Don Quixote Rides Again: Illusion and Delusion in Conrad’s Lord Jim: A Tale
“‘You are an incorrigible, hopeless Don Quixote. That’s what you are.’” (Conrad1946b, 44) Fifteen-year-old Konrad Korzeniowski (Joseph Conrad) heard theseadmonitory words from the lips of his tutor, a Krakowian college student instructed byhis maternal uncle (Tadeusz Bobrowski) to talk his nephew out of his eccentric desire tobecome a seaman. The link between young Conrad’s desire to become a sailor and therenowned knight of La Mancha is not a casual one. In his writings, Conrad generalisesthe particular case of his vocation for the sea by pointing to the reading of romances ofadventure as the cause prompting young men to join the maritime profession. Thus, forinstance, in the autobiographical work in which the words of dear tutor are quoted (APersonal Record) Conrad refers to Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea as his “firstintroduction to the sea in literature.” (1946b, 72) In “Tales of the Sea” (1898) ––anearlier piece written at a period in which he was already engaged in the composition ofLord Jim: A Tale–– Conrad speaks of how Frederick Marryat and James FenimoreCooper, the creators of sea fiction, “influenced so many lives and gave to so many theinitial impulse towards a glorious or a useful career”. (1949, 56) Later essays like “WellDone” (1918) or “Geography and Some Explorers” (1924) highlight the role played byromances and books of exploration in triggering young men’s desire for a life ofadventure at sea, Conrad’s included. In the latter he calls Nunez de Balboa, Tasman,Torres, Cook or Franklin “the first grown-up friends of my early boyhood” and statesthat their nautical feats were an inspiration for him. …
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…Facts! They demanded facts for him [Jim], as if facts could explainanything!” (Conrad 1946c, 29) This disavowal of the value of facts sounds is an anomalous one to hearcoming from a third-person narrator which, traditionally, was supposed to occupy the objective position of aview from nowhere specifically. It is important to add that such a statement is made in Chapter 4, at the endof which the third-person narrator gives the floor to Marlow, a first-person narrator subjectively involved inthe story he is telling.11 Needless to comment on the connection between hepatic diseases and alcoholism.12 It may be argued that the doctor’s irony and laughter are a sign of nervousness and a symptom of the lossof consistency of his self-representation as derived from a scientific practice whose solidity is equallyeroded by the engineer’s atypical hallucinations.
