"Get out!": Empire Migration and Human Traffic in "Lord Jim"Author(s): Scott A. CohenSource: NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction, Vol. 36, No. 3, Modernisms (Summer, 2003), pp. 374-397Published by: Duke University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1346096Accessed: 14/11/2010 15:34

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"Get Out!": Empire Migration and Human Traffic in Lord Jim

SCOTT A. COHEN

Traffic is not only a technique; it is a form of consciousness and a form of social relations.

Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (296)

"I don't suppose any of you have ever heard of Patusan?" (133). Chapter twenty- one of Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim begins with this question and the reader learns that the young eponymous hero has made his way to Patusan, a remote island district known by few and visited by even fewer. By this point in the novel, any reader might anticipate that though we know where Jim is, in characteristic Conradian fashion, we will soon find out precisely how he got there. And it is only two chapters later that we learn how Marlow and the trader Stein managed to dispatch Jim to "one of the lost, forgotten, unknown places of the earth" (196). In a passage that is most often read as a crucial moment in Marlow and Jim's friendship, Jim bursts into an excited elliptical stutter at the prospect of being released to this remote setting: "I've been waiting for that. I'll show yet ... I'll ... I'm ready for any confounded thing.... I've been dreaming of it ... Jove! Get out of this. Jove! This is luck at last....You wait. I'll..." (144). Here Jim endeavors to assert his readiness, that essential maritime attribute he unambiguously aban- doned by deserting the Patna, the pilgrim ship left to drift at sea while her crew sought safety in a lifeboat.

This passage narrates the moments surrounding what has come to represent a significant break in the novel's tenor and structure, resulting in what critics con- veniently refer to as the Patna and Patusan episodes. Critics have typically been less kind to the latter-which, as Fredric Jameson and others have suggested, traffics in the degraded form of romance-preferring the first half where Conrad's modernism is most visible: his unconventional use of time, his compli- cated use of indirect narration, his insistence on ambiguity, and his multiplied and variegated viewpoints.'

In addition to the significant shift in form and tone that occurs midway through the novel, this break registers most loudly in terms of space. Having been transported from the cloistered surroundings of his father's parsonage to the seemingly infinite space of exilic wandering among the ports of the Eastern Seas, halfway through the novel Jim stands on the threshold of Patusan which figures doubly as a dispatch and a retreat, a displacement and a homecoming, a descent and an ascent. Yet the move to Patusan is more than just another change in setting: it is the cessation of a particular type of movement that has dominated the novel up to this point. Conrad's life was characterized by a series of passages

1 See Jameson, The Political Unconscious, especially 208-223, and Watt 308-309.

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and dislocations, experiences he clearly draws on for the moral and ethical tale in Lord Jim.2 Writing in the shadows of the hills surrounding Pent Farm, Conrad slowly unfolded his short "sketch" of "Tuan Jim" into a complex modernist novel, a novel that is as much about space and movement through space as it is about the trials of a single character who has come in no small way to represent a crisis in modernist subjectivity.

In order to elucidate this unique and particularly modernist treatment of space and mobility, this argument locates Conrad's 1900 novel in the politics and ide- ology of empire migration during the final years of the nineteenth century and first years of the twentieth. The novel, I will suggest, foregrounds the instability of colonial space and the difficulties facing colonial administrators who were de- voted to sustaining British imperial hegemony by sending populations out into the empire. Lord Jim is thick with imperial traffic. By tossing its romantic hero into a churning sea of imperial places and ultimately casting him on the shores of a model colonial setting, the novel uniquely thematizes the turbulence of empire migration and rehearses the implications of real and imagined movement at the height of imperial administration.

Empire Migration and the New Anatomy of Empire

Debates about the proper settlement of colonies are as old as empires; but in nineteenth-century Britain, colonial settlement-or empire migration as proponents often called the practice of relocating British citizens in imperial zones-became an increasingly important topic and practice. Despite memorable calls for substantial state involvement in the movement of urban populations to the periphery, most formal emigration efforts were disorganized and suffered from a lack of funding. One familiar call for state support came from Cecil Rhodes, who argued that the danger of a "bloody civil war" was enough ration- ale for a massive resettlement of Britain's "surplus population" (qtd. in Lenin 79). Rhodes was echoing Sir John Robert Seeley's earlier suggestion that this "superfluous population" fulfill its expansionist destiny as members of the English race (Seeley 141). Indeed, most imperial-minded politicians across the political spectrum generally agreed that aggressive settlement of the colonies was a salutary approach to the imperial enterprise and domestic politics alike. Though it is not clear exactly how many of the sixteen million British subjects who left the United Kingdom between 1815 and 1914 intended to settle abroad permanently, for emigration enthusiasts this traffic was not nearly enough. The urgent call for the renewal of state support during the 1890s was met with only limited funding from the government, much to the disappointment of those who saw the colonies as "a population outlet" (Hobson 41), and privately funded charity organizations like the East End Emigration Fund and the Salvation Army continued to spearhead and bear much of the burden of resettlement efforts.3

2 See Baines, Sherry, and Najder. 3 Most modern political historians have been quick to voice their skepticism of "New

Imperialist" attempts to glean domestic benefit from colonial emigration. Eric Hobsbawm has asserted that "there is no good evidence that colonial conquest as such had much bearing on

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If the "enterprise of empire depends upon the idea of having an empire," as Edward Said famously asserted on the basis of his perspicuous reading of Conrad (11), then the politics of overseas settlement represent no less an impor- tant factor in how the imperial periphery existed in space. But more importantly, in discussions surrounding empire migration we witness the intersection of the "idea" and the material practices of empire, an intersection that is particularly frictional at this historical moment when the idea of empire was just beginning to come under siege, even though for some it seemed as if every measure of space had finally caught up with the visions of empire. Colonial emigration's structure of feeling-the subjective, emotive power of these colonial places imagined as open spaces before and beyond history, yet nevertheless intimately connected with and capable of reproducing British civilization-was under assault from the very patterns of imperial mastery that made empire migration an attractive en- terprise in the first place.

