Lord Jim and the Christian Reader Barrett Fisher Associate Professor of English Bethel College Throughout Mystery and Manners. The posthumous collection of Flannery O’Connor’s occasional prose, she discusses a number of literary models and influences, including Hawthorne, James, Flaubert, Kaflca, Kipling, Mauriac, J.F. Powers, and Joseph Conrad. Though Conrad is mentioned less frequently than James and Hawthome, O’Connor esteems him as one of the novelists whose aesthetic credo best explains her aim as a Catholic writer of fiction. Because she shares St. Augustine’s belief “that the things of the world pour forth God in a double way: intellectually into the minds of the angels and physically into the world of things” (157), O’Connor agrees with Conrad’s famous Preface to The Mgger of the “Narcissus”: “When Conrad said that his aim as an artist was to render the highest possible justice to the visible universe, he was speaking with the novelist’s surest instinct. The artist penetrates the concrete world in order to find at its depths the image of its source, the image of ultimate reality” (157). Clearly, in O’Connor’s own deliberately “distorted” fictional perspective, this penetration of the concrete world does not mean photographic realism, but a discovery of how the natural order reveals God. (In discussing her technique, O’Connor says that “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures’ [34]; this is as precise and clear an explanation of her so-caUed “grotesqueries” as one will find in any of her critics). The “things of the world” appear in O’Connor’s fiction as “a believable and significant social context” which provides “distinctive speech” and “distinctive features” (105) for her characters. By recreating “the texture of existence” (103) of the secular world of “manners,” she actuary approaches the holy realm of “mystery.” O’Connor finds an analogous relationship between “mystery” and “manners” in Conrad’s artistic creed. She states “that reality for him was not simply coextensive with the visible. He was interested in rendering justice to the visible universe because it suggested an invisible one” (80). Conrad the religious agnostic and O’Connor the Christian believer may not discover the same truth when they penetrate reality, but each believes that a close examination and faithful rendering of the surface is the way to reveal hidden truth. At this point, I must quote Conrad’s words at some length in order to show what he means by “truth,” and how he thinks that truth is discovered and communicated by the novelist: The artist, . . . like the thinker or the scientist, seeks the truth and makes his appeal.... His appeal is made to our less obvious capacities: to that part of our nature which, because of the warlike conditions of existence, is necessarily kept out of sight within the more resisting and hard qualities-like the vulnerable body within a steel amour.... He speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fellowship with all creation-and to the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity-the dead to the living and the living to the unbom.... My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel-it is, before all, to make you see.... If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm-all you demand-and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask. (Xi-xii, xiv) For both O’Connor and Conrad the goal of literary art is truth; literature achieves or reveals truth in two ways: 1) as a way of depicting the world which is faithful to the visible universe; 2) as a means of revealing the invisible reality behind or beneath the natural world. O’Connor and Conrad share the same artistic activity as a way of knowing without sharing artistic discovery. O’Connor can agree when Conrad says in his Preface that the artist “descends within himself. And in that lonely region of stress and strife, if he be deserving and fortunate, he finds the terms of his appeal” (xii). However, when he claims in a letter to one of his publishers that “the basis of art in literature” is “absolute truth to my sensations” (Blackburn 156), O’Connor can only partially agree. For her, “the basis of art is truth, both in matter and in mode” (65). In her “region of stress and strife” (the American South), she sees “grace as working through nature, but as entirely transcending it,” so that the “center of meaning will be Christ” (197). Despite an ultimate disagreement about the truth literature reveals, these two novelists fundamentally agree on the way truth is approached through the exercise of their art. “The novelist and the believer, when they are not the same man, yet have many traits in common,” she writes. “[A] distrust of the abstract, a respect for boundaries, a desire to penetrate the surface of reality and to find in each thing the spirit which makes it itself and holds the world together” (168). She shares Conrad’s emphasis on visual imagery; it is the novelist’s penetrating gaze that enable us to pierce reality as well. In fact, O’Connor calls this faculty “prophetic vision”: “The prophet is a realist of distances. And it is this kind of realism that goes into great novels. It is the realism which does not hesitate to distort