Chapter One

The Illusion of Transcendent Reality: Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim and Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room





Ludwig Wittgenstein's Tractatus, written during the first World War, occupies a prominent place in Analytic philosophy. Today, this text is recognized as marking the philosophical development of the analytic revolution that inaugurated the development of artistic modernism. The precise nature of this shift to the modern is a question whose problematic nature is widely debated among literary scholars. However, most critics agree that modern works may be characterized by a skepticism towards the possibility of transcending the physical world to a metaphysical world that is beyond the realm of logical facts. Despite attempts to delegitimize this notion of a metaphysical order undergirding the world, humanity's yearning for a metaphysics of presence continues to linger on. This is demonstrated in those individuals who understand the world as something that needs to be surmounted. These changes, too, were reflected and embodied in literary productions, as the form of modernist works came to prefer "reality represented by a chaotic conglomerate of fragments [and] forms of representation which approach collages rather than unified, harmonious compositions." As will be made clear, this is something which we can attribute to both Conrad and Woolf.

The existence of the human subject, so thoroughly fixed in pre-modern literature and philosophy, loses its orientation in the modernist period. This is because modern authors place an emphasis on those nonrational features of the human condition and promote a view of history which implicitly rejects the past by viewing history as ironic and contingent. Finally, modern works of art are situated at the horizon of what can be brought into works or images. While the list of features of modern works of art may not be complete, these features are those that are considered to exemplify the classics of modern art. "The world is everything that is the case," says Wittgenstein, defining the world as the sum total of all facts. In addition, with this statement he excludes the following concepts as illusory: the idea of a transcendence beyond the world of facts; the idea of absolute values as a way of guiding human behavior; and the idea of a comprehensive order of reality that allows the world to be systematized according to a set of propositions given by a master thinker.

It becomes clear that, for Wittgenstein, the facts of existence are the only things which can be spoken of. When a person attempts to speak of anything outside the world of facts, the results are equivalent to nonsense and illogical propositions. This unspeakable set of propositions are those which establish the basis for logic, metaphysics and the ultimate values of mathematics. With the division of the sayable from the unsayable, the traditional concept of philosophy has been obliterated. The only project left for the philosophers to advance is to show that philosophy itself is an untenble project. Wittgenstein declares that those projects that attempt to provide a rational basis for the arguments of philosophy are both unnecessary and impossible. All that is left after Wittgenstein has cleared away the nonessential components of language are the rules of the functions of logic, and any attempts to expand on these principles lead to the creation of arbitrary assumptions.

The project of abstracting rational values from one's experience in the world is misguided, for the idea of arriving at absolutely binding values in a world guided by facts is strictly impossible. In his work on the impact of the Tractatus on the modern arts, Jorn Bramann says Wittgenstein showed that philosophy can only bring change to life when it is grounded in rationality. The history of philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche is charged as comprising the history of metaphysics, a history that attempts to reveal an antecedent world beyond and prior to the realm of facts. With his Tractatus, Wittgenstein initiated a new model of thinking about the world, developing a self-conscious appraisal that found expression in modernist works of art, including the novels of Joseph Conrad and Virginia Woolf. By declaring the impossibility of reconciling statements that describe a transcendental world with statements that derive from experience in the empirical world, Wittgenstein forsaw a definitive clearing-up of philosophy and other modes of discourse. This thought was best summed up in the Tractatus's final proposition, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof let us be silent." Considering the purpose of philosophy to be the clarification of language, Wittgenstein proposed that no representation of a transcendent, supernatural world is possible. Thereafter, the idea of the mystical became, not a separate realm of transcendent being, but a special way of relating to the world.

Conrad's Lord Jim and Woolf's Jacob's Room are similar in that both writers attempt to debunk the illusion of transcendence. Due to their belief in this illusion, the heroes of both books are afflicted with a pernicious conception of selfhood that develops into a wish to transcend the physical reality of their existence. Unsurprisingly, this wish to experience another form of reality radically disturbs their ability to live a non-illusory life. As a result, they eventually slip away from reality entirely, becoming figures that exist as a part of history and mythology more than reality.

