Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad's Novels

Traci ng t h e Aesth etic Pr inciple in Conrad’s Novels

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Traci ng t h e Aesth etic Pr inciple in Conrad’s Novels

Yael Levin

tracing the aesthetic principle in conrad’s novels Copyright © Yael Levin, 2008. All rights reserved. First published in 2008 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978-0-230-60986-0 ISBN-10: 0-230-60986-4 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: January 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To Aryeh and Aliza

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It is otherwise with the artist. —Joseph Conrad, NN

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Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

Abbreviations

xii

1

Introduction

1

2

Seeing Otherwise: From Almayer’s Folly to Lord Jim

23

3

A Spectral Temporality: The History of Nostromo as Perpetual Return

53

4

Signifying Absences in Under Western Eyes

73

5

The Arrow of Gold: An Exercise in Procuring Absence

105

6

To End with Suspense

139

7

Conclusion

169

Notes

175

References

191

Index

199

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Ack nowledgments

My sincerest thanks and gratitude to Professor Robert Hampson whose comments, observations, and suggestions greatly benefited this study. I feel honored to have had the chance to work with such an enviably knowledgeable and insightful Conrad scholar. A further debt is due to Professor Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, a dear mentor and friend who not only introduced me to my first Conrad novel, Under Western Eyes, but also indulged me in my early absent-present obsessions. I would like to thank my parents, Aryeh and Aliza, two truly inspiring role models. I am and forever will be grateful for their unwavering encouragement and support. I also wish to express my gratitude to my husband, Ruben, for his invaluable input and love. I would like to thank the editors of the Conradian, Conradiana, and Partial Answers for their kind permission to reprint parts of the papers published in their journals.

Abbreviations Co nr ad’s Work s AF

Almayer’s Folly

AG

The Arrow of Gold

HD

Heart of Darkness

LJ

Lord Jim

OI

An Outcast of the Islands

N

Nostromo

NN

The Nigger of the “Narcissus”

NLL

Notes on Life and Letters

PR

A Personal Record

ASS

A Set of Six

SL

The Shadow-Line

S

Suspense

TH

Tales of Hearsay

TU

Tales of Unrest

TLS

‘Twixt Land and Sea

UWE Under Western Eyes V

Victory

All page references to Conrad’s works refer to the Dent editions (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1945–55). The author’s ellipses appear in brackets. An ellipsis without brackets appears in Conrad’s text.

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4

Chapter 1

I ntrodu ction

All through the languid stillness of that night he fought with the impalpable; he fought with the shadows, with the darkness, with the silence. He fought without a sound, striking futile blows, dashing from side to side; obstinate, hopeless, and always beaten back; like a man bewitched within the invisible sweep of a magic circle. —OI, 157

W

illems’s solitude is absolute, but he does not battle alone. Whether it is Almayer, Willems, Jim, Decoud, Heyst, Razumov, or any one of Conrad’s protagonists, man’s struggle with the forces of the impalpable recurs as this thematic preoccupation obsessively haunts the Conrad canon. The “invisible sweep of a magic circle” thus becomes one of the determining locales in the psychic topography of the Conradian text. Within the confines of this enchanting circle, the human senses are rendered obsolete; one cannot hear, see, or touch the enduring enemy. This is a metaphysical battle, a war waged against shadow, idea, thought, or illusion. At the same time, the threat of the impalpable, the unnamable, and the invisible—be it vague or evanescent—is real; caught in the “magic circle,” man must prevail or perish. The underlying lack that comes of an absolute negation of sound, light, sight, and touch metamorphoses into a living, menacing presence that indubitably vanquishes he who dares challenge it. In 1948, F. R. Leavis famously reflected that, for Conrad, it is “the vague and unrealizable” that “is the profoundly and tremendously significant” (199). Leavis’s words suggest that the struggles of Conrad’s

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Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad’s Novels

fictional characters are mirrored in his literary aesthetic. In this sense, Conrad’s fiction is itself a “magic circle” where, as Leavis argued, the unknowable or inconceivable overshadows the easily defined present. Needless to say, Leavis was not impressed by Conrad’s theatrics of the “unspeakable” and the “inconceivable.” Alleging an undue recourse to what he coined “adjectival insistence,” he criticized Conrad’s repetitious occupation with “the presence of what he can’t produce” (Leavis, 199). Leavis noted further that in Conrad’s writing, “the same vocabulary, the same adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery, is applied to the evocation of human profundities and spiritual horrors; to magnifying a thrilled sense of the unspeakable potentialities of the human soul” (196–97). Leavis’s final sentence is clear: “the actual effect is not to magnify but rather to muffle” (197). In the wake of Leavis’s strict appraisal, critical attempts have been made to redeem Conrad’s “insistences,” thereby recuperating Conrad’s seemingly obsessive preoccupation with the representation of the unspeakable. James Guetti notes that due to the failure of language, “reality” in Conrad’s stories “exists not in the positive but in the negative” (59). He consequently proposes that Conrad is “dramatizing the very inability that Leavis describes as a weakness of the prose” (5). Striking on a different path of interpretation, Allon White argues that the achievement of Heart of Darkness lies in the very technique that Leavis had earlier questioned which “preserves the aura of the work whilst simultaneously tantalizing the reader with an offer of initiation into mysteries” (119). Perhaps more in line with Guetti’s reading, Jeremy Hawthorn once again draws our attention to the inadequacy of words. In a study of Conrad’s language, he notes that “where something is too deep for words then you leave words out,” concluding further that “it is not too outrageous to suggest that Conrad is using a comparable technique in his ‘adjectival insistence’” (Language, 31). We see, then, that Guetti, White, and Hawthorn recover Conrad’s “insistences” as the markers of a profound engagement with the deficiencies inherent to language, an engagement that elicits, regardless of the debilitating limits constitutive of its very terms, a “tantalizing” dramatization of that which cannot be expressed. Although these readings provide a welcome reevaluation of Conrad’s style, it is clear that Leavis’s dissatisfaction does not arise from those moments where, as Conrad senses that “something is too deep for words,” he “leaves words out.” Rather, Leavis’s criticism is incited by the phenomenon in Conrad’s writing whereby words are not left out but rather proliferate in the void left by that which cannot be

Introduction

3

expressed or represented. Hawthorn addresses this and notes that Conrad’s prose is marked not only by verbal elimination but also by words that “draw attention to their own inadequacy” (Language, 31). As their prefixes repeatedly show, the “unspeakable” and the “inconceivable,” but also the recurring “irrealizable,” “inscrutable,” “invisible,” and “impossible,” are all adjectival negations. As such, they may indeed be said to mark the paucity and inadequacy of a language that cannot be made to represent the infinite range of impressions known to man. At the same time, it is clear that Conrad’s frequent negatives may be indicative not of a literary necessity that stems from the constraints of a limited language but of an artistic choice. Conrad paints a picture not by affirming what is seen but by indicating what is not. In this sense, Conrad’s “adjectival insistence” provides an alternative aesthetic to the realism of nominal affirmation or naming. While Hawthorn concludes that presence is inevitably distorted by its representation in language, I would like to argue that it is the very conception of presence that undergoes a radical transformation in Conrad’s writing.

Th e O therwis e Pres ent Conrad’s tales evolve and develop around a central contradiction: shadow, silence, and darkness—and other such indelible markers of lack—are invested with the power of presence. The clear categorical distinction between absence and presence is thus subverted as the impalpable is conjured up, fleshed out, and transfigured. As such an attempted subversion plays havoc with the categorical boundaries of language, the critical reader cannot address these transfigurations within the Conradian text without reverting to contradiction. As Leavis wrote, Conrad insists on the “presence of what he can’t produce” (199, my emphasis). If such is the case, it may be important to inquire whether Conrad actually succeeds in producing this “presence” or whether this insisted presence is, in fact, a nontractable nonbeing. Are we to address Conrad’s “insistences” from within the ontological framework of presence—or rather absence? In his acclaimed Narrative Discourse, Gérard Genette informs his readers, “Absence is absolute, but presence has degrees” (245). Genette’s statement depends on the assumption that there is a qualitative distinction between the binary poles. Absence and presence do not complement each other but rather correspond to two distinguishable essences. Whereas absence is uncountable, an unchanging and indivisible constant, presence is quantifiable, a variable in flux. While such an

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Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad’s Novels

exercised demarcation may prove intuitively alluring, we find that it does not necessarily correspond to the pseudoscientific laws of structuralism. It may therefore be instructive to consult the Oxford English Dictionary definition of absence. In marked contrast to Genette’s approach, here absence is defined in terms of its categorical opposite. The absent, we learn, is that which is nonpresent.1 We find that absence is not essentially other to presence (as good is to bad) but rather its diametrical opposite.2 The difference between the binary poles is therefore not necessarily qualitative, as Genette suggests, but quantitative. Absence and presence are inextricably tied in a relationship of diametrical exclusivity. As in a mathematical equation, the one complements the other in perfect opposition. If such is the nature of their relationship, the modification of one binary opposite inevitably leads to a complementary change in the other. If presence comes in degrees, absence follows suit. A cup half full is always half empty. We have so far discussed two distinct definitions of the binary opposites—the essentialist approach on one hand and the mathematical on the other. Regardless of their underlying difference, the two approaches share a fundamental precept: to think of absence and presence is to think disjunctively; we may think of either one or the other, but we may never think of both at one and the same time. Whether we make a qualitative or a quantitative distinction between the two, absence remains that which is not present; presence remains that which is not absent. It is precisely the binary nature of their relationship that will not allow us to think of absence and presence together. This disjunctive approach is instructive in elucidating Leavis’s criticism. Like Genette, Leavis holds an essentialist approach to the binary poles. If absence is always already absolute, then the impalpable, silent, and invisible “sweep” can be nothing but a technical flourish intended to mask an irremediable lack. Conrad’s method of representation through negation can be but a decoy—a play of signifiers bereft of referents. Like the tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” the specialized garments are, in actuality, a psychological trick designed to hide nothingness; what is believed to be a full-fledged presence is mere absence. Appearing to assume the role of the brave lad, Leavis unmasks the hoax: Conrad, he tells us, makes “a virtue out of not knowing what he means” (199). Interestingly, it would appear that the disjunctive approach is shared not only by Genette and Leavis but also by those critics who attempt to contradict Leavis’s literary indictment. We have already touched on the manner in which they suggest that the perceived problematic stems not from Conrad’s intentions but from the medium in which he represents them. As Edward Said writes, “To

Introduction

5

have chosen to write, then, is to have chosen in a particular way neither to say directly nor to mean exactly in the way he had hoped to say or to mean” (World, 90). Said does not recuperate Conrad’s literary absences but rather excuses them through reference to the signifying barrier of language, as the inevitable casualty of a constraining medium. It seems that in order to address Conrad’s writing, we must cast off not only the folk tale but also the premise it shares with Western metaphysics. For in order to reread Conrad’s absent presences and present absences, we must renounce the rigidly dichotomous and disjunctive view of the binary poles and transcend our inexorable bias toward presence. We must rethink the relationship between absence and presence from within a more flexible interpretative frame. By introducing an alternative, conjunctive approach, we are ultimately admitting a third category into the discussion: an intermediary position that exists between the two absolutes. Inevitably, such an understanding necessitates the rather forbidding task of grappling with a language that does not readily embrace the intermediate. Fortunately, such a task has already been undertaken. In his writings, Jacques Derrida challenges precisely “the limit which has always constrained us, which still constrains us—as inhabitants of a language and a system of thought—to formulate the meaning of Being in general as presence or absence, in the categories of being or beingness” (Margins, 10). The project of deconstruction is relevant here, as it initiates a probing and testing discourse that questions the very foundations of our understanding and perception and, in so doing, allows for the rethinking of such set categories as absence and presence. As we will see, Derrida’s work and, more specifically, the notion of “différance” illuminate Conrad’s transgression of the boundaries between absence and presence and the consequent upheaval of the separateness and discreteness of the binary poles. While it is my contention that deconstruction offers valuable tools of analysis for the reading of Conrad, the conditions of fin-de-siècle writing may appear to be at odds with the precepts of a theoretical movement born in the 1960s. Thus, for example, where Conrad notes that his readers yearn to be “set at rest” and to achieve a sense of “finality” (NLL, 19), the notion of “différance” entails the “temporal and temporizing mediation of a detour that suspends the accomplishment or fulfillment of ‘desire’ or ‘will’” (Derrida, Margins, 8). Clearly, these underlying motives appear to be contradictory: where one calls for closure, the other prescribes an endless slippage—an indelible openness. It will nevertheless be shown in the course of this study that, in the spirit of deconstruction, Conrad’s awareness of certain set

6

Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad’s Novels

limitations (in terms of reader expectations) does not signal an unqualified acceptance of their terms. Repeatedly, Conrad does not set us “at rest”; he does not provide us with a sense of “finality.” We will see, then, that in Conrad’s writing, there is a certain sense of “différance,” if we may be so reckless as to borrow the term, as the possibility of closure is undermined by an underlying openness and the fulfillment of desire by a tantalizing “irrealizability.”3 As we have seen, it is nevertheless clear that the frustration of expectations does not necessarily produce original critical solutions. Those readers who uphold the dichotomous view that Conrad challenges readily assign his intermediary creations to the order of either presence or absence, as they are not willing to suspend their disbelief in order to view them as both absent and present at one and the same time. Thus, for example, we have seen that Leavis rationalizes and subsequently dismisses his incomprehension as a product of absence. As he states, “The insistence betrays the absence, the willed “intensity” the nullity” (199). The association of the enigmatic with the absent, however, may stem from an erroneous leap to judgment. It is precisely such a leap to judgment that is challenged by Geoffrey Bennington in his attempt to correct the suspicion readers may harbor in relation to Derrida’s work. He argues that “we must not suppose that because Derrida questions presence he must therefore be a thinker of absence, emptiness, nothing” (Bennington, 75–76). Bennington’s defense of Derrida is useful here, if only vicariously, in its suggestion that there may be an additional interpretative solution to such a challenging of our preconceptions. A questioning or negation of presence does not unequivocally imply an endorsement of absence. Bearing this in mind, we now turn to a discussion of the collapsing of categorical boundaries in Conrad’s texts where it seems that neither absence nor presence can be deemed “absolute.” Conrad repeatedly questions the possibility of an essential opposition between the two terms. Rejecting the relationship of exclusivity that we associate with the binary poles, Conrad chooses rather to exercise an interrelationship that is characterized by flux and interchangeability. The two categories are always already contaminated by their opposing counterpart. Transgressing and transgressed, absence and presence, are boundaryless, and their distinctiveness and uniqueness forever undermined. This introductory elaboration of the terms absence and presence has provided a necessary framework for what is, in effect, a close textual reading of a selection of Conrad novels and short stories. It is the analysis of the textual manifestation of absence and presence that provides the focus of this study and directs my reading of Lord Jim,

Introduction

7

Nostromo, Under Western Eyes, The Arrow of Gold, and Suspense. Within these novels—and other Conrad texts to which I will refer more briefly—the fluid meeting of the binary poles lends itself to an accumulation of misleading signification, as signified and signifier are repeatedly mismatched in the attempt to represent the two terms. Such an exercise culminates in a chiastic crossover effect that is, in most instances, suffused with irony. Thus, in The Arrow of Gold, George tells Rita, “When I have you before my eyes [. . .] I fail to see you distinctly” (AG, 298). George’s revelation relies precisely on an inverted signification. Although faced with a distinct presence, George’s perceptive powers cannot but translate the manifest into absence. If she is there, he cannot see her. While this mystifying turn may be relegated to the hyperbole of a lover’s words of seduction, we find a counter example at the outset of Under Western Eyes. Here, in a much less romantic interlude, Haldin tells Razumov, “I understand your silence” (UWE, 65). Taking an inverse form, we have, once again, an example of a crossover of signification. Haldin transforms silence—an absence of speech—into meaning or presence. That is to say that what he understands is precisely what he cannot hear. These examples are indicative of an underlying problematic that would inevitably permeate our attempt to distinguish or to essentialize absence and presence in Conrad’s texts. The categories are not only enmeshed and blurred but also deceptive. In place of the distinct binary opposites, we have a play, a deferral, and a continual oscillation between two categorical extremes. Both absent and present at one and the same time, this dynamic entity is what I have termed “the otherwise present.” Recalling the Derridean trace, this nonentity “is not a presence but the simulacrum of a presence that dislocates itself, displaces itself, refers itself, it properly has no sites— erasure belongs to its structure” (Derrida, Margins, 24). As the elusively indeterminate, the study of the otherwise present may appear to be affiliated to analyses of Conrad’s obscurity or ambiguity. Conrad’s complex and complicating literary methods have long been the focus of critical readings of his work. Indeed, for over fifty years, Conrad has been notorious for his resistance to affirmation, his skeptical treatment of all absolutes, and a literary style that invests highly in suggestion rather than explicit naming. Today there are several important studies of Conrad’s obscurity or ambiguity that offer a systematic analysis of Conrad’s elusive methods, highlighting their contribution to modernist modes of writing and tracing their roots within the philosophical and literary traditions of Conrad’s developing career.4

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Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad’s Novels

These existing studies are indicative of the serious and multifarious critical attention already devoted to the ambiguous and mystifying aspects of Conrad’s poetics. Despite the diversity of their philosophical and theoretical frameworks, their interpretative strategies in addressing Conrad’s texts, their definition of ambiguity (and its derivatives), and their interpretation of its usage and motivation, I find that they all exercise a preliminary interpretative leap. The textual phenomenon that provides the focus of their study—be it absence, contradiction, or negativity—is soon converted into a more alluring substitute, namely obscurity, ambiguity, the sublime, or, as the case may be, “learned unknowing.” In coining such a term as the otherwise present, I may be accused of a similar conversion. Here, too, the unexplained is transformed into a convenient alternative—a reductive substitute. And, yet, the “otherwise present,” which will shortly be defined precisely as a substitute, does not attempt to blur, classify, or explain away the inherent oddities of the Conradian text. By choosing a neutral term that does not connote a hermeneutic impossibility or an interpretative occlusion, I attempt to resist a teleological reading that focuses on an end product—ambiguity, obscurity, or any other such term. Rather than signify a result, the otherwise present marks a process: the oscillation between presence and absence as it is represented in the text. As such, the process is discernable both in the thematic design of Conrad’s works and in their stylistic form. The mapping of the otherwise present will therefore allow us to compare not only the representation of different thematic strands (such as spectrality, love, and guilt) but also different stylistic methods (as, for example, the embedded narrative structure, repetition, the protagonist narrator, and so forth). Significantly, the otherwise present does not allude only to that which is not understood or comprehended, the indelible oddities in Conrad’s texts. Rather, we will see that it permeates both the odd and the transparent, both the mysteries of an occluded representation and the less problematized motifs of love and desire. It is thus crucial to note that this neither is nor wishes to become a study of Conrad’s ambiguity. And, yet, if we are to address the point in which the two analyses are affiliated, it would seem that it is in the introduction of the problematic conjunction “both” that the otherwise present may be perceived as a sibling or counterpart to the term ambiguity. In The Concept of Ambiguity, Shlomith Rimmon addresses the problem at the heart of this conjunction as she writes that the human mind is not capable of double perception: “rabbit or duck, urn or two profiles [. . .] are all impossible objects. Impossible, because they keep

Introduction

9

our imitative faculty constantly busy; impossible also because they are outside the range of our experience” (XI). As Rimmon describes, a double interpretation leads to an “impossible situation” that engenders ambiguity. Like Rimmon’s ambiguity, the otherwise present tests the boundaries of absence and presence by creating precisely such an impossibility in the meeting of the binary poles. Human perception is challenged and frustrated as the reader attempts to make sense of the coexistence of two opposites. The two terms, however, are not interchangeable. Rimmon explains that the reader of The Sacred Fount or “The Figure in the Carpet” is caught between two—and only two— mutually exclusive interpretations. Ambiguity thus signals a closing up of hermeneutic potential. Such is not the case with regard to the otherwise present. In Conrad’s texts, the otherwise present does not limit hermeneutic potential but rather increases it. Much in this vein, in 1922 Conrad wrote to Richard Curle that “explicitness, my dear fellow, is fatal to the glamour of all artistic work, robbing it of all suggestiveness, destroying all illusion” (Conrad, Letters, 89). Conrad’s aim is not so much to create ambiguity but rather to avoid the destructive effect of the explicit on the imagination. While the difference between ambiguity and “suggestiveness” may appear to be tenuous (for ambiguity is one of the effects of a resistance to explicit representation), it is nevertheless of fundamental importance. Whereas the first is liable to limit perception to a choice of the two mutually exclusive interpretations that create an “impossible situation,” the latter provokes and thereby promotes the workings of the imagination. Rimmon’s definition of ambiguity relies on the coexistence of mutually exclusive interpretations. The “impossible situation” is such precisely because it remains within the confines of an ontological framework: there is a figure in Vereker’s carpet, or there is not. That is to say that while both possibilities are viable, we must finally choose between them. The otherwise present collapses such a formal relationship, thereby resisting such a dichotomous ontology. There are no two interpretations to choose from, but rather an unlimited imaginative potential. Similarly, while the otherwise present may produce obscurity, this is merely one of a host of possible effects that it produces. Rimmon’s conception of ambiguity is a category of logic, but the otherwise present can be perceived only outside such a framework. Before launching a detailed discussion of what I term the otherwise present, I feel that two methodological observations are needed. First, in coining such a term as the “otherwise present,” I may be charged

10

Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad’s Novels

with a reassertion of Genette’s initial claim; the otherwise present is a presence by degrees, an essential other to the absolute absent. My reading, however, does not deal with essentialist absolutes, nor does it deal with mathematical degrees. The term “otherwise present” is a provisional one, a product of the limitations of an ontological language that has been challenged but not replaced. We have still to invent a language in which absence and presence are not diametrically opposed, and a third term—perhaps a meeting of the two poles— exists. Hence, if there appears to be a privileging of presence in such a formulation as the “otherwise present,” it should be noted that it is neither more correct nor apt than the interchangeable alternative, the “otherwise absent.” My choice of the former stems from my belief that many readers still intuitively agree with Genette’s distinction and do not recognize the possibility of a relative absence, that is to say, an absence that comes in degrees and is therefore, to some extent, present. Finally, it is important to note that my analysis does not focus on either one of the binary poles. The perpetual oscillation between the two does not render either absence or presence victorious or superior in the Conradian canon. In following this textual practice, my emphasis is on neither one of the two categories but on the “otherwise,” that is, the process whereby the two categories overlap, interrelate, and interchange—the method in which they are made to be otherwise. Second, it is important to note that in the transition from world to text, an interesting reversal occurs with relation to both absence and presence. Presence is represented, thereby creating a removal, an absenting, as it were, of its original physical manifestation. What we have is now its textual counterpart, a simulacrum that inevitably marks the disappearance of the model on which it is based. Whereas presence is in this matter absented, the textual manifestation of absence results in precisely an inverse process. In the process of signification, absence loses its defining principle, that is, its nonpresence. Rather, the textual representation of absence is a method of making present. It is in this manner that the text produces and reproduces both absence and presence, thereby a priori blurring the boundaries between the two poles. The process of textualization evidently problematizes the terms central to my analysis. Tzvetan Todorov faces a similar challenge in his treatment of the real and the imaginary in The Fantastic.5 Despite the centrality of the two terms to his argument, he concedes that “by its very definition, literature bypasses the distinctions of the real and the imaginary, of what is and what is not” (Todorov, 167). If, from the outset, we are unable to distinguish absence and presence within the confines of a textual space, it would be difficult to then claim that

Introduction

11

my analysis traces the collapsing of the boundaries in Conrad’s works. This, however, is precisely what I wish to undertake. As Todorov has done before me, I concede that my use of the terms “absence” and “presence” is provisional. As he writes, “in order to deny an opposition, we must first of all acknowledge its terms; in order to perform a sacrifice, we must know what to sacrifice” (Todorov, 168). Consequently, although already textualized, ellipsis, silence, and what is essentially a presented “nonpresence” will be addressed as absence in my critical treatment of them. The inverse is true of any represented, and therefore removed, textual presence that will be discussed. Interestingly, this textualizing “contamination” or “corruption” of the two terms provides a fitting analogy to the processes that take place within Conrad’s novels. Conceding, then, that the terms of this discussion are always already haunted by the traces of inverted commas, we may now go on to formulate a definition of the otherwise present. As we have seen, the Conradian otherwise present is a palpable nonentity that resists ontological classification. Neither absent nor present, it is the indeterminate, a product of a constant oscillation between the visible and the invisible, the tangible and the intangible, the constant and the elusive. In this sense, it is a corruption, a unique phenomenon that is a result of the contamination, as it were, of either absence or presence by its binary opposite. In turning to the text, we find that this collapsing of the binary boundaries and their cocontamination follows two possible trajectories of substitution. The first of these two processes comes from a textual lack or gap that demands completion. Here, the otherwise present fulfils the role of a substitute that is created to fill, complete, or veil absence. As such, it functions as an intermediary replacement that shuttles between absence and presence. To illustrate, we may return to Under Western Eyes where we find two key examples of this process. As we have noted, Razumov’s taciturnity provides one of the formative gaps from which the story develops. Interpreted as a sign of seriousness and trustworthiness, Razumov’s silence propels the action, bringing Haldin to his doorstep. This original interpretative error is then repeated as Razumov’s taciturnity colors his relations with all the characters he meets throughout the novel. His reserve is noted in relation to his social encounters at the university, in his encounter with Haldin and later Nathalie, and in his response to the English teacher and to the revolutionists. From the start, however, Razumov’s silences are forever filled in as they are hermeneutically transformed into present meaning. In an act of interpretation, Haldin, Nathalie,