appearances in order to show a hidden truth” (179). Both she and Conrad seek that hidden truth. Like O’Connor, the Christian reader has much to learn from an author whose own struggles in the service of art exhibit an admirable and even heroic fidelity to the truth of the visible world created by an invisible God, even if Conrad himself did not see with the eyes of faith. I want to further consider Conrad’s Preface within the context of a stimulating book by sociologist Parker Palmer. To Know as we Are Known is subtitled “A Spirituality of Education,” and is Palmer’s critique of an education system whose epistemology relies on facts and methods, turning truth into an abstract proposition, divorcing the learner from what is learned, conceiving knowledge as an object to be mastered or manipulated by the purely rational subject. In a chapter entitled “What is Truth?” Palmer argues that we do not simply pursue truth; this metaphor for knowing he calls “objectivist,” and typifies traditional scientific thinking. Palmer believes that we are m turn pursued by truth: “The knower who advances most rapidly toward the heart of truths” Palmer says, “is the one who not only asks ‘What is out there?’ in each encounter with the world, but one who also asks ‘What does this encounter reveal about me?”’ (60). In Conrad’s Preface, the capacity of the knower-the reader who receives truth “according to your deserts”-is an essential component in the discovery of truth. Conrad’s ideal artist and ideal reader are partners in the search for truth; all the qualities Conrad ascribes to the artist-vulnerability, imagination, sympathy, attentiveness, even moral rectitude- are required of the reader as well. In his search for truth as a way of knowing which “binds together all humanity,” Conrad illuminates a key proposition in Palmer’s book “in Christian understanding truth is neither an object ‘out there’ nor a proposition about such objects.... The search for the word of truth becomes the quest for commmunity with each other and all creation” (48-49). Palmer comments that “It is not necessary to accept Jesus as Lord and Savior to find in him a paradigm of personal truth” (50); but this is an epistemology consistent with a Christian ethic which refuses to treat others as objects for our own use or manipulation. Conrad’s link with this epistemology (and ethic) is his emphasis on emotion, intuition, and imagination. At this point, I want to use one of Conrad’s own stories to illustrate the limits of an objectivist view. The scene is a courtroom in the late 19th century; a young sailor named Jim is on trial for abandoning his ship. Let me quickly remind you of the background for this event (it may be a few years since you’ve read the book): Lord Jim is a novel about a young man endowed with an active imagination and strong body who leaves his father’s English country parsonage to become a sailor. He starts out in the British Merchant Marine, but undergoes a subtle, nearly imperceptible moral decline of sorts, ending up as first mate on the Patna, a “tramp steamer” which sails from Singapore to the Red Sea. One night as Jim stands watch the steamer strikes a submerged object; the Patna continues to sail with no perceptible damage, but an examination of the bulkhead mdicates the danger of imminent sinking. The four other crew members decide to abandon ship, leaving behind the more than 900 sleeping Muslim pilgrims who have been squeezed on board. Jim remains aloof from their efforts to free a lifeboat; after the boat reaches the water with the captain and two of three engineers aboard, they encourage the third engineer to join them, unaware that he has suffered a fatal heart attack. Unable to withstand their repeated calls of “Jump! Jump!” Jim, who has seen the rotten rusty buLkhead bulging from the pressure of the water behind it, leaps overboard. The ship does not sink but is later towed into port by a brave French lieutenant. Jim and the other survivors are the objects of an inquiry designed to discover the “truth” of what has happened by fully uncovering the “facts” of the case. Three men, a magistrate and two nautical assessors of impeccable moral character, question Jim. But the more explicitly and fully he attempts to communicate facts, the less able he is to convey the truth of his experience: A month or so afterwards, when Jim, in answer to pointed questions, tried to tell honestly the truth of this experience, he said, speaking of the ship: “She went over whatever it was as easy as a snake crawling over a stick.” The illustration was good the questions were aiming at facts, and the official inquiry was being held in the police court of an Eastern port.... [Ilhe terribly distinct questions that extorted his answers seemed to shape themelves in anguish and pain within his breast-came to him poignant and silent like the terrible questioning of one’s conscience.... They wanted facts. Facts! They demanded facts from him, as if facts could explain anything! (63) By the end of this passage, it is clear that a chasm has opened up between these “pointed questions” which aim at facts, and the truth of Jim’s experience which it is the court’s duty to ascertain. The passage moves from the adequacy of Jim’s