1The famous anecdote in Conrad’s childhood reminiscences in A Personal Record exemplifies his passion for geography, which he used later on in his professional life, both from the pragmatic viewpoint of a seaman and from the poetic stance of the fiction writer. He famously placed his finger on the then-blank map of Africa and declared how he “shall go there” (1912 13), which he did twenty-five years later. Marlow narrates this episode in Heart of Darkness: “Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration” (Heart of Darkness and the complete Congo Diary 8). Conrad’s imaginary geography was shaped by the adventure stories, the explorers’ accounts in magazines such as Wędrowiec, and the romantic Polish poetry fraught with chivalrous deeds which he read as a child. Geography remained a vibrant and fascinating subject when he launched his writing career decades later within the tradition of the imperial romance and the adventure story. In “Geography and Some Explorers”, written at the very end of his career, he reminisced on Sir Leopold McClintock’s The Voyage of the “Fox” in the Arctic Seas: A narrative of the discovery of the fate of Sir John Franklin and his companions, which had stirred his young imagination: “The great spirit of the realities of the story sent me off on the romantic explorations of my inner self; to the discovery of the taste for poring over maps; and revealed to me the existence of a latent devotion to geography” (The Last Essays, 17). The scientific nature of geography was never at odds with its fictional potentiality, quite the contrary, it is through its precise knowledge that fiction may ensue, science being a “springboard” for imagination to use Julie Gay’s word: “On pressent déjà la façon dont la géographie constitue pour Conrad un moyen de réconcilier son intérêt pour la réalité et son esprit romanesque (“realities”; “romantic”), en faisant d’une discipline scientifique un tremplin pour l'imagination” (Gay 374). The centrality of geography in Conrad’s work emerged as a subject in literary studies almost a century after Lord Jim. Before this “spatial turn”, “space was often viewed as a mere background or an empty container in which the unfolding of events over some durée could take place” (Tally 2). Lord Jim brings about a complete upheaval to the expected linearity of the plot as Marlow recounts Jim’s travels and trials in a non-chronological order. This breach in the linear progression of the narrative towards a logical end may be seen as Conrad's belief that positivism had become an illusion. Formerly, travel writers had expressed an unmitigated faith in the Empire’s ability to bring progress to all: “There was optimism that the creation of wealth, progressive science-based change, and religious redemption might all be promoted to the mutual advantage of Britain and overseas areas” (Bridges 59). This faith started waning with the imperial crimes that stirred European consciences in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, which Conrad so masterfully showcased in Heart of Darkness: “it was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind” (Heart of Darkness and the complete Congo Diary 8). Tim Youngs highlights how Conrad's novella shifted the lines in travel writing: “The best known Congo journey is a fictional one that does not name its setting” (1994 156). “All sorts of later travellers to the Congo refer to this tale” (Travelers in Africa 156). As Young reminds us, it was published less than ten years after the most successful travel book of its time: Stanley’s In Darkest Africa, which epitomized the “complicity of travel writing and imperialism” (Carr 71). Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, both fictional works, can be considered as stepping stones within a more loosely defined tradition of writing about travel. Both works are deeply interwoven: Conrad wrote the first four chapters of Lord Jim, then completed Heart of Darkness, and resumed with Lord Jim. With these works, Conrad changed the possibility to write in an optimistic and closed-ended manner about colonialism. Youngs insists on the relevance of reading Heart of Darkness within the tradition of travel writing, even though it is fictional, because it undermines the genre not only from an ideological standpoint, but also through its formal choices. Conrad’s doubt-ridden narrator, unable to fully grasp his whereabouts and his purpose, is the exact opposite of imperial travelers’ ultimate goal of quantifying the opportunity of their “discovered” territory: “To admit to a lack of comprehension is quite a failure in a travel narrative” (Travelers in Africa 200).

2With Lord Jim, Conrad shifted the lines of British travel writing again in several ways. As with his voyage to the Congo, Marlow’s experience in Patusan ends inconclusively. Taking up the pseudo-scientific stance imperial travel writers often would, Marlow collects what proves to be only subjective accounts about Jim. The unreliable nature of his own tale, tainted with his doubts and emotions, may be read as his way of underscoring the fallacy of any claim to objectivity.

3Another subversion with regards to travel writing concerns the novel’s visual dimension. Travel tales were systematically illustrated, and later accompanied with photographs, in such popular journals as the Illustrated London News (in which Conrad’s “Amy Foster” was serialized). Conrad aimed at creating impactful mental visions for the readers, as he famously defined as his task as a writer in the preface of The Nigger of the Narcissus: “before all, to make you see” (xlix). However, his defamiliarizing depictions thwarted expectations.