Joseph Conrafd's Lord Jim (1900) tells the story of a young man who, having been drawn into the world of romanticism, forges an unrealistic identity for himself by setting impossibly high standards, thereby ensuring that he will remain perpetually disconsolate, his personal goals being inexpressible and undeveloped. His experience of a traumatic event, and his failure to meet these standards at a critical moment lead Jim to confront the limits of his belief system, something that has radical effects on his life. For a time Jim finds liberation from his former self by taking up a new identity in an exotic country, but his inability to abandon this mode of thinking leads to his re-acceptance of his original ideology, and his inorexable return to the romantic code of the self. As Conrad states in his preface, although this character type is not the most prevalent in society, nevertheless, Jim's appeal is universal, as he symbolizes the common man with whom anyone can identify. He describes Jim as someone whose immaculate cleanliness signifies his detachment from all anger and hostility. Significantly, Conrad writes that Jim's characater was shaped in part by his exposure to "a course in light holiday literature," suggesting that his exposure to works of romantic fiction serves as his primary intellectual paradigm, the lens through which he interprets the world.

Conrad also states how Jim felt intimated and devaslued by his father, a figure who appeared to possess a set of truths that Jim could not have access to. Believing his father to possess a "certain knowledge of the unknowable," Jim found him to be a foreboding an ominious figure. As a result of this intimidation, Jim was progressively drawn into the space of his imagination, the territory where he alone stood as the adjudicator of moral correctness. Estranged from life, his intellect unstimulated and his imagination over-extended, Jim comes to feel contempt for the world, and views himself as a pitiful soul who stands above ordinary life and, simultaneously, is oppressed by the weight of the world. It is at this point that Jim begins to fade away, disappearing and retreating from life. His thoughts come to reflect his fundamentally displaced position, deliberately committing himself to a kind of thinking whose ultimate truth lies concealed in ambiguities and fuzziness. For these reasons, the reader of Conrad's tale finds it plausible when Jim, having been told that the Patna is sinking, abandons ship. Even though such a treacherous act goes against the ethical code of the sailor and, more significantly, against his personal moral judgment, Jim's desertion in that moment of crisis has far-reaching effects on his life. These effects determine the shape of his future life, as Jim must fashion a new identity, preparing himself for the next opportunity to confirm his ethical system in a moment when personal honor is at stake.

Conrad makes it clear that he wants us to see Jim as a common type, a man who is full of potentially great achievements and eager to make wise ethical and moral judgments. He describes Jim in auspicious terms, calling him "as promising a boy as ever stood." Eschewing the type of extrordinary hero from the typical heroic novels of his day, Conrad portrays a hero of more common stock, one who "was one of us." By taking his hero from such quotidian circumstances, Conrad promotes the view that Jim's story, the story of a common man grappling with ethical questions in an attempt to lay hold of an authentic moral identity, and not the story of a one-dimensiomal adventure hero, is the central stage of the human drama. This insight into Conrad's selection of his main character attests to his belief in Jim's story as the arena where acts of real heroism take place. As a young man, however, Jim's disposition was quite the reverse, as he was regarding by his fellow crewmembers as someone who was overly rigid and whose melancholy character befitted "a sulky brute" more than a hero or a Lord. As Conrad describes the workings of his psychology, as a result of being infected by the confusing landscape of the romantic perspective, his mind prevents him from taking direct action at key moments in his life, and unwittingly pre-determines the situation where his critical lapse of moral judgment launches onto a path towards a new identity.

Marlow records how Jim grew increasingly inward, delving further and further into a space where the intangible ideal of imaginary fiction and dreamy metaphysical secrets gained more and more verity until, finally, he established a permanent residency in this illusory world. With an odd, saintlike glow radiating from Jim's face, it is evident to Marlow that Jim has wrapped himself in fiction by removing himself from reality. At the courtroom proceedings that follow the incident on board the Patna, it is evident that Jim's act of cowardice was not based on his fear of death; rather, blinded by a dominating sense of romanticism, he was momentarily confused between his commitments to the value of his ethical system and the value of his own life. This confusion between expressible logic and inexpressible feelings returns when Jim angrily asks his accusers whether they truly consider him, a man of great moral ambition, to be a coward. Within a few pages, the reader sees Jim at the other extreme when, while giving his testimony, a silent masks falls over his countenance, a mask that appears to signal his permanent displacement from the world. With an austere, graven voice he admits to having abandoned ship, and the weight of his admission appears to be a delayed reaction to a traumatic experience. His statement, "I had jumped . . . it seems," sounds more like his discovery of the truth about hiomself than a confession of guilt. Noting Jim's mannerisms on the witness stand, Marlow describes Jim as a young child in need of a reprieve, a statement that Jim's testimony corroborates, for the imagery he uses indicates a wish to return to the maternal womb, where safety and quietude are assured: "I wished I could die. ... There was no going back. It was as if I had jumped into a well--into an everlasting deep hole. . . " But Jim knows his desire to return to a stable existence by separating himself from the rest of the world is, at this point, impossible.