In most respects the political and social circumstances which heightened im- perial administrators' desire to populate the settler colonies with "good English stock" had not changed much since readers saw characters like Dickens's Mr. Micawber or Trollope's Alaric Tudor, Lucius Mason, and George Vavasor dis- patched to colonial settlements. What had changed was the character of the em- pire in the British imaginary. Imperialist fantasies at the turn of the century were considerably restrained by the geographical fact that the planet was largely mapped and divided. Even before Lenin's famous 1917 assertion that "the world is completely divided up, so that in the future only redivision is possible," the shape of the European colonial map had more or less been determined (77)4 Such a spatial field challenged the adventure trope that had sustained

the employment or real incomes of most workers in the metropolitan countries, and the idea that emigration to colonies would provide a safety-valve for overpopulated countries was little more than a demagogic fantasy" (69). However, this description of emigration's role in forging domestic political strategy underestimates the ideological dimensions of such efforts. The

propaganda aimed at encouraging emigration and state support was driven by the perceived danger of an "excess" of women in the British Isles, by the racial politics that conceived the

possibility and indeed necessity of out-breeding native or other colonial populations as a viable foreign policy, and by the social politics of class in light of a growing working class that threatened to overwhelm the ruling classes. As one imperial historian has suggested, "the representation of the British dominions as being lands of fresh opportunity, social equality and advancement, morally untainted by the corruption and degradation of city life in the metropole, was a feature of imperialist rhetoric and dear to the self-image of the white colonies themselves" (Keith Williams 27). Notably, demographic studies were cooked to support what would come to be called the "myth of open spaces." One such study compared a crowded England where 650 people lived in one square mile to spacious New Zealand, Canada, Australia, and South Africa where 11.7, 2.5, and 1.8 settlers shared the same space, respectively. Notably, as Constantine also notes, these studies figured only the white population in their calculations (65).

4 Since the 1950s many imperial historians have recognized, however coolly, that "the main work of imperialism in the so-called expansionist era was in the more intensive development of areas already linked with the world economy, rather than in the extensive annexations of the remaining marginal regions of Africa. The best finds and prizes had already been made; in tropical Africa the imperialists were merely scraping the bottom of the barrel." See Gallagher and Robinson 18.

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exploration and resonated with the civilizing agenda of empire for more than a century. While exotic and heroic narratives such as How I Found Livingstone, or the colonial romances of Henry Rider Haggard and Rudyard Kipling surely still had the effect of galvanizing popular interest in empire, there was a growing sense that the business of empire had become an everyday affair and that the ar- dor of adventure had given way to tourism and trade.5 The empire had been brought home and thoroughly informed the daily lives of ordinary citizens. Though imperial ideology deepened in a variety of sectors, I want to argue that the British empire slowly became a victim of its own spatial success as much as its military and political failures. Writings about empire migration at the turn of the century reflect this new perception of empire; moreover, their reaction to these circumstances helped to inform imperialist discourses well into the twenti- eth century.

No doubt the sense of imperial unity produced by the expansive patches of British imperial pink-red that dominated the globe was an important factor in selling the idea of colonial migration.6 Yet at the beginning of the century, empire was giving a new shape to the world, one less defined by swaths of imperial color than by imagined trajectories among imperial nodes of trade. Though the familiar images of "Imperial Federation Map of the World" (1886) and the "Howard Vincent Map of the British Empire" (1886) likely still dominated the popular British imaginary, new technologies of communication and transport offered a very different topography of empire.

The maps of telegraph cables championed by imperialists as "the true nerves of the Empire" provide one example. These maps, in their schematic representa- tion of planetary space, delineated an entirely new anatomy of empire. In direct contrast to the imperial "map-as-logo"-that is, the "jigsaw effect" of coloring schemes of imperial dye that Benedict Anderson distinguishes for its being "infinitely reproducible" and "instantly recognizable" (175)-the pure geometry of these straight red lines, drawn with little concern for the actual distance be- tween places, produced a barely recognizable constellation of nodes throughout the empire (figs. la-b). Imperialists hailed these maps for their "annihilat[ion of] time and space on behalf of [the nation], [giving] unity to the disunion of her un- fettered peoples, and substance to her dream of an Imperial commonwealth" (Peel 287). By reducing the contours of continents to straight lines, oceans to short gaps between cities, these telegraph maps, which often bore only the vagu- est resemblance to the geographical formations they overlaid, offered a unique symbolic ordering of space.

The telegraph map offers a graphical narration of the more general shift in spatial perceptions that many critics suggest is one of the most lasting legacies of imperialist expansion. Geography during the expansionist "Age of Empire," as one geographical historian suggests, "serve[d] the interests of imperialism in its various aspects including territorial acquisition, economic exploitation, milita- rism and the practice of class and race domination" (Hudson qtd. in Driver,

5 See Brantlinger, especially 238-53. 6 See Bell et al. and Driver, Geography Militant.

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"Geography's Empire" 27). In "mak[ing] the world one," to borrow Said's well- known claim for the geographical and cultural implications of empire, continen- tal empires not only "integrated and fused things within" their spheres of influ- ence (6), they established routes, trajectories, and networks for commerce and transport. Edward Soja's work highlights this fact: "Capitalism did not suddenly internationalize. Mercantile capital had been operating to extract superprofits throughout the world for centuries through commodity trade. Imperialism, how- ever, internationalized another circuit of capital, involved in finance, money, and investment transactions, which more efficiently organized the international economy for larger scale geographical transfers of value than had ever before been possible" (165). This new form of circulation took place in and precipitated the production of what Henri Lefebvre calls abstract space, "which includes the 'world of commodities', its 'logic' and its worldwise strategies, as well as the power of money and that of the political state. This space is founded on a vast network of banks, business centres and major productive entities, as also on motorways, airports and information lattices" (53).

This new global spatiality had a tremendous influence on how individuals in- teracted with and perceived geographical places. As Roger Friedland concisely put it: "capital turns place into space" (14). Such a purely spatial world produces significant problems when it comes to perceiving the global, according to Fredric Jameson. In his seminal though oft-derided essay on the relationship between modernism and empire, Jameson suggests that modernist narrative form regis- ters this spatial crisis. In his reading of E. M. Forster's Howards End, Jameson points to a new type of "infinity" that he describes as a "grey placelessness": "It is Empire which stretches the roads out to infinity, beyond the bounds and bor- ders of the national state, Empire which leaves London behind it as a new kind of spatial agglomeration or disease" ("Modernism and Imperialism" 57). But mod- ernist narrative is not the only discourse to register of this problem of global im- ages. In looking at other discourses (and the solutions they developed in order to continue functioning across the infinity of imperial space) we can see the difficul- ties immanent in imperialism's articulation of the global, difficulties Conrad will explore in Lord Jim.

The Sublime Geography of Getting Out

In 1898, Ernest Williams, a Royal Statistical Society Fellow and strident imperial- ist, published a series of articles and a book on the virtues of colonial migration that helped to establish him as a prominent emigration advocate. In an early is- sue of the new imperialist weekly Outlook, Williams urged his readers to "Get Out!" into the empire. Rewriting the distinction between metropolis and periph- ery and attacking anti-expansionist "little Englander" thinking, Williams's essay suggests that even the most far-flung parts of the empire can be home to every Englishman. To "Get Out," in Williams's scheme, is to affirm one's Englishness. It is all a matter of definitions, Williams suggests: "I interpret country in a larger sense ... Our country is the British Empire" (76). Of course, such racialized appeals are not unique to Williams but rather echo a longstanding trope of colonial unity

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evinced in imperialist discourses from Robert Seeley to James Froude. However, in these earlier appeals the "colony-motherland" intimacy was to be sustained on the imperial frontier despite the strain of what was recognized as a long- distance relationship.