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Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad’s Novels

the English teacher, and the revolutionists all transform silence into speech, absence into presence. As each of them procures an interpretative substitute, they manage to cover up the noticeable lack that comes of their encounter with Razumov. A further example that I wish to outline is not precisely of the order of interpretation. Earlier in the novel, Razumov performs a similar transformation. In place of the gap left in Haldin’s wake, Razumov conjures up a moral specter, a substitute that is brought into being by a guilt-evoking absence. Haldin’s ghostly presence, another otherwise-present substitute, subsequently haunts Razumov and the reader until the novel’s conclusion. In The Arrow of Gold, George’s encounter with “the woman of all time” (AG, 67) allows Conrad to experiment with an inverse technique. Although George is faced with an actual, living presence, he, too, conjures up a substitute. Helplessly besotted, George imaginatively transforms the living, present-to-being Rita into a shifty and evanescent construct. In place of the woman of flesh and blood, George concentrates his infatuation on an imagined substitute, a woman so extraordinary that she cannot exist in corporeal form. Presence is thus absented, usurped by an imagined projection. To borrow Conrad’s awkward but nevertheless telling neologism, Rita is represented as the “irrealizable,” an otherwise-present construct that provokes desire and perpetuates it by barring its appeasement.6 These two examples show that whether the process of substitution takes on the form of a “presencing” of absence or the absenting of presence, the text resists the binary extremes, forever providing a substitutive mediation in the form of the otherwise present. The two processes demonstrated above arise from an essentially spatial interpretation of the binary opposites. Absence is that which is not there; presence is that which is. Conrad’s pitting of the two diametrical opposites against one another, however, follows not only a spatial but also a temporal trajectory. Chapter 3 of this study is devoted to the latter phenomenon, whereby the present is represented as a chronological impossibility—a conjunction of the now and the new, that is, of that which is present and that which was never present. The complex temporal machinery of Nostromo is one of a present that is stripped of a contemporaneity with itself—one that collapses the linearity of historical progression with the present-less circularity of repetition. The coincidence of absence and presence here results in the subversion and reinvention of historical discourse. We have seen, then, that the otherwise present is a product of an oscillation between the binary poles, a play or slippage between two no longer defined but fluid extremes. As the above examples show,

Introduction

13

one of the primary textual spaces in which we find this construct is the diegetic level where the play between absence and presence is often psychologically motivated. Here the otherwise present takes the form of a subjective construct in the minds of the participating characters, a metaphysical object that enjoys the limitless potential of the imagined. As such, it is not time bound, nor is it subjected to the rules of logic or reality. One of the recurring manifestations of this otherwise-present form is the illusion. We find a fitting tribute to its power in “Karain”: “Karain stared stonily; and looking at his rigid figure, I thought of his wanderings, of that obscure Odyssey of revenge, of all the men that wander amongst illusions; of the illusions as restless as men, of the illusions faithful, faithless; of the illusions that give joy, that give sorrow, that give pain, that give peace; of the invincible illusions that can make life and death appear serene, inspiring, tormented, or ignoble” (TU, 40). These lines pay homage to the infinite potential of illusion. Although internal, its control over man is in many ways greater than that of external reality. Man is motivated not by the immediate, surrounding present but by a constructed, unattainable image that, like the “invisible sweep of a magic circle,” has no external form. This citation contributes further to the understanding of the Conradian illusion in its suggestion that the illusion comes in many distinct forms, eliciting guilt (Razumov), shame (Jim), desire (George), and hope (Almayer). Although such characters as Jim and George are not usually compared—we do not often classify Lord Jim and The Arrow of Gold as comparable texts—I will demonstrate that there is a fundamental similarity in their psychological makeup. The two are both made and destroyed by their illusions. We find in Conrad’s texts a cluster of terms that are associated with the concept of illusion and likewise exert an enormous influence on the subject in which they are fixed. Karain’s “tormented weariness” is a result of “the anger and the fear of a struggle against a thought, an idea—against something that cannot be grappled, that never rests—a shadow, a nothing, unconquerable and immortal, that preys upon life” (TU, 23). Recalling Willems’s struggle, Karain’s torment is the result of an idea—a thought. Like the illusion, the idea— but also, by extension, the dream, belief, despair, honor, shame, guilt, and desire—affects the subject in an almost interchangeable manner. The inner voice that comes of these psychological constructs overshadows reality; its subjective otherwise-present projections lead to a misrepresentation of reality. While the ghostly and the spectral may be seen to coincide with the illusory, otherworldly apparitions extend the application of the otherwise present: the impossible conjunction that

14

Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad’s Novels

they represent is not only spatial but also temporal—both there and not there, they are also both past and present. As such, they provide an especially evocative manifestation of the otherwise present. If the illusion, the ghostly, and their derivatives provide the locale for the otherwise present in the minds of Conrad’s protagonists, an objective correlative for these terms is readily found in Conrad’s miseen-scène. Repeatedly, Conrad alludes to shadow, mist, darkness, fog, and so forth. Outside and inside become mirror images as the subjective inability to see beyond the mind’s projections translates into an objectively occluded reality. Moreover, these natural phenomena undergo a transformation akin to the one discussed so far. In Conrad and Impressionism, John G. Peters perceives the pervading darkness in The Shadow-Line as an “absence” (47) of context. And, yet, the terms used to describe it denote a tangible presence. It is like a “wall” that has to be “penetrated” (SL, 112). Similarly, the fog in The Tale grows “denser and as if solid in its amazing dumb immobility” (TH, 67). Presence is thus made to be otherwise both internally and externally. We have seen that the otherwise present proliferates in the life of Conrad’s characters and their represented surroundings. There is a strong sense, however, that the clashing of binary poles exceeds this thematic level, influencing not only what but how Conrad writes. Conrad’s stylization mirrors this thematic preoccupation, thereby exhibiting a technical parallel of the play between absence and presence. This is made evident in the manner in which the Conradian text is constructed of two warring forces: the first propagates distance and doubt; the second breeds proximity and assurance. If the first suggests absence, the second evokes presence. Conrad’s use of the narrative frame technique provides one of the most obvious methods associated with the first of these two dynamics. Through the piling up of narrative levels, the embedded narrative structure produces an illusion of distance both in time and space, which are both altered in the shift from one narrative level to the other. In the rendering of a story through a mediating, distancing frame, Conrad undermines the reality or presence of that which we encounter in the inner frame (the diegesis). As Marlow famously tells his listeners aboard the Nellie, “Of course in this you fellows see more than I could then. You see me, whom you know” (HD, 83). Marlow’s reassuring words point to the alleged transparency of the outer narrative frame: his listeners are not enveloped in darkness, neither literally nor metaphorically. However, in the following sentence the narrator nevertheless informs the reader that darkness has indeed engulfed Marlow’s listeners and that he cannot see Marlow at all. The narrator’s

Introduction

15

words thus disprove Marlow’s, showing, in effect, that the darkness Marlow experienced in the Congo is contagious and has spilled over from the inner to the outer narrative. The story and its living presence (“the dream sensation” HD, 82) are therefore twice removed. Although the embedded narrative technique is of an altogether different method of representation than that used by Marcel Proust in In Search of Lost Time, Genette’s writing on the latter offers a relevant summary of this effect. He writes, “What we are dealing with is not the story, but the story’s ‘image,’ its trace in memory” (Genette, 167–68). Genette’s words are doubly significant. The “trace” is by nature temporally distant; its lack of accuracy is indicative of the effects of erosion in time. Furthermore, the trace is housed in the mind—in memory. The erosion is therefore produced not only by time but also by the mutations brought about by the subjective interpretative frame exercised by the beholder. Indeed, with the passing of time, the details become more inward than they are outward; the memory becomes as much a product of the self as it is of the object, furthering the apparent distance between the tale and its readers. These factors are often reinforced by another of Conrad’s stylistic measures, namely the introduction of a narrator—not necessarily the protagonist but an onlooker of sorts—who offers a subjective prism of interpretation that often leads to an occlusion of the facts or a disruption of the narrative chronology. Relating to this type of narrator, and more specifically to Marlow who is a very appropriate representative, Moser notes that such a narrator “acts as a barrier or screen between the reader and the action” (38). And, yet, while “the extreme and overt break with the distance, impersonality, and omniscience of third person narration” (Watt, 205) may be said to result in a narrator that is often considered to be as confused as he is confusing, Conrad is not deterred from reinvoking him again and again in Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Chance. It is not only in his exploration of Marlow’s character, however, that Conrad creates a distorting narrating voice that acts as a barrier or screen between the reader and the narrated story. In The Arrow of Gold, the first-person narration is in many ways put in question by the anonymous narrator’s opening and concluding narrative frames. Furthermore, even in those cases in which the narrator’s story is not circumscribed by an outer narrative, his account is nevertheless undermined by biases and distortions that attest to an underlying unreliability. Thus, for example, in Under Western Eyes, the English teacher’s digressions, concessions, and excuses all suggest that we have here a case of the narrator who “doth protest too much.” The distance

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Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad’s Novels

between teller and told, reader and text, is further supplemented by additional representational techniques. As we have seen, Leavis claims that Conrad’s “adjectival insistence” suffices to induce a distancing obfuscation. Furthermore, through the use of ambiguity, competing narratives, irony, and, to use Ian Watt’s term, “delayed decoding” (techniques that produce suspicion and incomprehension in the reader), Conrad contributes to the underlying sense of distance that the reader experiences in his or her reading of the text. Interestingly, while Conrad appears to distance the readers from the text, he simultaneously invests in an attempt to bring them closer. This is apparent in the recurring representation of an oral transmission in his narratives.7 Tony Tanner suggests that the manner in which Conrad reintroduces “the hesitations of the speaking voice, the uncertainties and fadings of memory” serves to “undermine the illusory finality and exactitude of the written text, to unstabilise its silent impersonal unquestionable authority,” to get the language “off the page and back into the mouth” (“Bones,” 34). Michael Greaney perceives this as a sign that “Conrad’s fiction endeavours to negate its own writtenness, usually by ventriloquizing a raconteur [. . .] behind whose garrulous personal presence the text silently effaces itself” (2). By simulating a speaking narrator, Conrad draws his readers into an intersubjective group of involved listeners and readers, thereby overcoming the isolating effect of the written word. Conrad’s unreliable narrators often undermine the readers’ sense of trust and instill in them a distancing skepticism. An opposing dynamic is at work, however, in the recurrent use of tools of reliability and validation. Referring to the Author’s Notes, Said suggests that the “unusual attention paid to the motivation of the stories being told” derives from a “felt need to justify in some way the telling of a story” (World, 90). I would argue that it is the need not only to justify the telling but also to endow the story with a certain credibility, to present it not as fiction but as a part of living reality. As Conrad writes in the preface to Tales of Unrest, “as for the story itself it is true enough in its essentials. The sustained invention of a really telling lie demands a talent which I do not possess” (TU, ix). Similarly, Conrad’s tendency to furnish his narrators with a reliable source for their story—whether written document or eyewitness report—furthers the paratextual effect. Even the dizzying chronological foreground of Nostromo is supported by the rigorous—if elusive—historical document provided by Don José Avellanos’s “Fifty Years of Misrule.” The alleged transparency of the tale’s origin, both textual and paratextual, is designed

Introduction

17

to inhibit the readers’ barrier of suspicion and skepticism and bring them closer to the text. Said provides a useful summary of the tension between the written and the oral in Conrad’s texts, which we may read by extension as an apt summary of the stylistic tension between the binary poles: “We can conceive of Conrad’s narratives abstractly as the alternation in language of presence and absence. The presence of spoken words in time mitigates, if it does not make entirely absent, their written version; a speaker takes over the narrative with his voice, and his voice overrides the fact that he is absent (or unseen) to his listeners as he speaks” (World, 95). Said focuses here on the tension between the oral and the written, the present and the absent in time and space. The perpetual oscillation between representational tools of distance and proximity relates not only to the form of transmission but, as I have suggested, to a wide range of technical devices. From the outset, the tension between the real and the imaginary, the objective and the subjective, the oral and the written repeatedly draws attention to the otherwise-present quality of the text. We have seen that the diegetic level of the text features a psychologically motivated otherwise present, a “magic circle” within which the protagonist is trapped that is then translated into an objective correlative narrative setting.8 It is possible to claim, however, that the “invisible sweep of a magic circle” that permeates the thematic content of Conrad’s work does not originate in the work but outside it. Said writes, “Both in his fiction and in his autobiographical writing Conrad was trying to do something that his experience as a writer everywhere revealed to be impossible” (World, 90). Insofar as Said points to the underlying impossibility of the writer’s work, the “magic sweep of an invisible circle” may be regarded as a textual emblem of Conrad’s own difficulties, a circle that holds the author as well as his characters. Guetti and Said discuss Conrad’s despairing battle with his artistic medium.9 We may refer back, then, to the citation that opens this introduction, a passage that could readily translate into a self-reflexive description of Conrad’s own struggle with an impalpable opponent. While we may have traced in this a possible origin for the otherwisepresent quality of Conrad’s texts, whereby Conrad’s struggles with writing are reflected both thematically and stylistically in his work, it is important to note that this line of analysis will not be pursued here. The “invisible circle,” then, will be read not so much as the cage in which the author finds himself but rather as his method of entrapping his readers. This phenomenon recalls what Shoshana Felman, in her

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Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad’s Novels

analysis of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw, terms the “reading effect.” Such an effect occurs when a critical interpretation “not only elucidates the text but also reproduces it dramatically, unwittingly participates in it” (101). A survey of critical responses to the works analyzed in the course of this book suggests that a similar dynamic infects readers of the Conrad canon. The snares that inevitably trip us up are integral to Conrad’s artistic aesthetic, an aesthetic motivated by his wish to captivate his audience and engage his readers.

Th e O th erwi se-pres ent Aestheti c The otherwise present is an aesthetic of deferral, a means to intensify the readers’ desire for the written word by protracting or withholding its satisfaction. In formulating this aesthetic, Conrad was greatly influenced by Henry James who, as Philip Sicker posits, “realized that we create love-images, not out of what we see, but out of what we fail to see” (30). It is my claim that “the failure to see” is not the result of the author’s underlying negativity or skepticism or his futile struggle with the inadequacy of words but an intended aesthetic effect. Conrad’s “adjectival insistence” points to a reluctance to name, a reluctance to “destroy the illusion,” to rob the artwork of its “suggestive glamour.” A “failure to see” may be the effect of an aesthetic principle that is defined in Conrad’s words to Curle. However, such an effect would seem to undermine Conrad’s ars poetica contemplation in the preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus where he famously states that the task of the artist is, “before all, to make you see” (NN, xiv, Conrad’s emphasis). While we may choose to dismiss this incongruity as another example of Conrad’s contradictory thoughts on art, I believe that this particular statement merits closer scrutiny; in addition to being one of Conrad’s most sustained engagements with the role of art and of the artist, it has also become something of a topos in critical readings of his works. It is therefore important to note that despite its slogan-like immediacy, this phrase is embedded in an extremely complex preface that problematizes the very principles it seems to assert. In keeping with this supposed immediacy, the preface attests to Conrad’s participation in the Western metaphysical privileging of presence. What the artist wishes to represent must be “conveyed through the senses” (NN, xii), rendering it, according to Platonic thought, a vestige of the world of Forms. This is a presence that is tangible, visible, material, and, as such, always already temporal and transient. At the same time, the terms with which Conrad refers to this presence and the

Introduction

19

method whereby it is to be reproduced are evocative of that which cannot conform to phenomena. The artist, he writes, must “descend within himself”; he must appeal to our “less obvious capacities” that are “kept out of sight.” His appeal is “less loud [. . .] less distinct” (xi–xii). This ambivalence is amplified by the manner in which Conrad begins by invoking not the world of Becoming but the world of Being—the world of Ideas. He writes, “Art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its very aspect” (xi, my emphasis). Once again, what we encounter is a conjunction that collapses the two distinct worlds. Conrad wishes to embody what cannot be embodied; he wishes to flesh out the universal truth and make it present. A close reading of the preface not only problematizes its embedded motto but also brings to light two crucial aspects of Conrad’s aesthetics. First, although Conrad begins by describing the object of art (the truth), most of the preface is devoted not to the object but to the process whereby it is attained. Moreover, the relationship between the two is tellingly counterintuitive. Marlow demonstrates this in one of his metaliterary remarks in Lord Jim: “Try as I may for the success of this yarn I am missing innumerable shades—they were so fine, so difficult to render in colourless words. Because [Jim] complicated matters by being so simple” (LJ, 94). It is the method, then—the war of the words—that is enchanting, frustrating, and ultimately rewarding. It is not the “simple” object but its representation that will determine the success of the story. To return to the preface, the emphatic repetition of such words as “attempt,” “appeal,” “aspire,” and so on necessarily foregrounds the artistic process and produces a slippage whereby the object is overshadowed by its representation. The artistic method is thus transformed into an end or object in itself. The second principle comes to light in the concluding words: “To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and colour, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile—such is the aim, difficult and evanescent” (NN, xvi). No longer a need to bring to light the universal truth, the aim of art here is to tantalize the readers, to draw their attention and arrest their gaze. Conrad wishes not only to make them see or understand but to make them stop and take notice. What he wishes to provoke is his readers’ desire, a desire that he maintains cannot and will not be easily satisfied. It is this desire that contributes to the “glamour” of the work, a

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Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad’s Novels

glamour achieved not through explicit naming but through an evocative suggestiveness. Conrad’s aesthetics, then, are not transparent. They jar and arrest the reader as they draw attention to themselves and to their inherent difficulty, prefiguring, as it were, Shklovsky’s notion of defamiliarization. In a curiously fitting tribute to a concept that was yet to be formulated, Conrad writes that “it is only through complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance [. . .] that the light of magic suggestiveness may be brought to play for an evanescent instant over the commonplace surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless usage” (xiii). It is precisely because the preexisting methods of artistic depiction can no longer arrest the readers and elicit their desire that Conrad must innovate, enchant, and jolt us out of our habitual and habituated processes of reading and experiencing. For us to see better we must see otherwise. As it is beyond the capacity of this work to proffer an analysis of the complete Conrad canon, I have limited my selection to the five texts mentioned above. My reading of these novels, however, finds intertextual support in other Conrad novels and short stories that will be referenced throughout the course of this study. Despite this delimitation, my contention is that the object of this study relates to a phenomenon that pervades the Conrad canon in its entirety. The discussion herewith is not exhaustive but exemplary, thereby propounding a more general perspective on Conrad’s works. The selection of Lord Jim, Nostromo, Under Western Eyes, The Arrow of Gold, and Suspense—five considerably different novels that correspond to various periods in Conrad’s writing career, different thematic and stylistic preoccupations, and a diverse range of critical esteem—is programmatic.10 The variation in style and theme allows me to address different manifestations of the otherwise present. While we will see that Conrad uses a similar technique in his otherwise-present representations, its effect alternates as it elicits not only guilt, fear, and a chronological vertigo but also desire and suspense. Furthermore, my choice to include three esteemed novels alongside two lesser known and less appreciated works is driven by a need to renegotiate the critical biases that underlie and consequently explain the conspicuously uneven attention devoted to different works of the Conrad canon. While the “achievement and decline” theory conventionally holds that such a novel as Lord Jim cannot be classified alongside The Arrow of Gold and Suspense, my analysis highlights the manner in which the different novels are indeed the products of a shared aesthetic.

Introduction

21

Chapter 2 presents an analysis of Lord Jim. By addressing both thematic and stylistic concerns, this chapter outlines the application of the aesthetic of the otherwise present to the characterization of both the protagonist and the narrator. We will see how an otherwisepresent representation corresponds to a unique method of reading or seeing that, by way of an irremediable contagion, infects not only Jim and Marlow, the two main characters, but also the readers of the novel. In addition, we will test the clashing of ethics and aesthetics in a reevaluation of Marlow’s unique method of storytelling. Chapter 3 is devoted to an analysis of the representation of historical progression in Nostromo. While the novel is manifestly devoted to a setting down of the history of Sulaco and its people, a deep-seated generic ambivalence is suggestive of an underlying resistance to such a project. The project of objective documentation is usurped by the atemporal circularity of a performative reiteration that is associated with a language of fairy tales, myth, ghost stories, and folklore. Obsessed with the spectral remnants of historical figures and historical traumas, these generic borrowings undermine the notion of a chronological presence. Turning to Under Western Eyes, Chapter 4 traces the similarities underlying the storytelling methods of the English teacher and Marlow, indicating that here, too, the otherwise-present aesthetic results in a transgression of ethical concerns. The chapter proceeds with an analysis of the tribulations of a taciturn personality in a world in which silence exists not as absence but as present meaning. It then follows the motif of haunting that pervades the novel, a parallel theme in its transformation of absence into the otherwise present, and traces the trajectory that brings phantoms—both literal and metaphorical— into being. In The Arrow of Gold, we see that the motif of haunting serves an altogether different purpose—the creation of desire. Here the tantalizing play between absence and presence serves to create an effect—both aesthetic and psychological—of “irrealizability.” The chapter then focuses on two further manifestations of the oscillation between the binary opposites, both in a discussion of covert and overt plotting and in the treatment of the motif of Pompeii in the novel, a motif that metaphorically encapsulates the categorical enmeshment of absence and presence. Finally, in Suspense, the otherwise present is translated into an obsession with endings. By introducing the possibility of a “solution by rejection” (NLL, 18), we will engage with the manner in which the novel’s conclusion is rendered otherwise, as it adopts the form of a final suspension. Throughout, I wish to demonstrate how an attentiveness to the otherwise-present features of the text allows for a reinterpretation of

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Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad’s Novels

even the most canonical of Conrad’s texts, novels that have inspired a host of critical readings over the decades. A close reading of these texts and an examination of their method of construction show that the prejudices and conventions that inevitably inform our reading in many ways transgress their evocative openness. One of the key motivations underlying this analysis is a wish to reopen the text for those who have become overhabituated or desensitized to it; my readings are meant to defamiliarize the text in order to coax the reader into rereading the novels and reappreciating their elusive but nevertheless captivating “glamour.”

4

Chapter 2

S eeing Oth erwise Fro m A L M AY E R ’ S F O L LY to L O R D J I M

“Idealism,” Jeremy Hawthorn explains, “is a form of overestimation

of the self: the idealist imposes his own mental images on the world in preference for the real nature of that world” (Language, 47). Hawthorn’s account of Jim’s character reaffirms the substitutive power of a self-perpetuating fiction: “the real nature” of the world recedes before the wondrous imaginings of the mind. It is precisely within such a moment of imaginative reflection that Jim is described to us during his watch on board the Patna, before the fateful collision: At such times his thoughts would be full of valorous deeds: he loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary achievements. They were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality. They had a gorgeous virility, the charm of vagueness, they passed before him with a heroic tread; they carried his soul away with them and made it drunk with the divine philtre of an unbounded confidence in itself. There was nothing he could not face. He was so pleased with the idea that he smiled, keeping perfunctorily his eyes ahead. (LJ, 20)

Throughout these deep imaginings, Jim “perfunctorily” keeps his eyes ahead as his duty requires. What he sees, however, is not the sea but the hidden truths of his heroic existence. The “idea” born of his immersion in romantic sea literature overshadows the truth of his physical surroundings. Following a long line of characters from Dante’s Paolo and Francesca through Don Quixote and Madame Bovary, Jim’s objective reality is usurped by the projection of an imaginary alternative born in romantic fiction.

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Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad’s Novels

With the collision, the “real nature” of Jim’s existence brutally intrudes, pulling him back into the world of harsh fact, a world most poignantly encapsulated in the courtroom. Here, too, however, Jim actively resists the “serried circle of facts that had surged up all about him” and attempts to find “some opening” (LJ, 31) through which he may escape. Furthermore, we here witness not an isolated drama of evasion but yet another of Jim’s habitual departures from the harmful potential of an unmerciful reality. Among these repetitive escapes, we may count the training ship incident, Jim’s actions on board the Patna, his repeated employment-related disappearances, the move to Patusan, and finally, although this can be contested, his choice of death. The world of fact that was first displaced by his valorous imaginings is later replaced by the haunting memory of the Patna affair, then by the glory of his new name in Patusan, and finally by the demands of honor. C. B. Cox connects this last act of heroism to Jim’s heroic— but fictional—vision, suggesting that “perhaps at the last Jim felt himself metamorphosed into a hero suited to the fancies of Scheherazade” (43). To the very end, it seems, Jim’s perception of reality is colored by his imagination; throughout, Jim sees otherwise.1 The method whereby Jim integrates external stimuli into the maps of his illusory existence is not new to the Conrad canon. A similar dynamic is apparent in his earlier novels and short stories, most notably, perhaps, in the psychological makeup of his protagonists Almayer and Willems. Unlike Lord Jim, Almayer’s Folly stages a rude awakening for its main character in its very first words: “The well-known shrill voice startled Almayer from his dream of splendid future into the unpleasant realities of his present hour” (AF, 3). Almayer dreams of traveling to Europe and establishing a respectable and comfortable life for himself and for his half-caste daughter, Nina. And, yet, this is a novel of passivity, futility, and stasis. The incongruity between his ambitions and his actions is due precisely to his inability to rid himself of his illusions, his insistence on seeing otherwise. Through a perverted sense of loyalty to his imaginings, Almayer repeatedly defers action. Exasperated by his captivity in Sambir and his unfortunate marriage, he “[thinks] of everything; even [plans] murder in an undecided and feeble sort of way, but [dares] do nothing—expecting every day the return of Lingard with news of some immense good fortune” (26). Similarly, although he longs to see Nina in Singapore, he delays his voyage “from year to year, always expecting some favourable turn of fortune” (29). Almayer’s fortune does not turn. This, however, does not awaken him from his imaginative obsessions but rather propels him into a

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25

new form of blindness, a “smooth, round, black thing” (AF, 99) into which he gradually descends. Much like his fantasy of a life in Europe, his mourning of a lost future interferes with his reading of the present: “those signs of his daughter’s emotion Almayer did not see, for his sight was dimmed by self-pity, by anger and by despair” (103). The ensuing loss of his daughter deals the final deathblow. Without her, he has no future. A similar psychological blindness afflicts the protagonist of Conrad’s second novel. In the last pages of An Outcast of the Islands, Willems is portrayed as a shell of his former self. Like Almayer, his fantasies have propelled him into a life of incarceration and isolation, a far cry from his former vision of a great future. On the threshold of a tragic end, Willems surveys the “unattainable shore” (OI, 339). He looks, however, “without seeing anything”; “thinking of himself,” he sees “nothing” (340). Although somber, this scene is but a reworking of a theme that is present from the novel’s outset. Willems is repeatedly rendered insensible to his reality by the projections of his imagination. At the start, Willems’s delight in his moral superiority results in his misreading of the hatred and contempt that is harbored toward him by Mr. Vinck and by Joanna and her family. A false conviction in the imperviousness of his career leads to his betrayal of Mr. Hudig’s hard-earned trust. In Sambir, Willems commits a similar error as his desire for Aïssa—a desire that is itself based on a false image, a fantasy2—leads to his betrayal of Lingard and ultimately of himself.

