Geoffrey Clarke

This personification of a Doyle character also opens up questions of the ‘real life’ Sherlock Holmes whose apartments at the re-numbered 221b Baker Street house a museum dedicated to the life of the perhaps not erstwhile, that is, still living detective.[83]  Some of the intuitive methods that later appeared in the Holmes stories explain how Holmes was able in ‘The Adventure of the Creeping Man’ “by watching the mind of a child, to form a deduction as to the criminal habits of the very smug and respectable father.”[84]  Dr Bell had been summoned by the courts to solve a murder case in Edinburgh.  The murderer was a Frenchman, Eugene Chantrelle, whose victim was his wife.  There had been many mistakes made in the case, and Dr Bell had managed to guide the doctors and police in the right direction before isolating the cause of death as a gas pipe that had been tampered with.  Similar incidents appear throughout the Doylean texts, such as the solving of the riddle of the Naval Treaty where the papers were hidden below some gas pipes in a space beneath the “T-joint which gives off the pipe which supplies the kitchen underneath.”[85]

     There are many instances in Doyle’s stories where collaborative activity is involved.  In ‘The Reigate Squires’, collaboration takes place between Sherlock Holmes, Watson, and Inspector Forrester to solve a murder mystery occurring as a result of a burglary at Mr Acton's home.  Holmes agrees to stay at the home of Watson's bachelor friend Colonel Hayter: "when Holmes understood that the establishment was a bachelor one, and that he would be allowed the fullest freedom, he fell in with my plan",[86]  recounts Watson, suggesting a series of possibilities for male bonding in an all-male household.

     In an act of family collaboration, Mr Cunningham, J.P. and his son, Alec, both attempt to strangle Sherlock Holmes in order to prevent his investigations reaching fruition.  In this story Holmes's powers as a graphologist are put to the maximum use in solving the crime, for he is able to decipher that two hands were at work in collaborating on the letter which provides the main evidence in solving the mystery, and thereby incriminate the father and son.  It is a collaborative story in which Holmes examines the penmanship and the spaces between words in a fragment of a handwritten note grasped in a dead man's hand.  It is from this scrawled note that he determines the characters, ages, and relations between the two murderers who together commit the crime.[87]

     Graphology had reached a status in late-Victorian Britain, along with palmistry, séances in which the table moved and strange knocking was heard, and spiritualism and the occult as some of the pastimes to which people were addicted.  The two hands at work in writing leads back to the collaborative theme in literary production where men in pairs and groups bonded together to produce adventure fiction, suggesting that two minds can devolve into the consciousness of one, although Keats suggested that “I and myself cannot agree.”[88]   

      Further collaboration of a mystical kind arises in A Study in Scarlet.[89]  In Chapter 6, ‘Tobias Gregson Shows What He Can Do’, a father, aided by his son, Arthur Charpentier, a ghost and his daughter, Alice, encourage Mr Jefferson Hope to carry out the murder/revenge of an American traveller, Enoch J. Drebber who had lodged at a house in Camberwell.  The landlady, Mrs Charpentier, forms a poor impression of Mr Drebber and claims that he was “coarse in his habits and brutish in his ways....  His manners towards the maid-servants were disgustingly free and familiar.”  But far worse was that he acted in the same way “towards my daughter, Alice.”[90]  After the murder of Drebber, the ghostly collaboration leads to the death of Mr Drebber’s secretary, Strangerson, in the most unexplained of ways: “a most incomprehensible affair”.[91]  Above the bed where the murder occurred is found the word ‘RACHE’ written in blood.  Could the word have been a short version of the woman’s name, Rachel, as suggested by Gregson, a reference to the French tragic actor Rachel, or did it mean the German word for revenge or vengeance?  The questions that are raised are: was the word written by the deceased or by the perpetrator of the crime?  Was he poisoned or was his death by suicide or by violent means?  The events could only have taken place with the aid of a supernatural force.  Collaboration, here, is mooted with spectral activity as the only explanation of the deaths of the two men, leading to ideas of ghostly collaboration, revenge by the father for the sexual harassment by Drebber of the daughter, Alice, and exploitation of women by men in a highly patriarchal society.