What distinguishes Williams's articles from earlier arguments for empire mi- gration is the manner in which he is able to cast geographical space. Williams explains,

It is notfanciful to say that an Englishman, leaving Yorkshirefor Ontario or New South Wales, does not abandon his own country more than he would by goingfrom Yorkshire to Somersetshire. In both cases he journeys from his native, familiar district to another district, where he sees newfaces and new prospects: in both cases he experiences a sense of home in the companionship offellow-citizens of the same Empire, and in the enjoyment of that Empire's familiar institutions and the protection of its flag. The farther journey is not to-day much more formidable or distant really than the journey from one county to another was a few generations ago; and progress in transport inventions andfacilities is still at work, making the trip across the Empire an affair of yearly diminishing importance. (76)

Williams champions the new spatial configuration which he proudly suggests makes "getting out" an easy, almost everyday affair. "The world is getting rap- idly smaller, and traveling is becoming not only quicker and easier, but cheaper" (76), Williams reminds his readers, exploiting the conditions that the materialist geographer David Harvey would identify as "time-space compression." This ex- perience of space and time in modernity, according to Harvey, is "characterized by the speed-up in the pace of life, while so overcoming spatial barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us" (240). In the name of the emigration project-and the empire more generally-such an experience of space signified the success of British imperialism and the new networks of relations it claimed responsibility for introducing. For Williams, in particular, this new prox- imity signals the ease of transport and would almost certainly result in increased human traffic to the empire.

While this mobility became a crucial rallying point for imperialist politicians and empire migration enthusiasts, the spatial dynamic upon which it rested pro- duced rather ambiguous results for the structure of feeling cultivated by the em- pire migration movement, a structure of feeling that depended on the affective possibilities of specific remote places flying the Union Jack. On the one hand, the totalizing optics of imperialism, what J. A. Hobson called "the lust of the spectator" in his well-known discussion of Jingoism (215), allowed the empire migration enthusiast to delight in the shrinking of the globe. After all, such a condition underwrites Williams's suggestion that a trip to Somersetshire was equivalent to a voyage to New South Wales. Yet on the other hand, in many re- spects, the cartographic pleasure gained by a new global outlook was enjoyed at the expense of empire relocation which depended not only on the promise of vast open spaces but also on the specific articulation of legible identities ascribed to places within the empire. Quite simply, the success of appeals to "Get Out"

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depended on there being a place to get out to, a place that would be attractive to members of a metropolitan population who saw themselves living at the center of the world, with the trophies of unprecedented imperial conquest exhibited just outside their doors. The structure of feeling evident in more than a century of colonial narratives depended on the very basic fact of distance. As Raymond Williams put it in The Country and the City, "the lands of the Empire were an idyl- lic retreat, an escape from debt or shame, or an opportunity for making a for- tune" (281). In light of new projections of global space, emigration enthusiasts found themselves in a difficult position, yet not one beyond their powers to ne- gotiate with some imaginative interventions.

Against Melancholy Gravitation

If the difficulty of articulating the possibilities of a specific place posed any ob- stacle to the empire migration enthusiast, then unreflective movement offered at least an immediate solution. With the "abolishment of space and time," the movement of human populations became the driving force of imperialist plan- ners during the period. In 1904, the imperialist geographer H. J. Mackinder of- fered a formula for Britain's global supremacy. Mackinder famously asserted that understanding "the mobility of power"-from roaming ancient tribes to rail and steam locomotion-would lend a new "geographical causation in universal history" (Mackinder 422).

The belief that the success of the empire depended on mobility was carried from the nascent field of geopolitics to the seemingly mundane work of moving people out of the crowded imperial city. William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army and preeminent empire migration enthusiast, suggests as much when he fantasizes a constant flow of human traffic to the empire. Booth pro- claimed: "What I think is required, and what I should like to see realised, would be a bridge across the seas as it were, to some land of plenty, over which there should be constantly passing, under conditions as favourable as the circum- stances would allow, our surplus population, instead of its melancholy gravita- tion, as at present, down to the filthy slums, hated workhouses, the cruel casual wards, the hopeless prisons, and the like" (142-43). Booth's idea of a bridge, figu- rative as it was (though I should note that Booth also worked on plans for a rail- road from England to Australia but gave up at the apparently insurmountable obstacle presented by the English Channel), demonstrates a particular sense of idealized geographical space. As both a place and a form of mobility, Booth's bridge to the colonies is as much a trajectory and condition of transit as it is a site in itself.

When given greater space to articulate an argument for colonial settlement, Ernest Williams indicates that he recognized and was prepared to address the difficulties presented by the abolition of space and time which of course were the very conditions he celebrated in his essays in the Outlook Williams's book-length argument for empire migration, The Imperial Heritage, speaks directly to this spa- tial dilemma by attempting to accommodate totalizing notions of geographical space. The Imperial Heritage blends statistical data of the Colonial Yearbook,

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historical narratives of individual places, and colonial genealogy. What becomes clear in Williams's book is that the romance of empire, no matter how far away its destinations might be, begins and ends with maps. Williams asks,

Have you everfelt thefascination of a map of any part of the British Empire? If you have not, get hold of the first map-the bigger the better-of any portion of the Empire (it matters not which), and just pore over it. The sheet before you will grow into an entrancing dream of seas and islands, of mountains and lakes, of rivers and plains, of vast expanses, and of horizons limited only by the visual powers of the imagination.... From this panorama of Nature's majesty you turn almost with relief to the coloured patches and borders which betoken men's presence; for they show you that men do live in these remote regions, or at least have traversed them, dividing up the expanses into provinces and counties as at home.... Finally, you become possessed of the glorious consciousness that through every part of these regions, and of many more, the law of the Queen of England runs; every wind that blows across these plains and mountains unfurls a Union Jack from itsflagstaff the whole land is part of your Imperial heritage as afree-born English citizen. (19-23)

Such a reading model enhances the draw of geography in the face of projections of abstract space and reinvigorates a withering adventurist geography. Through enough study the "glorious consciousness" of empire unfolds before and within the reader as a totalizing vision. Williams models an affective geographical expe- rience for the potential emigrant, drawing out the particulars, reinstating an itin- erary, and imbuing the familiar map with mystery. Having been transported imaginatively to the empire, having been told numerous tales of the imperial pe- riphery in adventurous terms which depended on "the dark places of the earth," the armchair imperialist could, with Williams's new imperialist reading tech- nique, face the settled and charted map with renewed vigor. In The Imperial Heritage there is no longing for the vast, blank, uncharted spaces that Conrad's Marlow would recall. And while the proximity to England is gone, a certain in- discriminacy of location exists in Williams's suggestion that "any part of the empire will do" for his imaginative exercise in mapping. In a book that paradoxi- cally does not contain a single map, Williams turns from the embrace of modernization that marked his Outlook essays to marshal a form of romance that infuses the landscape with new adventure. In this romantic topography, Williams relishes in climbing the "herring-bone" etchings that denote mountain ranges, navigating the "patches of blue" representing "great wastes of water," and touring among the various "proofs of human habitation."