Fro m P rotag oni st to Reader Almayer, Willems, and Jim are thus caught in a “magic circle,” blind to what is and haunted by what is not. However, unlike Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, Lord Jim extends this dynamic, infecting not only the character but the reader, too. Harold Bloom’s puzzlement is exemplary of the quizzical responses Jim’s character typically elicits. Bloom asks, “Is Jim merely the spirit of illusion, or does there linger in him something of the legitimate spirit of romance? Marlow cannot answer the question, and we cannot either, no matter how often we read Lord Jim. Is that a strength or a weakness in this novel? That Conrad falls into obscurantism, particularly in Heart of Darkness, is beyond denial. Is Lord Jim simply an instance of such obscurantism on a larger scale?” (5). Bloom’s reading upholds two mutually exclusive interpretations. In attempting to decipher Jim’s character, Bloom’s hermeneutic capacities are divided by what he experiences as an incessant oscillation between the framework of

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Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad’s Novels

illusion and of romance. Moreover, the problematic is not exhausted in Bloom’s inability to commit to one of the two generic frameworks. For in addition to this underlying dilemma, Bloom finds that the novel will not allow its reader to conclude whether Jim’s inherent ambiguousness points to Conrad’s artistic weakness or to his strength. The suggested ambivalence with which Conrad treats his protagonist leads Bloom to believe that, like Heart of Darkness, the writing of Lord Jim deliberately brings about a perpetuation of an obscuring haze. Bloom is not alone in his inability to subscribe to one interpretative possibility. Engaging with a similar contradiction, John Batchelor posits that Jim “is both transparent and opaque, both an everyman and a single person, whose individuality is too rare to be definable, both richly accessible to Marlow and baffingly distant from him” (111–12). Although he expresses similar bafflement, Batchelor’s statement marks a progression from the disjunctive to the conjunctive; no longer “either/or,” Jim is now double. We might accordingly say that while Batchelor exposes a confusion that is comparable to Bloom’s, his argument is grounded in a more affirmative syntax. If Jim appears to challenge the reader with an unsupportable contradiction, this does not imply that Jim is impossible but that he is multifaceted—layered and complex. J. H. Stape similarly broaches this duality of subject, expressing it in spatial terms. Jim, he argues, is “both at the novel’s centre and on its periphery” (Stape, 63). Whether the representation of Jim is of the order of the disjunctive or of the conjunctive, whether it is topographical or tropological, it is clear that we do not see Jim very clearly. Thus, as opposed to Almayer and Willems, Jim not only sees what is otherwise present but is also seen as such. In the transition from Conrad’s earlier novels to Lord Jim, then, we may say that there is a certain unsettling of the camera lens. Seeing otherwise becomes not only the key psychological method whereby Conrad’s protagonists grapple with an unbending and at times merciless fate but also a way in which readers experience the story. Such a contagion or ripple effect is the result of Conrad’s increasingly performative method of writing. The thematic obsession with an impossible conjunction of two realities that we have traced so far increasingly haunts Conrad’s stylization. It is no longer merely what but how he writes. In tracing this burgeoning aesthetic, it is useful to note that the critical debate attested to here (articulated, as I have shown, in a divide between a discourse of either/or and one of doubling/accumulation) is in many ways prefigured by critical responses to The Nigger of the Narcissus. Published in 1897, The Nigger inaugurated Conrad’s first

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foray into the innovative narrative technique that was later to become one of the defining characteristics of his art. The perplexing duality here arises when the first thirty pages of uninterrupted omniscient narration are suddenly subverted by the transition from “led their busy and insignificant lives” to “kept our noses to the grindstone” (NN, 31, my emphases). Omniscience is subsequently restored but only for a short space, for several pages later it is reported that “the setting sun dipped sharply, as though fleeing before our nigger” (34, my emphasis). John Lester writes that from the scathing criticism of Marvin Mudrick to Albert J. Guerard’s compelling defense, “critical opinions have diverged sharply on the question of narrative suitability, for in that work what appears to be a standard third person omniscient narrator becomes, it seems, a member of the crew, and the narration fluctuates between first person plural and third person thereafter, until, in the final pages, first person singular pilots the novel to its conclusion” (163).3 It is even here, though, that the narration oscillates between “us” and “they,” as the “I” of the final pages is itself reluctant to take sides, shuttling between an objective viewpoint that offers the reader a last glimpse of the crew as “they” sway “on the broad flagstones before the Mint” and the subjective viewpoint, as he reminisces, “Haven’t we, together and upon the immortal sea wrung out a meaning from our sinful lives” (NN, 173, my emphases). Critical responses to The Nigger indicate that, although suggestive of a similarly perplexing duality, the difficulty here lies not in grasping the subject of the tale—the ship and its crew, both collectively and individually—but in attempting to pinpoint the source of the narrating voice. The question, in other words, is not what is being narrated but who is narrating. Articulating the inherent difficulty in determining the narrative voice, Jakob Lothe defines seven different narrative situations found in the novel.4 The challenge to the reader, however, lies not only in the multiplicity of narrating voices but also in the abrupt and unmarked shifts between them. As Katherine Isobel Baxter writes, Conrad alternates between perspectives “without signposting these shifts” (122). While Guerard holds that these “changes in point of view” are made “unobtrusively and with pleasing insouciance” (107), it is my contention that they grate and inevitably impede the reading process. The reader must grapple with the coincidence of such passages as, “It was just what they had expected, and hated to hear, that idea of a stalking death, thrust at them many times a day like a boast and like a menace by this obnoxious nigger,” and—three sentences later—“We hesitated between pity and mistrust, while, on the slightest provocation, he shook before our eyes the bones of his

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Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad’s Novels

bothersome and infamous skeleton” (NN, 36). Such narrative shifts defamiliarize; they arrest our attention by subverting our expectations and challenging our comprehension. Guerard’s suggestion that these shifts “admirably [reflect] the general movement from isolation to solidarity to poignant separation” (107) can only be a retrospective application of an interpretative solution to a baffling literary technique. Such a solution begs the question of why Conrad wishes to baffle his readers by proposing, as an underlying assumption, that Conrad’s technique does not baffle at all. In the light of the critical controversy incited by the experimental handling of narrative viewpoint in this novel, it seems that Guerard’s reading disposes of a central aspect of Conrad’s evolving literary technique. The stylistic method in The Nigger achieves not only an impressive coordination of theme and style but also a transition from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from the transparency of a nondramatized and unobtrusive narrative voice to the opacity of a representation that constantly draws attention to itself. Whether successfully or not, in shuttling between “I” or “us” and “they,” Conrad stages a performative articulation, a game, as it were, that perpetuates the tension between proximity and distance, between objectivity and subjectivity, between absence and presence. The otherwise present that we traced in Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast, and Lord Jim is here transferred through narrative technique from the experience of the protagonist to that of the reader. No longer represented to us as the frustrating experience of a character caught between two worlds, it is now the reader who is confronted with an impossible concurrence of a narrating voice that paraleptically shuttles between the limited viewpoint of an eyewitness and the all-knowing perspective of an omniscient narrator. The critical debate prompted by the later novel, as demonstrated above, is concerned not with an attempt to locate the narrating voice but with an attempt to decipher its subject. While the terms of the debate may consequently appear to be at odds with one other, it is nevertheless clear that they stem from a similar literary effect. As Brooks intimates, Jim is himself the product of a perpetuated tension between proximity and distance, objectivity and subjectivity, absence and presence. The two debates are thus similarly embroiled in a perplexing duality—whether it is that of Jim in Lord Jim or that of the narrative stance in The Nigger. Critical disputes such as those incited by The Nigger of the Narcissus and Lord Jim would suggest that whether or not Conrad’s artistic aim is “to make [us] see” (NN, xiv), we do not, in fact, see very well. I wish to argue that this effect is the product of

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Conrad’s otherwise-present aesthetic with which I will engage more closely in my reading of the latter novel.

Mar low The performative turn of the shifting pronouns in The Nigger of the Narcissus may be said to prefigure not only Conrad’s method of amassing competing narratives or viewpoints in the latter novel but also the aesthetic impulse underlying the creation of the Marlovian narrator.5 Marlow’s positioning in the text is an embodiment of the ambiguously located narration in the earlier novel. He is both protagonist and narrator, agent and eyewitness, and, insofar as he is both inside the diegetic world and outside it, present and absent. Jim is for him both “one of us” and an inscrutable other “under a cloud” (LJ, 416). It is Marlow who enumerates the incriminating evidence against Jim alongside an elaboration of the extenuating circumstances and who both records his testimony and colors it with a hint of irony. Marlow’s character thus allows for a performative oscillation between solidarity and discord, between identification and detachment, between “us” and “him,” “I” and “they.” But if, as Baxter suggests, the narrative innovations employed by Conrad in The Nigger mark an attempt at a more objective representation, it is clear that the development of a comparable technique in Lord Jim creates quite the opposite literary effect. While critical opinion holds that the transition from the first two novels to the third signals a movement from subjectivity to objectivity, it is clear that the transition from chapter 4 to chapter 5 in Lord Jim (marking the transition from omniscience to Marlow’s narration) is suggestive of an inverse trajectory. That is to say that the represented shifts in focalization and narrative voice that are associated with a more well-rounded and objective picture of the Narcissus and its crew create a contradictory effect in the later novel where they increasingly distance us, as it were, from Jim. Although contradictory, this effect is once again the product of a jarring shift in the narrating voice. Recalling the tone and stylization of Conrad’s first two novels, the first four chapters of Lord Jim offer a lucid and accessible representation of its protagonist. Once the omniscient narrator has proffered Jim’s biographical details, he narrates the events as they happen. The representation of Jim in the present moment enhances the transparency of the omniscient narrator’s account. Without chronological involutions, the reader is given an unmediated view of the protagonist. We soon find, however, that the

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first chapters are but an exposition that occupies only a brief moment in the scope of the narrative. Jim’s present moment is soon dismissed. The change in the narrating voice at the end of the fourth chapter brings about a change of perspective. No longer subject to the associated transparency of an omniscient narrator, Jim is now represented through the reported account of an eyewitness. This transformation is augmented by the temporal shift that accompanies the change of narrative voice. As Marlow displaces the omniscient narrator, the progression of an intensely present action is circumvented by the imposition of a consuetudinal future.6 To formulate this differently, a report in the present moment is cut short only to be replaced by the future repetitive telling of a past event; the singular present is replaced by a reiterated past. In this manner, the transition from the omniscient narrator’s account to Marlow’s produces a doubly removed representation of the protagonist. Both the lucidity and immediacy of representation in the first chapters are forgone. Jim is recreated as a spirit from the past brought forth through the subjective prism of a witness. As Batchelor argues, once Marlow takes over the narrative, Jim begins “to recede from us” (84). In place of his initially uniform representation, Jim is now composite—as much a product of Marlow’s distortions as of his own evasions. It is thus clear that the displacement of an omniscient narrator’s voice with that of a subjective second person does more than “ensure that Jim’s debate with himself does not degenerate into mere self-justification” (Berthoud, 79). Insofar as it displaces the relatively translucent narration of the preceding chapters, Marlow’s narrative serves to confound rather than to clarify. Guerard sums up the matter in his claim that “not very much may seem left of Jim, after we have discounted Marlow’s partialities and distortions” (140). Jim, whom we have so far characterized as “seeing” that which is otherwise present, is himself represented to us as such. Recalling the response to The Nigger, critical readings of Lord Jim often attempt to justify Conrad’s innovative or baffling narrative strategies by way of a thematic interpretation. Thus, the transition to Marlow’s narration may be explained as a transition from a tale of innocence to a narrative of guilt. Whereas the omniscient narrator is presented with—and may therefore be said to present—a transparent subject, Marlow inherits Jim’s error and culpability. The transition between narrators and their very different manners of representation may be seen to function as an objective correlative to the changes consequent upon Jim’s jump. Once Jim is thrown into “an everlasting deep hole” (LJ, 111), the possibility of a transparent narrative is undermined. We may say that the moral implications of Jim’s fall

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necessitate the introduction of an otherwise-present characterization. If Jim cannot bring himself to admit or recognize his culpability, surely Marlow will not take the responsibility of such an affirmation upon himself. Jim remains inscrutable throughout, and, as Marlow suggests at the end of the novel, it is we who must decide whether we wish Jim to be redeemed or damned. Alternately, J. H. Stape argues that the significance of Marlow’s ambiguous depiction lies not in a signaling of Jim’s culpability but rather in warning “the reader against a leap to judgement” (77). Stape believes that Jim’s elusiveness does not mark his culpability but rather his complexity. We are not in a position to judge that which we do not see very clearly. While Stape’s reading is morally appealing, it is in contradiction with one of the key elements of the narrative: the drawnout withholding of the details of the Patna’s fate. Such a formidable ellipsis would suggest that the reader is not warned against a “leap to judgment” but is rather forced to commit one.7 A thematic explication of the transition to an otherwise-present representation of Jim may also draw on a character analysis of Marlow, the newly appointed narrator. As we recall, Hawthorn suggests that “the idealist imposes his own mental images on the world in preference for the real nature of that world” (47). Jim is an idealist; the fiction he writes for himself supersedes the reality that surrounds him. Jim, however, is not the only such idealist in the novel. Edward Said writes, “Marlow’s generosity toward Jim is rooted in precisely that same tendency to romantic projection because of which Jim so embarrassingly prefers courageous voyages in projective inspiration to voyages in actuality. Neither man, whether hearer or storyteller, truly inhabits the world of facts” (World, 102–3). Marlow’s obvious dissatisfaction with the court proceedings alerts the reader to the fact that his account does not seek the “superficial how” but the “fundamental why” of Jim’s case. That Marlow’s alternative investigative technique is of an altogether different nature to the court proceedings further motivates the interpolation of his voice in the transition between chapters 4 and 5, by indicating that it is precisely such a mediator that is needed to ensure a more just and intimately profound analysis of the case at hand. If the transition subsequently results in some unsettling of the camera lens through which Jim is captured, we understand that this is a necessary evil that comes with the process of bringing to light additional insights into the mystery at the heart of Jim’s character. In the previous section, I outlined the manner in which Jim’s subjective projections contaminate his ability to perceive the reality in which he is immersed. Like Jim, Marlow possesses a unique method

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of perception. Not a great believer in fact, he, too, sees beyond objective reality. Jim is the first to draw our attention to this characteristic of Marlow. When he first lays eyes on him in the courtroom, Jim notes that Marlow appears to be staring not at him but behind him, “as though he could see somebody or something past [his] shoulder” (LJ, 33). Marlow looks at Jim, but he sees beyond surface truth, beyond a man’s flesh and bones. Intuiting this, Jim feels that “[Marlow] seemed to be aware of his hopeless difficulty” (33). Perhaps Marlow’s habit of looking beyond surface reality, beyond the concrete, is suggestive to Jim of his own habit. Whether or not this scene prepares the ground for Jim and Marlow’s subsequent comradeship, it is clear that the novel sets a certain parallel between the two. Marlow and Jim are both idealists; both see what is otherwise present. From chapter 5 onward, Jim’s story is recounted in Marlow’s voice; henceforward, the reader sees Jim through Marlow’s eyes. If Marlow sees otherwise, so must we. By focusing on the multifarious thematic motivations for the introduction of Marlow’s voice in chapter 5, we inevitably neglect the stylistic significance that underlies such a seismic shift in the narrative makeup. That is to say that by enumerating what are essentially the ethical ramifications of the otherwise-present representation of Jim, we fail to do justice to the aesthetic aspect of this shift. Although confessor, friend, father, and, conversely, an eyewitness whose analysis is prey to the pitfalls of a highly partial and motivated prism of interpretation, Marlow is also a narrative device, a tool needed to perfect Conrad’s art. We have seen that the stylistic innovations present in the narrative makeup of The Nigger are improved upon in the later novel, where the duality infecting the narrating voice is made to cohere with the subjectivity of a single, identifiable eyewitness. The accumulation of narrative stances (homodiegetic and extradiegetic, first-person and third-person narration) that is associated with a heightened objectivity in the earlier novel is here part and parcel of a highly partial interpreting agent. Recalling the pronoun shifts in The Nigger, Marlow’s narration is fed by the tension produced by an oscillation between proximity and distance, between identification and difference. The object of Marlow’s scrutiny is subsequently recreated or re-presented in the text (as of chapter 5) as an otherwise-present construct; for Marlow, Jim is, at one and the same time, tantalizingly close and exasperatingly other. With the introduction of Marlow, Conrad presents a new narrative perspective, one that he could not explore in earlier narratives in

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which he relied on omniscient narration or the complementing viewpoints furnished by seemingly unmotivated pronoun shifts. In this sense, Marlow may be seen as an expression of Conrad’s evolving literary aims. This is true, moreover, not only of the narrator of Lord Jim but also of that of “Youth,” Heart of Darkness, and Chance. Developed and changed to fit the needs of his creator, Marlow may be seen as a figure for that very evolution. As such, his method of storytelling offers the reader a system of self-reflexive strategies from which Conrad’s aesthetic principles may be extrapolated. Before turning to Lord Jim, it is therefore important to take stock of the considerable modifications made to Marlow in the course of Conrad’s writing career, modifications that reflect the development of his artistic vision. In “Youth,” the first of the Marlovian narratives, Marlow is fashioned in a manner reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s storyteller. According to Benjamin, a storyteller is a man of wisdom who conveys the lessons of his experience to his listeners. The storyteller’s task is to draw from his history a moral, a proverb, or valuable practical advice in order to better the lives of those who will listen.8 Indeed, Marlow’s narrative aim appears to be his wish to expound to his audience the lessons of personal experience—a meditation on youth inspired by the story of his first voyage to the East. We may say that, in this narrative enterprise, Marlow trespasses on the interests of a second party only insofar as his younger self becomes a source of wonder and fascination, an other to the more experienced and mature sailor. In the latter narratives, and perhaps most distinctly in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, it is possible to discern a certain straying away from the Benjaminian definition. Such a definition would appear to be increasingly contradicted by Marlow’s intensifying narrative mystification and the gradual transformation of the notion of personal experience.9 We may recognize the onset of this change in Heart of Darkness where a journey that begins as an exploration of the self is gradually displaced by a witnessing of the experience of another.10 To formulate this differently, what initially appears to be the story of firsthand experience is gradually revealed to be the relation of vicarious experience. Marlow informs his listeners, “It is [Kurtz’s] extremity that I seemed to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot” (HD, 101). Marlow’s “hesitating foot” does not affect his eye for dramatic effect; nor does the embracing of a vicarious experience go without its rewards. We may find one of the advantages of this unique form of storytelling in critical readings of the novel. Moser, for example, hails Marlow as one of Conrad’s

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Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad’s Novels

“perceptive heroes.” Such a hero, he writes, “is the kind of man who follows the simple seaman’s code, yet has the imagination, skepticism, and self-doubts of the betrayers. He meets his crisis with success; Marlow keeps his place in the ranks” (23). Clearly, Marlow meets his crisis with success precisely because he will not leave “his place in the ranks”; he will not step over the edge. Such success, moreover, is artistically predetermined: the storyteller must live to tell the story. As he himself is not willing or unable to undergo the ordeal of failure, betrayal, or death, he must find a subject who is. Thus we have it that if in “Youth” it had been the younger Marlow who provided the center of attention, in Heart of Darkness, it is Kurtz who faces “the horror” and perishes; in Lord Jim, it is Jim who betrays the code and jumps off the Patna; in Chance, Marlow’s involvement diminishes even more as Flora and Captain Anthony struggle alone in their attempts to find love and independence. In these three texts, Marlow is repeatedly transformed from a participant into a witness. Moser writes that “the simple betrayer such as Jim or Nostromo cannot really understand what he has done, let alone express it. For this reason, he requires an interpreter, someone more subtle to explain the failure to the reader. Jim has Marlow” (21). It is my contention that this coupling is not one-sided. Marlow is similarly in need of the “simple betrayer” for his enterprise of interpretation. By shifting the narrative focus to another, Conrad redesigns Marlow’s function in the story. Increasingly, the emphasis is no longer on what befalls him but on his interpretation of what befalls another. Although he remains within the narrative, or at least on its border—as a frame to the new subject of the story—his repositioning is reflective of a certain ambivalence. Both inside and outside the diegetic level, Marlow is transformed into a figure for the storyteller and the listener, author and reader. Much like his innovations in The Nigger of the Narcissus, Conrad’s fashioning and development of Marlow’s character as storyteller and framing device follow a process of accumulation. At first, Marlow is presented to the reader as a hardened sailor who recounts his adventures and extrapolates their hidden moral. That is, he is a device used to simulate presence and proximity by way of the represented voice of an experiencing subject. Gradually, however, Marlow’s character and his implication in the story undergo a telling transformation. The reporting subject is now entrusted with the additional duties of an objective observer, a duality inevitably infected by the trademarks of an unreliable narrator. Both implicated and distant, an eyewitness and a participant in a game of Chinese whispers, Marlow is as absent as he

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is present. By infecting the very source of the story with this duality, Conrad ensures that Marlow’s accounts are always already haunted by this reverberating ambivalence. The oscillation between proximity and distance, assurance and doubt, are conditioned by the manner in which the stories are told. The introduction of the other’s experience and the consequent displacement of Marlow as subject result in an increasing reliance on hermeneutics in Marlow’s project of narration. Thus we have it that after “Youth,” the lessons of personal history are displaced by a web of conjecture on the experience of an impenetrable other. Marlow’s stepping back therefore instills his narratives not only with the safety of “keeping his place in the ranks” but also with an irreparable doubt. The source of Marlow’s inspiration is equally a source of angst as his reliance on the experience of the other ultimately infuses his narratives with incertitude and indeterminacy. As he himself explains, “It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering, and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope of flesh and blood on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable, and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp” (LJ, 179–80). If the frustration attested to here is a product of distance—between a subject and the object of his scrutiny—this distance is further augmented by the temporal shift that is associated with the onset of Marlow’s narration. Marlow’s subject is not external but an internalization, the memory of his experience of Jim. He must look within himself to tell his tale. As a memory trace, Jim can no longer be represented mimetically. Guerard’s contention that “not very much may seem left of Jim” (140) is therefore deceptive, for devoid of Marlow’s partialities and distortions, Jim hardly exists at all. Of the forty-five chapters in the novel, Jim is represented to us through Marlow’s narration in all but the first four expository chapters. Jim does not exist despite but rather due to Marlow’s narration. What Guerard fails to recognize is that although the commencement of Marlow’s narrative effects an absenting, as it were, of Jim, it simultaneously introduces a new character to take his place. As Marlow has it, the subject of his tale is not hindered by his narration but is produced by it in the same way that, as we learn from Walter Benjamin, the “traces of the storyteller cling to the story the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel” (91). Indeed, once the reader accepts that the subject of Marlow’s narration

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Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad’s Novels

is other—it is not that of the first four chapters—it becomes clear that Marlow’s obstructions create as much as they conceal. From the end of chapter 4 onward, Jim is inextricably tied to the vessel that holds him in the form of a memory trace. As Marlow tells his audience, “[Jim] existed for me, and after all it is only through me that he exists for you” (LJ, 224). From chapter 5 onward, the novel assumes the form of a retrospective narrative. Jim is now a past present, a memory trace—precisely a composite of the distortions and partialities that are part and parcel of living memory. Interestingly, Marlow does not allow his audience to overlook this crucial fact. Although Marlow admits to being nothing more than a “receptacle of confessions” (LJ, 34), his repeated allusion to memory and its characteristic transience are not only apologetic concessions in response to the inaccuracy of the depiction but also affirmations that, to us, Jim’s existence is dependent on Marlow’s narration. Before leaving Patusan, Marlow reports, “When to-morrow I had left it for ever, it would slip out of existence, to live only in my memory till I myself passed into oblivion” (323). To this effect, Marlow tells his listeners that he is “the only one to whom it is a memory” (138) and that “all this was in the past, but I knew the story of his life” (203). The threat of forgetfulness, transience, and dissipation emphasizes the fact that Marlow remains the sole living testimony to Jim’s story. These asides repeatedly call attention to the significance of Marlow’s part in the transmission. The attention paid to memory and testimony serves an additional purpose. Marlow’s claim that he is compelled to speak on behalf of his younger brother from the “realm of forgetful shades” (LJ, 316) suggests to his listeners that it is his compassion and care for his friend that compels him to speak out. Marlow thus ennobles his narrative enterprise by enclosing it within a framework of ethical responsibility. The full scope and profundity Marlow associates with such an undertaking is revealed to the reader at a later point in the novel. Relating to Jim’s respect for the memory of Jewel’s mother, Marlow remarks, “There is in his espousal of memory and affectation belonging to another human being something characteristic of his seriousness. He had a conscience” (276). We may assume that Marlow thinks of himself in similar terms. His commendation of Jim is a clear indication of his belief in the seriousness of his own narrative task. He, too, has a conscience. With these frequent evocations, Marlow gradually shows himself to be unique and indispensable—both by virtue of his questioning methods and the priceless content of his memory. It is precisely these