It is here in the middle section of Conrad's novel that his narrative, ostensibly about the sailing adventures of an ordinary sailor, becomes a meditation on the question of man's place in the universe. In the following passage Conrad asks the question of whether a man such as Jim, when forced to confront life with its idealism stripped away, can again find meaning and order in a world that has been reduced to meaninglessness and confusion. Continuing his self-punishing ways, Jim expresses his desire to sink further and further away from himself, and what was once the promising life of a new day has faded into the anguish of a bottomless black night. As Jim explains to Marlow, although he considers his life to be an endless trial, he refrains from killing himself because, he stutters, "I believe it--would have--ended nothing." Interestingly, although he feels there is no meaning in life, Jim says that the only proper thing to do is to pass through life in a solitary hell, for only in this way is he able to "find out."

Hearing of Jim's predicament from Marlow, Stein expresses his belief that human beings are innately timid creatures. Before agreeing to employ the wandering Jim as his agent in the Patusan trading post, Stein reveals himself to be a thinker concerned with questions that are very much related to Jim's situation. How does a man such as Jim reclaim his moral confidence when the founding values of his life have been removed ? In Marlow's view, the question is one that requires deep contemplation. These sentiments are echoed by Stein, who ruminates over his collection of butterflies, marvelling at the construction of the human spirit, which he considers to be a flawed masterpiece. For Stein, the answer to Jim's spiritual resurrection is a matter of overcoming the romantic ideology that shapes his view of the world. Finding the solution to his problem involves taking up questions of the ontological status of man, the same existential questions that plagued Shakespeare's Hamlet -- "How to be ?"

Diagnosing Jim from a distance, Stein accurately supposes Jim to be confused by a self that offers a multitude of possible developments. Fearing to seize any of these possibilities, Stein speculates, he has become fixated on an ideal image of the self that retains all of these possibilities without ever having to actualize any of them: "He wants to be a saint and he wants to be a devil--and every time he shuts his eyes he sees himself as a very fine fellow--so fine that he can never be." The problem arises, Stein says, when Jim is forced to test the illusion against physical reality, for in these instances, he always comes away with a sense of his illusory beliefs crumbling beneath the destructive touch of reality. Eventually, individuals such as Jim must discover, to their horror, that their ambitions are unrealizable. Both Stein and Marlow recognize that if Jim is going to obtain satisfaction in life, he must modify the expectations he has. But how ? Finding an answer to Marlow's query, Stein suggests that the only way for Jim to overcome this illusory perspective is to experience life fully, regardless of the potential danger he may encounter. This dangerous proposition of Stein's is intended to liberate Jim by plunging him into the part of existence that he had dreamed of so longingly, coming to know consummately what he had only known imaginatively. As Stein says, "That is the way. To follow the dream, and again to follow the dream--and so--ewig usque ad finem." This final phrase thast Stein adds, a mixture of German and Latin, will prove to be prophetic, as Jim will soon enter Patusan, where he will live out his dream to the very end.

While Lord appears to be moving towards a conclusion common to realism, the hero's reunification with and return to his past, the concluding events marks this novel as a form unlike either realism or naturalism. Conrad attempts to disguise this through two movements. First, like any number of realist protagonists, Conrad introduces Jim as a romantic whose character was constructed by virtue of his reading literature. Second, after his failure of moral character, it appears that Conrad places Jim in Patusan to patch up the torn romantic plot. The story of Jim's rise to Tuan Jim satisfies the requirements of the romantic plot-structure, for Jim has returned to an apparent unity with his original romantic self-image. What remains of the plot ? Typically, one would expect that the ontological structure of the realist plot would require Jim's death. But Jim's death is required not in order to fulfill romanticism, or to verify realism, or to legitimize naturalism, but to carry out the logic that allows Lord Jim to pass over the limits of naturalism. In Lord, the idea of a fall from a privileged position no longer applies, for such a fall implies the existence of some original self-present essence; the lack of such an essence is exactly what Marlow discovers. The second half of Lord, where the exiled Jim recasts his identity into that of the mythical Tuan Jim, will attempt to show that the metaphysical urges of one's youth can, in fact, be conquered.