     Bonding takes place in ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ (1902).[92]   A character known as Stapleton, of a family formerly known as Vandeleur, arrives in Devon, under the cover of being a naturalist, with his wife, whom he passes off as his sister, in an attempt to deceive Sir Henry Baskerville out of the ownership of his property.  Stapleton collaborates with the pseudonymous John Barrymore, the butler, who was formerly named Selden.  Barrymore in turn collaborates with Selden — Barrymore’s wife Eliza’s younger brother, his brother-in-law — by signalling to him with a lighted candlestick.

     Holmes discovers that Stapleton is, in fact, a member of the aristocratic Baskerville family who, in order to try to regain the Baskerville estate, engages in a plot with his "confederate",[93]   who is a “criminal renegade”.  Stapleton brings to his aid a fierce dog that he disguises as the fiendish, “Hound of the Baskervilles” which legend has portrayed, in an attempt to dispossess Sir Henry, the baronet, and his heirs of his money, land and inheritance, by scaring him off his property.  Duplicity, disguise and name changes reside in the story as the clear thinking and perspicacity of Holmes cuts through the fog — the ‘morass’ that descends upon both the moor and the plot.  The reader’s task is to collaborate with Watson in unravelling Doyle’s intricate story unless, failing, to sink into the dreaded bog that is the Grimpen Mire, or indeed become lost in the plot of ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’.

     Stapleton’s wife refuses to take part in the plan and he has to resort to other means to carry off the deception.  Whilst Stapleton attempts to cause Sir Henry to have a heart attack as a result of an attack by the hound upon the moors, Holmes forestalls the plot.  It is only the perseverance and wily cunning of Holmes and Watson in another one of their partnerships which thwarts Stapleton in his collaborative ambitions, although here the means are collaborative as a way to a single end.  In a complex plot, the twists and turns reflect the dual nature and the convolutions of collaboration, for as Watson declares: “Holmes himself had said that no more complex case had come to him in all the long series of his sensational investigations.”[94]

      Collaboration and the ‘words’ are emphasised in the Dolyean oeuvre. Indeed, the very act of letter writing — sending letters back to Sherlock Holmes about his recollections of the case — mirrors the act of literary collaboration.  In ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’, Watson sends Holmes the ‘First Report of Dr Watson’ where in the story he recounts that he “will follow the course of events by transcribing my own letters to Mr Sherlock Holmes which lie before me on the table.”[95]  Later, Watson sends Holmes ‘The Second Report of Dr Watson’ stating that, as he was forced to leave Holmes early in the case, he has to catch up in an act of literary endeavour by “making up for lost time”,[96]  by writing a letter by a first class post that would arrive without delay.  Subsequently, in the chapter entitled ‘Extract from the Diary of Dr Watson’ he reveals that “I have arrived at a point in my narrative where I am compelled to abandon this method and to trust once more to my recollections”.[97] With the use of his desk diary and a good sense of recall, Watson is able to provide Holmes with all the details of the case that he had lacked.  Added to the reports and telegrams that he sends to Holmes, there exists the writing up of mysteries and solutions by Watson.  Yet Holmes often criticises him, amongst other things, for what he writes even though Watson suggests that “you must acknowledge, my dear Holmes, that I have done you very well in the matter of a report”, and at the end of ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ Holmes confirms that “I have already told you that your reports reached me rapidly...They were of great service to me.”[98]

     Writing and the writer are featured in Doyle’s work.  Holmes is a writer, too, for in The Sign of Four Holmes refers to a French man who is translating his minor works into French. "Your works?" asks Watson, incredulously, to which Holmes replies in the affirmative.

     These acts of writing are a form of collaboration.  The use of words is paramount in the collaborative process of solving the criminality within.  The use of ‘monographs’, reference works, typesetting, coloured plates and illustrations all form part of a technology that is central to collaboration in Conan Doyle, and in Dracula there appear acts of collaboration through writing in the use of the telegraph, the typewriter and print technology.  Holmes engages in technological studies with which the late-Victorians and Edwardians were enamoured, and it links to visions of Empire with technology, science and the minutiae of every area of life being subjected to the closest scrutiny and study by Royal Societies, groups and institutions.

