`Territorial betrayal in Patusan, the land of wish-fulfilment´.

SILVANA NOELÍ FERNÁNDEZ

Bath

Conferencia; 38th Annual Conference Joseph Conrad Society UK.; 2012

Joseph Conrad Society UK

Territorial betrayal in Patusan, the land of wish-fulfillment It is already a well-established fact that Lord Jim, appearing at the turn of the twentieth century, features in its background the instability of colonial space. After Jim?s incident at the Patna, his decreed fate seems to throw him into a whirl of geographic mobility and a seemingly never-ending removal to the horizon of the known empire. Due to Marlow?s need to find redemption for him, Jim is eventually established in Patusan, an outpost which marshals a form of romance in a space infused with the promise of new adventure. This paper argues that the narrative emplotment of the contending definitions of territory in Patusan add significantly to Conrad?s elaboration on a conception of space and an affective geography of adventure which is withering. I consider and address the manner in which Conrad frames and maps the colonial divide between the dream space of soul-making and multinatinational supra-state forces at work in the `out of the way´ space of Patusan. More specifically, I look into the articulation of different territories out of the various narratives of delimitation and enclosure and call into question the conception of Patusan as a seemingly homogeneous territory for Jim?s romance.