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two characteristics of Marlow’s narration, however, that contribute to the elusive representation of Jim. With the highlighting of Marlow’s narrative project he himself is brought to the fore and Jim increasingly grows dimmer to the audience. Ultimately, Marlow’s repeated assertions of his power to evoke the memory of his friend undermine the sense of Jim’s actuality. Jim is only a memory, and regardless of Marlow’s ability to conjure up the dead or the absent, the living man is lost.11 Marlow himself laments, “I shall never hear his voice again, nor shall I see his smooth tan-and-pink face with a white line on the forehead, and the youthful eyes darkened by excitement to a profound, unfathomable blue” (LJ, 343). As in this instance, Marlow’s narration produces a continuous oscillation between a conjured presence and an indelible absence. Paul Armstrong comments that “the young man may be figuratively bodied forth in the substance of Marlow’s speech and given a semblance of dramatic presence when he is quoted in dialogue. But this only ironically emphasizes his absence from the scene. His absent presence re-creates the distance that makes him enigmatic to Marlow and that even direct conversation cannot fully bridge” (123). There is a sense, then, that Marlow’s attempts to save his subject from oblivion suffer from Marlow’s insistence on his own presence and on the importance of his own narrative responsibility. By drawing attention to himself (and the present moment in which he is speaking), Marlow creates an unbridgeable temporal and spatial gap between his audience and his subject. Marlow’s loyalty thus seems to be divided between his responsibility to his subject and his own interests. Although his enterprise is tied to Jim, it is also his own voice that, with each repetition of Jim’s story, is saved from oblivion.12 Marlow’s stated unease as to the constant threat of transience and forgetfulness thus relates not only to the subject of his tale but also to his own self. Insofar as Marlow assures his own presence through the reiteration of Jim’s story, his fate is as dependent on Jim’s story as the latter is dependent on his narration. And so, Marlow tells and tells again. As we recall, the very first words that introduce Marlow specify that “later on, many times, in distant parts of the world, Marlow showed himself willing to remember Jim, to remember him at length, in detail and audibly” (33). But why is Marlow so willing to remember? Perceiving Jim’s constant and apparently unconscious evasions, Marlow tells his listeners, “No man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge” (80). As Marlow himself is such a “finished artist,” as his narrative is overflowing with the artful dodges he associates with Jim, it is inevitable that we should attribute this

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Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad’s Novels

observation to his own narrative enterprise. Royal Roussel suggests that, like Jim, Marlow’s artistry, his “own kind of portraiture,” allows him to “live on the visible surface of life” (104–5), thereby permitting a balancing of sorts between the underlying darkness epitomized in the Patna affair and the envisioned order and decency inherent in “the honour of the craft” (46). Thus, it is possible to understand the effects of Marlow’s encounter with Jim as an echo—a diminished parallel—of Jim’s experience aboard the Patna. Daniel Schwarz writes, “Just as the Patna elicited the hidden part of Jim’s character, Jim represents for Marlow a collision between his own soul and the circumstances beyond his control that inevitably have a stake in shaping his destiny” (Almayer’s, 91–92). Although the experience of betrayal cannot be said to be directly Marlow’s own, Jim’s class and upbringing create an indelible connection between the two. Andrzej Gasiorek posits that Marlow’s “interest in Jim is from the outset acutely personal, since Jim belongs to his own social group, reminds him of the now lost illusions of his youth and represents the collapse of the values he has all his life sought to uphold” (85). Marlow’s vicarious experience of Jim’s betrayal therefore leaves him haunted by its implications. C. B. Cox therefore concludes that “Marlow’s whole narrative is a form of evasion. His attempt to understand, his obsession with Jim, reflects his desire to escape from the horror in the thought that he would not trust Jim in charge of his deck” (36). These critics seem to suggest that Marlow cannot tell Jim’s story simply, because such a rendering would force him to address professional, psychological, and ethical questions that he would rather repress.13 By attempting to pinpoint the origins of the otherwise-present representation of Jim, we have followed a shift in focus from Jim— his elusiveness of vision and presence—to Marlow. We recognize that Marlow’s otherwise vision (and consequent otherwise-present representation of Jim) may be the result of a number of factors: his probing techniques, Jim’s status as a memory trace, and finally Marlow’s own psychologically motivated evasions. This list, however, is not exhaustive. Of the numerous lessons the novel teaches us, one of the most pronounced concerns the reciprocal nature of the narratives of self-perpetuation. The act of transmission entails not only a teller (a sender) but also a listener (a recipient). Such an idea, advocated in Conrad’s choice of epigraph,14 is suggestive of Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory that holds that “the most important acts, constitutive of self-consciousness, are determined by their relation to another consciousness” (311). Indeed, we must not assume that the epigraph relates to Jim alone; after all, he is not the primary teller in the novel. If Marlow’s

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identity is so bound to his story (much as Jim’s identity is bound to his own story), we can only presume that, as a storyteller, Marlow too yearns for the willing acceptance of an audience. Admittedly, he tells them, “Try as I may for the success of this yarn, I am missing innumerable shades—they were so fine, so difficult to render in colourless words” (94). Recalling Jim’s inability to adequately express himself in court, Marlow struggles in the formulation of his own speech. However, where Jim vainly wishes to correct his perceived culpability, it is for the “success” of his yarn that Marlow struggles. A competing interpretative solution to Marlow’s “artful dodges” thus presents itself. It is possible that one need not resort to psychologically motivated evasions in order to explain Marlow’s unique form of storytelling. It is possible, then, that the transition from chapter 4 to chapter 5 furnishes the narrative not only with a prism of interpretation that mimetically encapsulates the biases and faults associated with human subjectivity but also with a self-reflexive turn. Without relinquishing the evolution of Jim’s complex and later tormented persona, Conrad admits into the mix a struggling storyteller, a character responsible not only for the understanding of Jim’s inner recesses and a reportage of his history but also for the “success” of the story. Interestingly, the manner in which Marlow composes and transmits his narrative would suggest that, like his creator, he too subscribes to an otherwise-present aesthetic. Jim’s “simple” character expands under Marlow’s treatment, for he does not limit the characterization of Jim to what he is. Rather, Marlow constantly enhances the picture through a description of what Jim is not. This is a typical passage: “I don’t pretend I understood him. The views he let me have of himself were like those glimpses through the shifting rents in a thick fog—bits of vivid and vanishing detail, giving no connected idea of the general aspect of a country. They fed one’s curiosity without satisfying it; they were no good for purposes of orientation” (76). This passage evidently contributes more to the portrayal of the thick fog than it does to Jim’s character. If Jim is unclear and inscrutable, he is so partly as a consequence of Marlow’s method of depiction. Jim is represented not only through his ephemeral appearances but also through his episodic disappearances. In the making of his narrative, Marlow relies heavily on absence. In effect, Marlow’s characterization of his subject corresponds to a continuous oscillation between the binary opposites. The conflation of absence and presence is confusing and exasperating; it is, in Marlow’s words, “no good for purposes of orientation.” This, however, is precisely the effect Marlow achieves to ensure the continual interest of his listeners. It feeds “one’s curiosity without

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satisfying it.” We recall Bloom’s observation: “Is Jim merely the spirit of illusion, or does there linger in him something of the legitimate spirit of romance? Marlow cannot answer the question” (5). Bloom’s accusation may be off the mark. It is not so much that Marlow cannot answer the question but rather that he does not wish to. Anxious as to the success of his yarn, anxious to elicit his listeners’ curiosity, Marlow forgoes the limiting potential of affirmation. Armstrong suggests that “by reinforcing our effort to reach a global understanding at the same time as they frustrate our search for clarity and consistency, Marlow’s commentaries set up an opposition in the reader between a heightened desire to know and a heightened inability to understand. This opposition parallels Marlow’s own experience with Jim” (134). Indeed, the turn to the otherwise present arises from Marlow’s suspicion that a successful narrative does precisely what Jim does to Marlow; it feeds one’s curiosity without appeasing it. Evidently, the need to artistically perfect his narrative does not necessarily coincide with an ethical responsibility to Jim. We may subsequently ask whether Marlow’s trials do not at times contradict his care and loyalty to Jim. Marlow himself entertains this suspicion. Standing by Jim’s side in Patusan, Marlow reflects, “I don’t know whether it was exactly fair to [Jim] to remember the incident which had given a new direction to his life, but at that very moment I remembered very distinctly. It was like a shadow in the light” (265). Indeed, there are moments when it seems that Marlow’s keen memory does not serve his subject as well as it does himself. The evocation of the jump at this particular moment in time in which Jim observes his realm and basks in its glory may add a dramatic flare to Marlow’s story, but it only deflates a moment of triumph in the progression of Jim’s life. In the scene of Jim’s triumph—the meeting of the two men on a Patusan hilltop—Marlow exemplifies his ability to deflect the surrounding presence, which is at this point in the narrative a clear actuality, and to resurrect in its stead shades of a past history. By weighing Jim’s guilt against his triumph, Marlow plays with absence and presence, bringing the former forward in an artistic disregard for the latter. True, we may attribute this artful digression to Marlow’s assertion of the ethical, his unwillingness to forgive and forget Jim’s insurrection. At the same time, Marlow’s chronological displacements can be interpreted as an integral part of his ongoing attempt to arrest his audience. By recalling the long forgotten past, Marlow introduces a certain tension to the narrative, a complication that can be construed as a proleptic warning: Jim’s sin is not forgotten; his guilt taints his

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successes with the threat of an impending punishment. Marlow’s play with absence and presence may thus be attributed to an overall attempt to transform Jim into an overtly complex and contradictory subject. This may relate to the motif of the fog and mist that are forever enveloping the subject of Marlow’s narrative. Although these motifs may pertain to the objective correlative rendering of Jim’s occluded morality, it is possible that this mystification is yet another symptom of Marlow’s attempts to enthrall his audience in order to ensure the success of his yarn. In this, Marlow’s aesthetic responsibility to his audience appears to overshadow his ethical responsibility to Jim. As Guerard suggests, “imagery of nebulosity may magnify and glamorize Jim (as fog magnifies Wordsworth’s sheep), and also may be partly responsible for our first impression that Jim is an exceedingly mysterious person” (162). By presenting Jim as a person enveloped in a perpetual fog, always an elusive mystery, shifty and unknowable, Marlow creates an enduring subject, one that cannot be classified and forgotten. The invading mist that is forever obstructing Marlow’s vision cannot but furnish Marlow’s subject with a more mysteriously attractive aura. If Jim, as Marlow suggests, complicates things “by being so simple” (94), these narrative flourishes further complicate his character for the benefit of the beholder. The increasing reliance on hermeneutics, the temporal shift, and Marlow’s evident preoccupation with the artistic merit of his narrative increasingly distance the object of the tale from the narrator and his readers. As Marlow repeatedly confirms, however, Jim is not only the symbolic other—a mystery forever beyond comprehension, a tantalizing absence—but also a symbolic self. Marlow’s reiteration that Jim is “one of us” (LJ, 78, 93, 106, 224, 331, 361, 416) thus offers an inverted assertion, a claim to knowledge, familiarity, and proximity. “Don’t forget,” Marlow tells his listeners, “I had him before me, and really he was too much like one of us not to be dangerous” (106). Marlow does not mince words. He tells his audience that it is precisely because of Jim’s ties with the community of which Marlow and his audience are part that Jim’s case cannot but implicate and taint them all in its guilt. Jim is one of them, and they cannot sit back and enjoy the narrative as one enjoys an inconsequential fiction. Jim’s story is Marlow’s story; it is the story of each member of his audience. Tony Tanner drives this point further and writes, “We become so caught up in Marlow’s hovering interest and delicate probing that when he asserts that Jim was ‘one of us’—meaning a western seaman— Jim becomes, by extension, one of ‘us,’ the readers” (Conrad, 13).

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Whether Marlow’s involvement is psychological, moral, or fraternal is irrelevant; Jim is too much like him to allow a safe distance. Marlow’s reiterations thus effectively deny us the possibility of viewing him as a narrator who practices cool detachment. The subject of Marlow’s narration is too close to allow Marlow to stand “behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, pairing his fingernails” (Joyce, 233). Revealingly, the expression “one of us” is taken up by Conrad in his Author’s Note to the novel, written almost twenty years after its first publication. Echoing his narrator’s sentiment, Conrad writes, “It was for me, with all the sympathy of which I was capable, to seek fit words for [Jim’s] meaning. He was ‘one of us’” (IX). This proposed mission, moreover, is juxtaposed to a contrasting one that Conrad fervently denies: Jim, Conrad assures his readers, is not a product of “coldly perverted thinking” (IX) on his part. Clearly, a process of appropriation, of capitalizing on the suffering of the protagonist or sensationalizing his pain, forever underlies the storyteller’s project. Both Marlow and his creator, however, preempt such allegations by vouching for the sincerity of their intentions. By presenting a curiosity that is guided by a sympathetic and almost symbiotic familiarity, they emphasize an involvement that goes beyond morbid interference, beyond a detached appropriation. Jim is “one of us.” In this section, we have followed the manifest strategies of an otherwise-present aesthetic, the methods whereby the absenting, as it were, of the subject of the tale is accompanied by the inverse trajectory of making him acutely present. There is a sense, however, that the terms of the analysis are increasingly suggestive of a growing disparity between an ethical and an aesthetic approach to storytelling. This incongruence is marked by the sense that if Jim’s story is indeed ours to tell, then it is ours to tell well. Is Marlow, then, an exponent of Conrad’s evolving vision of an otherwise-present aesthetic and its associated glamour and thrall, or is he a compassionate but nevertheless objective interpreter entrusted with the responsibility of aiding and understanding a younger, fallen self? The following section examines the meeting of ethics and aesthetics in the work of a narrator committed to an otherwise-present method of storytelling.

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Seeing Otherwise

A Wil l i ngnes s to Rememb er As if the initial word of each our destiny were not graven in imperishable characters upon the face of a rock. —LJ, 186

On shipping Jim off to Patusan, Marlow makes the terms of the “agreement” or “experiment” (LJ, 231) quite clear: “I could make him a solemn promise that [the door] would be shut behind him with a vengeance. His fate, whatever it was, would be ignored. [. . .] Once he got in, it would be for the outside world as though he had never existed.” Marlow promises Jim oblivion, and Jim could not be happier: “Never existed—that’s it, by Jove” (232). It is soon made evident, however, that Marlow does not adhere to the terms of their agreement. In fact, this breach is made known to the reader many pages before the terms of the pact are presented. It suffices to read the introduction to Marlow’s narrative in order to comprehend the gravity of his transgression. We are informed that “later on, many times, in distant parts of the world, Marlow showed himself willing to remember Jim, to remember him at length, in detail and audibly” (33, my emphases). In utter disregard of his promise to Jim, Marlow is indeed “willing to remember.” Needless to say, Jim’s oblivion is hardly secured by Marlow’s repeated tellings. At the outset, Marlow suggests that he is no more curious of the details of the affair than are the others who come to the trial to be “enslaved by the fascination of [Jim’s] voice” (29). Marlow is a storyteller, and it appears that the Patna story is the one circulating item of interest at the time when Marlow first lays eyes on Jim. Naturally, his curiosity is aroused. Marlow explains that “the affair had been notorious for days, ever since that mysterious cable message came from Aden to start us all cackling.” He then adds that “the whole waterside talked of nothing else” (35). Marlow’s propensity to weave yarns and his delight in their telling cannot but contribute to his fascination with Jim. Hence, it is possible that Marlow’s obsession with Jim goes further than his need to affirm his sense of self or his belief in the “sovereign power.” For a renowned storyteller such as Marlow, the inherent value of a story cannot be overlooked.15 Marlow’s admissions of interest in the scandalous details of the affair are not, however, articulated in such terms. At first, he adopts the guise of a socioethical interest. We recall that it is “for the honour of the craft” (46) that he wants to see Jim “squirming like an impaled beetle” (42). We would be mistaken, however, to infer from

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these textual clues the true reason underlying Marlow’s interest in Jim, for, soon after his commitment to these claims, Marlow is caught in an interesting contradiction. After admitting to his initial curiosity, Marlow suddenly feigns lack of interest and abandons his former stance altogether. Foregoing his wish to see Jim, as it were, “impaled,” Marlow characterizes his initial encounter with Jim as one of active resistance. Not only does he not want to know of Jim, he wants nothing to do with him. Thus, in sharp contrast to his initial curiosity, in utter abandon of his psychological project to redeem his belief in the “sovereign power,” Marlow expounds to his audience his sense of abhorrence at the prospect of being made a “receptacle of confessions” (34): “[The devil] is there right enough, and, being malicious, he lets me in for that kind of thing [. . .] the kind of thing that by devious, unexpected, truly diabolical ways causes me to run up against men with soft spots, with hard spots, with hidden plague spots, by Jove! And loosens their tongues at the sight of me for their infernal confidences” (34). Marlow protests too much. His asserted unwillingness to know not only contradicts his initial socioethical interest but also contradicts the fact that, as the omniscient narrator has already reported, Marlow is later very “willing to remember” (33). His resistance is indeed so pronounced that no less than the devil himself is invoked in Marlow’s attempt to convey his sheer horror in facing his role as “a receptacle of confessions” (34). While such a strong asseveration serves to emphasize Marlow’s aversion, it ultimately proves detrimental. For later we see that a similar infernal invocation underlies Jim’s unwillingness to accept his responsibility for the fateful jump. There is a touch of irony in Marlow’s explanation that Jim believes that his jump from the Patna had not been an act of volition but rather that he “had suffered himself to be handled by the infernal powers who had selected him for the victim of their practical joke” (108). Thus, we have two instances of “infernal powers” acting out against two unsuspecting individuals. Inevitably, with such mirroring, Marlow’s insightful asides help to shed light not only on Jim’s evasions but on his own. As with Jim, there is something of an “artful dodge” in Marlow’s self-portrayal as a man helpless in the face of a higher power. It is Marlow acting on his own volition who goes to the trial to seek out Jim’s story. And yet, with these accumulating claims of passivity, he is in effect saying (much in Jim’s vein), “He had talked—it seems.” In his engagement with Jim, Marlow’s actions further undermine the veracity of his self-characterization as a “receptacle.” We recall that Marlow informs his listeners that it is by “devious, unexpected, truly

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diabolical ways” that he “run[s] up against men” (34) like Jim. We soon see, however, that it is not so much the forces of “darkness” that force him into such encounters but his own, active volition. Thus, following the “wretched cur” incident, Marlow reportedly decides “to trot” (75) in hope of catching up with Jim. Marlow’s endeavor is not, however, limited to a mere “trot.” Later, we see that Jim acquiesces to Marlow’s “pressing” (76) invitation to dinner. And still Marlow’s efforts are not exhausted. Marlow informs his listeners that “a little wine opened Jim’s heart and loosened his tongue” (77). Having trotted and beseeched, the man who so hates to hear another man’s confessions proceeds to administer alcohol to his interlocutor. If Marlow tells his audience that it is the devil that loosens the tongue of those who would make of him “a receptacle of confessions,” in administering the wine to Jim, Marlow is undertaking a very uncomplimentary role. Moreover, it finally seems that Marlow’s efforts had been unnecessary, for Jim retorts, “Don’t you think I can tell you what there is to tell without screwing myself up?” (116). Armstrong writes, “It is sheer accident that Jim and Marlow should establish a lasting relation on the basis of a misunderstanding about a dog in the courthouse” (114). While contingency is a prominent motif in the novel, the developing friendship between Marlow and Jim is not a matter of pure chance. We may assume that had Marlow’s aversion for his role as “receptacle” been true to his character, he would not admit to “prying” (51); he would not listen to Jim’s tale with a “concentrated attention”; and he would not reiterate his need “to know” (79). In fact, he finally takes responsibility for his involvement and claims that “one has no business really to get interested. It’s a weakness of mine” (94). Marlow thus finally confesses that he is intrigued: Jim is “too interesting or too fortunate to be thrown to the dogs” (177). It is precisely this interest that motivates Marlow to follow Jim, to detain him, and to plead, “You must let me help you” (183). Even Marlow’s stated wish to “to dispose of [Jim]” (221) assumes the form of an active intervention. Before returning to England, he seeks a meeting with Stein in the hope that such an encounter will furnish him with an opportunity to do so. Subsequently, this interview provides Marlow with just such an opportunity—not only for Jim but for himself. Thus, even in wishing to rid himself of Jim, Marlow must be an active participant. Cox accordingly notes that “like a novelist, Marlow wonders where next to send his hero [. . . . Jim’s] fictional roles shrink or expand, as under some optical toy, through Marlow’s manipulations” (25).

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Stein’s assertion that Marlow does not know “what it is for a collector to capture such a rare specimen” (LJ, 208) is misleading. Marlow’s belated explanation that he has come “to describe a specimen” (211) is not merely a rhetorical flourish; Jim is indeed a valuable find for Marlow. “Should I let him go,” Marlow ponders, “I would never forgive myself” (180). Marlow’s interview with Stein is, in this sense, an important juncture in the novel, not only in its exploration of the fate of the romantic hero, but also in bringing together the two collectors. Marlow and Stein share a habit of appropriation. Stein’s catacombs and glass encasings mirror, to some extent, Marlow’s narratives. Like Stein’s custom, Marlow preserves the memory of his own specimen so that it may be brought out in the form of a narrative when a willing audience occasions it. We have seen that Marlow wonders on one occasion whether it is “fair to [Jim] to remember the incident” (265). This ethical probing does not develop further. Despite moral scruples, Marlow is ever ready to administer the details of Jim’s story. We see, for example, that Marlow is quite ready to furnish Egström with the details of Jim’s transgressions. Marlow even attempts to justify his revelation, suggesting that he felt that he “owed some explanation” (196). Ironically, Marlow wonders that the affair “had an extraordinary power of defying the shortness of memories and the length of time: it seemed to live, with a sort of uncanny vitality, in the minds of men, on the tips of their tongues” (137). Yet only several sentences later, Marlow finds that his own telling furthers the evidence of the pervasiveness of the story. He asks his audience, “Has [Jim’s story] not turned up to-night between us?” (138). Marlow then adds, “I am the only one to whom it is a memory” (138). Indeed, Marlow is the only one to whom Jim’s story is a memory, and, insofar as he repeatedly enlivens this memory through his narrative, he is in a certain manner following Schomberg’s lead. Schomberg, we recall, is the innkeeper who would, “with both elbows on the table, impart an adorned version of the story to any guest who cared to imbibe knowledge along with the more costly liquors” (198). As I have already noted, both Greaney and Hampson underline the distinction between the storytelling ethics exercised by Schomberg and Marlow. Marlow’s adorned version may indeed be distinct from the one proffered by Schomberg, but “the casual crowd that frequented Schomberg’s establishment” (198) may not be very different from those who lend an ear to Marlow’s tale. Although they recognize the difference between the two storytellers, Greaney and Hampson both agree that Marlow’s methods do not precisely conform to the image of the Benjaminian

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storyteller. Greaney writes that Marlow is “the hypersensitive eavesdropper at large in the text, the uninvited guest lurking on the fringes of other people’s conversations” (69); Hampson reminds us that Marlow writes “gossipy letters” at the time of Jim’s crisis (Cross-Cultural, 132). We can say that both storytellers may be seen to turn a blind eye to the ethical implications of their story. Furthermore, while Schomberg’s tales are classified as gross gossip, we cannot say that he shares in the responsibility Marlow has undertaken in his befriending of Jim. It is Marlow and not Schomberg who has committed to help and support Jim. Such an obligation raises the question whether Marlow’s oral transmissions are not as objectionable in their own way as Schomberg’s gossip. As we have seen, Marlow’s ethical probing is arrested; he does not go further in questioning the legitimacy of his tellings. In fact, it seems that Marlow succeeds in actively avoiding their implications. When Marlow and Stein “hove [Jim] over the wall” (229), that is, transport him to Patusan, Marlow symbolically removes Jim from his world and his word. Here, the circulating gossip cannot harm Jim. In Patusan, it is no longer Marlow’s word that prevails. Patusan is “the land without a past, where [Jim’s] word was the one truth of every passing day” (272). Effectively, Patusan is a land without Marlow, a veritable shelter from Marlow’s narrative obsession. With the removal of Jim from the world in which his story is narrated, the question as to the fairness of remembering “the incident” is blurred, offering some relief to Marlow’s scruples. For as long as Jim is physically present to Marlow, the question is indeed a troubling one. And yet, if we look more closely, we find that it is not so much that Marlow is plagued by scruples but rather that he suffers from a certain anxiety about “ownership rights.” Prior to Jim’s move to Patusan we find several textual moments in which Marlow is forced to acknowledge that Jim’s fate is not precisely a possession of his own. This realization immediately effects a loss of composure on his part. Thus, for example, when Jim reassures Marlow that the trouble is, “after all,” his own (154), Marlow finds that he is at a loss for words: “I opened my mouth to retort, and discovered suddenly that I’d lost all confidence in myself; and it was as if he, too, had given me up” (154). The master of rhetoric does not often confess to such a state. And yet we would have already perceived such a loss of composure on Marlow’s part on an earlier occasion when Jim had first wished to take leave of him. After Jim attempts to walk off following the “wretched cur” incident, Marlow attempts to detain him. As he does so, however, he is suddenly and uncharacteristically at a loss