     The plot of ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’ opens up questions of the Victorian family's predilections for respectability and its susceptibility to disrepute.  The aristocracy at this period had come under scrutiny because of the degeneracy of elements within it.  The taint of criminality in a highly conservative late-Victorian environment was of an extremely critical nature: "Was it possible that this stolidly respectable person was of the same blood as one of the most notorious criminals in the country?" Watson enquires, indicating a preoccupation with Victorian eugenics.[100]  The debate about Darwinism opened up questions of nurture versus the hereditary nature of individuals which is to be seen here.  Indeed Darwin had confirmed in the Preface to The Descent of Man that man had evolved through the agency of natural selection, suggesting that heredity was all-important.[101]  Some people were beginning to question theories of heredity at the time as to whether man's development was influenced by acquired factors such as physical, moral and mental characteristics, or by nurture in the way of upbringing, social milieu and background.

     In ‘The Final Problem’,[102]  Holmes works with Watson in a collaborative enterprise to counter the intrigues of Professor Moriarty, who is not to be confused with his brother, Colonel James Moriarty, though some might claim that they are the same person, to solve the kind of murder mystery which intrigued a late-Victorian public conditioned by the Ripper murders and aristocratic involvement.  Disguised as a "decrepit Italian cleric",[103]  Holmes reveals himself to Watson in an act of collaboration tinged with religiosity and foreign tainting, which results in their both being able to apprehend the criminal, Moriarty.  The mystery nearly solved, a struggle ensues at the edge of the waterfall ending in Holmes and Professor Moriarty falling to their death, “locked in each other’s arms.”[104]   Holmes, in a dual and erotic embrace with Moriarty, falls over into the torrent at the foot of a precipice in Reichenbach in the Swiss mountains, thereby combining suppressed sexual imagery with homoerotic activity, as the waterfall suggests the phallus and their death fall physical intimacy.[105]  It is quite possible to regard the waterfall, a long white column of water, as being closely allied to a phallus and the linking of the two bodies in death as representing coitus with the act of coition schematised as collaboration,[106]  and, as the two men cling together, leading to ideas of repressed homosocial masculine desire.  In the last pages of the "Memoir", Holmes is killed off[107]  in a final act of suicidal collaboration between the author, the narrator, the character, and the editor so that the series can be brought to an end conveniently by their arranging Holmes's death.

    Doyle’s purpose in finishing the Sherlock Holmes adventures was to give himself the opportunity to engage in other kinds of literary work, but Doyle discovered that there was no impediment to his other forms of writing by continuing with the Holmes stories:

I did the deed, but, fortunately no coroner had pronounced upon the remains, and so, after a long interval, it was not difficult for me to respond to the flattering demand and to explain my rash act away.  I have never regretted it, for I have not in actual practice found that these lighter sketches have prevented me from exploring and finding my limitations in such varied branches of literature as history, poetry, historical novels, psychic research, and the drama.[108]

And so “in one bound he was free”[109]  and Holmes lives again to continue his life of detection, trouser ripping and collaboration.  It has been suggested by Lawrence Frank that Conan Doyle revived the Holmes stories because of their popularity due to issues of “empire, urbanisation and work that so preoccupied Victorian men and women.”[110]

      Holmes is resuscitated for further co-operative adventures in  The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1918)[111]  and  The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, (1927).[112]   Doyle had opened up a too lucrative and homoerotic vein to consider abandoning the writing at this stage without it achieving its full potential.  The Doylean oeuvre exists as a collaborative and homoerotic part of the canon of romance literature and the Sherlock Holmes character has taken on a new and abiding place in the social fabric of our contemporary times; but this is not to suggest that a review has not been made of the concept of the Holmesian character as being involved in eroticism, homosociality, drugs and same-sex bonding.