4Travel writing accompanied imperial expansion and glorified travelers, most of whom believed in their superiority. On that aspect, Conrad also went against the grain as he allowed for non-European voices, critical of the European protagonist, such as Jewel’s, to be heard—although as Amar Acheraïou demonstrated, he displayed some of the typical British prejudices and stereotypes of his time. He seemed to see a hierarchy in colonial powers, at the bottom of which the Portuguese are embodied in despicable protagonists, and he dodged depicting the harsh British colonial rule, rather focusing on the Dutch or Belgian ones:

Nowhere in his Malay stories, indeed, does he explicitly refer to Britain as a hegemonic imperial power in control of most of the trade and indigenous sultanates. Also missing from Conrad's representations of the Malay geopolitical context is a significant account of the coercive system put in place by the British. (Acheraïou 17)

5Yet, Conrad’s blow to the incarnation of British colonialism may not be minimized.

6This study contends that one crucial way in which Conrad shifted the lines of British travel writing is through his handling of space. The way travelers depicted their surroundings, central to travel writing and imperial romances, tended to be both subjective and tainted with the nationalistic prejudices of the time. These prejudices pervaded Henty or Kingston’s imperial romances, with their “focus on heroes anxious for thrilling adventure in tropical locations where they prove their manliness, assert English racial superiority, and plunder the land of its riches” (Dryden 4). Rider Haggard, though very knowledgeable about Africa, depicted “a continent steeped in mystery, violence, and vaguely supernatural occurrences” (Dryden 3). James shares the example of Flora Annie Steel’s On the Face of the Waters and its purported photographic— and therefore authentic—portrayal of an exotic imperial setting: “The sun sent golden gleams over the short turf worn to dustiness by crowding feet, and the long curves of the river, losing themselves on either side among green fields and mango trees, shone like a burnished shield” (598). The latter mango trees may be read as an intertext to Kipling, as James underlines, hereby exemplifying how the colonial imagination had fed on previous texts. Conrad also offered this type of wide-angle depictions of the landscape, as we will see later, usually underlining the fictitious nature of such picture-perfect descriptions. He also portrayed landscapes that no longer were the plain background to the glorious explorer, but vivid and obscure places that could not be deciphered by the European observer. Conrad’s Patusan is seen as an ancient place with a long and complex history, not a newfound land. Thwarting the imperial man’s attempt to conquer all the earth, Conrad reaffirmed a mighty universe hindering his progress and belittling his achievements. Jim brings peace to Patusan only for the short duration of his rule. I will argue that Conrad’s Lord Jim already displays a very acute sense of place as comprising different time spans that may be seized in a simultaneous manner, in a stratigraphic vision, to use the terminology developed by Bertrand Westphal in his Géocritique, with strata of times compacted in the soil of Patusan. In contrast to a timeless universe, the role of the heroic discoverer in travel writing is hereby demythicized and belittled on a time scale beyond human life.

7The romance of travel is taken down with him as Jim drifts towards the Suez Canal, after his desertion of the Patna. The completion of this shortcut into the desert allowed for direct steamship service between Europe and Asia. It represented “the unification of the globe” (Huber 39) and British domination of the world. A “kaleidoscope of movement” (Huber 2) passed through it, with a sharp increase in numbers of imperial travelers, troops and seamen, and stark restrictions for colonial subjects. It also had an impact on travel writing. For Huber, the rite of passage through the canal triggered a more introspective type of voyage for travel writers: “A plethora of travelogues illustrate the Canal as a moment of personal reflection and transition” (54). For Conrad, however, the increase in narratives related to the new, shortened route did not bode well, as he remarks in his essay “Travel” that “the inanity of the mass of travel-books the Suez Canal is responsible for took the proportions of an enormous and melancholy joke” (The Last Essays 124). With a dramatic increase in numbers of European travel writers passing through this threshold to the East, Conrad highlighted the risk of “parrot-like remarks”, “devastating to the world’s freshness of impression” (The Last Essays 124).