Williams's migration optics painfully elaborates on a totalizing vision of em- pire in order to locate the reader imaginatively in the colonial setting, reactivat- ing abstract space with the imagined footprints of the empire emigrant or colo- nial administrator. Michel de Certeau charts a similar relationship between individual movement and totalized and mapped space, while stressing the im- minent contestability of mapped spaces. For de Certeau, maps are documents of barbarism par excellence; they "colonize space" and enclose the spatial practices and processes that produced them:

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The map thus collates on the same plane heterogeneous places, some received from a tradition and others produced by observation. But the important thing here is the erasure of the itineraries which, presupposing thefirst category of places and conditioning the second, makes it possible to move from one to the other. The map, a totalizing stage on which elements of diverse origin are brought together to form a tableau of a "state" of geographical knowledge, pushes away into its prehistory or into its posterity, as if in the wings, the operations of which it is the result or the necessary condition. (121)

In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau explores the "erotics of knowledge" that inform the urban modernity. Through his articulation of various spatial practices which figure as tactics to undo the "scopic drive" of architects and planners, de Certeau helps move us beyond the tired binary of place and space.7 What distinguishes de Certeau from other cultural geographers is the recognition that humans play a crucial role in shaping geographical knowledge as well as the spaces that they occupy in everyday life. Individuals move. This speaks to the heart of empire migration enthusiasts' goals and obstacles in settling the colo- nies. In the locus of de Certeau's theorized city where the elevated observer is seduced by the notion of becoming merely a viewpoint, we can discern the impe- rial geographer standing above an utterly readable sprawling global space where difference has been effaced. The imperialist is transformed into a global voyeur whose scopic drive is matched by nineteenth-century narratives of home and away.

The conflict then encountered by the architects of empire migration is clear. Although they might prefer operating from the elevated position of the global strategist whose lust for the panoramic and panoptic produced the totalized vi- sion of networks of capital, emigration enthusiasts were also utterly dependent on the anonymous urban wanderer. The success of empire migration campaigns depended on a fusion of the "scopic drive" of the jingoist and the "pedestrian rhetoric" of the potential emigrant. Imperialists consequently faced a secondary, subterranean crisis of colonial migration: in the process of "getting out," indi- viduals might simply wander out of the empire (Keith Williams 25). This poten- tial is clear in the very vocabulary of emigration campaigns. The terms "Empire Settlement," "Overseas Settlement," "Empire Migration," which notably evoke a specific albeit broadly conceived notion of place of relocation, were positively charged. Whereas the term "emigration" was "regarded almost as synonymous with exile" (Amery qtd. in Keith Williams 25). Well into the twentieth century, the anxiety over exile within the empire and a vast British diaspora so deeply marked empire settlement projects that when Parliament finally began serious

7 De Certeau not only changes the terms of the debate, but suggests a more supple dialectic that considers real and imagined movement: "a space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction, velocities, and time variables." Place suggests, for de Certeau, a schematic of positions in a field: "it implies an indication of stability" (117). In de Certeau's formulation, "space is a practiced place."

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consideration of the Empire Settlement Act of 1922, much of the debate over the legislation centered around the hospitality of settler societies.8

To dismiss Williams's and Booth's exhortations as the shrill cries of jingoists is to risk misreading the architectonics of imperial movement on a global and local level. For what is particularly notable in Booth's and Williams's work is the con- tradiction that characterizes empire settlement efforts and the first imaginative solutions to a global image dominated by abstract space-the romance of space and movement over imagined bridges. As de Certeau helps to make clear, the attempt to imagine the totality of empire, the fantasy of open spaces, the imag- ined bridge to the colonies, the embracing of "time-space compression," all result in complicating the fundamental tropes that had constituted and sustained how the colonies had been imagined for two centuries. The itinerary, the journey, the mission are threatened by the projection of abstract space, and all that remains, like city names on a telegraph map, are the signifiers of places outside of lived experience. For a metropolitan audience, empire migration propaganda had to fend off the specter of illegible infinity. In large part, this was done by converting the nodes representing imperial outposts across the empire into real places con- nected not only by telegraph cables but also by imaginary bridges.

In 1886, James Froude published Oceana: or England and Her Colonies, a 341- page travel narrative of his trip around the world surveying "the empire of Oceana." Froude invites his readers on a luxurious journey through the clubs, gardens, terraces, and mansions of colonial outposts and white settler colonies. In asserting the consanguinity of these distant places, Froude elaborates on the notion of the imagined community of empire: "The people of England have made the colonies. The people at home and the people in the colonies are one people. The feeling of identity is perhaps stronger in the colonies than at home. They are far away, and things to which we are indifferent because we have them, are precious in the distance" (13). This obverse voyeurism involves a gaze that is marked by a global optics filtered through nostalgia. While the goal of imperial unity came closer to being realized by collapsing or bridging real geographical distance, during this period the very valuation of distance was being reconsidered-from the allure of distant lands or peoples ready for discovery or conquest to the comfortable proximity of settler colonies reproducing British culture and society abroad. This reevaluation stemmed from not only immigration into the British Isles but the manner in which imperialists perceived the possibility and indeed the necessity of more voyages out.

I have been tracing the tension that an imperialist geography faced at the turn of the century-between the projection of abstract space and the attempt to delve into the possibilities of place within the geographic logic of imperialism, between the collapse of distance and the invitation of distance, between the romance of totalizing maps and the realism of ground-level settlement. The symbolic econ- omy of location within the discourses of empire settlement had always been

8 Notably, the Empire Settlement Act of 1922 represented the most significant state contribution to the effort of empire resettlement and followed closely the less ambitious resettlement efforts for former servicemen. See Keith Williams 22-44; see also Hansard, 153: 575-656 and 154: 902- 31.

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dependent on the prospective settler whose "pedestrian rhetoric," to borrow de Certeau's term, narrated the voyage out or, as Froude described it, took "leaps in the dark ... to find unexpected places" (15).

The Turbulence of Getting Out

Arguably the most memorable "leap" in modern fiction is Jim's jump from the Patna, an event that sets the novel's hero into motion circuiting the major trading routes of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Unlike Froude's audience, readers of Lord Jim could not exude the same confidence in colonial spaces; for we quickly learn that there are no guarantees for Jim when it comes to finding a place on the periphery. So when an opportunity for redemption and geographical stability presents itself, Jim jumps-this time with every bit of consciousness. This later jump is narrated in Jim's oathful stammering with which we began this essay: "I'll show yet ... I'll ... I'm ready for any confounded thing.... I've been dreaming of it ... Jove! Get out of this. Jove! This is luck at last.... You wait. I'll..." (144).