A Story that Attempts but Cannot Finally Be Told.  Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

In Conrad's  Heart of Darkness, too, there is an explicit link between "collaborative" narrative structures informing us of who is telling and who is listening, and their implications for the reader/text relationship.  In  Heart of  Darkness,  the professional men who assemble to hear the recounting of a secretive and mysterious matter are all representatives of professions, and the effort to try to understand the inscrutable nature of the tale is a palpable one.  “We four affectionately watched his back”,[113]  as the Director of Companies looks out to sea and they commence the work to be performed in attempting to understand the nature of the story recounted by the narrators of the tale:

It seems to me I am trying to tell you a dream - making a vain attempt, because no relation of a dream can convey the dream-sensation…[114]

The intensity of the collaboration required is enormous to be able to make the connection between what Marlow goes on to recount and what is the truth of the incredible, almost religious nature of a story of “pilgrims”, and “idols” intent on an “idea”, indicating its status as a parable of collaboration and non collaboration.  The text implies an adventure between late-Victorian middle-class males determined upon a course of action to piece together the tale of quest and horror set in a River Congo no different from the River Thames on which it originates.  It is a voyage of discovery which results in a deeper self-discovery for Marlow and the four Englishmen, although the reader does not really know what the other males might have ‘seen’.

     The adventurers whose spirits are invoked, “Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame they had all gone out on that stream”,[115]  represent a historical pageant of men who had collaborated in the male enterprise of imperialism.  But as, “the yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut”,[116]  the “simple” nature of the tale is matched by the simple act of a collaboration between Marlow, the professional men -  — the Lawyer, the Accountant, the Director of Companies -  — and the first narrator to comprehend the nature of the expedition to the Congo on which Marlow had been sent.  As the Thames and its environs are made to convey the same sense of “one of the dark places of the earth”,[117]  with their “sandbanks, marsh, forests”,[118]  as the dark inner continent of Africa, the two separate places in the world converge into something greater, which the opening of the novella implies.  But once the tale is embarked upon, a spirit of collaboration quickly fades as the pilgrims, “white men with long staves in their hand”,[119]  demonstrate a singular lack of purposefulness and co-operation and, rather, engage in a fruitless task of accumulating, and then idolising, the ivory they have caused to be hunted: “you would think they were praying to it.”[120]  Whereas the collaborators have embarked upon listening to a story which commences in a savagery held to have been apparent not only in the Congo but on the Thames of old, its context of exploitation soon eliminates any continuation of collaborative practices. 

     If collaboration, in one of its aspects, is a form of discipleship, then Charles Marlow’s relationship with Kurtz is that of a faithful follower who sees himself as a pilgrim: “I became in an instant as much of a pretence as the rest of the bewitched pilgrims.”[121]  The construction of Africa in the novel allows for a megalomania to develop and Marlow is the silent witness of Kurtz’s actions.  The latter’s musical ability[122]   and the work that he has written impresses Marlow deeply: “I’ve seen it.  I’ve read it.  It was eloquent, vibrating with eloquence...”[123]  The text of the pamphlet, “the report on the ‘Suppression of Savage Customs’, with the postcriptum torn off,[124]  which Marlow rescues from the hands of the dying Kurtz, is given away in a spirit of collaboration to a “journalist anxious to know the fate of his ‘dear colleague’”.[125]   Marlow agrees that Kurtz had been “an — extremist”[126] and gives the journalist, as I said, the report “for publication if he thought fit.”  It is a form of collaboration with Marlow by the man with “furry straight eyebrows, bristly hair cropped short, an eyeglass on a broad ribbon”[127]  to receive the packet of papers and keep them for the judgement of posterity.

     Marlow contests the version of “the spectacled man” about Kurtz’s knowledge as having been “extensive and peculiar — owing to his great abilities and to the deplorable circumstances in which he had been placed”[128]  by informing him that his knowledge “however extensive [my italics] did not bear upon the problems of commerce or administration.”[129]   This underlines Marlow’s belief that Kurtz had a compendious knowledge of the unknown and uncharted regions of the world and was, thereby, a kind of nineteenth-century anthropologist.  His admiration for Kurtz is evident, for he judges him to be a fellow professional and a writer, “I had taken him for a painter who wrote for the papers, or else for a journalist who could paint,” pointing to Kurtz’s status in Africa as a writer and artist.[130]   Marlow remains faithful to Kurtz to the end, confirming that his was a firm assignation of a method, a plan, a way of doing things: “It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions.  But it was a victory.  That is why I have remained loyal to Kurtz to the last, and even beyond.”[131]  Kurtz had, indeed, surpassed all bounds, but the limitation of Marlow’s bonding with him is in the fact that he did not step over those boundaries, but, of course, is changed by it all. 