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for words: “Anxious not to lose him, I said hurriedly that I couldn’t think of leaving him under a false impression of my—of my—I stammered” (75). These examples show us, quite revealingly, that Marlow appears to be most vulnerable when Jim asserts his independence. These isolated glimpses of Marlow’s insecurity highlight the manner in which Marlow is empowered by the appropriation of Jim’s story. When this appropriation is jeopardized or in some way questioned, so is Marlow’s sense of mastery. While several critics see the relationship between Marlow and Jim as a rewarding partnership, I believe that Marlow’s narrative enterprise introduces a clear sense of power into the equation. Jewel’s belief that Marlow possesses some dark power over Jim emphasizes this aspect of the relationship. Marlow explains that, to her, “[he] belonged to this Unknown that might claim Jim for its own at any moment. [He] was, as it were, in the secret of its nature and of its intention;—the confidant of a threatening mystery;—armed with its power perhaps!” (308). While Marlow here downplays his power, portraying its immensity with a slight touch of sarcasm, it is clear that the secret he possesses does, in effect, give him power over Jim. “The onlookers,” we recall, “see most of the game” (LJ, 224). Despite a self-characterization that insists on an irrevocable involvement, Marlow is indeed an onlooker, and, as such, he secures a full and comprehensive perspective on all the proceedings. Furthermore, as we have seen, Marlow’s befriending of Jim allows him a unique glimpse of Jim’s adventures, a look so intimate that it sets Marlow apart from all those others who were, from the very first, similarly interested in Jim’s case. We remember that “everybody connected in any way with the sea was [at the inquiry]” (35). Although there is this multitude of onlookers, Marlow is the one man who becomes Jim’s friend and confidant, and he remains in sole possession of the knowledge and memory of the secret details of Jim’s fate. Finally, it appears that there is yet another benefit to the association with Jim. Jim’s romantic vision makes up for what Marlow claims to be an imaginative lack in himself, a complaint dire indeed for an avid storyteller. Marlow’s confession that he has “no imagination” (223) is reiterated when he tells his listeners that he “mistrusted [his] want of imagination” (224).16 Jim, who is noted for his extraordinary capacity to imagine, thus provides an extremely alluring subject of fascination. Here, too, Marlow benefits from distance. For, as we know, Jim’s imaginative faculty is double-edged: the source of his fame and his downfall. Marlow subsequently makes do with nothing but an interrogation of such a destructive power. Stepping back in fear of falling

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over the edge, he refrains from a firsthand experience of Jim’s insatiable imagination. The otherwise-present aesthetic does not entail sacrifice; Marlow will forever receive more than he surrenders. If Marlow “peeps over the edge,” he nevertheless “remains in the ranks.” Such, of course, is not the case for the subject of his narrative. As was the case in Heart of Darkness, Marlow’s narrative ends with the death of its subject. As Guerard concludes, Marlow’s narratives end when “the double is exorcised, whether to die or to go free” (114). The life that propels the narrative is Jim’s. By transforming this life into a narrative, Marlow figuratively “feeds” off Jim until, with the conclusion of the narrative and the death of its subject, Marlow is rid of his host. To the very end, Marlow is at a remove from the action. Marlow looks on, participates, but does not perish. Indeed, he is sheltered to such a degree that he derives the final part of the narrative from Brown and Stein—at a safe distance (both temporal and spatial) from the violent events that conclude Jim’s story. It further appears that this distance is augmented, for as we reach chapter 36, we learn that Marlow’s oral transmission is displaced by written document; his audience is dismissed only to be replaced by a single individual. Marlow, it would seem, specializes in disappearance acts. First, he surrenders the spotlight by taking leave of his listeners. Second, by turning to written communication, he literally effaces his presence from the novel. With this concluding invisibility, Marlow performatively repeats the representation of Jim’s gradual disappearance, a representation that begins with Jim’s removal to Patusan and ends with his death. This is then followed by an additional mirroring when, like Jim before him, Marlow finally dedicates his narrative to an individual. We recall that Jim’s first rendition of the events takes place in court. This, however, is a failed telling; by focusing on the facts of the event, the court proceedings do not allow Jim to win the approval or recognition for which he hopes. Subsequently, Jim retells his narrative to Marlow in a second attempt to fall on a more receptive ear. Marlow notes this, finding that Jim had “burrowed deep, deep, in the hope of [his] absolution” (97). Marlow’s repeated tellings of Jim’s story are directed toward an audience. Marlow, too, however, finally cuts the tale short and turns from the public eye to a solitary individual. As Marlow is the sole possessor of the knowledge of Jim’s history, so for Marlow “there was only one man of all these listeners who was ever to hear the last word of the story” (337). The performative repetition is complete. As Jim is first removed from Marlow’s world to Patusan later to leave only a trace in writing, Marlow is removed from his audience, leaving behind nothing but a written document. As Jim turns from the public to the

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private, so Marlow rids himself of his audience in his search for solace and understanding in the figure of one, lone individual. We find in this mirroring a series of retreats; repeatedly, presence is undermined by absence. Hampson traces this process: “Marlow’s invocation of Jim’s voice emphasises Jim’s absence. Jim’s voice is displaced by writing, and these documents are all that is left to gesture towards the life that has passed [. . . .] Marlow’s written text resurrects Marlow’s speaking voice and produces the illusion of Marlow’s presence. However, the condition of that ‘speaking’ remains the irremediable absence of Jim and the temporary absence of Marlow” (Cross-Cultural, 152). As Hampson suggests, the displacement of the oral by the written and the public by the private brings about a tantalizing play of absence and presence. What we have, finally, is an accumulation of illusory presences, each bringing the reader further away from both the subject of the story and its narrator. This final play of the binary poles provides further evidence for the pervasiveness of Conrad’s otherwise-present aesthetic. We have seen the manner in which it affects the representation of Jim both as subject and object. In addition, we have traced a similar effect in the creation of Marlow, once again both as subject and object. The all-encompassing effect of Marlow’s storytelling practice is yet to be exhausted, however, as we find that its effects exceed what has so far been the focus of our discussion, namely the characters of Jim and Marlow. An equally important aspect of this art is located in the critical reader’s response to the novel, an aspect to which we have already alluded in different parts of this chapter. Although Peter Brooks’s words refer to Heart of Darkness, his summary is extremely relevant to this discussion. He writes, any future retelling of Marlow’s tale of Kurtz’s story will have to be narrative in nature because there is no way to state its kernel, its wisdom, directly: this can only be approached metonymically, through a tryingout of orders, through plotting. And these will never take you there, they will only indicate where “there” might be located. Meaning will never lie in the summing-up but only in transmission: in the passing-on of the “horror,” the taint of knowledge gained. Meaning is hence dialogic in nature, located in the interstices of story and frame, born of the relationship between tellers and listeners. (Brooks, 260)

The story of Heart of Darkness begins, as we have seen in the introduction to this chapter, with a pseudowarning. “The meaning” of Marlow’s stories lies “not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping

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the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze” (HD, 48). Brooks alerts us to what is, perhaps, the most frequently discussed problematic that underlies our response to Marlow’s storytelling practice. Marlow’s plottings “will never take you there, they will only indicate where ‘there’ might be located” (Brooks, 260). There is no “kernel” in Marlow’s narrative—only an enveloping “haze.” We have seen the manner in which this metonymic aesthetic affects the rendering of his subject. Jim is no longer present, but a memory trace. Consequently, this subject cannot but be elusive, a mystery enveloped in shade and mist. We have also noted that Marlow undergoes a similar retreat and, subsequently, a similar reliance on what is, in effect, a metonymic representation. The otherwise-present aesthetic allows for the coming together of distance and proximity, experience and safety. The subversion of the concept of presence in Marlow’s poetics therefore affects the manner in which he exercises both seeing and being; the presence of both the object and the narrator is undermined. Finally, it is the story itself—its meaning and its message—that is otherwise present. In Heart of Darkness, the introductory words show us that it is not only the narrator and the subject of the story but also the tale itself that is enveloped in a hazy screen, a narrative obstruction that limits the readers’ comprehension and knowledge. This, too, may be attributed to Marlow’s particular storytelling practice. Marlow’s elusive representations are not merely a consequence of his skeptical outlook and the accumulation of his subjective conjecture. The turn to the otherwise present follows Marlow’s artistic and ethical stance as a storyteller, an aesthetic that is not motivated by a narrative endeavor to provide an unequivocal affirmation. Marlow informs his listeners that this is an impossible goal; it is impossible to know the inner recesses of the other’s soul. The telling, then, is propelled not by the answers but by the search for them, a process of investigation and contemplation that is dear to Marlow’s narrative enterprise. His narrative feeds our curiosity but neither wishes nor attempts to satisfy it. The narrative is not informative but rather, as Brooks suggests, experiential. Miller writes, “The overabundance of possible explanations only inveigles the reader to share in the self-sustaining motion of a process of interpretation which cannot reach an unequivocal conclusion” (39). As the novel concludes without affirmation, without a final sentence, Marlow’s fascination with Jim, his curiosity and his bewilderment, must be transferred to his audience. With this transferal, Marlow’s narrative effects an ironic subversion: the critical and rational reader must accept that it is not only the imaginative and youthfully romantic Jim whose perception is affected

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by the play of absence and presence. Nor is it only the cunning (or bewildered) narrator. In an attempt to make sense of the novel, we, too, become implicated in its action; and our vision, like Marlow’s and indeed like Jim’s, cannot but be distorted. Marlow’s narrative teaches us that as onlookers, reality always already recedes before us. The onlooker—be he Jim, Marlow, or the reader—cannot but be implicated. As such, we can perceive only that which is otherwise present. Conrad’s experimentation with Marlow’s character is suggestive of his growing understanding that the otherwise-present aesthetic forms an integral part of the very act of storytelling. Telling a story involves a performance of the oscillation between absence and presence, between knowledge and skepticism, between success and failure. The story is a product of the tension between binary extremes, a tension that sanctions a proliferation of meanings and interpretations, an open-endedness that allows the story to continue even after the last word has been spoken.

4

Chapter 3

A S pectral Temporality Th e Hi s to ry o f N O S T R O M O as Perpet ua l R et u r n

I

n the previous chapter, I traced the manner in which the transition from chapter 4 to chapter 5 in Lord Jim marks a significant shift in Conrad’s developing aesthetic. The surrendering of the narrative to a first-person narrator signals more than an attempt at a mimetic representation, one that highlights the partialities and distortions of living memory and the social and normative constraints that are associated with subjectivity. The casting off of omniscience is also integral to an aesthetic choice, a search for a specifically literary type of glamour that is produced by an indelible slippage of binary opposites that colors the representation with an aura of mystery and, in so doing, creates a self-perpetuating reading effect. The transition from chapter 4 to chapter 5 is a transition out of a spatial and temporal presence that, once abandoned, allows for the proliferation of paradoxical conjunctions that we associate with the otherwise present. The spatial and chronological involutions that I have traced in the novel form part of the machinery that allows Conrad to achieve both aims—the mimetic and aesthetic as one. In turning to Nostromo, we turn to a work that has been traditionally perceived as the apex of Conrad’s experimentation with chronology, a novel that is frustratingly “out of joint.” Articulating a widely held view, Edward Said writes, “We are never really certain about the novel’s time scheme” (Beginnings, 121). This perplexing uncertainty, the sensation that, as Leona Toker senses, “some tantalizing pattern seems to be there—just beyond our reach” (43) is a product of the coincidence of conflicting temporal strategies throughout the novel. As I will presently show, the novel’s temporal arrangement rests on the

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tension between the iterative and the singular, between the cyclical and the linear, between repetition and the originary moment. Once again we have an instance of an impossible conjunction of binary opposites; the story told in Nostromo is otherwise present. Critical attempts to negotiate the text’s complex machinery have identified different sets of oppositions, all suggestive of a similar conjunction of warring forces that lends the novel its temporal uniqueness. Jameson describes the movement from the individual to the transindividual as characteristic of a historical evolution whereby the actions of the subject facilitate the creation of a new institutional and collective space. Claire Rosenfield differentiates between political temporality and traditional atemporality, between the originality of human ambition and the determinism of historical recurrence. Toker delineates the opposition between expositional material and historical occasion. In an analysis of the pseudoiterative form so pervasive in the novel, Jeremy Hawthorn describes the tension between individual agency and passivity, between a conservative and a liberal view of historical progression.1 These extremely insightful analyses of the text share a telling find—although pertaining to different strategies or ideological frameworks, the various studies all draw attention to the difficulty in attempting to isolate the different temporal strategies. As Hawthorn writes: This paradoxical marriage of repetition and change, of being “every day alike” while simultaneously being instrumental to the bringing-about of enormous changes, is central to the thematics of Nostromo. When we turn to the narrative techniques used by Conrad in the novel, then, it should not surprise us to find that the iterative and singulative modes are frequently set in competing proximity with each other, and that the pseudo-iterative or the pseudo-singulative often mark the fault-line between repetition and change, that point at which “being oneself” becomes “being different,” where rehearsing a set speech is ushering in an era—or conversely, where doing something different turns out to be doing the same old thing. (“Repetitions,” 136–37)

The difficulty of interpretation or comprehension, then, lies in the coincidence of two or more frameworks that lead the reader to commit to opposing interpretative conclusions at once. In Nostromo, repetition and change are inexorably tied; recurrence is both self-same and other, identical and new. As such, the novel will allow for a substantiation of a cyclical, nonchanging view of history as it does a linear, evolving progression. The effect, then, is of an open-endedness

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that promotes multiple interpretative solutions, none of which may be deemed exclusive or definitive. A possible interpretative solution for this inherent temporal paradox is to read conjunctively. Rather than opt for one of several interpretative solutions or isolate the different temporal constructs within different narrative frameworks (i.e., politics/tradition, private/public, setting/occasion), we should identify the duality apparent in each isolated narrative strand, whether it pertains to a lone character or to the complex historical machinery of Sulaco. Such an elusive time frame, one that neither adheres to our preconceived notion of a chronology that follows a linear progression from past to present to future nor allows us to exercise our bias toward presence, will once again have to be grasped with the help of a deconstructive language. In a reading of Hamlet that is inspired by the legacy of Karl Marx, Jacques Derrida defines a phenomenon whereby the singular and the iterative are conjoined: “repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time, since the singularity of every first time makes of it also a last time. Each time it is the event itself, a first time is a last time.” “Altogether other,” such is the alternate ontology of the specter, which Derrida refers to as a “hauntology” (Derrida, Specters, 10). Although I have no wish to encumber upon Nostromo by attaching to it yet another impossible time frame, it is my contention that the notion of a “hauntology” is pertinent to a discussion of the novel’s temporality and will help to illuminate its dizzying dynamics. To embrace the spectral—clearly a supplement to human thought and experience—is not, however, to neglect the human. Rather, the terms Derrida uses to elaborate upon the notion of a hauntology relate precisely to the intensely human experience of “learn[ing] to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company, or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts. To live otherwise, and better. No, not better, but more justly. But with them. No being-with the other, no socius without this with that makes being-with in general more enigmatic than ever for us. And this beingwith specters would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and of generations” (Specters, xviii–xvix). The attempt, then, is not to comprehend the other as other, a unique entity separate from the self, but as the other within that self. Inheritance, memory, and haunting are all suggestive of the incorporation within the subject of the experience of the other. Such an exercise is inevitably accompanied by an inherited duality. Living otherwise or living with the other necessarily entails living in two worlds—two temporalities—at once. Derrida perceives this as

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a “spectrality effect,” one that “consist[s] in undoing the opposition, or even this dialectic, between actual, effective presence and its other” (Specters, 40). Living otherwise, then, brings about a skewed synchrony between what is present and what was never present, a synchrony that robs temporality of its clear linear progression, marking a time that is “out of joint.” Moreover, such a skewed synchrony afflicts not only the experiencing subject who in mourning is confronted with a command from beyond the grave but also with a collective, a politics in a state of flux that is haunted by its own history of former revolutions, symbols, traumas, and triumphs. Specters of Marx opens with a conjuration. Reading The Communist Manifesto and Hamlet side by side, Derrida finds that both works “[open] with the apparition of a specter. More precisely by the waiting for this apparition” (Specters, 4). Thus, beginning marks a process of awaiting a temporal interruption, a disassociation that strips presence of a contemporaneity with itself. Tellingly, Nostromo, too, begins with a scene of haunting. The narration starts not in but outside Sulaco, with a bird’s eye view of the neighboring peninsula of Azuera. Here, “two gringos, spectral and alive, are believed to be dwelling to this day amongst the rocks, under the fatal spell of their success. Their souls cannot tear themselves away from their bodies mounting guard over the discovered treasure” (N, 5). Conrad’s choice to begin outside is clearly essential from a topographical and geographical point of view, by way of establishing Sulaco’s sequestered remoteness, a key factor in the staging of its political life. The legend of the two gringos, however, is no less significant. In addition to formulating the inexorable psychological and discursive link between the material and the spiritual that will pervade the novel in its entirety, it also introduces the condition of “being-with specters,” or, in Derrida’s terms, a “hauntology,” which establishes the unique temporality of the novel from the outset. Nostromo appears to begin by drawing a line of demarcation between the chronicled event and the ongoing haunting of the nonevent. It is stressed (through reiteration) that the story of the two wandering sailors and their exploits is “within men’s memory” (4)—a remark suggestive of the possibility of chronicling the event in time (as opposed to such likely substitutes as “once” or “a long time ago”). At the same time, the event itself—the event that marks the transformation of the mysterious gringos into beings both “spectral and alive”—is a nonevent; it is not chronicled: “The impious adventurers gave no other sign. The sailors, the Indian, and the stolen burro were never seen again” (5). Haunting, as Derrida writes, “is historical, to

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be sure, but it is not dated, it is never docilely given a date in the chain of presents, day after day, according to the instituted order of a calendar” (Specters, 4). We could hypothesize, then, that the time scheme that Conrad’s narrator attempts to establish pertains to the historical event; it is the so-called expedition to uncover the treasure on Azuera and that portentous spiral of smoke that are “within men’s memories.” The act of haunting, however, cannot be situated in time. Insofar as it marks a revisitation, a return, haunting marks a perpetual reoccurrence, a nonchanging present. The transition from the event to the spectral nonevent, from a completed reproducible narrative to a constant recurrence, is signaled by a grammatical transition from the past to the present tense: “the tenacious gringo ghosts” are “now rich and hungry and thirsty” (5, my emphasis). Seemingly in opposition to one another—a past event that was once witnessed and an ongoing present that remains unseen—the two time schemes are nevertheless linked. “Within men’s memories” remains an ahistorical denomination; it is too vague a phrase to be suggestive of an honest attempt to chronicle an actual event. Indeed, the emphasis on memory, even if the notion of intersubjectivity lends it a more factual, verifiable tone, contrasts with written, documented time. Fittingly, the manner in which the tale is presented, that is, “the story goes also” (4) is hardly an appropriate opening for the setting down of history but is rather suggestive of popular belief, superstition, and word-to-mouth folklore that may, in fact, never have been an actuality. The past event once witnessed is itself a type of nonevent, a competing narrative that by its very definition cannot be factual. The event that precedes the spectral and indeed heralds it is itself riddled by a temporal elusiveness. By playing out the tension between the impulse to record the past and the prevalence of a discourse that is at odds with the premises of historical documentation, the exposition introduces an ambivalence that will pervade the novel in its entirety. If a language of haunting seems inappropriate within a discussion of styles of historical reportage, there is nevertheless a sense that it neatly complements the metaphysical and spiritual symbols that dominate the narrative. A justification for the insertion of the otherworldly strand of images that haunts the novel is provided at the outset, where it is stated that “the poor” associate “by an obscure instinct of consolation the ideas of evil and wealth” (4). This obscure instinct is translated into a proliferation within the narrative of allusions to evil, the ghostly, spells, and curses—all inexorably connected to a literary and psychological exploration of material interests.

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The discursive link between the spiritual and the material that is here established is repeatedly invoked throughout. To illustrate, we are told that Charles Gould falls “under the spell of the San Tomé mine” (59) and desires its “redemption” (78), and that, in agreeing to take the silver, Nostromo senses that he is “taking up a curse” (259). It is worth noting, however, that the prevalence of this lexical set goes beyond this ironic link. The ghostly pervades not only the material but all facets of life in Sulaco. Guzman Bento is resurrected in the form of a “sanguinary land-haunting spectre” (47); Mrs. Gould’s heart is prey to “the silent work of evil spirits” (222); and Dr. Monygham is “the slave of a ghost” (373). Nostromo casts “a spell on [Linda and Giselle]” (518), and Giselle’s love, in turn, casts on him “a spell stronger than the accursed spell of the treasure” (540–41). It is perhaps inevitable, then, that such discourse would infect not only the novel’s content but also its style, not only what is reported but how it is reported. Through a subtle slippage, the clear discursive link that connects the spiritual and the material and then the spiritual and the psychological thus infects the very method of representation—the way in which history is not only viewed or grasped but also told. We thus find that the very history of Sulaco is prey to a spectrality effect and that it is consequently rendered resistant to conventional methods of documentation. Said argues that the “narrative’s reluctance to pin down the present” may owe itself to Conrad’s attempt to mimetically render subjective perception or creatively represent “a hesitation to being” (Beginnings, 121). If, however, we are to view the novel’s style as a performative expression of its thematic concerns, it should be possible to locate the origins of this stylistic turn within the diegesis.

Livi ng with G hosts In Almayer’s Folly, Almayer’s nostalgia for Europe, on which he has never set eyes, is inherited from his mother who, as it is reported, would “from the depths of her long easy-chair [bewail] the lost glories of Amsterdam” (AF, 5). The inheritance of an idea, a desire—an obsession—is, in effect, an incorporation of otherness that infects the experienced present with the virtual experience of a past that was never present. As the example of the earlier novel shows, this lacuna has a powerful hold over the subject, a motivator that is at times stronger than external, present-to-being stimuli. In Nostromo, the condition of living with ghosts is a given; it is a way of life. A powerful testament to this is provided in the first part

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of the novel, in the tale of Charles Gould’s history and his return to Sulaco, a return that is predetermined by a life not his own. Having no choice but to accept the government’s offer of the perpetual concession of the San Tomé mine, Charles Gould’s father “swallowed the pill, and it was as though it had been compounded of some subtle poison that acted directly on his brain. He became at once mine-ridden, and as he was well read in light literature it took to his mind the form of the Old Man of the Sea fastened upon his shoulders. He also began to dream of vampires. [. . .] [S]ince that time he began to suffer from fever, from liver pains and mostly from a worrying inability of think of anything else” (55–56). The poison swallowed by the father cannot but infect his progeny. Charles Gould, we are told, fell “under the spell of the San Tomé mine” “by the time he was twenty” (59). This inheritance, however, is presented not in the form of a passive, unconscious incorporation but rather as a deliberately self-appointed project.2 It is for the “dead man’s memory” that he takes up the mission of redeeming the mine, of transforming it from an “absurd moral disaster” into a “serious and moral success” (66); it is “the dead man” that “must be put completely in the wrong” (75). Inevitably, however, the taking up of the cause of the San Tomé mine creates a reenactment of his father’s tortured existence. Like his father before him, he, too, can think of nothing else. Decoud notes this when he asks Emilia, “Are you aware to what point [Charles] has idealized the existence, the worth, the meaning of the San Tomé mine?” (214). Indeed, toward the end of the novel, the narrator informs us that “the mine had got hold of Charles Gould with a grip as deadly as ever it had laid upon his father” (400). In closing, the silver of the mine, which Gould had perceived as a beacon of hope to the wretched natives of Sulaco, is fittingly transformed into that which “shall weigh as heavily upon the people as the barbarism, cruelty, and misrule of a few years back” (521). Regardless of his lofty aspirations, the curse of the mine can be lifted neither privately nor publicly and consequently appears to be assimilated back into the history of a nation caught in a perpetual cycle of revolt and injustice. It is not only the inheritance of a family curse, however, that calls for a fragmentariness of a present that is always already doubled by the claims of a haunting specter. Old Giorgio Viola—or the Garibaldino, as he is aptly called—was “one of Garibaldi’s immortal thousand in the conquest of Sicily” (20); Garibaldi and Liberty are his only “divinities” (16). As he adheres to and, in a sense, perpetually lives in that glorious past, he cannot but look with scorn at the social upheavals taking place outside the very walls of his house, at revolutions devoid

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of ideals and led not “by people striving for justice, but thieves” (20). In the throes of a great danger to himself and to his family, he consequently turns “to the picture of his old chief, first and only” (21). Like Charles Gould, old Viola leads his family to Sulaco as a direct result of his idealistic aspirations. Although demonstrating a markedly different character, their wives inevitably become subjugated to these ideas; they are secondary to the values that dictate their husbands’— and consequently their own—lives. Emilia is first enthralled by the mine, investing in the silver “something far-reaching and impalpable, like the true expression of an emotion or the emergence of a principle” (107). It is only later that she becomes aware of the harmful potential of its magic: “It was a long time since she had begun to fear it. It had been an idea. She had watched it with misgivings turning into a fetish, and now the fetish had grown into a monstrous and crushing weight” (221). Emilia’s realization remains unspoken; she is unable or unwilling to attempt to tear her husband away from a devolutionary obsession with the mine. Unlike the latter’s resignation, Teresa admonishes her husband for his inability to fully devote himself to the demands of the present: “leave Cavour alone and take care of yourself now we are lost in this country all alone with the two children, because you cannot live under a king” (24–25). Charles Gould’s and old Viola’s pacts with an idea born in the past ultimately create a rift between themselves and their wives. Giorgio loses his wife to an illness that seems dictated by his inability to “live under a king.” In Teresa’s mind, her pain is directly related to her husband’s decision to leave their homeland. The pain “had come to her first a few years after they had left Italy to emigrate to America and settle at last in Sulaco after wandering from town to town;” “its gnawing had been part of the landscape embracing the glitter of the harbour under the wooded spurs of the range” (25). If it were not for his “living in the republicanism of his young days as if in a cloud” (319), Giorgio may have been more attentive to his wife’s suffering. The fate of the Gould’s marriage similarly forebodes separation, if only of a metaphoric nature. Emilia finds that “the inspiration of their early years had left her heart to turn into a wall of silver-bricks, erected by the silent work of evil spirits, between her and her husband. He seemed to dwell alone within a circumvallation of precious metal, leaving her outside with her school, her hospital, the sick mothers and the feeble old men, mere insignificant vestiges of the initial inspiration” (221–22). Emilia and Teresa thus serve as the elusive traces of a living and breathing present that remains inaccessible to their husbands.

