Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1991. British and American Philologycal Studies (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 20)

Katalin Grezsu: Psychological Implications in Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim

34 '.... from his relation I am forced to believe he had preserved through it all a strange illusion of passiveness, as though he hadn't acted but had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke.'^ The question that rises here is whether it was out of Jim's weakness that he could not do anything against the events or it was absolutely impossible to do anything in those circumstances. My answer is in connection with astrology. Jim with this Patna incident reached the end of the first period in his life and had to enter a new one. The accident on the community level is the Patna accident, and on an individual level his own moral defeat. Just as humanity cannot do anything against a coming Apocalypse, Jim was at least as unable to change his own destiny. He only realizes what happened to him a lot later. Although he knows he jumped, he simply cannot understand or explain it to himself. We can be sure he acted mechanically, automatically partly out of his conscious will that lifted its head from the nothingness and out of the power of black magic that worked upon him. Jim relates the events to Marlow like this

: 'I had jumped

...' He checked himself, averted his gaze ... 'It seems,'he added

.... 'Looks like it,

' I muttered. 'I knew nothing about it till I looked up,' he explained.'^ It looks as if Jim was torn between two parts: his body and his mind. His body is ruled and manipulated by powers beyond his control, while his mind only keeps a memory of the incidents. As he himself realizes later, it was only his body that jumped and not his mind. Marlow believes Jim, what is more, he tries to convince us that it could only happen this way: 'And that's possible, too. You had to listen to him as you would to a small boy in trouble. He didn't know. It had happened somehow. It would never happen again.' * ^ With this unconscious act a new period starts in Jim's life. Let's not forget that it is a transition from the Fishes to the Aquarius. The dominant element in both constellations is water. And water is present in this part of the novel as everywhere, almost folding the characters: they are sailing out in the ocean and it is raining heavily. As Marlow says: It was too dark just then for them to see each other, and moreover, they were blinded and half drowned with rain ... The sea hissed "like twenty thousand kettles".' * ^