     Marlow’s journey up river to find Kurtz has resulted in his discovering his second self or his alter ego — a man who has the character to impress Marlow beyond words — in words that Marlow finds difficult to express.  The imprecise meaning of Conrad’s text does not help to convey Marlow’s story to the reader.[132]  The act of writing is an act of collaboration and words like ‘inscrutable’, ‘inexplicable‘ and ‘implacable’ feature as a persistent refrain or motif throughout the novel in their inability to be understood and their meanings decoded.  Indeed, this novella is preoccupied by ‘words’ — their power, their ability to represent, misrepresent and falsify and ultimately to create illusions — illusions of supremacism and collaboration. 

     Later as they travel down river, the Manager’s boy assistant announces Kurtz’s death with an air of dislike:

Suddenly the Manager’s boy put his insolent black head in the doorway and said in a tone of scathing contempt:  "Mistah Kurtz – He dead"

But Marlow is not unduly moved by the death of Kurtz and “remained and went on with my dinner”.[134]  However, the emotion on his passing may have been affecting to him, for he “did not eat much.”[135]  Yet, Kurtz in life as in death is “the remarkable man who had pronounced judgment upon the adventures of his soul on this earth.”[136]  Marlow cannot let his passing go without commenting on the greatness of his achievement and the accomplishments of Kurtz’s life:  “The voice was gone.  What else had been there?”[137]

     After Kurtz’s death Marlow decides not to return to Europe immediately, but he “remained to dream the nightmare out to the end and to show my loyalty to Kurtz once more.”[138]  It is a form of dependency upon the memory of Kurtz and an inevitable submission to his destiny and the firm belief that he had encountered “a remarkable man.  He had something to say. He said it.”[139]  

     If Marlow can be said to co-operate with Kurtz, the Manager finally fails to co-operate with him.  He declares that Kurtz’s problem was that, “he did not see the time was not ripe for vigorous action.”[140]  The Russian harlequin, entirely self centred and vain, has spent much of his time in collaboration with him: “I tell you… this man has enlarged my mind”.[141]  The harlequin’s devotion to Kurtz is such that he is incapable of accepting that Kurtz will die: “I suspect that for him Mr Kurtz was one of the immortals”,[142]  says Marlow attempting to explain the harlequin’s closeness to Kurtz.  The Helmsman is a man who shows “no restraint, no restraint, - just like Kurtz - a tree swayed by the wind”.[143]  Yet the “subtle bond”[144]  that is forged between the helmsman and Marlow as he “steered for me”[145]  is evidence of a collaborative partnership.  Because the helmsman has spent months “at my back”, he has become indispensable to Marlow and regret is expressed over his death because of the friendship they have3 formed on the river journey. 

     The African people who accompany Marlow on his journey up river are portrayed as a collaborative and helpful group: “They were men one could work with, and I am grateful to them”,[146]  confesses Marlow, despite his earlier reference to them as cannibals.  ‘Work’ is a persistent motif  in the progress of Marlow upstream, as he works, helps and collaborates with the others to bring his journey to meet Kurtz to fruition.  The act of working  forms the bond in Heart of Darkness, as the dedication to work is the main reason for Marlow’s involvement in the Congo enterprise.  Marlow is part of the colonial movement for which they were all working, “part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings”[147]  and again, to confirm the collaborative nature of the enterprise, Marlow declares “It is strange how I accepted this unforseen partnership.”[148]