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Like Charles Gould and old Viola who experience life through the prism of a different time, of a different present, the old doctor furnishes the narrative with yet another temporally dissociated character. Haunted by Father Beron’s phrase “Will you confess now?” a constant reminder of an unpardonable transgression committed in the past, Dr. Monygham becomes “the slave of a ghost” (373). The memory that will not fade is identity forming; it makes “of him what he was [. . .] a man careless of common decencies, something between a clever vagabond and a disreputable doctor” (372). Once a respectable surgeon in the Royal Army, in the wake of what he perceives as his betrayal he forfeits his Europeanism. Feeling that it is “impossible to take his knowledge of Father Beron home to Europe” (374), his disgrace binds him to Sulaco “more than any amount of success and honour could have done” (375). Interestingly, it is precisely the “doctor’s sensitiveness about that far-off episode of his life” of which Charles Gould disapproves. “So much memory” we are told, “shocked [him]” (408). Such revulsion seems at odds with the fact that Gould’s present is as much the product of memory as is his compatriot’s. The disparity between the two characters’ emotional responses to memory is noteworthy in that it is reflected in their contrasting approaches to history. Dr. Monygham, who remembers his past “against all the forces of his will striving its utmost to forget,” refuses to “believe in the reform of Costaguana” (370). The deterministic role played out by his own history thus influences his outlook on public affairs, on the fate of the country to which he is so tragically bound. Believing only in the power of what is already past, he feels that “a frank return to the old methods [is] the only chance” (370). In his eyes, Decoud’s separationist plan is a “wild scheme” (370), and Charles Gould’s endorsement of it is suggestive of his being “hopelessly infected with the madness of revolutions” (376). Contrastingly, Charles Gould’s belief in his ability to transform a family curse into a project of national redemption is indicative of his belief in the active role of the individual and in his ability to change the past both privately and publicly. Regardless of their outlooks and their actions, both characters appear to be caught in a self-perpetuating cycle whereby a pattern created in the past always already determines what is yet to come. Where Gould’s resolve “to disobey the solemn wishes of the dead” nevertheless leads to a reenactment of his father’s obsessive captivity, by courting the new Decoud’s separationist plan marks an openness toward real change, an opportunity to truly shed the “appalling darkness of intrigue, bloodshed, and crime that [hangs] over the Queen

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of Continents” (83). What distinguishes Decoud’s plan from those of Dr. Monygham and Gould is not a lack of personal motivation— indeed, Decoud readily admits that his public enlistment is due solely to his love for Antonia—but the terms in which it is addressed. Tellingly, true change—be it in the guise of love or a breaking away from the endless cycle of revolution and bloodshed—is cloaked in impossibility. We are told that Decoud’s “only aspiration was to a felicity so high that it seemed almost unrealizable on this earth” (192). It is perhaps this radical aspiration that meets with the incredulity or suspicion of his audience. Reporting on their initial reaction to the plan of revolution, the engineer-in-chief tells Monygham that “[Decoud] had arguments which should have appeared solid enough if we, members of old, stable political and national organizations, were not startled by the mere idea of a new State” (315, my emphasis). An openness to the new calls for a willingness to accept what is wholly other, that which is entirely unforeseeable. The relinquishment of control called for by Decoud’s vision naturally inspires fear in individuals whose very identity is ingrained in the old and the familiar—their moral or institutional demerits notwithstanding. Ironically, however, the eruption or interruption of the wholly other—in the form of an absolute solitude and silence—“the first [Decoud] had known in his life” (496)—provides too great a challenge for he who appears to epitomize the radically new. “The spoiled darling of the family, the lover of Antonia and journalist of Sulaco,” we are told, “was not fit to grapple with himself single-handed” (497). Decoud’s suicide subsequently colors that hopeful “almost” with yet another instance of a piercing Conradian irony. The creation of the New Republic, a project envisioned and designed by Decoud, is consequently carried out by the “members of [the] old, stable political and national organizations” (315). Assimilated into the discourse of the “old and stable,” the “new” becomes something of an empty signifier, nothing but a recurring moment in the perpetuum mobile of history. It marks not a new era but another new era, one that is haunted from its inception by the cycles of success and failure that pervade Sulaco’s tumultuous past. The inscription on Don José Avellanos’s bust reads, “died in the woods of Los Hatos worn out with his lifetime long struggle for Right and Justice at the dawn of the New Era” (477). We recall a similar formulation in an ironic ventriloquizing of Mitchell’s likely response to the news of the vote conferring a five-year mandate upon Ribiera: “Captain Mitchell, had he been there, would no doubt have made an apt remark about the dawn of a new era” (141). The use of the phrase in the earlier part

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of the novel instills it with a certain irony and strips it of its historical significance. Through the frequency of its use, the temporal epithet ornamenting the bust is nothing more than a cliché. Fittingly, the transition from the Ribiera Republic to the Occidental Republic is conveyed through Captain Mitchell’s report to his privileged guest on the changing façade of the town, a metonymic representation of the changing face of its politics. Such a transformation is noted primarily on the level of town symbols and names—revolving signifiers that often pertain to a shared signified. The Ribiera Republic is now the Occidental Republic, the Intendencia, the President’s Palace. The equestrian statue—an “anachronism” (482)—is to be replaced by “a marble shaft commemorative of Separation, with angels of peace at the four corners, and bronze Justice holding an even balance” (482). The symbols of the New Republic’s heroes are already erected in the form of the bust depicting Don José and the medallion devoted to the memory of Decoud. If repetition is integral to the formation of the Occidental Republic, Captain Mitchell’s report nevertheless shows it to be a repetition with a difference. He assures his guest that “such a sight” as the marching of the miners upon the town, lead by Don Pépé on his black horse and “their very wives in the rear on burros, screaming encouragement [. . .] and beating tambourines” “will never be seen again” (477). That it is Captain Mitchell, however, who ultimately articulates this difference serves to detract from its significance. His is not a reliable narration; his project of recording, or rather, telling history, is colored throughout by his partiality, his limited understanding, and a tendency toward hyperbole. The two political visionaries who are associated with the hope of actual renewal—Don José Avellanos and Decoud—have been silenced and cannot pass judgment. At the same time, to attribute the corrosion of the new in the formation of the Occidental Republic to the loss of Decoud is problematic at best. Such an interpretation is undermined by its privileging of agency, a notion that the novel repeatedly challenges. We have already seen that Charles Gould’s professed exercising of his free will in his self-appointed project of redeeming the San Tomé mine is called into question by the manner in which the past commands and manipulates his actions; similarly, the man who symbolizes the possibility of accepting the radically new, the man who manages the significantly named Porvenir, is daunted and undone by that very encounter. More grave, perhaps, are the ramifications of the engineer’s words to Monygham when he suggests that even in the figure of Decoud we have nothing more than a performative reenactment of past events, a performative

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emulation of past leaders: “all at once [Decoud] began to talk, like an expert revolutionist” (316). If we are to forfeit agency as a possible locus for the generation and eruption of the new, we must return once again to its inception within historical patterns of evolution. Derrida identifies in the phenomenon of revolution a paradoxical meeting of temporalities: “the more the new erupts in the revolutionary crisis, the more the period is in crisis, the more it is ‘out of joint,’ then the more one has to convoke the old, ‘borrow’ from it” (Specters, 109). Revolution, then, is linked to a process of mourning, of assimilating the specters of the past. Such an assimilation involves both a conjuring and an abjuring—making the past present and then putting it to rest. Derrida explains that the latter is achieved thus: “Once the revolutionary task is accomplished, amnesia sets in. [. . .] Anachrony practices and promises forgetting” (Specters, 111). We see an example of this in Nostromo’s belated attempt to uncover the fate of Decoud. Glimpsing the unmanned dinghy afloat in the gulf, he disregards Barrios’s injunction and jumps overboard. In this embracing of crisis, of an unscheduled return to the moment of trauma, the past is brought back to life. As Nostromo sets foot on board the boat in which Decoud had committed suicide, he is transformed into Decoud’s double, living in both temporalities at one and the same time: “streaming from head to foot, with his hair and whiskers hanging lank and dropping and a lusterless stare fixed upon the bottom boards, the Capataz of the Sulaco Cargadores resembled a drowned corpse come up from the bottom to idle away the sunset hour in a small boat” (492). The temporal conjunction is made evident here through a language of possession: “Subsequently, without a limb having stirred, without a twitch of muscle or quiver of an eyelash, an expression, a living expression came upon the still features, deep thought crept into the empty stare—as if an outcast soul, a quiet, brooding soul, finding that untenanted body in its way, had come in stealthily to take possession.” (493). However, “after spending a night of sleeplessness as tormented as any known to Decoud” (501–2), Nostromo once again directs his thoughts to the needs of the present moment. The ghost of the past is dismissed, and in its place a plan to grow rich “very slowly” (503) is formed. These two examples, the creation of the Occidental Republic and Nostromo’s return to the Great Isabel, would both suggest that in Nostromo the eruption of the new is quickly assimilated into the old order. The will and the propensity to forget allow Nostromo and the people of Sulaco to engage in endless cycles of repetition, patterns

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of recurrence in which the new seemingly has no place. Such a dynamic of historic progression may seem highly deterministic in its readiness to preclude the new or its ability to dismantle and neutralize it. Nostromo, however, contains not one but two types of mourning. The interpretation of history as a deterministic force considers only a successful mourning, a trajectory of loss, assimilation and forgetting. Such a trajectory neither takes into account nor accounts for the novel’s hauntology. The ghostly insistence throughout—in the lives of the characters and in the life of the patria—is suggestive of an unsuccessful mourning, a process of endless repetition that resuscitates and animates the past by bringing it into the present. Through a haunting that pervades the narrative from beginning to end, the novel appears to reject the notion of a proper present, a present that is self-same and contemporaneous with itself. Such a time—a time dislocated, doubled, unhinged—is marked by an openness to the new. This is the time of revolution, an event that, as Derrida explains, “never takes place in the present” (Specters, 111). That is to say that the otherwise present, as signaled by the novel’s hauntology, provides a locus for the new. The effects of this wholly other are noted through eruption and interruption; resistant to assimilation or signification, it is only by way of a chronological anomaly that it can be recognized. While the revolution is finally represented through a barrage of empty signifiers, in the moment of its inception it takes effect as an interruption of history, an outside force that breaks the homogeneous course of historical progression.

Th e Ah is to ry o f “ The Story Als o Goes” The thematic problematization of the very notion of presence, a product of the novel’s hauntology, contaminates, or if seen differently, is performatively reenacted in the stylization of its historic representation. Much like the recurring patterns of spectrality that inform the exposition, the novel’s writing down of history is pervaded by a sense of the “always already”; there is no originary moment—only reverberations, both singular (in the sense of a variation on a theme) and iterative, of a past that was never present. While we may contend that such a manner of representation is commensurate with the negotiation of poltergeists, a stylistic method that is part and parcel of the machinations of a good ghost story and lends it an even greater sense of mystery and foreboding, the same cannot be said of historical accounts. And still, this amorphous time frame is carried into chapter 2 where the unraveling of Sulaco’s history is colored from the

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very first by what Hawthorn terms “a conspicuousness of the iterative mode” (“Repetitions,” 129). This mode, Hawthorn explains, “is used to convey a sense of repeated actions, events, or experiences” (126). Thus, although he does not return to the present tense used in reporting the story of the specters on Azuera, the narrator here slips into a grammatical form that is similarly evocative of an ongoing presence. The repetitive patterns that make up this part of the narrative are not dated but rather circumscribed within a generalizing time frame. We are informed that “the political atmosphere of the Republic was generally stormy in these days” (11), “these days” being a possible reverberation of the time scheme presented in the exposition, a present (“these” rather than “those” days) that spans from “within men’s memories [. . .] to this very day” (4–5). One may hazard the interpretation that the time span is more limited, as it centers on the time of the Ribiera Republic and its consequent demise. This, however, is not a time of one republic or one revolution. It is a time of “frequent changes of government brought about by revolutions of the military type”—a time in which “fugitive patriots of the defeated party had the knack of turning up again on the coast with half a steamer’s load of small arms and ammunition” (11). This method of historical summary eliminates the assurances of a linear chronology, offering in its stead the achronology of the spectral projections of the past. Jameson provides a cogent summary of this phenomenon where he argues that the Ribierist revolution “never really happens at all, for the initial discursive reference to it—not as scene but as fact or background— dispenses Conrad from having to ‘render’ it in all its lived presence later on. This central event is therefore present/absent in the most classic Derridean fashion, present only in its initial absence, absent when it is supposed to be most intensely present” (272). That is to say that the revolution occurs only insofar as it is fragmentarily repeated. Its actual and dated occurrence is displaced by the intersubjective memory of the event, represented by the occasional resurfacing of its haunting remnants. This section, then, is devoted to an analysis of the manner whereby the clashing of the competing narratives of historic progression—the linear and the cyclical, change and stasis, the unforeseen and the deterministic—is metonymically represented in the war waged between the conflicting styles of transmission that permeate the narrative of Nostromo. In its very conception, the notion of a hauntology calls upon methods of telling or narrating that are incompatible with a chronological summary. A resurfacing of haunting fragments relies heavily on memory and performance, two concepts that negate the process of

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scientific documentation associated with the writing down of history. Correspondingly, one of the significant aspects of this stylistic conflict is present in the novel in the dynamic pairing of written document and oral performance. In his reading of Nostromo, Michael Greaney distinguishes between the two, between the “totalizing gaze of the novelist-as-historian” and “the novelist-as-storyteller” (129). Greaney thus divides the text into two opposing literary impulses or drives, between the oral presentation of legend and a written handling of history, between traditional modes of transmission and modernist écriture. His premise is that while “folklore and popular legends of the region are occasionally sampled [. . .] the novel’s marginal storytellers never seem likely to challenge [the narrator’s] control of the novel’s language”(115). “Marginal” seems key here, for in concluding, Greaney reasserts that although continuing “to exert complex pressures on the novel’s central cast [. . .] storytelling and oral culture have been displaced to the margins of the text” (134). Such a claim is problematized by the sense that the novel is organized around Captain Mitchell’s oral account of Sulaco’s history, beginning with the account of Ribiera’s timely escape and concluding with the commentary on the new face of the Occidental Republic. Furthermore, Mitchell is not the only storyteller in the novel. A further setting for oral performance is staged in Old Giorgio Viola’s home where, triggered by “some slight incident, a chance word would set him off talking” (32). Perhaps an equal if not more significant mimicking of oral speech is found in the narrator’s turns of phrase, which are very often at odds with the objective rigor of historical documentation. Chronological transitions such as “eighteen months before” (34), “at that time” (44), “those of us whom business or curiosity took to Sulaco in these years” (95), and so forth give a sense of a setting familiar to Conrad readers, of a storyteller speaking in front of a live audience. Although recognizing the effects of orality on writing and the “endlessly intricate dialogue between” them, Greaney’s reading nevertheless relies on a tangible separation—on an evident and hierarchical distinction between two of the narrative impulses that underlie the text. As I have previously shown, an attempt to construct a clear line of demarcation between two distinct textual forces inevitably results in an underplaying of the permeability of the border between them. That is to say that while the novel indubitably sets up an opposition between writing and orality, it simultaneously gives rise to a slippage that not only challenges such a distinction but also contaminates the respective discourses in a way that invokes a third category—one that

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lies between history and story, between orality and writing. Such, we can say, is the category of the “historical anecdote” (402)—a notion that pertains to both registers at one and the same time and yet cannot neatly conform to either one or the other. Such conflations not only subvert the categorical opposition but also challenge suppositions as to their implied hierarchy. To this effect, the collapsing of the written and oral traditions is complemented by the frequent borrowing from genres that are ingrained in the oral tradition. Throughout the novel, a language of and allusions to myth, legend, fairytales, and folklore not only haunt but redefine the written tradition. Before turning to the use of competing genres in the novel, it is important to take stock of the collapsing of writing and orality. By virtue of his excessive letter writing, Gould senior is identified by Greaney as one of the novel’s representatives of the power of the written word. At the same time, Greaney notes that the letters are “full of references to “the Old Man of the Sea, vampires and ghouls,” and with the “flavour of a gruesome Arabian Nights tale” and concludes that they “are a kind of epistolary version of the Azuera legend” (130). The Arabian Nights Entertainment, one of the most recognized vestiges of an oral tradition dating back to the tenth century, permeates Gould’s letters. The written is thus infected by the oral, truly infected, for, as we have seen, the power of the written word on the son’s mind is itself charged with a power more closely associated with orality than with writing—that of spells, magic, and enchantment. A similar conflation occurs in the father’s mind as the “infamous” or “iniquitous” Gould Concession, epitomized in a piece of paper that he repeatedly desires to “‘tear and fling into the faces’ of presidents and members of judicature, and ministers of State” (58), is perceived as an eternal “curse” (57)—suggestive, once again, of a clear link to speech. It is thus evident that the written word is pregnant with a power linked to orality. Further evidence for this inexorable link is found in Decoud’s character. Despite being one of the novel’s principle agents of writing, he is nevertheless tested by means of the spoken word. The question of his public influence is exerted most forcefully by way of speech when reading aloud his “draft of a proclamation” he talks “very well for two hours about his plan of action” (315). His daring rendezvous with Antonia on the Gould’s balcony settles the matter of their engagement, and finally his death is the product of a lack not of writing but of speech. The cruelty of the isolation on the Great Isabel is noted first and foremost by an oppressive silence: “The solitude appeared like a great void, and the silence of the gulf like a tense, thin cord to which he hung suspended by both hands, without

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fear, without surprise, without any sort of emotion whatever. Only towards the evening, in the comparative relief of coolness, he began to wish that this cord would snap” (498). Decoud’s sense of reality is shaken by his immersion in such an absolute silence. His memory of actual people, of actual emotions, seems suspect—unreal; his faith in himself, in his tangible actuality, is spent. The oscillation between writing and orality—a dynamic that pervades the Conrad canon in its entirety and, as I have shown in the introduction, has often been associated with an attempt, on the author’s part, to revitalize and animate the written word and its elusive and alienating command—is here complemented by an additional stylistic concern. In Nostromo, the attempt to revolutionize the terms with which we comprehend and internalize historical progression, signaled by the turn to the oral, is tellingly linked to the question of genre. Repeatedly, we find that the coming to terms with historical events or the demands of the hour are portrayed not in terms of objective comprehension but rather by a turn to the fanciful. Charles Gould, we are told, “could not believe his own motives if he did not make them first a part of some fairy tale” (215); Decoud’s plan of separation, in the words of the chief engineer, not only sounds “like a comic fairy tale” but “may come off; because it is true to the very spirit of the country” (315). In a further example, the history of Sulaco, as recounted in the words of Captain Mitchell to those privileged few whom he happened to introduce to that part of the country, is “imperfectly apprehended [. . .] like a tired child [listening] to a fairy tale” (487). By borrowing from the ahistorical genres of ghost stories and fairy tales, genres in which variation overshadows the need for accurate reproduction, where each oral presentation is in itself an originary moment, the novel challenges the very principles of historical reconstruction. That is to say that although suggestive of an attempt to chronicle a certain period in the life of Sulaco and its people, Nostromo’s use of historical discourse is playfully deconstructive. We may say that the generic profusion is but a further symptom of the ongoing conflict between history and ahistory, between the impulse to document and the impulse to invent. The borrowing from the tradition of ghost stories and fairy tales does not exhaust the generic intertextuality evident in the novel. The Homeric epic, according to Erich Auerbach, “knows no background”; forever in the foreground, even those details pertaining to Odysseus’s past are given in the moment in which they occurred, that is, in their present moment. While such a technique resonates with Conrad’s use of the pseudoiterative and with his frequent allusions to

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genres in which such a method of transmission is customary, it is clear that the early modernist agenda is not one with the epic. As Auerbach writes, “the basic impulse of the Homeric style” is “to represent phenomena in a fully externalized form, visible and palpable in all their parts, and completely fixed in their spatial and temporal relations [. . .] nothing must remain hidden and unexpressed” (6). While the narrative impulse in Nostromo may be said to be of a contrasting nature, it is clear that the epic inspires its ambitious structure. The use of the epithet provides one of the most salient indications to that effect. In addition to Nostromo; the “Capataz de Cargadores”; and Charles Gould, “the King of Sulaco,” a host of characters’ names are repeatedly ornamented with a recognizable label. Thus we have “the beautiful Antonia” (149) and “our excellent Senor Mitchell,” who, known as such by the business and official world of Sulaco, is also referred to as “Fussy Joe” (10–11) by the commanders of the company’s ships. Claire Rosenfield’s suggestion that Nostromo’s and Decoud’s night journey signals a use of the topos of a descent into the underworld and of a consequent rebirth is suggestive of a further borrowing from the genre.3 In addition, allusions to Greek myth (and their Roman counterparts) are ample in connection with the O.S.N. fleet as testified in a passage that encapsulates the very essence of intertextuality: “their names, the names of all mythology, became the household words of a coast that had never been ruled by the gods of Olympus” (9). The Juno, Cerberus, Minerva, Ceres, and Pallas thus adorn the narrative regardless of Sulaco’s remoteness from the Ionian Sea, contributing a true deus ex machina to the account of Ribiera’s escape: “Captain Mitchell succeeded in taking everybody off in his own gig to one of the Company’s steamers—it was the Minerva— just then, as luck would have it, entering the harbour” (12). Finally, much like the reiterations of the tales told by Homer’s bards, Captain Mitchell’s oral account is itself something of an epic cycle that opens in the second chapter of “The Silver of the Mine” and ends in chapter 10 of “The Lighthouse” with the words, “The cycle was about to close at last” (489), only, we may assume from the use of the iterative, to be reproduced later.4 Referring to the work of Paul Ricoeur and Roland Barthes, Erdinast-Vulcan writes that “myth and history are usually conceived of as contradictory modes of discourse” (69) differentiated by their relationship to truth, verifiability, and time. If the first offers a “myth of origins,” a tradition that relies not on a verifiable truth but on a belief in a primordial past, the latter offers an authentic documentation of a recordable history. More significant in this context is the manner in

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which myth, like ghost stories, fairy tales, and folklore, is defined by its inception within the oral tradition. The mnemonic devices that I have enumerated—epithets, topoi, repetition, and so forth—highlight the importance of creative agency and memory in the reproduction of the story. That is to say that where history relies on the transparency of evidence and verifiable subject matter, the transmission of tales and myth highlights the significance of variation, entertainment, and effect. Where historical discourse aims to provide a finished product, storytelling revels in the dynamics of an evolving process. Where the first must provide an iterable result, one that with each reproduction must be self-same, the second relies on a performance that is always unique, always new. What I have so far explicated as the contamination of the stylistic handling of the novel by the thematic germinations of a chronological instability—a hauntology that strips presence of a contemporaneity with itself—thus further invests the narrative handling of the story with that same glimmer of the new, that same possibility for change and evolution that we uncovered in the theoretical underpinnings of revolution. This is made evident in the concluding part of the novel where it is possible to distinguish the represented consequences of the subversion of historical discourse. Here, the very building block of the novel’s history—the “memorable occasion” that we have come to associate with history, forming events such as the dramatic escape of Ribiera, the loss of the silver, and the death of Decoud—undergoes a radical transformation. Toward the end of Captain Mitchell’s cycle, the focalization attaches to his listener: “‘Abominable Pedrito! Who the devil was he?’ would wonder the distinguished bird of passage hovering on the confines of waking and sleep with resolutely open eyes and a faint but amiable curl upon his lips, form between which stuck out the eighteenth or twentieth cigar of that memorable day” (487). “That memorable day,” now measured out in cigars, has thus been transformed into the day of Captain Mitchell’s oral performance—the reciting of the cycle. No longer marking a historical occasion, the memorable day now marks the time in which history is narrated, in which the tale is transmitted. The novel thus concludes with a telling reversal: the significance of the past is undermined by its performative reiteration. While the novel is clearly devoted to the setting down of a national past—albeit a fictional one—it is nevertheless pervaded by a discourse that is resistant to such a project, one that subordinates accuracy and veracity to haunting, invention, folklore, and myth. In the course of this chapter, I have attempted to trace the battle between the

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binary opposites of linearity and circularity, death and life, the selfsame and the new. By pitting the conflicting discourses of history and storytelling against each other, the novel stages an impossible conjunction that is made manifest in a tantalizing interplay between the novel’s thematic concerns and its stylistic methods. In a novel beset by repetition and circularity, the staging of the otherwise present allows for the interruption and eruption of the evolutionary potential of radical otherness.