8The Suez Canal was instrumental in the ensuing heightened globalization through trade and mass tourism. In the post-modern age, this globalized context contributed to the emergence of a new type of vertical voyage, intent on discovering familiar spaces anew:

When the vertical movement inherent in such forms of travel is literal, implying a movement downwards and underground, clandestine or otherwise, it permits a discovery of elements of everyday space otherwise deliberately concealed or ignored by emphases on horizontal, seemingly superficial ways of encountering space and its contents. (Forsdick 100)

9Often constrained, vertical travel veers towards a slower, conscious voyage that delves into a given place. Though this concept stems from a post-modern context and is concerned with local travel, I would like to propose that it can be used fruitfully as a prism to read Conrad’s Lord Jim: his depiction of a landscape with different historical times visible to the acute observer can best be labelled as vertical indeed. Marlow’s tireless depiction of the landscape in all its imperceptible changes is reminiscent of the practice of cataloguing, which is a common feature of vertical travel. Marlow’s careful study of the Patusan geology that allows him to excavate the place's long history are in line with vertical travel, for which “the microscopic attention to details otherwise ignored is not merely a matter of archiving the everyday, but also a means of reflecting on the forms of travel (and travel writing) most appropriate for its (re)exploration” (Forsdick 109).

10First, I will discuss how Marlow’s slow downwards travel shifts the lines of the British tradition of travel writing and reveals a deep sense of space, with layers of history and even prehistory inscribed into a land the traveler fails to make his mark on. Marlow provides the reader with a thorough description of the place, explaining how space structures its social, economic, and political organization. I will then investigate the role of space and the systematic contrast between surface and depth, which, I will argue, shapes the novel on an aesthetic but also on a structural level. Abandoning a chronological storytelling for a layering of accounts that build up into an almost complete tale and slowing down to hyperfocus on details to impart meaning, Marlow's narration mimics his vertical travel in Patusan. I will highlight how the Patusan chasm encourages a vertical plunge into a psychological voyage and more generally a descent below the surface of things. Marlow's radical verticality takes him underground to retrieve the spirit of the departed. The superimposed gothic space around the Patusan grave is a prime example of Conrad’s recreating some “freshness of impression” (The Last Essays 124).

11Modern and post-modern travelers easily observe signs of disappearing life forms in the time of the Anthropocene. Though centuries apart, this anxiety of a disappearing world echoes with Conrad's nostalgia for the vanishing world of romantic travel and the advent of modernity. Indeed, Lord Jim was written at a time when steam was replacing traditional sailing, bringing the time of early explorers to an end. Jim covers a great expanse as he drifts over seven thousand kilometers eastwards across the entire Indian Ocean, from the Gulf of Aden to Patusan. His voyage is not linear as he flees from place to place, leaving no imprint in his horizontal drift on the surface of the sea. His trajectory comes to a sharp stop in Patusan. Marlow’s voyage in Patusan offers a detailed, informed, “authentic” depiction of a fictional Malay setting of the time. Concerned with verisimilitude, Conrad combined actual elements and assembled three locations:

[T]he name derives from a west Borneo village the British destroyed in 1843. This name is then attached to a settlement whose social formation (with its local rajah and contesting Arabs and Bugis) derives from Conrad's 1887 experience east of Borneo. However, the route Gentleman Brown follows places it firmly in Sumatra [...]. As the novel developed, Conrad seems to have changed the location of Patusan from Borneo to Sumatra [...]. (Hampson 126)

12The irony contained in this name may not be missed: “In Lord Jim, by choosing the name ‘Patusan,’ Conrad commemorates the west Borneo riverine village that British naval action destroyed in the ‘war against the pirates’ of 1843-44” (Hampson 125). The only pirate in the novel is a dubious British Gentleman fated to bring the illusion of the imperial romance to an end.

13Conrad’s spatial consciousness may be seen first and foremost in his attempt at being precise in his portrayal of the place—and his choice of assembling several places allows him to compile the complexities of the country in one location. The landscape and the inhabitants are not brushed over rapidly; the set of relations at play between the diverse dwellers and their environment are situated precisely. Geography and history are intertwined in his approach to space. Patusan’s social context is complex, ethnically diverse, with groups at odds with one another, vying for trade. The reader is provided with some background as to the local history, as well as the powers at play:

There were in Patusan antagonistic forces, and one of them was Rajah Allang, the worst of the Sultan’s uncles, the governor of the river, who did the extorting and the stealing, and ground down to the point of extinction the country-born Malays, who, utterly defenceless, had not even the resource of emigrating. (Conrad, Lord Jim 174)

14Doramin, the chief of the Bugis, is of the “nakhoda” “merchant class” (195) and leads “the immigrants from Celebes” who “formed the party opposed to the Rajah” (195). An Arab-Malay merchant also vies for power, with the “tribes in the interior” (196). A long history of migrations within the land as well as other journeys from other parts of the world are hinted at through references to the characters’ origins. Tamb’Itam is from the north of the country, Cornelius is of Portuguese descent. Jewel’s mother was a “nyai”, the concubine of a colonist, and was herself half Dutch. Conrad depicted a space with a history that spans over centuries. Migrations within the land and succeeding European invasions (Portuguese, Dutch, English) are inscribed in the land with the separate settlements of these diverse groups of people within the space of Patusan.