illustration for their purposes to the complete inadequacy of any facts to explain Jim’s failure. When Jim realizes how large a gap of understanding separates him from the judges-and from everyone else in the courtroom- he tries a different tack. His answers become exhaustive in detail as he tries to reproduce the scene with photographic accuracy. Nevertheless, as the following passage suggests, Jitn is cut off from his fellow men even as he stands before them in the court: He spoke slowly; he remembered swiftly and with extreme vividness; he could have reproduced like an echo the moaning of the engineer for the better information of these men who wanted facts. After his first feeling of revolt he had come round to the view that only a meticulous precision of statement could bring out the true horror behind the appalling face of things. The facts those men were so eager to know had been visible, tangible, open to the senses, occupying their place in space and time, requiring for their existence a fourteen-hundred-ton steamer and twenty-seven minutes by the watch; they made a whole that had features, shades of expression, a complicated aspect that could be remembered by the eye, and something else besides, something invisible, a directing spirit of perdition that dwelt within, like a malevolent soul in a detestable body. He was anxious to make this clear. This had not been a common affair, everything in it had been of utmost importance, and fortunately he remembered everything. He wanted to go on talking for truth’s sake, perhaps for his own sake also; and while his utterance was deliberate, his mind positively flew round and round the serried circle of facts that had surged up all about him to cut him off from the rest of his kind: it was like a creature that, finding itself imprisoned within an enclosure of high stakes, dashes round and round, distracted in the night, trying to find a weak spot, a crevice, a place to scale, some opening through which it may squeeze itself and escape. (65 A reader trying to account for this barrier between Jim and those who judge him faces two possibilities. On the one hand, Jim is cut off by his guilt, by the “objective fact” of his crime, and his clear breach of ethical obligations. On the other hand, Jim’s isolation is as much epistemological as moral; the reductively logical framework of this cOunroom, with its positivistic method of screening facts to get at truth, does not allow a different sort of truth to enter. What Jim knows is what he has felt and, even more importantly, imagined on board the Patna. But his imagination is irrelevant if the judges assume that the only possible truth is a space-time phenomenon, measurable, quantifiable, verifiable by a scientific apparatus. Once Jim tries to beat the court at its own game, so to speak, he is doomed to failure. His volubility is a valiant but futile attempt to describe a reality for which his examiners’ language has no words because, as Parker Palmer puts it, “The structure of reality is not exhausted by the principles of empiricism and rationality” (53). Marlow himself complains that “the questions put to him necessarily led away from what to me, . . . would have been the only truth worth knowing. [But] you can’t expect the constituted authorities to inquire into the state of a man’s soul” (84). The assumption m the courtroom that there can be no appropriate or relevant connection between personal and “objective” truth, so that talking for truth’s sake is opposed to talking for one’s own sake, is the very assumption that Palmer wishes us to question. I realize that I seem to be setting aside ethical questions in favor of epistemological distinctions. “After ad,” one might object, “the simple fact does remain that Jim’s jump is a heinous dereliction of duty, no matter how complex the event or even understandable his actions may have been. Of what use is an ethical code if it permits such breaches of conduct without penalty? Don’t you want ‘understanding’ to mean exculpation? How can Jim complain about being unfairly taken unawares by the emergency, when just such unexpected emergencies are the real test of readiness?” Actually, these are the very questions raised by the rest of the novel; Conrad does not separate epistemology and ethics, but suggests their intimate interdependence. Our response to Jim is mediated through the consciousness of the novel’s chief narrator, Charlie Marlow, for whom Jim is “inscrutable at heart” (351) yet “true to himself (127) ,” “not clear” (173) at all, yet “one of us” (74). A romantic whose “vapourings” (216) nauseate Marlow, who nonetheless declares himself responsible for “his very young brother” (207). Lord Jim the character is metonymic for Lord Jim the novel; not only Marlow, but nearly every character in the book “reads” Jim, seeking a truth about him which will shed light on their own lives. The novel’s frequent images of darkness, fog, and mists obscuring the figure of Jim symbolize each reader’s imperfect self-knowledge. Jim is elusive, Marlow tells us, for at least two reasons. First, each of his actions can be explained in directly polar terms: bravery vs. Cowardice, fidelity vs. Desertion, mastery vs. Surrender. Second, because “no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge” (102). For every major character, for Marlow, for each of us as readers, Jim becomes a kind of ethical Rorschach test we read him (and judge him) to a large extent as we read and judge ourselves. Marlow puts us in the position where we cannot confront Jim’s flaws without encountering our self- image. As Marlow confesses: “If he had not enlisted my sympathies [which he eventually does] he had done better for himself-he had gone to the very fount and origin of that sentiment, he had reached the secret sensibility of my egoism” (155). Important as this aspect of the novel is, my concern here is not with egoism as a thematic key to the book. I want to suggest that the range of responses to Jim illustrates not the danger of egoism but the necessary danger of reading as a way of discovering truth. Earlier I quoted Parker Palmerls statement that “The knower who advances most rapidly toward the heart of truth is the one who not only asks ‘What is out there?’ in each encounter with the world, but one who also asks ‘What does this encounter reveal about me?”’ In other words, what looks like self-interest may actually be a superior way of knowing. It is a striking paradox that this novel, so concerned with egoism, actually offers readers a great opportunity for self-transcendence. When we see ourselves in the other, it is not the other who is obscured but our self which is interrogated. One of Marlow’s outbursts against Jim shows how self-complacency is not confirmed but shaken by this personal identification with the object of knowledge: “I was aggrieved against him, as though he had cheated me-me!-of a splendid opportunity to keep up the illusion of my beginnings, as though he had robbed our common life of the last spark of its glamour” (139; emphasis added). The truths that Jim reveals may in fact be accessible to Marlow because of, not despite, the latter’s egoistic idendficatdon with Jim. I sometimes warn my students that entering into an imaginative world may mean losing, at least temporarily, your moral compass. (Perhaps your compass was not pointing to true North after an!) Marlow is neither a perfect character nor a perfect reader, but I maintain that he comes closer to Jim’s “truth” than do the judges at the trial. Like those judges, like Marlow, I too want to know the truth about Jim. When they finish the book, my students want to know the truth: Was he brave or cowardly? Was he faithful or deceitful? Did he redeem himself? Is he guilty or innocent? But Conrad wants us to discover that we cannot reach conclusions about such questdons without becoming profoundly mvolved with the object of knowledge. Like the artist who “descends within himself ‘ in order “to render the highest possible justice to the visible universe,” we can only render justice to Jim by searching ourselves as well. At the necessary risk of losing “objectdvity,” we must exercise those qualitdes Conrad had hoped to see in his readers: sympathy, imaginatdon, intelligence, and a recognition of human solidarity. Again, for Parker Palmer, as for Conrad, these are not simply desirable qualities in an individual but part of a way of knowing which has ethical implicatdons. To return to the trial scene: the judges’ response to Jim is like our response to a text. Their inquiry into truth is not idle curiosity or antdquarian interest. Rather, they are required to respond as moral agents in judging the conduct of another moral agent. If they examine the case using an inappropriate epistemology, one which refuses to admit evidence of a different sort than space-time events, how just will their judgment be? Conrad describes them as “impassible,” a precisely chosen word which means “incapable of pain or suffering” and “mvulnerable.” Are these the qualities we want in a judge? A key post I have been stressing is that our epistemology implies an ethic; if we know the world in Sobjective” terms only, then we may fail to know others as we ourselves are known: through those “less obvious capacitates” of imagination, intuition, and empathy. I am not endorsing moral relatdvism but suggesting that a judgment of “guilty” arrived at after fully understanding and sympathizing with Jim is profoundly different from a judgment of “guilty” arrived at by an “objective” examinations of the facts. The difference lies primarily in the effect on the moral character of the judge himself. In the latter case, the judge becomes the kind of human automaton represented by Dtagnet’s Joe Friday: “Just the facts, ma’am” may be one effective way to gather information, but it cannot be used exclusively as a human or humane procedure for judgment. Jesus was correcting an “objective” view of judgment when Peter asked him how many times he should forgive a sinning brother “Up to seven times?” (Matt. 18:21). Peter wanted an objective rule: seven times and you’re out. Jesus counters with the rhetorical ploy of hyperbole-”I tell you, not seven times, but seventy- seven [or seventy times seven] times” (Matt. 18:22)-Which exposes the inadequacy of Peter’s objectdvist thinking. Whether our judgment results in an innocent or guilty verdict, then, it must be a human transaction with concern for human