4

Chapter 4

S i gni fy ing Absences in UNDER WESTERN EYES

I

n Shakespeare’s King Lear, the old king admonishes his youngest and most beloved daughter for her refusal to speak on command, a silence he wrongfully perceives as a sign of defiance. Enraged by her insubordination, he commands her to undo her offence: “Nothing will come of nothing, speak again” (1.1.85). Refusing to humor him, Cordelia opts for a scant but conscientious response, and the drama of injustice follows. Only after trials and tribulations, humiliation and suffering, the King learns that the power of truth, innocence, and purity lies in Cordelia’s silence and that the speech of Gonerill and Regan is fraudulent, strategic, and dangerous. “Words,” King Lear will learn, “are the great foes of reality” (UWE, 3). This chapter examines the manner in which King Lear’s maxim is subverted in Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. In the Conradian confusion of the binary opposites, “nothing” does not and cannot come of “nothing.” Rather, “nothing” is always already something—it speaks and it resonates. The manner in which absence is always already perceived as presence thus provides the focus of this analysis.

C a p ita l izi ng on an Elli ps i s In his attempt to sum up the essence of Russian autocracy and revolt, the English teacher who narrates Razumov’s record offers the reader the catchy but perhaps ill-chosen mantra of “cynicism” (67). Hoping

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to offer a more accurate principle that may guide us in reading the novel, I would like to point to a formulation put forth by Derrida in the “Exergue” to Archive Fever: “According to a proven convention, the exergue plays with citation. To cite before beginning is to give the tone through the resonance of a few words, the meaning or form of which ought to set the stage. In other words, the exergue consists in capitalizing on an ellipsis” (7). We have in Under Western Eyes a series of such “capitalizations.”1 Both to the readers of the novel and the characters within, the novel presents a series of ideas, key words, and citations, all of which are immersed in a deceitful silence that inevitably carries the interpreter into a mistaken path of understanding. The force behind the novel, then, is to be found in the heuristic and impetuous character of the human mind. Reading is a process whereby we overwrite silence or absence with an unceasing and unconscious process of interpretation. The characters in the novel offer a perfect example of this hermeneutic activity as they constantly appropriate and transform Razumov’s silences from the very outset, constantly replacing absence with a meaningful presence. We find a clear example of such an exercise in Natalia’s reading of her brother’s letter. Haldin writes to her of Razumov’s “unstained, lofty and solitary existence” (135). There is no mention of a bond of friendship between the two; indeed, there is no allusion to any standing relationship between them. This omission, however, does not in any way influence Natalia’s interpretation of the letter. The effect of Haldin’s words corresponds to the process Derrida describes in the quoted passage. Natalia informs the narrator, “these are the words which my brother applies to a young man he came to know in St. Petersburg. An intimate friend, I suppose. His is the only name my brother mentions in all his correspondence with me. Absolutely the only one—and would you believe it?—the man is here” (135). Based on this short citation and the fact that he mentions no other name in his correspondence to her, Natalia surmises that Razumov is Haldin’s “intimate” and loyal friend. Haldin’s words subsequently become something of a leitmotif to Razumov’s character. That Haldin had never actually mentioned Razumov’s friendship is soon forgotten. In Natalia’s mind, her interpretation is fact. Given the loss she has suffered, it is, perhaps, inevitable that she would want it to be so. This inherent need may be said to explain her striking resistance to the reception and comprehension of Razumov’s confession. The narrator explains, “Utterly misled by her own enthusiastic interpretation of two lines in the letter of a visionary, under the spell of her own dread of lonely days, in the overshadowed world of angry strife, she

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was unable to see the truth struggling on his lips” (354). The narrator informs the reader that what we have here is a capitalization on ellipsis, an “enthusiastic interpretation of two lines in the letter of a visionary” (354). Natalia’s difficulty in accepting Razumov’s confession stems from the fact that the truth struggling on his lips entails an inevitable contradiction of her initial interpretative leap in reading her brother’s letter, an interpretative mistake that, for obvious psychological reasons, she strenuously wishes to maintain. In order to accept his silent confession (for, after all, it is not through words but by gesturing to himself that he conveys his culpability to her), she must relinquish her imagined projections, the interpretative presence with which she displaced the original ellipsis in Haldin’s letter.2 The manner in which Natalia comprehends Haldin’s letter thus provides us with a cogent example of the process whereby citation produces an inflation of meaning. This example is instrumental in demonstrating that the power of citation derives not from presence but from absence: not from what is said, but from what is not said. Furthermore, we find in this powerful citation the origination of not only a rational error but an emotional one, as Natalia’s surmise produces a budding romantic interest in Razumov before she has actually made his acquaintance. The quoted excerpt from Razumov’s journal interestingly shows that his interest in Natalia was similarly sparked by Haldin’s elliptical allusion to her. Razumov tells Natalia, “Of you [Haldin] said that you had trustful eyes. And why I have not been able to forget that phrase I don’t know” (349). Haldin’s words are, in this manner, indelibly etched not only in Natalia’s but also in Razumov’s consciousness. Their mutual attraction is thus yet another product of absence, the effect of a citational substitute in lieu of presence.3 Offering a neat summary of this phenomenon, the narrator concludes, “It was manifest that they must have been thinking of each other for a long time before they met. She had the letter from that beloved brother kindling her imagination by the severe praise attached to that one name; and for him to see that exceptional girl was enough” (347, my emphasis). As the temporal category of “before” substitutes that of “after,” with which we have so far associated the ramifications of an effective ellipsis, we see that strategies of interpretation are replaced by those of anticipation. Absence undergoes a metaphysical conversion into an imagined presence not only through the application of meaning but also through the projection of fantasy. We find evidence of this process, an additional method of capitalizing on an ellipsis, from the very outset.

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At the start of Under Western Eyes, Razumov is portrayed as a young man who believes that he has nothing but the power of his intellect. The silver medal that he so wishes to win symbolizes for him “a solid beginning” (14). Ironically, however, this “solid” beginning is, in matter of fact, nothing but an object of desire or, as Razumov remarks, “a shadow” (14). Again, potential lies in an absence, an absence that is here clothed in an imagined future. “The winner’s name,” Razumov muses, “would be published in the papers on New Year’s Day” (14). It is through writing, he believes, that he can create an identity for himself. And yet, Haldin’s unexpected visit indicates that if Razumov finally capitalizes, it is not on his intellect but on his silence. For, as we recall, “a comparatively taciturn personality is naturally credited with reserve power” (6). This gain, however, is apparently unintentional. Horror-struck by Haldin’s visit and the consequent discovery of this accidentally earned credit, Razumov wishes to be rid of both and thus resume the life he had planned for himself. However, by betraying and thereby ridding himself of Haldin, Razumov ironically creates an inflation of this credit. While his own silence had installed in his peers the notion that he is a man of superior ideas, a man that can be trusted, Haldin’s disappearance augments this image. In Haldin’s absence, Razumov becomes his double in crime and heroism. Indeed, one could argue that the power of his initial silence is so great that Razumov is consequently forced to capitalize on silence throughout a large part of the novel. He must be silent so as not to disclose the betrayal and, as the reader later learns, his role as a police spy as well. By addressing both the “before” and the “after” of Razumov’s betrayal of Haldin, I have shown that the signifying potential of absence is effective not only in a moment of subsequent (mis)understanding or (mis)interpretation but also in the prior moment of anticipation (as in Razumov’s dream of winning the silver medal). Regardless of the temporal circumstance, the process whereby absence is transformed into a virtual presence is one of projection: the mind replaces lack with a desirable alternative. In essence, the projection of speech onto another man’s silence is an extenuation of fantasy. In this context, Haldin’s misinterpretation of Razumov is not unlike Razumov’s dream of winning the medal. In both cases, the mind sees what it wishes to see. We have focused so far on the manner in which, by way of the projections of the hearer, omission contains the potential of limitless meaning. We should note, however, that fantasies and daydreams are usually subject to an inborn ability to distinguish fact from illusion. Thus, Razumov’s daydream of winning the silver medal is cut short

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by an abrupt awakening: “This is but a shadow” (14), he tells himself. At the same time, there is a sense that the associated tendency to attribute meaning to omission is not checked as easily. As it elicits an automatic and often unconscious process of interpretation, omission often goes undetected; in the mind, absence is always already transformed into a conjectural presence. That is to say that while it may be possible to detect the fantasy that displaces a nullity, it may be more difficult to acknowledge the blatant omission that underlies interpretation. The artfully elliptical transition between Part First and Part Second of the novel is exemplary of this effect. In conducting the transition, the English teacher does not state the outcome of the meeting between Razumov and Mikulin with which he concludes the first part of his narrative. Despite this obvious omission, the reader may all too readily assume that the narrator has no additional information to disclose and may thus be tempted to trust in his or her own interpretative strategies. As the narrative unfolds in Part Second, we find that Razumov has been released from the hands of the Russian police and that he subsequently finds refuge in the Russian community in Geneva. The reader is guided into believing that no important detail has been overlooked: Razumov’s betrayal remains a secret, and his refuge is a voluntary one. In lieu of the disclosure of Razumov’s secret mission, the temporal and spatial gap that is opened in the narrator’s transition is soon bridged in the mind of the reader who performs (whether consciously or unconsciously) a displacement of this textual absence with a conjectural presence. Such a hypothesized interpretation quickly transforms into fact in the reader’s mind. The deception has gone unnoticed. It is only in the final pages of the novel, where the truth of Razumov’s mission is revealed, that the reader may become aware of his interpretative error. As we have seen, it is precisely in this fashion, by way of an active filling in, that the characters in the novel transform absence into meaning. Natalia not only misinterprets Haldin’s omissions and Razumov’s silence but she remains oblivious to her own interpretative contribution. The mind, it would seem, abhors an absence. Before turning to a closer reading of the novel, we should take stock of the two principles that will subsequently guide our reading and thereby serve to illuminate several of the novel’s underlying deceptions. In Under Western Eyes, silence is transformed into a powerful and misleading signifier. Whether this metamorphosis is conducted within the text or in the process of interpretation that is integral to our reading, absence repeatedly assumes the guise of a substitutive presence. Furthermore, this principle is significantly supplemented by

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the unconscious aspect of the transformation: we are oblivious to our interpretative leaps. We must therefore proceed cautiously, for, with every such transformation that takes place, we inherit a blind spot that effectively augments our confidence in our mistaken interpretations.4

S il enc ed E x ploi ts In what reads as a suspiciously overwritten introduction, the narrator effectively embarks on a very wordy project with the warning that “words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality” (3). Although demanding considerable attention, this provocative claim is soon foregone when, in turning to a presentation of Razumov, the narrator alludes to a rather different communicative trick—not, as he had done in relation to himself, of the talker or the writer but of the listener: “With his younger compatriots [Razumov] took the attitude of an inscrutable listener of the kind that hears you out intelligently and then—just changes the subject. This sort of trick, which may arise either from intellectual insufficiency or from an imperfect trust in one’s own convictions, procured for Mr. Razumov a reputation of profundity. Amongst a lot of exuberant talkers, in the habit of exhausting themselves daily by ardent discussion, a comparatively taciturn personality is naturally credited with reserve power” (5–6). To the word-wary reader, silence is intuitively (if implicitly) associated with promise, with profundity, with truth. If one does not speak, if one resists the temptation of words, one cannot lie. This being so, it may be that we do not take sufficient note of the manner in which the narrator’s resonating formulation (“words are the great foes of reality”) is questioned by the implications of this passage. Although Razumov’s silence is possibly (we are encouraged to speculate) the product of his “intellectual insufficiency” or “an imperfect trust in [his] convictions,” his revolutionary friends perceive it as a sign of profundity. Whatever its motivation, Razumov’s silence is not truth but a “trick” that misleads his compatriots. A mere “trick” (5), however, cannot be classified among “the great foes of reality.” Indeed, it is not a strong enough term to overshadow or even question the bond that has already been established between words and treachery. Moreover, the deceptive nature of silence is blurred, not only by the narrator’s emphasis on the harmful potential of words and by the categorical difference between “tricks” and “foes,” but also by the intimation of what we may allude to as the “extenuating circumstances” that pertain to Razumov’s taciturnity. In Russia, the narrator explains, “an opinion may be a legal crime visited by death or sometimes by a

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fate worse than mere death” (6). This explication inevitably suggests to the reader that, in czarist Russia, silence is a form of self-preservation, a necessary exercise in the daily war of survival. In such a context, Razumov’s “trick” is readily disregarded: his silence cannot be so easily condemned. Significantly, these “extenuating circumstances” inform several influential critical readings of Razumov’s character. According to Guerard, Razumov is a character not unlike Jim, in that he is afflicted by a cruel and unmerciful fate.5 His courage, fidelity, loyalty, and fellowship are all tested by an arbitrary fate and checked by psychological pain. Offering a similar reading, C. B. Cox writes that Razumov’s “rational existence is destroyed by the sudden appearance of Haldin [. . . who] seems to Razumov like an emissary of the Fates” (108). These readings apparently follow this line of reasoning in Razumov’s reported thoughts. We recall that Razumov admonishes himself for receiving Haldin, thereby welcoming “the crazy fate” (84). Although this would appear to lend support to the interpretations of Guerard and Cox, it is clear that Razumov’s reported thoughts cannot be divorced from the narrator’s distorting mediation. Furthermore, the narrator’s commentaries to his Western readers clearly demonstrate the manner in which he himself emphasizes the arbitrary and even fateful nature of Haldin’s visit. Addressing the event of Haldin’s visit to Razumov, the narrator tells his readers that “it is unthinkable that any young Englishman should find himself in Razumov’s situation” (25). He further comments that such a reader “would not think as Mr. Razumov thought at this crisis of his fate” (25). The narrator informs his readers that the Russian man faces trials that they cannot even begin to fathom. These explanations serve to augment his original thesis, which showed that Razumov should not be seen as a perpetrator but rather as a victim in this affair.6 Silence, the narrator has informed us, is not a crime. If anything, it is a scrupulous and just alternative to words. It would thus seem that the readings of Guerard and Cox owe more to the narrator’s embellishments than to Razumov’s reported thoughts. As the narrator repeatedly argues, Razumov cannot be blamed for Haldin’s misreading of his intentions and beliefs. Guerard’s and Cox’s readings are, I believe, greatly affected by the narrator’s downplaying of the deceptive significance of silence. We know, however, that silence is not only a method of survival but also a deceptive “trick” employed by Razumov to gain social acceptance. If the narrator’s presentation of silence is misleading, perhaps Razumov’s vindication is not as easily achieved as Guerard and Cox suppose. If

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silence is the double of words, as much a strategy and a falsification as is language, it may be that Razumov is culpable from the very start. Thus, for example, while deliberating his betrayal of Haldin, Razumov tells himself that he is not betraying him because he has done nothing to provoke his confidence: “Have I provoked his confidence? No. Have I by a single word, look or gesture given him reason to suppose that I accepted his trust in me? No!” (38). Razumov asserts his own innocence; after all, Haldin had no cause to turn to him; he never promised Haldin his undying loyalty and devotion “by a single word, look or gesture.” At the same time, however, the reader knows that Razumov has not given Haldin any indication to the contrary. Razumov’s silence—his failure to express his true sentiments—does indeed provoke Haldin’s confidence. This “fateful” test, then, is not an arbitrary one; it is Razumov who both creates and sustains the reputation that brings Haldin to his doorstep. As the narrative unfolds, we find further examples of Razumov’s strategic exploitation of silence. If, at the outset, the narrator would have us believe in the innocence of a mere “trick,” a survival strategy in the social landscape of Razumov’s life, we soon realize that it is this same allegedly innocuous silence that later dupes Mikulin, the revolutionists, the English teacher, and Natalia. Razumov’s experience shows us that, in the world of Under Western Eyes, silence cannot be regarded as a binary opposite to words; for here, silence speaks. The reader has already been given a foretaste of the rhetorical efficacy of silence in the introduction of Razumov and his strategic “trick.” A more powerful indication is evinced in the first words of exchange between Haldin and Razumov, after the latter hears that his unwanted visitor is none other than the assassin of de P—: Razumov kept down a cry of dismay. The sentiment of his life being utterly ruined by this contact with such a crime expressed itself quaintly by a sort of half-derisive mental exclamation, “There goes my silver medal!” Haldin continued after a while— “You say nothing, Kirylo Sidorovitch! I understand your silence. To be sure, I cannot expect you with your frigid English manner to embrace me.” (16, my emphasis)

Lacan writes, “There is no speech without a reply, even if it is met only with silence” (Ecrits, 40). Much in this spirit, Haldin’s “understanding” of Razumov’s silence is exemplary of a theme crucial to the development of the novel from the very outset: silence is always

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perceived as a figure of signification. More importantly, however, Haldin’s words attest to the fact that silence is a deceptive mode of signification. Insofar as it is a signifier forever divorced of its signified, silence offers an inevitable and indelible source for the inception of erroneous interpretations. Interestingly, despite using this tool of deception, Razumov appears to resist the implications of his encounter with Haldin. Thus, while walking in the snow, his self-deliberation with regard to the betrayal hinges on his assertion that by not having given Haldin any reason to expect his loyalty, he has not committed himself to him. This reasoning is later repeated in his interview with Mikulin where Razumov states his protest against what he perceives as the latter’s insinuations regarding some form of allegiance between himself and Haldin with the following statement: “He talked and I listened. That is not a conversation” (92). If Razumov seems adamant in his refusal to acknowledge the signifying potential of silence in Part First of the novel, we see that later he is all too ready to embrace it in his attempt to survive in the world of the revolutionists.7 It is with silence, for example, that he greets Natalia’s dramatic welcome on the occasion of their unexpected first encounter. This decision proves to be a wise one: “He did not take [her] proffered hand. He even recoiled a pace, and Miss Haldin imagined that he was unpleasantly affected. Miss Haldin excused him, directing her displeasure at herself. She had behaved unworthily, like an emotional French girl” (171). Razumov’s mute reaction elicits Natalia’s admiration and respect. We further find that it is not only Natalia but also the English teacher who transforms Razumov’s silence into meaning. On hearing this extraordinary account of the events, he suggests that Razumov “must have been stern indeed, or perhaps very timid with women, not to respond in a more human way to the advances of a girl like Nathalie Haldin” (171–72). While Natalia interprets Razumov’s silence as a sign of an admirable reserve and great emotion, her teacher perceives it to be the product of social inhibition. The irony swells as Natalia reports that, on hearing her brother’s name, Razumov “positively reeled. He leaned against the wall of the terrace. Their friendship must have been the very brotherhood of souls!” (172). Clearly, both Natalia and the English teacher project their own beliefs, their own narratives, onto Razumov’s silence. Natalia’s erroneous reading of Razumov’s recoil indicates the perpetuation of her initial mistake in the interpretation of her brother’s letter. Natalia and the English teacher are not alone in pursuing a false path of understanding in response to Razumov’s silence. We had

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seen such a hermeneutic exercise performed by Haldin and his comrades, an intersubjective circle that is then recreated in the form of the revolutionary group in Geneva. Razumov is thus caught between intersubjective circles that sustain and perpetuate his false identity. Szittya writes, “Everyone who comes into contact with Razumov has to struggle with the difficulty of interpreting him and almost everyone fails: Haldin, Natalia, all the revolutionists, Mikulin, and most important, the narrator himself ” (195). I believe, however, that these failed interpretations abound not so much because Razumov is a difficult character to interpret, but because his silences are all too readily appropriated by the motivated projections of those he meets. Terence Cave has suggested that “Razumov’s ‘personality’ is a void to which an arbitrary chain of signifiers attaches itself, creating a fiction of such power that it absorbs every new detail that comes to light” (242). As Cave suggests, by presenting the characters he encounters with a “void,” Razumov’s “personality” effectively attracts and hosts a chain of signifiers. The resulting fiction, however, is not an arbitrary one. Razumov’s silence, or “void,” provides a mirror to the projected fictions of all the characters he encounters. In his passive silence, Razumov effectively assumes the roles each character expects him to fulfill. In accord with Natalia’s projections, Razumov assumes the character of her brother’s dearest friend, an “unstained, lofty and solitary existence” (135). Conversely, to the English teacher, Razumov’s encounter with Natalia is suggestive of social inhibition. We recall that in Razumov’s silence, Haldin is not able to imagine shock or condemnation but merely confirms what he believes to be Razumov’s “frigid English manner” (16). Echoing Haldin’s “I understand your silence” (16), Sophia Antonovna informs Razumov: “I have understood you at the end of the first day.” We have in this phrase not only an allusion to Haldin’s phrase but also a repetition of his interpretative error. Sophia Antonovna does not in actuality understand Razumov but perceives in him a confirmation of her envisioned male stereotype. She tells him, “Ah! Kirylo Sidorovitch, you like other men are fastidious, full of self-love and afraid of trifles. [. . .] What you want is to be taken in hand by some woman” (243). The reactions of Haldin, Natalia, the English teacher, and Sophia Antonovna are exemplary of the manner in which silence is perceived as an invitation for and confirmation of the hearer’s assumptions. A similar episode unfolds in Razumov’s first encounter with Tekla. He tells her that “it is possible that later on [he] may . . .” Although he does not conclude his sentence or reveal his secret plan, Tekla appears ready to take on what she believes to be her intended role. Unable to

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appreciate her error, Tekla completes his invitation thus: “Yes. If you were to get ill [. . .] or meet some bitter trouble, you would find I am not a useless fool” (233). With the novel’s conclusion, the projected fictions of Haldin, Natalia, the revolutionists, and the English teacher give way to the imaginings of Tekla, the propagator of self-sacrifice and invalid care. Natalia informs the English teacher of the manner in which Tekla undertakes the role of caregiver to Razumov. Tekla, she tells him, had affirmed to her that “there was some understanding between them—some sort of compact—that in any sore need, in misfortune, or difficulty, or pain, he was to come to her” (374). Although the reader is aware of the error that underlies this affirmation, the narrator accepts it as fact. He concludes, “It is lucky for [Razumov] that there was, then” (374). The extensive role-play Razumov undertakes can be said to be the unequivocal and direct result of his silences. If he is repeatedly informed that his silence produces “confidence,” it is precisely because his silence—falsely—confirms the projections and beliefs of his interlocutors. From his very first “trick,” silence thus appears to oust words from their position as the “great foes of reality,” for it allows not one, but an infinite number of possible interpretations and, consequently, an endless string of misinterpretations. We now return to the narrator. Bearing this conclusion in mind, it may be that his motive in presenting such a sweeping statement in relation to the nature of words upon embarking on his narrative enterprise is twofold. Recalling Marlow’s motivated concessions in Lord Jim, this statement is an integral (if paradoxical) part of a general attempt to vouchsafe his alleged impartiality, detachment, and reliability.8 As opposed to writers who are invested with talent, imagination, and the ability to create, he is merely a translator—he does not invent; he documents. Moreover, as opposed to those who would abuse and dupe their innocent readers with rhetorical fabrications, he apparently lives by the rule that “words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality” (3). In a modernist reworking of the modesty topos, both Marlow and the English teacher overstate their handicap as storytellers and admit neither the inclination nor the ability to invent. At the same time, however, the narrator’s criticism of words results in the implicit endorsement of what is increasingly revealed as a second, equally malevolent foe of reality—namely, silence. Michael Greaney addresses this phenomenon and suggests that “an important corollary of Conrad’s suspicion of language is his ambivalent conception of silence. [. . .] Language soon pours into any discursive gap left by silence” (5). The truth of this statement is revealed to the reader when

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he or she learns that Razumov uses silence as a tool of deceit. The manner in which the narrator himself manipulates silence, however, is not as easily perceived. It may be that the narrator’s overwriting of his own silences with the reiteration of the all too well-known preamble with which he begins creates and sustains this critical blind spot. The narrator’s preamble offers the critic something of a diversion—not to say a provocative bullfighter’s red rag—and the critic cannot look elsewhere. Critics subsequently return again and again to the narrator’s “wordiness” in their wish to undermine his initial preamble. Thus, Lothe posits that the narrator’s introductory words introduce “serious reservations about the legitimacy and reliability of words right from the start” (Conrad, 266). Similarly, Rado writes that “language itself is shown to be as unstable and elusive as Haldin’s phantom, and is deconstructed as a center of meaning and stability” (93). Lothe and Rado inform us that, in reading the novel, we must be cautious of the highly deceptive nature of language. However, as we have seen, this conclusion ultimately reproduces the narrator’s stated philosophy. We should subsequently note that while the approach exercised by these critics is helpful, it is not exhaustive. In turning to Part Second of the novel, we see that it is not only in the hands of the protagonist that silence is utilized as a strategic trick. If Part First ends with Mikulin’s resonating question, “Where to?” Part Second begins with the narrator’s history of his acquaintance with the Haldin family in Geneva. The narrator here reworks his initial preamble thus: “Aware of my limitations and strong in the sincerity of my purpose I would not try (were I able) to invent anything. I push my scruples so far that I would not even invent a transition” (101). The claim is simply that it is better not to invent a transition than to invent one. That is, omission (silence) is preferable to elaboration (words). Again, the narrator’s asserted “scruples” serve to advance the merits of silence. The reader has already been instructed not to trust words. An ellipsis is offered as the safest alternative to invention. And yet, as various critics have remarked, this attested reluctance to feign a transition is itself a transitional passage that very artfully bridges Part First and Part Second of the novel. Guerard notes, “The teacher of languages again protests, at the outset of the second part, his lack of professional skill [. . .] while accomplishing with ease the major transition from Councillor Mikulin’s ‘Where to?’ to the society of Nathalie Haldin and her mother” (251). Moreover, his asserted reluctance to offer an explanatory transition is instrumental, for it offers a convenient camouflage for his striking omission. The narrator, as

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quoted above, states that his scruples do not allow him the pleasure of inventing a transition. This is so, he claims, because he is unimaginative and untalented. At the same time, however, this self-reflexive transition makes no allusion to the outcome of the meeting between Razumov and Mikulin. By withholding the needed information (that Razumov undertakes the role of a spy), the narrator is able to play profusely and quite unscrupulously with irony (and this is especially evident in the encounter between Razumov and Natalia, which we have addressed). Furthermore, as Guerard writes, “By delaying as long as he does the formal revelation that Razumov is Mikulin’s agent, Conrad preserves a sympathy that would (with a more abrupt procedure) have been lost” (236).9 Indeed, it is only in the beginning of Part Four that the narrator admits that the omission was strategic. Here, he writes that his reluctance to divulge the incriminating fact arises from his belief in the “psychological value of facts” and his “desire of punctilious fairness” (293). However, by returning to the omitted truth, he effectively admits that the question that has been delayed, “throws a light on the general meaning of this individual case” (293), and thus exposes his own silent “trick.” For regardless of his motive, the fact that he decides “to throw light” on the case at this late moment suggests that, earlier, he had deliberately chosen to keep his readers in the dark. It is not only by way of an assertion of his moral concerns that the narrator downplays his apparently disingenuous narrative ploy. In an attempt to further reassure his readers of the purity of his motives, the narrator states that his reluctance to reveal the omitted fact “may appear absurd if it were not for the thought that because of the imperfection of language there is always something ungracious (and even disgraceful) in the exhibition of naked truth” (293). His initial preamble thus serves him here once more in his implicit claim that the exhibition of the naked truth is more “ungracious” or “disgraceful” than concealment. The deception of silence, then, is preferable to the “naked” truth. The ingenuity of the narrator’s tricks and rhetorical maneuvers is here marked by his artful orchestration of a clever metaphorical slippage. If we commonly associate truth with a sheltering atonement and omission with deceit (much as we may associate words with lies and silence with profundity), in the transition between the two parts, truth is transformed into a “naked” and “disgraceful” fact, while omission is represented in the light of a sheltering reprieve. Regardless of their new and elevated form, once again these claims ultimately blur and conceal the manner in which

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the narrator’s choices effect a straying away from his formerly stated loyalty to the Russian document that is his source. It is only toward the end of the novel that the narrator allows the reader to be privy to the secret of Razumov’s espionage. The transition between the two parts thus exemplifies the narrator’s strategy. By constantly drawing the readers’ attention to his words, the narrator diverts our notice from significant omissions in the narrative. It seems, then, that the critical reader may do well to internalize the novel’s lessons in regard to not only words but also silence. We must not repeat Haldin’s error: when reading the narrator’s silences (that is, his omissions), it is best not to believe we “understand” but to seek out what has been lost or evaded. As we have seen, however, in order to protect his own ploys and tricks, the narrator undertakes the project of redeeming silence and thereby preempts a reading that associates omission with deception. We have already seen that the narrator’s preamble and his treatment of Razumov’s “trick” implicitly suggests that silence is a more desirable alternative to language. A closer examination of his treatment of the motif of silence shows that, from the very outset, the narrator subtly effects an intensification of this claim. Thus, for example, from the start, the narrator’s claim that Razumov’s reserve stems either from an intellectual insufficiency or from a mistrust of his convictions is reinforced by his description of Razumov’s external features. The narrator likens Razumov’s face to wax that is held close to a fire “till all sharpness of line had been lost in the softening of the material” (5). The implication is that Razumov’s ideological convictions, like his features, are not entirely shaped. Hence, if Razumov chooses not to speak, it is because he does not yet know what it is, precisely, that he must say. This, however, does not suggest that Razumov possesses a deceptive nature. Indeed, it suggests quite the opposite. After all, Razumov does not lie about his convictions; he merely remains silent because they are not yet fixed. Following this initial introduction to Razumov, the narrator increasingly highlights the positive qualities associated with silence. Thus, in a subsequent appraisal of Razumov’s character, the narrator once again represses the fraudulent nature of silence. Alluding once more to Razumov’s reserve, he remarks that this quality is, in his mind, “associated with sincerity” (173). Razumov’s silence is thus recovered as a mark of trustworthiness and candor. Although he writes retrospectively, the narrator suspends his retrospective knowledge and identifies with Haldin, Natalia, and the other comrades who read Razumov’s character as one of an “unstained, lofty and solitary existence” (135).