15Over a period of centuries the Archipelago had seen Malays and Bugis emigrating from the places where they originally derived: Malays from the west of Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula and north-west Borneo, and Bugis from south-west Sulawesi following war in the seventeenth century:

Arabs had also emigrated over a period of centuries from the Persian Gulf, particularly from the Hadramaut […]. (Francis 148)

16The contrast between Jim’s imperial illusion that the history of the land begins with him and the history of colonialism that has already produced several waves of invaders is clearly brought to light in the novel. Patusan is envisioned by Jim with a typical Eurocentric bias, as an opportunity for him to create his own new colony. He is convinced that he is instrumental in improving the lives of the locals: “it’s the knowledge that had I been wiped out it is this place that would have been the loser” (Lord Jim 187). However, a deeper historical sense of the place is given by the depiction of the several waves of invaders. Jim does not arrive in a blank space. The palimpsestic nature of the place is underlined, as his conquest is but a reenactment of the European intrusion of the seventeenth century, when pepper was then a source of trade.

17A clear step away from the linear, one-voice travel narrative, Conrad represents several points of view, including that of the natives, to further undermine the typical imperial discourse propagated in the travelogues and imperial romances of the nineteenth century. As the “elderly headman of the fishing village” (184) tells Marlow upon his visit, Jim is “the second white man he had ever seen” (184). Jim’s discovery is belittled as Patusan is already an obsolete trading post “of no earthly importance” (166), as “the country seemed to drop gradually out of trade” (173) and “nobody cares for it now” (173).

18Space, in its stratigraphic depth, is at the crossroads between the present and history: “L’espace se situe à l’intersection de l’instant et de la durée ; sa surface apparente repose sur des strates de temps compact échelonnées dans la durée et réactivables à tout moment” (Westphal 223). In the current visible space of Patusan, a place “shut off” from the rest of the world, century-old memories of its heydays as a trading place for pepper are reactivated through “collections of old voyages” and its prehistory is hinted at in the fact that through the erosion of the “devouring stream”, it has dwindled to an “islet” (Conrad, Lord Jim 172):

Thirty miles of forest shut it off from the sight of an indifferent world, and the noise of fame. The stream of civilization, as if divided on a headland a hundred miles north of Patusan, branches east and south-east, leaving its plains and valleys, its old trees and its old mankind, neglected and isolated, such as an insignificant and crumbling islet between the two branches of a mighty, devouring stream. You find the name of the country pretty often in collections of old voyages. (172)

19Presented with a retrospective outlook as a place that used to be mentioned in “collections of voyages” (172), the archaic aspect of Patusan is highlighted with the repetition of the adjective “old” three times and the representation of a place off the stream of progress, “shut off”, “isolated” (172), decaying. The description of Patusan as obsolete does let on a certain scorn for non-European “backwards” spaces, passed by European modernity. However, its enduring history is contrasted with man’s fleeting presence. The latter’s strife and struggles are measured against the scale of an eternal earth. Man’s short lifespan renders his tragedy meaningless against the backdrop of a powerful and everlasting universe. Indeed, it is a “mighty devouring stream” (172) that has sealed its fate as a place of the past. Jim is but a passing traveler: “The sound of his fresh young voice (…) floated lightly, and passed away over the unchanged face of the forests” (204). As a consequence of his failure on the Patna, Jim is brushed aside from the face of the sea to land in Patusan, where he also fails to make a lasting impact and is simply “floating” over the surface of the trees, not taking roots in the Patusan ground. Jim had “ascended the Patusan river” (175) and “descended upon them from the clouds” (174) and his unnatural motions underline the impossibility for him to last in Patusan. The contrast between Jim’s recent and short-lived intrusion and the timelessness of this immemorial land is encapsulated in Doramin’s awareness that other men such as Jim will come and leave:

The land remains where God had put it; but white men—he said—they come to us and in a little while they go. They go away […]. Those they leave behind do not know when to look for their return. They go to their own land, to their people, and so this white man, too, would... (207-208)

20The recurring invasions reveal a lack of correspondence between space and time as “those they leave behind do not know when to look for their return” (208). The European and the Malay temporalities are not on a comparable scale. The linear, chronological time of modernity of the European man breaks down upon the timeless, rooted and “everlasting” (185) Patusan time. When Jim arrives, “at the first bend he lost sight of the sea” (185); with the loss of that referent, it is time as he knows it that is lost as well.