"Get out of this"-the utterance does not simply emerge from a sudden con- vulsive stutter; rather it is engendered by more than three years of movement through the Eastern Seas. Jim is always haunted by the epistemological and moral crisis produced by his "jump" from the pilgrim ship. Consequently, the terms that define Jim's movement, especially his "withdrawals," become points of painful semantic contention. These conditions are so traumatic that the terms used to describe Jim's movement undergo a considerable amount of revision throughout the novel. While Jim is resolved to let the repressive "it seems" apply to his jump from the Patna as long as possible, Marlow's interest is animated by this very resolution of apparent denial. In order for the status of the "jump" to be held in suspension-for it to merely "seem"-cognates like "clear out" must be exercised instead and quickly become markers for describing not only the gen- eral abandonment of the Patna but also for Jim's shipmates' utter abdication of culpability. Though Jim insists that he could not "think" of "clearing out" like the others-"I may have jumped, but I don't run away" (94)-Jim's stubborn assertion is juxtaposed with Marlow's description of the youth's footsteps on the gravel outside, "absolutely running, with nowhere to go to" (95).

If Jim's utterance is one that emerges out of lexical torment-out of circumstances which make "get out" singular in its being the only descriptor available for his final withdrawal to Patusan-Marlow's response to the youth's sanguine determination is barbed with both caustic irony and pity at the obvi- ousness of Jim's predicament: "Where's the wonder he wanted to get out, meant to get out, meant to stay out-by heavens! And I talked about proper frames of mind!" (144). By punctuating Jim's passage to Patusan with Ernest Williams's exhortations in the Outlook, exhortations with which Conrad was almost cer- tainly familiar,9 the novel not only signals the emigratory turn in the novel, a

9 Conrad almost certainly read Ernest Williams's articles while he watched for his own contribution, "Tales of the Sea," a review of Cooper and Marryat, to appear on the pages of the imperialist weekly. Williams's first article, "Get Out!" was published in February 1898; three

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turn recognized by most critics when they read the Patusan section as a colonial allegory, but again foregrounds the terms of movement and relocation in the novel. Even within the confines of the text, "get out" is a curious spatial descrip- tor, a phrase that lends to the question of whether or not Jim has in fact been get- ting out long before his dispatch to Patusan, that remote island region "three hundred miles beyond the end of telegraph cables and mail-boat lines" (172).

By focusing so much attention on Patusan as an allegorical (post)colonial space, critics have missed the significance of the spatial story of Jim's earlier lives. In the first half of Lord Jim, Conrad offers a specific figuring of space that is intimately tied to the notion of colonial traffic and emigration which, as I have indicated above, is a more complicated spatial configuration than merely an "escape from the home country" (Fleishman 99). Here I want to consider the spa- tial story of Jim's tenure as "a seaman in exile from the sea" (4) as an antecedent factor that ultimately informs Conrad's projection of a colonial "contact zone" in Patusan.

The topography of the first half of Lord Jim features the proliferation of places and non-places. Though we might safely follow the critical tendency to read these locations as unambiguously imperial, we should reconsider what specifi- cally determines their relation to the formal imperial project. For while Jim's be- havior in Patusan clearly resonates with the ruthlessness of other colonial "Jims" we might have encountered in our travels on the waters where the Pacific meets the Indian Ocean, in the Patna episode Conrad attempts to advance a spiritual narrative dominated by lofty discussions of crime and punishment. Benita Parry effectively untangles these filaments to suggest an unambiguous though thor- oughly vexed connection between the novel and the ideology of imperialism. Honor, justice, and the "moral consensus" binding the community of seamen-all of which are hauled in for interrogation at Conrad's writing desk-participate in imperialist ideology or underwrite the historical facts of empire (Parry 86). Yet such an Ideologiekritik of Lord Jim is admittedly more diffi- cult than examining Heart of Darkness, "An Outpost of Progress," or Nostromo, where imperialist pillaging is portrayed in a manner ready-made for such discussions.10

months later in April, Conrad's "Tales of the Sea" finally appeared in print. In a letter to E. L. Sanderson dated February 1898, Conrad described the periodical in the following terms: "There is a new weekly coming. Its name The Outlook; its price three pence sterling, its attitude-literary; its policy-Imperialism, tempered by expediency ... one of its contributors Joseph Conrad." See Conrad, Collected Letters 34.

10 The difficulty presented by the setting of the Eastern Seas is reflected in political readings of Lord Jim which at times can seem semantically strained in their delivery: the smoky verandas where Marlow delivers much of his narrative become "colonial verandas"; nearly everyone skimming across the waters of the novel are unambiguously "connected to the colonial service"; Marlow's audience must be made up of colonial planters and businessmen. This adjectivally driven criticism often yields sophisticated contrapuntal readings that account for how imperialist ideology penetrated everyday life during the period. Still, the a priori configuration of this space does not allow us to account for how this space is produced and how it might figure in imperialist discourses from.the period. See, for example, Fleishman 97- 98 and Conroy 31.

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If, as Lefebvre suggests, the social space of everyday life is produced through specific, interlaced historical practices, then what codes the space of the first half of Lord Jim as imperial is its traffic. Take the placid waters of Conrad's Eastern Seas, which Jameson seductively calls the "non-place of the sea." Jameson rightly highlights the dialectical formation of the space of the sea by quickly complicat- ing his "non-place" determination to suggest that "the sea is the empty space between the concrete places of work and life; but it is also, just as surely, itself a place of work and the very element by which an imperial capitalism draws its scattered beachheads and outposts together" (Political Unconscious 213). Clearly, work and labor convert the openness of the sea from the blank uninhabitable blue spaces on a map to strategic networks of power. More importantly, how- ever, the surplus geographical value, so to speak, of labor on the sea is the traffic that it produces and perpetuates. Traffic here is more than a specific "form of consciousness and a form of social relation," as Raymond Williams would sug- gest (296). In its execution, sea traffic engages in the territorialization and reterri- torialization of space: quite literally, the activity of charting these non-places is what codes them as specifically imperial and erases earlier non-Western landmarks in favor of ports-of-call flying particular flags. In this respect, de Certeau's conception of space-"as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate it, temporalize it" (117)-is particularly useful for discussing the sea. Insofar its vast blank spaces are only legible as a strata of trajectories and vectors between places, the sea poses both challenges and opportunities for im- perialist mappings.