Entering a new life in Patusan, Jim feels unburdened of his former emotions, fears and memories of failure. As Marlow observes, at last Jim was free from the knowledge others had of his past, as he had no need to continue wandering from place to place. Now at ease with himself, Jim has finally buried the volcanic self-hatred that drove him to seek out an idyllic form of reality. By exhibiting a peaceful disposition, Jim soon becomes a leader among the Patusan natives, who call him Tuan Jim--Lord Jim. For the first time in his life, Jim is able to take on the role of the hero, thinking before he takes action or, figuratively, looking before he leaps. Yet despite these indications of change, Marlow recognizes thast Jim is still a romantic, still believing that he can follow his ideals and enter the dream. Jim's latent romanticism can be seen through his solipsistic view of the world, as he keeps his interactions with others to a minimum, living as one who is truly independent from the world. Tuan Jim believes in nothing greater than "the laws of order and progress." In Marlow's view, at that moment, the "profound and terrifyting logic" of the romantic heart was closing in on Jim. It is perhaps this undying romanticism that causes Jim to take Gentleman Brown at his word, causing him to blame himself when Brown murders Dain Waris. Cretainly, it is this same component of Jim's psychology that leads him to offer himself to Doramin, Dain Waris' father, for corporeal punishment.

Conrad's concern for the individual consciousness as it grapples with the images of the transcendent self becomes evident at this moment, a second critical time of moral decision. Sitting like a figure made of stone, Jim finds himself forsaken from all sides, and an aura of deep serenity comes over his mind. Disenchanted with life, Jim submits to a code of honor that demands a sacrifice for his past failures, his abandoning the Patna as well as his role in Dain Waris' death. Carried by a sense of moral superiority, Jim feels removed from his surroundings--for the final time. He offers himself to Doramin, who executes him in an act that the Patusan natives see as a example of tribal justice. However, Marlow will not be fooled into thinking that Jim has attained his romantic ideals by absorbing the resposibuility for Dain Waris' death. Rather, as a final punishment for his inability to live up to his ideals, Jim sacrifices himself and finally disappears in the same way he first appeared before Conrad's imagination, "under a cloud, inscrutable at heart...and excessively romantic." Just as Conrad originally conceived him, so the readers of Lord retain an image of a man who chose to deny his love of life due to the demands of a romantic, self-obsessed heart. Yes, Jim was one of us, but now he is gone--and we are none the wiser for his premature death.

In many ways Virginia Woolf constructs Jacob Flanders, the main character of Jacob's Room, like Conrad's Jim, as these two characters are markedly similar in terms of their psychology. As a young boy playing on the beach, Jacob suddenly confronts the prone figures of a man and a woman and, for a moment, he looks into their "enormous red faces." Reacting to this exposure to sexuality with shock and horror, he turns away from the lovers, hurrying faster and faster as he streaks madly across the beach, psychically threatened by this unexpected entrance of the sexual world. He then finds an object that willl affect his future signficiantly, the toothy skull of an animal that has wahsed upon the shore. With the skull in his hands, Jacob uses the grim death's-head to re-stabilize his view of the world for he sees the skull, whose features have been worn smooth by time and the tide of the ocean, as something that has escaped the transcience of the world and the finality of death. Jacob uses this object as the model for his own life and, bringing the skull to his room, he sleeps through the night, undisturbed by this image of death that he has "kicked up against the iron-rail of his bed." Much as Jim's initial exposure to romantic literature incited the development of a fatalistic and self-involved personality, Jacob's identification with this object gives rise to an equally distorted image of the self; his attraction to the skull represents his attraction to the untenable possibility of transcending life. In this way Woolf allows the reader to see that Jacob's understanding of reality, having been shaped by this illusory object, is itsel;f a false image.

