The Ideological Construction of Otherness in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim

Résumé

J. Conrad’s narrative aim is well expressed in his preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897). He states, “you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm – all you demand - and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask” (1963: xiii). Thus, a literary text may produce meanings, “What art makes us see, and therefore gives to us in the form of ‘seeing’, ‘perceiving’ and ‘feeling’ (which is not the form of knowing), is the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes” (Louis Althusser, 1971:222). The ‘ideology’, to which Lord Jim alludes, is ‘Othering’, a term introduced by E. Said, which refers to the act of emphasizing the supposed inferiority of marginalized groups. The Patna as “a crowded planet” draws a demarcation line between superior and inferior. The Muslim pilgrims, in chapter three, are described awfully, they are ‘mastiffs’ with an eye on the top of their head and ‘ugly mouths’. They are qualified as ‘reptiles’ and ‘pink toads’ mirroring a disgusting image of the ship. These ‘brutes’ “are as a burden to clear out as quickly as possible” (1994: 46). These images reinforce the Oriental discourse. While Jim and the rest of the Patna crew, like the ship’s officers, are placed in a position of superiority, they are nevertheless economically dependent on the Muslim pilgrims, just as many European countries were at the time economically reliant on the natural resources of their colonies. The juxtaposition of the economic reliance and the use of stereotypes suggest that Conrad is fully knowledgeable of his literary actions and wishes to be, perhaps, subversive. This paper questions how Conrad negotiates and resists the Othering process where Orientalism as ‘a negative ideology’ has provided him a cultural resource to meditate on the bewildering complexity of human difference, and express it narratively.