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This feigned innocence is a strategy by which the narrator leads the reader into a reenactment of Razumov’s comrades’ initial interpretative mistake. In following his lead, we, too, must sympathize with Razumov, who is characterized as a victim caught in an unfathomable and arbitrary chain of events. The readings of Cox and Guerard offer performative examples of such a guided reading. As we have seen, Guerard posits that the narrator’s (or Conrad’s) decision to conceal Razumov’s employment as a police spy is instrumental in eliciting the reader’s sympathy. Implicitly, this is a necessary development for the success of his narrative. It is my contention, however, that the narrator’s wish to redeem Razumov’s silence is motivated not only by his wish to counterfeit his former ignorance in regards to the true significance of Razumov’s silences. By eliciting our sympathy and understanding, the narrator vindicates not only Razumov but himself. Although the narrator’s vindication of silence appears to serve the protagonist, we will see that it equally serves his own interests. Various critics have examined the underlying similarities between the characters of Razumov and the English teacher.10 Haldin’s remark to Razumov, which shows him to be “English-like” in his frigid and reserved manner, provides a common point of comparison. Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan develops this idea in her suggestion that “like Razumov, the old teacher of languages predicates his story from the very outset on the fact of his ‘otherness.’” She then adds that “both are initially the exponents of rationality, and both are, of course, in love with Nathalie” (120–21). Erdinast-Vulcan thus suggests that Razumov is a double of the English teacher, not only in mind and manners, but also in love. Although these are important elements of likeness (some of which, however, I contest shortly), I would like to draw the readers’ attention to an altogether different line of comparison. What has not yet been noted is the manner in which the narrator effectively and significantly repeats Razumov’s betrayal. The narrator’s relation to Natalia parallels Razumov’s relationship with Haldin. We recall that the relationship between Haldin and Razumov is founded on a deceptive silence. This feature is later shown to be an important part of the budding relationship between the teacher and his pupil. The narrator reflects on Natalia’s regard for him and remarks, “I do not know why she should have felt so friendly to me. It may be that she thought I understood her much better than I was able to do. [. . .] I am reduced to suppose she appreciated my attention and silence” (118). Like Razumov, the narrator uses silence as a social tool.11 We recall that the narrator (perhaps deceptively) proposes that Razumov uses silence to conceal a lack of knowledge

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or conviction. Here, we find that he himself adopts this strategy, suggesting that his interpretation of Razumov’s conduct may have been influenced by his own experience. Like Razumov, the narrator wins favor through silence. Both Natalia and Haldin put their trust in their silent acquaintances. I contend further that both are finally duped by their misguided trust. Razumov and the narrator are both silent listeners. In Geneva, Razumov performs a twofold capitalization on silence. First, his silences allow for the active interpretation of those he encounters. By remaining silent, he allows the myth of his fellowship with Haldin to continue and unfold, thereby ensuring his personal safety. Razumov further utilizes silence to engage in his role as a police spy. In this role, Razumov does not speak so that he may listen. This double capitalization ends, however, with the annihilation of his capitalizing powers as, with his deafening, Razumov begins to talk and ceases to listen. Interestingly, Razumov’s deafening produces yet another form of capitalization. Although this silence is of a different nature—not an active but a passive one—it seems that there is still some profit to be made of it. The narrator informs the reader that “there was some compunction, too, in the charity extended by the revolutionary world to Razumov the betrayer.” The deafened Razumov is, as Sophia Antonovna tells the narrator, a “victim of an outrage” (380). Razumov’s deafening at the hands of the betrayer Nikita renders him a victim. Thus, the novel ends with yet another signifying silence. It is in this final silence that he is forced to inhabit that Razumov finds the compassion and charity of the revolutionists.12 Like Razumov, the narrator performs a double capitalization. We have seen that in his relationship with Natalia, his silence is used to suggest a profound understanding that is instrumental in promoting their friendship. Like Razumov, however, the narrator employs silence not only to mask an underlying ignorance but also to advance his operative listening. In his espionage mission, Razumov is the subordinate of his Russian supervisors; effectively, he is an extension of their impenetrable yet penetrating gaze. Alluding to General T—— and Mikulin, the narrator writes, “One can imagine them talking over the case of Mr. Razumov, with the full sense of their unbounded power over all the lives in Russia, with cursory disdain, like two Olympians glancing at a worm” (306). We must remember, however, that the narrator is himself a spy and that the tale he tells is always already subordinated to the equally crushing gaze of the Westerner. The narrator’s record is thus something of a spy report itself and, like Razumov’s, it is extorted under false pretences. While Razumov’s true

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identity is concealed by his assumed role as a revolutionist, the narrator is shielded by the guise of an obtuse bystander. While we have seen that the critical reader is not often duped by this deceptive mask, the characters in the novel seem taken in by the narrator’s enacted persona. This should not be surprising, however, if we consider the number of times the narrator vocalizes his incomprehension. In response to Natalia’s political statement, the narrator states, “It is quite possible that I don’t understand” (104). Such communications abound in his exchanges with her, even if they assume a slightly embellished form, as, for example, in his comment, “Admitting that we occidentals do not understand the character of your people . . .” (105). Most likely in anticipation of such a remark, Natalia does not let him finish. The narrator repeatedly demonstrates his tactless incomprehension, and Natalia begins to take his obtuseness in relation to everything Russian for granted. We find an apt illustration of this in their conversation after the inception of the family’s fears for Haldin’s safety. Natalia informs her teacher, “I think [mother] is fretting because we have not heard from my brother for rather a long time.” Rather tactlessly, he answers, “No news—good news.” While the reader may appreciate the grossness of this proverbial retort, it necessitates Natalia’s reply, “Not in Russia” (108). Evidently, the narrator is old and foreign to the Russian nature and cannot possibly understand. This quality effectively lessens the degree with which he may be perceived as a security threat to the revolutionary circle, which does not seem to deplore the intrusiveness of his seemingly uncomprehending eyes. Indeed, to many of the participating characters, his existence is, as he himself claims, hardly noted at all. This may similarly explain how Razumov remains oblivious to the narrator’s presence throughout his confession to Natalia and acknowledges his presence only at the very end in his query, “How did this old man come here?” (355).13 Perhaps more so than his social encounters, the narrator’s “spy report” appears to rely heavily on Razumov’s diary. In his first mention of the diary, the narrator informs his readers that “it is inconceivable that [Razumov] should have wished any human eye to see [it]” (5). Regardless of this initial insight, the narrator not only publishes Razumov’s record but also fails to explain his decision to do so, making no attempt to justify the publication. Clearly, upon presenting him with the diary, Natalia does not request that he make it public. Indeed, the narrator has already informed the reader that Natalia appreciates his attention and silence. We may therefore assume that, as Haldin had put his faith in Razumov, Natalia trusts the narrator with the

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journal because she credits him with discretion. The narrator’s capitalization on silence—like Razumov’s—results in the gift (or curse) of a secret. Where Razumov reveals Haldin’s secret by betraying him to the czarist authorities, the narrator makes Natalia’s secret (in the form of Razumov’s diary) similarly public by publishing his version of it. This may appear to be an extremely malicious reading of the character of the language teacher. The narrator’s own words, however, show that his interest goes beyond his personal attachment to his student and that his actions are propelled by an underlying current of self-interest. In the introductory notes to Part Second, the narrator informs the reader that his friendship with the Haldin ladies “gave [him] a standing in the Russian colony which otherwise [he] could not have had” (103). The narrator, then, is not only infatuated with the striking features of Natalia but also intrigued by the possibilities that such a contact promises. This “privileged” position reminds us of Razumov’s own contrived entry into the society of the revolutionary circle. Both Razumov and the narrator are introduced through the Haldins into a social circle that would not receive them under normal circumstances, and both make their own covert use of this special invitation. Interestingly, the narrator repeatedly shows himself to be overzealous in his readiness to accept such a unique summons. This enthusiasm appears not only to affect but also to heighten his interpretative abilities. Thus, for example, the narrator chooses to explain his lengthy stay with Natalia by informing the reader that he “would have retired quietly and returned later on, had [he] not met a peculiar expression in [Natalia’s] eyes which [he] interpreted as a request to stay” (126–27). The narrator is so eager to stay that his communication with his student becomes almost telepathic. It suffices that she glance in his direction for him to infer that his presence is required. It is more plausible, however, that the narrator’s interpretations of Natalia’s wishes are self-serving, for he repeatedly perceives some sign in her conduct that he believes to be suggestive of her need of his company. Thus, once more he remarks that he “intended to leave them to themselves, but Miss Haldin touched [me] lightly on the forearm with a significant contact, conveying a distinct wish” (179). The narrator is always at hand, always ready to assist and accompany Natalia. It remains for the reader to decide, however, to what extent this accompaniment is indeed called for. It is nevertheless evident that by appropriating Natalia’s silence, the narrator further capitalizes on an ellipsis. Although we are aware of the deceptive potential of such an exercise, the reader is repeatedly tricked into accepting the narrator’s

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interpretation. We find such a trusting reader in Schwarz, who offers a reading that not only credits the narrator with reliability but also applauds his devotion: “[The narrator] involves himself in Natalie’s affairs, and befriends her with a sensitivity and responsiveness that her Russian acquaintances lack. To illustrate: when he arrived at the Haldins only to discover Peter there and ‘met a peculiar expression in [Natalie Haldin’s] eyes which [he] interpreted as a request to stay, with the view, perhaps, of shortening an unwelcome visit’ he dutifully remained’” (Almayer’s, 197). The reader already knows, however, that the interpretation of silence is distinctly problematic, often entailing a subjective projection rather than an objective deciphering. Perhaps, then, the narrator is motivated not by a sense of duty toward Natalia, as Schwarz suggests, but rather by his own voyeuristic interests. We may substantiate this claim by examining the last scene in which Natalia, Razumov, and the narrator are united. Here, the narrator no longer attempts to justify his presence by alluding to Natalia’s secret needs. On the occasion of Razumov’s final visit to Natalia, the narrator’s presence is not said to be required by any “peculiar expression” or “secret gesture.” Here, it is rather the absence of any such sign that the narrator interprets as an invitation to stay: “Had either of them cast a glance then in my direction, I would have opened the door quietly and gone out. But neither did; and I remained, every fear of indiscretion lost in the sense of my enormous remoteness from their captivity within the sombre horizon of Russian problems, the boundary of their eyes, of their feelings—the prison of their souls” (345). We are informed not only that the narrator is not needed but that his presence is obtrusive, an implication muffled in an elaborate assertion of Razumov’s and Natalia’s Russian “otherness” and his “enormous remoteness.” If the narrator cannot justify his presence, he feigns a figurative separation that is so vast that it colors his presence with an aura of absence. This idea is then extended as the narrator transforms himself from an observer to a captive: “My existence seemed so utterly forgotten by these two that I dared not now make a movement” (346). No more the intrusive eavesdropper, the narrator now shows himself to be in some way imprisoned by his own insignificance. In effect, these inflationary and supererogatory passages replace what he previously expressed as Natalia’s pressing need for his presence; they are an additional confabulation designed to give credence to his superfluous attendance. Exploiting Natalia’s and Razumov’s obliviousness to his presence, he witnesses a meeting that is anthropologically fascinating

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to his incredulous Western eyes. The language he uses—“sombre horizon,” “the boundary of their eyes,” “the prison of their souls”— reveals how the narrator has already begun writing the story. It is quite clear that any sense of duty toward Natalia is overshadowed by his aesthetic appreciation of the writerly possibilities of this scene. In this important last encounter between Razumov and Natalia, the first confession is enacted, and the truth of Razumov’s betrayal is finally revealed. Royal Roussel regards Razumov’s confessions as the “alternative to the slavery of lies into which Razumov has betrayed himself” (148). Underlining the peril that such a feat as confession entails, Cox writes that Razumov’s “confession, his act of commitment, becomes a kind of suicide. As he himself knows, he must confess and perish” (116).14 Evidently, it is not only Razumov who feels that he must own up to a hitherto undisclosed truth. “Without fear of provoking a smile,” the narrator says, “I shall confess that I became very much attached to that young girl” (102). A confession more embarrassing than it is damning, the narrator admits that his regard for Natalia goes beyond friendship. Some critics have suggested that the narrator’s emotional withdrawal, his choice not to develop his reported infatuation, points to a personal failure on his part in the pursuit of happiness and fulfillment.15 Erdinast-Vulcan, for example, writes that “the emotional withdrawal from the role of a lover can only be understood against the background of the narrator’s withdrawal from life itself” (122–23). This may be true: the narrator’s detachment accompanies the relinquishing of love and emotion. At the same time, however, one must not overlook the fact that the narrator’s stoicism has its own reward—his own personalized glimpse of the lives of the Russians in Geneva. Finally, the narrator’s “dutiful” silence is rewarded by the gift of Razumov’s journal. His imaginative lack and weakness of invention are thus cured by Natalia’s gesture as he inherits a ready-made story. We may conclude that, despite the evident differences between the English teacher and Marlow (most importantly, in the medium of their delivery), both can be said to follow the dictates of the aesthetic of the otherwise present. Although the English teacher is, at one and the same time, both involved in and divorced from the action, he makes sure to keep a safe distance from the dangers of implication. His most common defense is, of course, his alleged incomprehension, which is a convenient method of maintaining an imagined boundary between himself and the action that he observes. At the end of Part Second we find a particularly evocative image of the narrator’s immunity. Taking his leave of the young man, the narrator observes as Razumov,

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standing on a bridge, leans over the parapet and stares into its violent current. Walking away, the narrator comments, “The current there is swift, extremely swift; it makes some people dizzy; I myself can never look at it for any length of time without experiencing a dread of being suddenly snatched away by its destructive force. Some brains cannot resist the suggestion of irresistible power and of headlong motion” (197, my emphasis). Like Marlow’s observation of Kurtz and Jim, the English teacher watches as Razumov totters “suddenly on the very edge of the precipice” (LJ, 349) and falls, while he lives to tell the tale, free to “preserve or destroy” the memory of Razumov.16 This section thus concludes with an interesting twist. While we have come to associate Razumov’s character with the role of the spy, it appears that this role becomes emblematic of the narrator. Indeed, in his resistance to confession and atonement and his numerous manipulations and deceits, he is more true to his espionage duties than Razumov himself. Like a spy, the Conradian storyteller silences the narratives of his own motives and wishes and is thereby transformed into the receptacle of another man’s story. As opposed to Razumov, however, both Marlow and the English teacher are protected by the immunity that comes with the otherwise-present aesthetic. Avoiding the “edge of the precipice,” the Conradian storyteller will neither experience true dizziness nor suffer the wrath of retribution.

Exo rc is ing the Otherwi s e Pres ent In the previous section, I outlined the manner in which absence assumes the form of an active and meaningful signifier. Silence, as we have seen, is never construed as a negation of meaning but rather as an equivalent of projected speech. If we extend the lessons of Derrida’s formula of “capitalizing on an ellipsis” further, we find that one of the most striking examples of this phenomenon is found not only in omitted speech but in the omitted presence of the figure of Haldin. Although Haldin is absented from the novel at a very early stage, his nonappearance haunts the text throughout, much like the nonspeech of his betrayer. If, as we have seen, Razumov’s silences are transformed into words in the minds of the characters he encounters, Haldin’s absence is analogously metamorphosed into a living and menacing presence in Razumov’s consciousness. Razumov’s attempts to combat the effects of his haunting nemesis follow two distinct ontological trajectories. In the world of the manifest real, Haldin’s fate becomes an omitted truth that is utilized by Razumov to secure his safety. At the same time, however, Haldin’s nonpresence is made

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manifest beyond the real, in the realm of nightmare and hallucination. Here, Razumov finds that truth cannot be combated by silence. In the world of the unreal, the absent takes on a living form. Haldin is subsequently no longer a nonpresence but a living phantom, an otherwise present. Accordingly, Razumov turns to a traditional mode of warfare: exorcism. The scope of this chapter does not allow for an etiological mapping of the practice of exorcism within religious tradition. Nor is such an elaborate explanation necessary for what is attempted here. While the novel is saturated with religious allusion, it is nevertheless a determinedly secularized version of its religious counterpart, Crime and Punishment. In the secular world, it is not the priest who combats phantoms but the psychologist, the doctor, and the philosopher. The example of psychoanalysis nevertheless shows that the secular world contains residues of former religious practice. While psychoanalysis perhaps inherits (and therefore displaces) the role of the church in combating evil, the psychoanalytic session quite clearly resonates with the traditional rites of confession and exorcism. The working through process is, in its intended effect, a form of exorcism. The analyst displaces the priest in the role of the exorcist; the analysand, in turn, becomes the subject on whom the procedure is performed; finally, the unwanted other that is exorcised is the unconscious material that possesses the analysand’s actions. Incomprehensible memory gaps and irrational, repetitious behavior are transformed into structured memory and conscious action. The acting out, which is construed as a possession of sorts, is annulled. At the end of the therapeutic process, the analysand is, in effect, dispossessed. My analysis in this section does not address the specter as an ontological reality pertaining to the world of diabolical manifestations but rather as a psychological projection. In an attempt to provide a brief explanation for this interpretative leap, I would like to point to a relevant passage from Conrad’s Author’s Note to The Shadow-Line. Conrad writes: All my moral and intellectual being is penetrated by an invincible conviction that whatever falls under the dominion of our senses must be in nature and, however exceptional, cannot differ in its essence from all the other effects of the visible and tangible world of which we are a self-conscious part. [. . .] No, I am too firm in my consciousness of the marvellous to be ever fascinated by the mere supernatural, which (take it any way you like) is but a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead

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and to the living, in their countless multitudes; a desecration of our tenderest memories; and outrage on our dignity. Whatever my native modesty may be it will never condescend so low as to seek help for my imagination within those vain imaginings common to all ages and that in themselves are enough to fill all lovers of mankind with unutterable sadness. As to the effect of a mental or moral shock on a common mind that is quite a legitimate subject for study and description. (SL, v–vi)

Bearing Conrad’s categorical statement in mind, my treatment of the phantasmal occurrences in the novel are attributed precisely to the “mental or moral shock” that Razumov sustains and battles in the aftermath of the betrayal.17 This interpretation may be substantiated further by the narrator’s suggestion that there is an element of the “talking cure” in Razumov’s writing project. He observes that “there must be a wonderful soothing power in mere words since so many men have used them for self-communion” (5).18 Razumov’s journal may indeed be therapeutic, as the narrator suggests.19 It is nevertheless clear that Razumov combats his demons not only through writing but through ritual. Before he turns to the soothing power of words, he turns to the soothing power of performance. Such a claim may ring false if we consider Razumov’s much-emphasized role as a man of letters. We must not neglect, however, that while Razumov is a rational being, he is, at the same time, superstitious. According to Erdinast-Vulcan, this paradoxical fusion may be explained by the manner in which his character is comprised of an enmeshment of the Western and the Russian stereotypes that are presented in the novel. She finds in Razumov’s character a split between “the Russian mode of perception, which recognizes and accepts the metaphysical, and the Western outlook, which is secular, rational and materialistic” (Erdinast-Vulcan, 114). It seems that these two opposing perceptual frameworks cannot be reconciled: one does not deal with specters rationally. As Derrida writes, “One does not know: not out of ignorance, but because this non-object, this non-present present, this being–there of an absent or departed one no longer belongs to knowledge” (Specters, 6). Reason must inevitably fail Razumov in his encounter with the “nonpresent present.” Paradoxically, however, it is precisely a rational and calculating language that pervades his ghostly encounters. Perhaps in accord with his personality “split,” Razumov reacts to the visitation of phantoms and hallucinations with a striking combination of reason and irrationality. Thus, we find that the odd combination of East and West in Razumov’s character produces a practice that combines both the irrational

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and the rational. If the rational Razumov believes in detailed and logical thought, and his superstitious counterpart calls for irrational action, the two meet in the ritual. Regardless of the evident supernatural quality inherent in exorcism, Razumov does not relinquish reason but rather attempts to enlist it in battling that which is resistant to its laws. Derrida addresses this oxymoron-like fusion: “Without excluding, quite to the contrary, analytic procedure and argumentative ratiocination, exorcism consists in repeating in the mode of an incantation. [. . .] It proceeds by formulae, and sometimes theoretical formulae play this role with an efficacity that is all the greater because they mislead as to their magical nature, the authoritarian dogmatism, the occult power they share with what they claim to combat” (Specters, 48). This formulation provides a possible reading of Razumov’s behavior in Under Western Eyes. Although it is a “magical” use of the rational, it is with reason, with his “superior mind,” that Razumov attempts to combat Haldin’s phantom. We encounter such a pseudoexorcism ritual in one of the very first scenes in the novel. While engrossed in a lengthy self-deliberation about Haldin’s future and his own, Razumov comes across the phantom of Haldin lying on the snowy ground in his path. His first reaction to the image is a very rational one: namely, to check his pocket to make sure that his key is still there in order to reassure himself that Haldin could not have escaped from his room. This impulse, however, is soon checked “with a disdainful curve of his lips” (37). Razumov’s rational mind knows that this being is merely a hallucination, nothing but a projected simulacrum of the body of the man awaiting him in his room. The transition between thought and action in this scene is marked by a single word—Razumov “understood.” Thus, the supernatural and the rational are united. Razumov encounters a phantom, yet he knows rationally what he must do. He must annul the image of the phantom. By walking over the phantom of Haldin, Razumov performs his first exorcism: “Razumov tackled the phenomenon calmly. With a stern face, without a check and gazing far beyond the vision, he walked on, experiencing nothing but a slight tightening of the chest. After passing he turned his head for a glance, and saw only the unbroken track of his footsteps over the place where the breast of the phantom had been lying” (37). In this scene it is clear that Razumov does not abandon his meditative and calculating nature. He checks his impulses; he acts deliberately and consciously. The handling of the phantom is likened to the handling of a mundane problem. He assesses the situation and then decides on the course of action that is required. He thinks and only then performs. This scene thus

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demonstrates the manner in which the rational is interpolated into Razumov’s encounters with the otherwise present. Assuredly, Razumov undertakes additional methods in his