1

The Version of Record of this manuscript has been published and will be
available in Textual Practice 12 Oct 2016 http://www.tandfonline.com/ Doi:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2016.1237993

He was one of us: Rortyian liberal ethnocentrism and ironic narrative voice in Joseph
Conrads Lord Jim.
Abstract
This essay puts Joseph Conrads turn-of-the-century novel Lord Jim (1900) in imaginative conversation
with the work of the contemporary American liberal philosopher, Richard Rorty; it also makes a new
case for considering Lord Jim in close relation to Conrads later political novels, Nostromo (1904), The
Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911). At first glance, Rorty and Conrad, who hardly share
the same political worldview, appear to have little in common other than their mutual predilection for
irony. Yet on closer inspection Lord Jim contains a profound critique of Rortys liberal ethnocentrism,
which is rooted paradoxically not in differences but affinities between the moral attitudes of the two
writers. What emerges from this comparison is a literary criticism actively engaged in the theorisation of
political philosophy: a criticism in which the seemingly improbable pairing of Conrad and Rorty comes
to shed new light on both.
Keywords
Joseph Conrad, Richard Rorty, irony, narrative voice, liberalism, ethnocentrism

He was one of us: Rortyian liberal ethnocentrism and ironic narrative voice in Joseph
Conrads Lord Jim.
This process of coming to see other human beings as one of us rather than as them is a matter of detailed
description of what unfamiliar people are like and of the redescription of what we ourselves are like.
Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity1
Introduction
Ford Madox Ford, Conrads friend and collaborator between 1898 and 1909, once claimed that above
all things else [] Conrad was a politician.2 During the initial period of their collaboration, Conrad was
busy writing Lord Jim, and he would go on to publish two of the three novels which cemented his
reputation as a great political novelist: Nostromo (1904) and The Secret Agent (1907). However, Lord Jim is
not usually grouped with these two novels. Instead, it tends to be considered alongside Conrads earlier
works, in particular Youth (1902) and Heart of Darkness (1899), which share with Lord Jim the same
central character (Marlow) as narrator. In this essay, I aim to show how the depth of political insight
that would characterise Conrads later output is also a central feature of Lord Jim. The earlier novel, I
will suggest, demonstrates the same political prescience as the later ones, a prescience also evidenced in
essays such as Autocracy and War (1905), which describes with terrifying perspicacity an evolution of
warfare that would emerge onto the international stage to devastating effect in 1914.3
I also want to make a case that the political insight of Lord Jim reaches beyond its historical
context. To do this, I will place Conrads work in dialogue with that of the late twentieth-century
political philosopher, Richard Rorty. More specifically, I will interrogate Rortys ethnocentrism by
placing it in imaginative conversation with Lord Jim, which Rorty unwittingly quotes in the epigraph
above, sometimes seen as the definitive statement of his political philosophy. What it means to
consider another person one of us is also the central moral issue of Conrads novel. The novels main
narrator, Charlie Marlow, spends the novel trying (and ultimately failing) to understand the ways in
which the titular character manages to be paradigmatic of Marlows community of gentlemen while
simultaneously challenging the fundamentals that define it. The catchphrase one of us also refers
directly to Marlows audience within the novel that group, integral to the global distribution of
English liberal thought under British imperialism, to which both Marlow and Conrad himself belonged.
This is made explicit in Conrads 1917 Authors Note, where he expands us to include readers of the
novel.4 Because the process of coming to see other human beings as one of us rather than as

them is so important to Rortys thought, the textual unconscious of his work is haunted by Conrads
novel, and the rest of this essay will consider the mutual implications of this haunting, examining how a
sense of Rortyian ethnos animates Lord Jim, but also how the echoes of Conrads writing have come to
inflect Rortys ethnocentric liberalism in important ways.
For Rorty and the wider liberal humanist tradition, literature is an essential component of social
and political education. However, while Rorty writes quite extensively about literature, he is generally
not as attentive as literary critics are to protocols of literary form and intricacies of narrative style.
Conversely, although literature specialists have long been attentive to politics and political concerns,
they tend with some notable exceptions not to engage with political theory in a philosophically
rigorous way. This essay sets out to redress the balance by demonstrating some of the ways in which a
conversation between literary criticism and political philosophy may produce unique and urgent insights
for both disciplines. In particular, it will show how a close examination of genre, narrative structure
and, especially, the different literary forms and functions of irony may open up important questions for
liberal political thought.
I will make the case in brief for considering Conrad in conversation with Rorty before moving
on to examine the ramifications of this conversation for both the novelist and the philosopher.
Conrads construction of community in Lord Jim, when considered alongside his ironic narrative
technique, highlights the specific ways in which Rortys philosophy postmodernises liberalisms
complicity with imperialism. More generally, Conrads ironic treatment of modes of cultural interaction
speaks to Rortyian ideas of conversation, emphasising that the very process of giving voice to the other
in liberal narratives masks inequalities between cultures, and conceals liberalisms complicity in creating,
perpetuating and widening gaps of power. But rather than suggest we should abandon the attempt to
represent other cultures, Lord Jim deploys, alongside irony, the cruder comedies of burlesque and farce
in a gesture which democratises potentially elitist liberal discourse while also making the darker sides of
both irony and ethnocentric conversationalism harder to forget.
Although ethnocentrism is generally seen as being antithetical to good liberalism, a wellrehearsed critique of liberalism is that despite its aspirations to diversity, it is a manifestation of a
specific cultural formation, tied to a western rationalist tradition that is also elitist and patriarchal.5
Rorty, self-professed philosophical gadfly, would certainly have agreed with the first part of this
critique, accepting that liberalism is a formulation both socially and historically contingent. He has been
criticised for this ethnocentric stance,6 but such critiques often misunderstand the particular challenges
of Rortyian ethnocentrism, which is problematic not because it is exclusive, but rather because its