21Marlow sketches a stratigraphic map of Patusan, from a social, economic, political and geological perspective. An ancient mankind is depicted with their singular tragedies. Their unfathomable history cannot be measured and is represented in the intermingling of man and land, who have become one over time. The way the settlement is organized is deeply intertwined with the topographic constraints of the place. The village is indeed portrayed as an intrinsic part of the landscape, as if organically grown in its soil, and dwindled by the mighty hills: “the brown ribbon of houses following the sweep of both banks, overtopped by the twin hills uprising above the nearer tree-tops” (197).

22The many descriptions of Patusan provide a wide angle, for example when the settlements are depicted, but also a fragmented and granular view of it. As the river bends, it bars the traveler from an all-encompassing glance and compels the latter to take a closer look into the particulars of the place:

At the first bend he lost sight of the sea with its labouring waves for ever rising, sinking, and vanishing to rise again—the very image of struggling mankind—and faced the immovable forests rooted deep in the soil, soaring towards the sunshine, everlasting in the shadowy might of their tradition like life itself. (185)

23The sea and its forward, linear movements, instrumental in the European man’s conquest of the world, and the immovable land, unchanged by the flow of modern life, are contrasted. The deep roots of the trees signal a sense of determinacy that man has no grasp on. The trees that rise up sky high stop any human progress, as “struggling mankind” (185) may not make the trees budge. The Patusan forest is verticality per se. The paradigm of vertical travel, with the consciousness of being constrained at its core, is helpful in the way we can read the novel anew. In Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, movement forward is systematically slowed down by shallow waters, bends in the river, a deep forest or hills that stand like a wall.

24Marlow offers an almost prehistorical view of Patusan as shaped by the retreating waters. The red ground, the thick undergrowth and the primal forests present an image of the place before mankind. With this topographic and geological outlook on space, eternity is glimpsed in the very soil of Patusan:

The coast of Patusan […] is straight and sombre, and faces a misty ocean. Red trails are seen like cataracts of rust streaming under the dark-green foliage of bushes and creepers clothing the low cliffs. Swampy plains open out at the mouth of rivers, with a view of jagged blue peaks beyond the vast forests. In the offing a chain of islands, dark, crumbling shapes, stand out in the everlasting sunlit haze like the remnants of a wall breached by the sea. (184)

25Just as a “mighty, devouring stream” (172) has made Patusan obsolete, the retreating sea seems to have destroyed it, as it breached its former hills into a “chain of islands” (184), broken pieces, “crumbling shapes” (184). The red soil seen through the foliage is likened to “cataracts of rust streaming” (184), which could refer both to the blood shed by timeless human strife or remnants of traces dating back from the iron age. Read along with the idea of “crumbling shapes” (184), the decaying, lonely aspect of the place accentuates its extremely ancient existence.

26The difficulty to access the land and even get a good view of it is illustrated by the “haze”, the “swampy plains”, the bushes making the “low cliffs” inaccessible (184). Wide-angle depictions of a landscape amounted to the observers’ way of taking possession of it in colonial times: “panoramic description was a crucial narratological feature of imperialist fiction” (James 509). The “promontory descriptions” (Pratt 203) found in travel writing are thwarted in Conrad’s fragmented landscapes. The obscure country can only be “glimps[ed] through shifting rents in a thick fog” (62), it does not bare itself to the “monarch-of-all-I-survey” European eye, as the use of the word “cataracts” may also suggest. Through the thick foliage, only a blurry sight may be retrieved. Conrad’s strategy to write against the imperialist traveler, owning the world from a promontory, but rather depicting it at man’s height, showing a protagonist at grips with his surroundings, fits within the mode of vertical travel.

27In the liminal swamps, in a “sunlit haze” (184), the departing sea, as the departing forward motion of time, has left the place behind. The inhospitable landscape cannot be disrupted by Jim, whose expected departure from Patusan is expressed with a sea metaphor: his voice “floated” (204). The sea that brought Jim will retreat again and leave the immovable land intact. Steering away from a traditional approach in travel writing, Conrad’s landscape is not a backdrop, nor simply the recipient of the traveler’s Eurocentric impressions. A powerful and ageless universe is portrayed, in comparison to which the traveler appears to be but “a tiny speck” (253), his presence short-lived. Space thus emerges as intrinsically rooted in a long-standing history. By contrasting man’s actions with the immutability of the landscape as bordering on the eternal, a scale is given by which the events and their meaning may be assessed by the readers.