Appropriately, then, our introduction to Jim is through a catalog mapping his trajectory across vast oceans. By the end of the third paragraph of the novel, Jim's movement has already been charted by the anonymous narrator: "He retreated in good order towards the rising sun, and the fact followed him casually but in- evitably. Thus in the course of years he was known successively in Bombay, in Calcutta, in Rangoon, in Penang, in Batavia-and in each of these halting-places was just Jim the water-clerk" (4). Jim is so defined by his movements (and ironi- cally his immobility in the case of the training school incident and his unper- ceived mobility on the Patna jump) that we learn of the "halting-places" consti- tuting his trajectory before we learn of his parsonage origins. Ordinarily in Conrad's seafaring world, we would expect a trajectory to be determined by an intended destination. But partly from the facts of narration and partly from his exilic situation, Jim's trajectory is formulated quite differently.

What at first appears to be a clear trajectory summarized as Jim's general eastward bearing is quickly complicated when the facts of Jim's relocations are revealed. Conrad presents Jim's early history as an intricate relationship between movement and position. As readers we travel to a variety of places; we partici- pate in Marlow's unique interest in Jim's case; Jim's wandering is paralleled in the narrative leaps that characterize the first half of the novel. Such quantum leaps are linked together, of course, by a forward momentum, by a voice in the darkness, and by our faith that "one of Marlow's inconclusive experiences" won't leave us utterly stranded (Conrad, Heart of Darkness 21). Yet unlike Heart of Darkness, Jim's travels cannot easily be construed as following a mythic itinerary.

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Nor does the spatial form of the novel allow us, at least in the first half, to settle. Conrad's decision not to let Jim settle during the first half of the novel-even foregrounding Jim's apparent disgust for the sedentary life reflected in his movement among the "gossiping crowd" (9)-builds directly on the sort of ad- venture fiction which sent Jim to sea in the first place.

Insoluble Geographies

The first half of Lord Jim presents at least two different types of space-time rela- tions, what M. M. Bakhtin called chronotopes (84). Clearly borrowing from Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, Conrad interweaves the chronotope of the road with the chronotope of chivalric romance, delineating a vexing dialectic of the strange and familiar. In following the idealistic youth as he cuts across vast open spaces, Marlow's movements resemble the errant investigator or detective. After all, it is the "mystery" of Jim-a word that Marlow uses some fifteen times to describe his young friend-that keeps the narrative moving and prefigures the ironic dis- tancing of the "privileged reader" who attends to the concluding chapters from high above the imperial metropolis. The experience of these spaces from the per- spective of the mobile spectator, what might be called the chronotope of the er- rant detective or ancient mariner, becomes of central importance here. For out of this intersection, or to put it more precisely, out of this collision of chronotopes, we are reminded of the spatial story at the heart of empire migration propa- ganda. On the one hand, Marlow exhibits a desire for understanding that has almost no spatial bounds and always precipitates a vertical or panoptical desire to penetrate from above the "insoluble" problem of Jim. On the other hand, Jim lives with a vexed relationship with space and the concomitant effects on time caused by the unique condition of having nowhere to go and an unlimited amount of time to get there.

Thus Conrad formulates a form of time-space affect which comes into direct contact with what we might call the chronotope of empire migration that domi- nated the structure of feeling of empire settlement discourses. Unlike a nineteenth-century travel narrative or emigration fantasy where movement de- velops as a prelude to a specific affective relationship with a place, Jim's move- ment through the Malayan landscape in the years immediately following the in- quiry and in advance of his final relocation to Patusan goes largely without narration. Instead, Jim's movement mirrors the lines of telegraph cables until he is finally released to a place beyond their circumscription. Without a destination informing his movement-"He was running. Absolutely running, with nowhere to go to" (95)-Jim's traffic, the internal and external sets of relations that form his emigratory consciousness, itself determines the specifics of movement. Sig- nificantly, midway through the novel we learn that Marlow's catalogue of Jim's relocations is incomplete: "I have told you these two episodes at length to show his manner of dealing with himself under the new conditions of his life. There were many others of the sort, more than I could count on the fingers of my two hands" (119). The episodes we know the details of, however, give us an under- standing that each successive recognition both locates Jim in and inspires his

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movement through geographical space. Without the specter of recognition and its repetition as it resonates with the crisis in the last moments aboard the Patna, Jim, who is always seen as fading, could potentially fade into anonymity and out of the narrative.

But Jim is not allowed to fade away. In his constant flight from the disgrace of the Patna incident and inquiry, Jim's experience exhibits, through the distress and calamity that recognition carries, a traumatic and tortured version of what David Harvey terms the compression of space and time. As one never known to shy from a hyperbolic rendering, Marlow starkly portrays Jim's spatial plight following the inquiry: in a world "which to some seems so big and that others affect to consider as rather smaller than a mustard-seed, he had no place where he could-what shall I say?-where he could withdraw" (104). The world seems to collapse in on Jim as he exhibits some of the elements associated with "time- space compression." Yet notably, this treatment of space ultimately runs counter to how imperialists envisioned space and time, where space is supposed to give way to time. In the narration of Jim's spatial story, Conrad denies Jim the speed and ease of movement that a smaller world would permit. In Marlow's digres- sive delivery, time is extended and distorted." The novel is marked by relocation after relocation, whether it is Jim's actual relocations or Marlow's inquiring trav- els, effectively shaping its chronology around the latter's desultory inquiries.

If chronology suffers certain inconsistencies under the weight of space, then to what do we owe the torment of space? Clearly the theme of Jim's exilic plight is in no small measure responsible for producing these circumstances, but the novel's geography is more complicated than that. Indeed, the narrative structure of the first half is, as Jameson has suggested, of a writerly nature and schizo- phrenic in its narrative loops and turns. But less often recognized is that the ge- ography of this section reflects a similar psychosis. Jim's trajectory-Bombay, Calcutta, Rangoon, Penang, Batavia-is presented with seductive clarity. The specific starting point of Jim's travels following the inquiry, however, is radically unstable and almost indeterminate. The name of the Eastern port host to the in- quiry that set Jim in motion is conspicuously absent from the text, though critics generally agree the geographic logic of the novel suggests Bombay. Considering the extensive critical interest in the novel, this point has come under great scru- tiny over the past century of textual exploration. More distressing, then, is the fact that the nautical terms of the novel do not quite match. The narration of the

The novel's unique treatment of chronology, as Watt has suggested, is particularly evident during the period following the Patna inquiry when Jim's relocations affect the novel's treatment of time. Watt further argues that the novel uses time for the purpose of "narrative impressionism": "[T]he chronology of this period is quite indeterminate, and even mildly inconsistent if looked at closely. Four of Jim's particular jobs are specified ... Marlow says that there were 'many' other episodes" (Watt 304). In pointing to some inconsistencies of time in Marlow's narrative (merely two of Jim's relocations lasted six months each, yet the entire period is designated as approximately three years), Watt prioritizes the effects of chronology on the reader. But while Watt asserts that "the inconsistency is of no particular importance except that it illustrates how Conrad subordinated chronological consistency to the needs of the narrative" (304), a more complex matrix of spatial conflict is registered here, and with each successive "movement to the past and the future" we are transported a great distance.