aspirations toward inclusion resonate too easily with potentially imperialistic enlargements of liberal
political and economic influence. Notwithstanding, Rortys work raises the crucial issue of whether
liberalism is as equipped as it might claim to champion the cause of cultural diversity. Interestingly, in
his manifesto for liberalism, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Rorty suggests that the engagement
of ethnos with diversity is best facilitated not by philosophy, but through genres such as ethnography,
the journalists report, the comic book, the docudrama, and, especially, the novel (CIS, p. xvi).
Let me take Rorty at his word by looking at what Conrads fiction might have to say to him.
Rorty is well known for his conversational style, but even he might have struggled to see connections
between his own work and Conrads. Such connections are not merely wishful, however. Paul
Armstrong, for example, has argued convincingly for an affinity between Conrad and Rorty, suggesting
that he [Conrad] has a tonic, illuminating anguish about the contradiction Rorty would have us
embracethe contradiction, namely, between an ironic awareness of the contingency of all norms,
beliefs, and values and the necessity nonetheless to affirm a commitment to community, compassion,
and self-invention.7 For Armstrong, Conrad is an ironist but not a liberal, because in his work the gulf
between irony and Rortyian liberal qualities such as compassion is unbridgeable. I agree that Conrad is
no liberal in any obvious sense of the term, but in what follows I will argue that in Lord Jim, Conrads
critique of liberalism penetrates deeper than Armstrong allows. More specifically, I will suggest that the
narrative construction of Lord Jim and, particularly, the voice of its main narrator, Marlow, allows for
the articulation of familiar tensions within the political philosophy of liberalism. Lord Jim, however,
does not simply dismantle the tenets of liberalism; rather, Marlows imperialising narrative incorporates
the rapacity of colonialism, capturing a variety of voices, inflected by female and native subjectivities,
which explicitly destabilise his account. Conrads own generic flourishes, specifically his amalgamation
in Jims death of tragic and burlesque notes, remind us of problematic power relations that blight
processes of representation of description and redescription that are also central to Rortys project
of liberal enlargement. Furthermore, in the ultimate suicide of its protagonist, the novel suggests a
trajectory for liberal political engagement with others that takes responsibility for its own ambivalent
history. What emerges is a sense of Conrad as closer to Rorty on some fronts and more distant on
others. Rortys conceptual vocabulary his readily identifiable language of self-creation, ethnocentrism
and contingency possesses a profound affinity with the worlds conjured by Conrads narrative
technique, but my reading shifts the contradiction that Armstrong locates between liberalism and
ironism to become a constitutive fissure within liberalism itself.
For Rorty, language, self and community are characterised by mutual contingency (CIS, pp. 3-

69). He denies correspondence and representationalist theories of truth, instead suggesting