28A deep dive into the reality and the history of Patusan, including its geology is proposed. Close attention is also paid to the forest and how it appears to have evolved over centuries of maturation. And as a consequence of this close study, it is a scarred landscape that Marlow depicts, quite at odds with the expected exotic and primeval land represented in nineteenth century travel and adventure stories. Another key feature of vertical travel is to try and seize “the fractal diversity of what is otherwise seen as everyday” (Forsdick 100). If we accept to interchange the notion of “everyday” with “déjà-vu” exoticism, Marlow’s unexpected depictions of Patusan contrast with a place long known in “collections of old voyages” (172). The land has been defaced by the attacks of the sea, it is rusted, soiled. Patusan is not a garden of Eden, it bears the scars of its prehistory, defeating the idea of the European discovery of a primal land.

29The “thickness” of space stands out in Patusan as it is not the background to the story but a key, impeding force reasserting the hierarchy between man and the universe. Shifting the lines of travel writing, the landscape, rather than the colonist, is foregrounded. Space in its depth is so crucial that it also plays a defining role as a structuring principle in the narrative.

30The opposition between surface and depth, linearity and verticality are weaved in the narrative form, taking an in-depth approach, rather than a fluid linear progression towards a logical dénouement. Marlow’s downwards travel in Patusan is replicated in his slow, careful account that resembles a scientific study. In the second part of the novel, the plot carries on in a classical forward movement, but in the first part, Jim's linear progression across the Indian ocean, though it covers a great expanse, is repeatedly interrupted by Jim's recurring flights. His eastwards drift is irresistibly bringing him back to the land and its prehistoric forest, in a place marooned in time. Blending form and subject matter, the plot dovetails Jim’s trajectory in space. Jim’s several jumps, from the Patna, from his position as a water clerk or from the Rajah’s stockade, are mirrored in Marlow’s revisiting of Jim’s initial jump. Until Stein provides him with a solution for Jim, the plot does not move forward. With the repetition of the same event from various perspectives—the French Lieutenant’s, Brierly’s, Jim’s own take on the events, Marlow’s interpretation, Stein’s interpretation—the story of Jim’s desertion is built up vertically so to speak, with layered information that make up an almost complete account. Marlow’s narration eschews a chronological order to revisit the same event with different protagonists. Through Marlow’s reported dialogues, each account is a deep dive into each subjective perspective without the filter of an omniscient narrator. Marlow’s attempt at gaining some understanding of the event of the Patna desertion is an in-depth study of an occurrence, a vertical buildup of successive layers that must be descended into, as if core drilling in order to arrive at the original event itself.

31Though Conrad's space is not transparent, as I have sought to foreground, its abstract, symbolic dimension is key. With the deep, clear-cut chasm in the Patusan mountain, the reader is called upon to take a vertical look down into the gaping hole, to find out what may not be visible on the surface, to reveal the sham of imperial appearances:

At a point on the river about forty miles from the sea, where the first houses come into view, there can be seen rising above the level of the forests the summits of two steep hills very close together, and separated by what looks like a deep fissure, the cleavage of some mighty stroke. As a matter of fact, the valley between is nothing but a narrow ravine; the appearance from the settlement is one of irregularly conical hill split in two, and with the two halves leaning slightly apart. (168)

32Lynda Dryden identifies this rift as an intertextual reference to Haggard’s Sheba’s Breast in King Solomon’s Mines, and argues that these geological breaches “symbolize the boundary between the world of struggle and survival and the world of heroic romantic adventure” (Dryden 161). The rift at the heart of Patusan is indeed the thematic and formal crux of the novel. It is mirrorred in the formal audacity of the novel, split in two distinct parts, encompassing a deep literary history and heralding the psychological novel of the twentieth century. The undefinable form of the novel, combining elements of the travel narrative, the imperial romance with the adventure story, the bildungsroman, elements of Greek tragedy with modernist techniques, as well as a rich intertext especially with the romantics, suggests the vertical layering of an ancient literary tradition in the novel.

33This rift also symbolizes the duality of the narrative, which is not solely Jim’s but Marlow’s. It may be read to represent the split between youth and illusions as embodied by Jim, and maturity and pragmatism as embodied by British seaman Marlow. It also reflects Jim’s identity, on the one hand his idealized personality and on the other the reality of his conduct. In that, Lord Jim shares in the tradition of travel writing, in which “by projection and displacement, profoundly troublesome questions of national identity and self-identity were addressed obliquely, sometimes even unconsciously, as questions of authority and order, of purpose and direction, were mapped on to another landscape” (Youngs, Travelers in Africa 7). However, the rift and the depth of the questioning, bordering on the psychoanalytical, shifts the lines and goes far beyond the introspection expected in a travel narrative, if only with the variety of subjective points of view Marlow’s account is built upon. Marlow’s role as homodiegetic narrator entails that he brings to light, through a meaningful depiction of space tinged with his ominous or nostalgic perception, a relevant interpretation of Jim’s experience. Marlow systematically seeks to uncover a deeper meaning than a mere surface observation would allow. While he intently looks at the Patusan landscape, he intends to see “under its obscure surface” (Lord Jim 243). Hereby, the split mountain heralds the psychological voyage that the story is truly about: “Two of the most enduring adventurers of the fin de siècle, Conrad’s Marlow and Wells’s Time traveler, address the anxiety not only of the travel, but of interpreting the traveler and the tale” (Youngs, “Africa/The Congo” 211).

