, Wolfgang Iser emphasises that the prime task of literature lies in imaginarily realising the “plasticity of man” (13) to recognise the given as a set of contingent institutions and to imaginarily exceed them - a plasticity that Marlow mentions when he famously insists that “the mind of man is capable of anything” (Conrad, Heart of Darkness 36)� To achieve this, “we must […] suspend all our natural attitudes adopted toward the ‘real’ world” (Iser 13)� In Conrad this happens through aesthetic defamiliarisation, through the novel’s complex metaleptic fusion of texts and realities, and in its famous use of Marlow’s interlocked and associative narration that “introduces a new form of temporality into modernist fiction” (Levenson 182)� James Phelan summarizes that in Lord Jim such modernists’ “recalcitrance […] enhances our ethical engagement and ethical admiration for […] open-endedness” (58)� Such strategies, then, suspend natural attitudes and allow for none of the character-forming and world-making of imperial romance, whose representational scripts and alleged facticity typically demand that “natural attitudes continue unchanged” (Iser 13)� The notion of adventure that may be retrieved from Conrad’s aesthetics through Agamben, then, implies adventure as something that always confronts us with experiences and perceptions that challenge naturalised attitudes to the world and that urge us to accept uncertainty and / or to expand the scope of what is possible� If, in modernity, adventure has disappeared from the geographies of the world through the maps and texts with which we have replaced it, adventure can be retrieved by highlighting the possibilities and existences that these familiar maps and texts obscure� Rather than rehearsing the representational “pleasure […] of certainties” (Bruzelius 213) associated with imperial romance, or 7 For a list of examples of this technique across Conrad’s works, see Miller 17-20� 256 J ens e lze 10.24053/ REAL-2021-0011 enacting the (self-)transformative myths of realisability and its novelistic individualist frustrations, such a modernist vision of adventure points to the more thoroughly aesthetic ‘pleasures of peril’ that constantly beset our lives, in Agamben’s words, offering “an adventure that still continues to happen” (83)� Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio� The Adventure, translated by Lorenzo Chiesa. 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