pragmatically that understanding is constructed through a network of metaphors what he calls our
final vocabulary used to arrive at provisional comprehension of the world. This vocabulary is final
because it cannot be defended except through circular arguments. Final, in fact, is a characteristically
ironic Rortyian term that exposes fundamental doubts regarding the validity of our own vocabulary,
simultaneously revealing the need to modify it to enlarge it, in Rortys idiom through
conversational engagement with others. Rorty calls this process of enlargement redescription and
makes it the basis for his method. By continually describing things in new ways we build transformative
understandings of the world. Final vocabulary is a feature of both individuals and communities: it is not
just the sum of our personal assumptions, but also of the assumptions that underpin cultures and
cultural formations. In this sense we are all ethnocentric: contingent on a multitude of circumstances,
but still influenced by the particular cultures and communities to which we imagine ourselves to belong
(CIS, pp. 73-80). Rorty defines ethnos as those who share enough of ones beliefs to make fruitful
conversation possible.8 Ethnocentrism, seen this way, describes the mechanism through which our
fundamental views, while not completely determined, are rooted in shared descriptions and
perspectives. In relation to western liberalisms ethnos, this is something to be celebrated, since it is a
cultural formation that aspires to diversity and equality.9 Enlargement is a key notion for Rorty because
it constitutes his practical solution to the problem of difference. The desire to enlarge our ethnos and
final vocabulary is a validating feature of western liberal culture, and imaginative engagement with
different people is central to this enlargement. Because it involves the expansion of vocabulary through
redescription, Rortyian enlargement is also a process of representation. This representational process
involves the description of the other, the incorporation of related new terms into our vocabulary, and
the transformation of self-narrative as a result of these changes.
There is another side to ethnocentrism of course: its propensity to promote intolerance and
elitism.10 It is true that Rorty is deeply patriotic and proud of the liberal traditions that define American
political identity: to criticise him on this score, though, is to underplay the importance of conversation
and cultural enlargement in his thought. Rortys ethnocentrism is not inward looking and exclusive, but
voracious in its appetite for novelty. In fact, enlargement of ethnos functionally replaces the
universalism of more traditional forms of liberalism; rather than measure humanity against a set of
truths or rights universal to all, Rorty imagines a dialogue which attempts to encompass ever more
peoples while acknowledging that there will always be some with whom we cannot converse. Note that
it is not my intention here to reclaim Rortyian ethnocentrism for the arsenal of liberal self-justification;

rather, I want to suggest that conversation and enlargement bring with them distinct problems of their
own problems that are reflected in liberalism at large. My central argument is that these problems
revolve around representation. In particular, narrative works such as Lord Jim, which have a strong
political dimension, make forms of fictional representation overlap significantly and productively with
notions of political representation. In Conrads work, challenges of fictional representation, which often
coalesce around notions of verisimilitude, bleed into questions of politics relevant to representative
democracy and to international and inter-ethnic relations. As will be seen, such overlaps, when
considered in relation to Rortys particular version of redescriptive liberalism, become profound.
Lord Jims fellowship of the craft and Rortyian ethnos
In broad Rortyian terms, Lord Jim might best be seen as exploring the ways in which identity is both
contradictory and formed in relation to particular, ethnically circumscribed communities and cultures.
Rortys sense of ethnos as defined by conversational compatibility is tested to the limit in Lord Jim by
the relationship between the narrator, Marlow, and the protagonist, Jim. Both are British sailors, bound
by a sense of common community and purpose. This bond manifests itself on different levels: it is the
fellowship of the craft (p. 101) that supports the cosmopolitan community of European seamen
working the South China Sea but, at the same time, it is inflected by a tacit nationalism. Marlow is
driven to discover what lies behind Jims story of failure. Early in the novel, Jim, along with the other
European members of the crew, abandons the Patna and leaves its native passengers to drown when it
strikes a submerged hazard. Against all odds, the ship does not sink, and as a result the European
sailors unprofessional and cowardly behaviour is revealed to the wider sailing fraternity, resulting in Jim
being cast out of the profession and shamed for life. He spends the rest of the novel fleeing his
reputation by moving from port to port until he settles on Patusan, an obscure South-East Asian
outpost. Here he assumes rule over a local (Malay) community, winning renown in the process, only to
see his reputation once again challenged, this time definitively, and his happiness destroyed.
Marlow is driven to learn more about Jim by the disjuncture between what he knows of Jims
biography and his intuitive sense that Jim is one of us (p. 38), a sailor who can intrinsically be relied
upon. Jim is of a type Marlow has seen many times before, and has indeed helped train for the service
of the Red Rag, to the craft of the sea (p. 39). Marlows syntax elides the craft of the sea with the
service of the Red Rag from 1864 onwards, the ensign of the British Merchant Service in a tacitly
imperialising gesture. Thus, in troubling Marlows sense of what makes a good sailor, Jim is effectively
shaking the foundations of an entire community defined in professional, national and imperial terms. In