34Traveling slowly downwards the Patusan landscape, Marlow attempts to portray Jim’s inner life, his personality, his “innumerable shades” (Conrad, Lord Jim 76). Marlow’s careful study of all the innuendos in Jim’s expressions may be assimilated to a vertical traveler’s attempt at cataloguing elements in his surroundings. Marlow’s endeavor is impossible, as it amounts to recording all the circumvolutions of a cloud, and therefore fails to bring any closure on account of its “unfinishedness”, to use the word Forsdick coined to refer to the quixotic task of cataloguing (110) that can sometimes be found in vertical travel writing. Jim is compared to a territory that he explores very carefully, as he tries to identify his “invisible personality” (Conrad, Lord Jim 75), what escapes his vision. Marlow spots the deep defect at the heart of Jim’s character despite his sound appearance of a “dear young boy” (139). Just as Patusan is not described as a pristine landscape with its “cataracts of rust” (184), Jim’s hidden flaw is brought to light. Marlow’s account slows down and digresses in the midst of an action-in-progress to focus on specifics that may shed light on the event, in particular as he is going over the moments that led to Jim’s unexplained jump from the ship. And just as his study of the Patusan landscape only allows him to glimpse traces of the past, a comprehensive view of the Patna episode may not be arrived at. The “pauses between the words” (84) are clues that Marlow’s acute ears can weave into a meaningful quasi whole, just as his sight tries to recover what is not there to be seen, but only guessed through the traces left behind on the land: “I don’t pretend I understood him. The views he let me have of himself were like those glimpses through shifting rents in a thick fog—bits of vivid and vanishing details, giving no connected idea of the general aspect of a country” (62). The exotic no longer resides in a re-discovered land, and the only true exploration for the “Ever-undiscovered country” (254) left is that of the inner self. The split hill could also be seen as a signifier of the unbridgeable rift between the past and the future. The romance of travel, simple escapism, and Jim as its disappointing embodiment, are to be left behind, in the abyss that Patusan stands for:

I don’t know why listening to him, I should have noted so distinctly the gradual darkening of the river, of the air; the irresistible slow work of the night settling silently on all visible forms, effacing the outlines, burying the shapes deeper and deeper, like a steady fall of an impalpable dust. (230)

35Marlow finds evidence of Jim’s foredoomed failure in the glittering moon or the darkening of the sky. The narrator’s granular approach to the geology of Patusan also leads him to see air as particles of dust. The opacity of Marlow’s depictions of Patusan go hand in hand with his incomplete tale. The form of the narrative underlines the difficulty of going below the surface to arrive at a truthful account, and Marlow’s “shadowiness” (Youngs, Travelers in Africa 194) is in stark contrast with the assertive authorial voice of imperial travel writers. All the more so as another storyteller interferes now and then, as is the case in chapter thirty-four when the discreet omniscient narrator shares a didactic “first-hand” account of Marlow’s experience upon discovering the presence of the grave, depicting him as having the “eyes of a man returning from the excessive remoteness of a dream” (241).

36Marlow’s gothic depictions of the landscape around the grave verge on the poetic. His very visual landmark scenes comply with the detailed depictions and illustrations of travel tales, but depart from them as they highlight their own fictional nature. Patusan’s split mountains are in the background as Marlow and Jim part ways. The overwhelming gothic imagery signals a step away from the typical realistic descriptions in travel writing. It points to the uncanny, hidden truth that hovers over Patusan. In the haunted place, “used as a grave for some sin, transgression, or misfortune” (167), Marlow can see “the moon float away above the chasm between the hills like an ascending spirit out of a grave; its sheen descended, cold and pale, like the ghost of dead sunlight” (187). Jim’s illusion will end in the grave of Patusan, where he was always meant to be “bur[ied] in some sort” (167). Marlow then resumes a horizontal voyage back on the sea. It is a painting he leaves behind. Patusan appears to be under the sea level, engulfed in prehistory. The sea and the future, the flow of life, are blocked by a “wall of steel” (201):