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travels of the Patna are "navigationally confused," as Hans van Marle and Pierre Lefranc have demonstrated. Most everything else is either inconsistent or spa- tially troubled notwithstanding Conrad's unusual attendance to specifics. Given Patusan's status as a colonial settlement and in light of my above claims about the turbulence of empire migration, it is not particularly surprising that despite being consistently shrouded in mist and apparently falling off the known earth Patusan is one of the only geographically consistent places in the novel, both within the narrative's logic and the real geography of the Pacific and Indian Oceans.12

While some circumspection is required when applying the rigor of real world coordinates to a work of fiction, such location games reveal more than simply the ability of some literary scholars to translate fiction into physical geography. Per- haps we should afford some latitude to an author who presents an ancient mari- ner figure relating the travels of a character who thinks he belongs to the world of adventure fiction. Moreover, we might be tempted to believe that the crossing of the spatial story's wires allows Conrad to explore the heights of moral phi- losophy-that if the "one of us" universalizes, then geographical specificity would only particularize Jim's plight, attenuating the sweeping applicability of the narrative. But at the same time, the text is rife with enough specifics that might lead us to think that location was important.

Yet the very fact that position is indefinite in the face of geographical details lends to a specific sort of reading of the text where the difficulty of triangulating a position within known coordinates effectively thematizes movement over ac- tual location. This is in accord with Conrad's emphasis on the subjective nature of space: space, like the moments of recognition, is determined by Jim's own projections. As Jim moves-and as the novel progresses-the number of secret sharers apparently grows, a fact Marlow only reticently reveals and in propor- tion to his growing intimacy with Jim. For as Marlow explains,

To the common mind he became known as a rolling stone, because this was the funniest part; he did after a time become perfectly known, and even notorious, within the circle of his wanderings (which had a diameter of, say, three thousand miles), in the same way as an eccentric character is known to a whole countryside. For instance, in Bankok, where he found employment with Yucker Brothers, charterers and teak merchants, it was almost pathetic to see him go about in sunshine hugging his secret, which was known to the very up-country logs on the river. (119-20)

12 See also Sherry and Lippe. I am much indebted to these studies for outlining the specific nautical trajectories and their rigorous geographical and historical explication of the novel. From the geographical facts culled from the text critics have argued that two seemingly incommensurate strains of geographical imagination exist in the novel: "on the one hand we ... can watch with ever-renewed interest identifiable fragments of experience-places, episodes, and people-being combined or fused together in rich and varied patterns" and "on the other hand, however, at a surprisingly early date after Conrad had left the sea, his handling of sea matters sometimes became uncertain, or vague, or even erratic, and appears to have been perturbed by imaginative factors of another sort" (van Marle and Lefranc 129).

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Marlow's simile suggesting equivalence between the "trading seas" and the countryside is interesting in two ways. In a novel that has set about tying Jim's failures to his inglorious beginnings, the notion that he returns to the status of a provincial oddity among the community of seamen is somehow reassuring, and by analogy further develops the organic nature of that community. The travelers of the seas of Lord Jim are not alien to but are in fact intimately connected with those marking the landscape of a place like Jim's father's parsonage, where "people [live] in cottages without disturbing the ease of mind of those whom an unerring Providence enables to live in mansions" (4). But significantly, Conrad's association of the sea with rural society also replicates the metropolitan "myth of open spaces" where social formations might simply be transplanted to virgin territory on the periphery and suffer only the pleasing shock of fresh air. This specific vantage is only possible from the "privileged reader" whose outpost above the imperial metropolis offers a unique perspective on the trading world of distant seas. Indeed, the fusion of these spatial configurations and projections was a vision that empire migration enthusiasts might not entirely rebuke.

If at times Lord Jim offers a portrait of the sea as a rural zone or hinterland in a manner the emigration enthusiast would enjoy, it does so only to later unravel this perception with the specific movement of colonial traffic. The fusion of a highly subjective notion of space with an indefinite and unyieldingly mobile ge- ography, where place after place is available yet unavailable in the face of recog- nition, illustrates a specific notion of geographical space that formed the crux of empire migration's crisis with space. While Jim experiences some elements of a shrinking world, his experience in that smaller world is not the comfortable ex- perience of modernity imperialists like Williams or Booth might have imagined for him. For while space has collapsed, time has not. This uneven triumph of modernity has a double effect. First, insofar as we are meant to sympathize with Jim, we clearly see that there is no place for him to go or "get out" to until the appearance of Patusan. We sense that the world is getting smaller, a fact rein- forced by Conrad's cloistered community of the sea where the chances of Marlow running into Jim are inexplicably high. Secondly, the novel's emphasis on the drag caused by movement expands the world for the reader. The three years of Jim's exile become an open expanse for us to imagine Jim's movement to a variety of unnarrated places where each leap is only into darkness and never an escape but a repetition of an earlier movement.

Jim's movements also represent the denial of the scopic drive associated with global imperialism's geographical fervor. In Lord Jim we are reading what de Certeau calls the pedestrian rhetoric, the enunciation of Jim's movements across colonial spaces where each narrated relocation's affective force is conveyed to the reader. In large part, Jim's pedestrian rhetoric forgoes mapping and becomes merely a trajectory, akin to the way his ability becomes "[a]bility in the abstract" (3, 4). Conrad refuses the scopic drive of narrative that had predominated in many discourses of the nineteenth century, novelistic, geographic and imperial. This is where the problem of emigration comes into focus: for as much as empire migration enthusiasts recognized the need to fill spaces with white colonial set- tlers, the need to set colonial footprints on the periphery, they misunderstood the

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manner in which a pedestrian rhetoric forms a tactic, reterritorializing and in- deed liberating spaces by denying or altering the premapped space imperial planners might have imagined.

Thus Jim's traffic signifies the development of a specific type of mobility and spatial consciousness that one critic has rightly described as a condition between exile and diaspora: "Lord Jim could be considered an exilic bildungsroman, in which exile becomes a precondition for a rite of passage in a global framework" (Israel 58). I would further contend that such a consciousness is formed by and plays out in the specific context of the strategies and internal struggles of empire migration. This would suggest that a specific sort of ideological negotiation is at work in Conrad's novel. The ease of the "bridge" to the colonies and the lacka- daisical nature of travels to the periphery are denied when the novel highlights the sheer difficulty of moving within the perimeters of these ideological struc- tures. Moreover, the ideological structures that bind people together on the pe- riphery, what allowed Ernest Williams to imagine a "country in a larger sense" in a smaller world, are revealed as oppressive forms. The "one of us" that makes Jim inscrutable to Marlow also makes Jim's crime legible at every relocation, re- versing the anxiety of empire migrationists who constantly feared that in their relocation people might fall out of the empire. The entire notion of a bridge to the empire emerged to deal with precisely this problem: that under the stress of relo- cation or movement the bonds of empire would fail. Relocation is necessary and registers its psychic toll on Jim so long as he carries the secret of his past, so long as he is "one of us," so long as he is in the "country in a larger sense."