Rortyian terms, Jims fall from grace ironises Marlows final vocabulary, forcing Marlow to engage in an
extensive project of redescription, both of Jim and of himself. But Conrads novel ironises Marlow in
another way by not permitting us to see him as authoritative. Jims ability to engage with cultural
difference (in the form of the residents of Patusan), and the final surrender of his own imperial identity
to their summary justice, both act as a devastating critique of Marlows own imperialising voice.
The construction of Marlows narrative voice is central to the way in which Lord Jim engages
with issues of ethnos, enlargement and identity. Its representations capture the unequal relationships of
the novels colonial setting, and even a cursory examination of its structure is enough to elucidate the
troubling dynamics of enlargement that haunt Rortys work. These representations centre on Marlows
depiction of a fellow sailor, Jim, and are relevant to the wider problems of Rortyian representation.
These problems are crystallised in two questions, both of which remain open in the novel. To what
extent are the positive aspects of Jims well-intentioned impact on Patusan no more than a shallow
gilding of the realities of colonial power and exploitation? And to what extent is Jims enlargement
simply an enlargement of empire itself? These questions are addressed in the novel by the narrative
techniques that give substance and complexity to Marlows representation of Jim and the natives of
Patusan. In part, their resolution lies in the extent to which Marlows narrative can be seen as being
undermined through irony, a process that rests on the ownership of the redescription to which Jim
himself is subjected. And at the heart of this are the multiple and contradictory voices Marlow
synthesises in order to construct his own version of events.
Imperialism, redescription and ironic narrative voice
Lord Jim has a complex narrative structure. The opening section of the novel, which relates the story of
Jims early career, and his subsequent disgrace when he abandons the Patna, is told from an omniscient
third-person perspective. Marlow picks up the narrative during the inquiry into the event, at which Jim
is debarred from sailing. The telling of Jims subsequent life until he has established himself as de facto
ruler of Patusan, is told in unclear circumstances: many times, in distant parts of the world, Marlow
showed himself willing to remember Jim [] Perhaps it would be after dinner, on a verandah draped in
motionless foliage and crowned with flowers, in the deep dusk speckled by fiery cigar-ends. The
elongated bulk of each cane chair harboured a silent listener (pp. 30-31). The final section, the tale of
Jims ultimate downfall and tragicomic death, is related in a letter to one member of Marlows shadowy
audience, a privileged man (p. 254), defined primarily in the novel by his attitudes towards Jims
colonialism: giving your life up to them (them meaning all of mankind with skins brown, yellow or

black in colour) [is] like selling your soul to a brute. [Such behaviour is] only endurable and enduring
when based on a firm conviction in the truth of ideas racially our own, in whose name are established
the order, the morality of an ethical progress (p. 255). Marlows confidant combines an ethnocentric
perspective with echoes of John Stuart Mills defence of imperialism, as expressed in his 1861 treatise
Considerations on Representative Government. Here, Mill justifies imperial rule as a measure to bring less
advanced civilisations to a point of progress where they are capable of governing themselves.11 The
privileged mans firm conviction in the truth of ideas racially our own is distinctly un-Rortyian. It is
Jim who brings doubt into the novel, both in his impact on Marlow and in his own insistent selfquestioning. Yet Jim and Marlow are no less ethnocentric than the privileged man, and they too are
members of a white male elite whose luxurious lifestyle is in stark contrast to the lives of the local
people they mix with. Furthermore, they are part of a community that is privileged, not only in relation
to the British Empires colonial subjects, but also to most of the population of Britain itself. The
privileged mans ideas are not just those of a race; they also cluster around a particular intersection of
class and gender, highlighting the problem of promoting such ethnocentrism in a world shaped by the
manifest inequalities of colonialism on both home and colonial fronts.
The way in which Marlows privileged voice assimilates the voices of others to his own account
is doubly problematic because, as his tale progresses, these voices become increasingly remote from his
own personal experience. Initially, Marlow speaks of his encounters with Jim, recalling how he first
came to know him owing to an unfortunate misunderstanding outside the court. Jims subsequent life is
reconstructed through his own reports during periodic conversations with Marlow, who keeps trying
(but ultimately fails) to help him build a new life. Their last encounter occurs after Jim has taken rule of
Patusan, and the narrative continues, reconstructing events from fragmentary [] pieces, in the letter
to the privileged man. Marlow tells the tale, however, as though he had been an eyewitness, signalling
a process of near-complete appropriation that effectively absorbs the voices and vocabularies of his
sources into his own (p. 258). However, while indicating the composite nature of Marlows voice, the
novels initially omniscient narrative undermines Marlow from an opposite position. It reminds us of
Marlows lack of omniscience; that his is a deeply personal response to Jims story. In fact, the whole
narrative is troubled by the presence of this frame narrator, being bound in a complex network of selfrefutations that highlight both Marlows fictionality and the deeply unreliable nature of his story and the
sources around which it is built. Ironically, the clash in tones between Marlows personal account and
the omniscient anonymity of the frame narrator underscores the entire fiction. The dramatic transition
between registers when the narrative switches, and the occasional resurfacing of the frame narrator to