A brooding gloom lay over this vast and monotonous landscape; the light fell on it as if into an abyss. The land devoured the sunshine; only far off, along the coast, the empty ocean, smooth and polished within the faint haze, seemed to rise up to the sky in a wall of steel. (201)

37Upon leaving the theatrical scene of Patusan, Marlow feels “as if a great hand far away had lifted a heavy curtain” (249). As Julie Gay has shown, the metaphor of the theater stage, “lieu de concentration microcosmique d’espaces et de temporalités hétérogènes” (290), illustrates the heterotopic and palimpsestic nature of Patusan. It also underlines the fictional nature of Jim’s staged adventure. The place is described as a “picture”, “motionless, unfaded, with its life arrested” (248).

38Marlow's singular outlook has taken him below the surface, very deep, beyond the living, to the world of shades. Though bent on creating an authentic Malay setting, Conrad also expressed his very singular poetics of place with Patusan, a clear step away from realism with its depiction as a morbid landscape. In an all-chartered world, Conrad devised a liminal space between dream and reality, life and death. Many descriptions indeed convey the impression that Patusan is a grave. As Stein understands Marlow’s request to “dispose” of Jim, he proposes the following solution: “there’s Patusan”, “and the woman is dead now” (167). Patusan is presented from the beginning as a place where personal tragedies must be hidden. Jewel’s mother lies in a “solitary grave perpetually garlanded with flowers”, “special flowers gathered by no man, grown not in this world, and destined for the dead alone” (243). With the tragic and silenced figure of the dead woman, whose spirit haunts the place, space is given even more depth. The Patusan heterotopia can “bring together incompatible sites. More precisely, it brings together different times as well as sites” (Hampson 129). As he reaches the world of shades, Marlow literally travels underground. The readers are not only faced with the world in its geographical and historical dimensions, but they may also catch a glimpse of a world of shadows which inhabit a liminal space between fiction and reality. The powerful motif of the sacrificed mother, “the melancholy figure of a woman” (208), although it is only “visible in the background” (208), takes centre stage. Patusan is associated with the tragic fate of Jewel’s mother, likened to “a cruel wisdom buried in a lonely grave, looking on wistfully, hopelessly, with sealed lips” (208). The shadow of the dead woman’s grave permeates the place, and deeply shakes the colonial hierarchy. The jilted Malay woman’s suppressed presence subverts the official imperial story. She symbolizes human tragedy, that of “all the world”, of those “buried in remote places”, “as if the earth had been one grave” (243). The graveyard that Patusan ends up being described as shows how deep Marlow has travelled, recovering the meaning of the tale in past tragedies that may be connected in a network of shared misfortunes across the globe. Universalizing the symbolic revelation brought about by the Patusan landscape, Conrad uncovers layers of history in one location and connects all the world, past and present, in that very space. With his imaginary geography, he recreates a space of defamiliarization, to impart new symbolic and thus universal meaning. Even though Conrad was not free of prejudices prevalent in England in his lifetime, and though to the very end of his life he paid tribute to the early explorers, such as the Rajah of Sarawak, granting them a purity of purpose they may not have had, he stood out amongst his contemporaries as he expressed a singular concern for a common humanity, across time and borders. He foregrounded the wrong-headedness of the British imperial man’s belief in his own superiority over others and over the Universe.

39Patusan thus exemplifies Conrad’s approach to space, uncovering layers of recent and ancient history and diving all the way down to the world of shades. The plot, the spatial trajectory of the protagonist and the landscape are weaved in. As the protagonist fails to develop, the plot stutters and revisits Jim’s original fault. Deflating the hubris of the imperial man, Conrad placed him in a subordinate hierarchical relation to the timeless universe. At a time when the earth no longer held any blank spaces, Conrad chose to dig into the layers of history contained in Patusan. There, he was able to portray a timeless land and imagine its prehistorical state. He could also portray an “old mankind” (172), whose complexities pre-existed and would outlast the temporary intrusion of the European colonist. With a deep dive into the Patusan rift, Conrad’s tale of travel became a voyage through Jim’s personality and was already heralding the end of the romance of travel, accompanied by the end of the assumed endless linear human progress. The harrowing Patusan landscape and its unbridgeable rift symbolize the impossible closure that the novel proposes, breaking away from the simplistic, optimistic linear progression of travel, towards a slow, focused deep dive into the timeless complexity of the human experience. Through the depth of his landscapes, Conrad thus shifted the lines of British imperial travel writing, heralding a very modern pattern for voyaging vertically.