From Blueblood to Trueblood: Ngugi wa Thiongo’s and Ralph Ellison’s Rewritings of Conrad’s "Lord Jim"

Abstract

Postcolonial re-writings of Joseph Conrad’s works rarely make use of Lord Jim, Ngugi wa Thiongo’s A Grain of Wheat being one of the few exceptions. It is also a rare example of a re-writing in which evident intertextual connections ( in this case to Under Western Eyes and Heart of Darkness, as well as The Tempest) conceal other, more deeply embedded ones (Lord Jim). Ngugi’s version of Lord Jim has at its center John Thompson, the British antagonist of all the Gikuyu characters in the novel, and a parodic embodiment of Lord Jim’s dreams of power and glory. The most salient difference between Thompson and Jim lies in the way in which they perceive their own status within the British colonial enterprise. The Oxonian Thompson is fully conscious of the ideological implications of his occupation, while uneducated Jim can barely see the surface of his. Thompson’s state-sanctioned escape from Kenya on the day of its regaining independence, read as a parody of Jim’s escape from the Patna, opens the fi eld for an incisive ideological critique of the colonial contexts of Jim’s tragedy. Ralph Ellison’s rewriting of Lord Jim is limited to the Trueblood episode of Invisible Man and focuses on the main character’s breaking of the incest taboo, which may be compared to Jim’s abandoning ship. Trueblood’s attempt to „move without moving” echoes Jim’s account of his purportedly unconscious jump from the Patna. While Jim, as well as Marlow, present these events and those that occur later, in Patusan, as versions of the Greek tragic paradigm of human transgression and divine retribution, Ellison brings Trueblood’s transgression down to a more quotidian level, substituting a family tragedy in which the gods do not intervene for the pathos with which Conrad endows Jim. Norton in this version of Conrad’s novel serves a similar purpose – he is the parodic, downsized equivalent of Brierly, the captain who commits suicide after realizing that if he had found himself in Jim’s position on the Patna he would have done the same thing. Compared with the reality of a black sharecropper’s life in Alabama, Jim’s obsession with valor and honor, as well as his lust for adventure, are simply infantile, and the imperialist underpinnings of his transgression make it a parody of taboo-breaking. Ellison’s „signifying” on Lord Jim, as far as I know, has not been hitherto noticed by critics.