truth. The danger lurking in the courtroom scene is the danger of objectdfying, “reifying” another person so that he becomes a quantity to be subtracted from the sum of human society. In fact, Marlow’s judgment on Jim is soon complicated by compassion, an inevitable consequence of his way of knowing: “It was the fear of losing him that kept me silent. For it was borne upon me suddenly and with unaccountable force that should I let him slip away into the darkness I would never forgive myself” (175). Marlow’s response to Jim represents the necessary danger of reading sympathetically: “too much like one of us not to be dangerous.” In “reading” Jim, Marlow sometimes succumbs to the dangers of self-indulgent egoism and intellectual skepticism. These are paradoxical dangers if, as I have argued, we need to read sympathetically in order to break the limits of our own minds and discover a new truth. Of course one potential consequence of sympathy for someone else’s transgression is leniency toward our own real failings; one potential consequence of another way of knowing is radical uncertainty about our ability to know anything. Fortunately, however, the novel allows us, actually forces us, to experience these confusions and perplexities in a challenging yet safe environment. Despite our deep identification with Marlow and perhaps Jim, we are not living their lives; we can try their skins on for while, discover what we learn about our assumptions, prejudices, limitatdons-and then live out our newly refined values. As a Christdan teacher, then, I want my students to feel deeply the pull of Jim’s plight and even the attractiveness of Marlow’s philosophizing. I want them to feel and understand these things for three reasons. First, because this grappling with traditional, communal values and encountering challenges to assumptions about “fixed” truth is a large part of what it means to live in the 20th century, even if we are followers of Christ. Second, because we in the church are not immune to moral smugness and a naive tendency to see complex moral issues simplistically. Third, reading this way reinforces the power of literature in our lives to both illuminate and interrogate us. While a novel is not a parable, Conrad’s tale does a have a power akin to the stories Jesus told. What I have been calling an “egoistic” reading is like a parabolic reading, as Jesus led the Pharisees to identify themselves with those in need of correction. It is clear that whatever Marlow believes about Jim tells as much about himself as about the lapsed young sailor “I cannot say I had ever seen him distdnctly-not even to this day, after I had my last view of him; but it seemed to me that the less I understood the more I was bound to him in the name of that doubt which is the inseparable part of our knowledge” (206). Our knowledge of others is ultimately limited by our knowledge of ourselves; because Conrad is not God, it is at this point that the Christian reader can extend his parable. Yes, sympathy with Jim complicates our judgment; we are no longer sure of the truth. But we are known by One greater than our hearts, and we trust in His judgment. Conrad can bring us to a new realization of this old truth in a powerful and moving way. A concluding question: what kind of person does reading such literature in this way help us become? History has sadly demonstrated that a cultured or educated person may not necessarily be a consistently moral person: the Nazi death camp commandant enjoying his Goethe of an evening or Ezra Pound’s Fascist radio broadcasts are two examples that come immediately to mind. But even if “culture” is no guarantee of virtue, let alone holiness, I still hope that the sort of “close reading” I have been doing, an honest interaction with the text, is both the basis for all literary criticism and a potentially ethical actdvity. Two necessary (though not sufficient) characteristics of a Christdan approach to literature are a posture of attentdve openness and an attitude of sympathetdc involvement. In her “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God,” French philosopher and mystic Simone Weil claims that even the solutdon to a geometry problem, being “a little fragment of particular truth,” is also “a pure image of the unique, eternal, and living Truth”; thus, “every school exercise, thought of in this way, is like a sacrament” (112). This sacramental aspect of study is especially evident in the faculty of attention, which has its spiritual application in prayer: “School children and students who love God should . . . learn to like all . . . [academic] subjects, because all of them develop that faculty of attention which, directed toward God, is the very substance of prayer” (106). It may seem absurd to link an explication de texte with mystical communion, but Weil (like O’Connor) calls our attention to the various ways that the natural and the supernatural interpenetrate. Perhaps good reading occurs at the intersection of the intellectual, the emotional, and the spiritual capacitdes of ours minds and souls. Reading as Weil and Palmer have described it directs the force of truth into us; it also turns us outward to the source of truth. It means cultivating a habit of mind