comment on Marlows narrative, both serve to undermine verisimilitude. In addition, the frame
narrator provides a crucial link between the world of the text and the world of the reader. As one of
Marlows interlocutors, the frame narrator is a bona fide character in the novel, but as an omniscient
narrator, he is not a character but a device. By occupying this double position, both within and without
the story, the frame narrator bridges the gap between fiction and reality. He is not Conrad, to be sure,
but he speaks to both Marlow and the reader, and in this way he is able to emphasise that the novel is
also a part of the world, impacting on readers and reshaping the ethnos it depicts and critiques. Lord
Jims use of ironic fictionality makes it a compelling reflection of Rortyian ironism, which is alive to the
ways that reality and fiction, both in novels and other narratives of identity, intersect. But it also
highlights ways in which power and privilege shape these narratives, emphasising that conversations
across the boundaries of ethnos can have more in common with colonisation than exchange.
A key element in Lord Jim of this double-edged assimilation is its incorporation into Marlows
voice of the opposed accounts of Gentleman Brown, Jims antagonist in the novels final section, and
of Tamb Itam, his loyal bodyguard. In several respects, Gentleman Brown represents the opposite pole
of colonialism to Jim: un-ideological greed with no concern for the needs and wants of anyone apart
from himself. His is the extreme individualism of an amoral libertarianism that highlights the brute
force and greed that underpin colonial action. Brown mirrors Jim perfectly: he is Gentleman to Jims
Lord, a man with no given name rather than no surname, worldly and cynical to Jims nave and
idealistic. He is Jims ironic other his doppelgnger. In his position as the ironic mirror-image of Jims
colonialism, Brown also stands at the limit of my own personal tolerance for Conrads ironies: he is an
inherent part of the double-edged identity of colonialism that Conrad systematically undermines, but
also necessarily affirms. It is the nature of the irony that Conrad cannot uphold Jim without Brown;
and his partial redemption that, in the same vein, he cannot denigrate Brown without Jim suffering also.
Brown is the inescapable fact of colonialism, and cannot be ignored or glossed over with higher
purposes and good intentions. That is why Jim must take responsibility for Browns actions, and why
he must be punished for them by Doramin: because, on a crucial level, he and Brown are the same, the
two sides of colonialisms ironically divided self. Within this logic, Jim has to allow Brown to leave
Patusan alive because to deny him would be to invalidate his own position as a white colonialist reaping
privilege and comfort from his subjects. Similarly, Browns crime is Jims: the treacherous murder of
Dain Waris, and the strain it places on the future of Doramins family, are Jims responsibility because
on Patusan things are no longer working in an individualist paradigm. Western juridical notions of
responsibility have no bearing there, and the individualism associated with liberalism is invalid because

10

the individual has been jettisoned.

That is also why it is so important that Browns voice be a crucial part of the closing narrative:
for Brown is not only Jim, he is also Marlow and, by extension, Marlows audience: the privileged man,
whose statement that benevolent colonialism is like selling your soul to a brute, counterpoints Browns
own brutality to create still another ironic note, which is further compounded by the force of Jims own
firm conviction in the truth of ideas racially our own (p. 255). It is because Jim cannot live up to these
ideas that he flees to Patusan; and while these selfsame ideas contribute to his success there, they also
lead inexorably to his downfall, with Brown proving once again that Jim cannot embody the ideal for
which he has been made to stand. Jims legacy is far from enduring the novel ends with little sense of
ethical progress, and Brown, who is supposed to be the son of a baronet (p. 265), becomes the voice
of violence and exploitation that fatally lingers in the feudal roots of the chivalric and gentlemanly code.
The novels ironic stance is the result of this awareness, and of the strategy that allows it to cohere
despite the compromises it accumulates. This irony ruptures potential acquiescence, leaving an unhealable rift in the narrative which turns our reading of it into an ongoing (and essentially unfinishable)
process of redescription; for to settle on one position would be to foreclose our awareness of our own
privilege, and of the continuing inequality that is simultaneously imperialisms legacy and modern
liberalisms core.
Still, Lord Jim does not end without hope, for in the final run-up to his death Jim demonstrates
that feelings of solidarity between cultures, the enlargement of the stories we tell and audiences to
whom we can speak, may be possible after all. It is the second narrator of Jims last moments, Tamb
Itam, who demonstrates this most clearly, and whose voice we hear in the strange mythologising tone
that is employed in the narrative to describe Jims ultimate demise. We already know that Jim had been
mythologised long before his death, both by the locals after his defeat of Sherif Ali the legend had
gifted him with supernatural powers (p. 201) and by the colonialists, who incorporate Jim and Jewel
(Jims part-Malay bride) into the story of a fabulously large emerald [] as old as the arrival of the first
white men in the Archipelago (p. 211). (Note that the European myth created around Jim further
ironises the colonial project by foregrounding its preoccupation with untold wealth.) At the very end of
the novel, however, there are two bizarre instances of archaic diction that highlight this tone and draw
attention to the communal redescription that underlies it. The first is spoken by Jewel:
Ah! but I shall hold thee thus, she cried. Thou art mine!
She sobbed on his shoulder. The sky over Patusan was blood-red, immense,