Elizabeth Flanders, a middle-aged widow and mother to Jacob, has several potential suitors, but she declines to accept any of their proposals because she believes it is impractical for her to marry a second time. Still, she admires Mr. Floyd, who holds a high place in her mind as a distinguished intellectual. Although Woolf does not say that Jacob is aware of his mother's admiration of this man, when he enters the academic world of Oxford University to pursue the life of a scholar, it is evident that Jacob seeks to realize his mother's unfulfilled dreams. As a young man at Oxford, Jacob's confrontation with a literary history stretching from Homer to Shakespeare leads to a reaction that recalls the fearful outburst that overtook him when he was confronted with sexuality, "Oh my God, oh God, oh God ! ... Oh my God !" Like Jim, Jacob is an imaginative young man, and both of them have defined themselves according to a rigorous image of the self.

While an adolescent, Jacob spent his time collecting insects and preserving them in camphor, making his room a place dominated by a set of orderly and lawful codes. In much the same way, Jacob's room at Oxford is governed by a consciously orchestrated display of refinement. The room is simply and economically furnished, decorated with various objects from his past, including signs that denote his membership in rarefied circles, the minutiae of his boyhood and the essential visage of his mother. Other signs, the remains of Jacob's presence, include an unfinished essay lying neatly on the table, awaiting the author's final pronouncement on whether or not the individual should be seen as the preeminent force in history. Although the books Jacob has assembled displace the works of French Literature in favor of English works, his library contains many well-respected volumes from the canon of Western civilization. While Woolf mentions the attitude that one should read what one likes, her sketch of Jacob's room suggests that his life has been shaped in deference to a specific view of greatness. Her description of the room suggests that the books are designed to cultivate an ideology fashionable among the intelligentsia, not because of their intrinsic value. Perhaps the most signficiant fact is that Jacob is not physically present in this scene. "No one sits there" among the accouterments of an English schoolboy, for Jacob has retreated completely into the world on language, history and poetry. As we will see, living under such circumstances will have significiant effects on Jacob's ability to establish a stable personal identity.

Like Jacob, the young men at Oxford University are also engaged in a program of study that demands the harnessing of a stylized self. Filled with the sound of a Romantic piano, the crowded room of privileged males takes on the atmosphere of a military hall, with its sense of hurried activity, or a monastary, with its code of silent engrossment. Woolf cautions us from seeing these young students as devout men of faith when she pejoratively describes them as lounging in "shallow" chairs, reading books as if they expected a real physical presene to emerge. She speculates that some were preparing to study European history, swiftly deciding that the proper point of origin is the first volume of the first authorized set of books on that subject. Here Woolf points out the irony of trying to obtain knowledge of life by studying books. She also points out that the study of life in relation to texts leads to a split in the student's thinking, specifically, a dichotomy between categories of good and evil.

Jacob's thinking at this time can be defined using the term logocentrism. This term, often used by the French critic Jacques Derrida, stands for the overwhelming emphasis on truth, rationality, logic and "the word" that marks the Western philosophical tradition since the time of ancient Greece. In his critique of Derrida's use of this term, John Searle notes that logocentrism comprises a variety of concepts including those elements of logical argumentation that are used to substantiate and affirm the existence of oppositional categories such as "proving, refuting, establishing and confirming." While Searle may have doubts about the validity of logocentrism, if the term is used simply to indicate the set of presuppositions that come into play when our concepts of language, science and common sense are evoked, then Derrida's critique of the Western concept of rationality may be used to characterize the academic culture at Oxford. Enveloped in the rational pursuit of knowledge, it is not suprising that young men such as Jacob, pursuing their studies with the intention of obtaining the truth, fail to distinguish between reality and appearance, between truth and fiction.

When we encounter Jacob again, his education has caused him to become prematurely aged, feeling more at home in his library than in the world. He is aghast at his fellow students, whose study of the history of philosophy has led to their newfound skepticism about religion, if not outright atheism. In defiance of this educated priggishness that has infected the others, Jacob remembers the words to his favorite Christian hymn and sings "Rock of Ages" at the top of his voice. Retreating even further from life, Jacob gazes at a bookcase teeming with great works and considers how, in the world's golden age, great men walked the earth. It is evident that this logocentric literary world, where a bookcase can stand as the central repository of meaning and transcendent truth, is a world that is divorced from life.

