Hanging Together. Not the How but the Why: Lord Jim and the Function of Intertextuality

This paper first examines what kind of texts Conrad cites in his novels, and how they function and goes on to ask why Hamlet and the Bible are so significant in Lord Jim. We will argue that Hamlet and Lord Jim have something in them that will not be transformed into art and that accounts, in part, for Conrad’s saying that he has been “satanically ambitious” in writing this novel, which analyses the human condition, its hopes and shames, courage and cowardice, to a profound depth at the limit of language and artistic expression. The intertext, indirectly, enables Conrad to bestow a heightened rhetoric onto his protagonist, which he would otherwise have found impossible in the Modern period. Conrad frequently states his difficulty in finding language to express the reality of Jim; he also has recourse to different narrative genres – adventure, gothic, romance – to give consolation to those looking for narrative closure. The intertext of Hamlet and the Bible enable the reader to perceive beyond closure that there are areas of existence that cannot be expressed in words. However, whether we perceive the silence beyond the text as ineffable or unsayable must, finally, depend on the individual reader. Conrad loads Jim’s presence with Christian imagery in order to show that this very young, flawed, incoherent seaman is fated to atone for sin in self-sacrifice. Society hangs together in terms of inter-dependent community, but in another sense our common fate is to “hang together” for, in a post-lapserian world, we are all of us guilty and “under a cloud”.