that also opens the heart and increases its capacity to receive instruction and illumination, to be searched by that which we would prefer to analyze and classify. I have several times quoted Conrad on “our less obvious capacitbes”; surely genuine prayer is one of those. How many of us feel daily the inadequacy not merely of our prayers but of our praying? We know that is a capacity, but one which needs to be carefully nurtured. Again, I hope you don’t think I am claiming too much when I say that the habit of attention that the study of literature encourages can have to it a prayerful dimension. In Parker Palmer’s view, prayer is a legitimate partner in our intellectual and academic development: If our education, and our knowledge itself, became prayerful through and through, we would create a great countercurrent to the tides of cynicism and violence in this “well educated” society of ours. Formed in transcendence, the knowledge of physical science would be less readily translated into devices to destroy the ecology of the earth; the insights of social science would be less easily turned into programs of social and political manipulation that break our faith with one another; and literary studies would be less likely to breed cultured despisers of our common life. An education in transcendence would open us to compassion and the great work of co-creatdon. (13-14) Conrad himself (through Marlow of course) had declared in Lord Jim: “We exist only in so far as we hang together” (207); as a consequence, he believes that “the real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind” (158). What is attractive about both Palmer’s and Weil’s perspective is the hope that a Christian literary study with a transcendent dimension to it may be able to achieve the human community that seems all to fragile to the creator of Jim and Marlow. To borrow a phrase from Albert Camus’ The Fall, I will describe my ideal Christdan reader as a “judge-penitent.” At the end of that novel the narrator, symbolically named Jean- Bapdste Clamence (John the Baptdst Clemency), who paints an unflattering picture of himself throughout a long first person narratdve, turns to his interlocutor (and the reader) to announce that “the portrait I hold out to my contemporaries becomes a mirror” (140). Literature gives us both portrsuts and mirrors: we pronounce judgment on others at the risk of pronouncing judgment on ourselves; we show mercy towards others in hope that God will show mercy towards us. The ultimate judgepenitent, however, is Christ himself. The Incarnation is sympathetic knowledge of the human condition; even God’s knowledge became personal, physical, painful. Christ is both perfect penitent, dying for sins he did not commit, and perfect judge, punishing sins whose attraction he could feel. Remember that Conrad offered his reader’s “encouragement, consolation, fear, charm” along with “that glimpse of truth,” all “according to [their] deserts.” But God’s promise is infinitely greater. Because of Christ the desert we receive is not the judgment which we as human readers deserve-no matter how conscientious we may be-but that which the divine judge- penitent is pleased to bestow. One does not have to be a Christian in order to perceive truth, read sympathetically, and behave ethically, or even pray diligently. But Christ’s incarnation gives this world, this flesh, this language significance; none of these “natural” actdvitdes-searching for truth, reading well, leading “the good life”-are unredeemable. I have indeed identified activities which Christdan and nonChristian readers share. But insofar as a non-Christian participates in them. I argue that that person may be prepared for grace; insofar as Christians engage in these activities, they will better understand their own fallenness and appreciate God’s grace. “Despair,” a teacher in graduate school once reminded me, “is the conviction of sin without hope of redemption.” For modern authors and readers alike, this is the despair or “worldly sorrow [which] brings death” (2 Cor. 7:10b): the death of hope, the death of ultimate values, the death of belief in an immortal soul. For the Christian, however, an encounter with the “lies” of literature may mean the exciting discovery of new truths, as well as a fresh realization of an old Truth in Jesus Christ, who is the Way from mere texts to abundant life. 14 Works Cited Blackburn, William, ed. Conrad: Letters to William Blackwood and David S. Meldrum. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1958. Camus, Albert. The Fall. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York Alfred A. Knopf, 1956. Conrad, Joseph. Preface. The Nigger of the “Narcissus”. 1897. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1944. Lord Jim. 1900. Ed. Cedric Watts and Robert Hampton. Harmondsworth, Eng.: Penguin, 1986. O’ Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners. Ed. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1961. Palmer, Parker. To Know As we Are Known: A Spiritualitv of Education. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983. Weil, Simone. Waiting for God. Trans. Emma Craufurd. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1951. New York: Harper & Row, 1973.