This is a society where, to avert the plunge in disapearance, exemplary works of high culture are used to provide a refuge from the world. In his literary cocoon of seclusion, Jacob has a stable self, "extremely awkward...but so distinguished looking," as Mrs. Durrant describes him. Jacob's displacement from life is seen as by others as commendable, as seen when Clara becomes infatuated by her image of Jacob as an "unworldly" being. Unfortunately for Clara, Jacob's education has led to his sexual frustration, as he dismisses any light-hearted discussion of sexual matters as "indecent" speech. A truly text-bound scholar, this otherworldly visitor is clumsy with the material and bodily things of the reified world. His years at Oxford and his intense study of literary history has brought about "the condition of his love," and Woolf suggests that Jacob would eventually be faced with the repercussions such education has on "the effect of sex."

Newly graduated from college, Jacob explores the Grecian world, an age idealized in Jacob's mind as the point of origin in the genealogy of cultures. His status as a mere dilettante is affirmed when Woolf reveals that he "knew no more Greek than served him to stumble through a play. Of ancient history he knew nothing." In addition, his hyper-romanticized mind has left him without love, as he now descends into the anti-physical, negative side of romantic consciousness, leading him to cry out that "Life is wicked !" To Jacob, life is wicked inasmuch as it differs from a text. Unlike a great work of literature, where a privileged authorial consciousness maintains a stable set of relations between fictional characters, there is no coherent map of the world that is given to the mind, and Jacob is unable to locate a stable image of the self. One of Woolf's characters even attributes Jacob's maladroit personality to higher education, saying that "book learning" is responsible for it. Although it contains a rich depth of meaning, Jacob's mind has been put away, like a museum piece, allowing him to carry on alone. Foreshadowing Jacob's own departure, Woolf records how Jacob watched as Cruttendon, Jacob's school friend, dissolved into the night "like a genuis." Fearing life, and wishing he could disappear like Cruttendon, Jacob returns to Greece, where his romantic thoughts cause him to despair that most men shun the experience of life, preferring to be brought up under illusions. His thinking growing wild, Jacobs condemns all of civilization, moving through the mythical Greek landscape while the skies of modernity surround him in dark portent. In an attempt to repudiate the whole of modern life, Jacob curses the role of women, for it is they who disturb the male image of history as a linear system.

The critic Edward L. Bishop has pointed out that the form of Woolf's fiction, and Jacob's in particular, is part of an ideological re-orientation of the reader with the text. By examining how the subject is created through ideology, Woolf turns Conrad's view of the relationship between society and the subject on its head. Woolf depicts how Jacob, a young man educated in the twentieth century, becomes immersed in an ideological struggle. Torn between the pressures of nationalistic ideology and his own personal desire for artistic greatness, Jacob's conflict lies in the struggle to move beyond the catagories of the self prescribed by society and becomes a true hero. Instead of being composed from the multiple voices of an internally dialogic character, Jacob's presence is constituted through his absence. "The history of narrative in Western literature," says Bishop, "is distinguished by an inward turn, an increasing emphasis on rendering mental states." After Jacob's, Woolf's artistic work moves toward an increasing concern with rendering the mental states of her characters. As we will see in The Waves, eventually her work turns even further inward, seeking to problematize the process by which a reader comes to identity with a character.

According to Thomas Docherty, "In the postmodern novel, the stability of character is replaced by the more mobile subject." Instead of characters we have "instants of subjectivity," none of which develop into a modernist self. Although he is presented in a fragmentary way, Bishop says that Jacob is not like the postmodern subject outlined by Docherty, and he is not reduced to a voice. While Bishop points out that "the prototypical modernist hero is the alienated individual," it should be noted that the way Conrad and Woolf write causes their protagonists to be distinctly different. While Jim's existential isolations prevents us from identifying with him, Woolf allows her readers to identify with Jacob's situation, thereby investing Jacob with their own subjectivity. While Jacob's skillfull erudition earns him high praise at Oxford, his learning is fatally incomplete, leaving him prey to the intellectual hubris that incites young men to go off to war. Paradoxically, the intellectual character that earns him praise as a student also brings about his death, for this same quality blinds him to the logocentric rationality of Western civilization. Jacob's depicts how the rationality of the subject often suffers a false development, promoting an ideology of the subject who, as a self-affirming entity, sees war as the only logical outcome to the conflict of rationality and ideology. In this way, Jacob's challenges the use of power to command subjects to give up their lives in the name of idieology.

His head filled with the burden of knowledge, Jacob appears to have no independent, rational will of his own when he joins the other men fighting for their country, sons fighting for their motherland. Woolf notes that time does not stop with Jacob's death, but his absence is marked most significantly by an empty room where the trace of Jacob's presence lingers on in a pair of old shoes. There is a remarkable similarity betwen these characters and Wittgenstein's distinction between the sayable and the unsayable. Both Conrad's Jim, who reflects "the passionate desire to transcend the world of facts" and Woolf's Jacob, who "embodies a relentless intellectual honesty," view metaphysics as a privileged, yet impossible goal. While they are not so much utter moralists as much as they are moral innocents, both Jim and Jacob are indiviudals who are controlled by the rigor with which they approach life. Indeed, Jim's concept of identity stems from, and is inherently tied to, the code of personal honor he was exposed to during his military career, while Jacob's university career leads him to extend himself backward, into history and literature, until he disappears from the physical world entirely. In an attempt to make himself fully present in the world, Jim submits to a death through ritual murder. Like Jim, Jacob, too, becomes invisible my disappearing from the world-stage, convinced that his absence will resound through history. But unlike the fantasy where his death constitutes an event of historical significance, his absence is felt most acutely in his boyhood room, where his memory is recorded in the objects of his adolescence that lie scattered on his desk. The dissatisfaction with life that has afflicted both Jim and Jacob derives from their overly dogmatic approach to the world. Living in isolation, they each become engaged with an image of the world that is derived from a textual basis. The attempt to mold life into a substitute for literary experience leads to, in the case of Jacob, the creation of an atrophied existence and a desiccated cultural mind and, in the case of Jim, the establishment of a value-system where the resignation of one's life assuages a supposed loss of personal honor.

Jim and Jacob are similar in that both affiliate themselves with a logocentric viewpoint. Jim's exposure to "a course of light holiday literature" promoted his rigorous conception of life where honorable death stood opposed to a dishonored life. In the case of Jacob, it is "book learning that does it," that is, it is his internalization of the logocentric discourse of Western civilization that leads him to accept, as Jim does, a view of life as a fixed textual construction. I attempted to show this at various pints in his life: his paranoid insight to death as the end-point of life and the resultant identification with the animal skull; his years at Oxford, where his assimilation of a specifically literary history translated into his conception of life as a teleological narrative whose claims to the truth lie written in the stars. It is this thinking that leads Jacob to go to war, and his eventual death is the fulfillment of his logocentric and telological world-view.

Like the philosophy of the early Wittgenstein, who believed that a rigid set of propositions separated language and logic, Jim and Jacob are heroes who are so committed to their rigid conception of existence that the attempt to import these intuitions directly onto life causes their early deaths. Beneath the weight of the heroic image of the self, these young men wrapped themselves in the sentimental spirit of literature. Both Jim and Jacob allowed the literary spirit to operate as the central axis in the formation of one's character. The deaths of Jim and Jacob constitute the heroic assertions of their romantic desires to transcend the physical world through the ethics of the indomitable self. Another significant parallel between the case of Jim and Jacob is that there is a similar sourcre from which both heroes construct their knowledge of the world--literature, textuality, the representation of speech through writing. Obviously, it is war and ritual murder, and not language, that is responsible for the deaths of Jim and Jacob. Yet on another level, it is their logocentric fixation, as manifested in both language and culture, that is unable to disinguish betwen the real and the fantastic. It is this ideological gestalt that brings about their desmise, and for this reason Wittgenstein and Derrida are appropriate.

Due to their longing for a divine world, a world guided by imagination, Jim and Jacob decide to recreate the given blank world according to the most extreme absolute of divinity they can conceive. While one might not be convinced their deaths are related to language, I feel that among the misperceptions of the logocentric intellectual viewpoint is an incomplete understanding of the nature of language. It is this misjudgment that determines their ideological makeup and the structure of their lives is determined by this fallacious interpretation of language. When language is pushed beyond the realm of logical statements it enters a kind of illogical space where, to compensate for their disorientation, Jim and Jacob subscribe to a kind of non-sense where being is erased due to having stakes their lives on what are untenable propositions; in doing so they situate themselves along the dividing line between life and death. Their failure to perceive the internally conditioned limits of language causes Jim to place honor and Jacob to place historical tradition as the sine qua non of their religious and morally-centered belief-systems. Consequently, Jim and Jacob place their ultimate values in categories that steadfastly remain "unsayable." As a result they each grow further and further distant from the world, to the point that their bodies become only an image. As these two novels show, this image is inexorably erased under the weight on a non-realizable transcendent truth.