Beyond the Bildungsroman : Character Development and Communal Legitimation in the Early Fiction of Joseph Conrad

Abstract

����� ��� In what sense could “Tuan” Jim be said to have been “one of us”? (Lord passim). Marlow’s sudden appearance in the fifth chapter of Lord Jim derails the form of what had previously seemed a conventional novel of disillusionment, and yet is motivated by nothing more than the urgency of his claim. It seems plausible to read into this urgency the repressed anxiety of an author whose relationship to his self-chosen national community remained open to question throughout his life, who after fifteen years in the most British of all professions still felt that his ability to pass for an Englishman was not taken for granted by everyone. In a classic study, Avrom Fleishman documented Conrad’s affinity for postBurkean conceptions of “organic” and self-contained national communities in meticulous detail (51ff.). More recent essays have applied his findings to Heart of Darkness and uncovered in that novel a profound meditation on the question of “Englishness.” 1 Remarkably little attention, however, has been paid to Lord Jim and the way in which its central narrative rupture implicates questions of form and genre in Conrad’s struggle for communal recognition and legitimation. 2 The dominant model for such legitimation in the stories and novels that Conrad produced during the early part of his career is that of the Bildungsroman, a form that is still reflected in the opening chapters of Lord Jim. But already in these early efforts we can detect the attempt to express a model of human experience that cannot easily be incorporated into the classical framework by which the Bildungsroman medi