     The Intended also has a key co-operative function for she is the person who receives the batch of papers and the portrait which form the framework of Marlow's narrative.[149]  The portrait of the Intended is only one of the items of memorabilia returned to her by Marlow, along with the “private letters” and the “bundle of papers”.[150]  Marlow refuses to collaborate with “the clean shaved man with the official manner” and does not part with any of the “documents” to him but reserves them in an act of even more faithful collaboration with the fiancée, even though the mother of Kurtz had “died lately watched over, as I was told, by his Intended.”[151]  The fiancée, as I will show later, is denied the truth, so their collaboration is a fiction and a fantasy of male supremacy.  The papers and Marlow’s very handling and distributing them, as well as the act of suppression of the truth from the fiancée are further instances of a type of “‘literary’ collaboration” with Kurtz that, added to his position as a literary man form a clear impression of this aura of literariness, joint endeavour and syncretism.  The fiancée represents a profound influence upon the novella as her presence provides an important background and support to Kurtz's activities in the Congo, although, of course, it represents heterosexual activity.  She serves as a significant vehicle for the plot for, even one year after the events, she collaborates in the interview with Marlow upon which the final part of his testimony is based.  However, the collaboration does not reach fruition and Marlow collaborates with her expectations by telling a lie about Kurtz’s final moments.  He does not convey to her the very last words Kurtz uttered and can only plead with her to be conscious of them:

“Don’t you hear them.”  The dusk was repeating them in a persistent whisper all around us, in a whisper that seemed to swell menacingly like the first whisper of a rising wind. “The horror! The horror!”[152]

Marlow ends by lying to the Intended about Kurtz’s final words.  They did not concern her, but Marlow, intent on collaborating with her intentions to the end even if it means glossing over his [Kurtz’s] activities in the Congo and misrepresenting him replies “The last word he pronounced was – your name.”[153]  So in a final act of collaboration with the Intended he does not verbalize the reality of the Belgian Congo enterprise even to the main protagonist’s beloved.  Their collaboration thus becomes a fantasy, a fanciful myth of male supremacy. 

     The one collaborative act remaining is that of the reader who must use his powers of co-operation with the author to try to understand the religious intensity with which the story of pilgrims in their white clothes and staves, the prophet Kurtz, and the idol Marlow is told.  Not only do the professional men on board the Nellie need to collaborate in order for the tale to be unravelled, but Conrad enlists the reader’s collaboration to discern who is listening and who is telling a tale constructed with multiple layers of meaning.  The reader is drawn into a collaboration in his relationship with both the text and the author because the narrator constantly begs the reader to listen, to hear and to understand when reading a story based on male collaboration gone mad. 

     One of the overt moments when his audience’s collaboration in listening is called upon occurs when Marlow demands their participation to find out the meaning of Kurtz’s activities: “Do you see him?  Do you see the story?  Do you see anything?5 154 Conrad declares in his preface to ''The Nigger of the Narcissus''  that the goal of the artist ''... is, before all, to make you see.''[155]  The assertion of the creed of “seeing” is a frequent one in Conrad’s narratives.   It is a question of whether he is able to tell and if they are able to listen.  The voice is the voice of Kurtz and perhaps of a deeper voice — that of the Congo calling for retribution and release from despair at their collaborative activities.  Yet Marlow is unable to make his collaborators comprehend, and he breaks off:

 He paused again as if reflecting, then added:

“Of course in this you fellows see more than I could see then.  You see me, whom you know…”[156]  

He concludes that “the essentials of this affair lay deep under the surface, beyond my reach and beyond my power of meddling.”[157]   One of the aspects, therefore, that makes this tale a collaborationist one is that it is about a story that attempts but cannot finally be told.  It is held at levels of meaning, readings of which are possible but a final deconstruction is nowhere in the reader’s grasp.  Just as the story is about the impossibility of understanding the events that drove Kurtz, so the reader finds himself driven toward the impossibility of understanding the meaning of Conrad’s novella, even upon repeated readings alone, or together in collaboration with others..

A Homosocial bond between Marlow and Jim: Lord Jim.