11

streaming like an open vein. An enormous sun nestled crimson amongst the treetops, and the forest below had a black forbidding face.
Tamb Itam tells me that on that evening the aspect of the heavens was angry and
frightful. I may well believe it, for I know that on that very day a cyclone passed
within sixty miles of the coast, though there was hardly more than a languid stir of air
in the place (p. 310).
To compound the archaism of thee and Thou, which lends proceedings the solemn and portentous
air of a ceremony, Marlow acknowledges the implausibility of the pathetic fallacy that he attributes to
Tamb Itam. This attribution is redundant in the sense that it merely provides a gloss on Marlows own
description of the sky, blood-red [] like an open vein, which foreshadows Jims suicide. But the
gloss makes it clear that this is Marlows description even if he is rendering Tamb Itams tale in his
own words. The second instance of archaism follows swiftly, when Jim arrives in Doramins court:
He came! He came, was running from lip to lip, making a murmur to which he moved. He hath
taken it upon his own head, a voice said aloud. He heard this and turned to the crowd. Yes. Upon my
head. A few people recoiled. Jim waited awhile before Doramin and then said gently, I am come in
sorrow. He waited again. I am come ready and unarmed, he repeated (p. 312). Here, Jims words
echo the voices of his adopted community, taking up the archaic tone they have initiated. Repetition
and rhyme add to the general sense of solemnity and ritual. But at this point we have no idea what
Marlow is translating: he had not previously felt the need to render translation strange through
archaism, despite the fact that much of the earlier reported speech would not have been English. In the
Malay Archipelago there are high versions of language reserved for formal and religious occasions, and
it is possible that Conrad is displaying his awareness of this. This high language implies a shift of
register in order to demonstrate the communitys solemn attitude towards Jims actions. But if this is
the case, it only strengthens the sense of communal redescription of Jim, whose echoing of their voice
shows the extent to which he has accepted their inscription of his narrative. While the example may
seem incidental, it is in fact is a profound sign of Jims enlargement of ethnos, a powerful countercurrent to the dominant image of Jim-as-benevolent-imperialist that circulates throughout the latter
part of the text.
During the course of the novel, Jim becomes the subject of both Eastern and Western
mythmaking but, more importantly, we also see both Jim and Marlow internalise the vocabulary of the
local: of Tamb Itam (Marlow) and the natives of Patusan (Jim). These internalisations are indicative of

12

a transmission of values as well as words: in Rortys terms, it is final vocabulary that is shifting. By the
end of the novel, Jim has succeeded in marrying his individualistic chivalric values with the communal
values of Doramins clan, combining proof that he has overcome his fear of death with submission to
Doramins cathartic vengeance. As Rorty might put it, Jims suicide is conversational, his calm
announcement that I am come ready and unarmed being met by Doramins expression of mad pain
[and] rage. Marlow, for his part, prefers to reinforce Tamb Itams mythic portrayal of Jims end,
rendered through the pathetic fallacy of a the angry heavens. Rather than ignore the implausibility of
Tamb Itams account, Marlow incorporates it into his own, but also attempts to make it convincing to
his audience by providing an explanation for it with his reference to a cyclone. What is important in
both of these cases is that, while they provide a degree of redescription, their original ethnos is not
effaced.
Comedy and duplicity
At the same time, one of the passages cited above possibly indicates a less elevated register at work that
plays on another sense of the verb to come, which had been in use since the mid seventeenth century.
As so often in Conrads oeuvre, tragedy threatens to descend into farce and solemnity co-exists with
ribaldry, Jims final moments already having been prefigured by references to the element of burlesque
in his ordeal (p. 84). Burlesque degrades tragedy by associating it with the colloquial and the sexual;
here it features a typical Conradian double entendre connecting death and orgasm, as in the French la
petite mort.12 The consummation through suicide of Jims wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct
(p. 313) takes on an entirely different tone, with Jims self-actualisation (another Rortyian term)
involving the rejection of a potentially life-changing marriage to the mixed-race Jewel, and his embrace
instead of a suicidal affiliation with ideas racially his own. Conrads double entendre highlights this
unsettling transference. The burlesque tones that accompany his death undermine the dignity that
might otherwise be accorded to it, and underscore the absurdity of the tale, which, like a good farce, is
full of both literal and metaphorical falls. This is not to pretend that Lord Jim is a comic novel, rather
to suggest that comedy is a presence that threatens authority throughout. If Marlows imperialistic voice
is undermined by humour, so too are whatever elements of resistance exist in the novel. Jims rejection
of liberal notions of justice, his marriage to Jewel, and his friendship with Dain Waris are all equally
undermined in the text, reminding us that comedy can be a tool of oppression as much as an
instrument of freedom.
More than anything else, it is the subversive position of comedy in Lord Jim that opens up

13

Rortys thinking. Rorty himself chooses a comic trope, irony, to define his epistemology, but, like
Marlow, he does not consider the subtle (sometimes unsubtle) ways in which comedy threatens to
subvert the ironic methods he employs. His work does occasionally acknowledge the cruelty of irony,
its power to belittle and oppress (CIS, pp. 88-94), demonstrating an awareness of the political neutrality
of irony, which can serve authority and resistance, shoring up the structures of existing power but also
suggesting the possibilities by which such structures might be undermined. But this political neutrality
does not necessarily lead to a balance of power. Comic tropes may destabilise authority, but oppression
is rarely overcome with laughter. Acts of resistance are not necessarily effective; subversion can easily
go undetected; and even when identified, the reversible natures of irony and double entendre mean that
they can still be denied.
Conclusions: duplicity and Rortyian ethnocentrism
It is this problem of doubleness, and the duplicity that accompanies it, which I will close by
considering, because it constitutes a problem not only for Conrads writing, but also for Rortyian
ethnocentrism as a whole. Lord Jim highlights the numerous lines along which good intentions fail to
manifest positive actual outcomes, and it is equally impossible to predict the outcome of liberal projects
of self-enlargement, especially when such projects, like Jims, can so easily be subverted from within.
Gentleman Browns conversational compatibility with Jim may only be partial, but he also converses
with Marlow, and his testimony is crucial to Marlows narrative. Similarly, Jims decision to spare
Brown is part of the chivalrous tradition of magnanimity that shapes his own conduct: in granting
Brown quarter, Jim is effectively acknowledging him as a peer. Marlow himself intermittently
acknowledges the community between himself, Jim and Brown. When, having left Patusan under a
truce, Brown ambushes Dain Waris, killing him and several others in his party, Marlows evaluation of
this is surprising: It was not a vulgar and treacherous massacre; it was a lesson, a retribution a
demonstration of some obscure and awful attribute of our nature which, I am afraid, is not so very far
under the surface as we like to think (p. 304). Though this can be read as a general comment on
humanity, the referent of our nature is unclear. Given Marlows tendency to speak of Jim as one of
us, it is tempting to read Marlows interpretation of events, not as a universal comment on mankind,
but as a more specific reflection on the particular community to which he, Jim and Brown all belong
the same community that comprises Marlows audience, who are also likely to relate to the quality by
which Brown is ironically designated: gentlemanliness, with its associated norms of honour and
chivalry. The broader implication is that Jim is hopelessly nave in his assumptions, and that the norms

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that define gentlemanly behaviour are only a surface; the rapacity, vengefulness and pragmatism that
characterise Gentleman Brown are at the core.
Gentlemanly conduct has its origins in a chivalric system where honourable behaviour towards
peers did not necessarily translate between social strata. The historical reality of chivalry involved the
violent exploitation of wider populations by a warrior elite, and this reality is painfully relevant to the
relationship between Jim and Brown. Colonialism has transposed this relationship onto new territories,
crystallising its language around notions of race and colour, but as Conrads contemporary readers we
should remember that in some ways this is a repetition of the invasions and colonisations that Britain
underwent, and which are themselves formative elements of the culture of chivalry itself. The duplicity
of the novels narrative, its use of such devices as irony and double entendre, is thus reflected in the
double standards it depicts, with the gentlemanly qualities that Marlow and Jim aspire to functioning as
a surface decor that obscures the violence and vengefulness of Gentleman Brown. Although Conrads
characteristically disturbing blend of registers at once comic and tragic, alternately elevated and bawdy
is an effective means to unsettle Rortys easygoing utopianism, the duplicity readily apparent in Lord
Jim, and arguably lurking beneath the surface in Rortys writing, cuts two ways. As previously suggested,
Conrads novel reminds us of how fiction is central to our identities and shapes reality at large; but
beyond this, its black comedy also emphasises the masquerade of burlesque and the cruelty of farce.
Lord Jim can thus be seen as providing material for a critique of the fictions of identity that underpin
Rortys liberal community building. While Rorty acknowledges the potential cruelty of ironic
redescription, he has less to say about its insincerity. Conrad reminds us that irony in particular, and
fiction in general, are both forms of sham; and that while irony may be an effective strategy to
perpetuate doubt, it is equally effective in promoting deception and exploitation. For all their good
intentions, Jim and Marlow cannot extricate themselves from the dubious heritage of their own values
the honour code which ties them to Gentleman Brown, and which also binds them together, but
additionally Marlows compassion for Jim. The relationship between Marlow and Jim is exemplary of
the values Armstrong places at the heart of Rortys liberalism, namely commitment to community,
compassion, and self-invention as discussed at the beginning of this essay. Lord Jim suggests, however,
that any commitment to a community binds us to that communitys problematic history. Jims
enlargement of ethnos is pointedly not an escape from its own heritage, for at the heart of his
community, at its rotten core, the figure of Brown remains. Likewise, membership of a liberal ethnos
entails its own violent history and genealogy, in particular the relationship between liberal politics and
elite interests with its roots in oppressive feudal pasts. Lord Jim implies that enlargement is not only

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questionable because it can countenance colonisation and empire building, but also because it silently
suggests the preservation of what has come before. Rortys emphasis on contingency thus leads to a
conservatism we might not expect from him, if we might well from Conrad, though it is also reflected
in his insistence that liberalism requires no more conceptual revolutions (CIS, p. 63). It transpires that,
far from being insufficiently inclusive, Rortyian ethnocentrism is not exclusive enough; however much
it might provide us with a vocabulary for engaging with others, and for incorporating difference into
our own identities, it does not give us a similar conceptual framework for addressing our own troubled
pasts.
This brief examination of Lord Jim in relation to Rortys political philosophy has suggested that
Conrads earlier work deserves greater recognition as a political novel. Like his subsequent political
works, though in a unique context, Lord Jim engages political ideas and ideals and pushes them to their
limits. The engagement with Rortys explicitly ironist brand of liberalism helps to expose the political
imagination of Lord Jim, which in return exposes what I have called a fissure within Rortys liberalism.
Rortys (anti)epistemology, in stressing the contingency of self, community and knowledge, depends on
redescription to promote change and enlargement to accommodate diversity. However, in placing an
elitist ironic discourse at its core, it does not challenge hierarchical structures that are at odds with its
democratic intentions. As my examination of Conradian irony in Lord Jim suggests, ironic redescription
is a double-edged proposition that allows us to maintain questionable attachments to former selves.
Though this enables us to maintain a coherent sense of identity and even make progress both in our
individual and communal narrative, it also opens the door for the past to re-enter violently and against
our will. Liberal enlargements and redescriptions, which for Rorty are inescapably ethnocentric, are
shown in Lord Jim to be contingent not only on liberal imperialism (such as that advocated by J. S. Mill),
but also on historical ties between liberalism and aristocracy. What Rorty does not make clear, but what
becomes apparent in conversation with Lord Jim, is that according to Rortys own logic, all
redescriptions are enlargements more than they are transformations. Liberalisms own transformations
can be evoked in the evolution of liberties from their sense in feudal discourse as noble privileges into
our universal rights whose distribution is still distinctly uneven. Lord Jim reveals the connection
between these old and new inequalities to be a key feature of Rortys conceptual schema because
redescription cannot exclude the pasts upon which it is contingent, contemporary liberalism cannot
evade its potentially embarrassing older relations. This contradiction enables the re-entry into Patusan
of piracy and exploitation in the form of Gentleman Brown. A question remains: is ironic gesture, as a
knowing exchange between the elite circle of those who comprehend it, sufficient? Conrads use of

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burlesque and farce highlights how irony has never been the most democratic form of humour. Thus,
as much as it might enable an enlargement of ethnos, and however convincing its rationale for selfimprovement, Rortys vocabulary ultimately fails to provide us with the tools to solve, and perhaps
even adequately to enunciate, the problem that for western liberals, Gentleman Brown is one of us.

Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. xvi,
hereafter referred to as CIS.
2
Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (Boston: Little Brown, 1924), p. 57.
3
Joseph Conrad, Autocracy and War, in Notes on Life and Letters (Edinburgh: John Grant, 1925), pp.
83-114.
4
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), p. 6, hereafter, referred to
with page numbers only.
5
For a detailed consideration of the tension between universalism in nineteenth-century liberal thought,
its cultural contingency, and the relationship to imperialism, see Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and
Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1999).
6
See Bryan Fanning and Timothy Mooney, Pragmatism and Intolerance: Nietzsche and Rorty,
Philosophy Social Criticism 36.6 (2010), pp. 735-755.
7
Paul Armstrong, Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 2005), pp. 85-86.
8
Richard Rorty, Solidarity or Objectivity, in C. J. Volparil and R. J. Bernstein (eds.) The Rorty Reader,
(Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2010), p. 235.
9
Richard Rorty, On Ethnocentrism, Michigan Quarterly Review 25(3) (1986), pp. 527-29.
10
Fanning and Mooney, p. 742.
11
J. S. Mill Considerations on Representative Democracy, in J. M. Robson (ed.), Collected Works of John
Stuart Mill, (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), Vol. 19, pp. 567-68.
12
Jeremy Hawthorn, Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad (London: Continuum, 2007), p.
2.

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