Repetition in Lord Jim, J. Hillis Miller suggests, is most evident in its narrative and images: "Lord Jim is a chain of repetitions, each event referring back to others which it both explains and is explained by, while at the same time it prefigures those that will occur in the future" (34). Miller's reading asserts that such repeti- tion of images and narrative elements "weave[s] a fabric of words which is inca- pable of being interpreted unambiguously, as a fixed pattern of meaning" (31). While this is most certainly the case, repetition also has an ideological dimension, especially when it comes to locations on the periphery of empire. When we look at the treatment of space in light of this repetitive ethos, two countervailing forms of repetition determine Jim's traffic: the force of "one of us" and the force of relocation produced by recognition. These two movements are inseparable, just as recognition figures to both locate and relocate Jim in the narrative. But it is in this matrix that the novel most clearly articulates a spatial field inhospitable to the notion of emigration settlement.

In focusing on the recursive and mobile character of identity, Conrad reveals that a national culture must be able to travel. As Homi Bhabha's work has taught us, "the scraps, patches and rags of daily life must be repeatedly turned into signs of a coherent national culture, while the very act of the narrative perform- ance interpellates a growing circle of national subjects" (145). Like Bhabha, Conrad was keenly aware of how institutional cultures-the seafaring community, nation, empire-might constitute themselves amid such turbulence of geographical relocation. Such formations can only be sustained through what Bhabha has characterized as a specific narrative act: "In the production of the

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nation as narration there is a split between the continuist, accumulative tempo- rality of the pedagogical, and the repetitious, recursive strategy of the performa- tive. It is through this process of splitting that the conceptual ambivalence of modem society becomes the site of writing the nation" (145-46). Accordingly, such repetition of movement-such repeated relocation-should not be read as specific to Jim's case. Instead, the necessity of sending British people across vast spaces that were connected only through narrative acts required specific narra- tive inventions which, as we have seen, included romancing space to highlight the journey and the voyage out. So far as we are meant to sympathize with Jim, in the novel repetition figures negatively. Not only do the particular institutions (adventure fiction, a written and unwritten mariner's code) fail, but their very accumulation ("country in the larger sense," a community of the sea) is responsi- ble for Jim's tortured movement and inability to find a place until Patusan.

Having betrayed that source of cultural positioning that the community of the sea provides, Jim has lost his mooring. His relocations demonstrate a very spe- cific sort of failure in the midst of a coordinate success: a failure to narrate a new identity in light of the continuousness of Englishness. The "trading world" of Conrad's novels is filled with much traffic underwriting the British imperial des- tiny and identity. Figures as diverse as Marlow, Brierly, Captain Robinson, and Chester apparently have none of the problems with space that Jim does. Conrad endows Jim, unlike the others, with the structure of feeling of empire settlement, allowing him to actually "get out" as a settler in Patusan in order to interrogate this ideological formation at the ground level. Ultimately Conrad reveals the transformative potential of imperial traffic, a fact well-known to the physician who measures Marlow's head before he descends into the bush in Heart of Darkness.

The repetitive spatial story of Lord Jim conflicts with the spatial narration of empire. Jim is running to nowhere, but this condition might be better character- ized as less a placelessness than a circulation among a variety of places. Thus, Jim's spatial history is characterized by the deferral of the stability that a place would offer. In its delays, shifts, gaps, and ambiguity, even its stutters, fits, and starts, the first half of Lord Jim is a narrative always on the threshold of another event that threatens to alter the spatial story of its protagonist and its reader's mappings. Both in its structure and topography, this half of Lord Jim privileges delay, wandering, discursiveness, and ultimately suspense through a prolifera- tion of places. Through this Conrad allows the imperial romance to collapse in on itself when spread out over vast global space.13 The viable places Jim seeks are ultimately, and repeatedly, denied, as they are conquered by the traffic of the community of the sea, carrying with them the history of his failure. Not until he has access to a Patusan, truly a non-place by any description, does the potential of place become available for Jim, who is forced to operate in a purely spatial world and follow the trade routes, simply hoping to blend in. By stressing the difficulty of traffic throughout the first half of the novel, Conrad's novel

13 For a genealogy of imperial romance in Conrad's Lord Jim, see Dryden, especially 137-43. I am also indebted to Patricia Parker's insightful analysis of romance. See Parker, especially 4-10.

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demonstrates that networks are easy to imagine from the imperial metropolis, but living in them is something altogether different.

Hence it is in the most heartrending terms that Conrad portrays Jim's submis- sion to local justice after the disastrous events on the Patusan River. The old Nakhoda Doramin is visibly shaken and needs assistance as he rises to stand. Jim receives the shot to his chest. The bystanders rush toward Jim's fallen body. Cov- ering his mouth as he falls forward, Jim is silenced in the extreme, a silence mir- rored in Jewel's "soundless, inert life" at Stein's. The tumultuous crowd, the re- sounding shot, the last gesture to his mouth, all contribute to the finality of Jim's story. Yet the finality of this scene which uncomfortably merges colonial inti- macy and proto-postcolonial justice remains incomplete so long as Marlow's quotation marks remain open. It is not until they close that Conrad reinserts the spatial distance of the "privileged reader" from London, strangely compromising any proximity the reader might have had with the events in Patusan.

Such a compromise is necessary, however, as Marlow and the novel try to find a resting place for Jim. As the narrative options embodied by adventure stories and travel narrative diminish, Jim's demise is only legible from the imperial me- tropolis. Having fallen off the earth and out of familiar narrative molds, what remains is a bitter mixture of nostalgia for adventurous wandering and the vio- lence of colonial reconciliation. This complicated double-vision and generic play is unique to Conrad, whose novel masterfully negotiates the perspectives of a spectator situated on the periphery and the reader in the metropolis, undermin- ing the scopic drive of imperialism and narrative. Just as de Certeau's voyeur from the summit of the World Trade Center could once "lust to be a viewpoint and nothing more" (92), Conrad's "privileged reader" featured in the last part of the novel can look out from his flat high above the city and see "afar beyond the clear panes of glass" into the heart of London as well as recapture some of the "hot quest of the Ever-undiscovered Country" (205) through a careful reading of Marlow's narrative-but notably he can only finish reading Marlow's story after he closes the heavy curtains to conceal the more immediate view of sloping roofs and church spires.

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Figs. la-b. George Peel's telegraph cable maps from The Empire and the Century (London: John Murray, 1905). Reprinted with permission from the Newberry Library.

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SCOTTA. COHEN | EMPIRE MIGRATION

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