In Conrad’s other bonding novel, Lord Jim,[158]  the sea captain, Marlow, attempts a collaboration with the younger Jim, a seaman and pastor's son.  The action of the first part takes place aboard the Patna:

The Patna was a local steamer as old as the hills, lean like a greyhound, and eaten up with rust worse than a condemned water-tank.[159]

The ‘crisis’ on board leads Marlow, on hearing of it, to a different understanding of Jim’s character than he had previously formed, however.  It causes him to think that Jim has an unsteady character, although Marlow tells us that the time would come when Jim would become “loved, trusted, admired, with a legend of strength and prowess forming round his name as though he had been the stuff of a hero.”[160]. 

     During a storm at sea the vessel, loaded with eight hundred pilgrims bound for Mecca, strikes a submerged obstacle and begins to sink.  The sea forces its way into the bulkhead which prevents the water from reaching the pilgrims in the hold.  Jim is sure that the bulkhead will not hold, but contemplates trying to shore it up:

Have you watched a ship floating head down, checked in sinking by a sheet of old iron too rotten to stand being shored up?  Have you? Oh yes, shored up?  I thought of that — I thought of every mortal thing; but can you shore up a bulkhead in five minutes — or in fifty for that matter?[161]

The first engineer exhorts Jim to assist him but resorts to calling Jim a coward: “Coward!  He called me an infernal coward!”[162]  Jim helps to lower a lifeboat and abandons the vessel to its fate.  He makes his escape and jumps from the ship into the lifeboat:  Reminiscing later he recalls ‘“I had jumped...”  He checked himself, averted his gaze... “It seems,” he added.’[163]  Jim has failed to collaborate with the others, yet throughout the novel he continually stresses that he did what many would have done in the same circumstances. 

      Fortunately, the ship is rescued by a French naval vessel and the pilgrims are saved from drowning.  The steamer Avondale picks up Jim and the other officers from the lifeboat.  Later, at a court of enquiry in “an Eastern port”,[164]  Marlow enters the scene and begins a friendship with Jim.  He finds a job for him, but Jim soon disappears when the weight of the events surrounding the sinking of the Patna becomes too much.  Marlow continues to defend him and, after various vicissitudes, helps an old trader, Stein, to send Jim as a trading-manager to Patusan, in Sarawak, as his representative. 

     Once there, Jim proves himself as a leader of the people, leads the native people against rival gangs and helps to defend them from raiders.  He is given the title of "Tuan Jim," or Lord Jim and settles down with a local woman as a partner.[165]  A couple of years later, Marlow revives the friendship with Jim, which is not altogether successful.  The weaknesses in Jim’s character — inconstancy and indeterminacy, and the failure to understand Brown’s character — are still apparent, and he finally succumbs to the Malay chief, Doramin.  He offers up his life as a proof that Brown can be trusted.  The act of submitting himself to be killed by Doramin could be taken to mean an act of collaboration with the villagers, and might represent a return to the Patna thereby to assuage his crimes.  When Jim climbs up to the village, he has “jumped” all the way back to the Patna where he jumped from the ship on that original occasion.[166]  He has conquered his bad memories and his shame, but Conrad, underlining Jim’s fixation about his [Jim’s] honour, considers it an example of his “exalted egoism” and a “pitiless wedding with a shadowy ideal of conduct”.[167]  It is apparent that, once again, as in a number of Conrad’s novels, there is a central male character who acts as a narrator figure to bring together the helpful aspects of the story.  The action of collaboration required is that between the narrator and the other characters to ascertain the nature of the crime that Jim is supposed to have committed in his past, which the reader is aware of but they are not.  The truth of the events never does emerge — Jim is pursued by gossip and hearsay.  The characters must work together with the narrator to piece together the facts of a story in which Jim is constantly running away from his past action on the Patna and is never allowed to mitigate his crime until Conrad arranges a plot structure in which Jim gives up his life as an action of redemption.

     Whilst in Patusan, there develops a bonding and a consanguineous relationship between Jim and an Australian adventurer, ‘Gentleman Brown’.  Jim remains unable to understand Brown’s treachery and is misled into thinking that he [Brown] possessed a good moral character.  He continues to flatter and patronise Jim by continually referring to the bond that existed between them.  The narrator confirms this: