Under Conrad's Eyes : The Novel As Criticism [1 ed.] 9780773577060, 9780773535107

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U N D E R C O N R A D ’S E Y E S

McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Ideas Series Editor: Philip J. Cercone 1 Problems of Cartesianism Edited by Thomas M. Lennon, John M. Nicholas, and John W. Davis 2 The Development of the Idea of History in Antiquity Gerald A. Press 3 Claude Buffier and Thomas Reid: Two Common-Sense Philosophers Louise Marcil-Lacoste 4 Schiller, Hegel, and Marx: State, Society, and the Aesthetic Ideal of Ancient Greece Philip J. Kain 5 John Case and Aristotelianism in Renaissance England Charles B. Schmitt 6 Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process of SelfRecognition in EighteenthCentury Political Thought J.A.W. Gunn 7 John Toland: His Methods, Manners, and Mind Stephen H. Daniel 8 Coleridge and the Inspired Word Anthony John Harding

9 The Jena System, 1804–5: Logic and Metaphysics G.W.F. Hegel Translation edited by John W. Burbidge and George di Giovanni Introduction and notes by H.S. Harris 10 Consent, Coercion, and Limit: The Medieval Origins of Parliamentary Democracy Arthur P. Monahan 11 Scottish Common Sense in Germany, 1768–1800: A Contribution to the History of Critical Philosophy Manfred Kuehn 12 Paine and Cobbett: The Transatlantic Connection David A. Wilson 13 Descartes and the Enlightenment Peter A. Schouls 14 Greek Scepticism: Anti-Realist Trends in Ancient Thought Leo Groarke 15 The Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought Donald Wiebe

16 Form and Transformation: A Study in the Philosophy of Plotinus Frederic M. Schroeder 17 From Personal Duties towards Personal Rights: Late Medieval and Early Modern Political Thought, c. 1300–c. 1650 Arthur P. Monahan 18 The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi Translated and edited by George di Giovanni 19 Kierkegaard as Humanist: Discovering My Self Arnold B. Come 20 Durkheim, Morals, and Modernity W. Watts Miller 21 The Career of Toleration: John Locke, Jonas Proast, and After Richard Vernon 22 Dialectic of Love: Platonism in Schiller’s Aesthetics David Pugh 23 History and Memory in Ancient Greece Gordon Shrimpton 24 Kierkegaard as Theologian: Recovering My Self Arnold B. Come

25 Enlightenment and Conservatism in Victorian Scotland: The Career of Sir Archibald Alison Michael Michie 26 The Road to Egdon Heath: The Aesthetics of the Great in Nature Richard Bevis 27 Jena Romanticism and Its Appropriation of Jakob Böhme: Theosophy – Hagiography – Literature Paolo Mayer 28 Enlightenment and Community: Lessing, Abbt, Herder, and the Quest for a German Public Benjamin W. Redekop 29 Jacob Burckhardt and the Crisis of Modernity John R. Hinde 30 The Distant Relation: Time and Identity in SpanishAmerican Fiction Eoin S. Thomson 31 Mr Simson’s Knotty Case: Divinity, Politics, and Due Process in Early EighteenthCentury Scotland Anne Skoczylas

32 Orthodoxy and Enlightenment: George Campbell in the Eighteenth Century Jeffrey M. Suderman

40 Reason and Self-Enactment in History and Politics: Themes and Voices of Modernity F.M. Barnard

33 Contemplation and Incarnation: The Theology of MarieDominique Chenu Christophe F. Potworowski

41 The More Moderate Side of Joseph de Maistre: Views on Political Liberty and Political Economy Cara Camcastle

34 Democratic Legitimacy: Plural Values and Political Power F.M. Barnard

42 Democratic Society and Human Needs Jeff Noonan

35 Herder on Nationality, Humanity, and History F.M. Barnard 36 Labeling People: French Scholars on Society, Race, and Empire, 1815–1849 Martin S. Staum 37 The Subaltern Appeal to Experience: Self-Identity, Late Modernity, and the Politics of Immediacy Craig Ireland 38 The Invention of Journalism Ethics: The Path to Objectivity and Beyond Stephen J.A. Ward 39 The Recovery of Wonder: The New Freedom and the Asceticism of Power Kenneth L. Schmitz

43 The Circle of Rights Expands: Modern Political Thought after the Reformation, 1521 (Luther) to 1762(Rousseau) Arthur P. Monahan 44 The Canadian Founding: John Locke and Parliament Janet Ajzensta 45 Finding Freedom: Hegel’s Philosophy and the Emancipation of Women Sara MacDonald 46 When the French Tried to Be British: Party, Opposition, and the Quest for the Civil Disagreement, 1814–1848 J.A.W. Gunn 47 Under Conrad’s Eyes: The Novel as Criticism Michael John DiSanto

UNDER CONRAD’S EYES The Novel as Criticism

Michael John DiSanto

McGill-Queen’s University Press Montreal & Kingston • London • Ithaca

© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2009 isbn 978-0-7735-3510-7 Legal deposit second quarter 2009 Bibliothèque nationale du Québec Printed in Canada on acid-free paper that is 100% ancient forest free (100% post-consumer recycled), processed chlorine free. This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Aid to Scholarly Publications Programme, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Funding has also been received from the Laurentian University (Algoma University) Research Fund, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication DiSanto, Michael John, 1975– Under Conrad’s eyes: the novel as criticism / Michael John DiSanto. (McGill-Queen’s studies in the history of ideas; 47) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-7735-3510-7 1. Conrad, Joseph, 1857–1924 – Criticism and interpretation. 2. Criticism. I. Title. II. Series. pr6005.o4z6573 2009

823'.912

c2008-906604-9

This book was typeset by Interscript in 10/12 Baskerville.

For my mother and father

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Contents

Acknowledgments Abbreviations

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xiii

First Publication Dates of Primary Texts

xv

Introduction: Something of an Intellectual

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1 The Dangers of Carlyle’s Heroic Work in Heart of Darkness 33 2 The Despair of Knowing in Bleak House and The Secret Agent 66 3 The Trouble with Sympathy in Middlemarch and Nostromo 96 4 Dostoevky’s Last Confession in Under Western Eyes 5 Living to Die in Lord Jim

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6 Conrad versus Nietzsche versus Christ Conclusion: Future Work Works Cited Index

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Acknowledgments

in the last class of a course on the history of the English novel, which that year fell on April Fools’ Day, I encountered the argument in which this study is rooted. Brian Crick, in a lecture on the dialogue between Conrad and Nietzsche, explored some of the ways in which Conrad extends and combats the intellectual preoccupations of the nineteenth century. I experienced, not for the first or last time in Crick’s presence, “thought kindling itself at the fire of living thought.” His lectures always exemplified “a man in his wholeness wholly attending” and I am bound to him for teaching me to love reading and thinking. I thank my grandparents, my father, and my mother for sending me to university and for their love and support. I thank my sister for much more than I can say here. This work was made possible by the patience, encouragement, faith, and love of my wife, Ching-yi Lin. She made me understand the truth in the statement “it is certain my Conviction gains infinitely, the moment another soul will believe in it.” I thank Rohan Maitzen for her guidance and support while supervising my phd studies. I am grateful to J. Russell Perkin and Ieva Vitins for their criticism while serving on my phd thesis committee. For our conversations about literary criticism, and for making me an offer I could not refuse to pursue my doctoral studies at Dalhousie University, I thank John Baxter. I am deeply indebted to Patricia Menon for reading this work in its various stages of composition. Her criticism and editing were invaluable to me. I am pleased to have my work published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, especially because George Whalley’s Studies in Literature and the Humanities was published there. My gratitude and thanks go to Kyla Madden, the senior deputy editor at McGill-Queen’s, for helping me through every stage of the publication process. My work benefited from

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her comments and guidance. I am also grateful to the readers from McGill-Queen’s whose criticism of my manuscript helped me improve my work. This book is better because of them. My phd degree, of which this book is a product, was funded by doctoral fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Killam Trusts.

Abbreviations

Unless otherwise noted, all italics are in the original texts. Ellipses not found in the original texts are enclosed in square brackets, […]. For full publication details see Works Cited. a bge bh bt c cljc cp eh gs ha hd jcpr lj m n oh pp pr sr st t tsa uwe

The Anti-Christ, Friedrich Nietzsche. Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche. Bleak House, Charles Dickens. The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche. “Characteristics,” Thomas Carlyle. Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, Joseph Conrad Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky. Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche. The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche Human, All Too Human, Friedrich Nietzsche. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad. Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, Ford Madox Ford. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad. Middlemarch, George Eliot. Nostromo, Joseph Conrad. On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, Thomas Carlyle. Past and Present, Thomas Carlyle. A Personal Record, Joseph Conrad. Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle. “Signs of the Times,” Thomas Carlyle. Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche. The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad. Under Western Eyes, Joseph Conrad.

xiv

v wp z

Abbreviations

Victory, Joseph Conrad. The Will to Power, Friedrich Nietzsche. Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche.

First Publication Dates of Primary Texts

1829 1831 1833–34 1841 1843 1845 1849

“Signs of the Times,” Carlyle “Characteristics,” Carlyle Sartor Resartus, Carlyle On Heroes, Hero–Worship, and the Heroic in History, Carlyle Past and Present, Carlyle Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, Carlyle “An Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” (republished in 1853 as “The Nigger Question”), Carlyle 1852–53 Bleak House, Dickens 1856 “The Natural History of German Life,” Eliot 1864 Notes from Underground, Dostoevsky 1866 Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky 1871 The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin 1871–72 Middlemarch, Eliot 1873–81 A Writer’s Diary, Dostoevsky 1878–80 Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche 1882–87 The Gay Science, Nietzsche 1883–85 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (book version 1892), Nietzsche 1886 Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche 1889 Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche 1895 The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche 1899 Heart of Darkness, Conrad 1899–1900 Lord Jim, Conrad 1904 Nostromo, Conrad 1906 The Secret Agent (book version 1907), Conrad 1908 Ecce Homo, Nietzsche 1908–09 A Personal Record (book version 1912), Conrad 1910–11 Under Western Eyes, Conrad 1915 Victory, Conrad

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U N D E R C O N R A D ’S E Y E S

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Introduction: Something of an Intellectual Une de mes petites vanités est de croire que je sais lire. (One of my little vanities is believing that I know how to read) Conrad to André Ruyters, 30 March 1913 (cljc 5, 202)

in joseph conrad: a personal remembrance, Ford Madox Ford writes about the “small, cheerful pleasures” Conrad found in life.1 One of Conrad’s enjoyments while living at Pent, which was furnished by his friend Ford from older family items, was “to write at a Chippendale bureau on which Christina Rossetti had once written or at another which had once belonged to Thomas Carlyle” (jcpr, 39). Later, Ford returns to the subject of Conrad’s love of the bureaus, and recalls that “he would say that Heart of Darkness was written on the same wood as” one of Rossetti’s poems, and the End of the Tether before the glass bookshelves that had seen Carlyle write the French Revolution [sic]. It did not matter that Christina wrote most usually on the corner of her washstand or that Carlyle had bought the desk at a secondhand dealer’s in the street next Tite Street, Chelsea. It made indeed no difference that he disliked the work of Carlyle or thought Christina the greatest master of words in verse […]. But there Heart of Darkness had to have been written, and there the poem; here the End of the Tether, and here The French Revolution … It was like building retrospective castles in Spain, it was squeezing the last drop out of the subject.2

These memories reveal the delight Conrad found in thinking of himself in relation to significant writers of the past. They suggest a 1 jcpr, 39. Ford has been accused of exaggerating his part in the relationship in terms of his collaboration with Conrad; however, there is nothing in the stories of Conrad’s attachment to the bureaus and of Conrad’s extensive reading that would cause Ford to exaggerate them. 2 Ibid., 88–9. Stanley Renner also discusses the importance of the connection in “Sartor Resartus Retailored? Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Peril of Idealism,” 187–9.

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different aspect of Conrad that coexists alongside the writer who told Blackwood “I don’t compare myself with them” when discussing nineteenth-century novelists such as Sir Walter Scott, William Thackeray, and George Eliot (cljc, 2, 418). Later in the same letter, Conrad declared “I am modern,” but that sense of his identity did not preclude him from taking pleasure and a serious interest in the past (cljc 2, 418). Thinking of Conrad using Rossetti’s and Carlyle’s bureaus when writing his works brings into focus a special connection with nineteenthcentury writers. Living close in time to them, Conrad used their everyday things, the furniture that was part of their lives, much as they had. The memory is very suggestive in another sense. The shadows of nineteenth-century writers still enveloped the language and thought of the world in which Conrad wrote his novels. Conrad wasn’t merely using their furniture, but also their much more valuable legacies. The wealth of words and ideas these writers had bequeathed to their readers and to later writers was inherited by the novelist who wrote at their bureaus. Conrad identified himself as modern, but he lived more of his life in the nineteenth century than in the twentieth, both literally and figuratively. In the dedication to H.G. Wells inscribed in The Secret Agent, Conrad describes his novel as a “simple tale of the nineteenth century.” If I may borrow some words from the chief engineer for the railway in Nostromo, “that’s what I call putting the face of a joke upon the body of a truth” (n, 316). While The Secret Agent is, like all his major novels, anything but “simple,” Conrad’s identification of the novel as a “tale of the nineteenth century” should be used as an epigraph for several of his works from Heart of Darkness to Victory. Although the majority of these works were written after the turn of the century, they bear the marks of the earlier intellectual atmosphere. They are products of Conrad’s interest in literature: he was an incredibly well-read man. In A Personal Record, Conrad confesses that “since the age of five I have been a great reader, as is not perhaps wonderful in a child who was never aware of learning to read. At ten years of age I had read much of Victor Hugo and other romantics. I had read in Polish and in French, history, voyages, novels” (pr, 70). At the time of writing his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, in the early 1890s, he thinks it “very likely” he was reading “one of Anthony Trollope’s novels” because his “acquaintance with him was then very recent. He is one of the English novelists whose works I read for the first time in English. With men of European reputation, with Dickens and Walter Scott and Thackeray, it was otherwise” (pr, 71). That is, for these and other English novelists, the first acquaintance occurred much earlier when Conrad read them for the

Introduction

5

first time in French or Polish. His first encounter with Dickens, reading Nicholas Nickleby in Polish, “must have been in the year ’70,” when he was thirteen years old (pr, 71). As if to confirm Conrad’s claims, Ford repeatedly reminds us that Conrad’s life “was a perpetual reading.”3 Not only had he read as a young man when living with his father, the writer and Polish translator of Shakespeare, but he read while living in the house of his uncle and then he “read an inordinate amount” while at sea, including a pocket edition of Shakespeare’s plays.4 Ford emphasizes that, for Conrad, after arriving in England, “it was during all these years that he read” (jcpr, 92). With some amazement, Ford recalls Conrad read “every imaginable and unimaginable volume of politicians’ memoirs” and that his ability to “suddenly produce an incident from the life of Lord Shaftesbury and work it into Nostromo […] was one of the secrets of his greatness” (jcpr, 59). For Ford, “the dominant attraction of Conrad’s mind was the firmness with which he held ideas after he had contemplated a sufficient number of facts or documents. He had had great experience of the life of normal men; his reading had been amazingly wide and his memory was amazingly retentive” (jcpr, 56). Despite his wide reading and invaluable knowledge of literature written in French, English, Polish, and translations of works from other languages, Conrad did not betray this to others.5 Ford explains that “Conrad never presented any appearance of being a bookish, or even a reading man. He might have been anything else: you could have taken fifty guesses at his occupation, from precisely ship’s captain to say financier, but poet or even student would never have been among them and he would have passed without observation in any crowd. He was frequently taken for a horse fancier. He liked that” (jcpr, 56–7). In his life, Conrad concealed the extent of his reading, and, as Jocelyn Baines suggests, he had a “tendency to disguise his indebtedness to books” in his novels.6 And in the process of reading 3 jcpr, 79. In “Reminiscences of Conrad,” John Galsworthy also emphasizes that “Conrad was a most voracious reader” (8). 4 jcpr, 92. Conrad mentions his edition of Shakespeare’s works in A Personal Record. See page 72. 5 Conrad discusses his reading in these languages in A Personal Record, 70–1. 6 Baines, Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography, 294. Conrad tells us very little about his reading in A Personal Record, which Albert Guerard calls “exceptionally evasive” (Conrad the Novelist, 4). It seems that Conrad had, as Guerard suggests, a “strong reluctance to talk about personal matters,” including the extent of his reading (2). In observing that Conrad “covered the tracks of his reading” Peter Kaye reinforces Baines’s statement. See Dostoevsky and English Modernism: 1900–1930, 136.

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and writing, an “indiscernible influence may have been assimilated beyond all recognition” as David Thatcher suggests about readers of Nietzsche.7 Yet, by carefully reading Conrad’s novels, we can begin to recognize that Conrad was, to use Ford’s word, a “student” of literature, especially of the nineteenth century. Conrad absorbed the intellectual and literary atmosphere in which he was born, educated, read, and worked and that experience informs the writing of his novels. In 1985, Frederick Karl published an article entitled “Three Problematical Areas in Conrad Biography” in which he argues that “there are areas in Conrad’s life which are critical for our understanding of him and his work, and yet these very areas lack the necessary documentation or verification.”8 Karl admits that, despite all we know and the significant amount of biographical research that has been conducted, there is a great deal we don’t know about the relationship between Conrad’s life and his work. One of the problem areas Karl identifies is “the question of literary influences on Conrad, an enormous question in itself.”9 Acknowledging that the focus of different attempts to discover Conrad’s knowledge of Polish, French, and English writers has shifted from time to time, Karl reflects on the fact that “we know that his reading while he was on board ships was heavily in English: Shakespeare, of course, but also Dickens, Cooper, Marryat, other English novelists, including George Eliot.”10 Twenty years after Karl’s account, the problems remain. We know Conrad read but do not know the extent of his reading or the specifics of what he read and when he read it. Karl writes as a biographer, but his concerns are relevant for the literary critic as well, especially in terms of this study. About Conrad’s reading, we have little evidence apart from his letters, comments in autobiographical works, and his essays. In contrast to the wealth of commentary we have from Henry James, D.H. Lawrence, or Virginia Woolf, Conrad did not consistently write reviews or critical works on other authors. For instance, in the essays from Notes on Life and Letters and Last Essays, we have Conrad’s comments on a small group of writers including Henry James, Alphonse Daudet, Guy de Maupassant, Anatole France, Turgenev, Stephen Crane, Marryat, John Galsworthy, and some minor figures that amount to very little in comparison with 7 Thatcher, Nietzsche in England, 13. 8 Karl, “Three Problematical Areas in Conrad Biography,” 13. 9 Ibid., 16. 10 Ibid. Karl is emphasizing a fact, not suggesting we ignore Conrad’s reading of French, Polish, Russian and other literatures.

Introduction

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the work of some of his contemporaries. Of the authors included in this study, Conrad rarely mentions any by name in the surviving letters from his correspondence, Notes on Life and Letters, Last Essays, Mirror of the Sea, or A Personal Record. Darwin is never named. Conrad names Dickens once in a letter to George Gissing on 21 December 1902 in referring to “a Christmas Tale,” but the eleven other references are confined to allusions to Dickens novels including Bleak House, The Old Curiosity Shop, The Pickwick Papers, Nicholas Nickleby, and Our Mutual Friend.11 In the essay “Poland Revisited,” Conrad writes of an office that was “Dickensian,” but the longest discussion of Dickens is found in A Personal Record when Conrad describes his admiration of Dickens’s work, especially Bleak House.12 Nietzsche is named or alluded to in six letters beginning in July 1899 and ending in March of 1913, most significantly when Conrad condemns his “mad individualism” and identifies him as one of the “great minds.”13 Also, he names Nietzsche in the attack on German foreign policy and politics in “The Crime of Partition,” published in 1919.14 Dostoevsky is named or alluded to seven times beginning in July 1911 and ending in December 1921.15 These often-quoted comments 11 See the following letters of 6 November 1896 to Edward Garnett (cljc 1, 313–14), 20 October 1898 to Ford Madox Ford (cljc 2, 110–11), 21 December 1902 to George Gissing (cljc 2, 464–5), 1 November 1903 to John Galsworthy (cljc 3, 71), 8 October 1907 to the Daily Mail (cljc 3, 493–5), 6 January 1908 to John Galsworthy (cljc 4, 8–12), (?) September 1909 to Stephen Reynolds (cljc 4, 274–5), 15 February 1911 to Warrington Dawson (cljc 4, 413–14), 16 February 1912 to Eden Phillpotts (cljc 5, 22–3), 14 January 1913 to Norman Douglas (cljc 5, 162–3), 9 December 1913 to J.B. Pinker (cljc 5, 310–11), and 28 November 1923 to Eric S. Pinker (cljc 8, 231). 12 Conrad, Notes on Life and Letters, 152; pr, 124. 13 cljc 2, 188; cljc 5, 204. The letters are dated 22 July 1899 to Helen Sanderson (cljc 2, 188), 29 October 1899 and 9 November 1899 to Edward Garnett (cljc 2, 208–10, 218), 23 July 1901 to Ford Madox Ford (cljc 2, 343–5), 16 April 1909 to J.G. Huneker (cljc 4, 217–18) and 30 March 1913 to André Ruyters (cljc 5, 202–4). 14 Conrad, Notes on Life and Letters, 125. 15 The letters are dated 18 July 1911 to Garnett (cljc 4, 459–60), 26 December 1911 to Jacques Copeau (cljc 4, 526–7), 27 May 1912 to Garnett (cljc 5, 70–1), 23 February 1914 to Garnett (cljc 5, 358–9), April 1917 to Garnett (cljc 6, 77–9), and 12 December 1921 to Garnett (cljc 7, 398–9). There is also an allusion to a passage from Dostoevsky in a letter dated 9 February 1913 to John Quinn (cljc 5, 175–6).

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include Conrad’s sardonic remark that Dostoevsky is “too Russian for me” (cljc 5, 71). Carlyle is named three times and George Eliot is named twice. Invoking the idea of earnestness in relation to the work of writing, Conrad compares himself with Carlyle in a flattering way by joking that the writing of the history of Frederick the Great was merely the work of a “volatile butterfly.”16 He also mentions borrowing Froude’s two-volume biography of Carlyle from Sidney Colvin, demonstrating an interest in Carlyle’s life (cljc 6, 158). In the first of two letters to Blackwood, Conrad suggests that Margaret Oliphant is a “better artist” than George Eliot, and in the second he declines to compare himself to Eliot because he is “modern.”17 Counting the number of references to specific writers in a collection of letters is not a measure of their importance in Conrad’s thought. However, in every case, the often brief comments do suggest knowledge of their work. Also, works by all of the writers, most importantly Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, were available to Conrad to read in English or French or both.18 Because of Conrad’s evasiveness, he avoided making comments in letters such as “My dearest Edward, After reading your article, I read Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy” or “I’m thinking of Nietzsche’s theory of knowledge in Lord Jim.” That Conrad does not make these comments or discuss the writers at length in his letters does not prove a lack of knowledge or allow us to dismiss the possibility that he knew their works very well, perhaps as well as he knew Dickens. And though we have what may seem like an enormous amount of Conrad’s writing, we cannot forget that much else in the form of letters, rough notes, and conversations is lost. Conrad had no Boswell to record his life and conversation. Having a written record of Conrad’s reading or a 16 cljc 4, 112. See the letters dated 18 July 1901 to J.B. Pinker (cljc 2, 320), 28 August 1908 to Edward Garnett (cljc 4, 111–13), and 30 December 1917 to Sidney Colvin (cljc 6, 158–9). 17 See the letters to William Blackwood dated 4 September 1897 (cljc 1, 379) and 31 May 1902 (cljc 2, 415–18). Of course, this short collection cannot claim to be complete. Some allusions may be difficult to identify or simply missed altogether. 18 See Peter Kaye’s introduction to Dostoevsky and English Modernism for some discussion of the French and English editions of Dostoevsky’s works. According to David Thatcher, a substantial selection of Nietzsche’s works was translated into English or French between 1896 and 1900. Details of the dates are given in a chart in the beginning of his book.

Introduction

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catalogue of the books in his library would be exceptionally helpful and certainly enlightening but is not absolutely necessary to the exploration of his dialogues with his predecessors.19 The best evidence of Conrad’s reading is in the language, style, and structure of his novels, however difficult it is to identify the echoes of and allusions to other writers. For instance, despite the common assumption that Conrad read Dostoevsky, one that I share, we have no documentary evidence he did so until, after writing Under Western Eyes, he exchanged some letters about Constance Garnett’s translation of The Brothers Karamazov with Constance and Edward Garnett.20 Conrad’s works were immediately compared with those of Dostoevsky because all things Russian were the rage in England at the beginning of the twentieth century, none more so than Dostoevsky.21 Never once does Conrad mention Crime and Punishment, but that is the novel commonly compared with Under Western Eyes. Despite these problems, the comparison of Dostoevsky and Conrad continues on the understanding that the latter must have read the former, given the evidence in the novel. Because we don’t have a written record of when he read Dostoevsky’s novels, much of our understanding may be categorized as speculation, but I cannot imagine that any serious Conrad scholar would deny the connection at the present time. The tradition is already firmly established by major scholars in the field over a century. Critical traditions are important because they partly determine what is thought and said about a writer, especially by educated readers, but these traditions should always be open to challenge and expansion, especially when we consider how much we do not know about Conrad.

19 In Joseph Conrad’s Reading: An Annotated Bibliography, David Tutein has collected a wealth of information regarding a vast number of works Conrad is thought to have read. This kind of work is valuable and partly depends on the work of critics to recognize connections between Conrad and other writers. 20 According to Conrad, he “finished the revise” of Under Western Eyes on 11 May 1910 (cljc 4, 328). The first time Conrad names Dostoevsky in a letter is 18 July 1911 when he tells Edward Garnett that “I am immensely excited about your wife’s trans: of Dostoievski” [sic] (cljc 4, 460). 21 Peter Kaye notes that, in a 1902 review, Edward Garnett compares Heart of Darkness with Crime and Punishment (130).

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While many essays on Conrad’s links to Dostoevsky have been published, the same cannot be said of Conrad’s relationship to Carlyle.22 For a moment, imagine that a reader stumbled across Ford’s passing comments about Conrad’s pleasure in writing at Carlyle’s bureau and Conrad’s interest in politician’s memoirs and letters, and knew that Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches was by Carlyle. Assume that Carlyle’s reputation in 1924 was as popular as Dostoevsky’s ten years earlier and the reader published an article revealing this important fact and compared Carlyle’s work with Conrad’s. Had that happened, today we might be discussing the echoes of Carlyle’s introduction on “Anti-Dryasdust” history found in Heart of Darkness. We might be discussing Conrad’s shared interest in Carlyle’s preoccupation with history and memory, which is the focus of his remarks about the records of heroism as “scattered waste as a shoreless chaos[…] full of every conceivable confusion; – yielding light to very few; yielding darkness, in several sorts, to very many.”23 Some difficult questions might be raised about how Conrad transforms Carlyle’s metaphors about history as a dark continent of forest and jungle into the setting for Marlow’s journey “down deep to the beginnings of the History of Man”24 to meet the degenerate hero Kurtz: “Dreariest continent of shot-rubbish the eye ever saw. Confusion piled on confusion to your utmost horizon’s edge: obscure, in lurid twilight as of the shadow of Death; trackless, without index, without finger-post, or mark of any human forgoer; – where your human footstep, if you are still human, echoes bodeful through the gaunt solitude, peopled only by somnambulant Pedants, Dilettantes, and doleful creatures, by Phantasms, errors, inconceivabilities, by Nightmares.”25 There might be a general recognition of how Conrad’s grove of death and Conrad’s representation of the Africans contain remarkable echoes of this passage: “what is it, all this Rushworthian inarticulate rubbish-continent, in its ghastly dim twilight, with its haggard wrecks and pale shadows; what is it, but the common Kingdom of Death? This is what we call Death, this 22 This relationship has been discussed at length and in detail in only a few places since 1972. For instance, see Alison Hopwood, V.J. Emmett, Stanley Renner, and Alan Hunter. The lack of interest in exploring this relationship is probably connected to the poor reputation that Carlyle has had since at least the time of the First World War rather than to arguments demonstrating there is no connection to explore. 23 Carlyle, Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, 2. 24 Ibid., 7. 25 Ibid., 3.

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mouldering dumb wilderness of things once alive. Behold here the final evanescence of Formed human things; they had form, but they are changing into sheer formlessness; – ancient human speech itself has sunk into unintelligible maundering.”26 Surely, if these kinds of connections were discussed as commonly as those between Conrad and Dostoevsky, our understanding of Heart of Darkness would be very different. By this time, some three-quarters of a century would have passed in which other readers could have explored new implications of the relationship, as has been happening with Conrad and Dostoevsky for nearly a century. The history of criticism of Conrad’s work might be very different after years of discussing how Marlow’s thought is informed by the style and thought of Carlyle. The same kind of observations could be made regarding Dickens, George Eliot, and Nietzsche. Because Conrad doesn’t write prefaces to his novels or send letters to his correspondents that include painstaking accounts of all his literary influences, it falls to his readers to explore the possible links. An argument that Conrad must have known about the writers because their ideas were in the air is unnecessary here. As Carlyle argues repeatedly, so much of history, personal and public, is lost to us that we can only make our best attempt to reconstruct the past with the materials that we have: in this case, the language and thought of the novels constitute the best evidence available to make a case for the conversations between Conrad the other writers. There are hardly ever explicit signals in his novels, except for the rare mention of Carlyle in “Youth” or Dickens in Chance, to indicate to us what he has in mind when writing.27 Rather than looking for obvious signals, a sensitivity to language and thought is required. Throughout this study, a careful attention to language and structure is used to trace the connections that Conrad makes to other writers in his novels. Resistance to alternative ideas or ways of reading that do not correspond to contemporary conventions may present a certain kind of difficulty; however, the work undertaken here provides some compelling evidence to provoke a renewed interest in Conrad’s relationship with the nineteenth century. Despite my conviction that Conrad has both read and is in dialogue with these writers, I have chosen to be suggestive rather than conclusive in making my case. This undoubtedly adds an occasional uncouthness to my style. Perhaps the best solution is to repeat the argument used by Peter Kaye, only the most recent critic to profess a lack of sufficient 26 Ibid., 10. 27 Conrad, “Youth,” 97, Chance, 141.

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Under Conrad’s Eyes

knowledge to make judgments concerning Conrad’s knowledge of other writers while simultaneously presenting the overwhelming evidence he collects to the contrary: “though the evidence of his creative response to his Russian rival is necessarily circumstantial, a compelling case based on similarities of subject matter, plot, theme, and language can be made to show the impact Dostoevsky had on Conrad’s fiction.”28 The disclaimer of making a compelling case using strong circumstantial evidence can be extended to include all the authors in this study. This raises an important literary critical question: When does evidence, in the form of specific language and thought from the novels, cease to be circumstantial and become accepted? Another way of arguing the same point is to say that Conrad’s novels would not have been possible without the work of the earlier writers. When discussing the hero as man of letters, Carlyle says that such a writer “had to travel without highway, companionless, through an inorganic chaos, – and to leave his own life and faculty lying there, as a partial contribution towards pushing some highway through it” (oh, 146). This is the path of many writers who strike off in new or exceptional directions from their predecessors and later become the provocation for writers who strike out in other directions. Today, we know that Conrad prepares the way for F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, and Virginia Woolf, among others, and that they take up his questions in their own works. They are in dialogue with him and the one major difference is that they reveal the existence of the dialogue through their explicit admiration. Fitzgerald declares, “this fellow Conrad seems to be pretty good after all.”29 When visiting the Kent countryside, Faulkner wrote to his mother, “no wonder Joseph Conrad could write fine books here.”30 After reading his novels yet again to write a review, Woolf wrote that he “is a much better writer than all of us put together.”31 Unlike his successors, he kept his silence. The writers I am identifying as some of Conrad’s major predecessors are exactly that because they prepare a way for Conrad. They are the first explorers of the questions Conrad takes up and the first questioners of the problems he poses. They influence and shape the language in ways that allow Conrad to add his particular contributions to it. Very few readers would dispute that Austen 28 Kaye, Dostoevsky and English Modernism, 136. 29 Turnbull, The Letters of F. Scott Fitzgerald, 144. 30 Blotner, Selected Letters of William Faulkner, 30. 31 Nicolson and Trautmann, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, Volume 3: 1923– 1928, 62.

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prepares the way for George Eliot, who in turn prepares the way for Henry James. Even if Conrad hadn’t read some of the authors discussed here, which is so unlikely as to be inconceivable, he necessarily falls into conversation with them because they are already doing some of his work, in embryo. Their work anticipates his, makes it possible. Conrad renews and extends their thought by revisiting the problems in his novels. Although Leavis’s criticism is decidedly unfashionable these days, and The Great Tradition has been relegated to the dustbin of history by those who dismiss his work as elitist and exclusive, his arguments remain vital because he challenges us to recognize the continuities and discontinuities among writers. His discussion of the dialogue between Daniel Deronda and The Portrait of a Lady is thought-provoking and suggestive because he explores the transposition of ideas, characters, form, and structure from one novel to another. Although he has James’s critical dialogue on Daniel Deronda as evidence in his case, Leavis’s primary evidence comes from the language and structure of the novels. He doesn’t appeal to letters or records of James’s reading. The evidence, he shows us, is there in the novels for anyone to see. Because that discussion is long established, there is no resistance from critics; it is, in a sense, common knowledge. What if critics had taken up Edward Said’s comments, made in 1974, calling for an examination of the relationship between Conrad and Nietzsche? By this time, part of my work might be extending an existing critical tradition, but very few critics have answered that call.32 By reading Conrad in dialogue with some of his major predecessors, this work shares some similarities with Donald Stone’s criticism in Communications with the Future: Matthew Arnold in Dialogue, in which he identifies Arnold’s work as dialogic in nature and then explores the connections between the English critic and a number of other writers. Recognizing the dialogues that Conrad enters into not only helps to reveal his relationship to past literature, but also prepares the way to study how later writers enter into dialogues with his work. My study is timely for a number of reasons. Given the recent publications of works such as Rob Breton’s Gospels and Grit: Work and Labour in Carlyle, Conrad, and Orwell and Peter Kaye’s Dostoevsky and English Modernism: 1900–1930, there appears to be a strong interest in studying Conrad’s novels as critical texts. Neither study makes Conrad a major focus, but both recognize that novels such as Heart of Darkness and Under Western Eyes are critical texts in which Conrad is in dialogue with the ideas and forms used by other writers. Both critics show that Conrad’s work 32 For instance, see Nic Panagopoulos and George Butte.

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Under Conrad’s Eyes

grows out of significant nineteenth-century intellectual traditions. One important difference between their work and mine is the focus on specific works in dialogue throughout this study. Here, Conrad is the major focus. In a way, this study reverses the structure employed by Kaye: rather than exploring the significant responses of several writers to an important nineteenth-century novelist, my study explores the significant responses of one novelist to several nineteenth-century writers: each writer serves as an “interlocutor” for Conrad.33 His critical rethinking of their works not only allows us to overhear “self-revealing dialogues,” but we also gain significant insights into the art and thought of the other writers.34 In Breton’s book, there is no real dialogue between Carlyle and Conrad because he includes no detailed examination of passages in their works. Because the specific comparative work is lacking, Breton assumes that Conrad’s philosophy of work differs little from Carlyle without presenting good evidence and asserts that Conrad is comfortable with a devotion to leaders and an authoritarian society despite the complexities in the representations of figures such as Kurtz, Jim, Peter Ivanovitch, and others.35 Through detailed comparative work, the complexity of Conrad’s reworking of the other writers is seen more clearly. The idea of the novel as criticism is rooted in the thought of D.H. Lawrence, Leavis, and Ian Robinson. For instance, in The Survival of English, Robinson argues that “the creative energy in George Eliot, Dickens, Tolstoy, Stendhal is concentrated on criticism of the age.”36 More recently, writers working in literature and philosophy, such as Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty, among others, have read novels as critical texts and shown that they explore a broad range of ideas.37 The focus on “the novel’s triumph over other ways of imagining the world” and the genre as a “living form” are central to Nussbaum’s arguments about the novel as criticism.38 Nussbaum occasionally uses critical ideas that recall the arguments, made by D.H. Lawrence and F.R. Leavis, rejecting

33 Kaye, Dostoevsky and English Modernism, 194. 34 Ibid. 35 Breton, Gospels and Grit, 98, 111. 36 Robinson, The Survival of English, 230. 37 See Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity and Martha Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: Literary Imagination and Public Life and Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. 38 Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, 3, 6.

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a false art/life dichotomy and identifying “the highest example of subtle inter-relatedness” in the form of the novel. She argues that literary texts are “occasion[s] for a complex activity of searching and understanding.”39 Typically, Rorty and Nussbaum are preoccupied with philosophical matters and, at times, make use of novels to substantiate certain claims made by theories, not recognizing the extent to which novels may challenge such theories.40 To some degree, my work has a closer affinity to Samuel Goldberg’s work in Agents and Lives: Moral Thinking in Literature, in which he explores how literature can “enact a process of moral thinking.”41 In his chapters on George Eliot, Goldberg demonstrates the kinds of responsive thinking “answering to the thinking of the novel” that we can recognize in Conrad’s novels.42 Goldberg often focuses on the “distinctiveness [that] lies in being open, potential, responsive to new and fuller experience of the world” in exploring how we read characters and the novel as a whole.43 The critical dialogues Conrad writes into the novels embody the notion of a “responsive insight, one capable of answering to” the fullness of existence found in the language and thought of other writers.44 I assent to Goldberg’s deep sense that “thinking in the novel [is] so difficult to untangle.”45 I am also offering a way of reading Conrad that differs from the dominant discussion pervading at the present time. Postcolonial readings of Conrad’s works have all but monopolized the critical discussion in

39 D.H. Lawrence, “Morality and the Novel,” 528; Nussbaum, Love’s Knowledge, 6. Nussbaum acknowledges the importance of Leavis and Lionel Trilling as literary critics who explore the kinds of questions she raises in Love’s Knowledge. For instance, see pages 21–2 and 190–1. I am unsure whether or not Nussbaum has read Lawrence’s essays, but Leavis’s criticism is a development of Lawrence’s critical thought, so the indebtedness may be indirect. 40 See Goldberg’s criticism of Nussbaum, Rorty, Cora Diamond, Bernard Williams, Alasdair McIntyre, and other writers preoccupied with the relationship between philosophy and theory in the last chapter of his book. 41 Goldberg, Agents and Lives, 22. See Goldberg’s complex consideration of morals and morality in the first two chapters. 42 Ibid., 74. 43 Ibid., 176. 44 Ibid., 108. 45 Ibid., 151.

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Under Conrad’s Eyes

recent years.46 Rather than read Conrad from an early twenty-first century perspective, we should explore Conrad’s early twentieth-century view of his major predecessors. Examining Conrad’s thought against the background of the writers he was grappling with offers an alternative reading of Conrad’s art that breaks from this kind of discussion while remaining relevant to the questions raised by postcolonial readings. There is a serious danger that if the range of criticism of a writer is too narrowly defined, then the criticism will fail to attend to alternative or potentially dissenting perspectives, especially the author’s own. Conrad’s prophetic vision of our culture is a product of his profound understanding of the ideas he inherited from the nineteenth century which continue to live in our culture today. Readers should consider Conrad’s thoughts about the age in which he lived and the authors that he read, reversing the kinds of argument offered in Kaplan, Mallios and White, Conrad in the Twenty-First Century: Contemporary Approaches and Perspectives. Throughout my study, Conrad’s novels are read as critical texts in which he writes sustained meditations on the questions and ideas that preoccupied some of his major nineteenth-century predecessors. Having read a vast amount of literature, Conrad reworks, refashions, and rewrites different aspects of the thought of various authors in Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, and Victory. These novels are a series of complex critical dialogues and demonstrate Conrad’s profound preoccupation with the characteristic questions and ideas that inform the writings of several of his predecessors: Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Charles Darwin, and Friedrich Nietzsche. The novels embody a complex form of literary criticism in which Conrad repeatedly revisits and reworks the characteristic language and thought of these writers. The novels demonstrate a profound understanding of the ideas and forms that inform his predecessors’ works. When reading his 46 Titles of recently published books on Conrad provide ample evidence for this claim: Terry Collits, Postcolonial Conrad: Paradoxes of Empire; Byron CamineroSantangelo, African Fiction and Joseph Conrad: Reading Postcolonial Intertextuality; Stephen Ross, Conrad and Empire; David Adams, Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel; Gail Fincham and Attie M. de Lange with Wieslaw Krajka, eds, Conrad at the Millennium: Modernism, Postmodernism, Postcolonialism; Adriaan M. de Lange and Gail Fincham, eds, Conrad in Africa: New Essays on Heart of Darkness. For instance, Byron Caminero-Santangelo reads Conrad from the perspective of postcolonial novels to reveal the complex ways in which Conrad’s fiction has been assimilated by African novelists.

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novels beside the writings of others, the works become mutually illuminating. Certain aspects of Conrad’s thought become significant or more meaningful and certain aspects of the other writer’s thought are read differently than before. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad writes a critical reconsideration of Carlyle and his ideas about the health and sickness of culture, heroes and heroworship, and the importance of work. The profound ambivalence in the relationship between Marlow and Kurtz is an indication of Conrad’s unease with and equivocation toward Carlyle. Conrad questions whether the prescriptions Carlyle offers for the diseased signs of the times have become causes of illness. The novel offers a revaluation of Carlyle in which Conrad explores the profound influence and potential dangers of Carlyle’s ideas. Finding a style and form in which to write was a major difficulty for both writers, who struggled to voice their criticism of the signs of the times, and their problems resulted in the complex frame structures of Sartor Resartus and Heart of Darkness. Although the focus is limited to a discussion of Heart of Darkness, Conrad’s preoccupation with Carlyle continues into later works. In Lord Jim, Conrad again uses a complex frame structure to explore the ideas of heroes and hero-worship, the importance of work, and faith and skepticism, among others. In Nostromo, the preoccupation with history and the “biography of one of our great men” recalls Carlyle, and in Under Western Eyes, Tekla’s comment that “great men are horrible” suggests that Conrad is yet again in dialogue with Carlyle (n, 180; uwe, 165). The Secret Agent is an impressive rewriting of Dickens’s Bleak House, which Conrad tells us is “a work of the master for which I have such an admiration, or rather such an intense and unreasoning affection, dating from the days of my childhood, that its very weaknesses are more precious to me than the strength of other men’s work.”47 The two writers share a preoccupation with the complex relationship between knowing and not knowing and the novels are written as inquiries into understanding how knowing can be a form of negating thought. Questions regarding the balance of strength between the will to know and the will not to know are written into the grammar and style of the novels, especially in the characters of Esther, Jo, Stevie, and Winnie Verloc. The detective narratives are used to explore the relationship between knowing and work as Dickens traces the life of the powerful Inspector Bucket and Conrad shows us how Inspector Heat and the Assistant Commissioner avoid the 47 pr, 124. Conrad continues by revealing “I have read it numerous times, both in Polish and English; I have read it only the other day” (124).

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Under Conrad’s Eyes

painful aspects of their work. In The Secret Agent, Conrad transposes many significant characters and scenes, the most important of which are the refashioning of Lady Dedlock into Winnie Verloc and Jo the street sweeper into Stevie. In many ways, Conrad performs another kind of transposition of characters and ideas from Middlemarch into Nostromo. The reconstructed counterparts of many of George Eliot’s characters can be found in Conrad’s novel, for instance, Dorothea Brooke and Emilia Gould, the doctors Lydgate and Monygham, and the dilettantes Ladislaw and Decoud. Both authors write inquiries into the private and public lives of the characters as a way of demonstrating the fragmentation of the community and the difficulties of true human sympathy. In both novels the opposition of egoism and sympathy is undermined, making the antithesis difficult to distinguish clearly. Conrad reworks some of Eliot’s characteristic scenes, such as when Lydgate and Rosamond are engaged, in the dialogues between Emilia and Charles Gould and then Decoud and Antonia, offering a different treatment of a similar subject. In Conrad’s thought, Eliot’s preoccupation with isolation and the failure of human fellowship is taken to an extreme in Decoud’s and Nostromo’s desperate adventure with the silver. In Under Western Eyes, which has long been recognized as a critical rewriting of Dostoevsky’s characteristic concerns, especially those of Crime and Punishment, Conrad writes a critical reassessment of the confession, a fundamental element of Dostoevsky’s fiction. Through a complicated frame structure in which the narrator relies on a mixture of direct observation and documentation in the form of writings by Razumov and Peter Ivanovitch, Conrad raises questions about Dostoevsky’s idealization of some of his female characters who embody his religious beliefs. Conrad confounds Dostoevsky’s distinction between ordinary and extraordinary men, replaying an important concern in Carlyle. A careful comparison of the confessions in the two novels demonstrates that Conrad sees the act of confession as both self-preserving and self-destructive. One of the fundamental problems informing the design of Lord Jim is the relationship between self-preservation and self-destruction, a central concern for Darwin and Nietzsche. Anticipating the later attempts to formulate a binary opposition between self-preservation and self-destruction undertaken by Freud, Conrad confounds the relationships between antithetical terms, demonstrating that our perception of ideas in opposition often ignores their identity and providing a remarkably thoughtful response to key problems in Darwin’s and Nietzsche’s thought. Stein can be read as a kind of caricature of the methods employed in constructing

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typologies. By obscuring any clear distinction between self-preservation and self-sacrifice, Conrad makes it impossible to judge the end of Jim’s life with any certainty, thereby raising questions about our ability to distinguish between opposing actions or ideas. The profound ambivalence of Conrad’s response to Nietzsche is written into Victory, Lord Jim, and The Secret Agent. The relationship between Heyst and his father reveals something of the nature of Conrad’s thought about Nietzsche. In the words of Heyst’s father, Conrad reproduces the scathing contempt for belief and pity found throughout Nietzsche’s writings. In Jim and Stevie, Conrad writes a critique of the antithetical relationship between Dionysus and Christ that is central to Nietzsche’s late writings, especially The Anti-Christ and Ecce Homo. Through the representation of the two characters, Conrad collapses Nietzsche’s antithesis, making it difficult to differentiate between the characteristics of Dionysus and Christ. Although Nietzsche had a masterful understanding of antithetical terms as opposite and identical, Conrad reveals that Nietzsche’s thought was not sharp enough to save from falling into the error of thinking in opposites himself. Although various critics have commented on connections between Conrad’s novels and the works of the earlier writers, I have come to realize that we are far from a full understanding of Conrad’s relationships with his predecessors. An important consideration is that “what one great original artist learns from another, whose genius and problems are necessarily very different, is the hardest kind of ‘influence’ to define, even when we see it to have been of the profoundest importance.”48 As Leavis indicates by placing the word in quotation marks, the word “influence” does not really express the essence of the problem: the dialogue that occurs between any two writers is highly complex, a mixture of any number of sympathies and antipathies, agreements and disagreements, understandings and misunderstandings. This study, therefore, is and is not a study of influence. While Conrad’s indebtedness to his predecessors is acknowledged throughout, the primary focus is on Conrad’s complex and critical responses to other writers.49 Perhaps it goes without saying that the existence of a response means that Conrad must have been influenced, but the novels show that Conrad is grappling with the language and thought of other writers. 48 Leavis, The Great Tradition, 18–19. 49 Harold Bloom often discusses the relationships among authors in terms of more or less strong misreadings. For instance, see the chapters on Freud and Joyce in The Western Canon.

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Under Conrad’s Eyes

In part, my study might be read as implicitly offering an answer to the question that Yves Hervouet raises, “Why did Conrad borrow so extensively?” but it pursues a different line of inquiry by focusing on Conrad’s novels as criticism. How one answers the question depends on one’s understanding of the nature of influence and inspiration, the purposes for and uses of fiction, the creative and critical activities that result in the writing of a novel, and the relationships between the reading of another’s thoughts and the making of one’s own. In short, it has much to do with how one perceives Conrad’s participation in an intellectual and literary tradition that he extends, counters, and combats. Exploring the range and significance of what he terms Conrad’s “borrowings” from a number of literary predecessors, Hervouet concludes that it is “abundantly clear that Conrad knew exactly what he was doing, and that we are faced with a deliberate method of composition.”50 I agree, and throughout I inquire into the significance of Conrad’s grappling with other writer’s thoughts, but I think it is reductive to characterize Conrad’s writing as an act of “appropriation” in which he “systematically exploited his favourite writers.”51 This language suggests that there is something dishonest and underhanded in Conrad’s work, as if his art is comparable to an unethical corporate misuse of natural resources for pecuniary ends. On the contrary, though Conrad does not openly declare his intellectual debts, there is no reason to think that he did not expect readers to overhear and to understand his dialogues with other writers. I am inclined to agree with Albert Guerard that “Conrad was wise not to supply too many clues to novels which are mysteries for the reader to explore.”52 It is hardly a fault that the ideas are transformed extensively when we find them in Conrad’s fiction and it has taken much work to trace even a few of the connections that we have in some cases just begun to recognize and have yet to fully understand: “Some books must be read more strenuously than others.”53 This indicates the kind of rich intellectual experience and range of knowledge required of readers to keep pace with Conrad’s remarkable intelligence. Whatever Conrad took from other writers, it is transfigured in his complex and intricate thought, becoming his own in a way that belies the analogy that Hervouet repeatedly makes with Coleridge’s “plagiarism.”54 50 Hervouet, “Why Did Conrad Borrow so Extensively?”, 737. 51 Hervouet, “Aspects of Flaubertian Influence on Conrad’s Fiction,” 206. 52 Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, 2. 53 Ibid., 210. 54 Hervouet, “Aspects of Flaubertian Influence on Conrad’s Fiction,” 207; “Why Did Conrad Borrow so Extensively?”, 741.

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The precise value of Hervouet’s psychological explanations for Conrad’s “method of composition” is debatable, but I am inclined to think that we cannot answer Hervouet’s question without carefully attending to the 19 June 1896 letter from Conrad to Edward Garnett. In it, Conrad tells Garnett that “to be able to think and unable to express is a fine torture” and confesses “I am frightened when I remember that I have to drag it all out of myself” (cljc 1, 288). Revealing the nature of the trouble, Conrad explains that Other writers have some starting point. Something to catch hold of. They start from an anecdote – from a newspaper paragraph (a book may be suggested by a casual sentence in an old almanac). They lean on dialect – or on tradition – or on history – or on the prejudice or fad of the hour; they trade upon some tie or some conviction of their time – or upon the absence of these things – which they can abuse or praise. But at any rate they know something to begin with – while I don’t. I have had some impressions, some sensations – in my time: – impressions and sensations of common things. And it’s all faded […]. (cljc 1, 288–9)

With this in mind, I think it very likely that Conrad repeatedly finds a beginning in the works of the writers he reads and rewrites them in making his novels. As Baines suggests, “these books only supplied the raw material with which [Conrad] built the edifice.”55 Nowhere does Conrad uncritically reproduce the language and thought of his predecessors; he transforms and transfigures them in making his novels which dramatize his remarkable and complex inquiries into the intellectual inheritance bequeathed to him. To say that Conrad admired one writer or repudiated another writer is not sufficient. Instead, the writing of the novels should be recognized as a process of exploration in which Conrad is developing his criticism, exercising his intelligence, and answering the questions raised by the earlier writers. The dialogue does not exist prior to the writing of a novel but finds a form only in the language of the novel. The works are living records of Conrad’s attempts at having conversations with other writers. To borrow an idea from George Whalley, Conrad’s writing is radically heuristic. As Whalley explains, there is “no [English] verb to match the Greek heuriskein – a busy, seeking word for which ‘pursue’ is no substitute and of which ‘research’ gives no inkling.”56 When Whalley calls for “a philosophy of heuristics,” he says we need “a study of the 55 Baines, Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography, 297. 56 Whalley, Studies in Literature and the Humanities, n16, 258.

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ways we hunt for and find out things when we aren’t certain what we are looking for.”57 Conrad’s work embodies this hunting or searching after uncertainties. Arguably, the novels manifest Conrad’s attempts to find ways to enter into conversations with the ideas and forms of previous writers. If writing is making, an idea Whalley explores in his commentary on Aristotle’s Poetics, then there is also an element of remaking in Conrad’s dialogues with other writers. If one purpose of writing is to make meaning, to realize a meaning that did not exist prior to the act of writing, then the writing of the novels is Conrad’s attempt to make meaning out of his reading, to explore possible answers to the questions that previous writers raised and he inherited.58 Writing letters to dead authors was not an option and Conrad was not interested in making a career as an essayist. We should be thankful, because the essays do not manifest the same searching intelligence that we find in his novels. Throughout my work, I have kept in mind Whalley’s notion of the novelist as one “who lives in an imaginative universe that is rooted in life and the ways of human life; but his universe is also haunted by words, shaped by utterances.”59 Conrad’s novels demonstrate the truth of Whalley’s observation because they are seemingly “haunted” by the allusions to and echoes of the words written by others. One valuable observation from Bakhtin’s arguments about the critical aspect of Dostoevsky’s art applies just as well to Conrad’s: [He] possessed an extraordinary gift for hearing the dialogue of an epoch, or, more precisely, for hearing his epoch as a great dialogue, for detecting in it logic relationship [sic] among voices, their dialogic interaction. He heard both the loud, recognized, reigning voices of the epoch, that is, the reigning dominant ideas (official and unofficial), as well as voices still weak, ideas not yet fully emerged, latent ideas heard as yet by no one but himself, and ideas that were just beginning to ripen, embryos of future worldviews.60

In his novels, Conrad explores many ideas that have been the subjects of profound meditations by other writers. Like Dickens, Dostoevsky, 57 Ibid., 99. 58 See Whalley’s discussion of writing and making in his introduction to his translation of Aristotle’s Poetics in Studies in Literature and the Humanities, chapter 2. The essay is also included in Whalley’s translation entitled Aristotle’s Poetics. 59 Whalley, Studies in Literature and the Humanities, 150. 60 Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, 90.

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and Eliot, Conrad has a special capacity for writing and dramatizing many voices in co-operation and competition, sympathy and solitude. Having heard so many different voices, Conrad is “haunted” by them. By alluding repeatedly to the tower of Babel in Bleak House, Dickens signals to readers that he is preoccupied with conversation, or the lack thereof, among his characters. Conrad inherited Dickens’s sense of the dramatic possibilities inherent in the play of voices that are and are not speaking to one another. Throughout Conrad’s art, the conversations, whether written or spoken, are often forced dialogues.61 I am never sure whether Conrad imagines himself more as a person forced to hear others speak or as a person forced to write. Most likely, it is a combination of the two. The best analogy may be to compare Conrad’s thought about writing to the aspect of Marlow’s life wherein he is compelled to listen to Jim and compelled to tell Jim’s story, again and again, like the ancient mariner in Coleridge’s poem, who was telling his own story. Another analogy is found in Razumov’s life: he is compelled by Haldin to listen and by Mikulin to write. A characteristic moment in Conrad’s thinking can be recognized in the style of this exchange between Mikulin and Razumov: Again Councillor Mikulin glanced down his beard with a faint grimace; but he did not pause for long. Remarking with a shade of scorn that blasphemers also had that sort of belief, he concluded by supposing that Mr. Razumov had conversed frequently with Haldin on the subject. “No,” said Razumov loudly, without looking up. “He talked and I listened. That is not a conversation.” “Listening is a great art,” observed Mikulin parenthetically. “And getting people to talk is another,” mumbled Razumov. (uwe, 67)

In some way analogous to the forced conversations which characters such as Marlow and Razumov must endure, Conrad seems to be compelled to listen to the many conflicting ideas expressed by his literary predecessors and write in response to them. Having been forced to listen to Haldin’s confession, Razumov begins writing a confession. That is, he responds in kind, so that being compelled to listen is interconnected with the compulsion to write. Also, there is undoubtedly something important in the fact that Conrad learned to read through “the process of being trained in the art of reading aloud” by his father, “an admirable reader” who was “the 61 This is one of the most important arguments in Aaron Fogel’s Coercion To Speak. See especially chapters 1 and 5.

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most exacting of masters” (pr, 72). The memory of learning to read by reading Shakespeare aloud is conflated with Conrad’s memory that “all unknown to myself I had earned, in my father’s mind, the right to some latitude in my relations with his writing-table” (pr, 72). Reading and writing are interconnected in Conrad’s mind. This suggests that Conrad’s choice of form is the counterpart of his reading of novels and other literary works, particularly Shakespeare’s plays.62 This is not to say that other forms are not important, only that nineteenth-century novelists and Shakespeare are vital influences on Conrad’s art and thought. In reading Conrad, I have become increasingly doubtful about the assumptions we force upon works of literature, of the presumptions that form our identification of a work. The importance of Whalley’s lesson that “we need to approach [literature] with a quiet mind, subduing our prejudices, presuppositions and formulated responses, even our approximate expectations” cannot be overestimated.63 Recognizing the dialogues in which Conrad’s novels participate raises questions about the categorical distinctions we apply to works of literature. More often than not, Conrad’s characters misapprehend or misidentify each other because of predetermined ideas and assumptions. The almost compulsive misidentifications and misapprehensions are lessons for our reading. The argument that “literary texts often invite readers to 62 While the total effect of Conrad’s experience reading Shakespeare is difficult to measure, I am willing to speculate that the subtlety and complexity of Conrad’s thought is at least partly rooted in his reading of Shakespeare’s plays. Several writers have explored the importance of Shakespeare’s art and thought for Conrad’s writing. For instance, see Adam Gillon’s essays on the two writers originally published in Conradiana and later collected in Joseph Conrad: Comparative Essays, and the essay on Hamlet and Lord Jim by Thomas Schultheiss. As Schultheiss states, “that Conrad read and was substantially influenced by Shakespeare’s works is a matter of simple fact” (“Lord Hamlet and Lord Jim,” 102). The encounter with Shakespeare is a continuing element through his life, from the initial discovery of the translations in his father’s study to the pocket edition of Shakespeare’s plays which Conrad kept with him as a sailor. The discovery of Shakespeare’s works in his father’s study marks a significant moment of initiation into literature for Conrad. See chapter 4 of A Personal Record. Evidently, Conrad makes use of his memories regarding “a five shilling one-volume edition of the dramatic works of William Shakespeare, read in Falmouth, at odd moments of the day,” by placing a “half-crown complete Shakespeare” in Jim’s hands in Lord Jim (pr, 72; lj, 143). 63 Whalley, Studies in Literature and the Humanities, 209.

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notice how learning involves unlearning” and the process of “being jarred out of one’s previous modes of understanding, surprised into new perceptions” is apt here.64 The present study is an attempt to surprise readers into new perceptions of Conrad’s novels in relation to other authors. My “unlearning” began in courses on the novel and nineteenth-century thought taught by Brian Crick and has continued in our ongoing conversations. Because our discussions always focused on the literary critical problems of having conversations and recognizing conversations among books and authors, I never learned to categorize Conrad simply as a novelist or as a modernist. Reading Conrad alongside Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and a range of novelists diminished the significance of boundaries of history, genre, or discipline. The texture of Conrad’s response to other writers, as manifested in his language and thought, has always been a paramount concern. Thinking more about the problem of recognizing connections and conversations, we can turn to Carlyle. In the third lecture of On Heroes, Carlyle criticizes the tendency to “talk of faculties as if they were distinct, things separable; as if a man had intellect, imagination, fancy, &c., as he had hands, feet and arms” (oh, 90). After acknowledging that “necessities of language do perhaps prescribe such forms of utterance,” Carlyle warns, “but words ought not to harden into things for us. It seems to me, our apprehension of this matter is, for most part, radically falsified thereby” (oh, 90). Carlyle’s criticism is relevant to the divisions established between historical and literary periods, between Victorians and moderns for instance. Often, these structures divide writers into different distinct categories, separating those who do not write in the same genre or during the same period. Carlyle challenges us to view these categories with some suspicion. To rephrase Carlyle: if we allow these divisions to harden, our apprehension of the relationships among writers and ideas is radically falsified. For instance, Eliot, Darwin, and Nietzsche are not, or not often enough, read alongside Conrad, and we miss valuable opportunities to observe important relationships among all the authors. In part, education can obscure our view of the significant relationships. Carlyle is more likely to be read, if he is read at all, on a Victorian prose course, separated from Conrad who is taught as a modern novelist. Rarely will they be regarded as thinkers in dialogue, though the work by Stanley Renner, who recognizes the profound

64 Jane Adamson, “Against Tidiness: Literature and/versus Moral Philosophy,” 91.

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literary critical conversation between Sartor Resartus and Lord Jim, and others, is a cause for hope.65 Leavis’s arguments about Conrad being “the servant of a profoundly serious interest in life” and also “one of those creative geniuses whose distinction is manifested in their being particularly alive in their time – particularly alive to it[…] sensitive to the stresses of the changing spiritual climate” hardly need to be repeated.66 And yet the argument is important because Leavis recognizes that Conrad’s writing is an attempt to register and to inquire into the culture in which he lived. Although Leavis does not make the connection explicit, his argument links Conrad with Carlyle, revealing an important analogy between the two authors who write profound critiques at opposite ends of the nineteenth century. Also having read Carlyle, both Dickens and Eliot wrote novels to criticize the spirit of the age in England. Dostoevsky was critical of the intellectuals in Russia and almost the whole of Nietzsche’s body of work is a criticism of the Western Christian world. Though not a critic in the same sense as Carlyle, Darwin’s thought is a critical revaluation of the predominant assumptions of the time. Conrad’s critical preoccupation with the intellectual climate of his age is comparable to the other writers in this study. Another consideration is captured in Edward Said’s comment that “no one could have written such works as Heart of Darkness, with their suggestive dramatisation of changes in state of mind, and have not been sensitively attuned to the whole psychological culture of late nineteenthcentury Europe.”67 In the same essay, he laments that “Conrad has been systematically treated as everything except a novelist with links to a cultural and intellectual context.”68 Since Said delivered his paper, much has changed in literary criticism. The amount of biographical, historical, and political speculation regarding Conrad’s life and work has significantly increased; nevertheless, Conrad’s relationship with his major intellectual 65 See Renner, “Sartor Resartus Retailored?” 66 Leavis, The Great Tradition, 28, 33. 67 Said, “Conrad and Nietzsche,” 75. 68 Ibid., 66. In Conrad: The Psychologist as Artist, Paul Kirschner argues that Conrad was “writing in the mainstream of European thought and literature” and discusses Conrad in relation to Flaubert, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and, in the last chapter, Schopenhauer (284). Unfortunately, in focusing only on European thought, Kirschner neglects to discuss Conrad’s indebtedness to English writers. Conrad’s thought is indebted to both traditions, not exclusively one or the other.

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predecessors has not been sufficiently examined. Certainly a wealth of articles and chapters in books on Conrad’s relationship with Dostoevsky has been published, but there has not been the same kind of interest in investigating Conrad’s relationships with other major nineteenth-century writers. There is a noticeable lack of critical work on Conrad’s relationships with Carlyle, Dickens, and Nietzsche, as well as other writers not included in this study. Part of the problem is in the identification of what constitutes a significant “source” for Conrad’s work. Few critics maintain the dual perspective concerning Conrad’s relationship with the nineteenth century that informs George Levine’s comment that Conrad both radically undermines and yet redeems the traditions of nineteenthcentury English fiction.69 Undoubtedly, the question of what constitutes the relevant “cultural and intellectual context” for Conrad’s works is important.70 The dominant answer at the present time can be seen in the materials, mostly historical and political documents, included in the Norton Critical Editions of Conrad’s works. In the critical edition of Heart of Darkness, Robert Kimbrough includes, among others, current academic histories of the Congo and various historical documents from Maurice Hennessey, Sir Harry Johnston, John Hope Franklin, and George Washington Williams. In the critical edition of Lord Jim, Thomas Moser includes materials he identifies as “sources” for the novel such as a collection of newspaper articles, a court report, various descriptions of the people and the area supposed to be the location for Patusan. Hunt Hawkins objects to the inclusion of these kinds of materials alongside Conrad’s works because the historical documentation “has no obvious connection with Conrad’s story, which does not mention any of it.”71 Although Conrad may have made some use of these materials, the value for readers today is limited to learning basic background information rather than provoking significant insights into his work. The importance of the documents pales in comparison with works by Dickens or Nietzsche that significantly enrich our understanding of Conrad’s relationship to the intellectual conditions in which he lived, worked, and wrote. If we are to understand how Conrad is attuned to the whole intellectual culture 69 See pages 47 and 254 in The Realistic Imagination. 70 The essays collected in the book Conrad: Intertexts and Appropriations, Essays in Memory of Yves Hervouet, edited by Owen Knowles and published in 1997, attempt to address this question by discussing Conrad in relation to various writers, including Dickens and Balzac. 71 Hawkins, “Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: Politics and History,” 207.

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Under Conrad’s Eyes

of late nineteenth-century Europe, then identifying the authors whom Conrad is in dialogue is crucial. The problem can be put into perspective by considering the differences between what editors include as relevant “sources” in critical editions on Conrad’s works as opposed to Dostoevsky’s works. In the Norton Critical Edition of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Michael Katz includes not only some important passages from Dostoevsky’s letters and Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, but also excerpts from V.F. Odoevsky’s Russian Nights, Turgenev’s “Hamlet of Shchigrovsk District,” and Chernyshevsky’s What is to Be Done?. Katz assumes that for readers to understand Dostoevsky’s art it is important to know the works of literature he was reading. Several critics of Notes from Underground have recognized that Dostoevsky is preoccupied with responding to the ideas that Chernyshevsky advocated in his famous book What Is To Be Done?, so Katz has substantial reasons for including passages from the latter.72 No similar assumptions guide the decisions made by Conrad’s editors because critics have not recognized the degree to which Conrad’s novels are in dialogue with Carlyle or Nietzsche. Few of Conrad’s most influential critics make the kinds of arguments which would change the selections made by editors. This raises the question of why Dostoevsky’s art is perceived as strongly participating in a specific literary tradition, and more importantly, in a specific literary debate, while Conrad’s art is perceived as participating in historical-political rather than artistic or philosophical movements. In my view, the materials included in critical editions should provide an opportunity for readers to recognize at least some of the conversations in which Conrad engages with his literary predecessors. For instance, relevant passages from Carlyle’s early essays such as “Characteristics” and “On History”; from the introductory chapter on Antidryasdust history from Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches; and from the lectures published as On Heroes and Hero-Worship might be included in a critical edition of Heart of Darkness, and selected passages from On Heroes as well as from Darwin’s Descent of Man and Nietzsche’s writings might be included in a critical edition of Lord Jim. Whatever the abstract historical value of the various documents often included in these editions, the significance of those materials pales in comparison with the works of art, criticism, and philosophy in which Conrad’s thought is rooted. 72 See Joseph Frank’s discussion, included in Katz’s edition of Notes from Underground, which reveals the important connections in Dostoevsky’s polemical reply to Chernyshevsky’s thought (213–50). The passage is originally from Frank’s Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865 (310–47).

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To this day, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century remains a good introduction for readers inquiring into Conrad’s relationship with major nineteenthcentury currents of thought. Ian Watt provides a compelling account of “Conrad’s inheritances from the past [which] were so rich and diverse.”73 I agree with Watt’s argument that “these historical considerations help us to understand the nature and the originality of Conrad’s narrative methods more clearly; and these methods, in turn, are directly related to Conrad’s sensitiveness to the fundamental social and intellectual conflicts of his period”74; however, judging the overall effect of Watt’s work is difficult because the planned second volume which he promised to publish never materialized, a major loss to criticism on Conrad.75 I am unsure of the degree to which I should be critical of Watt’s argument that Conrad’s “basic intellectual assumptions were similar to those of the most original and influential thinkers of the last decades of the nineteenth century.”76 Instead of looking at the whole intellectual tradition that Conrad inherited, Watt restricts his focus too narrowly and doesn’t consider debts from earlier in the century.77 There is some merit to Robert Caserio’s criticism that “the prime fault of [Watt’s] contextualizing method is an evasion of

73 Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, ix. 74 Ibid., ix–x. 75 Watt describes the scope of the planned second volume at the end of the Preface to Conrad in the Nineteenth Century. See page x. Some parts originally intended for the second volume are published in Joseph Conrad: Nostromo and Essays on Conrad. Watt might have discussed Conrad’s relationship with writers such as Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche in the later critical work. 76 Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, x. 77 Writing of Conrad’s relation to Dickens in “Joseph Conrad, Dickensian Novelist of the Nineteenth Century: A Dissent from Ian Watt,” Robert Caserio finds faults in Watt’s arguments concerning the relevant contexts for Conrad’s art, arguing “we certainly want to see what Watt promises to show: how Conrad is not incidentally, loosely situated in the nineteenth century but is exactly of that time […] to see how the exposition of a writer’s context is not mere arbitrary juxtaposing of his texts with certain contemporary isms and ideas” (337). To be just, whatever the measure of Watt’s faults, his arguments are not “mere arbitrary juxtaposing of texts.” When Watt does discuss an earlier nineteenth-century writer such as Carlyle in relation to Heart of Darkness, he does not realize the full significance of the presence of Carlyle’s ideas. His readings would be richer had he included a detailed consideration of Conrad’s relationship with Carlyle and the importance of writers such as Dickens, Eliot, and Nietzsche.

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Conrad’s relation to Victorian literature.”78 My study provides an addendum to Watt’s work without pursuing the larger biographical speculations that he includes. The fundamental premise for my reading is that Conrad’s novels are a product of his thinking, and that there is no way to enact a straightforward separation between the artist and his works despite the claims made by writers as different as T.S. Eliot, Roland Barthes, and Michel Foucault.79 I am very aware of the possibility of being accused of naïvety in arguing that the mind of the man Joseph Conrad is written into the style of his prose and the structure of his novels, but in this I do not differ from Conrad himself: “A writer of imaginative prose (even more than any other sort of artist) stands confessed in his works” (pr, 95). I agree with Henry James that novels “are successful in proportion as they reveal a particular mind, different from others” and that the “novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life.”80 The argument Whalley makes concerning the relation between a writer and his or her work is the best thinking about this problem that I can provide. He argues that “behind every utterance there is a person. It is not simply the words that mean; it is a person who means; and what the person means, intends to convey or declare or conceal and for what reason, is physically imprinted into the structure and texture of his language, unless he is using language very badly.”81 The “imprint” of the thinker is important because “in the hands of a competent writer, prose style is the image of the mind that produces it.”82 Therefore, if the critic reads with sufficient deliberation and care, then “to the perceptive ear an utterance becomes not only a declaration by the writer but also a disclosure of the writer.”83 This is fundamental to my argument: the works written by all writers are not only declarations but also disclosures; the styles and the structures manifest the authors’ 78 Caserio, “Joseph Conrad,” 337. 79 In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T.S. Eliot’s argument that “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates” advocates that a critical distinction be made between the artist and his or her works (41). Barthes’s essay entitled “The Death of the Author” and Foucault’s essay entitled “What Is an Author?” are important sources promoting the claims which I allude to here. 80 James, “The Art of Fiction,” 192. 81 Whalley, Studies in Literature and the Humanities, 82. 82 Ibid., 82, 54. 83 Ibid., 82.

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thoughts. So a major problem for the critic is the discovery of the assumptions and values which enable the writing. Throughout his major works Conrad reminds readers that he is thinking about the problems inherent in the ideas informing our living. The challenge to Edward Garnett to recognize that “I am concerned with nothing but ideas, to the exclusion of everything else” is also a challenge to all his readers (cljc 4, 489). For instance, in Lord Jim the relation between ideas and beliefs is questioned through the representation of the passengers who board the Patna in order to undertake their pilgrimage “at the call of an idea” (lj, 14). Throughout the novel, Conrad shows how Marlow is disconcerted by the potential dangers in ideas which threaten like “tramps, vagabonds, knocking at the backdoor of your mind” (lj, 30). In depicting Brierly’s suicide, Conrad invokes the danger posed by “some thought with which a man unused to such a companionship finds it impossible to live” (lj, 39). Knowing the terrible dangers of ideas, especially in their power to change our living and being, Conrad often provides warnings about how “ideas may be poison to you” (uwe, 60). In Nostromo, he ponders the problem of “something inherent in the necessities of successful action which carrie[s] with it the moral degradation of the idea” (n, 521). In Under Western Eyes, he raises questions about “times […] when men were sacrificing themselves to ideas,” and shows the dangers when a character gets “any ideas into his head” (uwe, 58–9). Haldin’s assassination is enabled by revolutionary ideas; he acts upon a way of knowing, upon a kind of thinking. Razumov’s angry questions to Kostia could be read as analogous to Conrad’s own demands to his readers: “What do you know of my ideas?”; “What have you got to do with ideas?” (uwe, 60). These are the most elementary questions Conrad could ask of us. He constantly explores how ideas pass among and through different human consciousnesses and asks readers to recognize the changes that occur in these transformations. The idea can be a catalyst for some change in a person, or the idea can become transformed by the knowing and thinking of a character into something radically different. The phrase “A man of ideas – and a man of action too” reveals Conrad’s concern with the relationship between ideas and actions (uwe, 59). In Conrad’s work, no man of action is not also the embodiment of certain ideas, and no man of ideas is not also the cause of certain actions, whether performed by himself or others. All Conrad’s major novels should be read as sustained meditations on ideas like those I am raising here. Although the narrator of Under Western Eyes holds that listening for ideas is a “peculiarity of Russian natures,” Conrad wants his readers to be engaged with the ideas in his

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novels: he asks “that, however strongly engaged in the drama of action, they are still turning their ear to the murmur of abstract ideas” (uwe, 208). Of course, the ideas are never abstract because they are embodied in the lives and actions of his characters, but the constant murmur is the same. One of the great challenges in Conrad’s fiction is articulated through Tekla. She reflects on the time in which “I began to think by myself” and realizes that “it is not very easy, such thinking. One has got to be put in the way of it, awakened to the truth” (uwe, 107). While Conrad’s art may not offer “the truth,” it does make ideas and thought, as lived and living, primary considerations for readers. Throughout Conrad’s novels, there is an intense interest in the process, movement, and action of ideas in living and being. The complex embodiment of ideas in the actions, thoughts, and words of the characters in Conrad’s novels is a manifestation of his searching after answers that he does not have to questions that are difficult to articulate. To paraphrase Arnold’s characterization of Edmund Burke’s writings, Conrad’s novels are saturated with thought.84 My hope in writing has been to offer some insight into Conrad’s novels as criticism while demonstrating that, despite George Levine’s doubts, Conrad is indeed an “intellectual of sorts” because his works are a remarkable commentary on some of the most important writers of the nineteenth century.85

84 Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time,” 266. 85 Levine, The Realistic Imagination, 274.

1 The Dangers of Carlyle’s Heroic Work in Heart of Darkness when thinking about the relationship between Joseph Conrad and Thomas Carlyle, it is necessary to begin with the epigraph from Novalis which strongly attracted both writers: “It is certain my Conviction gains infinitely, the moment another soul will believe in it.”1 The epigraph for Lord Jim is quoted verbatim from Carlyle’s translation in On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History.2 This marks an important point of contact between these two great authors. Writing at opposite ends of the Victorian age, both Carlyle and Conrad are preoccupied by 1 Conrad also uses this quotation from Novalis as an introduction to the story, in A Personal Record, about the first reader of his earliest novel, Almayer’s Folly (15). The story illustrates the importance of the Novalis passage by showing how Conrad’s decision to become a writer is justified by the response of his reader. See A Personal Record, 15–19. 2 oh, 50. Carlyle translated the sentence twice more, with variations, in his writings, making it possible to pinpoint exactly where Conrad found the phrase. In “Characteristics,” the translation reads “Already my opinion, my conviction, gains infinitely in strength and sureness, the moment a second mind has adopted it” (11). In Sartor Resartus, the translation changes slightly: “It is certain, my Belief gains quite infinitely the moment I can convince another mind thereof” (158–9). Paul Kintzele registers the importance of the borrowing (“Lord Jim: Conrad’s Fable of Judgment,” 76). Ian Watt corrects Richard Samuel’s mistake in thinking that Conrad borrowed the phrase from W. Haste’s English translation and explains that Edward Said recognized how Conrad quotes Carlyle’s translation verbatim (Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, 40). In “Sartor Resartus Retailored? Conrad’s Lord Jim and the Peril of Idealism,” Stanley Renner calls attention to the epigraph and also discusses the thought-provoking idea of Conrad writing Lord Jim at Carlyle’s desk (217–18).

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Under Conrad’s Eyes

questions concerning the value of their convictions and beliefs. They are self-conscious about writing during a period of intellectual and stylistic revolution in the English language in which the old forms and values are disintegrating.3 From Carlyle’s perspective, the questionable values he inherited from the skeptical doctrines of the eighteenth century must be replaced; hence, his insistent argument that his culture must move from a condition of unbelief to belief.4 From Conrad’s perspective, what has become questionable is the value of Carlyle’s ideals, the prescriptions he advocated as cures for the spiritual disease at the heart of his culture. When Conrad tells Blackwood in a letter dated 31 May 1902 that the interview between Marlow and the Intended at the end of Heart of Darkness offers “one suggestive view of a whole phase of life,” he is pointing toward the emphasis on the problem of belief that pervades the last scene in the story (cljc 2, 417). In case readers miss the importance of the questions about belief raised throughout the work, Conrad repeats the word again and again at the end so his meaning is not lost. In writing an inquiry into English culture, Conrad is preoccupied with the “mature capacity for fidelity, for belief, for suffering” that Marlow identifies in the Intended (hd, 73). He is troubled by the potential dangers in having “faith” in a “great and saving illusion” (hd, 74). For nineteenth-century English culture, Carlyle’s ideas composed an important constellation of beliefs. In Heart of Darkness, Conrad makes a sustained inquiry into two of Carlyle’s most significant and enduring ideas: hero-worship and work. Heart of Darkness should be read as a concentrated rewriting of Carlyle’s thought. Almost without exception, all the major questions 3 Two of Carlyle’s letters on this problem in relation to Sartor Resartus, dated 12 August 1834 to Ralph Waldo Emerson and 4 June 1835 to John Sterling, are included as the third and fourth appendices in the McSweeney and Sabor edition of Sartor Resartus (231–5). In the letters Carlyle reflects on the problem of writing when “the whole structure of our Johnsonian English [is] breaking up from its foundations” and knowing “I have no known public” (234, 232). The letters that Conrad wrote throughout his work on Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim share Carlyle’s preoccupations. However, the most important letters are those to Edward Garnett on 19 June 1896 (cljc 1, 288–9), 29 March 1898 (cljc 2, 49–51), and 13 August 1898 (cljc 2, 85). For Conrad, “to be able to think and unable to express is a fine torture” which he endures repeatedly in composing his novels (cljc 1, 288). He is “haunted, mercilessly haunted by the necessity of style” (cljc 2, 50). 4 This argument persists throughout Carlyle’s early writings. See especially the fifth lecture from On Heroes: “The Hero as Man of Letters,” 146–52.

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raised in Heart of Darkness have their origins in Carlyle’s arguments: Marlow’s role as a prophetic cultural critic, Marlow’s ambivalent heroworship and the Russian’s unqualified adoration of Kurtz, Kurtz’s greatness and his infamous sincerity, Marlow’s ambivalent attitude toward work, and the depiction of the dying Africans in the grove of death. In effect, Conrad’s thought in Heart of Darkness results from distilling and synthesizing Carlyle’s central ideas. The ideas are tested through Marlow’s experience while working for the Company and also through his thoughts or recollections about that experience. The difficulty is recognizing how Carlyle’s ideas of hero-worship and work provide the basic assumptions informing Marlow’s thought both during the actual experience and afterwards in recollecting his experience. Both ideas cause significant problems for Marlow’s knowing and judgment; however, the relationship between cause and consequence is not altogether clear. Are Carlyle’s ideas distorted by the demands of Marlow’s knowing? Or is Marlow’s knowing distorted by the demands made by Carlyle’s ideas? Marlow’s “heavenly mission to civilize” his listeners is analogous to Carlyle’s mission to cure the diseased state of his culture (hd, 11). The effect of Conrad’s lessons about the monstrous conditions of his culture brings his thought close to sharing the same quality as Carlyle’s and Marlow’s mission, but he remains doubtful about it. He offers no decisive answer about whether to accept or reject Carlyle’s teachings because his own writing is deeply indebted to Carlyle’s thought. He does not repudiate Carlyle but instead remains suspended between two judgments: that Carlyle is an important thinker who commands respect and whose ideas must be confronted; and that Carlyle’s ideas are contributing to if not largely causing the monstrous conditions Conrad perceives in late nineteenth-century culture.5 When rethinking the value of hero-worship and work, Conrad is conflicted. Undoubtedly, he is skeptical of Carlyle’s ideas, which in Carlyle’s view would mean that no truth could come from Conrad’s criticism. In Carlyle’s judgment, “for these poor Sceptics there [is] no sincerity, no truth” because “they had lost any notion that sincerity was possible” (oh, 147). For Carlyle, sincerity, truth, belief, and conviction are interdependent; at times the words almost become synonymous in his thought. To be sincere is to be true and to have belief is to be sincere 5 Stanley Renner argues that Conrad is “ambivalent” toward Carlyle (214). Renner calls attention to the analogies between Conrad’s Marlow and Carlyle’s editor in Sartor Resartus and demonstrates that Conrad’s debt to Carlyle can be recognized throughout Lord Jim.

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and so on. But Conrad’s doubt toward Carlyle is not as extreme as Nietzsche’s. The latter uses Carlyle as the basis for a type in defining “Carlylism” as “the need for belief, for some unconditional Yes and No” (a, 184. Section 54). In Nietzsche’s view, Carlyle’s belief in the importance of strong convictions should be repudiated because “convictions are prisons” (a, 184. Section 54). For Nietzsche, convictions are equivalent to lies, and “convictions might be more dangerous enemies of truth than lies” (a, 185. Section 55). The man of conviction is “the antithesis, the antagonist of the truthful man – of truth”; therefore Nietzsche identifies the skeptic as the one with “the capacity for an unconstrained view” (a, 184, 185). Neither Carlyle’s advocacy of absolute belief nor Nietzsche’s advocacy of radical skepticism is tenable for Conrad and he does not attempt to work or think at either extreme. While voicing serious doubts about Carlyle’s ideals, Conrad does not contemptuously dismiss them. Conrad’s skepticism does not preclude him from recognizing the importance of belief, but everywhere in Carlyle’s thought he sees problems which he explores in terms of knowing. The primary question Conrad raises is what relation Carlyle’s hero-worship and work have to knowing. Conrad’s ambivalence toward Carlyle informs the structure of Heart of Darkness as a whole. There is neither acceptance nor rejection, but only a profoundly troubling engagement with the unavoidable presence of Carlyle’s ideas.6 Conrad views his relationship with Carlyle with something like the unease and equivocation that Marlow feels toward Kurtz. Carlyle is “no idol” to Conrad, yet Conrad may be Carlyle’s “last disciple” after Dickens (hd, 58). Conrad “resented bitterly the absurd danger” of the situation in England at the end of the nineteenth century, knowing that the predominance of Carlyle’s ideas placed him “at the mercy of that atrocious phantom” (hd, 59). The quality of Conrad’s response can be measured from two important passages in his writings. Conrad’s troubled judgment of Carlyle is evident in the only letter in which he discusses Carlyle at length.7 The letter includes significant 6 In Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, Ian Watt discusses Marlow’s ideas in relation to Carlyle; however, Watt betrays his own best observations by concluding that “most of the ideological content of Heart of Darkness is of a very different nature [from Carlyle’s], and amounts either to a rejection of many of the other standard Victorian assumptions, or to a warning against their ultimate implications” (151). 7 In a letter dated 18 January 1901 to J.B. Pinker, Conrad includes Carlyle’s name in referring to a “collection of autographs” he is disposing of for a friend (cljc 4, 320).

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comments that reflect back upon Heart of Darkness almost a decade after it was published. Writing to Edward Garnett on 28 August 1908, Conrad defends himself against charges made in a recent review questioning his seriousness by declaring that he is “terribly earnest” (cljc 4, 111). He characterizes himself as more in earnest than the very personification of earnestness in the nineteenth century: “But let me ask is my earnestness of no account? Is that a Slavonic trait? And I am earnest, terribly earnest. Carlyle bending over the history of Frederick called the Great was a mere trifle, a volatile butterfly, in comparison. For that good man had only to translate himself out of bad German into the English we know whereas I had to work like a coalminer in his pit quarrying all my English sentences out of a black night” (cljc 4, 112). The basis of the comparison is the question of style, the trouble both writers had in writing. Despite identifying the very problem which decisively connects his work with Carlyle’s, Conrad attempts to elevate himself above his predecessor in terms of a greater earnestness and stronger work ethic. But the comparison only succeeds in revealing the tension in Conrad’s thought when he attempts to judge himself against Carlyle’s accomplishments. Conrad parodies Carlyle and Teufelsdröckh’s clothes philosophy from Sartor Resartus in “Youth,” the first of the Marlow tales.8 In a characteristic manner, Conrad makes Carlyle’s importance evident through a great joke, and it is important to note that the caricature or parody is not merely contemptuous.9 Marlow introduces us to the wife of his captain: 8 See Hopwood (“Carlyle and Conrad: Past and Present and Heart of Darkness,” 170), and Watt (Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, 168). 9 In an essay entitled “Parody as Style: Carlyle and His Parodists,” G.B. Tennyson, a longtime critic of Carlyle, records many of the important writers who have parodied Carlyle’s style in their works. Despite his careful eye, Tennyson missed Conrad. Perhaps the problem is analogous to Tennyson’s argument about Joyce, that Conrad “so fully adopts his parody into his own strategy that its parodic dimension is reduced” (313). It is Conrad, and not Joyce, who is “the most like Carlyle himself” (313). The best example may be the sentence “It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled by an august Benevolence” (hd, 50). This line could have been copied from any number of Carlyle’s works. The use of the upper case letters for “Immensity” and “Benevolence” are characteristic of Carlyle’s style. The whole sentence recalls Carlyle’s often transcendental thought. But this next passage, more relevant to my discussion, is perhaps more transparent: “It appears I was also one of the Workers, with a capital – you know. Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle” (hd, 15). Marlow is repudiating the “rot let loose in print and talk about that time” but Conrad also has Carlyle in mind

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Mrs. Beard was an old woman, with a face all wrinkled and ruddy like a winter apple, and the figure of a young girl. She caught sight of me once, sewing on a button, and insisted on having my shirts to repair. This was something different from the captain’s wives I had known on board crack clippers. When I brought her the shirts, she said: “And the socks? They want mending, I am sure, and John’s – Captain Beard’s – things are all in order now. I would be glad of something to do.” Bless the old woman. She overhauled my outfit for me, and meantime I read for the first time Sartor Resartus and Burnaby’s Ride to Khiva. I didn’t understand much of the first then; but I remember I preferred the soldier to the philosopher at the time; a preference which life has only confirmed. One was a man, and other was either more – or less. However, they are both dead and Mrs. Beard is dead, and youth, strength, genius, thoughts, achievements, simple hearts – all dies … No matter.10

Marlow says this is “no matter,” but Conrad certainly means otherwise.11 Before Marlow ever mentions Carlyle, we see him in the form of Mrs Beard. Sartor Resartus translates into English as the “tailor retailored.” Carlyle and Teufelsdröckh are concerned with mending and replacing old clothes: worn-out customs and ideals. In this passage Mrs Beard is the tailor retailoring Marlow’s clothes, giving Marlow the time to read Carlyle’s book. Like Carlyle, she is busy overhauling worn out clothing. But while Carlyle is working to establish order, Mrs Beard has finished her job: “things are all in order.” And taking Carlyle’s gospel of work to heart, Mrs Beard begs to repair Marlow’s socks because she “would be glad of something to do.” So when we read that between Carlyle and Burnaby, “one was a man, and the other was either more – or less,” we would do well to recognize that Carlyle is not a man at all in this passage. Conrad has turned him and his professor into Mrs Beard.

(hd, 15–16). It is difficult not to think of “Workers, with a capital” without recalling Carlyle’s pronouncements about work: “It has been written, ‘an endless significance lies in Work;’ a man perfects himself by working” (pp, 195). 10 Conrad, “Youth,” 97. 11 When Marlow recounts his first experience of reading Carlyle, we learn that, at least potentially, Conrad has long been familiar with the author of Sartor Resartus. In Cedric Watts’s edition of “Youth,” he notes that Marlow’s story is based on “Conrad’s first voyage to the East, as second mate of the Palestine in 1881–3” (260). If we can accept Marlow’s experience as corresponding with Conrad’s in this detail, then at the time he was writing “Youth” Conrad had been familiar with Carlyle for some seventeen years.

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And in case we missed the import of the joke, Conrad makes another for us. Alluding to Carlyle’s dictum in Sartor Resartus to “Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe,” Marlow tells us he bought “a complete set of Byron’s works.”12 Conrad was well aware of the dangers of selecting Carlyle as a predecessor who must be acknowledged and confronted. Later in his career Carlyle’s criticism of democracy, liberalism, and rights was incomprehensible to many of his readers and even his close friends and admirers.13 Conrad illustrates the kind of critical attitudes that plagued Carlyle’s reputation late in the nineteenth century in an exchange between the Manager and Marlow. To respect Carlyle’s thought, especially in the years after his death, may have been a decision different in degree but similar in kind to Marlow’s “choice of nightmares.”14 Conrad captures the response of readers then, and perhaps one that lingers even now, in the Manager’s complaints to Marlow about Kurtz. The Manager declares that “the time was not ripe for vigorous action,” which is how England responded to much of Carlyle’s late criticism (hd, 61). The passage following anticipates the kind of judgment that can be found in many essays on Carlyle’s thought: like the Manager, critics denounce Carlyle “because the method is unsound” (hd, 61). Carl Niemeyer unknowingly plays the Manager in his introduction to On Heroes in explaining that “Carlyle’s own method did not save him from taking positions that seem to us indefensible.”15 Again, when the Manager accuses Kurtz of showing “a complete want of judgment,” Niemeyer does the same in declaring that “Carlyle failed to discriminate 12 sr, 143. “Youth,” 106. Stanley Renner offers a different reading of this passage in which he emphasizes an either/or proposition that links Carlyle with a “spirit of divinity” that makes him close to God or with an incapacity to “accept all of man” (214). 13 For one account of the changes toward the increasing valuation of authority in Carlyle’s thought see Chris Vanden Bossche’s Carlyle and the Search for Authority. As Ian Campbell records, Carlyle’s late thought “was an extraordinary message to a free country: the country could not wholeheartedly accept it” and the works “alienated many permanently from Carlyle” (Thomas Carlyle, 122). 14 hd, 62. See the introduction to Simon Heffer’s Moral Desperado: A Life of Thomas Carlyle entitled “Death and Assassination.” Heffer makes a point of noting that “As English literature became a more popular industry in our universities, so Carlyle came up against academics who found his political views repugnant” (22). 15 Niemeyer, “Introduction,” x.

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his heroes.”16 Conrad anticipates twentieth-century readings of Carlyle with remarkable accuracy. At the end of the passage Conrad reveals a great deal about how he perceives his relationship with Carlyle and anticipates the critical reputation that he shares with Carlyle today. If critics are ready to dismiss Carlyle for his unsound methods, Conrad is not. In a world ready to dismiss Carlyle and his ideas, Conrad’s response is arguably closer to Marlow’s: “It seemed to me I had never breathed an atmosphere so vile, and I turned mentally to [Carlyle] for relief – positively for relief. ‘Nevertheless, I think Mr. [Carlyle] is a remarkable man,’ I said with emphasis. He stared, dropped on me a cold heavy glance, said very quietly, ‘He was,’ and turned his back on me. My hour of favour was over; I found myself lumped along with [Carlyle] as a partisan of methods for which the time was not ripe. I was unsound. Ah, but it was something to have at least a choice of nightmares” (hd, 61–2). Considering the current reputation that Conrad shares with Carlyle as a questionable writer, Conrad could not have stated the truth better. Both authors are considered at best “unsound”: routinely, Carlyle is accused of fascism and Conrad is accused of racism.17 However, Conrad did have “at least a choice of nightmares,” and he chose, with no small degree of fear and trepidation, Carlyle. Confronted with English civilization at the end of the nineteenth century, Conrad may have felt compelled toward a Kierkegaardian either/ or decision: either to accept the “monstrous” conditions he represents in Heart of Darkness or to embrace Carlyle’s fierce criticism of English culture (hd, 9). Choosing to criticize English culture meant accepting, or at least contemplating, many of Carlyle’s critical ideas. Whatever Carlyle’s deficiencies, Conrad does not “betray” him and remains “loyal to the nightmare of [his] choice” (hd, 64). Yet like so much in Conrad’s art, his relationship with Carlyle is another of his “inconclusive experiences” (hd, 11). He cannot adopt Carlyle’s forms or ideas without simultaneously revealing their shortcomings. The problem for Conrad is 16 hd, 61. Niemeyer, vii. 17 For the accusations against Carlyle, see John Rosenberg’s Carlyle and the Burden of History and Herbert Grierson’s “The Hero and the Fuhrer.” Ian Robinson discounts the accusation by remarking that “it would be interesting to ask whether, even if Carlyle were a proto-fascist, he might still have valuable things to say, but our course is easier because in point of fact he wasn’t” (The English Prophets, 57). For the accusations against Conrad, see Achebe’s “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.”

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captured in Carlyle’s idea that “he alone can love, with a right gratitude and genuine loyalty of soul, the Hero-Teacher who has delivered him out of darkness into light” (oh, 108). What is the measure of “right gratitude”? Conrad tests the limitations of “genuine loyalty of soul.” In effect, he wonders over the problem of whether or not Carlyle should be recognized as a “Hero-Teacher.” Conrad is not entirely convinced that Carlyle’s ideals will deliver us “out of darkness into light.” His skepticism makes him wary of becoming confused about the distinctions between darkness and light, and about how the distinctions are to be made at all. The questions provoked by Carlyle’s statement are relevant to the relationship between Conrad and Carlyle and the relationship between Marlow and Kurtz: these relations are inextricably linked through a complicated analogy. Neither Conrad’s nor Carlyle’s thought can be located directly in the representations of Marlow or Kurtz; nevertheless, the relationship between the two writers plays across and over the two characters in the story. Recognizing the analogical relation returns my discussion to the connection to Conrad’s and Carlyle’s shared preoccupation with the Novalis epigraph “it is certain my Conviction gains infinitely, the moment another soul will believe in it.” Much like Marlow identifying Kurtz as the one man who judges the terrible state of the world, Conrad identifies Carlyle as another soul who shares his convictions about the monstrous conditions of his culture. In a way, Conrad identifies Carlyle not only as someone whom he must read but also as a potentially sympathetic reader, as someone who will confirm his beliefs and strengthen his convictions. Paul Kintzele makes an important argument in this regard about Carlyle’s preoccupation with heroes in suggesting the point of the Novalis quotation is that “to be a hero is to require the legitimization or validation of another: the hero needs an audience. Conviction, although seemingly a process by which an individual simply consults his or her reason, becomes conviction (it gains ‘infinitely,’ that is, it becomes, precisely, a conviction) only through the intervention of ‘another soul’ that seconds its legitimacy.”18 We should not forget that one of Carlyle’s most important heroes and perhaps the only one available in the late nineteenth century is the Hero as Man of Letters. Having read On Heroes, Conrad is well aware of Carlyle’s ideas about the writer as hero, and experiences something like the hero’s “vertigo of being chosen, of being singled out and facing the difficult prospect of having

18 Kintzele, “Lord Jim,” 76.

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to convince others.”19 Both authors are compelled to write their criticism of culture, yet are well aware that their culture is not one in which readers are likely to worship them as heroes, let alone accept or understand their devastating criticism of society. Doubts about claiming the position of a hero cause the characteristic manoeuvre found in Carlyle’s writings whereby he distances himself from his own ideals by playing the role of an editor. For instance, the editorial frame structure of Sartor Resartus opens up a distance between Carlyle and the ideas at the centre of the work attributed to Teufelsdröckh; nevertheless, the ideas of hero-worship and work, among others, are unmistakably Carlyle’s. And there is also the complication of Carlyle identifying himself as a hero or making his heroes share aspects of his own character. The biographies of heroes might be read as semiautobiographical accounts through which Carlyle articulates aspects of his own character and identifies himself as a hero for nineteenthcentury England.20 Yet Carlyle cannot bring himself to play the role of the hero as man of letters without a disguise. He can hardly declare that hero-worship is the “supreme practical perfection, of all manner of ‘worship’ and true worships and noblenesses whatsoever” and then represent himself as a hero (pp, 37). In the increasingly democratic and liberal sentiments of the nineteenth century the claim would not be credible. Doubts about Carlyle’s position are manifested in his style whenever he comes close to suggesting that he is the hero-teacher: Certainly, could the present Editor instruct men how to know Wisdom, Heroism, when they see it, that they might do reverence to it only, and loyally make it ruler over them, – yes, he were the living epitome of all Editors, Teachers, Prophets, that now teach and prophesy; he were an Apollo-Morrison, a Trismegistus and effective Cassandra! Let no Able Editor hope such things. It is to be expected the present laws of copyright, rate of reward per sheet, and other considerations, will save him from that peril. Let no Editor hope such things: no; – and yet let all Editors

19 Ibid., 76–7. 20 In “Thomas Carlyle: Chaotic Man, Inarticulate Hero,” Michael Timko argues that Carlyle “sees himself as one of the heroes he is describing” and that “Carlyle’s heroes are self-reflexive; they reflect and reveal his own unwavering moral stance” (56, 57). On Heroes is a kind of autobiography in which all the examples are “Carlyle himself, living at different times, speaking different languages” and all epitomizing Carlyle’s ideals (57). In some way, Carlyle “saw himself as the only possible hero in England in 1840” (59).

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aim towards such things, and even towards such alone! One knows not what the meaning of editing and writing is, if even this be not it. (pp, 40)

No matter how tempting it is, Carlyle simply cannot appropriate the role. He hopes to fulfill the role, but the grammar reveals his anxiety about declaring anything openly; hence, the collision between “certainly” and “could” at the beginning of the paragraph and the “no; – and yet” construction toward the end. Of course, a profound skepticism will not allow Conrad to play the role of the hero as man of letters; nevertheless, he explores the possibilities through Marlow and reworks Carlyle’s characteristic forms in the structure of Heart of Darkness. Consider the influence of Sartor Resartus on the frame structure of the Marlow tales. Conrad adapts Carlyle’s experimental structure: Sartor Resartus is structured with an English editor’s commentary framing the autobiographical notes and philosophical ideas of Teufelsdröckh; Conrad’s works have an English frame narrator retelling Marlow’s stories. The two authors transform periods of their lives into fictional form, critically rethinking their own experiences. Both books are a strange mixture of commentary, autobiography, and biography: Carlyle’s editor quotes Teufelsdröckh’s autobiographical notes and Conrad’s narrator repeats Marlow’s autobiographical narrative which contains a very brief biography of Kurtz. Both writers create elaborate structures distancing readers from the thoughts of Teufelsdröckh and Marlow. Teufelsdröckh and Marlow are both called “wanderers” (sr, 127; hd, 9), and after periods of unrest both complete journeys that are referred to as “pilgrimages” (sr, 118; hd, 17). During those journeys Teufelsdröckh and Marlow both meet “great men”; the former meets Napoleon and the latter meets Kurtz. Both characters suffer through periods of sickness, declare their belief in the value of work, and have a relationship with a man who advocates the extinction of a particular population.21 Both the English editor of Sartor Resartus and Marlow reflect at length upon the memory of the last words they heard from Teufelsdröckh and Kurtz respectively.22 Despite the presence of Carlyle’s thought, Conrad is troubled by his predecessor’s ideas. It is no surprise that Conrad also “had to resist and 21 Hofrath Heuschrecke and Kurtz: see book 3, chapter 4 of Sartor Resartus entitled “Helotage,” 167–70. 22 See book 1, chapter 3 of Sartor Resartus entitled “Reminiscences,” 12–21. Renner makes a sustained comparison of Sartor Resartus and Lord Jim, which could be expanded to include Heart of Darkness, to demonstrate the influence of the former on Conrad’s frame structure (189–91).

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attack sometimes” and one important point for this resistance is Carlyle’s belief in heroes (hd, 19). Conrad’s ambivalent response to Carlyle’s ideas about heroes and hero-worship can be recognized by examining how the question of Marlow’s health is vitally important and then by demonstrating how Carlyle’s ideas inform both the construction of Marlow’s character and the representation of Kurtz. Carlyle’s ideal of hero-worship informs every aspect of Conrad’s thought in Heart of Darkness. V.J. Emmett argues, “by confronting Marlow in Heart of Darkness with the charismatic villain Kurtz, Conrad offers a critique of the widespread nineteenth-century phenomenon of hero-worship.”23 While I agree with Emmett’s view that “Conrad was sceptical of the general idea of the heroic,” the idea that “the basic resemblance between the two works involves ironic inversion” and that the “influence was largely negative” is mistaken.24 Conrad’s ambivalence makes his reading of Carlyle much more complex and produces a more troubling response than simply an “ironic inversion” of Carlyle’s values. Conrad’s criticism of Carlyle’s hero-worship is connected to a preoccupation with health and sickness, ideas central to Carlyle’s critical thinking as a whole. The question operates at two interrelated levels: the individual and the cultural. If the culture as a whole is sick, then the likelihood of the individual being healthy is minimal. Throughout Heart of Darkness Conrad raises questions about the condition of Marlow’s health. During the journey toward the central station, Marlow wonders whether he “was becoming scientifically interesting” (hd, 24). The pilgrims doubt whether Marlow is “disturbed” because he is sleeping on the steamer (hd, 31). And later while travelling up the river toward Kurtz, Marlow confesses that “perhaps I had a little fever too. One can’t live with one’s finger everlastingly on one’s pulse. I had often ‘a little fever,’ or a little touch of other things – the playful paw-strokes of the wilderness, the preliminary trifling before the more serious onslaught which came in due course” (hd, 43). Conrad makes Carlyle’s analogy quite literal in exploring Marlow’s physical health and sickness, signaling to readers that both Marlow’s and Carlyle’s judgment may be compromised. The question is the degree to which Marlow’s perspective is distorted and whether or not his judgment can be trusted. If Marlow is a version of Carlyle’s hero or even a hero-teacher, insofar as he attempts to instruct his listeners about the corruption at the heart of his culture, 23 Emmett, “Carlyle, Conrad, and the Politics of Charisma: Another Perspective on Heart of Darkness,” 145. 24 Ibid. 145.

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then his message may be compromised by the quality of the knowing he offers. The repeated concern with Marlow’s health recalls Carlyle’s concern with health and sickness in “Characteristics.” The opening paragraph of “Characteristics” explains how the physician’s aphorism can be applied to all of our living: ”The healthy know not of their health, but only the sick: this is the Physician’s Aphorism; and applicable in a far wider sense than he gives it. We may say, it holds no less in moral, intellectual, political, poetical, than in merely corporeal therapeutics; that wherever, or in what shape soever, powers of the sort which can be named vital are at work, herein lies the test of their working right or working wrong” (c, 1). For Carlyle, skepticism is symptomatic of bad health because “the beginning of inquiry is disease” (c, 2). He constructs a series of words in antithetical categories: health, wholeness, harmony, order, and unconsciousness are placed against sickness, disintegration, derangement, disorder, and consciousness. The greatness which defines the hero is aligned with the healthy and unconscious: “the Perfect, the Great is a mystery to itself, knows not itself; whatsoever does know itself is already little, and more or less imperfect. Or otherwise, we may say, Unconsciousness belongs to pure unmixed life; Consciousness to a diseased mixture and conflict of life and death: Unconsciousness is the sign of creation; Consciousness, at best, that of manufacture” (c, 16). There are several consequences of Carlyle’s arguments. To use his own word, Carlyle’s criticism is a form of “therapeutics,” and in making the health and sickness of culture his major concern, Carlyle unknowingly anticipates the birth of Freud’s psychoanalytic “therapeutics” by about seventy years. While both Carlyle and Freud seek to provide prescriptions to cure the intellectual and physical illnesses undermining their respective cultures, there are significant differences in the fundamental assumptions informing the ideals of the two writers. Carlyle and Freud think in terms of moving from darkness to light, from ignorance to truth, but Freud alone believes that expanding consciousness as much as possible is unquestionably good. For Carlyle, the opposite is true: the great and healthy do not know. The ideal hero remains unconscious, a condition which precludes questioning and doubt: not knowing is interconnected with heroism, and in Carlyle’s argument all but synonymous. For Conrad, this kind of conclusion is problematic. He questions whether the fundamental ideas underlying Carlyle’s therapeutics are not in themselves a symptom of sickness. Is hero-worship a desire toward not knowing? The prescription is as much of a problem as the disease it is supposed to cure. Is Carlyle’s idea a sign of illness that he does not recognize?

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This concern is written into aspects of Marlow’s experience as well as the accounts of Kurtz. The problem is readily apparent in Marlow’s recollection of his return to Europe. Here Conrad makes the health and sickness of knowing the central issue. Is Marlow’s criticism the result of some sickness and is that sickness located in the individual or pervading the entire culture? The passage is meant to produce a “shuddering wonder” over Marlow’s condition: I found myself back in the sepulchral city resenting the sight of people hurrying through the streets to filch a little money from each other, to devour their infamous cookery, to gulp their unwholesome beer, to dream their insignificant and silly dreams. They trespassed upon my thoughts. They were intruders whose knowledge of life was to me an irritating pretence because I felt so sure they could not possibly know the things I knew. Their bearing, which was simply the bearing of commonplace individuals going about their business in the assurance of perfect safety, was offensive to me like the outrageous flauntings of folly in the face of a danger it is unable to comprehend. I had no particular desire to enlighten them, but I had some difficulty in restraining myself from laughing in their faces so full of stupid importance. I daresay I was not well at that time. (hd, 70)

This passage is unsettling. It is difficult to know with any assurance whether Marlow is simply recollecting his thoughts from a previous experience, or if the thoughts are still operative in the present telling. Marlow acknowledges that he was sick upon his return, but it is difficult to know how well he has recovered, if at all, as he remembers the experience. To some degree, the sickness could still be distorting his telling. The contempt manifested in the style is related to the passages describing the Professor’s thought in the fifth and thirteenth chapters of The Secret Agent; however, where the Professor also fears the commonplace masses surrounding him, Marlow counts himself superior, as if elevated above the common life. While readers might applaud Marlow’s scathing contempt for the pilgrims and the colonial enterprise as relatively true, his criticism of life in Europe is extreme and unbalanced. Part of the difficulty is determining the source of Marlow’s knowledge. One of his claims is to knowing so much more because of his experience in the wilderness; hence, his earlier digressions concerning his listeners’ inability to understand because they still live “with solid pavement under [their] feet” and “kind neighbours” and “policemen” surrounding them (hd, 49). But Conrad raises doubts about the relation between Marlow’s knowing and his physical condition at the time, making it difficult to

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determine whether it is any better now. Marlow imagines himself superior to “the commonplace individuals” around him: but is he suffering from a delusion of greatness? Does Marlow make himself into something that “resembled an idol”? (hd, 7). If we have Carlyle’s and Nietzsche’s attacks on idols in mind, is Marlow a true or false idol? One conclusion may be that Marlow’s knowing and sickness are interrelated so Conrad is confirming Carlyle’s judgment: self-conscious knowing is a disease. Thinking of Heart of Darkness as a whole, it is not clear that Marlow’s knowing is healthy elsewhere in the book. In fact, Marlow often practices the not knowing that Carlyle advocates. This has major implications for reading his judgments concerning Kurtz. The counterpart to Marlow as a sick skeptic is Kurtz as a degenerate hero. Kurtz is represented as a great man compromised in his greatness. The difficulty for understanding Conrad’s version of the hero in Heart of Darkness is largely attributable to the structure of the story. We rarely hear Kurtz’s own words and only have a kind of highly compressed biography of his existence. Marlow is the Boswell to Kurtz’s Dr Johnson.25 Everything we know about Kurtz comes to us through Marlow’s telling and is refracted once again through the knowing of the frame narrator. I am not altogether sure that Conrad succeeds in making Kurtz’s greatness completely real because of the distance between the reader and Kurtz. Kurtz’s mind and history are largely closed to our knowing, unlike in Lord Jim where Conrad allows us more direct access to Jim’s thoughts before interposing the increasing layers of interpretive distance. Too much depends upon the judgment of others and not enough on actual evidence through Kurtz’s actions or thoughts and ideas. Nevertheless, Conrad attempts to present Kurtz as a plausible representation of greatness, seriously qualified by Carlyle’s own arguments about the qualities of a hero. There is no mistaking the insistence on Kurtz’s greatness: the Manager describes him as the “best agent he had, an exceptional man, of the greatest importance to the Company”; with some resentment, the brick maker calls him a “prodigy” and “special being”; and Kurtz’s cousin calls him a “universal genius” (hd, 25, 28, 71). His greatness is explained as the consequence of his remarkable talents as an orator, poet, musician, writer, businessman, etc. In making Kurtz’s range of talents so allencompassing that it becomes nearly impossible to identify “which was the greatest of his talents,” Conrad rewrites Carlyle’s ideal of a hero 25 Carlyle’s admiration for Boswell’s capacity for hero-worship is evident in the essay “Boswell’s Life of Johnson.”

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(hd, 71). As Carlyle explains, “I have no notion of a truly great man that could not be all sorts of men” because there is no strict category for the proper actions worthy of a hero: “I fancy there is in him the Politician, the Thinker, Legislator, Philosopher; – in one or the other degree, he could have been, he is all these” (oh, 67, 68). Conrad translates Carlyle’s idea into Kurtz’s seemingly limitless talents and potential but he is careful not to exclude two very serious problems in Carlyle’s vision. The first problem is Carlyle’s idea that “the Great is a mystery to itself, knows not itself” (c, 16). The health of a hero depends upon a wholeness of being that potentially excludes the capacity for selfconsciousness. The second problem is Carlyle’s idea that “there is something of the savage in all great men” (oh, 165). The two ideas are from different works, but this does not prevent Conrad from recognizing the consequences should the two ideas come together. The problem is whether Carlyle realizes the consequences of these two ideals being shared in the great man. The test for Carlyle’s hero as represented in the character of Kurtz is the solitude of the wilderness and the removal of the restraints inherent in the structure of civilization. The passage describing Kurtz’s disintegration and self-destruction in the wilderness is Conrad’s response to Carlyle’s two ideas. While describing Kurtz’s actions Marlow explains that They only showed that Mr. Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him – some small matter which when the pressing need arose could not be found under his magnificent eloquence. Whether he knew of this deficiency himself I can’t say. I think the knowledge came to him at last – only at the very last. But the wilderness had found him out early, and had taken on him a terrible vengeance for the fantastic invasion. I think it had whispered to him things about himself which he did not know, things of which he had no conception until he took counsel with this great solitude – and the whisper had proved irresistibly fascinating. (hd, 57)

The question of what Kurtz knew of himself is insistent here. The most likely deficiency in Kurtz’s knowing is precisely self-knowledge: the quality or kind of his greatness and his being. And the knowledge that comes to Kurtz in the wilderness is the savagery that Carlyle argues is inherent in every great man. Kurtz had “no conception” of his own savagery until he found himself in conditions in which the external restraints provided by civilization were removed and he was left alone in the solitude. Kurtz comes to know “the awakening of forgotten and brutal instincts, by the memory of gratified and monstrous passions” (hd, 65). By placing

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Kurtz in the wilderness, Conrad removes the boundaries limiting Kurtz’s development, and “this alone had beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations” (hd, 65). Conrad asks us to witness the development of the great man with Carlyle’s two ideas in mind. Granted, Kurtz’s physiology has been compromised by the multiple illnesses which he has endured and this might be evidence that he is simply a sick version of Carlyle’s hero. However, the cause of the sickness is internal and external. As a great man, Kurtz is predisposed to some form of savagery, if only the conditions are right. Conrad places Kurtz in the one location wherein Carlyle’s earliest heroic form, the hero as divinity, remains possible.26 Marlow’s description of the journey is important because it reveals the conditions for testing Kurtz’s heroism: a “prehistoric earth” located in “the night of first ages” among “prehistoric man” (hd, 37). The capacity for worship manifested by some of the Africans is directly related to the lack of history and scientific progress. Carlyle’s heroes “are intrinsically of the same material” but “the outward shape of [the hero] will depend on the time and the environment he finds himself in” (oh, 99). In nineteenth-century England, the hero as divinity was impossible, but in the heart of Africa, far from the unbelief of European civilization, the childlike naïveté and belief which makes the earliest kind of hero-worship possible is still a reality.27 In Lord Jim, this is also central to Conrad’s representation of Patusan, the one place where Jim can potentially become the hero as divinity. To be fair to Carlyle, it is necessary to recognize that he might read Kurtz as a false hero. Kurtz’s ambitions, which included a desire “to have kings meet him at railway stations on his return from some ghastly Nowhere,” would place him, in Carlyle’s view, “among the wretchedest sights seen under this sun” (hd, 67; oh, 191). Kurtz simply would not qualify for a seat among heroes: A great man? A poor morbid prurient empty man; fitter for the ward of a hospital, than for a throne among men. I advise you to keep out of his way. He cannot walk on quiet paths; unless you will look at him, wonder at him, write paragraphs about him, he cannot live. It is the emptiness of the man, not his greatness. Because there is nothing in himself, he hungers and thirsts that you would 26 Emmett also recognizes this part of Conrad’s thought concerning the importance of the African setting for testing Carlyle’s ideals (148–9). 27 Carlyle discusses the childlike cultural conditions which make the hero as divinity possible in the first lecture in On Heroes.

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find something in him. In good truth, I believe no great man, not so much as a genuine man who had health and real substance in him of whatever magnitude, was ever much tormented in this way. (oh, 191)

Kurtz can be read as the logical consequence of Carlyle’s ideas about the hero’s unconsciousness and inherent savagery. If Kurtz belongs in a hospital, then Carlyle must take some responsibility for defining the hero in such a way that his character could be predisposed toward the corruption that Kurtz displays. If the treatment for the salvation of culture has failed, Carlyle’s therapeutic practice is at issue. Conrad has Carlyle’s objection in mind in writing Marlow’s judgment that there is an “original Kurtz” and “the hollow sham” (hd, 67). The latter is “avid of lying fame, of sham distinction, of all the appearances of success and power” (hd, 67). In effect, this makes Kurtz a sham because by Carlyle’s definition a hero “looks through the shows of things into things” and recognizes the difference between “Idolatries” and reality or truth (oh, 48). But the hollow sham is not the Kurtz that Marlow values. He values the original Kurtz, the one who “had something to say” and made a “pronouncement” “piercing enough to penetrate all the hearts that beat in the darkness” (hd, 69). Of course, the claim implicit in Marlow’s judgment that he can distinguish the true from the false Kurtz is problematic. The judgment is partly the result of Marlow’s extreme reaction against everything he recognizes as false in his culture and in the Company in which he works; for instance, the “faithless pilgrims” and the greed to “make no end of coin by trade” (hd, 26, 13). The judgment is also the result of Marlow’s desire for an alternative to the monstrous conditions that he witnesses; hence, Kurtz becomes the only real choice among the nightmares. But Conrad questions the fundamental basis of Carlyle’s capacity to know the heroic. The distinction Marlow draws between the original and the sham Kurtz is too simple by half. It points to a major problem in Carlyle’s thought. From Conrad’s perspective, the hero cannot be judged in part but must be confronted as a whole. In Heart of Darkness all of Kurtz’s actions as a whole speak to the quality of his greatness. The problem is how to read the potential greatness of men while attending to both the good and evil of their actions. This is analogous to Conrad’s relationship with Carlyle insofar as Conrad is having to judge Carlyle’s thought as a whole. And this problem will return again and again with Dickens, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche: there is no separating the good from the bad or the strong from the weak in the thought of those writers. The simultaneous existence of both makes

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both possible. The problem is how to praise and blame the heterogeneous elements. For Conrad, the dangers in hero-worship are too great if the choice is made to obey the wrong authority. The difficulties inherent in Carlyle’s position, which advocates obedience and loyalty to the hero, are captured in Conrad’s representation of the Russian “harlequin” (hd, 53). Conrad is careful to connect the harlequin with Carlyle through allusions to Teufelsdröckh’s clothes philosophy in Sartor Resartus. The harlequin is described in terms of his clothing, which “was covered with patches all over, with bright patches, blue, red, and yellow – patches on the back, patches on the front, patches on the elbows, on knees, coloured binding round his jacket, scarlet edging at the bottom of his trousers, and the sunshine made him look extremely gay and wonderfully neat withal because you could see how beautifully all this patching had been done” (hd, 53). Marlow observes that “the glamour of youth enveloped his parti-coloured rags” (hd, 55). Conrad makes the harlequin young and boyish, as a way of emphasizing the youthful devotion of the Russian’s feelings toward Kurtz. Marlow’s ambivalence toward the harlequin is informed by Conrad’s ambivalence toward Carlyle. There is genuine admiration in Marlow’s reflection that the harlequin’s “need was to exist and to move onwards at the greatest possible risk and with a maximum of privation. If the absolutely pure, uncalculating, unpractical spirit of adventure had ever ruled a human being, it ruled this be-patched youth. I almost envied him the possession of this modest and clear flame. It seemed to have consumed all thought of self so completely that even while he was talking to you, you forgot that it was he – the man before your eyes – who had gone through these things” (hd, 55). Marlow admires the complete lack of self-consciousness in the harlequin, but the lack of selfconsciousness cannot be separated from the harlequin’s hero-worship of Kurtz. Marlow “did not envy him his devotion to Kurtz, though. He had not meditated over it. It came to him and he accepted it with a sort of eager fatalism. I must say that to me it appeared about the most dangerous thing in every way he had come upon so far” (hd, 55). Thinking himself a skeptical man, Marlow is critical of the harlequin but Conrad is careful to double the two characters and complicate the judgment accordingly. A fascination with adventure is exactly what causes Marlow to come to Africa; hence his admiration for the harlequin’s “unpractical spirit of adventure.” Marlow’s criticism of the harlequin does not necessarily imply that he is sufficiently critical of his own loyalty toward Kurtz. Does Marlow realize sufficiently the danger of choosing the nightmare that is Kurtz? Conrad has some doubts about whether there is much of a

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choice at all in either the monstrous conditions or the monstrous hero. The harlequin is emphatically not Kurtz’s “last disciple”: that questionable distinction belongs to Marlow (hd, 58). When we think of Conrad and Carlyle, several ideas can be inferred from these passages. In Conrad’s view, hero-worship is Carlyle’s most dangerous idea; and yet, we cannot wholly do without it, nor can we wholly escape the idea even if we try. This recognition, that present thought is rooted in past ideas, which may be dangerous, enters into all of Conrad’s thought about the great writers with whom he engages in critical dialogues. Despite the repudiation of the Russian harlequin’s pure form of heroworship with all the qualities of admiration, obedience, and devotion that it implies, Marlow is also guilty of some more modern form of worship. I am not altogether sure how to characterize Marlow’s worship in relation to Carlyle’s thought, but the source of the worship is intimately related to a sense of meeting a kindred spirit or someone similar in kind. Marlow marks Kurtz as someone who shares an antipathy to the sham culture he himself despises, as an ally in his opposition to the evils of the Company as a symbol of Europe as a whole. The choice is informed by Marlow’s belief in the virtue of sincerity being shared between himself and Kurtz. Marlow sides with greatness against the hollowness of culture, but for Conrad the judgment is questionable. Again, the problem is related to health and sickness and also Carlyle’s use of the word “sincerity.” Throughout the lectures that make up On Heroes, one of the most important word-ideas in Carlyle’s vocabulary is “sincerity.” The entire work can be read a sustained meditation on the importance of sincerity. It is central to Carlyle’s primary definition of the heroic man, the only test of whether or not he is “true”: “I should say sincerity, a deep, great, genuine sincerity, is the first characteristic of all men in any way heroic” (oh, 39). And the measure of sincerity depends on Carlyle’s valuation of unconsciousness insofar as it is “not the sincerity that calls itself sincere” because “the Great Man’s sincerity is of the kind he cannot speak of, is not conscious of” (oh, 39, 40). The hero does not know whether he is sincere or not because he does not ask himself whether he is so or not: “his sincerity does not depend on himself; he cannot help being sincere!” (oh, 40). In Conrad’s work the idea of sincerity, rooted in Carlyle’s argument that identifies the heroic with the sincere and the proposition that “the sincere alone can recognise sincerity,” is problematized (oh, 186). The desire to create “a whole World of Heroes” causes Carlyle to raise the question: “If Hero mean sincere man, why may not every one of us be a Hero?” (oh, 109). The answer implicit here is challenged by Conrad: Carlyle’s ideal is admirable, but is it likely to be realized?

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In Marlow, Conrad illustrates this aspect of Carlyle’s thought in several ways. Marlow’s repudiation of lying, “which is exactly what I hate and detest in the world – what I want to forget” owes its origins to Carlyle’s criticism of the sham and false (hd, 29). But the statement is complicated when Marlow allows himself to go “near enough” toward making a lie of omission in “letting the young fool there believe anything he liked” (hd, 29). He realizes that “I became in an instant as much of a pretense as the rest of the bewitched pilgrims” (hd, 29). Of course, this is not Marlow’s only lapse from telling the truth since he commits a more serious breach at the end of the story, but Conrad raises questions about Marlow’s capacity for sincerity and his self-consciousness of lapsing from sincerity. Whether or not Marlow has the capacity to be heroic through his worship is intimately related to his capacity for sincerity. If Marlow is to be “an exceptional and gifted creature” either in his ability to recognize and reverence the hero or in the potential to be a hero himself, then the measure of whether or not he is “exceptional” depends largely on his sincerity (hd, 15). The measure of Marlow’s own greatness cannot be separated from his judgment of Kurtz’s greatness. The element of identification implicit in Carlyle’s argument that “the sincere alone can recognize sincerity” informs Marlow’s profound ambivalence toward Kurtz. As a skeptical critic of his culture, Marlow is unlikely to engage in the pure form of hero-worship that Carlyle idealizes. He is not about to identify Kurtz as an absolute authority and pledge his obedience accordingly. Nevertheless, the need for a choice different from the sham reality surrounding Marlow causes him to turn toward Kurtz with a terrible fascination. Part of the difficulty is in knowing whether Marlow is projecting the qualities of the heroic onto Kurtz because he must fulfill Marlow’s desire for an alternative to the cultural nightmare in which he lives. Does Marlow identify Kurtz as a hero and a great man by attributing to him the characteristics that Carlyle idealizes? Or are the elements really present in Kurtz? Consider Marlow’s assessment of Kurtz’s final words. Conrad places Marlow’s judgment and description of Kurtz’s words before the recounting of the utterance. Through the order of the telling, Marlow’s idea reinforces the convention of the deathbed scene in which the final utterance is a real insight into the truth. Marlow explains that “no eloquence could have been so withering to one’s belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity” (hd, 65–6). Judging by Kurtz’s famous final words alone, it is difficult to know what Kurtz means, never mind whether his words can be judged to be sincere or insincere. But Marlow’s reading forces the idea of sincerity upon Kurtz’s language. Through the language of Marlow’s summary of Kurtz’s final burst of

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sincerity, Conrad shows the element of identification in Marlow’s desire: “He was a remarkable man. After all, this was the expression of some sort of belief; it had candor, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth – the strange commingling of desire and hate” (hd, 69). Conrad records the process through which Marlow makes Kurtz’s final moments into something characteristic of a hero. Marlow alone was present to hear Kurtz’s final words, sincere or not. The entire scene is perplexing when we question whether or not Marlow is a hero if only sincerity can recognize sincerity. As before, the problem brings us back to the Novalis epigraph. Is Marlow making Kurtz into someone with whom he can share a belief and thereby strengthen his convictions? Is Marlow’s faith in Kurtz’s sincerity an expression of his own “want” of a “deliberate belief”? (hd, 38). Marlow’s reading of Kurtz’s final words reflects more upon Marlow’s judgment of his civilization than anything we can know about Kurtz: the self-condemnation that Marlow reads in Kurtz’s final words is spoken by the original Kurtz against the hollow Kurtz. The latter is a betrayal of the former because the false Kurtz embraces the sham reality of the false civilization that Marlow despises and therefore must be repudiated. Marlow prefers the pure savagery of Kurtz because in the region of “subtle horrors” his “pure, uncomplicated savagery was a positive relief” (hd, 58). The pure savagery is preferable to the rationalized and institutionalized forms in the Company, which is to say Kurtz is real while the Company is false. But the degree to which Marlow knows Kurtz is questionable, and will be explored again below in relation to Carlyle’s ideal of work. Marlow’s ideas about work affect his knowing of and his reaction toward Kurtz. Conrad makes this explicit when, before he ever meets Kurtz, Marlow wonders whether the man “was just simply a fine fellow who stuck to his work for its own sake” (hd, 34). Conrad doubles the two characters through Marlow’s projection of his own notions about work onto Kurtz’s character. Marlow’s curiosity about “whether this man who had come out equipped with moral ideas of some sort would climb to the top after all and how he would set about his work when there” points toward the central issue even more insistently (hd, 33). Marlow wonders if Kurtz is a worker, and how his ideas relate to his work. This is a central question that Conrad raises for Marlow as well: how and why his ideas about work affect his knowing or not knowing throughout his experience in Africa. With Carlyle’s concerns about the importance of work in mind, Conrad makes the idea of work a central problem in

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Heart of Darkness.28 Once again, it is a question of shared convictions since Conrad also thinks that work is a vital part of our living. To make sense of Marlow’s ideas concerning work, it is necessary to have Carlyle’s teachings in mind. Throughout Heart of Darkness Conrad has in mind the most famous dictum from Carlyle’s gospel of work in Sartor Resartus: “A certain inarticulate Self-consciousness dwells dimly in us; which only our Works can render articulate and decisively discernible. Our Works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly of that impossible Precept, Know thyself; till it be translated into this partially possible one, Know what thou canst work at” (sr, 123). The imperative to work is both prior to knowledge and the route to knowledge. In working we render ourselves visible so others can discern our being and we can know ourselves. We realize our self-consciousness through our actions; however, there is a question about whether or not our work can obstruct the movement toward self-knowledge. And Carlyle does not allow for thinking and questioning as a kind of work. The problem is apparent when Carlyle argues that “man is sent hither not to question, but to work” (c, 25). If thinking is opposed to working, then the relationship between work and knowledge is strained. Carlyle is sometimes dangerously close to denying the possibility of knowledge coming from any part of life but work. In the chapter entitled “Labour” in Past and Present, Carlyle makes this claim explicit: “Knowledge? The knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave to that; for Nature herself accredits that, says Yea to that. Properly thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by working; the rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge; a thing to be argued of in schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless logic-vortices, till we try it and fix it. ‘Doubt, of whatever kind, can be ended by Action alone’” (pp, 196–7). Carlyle does not ask if work is the true and only source of all knowledge. He cannot if he wants work to silence all doubts and questions. But what can Carlyle do with the knowledge that comes from thought? Doubt and thought are opposed to work and knowledge. The imperative to work, to always be working, Carlyle offers as a form of salvation, because “in Idleness alone is there perpetual despair” (pp, 195). For his sick culture, Carlyle prescribed work as the best cure. Periods of idleness and solitude are dangerous because the mind is free to think, conjecture, speculate, and doubt. Idleness becomes equated with thought. If work

28 See the discussions by Ted Boyle, Daniel Brundley, and Rob Breton.

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leads to knowledge it can also be seen as an avoidance of thought.29 The idea of work is a contradiction: simultaneously the means to know and to not know; the most important expression of being and the most important avoidance of being. Conrad recognizes the contradiction within Carlyle’s idea. In Marlow’s reflections on work Conrad represents the tension Carlyle creates between work and thought: “[The steamboat] had given me a chance to come out a bit – to find out what I could do. No. I don’t like work. I had rather laze about and think of all the fine things that can be done. I don’t like work – no man does – but I like what is in the work – the chance to find yourself. Your own reality – for yourself – not for others – what no other man can ever know. They can only see the mere show, and never tell what it really means” (hd, 31). This reflection is indebted to Carlyle, but Conrad challenges us to consider whether we “only see the mere show” of Carlyle’s praise of work, or whether we can “tell what it really means.” Where Carlyle uses the word “idleness,” Conrad uses the phrase “laze about.” Marlow accepts Carlyle’s doctrine, probably without much thought: he simply equates thinking with lazing about and working with self-knowledge. But Conrad has serious doubts about whether work really does give an individual the chance for self-knowledge. Because the narrative is retrospective, Conrad forces us to think how Marlow’s work then affects his telling now. Conrad repeatedly shows us how work keeps knowledge separate from being, as if registered by but not assimilated into self-consciousness. Marlow does not realize it, but Conrad emphasizes the idea that work is a way of not knowing. It shields Marlow from the temptations in the wilderness which could potentially undo him as Kurtz has been undone. One way of examining the idea is to recognize the importance Conrad places on the relationship between individuals and their occupations. The world of Heart of Darkness is practically without names. We are left without any way of discriminating individuals from one another except by their job titles. Those in the audience listening to Marlow’s tale are known only by their occupations: the Director of Companies, the Lawyer, 29 Houghton quotes a passage from Charlotte Mary Yonge’s novel The Daisy Chain that makes the contradiction in work humorously explicit: “I must be away from it all, and go to the simplest hardest work, beginning from the rudiments, and forgetting subtle arguments.” “Forgetting yourself,” said Ethel. “Right. I want to have no leisure to think about myself,” said Norman. “I am never so happy as at such times.” (259)

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and the Accountant. All the words are capitalized, as if taken from one of Carlyle’s books, and we remember Marlow’s comment about being “one of the Workers – with a capital – you know” (hd, 15). Except for Captain Fresleven, who as a fellow seaman is undoubtedly important to Marlow, and Kurtz, Conrad represents only workers: the Doctor, the Company’s chief accountant, the Manager, the brick maker, the mechanic and boiler-maker, etc. The names themselves become a “mere show” of an individual, although Conrad does reveal some details about these figures at times. For instance, we learn that the mechanic “was a widower with six young children […] and the passion of his life was pigeon-flying” (hd, 31). With that realization, the mechanic is not merely his occupation anymore. But we should note that it was only “after work hours he used sometimes to come over from his hut for a talk about his children and his pigeons” (hd, 31). The mechanic’s family life finds expression only when he is lazing about, away from work. His being is not realized solely through his work: his individuality is expressed after the work stops. The best example Conrad gives us of an individual abstracted into his occupation is the Company’s chief accountant. He serves as a double for Marlow, showing work as a defence against the wilderness. But Conrad also reveals the brutal callousness that is possible when an individual becomes absolutely identified with the narrow duties of his work. The chief accountant lives in the Company station as if he were living in London. He is untouched by the wilderness, a “sort of vision” in his “high, starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clean necktie, and varnished boots” (hd, 21). Marlow’s wonder is understandable but unsettling; he admires and respects the chief accountant too much. Marlow betrays a lack of judgment when he sympathizes with the man who has “been teaching one of the native women” to tend to his clothes instead of the woman who “had a distaste for the work” (hd, 21). Despite his own distaste for work, Marlow does not sympathize with the native woman. Instead, he is enchanted by the chief accountant’s devotion to his books, which are in “apple-pie order” (hd, 21). The chief accountant’s devotion allows him to separate himself from his surroundings but also eliminates his capacity to be moved by human suffering. So much so, that when a “sick man” is placed in a room with him, the chief accountant can only display a “gentle annoyance” and remark that “the groans of this sick person […] distract my attention. And without that it is extremely difficult to guard against clerical errors in this climate” (hd, 22). Conrad makes it difficult to simply condemn the chief accountant. Our reading of the character is complicated considerably in our last view of

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him: “He turned to his work. The noise outside had ceased, and presently in going out I stopped at the door. In the steady buzz of flies the homeward-bound agent was lying flushed and insensible; the other bent over his books was making correct entries of perfectly correct transactions; and fifty feet below the doorstep I could see the still tree-tops of the grove of death” (hd, 22). The chief accountant’s devotion to work and to keeping up appearances is a defensive measure and partly related to the instinct for self-preservation. We are back to Carlyle’s idea that work saves a man from doubts and despair. The work preserves the accountant from becoming physically ill like the agent on his floor or mentally ill like Kurtz and saves him from knowing the horror of the grove of death just a short distance from his door. While the avoidance of knowing is deplorable, he could not live in the station without the distraction of his work. His devotion is necessary to live but his life is reduced to an exemplification of his occupation and almost nothing more. In opposition to this, Conrad creates the brick maker, the “papiermâché Mephistopheles” (hd, 29). While the chief accountant has no existence apart from his occupation, the brick maker does not work at his occupation at all. His thoughts are directed toward himself and selfadvancement. Although “the business entrusted to this fellow was the making of bricks […] there wasn’t a fragment of a brick anywhere in the station” (hd, 27). Again, he is another double for Marlow, but an extreme of the idea of idleness that Marlow enjoys: he would rather laze about and think about what might be done than actually do his work. By doing nothing, the brick maker is aligned with the pilgrims of the station. In their “waiting,” they all fall prey to “disease” (hd, 27). Their idleness undermines their health, mentally and physically. The idleness leads the brick maker and the pilgrims to be tempted by the doubt and speculation that Carlyle abhors: They beguiled the time by backbiting and intriguing against each other in a foolish kind of way. There was an air of plotting about that station, but nothing came of it, of course. It was as unreal as everything else – as the philanthropic pretense of the whole concern, as their talk, as their government, as their show of work. The only real feeling was a desire to get appointed to a trading-post where ivory was to be had, so that they could earn percentages. They intrigued and slandered and hated each other only on that account – but as to effectually lifting a little finger – oh no. (hd, 27)

Though unmistakably of Conrad’s world, this is the kind of chaos that Carlyle fears from idleness. As if to spite Carlyle, or perhaps to fulfill all

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his warnings about the dangers of idleness, these men think their rewards must be found in this life rather than found “in Heaven or else Nowhere” (pp, 202). Conrad represents men lazing about and thinking: all these men can do is scheme about their potential rewards. And without the defence that activity and work gives the chief accountant, these men will fall sick and die long before they get their percentages. Marlow’s idealization of work is partially caused by his reaction to the conspiratorial atmosphere created by the idleness he witnesses. At that moment, Marlow is very much like Carlyle, whose ideas about work are partially a reaction against what he perceived as his culture’s illness, the self-conscious sickness that is the symptom of “working wrong” (c, 1). Hence Carlyle’s reaction against Byron in favour of Goethe, who suggested that “an endless significance lies in work” (pp, 195). Conrad is preoccupied with two problems: that the idealization of work as a means to forget the self is a good insofar as it eliminates the dangers of the speculative, conspiratorial world of the brick maker and also that the idealization of work as a means to realize the self or find the self is potentially an error. For instance, we should read Marlow’s comments about the “savage” trained as a fireman against Marlow, against all the workers in Heart of Darkness (hd, 38). In Carlyle’s view there would be little or no irony in Marlow’s idea that the black men, trained to work on the ship, are an “improved specimen” of humanity (hd, 38). While Marlow sees something comic in his fireman, like a “dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat walking on his hind legs,” Conrad tells us that “a few months of training” has “done for” Marlow as well.30 Unlike his fireman, Marlow might be out of place “clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank,” but he too could be doing something else, “instead of which he was hard at work” (hd, 38–9). Marlow’s response to what is happening on the shore has been conditioned by his training to work and live in civilization. Like the fireman, Marlow “was useful” to the Company “because he had been instructed” (hd, 39). This may help explain the aunt’s biblical allusion in explaining to Marlow that “the labourer is worthy of his hire” (hd, 16). Conrad shows us how Marlow too is “full of improving knowledge” in and of his work, just as Carlyle would have it (hd, 39). But this makes Marlow as much “a thrall to strange witchcraft” as his fireman (hd, 39). Neither of them has “any time to peer into [their] creepy thoughts” (hd, 39). 30 hd, 38. It is hardly a coincidence that Marlow’s humour in this passage involves clothing, recalling yet again Carlyle’s central metaphor in Sartor Resartus.

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Immediately afterwards Marlow recounts his story of finding the Russian’s book: An Inquiry into Some Points of Seamanship. Marlow identifies with the book because he recognizes “a singleness of intention, an honest concern for the right way of going to work which made these humble pages thought out so many years ago luminous with another than a professional light” (hd, 39). The “singleness of intention” recalls Marlow’s respect for the chief accountant, and the “right way of going to work” recalls Marlow’s objections to the brick maker’s idleness. But what is most important is that the “simple old sailor” makes Marlow “forget the jungle and pilgrims in a delicious sensation of having come upon something unmistakably real” (hd, 39). While reading this book, Marlow is kept from thinking about his situation: he is distracted from the horrors of the moment. The “unmistakably real” excludes everything surrounding him for a few moments because it is preoccupied with work. During his trip around the coast on the French steamer, Marlow is free to think because he is not working: “The idleness of a passenger, my isolation amongst all these men with whom I had no point of contact, the oily and languid sea, the uniform somberness of the coast, seemed to keep me away from the truth of things within the toil of a mournful and senseless delusion. The voice of the surf heard now and again was a positive pleasure, like the speech of a brother. Now and then a boat from the shore gave one a momentary contact with reality” (hd, 17). The real takes a different form here. Rather than from a book, the real comes to Marlow from the boat that he sees, which recalls his own occupation. The “great comfort” of feeling that he “belonged still to a world of straightforward facts” connects this with the previous scene (hd, 17). In both cases, Marlow is apparently open to an experience of contact, but he is, at least partially, thinking about his own preoccupations with ships and his work. Again, it is the problem of Marlow recognizing a value only in things connected with himself or his own preoccupations. The entire style of the two passages is different and distinct within the story. There is a calm observing and registering of experience that is akin to Marlow’s walk through the grove of death, where again he is not at work. Conrad reveals an immediacy and clarity in experience when those experiences are not distorted through the distraction of working; but nevertheless Marlow’s mind is never far from the subject of work. Work potentially dulls the senses and the ability to know yet also informs in some subtle, unconscious manner all Marlow’s knowing. Conrad emphasizes the necessity for what Carlyle calls idleness, for the periods of inactivity that allow for real human contact and real human knowing, but reveals that Marlow’s preoccupation with work is never wholly absent from his thinking.

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Conrad undermines the significance Marlow attributes to Kurtz in the passage leading to Kurtz’s death scene. There are three paragraphs about how “Kurtz discoursed,” which are immediately followed by a strong qualification concerning how much time Marlow could attend carefully to Kurtz: “But I had not much time to give him because I was helping the engine-driver to take to pieces the leaky cylinders, to straighten a bent connecting rod, and in other such matters. I lived in an infernal mess of rust, filings, nuts, bolts, spanners, hammers, ratchet-drills – things I abominate because I don’t get on with them. I tended the little forge we fortunately had aboard; I toiled wearily in a wretched scrap-heap – unless I had the shakes too bad to stand” (hd, 67, 68). This scene is a kind of reversal of the meeting Marlow had with Mrs Beard in “Youth.” While she worked, Marlow had time to read. Now, while Kurtz discoursed it was Marlow who worked. Conrad gives us very good reasons to doubt Marlow’s knowledge of Kurtz and how well Marlow might have attended to the meaning of Kurtz’s words. This passage reminds us of the chief accountant’s devotion to work that compels him to ignore the dying man placed in his room. Marlow’s claim to know the significance of Kurtz’s last words is questionable at best. In the grove of death Conrad represents an experience of human communion which may be the most important in terms of Conrad’s critical thought about Carlyle’s ideal of work. First, Marlow was “loitering in the shade,” which recalls Marlow’s idea of lazing about and thinking (hd, 21). The horrors of what he sees there cause him to “ma[k]e haste towards the station” (hd, 21). That is, he wants to move from “loitering” to take up his position working. This is an avoidance of knowing. Marlow is not working, and his experience in the grove of death comes before his meeting with the chief accountant, the brick maker, and his idealized thoughts about work. Marlow’s experience in the grove of death is the cause or the beginning out of which all the later experiences grow and take their character. The idealization of work grows out of the need to be saved from knowing such horrors. Conrad’s representation of the grove of death is a contentious passage. Chinua Achebe dismisses the scene as “bleeding-heart sentiments” while C.B. Cox argues that the scene expresses “profound compassion for the sick negroes.”31 I believe that Cox is right in recognizing that Conrad is trying to earn the reader’s compassion, but the debate among 31 Achebe, “An Image of Africa,” 256. Cox, Joseph Conrad: The Modern Imagination, 52.

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these critics proceeds without sufficiently understanding Conrad’s design because they are not aware that Carlyle is present at the scene. Before entering the grove of death Conrad shows us an “inhabited devastation” (hd, 18). Using the word “machinery” to recall one of Carlyle’s characteristic ideas from “Signs of the Times” – that the nineteenth century is “the Age of Machinery” – Conrad shows us that at the end of the nineteenth century the idea of work has decayed, and Carlyle’s cure for diseased self-consciousness may have become a mechanical habit. (hd, 19; st, 59). The grove of death is one potential result of Carlyle mistaking his gospel of work for a real religion, as the means by which “a man perfects himself” (pp, 195). The prescription to make men heroic through work may do more harm than good. The call for the “Force for Work” to be enforced upon others is troubling (pp, 200). If work is a call to make order, then the worker, and especially the hero, must combat disorder everywhere he sees it: What is immethodic, waste, thou shalt make methodic, regulated, arable; obedient and productive to thee. Wheresoever thou findest Disorder, there is thy eternal enemy; attack him swiftly, subdue him; make Order of him, the subject not of Chaos, but of Intelligence, Divinity and Thee! […]. But above all, where thou findest Ignorance, Stupidity, Brutemindedness, – yes, there […] attack it, I say; smite it wisely, unweariedly, and rest not while thou livest and it lives; but smite, smite, in the name of God! (pp, 200–1).

The language suggests a religious crusade, much like the campaigns Carlyle describes Mahomet and Cromwell undertaking in On Heroes. Carlyle’s demands that people who do not recognize the gospel of work should be forced to embrace it are explicit. Carlyle’s language must have been convincing to some because it inspired the explorer H.M. Stanley to declare: “Carlyle says that ‘to subdue mutiny, discord, widespread despair by manfulness, justice, mercy, and wisdom, to let light on chaos, and make it instead a green flowery world, is beyond all other greatness, work for a God!’ Who can doubt that God chose the King for His instrument to redeem this vast slave park …. King Leopold found the Congo … cursed by cannibalism, savagery, and despair; and he has been trying […] to relieve it of its horrors.”32 Carlyle was identified as an authority on bringing ideas such as work into Africa. Arguably, his is the “idea at the back of it” that Marlow alludes to early in Heart of Darkness (hd, 10). 32 Stanley, Epigraph, 79.

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In “An Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” work is no longer a duty that should be accepted but a moral absolute that must be forced upon all people. The combination of Carlyle’s gospel of work with his racist language makes the passage difficult to read. Carlyle asserts That no Black man who will not work according to what ability the gods have given him for working, has the smallest right to eat pumpkin, or to any fraction of land that will grow pumpkin, however plentiful such land may be; but has an indisputable and perpetual right to be compelled by the real proprietors of said land, to do competent work for his living. This is the everlasting duty of all men, black or white, who are born into this world. To do competent work, to labour honestly according to the ability given them; for that and for no other purpose was each one of us sent into this world; […] Whatsoever prohibits or prevents a man from this his sacred appointment to labour while he lives on this earth, – that, I say, is the man’s deadliest enemy; and all men are called upon to do what is in their power or opportunity towards delivering him from that. If it be his own indolence that prevents and prohibits him, then his own indolence is the enemy he must be delivered from: and the first ‘right’ he has, – poor indolent blockhead, black or white, – is, That every unprohibited man, whatsoever wiser, more industrious person may be passing that way, shall endeavour to “emancipate” him from his indolence, and by some wise means, as I said, compel him, since inducing will not serve, to do the work he is fit for.33

Carlyle’s earnest desire to save individuals from despair becomes a morbid desire to force everyone to work whether they will or not. Every individual’s mission is to deliver others from their indolence, from themselves as their own enemy. Here Carlyle’s idealism concerning the importance of work has degenerated into an absolute system, into another piece of machinery, like that of the Benthamites and other systemmongers that he railed against in “Signs of the Times.” Marlow’s entrance into the grove of death is a criticism of Carlyle’s late, extreme position on work. When we read that each of the “six black men” has “an iron collar on his neck,” Conrad makes it appear as if the men are criminals or prisoners of war because in Carlyle’s thought either name might apply. Marlow comments that “these men could by 33 Carlyle, “The Nigger Question,” 355. In “Anti-Dogmatism and the ‘Metaphorical Quashee’: Thomas Carlyle’s ‘An Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,’” Carol Collins makes a persuasive argument that Carlyle’s ideas are “presented humourously” in response to the politics of the day (32). Nevertheless, Conrad recognizes that Carlyle’s humour is problematic.

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no stretch of the imagination be called enemies,” so we are left with the word “criminals” (hd, 19). The “outraged law” that “like the bursting shells had come to them” is Carlyle’s gospel of work. Just as the sounds of drums are mysterious and incomprehensible to Marlow, the “outraged law” is “an insoluble mystery from the sea” which they cannot comprehend (hd, 19). Conrad’s criticism of Carlyle is especially troubling in showing us “one of the reclaimed, the product of the new forces at work” (hd, 19). The new forces at work are Carlyle’s, and his call for every man to work and produce is now producing the awful scene Conrad shows us. “The great cause of these high and just proceedings” is Conrad’s summary of the arguments and ideas that Carlyle employs in his gospel of work (hd, 19). In Carlyle’s language, work appears “high and just” but Conrad shows us the reality is very different. The grove of death illustrates what occurs when Carlyle’s arguments about work are put into practice. But as always with Conrad, there is a complication. Conrad writes one of the most remarkable passages of criticism in all his fiction; it is all the more so because no one has noticed it. Through the imaginative creation of the scene, he makes Carlyle experience the horror. In writing the grove of death Conrad has another passage from the “Occasional Discourse” in mind: “A poor Negro overworked […] is sad to look upon; yet he inspires me with a sacred pity, and a kind of human respect is not denied him; him, the hapless brother mortal, performing something useful in his day, and only suffering inhumanity, not doing it or being it.”34 Conrad transforms the Carlyle of this passage into Marlow. The possibility of pity and compassion at the sight of suffering inhumanity that Carlyle confesses to feeling here informs Marlow’s perspective. Carlyle’s thought is transfigured into Conrad’s fiction. Through Marlow’s eyes, Conrad forces Carlyle to look upon the grove of death “with a sacred pity and a kind of human respect.” In his art, Conrad makes Carlyle know the end of his own arguments about work; through Marlow, the compassionate side of Carlyle’s thought in the “Occasional Discourse” is confronted with what occurs when the Gospel of work is taken to an extreme: “They were dying slowly – it was very clear. They were not enemies, they were not criminals, they were nothing earthly now, nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation lying confusedly in the greenish gloom. Brought from all the recesses of the coast in all the legality of time contracts, lost in uncongenial surroundings, fed on unfamiliar food, they sickened, became inefficient, and were then allowed to crawl away and rest. These 34 Carlyle, “The Nigger Question,” 364.

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moribund shapes were free as air – and nearly as thin” (hd, 20). Marlow’s response is one that we might expect from Carlyle had he not been preoccupied with making the men work. Conrad is challenging Carlyle to recognize the errors in his arguments. These men were once full of “a wild vitality” and “an intense energy,” but have been transformed into mere “shadows” of what they once were (hd, 17, 20). They can rest now, but it is too late for them. According to Carlyle work is supposed to free a man from disease and despair and perfect his soul, but Conrad shows that, when a man is compelled, work potentially condemns a man to suffering and death. These men are “free as air,” but free to do nothing but die (hd, 20). Conrad shows these men losing their humanity because of the work forced upon them. He is showing Carlyle the horrors of what his ideas can cause. And to silence any doubt that he has Carlyle in mind throughout this passage, Conrad includes a telling detail: Marlow notes that one of the dying workers “had tied a bit of white worsted around his neck” (hd, 20). This “bit of white thread from beyond the seas” is yet another allusion to the clothes philosophy of Sartor Resartus (hd, 20). Discerning the extent of Conrad’s criticism of Carlyle in Heart of Darkness depends on recognizing the presence of Carlyle’s ideals in the text and how they are being perceived. I believe that Conrad does not articulate a more complete criticism of Carlyle until Lord Jim, where he examines the relationships among belief, conviction, and heroes. In Lord Jim, the relationship between Jim’s questionable heroism and the work that he does or does not accomplish both before and during his time in Patusan are further reflections on Carlyle’s ideas. Conrad revisits Carlyle yet again in Under Western Eyes but is also responding to Dostoevsky’s valuation, which repudiates the great, heroic, extraordinary man in favour of the ordinary man. Conrad raises questions about the relationship between heroism and work in exploring the actions of many of the characters in the novel: Haldin, Razumov, Peter Ivanovitch, and Tekla, to name a few. The critical preoccupation with the relationship between work and thought that Conrad writes into Heart of Darkness informs his other novels as well. Conrad critically responds to the thought of other authors as it is manifested in their work of writing. His criticism raises questions about the relationship between knowing and not knowing in their works: for instance, what is Nietzsche willing to know and not know in his writing? Reading Conrad’s novels alongside Dostoevsky or George Eliot reveals the implications of the ideas that enable their writing. The critical concerns about work and heroism should be kept in mind when reading the chapters that follow.

2 The Despair of Knowing in Bleak House and The Secret Agent an inquiry into the relationship between Conrad’s and Dickens’s thought should begin by focusing on two novels: The Secret Agent and Bleak House. I wholly agree with Seymour-Smith’s remark that The Secret Agent “could hardly exist without Dickens.”1 While Conrad’s novel distills and concentrates Dickens’s wide-ranging study of English society, the purposes of the novels are analogous: an investigation into and a critique of a perceived sickness undermining English culture. Because both novels are highly complex inquiries into English language and culture, from among the significant points of contact the problems surrounding the relationship between knowing and not knowing have been chosen as a focus. The two authors share the idea that not knowing is the dominant impulse or instinct, with the suggestion that knowing can act also as a cover for not knowing. In a few characters, such as Jo, Snagsby, and Esther in Bleak House and Winnie and Verloc in The Secret Agent, not knowing dominates their thought. Even the characters with a will to know, such as Bucket and Tulkinghorn in Bleak House and Inspector Heat and the Assistant Commissioner in The Secret Agent, embody both impulses, in some unequal degree. And, of course, the detective narratives central to the novels are important because Conrad and Dickens raise questions about the detectives’ will to know in conducting their investigations. The two authors are careful to reveal the limitations of the investigative talents of the investigators. 1 tsa, 12. His comments are corroborated by Sylvere Monod (“Some Dickensian Echoes in Conrad’s The Secret Agent,” 153), Wendy Lesser (“From Dickens to Conrad: A Sentimental Journey,” 185), and James Walton (“Conrad, Dickens, and the Detective Novel,” 447). See also Hugh Epstein’s “Bleak House and Conrad: The Presence of Dickens in Conrad’s Writing.” Aaron Fogel’s comparison of the two novels is well worth reading (Coercion to Speak, 163–5 and 174–7).

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The criticism of life made by these two writers is meant to unsettle our complacent thinking which mistakenly forces pre-determined formulas upon our living and our culture, rather than carefully responding to changing ideas and conditions. In my view, Conrad and Dickens share the kind of doubts about knowing that George Whalley articulates: “These days I find it assumed that there is only one way to knowing and that we all have easy access to it as an act of will. If you want to know anything you ‘study’ it, you bring your mind to bear on it, you force its meaning out of it, you analyse it, master it, control it. It is assumed that there is only one way of getting ‘knowledge’ and that we all know how this is done.”2 The novels are at least partly lessons regarding the dangers inherent in our presuppositions about how we get to know a thing and propose themselves as forms of knowing which explore the many problems in the relationship between knowing and not knowing. Through the plots of the novels, both authors represent how positively knowing one idea or answer can be an attempt, conscious or unconscious, to not know something other or to escape knowing something unendurable. And it may also be possible that knowing one idea can cause blindness to alternative or interrelated possibilities. This can be dangerous and potentially fatal. Although the effect is partly humourous, there is also a serious criticism in Dickens’s depictions of Mrs Jellyby, whose idea of “the momentous importance of Africa, and the utter insignificance of all other places and things” causes her to neglect her family, and Mrs Pardiggle, whose very clear notions of her work to improve the conditions of impoverished families cause her to be negligent of the humanity and the other very real needs of the families she visits (bh, 87). Miss Flite’s and Richard’s obsession with the Jarndyce lawsuit in Chancery, like Winnie’s vigilance toward Stevie, is directly connected with their deaths: the mania for an idea is a serious problem potentially leading to self-destruction. Similarly, categorical distinctions – Stein’s butterflies and beetles or Nietzsche’s antithetical relationship to Christ – are simply not tenable. Partly, Conrad learns from Dickens that the categorical judgments that establish types or models for knowing are too simple. Embracing models and formulas can become an avoidance of knowing the potentially disturbing if not fatal relationships among ideas that peacefully coexist when separated into different categories. The two writers do not advocate either knowing or not knowing as a good in itself, but instead explore the dangers inherent in embracing either instinct or impulse as a satisfactory solution. They work to show that a compulsion to know can be analogous to living as a Tulkinghorn 2 Whalley, Studies in Literature and the Humanities, 207.

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or Stevie and a compulsion to not know can be analogous to living like Esther or Winnie: taken to an extreme, each position is fatal. The thought in these two novels about the disturbing relation between knowing and not knowing is at least as troubling as the inquiries in Nietzsche’s philosophy or Freud’s psychoanalytic theory. The novels should be the starting point for an inquiry into questions which are more often connected with Nietzsche in the last quarter of the nineteenth century or Freud at the beginning of the twentieth century.3 The lessons Conrad learns from Dickens at least partly enable his criticism of Nietzsche, which I discuss in chapter 6. Dickens and Conrad use the novel form to write sustained meditations on the complexities inherent in our living. Bleak House and The Secret Agent are thought about thought, critical inquiries into the ways in which we think and read that cannot be separated from our living. To think profoundly about these problems, Conrad did not need to read Nietzsche; many of the necessary questions are already present in the art and thought of Bleak House. While neither Conrad nor Dickens maintains a perfectly equal balance in their inquiries into knowing and not knowing, their novels offer powerful insights into the problem and deserve to be recognized for the strength of their thought. Before exploring how Dickens and Conrad conduct their inquiries into knowing and not knowing, it is important to recognize their use of negative grammatical structures and to show the centrality of the problem in the two novels. The question is why the authors would identify knowing and not knowing as a central issue in language and culture. Partly, this grows from their shared interest in the works of Thomas Carlyle. In early essays such as “Signs of the Times” and “Characteristics,” Carlyle attempts to diagnose the symptoms of the illness affecting English culture and this partly determines the interest that Conrad and Dickens share in the problem. The negative grammar that pervades both Bleak House and The Secret Agent is an important inheritance from Shakespeare. Brian Crick recognizes that “perhaps only Dickens and Shakespeare are Conrad’s equal 3 Nietzsche also realizes the necessity of not knowing. For instance, in The Gay Science Nietzsche notes that “to find all things deep – that is an uncomfortable trait: it makes one constantly strain one’s eyes and in the end always find more than one had wished” (133, Section 158). Or, Nietzsche argues that “even the bravest of us rarely has the courage for what he really knows” and that “once and for all, there is a great deal I do not want to know. – Wisdom sets bounds even to knowledge” (t, 33, Section 8 of “Why I Am So Clever”).

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when it comes to sympathetically imagining the absurd and poignant drama of the human consciousness caught in the act of not knowing.”4 For Crick, these three authors are “no – know” thinkers. The negative grammar of knowing not only informs but fundamentally is the basic grammar of their works and the primary focus of their inquiries into human thinking and being. Two of the most basic grammatical constructions in Shakespeare are “not know” and “know not.” The Merchant of Venice opens with Antonio’s declaration that “In sooth I know not why I am so sad” and the play explores the degree to which any of the characters has a capacity to know themselves or to know others and whether or not knowing is simultaneously a cover story for a desire to not know. In my judgment, Othello is a profound exploration of the “no – know” problem, especially in the love triangle between Desdemona, Othello, and Iago.5 Iago’s speeches are seemingly always constructed in a negative grammar. He repeatedly says “I know not”6 and is perhaps the only character in Shakespeare, if not in English literature, to utter the phrase “I think no.”7 However, reading the entire line is important, because Iago actually says “By Janus, I think no.” Shakespeare shows us how thinking and negating are two sides of the same Janus-faced coin. He plays with the relationship between the two words in phrases such as “No, let me know.”8 Balancing “no” and “know” on opposite sides of the phrase, Shakespeare creates a considerable tension in the grammatical construction. The phrase simultaneously says “I want to know” and “I do not want to know” but neither idea exists independently of the other: the knowing moves in opposite directions. One way of thinking about the connection between “no” and “know” is to question whether all attempts to know are attempts to think no; that is, all knowing in and of itself is a kind of negation of knowing, a wanting to not know. Dickens and Conrad both assimilate Shakespeare’s grammar and rewrite Shakespeare’s lesson throughout their novels by revealing how “knowing not” or “thinking no” are basic elements of the illness afflicting English culture and thought. 4 Crick, Love Confounded, 242. 5 See my discussion of the relation between knowing and not knowing and faith and doubt in “Nothing If Not Critical: Stanley Cavell’s Skepticism and Shakespeare’s Othello.” Of course, see Cavell’s important work Disowning Knowledge. 6 For instance, see Othello, 3.3.36 and 4.1.32 7 Othello, 1.2.33. 8 Othello, 4.1.72.

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In Bleak House, Dickens employs Shakespeare’s negative grammar almost compulsively and identifies it as one important symptom at the very heart of the sickness in England. In relation to the problem of not knowing in Bleak House, the importance of Tom-All-Alone’s and its most famous, if only periodic tenant, Jo, cannot be underestimated. I agree with Monroe Engel that “Jo is a central character in Bleak House. He might, in fact, be called the central character.”9 Jo is one pivot upon which nearly all the characters in the book become interrelated by being contaminated and infected with Tom’s revenge, which is at least partly a metaphor connected with Jo’s negative grammar. Conrad also writes the negative grammar of knowing into nearly every aspect of the action of The Secret Agent. It is difficult to read for more than a page in the novel without finding a sentence written in a negative grammar, but the problem is especially concentrated in Winnie Verloc. As Conrad explains in the “Author’s Note,” the novel is “at last the story of Winnie Verloc” and all the other characters are “grouped about Mrs. Verloc and related directly or indirectly to her tragic suspicion that ‘life doesn’t stand much looking into’” (tsa, 41). Winnie is analogous to Jo in that the primary characteristic defining her character involves the negation of knowing, but in Conrad’s novel almost all the characters share this tendency to some degree. Dickens emphasizes the problem of language and grammar that Jo represents through periodic variations upon his characteristic utterance: “I don’t know nothink.”10 With Iago’s grammar in mind, the Shakespearean heritage is apparent. The phrase synthesizes several utterances and grammatical structures together into one complicated yet strangely simple whole: I do not know; I do not think; I know nothing; I think nothing. The phrase is a negation of thought, of the capacity for thought, of the desire to think. Jo’s characteristic utterance is simultaneously a denial of thought and identity, if we still count Descartes’s famous proposition, 9 Engel, “Bleak House,” 198. Jo takes Lady Dedlock to the grave of Nemo/ Captain Hawdon (chapter 16) and unknowingly leads Tulkinghorn and Bucket to make a connection between Lady Dedlock and Nemo/Captain Hawdon (chapter 22). The infection that Jo spreads is central to the plot because it causes Esther’s illness (chapter 31) and also the change in her appearance which destroys the resemblance which declares, at least physically, the connection to her mother, Lady Dedlock (chapter 36). 10 bh, 274, 276, 324, 412. James English’s discussion of Conrad’s style calls attention to the use of repetition in descriptions to connect key ideas with characters. Arguably, Conrad adopted this stylistic trait from Dickens.

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“I think, therefore I am,” as one of the basic tests of being. Part of the difficulty is determining how Jo’s life can be understood if his being is a concentrated and continuing expression of “I know no thought” or “I have no thought” or perhaps even “I am no thought.” Conrad repeats and varies the problem in Winnie’s characteristic thought: “She felt profoundly that things do not stand much looking into” (tsa, 172). Although perhaps not as clever as Dickens’s confounding fusion of words, Conrad’s sentence is no less troubling. Winnie’s “principle to ignore” “the inwardness of things” is unquestionable for her; however, the ambiguity of the word “things” in both passages makes it difficult to determine the limits of Winnie’s “philosophical, almost disdainful incuriosity” (tsa, 155, 216). The “force” and “wisdom” of Winnie’s “instinct” to not know is strangely undetermined yet powerfully absolute: her entire being is an expression of the negation of knowing. But the phrasing of the sentence suggests that there is a measure of “necessity” in the idea, and I use the word deliberately because Conrad repeatedly uses it in reference to Winnie in the “Author’s Note” (tsa, 41). Her very identity is at stake in her unwillingness to know, which is also to say that her identity is founded upon her philosophical incuriosity. The questions surrounding what we can and cannot know or what we are willing and unwilling to know about ourselves and others are vitally important in both novels. My identification of Bleak House and The Secret Agent as critical inquiries is rooted in three important ideas. The first, at the centre of the inquiries, is a “no – know” question, which Dickens emphasizes when Tulkinghorn explains “Nemo is Latin for no one” (bh, 185). How and why Captain Hawdon and Stevie might be no one or some one depending upon who is the knower is a central issue in the books. Dickens and Conrad construct two versions of what is at least potentially “an inquest to be held presently upon a person likely to remain for ever unknown” (tsa, 108). The fact that the remains of both persons are later identified as Captain Hawdon and Stevie does not dissipate all the questions about how they were known in life, whether or not either of them can be known in death, and whether or not either of them is known for what he was. The second idea is that both novelists are self-consciously and self-critically playing the part of the hero as man of letters in performing an essentially Carlylean task – identifying the signs of the times. The third idea is that the both novelists recognize the troubling analogy between their own work and the work of the detectives in their novels. Both the authors and the detectives play relatively analogous roles as investigators and storytellers. These two roles are also interrelated in our thinking about the Carlylean task of the hero as man of letters, which is

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in some ways analogous to the work that the detectives pursue: to know and tell the truth. Dickens and Conrad recognize the significance of the analogy in thinking about the dangers inherent in the actions of the detectives. Like Dickens, Conrad is engaged in an inquiry that Edgar Johnson characterized as “The Anatomy of Society,” which is a typically Carlylean project.11 They transfigure Carlyle’s characteristic preoccupations with the health and sickness of society into the novel. In the opening paragraph of “Characteristics” Carlyle invokes the “Physician’s Aphorism” that “the healthy know not of their health, but only the sick” as “the test” for whether the “moral, intellectual, political, poetical” elements informing a culture are “working right or working wrong” (c, i). At issue is the health and sickness of our thoughts and impulses. This partly explains why Conrad and Dickens are preoccupied with how the language and thought of a culture are “working right or working wrong.” Many characters in the two novels are sick in their thinking and knowing but remain unconscious of the illness. Both writers make a diagnosis of their respective cultures; however, their knowing is not a truth-telling or seeing into the truth of things, but rather a testing of the dangers in taking that kind of position through the representations of their detectives. The inquiries in Bleak House and The Secret Agent are rooted in Carlyle’s thought about the connectedness of human lives in communities. Both novelists explore the disintegration of English culture in terms of a shared or community-wide illness and construct analogies that connect physical illnesses to moral corruption. As John Lucas notes, the design of Bleak House “is about England as a society which is failing of mutuality […] or, to give it the word Carlyle chose, it is about the collapse of brotherhood.”12 Lucas demonstrates that Dickens 11 See Edgar Johnson’s chapter on Bleak House in Charles Dickens; His Tragedy and Triumph. Jan Gorak argues that, in The Secret Agent, “the genre will become an anatomy of English civilization” as we “witness Conrad’s bid to utilize a popular instrument (the spy novel) to prosecute a serious public inquiry” and complete a “diagnosis of the national condition” (“Popular/ Canonical: The Case of The Secret Agent,” 78, 82, 86). 12 Lucas, The Melancholy Man, 207. U.C. Knoepflmacher is right to argue that Conrad’s “return to an earlier setting is deliberate” (Laughter and Despair, 241). Conrad brings readers close to Dickens’s London, but it is not wholly Dickens’s world. In “Bleak House and the Moral Life,” J. Hillis Miller observes that “the world of the novel is already, when the story begins, a kind of junk heap of broken things,” a world of “spiritual disintegration” wherein the normal condition for

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expands on Carlyle’s famous argument about the poor Irish widow who asserts her sisterhood with a negligent society by infecting her entire lane with typhus fever before dying.13 The lesson in Carlyle’s example is that a willed ignorance cannot negate the essential truth that all human lives are interconnected spiritually and physically. If anything, not attending simply propagates the problem. In the two famous passages from Bleak House that raise questions about “what connection can there be” among so many disparate elements of society and how the corruption or degradation of Tom’s revenge forces a connection among the disparate elements, Dickens writes his own lesson about the consequences of wilfully ignoring that we are fundamentally interconnected with everyone.14 In The Secret Agent, Conrad adopts Carlyle’s and Dickens’s ideas about the interconnectedness of society.15 There is also a persistent emphasis on questions about health and sickness in Conrad’s language of “hygienic idleness” and “unhygienic labour” (tsa, 52). In one sense, Conrad and Dickens are rethinking Carlyle’s analogy, in which criticism is like a medical analysis, by performing an anatomy of culture, but neither author is entirely comfortable with the role of the investigator, and their discomfort is evident in their representations of the detectives, Inspector Bucket, Inspector Heat, and the Assistant Commissioner. Both authors are self-conscious about playing the role of the hero as man of letters and the relation that it bears to the detectives through the knowing and truth-telling that both kinds of work share.

individuals is “dereliction” (158, 162). Conrad takes Dickens’s idea of a broken society further, and to borrow Miller’s description of Bleak House, The Secret Agent shows a more advanced state of decay and disintegration: “Things are then like the wreckage left behind after the destruction of a civilization. Each fragmentary form once had a use and a purpose, but is now merely debris” (160). 13 Lucas, The Melancholy Man, 207. Carlyle’s parable is in “The Gospel of Mammonism” in Past and Present (150–1). There is another allusion later in the book in “Democracy” (209–10). In Dickens the Novelist, Q.D. Leavis corroborates Lucas’s argument that Dickens has Carlyle in mind and cites Carlyle’s argument about the typhus fever carried by the poor Irish widow. See pages 125 and 166. 14 bh, 272. The two passages are in chapters 16 and 46. 15 In “The Design of Conrad’s The Secret Agent,” John Hagan observes that Conrad “render[s] the moral atmosphere surrounding not one or two individuals, but an entire community of which the Verlocs, though symptomatic of the whole, form but a part” (148).

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In writing their inquiries, Dickens and Conrad are performing what Carlyle calls the “grand business,” which is to “discern truly the signs of our own time; and by knowledge of its wants and advantages, wisely adjust our own position to it” (st, 56, 59). Carlyle thinks that we should “look calmly around us, for a little, on the perplexed scene where we stand. Perhaps, on a more serious inspection, something of its perplexity will disappear, some of its distinctive characters and deeper tendencies more clearly reveal themselves” (st, 59). The person making the inquiry is partly passive because the problems “reveal themselves,” but Carlyle is not advocating passivity for the hero if there is a “case” or “crisis” that demands investigation (st, 56, 57). For Carlyle’s hero, “the Alpha and Omega of his whole Heroism [is] That he looks through the shews [sic] of things into things” (oh, 48). In no uncertain terms, the hero uncovers the truth and then he tells the truth in whatever ready speech he has to everyone who will listen. The work of diagnosing the ills of culture in Carlyle’s heroic “therapeutics” is very much analogous to the work performed by a detective who identifies a transgression and then proceeds to look through the appearances to reconstruct the truth and finally tell the story (c, 1). In calling attention to this analogy, I want to argue that Dickens and Conrad are both critical of the kind of knowing that Carlyle attributes to the hero as man of letters. The impulse to know the truth can be destructive; for instance, an invasive investigation can be fatal because an anatomy requires the subject to be dead before the procedure can begin. A will to knowledge can result in fatal consequences both for the knower and the person being known. Conrad and Dickens write detective narratives in order to conduct their inquiries into the signs of the times, while simultaneously thinking about the trajectory of these narratives and the knowing of the detectives. They are concerned with the dangers of a wilful movement toward knowing and the dangers connected with revealing secrets. And both writers have concerns about the dangers of looking through the shows of things into things because some knowing may be unendurable or fatal. There is a recognition that not knowing is sometimes a necessity and a realization of the truth in Marlow’s reflection that “there was surfacetruth enough in these things to save a wiser man (hd, 38). There are times when the “surface-truth” is all that any knower can endure. The fundamental element in the analogy between Dickens and Conrad as writers and the detectives in their fiction is the work of knowing, specifically, causes and origins. Both the authors and the detectives are interested in searching for motivations and explanations. In the “Author’s Note” to The Secret Agent, Conrad writes about how readers have little or

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no interest in knowing the causes or motivations of an action. In thinking about his tendency to explain himself, Conrad reflects upon how “That kind of weakness is dangerous only so far that it exposes one to the risk of becoming a bore; for the world generally is not interested in the motives of any overt act but in its consequences. Man may smile and smile but he is not an investigating animal. He loves the obvious. He shrinks from explanations. Yet I will go on with mine” (tsa, 38). In the immediate context of the passage, Conrad continues with his explanation for writing the novel, but my assumption is that the action of The Secret Agent is itself an examination of the importance of knowing causes and not simply consequences. Conrad claims the role of the investigator, so where does that leave his readers? The argument has implications for how we read his novel because it suggests a dual analogy involving the reader, the author, and the characters. The author is most like Stevie, who “wished to go to the bottom of the matter” to understand the cause, and the reader is most like Winnie, who “felt profoundly that things do not stand much looking into” (tsa, 169, 172). But Conrad is not suggesting that Stevie’s is the better position: there are consequences whether we are determined to know like Stevie or determined to not know like Winnie. Neither role is especially comforting because Stevie’s death might be read as partly a suicide and all indications suggest Winnie’s death is a suicide. If death results in either case, Conrad is certainly giving us ample warning of the dangers of valuing one or the other term in the antithesis too highly. This part of Conrad’s inquiry is interconnected with the trajectory of the detective plot as in Dickens’s Bleak House.16 In both novels the movement of the action is predominantly from not knowing to knowing as the various secrets and crimes are forcefully uncovered by the different detectives or inadvertently discovered by less deliberate characters. But the trajectory of the novel should not be mistakenly equated with the author’s thought as if Conrad and Dickens conclude that it is better to know than to not know. The novelists are highly ambivalent, challenging readers to think about the causality of knowing by raising questions about the causes informing or provoking a character’s will to know or to not know. At times, the present knowing manifested by the characters is a consequence of a prior history which is slowly revealed through the action of the novels. In this, Conrad and Dickens are like George Eliot in revealing the history of knowing by focusing directly on the individual 16 The detective narratives in both novels have been the subject of much critical discussion. See D.A. Miller, Mark Conroy, and William Moseley.

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lives of the characters, but do not write a history that is premised on a microscopic examination of the other. Conrad and Dickens are equivocal in their judgment of detectives and detective narratives because of the drive toward knowing manifested in them. Although connected with their detectives through a shared drive to investigate causes, the authors carefully reveal the dangerous consequences of knowing in terms of the motives of the knowing and not knowing. Dickens and Conrad are preoccupied with the work of knowing as a profession. They raise questions about the consequences resulting from knowing becoming institutionalized in the form of an occupation, whether it is as a detective or literary critic, among others. It is difficult to discern the degree to which the knowing of the specialist is the cause or the consequence in relation to his or her work. In one sense, the problem is about identity. As if in contradiction to Iago, who makes his identity equivocal in declaring “I am not what I am,” Inspector Bucket is absolutely unequivocal when “in a confidential voice” he declares “I am Inspector Bucket of the Detective, I am.”17 In Bucket’s statement Dickens shows how the detective identifies himself primarily by his occupation. Even when thinking of his wife, Bucket thinks in terms which characterize himself, because he is the “natural detective genius” who has been “improved by professional exercise” and evidently has “done great things” (bh, 769). Inspector Heat is not as forceful in declaring his identity, but Conrad shows that the detective defines himself through “his consciousness of being the great expert of his department” (tsa, 104–5). Then Conrad repeats the idea again and again to reinforce how Heat defines himself as the “principal expert” and “eminent specialist” (tsa, 105). And like Bucket, Heat enjoys the “trained faculties of an excellent investigator” (tsa, 107). To what degree does the consciousness of their identity as detectives and experts inform their knowing? If we read the whole of Bucket’s declaration, what he actually says is “I am Inspector Bucket of the Detective, I am, and this […] is my authority” (bh, 785). Bucket produces “the tip of his convenient little staff,” but Dickens uses the word “this” to obscure whether it is the physical object in Bucket’s hand or his name and occupation from which he derives his authority (bh, 785). What is at issue is the quality of Bucket’s and Heat’s knowing in having achieved the reputations and the positions they now enjoy in their work. Conrad makes the difficulty explicit in writing that “Chief Inspector Heat was not very wise – at least not truly so. True wisdom, which is not certain of anything in this world of 17 Othello, 1.1.64. bh, 785.

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contradictions, would have prevented him from attaining his present position” (tsa, 105). Certainty is the one quality which both detectives are not lacking, but Dickens and Conrad are doubtful about the quality of the detectives’ thinking. While neither Bucket nor Heat entertains any serious doubts about his knowing, Dickens and Conrad are, in varying degrees, critical of the detectives’ language and thought. Admittedly, Dickens’s representation of Bucket is difficult to read with sufficient care, making it difficult to judge Dickens’s relation to Bucket. There is an ambivalence in Dickens’s valuation of Bucket which is split between a fascination with the detective’s remarkable talents and a realization that the detective is altogether too powerful in his knowing. In no way can I suggest that Dickens is wholly critical of Bucket, but he does give us some indications why we should question Bucket’s abilities. Although Bucket dislikes writing letters for fear that they might be produced as evidence later, Dickens implies something more in writing that the detective “discourages correspondence with himself in others, as being too artless and direct a way of doing delicate business” (bh, 771). While Bucket is thinking about letters, Dickens is also raising questions about identity and sympathy. What is troubling about the passage is the way in which the detective’s dislike of “correspondence” is interconnected with a characteristic tendency to impose his explanations on others: the basic grammar of his speech is an imposed reading or an assertion that his knowing corresponds to the existence of the other. Recalling Iago again for a moment, his knowing is formulated in the idea that “knowing what I am, I know what she shall be.”18 He knows others as he knows himself, which raises the question of how well Iago knows himself at all. In this Bucket is like Iago: Bucket is a thinker who tells others “that’s what you are, you know” (bh, 362). While Bucket may be correct in his judgment at times, there remains the question of whether he is capable of explaining others to themselves. There is no doubt in Bucket’s assessments, and the “you know” added at the end of the statement raises the question of whether the other characters know or Bucket is merely telling them that it is so. Bucket has a “confidential manner impossible to be evaded or declined” with which he is able to “persuade [another] that he is a party to some dangerous secret without knowing what it is” (bh, 409). This imposed knowing potentially displaces the knowing of the other. “The velocity and certainty of Mr. Bucket’s interpretation on all these heads is little short of miraculous,” 18 Othello, 4.1.72.

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but that does not necessarily mean that he is wholly right in his judgment or wholly warranted in imposing his readings upon others (bh, 820). There is an uneasy relationship between the speed of Bucket’s thought and the degree to which he assumes himself to be correct. The dislike of correspondence is a dislike of conversation or argument. Bucket wants to hear from others only when he asks questions; otherwise he prefers to do all the talking. His reading is quickly made the prescribed reading, and in some way he exerts a measure of control in imposing himself upon others. By defining others before they can define themselves Bucket precludes dialogues from occurring. His knowing comes dangerously close to becoming the only knowing and perhaps the only truth. When Bucket either “dips down to the bottom of his mind” or “mounts a high tower in his mind” there is a question about the degree to which his knowing reaches a level of near omniscience or at least reaches up to the level of Dickens as the author (bh, 362, 824). When Bucket “looks out far and wide” he surveys the novel as if he were writing it, as if he were in control (bh, 824). Because Bucket fails to find Lady Dedlock at the end of the novel, Dickens exposes the limitation of the detective’s power, but Bucket still continues in his occupation. From what we know, failing in one case does not ruin Bucket’s career, so Dickens’s ambivalence remains. If James Walton is correct in observing that “Conrad’s delineation of Heat is like a gloss on Bucket’s character,” then it is necessary to discern which elements Conrad amplifies or attenuates in rewriting Dickens’s detective.19 One observation about Heat which bears analogies to Bucket is how he has been “forced by his calling into an attitude of doubt and suspicion towards his fellow citizens” (tsa, 194). Is the work conditioning the detectives’ suspicion or is the detectives’ suspicion conditioning the work? This universal suspicion informs Heat’s certainty when confidently declaring to a “high official” that his expansive knowledge allows him to “know what each of [the terrorists] is doing hour by hour” (tsa, 105). Heat is so consumed with playing the part of an “eminent specialist” that he relies on “wisdom […] of an official kind” instead of realizing that it is “a matter not of theory but of experience that in the close-woven stuff of relations between the conspirator and police there occur unexpected solutions of continuity, sudden holes in space and time” (tsa, 105). In a strange way, Heat’s selfconsciousness makes him play at being a detective, as if he is dreaming of an earlier world in which he could work with “an authorized mission on 19 Walton, “Conrad, Dickens, and the Detective Novel,” 459.

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this earth and the moral support of his kind” (tsa, 113). But Heat’s “consciousness of universal support” is largely an over-inflated self-confidence in his own expertise (tsa, 113). Conrad undermines Heat’s seemingly impressive warning to the Professor that “when I want you I will know where to find you” by commenting that “those were perfectly proper words, within the tradition and suitable to his character of a police officer addressing one of his special flock” (tsa, 111). Heat’s position in the novel is undermined further because, as Crick observes, “Conrad grants him no opportunity for exercising his professional skill in detection, and thus, no chance for the reader to wonder at the officer’s astonishing capacities for solving obscure crimes.”20 Nevertheless, Conrad reveals that Heat’s knowing is very troubling in manifesting some of the qualities related to his predecessor Bucket. The compulsive correspondence through which Bucket imposes his knowing on others reappears in Heat. In the scene where Heat examines Stevie’s remains, Conrad illustrates how the detective’s knowing acts by imposition, or if we use Freud’s language, it is a kind of free association or free interpretation. Before starting his investigation, Heat decides that “the first term of the problem was unreadable – lacked all suggestion but that of atrocious cruelty” (tsa, 108). There are at least two problems here. Heat is already offering a reading of the “first term” by thinking that it is an “atrocious cruelty” and he is imposing his own knowing when making that judgment. Reading Heat’s response to seeing Stevie’s remains, it is important to recognize that “his reason told him the effect must have been as swift as a flash of lightning” and the man “died instantaneously” (tsa, 107). Nevertheless, Heat finds this answer “impossible to believe” without imagining “that a human body could have reached that state of disintegration without passing through the pangs of inconceivable agony” (tsa, 107). What follows is Conrad’s lesson about imposing our knowing or reading on someone or something other than ourselves. Despite knowing better, “Chief Inspector Heat rose by the force of sympathy, which is a form of fear, above the vulgar conception of time” (tsa, 107). In connecting sympathy and fear, Conrad shows how Heat’s knowing is seriously complicated at this moment. Sympathy can be equated with identification if the knower projects his or her own idea onto the other, thereby violating the distinction between self and other. But if sympathy is a form of fear, then what Conrad suggests is that sympathy can manifest itself as a desire to not know. Projecting ideas upon another person precludes the possibility of 20 Crick, Love Confounded, 231.

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having to know that other person, or, in this case, the horror of the complete disintegration of a human being. Therefore, Heat distances himself from the remains by allowing his thought to revert to “all he had ever read in popular publications” (tsa, 107). He is not focused on the remains but instead focused on his memories of reading. It is impossible for him to know the remains if his mind is diverted toward evolving “a horrible notion that ages of atrocious pain and mental torture could be contained between two successive winks of an eye” (tsa, 107). The idea may amount to a remarkable theory or leap of imagination concerning the workings of time, but Conrad exposes a lack of attentiveness in describing how Heat “went on peering at the table with a calm face” and was like a “customer bending over what may be called the by-products of a butcher’s shop” (tsa, 107). The unfamiliar makes Heat fearful and causes him to project what is already familiar and known upon what is unfamiliar and strange. Conrad reinforces this problem when Heat confronts the Professor. The detective’s response to the Professor is also sympathy as a form of fear insofar as he does not want to know him and would prefer to avoid him altogether. Heat already knows and is familiar with thieves; hence the passage in which he imagines that “he could understand the mind of a burglar, because, as a matter of fact, the mind and the instincts of a burglar are of the same kind as the mind and the instincts of a police officer” (tsa, 110). Here is the more familiar connotation of sympathy as a form of identification, but it is important to remember that these memories are the result of the disinclination to think about the anarchists. When he confronts the Professor, Heat is troubled by “the absurdity of things human, which in the abstract is sufficiently annoying to an unphilosophical temperament, and in concrete instances becomes exasperating beyond endurance” (tsa, 110). The Professor is that concrete example of an idea that the detective wants to avoid. As during his confrontation with Stevie’s remains, Heat immediately begins thinking of something familiar and known. While “thieving appeared to his instinct as normal,” Heat’s “mind … was inaccessible to ideas of revolt” (tsa, 111). Everything that the Professor represents is strange and unknown so Heat’s knowing diverts toward other ideas. In effect, what Heat knows conceals what he wants to not know. Or to emphasize the problem in yet another way, Conrad suggests that sympathy can be a form of knowing which relates the value of anything back to the identity of the knower. In repeatedly observing “we can never cease to be ourselves,” Conrad makes readers consider the degree to which the self eliminates the possibility of knowing because it turns away from the strange back to the

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familiar, which is to say it turns from what is other back to the self (tsa, 129). When Heat finds the evidence in Stevie’s coat, he immediately realizes that “he no longer considered it eminently desirable all round to establish publicly the identity of the man who had blown himself up that morning,” despite being of the opposite mind just moments before (tsa, 109). Conrad suggests that sympathy, instead of asking “what does this mean?” asks “what does this mean to me?” or, to be more forceful, declares “to me, this thing is.” One distinct problem is the degree to which Heat is in control of his thinking and knowing. This bears on Heat’s thoughts about the workings of his department. In between the passages describing the processes through which Heat mentally turns away from Stevie’s remains and the Professor, Conrad places the reflection that “a department does not know so much as some of its servants. Being a dispassionate organism, it can never be perfectly informed. It would not be good for its efficiency to know too much” (tsa, 109). For Heat the problem is apparently about “the disclosure of many things” which would result in “the laying waste of fields of knowledge,” but in Conrad’s view, the dangers of knowing too much apply just as well to Heat as they do to the department (tsa, 196–7). Indeed, “it would not be good” for Heat’s “efficiency” if he knew too much, which is why the detective does not work from “true wisdom” (tsa, 105). Heat is a passionate organism, but he cannot be “perfectly informed” either. One way of reading the passage is that Heat’s limitations make him perfectly suited for the occupation. Are the faults in the detective’s knowing caused by his occupation or does the detective’s knowing cause the faults in the occupation? Conrad makes it difficult to know with any degree of certainty and asks whether we would substitute a man of “true wisdom” for a man whose knowing is suited for the occupation. If the man of “true wisdom” cannot perform the work, then what would happen? The other major lesson about the will to know that Conrad learns from Dickens concerns Tulkinghorn’s work, which is “the acquisition of secrets, and the holding possession of such power as they give him, with no sharer or opponent in it” (bh, 567). All three elements are interrelated: secrets and power and authority. Much of Tulkinghorn’s character is revealed through a struggle with a woman who makes a worthy opponent and yet is also an enemy who must be defeated. Despite or perhaps because he conquers Lady Dedlock, Tulkinghorn cannot help admiring her composure: “The power and force of this woman are astonishing!” (bh, 632). But the praise reveals the degree of identification since power and force are his strongest qualities. Dickens

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shows how Tulkinghorn thinks of Lady Dedlock as “a study” and when thinking about her or speaking to her “he methodically discusses his matter of business, as if she were any insensible instrument used in business” (bh, 716, 715). This reduces Lady Dedlock to merely an object to be used as part of the plot he is writing. The drive to be the guardian or the author of the Dedlock fortunes and Lady Dedlock’s future causes Tulkinghorn to dismiss her own claims to any degree of self-determination. In his apparently machine-like drive to uncover Lady Dedlock’s history, Tulkinghorn very rarely betrays any emotional reaction to his work, as if he were the prototypical objective analyst reconstructing a case. But Dickens does indicate that there is a note of pleasure in Tulkinghorn’s thought about the power he gains through knowledge. His knowing compels him to correct Lady Dedlock over the question of who rightly possesses the secret of her history: “Now, Lady Dedlock, this is a matter of business, and in a matter of business the ground cannot be kept too clear. It is no longer your secret. Excuse me. That is just a mistake. It is my secret, in trust for Sir Leicester and the family. If it were your secret, Lady Dedlock, we should not be here, holding this conversation” (bh, 715). Knowing and power are nearly inseparable for Tulkinghorn: in possessing her secret, he claims to possess Lady Dedlock and the power to determine her life accordingly. For Tulkinghorn, the only pleasure greater than knowing a secret is the opportunity to reveal the secret. Acting as if he were the author of the novel, or at least of Lady Dedlock’s life, Tulkinghorn finds pleasure in exercising the power of exposing her. Dickens levels a telling critique of Tulkinghorn’s character after the lawyer reveals a thinly veiled version of Lady Dedlock’s history: Mr. Tulkinghorn arrives in his turret-room, a little breathed by the journey up, though leisurely performed. There is an expression on his face as if he had discharged his mind of some grave matter, and were, in his close way, satisfied. To say of a man so severely and strictly self-repressed that he is triumphant, would be to do him as great an injustice as to suppose him troubled with love or sentiment, or any romantic weakness. He is sedately satisfied. Perhaps there is a rather increased sense of power upon him, as he loosely grasps one of his veinous wrists with his other hand, and holding it behind his back walks noiselessly up and down. (bh, 650–1).

Dickens suggests that the power of possession and knowing can be increased through an exercise of that power in telling. Tulkinghorn is by far the most discomforting version of professional duty and responsibility in Bleak House. Like Vholes, who is a “very respectable man,” Tulkinghorn’s

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determination to perform a frightening ideal of professional duty makes him a “dan-gerous man [sic].”21 By opposing Lady Dedlock and working primarily to gain power over her, Tulkinghorn becomes her double. Dickens is careful to note how Lady Dedlock “supposes herself to be an inscrutable Being” (bh, 59). The lawyer has a “personal secret,” but “he is his own client in that matter, and will never betray himself” (bh, 213). Tulkinghorn’s “usual expressionless mask” reveals almost nothing (bh, 213). His acquisition of secrets and his will to know others is interconnected with a will to not know himself. Filling his mind with the knowledge of others is an avoidance of having certain knowledge of himself. Dickens at least hints at the emptiness of Tulkinghorn’s being in revealing the story of the lawyer “of the same mould” as Tulkinghorn who “hanged himself” (bh, 359). It may be that Tulkinghorn possesses Lady Dedlock’s secret not only out of professional duty toward his employer and the family estate, but also to avoid exploring his own mind. While there is no indication that Tulkinghorn is at odds with his work, Conrad’s Assistant Commissioner “did not like the work he had to do now” (tsa, 116). Dickens represents Tulkinghorn’s existence as inextricably linked to his occupation, while Conrad reveals how the Assistant Commissioner is “appalled” by the “futility of office work” (tsa, 116). However, the two characters are analogous in being born detectives displaced into other occupations whose knowing is enabled by suspicion and some pleasure in the exercise of their power of investigating and then revealing their discoveries. The Assistant Commissioner’s confrontation with Vladimir at the end of chapter 10 in The Secret Agent can be compared with Tulkinghorn’s confrontation with Lady Dedlock at the end of chapter 40 and the beginning of chapter 41 of Bleak House. Both novelists represent how revealing another’s secrets becomes a satisfaction of a drive for power that is linked to a drive to know. In some ways, Conrad’s representation of the Assistant Commissioner is more difficult to read than Dickens’s representation of Tulkinghorn because Conrad includes more insights into the motivations driving his character’s actions. When writing about Tulkinghorn, Dickens’s basic grammar is equivocal, and he often repeats some variation on the phrase “it may be so, or it may not” when representing the lawyer’s thoughts (bh, 59). Granted, Dickens indicates that it is impossible to know Tulkinghorn because the lawyer reveals so little about himself, but 21 bh, 603, 874. In The Melancholy Man, John Lucas argues “much of the horror of the social situation that Dickens presents in Bleak House is caused by people doing their duty” (214).

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Conrad is not equivocal in this way. When inquiring into the causes enabling the Assistant Commissioner’s actions, Conrad questions the sources for the motivations even if the Assistant Commissioner is not completely conscious of them himself. Like Tulkinghorn or Bucket, the Assistant Commissioner is a man “in quest of secrets locked up in guilty breasts” who has “considerable gifts for the detection of incriminating truth”; however, when Conrad remarks “that particular instinct could hardly be called a weakness” it is important to notice that his instincts are not called a strength (tsa, 129). The primary problem concerns how the Assistant Commissioner’s instincts have “unconsciously governed” his judgment (tsa, 129). The Assistant Commissioner’s drive to suspect and know others is simultaneously a drive to avoid thinking about his own situation. As Brian Crick argues, “Conrad’s supposed identification with the intellectually adventurous detective does not preclude a clear-eyed awareness of his limitations.”22 When Conrad writes that “suddenly [the Assistant Commissioner’s] suspicion was awakened,” he has already prepared the reader with an exploration into the reasons or impulses that make the character’s suspicion “not difficult to arouse” (tsa, 127). Conrad makes his investigator’s motivations the focus of his own investigation which largely involves revealing the complications of the Assistant Commissioner’s marriage. The Assistant Commissioner explains to Sir Ethelred that “from a certain point of view we are here in the presence of a domestic drama” (tsa, 204). The observation is true not simply of the Verloc family but of the Assistant Commissioner’s life as well. Hence, the seemingly incidental remarks about the Assistant Commissioner’s marriage at the end of chapter 5 are expanded upon at length in the first few pages of chapter 6 which describe the parlour talk at the Lady Patroness’s parties (tsa, 116, 119–25). The Assistant Commissioner’s thoughts about his marriage are part of the reason that “the instinct of self-preservation was strong within him” (tsa, 126). That instinct for self-preservation seriously complicates the investigator’s will to know. Conrad makes the problem explicit in reflecting upon how “it is only when our appointed activities seem by a lucky accident to obey the particular earnestness of our temperament that we can taste the comfort of complete self-deception” (tsa, 125). The idea is that in following his instincts to suspect others the Assistant Commissioner avoids confronting what he wants to not know. When Conrad writes that “the Assistant Commissioner did not like his work at home,” the point is not simply that the character enjoyed more 22 Crick, Love Confounded, 241.

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adventures when working abroad but also that he does not like his role as a husband (tsa, 125). He prefers to know himself as a detective rather than a husband and by exercising his talents the Assistant Commissioner indulges in his desire to avoid domestic concerns. This informs Crick’s argument that the Assistant Commissioner transforms himself from an investigator into a person more like Winnie, who is disinclined to question anything. Crick recognizes that after discovering the implosion in process at the Verloc home, “he abruptly veers away from the Verlocs to chase down Vladimir” and “the veiled impulse behind his switch from evasion to pursuit” is “the common marital situation he shares with Verloc.”23 The Assistant Commissioner’s quest for secrets is halted suddenly when he encounters Verloc, whose domestic situation reminds him of his own troubles. The dialogue between Heat and the Assistant Commissioner is a central moment in Conrad’s novel because it is analogous to Conrad’s own purposes in writing. If Conrad is preoccupied with the relationship between causes and knowing and is also self-conscious about his own work as an investigator, then he offers the perfect scene for readers to explore the problems by having one detective question another. And it is important to recognize how Conrad is rethinking important chapters from Bleak House. In Dickens’s novel, Tulkinghorn and Lady Dedlock meet repeatedly in a battle of wills over the possession of her secret. As I noted previously, Tulkinghorn makes Lady Dedlock into “a study” upon which he can exercise his instinct for suspicion and his desire for power.24 23 Ibid., 240. 24 bh, 716. The relationship between the Assistant Commissioner and Inspector Heat includes something of the dynamic between Mr Guppy and Richard. The Assistant Commissioner’s suspicion of his subordinate includes an element of the professional jealousy and mistrust that Guppy exhibits when Richard enters on his apprenticeship at Kenge and Carboy’s: “Mr. Guppy suspects everybody who enters on the occupation of a stool in Kenge and Carboy’s office, of entertaining, as a matter of course, sinister designs upon him. He is clear that every such person wants to depose him. If he be ever asked how, why, when, or wherefore, he shuts up one eye and shakes his head. On the strength of these profound views, he in the most ingenious manner takes infinite pains to counter-plot, when there is no plot; and plays the deepest games of chess without any adversary” (bh, 327). In a similar manner, the Assistant Commissioner suspects Inspector Heat because the latter identifies Michaelis as a suspect in the explosion. As the Assistant Commissioner studies Inspector Heat’s physical features,

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Conrad transforms Dickens’s scene by making both the antagonists detectives with secrets they are anxious to conceal: Heat wants to conceal his informant, Verloc, while the Assistant Commissioner wants to conceal that he has private motivations, rooted in his marriage, to remove any suspicion from Michaelis. In each of the detectives’ positions, knowing and not knowing are confounded. The knowledge revealed is a cover for what each cannot know or will not allow to be revealed. The entire scene is a compelling illustration of Conrad’s idea of how a “satisfactory sense of superiority” is enjoyed when “the vanity of power is soothed, and the vulgar love of domination over our fellow creature is flattered as worthily as it deserves” (tsa, 132–3). Unfortunately for Heat, who was unable to satisfy his sense of power over the Professor, he loses again to the Assistant Commissioner, who takes over his work. The conversation between the two detectives is about the problem of secrecy and Conrad shows how secrets and power are interconnected with knowing. For both men, working and knowing exist in a complicated relation. For either Heat or the Assistant Commissioner to work, knowing must often be a cover for not knowing. As Heat says “I must do my work in my own way” which means that “there are things not fit for everybody to know” (tsa, 140). But for both men, there are also things which are not fit for them to know or which they cannot endure to think about or know either. These kinds of questions are all interconnected with the despair of knowing that Conrad and Dickens explore. For the detectives in in that purposeful contemplation of the valuable and trusted officer he drew a conviction so sudden that it moved him like an inspiration. “I have reason to think that when you came into this room,” he said in measured tones, “it was not Michaelis who was in your mind; not principally – perhaps not at all.” “You have reason to think, sir?” muttered Chief Inspector Heat with every appearance of astonishment, which up to a certain point was genuine enough. (tsa, 128) Had the Assistant Commissioner been “asked how, why, when, or wherefore” like Mr Guppy, the best he could do to explain his “inspiration” is “to shake his head.” Although the Assistant Commissioner’s suspicion turns out to be correct, he only imagines a plot where he cannot know that one really exists. With a Mr Guppylike concern for his own interests, the Assistant Commissioner creates a situation wherein he can replace Inspector Heat and ensure that the investigation of the explosion protects his own best interests, which are to prevent upsetting either the Lady Patroness or his wife.

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both novels, knowing does not become a self-conscious problem. The detectives are not troubled by questions about how a will to know can operate in harmony with a will to not know nor by the thought that knowing can be a curse and become unendurable. The novelists distance themselves from their detectives when a valuation of knowing is made. The limitations of the detectives are most apparent when compared with Conrad’s and Dickens’s terrible insights into the fears that can result from self-conscious knowing. In Bleak House, the most concentrated representation of the fear that results from knowing is found in Mr Snagsby. Late in the novel Mr Snagsby declares “I don’t know. I have not the least idea. If I was to be informed, I should despair of understanding, and I’d rather not be told” (bh, 862). The negative grammar of Jo’s utterances is doubled in the representation of Snagsby with one important difference. Like Jo, Snagsby is deficient in his knowing insofar as he is unsure of the problem or idea at issue, but unlike Jo, Snagsby is self-conscious of his knowing and desperate to escape from the burden on his consciousness. The first two sentences in Snagsby’s plaint are both an acknowledgment of ignorance and a reinforcement of the desire to not know. He cannot endure knowing and turns away from it. Part of Snagsby’s despair is attributable to his sense that “he is a party to some dangerous secret without knowing what it is” that produces something in the nature of a “crisis of nightmare” (bh, 409). Because his thoughts are anything but certain, Snagsby cannot bear to know, though Dickens makes no suggestion that if Snagsby did possess some kind of sure and certain knowledge his condition would improve. While the detectives in both novels expend all their energy suspecting others, Snagsby’s suspicion is directed toward himself in a terribly concentrated way. It is the thought of being a suspect, or in other words, being a suspect to himself, which causes Snagsby to suffer. In one of Conrad’s versions of the fear of knowing, the problem is different because Ossipon’s thought is centred on Winnie’s suicide after his betrayal of her, which is not to say that he bears all the guilt for her action. What is compelling in this variation is that the negative grammar does not enter into Ossipon’s knowing to the degree it does with Snagsby. Snagsby’s fear of knowing is manifested as a compulsion or instinct (of self-preservation?) to not know. He explains how his mind is working against knowing; however, despite dismissing the newspaper story of Winnie’s suicide as “nothing,” Ossipon’s knowing is not marked by a negative grammar afterwards (tsa, 266). Conrad repeats two phrases: “Comrade Ossipon was well informed” and “He knew” (tsa, 266). For anyone else reading the newspaper, the story is “an impenetrable mystery,” but to

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Ossipon he “could never get rid of the cursed knowledge” (tsa, 266). Unlike Snagsby, whose fear is centred on his own being and consciousness, Ossipon’s fear is centred on Winnie’s consciousness. As far as I can judge, Ossipon comes close to knowing the other in a way that eludes the other characters in the novel: “Comrade Ossipon knew that behind that white mask of despair there was struggling against terror and despair a vigour of vitality, a love of life that could resist the furious anguish which drives to murder and the fear, the blind, mad fear of the gallows. He knew” (tsa, 267). If Ossipon’s reading of Winnie is not the whole truth, it may be the best reading any character in the novel makes of another character. But the clarity of Ossipon’s reading and knowing is a curse that taints his own life. His knowing makes his life a “ruin” (tsa, 269). Questions arising from the despair of knowing are especially concentrated in the representations of Winnie and Esther. The two authors make profound inquiries into the conflicted minds of the two women, focusing their investigations on the knowing and not knowing of the women. Conrad and Dickens recognize the dangers of the ways in which their detectives work, so they avoid working in the same manner as their investigators. The representations of the women are not driven by suspicion or to satisfy the vanity of power. They do not make the same errors in representing Winnie or Esther that would be made had Bucket, Tulkinghorn, Heat, or the Assistant Commissioner written the novels. Dickens writes Esther’s autobiography as a sustained meditation on her effort toward not knowing. From the very first moments in which Esther begins her story, Dickens emphasizes her predicament through the proliferation of negative grammatical structures in her writing. If Jo’s characteristic grammar is “I don’t know nothink,” then the grammatical structure that characterizes Esther’s thought is “I know I am not” (bh, 62). In the first few paragraphs of chapter 3 alone, Esther repeatedly assures readers that “I am not,” “I have not,” “I was not,” “I never,” and “I had never.”25 In Esther’s writing, Dickens represents how 25 bh, 62–3. Judith Wilt examines Esther’s prose and concludes that “her personal syntactic shape is the parenthetical sentence; and the closer her knowing comes to herself, the thicker becomes the parentheses, which signal the strain and confusion of knowing her knowing” (“Confusion and Consciousness in Dickens’ Bleak House,” 289). While this may be accurate in a way, Dickens emphasizes the incredible tension between Esther’s telling and her wanting to not know through the proliferation of negative grammatical structures. When Esther comes to moments in the story especially personal or self-revealing, her sentence structures include a greater number of negations.

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the problems of not knowing and identity are interconnected. Although we cannot know much about the causes of Esther’s thought until we have finished reading the novel, Dickens gradually makes it clear that Esther’s self-effacement is intimately related to her childhood desire, never forgotten, that “I would try, as hard as ever I could, to repair the fault I had been born with (of which I confessedly felt guilty and yet innocent)” (bh, 65). That fault, impressed upon her by her godmother/ aunt, is that “your mother, Esther, is your disgrace, and you were hers” (bh, 65). Bleak House is designed so that Esther’s telling is already influenced by the experiences of seven years ago which lead to the discovery and death of her mother, Lady Dedlock. I want to call attention to one very important scene that anticipates and rivals Nietzsche’s and Freud’s very best thinking about repression and not knowing. The moment in chapter 36 in which Esther meets Lady Dedlock is marked by a particularly extreme form of the negative grammar which characterizes her telling. In retrospect, Esther’s memory is a record of a continuing self-effacement. The passage begins with a series of negatives: “I looked at her; but I could not see her, I could not hear her, I could not draw my breath” (bh, 565). Esther’s language reveals more than she means in declaring “that I felt as if my life were breaking from me” (bh, 565). Indeed, it is: the present telling does enact a break from the past experience. Not only does she become someone’s child in learning the identity of her mother, but she also discovers the person with whom she shares her disgrace, the terrible curse placed upon her as a child. However, the most important detail in the passage is the fact that no connection can be made. She erases the recognition as it occurs: “I felt, through all my tumult of emotion, a burst of gratitude to the providence of God that I was so changed as that I never could disgrace her by any trace of likeness; as that nobody could ever now look at me, and look at her, and remotely think of any near tie between us” (bh, 565). The first two times Esther and Lady Dedlock meet, there can be no recognition of the mother-daughter relation.26 It is only when the physical resemblance has been erased that Dickens allows the recognition to occur. Esther’s self-effacement is reiterated when she contemplates how “I had never, to my own mother’s knowledge, breathed – had been buried – had never been endowed with life – had never borne a name” (bh, 569). The thought is self-destructive: there is a wish that these “nevers” had been true. Esther’s whole narrative is marked by her 26 In chapter 18, Esther sees her mother in the church and then meets and talks with her in the lodge. See pages 304 and 309.

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“heavily sorrowful” thoughts, caused by her reading of Lady Dedlock’s letter, that “I had ever been reared,” and “it would have been better and happier for many people if indeed I had never breathed” (bh, 569). The autobiographical narrative as a whole is very subtly marked by Esther’s realization that “I had a terror of myself” (bh, 569). Dickens emphasizes Esther’s terror through the dramatic sequence in which she becomes the fulfillment of the prophecy for the Ghost’s Walk: “it was I, who was to bring calamity upon the stately house” (bh, 571). The moment reinforced her “despair of understanding” “with an augmented terror of myself” (bh, 862, 571). Her identity is defined by that terror. Like Snagsby, Esther fears understanding and would rather not be told. She is the personification of being “quite content to know no more” (bh, 149). Knowing has made her life terrible to her, although she cannot fully realize the enormous problem in her thinking. The problem in Esther’s character is repeated with variations in other characters in the novel, most notably in Lady Dedlock; however, the central problem is sufficiently clear and this brief look at Esther should suffice. Conrad transfigures the questions Dickens raises in Esther’s autobiography into his representation of Winnie. Winnie “felt profoundly that things do not stand much looking into. She made her force and her wisdom of that instinct” (tsa, 172–3). Conrad’s preoccupation is not simply with Winnie’s not knowing, but the motivations or causes and the consequences. As Conrad explains in the “Author’s Note,” he is not interested in merely delineating Winnie’s “psychology” but rather her “humanity” (tsa, 41). While Conrad may express some “contempt” or “scorn” for Winnie since she is the very embodiment of a being as “not an investigating animal,” he does extend the pity that her “tragic suspicion” of life demands (tsa, 38, 41, 38, 41). Winnie’s profound instinct for not knowing is largely informed by or at least interconnected with her “maternal vigilance” surrounding everything related to Stevie (tsa, 50). In the “Author’s Note,” Conrad asks readers to recognize that his novel began with “the dawning conviction of Mrs. Verloc’s maternal passion,” and that he then wrote the novel which is “that story, reduced to manageable proportions, its whole course suggested and centered round the absurd cruelty of the Greenwich Park explosion” (tsa, 41). In representing Winnie as both a sister and a mother to Stevie, Conrad makes use of both Esther and Lady Dedlock, but the latter is arguably more important. No one registers the joke in Conrad making the English-sounding name “Dedlock” into a foreign and perhaps Polish or French-sounding name, “Verloc.” Dickens only shows Lady Dedlock’s maternal passion in one or two scenes: when

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she reveals herself and her fears of exposure to Esther and when she allows Rosa to leave her service in order to be educated and married to her lover, the young Rouncewell (bh, 563–9, 706–13). Arguably, Lady Dedlock’s actions demonstrate her own “maternal vigilance” toward her real daughter Esther and her “adopted” daughter Rosa. Conrad adapts other parts of Lady Dedlock in having Winnie choose Verloc over her lover, the “only son of a butcher in the next street,” whose figure appears fleetingly in Winnie’s memory in the novel (tsa, 72). Conrad’s characterization of Winnie is true for Lady Dedlock: both women make a “bargain” in their marriages (tsa, 232). Lady Dedlock chooses wealth and security over her lover, and Winnie chooses security and protection for her brother Stevie over her lover. Conrad also transposes characteristic traits from Dickens’s character into his own. Lady Dedlock is characterized by her “freezing mood” which is “an exhausted composure, and worn-out placidity, an equanimity of fatigue not to be ruffled by interest or satisfaction” (bh, 57–8). Lady Dedlock is “perfectly well-bred” and “supposes herself to be an inscrutable Being” (bh, 58, 59). Although nothing of an aristocrat, Winnie also “preserved an air of unfathomable indifference” and “unfathomable reserve” (tsa, 46, 47). The inscrutability and unfathomableness that the two women share are important to each plot. Lady Dedlock hides her past and lack of family connections from the world, and the revelation of her secrets is a major element of Dickens’s design. Winnie never reveals to her husband the premise upon which she entered into the marriage contract: the unspoken promise to protect Stevie. Conrad also makes use of Lady Dedlock’s flight. After Winnie murders Verloc, her attempt to flee London is represented as a flight from “idleness and irresponsibility” (tsa, 236). After the murder, Winnie is no longer “a person of leisure and irresponsibility” (tsa, 237). Like Lady Dedlock, she is outcast from her former life. Lady Dedlock’s self-destructive flight is largely informed by an avoidance of her husband to remove her “deeper shame” from his family (bh, 816). But Winnie’s flight is initially self-destructive; she enters into the one moment in her life wherein she “was compelled to look into the very bottom of this thing” and she is haunted by her fear of the “gallows” but “she could not stand thinking of it. Therefore Mrs. Verloc formed the resolution to go at once and throw herself into the river off one of the bridges” (tsa, 237, 238). Despite Winnie’s momentary hope for salvation through the intervention of Ossipon, she kills herself as Lady Dedlock does. Throughout the novel, Conrad emphasizes that Winnie’s “only real concern was Stevie’s welfare” (tsa, 185). After her mother leaves,

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Winnie’s responsibility increases. When Verloc remarks “perhaps it’s just as well” that Winnie’s mother moved to the almshouse, Conrad writes that Mrs. Verloc kept still, perfectly still, with her eyes fixed in a dreamy, quiet stare. And her heart for the fraction of a second seemed to stand still, too. That night she was ‘not quite herself,’ as the saying is, and it was borne upon her with some force that a simple sentence may hold several diverse meanings – mostly disagreeable. How was it just as well? And why? But she did not allow herself to fall into the idleness of barren speculation. She was rather confirmed in her belief that things did not stand being looked into. Practical and subtle in her way, she brought Stevie to the front without loss of time, because in her the singleness of purpose had the unerring nature and the force of an instinct. (tsa, 173–4).

This passage reveals how Winnie’s mind moves away from speculation by indulging in her characteristic tendency toward not knowing and how this is immediately connected with her thoughts about Stevie. One way of reading the passage is to argue that Winnie’s not knowing is caused by her instinct for protecting Stevie. She cannot indulge in speculation in examining either herself or Verloc because her mental habit is to promote Stevie’s welfare. Her being is concentrated upon him with a terrible intensity which precludes her thinking too much. As Conrad suggests, Winnie’s love for Stevie is nearly an unquestioned faith. She believes in Stevie as a kind of heroic or martyr figure who lived “a life of single purpose and of noble unity of inspiration, like those rare lives that have left their mark on the thoughts and feelings of mankind” (tsa, 219). After learning of Stevie’s death, “mentally she assumed the biblical attitude of mourning – the covered face, the rent garments; the sound of wailing and lamentation filled her head” (tsa, 223). When Conrad writes that “she had battled for him – even against herself,” he reveals that Winnie fought against her own being in some fundamental way (tsa, 223). Winnie’s thinking is largely instinctual and, to her, Stevie’s preservation is more important than her own self-preservation while he is alive. She has no thoughts about self-preservation until after she learns of Stevie’s death (tsa, 228). A constitutional unwillingness to look into anything is the counterpart to the concentration of her entire being upon her brother’s welfare. In Winnie, a form of self-sacrifice is interconnected with not knowing. Winnie’s existence depends upon her brother and the exercise of her love for him and protection of him: the instincts for self-preservation and self-sacrifice are indistinguishable in her protection of Stevie.

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Conrad reveals yet another complication in Winnie’s not knowing by questioning whether her love for her brother is also tainted by her instinct that it is not good to know anything too much, including Stevie. This is evident when, in witnessing Stevie’s “bodily agitation” following the encounter with the cabman and the horse, “Winnie soothed his excitement without ever fathoming its twofold character. Mrs. Verloc wasted no portion of this transient life in seeking for fundamental information. This is a sort of economy having all the appearances and some of the advantages of prudence. Obviously it may be good for one not to know too much. And such a view accords very well with constitutional indolence” (tsa, 167). Winnie’s not knowing is meant to be for her brother but actually eliminates the potential for her to know Stevie other than as the child whom she protected from their abusive father. Or recalling Bucket and Heat, Winnie only knows Stevie in terms of what he means to her, what valuation he has in terms of her life. His being as separate from hers disappears from her knowing. Allowing for the change of pronouns, Conrad’s idea of Verloc’s justification for not knowing his wife works just as well for Winnie’s inability to know Stevie: “it was impossible for [Winnie] to understand [him] without ceasing to be [her]self” (tsa, 213). In making “Stevie’s welfare” her only concern, Winnie has lost sight of her brother (tsa, 185). In Winnie’s mind there may be something of Heat’s problem where an idea comes between the knower and the known. The preoccupation with protecting Stevie is fundamental to her, but this knowing dominates in such a way that she does not know her brother. Like Dickens’s philanthropists in Bleak House, Winnie performs her good works without really knowing the individual for whom they are performed. For Winnie, Stevie is an abstraction partly created by her own maternal and fraternal passions. Again, like the assistance offered by Dickens’s philanthropists, Winnie’s assistance proves to be more harmful than good. When Winnie experiences the “paralysing atrocity of the thought” that “this man took the boy away to murder him,” her mind is “governed too much by a fixed idea” (tsa, 222, 224). She needs to replace the prior dominant idea with a new one since Stevie is dead: she can no longer concentrate her being on her thoughts of protecting him. But Conrad also indicates that the identification of Verloc as the murderer enables Winnie to not know, not realize in any way how all of her plans in life have contributed to Stevie’s death. Winnie chose Verloc over her previous lover. She deliberately pushed Verloc and Stevie together and imagined them as “father and son” (tsa, 179). So when Verloc claims that “it’s as much your doing as mine” he is right, but Winnie cannot

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endure nor recognize the truth in that thought (tsa,230). In showing how nearly all of the characters’ actions in the novel contribute to Stevie’s death, Conrad is not interested in portioning out the proper measure of blame for Winnie to bear. He is preoccupied with how Winnie’s mind continually blinds itself from knowing and how her knowing causes the blindness. It is only after Winnie’s “instinct for self-preservation” becomes dominant that “Mrs. Verloc, who always refrained from looking deep into things, was compelled to look into the very bottom of this thing” (tsa, 228, 237). The idea of the gallows and her memory of the phrase “the drop given was fourteen feet” cause an instinctual revulsion in Winnie: “No! that must never be. She could not stand that. The thought of it even was not bearable. She could not stand thinking of it. Therefore Mrs. Verloc formed the resolution to go at once and throw herself into the river off one of the bridges” (tsa, 238). The relationship between Winnie’s knowing and her instinct for self-preservation is conflicted: she cannot bear to think the thought and live thinking it yet she is strongly compelled to have Ossipon save her. Her hope to escape with Ossipon signifies not only a physical escape from a punishment of death for murder, but also an escape from knowing what is unendurable. The importance of Stevie in The Secret Agent is a central concern in my chapter on Nietzsche; however, I want to note a significant analogy between Jo and Stevie. The description of Stevie’s speech applies just as well to Jo: “The docile Stevie went along; but now he went along without pride, shamblingly, and muttering half words, and even words that would have been whole if they had not been made up of halves that did not belong to each other. It was as though he had been trying to fit all the words he could remember to his sentiments in order to get some sort of corresponding idea” (tsa, 168). Where Jo has no education at all, Stevie has had just enough to make it is necessary for us to recognize that the two figures associated with sympathy are antipathetic in their knowing. While Jo “don’t know nothink,” Stevie will not rest in his knowing because “he wished to go to the bottom of the matter” (tsa, 169). The two characters at the focus of the arguments the authors are making about sympathy are, in many ways, antithetical in their knowing and not knowing. In a novel full of troubling characters, Stevie might be the most troubling and puzzling figure. Unlike his adopted parents, Stevie does not suffer from an indolence that makes him constitutionally incurious. Unlike Jo, Stevie struggles very hard to declare himself and his ideas. The question of how to resolve the problem of Conrad’s decision to make

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Stevie an idiot, which is connected with Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot in relation to the remark that “being no sceptic, but a moral creature, he was in a manner at the mercy of his righteous passions” (tsa, 169). Conrad places skepticism in opposition to Stevie’s identity as a moral creature, raising the question of whether Stevie is one of the “moralists” whose “idealization makes life poorer” in Michaelis’s view (tsa, 73).

3 The Trouble with Sympathy in Middlemarch and Nostromo in a letter dated 31 may 1902 to william blackwood, Conrad acknowledges that Eliot is one of the “great names” in English literature and “I don’t compare myself with them”(cljc 2, 418). Trying to mark the distance between himself and his predecessors, Conrad tells Blackwood “I am modern” (cljc 2, 418). The nature and the extent of the proximity or distance between Conrad and Eliot have yet to be determined. George Levine is one critic who recognizes “there is a continuity and community of attitudes” between Eliot and Conrad and “the distance between Middlemarch and Nostromo is thus by no means absolute.”1 Arguably, Eliot counts for as much in Conrad’s style and thought as Carlyle or Dickens or Dostoevsky. The complexity of the analogical structures in Middlemarch and Nostromo makes understanding each of them a difficult proposition; reading them in dialogue only compounds the number of questions. Nevertheless, carefully reading the two novels together becomes an opportunity to recognize how many interests Conrad and Eliot shared.2 Although the focus for each novelist is different, their writings are marked by profound preoccupations with 1 Levine, The Realistic Imagination, 292. Levine argues “it would be surprising if Conrad had not read Middlemarch” because his “familiarity with Victorian literature was great” (294, 348). 2 Despite writing suggestive accounts of the connections between the two authors, Levine and Ridley Beeton avoid the question of Conrad’s indebtedness to Eliot. Levine discusses many concrete details connecting Middlemarch and Nostromo, but he betrays his own best observations by dismissing the analogies as “striking but apparently accidental similarities” between the two books (308). Beeton calls the books “wonderfully comparable,” but, apologetically, does not provide any details (85).

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sympathy and judgment, solidarity and solitude, knowing and not knowing, public and private life, individuals and society, reason and passion, work and duty. The threads connecting the two books are manifold, demanding great care to disentangle a few of the different strands. Of these shared preoccupations, sympathy will be used as a focal point from which to explore how Conrad refashions at least part of the complex set of relations and some of the characteristic ideas in Eliot’s novel. The nature and value of sympathy is questioned throughout Nostromo as Conrad engages in a dialogue with Eliot about its meaning. As if embodying Carlyle’s idea that “history is the essence of innumerable biographies” in the structure of their books, both novelists conduct inquiries into sympathy that are rooted in the complex demands of the relationship between private and public life.3 In exploring the suggestive analogies between Emilia Gould and Dorothea, Martin Decoud and Will Ladislaw, Lydgate and Monygham, and others, we come to recognize something of how Conrad reworks Eliot’s design by refashioning important aspects of her narrative and fundamental ideas in her thought. The analogies among the characters of the two novels are more complex than Levine suggests in his comparison of the novels.4 In these novels, sympathy must be read in relation to different sets of antithetical terms, including knowing and not knowing, self and other, and resentment and pity. At times, Eliot recognizes that there is no sharp distinction between sympathy and egoism; the opposites are copresent in scenes such as when Lydgate helps Bulstrode leave the meeting room. But in other passages, sympathy is represented as a power conquering resentment and the antithesis is reasserted. The problem becomes more insistent in Conrad, who repeatedly collapses and recombines antithetical terms, representing sympathy, resentment, and egoism as simultaneous and seemingly impossible to disentangle. In various 3 Carlyle, “On History,” 5. In “Nostromo: Conrad’s Organicist Philosophy of History,” T. McAlindon notes that “Conrad’s view of the hero and his place in history differs greatly from that of Carlyle” (38). In the structure of Nostromo, which like Middlemarch has a whole community rather than one or two central characters as a focus, Conrad may offer a critique of Carlyle’s preoccupation with individual great men. In “Heroism and Organicism in the Case of Lydgate,” William Deresiewicz reads Eliot’s representation of Lydgate as both indebted to and critical of Carlyle’s idea of heroism. For instance, see page 725. 4 Levine’s suggestions regarding the analogies among the “dramatis personae of both novels” are thought-provoking but focus too much on Will Ladislaw and Decoud. See The Realistic Imagination, beginning on page 295.

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scenes the authors question not only the responses of characters but the responses of readers as well. How we read different scenes may be analogous to some of the responses in the book, raising questions about why we read as we do. While Eliot explicitly raises these questions through her narrator and the action of the narrative, Conrad primarily uses the dramatic action, eliminating the presence of an explicit commentary by a narrator who directs the focus and perception of readers. Part of the problem in conceptualizing the dialogue about the nature of sympathy is to avoid turning passions and emotions into sterile intellectual abstractions. Though both authors challenge us to think about the nature of sympathy, the emotional significance of the passion is never lost in the novels. Undoubtedly, both authors have a keen insight into the dangers of sympathy. In some passages Eliot reveals its limitations, demonstrating that her faith in the idea can be complex. In Dorothea’s and Casaubon’s marriage, initially in relation to his sensitivity to any criticism of his work but especially in relation to his resentment toward Ladislaw, Eliot explores how “sympathy might make a wound” through Dorothea’s mistaken attempts to help both her husband and Ladislaw (m, 755). Although wanting to assist in Casaubon’s work and redress the wrong done to Ladislaw’s family, Dorothea only succeeds in hurting her husband because of his egoism. Also knowing that “the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity,” Eliot provides opportunities for readers to sharpen their “vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,” though she warns that there is a very necessary limit because an absolute sensitivity “would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence” (m, 192). Eliot is aware that sympathy has limits, but Conrad extends her qualifications and suggests that sympathy can become selfdestructive. In Nostromo, the wounds made by sympathy are often selfinflicted, especially in Emilia’s consciousness as she endures the pain of the growing isolation caused by her husband’s passion for the silver. One significant difference between the two books is Conrad’s interest not only in ordinary life, but in the extraordinary, extreme, and strange lives that are not represented in Eliot’s provincial society. In Middlemarch, the characters endure intellectual and emotional troubles in their marriages and relationships, but, in addition to these, Conrad focuses on experiences that include the tortures of physical punishments and emotional terrors that are not comparable with the lives in Eliot’s world. Although Conrad shares with Eliot a keen interest in the pain experienced in everyday life, he also explores the extreme limits of the

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human toleration for suffering by representing examples of human cruelty that are outside the daily experience of most who live in civilized and well-ordered societies, but an inescapable part of the experience of those who live in areas destroyed by civil wars and revolutions. Conrad transposes her thought to a different set of conditions. First, it is necessary to have a basic understanding of Eliot’s belief in sympathy. Eliot’s conception of art is interconnected with an idea of educating and extending readers’ sympathies. Fifteen years before the writing of Middlemarch, and even before she began her career as a novelist, Eliot had asserted that The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies […] a picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment […]. Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot. All the more sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People.5

For Eliot, the “sacred” “task” given to artists is the “extension of our sympathies.” Her novels embody the belief that “if Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.”6 Although Middlemarch does not merely advocate Eliot’s faith in sympathy, the idea remains central to her thinking. When Eliot focuses on the troubling complications in our sympathies, the too simple antithesis of egoism versus sympathy is undermined and she challenges readers to see that the opposites are entangled. And yet she also shows how egoism and sympathy are separated and her belief in the “greatest benefit” of the “extension of our sympathies” dominates. Conrad shares something of Eliot’s understanding of the significance of sympathy, but not the sacred task of extending our sympathies. In the same letter to Blackwood in which he alludes to Eliot, Conrad rejects “endless analysis of affected sentiments” in favour of “action observed, felt and interpreted with an absolute truth to my sensations (which are the basis of art in literature)” (cljc 2, 418). This is the primary task for Conrad, who is not concerned with enlarging people’s sympathies but 5 Eliot, “The Natural History of German Life,” 263. 6 From a letter dated 5 July 1859 to Charles Bray in Bert Hornback’s Norton Critical Edition, 526.

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with examining the nature of those sympathies. When writing about Doctor Monygham, who receives the least amount of sympathy from the people of Sulaco because “people believed him scornful and soured” (n, 520), Conrad raises questions about the public response to a deeply passionate and sensitive man whose existence appears monstrous to others because of the physical suffering he has endured. He makes the relationship between tolerance and sympathy a central issue. Conrad writes that “the truth of his nature consisted in his capacity for passion and in the sensitiveness of his temperament. What he lacked was the polished callousness of men of the world, the callousness from which springs an easy tolerance for oneself and others; the tolerance wide as poles asunder from true sympathy and human compassion. This want of callousness accounted for his sardonic turn of mind and his biting speeches” (n, 520). The last sentence sounds as if Conrad is describing himself: his humour is often sardonic and his style, especially in a novel such as The Secret Agent, is often biting. He challenges readers to recognize a distinction between “easy tolerance” and “true sympathy.” The former excludes passionate love or hate, sympathy or resentment. A “polished callousness” results from eliminating strong passions and strong responses toward others, suggesting a kind of cultivated indifference that stifles reactions and judgments unbecoming to “men of the world,” probably because they want to be on good terms with everyone. “Easy tolerance” is little more than a practiced indifference, a conscious unwillingness or unconscious inability to love and hate passionately, an absence of strong feelings. An easy tolerance for everyone potentially eliminates strong feelings for one person, whether those passions are love or hate. It is the idea that if a person is friends with everyone then he is friends with no one.7 For Conrad, tolerance is “easy” because the self avoids feeling or revealing either sympathy or antipathy toward others and remains undisclosed if it does have these feelings. If “true sympathy” is opposed to “easy tolerance,” then the suggestion is that the former manifests passions and feelings that are “human,” meaning it has a capacity for experiencing both strong pity and resentment and having different feelings for different individuals. We can infer that part of Conrad’s purpose is to represent strong passions and feelings in at least some characters who have not developed an “easy tolerance for oneself and others” and that those feelings will not be limited to love and pity, but include hate and resentment as well. But, as a passion, 7 See Ian Robinson’s humourous discussion regarding friendship in The Survival of English, pages 16–17.

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sympathy is prone to the extremes experienced in love or hate, and it can also become confounded with other passions, making it difficult to identify and differentiate. In order to understand Eliot’s thought about sympathy, it is important to consider a dialogue between Celia and Dorothea that occurs after the latter’s engagement to Ladislaw. Celia is puzzled by the turn of events: Dorothea smiled, and Celia looked rather meditative. Presently she said, “I cannot think how it all came about.” Celia thought it would be pleasant to hear the story. “I dare say not,” said Dorothea, pinching her sister’s chin. “If you knew how it came about, it would not seem wonderful to you.” “Can’t you tell me?” said Celia, settling her arms cozily. “No, dear, you would have to feel with me, else you would never know.” (m, 807).

Although this is a dialogue between two characters, the lack of ironic commentary on the engagement between Dorothea and Ladislaw and the fulfillment of Dorothea’s yearning in the closing stages suggests that Eliot’s criticism of her heroine is minimized late in the book. As Leavis argues, Eliot’s personal involvement in Dorothea’s character is troubling, especially when it comes to the relationship with Ladislaw.8 This conversation reveals much about Eliot’s thought in her use of the words tell, think, feel, and know. Judging by this dialogue, telling alone is insufficient to convey real knowledge or to make a person “feel with” the other, making confessions or other personal accounts of doubtful quality. Instead, feeling with the other is the only way to know the other: in the last sentence the grammar is insistent in the use of “have to” and “never” and the implied either/or structure of the two clauses. The passage suggests that sympathy means knowing the other and this belief informs Eliot’s detailed histories of her characters’ lives and thoughts. By increasing our knowledge of her characters, Eliot teaches us to withhold judgment in order to know something of a life other than our own: egoism must be minimized in order to know the other. But the statement “you would have to feel with me” also raises questions about whether sympathy becomes a form of identification, as in “you must feel like me” or “you must feel the same as me.” This raises a danger of which Conrad is aware. If the other is displaced because the ego is preoccupied with its own attempts to know and feel, then sympathy 8 Leavis, The Great Tradition, 89–93.

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becomes a kind of self-projection in which the other is inscribed with the assumptions produced by the needs and wants of the self. In a conversation when Monygham tells the Goulds of Decoud’s death, Conrad questions these ideas and explores sympathy as selfprojection. Focusing our attention on the concentration of emotion and sympathy in Emilia’s thoughts about Antonia’s loss of the man she loved, Conrad shows “she could not contain her tears at the thought of the poor girl” (n, 377). Hardly participating in the dialogue, Emilia is desolate and whenever she looks at her husband, her eyes “filled with tears again. And again she seemed to see the despair of the unfortunate Antonia” (n, 379). Imagining the mind of the other quickly develops into a dangerous situation as Conrad reveals that Emilia’s mind is filled “with horror” as she asks herself “What would I have done if Charley had been drowned while we were engaged?” (n, 379) She answers herself by crying aloud “Antonia will kill herself!” (n, 379). Conrad indicates that she assumes too much in mistaking her vision of the other as reality. Here sympathy is a form of identification and mistaken selfprojection. Imagining she would commit suicide, Emilia assumes the same must be true of Antonia. We see what it means for a person to create terrors for herself in imagining the loss of her beloved husband, her own suicide, and the suicide of another person. Sympathizing with the other becomes a confusion of self and other through self-projection. We see that sympathy can be harrowing for the self, inflict terrible suffering on the sympathizer, and that the sympathized becomes an occasion for these feelings. The idea that Emilia’s cry had “strangely little effect” is not only a troubling comment on her listeners but also a critique of her emotion, as if to suggest that such sympathy is impotent (n, 380). The question is whether or not her interlocutors and even readers should be affected by her cry. Her sympathy is not knowledge, at least not in this passage. So Conrad suggests that, while sympathy may be a form of selfprotection, it may also be a form of terrorizing the self, of inflicting terrible suffering on the self with the imagination. Also, feeling with the other may expose the self to certain dangers in the identification: there must be others with whom we would not want to feel because of the horrifying knowledge that comes with that sympathy, whose lives and stories are not “pleasant to hear” as Celia imagines. In that case, the self needs to be protected and sympathy becomes the avoidance of knowledge by imagining a situation for the other that answers to the self’s own needs and desires. Conrad’s understanding of sympathy is interconnected with not knowing and recalls Kierkegaard’s argument that sympathy “is the

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most paltry of all social virtuosities and aptitudes. Sympathy, so far from being a good to the sufferer, is rather a means of protecting one’s own egoism. Not daring in the deeper sense to think about such things, one saves oneself by sympathy.”9 In a way analogous to Conrad’s treatment of Inspector Heat’s reaction to Stevie’s remains in The Secret Agent, where sympathy is equated with a “form of fear,”10 Kierkegaard sees sympathy as self-preservative, as an avoidance of knowing. Sympathy is a shield for one’s egoism because it prevents a person from really knowing or really seeing the other. For Conrad and Kierkegaard, sympathy is potentially a form of not knowing. After reading Nostromo, we can recognize that Eliot’s method in Middlemarch might actually suggest a different conclusion than she realizes. Her sophisticated psychological analysis may be a form of self-protection that avoids knowing suffering or perhaps makes it tolerable by treating it in a limited intellectual manner. First, it is necessary to discuss some important analogies between Dorothea and Emilia because the inquiries into sympathy in both novels are centred on their characters. Although the large number of characters in these novels makes talking of a central hero or heroine misleading, the focus of Eliot’s and Conrad’s inquiries into sympathy are Dorothea and Emilia, respectively.11 There is no mistaking that “Emilia certainly occupies a Dorothea-like position” in Nostromo as Levine suggests.12 In representing Emilia, Conrad includes details that recall Dorothea. Both young women anticipate that marriage will be a great opportunity for them to move beyond their present life: Dorothea sees the possibilities of learning and growing and the openings to the “widest knowledge,” and Emilia anticipates “a future in which there was an air of adventure” (m, 22; n, 65). In Emilia, Conrad echoes Dorothea’s desire to do good work for others. Both women use their 9 Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, 120. 10 tsa, 107. In his chapter on The Secret Agent, comparing Dickens and Conrad, Aaron Fogel focuses on sympathy. Some of his discussion could be transferred to a comparison of Conrad and Eliot. See chapter 4, “The Fragmentation of Sympathy in The Secret Agent.” 11 Both Jacques Berthoud, in Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase (99–100), and David Ward, in “‘An Ideal Conception’: Conrad’s Nostromo and the Problem of Identity” (288–9), read Nostromo as focused on four central characters: Charles Gould, Monygham, Nostromo, and Decoud. This ignores Conrad’s structure, which includes the whole community, and Conrad’s preoccupation with Emilia Gould, Antonia Avellanos, Teresa Viola, and the other women in the story. 12 Levine, The Realistic Imagination, 295.

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wealth and influence to become patrons: for instance, Dorothea invests in the hospital and repays Lydgate’s debt to Bulstrode and Emilia ensures that Giorgio Viola’s inn is not destroyed during the construction of the new railway line. In both books, the authors change the characters’ lives by placing them in contact with the skeptical dilettantes, Ladislaw and Decoud, who infect the women with doubt about their husbands’ work. The women marry men unwilling or unable to father a child because a passion for work consumes them and reduces their passion for their wives. Of course, Eliot gives Dorothea a second chance in the marriage with Ladislaw whereas Conrad excludes the happy ending from his representation of Emilia. This is a significant difference in Eliot’s and Conrad’s inquiries into sympathy in the two characters. Both novelists insist upon the connection of sympathy with the two women. Eliot makes us aware that Dorothea is “alive to anything that gave her an opportunity for active sympathy” and Conrad represents Emilia as an “intelligently sympathetic” woman who has “been always good to the poor” (m, 201; n, 86, 586). Comparing analogous passages in which Eliot and Conrad represent the women looking upon poor peasants helps us identify how the focus for each author is different. Eliot dramatizes Dorothea’s capacity for sympathy in the famous moment after she forces herself to recollect the events that cause her resentment toward Ladislaw and Rosamond when “the dominant spirit of justice” makes her find a “truer measure of things” and the “vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as a power” (m, 775). Part of the point is to trace the process of thought through which Dorothea’s anger is defeated by her sympathy. Dorothea asks herself “What should I do – how should I act now, this very day, if I could clutch my own pain, and compel it to silence, and think of those three?” and then she looks out of the window: She opened her curtains, and looked out towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond, outside the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures moving – perhaps the shepherd with his dog. Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance. She was part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining.” (m, 776)

The view outside the window is partly an answer to Dorothea’s question. Although Eliot suggests this is a moment of clear-sightedness for

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Dorothea, the attention given to the people in the road lasts only for the length of the second sentence. In the last two sentences, the distraction of another vision in the form of a feeling of “the largeness of the world” causes a loss of attention to the specific details of the man, woman, and child. This leads Dorothea back to herself as she identifies her “part” of that “palpitating life” and Eliot formulates a kind of lesson in showing that Dorothea thinks she could not live as a “mere spectator.” Though seemingly a moment of fellow-feeling, Dorothea’s thought does not keep the other in view. The experience emphasizes the “power” of sympathy to “make” Dorothea “more helpful” (m, 775). Partly, the scene represents sympathy as an “obligation” as Dorothea wants to satisfy her “yearn[ing] towards the perfect Right” so she can make for it “a throne within her, and rule her errant will” (m, 776). The thought of making sympathy rule her will in order to compel her pain into silence is troubling because it suggests she is doing some harm to herself in order to serve the obligation to sympathize. When sympathy returns as a power, an execution of specific emotions occurs, as if it is a tyrant that will not endure the simultaneous presence of resentment. At this late stage in the novel Eliot does not critique the potentially self-destructive act of compelling personal suffering into silence. Conrad echoes some aspects of Eliot’s thought in representing Emilia’s journey with her husband “in the search for labour” around Sulaco (n, 86). He emphasizes that Emilia comes “nearer to the soul of the land in the tremendous disclosure” of “a great land of plain and mountain, and people, suffering and mute” (n, 88). As if directly recalling the details of the “man with a bundle” in Dorothea’s view from the window, Conrad rewrites the scene from Emilia’s perspective: Having acquired in Southern Europe a knowledge of true peasantry, [Emilia] was able to appreciate the great worth of the people. She saw the man under the silent, sad-eyed beast of burden. She saw them on the road carrying loads, lonely figures upon the plain, toiling under great straw hats, with their white clothing flapping about their limbs in the wind; she remembered the villages by some group of Indian women at the fountain impressed upon her memory, by the face of some young Indian girl with a melancholy and sensual profile, raising an earthenware vessel of cool water at the door of a dark hut with a wooden porch cumbered with great brown jars. (n, 89)

Unlike Eliot’s passage where a moment of recognition returns to concerns about the self, Conrad keeps the experience from becoming self-preoccupied. As Berthoud argues, Emilia “responds with an

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extraordinary vividness to the enduring life of landscape and the people” and we can recognize this in the details of her memories.13 In Conrad’s version of the scene, the thought remains focused on the people and the places. The clarity of the details is remarkable, especially when Conrad has Emilia see “their white clothing flapping about their limbs in the wind.” The appreciation of the “great worth of the people” is exemplified in the unwavering attention and the sharp quality of the memories. A significant difference in the representations of these scenes is in Eliot’s preoccupation with articulating Dorothea’s feelings of obligation and self-sacrifice, something that is lacking in the corresponding passage from Conrad. He focuses our attention on the quality of the perception in which the people are simply seen. A sense of self does not intrude into Emilia’s seeing and does not distract her attention. There is no sense of obligation or sympathy as a power in Conrad’s thought, marking a difference from Eliot’s thought. However, the sympathies of the women are tested when the authors place their heroines into contact with a skeptic. Both novelists structure the narratives so that Ladislaw and Decoud play pivotal parts in undermining the faith that Dorothea and Emilia have in the work of their husbands. George Levine is certainly right that Conrad is thinking of Ladislaw in writing Decoud.14 The representation of Decoud echoes some important aspects of Eliot’s depiction; for instance, the two characters attempt to maintain a skeptical distance from life, finding humour in the actions around them, but fail to keep their distance as both are recruited to act as spokesmen for political ideas. They begin as dilettantes, but sacrifice their freedom to win the women they love; they become newspaper editors because they desire to remain close to the women (n, 153; m, 78–80, 454). Decoud is characterized by his “bitter levity” and “light banter” and Ladislaw also manifests a tendency toward a keen “sense of the ludicrous” in the “pure enjoyment of 13 Berthoud, Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, 129. Like the comments offered by Berthoud, my reading counters the claims made by Rebecca Carpenter in “From Naiveté to Knowledge: Emilia Gould and the ‘Kinder, Gentler’ Imperialism,” alleging Emilia’s “ignorance of and aloofness from the people she purports to help” (86). Carpenter’s account is reductive and does not consider passages in which the style embodies Emilia’s profound attentiveness, such as the one I reproduce. 14 See pages 297–313 in The Realistic Imagination. Levine recognizes that Decoud infects Emilia with disbelief but focuses on the idea that Dorothea “infects Ladislaw with faith” (314).

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comicality.”15 Conrad structures his story differently: while Eliot makes Ladislaw a lover for Dorothea, Decoud is a lover for Antonia and a political conspirator when talking to Emilia. Ladislaw’s attack on Dorothea’s faith is self-interested because he wants to win her; Decoud’s attack on Emilia’s faith in her husband promotes the separatist cause, which is informed by his passion for Antonia. And then Decoud attacks Antonia’s faith in her father to secure her love and attention. Ladislaw is the mechanism with which Eliot undermines Dorothea’s faith in her husband. He encourages Dorothea’s doubt about Casaubon’s work, making it difficult for her to sympathize with his struggle. Dorothea is “wounded” by Ladislaw’s criticism and becomes “absorbed in the piteousness of [the] thought” that “the labour of her husband’s life might be void” (m, 205). After the infection has grown, “the poor child had become altogether unbelieving as to the trustworthiness of that Key which had made the ambition and the labour of her husband’s life” (m, 471). Though Dorothea’s faith fails, Eliot saves Dorothea from living a hollow existence: Dorothea escapes the potentially terrible request made by her husband to devote her life to his work because Eliot kills him off. In the final moments before Casaubon’s death, Eliot dramatizes the conflict that Dorothea experiences, but she allows Dorothea to escape the “real yoke of marriage” to which she was “fettered.”16 Dorothea might very well make herself a sacrifice to duty, but Eliot cannot allow it. Eliot is more truthful than she knows in writing “that God was with” Dorothea (m, 421). In this novel, it is true “that all heaven, though it were crowded with spirits watching them, must be on [Dorothea’s] side” (m, 421). For Eliot, separating Dorothea and Casaubon is necessary to preserve Dorothea’s existence. In reproducing in the Goulds some of the horror of Eliot’s couple, Conrad eliminates the possibility of a separation. For instance, Charles Gould is saved from the execution that would free Emilia from him, though the freedom might be equally painful for her. She is bound to him. In the conversation between Emilia and Decoud, Conrad includes skeptical objections to precipitate Emilia’s loss of faith in her husband. Strangely, the sentence “he must have known what he was talking about” is not attributed to Emilia’s thoughts, though it might seem natural to assume this (n, 216). It is Conrad’s signal to readers to listen carefully to 15 n, 180. m, 78. In addition, see the following pages on Decoud (153) and Ladislaw (78–80, 454). 16 m, 475. As Barbara Hardy remarks, “death often has to provide a substitute for divorce in Victorian fiction” (Particularities, 33).

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Decoud at this moment because “the effect he expected was produced. Mrs. Gould, ready to take fire, gave it up suddenly with a low little sound that resembled a moan” (n, 214). Conrad captures the dread in Emilia’s question “What do you know?” (n, 214) and reveals the fear in Emilia that her doubts will be voiced aloud. By the end of the conversation, Conrad shows that faith has been converted into doubt: The fate of the San Tomé mine was lying heavy upon her heart. It was a long time now 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. It was as if 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. “Those poor people” she murmured to herself. (n, 221–2)

As if to emphasize the analogy at this moment, Conrad uses a phrase that is so characteristic of Eliot: “Those poor people.” Emilia is isolated from her husband, the mine, and the work of the material interests that were to bring justice and peace. This recalls the complicated emotions Mrs Bulstrode feels for her husband who had his own dreams, but hers are a mix of “scorching shame” and “mournful but unreproaching fellowship” (m, 738). Despite her knowledge, Mrs Bulstrode’s sympathy counters her other emotions and she remains with her husband. In revealing Emilia’s impression of “a great wave of loneliness that swept over her head,” Conrad articulates the terrible realization “that no one would ever ask her with solicitude what she was thinking of” (n, 521). The isolation and disconnection is insistent. Human sympathy is denied because there is “no one who could be answered with careless sincerity in the ideal perfection of confidence” (n, 521). There is the possibility for sympathy in talking to the doctor, but not the kind Emilia wants. Emilia’s isolation is different from Decoud’s solitude: Decoud dies of his disbelief because he lacks the capacity to combat the solitude on the island; Emilia lives with her disbelief because of her endurance and suffers through the solitude of her marriage. Conrad shows us that Emilia’s sympathy cannot overcome her isolation from her husband. He shows us the terrible desolation of living in a marriage in which Emilia is all but abandoned, revealing an important debt to Eliot while refashioning a significant element of her thought.

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Both authors focus on the relationship between two powerful passions, sympathy and love, in representing scenes during which the couples are engaged. Conrad reworks some fundamental elements of Eliot’s art, making it difficult to discern where her influence ends and his distinct individual preoccupations begin. The scenes in Middlemarch are in chapter 31 for Rosamond and Lydgate and chapter 83 for Dorothea and Ladislaw and in Nostromo are in part 1, chapter 6 for Charles and Emilia and part 2, chapter 5 for Decoud and Antonia. Comparing the scenes allows us to recognize Conrad’s indebtedness to Eliot and to see some of the differences in their treatment of analogous moments that are vitally important in life. Eliot writes two versions of “a strange way of arriving at an understanding” (m, 298). Both scenes use similar elements, including childish emotions and the confounding of love and sympathy. In the first, leading up to the engagement scene between Rosamond and Lydgate, Eliot reveals a lack of understanding between the couple: both rely on assumptions that satisfy their desires and neither knows the other’s thoughts and feelings. Eliot focuses on the problems caused by Rosamond’s feelings of being “keenly hurt” by Lydgate’s manner during their conversation.17 What begins as Lydgate’s idea of an official visit to deliver a message becomes a love scene when Lydgate “saw a certain helpless quivering” produced by her pain that makes him “look at Rosamond with a questioning flash” (m, 298). The development of the scene depends upon Eliot’s characterization of Rosamond becoming “as natural as she had ever been when she was five years old” (m, 298). Emotionally, Rosamond is not an adult here, and Eliot raises questions about whether or not Lydgate’s response is mature. Responding with a combination of love and sympathy to what looks like the pain of a child, Lydgate is “completely mastered by the outrush of tenderness” and his sense that she “depended on him for her joy” (m, 298). When he experiences “passionate love,” Lydgate’s words and actions are connected with his work as a doctor because “he was used to being gentle with the weak and suffering” (m, 298). Before declaring his love, Lydgate asks a question that, without the passion of the moment, would be the kind of inquiry he might ask one of his patients: “What is the matter? you are distressed. Tell me – pray” (m, 298). Lydgate’s response is problematic because the confusion of sympathy with love overwhelms him, leading him into an engagement without careful consideration and despite his intentions to avoid such a commitment, and he suffers the 17 m, 297. See W.J. Harvey’s reading of the scene in pages 55–62 of The Art of George Eliot.

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consequences of that moment until his death, which is precipitated by this failure. In the scene with Dorothea and Ladislaw, Eliot does not make the same criticism of the confused emotions. Previously, the woman was compared to a child, but in this scene both the man and the woman are “like two children” and the irony and criticism is lacking (m, 796). Though the scene certainly shows another “strange way of arriving at an understanding,” Eliot makes no ironic remark to that effect. We ought to be concerned that Miss Noble, who brings nourishment and sympathy to the needy, delivers Ladislaw to Dorothea, as if giving Dorothea a gift to satisfy her yearnings for sympathy and self-sacrifice. A significant cause of the difficulties in Dorothea’s marriage to Casaubon is her desire to do some good for Ladislaw because of her sympathy for the wrong done to his family. This is interconnected with her discomfort toward the money that she asks Casaubon to give to Ladislaw to redress those past wrongs and which she inherits after Casaubon’s death. Two yearnings would be satisfied in Dorothea marrying Ladislaw: she gets rid of the inheritance money she does not want, and she gets to do some good for Ladislaw, whom she has long identified as a case for sympathy. This is troubling because sympathy and love are confounded, but Eliot does not critique the problem. She feels with Dorothea too much when her character is behaving in a “sobbing childlike way.”18 Some aspects of Eliot’s two scenes are reworked in Conrad’s representation of the engagement of Emilia and Charles. As in Eliot’s scenes, Conrad makes the engagement an accident caused by the conditions of the moment. Lydgate and Ladislaw focus on their lovers, but Charles is distracted by his grief. The death of Gould senior causes Charles to propose to Emilia, but he is not really focused on her and “elects to stare at nothing past a young girl’s head” (n, 63). Conrad makes at least one half of the couple absent mentally. Charles is thinking of his father and the mine when he asks Emilia “whether she did love him enough – whether she would have the courage to go with him so far away” (n, 63). Conrad makes it difficult to determine whether Charles’s “anxiety” of a “determined man” is focused on his desire to take his father’s position or on his proposal to Emilia (n, 63). However, there is no question that Emilia is focused on Charles and the way his manner pleases her. 18 m, 798. See Patricia Menon’s discussion in pages 158–60 of Austen, Eliot, Charlotte Brontë and The Mentor-Lover. In her comments on Dorothea and Ladislaw, Barbara Hardy argues that “it is when they are together, physically or in the thoughts of each other, that the romantic glow seems false and the childlike innocence implausible and inappropriate” (Particularities, 33).

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Though Conrad shows us that she is transported in the moment after his proposal, as if the earth were “falling away from under her,” there is no indication that she has thoughts other than her feelings for him (n, 63). In Eliot’s scenes, the women are reduced to being children emotionally. Initially, when Conrad places both the tears and the sympathy in Emilia, it appears he has reproduced this element of Eliot’s thought. When she “murmured ‘Poor boy,’ and began to dry her eyes,” we cannot tell who Emilia has in mind here, the dead father or Charles (n, 62, 63). Although Emilia is “almost like a lost child crying,” the “almost” is an important qualification and emphasizes that Conrad is not making her a child, but instead shows that she has “the fastidious soul of an experienced woman” (n, 63). Though showing that Emilia is caught between emotions of love and sympathy, Conrad does not reduce her emotional experience to that of a crying child, but instead emphasizes Emilia’s maturity in her realization of “the full force of its misery” that places others ahead of herself in her mind (n, 62). Although exploring the same question of the confusion of love and sympathy, the reliance on childlike emotions are excluded from Conrad’s thought. In the scene between Decoud and Antonia, Conrad is skeptical of the conjunction of love and sympathy in a way that recalls Eliot’s irony in the scene between Rosamond and Lydgate, but he includes some aspects of the scene between Dorothea and Ladislaw as well. It is important to recognize that this is the first of two scenes in which Decoud corrupts a woman’s beliefs; the second involving Emilia I have already discussed. Conrad’s representation of Antonia bears some analogies with Dorothea: Antonia is “reputed to be terribly learned and serious” and she is devoted to her father and his political work, reading “all the correspondence” and writing “all the papers” for him (n, 140, 182). The representation of Antonia’s devotion to her father recalls Dorothea’s idealization of a marriage where “your husband was a sort of father” which Eliot reveals is part of her attraction to Casaubon (m, 10). Conrad creates a situation where, to secure Antonia, Decoud must displace her father from the central place in her feelings to make room for himself; hence, he mocks the politics of Costaguana and the “Fifty Years of Misrule,” the book written by her father (n, 112). (This bears some analogies to Ladislaw’s attempts to poison Dorothea’s faith in Casaubon, who is almost old enough to be her father.) His skepticism, irony, and joking manner undermine her faith. Once again, Conrad reworks childlike emotions in the scene. Decoud insistently imagines Antonia as a “school-girl” who had “ventured to treat slightingly his pose of disabused wisdom” (n, 155). Eight years before the passionate love scene,

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Antonia had attacked “the aimlessness of [Decoud’s] life and the levity of his opinions” marking an experience that “disconcerted him so greatly” (n, 155). The criticism marks the beginning of Decoud’s attraction for her, in a way analogous to the way in which Ladislaw’s interest in Dorothea began with his perception that she criticized his art. Conrad makes us focus on the disparity in Decoud’s thoughts about Antonia: whenever Decoud looks at the “mature Antonia,” his memories invoke “with an extraordinary vividness the austere schoolgirl of the earlier days” (n, 183). This raises questions about Decoud’s inability to reconcile his memories with the living presence of the woman before him. Conrad makes us doubt Decoud’s willingness or ability to accept that she is a mature, adult woman. This is very important in the strange love scene that revolves around Decoud’s need for sympathy. Conrad focuses our attention on Decoud’s repeated attempts to provoke a response from Antonia. Wanting some expression of sympathy, Decoud insists upon the “deadly” dangers attending upon his stay in the country (n, 180). Finally, after trying to explain the threats to his life posed by the Montero brothers who will execute him if he is caught, Decoud tells her “I shall go to the wall”; due to his devotion for her, he will not leave the country without her (n, 181). Evidently, she makes a response that satisfies him by saying “Martin, you will make me cry,” because “those were the last words, it seemed to him, that could ever have been spoken by Antonia. He had never made it up to her so completely in all their intercourse of small encounters” (n, 181–2). But knowing the meaning of her tears is difficult because Conrad holds us close to Decoud throughout the scene. We cannot tell if they are tears of sympathy in response to Decoud’s anticipations of a frightful death or an expression of love for him or both. All the love-making is on one side: she never responds to Decoud’s declaration, “But I love you, Antonia!” (n, 182). We should question the lengths to which Decoud will go to satisfy his desires, which are a result of his memories of her as a schoolgirl. Her composure strongly suggests that she is a mature woman in the same way as Emilia. We should recognize the criticism in Decoud “assur[ing] her that his only aspiration was to a felicity so high that it seemed almost unrealizable on this earth,” because Conrad shows us that his faith in her fails once he is alone on the island (n, 192). In her presence, he is passionately attracted to her, but once separated, he is convinced that “she had not survived. But if she survived he could not face her” (n, 498). Because Decoud’s “intelligence and his passion were swallowed up easily in this great unbroken solitude of waiting without faith,” he is identical and antithetical with Emilia who suffers in solitude without faith but is

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not swallowed by it (n, 498). Her intelligence and passion are still intact at the end of the novel, though she suffers still. Because of his unbelief he commits suicide and eliminates the chance to be with Antonia. There is no marriage after this engagement. In Nostromo, neither Antonia nor Emilia is given a second chance by Conrad. Unlike Dorothea, whom Eliot rewards with happiness through a second marriage, Antonia remains alone and Emilia does not receive anything remotely resembling a fairy-tale ending. If Decoud’s criticism is any indication, Conrad does not believe in “motives” that are made “a part of some fairy tale” (n, 215). In our last view of Emilia, she is isolated and alone. Although the “eye of [Emilia’s] compassion [is] famed from one end of the land to the other,” Conrad reveals the complexity of her personality by representing the conflict between her sympathy and her suffering (n, 559). The pain Emilia has suffered because Charles’s passion for his mine outweighed his passion for his wife informs her response to Nostromo’s dying wish to confess the location of the silver: “A pained, involuntary reluctance lingered in his tone, in his eyes, plain to the woman with the genius of sympathetic intuition. She averted her glance from the miserable subjection of the dying man, appalled, wishing to hear no more of the silver” (n, 560). Recalling both Mary’s refusal to comply with Featherstone’s dying wish and Nostromo’s refusal to comply with Teresa’s, Conrad focuses on Emilia’s desire to avoid hearing Nostromo’s dying confession. Her own suffering is stronger than her sympathy and she protects herself from hearing words that will only aggravate her memories of “conceal[ing] the truth from her husband,” being “corrupted by her fears,” and thinking she was “nearly the cause of Dr. Monygham’s death” (n, 557). “This woman, full of endurance and compassion,” is not devoid of resentment toward the silver from the mine (n, 558). Though Dorothea’s isolation in her marriage is a characteristic preoccupation for Eliot, Conrad’s “true sympathy” for Emilia eliminates the kind of self-projection involved in the fairy-tale ending Eliot grants Dorothea (n, 520). Arguably, the difference between the two representations is linked to the problem of knowing and not knowing. Much of Middlemarch is constructed on the understanding of sympathy as feeling with the other as a means to knowledge. The detailed psychological insights are attempts to make readers sympathize with others and know the characters intimately. In her criticism of Dickens, Eliot identifies him as an artist of “external traits” and calls for the addition of a delineation of the “psychological character”; the combination of both “would be the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the

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awakening of social sympathies.”19 In making an attempt to produce that great contribution, Eliot challenges readers to feel with her characters, and sometimes makes the demands explicit, such as when she raises a “protest against all our interest, all our effort at understanding being given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble” (m, 275). Following the protest, Eliot suggests we ought to sympathize with Casaubon because “his experience was of that pitiable kind which shrinks from pity, and fears most of all that it should be known,” and he does not have life enough “to spare for transformation into sympathy” because of his “self-preoccupation” (m, 277). Despite making Casaubon the embodiment of egoism in the novel, Eliot asks readers to share the feelings of the narrator who says “for my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self” (m, 277). Though the passage is meant to teach readers to feel with a character with whom it is difficult to sympathize, the lesson should make readers uncomfortable because pity can become confused with superiority. I agree with Brian Crick that the word “poor” is used too often in the novel, marking a distance between the narrator and the suffering characters.20 The narrator is akin to Miss Noble: “fostering and petting all needy creatures being so spontaneous a delight to her, that she regarded it much as if it had been a pleasant vice that she was addicted to” (m, 167). The psychological observer making a study of provincial life is curiously mixed with Mrs Noble the gift-giving addict: sympathy is a vice, however pleasant both of them might believe it to be. One of Nietzsche’s remarks from The Gay Science is apt here: “When we see someone suffering, we like to use this opportunity to take possession of him; that is for example what those who become his benefactors and those who have compassion for him do, and they call the lust for new possessions that is awakened in them ‘love’” (gs, 40. Section 14). Eliot’s treatment of Dorothea manifests this possessiveness of a benefactor, but she also takes possession of Casaubon in protecting him from judgmental readers (though she has provided ample reasons for us to dislike him), and some of the other characters as 19 Eliot, “The Natural History of German Life,” 264. 20 As Brian Crick writes, “I find Eliot’s compulsive habit of attaching the word ‘poor’ to character after character troubling. Why are their lives always a ‘lot’ assigned to them? Living in a world of her creation is like being an inhabitant of a petting farm in which the keeper pinches you so she can pet ‘ya” (Love Confounded, 11).

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well. When the narrator declares “for my part I am very sorry for him,” this in itself is a kind of egoism as the novelist demonstrates her superiority in sympathy and implies that it is lacking in her readers. The style is very different from other parts of the novel in which the focus is not the narrator, but instead Casaubon’s dislike of Ladislaw for instance. In those passages, the representation is not obscured by the narrator’s commentary. Casaubon’s terrible jealousies and insecurities, all a part of his egoism, are revealed, and we know him for who he is. We might not feel with him, but our perspective is not obstructed by the narrator’s demands for pity. In Nostromo, Conrad does not reproduce the demands made by Eliot’s narrator, excluding the commentary to direct his readers, and potentially diagnoses some of the symptoms. It should be emphasized that this is not a criticism of all commentary. It is not the use of commentary in itself which is Eliot’s problem, but its quality. When Charles delivers the news of the death of his father to Emilia and then makes a proposal of marriage, Conrad reproduces something of the pitying aspect of Eliot’s thought that sees her characters as “poor.” The scene is about love and death, but also involves sympathy. Charles and Emilia cannot think of his father without expressions of pity. As if to emphasize the allusion to Eliot, the adjective “poor” is repeatedly used in relation to Gould senior and an important subject is that “poor father takes a wrong view of that San Tomé business” (n, 60). The great physical distance between the two young lovers in Italy and Charles’s father in Costaguana emphasizes the emotional and intellectual limitations of their sympathy: “they discussed that opinion long and earnestly, as if they could influence a mind across half the globe” (n, 60). As readers, they only know of the business through his letters, so their knowledge is limited to what he writes. There is no indication that Emilia and Charles can feel with him in order to know his experience, as Eliot suggests. Conrad reveals that, despite Charles feeling “rather sorry for his dad” and thinking his “advancing wisdom” might perceive the “plain truth of the business,” he does not understand the nature of his father’s misery (n, 57, 58). Though Charles “thought of it every day; but he thought of it without bitterness,” the indeterminate referent makes it difficult to know what exactly Charles thinks about: the mine, his father, the business (n, 58). In revealing that Charles does not share his father’s bitterness, Conrad exposes the considerable difference in their experience and the isolation of the self and the other. The moment of doubt in the sentence “it might have been an unfortunate affair for his poor dad” (my italics), focuses our attention on the problems of sympathy: “The view he took of it was sympathetic to his father, yet

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calm and reflective. His personal feelings had not been outraged, and it is difficult to resent with proper and durable indignation the physical or mental anguish of another organism, even if that other organism is one’s own father” (n, 58–9). Here Conrad raises questions about what it means for sympathy to be a “view,” a perspective, rather than a passion, and whether or not it can be “calm and reflective.” The experience may not be sympathy at all because “personal feelings” are not “outraged” and passions are not enflamed. What is the relationship between personal feelings and sympathy and are there clear distinctions to be made between them? If sympathy is identical with personal feelings, then the implication is that the whole of the person is involved in the passion. The “other organism” has its own feelings that are not shared. Whatever the anguish or resentment of the other, sympathy depends on the feelings of the self. If feelings are not shared, then the two organisms cannot be identified. The outrage proper for the one is not identical to the outrage proper for the other. Each exists in solitude, though the feelings of the one may provoke the feelings of the other. Conrad doubts we feel the same as the other, or feel with the other, suggesting instead we feel for ourselves. Here, sympathy is not knowledge of the other. The passage raises questions about the difficulty of feeling another person’s resentment or anguish, whether or not the person is a blood relation. When Conrad points out these difficulties, he casts doubt on Eliot’s attempts to make us sympathize. Asking readers to sympathize with another person’s anguish is a difficult proposition given the situation Conrad articulates here. It would be strange to sympathize with the other’s resentment in Eliot’s novel, especially when sympathy is a power that defeats anger and resentment. Without suggesting it is impossible, Conrad has doubts about feeling the other’s anguish. Another passage, close to this in the text, introduces a difficulty that may suggest a stronger difference between Conrad and Eliot; however, in order to understand the comparison, some of the analogies between Charles Gould and Lydgate should be briefly outlined. Partly, Gould should be read as an extension of Eliot’s interest in how “man’s new means of realizing himself will be his own works,” a key idea Alan Mintz identifies in Middlemarch.21 In the account of Gould’s growing fascination with mining, Conrad reproduces, in a very compressed form, the brief history of Lydgate’s education. The desire for work and the 21 Mintz, “Middlemarch, The Romance of Vocation,” 632. Although Mintz suggests that Eliot’s preoccupation with vocation is a “Miltonic legacy,” I suspect that the notion is strongly rooted in Carlyle (640).

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passion for reform in Lydgate are recreated in Gould: the former desires to reform medicine and the latter desires to achieve great success in resuscitating the San Tomé mine. Both are entangled in politics: both are confounded in their desires to remain independent because Gould cannot keep clear of the corruption of the country and Lydgate falls into debt, which forces him into a harrowing relationship with Bulstrode. Both become increasingly entangled in the politics of the places where they live. In the end, their successes are corrupted because they succumb to different public pressures: Gould backs the revolution and Lydgate works on fashionable and more lucrative diseases before his death. In Lydgate’s history, Eliot focuses on his youthful love of reading and his discovery of an “intellectual passion” for science and medicine (m, 142). Through him she traces the changes that happen to men “who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little” (m, 143). Lydgate becomes convinced that “the medical profession” combines “intellectual conquest and the social good” and it “wanted reform” (n, 143). As if heeding Carlyle’s dictum to find work, Lydgate shapes his “plan of the future: to do good small work for Middlemarch, and great work for the world” (m, 147). Conrad would have found much inspiration here for the character of Charles Gould. The preoccupation with work that Eliot shares with Carlyle makes this important for Conrad. Charles Gould’s early life shares some of Lydgate’s experience. Though Conrad changes the nature of the work, the difference in their professions is not absolute, especially in terms of the presence of sympathy. Though we might think that medicine is likely to be connected with sympathy, it depends on the person of the doctor: unlike Lydgate, who has sympathy for the weak, a doctor may view his patients as merely objects in his research. Conrad emphasizes that, like Lydgate, Gould idealizes his profession by linking personal success with the social good: the “moneymaking” of the mine is “justified because the security which it demands must be shared with an oppressed people” (n, 84). As an orphan, Lydgate chooses his future in medicine and science, but Gould’s life is largely determined by his father’s obsession with the mine. Because of his father’s letters, Gould “grew more and more interested in that thing which could provoke such a tumult of words and passion” (n, 58). The essence of Lydgate’s education is captured in Conrad’s comments about how Gould fell “under the spell of the San Tomé mine” and “pursued his studies in Belgium and France with the idea of qualifying for a mining engineer. But this scientific aspect of his labours remained vague and imperfect in his

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mind” (n, 59). Because science is not the primary concern, Gould’s pursuits are different from Lydgate’s passion; however, the study of objects is analogous in some way. Gould’s study of mines conflates the observation of human beings with the observation of things, raising questions about the relationship between the observer and the observed, between the sympathizer and sympathized. When looking at “material things,” Gould feels the pangs of sympathy and compassion: Mines had acquired for him a dramatic interest. He studied their peculiarities from a personal point of view, too, as one would study the varied characters of men. He visited them as one goes with curiosity to call upon remarkable persons. He visited mines in Germany, in Spain, in Cornwall. Abandoned workings had for him strong fascination. Their desolation appealed to him like the sight of human misery, whose causes are varied and profound. They might have been worthless, but also they might have been misunderstood. (n, 59)

In this passage, Conrad makes it difficult to differentiate between studying human beings and objects or “material things.” In other parts of the novel, Conrad emphasizes that Charles thinks little of the people around him; though seeing the suffering of the wounded in the courtyard of his mansion, he thinks of his own predicament (n, 364). The fact that, prior to the ringing of the bells celebrating Pedrito’s entrance into Sulaco, Charles never noticed the aged people and children, is especially telling (n, 382–3). In passages such as these, Conrad questions Gould’s sensibility and asks us to consider how this kind of pity for material things is related and opposed to the human sympathy embodied in Emilia. The indifference toward much that is not directly connected with the mine, which is very different from Emilia’s profound attention to people, belies his stated belief in doing good for others. These reflections raise questions about the form of Middlemarch, especially when we remember Eliot’s idea that her novel is a study. The quality of the two studies are analogous: the “dramatic interest” in “varied characters” and “remarkable persons” and the “sight of human misery” and people who “might have been misunderstood” sounds like a description of Eliot’s preoccupations in Middlemarch. Questioning an aspect of Eliot’s form involves questioning her idea of sympathy. The idea of the novel as a study connects her work with that of Casaubon and Lydgate.22 Like Casaubon in his study of religious 22 See Cherry Wilhelm’s discussion of the analogies between Eliot’s and Lydgate’s methods (602).

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mythology, Eliot meticulously researched the context and background for her novel, especially scientific language and thought. Sometimes her characters are like specimens: during her detailed psychological examinations the thoughts, emotions, desires, and other aspects of their lives are analyzed with precision as if viewed through Lydgate’s microscope. Farebrother’s love of natural history, which leads him to “have made an exhaustive study of the entomology of this district” is analogous to Eliot’s work, a point highlighted in her earlier articulation of an ideal conception of art in an essay praising a work on the natural history of a people (m, 170). Certainly, no character in the novel can approach her knowledge of human life; some of them might have trouble understanding some of the complex reflections included in her observations. For instance, we recall the pauses in the narrative when she reflects on “the means of elevating a low subject” through “historical parallels” and the story given to her by “an eminent philosopher among my friends” about the effect of the “lighted candle” on the scratched surface (m, 337, 261–2). The quotations that serve as epigraphs for each chapter suggest an extensive knowledge of literature well beyond the capacity of her characters. An argument might be made that she is not writing for the kind of people who populate her book but for educated readers such as her friend, the eminent philosopher, who likely lives in a cosmopolitan city and not a country town. There is a danger in a form of sympathy that perceives the object of sympathy as not intelligent enough to participate on an equal footing with the researcher. We are close to the problem of her writing about German peasants in this way: “Systematic co-operation implies general conceptions, and a provisional subordination of egoism, to which even the artisans of towns have rarely shown themselves equal, and which are as foreign to the mind of the peasant as logarithms or the doctrine of chemical proportions.”23 The complexity of the language declares an intellectual superiority that calls attention to itself and announces that the writer is educated and shares little with the narrow knowledge of the subjects. At times, Eliot is too much an analyst looking over the specimens in the controlled experiment that is Middlemarch.24 The nature of her study 23 Eliot, “The Natural History of German Life,” 278. 24 Again, see Wilhelm’s argument that Eliot is conducting a “scientific demonstration” and an “experiment” (602). In her introduction to the novel, Felicia Bonaparte observes that Eliot’s “admiration for science is not for a moment in doubt” and she derives her “methodology” from science (xv). This informs Eliot’s psychological analysis of character in the novel.

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can seem uncomfortably close to sociological research because the novel is fashioned after the ideal of a “man of sufficient moral and intellectual breadth” devoted to “studying the natural history of our social classes, especially of the small shopkeepers, artisans, and peasantry” who would “give us the result of his observations in a book well-nourished with specific facts.”25 Her admiration for the work of Riehl serves as the “model” she transforms into her art.26 Though the essay is earlier, she continues to use this idea. Eliot is insufficiently aware of the problems caused by the vast distance between the sophistication of her language and arguments and the education of the people she is observing. Her personal experience of growing up in the country is a valuable part of her understanding of it, but her observations are sometimes close to a sophisticated sociological researcher. She is no longer part of that world and she sees it as narrow and confining. Conrad understands this problem and presents it in Decoud, a native of Costaguana who is intellectually sophisticated beyond any of the inhabitants of the place because of his education in Europe. The “talented young man” is educated in France and hopes to “become a poet” but “condescend[s] to write articles on European affairs” for a newspaper (n, 151–2). Later, like Ladislaw, he is an editor, occupying a role similar to Eliot’s with the Westminster Review. Having grown up in a provincial part of England, like that represented in Middlemarch, Eliot becomes an outsider because of her education and experiences, including her loss of faith and her long-time relationship with George Henry Lewes, which made her life scandalous for the time. While in Paris with his European friends, far from the life of his birthplace, Decoud imagines his home as “a thing of exquisite comicality to a discerning mind.”27 Although she is not a “dilettante in life,” the intellectual sophistication separating Eliot from the emotional life of some of her .

25 Eliot, “The Natural History of German Life,” 265–6. 26 Ibid., 266. See W.J. Harvey’s discussion, in The Art of George Eliot, of the “thoroughly intellectual” syntax of Eliot’s prose (206). Although Harvey praises the virtues of some aspects of Eliot’s prose, he also argues that her “style has its failures. We are sometimes left with mere pedantry and sometimes the formidable intellect at work behind the prose acts as a wheel to crush its butterfly of a subject” (210). 27 n, 152. T. McAlindon argues “obviously, [Decoud] is modelled on the selfworshipping dandy and the skeptical dilettante of Sartor Resartus” (“Conrad’s Organicist Philosophy,” 38). With this in mind, it is arguable that Ladislaw might owe something to Carlyle’s dandy as well.

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characters is comparable to Decoud “watching the picturesque extreme of wrong-headedness into which an honest, almost sacred, conviction may drive a man” (n, 200). Eliot makes Casaubon, Bulstrode, and Lydgate betray forms of wrong-headedness in their marriages and professions. Granted, she doesn’t have Decoud’s mocking humour, but she shares his tendency to “contemplate […] from a distance” (n, 176). They share a “disabused wisdom” of the places they originate from.28 Reading the representation of Decoud, we can see that Conrad understands the potential dangers in a sophisticated irony that separates the observer and the observed, the sympathizer and sympathized. One of the major challenges in reading these novels is to make sense of the wrecked lives and communities we encounter. The provincial and South American locations are different from Bleak House or The Secret Agent, but there are striking analogies in that many of the characters exhibit a similar advanced state of disintegration that recalls the populations of the two versions of London. Conrad and Eliot explore communities wrecked by the turbulence of political and economic reform or revolution and individuals jostling one another emotionally and intellectually, causing further damage. In his criticism of Middlemarch, Raymond Williams identifies an isolation in Eliot’s characters that is aggravated by a society that is “compromising, limiting, mutually frustrating,” an observation that is true of Nostromo as well.29 In representing the lives of the couples in the marriages, Eliot is preoccupied with isolation. In the marriage of Lydgate and Rosamond, “it was as if they were both adrift on one piece of wreck and looked away from each other” (m, 746). Much of Eliot’s novel embodies the horrifying failure of conversation and mutual understanding, dramatizing the isolation encapsulated in her analogy with the shipwreck. The metaphor of two persons adrift together in a wreck and disconnected despite their shared situation is transformed in Conrad’s novel, as if he were writing a profound meditation on the meaning of that very suggestive sentence from Eliot’s book. After the lighter they are in is struck by Sotillo’s steamer full of soldiers, Decoud and Nostromo are trying to save the ship, the silver, and themselves:

28 n, 155. Bert Hornback attempts to defend Eliot’s “prejudice” by suggesting “none of the other characters has such a rich interior or spiritual life as Dorothea” in “The Moral Imagination of George Eliot,” 610. 29 Williams, The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence, 88.

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Decoud pumped without intermission. Nostromo steered without relaxing for a second the intense, peering effort of his stare. Each of them was as if utterly alone with his task. It did not occur to them to speak. There was nothing in common between them but the knowledge that the damaged lighter must be slowly but surely sinking. In that knowledge, which was like the crucial test of their desires, they seemed to have become completely estranged, as if they had discovered in the very shock of the collision that the loss of the lighter would not mean the same thing to them both. This common danger brought their differences in aim, in view, in character, and in position, into absolute prominence in the private vision of each. There was no bond of conviction, of common idea; they were merely two adventurers pursuing each his own adventure, involved in the same imminence of deadly peril. Therefore they had nothing to say to each other. But this peril, this only incontrovertible truth in which they shared, seemed to act as an inspiration to their mental and bodily powers. (n, 295)

We might say, metaphorically, that these two men are married in the shared danger of the moment, but Conrad reveals the opposite. Somehow, this shared moment is profoundly private and isolating. Anticipating Conrad’s preoccupation with the problem of knowing others, Nietzsche argues that “what we most deeply and most personally suffer from is incomprehensible and inaccessible to nearly everyone else” (gs, 191. Section 338). The ramifications of Conrad’s thought mark a distinction from Eliot’s ideas. Although she recognizes deep divisions between people, especially in her married couples, Eliot does not imagine this extreme of near total separation. For instance, though Rosamond does not, Lydgate eventually adapts to the conditions of their marriage by sacrificing himself to a death in life: Eliot does not portray a couple as “merely two adventurers pursuing each his own adventure.” In Conrad’s passage, the possibility of sympathy and fellowship is negated in nearly every sentence. The difference is nearly absolute, but Conrad changes the direction of his thought in the final sentence. The two men share one truth: the peril. The inspiration for their work to save themselves, the lighter, and the silver follows from the shared sense of danger, and nothing more. Until reading the final sentence, there is a sense that Conrad is taking us to the utmost extreme of human isolation. The situation lacks any sense of human solidarity, fellowship, and sympathy. The men are very close together in a small boat, and yet the intimacy of the small space does not provoke a feeling with one another. Instead, it provokes the opposite. Although Decoud and Nostromo are “companion[s] in the most desperate affair” of the silver, the differences between them are an

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important part of the entire adventure and an important aspect of Conrad’s thought about isolation (n, 502). They are of “extraordinary value” in Conrad’s inquiries into “the force of character” by playing out the dialogue between doubt and faith in the novel.30 Conrad places together Decoud, the man who “believed in nothing” with Nostromo, who is identified by Mitchell as trustworthiness personified and the object of belief for the people of Sulaco (n, 500). Decoud is right that both men “come casually here to be drawn into the events” of the revolution, but he is mistaken in thinking they are both skeptics (n, 246). Decoud’s existence is defined by his opposition to Sulaco and Nostromo’s existence depends upon the value he places in his reputation. From the beginning, Decoud is empty of belief in himself and others and Nostromo gradually arrives at that position in the end. When Nostromo arrives on the island only to find Decoud and four bars of silver missing, he “resembled a drowned corpse come up from the bottom” and becomes a double, a stand-in for Decoud.31 They are extreme cases: antithetical and identical. Decoud is a lesson about the dangers of skepticism in which Conrad exposes Nietzsche’s arguments repudiating sympathy and pity as incompatible with life: no one can survive the absolute solitude of skepticism, especially when removed from the surroundings that provide the conditions necessary to be skeptical of others. Without faith in anything or anyone, including himself, Decoud is the “victim of the disillusioned weariness which is the retribution meted out to intellectual audacity,” a criticism that Conrad shares with Dostoevsky and Kierkegaard (n, 501). The representation of Decoud might be read as Conrad’s agreement with Kierkegaard’s warnings, which he makes repeatedly, against doubting everything. Nostromo is a lesson about the dangers of relying on public approbation for a sense of self. The question of whether or not Nostromo is trustworthy replays some of the central 30 n, 44, 13. Fleishman suggests that “the two characters are twin studies of the relationship between personal and social motives, between egoism and the urge for community” (Conrad’s Politics, 176). I am inclined to think that Conrad’s representation of Nostromo and Decoud can be read with Berthoud’s comment in mind: “if skepticism allows us to see that faith is an illusion, faith enables us to see that skepticism is a pose” (Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, 109). Although Decoud is often read as a semi-autobiographical embodiment of Conrad’s skepticism, I read him as another aspect of Conrad’s criticism of Nietzsche, humourously mixed with Carlyle’s portrayal of the dandy in Sartor Resartus. 31 n, 492. In “Nostromo: The Tragic ‘Idea,’” Lee Whitehead emphasizes that Nostromo and Decoud are not simply antithetical. See pages 471–2, 474.

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concerns from Jim’s life. They are sent on missions that raise significant questions about their public reputation and their self-identity. Both men fail during desperate affairs on ships, though one sinks and the other does not. Both are the focus of public faith in their abilities on the part of the pilgrims on the Patna or the people in Patusan and the people of Sulaco. In tracing the corruption that destroys Nostromo, Conrad questions the judgment of Mitchell, Decoud, Monygham, Gould, and everyone else in the community who “accepted the popular conception of the Capataz’s incorruptibility because no word or fact had ever contradicted a mere affirmation” (n, 432). Nostromo is no less “terrible in the pursuit of his idea” than Decoud, Monygham, or Gould (n, 434). Despite the isolation of their lives, Conrad reveals a continuity and brotherhood in the deaths of the men in the lighter through a connection with the silver: Hirsch dies because he cannot tell Sotillo where the silver is hidden, Decoud dies after suffering in solitude with the silver and using it to ensure he sinks to the bottom, and Nostromo dies because the silver, which had “been tied for safety round Nostromo’s neck,” becomes an albatross that ruins him (n, 265). They all die of gun shots. Hirsch and Decoud both hang, the former literally and the latter figuratively. Decoud ends his life in the water and Nostromo climbs out of it like a corpse. We should also note Conrad’s persistent preoccupation with self-preservation and self-destruction. Hirsch’s attempts to preserve himself lead to the terrible death he feared. Decoud’s attempts to preserve himself from the Monteros by leaving with Nostromo in the lighter create the conditions that lead to his self-destruction. And Nostromo’s attempts to preserve himself, his identity, and his secret, are interconnected with his love for Giselle that leads to his death. The silver represents the moral and physical self-preservation and the selfdestruction of many people in Sulaco. The Goulds, Monygham, and others don’t suffer physical destruction, but decay morally. The situation in the lighter is analogous to the moral problem connecting Lydgate and Bulstrode, the two men caught together in the wreckage following the death of Raffles. Following the accusations Hawley levels against Bulstrode, Lydgate feels “his own movement of resentful hatred was checked by that instinct of the Healer which thinks first of bringing rescue or relief to the sufferer, when he looked at the shrunken misery of Bulstrode’s livid face” (m, 715). There is a lesson in Lydgate’s realization that he is deeply implicated in the accusations. Anticipating the scene in which the power of sympathy conquers the resentment Dorothea experiences, Eliot shows how Lydgate’s resentment is overpowered by his sympathy. His instinctual compassion as a doctor

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will not allow him to abandon Bulstrode. When Bulstrode decides to leave the room, Lydgate knows “he could not see a man sink close to him for want of help. He rose and gave his arm to Bulstrode, and in that way led him out of the room; yet this act, which might have been one of gentle duty and pure compassion, was at this moment unspeakably bitter to him” (m, 718). Initially, the two instincts are in tension, but then Eliot shows that sympathy is stronger than resentment. The comment that follows afterwards, that Lydgate is “morally forced to take Mr. Bulstrode to the Bank,” sounds as if the narrator is apologizing on his behalf, as if Lydgate must be excused for taking the man out of the room and for sympathizing with a being unworthy of that feeling (m, 718). Lydgate does not want to help Bulstrode, but his moral sense makes him sacrifice himself to help this man. If he wasn’t morally forced, would his resentment have allowed him to watch the man fall? It is telling that the narrator’s pity is reserved for Lydgate alone: Bulstrode does not receive the adjective “poor,” suggesting a difference in the narrator’s attitude toward him. The problem is reconfigured by Conrad to remove a reliance on the idea that Lydgate is “morally forced” in his actions. Conrad says to us: What if there is no moral force of that kind? What if we are not bound to and responsible for one another? The answer, as suggested in the passage of the sinking lighter, is that everyone becomes merely “adventurers pursuing each his own adventure” (n, 295). This kind of isolation, that assumes the complete absence of sympathy for one another, is a problem that Conrad explores throughout the novel. Not only is Nostromo involved in the “most desperate affair” of his life; this is true for many in the book, hence the repetition of variations on the phrase.32 This is the complete disintegration of social sympathies and responsibilities and more or less the world Arnold fears in Culture and Anarchy wherein everyone is “doing as one likes.” The metaphor in Lydgate’s thought that “he could not see a man sink close to him for want of help” is Conrad’s subject, but in the lighter Decoud and Nostromo are saving themselves and their own visions of the treasure’s significance at the expense of allowing Hirsch to sink. Conrad challenges readers to make sense of what happens when Nostromo and Decoud discover that Hirsh is a castaway in the lighter. Hirsch, the very epitome of fear incarnate, is a danger to them both, because any noise he makes in the darkness of the night may betray them to Sotillo’s ship full of men who are eagerly 32 For instance, see the following pages in Nostromo: 265, 267, 268, 273, 276, 281, 283, 291, 296, 303, 321, 426, 430, 434, 502.

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looking and listening for any sign that will help lead them to the harbour. Without question, this is presented as a life-and-death situation, and here sympathy is aligned with self-destruction and antipathy with self-preservation. Although Decoud, who is “imaginative enough for sympathy,” realizes that “some compassion was due to so much terror,” he “resolved not to interfere with any action that Nostromo would take” (n, 275). Conrad emphasizes that sympathy is not strong enough to overcome the instinct of self-preservation. No spoken agreement is made between the two men, but they share a silent understanding that Hirsch “could make himself dangerous.”33 Self-preservation binds two men together at the expense of another. Judging the scene is difficult because we must consider the perspectives of all three men. Potentially, Hirsch has endangered the lives of two men, but he is only on the lighter because of his all-encompassing fear and his instinct for selfpreservation. Nostromo and Decoud also fear for their self-preservation and the success of their mission, but their fear causes them to turn themselves against Hirsch whose terror requires their compassion. Nostromo’s temptation to end Hirsch’s suffering reveals yet another complication in how we understand this scene: “And yet it would have been no cruelty to take away from him his wretched life. It is nothing but fear” (n, 284). There is a serious question in this: is there compassion in delivering a person from great suffering? The problems surrounding sympathy in Middlemarch are amplified in Nostromo, and Conrad removes some of the elements of Eliot’s art, such as the detailed individual histories, that work to educate readers’ sympathies. While Eliot recognizes that some forms of sympathy are difficult, sometimes impossible, but desirable, Conrad questions both the possibility and the desirability of sympathy. At times, Conrad’s thought moves away from Eliot’s ideas and closer to Nietzsche’s attacks on pity and sympathy. Through the detailed histories of the characters, Eliot gives readers the opportunity to feel with them. The individual histories in Nostromo are reduced to fragmentary glimpses. By the end of the novel, we know Conrad’s characters differently. The idea that sympathy is equal to knowledge is doubtful, partly because Eliot constructs a novel with the purpose of asking us to sympathize and withhold judgment while she educates our judgments. For instance, if we judge Bulstrode in a manner that resembles the half-truths found in the public gossip, then Eliot has exposed us as little better than the prejudiced public in her novel. 33 n, 274. See Aaron Fogel’s discussion of Hirsch, Decoud, and Nostromo in Coercion to Speak, pages 118–19.

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However, it is possible to judge Bulstrode, Casaubon, and other characters without reducing the judgments to the non-thought of the gossip in the novel. There are times when judgment is necessary and we must reject the monstrous or obscene or terrifying. In Nostromo, Conrad does not allow us to live with characters as we might by reading Eliot’s psychological histories. Not only that, but his characters are difficult to comprehend because they are extreme cases. He includes doctors and merchants as we find in Eliot’s novel, but they have exceptional experiences. Hirsch is simply trying to do business in Sulaco before he is caught in the revolution. Monygham has an unexceptional life prior to the reign of terror of Guzman Bento. We may have some understanding of Hirsch’s terror or Monygham’s suffering, but we cannot feel with them. We cannot truly know their lives without experiencing something approaching their fear and suffering. Hirsch’s morbid sense of terror is not an experience that many of us would want to know intimately. This raises some interesting questions about whether or not Eliot’s lessons in sympathy would work if her world were populated by characters from Dostoevsky’s novels such as the Karamazov brothers or the underground man. Her lessons on sympathy and judgment would be very different if Lydgate and Rosamond were replaced by Rogozhin and Nastasya Filipnova. Representing Rogozhin’s extreme sensuality and murderous temperament as sympathetic would be a very different challenge from asking readers to closely follow the life of a country doctor. Conrad makes Sotillo and Pedrito Montero extremely ridiculous and dangerous, not characters that readers will sympathize with. Even Conrad’s victims are dangerous, making it difficult to pity them. One way of reading Nostromo is to recognize that Conrad’s world mixes characters from the novels of Eliot and Dostoevsky. The characters test the limits of our knowing and our avoidance of knowing, of our sympathy and our antipathy. Conrad attacks and confuses our instincts to be attracted to or repulsed by the characters. Don Jose Avellanos and Doctor Monygham, who “considered themselves most unfortunate at not having been summarily executed,” are two examples of Conrad’s characters who are physically and mentally deformed by the torture they suffered, in this instance under the oppression of Guzman Bento (n, 137). Conrad asks us to think about the lives of men who were reduced to living like animals and then given their liberty. Afterwards, Avellanos becomes a respected man in Costaguana, but Monygham remains tortured and broken. Monygham’s character is warped because his identity is defined by the memory of Father Beron, his torturer: “He remembered him against all the force of his

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will striving its utmost to forget” (n, 371). The memory “made of him what he was in the eyes of respectable people, a man careless of common decencies, something between a clever vagabond and a disreputable doctor” (n, 372). In making his confessions, Monygham “longed for” death and he “consoled the misery of his soul with acute reasonings that he had confessed to crimes enough for a sentence of death” (n, 374). After having been “left for months to decay slowly,” Monygham was released, but he was crippled physically and emotionally and “his heart was beating violently with the fear of this liberty” (n, 374). Following his release, he “made himself an ideal conception of his disgrace” (n, 375). In Monygham, Conrad represents an extreme of human suffering that is horrifying and perhaps foreign to readers who value life and liberty. Although the doctor is the victim of terrible abuses, he is also “a dangerous man” (n, 438, 452). He is not simply a victim with whom readers can sympathize. As is the case with some of the characters in the novel, including Nostromo, Decoud, and Charles Gould, Monygham possesses “a will haunted by a fixed idea” (n, 379). Conrad’s sardonic comment is that “a man haunted by a fixed idea is insane. He is dangerous even if that idea is an idea of justice; for may he not bring the heaven down pitilessly upon a loved head?” (n, 379). The extreme passions of some of the characters that Conrad explores are examples of lives that Eliot does not include in her provincial study. Remembering Nietzsche’s observation of sympathy as a form of possession, which is then mistaken for love, Conrad’s representation of the doctor can be read as a meditation on that problem. He reveals how the boundary between love and sympathetic self-sacrifice breaks down as Monygham works to do some active good for Emilia. Like Lydgate, who thinks of Dorothea in relation to the “Virgin Mary,” Monygham adores Emilia, but his adoration is more akin to Ladislaw’s worship of Dorothea (m, 757). We learn that the doctor loves Emilia with an “utter absorption” that is akin to a “priceless misfortune” and the sight of her “suggested ideas of adoration, of kissing the hem of her robe” (n, 513). This recalls Ladislaw’s position as a “devout worshipper” and his momentary thought that “it would not be useful for him to embrace her slippers, and tell her that he would die for her” (m, 430, 218). Monygham’s love for Emilia causes him to act upon what is only a thought for Ladislaw: Monygham risks all to save the mine, but really to save Emilia, in his dangerous game with Sotillo. His “task of love and devotion” is a kind of commentary on many characters in the book, including Charles Gould and Nostromo, because Conrad represents the doctor “living on the inexhaustible treasure of his devotion drawn upon in the secret of his

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heart like a store of unlawful wealth” (n, 461, 504). All three men demonstrate in their own way how each is “terrible in the pursuit of his idea,” but only Monygham’s passion is for a woman (n, 434). The example of sympathy in Monygham recalls Kierkegaard’s argument that the “sympathetic person” must realize that “it is his own case that is in question” because he is fighting for himself.34 Conrad intertwines the doctor’s desire for self-destruction, his sympathy, and his adoration of Emilia. The doctor’s case is analogous to Nietzsche’s argument that “there is a secret seduction even in all these things which arouse compassion and cry out for help, for our own way is so hard and demanding and so far from love and gratitude of others that we are by no means reluctant to escape from it, from it and our ownmost conscience – and take refuge in the conscience of others and in the lovely temple of the ‘religion of compassion’” (gs, 192. Section 338). The doctor finds an escape in devoting himself to Emilia: this is sympathy as an avoidance of knowing the self. When he realizes that “no one seems to be thinking of” Emilia, he makes himself the person who will think of her (n, 380). The “claim” of Emilia’s “worth” makes Monygham’s “thinking, acting, individuality extremely dangerous to himself and to others, all his scruples vanishing in the proud feeling that his devotion was the only thing that stood between an admirable woman and a frightful disaster” (n, 431). In the doctor, Conrad is preoccupied with the point where sympathy, love, and self-destruction intersect. He is also exploring how sympathy for the good and the beautiful is very different from sympathy for the monstrous and deformed. The question is how sympathy changes depending upon the intellectual and physical character of the sympathized. He reveals the deep division that can result when sympathy is directed toward the beautiful or the ugly. The adoration for Emilia makes Monygham indifferent toward others and they become merely instruments to him: his passion is directed toward one person, leaving no sympathy for others. Monygham accepts Nostromo’s “reputation” because he is the necessary instrument to carry the news to Barrios (n, 432). His conversation is a long attempt to speak “as sympathetically as he was able” to convince Nostromo to undertake a very dangerous task.35 Here, sympathy becomes another instrument for Monygham to execute his dangerous plan to save Emilia. 34 Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, 120. 35 n, 432. I disagree with Albert Guerard that Monygham finds “redemption at last” (Conrad the Novelist, 176). The doctor’s mere indifference toward and/or willingness to sacrifice others is not a sign of redemption.

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Nostromo’s repeated accusations that Monygham is a “dangerous man” must be carefully considered, especially when Nostromo suggests that the doctor had a hand in Hirsch’s death (n, 438, 452). Conrad emphasizes that the devotion to Emilia makes Monygham’s “heart steeled against remorse and pity” so that he “did not give a thought to Hirsch” because “the luckless wretch was doomed” “just as I myself am doomed” (n, 438–9). Because the doctor is willing to sacrifice his own life, the lives of others become expendable as well. This mistaken valuation of others results from self-projection. The wreckage of their lives is part of “that spiritual state” in which “the fate of Hirsch presented itself as part of the general atrocity of things” (n, 439). Conrad reveals the analogy between the doctor and Jim in explaining that “though he had no sort of heroic idea of seeking death, the risk, deadly enough, to which he exposed himself, had a sustaining and comforting effect” (n, 439). Though not thinking of himself as a hero, the doctor repeats at least one part of Jim’s self-sacrifice as self-destruction, which I will discuss in the fifth chapter. Monygham may imagine himself “the only one fit for that dirty work” in sacrificing himself for Emilia, but he is not alone in the novel in having dirty work to do (n, 439). Throughout both novels, attempts to maintain the purity of ideas and actions are undermined because “there was something inherent in the necessities of successful action which carried with it the moral degradation of the idea” (n, 521). Gould cannot keep free of political corruption; Nostromo’s heroic reputation fails; Decoud becomes entangled in politics; Casaubon’s marriage threatens his work; Lydgate falls into debt: the relationship between ideas and actions is conflicted.36 There is no independence that maintains a separation of the public and private. The characters suffer terrible isolation from others while entangled in the life of society. Sympathy is one of the ideas that suffers moral degradation because of actions, successful or not. In Conrad’s novel we discover a remarkable re-examination of the ideas characteristic of Eliot’s thought. Among the connections not discussed, the preoccupation with history shared by the two novelists is likely the most important. Arguably, Eliot’s and Conrad’s thought about history is deeply rooted in their reading of Scott (and Carlyle). When Avrom Fleishman argues that Nostromo is “in the tradition of those nineteenth-century fictions that endow themselves with the status of histories 36 Jacques Berthoud’s separation of agents and critics, actors and thinkers, is reductive and does not account for the true complexity of the novel (Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, 99–100).

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– from the local scale of Middlemarch to the international one of War and Peace,” he identifies Conrad’s art as comparable to Eliot’s and Tolstoy’s in the complexity of its representation of “the actual condition of historical life.”37 Much work must be undertaken to fully understand Conrad’s connections to this tradition of novels as histories. For instance, not only are Nostromo and Decoud descendents of Scott’s heroes, as Fleishman suggests, but Jim and Razumov, among others, arguably bear some analogies as well.38 Between the writers preoccupied with history – Scott at the beginning and Conrad at the end – there stands Eliot, who likely acts as a mediator. Though the fact is relatively unnoticed, Nostromo should be read as an attempt to enter into a dialogue with Eliot, one of the major predecessors who prepared the way for Conrad’s thought.

37 Fleishman, Conrad’s Politics, 161–2. 38 Ibid., 162–3.

4 Dostoevsky’s Last Confession in Under Western Eyes conrad’s relationship with dostoevsky has been the subject of a great deal of critical debate. In his 1911 review of Under Western Eyes, Richard Curle unwittingly initiated the great profusion of academic speculation by calling attention to scenes in Conrad’s novel that are “strangely reminiscent” of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.1 Since that time, many critics of Conrad’s work have commented on his relation to Dostoevsky, whether in passing or at length. The number of published articles and chapters in book-length studies is both impressive and daunting. While recognition of the convergences and divergences in Conrad’s and Dostoevsky’s art and thought is important, my discussion is not concerned with merely revealing new instances of Dostoevskian echoes. My focus bears directly on Conrad’s novel as criticism. Under Western Eyes does not simply rework or rewrite major characters and ideas that Dostoevsky used in Crime and Punishment; Conrad’s novel critiques Dostoevskian ideas and structures, thereby revealing problems in the art and thought of the great Russian novelist. The novel straddles the boundary of art and criticism: Under Western Eyes is a critical commentary on Dostoevsky manifested in the form of a novel. In a letter dated 20 October 1911, Conrad asked Edward Garnett whether it is “possible that You haven’t seen that in this book [Under Western Eyes] I am concerned with nothing but ideas, to the exclusion of everything else” (cljc 4, 489). To understand Conrad’s reassessment of Dostoevsky’s art and thought, it is necessary to take Conrad at his word and to recognize, as Carola Kaplan argues, that “in Under Western Eyes, 1 Curle, “Manchester Guardian Review,” 229. It is worth noting that Edward Garnett made a connection between Heart of Darkness and Dostoevsky’s work in a review in 1902. See Kaye, Dostoevsky and English Modernism, 130.

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Conrad challenges the nineteenth-century Russian novel on its own terms: as a novel of ideas.”2 Conrad engages with the ideas that inform the art of Dostoevsky’s great novels. Under Western Eyes demonstrates that Conrad identified Dostoevsky as an important thinker and responded with serious criticism. Conrad’s attitude toward Dostoevsky bears analogies with Nietzsche’s idea of “a tempting and challenging, sharp-eyed courage that craves the terrible as one craves the enemy, the worthy enemy, against whom it can test its strength” (bt, 4. Section 1). Conrad undoubtedly recognized that Dostoevsky engaged in similar critical practices. It is well known that Dostoevsky sought to expose the dangers inherent in the ideas represented by Chernyshevsky in What Is To Be Done?.3 Following Dostoevsky, who exposed the consequences of Chernyshevsky’s ideas, Conrad in turn reveals some of the problems in and the consequences of Dostoevsky’s ideas. For both writers the novel is a form of criticism. Creativity and criticism exist simultaneously in the art. Under Western Eyes is an inquiry into a characteristically Dostoevskian idea and/or genre: the confession. Employing all of his remarkable technical virtuosity, Conrad creates a very complicated version of Dostoevsky’s confessional form which is perplexing in the extreme. Conrad constructs a confounding layer of narrative structures in which the frame narrative, spoken by the English professor, is a confession recounting the details of several other written or spoken confessions, including those of Razumov and Peter Ivanovitch. And one of the primary documents out of which the frame narrative is constructed, Razumov’s diary or journal, is itself a confession recounting the details of another confession, namely Haldin’s. The novel is a confession about a number of other confessions. Because of the design of the overarching structure, every aspect of Conrad’s novel is then related or subordinated to the fundamental question of what occurs when one person attempts to explain or reveal his or her self to another person. A confession is made both the primary cause for and the consequence of the action in the novel: in the beginning Haldin reveals 2 Kaplan, “Conrad’s Narrative Occupation of/by Russia in Under Western Eyes,” 97. Zdzislaw Najder also insists upon reading Under Western Eyes as a novel of ideas. See “Conrad and Rousseau: Concepts of Man and Society,” 85. 3 As Joseph Frank argues in Dostoevsky: The Miraculous Years, 1865–1871, “Dostoevsky portrayed Nihilist ideas, not on the level at which they were ordinarily advocated, but rather as they were refashioned by his eschatological imagination and taken to their most extreme (though quite consistent) consequences” (101).

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himself to Razumov, and in the end Razumov reveals himself to Natalia and the revolutionaries. Through both confessions, Conrad explores the terrible consequences that occur for both the speaker and the listener when one individual forces an unexpected and possibly unwelcome utterance upon another individual. For Conrad, confiding in another may potentially destroy the self and the other which contradicts Dostoevsky’s ideal wherein the confession is the first step toward salvation, as manifested in Raskolnikov’s self-revelation to Sonya. In rewriting Dostoevsky’s use of the confession, Conrad is critical of some of Dostoevsky’s most significant ideas. Beginning with Peter Ivanovitch and then including the narrator and Razumov, Conrad critiques what he identifies as Dostoevsky’s troubling idealization of women. While Conrad’s representation of Peter Ivanovitch’s relationship with Tekla poses special problems about how Dostoevsky inscribes his own ideas upon or speaks through his female characters, the English professor, Razumov, and Peter Ivanovitch all superimpose their own values and ideas upon Natalia, raising questions about whether any of the three men can know her apart from their own imaginative constructions. The caricature of some aspects of Dostoevsky’s art and life in the character of Peter Ivanovitch is interconnected with all these ideas. But I will begin by briefly reconsidering the terms in which Conrad’s and Dostoevsky’s relationship has been discussed and then explore Conrad’s awareness of the problem of his simultaneous appositional and oppositional relationship with the great Russian writer. The relationship between Conrad and Dostoevsky has been distilled into a formula, reproduced with some variations by different critics. Reduced to its most simple form, the formula resembles a Nietzschean antithesis: a negative repudiation is also a sympathetic identification. In discussions of Conrad and Dostoevsky there is always the shadowy presence of Nietzsche’s warning that “he who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster” (bge, 102. Section 146). The problem with previous discussions is that critics show little or no awareness of Conrad’s consciousness of the problem. Indeed, Keith Carabine boldly declares that Conrad’s complex critical design in Under Western Eyes is “doomed to failure because of the inherent contradictions and manifest double thinking at the heart of this enterprise.”4 The assumption is that Conrad repudiated Dostoevsky as a devil or monster without realizing the simultaneous identification with that monster. But Conrad understood the problem of negative identification as well 4 Carabine, “Conrad, Apollo Korzeniowski, and Dostoevsky,” 11.

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as Nietzsche and critics have mistakenly projected the directness of Conrad’s comments in his letters onto the subtle complexity of his art. Conrad’s awareness of his antipodal relationship with Dostoevsky is manifested in the doubling that informs the basic structure of Under Western Eyes: the overlapping sets of antipodal relationships – sympathetic and/or antipathetic – that pervade the novel: Western versus Russian, Geneva versus St Petersburg, democracy versus autocracy, liberty versus tyranny. None of these pairs are simple oppositions; Conrad collapses and confounds these sets of ideas, especially by overlapping different combinations of words. Everywhere in the novel Conrad is thinking about the very problem that critics are attributing to him. It is only fair to ask what Conrad makes of the problem before concluding he is guilty of some strange unconscious identification with Dostoevsky that was beyond his understanding. The opposition is interconnected with sympathy and the double movement informs all Conrad’s antithetical structures. So if Dostoevsky is a devil that must be argued against, Conrad understands the dangerous element of identification inherent in the attack. Making the case for Conrad’s negative reaction has always been fuelled by the explicit comments in his letters; however, I want to call attention to an important moment in Under Western Eyes in which Conrad reveals the element of identification informing his relationship with Dostoevsky: the scene wherein Razumov writes under the statue of Rousseau.5 Conrad raises the question of the potential identification of himself with Dostoevsky when Razumov goes to “that unfrequented tiny crumb of earth named after Jean-Jacques Rousseau” and discovers that “this was the place for making a beginning of that writing which had to be done. The materials he had on him. ‘I shall always come here,’ he said to himself” (uwe, 205). Razumov “unconsciously” chooses the small island after “the idea of writing evoked the thought of a place to write in” (uwe, 205, 204). Conrad emphasizes the importance of Rousseau’s presence by describing how “the exiled effigy of the author of the Social Contract sat enthroned above the bowed head of Razumov in the somber immobility of bronze” (uwe, 206). The effigy of Rousseau is a “silent spectator” watching Razumov write, much as the narrator insists on 5 Aaron Fogel recognizes that Dostoevsky should be connected with Razumov. In Coercion to Speak, he compares the conversations, or the lack thereof, in Conrad’s and Dostoevsky’s art. Fogel argues that Conrad’s “main motive” for reworking Dostoevsky’s art and thought was “to enter a forced dialogue with Dostoevsky” (199).

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describing himself as a “silent spectator” of Razumov’s confession to Natalia (uwe, 242). His presence haunts the book as a whole. But Rousseau also stands behind Razumov, and the shadow he casts includes his influence on the confessional genre in nineteenth-century literature; the Confessions made Rousseau the unquestioned godfather of the genre. Conrad was well aware of this fact. In A Personal Record, he reminds readers that “The matter in hand, however, is to keep these reminiscences from turning into confessions, a form of literary activity discredited by Jean Jacques Rousseau on account of the extreme thoroughness he brought to the work of justifying his own existence; for that such was his purpose is palpably, even grossly, visible to an unprejudiced eye. But then, you see, the man was not a writer of fiction” (pr, 94–5). By explicitly emphasizing Razumov’s occupation as an author, Conrad links himself with Dostoevsky in the work of writing that they share. As Jeffrey Berman and Donna VanWagenen observe, when Razumov writes “in the presence of the bronze effigy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, we are reminded not only of the illustrious author of the Confessions but of the even more celebrated if notorious author of Crime and Punishment and The Diary of a Writer, who more than any other single artist developed the confessional novel to its perfection.”6 In effect, Conrad reveals that, like Razumov, he and Dostoevsky “always come here” to write under the shadow of Rousseau using the genre of the confession. Conrad and Dostoevsky continually rework Rousseau’s characteristic genre.7 6 Berman and VanWagenen, “Under Western Eyes: Conrad’s Diary of A Writer?,” 273. 7 Many critics have commented on Dostoevsky’s response to Rousseau as well as his extensive reworking of the genre that Rousseau made popular. For instance, see the essays by Robin Feuer Miller, Barbara Howard, Tanya Mairs, and J.M. Coetzee. In “Imitations of Rousseau in The Possessed,” Robin Feuer Miller writes, “Dostoevsky’s reaction to Rousseau spanned the length of his writing career” and he “chose to polemicize with and parody the ‘Jean-Jacques’ of the Confessions” (78). I agree with her conclusion that in the end Dostoevsky not only succeeded in making passages from Rousseau’s book into his own, but appropriated the confessional genre. In Crime and Punishment, Razumikhin tries to convince Raskolnikov to work at translating “some really boring spicy bits from the second part of the Confessions” (154). In The Possessed Stavrogin’s confession contains a passage in which he reveals that “having indulged until the age of sixteen with unusual immoderation in the vice to which Jean-Jacques Rousseau confessed, I ceased doing so at the age of seventeen, just as soon as I so decided” (462–3). In Notes from Underground the underground man explains that his story

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The importance of confessions in Under Western Eyes is obvious to any reader of the novel. The confessions proliferate at a compound rate. Noting that the novel belongs in a “literary tradition of confession,” Andrew Long counts six confession scenes in the novel: “Haldin confesses to Razumov, who then confesses to Prince K, General T, and finally to Privy Councilor Mikulin. In Geneva, Razumov confesses to Natalia, Haldin’s sister, and then to the anarchist group, which he has infiltrated and betrayed.”8 He also notes that “the text itself is a mediated confession” because “the narrator […] compiles and then presents Razumov’s secret diary.”9 Long’s accounting actually falls short, because his definition is limited. Part of the problem is that Conrad insists upon the word “confidence” as much if not more than “confession” throughout the novel, as he does with Jim and Marlow in Lord Jim. So in addition to Long’s list I would add at least these others: the narrator’s story is itself a confession of his regard for Natalia; Madcap Kostia confesses to Razumov; Natalia confides in the narrator; and Tekla confides in Natalia, who then retells her story to the narrator.10 But perhaps most important in terms of Conrad’s response to Dostoevsky, there is the confession of Peter Ivanovitch. The narrator of Under Western Eyes anticipates that “readers of these pages will be able to detect in the story the marks of documentary evidence. And that is perfectly correct. It is based on a document” (uwe, 5). He reveals that “the document, of course, is something in the nature of a journal, a diary, yet not exactly that in its actual form” (uwe, 5). The narrator is referring to Razumov’s writings, the confession is an “experiment” to answer the question “is it possible to be absolutely honest even with one’s own self and not to fear the whole truth? Incidentally, I’ll mention that Heine maintains that faithful autobiographies are almost impossible, and that a man is sure to lie about himself. In Heine’s opinion, Rousseau, for example, undoubtedly told untruths about himself in his confession and even lied intentionally, out of vanity” (28). Dostoevsky makes the genre a characteristic element inseparable from his own art and thought: Notes from Underground as a whole is a confession. 8 Long, “The Secret Policeman’s Couch: Informing, Confession, and Interpellation in Conrad’s Under Western Eyes,” 498. 9 Ibid., 498. 10 In this, Conrad constructs a structure analogous to the novel as a whole. Natalia is the narrator of Tekla’s confession just as the English teacher is the narrator of Razumov’s confession. This structure emphasizes the analogy between Tekla’s and Razumov’s lives.

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that provides the primary basis of the narrator’s story in the novel, but the insistence upon the use of one document is misleading, and Conrad makes this evident in part 2, chapter 2 of the novel. Meeting Peter Ivanovitch for the first time, the narrator introduces a second document as another source of his information for the story. Like Razumov, Peter Ivanovitch has also written a document in the nature of a confession, an autobiography containing “whole pages of self-analysis,” that was once a popular bestseller: “At one time all Europe was aware of the story of his life written by himself and translated into seven or more languages” (uwe, 88, 87). Although the narrator emphasizes the primacy of Razumov’s document, Conrad constructs Under Western Eyes as a narrative based upon two documents containing multiple confessions. Conrad doubles Razumov and Peter Ivanovitch in the occupation they share: both men are authors of autobiographies and confessions. But whereas Conrad implicates both himself and Dostoevsky in Razumov, in my judgment, Peter Ivanovitch is a caricature of elements of Dostoevsky’s art and life. Of course, critics have extensively debated the sources for Peter Ivanovitch’s fictional biography and attributed different parts of his story to many famous nineteenth-century figures, both literary and political.11 However, I am concerned only with Conrad’s criticism of Dostoevsky, and I believe that the elements of Peter Ivanovitch’s story that critics have thought are incongruous with Dostoevsky’s biography, works, and thought are not so. Conrad’s design is masterful. There is substantial evidence for recognizing Peter Ivanovitch as a caricature of some important elements of Dostoevsky’s art and life. The most impressive evidence produced thus far is Jeffery Berman’s and Donna VanWagenen’s discovery that “even as Conrad parodies Dostoevsky’s confessional art through the character of the ‘heroic fugitive,’ he pays tribute to his famous nineteenth-century Russian rival by apparently taking Peter Ivanovitch’s actual speeches from Dostoevsky’s

11 In The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad, Eloise Knapp Hay has attributed characteristics of Peter Ivanovitch’s character to Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin, and Leo Tolstoy (283). In the notes to his edition of Under Western Eyes, Paul Kirschner lists a number of possible sources, including Turgenev, Ford Madox Ford, and Anatole France’s poet Choulette (280). In “Peter Ivanovitch’s Escape: A Possible Source Overlooked,” Margaret Ann Rusk White invokes the confessions of a Polish political convict named Rufin Piotrowski. I believe that along with Dostoevsky, Rousseau is actually the other target of Conrad’s strange humour. In “Conrad and Rousseau: Concepts of Man and Society” Zdzislaw Najder makes the connection between Peter Ivanovitch and Rousseau (84).

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The Diary of a Writer.”12 They demonstrate how Conrad “paraphrases” Dostoevsky’s proclamations concerning the “future of democracy in Russia and on the subject of women” from the May 1876 entry in The Diary of a Writer entitled “Unquestionable Democracy. Women.”13 Berman and VanWagenen describe Conrad’s representation of elements of Dostoevsky’s art and life in Peter Ivanovitch as a “tribute,” which suggests there is a positive quality in the design.14 Guerard also recognizes a “creative sympathy with the exceptional buffoon or exceptional object of contempt” in Conrad’s thought.15 He describes “the ironic account of Peter Ivanovitch’s absurd heroic progress across Siberia, engirdled by his chain” as one of “the summits in Conrad’s work.”16 In his “Author’s Note” Conrad states that “Peter Ivanovitch and Madame de S– are fair game. They are the apes of a sinister jungle and are treated as their grimaces deserve” (uwe, lxxxiv). With the partially sympathetic treatment of Peter Ivanovitch in mind, I cannot help but wonder if Conrad remembered that in response to Polonius’s statement that “I will use them according to their desert” Hamlet replied, “Use every man after his desert, and who shall ‘scape whipping? Use 12 Bergen and VanWagenen, “Under Western Eyes: Conrad’s Diary of A Writer?,” 270. 13 Ibid. 270. Berman and VanWagenen quote at length the relevant passages of Dostoevsky’s article from a translation compiled by Boris Brasol. The edition of Dostoevsky’s work that I have read is translated by Kenneth Lantz, who chose the title A Writer’s Diary. The relevant article from May 1876 in Volume 1 of Lantz’s translation is entitled “A Democratic Spirit, for Certain. Women” (500– 2). Peter Ivanovitch’s first speech in Kirschner’s edition of Under Western Eyes occurs on page 86. In the notes for their essay, Berman and VanWagenen also recognize that “the confessional autobiography that Peter Ivanovitch writes after his escape from prison recalls Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead, which depicts his harrowing personal experiences during his years of imprisonment and suffering in Siberia” (274). They note that the work “became an immediate bestseller and established [Dostoevsky’s] international reputation” (274). See Keith Carabine’s corroboration of their arguments in his study of the Razumov manuscript in “From Razumov to Under Western Eyes: The Case of Peter Ivanovitch” (6). Carabine carefully notes how Conrad reduced the explicitness and the number of allusions to both Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in revising the manuscript for Under Western Eyes. See especially page 8. 14 Berman and VanWagenen, “Under Western Eyes: Conrad’s Diary of a Writer?,” 270. 15 Guerard, Conrad the Novelist, 246. 16 Ibid. 246.

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them after your own honour and dignity.”17 Conrad does not treat Dostoevsky with contempt; he is treated with the respect of a rival artist and thinker. One great stumbling block to identifying Peter Ivanovitch as a caricature of aspects of Dostoevsky’s thought has been his position as a “revolutionary feminist” (uwe, 95). The problem is that Conrad’s idea of Dostoevsky as a “revolutionary feminist” is yet another of his jokes.18 Although Conrad is making a serious criticism of Dostoevsky, the element of comedy must be taken into account. The whole chapter on Peter Ivanovitch is written in a partly comic yet partly serious register. Another difficulty is in recognizing that Conrad is fusing or synthesizing elements from Dostoevsky’s biography with elements from his artistic productions. Critics have been quick to expose Conrad through his works because of his statement that “a writer of imaginative prose (even more than any other sort of artist) stands confessed in his works” (pr, 95). But as this passage follows upon his remarks on Rousseau’s use of the confession, and as Conrad associates Dostoevsky with the confessional genre, it stands to reason that Conrad is thinking not only of himself or Rousseau, but also has Dostoevsky in mind. The passage illuminates the narrator’s description of Peter Ivanovitch’s autobiography: “There are in his book whole pages of self-analysis whence emerges like a white figure from a dark confused sea the conviction of woman’s spiritual superiority – his new faith confessed since in several volumes” (uwe, 88). Dostoevsky’s “new faith” in women may appear most prominently in The Diary of a Writer, but Conrad is including Dostoevsky’s other works, the “several volumes” of his novels. Conrad’s use of the word “feminist” is comic and ironic. Conrad reveals that Dostoevsky’s thought is marked by a strange kind of feminism in the sense that some of his heroines, in the case of Crime and Punishment specifically Sonya Marmeladov, are exceedingly important and vital characters in his novels. The reference is ironic in that Conrad reveals how Dostoevsky’s heroines are idealizations of women, repeatedly inscribed with Dostoevsky’s own thoughts about suffering and selfsacrifice. Dostoevsky’s ideal is that the highest form of individualism 17 Hamlet, 2.2.487–90. 18 Part of the difficulty, as evidenced in Gordon Spence’s article “The Feminism of Peter Ivanovitch,” is that critics demand a level of exactness or precise correspondence in Conrad’s caricature that he does not provide. Paul Kirschner also misses Conrad’s joke in his introduction to Under Western Eyes in questioning Conrad’s inclusion of feminism in the novel, “as if the Revolution were only about that” (xxii).

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requires individuals to accept suffering and self-sacrifice in order to enact God’s will. In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky’s ideal is represented in the figure of Sonya, especially in her reading of the story of the resurrection of Lazarus from the Gospel according to St John, the passage in which Jesus exclaims “I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.”19 Dostoevsky is at one with Sonya in her “confessing her creed for all to hear.”20 Sonya represents the good in her self-sacrifice for her family, and later in her self-sacrifice in acting as Raskolnikov’s confessor by instructing him to “accept suffering and redeem yourself by it” (cp, 489). Nicholas Berdyaev describes Dostoevsky as “the defender of freedom” who “exhorts man to take suffering upon himself as an inevitable consequence of freedom.”21 In having “accepted the necessity and inevitability of suffering,” Sonya “exists in true freedom.”22 She is a development of Liza from Notes from Underground, who embraces the underground man after recognizing his suffering.23 Liza represents the “genuine act of love – a love springing from that total forgetfulness of self” which Joseph Frank recognizes in his discussion of Notes from Underground as Dostoevsky’s “highest value”: “Liza’s complete disregard of her own humiliation, her whole-souled identification with [the underground man’s] torments – in short, her capacity for selfless love – is the only way to break the sorcerer’s spell of egocentrism. When she rushes into his arms, thinking not of herself but of him, she illustrates that ‘something else’ which his egoism will never allow him to attain – the ideal of the voluntary self-sacrifice.”24 Throughout Dostoevsky’s works, the greatest achievement, the greatest possible form of selffulfillment for any individual is the acceptance of suffering that leads to the attainment of a self-sacrifice in the service of God and all humanity.25 As Dostoevsky writes in Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, he is not 19 cp, 386. John 11: 25. 20 cp, 386. Ernest J. Simmons also concludes that “Dostoevsky places in Sonya’s mouth his own doctrine of earning one’s happiness by suffering” (“The Art of Crime and Punishment,” 511). 21 cp, 25. Quoted from David McDuff’s introduction to the novel. 22 cp, 25. Quoted from David McDuff’s introduction to the novel. 23 Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, 86–7. 24 Frank, Dostoevsky: The Stir of Liberation, 1860–1865, 341, 344–5. 25 See the postscript to chapter 4 of the July and August issue of A Writer’s Diary. Dostoevsky elevates his ideal to the level of the Russian people as well as the Slavic people as a whole. The “Slavic ideal in its highest sense” is “the notion of sacrifice, the need to sacrifice even oneself for one’s brother” (598). See pages 597–601.

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repudiating the notion of individuality, but “On the contrary, on the contrary, I say, not only is it unnecessary to be without individuality, but it is even essential to achieve a greater degree of individuality than actually exists now in the West. Understand me: voluntary, completely selfconscious, and totally un-constrained sacrifice of one’s entire self for the good of everyone is, in my opinion, a sign of the highest development of individuality, of its greatest power, its greatest self-mastery, the greatest freedom of its own will.”26 Dostoevsky believes that self-sacrifice and the acceptance of the suffering allow the individual to repudiate egoism and relinquish the will to power and strength in order for God’s will to be fulfilled. He repeatedly confessed his faith, and Conrad recognized that in his works. With these ideas in mind, it is possible to recognize that the caricature of Dostoevsky’s thought in Peter Ivanovitch fuses elements of Dostoevsky’s ideals and convictions with elements of his novels. Consider the passage in which the narrator describes Peter Ivanovitch’s escape from Siberia: All this is precise, yet symbolic; and the file had its pathetic history. It was given to him unexpectedly one evening, by a quiet, pale-faced girl. The poor creature had come out to the mines to join one of his fellow convicts, a delicate young man, a mechanic and a social democrat, with broad cheek-bones and large, staring eyes. She had worked her way across half Russia and nearly the whole of Siberia to be near him, and as it seems, with the hope of helping him to escape. (uwe, 87)

The “symbolic” character of the events points toward Dostoevsky’s selfrevelation in his characterizations of women. The young convict in prison with Peter Ivanovitch could be Raskolnikov or Dimitry Karamazov, and the young woman might be either Sonya or Grushenka (more likely it is an allusion to The Brothers Karamazov, since Grushenka and Ivan planned Dimitry’s escape). Throughout the description of the prison escape, Conrad includes several important encounters with women during Peter Ivanovitch’s journey back to civilization and humanity. After the Sonya/Grushenka figure provides Peter Ivanovitch with a file to escape, he succeeds in removing only one of the chains attached to his legs. Having lost the file, Peter Ivanovitch feels “profoundly ashamed of his 26 Dostoevsky, Notes from Underground, 101. This passage is quoted from Michael Katz’s translation. In David Patterson’s translation of Winter Notes on Summer Impressions, “personality” is substituted for “individuality” (49).

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weakness. She had selected him for the gift of liberty and he must show himself worthy of the favor conferred by her feminine, indomitable soul. It appeared to be a sacred trust. To fail would have been a sort of treason against the sacredness of self-sacrifice and womanly love” (uwe, 88). In this passage Conrad makes what becomes an extremely complex criticism of Dostoevsky’s thought concerning women. Conrad reveals that Dostoevsky represents his idealized heroines as possessing an “indomitable soul” in his novels. The suggestion is that Dostoevsky has a “sacred trust” with his female characters to include some element of this “feminine, indomitable soul” in all the central female characters of his novels, most importantly here, in Liza in Notes from Underground and Sonya in Crime and Punishment. The failure to include something of the “feminine, indomitable soul” in these women would be an act of “treason against the sacredness of self-sacrifice and womanly love.” Liza and Sonya embody Dostoevsky’s ideal of the individual accepting suffering and self-sacrifice. Womanly love and self-sacrifice seem to be inseparable in Dostoevsky’s thought. Conrad reveals that the interconnection of love and sacrifice is central to Dostoevsky’s art; hence the comment concerning “the conviction of woman’s spiritual superiority – his new faith confessed since in several volumes” (uwe, 88). The idealization of Sonya in Crime and Punishment or Liza in Notes from Underground is a central tenet of the faith which Dostoevsky repeatedly confessed. Peter Ivanovitch’s last encounter with a woman secures his return to civilization and humanity. The core of the passage begins with an allusion to Crime and Punishment; specifically, the scene of Raskolnikov’s murders. Conrad writes that Peter Ivanovitch “approached [the woman] silently, his hatchet stuck in his iron belt, a thick cudgel in his hand […]. A faint clink of his fetters made the woman turn her head. Too terrified by this savage apparition to jump up or even to scream, she was yet too stout-hearted to faint …. Expecting nothing less than to be murdered on the spot she covered her eyes with her hands to avoid the sight of the descending axe” (uwe, 89). In this passage, Conrad is rewriting Raskolnikov’s unplanned murder of Lizaveta. Dostoevsky writes that Raskolnikov rushed at her with the axe; her lips grew contorted in the pitiful manner common to very young children when they begin to be afraid of something, stare fixedly at the thing that is frightening them and prepare to cry out loud. Moreover, this unhappy Lizaveta was so simple, downtrodden and utterly intimidated that she did not even raise her hands to protect herself, even though this would have been a most natural, lifesaving gesture for her to make at that

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moment, as the axe was raised right above her face. She merely raised her unengaged left arm the tiniest distance, a long way from her face, and slowly extended it towards the axe, as though in an attempt to ward it off. (cp, 117).

Yet, unlike the passage from Crime and Punishment, wherein Lizaveta is killed by Raskolnikov, the woman that Peter Ivanovitch meets finds the “courage to look again,” and sees him “sitting on the bank six feet away from her” (uwe, 89). He has no intention of killing the woman; he desperately wants her help and needs the woman to save him. In showing Peter Ivanovitch’s desire for assistance to return to humanity, the passage also recalls the moment of Raskolnikov’s unspoken confession: he looked at her, and suddenly in her face he saw the face of Lizaveta. He had a vivid memory of the expression on Lizaveta’s features as he had approached her with the axe and she had backed away from him towards the wall with her hand held out in front of her and a look of utterly childish terror in her eyes […]. Almost the same thing took place now with Sonya: it was with the kind of helplessness and fear that she looked at him for a time and then suddenly, holding out her left hand, rested her fingers slightly, the merest fraction, on his chest and began to get up from the bed, backing further and further away from him, as her gaze fastened on him ever more motionlessly. Her horror suddenly found its way to him, too; the same fear was displayed in his face, and he began to look at her the same way, almost with the same childish smile. (cp, 478–9)

It is in this moment that Sonya finally realizes the nature of what Raskolnikov is hesitant to confess. Dostoevsky interconnects the first passage of the murder with the second to reveal the intimate relation between Sonya and Lizaveta, but also suggests the terrible potential in Raskolnikov’s confession to shake Sonya in her very being and to kill her faith in him. This possibility is not realized: Sonya’s faith in Raskolnikov is redoubled in her question “what have you gone and done to yourself?” which also reveals her infinite capacity for forgiveness (cp, 479). Rather than seeing a murderer, Sonya sees Raskolnikov as the victim of his own misguided actions. In one variation of the confession scene from Crime and Punishment, Conrad compresses Dostoevsky’s thought into a short passage in which Peter Ivanovitch plays a role akin to Raskolnikov and the woman plays a role akin to Sonya: It seemed as though he had lost the faculty of speech. He had become a dumb and despairing brute, till the woman’s sudden, unexpected cry of profound pity,

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the insight of her feminine compassion discovering the complex misery of the man under the terrifying aspect of the monster, restored him in the ranks of humanity. This point of view is presented in his book with a very effective eloquence. She ended, he says, by shedding tears over him, sacred, redeeming tears, while he also wept with joy in the manner of a converted sinner. (uwe, 89)

The passage includes all the important elements of the famous confession scene: the loss of Raskolnikov’s power of speech until Sonya guesses his guilt; the “cry of profound pity” and the “insight of her feminine compassion” that allows Sonya to discover “the complex misery of the man”; the partial restoration of Raskolnikov to the “ranks of humanity” because he is able to communicate and share his isolation with another human being; and Sonya’s shedding of “redeeming tears” and Raskolnikov’s first tears that lead him toward becoming a “converted sinner.” Yet it is important to recall that Peter Ivanovitch is a caricature of Dostoevsky’s thought in this passage. In having Ivanovitch/ Dostoevsky playing the role of Raskolnikov, Conrad is suggesting that the confession scene in Crime and Punishment is very personal, and possibly even a kind of fantasy for Dostoevsky himself; hence Conrad’s criticism that Dostoevsky’s books contain “whole pages of self-analysis” and Dostoevsky’s “new faith” is confessed in “several volumes.” Dostoevsky repeats this confessional scene with different variations throughout his later works, but the structure is essentially the same. The guilt-stricken man confesses to the woman that he loves, and she sacrifices herself by helping him realize his own suffering and rewarding his confession with love. Conrad asks us to consider whether Dostoevsky’s continual reworking of the same idea exposes the great Russian writer’s own deeply rooted identification with the relationships between the guilty man and the redeeming woman, whether Dostoevsky is working through his own moral problems in this kind of relationship. The problem is written into the relationship between Peter Ivanovitch and Tekla. Through the relationship of the great author and the selfsacrificial woman, Conrad emphasizes how Peter Ivanovitch’s process of writing is a violation of Tekla’s being, which is a comment upon Dostoevsky’s writing of his female characters.27 Like Sonya or Liza, Tekla is one of the insulted and the injured who has experienced “the horrors from which innocent people are made to suffer in this world” 27 Prior to their marriage, Dostoevsky’s second wife recorded Dostoevsky’s dictation of his novels. This biographical detail may be an important element in Conrad’s representation of the relationship between Peter Ivanovitch and Tekla.

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(uwe, 107). But one lesson stands out among everything Tekla has learned in her unfortunate life: “I know Peter Ivanovitch sufficiently well. He is a great man. Great men are horrible” (uwe, 165). To Tekla, the great revolutionary “is an awful despot” (uwe, 165). The cause of her horror stems from her intimate knowledge of “the secret of composition” behind Ivanovitch’s writing (uwe, 107). While Tekla is referring to how she witnessed the “great author of the revolutionary gospels grope for words,” Conrad is more interested in how “Peter Ivanovitch could treat any woman so rudely” (uwe, 107, 106). The primary problem is that Peter Ivanovitch uses Tekla as “the blind instrument of higher ends” (uwe, 107). He dictates his thoughts to Tekla, writing his self over and through hers, or, in other words, makes her a medium for his thought (uwe, 106, 110). The question Conrad raises is the degree to which, like Peter Ivanovitch with Tekla, Dostoevsky employs Sonya as a “blind instrument” of his own higher ends, which are the propagation of his self-sacrificial ideal. In terms of the art of the novel, Conrad questions whether Dostoevsky violates Sonya’s character by inscribing her with his own ideals. Significantly, Tekla’s suffering before her employment with Peter Ivanovitch “was infinitely less killing than the task of sitting for hours at a table in a cold study to take the books of Peter Ivanovitch from dictation” (uwe, 110). The previous suffering was “less killing” because Tekla was able “to think by myself” despite it being “not very easy, such thinking” (uwe, 107). But once she begins writing and thinking according to his dictation, any of her own “illusions” are “destroyed” because “it seemed to freeze my very beliefs in me” (uwe, 107). Her individuality is forcefully displaced by the thoughts of another mind. Being forced to think the thoughts of another is destructive, and Conrad’s criticism is that Dostoevsky violates, if not destroys, the individuality of his female characters in forcing them to become mouthpieces of his own ideals. And yet again, Conrad compounds his criticism of Dostoevsky’s idealization of women by doubling Peter Ivanovitch’s “special devotion” to the “cult of the woman” in the narrator, Ziemianitch, and in Razumov (uwe, 90). Razumov marks Ziemianitch as “a feminist of a different stamp from Peter Ivanovitch,” but this is true of the narrator and himself as well (uwe, 200). Conrad links Peter Ivanovitch, the narrator, and Razumov through their admiration of and/or desire for Natalia. Like Peter Ivanovitch with Tekla, Razumov and the narrator violate Natalia’s individuality by superimposing their own thoughts and ideals upon her. Rather than recognizing what she is, they inscribe upon her being what they want her to be. In doing so, they fail to acknowledge her otherness.

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The case for seeing a connection between the narrator and Peter Ivanovitch is strongest in a scene found in Conrad’s typescript version of the novel.28 The scene emphasizes the antithetical nature of the relationship between the two men, as the narrator “felt with displeasure that a mysterious contact was being established between our two mental personalities.”29 In the typescript, the mutual dislike that the two men have for one another is obvious, but Conrad includes sufficient evidence in the published version of Under Western Eyes to reveal the narrator’s connection with his antagonist. Like Peter Ivanovitch, the narrator engages in his own idealization of women; unlike his rival, who indiscriminately elevates all women, the narrator idealizes only Natalia. He absolutely gives himself away in declaring “I am not a feminist, like that illustrious author, Peter Ivanovitch, who, to say the truth, is not a little suspect to me” (uwe, 132). The persistent negative grammar should raise some doubts about the narrator. There is more than enough evidence to suggest an appositional relation. The two men are guides or teachers for Natalia. The narrator takes Natalia “through a course of reading the best English authors” (uwe, 74). After Peter Ivanovitch’s appearance, Natalia contemplates whether to accept him as a “guide” because there is “no harm in having one’s thoughts directed” (uwe, 95, 96). The narrator resents the idea that Peter Ivanovitch has appeared to the Haldin women as a substitute “to say the right thing, to strike the true, perhaps a comforting note. But I did not like to see him sitting there. I trust that an unbecoming jealousy of my privileged position had nothing to do with it. I made no claim to a special standing for my silent friendship” (uwe, 91). The thought of being replaced antagonizes the narrator. Although he admits that “it is not becoming for an obscure teacher of languages to criticize a ‘heroic fugitive’ of world-wide celebrity,” his recounting of Peter Ivanovitch’s autobiography is full of sarcasm and irony; for instance, he defines the book by its “mystic treatment and symbolic interpretation” (uwe, 91, 90). Repeatedly, the narrator betrays himself. His “claim to a special standing” is in his continuous self-denial or self-sacrifice toward Natalia; he refuses to indulge in his passion for Natalia. Conrad wants readers to doubt the narrator and to recognize his idealization of a woman. The narrator’s admiration is evident during his 28 In “Conrad’s ‘Unkindest Cut’: The Cancelled Scenes in Under Western Eyes,” David Leon Hidgon and Robert F. Sheard transcribe a scene describing a meeting that occurs between the narrator and Ivanovitch in a café. See pages 173–8. 29 Ibid., 174.

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first meeting Natalia when he confesses that “I became aware, notwithstanding my years, how attractive physically her personality could be to a man capable of appreciating in a woman something else than the mere grace of femininity” (uwe, 74). Where Peter Ivanovitch admires a woman’s “sacredness of self-sacrifice and womanly love,” the narrator chooses to admire her “attractive […] personality,” but in both cases the woman is something more or other than herself (uwe, 88, 74). For the narrator, Natalia becomes the idealized version of the wife or daughter that he never had, reminding us somewhat of George Eliot’s depiction in Middlemarch of Casaubon’s and Dorothea’s relationship, although Conrad reverses the relation so that rather than the young woman idealizing the older scholar, the old scholar idealizes the young woman. Despite the attempt to qualify his passion for Natalia by representing them as “excellent friends,” the narrator continually confesses more than he knows in his carefully controlled admissions: “Without fear of provoking a smile, I shall confess that I became very much attracted to that young girl” (uwe, 75). Adam Gillon is right to remark that Natalia is “courted by both Razumov and Peter Ivanovitch,” but he should also include the platonic courting that the narrator engages in as well.30 To the narrator, Natalia is an “exceptional creature,” with “indefinable charm,” whose hand possessed a “seductive frankness, a sort of exquisite virility” (uwe, 82, 84, 85). The narrator’s descriptions of Natalia are a prolonged meditation upon “the harmonious charm of her whole person, its strength, its grace, its tranquil frankness” (uwe, 119). I might produce many other examples, but it is clear that “she compelled [the narrator’s] wonder and admiration” (uwe, 127). The narrator’s recounting of Razumov’s and Peter Ivanovitch’s lives and confessions is at the same time an opportunity for him to indulge in his own memory of and attraction to Natalia. His passion for Natalia is simultaneously concealed and revealed by attributing ideas to Razumov that are also self-revelations, for instance, during the moments before Razumov’s confession when the narrator comments “it was as though he were coming to himself in the awakened consciousness of that marvelous harmony of feature, of lines, of glances, of voice, which made of the girl before him a being so rare, outside, and, as it were, above the common notion of beauty” (uwe, 241). It is difficult to know with any certainty whether these are the narrator’s or Razumov’s thoughts. In this Conrad creates an analogy with Dostoevsky because the narrator 30 Gillon, “Conrad’s Satirical Stance in Under Western Eyes: Two Strange Bedfellows – Prince Roman and Peter Ivanovitch,” 122.

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projects his own ideas onto others, as Dostoevsky does in writing Sonya. Although recounting Peter Ivanovitch’s and Razumov’s interest in Natalia, the narrator reveals his own, whether he intends to or not. The narrator’s antipathy toward Peter Ivanovitch informs his role in the story and is another of his motivations for his own confession in recounting Razumov’s and Peter Ivanovitch’s lives. If the narrator cannot have Natalia, he will be sure that Peter Ivanovitch will not have her either. This complicates his claim only to be “thinking of [Natalia’s] preservation” and “personal safety” in asking her to return to Russia (uwe, 96). He works to save her from being a “victim” of the revolution, but it is Peter Ivanovitch that he wishes to save her from (uwe, 97). The narrator’s desire to save Natalia leads him to misread Razumov, and his knowledge is only corrected by his witnessing Razumov’s confrontation with Natalia and later reading Razumov’s written confession. In effect, the narrator’s story is about assigning guilt as he attempts to show that he cannot be blamed for misreading Razumov or for nearly leading Natalia into a potentially disastrous marriage.31 In this, the narrator is a strange combination of Lockwood and Nelly Dean from Wuthering Heights: Lockwood reveals an intermittent passion for the young Cathy in his telling of the tale and inadvertently participates in Nelly Dean’s plot to get the young Cathy married.32 Fantasizing about arranging a marriage causes the narrator initially to misread the Razumov’s confession to Natalia as a straightforward love scene. Just before the confession, the narrator claims that “the period of reserve was over; he was coming forward in his own way. I could not mistake the significance of this late visit, for in what he had to say there was nothing urgent. The true cause dawned upon me: he had discovered that he needed her – and she was moved by the same feeling. It was the second time that I saw them together, and I knew that the next time they met I would not be there, either remembered or forgotten” (uwe, 244). The narrator is 31 In “Under Western Eyes and the Missing Center,” Eloise Knapp Hay asks why the narrator “doesn’t throw the diary away” (138). My answer is that the narrator needs the corroborating evidence contained in Razumov’s diary to strengthen his own argument that he is not to blame for Natalia’s victimization. He places the blame on Razumov. Knapp Hay describes the narrator and Razumov as “opposites,” “supplements,” or “alter egos” (134). But she does not register how the narrator uses Razumov’s confession as a cover to his own confession. 32 See Brian Crick’s arguments concerning Lockwood’s and Nelly Dean’s roles as participants and narrators in “On Valuing Wuthering Heights” in Love Confounded, pages 113–48.

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right and wrong in his assumptions. He is right in that Razumov and Natalia need each other, but he is wrong in thinking that what will follow will be a straightforward love scene. And Conrad makes a joke about the narrator’s role in the novel which the narrator cannot understand. The narrator believes he is describing Razumov’s meetings with Mikulin: “To the morality of a Western reader an account of these meetings would wear perhaps the sinister character of old legendary tales where the Enemy of Mankind is represented holding subtly mendacious dialogues with some tempted soul. It is not my part to protest. Let me but remark that the Evil One, with his single passion of satanic pride for the only motive, is yet, on a larger, modern view, allowed to be not quite so black as he used to be painted” (uwe, 215). The allusion to the devil conversing with “some tempted soul,” whatever else Conrad has in mind, recalls Ivan’s strange conversation with the devil in book 11, chapter 9 of The Brothers Karamazov. Although the narrator makes a pitiful specimen of “the Evil One” (perhaps one analogous to the shabby devils Marlow meets in Heart of Darkness), Razumov doesn’t fail to identify him as a devil who “was egging me on to the unpardonable sin of stealing a soul. Could he have been the devil himself in the shape of an old Englishman?” (uwe, 252). Despite the narrator’s efforts to minimize the blame he must bear for the collision between Razumov and Natalia, Conrad reveals that the old man was “betrayed by a shortsighted wisdom” (uwe, 215). In producing Razumov’s diary to substantiate his own claims of Razumov’s guilt, the narrator makes Razumov into something of a scapegoat. Of course, fortunately for the narrator, Razumov has already revealed himself more than willing to bear the sacrifice, but I will return to this later. Razumov’s special brand of feminism is embodied in his idealization of Natalia, especially during the second confession to Natalia which he writes in his diary following the confrontation at her home. Razumov’s idealization of Natalia rivals the narrator’s in representing her as “truth itself” with her “trustful eyes” and “pure forehead” that “bore a light which fell on me, searched my heart and saved me from ignominy, from ultimate undoing” (uwe, 253). He claims she has “freed me from the blindness of anger and hate – the truth shining in you drew the truth out of me” (uwe, 253). Early in the novel, Razumov laments that he “had no heart to which he could open himself” despite his desire “to be understood” (uwe, 29). In this, Razumov is analogous to Raskolnikov, who is deeply troubled by the thought that “every man must have at least somewhere he can go” (cp, 79). Later Razumov identifies Natalia as the one person who will understand and whom he can trust with

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his confidence. Only to her will he make “the true confession” and Razumov claims that in provoking him to confess, not only has Natalia “saved me” but has “saved her too” (uwe, 252, 253). The idealization of Natalia is interconnected with his motivations for the confession. The confession scene between Razumov and Natalia revisits the confession scene between Raskolnikov and Sonya for a second time, following the reading lesson Conrad includes in Peter Ivanovitch’s experiences with the woman who saves him. But the later scene is more complicated because Conrad breaks the confession into three acts: there is the initial confrontation with Natalia when the narrator is present, and then the written confession, followed by the spoken confession to the revolutionaries. In the first act Conrad reworks some important moments from Dostoevsky’s novel. For instance, like Raskolnikov, Razumov cannot bring himself to utter a confession in the presence of the woman. After asking Sonya several times to “guess,” Raskolnikov evades the responsibility of uttering his confession because she comes to the realization herself (cp, 478). Sonya divines what Raskolnikov has done. Although he reveals some broken details surrounding his betrayal of Haldin, Razumov does not utter a confession in Natalia’s presence. Instead, he “pressed a denunciatory finger to his breast with force, and became perfectly still” (uwe, 249). But the precise meaning of Razumov’s physical sign of self-accusation remains indefinite, especially because the moment before he makes the movement he declares that “the terrors of remorse, revenge, confession, anger, hate, fear, are like nothing to the atrocious temptation which you put in my way” (uwe, 248). Razumov is not primarily preoccupied with his betrayal of Haldin at this moment; he is more concerned with the “temptation” concerning his relationship with Natalia. This is important because in Dostoevsky’s novel, Raskolnikov’s confession is about the murder he has committed. He both confesses to the act and attempts to justify or explain the motivations of that action; however, that is not Razumov’s preoccupation. The initial transgression of betrayal is not the central subject weighing upon Razumov’s mind. The other considerable problem that Conrad explores concerns the nature of Razumov’s and Natalia’s relationship. In Crime and Punishment, the confession scene is also a love scene. Moments before he confesses, Raskolnikov recognizes the “love in [Sonya’s] gaze,” which makes him realize that the time to confess has arrived (cp, 476). Although Raskolnikov’s confession to Sonya may not be precisely the cause of the love that later grows between them, it transforms their relationship into something different from what it was because Sonya

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makes her self-sacrifice for him. In Under Western Eyes, the narrator initially thinks that the scene he is witnessing is a straightforward love scene between Razumov and Natalia; however, Conrad actually reverses Dostoevsky’s idea. Instead of igniting a latent love, the confession in Conrad’s scene causes the death of their unspoken love. To emphasize the point in a different way, Razumov’s confession destroys Natalia’s idealization of him. Previously, she unquestioningly accepts Haldin’s idea of Razumov as one of the “unstained, lofty, and solitary existences” and imagines that Razumov is an “extraordinary man” (uwe, 97, 144). Her love for Razumov, with more than a hint of Carlyle’s hero worship, is at least partially a kind of displaced love for her dead brother: Razumov is a substitute for Haldin, and she assumes that he shares all of the best qualities she attributes to her brother.33 However, the most important change that Conrad makes is in the focus of Natalia’s thoughts, and he marks the significant reversal by placing a paraphrase of one of Sonya’s most memorable lines into Natalia’s speech. After Raskolnikov confesses, Sonya tells him that “there’s no one, no one in the whole world more unhappy than you are now” (cp, 480). For Sonya, every other concern falls away from her mind because of her intense feeling for Raskolnikov. After Razumov leaves, Natalia says “it is impossible to be more unhappy” and then completes the thought by saying “it is impossible …. I feel my heart becoming like ice” (uwe, 250). Natalia’s thoughts are concentrated upon herself. She is not concerned with Razumov in the way Sonya is concerned with Raskolnikov; however, to be fair to Natalia, the quality of Razumov’s concern for her is questionable as well. When reading Razumov’s written confession, the most important quality in the style is his hyperbolic idealization of Natalia. The passage reveals that Razumov’s valuation cannot be equated with Conrad’s valuation of Natalia. Conrad exposes the dangers in Natalia’s thought through her idealization of “love” which makes it nothing less than a despotic tyrant (uwe, 264). Natalia is “looking forward to the day when all discord shall be silenced,” “all is still,” and all men are “united” “because so many ideas have perished for the triumph of one” (uwe, 264). Natalia’s vision is the death of thought and culture, if not also the death of the many individuals whose “hearts shall be extinguished in love” (uwe, 264). Revealing the dangers in Natalia’s idealization of love, 33 See Brian Crick’s arguments concerning the confounding of conjugal and fraternal love in Love Confounded, especially his insight into Conrad’s critique of this subject.

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Conrad also doubts Razumov’s idealization of Natalia. At least partly because of Haldin’s description of Natalia’s “most trustful eyes,” Razumov imagines Natalia as a kind of goddess (uwe, 18, 252). When thinking of Natalia, Razumov places himself in the position of “a believer who had been tempted to an atrocious sacrilege” against a higher being or god, which is to say like a man worshipping an idol (uwe, 253). He imagines her as “truth itself” (uwe, 253). But Natalia is not a goddess, so why does Razumov imagine her in such a way? The cause of the idealization is at issue because it informs Razumov’s actions toward Natalia here. Razumov’s idealization is interconnected with his desire to avenge the wrongs he has suffered and seriously complicates the love that he feels for Natalia. Unlike Raskolnikov, who acknowledges that he is to blame, Razumov is not confessing his responsibility for betraying Haldin. While Dostoevsky is preoccupied with the question of how Raskolnikov will reveal his crime, explain his motivations, and perhaps achieve some real self-knowledge about his terrible transgression, Conrad’s thought is focused elsewhere. Razumov seems to be unconcerned with his betrayal of Haldin; instead, his confession to Natalia is about his plan to “steal” her heart and soul (uwe, 252). Despite Razumov’s declaration that he “had ended by loving” Natalia, his confession cannot be read simply as an act of love (uwe, 253). Whatever love he may feel for Natalia, Razumov has not exhausted the “inexhaustible fund of anger and hate” that he has for Natalia and Haldin (uwe, 251). His confession of love reads also as an act of revenge, but Razumov cannot recognize it. Razumov’s language is strongly marked by verbs denoting a compelled action. He repeats again and again that “I felt that I must tell you” or “I must first confess” (uwe, 253). Yet he claims that Natalia is the cause of the confession, that her “light” and “truth” forced him to confess (uwe, 253). In other words, she is the cause. But she is the cause only because his idealization of and love for her are a cover story which obscures the revenge upon her. Razumov claims that she “saved” him which in turn “saved” her from his plan (uwe, 253). For Conrad, it is a complicated question. Instead of Dostoevsky’s idea that the confession leads to salvation, Conrad reveals that the confession, at least potentially, leads to damnation. There are at least two major problems with Razumov’s confession. In Razumov’s mind, Natalia represents a substitute for the essay prize Razumov knows he will never win. For Razumov, Natalia is “the prize” that compensates for the wrong that Haldin committed in stealing “years of good work” (uwe, 253, 252). The other complication is that Razumov doubles Haldin in making his confession to Natalia. Haldin

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forces an unwelcome and morally destructive revelation on Razumov at the beginning of the novel; Razumov does nothing less than force an unwelcome and morally destructive revelation on Natalia at the end. Razumov writes that “you must believe what I say now, you can’t refuse to believe this,” but we should question the degree to which his claims are believable or not (uwe, 254). If Natalia “drew the truth out of” Razumov, then a part of that truth is his resentment toward Haldin and the loss of all the potential work that he might have accomplished (uwe, 253). The claim to be acting solely out of love is too simple, and Razumov’s repudiation of hatred and revenge is questionable at best. Razumov might think that “you could not suspect me,” but Conrad is asking readers to do otherwise (uwe, 253). Razumov has been a “suspect” throughout the novel and does not cease to be a suspicious character (uwe, 48). His confession is not only about love and betrayal but is also a justification of his desire for revenge against Natalia which, simultaneously, becomes an act of revenge because it destroys her faith in him. Which would have been the worse crime? Would Razumov really have avenged himself by marrying Natalia, allowing her to retain her faith in him and giving her the compensation for the missing love that she wants? Or does Razumov avenge himself by destroying Natalia’s illusions and eliminating the possibility for love and marriage? Conrad makes it exceptionally difficult to know whether Razumov’s plan or his confession about the plan constitute the worst form of revenge. So Conrad’s criticism of Dostoevsky’s confession scene has several implications. In idealizing Sonya, Dostoevsky is able to create a perfect receptacle for Raskolnikov’s confession to ensure his salvation thereafter. As the embodiment of self-sacrifice, Sonya can only respond by embracing Raskolnikov and trying to save him. In short, Dostoevsky constructs the best possible conditions. In Under Western Eyes, Conrad makes this kind of outcome impossible by constructing the worst possible conditions. The figure of womanly self-sacrifice in Conrad’s novel is Tekla, not Natalia, which means that Razumov confesses to the wrong person if the book is to be about salvation. However, if the novel is about the terrible consequences caused by unwelcome confessions or revelations, then the design focuses directly on the terrible dangers that result from forcing the self upon the other. The terrible irony for Natalia is that at the moment of his confession, Razumov is behaving very much like her brother: he commits the same act of forcing unwelcome knowledge on an unreceptive listener. Conrad reveals that she has loved the man most like her brother and now will suffer for it. When, at the end of writing his confession, Razumov reflects that “I had neither the simplicity nor the

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courage nor the self-possession to be a scoundrel, or an exceptionally able man,” Conrad makes us wonder whether Razumov is a scoundrel or an exceptional man (uwe, 254). Most likely, Razumov is some combination of both, which brings me to the problem of Raskolnikov’s thought about the relationship between ordinary and extraordinary men. Conrad spares nothing in order to make readers understand that Under Western Eyes is about the ideas surrounding exceptional or great or inspired men. Several characters in Under Western Eyes are described, ironically and seriously, as exceptional or great: Peter Ivanovitch is described as “great” and “inspired” (uwe, 105, 268); Razumov is described as an “extraordinary person” and a “superior creature” (uwe, 144, 146, 174); Haldin is described as “heroic,” “inspired” (uwe, 112, 113); and even Natalia is described as “heroic,” and “exceptional” (uwe, 88, 95, 82). If Carlyle’s thought is included in the conversation, then Under Western Eyes is about heroes, real and sham, and what actions or sacrifices compel admiration and worship. In this, Conrad is responding to yet another of Dostoevsky’s important preoccupations: whether or not there are great or exceptional men and, especially, whether or not these men have a right and a duty to transgress laws, boundaries, and other restraints. In Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky reveals how Raskolnikov’s experiment to see “whether I could take the step across” fails terribly because, as Raskolnikov comes to realize, “it was myself I killed, not the old woman!” (cp, 488). Unlike Nietzsche, who is fascinated with the idea, Dostoevsky rejects the notion that there are exceptional men with the right to transgress according to their will. Conrad uses the theories Raskolnikov explores in his article “On Crime”34 in making Razumov’s character; they inform the latter’s actions and his confessions. In doing so, Conrad works to demonstrate how it is difficult, if not impossible, to discern whether Razumov displays “ordinary” or “extraordinary” qualities. Razumov claims to be an ordinary worker, but the nature and consequences of his work are difficult to measure. In Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov publishes a theory of the division between “extraordinary” and “ordinary” men months before committing the double homicide. Dostoevsky does not reveal the existence of Raskolnikov’s article until after the murders; however, he does introduce Raskolnikov’s ideas obliquely before the murder in the scene where Raskolnikov overhears a conversation between a student 34 The discussion of Raskolnikov’s article among Raskolnikov, Porfiry Petrovich, Razumikhin, and Zamyotov occurs in part 3, chapter 5 of Crime and Punishment (299–321).

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and an officer (cp, 101–2). Porfiry provides a brief summary of Raskolnikov’s argument during the first meeting between the two men: “The whole point of his article is that the human race is divided into the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘extraordinary.’ The ordinary must live in obedience and do not have the right to break the law, because, well, because they’re ordinary, you see. The extraordinary, on the other hand, have the right to commit all sorts of crimes and break the law in all sorts of ways precisely because they’re extraordinary” (cp, 311). Although Raskolnikov admits that this is a “completely correct” account of his theory, he “decided to accept the challenge” implicit in Porfiry’s comments (cp, 311). Raskolnikov argues that an “extraordinary” person has a right … not an official right, of course, but a private one, to allow his conscience to step across certain … obstacles, and then only if the execution of his idea (which may occasionally be the salvation of all mankind) requires it […]. [I]f the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not on any account, as a result of certain complex factors, have become known to people other than by means of sacrificing the life of one person, the lives of ten, a hundred or even more persons, who were trying to interfere with those discoveries or stand as an obstacle in their path, then Newton would have had the right, and would have even been obliged … to get rid of those ten or a hundred persons […]. The crimes of these people are, of course, relative and multifarious; for the most part what they are demanding, in highly varied forms, is the destruction of the present reality in the name of one that is better. But if such a person finds it necessary, for the sake of his idea, to step over a dead body, over a pool of blood, then he is able within his own conscience to give himself permission to do so – always having regard to the nature of the idea and its dimensions – note that. (cp, 312–13)

Raskolnikov’s “extraordinary” person not only has a right but a duty to transgress whatever laws are necessary to realize his idea, or to make his idea of a future reality prevail by destroying the present reality, thereby furthering humanity. The “execution of the idea” becomes the guiding principle for human action, countering the most basic of human laws: “Thou shalt not kill.” In Raskolnikov’s first dream sequence, Dostoevsky suggests that there is a subconscious instinct or impulse that repudiates the idea of murder.35 For Dostoevsky, the prohibition against murder is 35 The first dream sequence depicts Raskolnikov’s horror at the scene in which the peasant Mikolka beats a horse to death. See part 1, chapter 5, pages 89–95.

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not simply a social law but a natural law for human beings. What happens when this impulse is ignored or openly repudiated by the individual who “allow[s] his conscience to step across” his own moral restraint and better judgment? This leads to the situation where all values and judgments are relative, and Dostoevsky is right to perceive this as a threat to humanity because it openly avows the notion that pluralism is the basis of human society. When the common pursuit of true judgment is replaced by the individual assertion of one’s own judgment, society has reached a dangerous juncture. In rejecting the extraordinary man’s right to transgress according to his conscience, Dostoevsky sides with the ordinary Russian who suffers and makes sacrifices in his living. But Conrad does not draw the same conclusion. As I have discussed in the previous chapters, Conrad’s attitude toward exceptional and heroic men is conflicted. In Razumov, Conrad complicates the implications of Raskolnikov’s antithesis of ordinary and extraordinary. To understand Conrad’s design in raising the question of whether Razumov is ordinary or extraordinary, it is necessary to return to the moment when Haldin forces his confession upon Razumov and violates Razumov’s life and work. This is the first forced confession in the novel, the first forced dialogue. Haldin’s confession is a sermon explaining his revolutionary faith and the convictions rooted in it, but for Razumov the utterance undermines his existence. Haldin’s confession to Razumov is represented as the third explosion occurring in the novel. There are also, of course, the first bomb thrown by Haldin’s partner and the second bomb thrown by Haldin (uwe, 9). These two “engines” are physical manifestations of the ways in which Haldin’s ideas destroy lives indiscriminately (uwe, 14). But there is a third murder or assassination in the opening chapter that is moral. When Razumov encounters Haldin in his room, and Haldin declares that “It was I who removed de P this morning,” Razumov’s entire existence is exploded as well (uwe, 13). Alongside Razumov’s “half-derisive mental exclamation, ‘There goes my silver medal!’” is the realization that “his life [is] utterly ruined by this contact with such a crime” (uwe, 14). Later, after his interviews with the Prince and the General, Razumov reveals the best manner of understanding his position in thinking that “I am a suspect now” (uwe, 48). He is condemned to be an object of suspicion, whether he is actually under the surveillance of the authorities or is troubled in his own mind by self-doubts. His very being has been exploded. In Lord Jim Conrad explores the dangers inherent in listening to confessions and confidences. Marlow’s moral being is disrupted in becoming a receptacle for Jim’s confession. Like Marlow, Razumov is compelled to hear an unwanted

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and dangerous confidence, but Marlow’s life is not threatened in the same immediate manner as Razumov’s. And in Under Western Eyes, Conrad moves the confessor-character at the frame of the narrative to the centre and then constructs another frame around that new centre creating a third distancing layer. Haldin now occupies Jim’s position, Razumov occupies Marlow’s position, and the narrator’s recounting is a confession about a confession. As far as I know, Dostoevsky did not create such a complex layer of confessional narratives. In Notes from Underground the confession is mediated slightly by the editorial notes that Dostoevsky provides at the beginning and end, but these hardly create the same complications that occur in Conrad’s novel. Following his encounter with Haldin, Razumov believes himself to be an extraordinary man, yet Conrad does not value Razumov’s actions in the same way: the character may be somewhat ordinary in his motivations. I find it difficult to know with any degree of certainty whether Haldin’s confession releases an idea that already existed in Razumov’s mind or Haldin infects Razumov with the idea. In confessing to Razumov, Haldin declares that “speaking to a superior mind like yours I can well say all the truth” (uwe, 16). Later, Haldin repeats his idea by describing Razumov as “a young man in this town head and shoulders above common prejudices” (uwe, 42). Deciding whether or not this comment initiates Razumov’s idealization of himself as an extraordinary man is complicated by a passage in which the narrator describes Razumov’s dreams. Sometime in the future Razumov hopes that Prince K’s family would “be aware of him as a celebrated old professor, decorated, possibly a Privy Councillor, one of the glories of Russia – nothing more! But a celebrated professor was a somebody. Distinction would convert the label Razumov into an honoured name. There was nothing strange in the student Razumov’s wish for distinction. A man’s real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men by reason of respect or natural love” (uwe, 12). Making sense of this is difficult because it is spoken by an old professor. I cannot know where Razumov’s thoughts end and the narrator’s thoughts begin. Razumov does work for distinction, starting with the essay prize. But is his “real life” accorded to him by Haldin’s idea that he is a “superior mind”? Or does he already believe this before Haldin has made the comment aloud and opened Pandora’s Box as it were? Certainly, Razumov begins thinking like Haldin in the moments before he decides to betray Haldin. Echoing Haldin’s earlier remark, Razumov refers to his own “cool, superior reason” and believes he “was sacrificing his personal longings” (uwe, 27). And then the “conversion” of Razumov into a likeness of Haldin is all but complete when Razumov begins calculating the relative value of different human lives as Haldin

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did in committing the murders: “What is this Haldin? And what am I? Only two grains of sand. But a great mountain is made up of just such insignificant grains. And the death of a man or of many men is an insignificant thing. Yet we combat a contagious pestilence. Do I want his death? No! I would save him if I could – but no one can do that – he is the withered member which must be cut off.”36 His language recalls Haldin’s argument about “removing” Mr de P. Razumov is assuming the extraordinary man’s position as the judge of human life. These thoughts inform Razumov’s “extraordinary experience” of stepping across the “extraordinary illusion” of Haldin lying on his back in the snow (uwe, 28). The repetition of “extraordinary” recalls Dostoevsky’s interest in the problem of transgressions and Raskolnikov’s theory that an extraordinary man relies upon the judgment of his conscience alone in stepping across obstacles in order to realize his idea. Conrad invokes Raskolnikov’s idea explicitly in Razumov’s reflections upon his own “superior mind”: “Not one of them is capable of feeling and thinking as deeply as I can. How many of them could accomplish an act of conscience?” (uwe, 29). This follows Razumov’s realization that “I shall give him up” and his rationalization for betraying Haldin: “Betray. A great word. What is betrayal? They talk of a man betraying his country, his friends, his sweetheart. There must be a moral bond first. All a man can betray is his conscience. And how is my conscience engaged here; by what bond of common faith, of common conviction, am I obliged to let that fanatical idiot drag me down with him? On the contrary – every obligation of true courage is the other way” (uwe, 28–9). Razumov grapples with the question of whether or not he possesses an extraordinary conscience, the very test that Raskolnikov fails. But in Conrad’s version it is difficult to know if Razumov fails to prove that he possesses an extraordinary conscience or succeeds in displaying an extraordinary conscience with a capacity for suffering and self-sacrifice beyond even Dostoevsky’s Sonya. In Conrad’s novel, self-sacrifice becomes the test for the extraordinary; he asks whether an extreme self-sacrifice makes a person extraordinary. The problem is evident in Razumov’s confessions to Natalia. Conrad brings into sharp focus the question of what kind of story he is writing through Razumov’s confessions. At issue is the design of his 36 uwe, 26, 27–8. In “‘Peace that Passeth Understanding’: The Professor’s English Bible in Under Western Eyes,” Dwight Purdy argues that although Razumov “recognizes the specific quality of Haldin’s disease […] he succumbs nonetheless” and “perhaps like Haldin, Razumov believes that he himself may be the man, for, like Haldin, Razumov has a messianic text to excuse betrayal” (87).

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novel. Just before making the silent gesture in which he reveals himself as Haldin’s betrayer, Razumov suggests that he knows “a whole story”: “There is a staircase in it, and even phantoms, but that does not matter if a man always serves something greater than himself – the idea. I wonder who is the greatest victim in that tale?” (uwe, 248). Under Western Eyes is full of victims and different forms of victimization. Making a proper account of all the variations would be difficult, but not necessary here. As in so many of Dostoevsky’s works, Conrad’s novel is about the insulted and the injured of the world. But in Razumov, Conrad creates a strange version of an insulted and injured man. Haldin’s confession to Razumov “robbed” the latter of his “guiding idea”: “my hard-working, purposeful existence” (uwe, 251). But during or after that confession, Razumov inherited, or Haldin awakened in him, a vision of self-sacrifice that recalls Tekla’s self-effacement when she serves Peter Ivanovitch. We can view the idea at times through the doubling of Razumov and Ziemianitch. The early scene in which Razumov beats Ziemianitch recalls the first dream sequence from Crime and Punishment in which Raskolnikov watches a crowd beat a horse to death. Commentators have noted that the vicious beating and murder of the horse is partly Raskolnikov viewing the self-punishment his conscience is inflicting on himself. The dream is a projection of his own suffering: both the horse and the peasant Mikolka are components of Raskolnikov himself. The “terrible fury – the blind rage of self-preservation – possessed Razumov” and causes him to beat Ziemianitch leading to the “weird scene” that recalls the important passage from Dostoevsky’s novel (uwe, 23). After this, Ziemianitch haunts Razumov, his name being the one word that Razumov struggles hard to conceal. In his first meeting with Mikulin, Razumov tells himself “all he had to do was to keep the Ziemianitch episode secret with absolute determination when the questions came. Keep Ziemianitch strictly out of all the answers” (uwe, 66). But for Razumov “it seemed impossible to keep Ziemianitch out. Every question would lead to that, because, of course, there was nothing else” (uwe, 66). In a way that differs from the captain and criminal of “The Secret Sharer,” Conrad makes Ziemianitch into Razumov’s secret sharer or double or second self. In “The Secret Sharer,” the captain ensures the safety of the criminal that he protects. Ziemianitch does the same, but involuntarily and without knowing, for Razumov. Conrad emphasizes this by borrowing an element of Dostoevsky’s art in which the devil appears as a projected double for a character. In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan is tortured by a devil that visits him and is partly a double and projection of himself. Ziemianitch

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endures the same troubling ideas as Ivan, in that “Ziemianitch was notoriously irreligious, and yet, in the last weeks of his life, he suffered from the notion that he had been beaten by the devil” (uwe, 198). That would make Razumov the devil. In case we misunderstand the doubling, Conrad emphasizes the importance of the connection between the two men when Razumov reflects that “it was obvious that [Sophia Antonova] did not make much of the story – unless, indeed, this was the perfection of duplicity” (uwe, 199). The “perfection of duplicity” is in Conrad’s design, not Sophia’s understanding. It is only after Ziemianitch’s suicide that Razumov is safe. And only then does he find a place “for making a beginning of that writing which had to be done” under the statue of Rousseau (uwe, 205). But most importantly, after the death of his secret sharer, Razumov wonders “is it possible that I have a conventional conscience?” (uwe, 204). The question is whether Razumov is ordinary or extraordinary. Through the writing of his confession, Razumov comes to realize that “I had neither the simplicity nor the courage nor the self-possession to be a scoundrel, or an exceptionally able man” (uwe, 254). That is, he could not follow the example of Haldin and transgress according to his conscience. However, Razumov does show that he is capable of suffering and selfsacrifice, thereby proving that he has an extraordinary conscience in another sense. He will take the blame for his crime and endure the punishment. He will make a sacrifice of himself in the third act of his confession. To the revolutionaries, Ziemianitch stands guilty of Haldin’s betrayal and death: he stands in for Razumov. For a period in the novel Ziemianitch becomes a scapegoat for Haldin’s death. When Razumov makes his confessions to Natalia and the revolutionaries, he takes possession of his own crime and the suffering that comes with it. Conrad makes Razumov’s claim to suffering explicit in his declaration that “I am independent – and therefore perdition is my lot” (uwe, 254). Whatever Razumov argues in the written rationalization for his confessions, Conrad renders the ideas doubtful because Razumov is writing in retrospect, composing justifications which may or may not have informed his previous actions. For instance, Razumov claims that the marriage to Natalia would have been in revenge for what Haldin had caused him to do. But in renouncing his revenge Razumov also rejects the marriage and family that he so desperately wanted. And if revenge, and not love, really was the motive for the marriage, Razumov turns the revenge upon himself. In every way, he works to make himself the “greatest victim” of the tale, a very different kind of prize that earns him a distinction very unlike the essay and professorship he had dreamed about at the

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beginning of the tale. It is important to remember that Razumov realizes “in giving Victor Haldin up, it was myself, after all, whom I have betrayed most basely” (uwe, 253–4). When Razumov explains that “I had to confirm myself in my contempt and hate for what I betrayed,” that vengeful movement is directed toward himself (uwe, 252). Razumov reclaims the position that had been mistakenly attributed to Ziemianitch and also claims for himself the self-sacrifice informing Haldin’s actions. The superior act of conscience through which Razumov proves himself to be extraordinary and independent is self-betrayal. In Razumov, Conrad demonstrates how self-sacrifice and suffering can become an ideal in and of itself, without being interconnected with dreams of delivering the oppressed or instigating a revolution. In Razumov, self-sacrifice reaches an extreme in being elevated into a strange autonomous distinction; it displaces his original ideal of work as the centre of his moral existence. In the end, Tekla may be the one character in Under Western Eyes who earns Conrad’s sympathy. Undoubtedly she is one of the insulted and injured. The story of her suffering is genuinely moving and she has no notions of claiming for herself the distinction of being the “greatest victim” in the novel. Sofia Antonova’s praise for Tekla possessing “a faithful soul, an undaunted spirit and an indefatigable body” might be akin to Conrad’s own judgment (uwe, 265). Furthermore, she is the most straightforwardly Dostoevskian character in the novel, but with one important difference. She suffers without recourse to an ideal such as Sonya’s and Dostoevsky’s Christ, and her willingness to serve others without any thought for herself is truly extraordinary.

5 Living to Die in Lord Jim

in lord jim, conrad rewrites dar win’s and Nietzsche’s arguments about the instincts for self-preservation and self-destruction. The novel is a critical reconsideration of Darwin’s observations regarding the central importance of the instincts toward self-preservation and selfsacrifice from an almost Nietzschean perspective in which the two instincts are collapsed, making it difficult to discern one from the other. Conrad’s thinking is radically heuristic in that he explores the implications when ideas come into collision. He tests the potential consequences by representing multiple variations on the relationship between the two instincts: ideas are raised, reconfigured, and questioned through particular lived experience. The abstract idea of an antithetical relation between self-preservation and self-destruction is turned into a question of living and being through the analogical scenes comprising the trajectory of the novel. By confounding antithetical structures, Conrad reveals important questions complicating Darwin’s and Nietzsche’s influential perspectives. The reconsideration of self-preservation and self-destruction is located directly in Jim’s dreams about becoming a hero. Conrad makes it impossible to know whether Jim believes that heroism involves selfpreservation or self-sacrifice (hence, self-destruction). The quality of Conrad’s preoccupation with fundamental human instincts is analogous to Nietzsche’s argument that “these instincts contradict, disturb, and destroy one another” and Jim becomes an example of “the modern as physiological self-contradiction.”1 When instincts are at war with one another, differentiating the antagonists through the descriptions and confusions caused in the very moment of the battle becomes increasingly difficult. At the end of the nineteenth century, Conrad challenges us to consider whether the systematic distinctions are tenable. 1 t, 107. “Expeditions of an Untimely Man,” Section 41.

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This argument relates directly to the discussions published in recent years by Matthew Condon, Michiel Heynes, and Andrew Mozina that study Jim’s function as the hero or failed hero who becomes a scapegoat.2 Without directly answering the readings offered by these three critics, the argument in this chapter complicates their ideas about what Conrad is doing with Jim as a sacrifice of some kind. The quality of Jim’s own instincts is a significant problem when thinking about him as a scapegoat and the punishments levelled by the two communities, in the European court and in Patusan. One important consideration is the degree to which the community does not simply work against the instincts of the individual but in some strange manner works to enable and confirm the very movements and ends which those instincts demand. The question of whether to identify Jim as a sacrifice, a suicide, or a victim bears directly upon my discussion of Conrad’s criticism of Nietzsche in the next chapter. Conrad makes it exceptionally difficult to differentiate between the three roles, choosing instead to superimpose them throughout the novel. In Lord Jim, Conrad’s inquiry into the relationship between selfpreservation and self-destruction can be connected to Nietzsche’s argument that “the two greatest judicial murders in world history are, not to mince words, disguised and well disguised suicides. In both cases the victim wanted to die; in both cases he employed the hand of human injustice to drive the sword into his own breast” (ha, 233. Section 94). Although Nietzsche leaves the names of the two victims unclear, it is not very difficult to guess that he is thinking about Socrates and Christ. The argument is that the two deaths have been misidentified, or only partially understood. The communal punishment of the scapegoat, regardless of whether it was in the name of justice or revenge, can be read as realizing the victim’s desire to become a self-sacrifice. Conrad challenges us to think about the question that Nietzsche raises so that the meanings of both judgments levelled against Jim become highly ambiguous. Can we read the judgments as punishments if the consequences actually enable Jim’s desire to become a hero through a self-sacrificial act? At issue is Marlow’s realization that Jim “was eager to go through the ceremony of execution,” not only in confronting the European court but also in the final judgment in Patusan (lj, 93). Jim’s eager 2 See Condon’s “The Cost of Redemption in Conrad’s Lord Jim,” the fourth chapter of Heynes’s Expulsion and the Nineteenth-Century Novel, and the second chapter of Mozina’s Joseph Conrad and the Art of Sacrifice. All three critics are drawing on the arguments René Girard makes in The Scapegoat.

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anticipation, or at least uninhibited willingness to be punished, makes for a real problem in reading the novel. Conrad undermines the fundamental assumption that the instinct for self-preservation is the most important of laws governing human behaviour, anticipating Freud’s insights in The Ego and the Id and Beyond the Pleasure Principle by at least a decade. But unlike Freud, Conrad does not claim to know precisely where self-preservation ends and self-destruction begins. Also, by making the connection between the instinct for self-destruction and the idea of heroism, Conrad offers an important insight into the greatness that sometimes accompanies self-sacrifice.3 Finally, Conrad raises real questions about the degree to which Jim’s life is typical or atypical: he is both “one of us” and a hero. Is the troubling conflict between selfpreservation and self-destruction only true in Jim’s strange and tragic life, or is it true for human living as a whole? Conrad makes a subtle inquiry that embodies how a simple antithesis between the two instincts is insufficient and should be replaced by the realization that the two instincts are often indistinguishable. Also, through Jim’s actions, Conrad suggests that the appearance of selfpreservation can conceal an instinct for self-destruction; the former can provide a cover story for the latter. I have no doubt that Conrad is engaged in conversations with both Darwin and Nietzsche; however, in discussing the history of an idea, establishing the sources or the lines of influence is not always the central concern.4 When making the connection between Conrad and Darwin, Redmond O’Hanlon argues that “we must remember that Victorian science was still almost immediately accessible to all intelligent men.”5 And Gillian Beer reminds us that in the nineteenth century “scientists still shared a common language with other educated readers and writers of their time. There is nothing hermetic or exclusive in the writing of Lyell or Darwin […] they shared a literary, non-mathematical discourse which was readily available to readers without a scientific training. Their texts could be read very much as literary texts.”6 The group of authors 3 See Sung Ryol Kim’s discussion in “Lord Jim’s Heroic Identity” for a lengthy summary of the many contemporary arguments concerning the relationship between Jim’s heroism and the ideas of self-sacrifice or suicide. 4 Gillian Beer makes this point as well (Darwin’s Plots, 5–6). Redmond O’Hanlon and Allan Hunter have written full-length studies documenting Conrad’s knowledge of and response to Darwin’s works. 5 O’Hanlon, Joseph Conrad and Charles Darwin, 11. 6 Beer, Darwin’s Plots, 6–7.

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included in this chapter conduct inquiries into a constellation of interconnected ideas making their works enter into a dialogue with one another. Of course, I am primarily concerned with Conrad’s perspective and to understand him as one of the readers of whom Beer speaks in suggesting that “it was possible for a reader to turn to the primary works of scientists as they appeared, and to respond directly to the arguments advanced.”7 Lord Jim is a record of Conrad’s response and his most generous clue for readers is Stein. The representation of Stein as a “naturalist” or “learned collector” bears remarkable analogies to Darwin and Nietzsche in their roles as arrangers and classifiers of facts or information. He loves “classing and arranging specimens” and “writing up a descriptive catalogue of his treasures” (lj, 125). The important point of similarity is the drive to categorize and catalogue, to distinguish among and between types, to separate the butterflies from the beetles and then create subcategories within those divisions. Darwin and Nietzsche are taxonomists in practicing the science of classification, or typologists by engaging in the study or interpretation of types. They are also genealogists, tracing the histories of the types they identify. Darwin is undoubtedly the great precursor to Stein’s passion to collect and classify, specifically, biological types, but Nietzsche practices Darwin’s art by identifying and categorizing moral types. The Twilight of the Idols is a catalogue of types, which is especially apparent in the section entitled “Expeditions of an Untimely Man” wherein Nietzsche identifies and categorizes some of his major contemporaries. Part of Conrad’s objection to these different schemes of classifying the world is that the labels and categories can obscure as much as they illuminate. In any attempt to know the butterflies and the beetles the difficulty is to simultaneously recognize the distinct differences and the important resemblances. In effect, Stein’s separation of the butterflies from the beetles, the beautiful from the monstrous, succeeds in performing the former but fails in performing the latter. Conrad not only places the butterflies and the beetles together in the same display case and the beautiful and monstrous in the same character, but calls into question the markers or definitions distinguishing the two. Conrad’s work raises questions about scientific and philosophical systems that construct antithetical systems in order to formulate solutions. Reading Stein as a response to these different thinkers illuminates one important aspect of Stein’s oft-debated wisdom. I do not want to debate the strange grammatical structure or the “real” meaning of Stein’s 7 Ibid., 7.

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obscure pronouncement about immersing one’s self into the destructive element. I have a suspicion that Conrad wrote the passage knowing how “very funny this terrible thing is” and that readers would be endlessly fascinated with discussing the intricacies of the passage (lj, 129). Quite likely, I am yet another victim of Conrad’s humour in suggesting that when reading the famous passage in chapter 20 it is significant that Stein is discussing life and death, or to be more specific, self-preservation and self-destruction: “A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns – nicht war? … No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.”8 The instinct for self-preservation compels a person to act if he falls into water. This may cause a person to perform the wrong action leading to self-destruction. Yet, submitting to the “destructive element” may be self-preservative. If water is potentially the destructive element, then it can also be used as a self-preservative element by swimming. Perhaps my reading is too simple by half, but the point is that the basic problem of the relation between self-preservation and self-destruction is inscribed in this passage. And in some degree, like Stein’s grammar and syntax in this passage, Conrad articulates the relation between the two instincts in a manner that is anything but clear. The passage is nothing if not a problem and the structure of the passage defies finding a solution. Comparing Conrad and Freud for a moment helps us to focus on the issue at hand. The two thinkers construct relations between ideas very differently. In the language of Peter Brooks’s Reading for the Plot, it is partly a question of plotting, as if to ask: where does an author place an idea on the map of his thought? Or, how does an author manipulate an idea through the trajectory of a plot or argument? Freud sees the relation between the self-preservative and self-destructive instincts as 8 lj, 129. Given Stanley Renner’s demonstration of how Lord Jim embodies Conrad’s preoccupation with Carlyle’s thought, it is worth noting that, in Past and Present, Carlyle writes a passage that anticipates Stein’s famous speech: “‘All work of man is as the swimmer’s:’ a waste ocean threatens to devour him; if he front it not bravely, it will keep its word. By incessant wise defiance of it, lusty rebuke and buffet of it, behold how it loyally supports him, bears him as its conqueror along” (198). If Conrad is indebted to Carlyle, it is significant that he changes the relationship between the swimmer and the water from defiance to submission.

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antithetical and his language leaves no room for doubt: “sharp distinction”; “dualistic”; “two opposites”; “antithesis”; and “two polarities.”9 He reinforces the distinction in the chapter heading to part 4 of The Ego and the Id: “The Two Types of Drives.” Freud claims to witness the “merging” and “de-mergence” of the two drives.10 At one moment Freud comes close to confessing that “our grounds for distinguishing between the two types of drives seem not altogether strong enough,” but ends by concluding in a very characteristic fashion that “If it were not for the arguments set forth in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, and ultimately also the sadistic admixtures encountered in Eros, we would have difficulty in holding firm to our fundamental dualist position. But since we have no alternative, we are driven to the supposition that death drives very largely remain silent, and that the clamour of life comes mostly from Eros.”11 Freud is unwilling to question the arguments he has created. Rather than adjust his theory to the observations, Freud will not modify the basis of his assumptions. Despite his determination “to follow an idea right through to its logical conclusion,” he stops at the boundaries created by his own arguments.12 The alternative that Conrad offers in Lord Jim is to confess that the relation between the two drives is difficult to discern and they are not easily distinguished. Conrad seriously doubts any knowing that claims such certainty: the relation between the two instincts is indefinite and the novel questions whether we can tell one instinct from the other. Conrad does not dismiss the possibility of antithetical ideas, but he questions the relation between the ideas in terms of perspective.13 Perhaps the best example from the novel is Jim’s reflection that “It was not a lie – but it wasn’t truth all the same. It was something …. One knows a downright lie. There was not the thickness of a sheet of paper between the right and the wrong of this affair” (lj, 80). Jim wants to believe that he can recognize a “downright lie,” but for Conrad the problem is not so simple. The grammar of the entire passage points toward the difficulty, starting with the negations in the first sentence. It 9 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 92–3. 10 Freud, The Ego and the Id, 131. 11 Ibid., 132, 136–7. 12 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 63. 13 See J. Hillis Miller’s discussion of Conrad’s “manipulation” of the “binary pattern” of light and dark in “Lord Jim: Repetition as Subversion of Organic Form,” 452.

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is neither this nor that, and the best that can be said is that “it was something.” Jim might have said it was anything, because the thought remains unclear. The very act of knowing and distinguishing is questioned here. The last sentence both reinforces and extends the problem. Right and wrong are brought into collision, and if there is “not the thickness of a sheet of paper between” them, then it is very difficult, if not impossible, to discern one from the other with any certainty. By repeating the basic problem with different variations throughout Lord Jim, Conrad emphasizes the difficulties involved. The repetition of the grammar creates continuity and a kind of rhythm in the work. When Chester reflects upon Robinson’s ship disaster, there is a glance back to Jim’s comment about distinguishing between right and wrong: “the Lord God knows the right and the wrong of that story” (lj, 99). The connection is immediately recognizable in Marlow’s variation: “I strained my mental eyesight only to discover that, as with the complexion of all our actions, the shade of difference was so delicate that it was impossible to say. It might have been flight and it might have been a mode of combat” (lj, 119). The repetition of the conditional “might” emphasizes the ambiguity and indecisiveness. In one other passage, “there is so little difference, and the difference means so little,” Conrad calls into question the impulse to distinguish differences, suggesting that the similarities matter just as much if not more (lj, 135). He questions the importance of establishing differences, indicating that those distinctions potentially obscure our knowing. Conrad is not abandoning the idea that there is a distinction between A and B or right and wrong in favour of moral and perspectival relativity, but he is questioning whether there is a position from which anyone can attain a clear view to know absolutely. Nietzsche offers a good summary of the problem by acknowledging the danger inherent in the “Habit of seeing opposites”: “The general imprecise way of observing sees everywhere in nature opposites (as, e.g. ‘warm and cold’) where there are, not opposites, but differences of degree. This bad habit has led us into wanting to comprehend and analyze the inner world, too, the spiritual-moral world, in terms of such opposites.”14 As Nietzsche says, the difficulty is that “being unable to see both sides of a thing at the same time, we see and represent them one after the other, but in such a way that we always misjudge or deny the other

14 ha, 326. Number 67 of “The Wanderer and His Shadow.”

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side in the delusion that what we are seeing is the whole truth.”15 Like Nietzsche, Conrad recognizes the problem inherent within dualist structures and the result is that, when reading his novels, if there is a set of antithetical ideas, then we must be careful not to misjudge or deny either one side or the other in an attempt to discern which side we are seeing. The challenge is to recognize the simultaneous presence of disparate ideas, if only for a moment. Language works against this in identifying one thing as A and the other as B. In grammatical terms, Freud tends to structure his arguments in terms of either/or dichotomies, whereas Conrad’s plot makes us think of the problem in terms of a both/and conjoining which implies simultaneous apposition and opposition. Conrad does not share this belief of Freud’s: “precisely how drives of the two types connect, combine and blend with each other remains entirely unimaginable.”16 Lord Jim is an extended meditation upon how the two instincts become “confounded” (lj, 30). The grammatical problems are inseparable from the plot. Freud’s fundamentally dualist structure informs his vision about the basic trajectory underlying the life of any living organism. Declaring that “the goal of all life is death,” Freud may suggest that the plot is simple, but the action is not.17 In life there is the struggle between drives for self-preservation and self-destruction, and as Freud summarizes in The Ego and the Id, “both drives behave in a strictly conservative manner, in that they seek the restoration of a state that was disrupted by the emergence of life. According to this view, the emergence of life is therefore the cause both of the urge to carry on living and, simultaneously, the urge for death, while life itself is a battle and constant compromise between the two urges.”18 Conrad anticipates Freud with ideas that are in some ways similar, but he introduces some complications. The trajectory of Jim’s life is very difficult to discern: distinguishing between self-preservative and self-destructive acts is not easy and may not be possible. In Lord Jim, the appearance of an instinct for self-preservation is often a cover story, obscuring what is a desire for self-destruction. There is a troubling connection between opposing instincts and desires. The part of Jim’s heroism that works toward selfsacrifice is a movement toward death. I do not mean that Jim is plotting his own death as a suicide, yet in some way Jim is arranging his death as a 15 16 17 18

ha, 230. Number 79 of “Assorted Opinions and Maxims.” Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 131. Ibid., 78. Freud, The Ego and the Id, 131.

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self-sacrifice whether he realizes it or not. The plot reveals the movement toward that end, but the movement is not decisively willed by Jim. There are too many external complications that work against identifying Jim as the author of his own existence; yet, for Jim to die in his own way, his death must come through serving others. There is no simple way to explore these questions in Lord Jim. The structure of the novel as a whole is informed by Conrad’s conversation with Darwin’s and Nietzsche’s ideas, so I cannot point to a particular passage and definitively identify either writer’s presence in a straightforward manner. The problem is in understanding how Conrad collapses, reconfigures, and recombines the ideas of these two major intellectual predecessors. Because we live in a post-Darwinian, Nietzschean, and Freudian world, recognizing Conrad’s ideas and questions is especially difficult. As Beer suggests, the formulations of the other thinkers are familiar, and exist like habits in our thinking.19 We look for reproductions of their ideas in Conrad’s text and find it difficult to recognize when he is doing something different. Freud might like to think of reading as an archaeological or geological survey, but Lord Jim is neither a monument from ancient Rome nor an exposed geological formation. Darwin’s and Nietzsche’s ideas are not stratified in the novel like layers of sediment. But in order to make my argument, I will impose an artificial clarity on the discussion, knowing that the clarity is only apparent. Before exploring some of the complications in Conrad’s text, it is necessary to briefly outline important ideas from Darwin and Nietzsche. Although many other ideas might be included, the key question raised by Darwin concerns the instincts for self-preservation and self-sacrifice, and the key questions from Nietzsche concern the essential self-regarding quality of all actions and instincts and the thwarting of the instinct for self-preservation by self-sacrifice. 19 See Beer’s argument concerning the impression made by the thoughts of past thinkers on the language and thought of later thinkers (Darwin’s Plots, 5). If past patterns of apprehending experience have been disrupted, that does not mean that there are no other modes of thought capable of criticizing Darwin and Freud. The question is how to be critical in a world dominated by certain assumptions and ideas. Conrad is critical of the ideas that he inherits from Darwin, demonstrating at least one way of thinking differently from how Darwin proposes. And writing Lord Jim before Freud publishes his later postwar works, Conrad offers a criticism of late Freudian psychoanalytic theory that has not been influenced by Freud’s ideas and language as we have.

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As critics have recognized, Conrad responds to key parts of Darwin’s theories.20 In chapter 4 of The Descent of Man, Darwin explores the relation between self-preservation and self-sacrifice. He offers examples of both instincts and how they come into conflict, repeatedly returning to the problem of how “the instinctive impulses have different degrees of strength” and suggesting that “a struggle may often be observed in animals between different instincts, or between an instinct and some habitual disposition.”21 The two passages that manifest the closest analogy to Lord Jim raise questions that bear directly upon Jim’s actions. In thinking of how one instinct overcomes another, Darwin notes, “nevertheless many a civilized man, or even boy, who never before risked his life for another, but full of courage and sympathy, has disregarded the instinct of self-preservation, and plunged at once into a torrent to save a drowning man, though a stranger.”22 Then a page later Darwin offers the opposite case: “In a timid man, on the other hand, the instinct for selfpreservation might be so strong, that he would be unable to force himself to run any such risk, perhaps not even for his own child.”23 The courage of self-sacrifice is apparently what the French Lieutenant and Bob Stanton demonstrate, whereas Jim is unable to overcome his instinct for self-preservation.24 In evaluating Jim’s actions, we must avoid identifying him as belonging to a lower order of humanity based on the mistaken assumption that, between the two instincts, self-preservation is unquestionably a base and animal impulse whereas self-sacrifice belongs to the higher

20 In Lord Jim and the Ethics of Darwinism, Alan Hunter reveals the “direct debts of Conrad to most of the major writers on evolution in his day” and argues that “he is in most cases extending and re-writing their rather theoretical works” (6). He demonstrates that Conrad “had begun to explore evolutionary thought in order to understand its mechanism” and is skeptical of the “applicability of Darwin’s doctrine to all aspects of life” (12). Redmond O’Hanlon reads Lord Jim as “Conrad’s tortuous exploration of contemporary scientific ideas” and sees Darwin at the centre of them (55). 21 Darwin, The Descent of Man, 114, 111. 22 Ibid., 114. 23 Ibid., 115. 24 O’Hanlon argues that Jim is “burdened with the weight of an uncontrollable instinct for self-preservation” (35) and Hunter agrees, with the qualification that Jim’s actions are “involuntary” and only made possible because he “resigns himself to die” (32).

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instincts of man.25 Darwin does not share this judgment and argues that animals display an instinct for self-sacrifice as well, such as the “heroic little American monkey” who saved his keeper from “the great and dreaded baboon.”26 However, in describing the “social instinct” as the “foundation stone” for co-operation among animals and human beings, Darwin does make ideas such as sympathy and self-sacrifice vitally important.27 The valuation of self-sacrifice above self-preservation is openly attacked by Nietzsche throughout his works. He attacks the assumption by undermining the “belief that ‘unegoistic’ and ‘egoistic’ are antitheses” by arguing “there are neither egoistic nor unegoistic actions: both concepts are psychologically nonsense.”28 For Nietzsche, the question is not whether any action is egoistic or unegoistic, but rather if actions are self-preservative or self-destructive. The change in terms is important, because Nietzsche aligns self-sacrifice and altruism, that is, unegoistic actions, with selfdestruction. In The Gay Science Nietzsche addresses a lesson “To the teachers of selflessness” in which he articulates his view that self-sacrificing acts are harmful to the self and praised only because they bring benefits to others: “The ‘neighbour’ praises selflessness because it brings him advantages!” (gs, 45. Section 21). Characteristically, the central focus is on valuation: “The praise of virtues is the praise of something privately harmful – the praise of drives which deprive a human being of his noblest selfishness and of the strength for the highest form of self-protection” (gs, 44. Section 21). For Nietzsche, a morality that praises self-sacrifice is a decadent and degenerate morality. In Twilight of the Idols he argues that a “healthy morality, is dominated by an instinct of life.”29 An instinct of life must consider that “when within an organism the meanest organ neglects even to the slightest degree to assert with absolute certainty its self-preservation, indemnity for its expenditure of force, its ‘egoism’, the whole degenerates […]. When one directs seriousness away from selfpreservation […] what else is it but a recipe for décadence.”30 25 Hunter repeatedly describes Jim as “sub-human” and “animalistic” (32, 35) and O’Hanlon places the instinct for self-preservation beneath “the higher social instinct of a man whose intellect and capacity for sympathy are both well advanced” (41). 26 Darwin, The Descent of Man, 114. 27 Ibid., 103. 28 eh, 45. See “Why I Write Such Good Books,” Section 5. 29 t, 55. “Morality as Anti-Nature,” Section 4. 30 eh, 67. Section 2 on Daybreak.

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Darwin’s original antithesis, which places self-preservation against selfsacrifice, is complicated by Nietzsche’s argument that self-sacrificing impulses are really drives that are destructive; however, neither Darwin nor Nietzsche argues that there is an impulse unto death. For Nietzsche, the morality that he attacks undermines life and quickens the movement toward death, but does so inadvertently; Christianity is not a will to death but instead a degenerate form of life, a devaluing of the instinct for life. In a sense, Conrad perceives Darwin’s antithesis through a Nietzschean lens: he does not simply see opposites but a more subtle relation between the two. And like Nietzsche, Conrad is skeptical about the nature of selfsacrifice and its relation to self-destruction. One way of reading Lord Jim is to recognize that Jim’s self-sacrifice is potentially a cover for an instinct for self-destruction. However, this does not mean that Conrad merely corroborates or reproduces Nietzsche’s conclusions. There is a problem in identifying Jim solely with the instinct for selfpreservation. In the first chapter, before Jim’s first real test, Conrad makes it clear that both of Darwin’s instincts are involved. The language Conrad uses to represent Jim’s “hope of a stirring life in the world of adventure” raises the question of what is happening in Jim’s thought when “he would forget himself, and beforehand live in his mind the sealife of light literature” (lj, 9). Jim’s dream, his ideal conception of heroism, is simultaneously made up of acts of self-preservation and acts of self-sacrifice: “He saw himself saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line; or as a lonely castaway, barefooted and half naked, walking on uncovered reefs in search of shellfish to stave off starvation” (lj, 9). The first half proposes a series of self-sacrifices, of endangering the self in order to save others; the second half proposes a solitary struggle for self-preservation, of maintaining one’s existence. In this passage, the struggle that Darwin observes between the two instincts is momentarily silenced. In the peacefulness of his imaginings, Jim is not troubled by the conjoining of the two opposing instincts under the overarching ideal of heroism. As Nietzsche remarks, a word is said “so quickly it almost seems as if it could contain no more than one conceptual and perceptional root […]. As if every word were not a pocket into which now this, now that, now several things at once have been put!”31 Jim dreams of a concept that he knows as heroism but never really examines the contradictory elements contained within that idea. The conflicting elements contained within a seemingly unified whole provoke the questions that preoccupy Conrad. 31 ha, 316. Section 33 of “The Wanderer and His Shadow.”

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He constructs his plot as a complex working through or playing out of the two ideas existing simultaneously in Jim’s thoughts. But the working through of the plot is Marlow’s task in the telling, and this is another complication to consider. As the teller of the tale, Marlow is simultaneously writing the plot of the novel and reconstructing, to the best of his understanding, the trajectory of Jim’s life. Although Marlow’s is undoubtedly the dominant perspective on Jim’s life, J. Hillis Miller is right to recognize that “the novel is a complex design of interrelated minds, no one of which can be taken as a secure point of reference from which the others may be judged.”32 Through “a pattern of recurrent motifs” Conrad “reveals more about Jim than Marlow comes to understand.”33 Conrad’s language and structure reveal a greater knowing than Marlow possesses. Without entirely realizing the problem, Marlow makes a mistake in speaking of Jim’s “superb egoism,” “exalted egoism,” and “ideal of conduct” (lj, 244, 246). Speaking of an “ideal” obscures the fact that Jim’s thoughts are a composite of contradictory ideas. Granted, Marlow does not know this. It is the narrator of the first four chapters of the novel who reveals this important detail. When recounting Jim’s life in Patusan, Marlow’s idea of heroism is not necessarily the same as Jim’s. Not having the seemingly omniscient knowledge the narrator in Middlemarch demonstrates in the detailed histories of the characters, Marlow cannot understand that Jim’s “recklessly heroic aspirations” are simultaneously self-preservative and self-sacrificial/destructive (lj, 53). For Marlow, the end of Jim’s life in Patusan exemplifies that “he was going to prove his power […] and conquer the fatal destiny itself,” a conclusion that is ambiguous at best, though I am not sure that Marlow realizes this (lj, 242). He does not imagine that Jim’s heroism is a strange offering up of himself as a sacrifice, nor that this sacrifice could be a cover for a self-destructive instinct. This brings into question Marlow’s capacity to understand Jim’s actions, and forces us to judge Jim’s life differently from the account Marlow makes. Conrad continually emphasizes the strange duality of Jim’s heroism, and Marlow’s repeated allusions to Jim’s dreams do not help to clarify the problem. If Jim is “projected headlong into the fanciful realm of recklessly heroic aspirations” then we must stop to consider what Marlow means in reflecting “he had no leisure to regret what he had lost, he was so wholly and naturally concerned for what he had failed to 32 Miller, “Lord Jim,” 447. 33 Ibid., 446.

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obtain” (lj, 53). Which of the two impulses embodied in Jim’s ideal of heroism is Marlow thinking about? After the first test Jim faces he convinces himself that “now he knew what to think of” in reference to the menace of the storm (lj, 10). By not participating, Jim imagines He had enlarged his knowledge more than those who had done the work. When all men flinched, then – he felt sure – he alone would know how to deal with the spurious menace of wind and seas. He knew what to think of it. Seen dispassionately, it seemed contemptible. He could detect no trace of emotion in himself, and the final effect of a staggering event was that, unnoticed and apart from the noisy crowd of boys, he exulted with fresh certitude in his avidity for adventure, and in a sense of many-sided courage. (lj, 10)

By the end of this passage, Jim returns to his emotional and intellectual position before the test. He returns to dreams of heroism, which means the unarticulated contradictory impulse to save and sacrifice himself. Though Jim is perhaps more experienced, his instincts are no less confused. Later, after the jump from the Patna, Jim thinks “it is all in being ready,” and Marlow explains that “ever since [Jim] had been ‘so high’ – ‘quite a little chap,’ he had been preparing himself for all the difficulties that can beset one on land and water. He confessed proudly to this kind of foresight. He had been elaborating dangers and defences, expecting the worst, rehearsing his best. He must have led a most exalted existence. Can you fancy it? A succession of adventures, so much glory, such a victorious progress! and the deep sense of his sagacity crowning every day of his inner life” (lj, 52, 60). Jim’s preparations to be in a constant state of readiness share the contradictory instincts of his heroism. This is the problem with Jim’s “perfect state of preparation” (lj, 60). Jim is mistaken in claiming that “he had been taken unawares” by the events on the Patna (lj, 60). On the contrary, he is ready and able, but both the contradictory instincts simultaneously present in his “perfect state of preparation” answer the call for action. This will become clearer momentarily, but first there is another problem to consider. Darwin examines the struggle that occurs among instincts by considering the difference between “actions performed impulsively” and “actions done deliberately” and confesses that “it appears scarcely possible to draw any clear line of distinction of this kind.”34 The difficulty that Darwin recognizes is represented by Conrad in Jim’s actions during the storm. To Jim, “it seemed” as though “he was whirled around” by 34 Darwin, The Descent of Man, 115.

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the “furious earnestness” and the “brutal tumult” of the storm (lj, 9). The instinct for self-preservation appears to force Jim to stand passively watching, but at the last moment Jim shows something of the instinct for self-sacrifice because he “seemed on the point of leaping overboard” (lj, 10). The repeated use of the conditional and questionable “seemed” should be noted. Grammar is a problem here because there is no conclusive evidence that Jim deliberates, decides, or wills. The distinction between impulse and deliberation is obliterated for a moment. Jim’s dream of heroism, having been the primary focus of his conscious thoughts, has become a kind of second nature, or even possibly a first nature. The thoughts have become habits, and as Darwin repeatedly suggests, there is hardly any difference between what has become habit and what has become instinctual. Jim’s ideal of heroism may have begun as a conscious thought but has become intertwined if not synonymous with Jim’s nature. Conrad calls attention to his own art and thought and helps readers orient themselves to his novel. He includes a series of variations on Jim’s problem that are something like Soren Kierkegaard’s “attunements” in Fear and Trembling.35 Through a series of miniature plots within the larger whole, Conrad illuminates different aspects of Jim’s dilemma.36 These different perspectives complicate any single reading of Jim’s action, as the examples in themselves are complex and if read carefully pose difficult questions concerning the causes of the acts. The sequence in which Conrad orders the novel is important and we can recognize that the questions surrounding Jim’s actions are already being developed when other examples, such as Brierly, the French Lieutenant, and Bob Stanton, are introduced. If readers do not recognize the ambiguity in Jim’s actions, these passages are meant to make us more careful and deliberate in our reading. The synthesis of the two instincts within Jim’s character is important and the possibility of the two instincts co-existing should be compared 35 See pages 44–8. 36 J. Hillis Miller argues that “in the sequence of discrete episodes which makes up the novel, no episode serves as the point of origin” (“Lord Jim,” 448). While Miller might be correct in his observation, he places too much emphasis on the centripetal force of the different episodes. In “Lord Jim and the Formal Development of the English Novel,” Ralph Rader discusses Conrad’s use of a “shaping commentary” through the presence of “secondary characters” such as Brierly, the French Lieutenant, and the “principal instrument” Stein (229, 228, 230). I disagree with Rader’s judgment that Stein is “unequivocally reliable” (231).

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with the examples of Bob Stanton and Brierly.37 All the characters are examples of Conrad playing with Darwin’s and Nietzsche’s ideas. The perspective from which the actions of these men are described is as important as the actions themselves. The passages are lessons in reading and judgment. The story recounting the actions of Bob Stanton is indeterminate and equivocal. Bob Stanton is seemingly the ideal representation of Darwin’s self-sacrifice. In a situation resembling the first test for Jim, Bob tries to rescue a girl who has been left behind after all the passengers of a ship involved in a collision have been taken to safety. The story is strange in a couple of ways. The girl “had gone completely crazy – wouldn’t leave the ship – held to the rail like grim death,” as if she did not want to be rescued and was determined to die (lj, 92). And Bob, after initially engaging in a “wrestling-match” with the girl to rescue her from the sinking ship, “had given up hauling at the gal, and just stood by looking at her, watchful like,” as if infected by her desire to die (lj, 92). He would not let any other rescuers intervene, “letting out a yell now and then to warn his boat to keep well clear of the ship,” although he undoubtedly knew that the boat “daren’t come alongside” (lj, 92). There is a strange ambivalence in the representation of Bob’s actions, partly because of the humorous tone in the voice of the narrator of the story, but the comedy is muted. If Bob represents the ideal of self-sacrifice in which a person is willing to die in order to save the life of another, there is also the potential that he represents the ideal of selfsacrifice which acts as a cover for a person wanting to die. It is as if Bob decides that his self-sacrifice requires that he drown with the girl. The altruistic sacrifice is an expression of sympathy as identification. Darwinian self-sacrifice and Nietzschean self-destruction are brought into collision here. The “complications of a love affair” and a “mode of life more barren of consolation” certainly suggest that Bob was troubled in his living (lj, 92, 91). The details would not have been included if Conrad had not wanted to create some measure of doubt about the causes for Bob’s actions. The representation of the actions makes it difficult to determine which of the judgments is true. Potentially, both are true and readers are forced to weigh the consequences of judging the scene in various ways.

37 Daniel Ross raises questions about the heroism of characters such as Bob Stanton and Brierly. See “Lord Jim and the Saving Illusion.”

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Conrad constructs another analogy with Jim in the figure of Brierly, but there is a difference.38 While the others have no direct contact with Jim, Brierly is one among the panel of magistrates that sits in judgment on Jim’s case following the Patna incident and contributes to the cancellation of Jim’s certificate and the series of self-punishments Jim creates and endures afterwards. Within a week of delivering the judgment, Brierly commits suicide. Marlow’s representation of Brierly has practically dictated the critical response to his character and the nature of his suicide; however, Conrad includes good reasons to doubt Marlow’s judgment here. Marlow remembers Brierly as a “complacent soul” whose “self-satisfaction presented to me and to the world a surface as hard as granite” (lj, 39). He speculates, No wonder Jim’s case bored him, and while I thought with something akin to fear of the immensity of his contempt for the young man under examination, he was probably holding silent inquiry into his own case. The verdict must have been of unmitigated guilt, and he took the secret of the evidence with him in that leap into the sea. If I understand anything of men, the matter was no doubt of the gravest import, one of those trifles that awaken ideas – start into life some thought with which a man unused to such a companionship finds it impossible to live. (lj, 39)

The question of whether Marlow can “understand anything of men” does not discount his argument but signals to readers that his understanding may be flawed. Marlow represents Brierly as a man with no higher faith than a “belief in his own splendor” and is at a loss to “tell what flattering view [Brierly] had induced himself to take of his own suicide” (lj, 43). The judgment is corroborated by Jones’s remark that “neither you nor I, sir, have ever thought so much of ourselves” (lj, 43). And Marlow echoes Jones’s remark in remembering the story: “I strongly suspect it was strictly in character: at bottom poor Brierly must have been thinking of himself” (lj, 44). This account has been accepted much too often without being sufficiently questioned. While the identification with Jim is important, Brierly’s example cannot be reduced to narcissism or an excessive self-regard. When Brierly destroys himself, he demonstrates a noticeable regard for others; for instance, in writing the letter to the shipping company he 38 Readers are encouraged to compare my reading with Watt’s in Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, 276–8.

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recommends Jones for a command (lj, 41). Also, he ensures that his dog Rover will not act upon its instincts of self-sacrifice like Darwin’s monkey. Despite Marlow’s and Jones’s characterization of Brierly’s suicide as a self-regarding act, the evidence of the manner in which Brierly prepares for death suggests otherwise. Brierly does everything to ensure the safety and well-being of others. He even tells Jones that “I am going aft, and shall set the log at zero for you myself, so that there can be no mistake. Thirty-two miles on this course and then you are safe” (lj, 40). A large measure of his thought is for the well-being of the crew and the ship. As he writes in the letter to the company, “even now he was not betraying their confidence, since he was leaving the ship to as competent a seaman as could be found” (lj, 41). Brierly’s self-destruction is potentially a self-sacrifice for the good of others. What might be read as a straightforward suicide is connected with self-sacrifice. An important element of Brierly’s identification with Jim is captured in Jones’s remark, “maybe his confidence in himself was just shook a bit at the last” (lj, 41). To emphasize the importance of the remark Conrad has Brierly repeat a variation of it: “Such an affair destroys one’s confidence” (lj, 45). Having thought of Jim’s failure in the face of danger, Brierly questions himself and he loses confidence in his abilities. He begins to doubt whether, “when the call comes,” he will be capable of fulfilling his duties (lj, 45). The suspicion that he is a danger to his ship and crew informs his decision to destroy himself: self-preservation becomes synonymous with endangering others. Through Brierly’s example, Conrad creates a lesson in reading how self-destruction can become equated with self-sacrifice. In the two different examples, Conrad is playing with different pairs of word-ideas, aligning different apposites and opposites to explore what occurs when they come into contact. The lessons emphasize the different elements comprising Jim’s actions. Having attuned our thought to his art, Conrad challenges us to recognize the complications in the trajectory of Jim’s life. Conrad carefully prepares his readers for the account of Jim’s jump with some important passages of conversation and reflection between Marlow and Jim in chapter 7. Three connected ideas are repeated several times: that Jim did not think of himself, that he was not afraid of death, and that he was resigned. Believing that “the ship would go down at any moment,” Jim “imagined what would happen perfectly; he went through it all motionless by the hatchway with the lamp in his hand” (lj, 55). He concludes “that there was nothing I could do. It seemed to take all life out of my limbs. I thought I might just as well stand where I was and wait” (lj, 55). Jim is resigned to the events, being “overburdened

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by the knowledge of an imminent death” (lj, 54). He repeatedly “protested he did not think of saving himself” and that all his thoughts were for the “silent company of the dead,” the eight hundred passengers who would drown when the ship sank. Jim suspects that Marlow doubts him and asks “do you think I was afraid of death?”, then declares “I am ready to swear I was not – I was not” (lj, 55). It is important that later Jim remembers saying to himself “sink – curse you! – Sink” because he “wanted it over” (lj, 63). Alan Hunter points to the exchange in chapter 7 as evidence that a relaxation of Jim’s perfect state of readiness is the cause of his jump. Jim is undermined by “the weariness of having to wait, alert, for the unexpected” and his “relaxation” “caused him to make his irreversible jump.”39 In effect, Jim’s relaxation allows his instinct for self-preservation to dominate. Hunter sees that a kind of willingness for death creates the conditions that make self-preservation possible. In doing so, he drastically undercuts the importance of Jim’s repeated assertions that he was ready to die and separates the potential of a self-destructive impulse from the jump. For Hunter, the jump must be self-preservative and cannot be connected with Jim’s willingness to die. He wants to attribute the jump to one cause; however, Conrad’s representation makes the cause of the action indeterminate because of the multiple causes involved. If Jim is resigned to die, why not make the connection with the jump? The problem is this reading does not take into account Conrad’s insistent and emphatic doubling of Jim with George, the acting third engineer. Philip Weinstein recognizes the significance of the connection between the two characters: “Jim’s account unintentionally but insistently associates himself with George. He jumps into the place reserved for George; more darkly, he jumps into George.”40 Before Jim jumps, the officers who have already abandoned the Patna are calling “Jump, George! Jump! Oh, Jump!”; of course, it is Jim who answers the call (lj, 69). After the jump, Jim recalls that the officers “were abusing me – abusing me … by the name of George” (lj, 73). As Weinstein argues, the importance of the doubling is that Jim “carries George within him – a secret sharer – and George is dead. The implication, borne out in a number of ways, is that Jim is dead too,” or that Jim should be dead, that he has an instinct for self-sacrifice/destruction.41 The possibility is that the jump was meant to ensure his death by plunging into the sea instead 39 Hunter, Joseph Conrad and the Ethics of Darwinism, 42. 40 Weinstein, “‘Nothing Can Touch Me’: Lord Jim,” 465. 41 Weinstein, “‘Nothing Can Touch Me,’” 465.

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of safely landing in the boat. Before recounting the jump, Jim recalls tripping past the dead man and explains to Marlow “it was easy to see he did not want to die either. Droll, isn’t it? May I be shot if he hadn’t been fooled into killing himself! Fooled – neither more nor less. Fooled into it, by heavens! just as I … Ah! If he had only kept still” (lj, 67). The broken phrase “just as I” makes Jim’s comments reflect upon himself as much as they do George. The identification complicates Jim’s earlier insistence that he was resigned to die and was not afraid of death. As the one who remains alive and takes George’s place in the lifeboat, Jim is “fooled” into saving himself, despite his readiness to die. Like George, Jim does not want to die, but this does not mean that only self-preservation is operating in Jim’s jump. In jumping Jim has also been “fooled into killing himself.” He is dead in life after the jump, but not literally dead; therefore, the sacrifice is not complete. In reading Jim’s life afterwards, we should recall Kierkegaard’s argument that “unless you grasp that it requires all the strength of spirit to die, that the hero always dies before his death, you will not come particularly far in your observations on life.”42 Conrad repeatedly signals the importance of Kierkegaard’s observation. The captain of the ship that brought Jim to Patusan reinforces this idea in telling Marlow that “the gentleman was already ‘in the similitude of a corpse’” (lj, 145). One way of reading the rest of Lord Jim is that Jim attempts to preserve a life that he has already destroyed. Another way of reading is that the remainder of the novel is Jim’s attempt to consummate the self-sacrifice/destruction that eluded him here because he was “fooled” into saving himself. In this way the jump is informed by a self-destructive instinct as much as it is a self-preservative instinct. The jump parallels others in the novel: Brierly’s jump is self-destructive and potentially self-sacrificial. The second engineer also associates jumping with self-destruction: “If I thought I was drunk I would jump overboard – do away with myself” (lj, 20). Through these parallels Conrad teaches us to read the jump as a double movement. Both instincts are engaged in a struggle and there is no clear evidence that one has conquered the other or that one dominates as the cause of Jim’s action. But we must consider the possibility that Jim’s jump only appears to be self-preservative and that it really was meant to be self-destructive. And all the actions that follow this decisive moment in Jim’s existence that have been read as self-preservative are potentially self-destructive as Jim moves toward death. The repetitions are unto death, not unto life. 42 Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 141.

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Conrad emphasizes the connection of self-sacrifice and self-destruction in Jim’s lamentations, “ah! what a chance missed! My God! what a chance missed!” (lj, 53). The chance missed is the self-sacrificial death with the pilgrims. Jim explains that once he was in the lifeboat the abuse poured upon him by the officers “kept me alive” and “saved my life,” while his mind was focused on other things (lj, 73). Thinking that the ship sank, Jim was haunted by the missed chance, as Marlow recounts: I believe that, in this first moment, his heart was wrung with all the suffering, that his soul knew the accumulated savour of all the fear, all the horror, all the despair of eight hundred human beings pounced upon in the night by a sudden and violent death, else why should he have said, “It seemed to me that I must jump out of that accursed boat and swim back to see – half a mile – more – any distance – to the very spot …”? Why this impulse? Do you see the significance? Why back to the very spot? Why not drown alongside – if he meant drowning – why back to the very spot, to see – as if his imagination had to be soothed by the assurance that all was over before death could bring relief? I defy any one of you to offer another explanation. It was one of those bizarre and exciting glimpses through the fog. It was an extraordinary disclosure. (lj, 71)

The passage as a whole is an “extraordinary disclosure,” and I read it as one of the most important in the novel. The questions that Marlow directs at his listeners are meant for Conrad’s readers as well; he is asking us if we can conceive of the thought that would inform such an action, if we can see the significance of Jim having to die with the pilgrims. He emphasizes that Jim’s self-sacrifice must occur with his self-destruction. The passage is analogous to Bob’s episode, where Bob identifies with the drowning girl, much in the same way that Marlow thinks all of Jim’s thoughts are for the drowning pilgrims. Jim cannot die for himself, alone: it must be at the service of others. Afterwards, Jim enacts a series of repetitions of the initial jump, each of which emphasizes the basic ambivalence of the original: dropping his employments, escaping from Sherif Ali’s camp, and appearing before Doramin.43 For Freud, the compulsion to repeat is simply a conservative instinct through which an organism attempts to revert or regress back into a prior state. In Conrad’s novel, the movement is ambivalent: it is 43 As Paul Kintzele observes, Jim’s final and fatal meeting with Doramin can be read as “simply another form of jumping” and “by creating a repetitive structure in the narrative, Conrad subtly suggests that Jim is trapped in a behavioral loop.” (“Lord Jim: Conrad’s Fable of Judgment,” 71–2).

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not clear whether Jim is progressing or regressing. And does progress mean moving closer toward death or does it imply that Jim is moving closer to his origins? And in which location should Jim’s heroic ideal be placed? Does Jim progress forward toward it or regress back to it? In chapters 18 and 19, Marlow explains that Jim passed through a series of jobs in quick succession prior to Stein sending him to Patusan. Every time any mention is made of the Patna incident, Jim leaves his employer. The connection with Jim’s jump is made explicit in his conversation with Egström. After Egström tells Jim that “this business ain’t going to sink,” Jim “gave a big jump” (lj, 118). Jim departs to save himself from the disgrace of living with others who know of the incident. But like Brierly, Jim also leaves to save his employers from being disgraced, fearing that if anyone knew his identity his employers would suffer some form of guilt by association and lose business. These departures slowly undermine Jim’s life and his attempts to preserve his moral identity and conscience. He only succeeds in making his secret “perfectly known,” counteracting his own efforts (lj, 119). His attempts to preserve his moral identity are self-destructive. Jim’s repeated attempts to move beyond the Patna incident cause him to recall the experience and re-enact it over and over. The jump from Sherif Ali’s compound is a more explicit repetition of the jump from the Patna. Taking Marlow on a tour of Patusan, Jim points out “this is where I leaped over on my third day in Patusan […]. my second leap. I had a bit of a run and took this one flying, but fell short. Thought I would leave my skin there.”44 The cause for the jump is that “the true perception of his extreme peril dawned upon him” in realizing that Sherif Ali and his men were going to kill him (lj, 152). Before the jump Jim is repairing a clock, which suggests that Jim is in the process of repairing time itself. If he repairs time, then perhaps Jim can have another chance, a repetition, and a variation on his earlier life. As in his first jump, there is no deliberation but rather an instinctive action: “without any mental process as it were, without any stir of emotion, he set about his escape as if executing a plan matured for a month […]. He never thought of anything at the time” (lj, 152). Only afterwards, 44 lj, 151. It is Jim’s third jump literally (he first jumps over the fence, then over the creek), but, metaphorically, it is not if all the “jumps” from the employers are included as well. Of course, there is no forgetting the aborted jump that Jim fails to make off the training ship at the end of the first chapter. Yet there is a distinction to be made in that Jim jumps away from the pilgrims on the Patna and toward the Bugis in Patusan.

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“he came to himself” (lj, 152). The self-preservative escape is transformed at least momentarily into a death scene when, trying to climb up the muddy bank of the river, Jim begins “burying himself alive” then falls asleep before experiencing the “violent convulsive start of awakening” (lj, 153). The jump is a death and rebirth. In making Jim’s life and Lord Jim as a whole a series of repetitions, Conrad is anticipating yet another idea that later became central to Freud’s theory. Freud argues in The Ego and the Id that “both drives behave in a strictly conservative manner” and “seek the restoration of a state that was disrupted by the emergence of life.”45 Freud insists upon the impulse for an organism to return to an inanimate state, but in Beyond the Pleasure Principle the problem is openly stated and relates more directly to Conrad’s inquiry. The whole passage is worth quoting because Freud displays a characteristic tendency to be the first to discover and solve an important question or case. But what is the nature of the connection between the realm of the drives and the compulsion to repeat? At this point we cannot help thinking that we have managed to identify a universal attribute of drives – and perhaps of all organic life – that has not hitherto been clearly recognized, or at any rate not explicitly emphasized. A drive might accordingly be seen as a powerful tendency inherent in every living organism to restore a prior state, which prior state the organism was compelled to relinquish due to the disruptive influence of external forces; we see it as a kind of organic elasticity, or, if we prefer, as a manifestation of inertia in organic life.46

Freud is not the first to investigate and “identify” this “universal attribute.” Conrad was exploring it in his novels before Freud articulated his theories. Jim’s life is a massive preparation for his death or his selfpreservation is a radical movement toward realizing his self-destruction. For readers, understanding the narrative is difficult because Conrad’s design is subtle. If Jim is working to restore a prior state, it is necessary to recognize the conditions of his original state and how it is disrupted. Jim’s life began in “piety and peace” (lj, 8). The first test aboard the training ship represents a minor disruption of this peace which is, at least apparently, quickly restored in Jim’s mind. The second test Conrad creates provides a “glimpse of the earnestness in the anger of the sea” that betrays a 45 Freud, The Ego and the Id, 131. 46 Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 76.

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“sinister violence of intention” in a “complication of accidents” “coming at him with a purpose of malice, with a strength beyond control” (lj, 11). The storm “means to tear out of him his hope and his fear, the pain of his fatigue and his longing for rest,” destroying “all that is priceless and necessary” (lj, 11). Following the storm, Jim is “tormented as if at the bottom of an abyss of unrest” (lj, 11). While in this torment, Jim is indifferent toward death because his peace has been disrupted. The unrest brings a “rush of anguish [that] would grip him bodily” and make him revolt against the “unintelligent brutality of an existence liable to the agony of such sensations [which] filled him with a despairing desire to escape at any cost” (lj, 12). The disturbance that Jim experiences is extreme. The peace that exists before the storm is nothing short of a necessary condition for Jim’s existence, but then the question is why the condition is necessary. Jim escapes the torments by incurring the relatively small cost of being left behind in a hospital when his ship departs. There he settles into a life of tranquility with the “gift of endless dreams” “resembling a holiday pageant” (lj, 12). The space of time on shore is the epitome of “eternal serenity” and “smiling peace” (lj, 12). Among the other men he stays with, there are two groups: the ones who “led mysterious lives” with the “temper of buccaneers” and the others who developed “a horror of the home service” and “shuddered at the thought of hard work” and preferred “a soft thing” in the form of an “easy billet” (lj, 12–13). Jim develops a “fascination” for the latter group, and by renouncing an opportunity to return home, the original place of peace, he finds a compromise wherein he can remain a sailor and realize his “determination to lounge safely through existence” (lj, 13). Jim’s work on the Patna is as close to peace as possible and far from the “killing work” he later endures as a “waterclerk” (lj, 121, 7). For both Jim and the pilgrims that board the Patna, the voyage is informed by “the hope of paradise” (lj, 13). Jim’s time on the Patna prior to the accident is characterized by “the assurance of everlasting serenity,” as if the ship “had been part of the scheme of a safe universe” (lj, 15). He delights in the safety and peace of the moment: “Jim on the bridge was penetrated by the great certitude of unbounded safety and peace that could be read on the silent aspect of nature like the certitude of fostering love upon the placid tenderness of a mother’s face” (lj, 15). The “very excess of wellbeing” is marked by an “invincible aspect of […] peace” (lj, 17). The disturbance in the motion of the ship that causes the engineer to tumble and the “vibration” to which the ship “quivered in response” are simultaneously a disturbance in the peace of Jim’s life (lj, 21). Everything that

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Jim thought was invincible is broken “and suddenly the calm sea, the sky without a cloud, appeared formidably insecure in their immobility, as if poised on the brow of yawning destruction” (lj, 21). Following the Patna incident, everything in Jim’s life manifests a desire to restore the conditions of peace that have been destroyed. Once the comforting habitual condition is lacking, one part of Jim’s being needs the restoration to satisfy the want, but then Conrad forces us to ask why Jim attempts to restore these conditions. To what end? The restoration also creates the condition for Jim to potentially achieve the ideal that has eluded him before. It makes an opportunity to realize his heroism, so in one sense, the movement is a progress because Jim is moving into a new time in his living; however, the heroic ideal that he moves toward is still an element of his childhood fantasies. Conrad simply will not allow the reader to judge with any degree of certainty whether Jim is progressing or regressing in his living. Significantly, Jim is unable to establish the conditions for this restoration prior to his stay in Patusan. He cannot find peace, but once he arrives in Patusan Jim creates the conditions that have been lacking. By ending the war in the country Jim completes two complementary tasks: he brings peace to the Bugis while making peace for himself. Marlow explains that “there was no doubt that it had come to him; and it had come through war, too, as is natural, since this power that came to him was the power to make peace. It is in this sense alone that might so often is right” (lj, 157). The “moral effect of his victory in war” is “in truth immense” for both Jim and the Bugis (lj, 161). The language describing the victory is important: “It had led him from strife to peace” (lj, 161). When Jim exults “that he often watched these tiny warm gleams go out one by one, that he loved to see people go to sleep under his eyes, confident in the security of to-morrow,” he fully shares in the satisfaction of the peace. The contentment resonates in his rhetorical question to Marlow: “Peaceful here, hey?”47 Having created the conditions restoring the prior state, it is understandable why, in response to Marlow’s question about leaving, Jim answers, “it would have been harder than dying” (lj, 149). Death is preferable to leaving the peacefulness 47 lj, 149. Daniel Ross observes that Patusan is an “environment of constant hostility, danger, and intrigue” (“Saving Illusion,” 56). In light of the assassination plots and the presence of Cornelius, Ross may be right, but then Jim’s idea that Patusan is peaceful is an illusion he maintains for himself. The problem is unchanged, because whether the peace is real or not, Jim believes that it exists here for him and the Bugis, and his belief is what determines his behaviour.

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again. The idea should be recalled when Jim presents himself for judgment before Doramin. Jim’s inability to leave partly informs Marlow’s reflection concerning why the accomplishments “that made [Jim] master had made him a captive too” (lj, 149). When Jim looks with “an owner’s eye at the peace of the evening” and Marlow explains that the country had “possessed” Jim, it is because the conditions are necessary for himself. Conditions other than those Jim creates in Patusan are unendurable. Jim explicitly identifies the condition of peace with himself; Marlow emphasizes that Jim “had made himself responsible” (lj, 158, 176). When we recognize the connection between what Jim has lost by jumping from the Patna and what he has regained in creating the peace in Patusan, Marlow’s earlier reflections about Jim’s readiness for death take on an added significance: He might have been resigned to die, but I suspect he wanted to die without added terrors, quietly, in a sort of peaceful trance. A certain readiness to perish is not so very rare, but it is seldom that you meet men whose souls, steeled in the impenetrable armor of resolution, are ready to fight a losing battle to the last; the desire of peace waxes stronger as hope declines, till at last it conquers the very desire of life. Which of us here has not observed this, or maybe experienced something of that feeling in his own person – the extreme weariness of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest? (lj, 56)

The conditions Jim creates in Patusan are the most analogous to those at the hospital and on the Patna before the incidents that occur in the later part of novel. Both moments are a “sort of peaceful trance.” And both are a space of time in which Jim might have died “without added terrors.” The question Conrad raises is whether that desire for peace is self-destructive. With Jim’s actions in Patusan in mind, the argument is difficult to see steadily and whole. Jim demands the conditions of peace that existed prior to the Patna incident (which in themselves make Jim’s existence resemble a kind of death in life). Jim arrives in Patusan and successfully creates and enjoys those peaceful conditions, at least until the arrival of Brown. The creation of those conditions is simultaneously self-preservative and self-sacrificial. He endangers his life to create the peace for himself and the Bugis; he risks death in order to survive. The account of Jim drinking the potentially poisoned coffee when meeting with Tunku Allang is a concentrated example of this. Enduring the monthly ritual in which there is the “barest chance” that Jim will be poisoned is necessary if he is “to do any good here and preserve [his]

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position” (lj, 151). When Marlow charges Jim with having a “fierce egoism,” there is some relation to Marlow’s thought about Brierly’s narcissism (lj, 150). For Brierly, self-destruction meant self-sacrifice for the good of his ship and crew. The potential self-destruction Jim risks in taking the coffee is a necessary self-sacrifice for the Bugis, but it is also necessary for his own self-preservation. If the conditions were destroyed, Jim might not live, or he might return to the tortured existence he experienced before. If Jim dies from the coffee, the death would occur in the peaceful conditions he created and without the added terrors that a war would bring. While Jim creates conditions that are necessary for him to live, these are also the conditions in which he can die. Through the composite heroic ideal of his dreams, Jim’s choice for his death is created and repeated until it is rendered instinctual. The self-sacrificial death becomes inseparable from Jim’s nature. But Conrad shows that the idea of choosing a death is complicated. As Nietzsche often argues, impulses or drives can completely overwhelm a person, making the ideas of freedom, will, and choice insignificant. Nietzsche is not consistent in his arguments about the value of the will, and I am not sure Conrad thinks that we entirely lack will and freedom. The problem is that Jim’s instincts are working against each other; Jim might have an instinct for a self-sacrificial death, but his self-preservative instincts do not simply resign themselves in order for him to be satisfied in this. Nor does Jim have total control over the moment of his death. Jim’s selfsacrificial death is frustrated in some way by his self-preservative instinct or by chance allowing him to land in the lifeboat. In the later part of the novel, Conrad emphasizes that Jim does not have an unlimited freedom in defining the conditions for his death by having Brown upset the peace in Patusan. Jim might work toward creating conditions that express his instincts, but he can only do so much. The conditions of the novel and the trajectory of the plot are larger than Jim’s life and the workings of his internal drives. Nevertheless, there is a moment in which Jim achieves something akin to “mastering his fate”: his confrontation with the assassins (lj, 164, 193). But even here Conrad depicts a complicated collision among different ideas that can produce different readings. Jim is tested repeatedly by external agents: the storm on the training ship, the derelict ship that the Patna strikes, the men with knowledge of the Patna affair, the assassins, and Brown. In only one of the tests does Jim have any real control and he imagines that they are all “too much for any man” (lj, 77). The one possible exception is Jim’s confrontation with the assassins in which he appears to achieve as complete a

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control of the situation as humanly possible; however, his measure of control is anything but assured. One of the significant differences between the test on the Patna and the test with the assassins is Jim’s readiness. Jim is not ready for the assassination attempt, because “he was weary of these attempts upon his life” (lj, 177). The complication is the degree to which Jim’s instinct for self-preservation is relaxed and/or Jim is actively courting death. Jewel keeps watch over Jim, who was “to be set upon while [he] slept” (lj, 177). If she had not, then it is likely that Jim would have died. This is surely not the death that Jim desires. When Jim suggests “I was not quite myself for whole weeks on end about that time,” Marlow contradicts him: “Oh yes. You were though” (lj, 177). For readers, the problem is discerning how Jim is fully himself in the scene that follows. Reading Jim’s confrontation with the assassins is difficult. Initially, it appears as though Jim is engaged in a simple act of self-preservation: it is either him or the assassins. But Jim’s thoughts reveal a more troubling set of problems. According to Freud’s theories in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Jim is identical to the child at play in that he makes himself the master of the situation. In Freud’s reading, Jim is revenging himself upon these men for the cruelties that he has suffered before. This might explain Jim’s “vengeful elation” and his forcing the three remaining assassins to jump into the river, thereby making them relive his own experience (lj, 179–80). However, the psychoanalytic explanation simplifies the scene because the identification implied in the forced re-enactment of Jim’s experience is more complicated.48 Potentially, Jim is doing unto others what he would have done to himself: his annihilation of the assassin is also identification because Jim desires death for himself. Conrad makes Jim’s mastery very strange. The act of self-preservation is mixed with a strange expression of Jim’s desire for death. Or, the act of selfpreservation obscures the coexisting instinct for self-destruction. In this passage, the instinct for self-destruction has only been displaced momentarily. Jim has himself as much in mind as the assassin that he is killing. If Jim believes that “the death of that man had atoned for 48 Weinstein argues that “Jim relishes this death scene too intensely for it not to relate massively to his own. His prolonged savoring of this moment in which a dangerous man is about to be annihilated by his own greater power reverses satisfyingly his earlier nightmare of impotence. ‘Relief … vengeful elation … appeased … atoned’ – this is the language of a man with a death inside him, and he is ready to inflict it on others, as he is ‘heroically’ ready to inflict it on himself” (466).

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everything,” then this may also be true of his own death (lj, 179). In the immediate context, the referent for “that” appears to be immediately clear, but when we think about the novel as a whole, Conrad includes Jim in “that” as well. In the final scene of the novel, Jim occupies the dead man’s position, and Conrad asks us to consider the degree to which his death “atoned for everything.” Conrad’s preoccupation with the complicated relationship between the instincts for self-preservation and self-sacrifice/destruction persists throughout many of his major works. In The Secret Agent, the conflict informs nearly all the major characters to some degree, and in Under Western Eyes, Conrad returns to explore a pattern very close to Lord Jim. Conrad is strongly preoccupied with these kinds of questions and complicates them by exploring the relation of the instincts to knowing. Conrad asks whether Nietzsche’s own self-preservation depends on the avoidance of feeling pity, or whether that denial is actually self-destructive.

6 Conrad versus Nietzsche versus Christ

having spent a great deal of time thinking about how to characterize Conrad’s thought about Friedrich Nietzsche, I am convinced that it is best described as a profound ambivalence. Conrad’s response to Nietzsche is analogous to Marlow’s response to Jim: a conflicted combination of sympathy and judgment. Lord Jim and The Secret Agent can be read as Conrad’s critical inquiries into key aspects of Nietzsche’s thought, and some specific passages from Victory can be used to identify important problems in reading Conrad’s criticism of Nietzsche. Conrad’s responses to Nietzsche are contradictory, and, as George Butte argues, they include “unwilling sympathy and hostility, imitation and parody, as Conrad seems to argue with Nietzsche about the best human response to knowing the worst of our condition.”1 For Conrad, Nietzsche exemplifies the best and worst of our condition, and he struggles to acknowledge the best and worst in Nietzsche’s thought. But Conrad also struggles with his sympathy and antipathy toward Nietzsche’s ideas, some of which are uncomfortably close to Conrad’s own convictions. The conflicted thought in the novels is an indication of Conrad’s difficulty in writing about Nietzsche’s ideas. Conrad’s ambivalence toward Nietzsche is encapsulated in the language which he employs in the “Author’s Note” to The Secret Agent, where, in a characteristic manner that recalls Nietzsche’s preoccupation with antithetical thinking, a pair of ideas – pity and contempt – are 1 Butte, “What Silenus Knew: Conrad’s Uneasy Debt to Nietzsche,” 155. In his reading of “Conrad’s ambivalence towards Nietzsche” in The Secret Agent, Butte recognizes that “the generally ambivalent, often self-dismantling ironies of the novel seem to communicate a divided response” (166, 167). Butte’s arguments should be compared with Nic Panagopoulos’s work on Conrad and Nietzsche.

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suspended on either side of a conjunction, raising questions about the opposition or apposition between the terms. But the inclusion of a third term further complicates the passage: Conrad defends “the whole treatment of the tale” by arguing that The Secret Agent is informed by an “inspiring indignation and underlying pity and contempt” (tsa, 38). These three ideas are all interconnected through conjunctions, which makes the passage difficult to read with sufficient care and attention. Raising the question of how the three terms are related, Conrad begins with an emotion that is qualified by and qualifies the emotions that follow. It is unclear if these responses are simultaneous or one is the cause of the others. Arguably, among the important causes of Conrad’s inspiration to write are Nietzsche’s ideas. The indignation written into The Secret Agent expresses Conrad’s pity for Nietzsche’s lack of insight into or wilful not knowing of himself which causes his self-destruction. It also expresses Conrad’s contempt for Nietzsche’s striving to be a great man through his attempts to destroy Christianity. Or, to change the problem slightly by using the dominant language from Lord Jim, Conrad sympathizes with Nietzsche’s suffering but judges Nietzsche’s thought to be inadequate. By carefully reading the criticism embodied in the novels, we recognize that Conrad perceives that the great master of antithetical thinking fails to know himself sufficiently, through the very antithesis which he constructs, and reveals how Nietzsche’s not knowing is an important cause of his self-destruction. Like Nietzsche, Conrad, too, is a master of antithetical thinking; he is adept at synthesizing, confounding, and conflating what are usually viewed as distinct or opposite ideas, positions, or arguments. “The Secret Sharer” is the most obvious example of his strength, but the same sensibility informs all the major fiction. He understands very well that the relationship between pity and contempt is not simply antithetical, having written a sustained meditation on the relationship between the two concepts in Victory. The lessons Heyst’s father teaches concerning the antithesis are important because they show how Conrad revisits Nietzsche’s thought about these ideas.2 But the other question that Conrad raises is the degree to which contempt becomes a defence against pity, a consideration that answers to Nietzsche’s thought.3 Conrad 2 In Conrad: The Later Moralist, J.E. Saveson argues that Victory is clearly influenced by “Nietzsche’s philosophy” and explores how Victory is “predominantly a Nietzschean work with a Nietzschean psychology” (111, 119). 3 Saveson claims that Heyst’s father is close to Schopenhauer and that Conrad is expressing a Nietzschean opposition to him (119).

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asks us to consider how Nietzsche’s dominant intellectual movement toward contempt conceals an equally strong movement toward pity when we read the representation of Stevie in The Secret Agent. In the “Author’s Note” for Victory, Conrad repeatedly returns to the notion of “detachment,” especially in connection with Axel Heyst, who is the very embodiment of the idea in the novel (v, 48). If Conrad “wouldn’t be suspected even remotely of making fun of Axel Heyst,” then the disagreeableness of the idea is partly informed by Conrad himself playing a part at times very much like his difficult hero in the passage from which I quoted in “Author’s Note” to The Secret Agent (v, 48). The “underlying pity and contempt” are offered as proof of his “detachment” in writing The Secret Agent (tsa, 38). The relationship between Conrad and Heyst, his unbelieving hero, is entangled in the close proximity between skepticism and detachment. In The Secret Agent and Lord Jim, Conrad rewrites and revalues Nietzsche’s criticism of Christianity, primarily through the central heroes or victims or scapegoats: Stevie and Jim.4 The problem of knowing which of the three terms best applies to the two characters is not resolved because Conrad shows how there is a degree of truth in identifying Stevie and Jim with all three. The characters are a complex combination or conflation of heroes, victims, and scapegoats. By writing passages that can be read as commenting on aspects of Nietzsche’s thought in both characters, Conrad suggests that Nietzsche can potentially be identified with all three ideas. In the representations of the two characters, Conrad reworks many ideas central to Nietzsche’s thinking about Christianity, which is to say his thought as a whole.5 When read together, Lord Jim and The Secret Agent constitute an elaborate and sustained meditation on the problems inherent in Nietzsche’s professed antithetical relationship to Christianity, famously expressed in the final line of Ecce Homo: “Have I been understood? – Dionysus against the Crucified …” (eh, 104). Through Stevie and Jim, Conrad collapses the opposition that Nietzsche constructs. For Conrad, there is much less 4 Garry Watson discusses Stevie as a scapegoat in relation to Girard’s arguments concerning the “sacrificial crisis” at the centre of Christianity (“Fundamental Information,” 218). 5 I am of the same mind as Girard who holds that Nietzsche’s philosophy as a whole cannot be separated in any way from his antipodal relationship with Christianity. In Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Walter Kaufmann also argues that Nietzsche’s position toward Christianity “is so intimately related to the rest of his thought that his philosophy cannot be fully understood apart from it” (337).

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of a difference than Nietzsche desires between himself and Christ. And not only is Conrad’s response to Nietzsche marked by a profound pity and contempt for the great philosopher’s life and thought, but the very problem Conrad identifies as crucial in Nietzsche’s thinking is the troubling preoccupation with repudiating pity, compassion, or sympathy and the characteristic tendency toward contempt, disgust, and repudiation found throughout the philosopher’s works. Nietzsche is burdened by the thought of whether to feel pity or contempt for the suffering that he recognizes in humanity. Judging by the action in the novels, Conrad views this difficulty in combination with the near obsession with Christ and Christianity in the last year of Nietzsche’s life and reveals an important cause for Nietzsche’s self-destruction and descent into madness. In part, Conrad reveals this insight through his representation of Stevie, a complex character that draws upon a rich literary history that includes Jo from Bleak House, Raskolnikov from Crime and Punishment, and Prince Myshkin from The Idiot, and who should be read as a commentary on significant aspects of Nietzsche’s life and thought. In Stevie, the initial tension between and then later collapse of pity and resentment is one of the causes leading to his explosion. But the problem of pity and contempt, closely related to but not exactly the same as the relation between sympathy and judgment, is also the underlying consideration in Lord Jim, where Conrad writes an inquiry into the limitations of belief and skepticism. Perhaps the best way to indicate Conrad’s concern is to point to the problem which preoccupied Nietzsche in The Anti-Christ: “the psychological type of the redeemer” (a, 152. Section 29). Through Stevie and Jim, Conrad reveals how Nietzsche’s own thought is characteristic of the “type of the redeemer.” In the representation of the characters Conrad measures Nietzsche against his own categories and judgments and asks whether the philosopher is true to the “type.” Conrad’s two redeemers can be read as sustained meditations upon Nietzsche’s troubled philosophy. Arguably, Conrad is one of the best of Nietzsche’s readers early in the twentieth century and remains one of his best readers today. It should not be surprising that Conrad is preoccupied with Nietzsche, nor surprising that Conrad’s works often extend or combat vital ideas in Nietzsche’s thought. As Allan Bloom comments, “Nietzsche’s effect was immediately felt by artists in all Western countries. He was the rage from 1890 on, and hardly any important painter, poet or novelist was immune to his charm.”6 In Nietzsche, Conrad found many of the same 6 Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, 309.

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intellectual and philosophical questions with which he was preoccupied; like Dostoevsky, Nietzsche might be identified as a literary brother with whom Conrad quarrels over the questions central to modernity. In Nietzsche in England: 1890–1914, David Thatcher demonstrates Nietzsche’s presence in the intellectual atmosphere of late Victorian and modern England and emphasizes that “Nietzsche’s impact was most strongly felt, not in academic circles, but in artistic ones.”7 Thatcher’s work is corroborated by Conrad’s own testimony in the letters of 26 October 1899 and 9 November 1899 in which he alludes to Edward Garnett’s article on Nietzsche, which appeared in Outlook on 8 July 1899. Conrad undoubtedly read the article, as did the many people who wrote to him about it. According to Thatcher, numerous editions of Nietzsche’s works were available in French and English, many of them published between 1895 and 1901, giving Conrad ample opportunity to read his works.8 Not only were Nietzsche’s books available, but passages from his works were printed in English journals and newspapers along with other reviews and commentaries on his work.9 Also, Max Nordau published his criticism of Nietzsche in Degeneration in 1895 and the enormous success of the book resulted in further editions in 1898, 1913, and 1920.10 Conrad’s close friend Garnett was a personal connection who might have been instrumental in bringing Nietzsche into Conrad’s life. In what must have been a very suggestive article for Conrad, Garnett identifies Nietzsche as the man who “is going to root out pity from the heart,” “wage war on Sentimentalism, Pity, Christianity,” and “isolate[d] himself from the outer world” because of “suffering.”11 Sustained meditations on these ideas are found throughout Conrad’s novels. 7 Thatcher, Nietzsche in England, 121. 8 For a full list of titles and the publication dates for the translations, see Thatcher, Nietzsche in England, x. The most important titles, with the publication dates for the translations in parenthesis, include the following: The Birth of Tragedy (1901), Human, All Too Human (1899), The Dawn (1901), The Gay Science (1901), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1898), Beyond Good and Evil (1898), The Genealogy of Morals (1900), The Twilight of the Idols (1899), Nietzsche Contra Wagner (1899), and The AntiChrist (1899) were all published in French editions; Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1896), The Genealogy of Morals (1899), Twilight of the Idols (1896), Nietzsche Contra Wagner (1896), and The Anti-Christ (1896) were all available in English. 9 See the first chapter of David Thatcher, Nietzsche in England. 10 In a letter dated 22 November 1898, Conrad acknowledges receiving an autograph of Nordau’s from A.E. Bontine in which Nordau praises Conrad’s work (cljc 2, 121). 11 Garnett, “Nietzsche,” 6, 7, 10.

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A lasting preoccupation with Nietzsche can be inferred from the fact that Nietzsche’s name appears in Conrad’s letters from 1899 to 1913. In the earliest letter, he discusses the philosopher in relation to the problem of faith in a letter to Helen Sanderson on 22 July 1899, writing about how “the mad individualism of Niet[z]sche the exaggerated altruism of the next man tainted with selfishness and pride come with their noise and froth, pass away and are forgotten” (cljc 2, 188). In a letter to Ford Madox Ford on 23 July 1901, Conrad recalls a conversation he had about Nietzsche’s thought in which he said “that’s what Niet[z]sche’s philphy [sic] leads to – here’s your overman,” clearly alluding to Nietzsche’s arguments about the Übermensch (cljc 2, 344). In a letter of 16 April 1909, Conrad thanks J.G. Huneker for including his name in the latter’s book, Egoists: A Book of Supermen, which also included Nietzsche (cljc 4, 217). And there is the letter of thanks to André Ruyters on 30 March 1913 for a book in which the latter attempts to reconcile the antithetical relationship between Nietzsche and Christ (cljc 5, 202–4). Clearly, not only Nietzsche’s name, but his ideas were well known to Conrad. It is also worth noting that, in “The Crime of Partition,” an essay published in 1919, Conrad includes Nietzsche’s name in his attack on German foreign policy.12 Given the number of editions of Nietzsche’s work available in French and English, Garnett’s interest in Nietzsche, years of allusions and references to Nietzsche in his writings, and Conrad’s love of reading, it is hard to believe Conrad had no knowledge of one of the most famous philosophers at the beginning of the twentieth century. In Victory, there are passages that seem to comment on Conrad’s first encounters with Nietzsche’s thought and suggest he became familiar with the philosopher’s thought years before the novel was published. By exploring the relationship between pity and contempt in Victory, we can recognize how Conrad transforms the skeptical confounding of the distinction between pity and contempt often expressed in Nietzsche’s philosophy into the ideas and words of Heyst’s father.13 The elder Heyst’s thoughts are seriously qualified by how Heyst remembers and/or the narrator describes him, as the man sitting “rigid in the high-backed chair,” 12 Conrad, Notes on Life and Letters, 125. 13 In “Conrad’s Victory and the English Tradition,” L.R. Leavis and Detlef Wagenaar argue that the philosophy of the elder Heyst is related to Schopenhauer (488). The problem with this view is that the elder Heyst views pity contemptuously, whereas my own reading of the centrality of pity for Schopenhauer’s philosophy is confirmed by Brian Leiter’s argument that “for Schopenhauer, compassion is the true basis of morality” (Nietzsche on Morality, 57).

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“who had spent his life in blowing blasts upon a terrible trumpet which had filled heaven and earth with ruins, while mankind went on its way unheeding” (v, 194). At the opening of the third chapter of part two, he is described as the “thinker, stylist, and man of the world” who “had dragged on this painful earth of ours the most weary, the most uneasy soul that civilization had ever fashioned” (v, 129). Rather grudgingly, the narrator observes that “one could not refuse him a measure of greatness, for he was unhappy in a way unknown to mediocre souls” (v, 129). Like Nietzsche, Heyst’s father had been ignored in his lifetime, and they both share an “uneasy soul” and a greatness allied to a kind of suffering only known by superior men. There is a grandeur in the style describing the elder Heyst’s failure to convince others (v, 194). Heyst is the living embodiment of the education the father provided. His troubled life and his problems with human solidarity are shown to be a direct consequence of his inability to escape from his father’s teaching; his detachment is interconnected with his intellectual tendency toward contempt for others through which his sympathy is only intermittently revealed. If the elder Heyst includes aspects of Nietzsche’s thought, then this raises the question of the degree to which Heyst is analogous to Conrad. The question is whether the pity and contempt in Heyst’s feelings toward his father can be read as analogous to Conrad’s response to Nietzsche. The description of Heyst’s father as “that bitter contemner of life” resembles Nietzsche’s criticism of lives rooted in resentment and Christian/slave morality, but differs from Nietzsche’s acceptance of life as a whole (v, 194). Some aspects of the elder Heyst’s lessons to his son sound strikingly Nietzschean, undoubtedly because the man is represented as “the silenced destroyer of systems, of hopes, of beliefs” (v, 194). Conrad’s identification of Nietzsche as one of “the great minds” in the letter to André Ruyters on 30 March 1913 should be kept in mind when reading Heyst’s recollections of his father.14 If Conrad was reading Ruyters’s work about Christ and Nietzsche and writing about Nietzsche in his letters in the time before composing Victory, then it is very likely that he had Nietzsche in mind when writing the novel. The aspects of Nietzsche’s thought present in the elder Heyst will be easier to recognize if we have a sample of Nietzsche’s repudiation of pity 14 cljc 5, 204. In a footnote, Frederick Karl explains that Ruyters “had undertaken the formidable task of reconciling Christ and Nietzsche” (cljc 5, 203). Of course, the fact that Conrad had read Ruyter’s Le Mauvais Riche before writing Victory reinforces my conjectures about the degree to which Heyst and/or his father are written with Nietzsche’s ideas in mind.

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in mind. On the Genealogy of Morals is a sustained meditation on pity, the central problem provoking Nietzsche’s study as it relates to resentment and the slave morality of Christianity. Any number of passages from the work would be useful here; however, a troubling passage from Beyond Good and Evil, which condenses many of the concerns in the earlier work, helps bring the problem in Nietzsche’s thought into focus. Nietzsche argues that, in nineteenth-century Europe, “no other religion is any longer preached now” except for “pity and fellow suffering” (bge, 151. Section 222). He marks this as part of the “darkening and uglification of Europe” (bge, 151). Nietzsche’s rejection of pity emphasizes how it can be a form of contempt, and his play with words shows his contempt for pity. Nietzsche argues that anyone with an artist’s conscience will look down on [certain modes of thought] with derision, though not without pity. Pity for you! That, to be sure, is not pity for social “distress,” for “society” and its sick and unfortunate, for the vicious and broken from the start who lie all around us; even less is it pity for the grumbling, oppressed, rebellious slave classes who aspire after domination – they call it “freedom.” Our pity is a more elevated, more farsighted pity – we see how man is diminishing himself – how you are diminishing him! […]. And that your pity is for the “creature in man,” for that which has to be formed, broken, forged, torn, burned, annealed, refined – that which has to suffer and should suffer? And our pity – do you not grasp whom our opposite pity is for when it defends itself against your pity as the worst of all pampering and weakening? – Pity against pity, then! – But to repeat, there are higher problems than the problems of pleasure and pain and pity; and every philosophy that treats only of them is a piece of naïvety. (bge, 155–6. Section 255)

Nietzsche scorns Christian pity for defending the weak and suffering. His revaluation confounds the distinctions between pity and scorn in order to enlist an apparently Christian value for his own service. The question is whether Nietzsche still recognizes the need for the distinction or simply replaces the former rejected meaning with his new “elevated” definition. Conrad takes up Nietzsche’s preoccupation in the third part of Victory by representing Heyst’s recollections of his father’s ideas. The first passage in which the father’s ideas appear is in a scene reminiscent of Heart of Darkness, wherein death creeps among “the London houses [which] began to look like the tombs of an unvisited, unhonoured, cemetery of hopes” (v, 194). The father’s “unexpectedly soft mood” signals that this dialogue is an exceptional moment in the great destroyer’s life, and it is significant that the father is answering Heyst’s question – “Is there no

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guidance?” – about the existence of God or providence (v, 194). For Nietzsche, the only answer is no. The elder Heyst answers: “You still believe in something, then?” he said in a clear voice, which had been growing feeble of late. “You believe in flesh and blood, perhaps? A full and equable contempt would soon do away with that, too. But since you have not attained to it, I advise you to cultivate that form of contempt which is called pity. It is perhaps the least difficult – always remembering that you, too, if you are anything, are as pitiful as the rest, yet never expecting any pity for yourself.” (v, 194)

In Nietzsche’s criticism, belief is intimately related to the origins of Christian culture and the pity toward suffering. The negation of all belief is ultimately the negation of the idea of God as well as Christian morality. In Conrad’s passage, the first use of contempt is an expression of complete negation, and the word “nihilism” comes to mind. The second form of contempt masquerades as pity, and here Conrad reproduces the intellectual manoeuvre that Nietzsche accomplishes in the previously quoted passage. Conrad challenges readers to question whether there is a “form of contempt which is called pity.” If so, does pity always include something inherently contemptuous in its expression? There is a suggestion of two kinds or levels of contempt, one elevated and possessed by the intellectual, and the other debased and possessed by the masses. The first corresponds closely to Nietzsche’s revaluation of pity, and the second corresponds to the pity upon which he heaps his scorn. While the first kind raises the thinker above everything – partly recalling Conrad’s preoccupation with detachment – the second kind lowers the thinker into a position alongside everything else which is pitiable, weak, and resentful. The second is the lesser achievement in the valuation offered here, a lesser form of morality. By dramatically enacting his inquiry into the ideas, Conrad explores Nietzsche’s thought without taking a definite position. We are given yet another view of the father’s thought when Heyst is reading one of his father’s books in the fifth chapter of part three.15 Nothing in the first section of the father’s prose suggests anything especially Nietzschean in the thinking; however, the second and longer of the two passages can be read as an oblique commentary upon Nietzsche’s intellectual position and thought. Heyst’s father makes an inadvertent confession of himself through his psychological musings which suggests that he is one of the “men of tormented conscience, or 15 Specifically, pages 230–1 in Victory.

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of a criminal imagination [who] are aware of much that minds of a peaceful, resigned cast do not even suspect” (v, 230). This sounds suspiciously close to Nietzsche’s claim that suffering is the primary source of great human accomplishments: “The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – do you not know that it is this discipline alone which has created every elevation of mankind hitherto?” (bge, 155. Section 225). And the allusion to the criminal recalls Nietzsche’s intermittent admiration for criminals as great men reduced to being victims of Christian society.16 The last two lines of the Conrad passage are especially compelling because of the idea that “man alone can give one the disgust of pity; yet I find it easier to believe in the misfortune of mankind than in its wickedness” (v, 231). The use of the word “believe” is surprising because the elder Heyst repudiates belief. The fact that it enters into his thought here must be important. Disgust is different from contempt, yet the word is still connected with pity. What is perhaps surprising is that the elder Heyst’s thought moves, if only for a moment, toward something we might recognize as real pity. Of course, it is a mixture of pity and disgust because the elder Heyst’s intellectual instinct precludes any separation of the two; however, the father acknowledges some misfortune and does not simply blame humanity for its weaknesses or failures. It is what we least expect from the elder Heyst or from Nietzsche. But Conrad has good reason to suspect that the man of great scorn is also the man of great pity: an impulse or instinct toward disgust can act as a defence against the instinct toward pity. Or, emphasizing Conrad’s preoccupation with the troubling relation between knowing and not knowing, Nietzsche’s contempt is a form of not knowing his own pity or his capacity for pity. The passages from Victory can be read as a commentary on two important passages in Beyond Good and Evil in which Nietzsche’s thoughts are analogous to the ideas of the elder Heyst. In the same section from which I quoted previously, Nietzsche uncharacteristically reveals that “there are times when we behold your pity with an indescribable anxiety, when we defend ourselves against this pity” (bge, 155. Section 225). Is 16 For example, in his argument concerning Dostoevsky’s insight in The House of the Dead, Nietzsche reveals that “the Siberian convicts in whose midst he lived for a long time, nothing but the worst criminals for whom no return to society was possible, [were] very different from what he himself had expected – he found them to be carved out of about the best, hardest and most valuable timber growing anywhere on Russian soil” (t, 110. “Expeditions of an Untimely Man,” Section 45).

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there a note of genuine fear and trembling in those words? In the context of the passage as a whole it is easy to pass over this statement as yet another of Nietzsche’s counter movements against Christian pity, as if to say “I have more to fear from you than you have to fear from me.” Nevertheless, if the anxiety is “indescribable,” then perhaps Nietzsche does not have complete control over the fear of which he is speaking. He cannot or will not know it. The unknown or unknowable quality of the pity provokes Nietzsche to defend himself against it, a reaction suggesting an instinct for self-preservation. The idea that Conrad is in dialogue with some important passages in Beyond Good and Evil is strengthened when we recognize that later in Nietzsche’s book there are two consecutive sections in which Nietzsche first thinks about the problem of pity and then immediately turns to the problem of disgust. Nietzsche prides himself on his abilities as “a born, an unavoidable psychologist and reader of souls” but a genuine sense of unease enters into his style when he explains that the more the psychologist “turns his attention to the more select cases and human beings, the greater grows the danger of his suffocating from pity: he needs hardness and cheerfulness more than other men. For the corruption, the ruination of higher human beings, of more strangely constituted souls, is the rule: it is dreadful to have such a rule always before one’s eyes” (bge, 206. Section 269; bge, 207. Section 269). The danger of “suffocating from pity” is a very real threat for Nietzsche and later he describes how the psychologist requires a “cure” to defend himself against being overwhelmed by pity (bge, 207). Notice the last sentence in the passage above. Whether or not Nietzsche considers himself one of the “higher human beings” is a problem here. To what degree does Nietzsche fear the ruination of himself? And will it be pity or hardness which contributes most to this ruination? Just as the elder Heyst proposes that attaining a high level of contempt elevates and separates a thinker from others, Nietzsche remarks in the very next passage that “profound suffering ennobles; it separates” and that “spiritual haughtiness and disgust” is the consequence of suffering (bge, 209. Section 270). In The Anti-Christ Nietzsche makes an explicit confession which is unmistakably the counterpart to his fear of suffocating from pity; that is, his fear of choking from contempt: “At this point I shall not suppress a sigh. There are days when I am haunted by a feeling blacker than the blackest melancholy – contempt of man. And so as to leave no doubt as to what I despise, whom I despise: it is the man of today, the man with whom I am contemporary. The man of today – I suffocate of his impure breath […]. What was formerly merely morbid has today become

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indecent – it is indecent to be a Christian today. And here is where my disgust commences” (a, 161. Section 38). In passages such as this, we see in Nietzsche the kind of psychological problem which Conrad reveals in the brief glimpses he provides of the elder Heyst’s language and thought. In Nietzsche’s thought there is a profound conflict between, and collision of, pity and contempt or scorn or disgust. Conrad’s recognition of and participation in this conflict informs his ambivalence toward Nietzsche. By exploring the psychological causes and consequences of the conflict, Conrad provides valuable insights for reading Nietzsche’s mental collapse. The final passages from Victory especially relevant to my argument are Heyst’s descriptions of his father, which are remarkable because of Conrad’s style. The problem of the degree to which Nietzsche might be counted “responsible” for Conrad’s intellectual “existence” is implicit here, raising the question of whether or not Conrad perceived Nietzsche as one of his intellectual fathers (v, 212). Taken out of context, the passage might lead a reader familiar with Nietzsche to mistake Heyst’s thoughts for Conrad’s own reflections on the philosopher’s works. With some minor changes, Conrad might have written this in a letter: It wasn’t a new discovery, but he brought his capacity for scorn to bear on it. It was immense. It ought to have withered the globe. I don’t know how many minds he convinced. But my mind was very young then, and youth I suppose can be easily seduced – even by a negation. He was very ruthless, and yet he was not without pity. He dominated me without difficulty. A heartless man could not have done so. Even to fools he was not utterly merciless. He could be indignant, but he was too great for flouts and jeers. What he said was not meant for the crowd; it could not be; and I was flattered to find myself among the elect. They read his books, but I have heard his living word. It was irresistible. It was as if that mind were taking me into its confidence, giving me a special insight into its mastery of despair. (v, 213)

Despite the emotional responsiveness in the passage, the effect of the whole remains ambivalent and the valuation is equivocal. It opens with some skepticism toward the “capacity for scorn” which was relatively impotent and may or may not have convinced many minds, but ends with some sense of genuine wonder toward the man who made the “special insight” possible. The valuation is also difficult to read because it is presented as the recollections of an older man looking back upon his thoughts as a youth. This is analogous to Conrad’s own position, since in 1915 his early encounters with Nietzsche’s thought are well behind him.

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What is especially important is that the “capacity for scorn” is qualified by the admission that “yet he was not without pity.” Conrad is willing to acknowledge both coexisting in the same mind. The ruthlessness is not simply heartlessness. The style Conrad employs has some capacity for praise and blame. Having explored Conrad’s critique of Nietzsche’s doubts concerning pity, I will now focus on the question of how Conrad comments on aspects of Nietzsche’s thought about Christianity in the representations of Jim and Stevie. Conrad explores many of the same questions surrounding heroism, greatness, self-sacrifice, self-destruction, and martyrdom in these two characters; therefore, to avoid repeating the same observations about the two books, I suggest that Conrad writes variations on a number of interconnected questions in both Lord Jim and The Secret Agent. Conrad engages in a remarkably subtle and profound exploration that can be read as an inquiry into the causes and consequences of Nietzsche’s thought – especially in relation to Nietzsche’s preoccupation with belief and doubt – and how it affected Nietzsche’s being. In the representations of Stevie and Jim, Conrad offers potential answers to a question, the focus of which shifts slightly depending on the idea placed at the centre: Is a Christ-like man, a hero, or a great man possible at the end of the nineteenth century? Both characters can be read as Conrad’s examination or revaluation of Nietzsche’s antithetical relationship with Christianity in general and Christ in particular. Conrad’s ambivalence toward Christianity, and his equivocal valuation of faith and doubt, is rooted in his ambivalent response to Nietzsche. Conrad simultaneously reaffirms and collapses the antithesis between Dionysus and the Crucified that characterizes Nietzsche’s philosophy, making it difficult, if not impossible, to separate the aspects of Stevie’s and Jim’s characters that allude to Nietzsche or allude to Christ. Keeping pace with Conrad demands a constant attentiveness to his language and style. Conrad understands that Nietzsche’s antithetical thought is simultaneous identification and repudiation; the impulses are interconnected, with less difference than we expect. Conrad should be recognized as one of Nietzsche’s great critics because his novels reveal his capacity to simultaneously assent to and dissent from the philosopher’s thought. In the play of perspectives that comprises the drama of his novels, Conrad tests Nietzsche’s ideas and provides glimpses into the relationship between Nietzsche and Christ. As if taking up the questions implicit in the subtitle of Ecce Homo, in the representations of Jim and Stevie Conrad explores how Nietzsche’s thought becomes what it is. In Conrad’s view, despite his own warnings

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against antithetical arguments and relationships, Nietzsche does not question or comprehend his own opposition to Christ sufficiently. First, it is important to review Nietzsche’s thought about Christ. In an earlier or at least an alternate draft of the passage I have quoted from Ecce Homo, which is included in the collection of workbook materials entitled The Will to Power, Nietzsche writes two different versions of his famous declaration: “The two types: Dionysus and the Crucified” and “Dionysus versus the ‘Crucified.’” (wp, 542. Section 1052). The change from “and” in the first to “versus” in the second does not mark a difference one way or another in Nietzsche’s thought. Nietzsche explains “there you have the antithesis. It is not a difference in regard to their martyrdom – it is a difference in the meaning of it” (wp, 542–3). The problem is that Nietzsche might have thought further about the similarities but instead he emphasizes the differences. Christ is counted as “the innocent one” whose death is “an objection to life” because the “Christian meaning” of suffering “is supposed to be the path to a holy existence” (wp, 543). On the other hand Dionysus is the “tragic meaning” of life wherein “being is counted as holy enough to justify even a monstrous amount of suffering” because the “tragic man affirms even the harshest suffering” (wp, 543). Nietzsche concludes that “the god on the cross is a curse on life, a signpost to seek redemption from life; Dionysus cut to pieces is a promise of life: it will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction” (wp, 543). However, when Nietzsche actually engages with Christ’s teachings and life his tone and style are very different from when he writes about the Christian type. In The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche reads Christ as a strange reflection of himself. The strong element of identification in the passages in which Nietzsche explores the psychology of the redeemer suggests he is revealing something of his own psychology. There are moments when his style is free of contempt and full of admiration for Christ’s practice. In describing Zarathustra in Ecce Homo as a thinly veiled version of himself, Nietzsche writes that “he contradicts with every word, this most affirmative of all spirits; all opposites are in him bound together into a new unity.”17 This element of himself is projected onto Christ whose “‘glad tidings’ are precisely that there are no more opposites” (a, 156. Section 32). Nietzsche explains that “one could, with some freedom of expression, call Jesus a ‘free spirit’,” an expression reserved for very few men in his philosophy, including himself (a, 156. Section 32). He reads Christ as a kind of anarchist who launched a “revolt against the Jewish 17 eh, 76. Section 6 of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

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Church,” making him an early example for Nietzsche’s own revolt against the Christian Church (a, 151. Section 27). Because “denial” is lacking in Christ, he is a reflection of Nietzsche’s valuation of affirmation (a, 157). But most importantly, Christ’s “life of the redeemer” was a “practice” which “abolished” the “concepts ‘sin’, ‘forgiveness of sin’, ‘faith’, ‘redemption by faith’ – the whole of Jewish ecclesiastical teaching was denied in the ‘glad tidings’” (a, 158. Section 33). Here Nietzsche reads into Christ his own project of abolishing the Christian teachings he opposes. The problem of Nietzsche’s identification with Christ is part of Conrad’s representation of Jim and Stevie. By making Stevie and Jim into both victims and self-sacrifices, Conrad writes a strange yet effective account of Nietzsche’s thought. Judging by the representations of the characters, in Conrad’s view Nietzsche emulates Christ’s example: he is the victim of Christian pity, yet also a selfsacrifice. One of Conrad’s insights into Nietzsche’s thought is revealed through the analogy with Jim. Jim’s heroism is self-preservative and self-destructive. With this in mind, it is difficult to tell if Nietzsche’s self-preservative attacks against pity and Christianity are not also selfdestructive: in effect, whether his defence is to destroy himself. The problem is even more pronounced when examining whether or not Stevie’s death is a form of heroic self-sacrifice. Conrad’s ambivalence toward Nietzsche’s achievement as a thinker, whether to judge him as heroic or not, a great man or not, is captured in the combination of pity and contempt with which both characters are treated, the double movement wherein Stevie and Jim are potentially great men and idiots. The use of the word “idiot” in both The Secret Agent and Lord Jim is important. Stevie and Jim are both identified as idiots: Verloc entertains some doubt that “perhaps his brother-in-law was not such an idiot as he looked” and the chief engineer thinks Jim is “the greatest idiot that ever was” (tsa, 179; lj, 72). Understanding the significance of the word “idiot” is difficult because both Conrad and Nietzsche assimilate and rewrite Dostoevsky’s idea from the novel The Idiot. In Dostoevsky’s conception, Prince Myshkin exemplifies a good man who is innocent, sympathetic, loving, and capable of the highest insights, but his health is undermined by the seizures he suffers. In The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche uses Dostoevsky’s idea in his criticism of Christ. For Conrad, making Stevie and Jim is part of his rethinking of the relation between Nietzsche and Christianity; however, he complicates Dostoevsky’s idea by conflating it with Carlyle’s idea of the hero, a relationship that Dostoevsky would repudiate. In effect, Conrad actually has three different thinkers in mind in representing Stevie and Jim, but the focus will remain on Nietzsche here.

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In The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche’s discussion of the “psychological type of the redeemer” relies on the opposition that he constructs between his own Dostoevskian-influenced version of Christ, from a world of “‘childlike’ idiocy,” who is “childlike” or “childish,” and Renan’s version of Christ as a “genius” or “hero.”18 For Nietzsche, Christ represents the antitype of the hero because he is “precisely the opposite of all contending” and is the manifestation of “the incapacity for resistance” (a, 153). Christ is no hero because “true life, eternal life is found – it is not promised, it is here, it is within you: as life lived in love, in love without deduction or exclusion, without distance. Everyone is a child of God – Jesus definitely claims nothing for himself alone – as a child of God everyone is equal to everyone else …” (a, 153). Nietzsche represents Christ as an egalitarian and a democrat whose levelling message results from a kind of arrested emotional and intellectual development. Although Nietzsche rejects Christ’s message of equality because greatness requires a separation of the highest or noblest and everything below, Nietzsche must acknowledge Christ’s greatness. To deny it, Nietzsche must deny himself the greatness implicit in naming himself as the Antichrist: only Nietzsche could confront and supplant the greatest figure in Christian culture. His work and being depends upon this relationship to perhaps the greatest man of his culture. Conrad makes Jim “the greatest idiot that ever was,” a modern variation of Christ’s example, specifically through Jim’s impulse or will toward greatness and heroism. To recognize that Conrad rewrites Christ’s selfsacrifice are only need to attend to the overwhelming number of allusions included in Lord Jim. The second half of the novel represents Jim as Christ-like, as a kind of God in Patusan. The lack of faith that marks the European skepticism toward Jim is reversed in Patusan where the people 18 a, 154–5, 152–3. Sections 29 and 31. Nietzsche makes “idiot” a key word in his discussion by reading the Gospels as “that strange and sick world […] like that of a Russian novel” (a, 154). For Nietzsche, “one has to regret that no Dostoevsky lived in the neighborhood of this most interesting décadent; I mean someone who could feel the thrilling fascination of such a combination of the sublime, the sick, and the childish” (a, 155). The influence of Dostoevsky is clear: in The Idiot Prince Myshkin is childish (especially in the scenes with the children), sick with epilepsy, and experiences moments of unimaginable beauty during the onset of his epileptic attacks, which are sublime. Nietzsche knows Carlyle’s ideas and repeatedly attacks him in Twilight of the Idols (Section 1, 78; Section 12, 85–6; Section 44, 108–9) and The Anti-Christ (Section 54, 184–5). In Twilight of the Idols, Nietzsche repudiates Carlyle’s version of the great man or hero because of Carlyle’s “religious way” “of coming to terms with the genius and ‘great man’” (Section 44, 109).

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all but worship him as if he were the modern embodiment of Carlyle’s hero as divinity. The title “Lord” connects Jim with Christ, who is often identified in prayers as “our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.” The fact that Jim symbolically rises from the dead on his “third day in Patusan” is an allusion to Christ’s resurrection on the third day after the crucifixion (lj, 151). The people of Patusan transform Jim’s story into a “legend” and attribute “supernatural powers” to him (lj, 159). His word, like a god’s, “decided everything” (lj, 161). Structurally, Stein’s decision to send Jim into Patusan is analogous to God the Father’s decision to send Christ to earth, where in both cases the son sacrifices himself. (Of course, if my idea that Stein can be read as analogous to Nietzsche is correct, this is a very strange father-and-son relationship indeed.) And for Jim, the world is marked by the absence of his real father – a significant absence in Nietzsche’s life as well – which is an important analogy to the absence of God in the second half of the nineteenth century. Jim’s life also revisits Christ’s example insofar as Jim’s heroism is marked by a significant double movement. Christ was both a self-sacrifice and a scapegoat: he sacrificed himself for the good of humanity, dying to atone for the guilt of all sins, yet he was also a victim of the justice or retribution of the state, of his community. To borrow Nietzsche’s thought for a moment, Christ used the vengeance of the community and the scapegoat impulse of his culture to achieve his self-sacrifice. He could not kill himself, so he allowed others to kill him. Or, seen in another way, he created the conditions in which he could die. Jim’s life follows a similar trajectory. When the European court and Doramin pass judgment on Jim, they make Jim’s self-sacrifice possible. First he accepts the punishment of all the officers on the boat, allowing himself to become a scapegoat. But his dreams of heroism remain unfulfilled because he is not sacrificed and cannot consummate his self-destruction. Therefore, he creates the conditions in Patusan which enable his self-sacrifice. Through the representation of Jim, Conrad reveals how we can recognize that, in choosing to be the Antichrist, Nietzsche makes himself a rewriting of Christ’s example. The analogy between Jim and Nietzsche can be understood if we recall Walter Kaufmann’s observation that Nietzsche is “one of the great scapegoats of all time.”19 If this is true, then Nietzsche is at least partly 19 See Kaufmann’s discussion in the “Editor’s Introduction” to On the Genealogy of Morals, included in Peter Gay’s edition of The Basic Writings of Nietzsche (445–6). Also, it is important to remember that Nietzsche was made a scapegoat by Max Nordau in his book Degeneration, published in 1895. See Thatcher’s discussion of the immense influence of Nordau’s book (27–9).

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responsible for creating the conditions which made this possible: like Jim, Nietzsche brought himself to his death in a kind of self-destruction. In writing a modern skeptical Bible – in the form of a less than successful novel – and creating a new example to replace Christianity in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche should not be misunderstood. Merely attending to the joking seriousness of the title of Nietzsche’s strange autobiography reveals a great deal about his thinking.20 In making himself the Antichrist, Nietzsche is offering himself as a redeemer: “On one occasion Zarathustra strictly defines his task – it is also mine – the meaning of which cannot be misunderstood: he is affirmative to the point of justifying, of redeeming even the entire past.”21 Despite Nietzsche’s claims that “here there speaks no ‘prophet,’ none of those gruesome hybrids of sickness and will to power called founders of religions,” Conrad suggests that Nietzsche’s thought should be read as the necessary counterpart to his antithesis.22 For Conrad, Nietzsche gives himself away in claiming that he is “precisely the opposite of” the “‘sage,’ ‘saint,’ ‘worldredeemer’.”23 There is a seriousness and truthfulness in Nietzsche’s humorous comment that “now I bid you to lose me and find yourselves; and only when you have all denied me will I return to you …,” a clear allusion to Christ’s conversation with the disciples in the Gospels.24 Recognizing Conrad’s diagnosis of Nietzsche’s tendency toward the “psychology of the redeemer” reveals how, as Nietzsche brought himself closer to a decisive encounter with Christ, he was in danger of coming into contact with the opposing element that would result in an explosion. That element was Christian pity, the one thing that Nietzsche set himself against with fear and loathing. A specific aspect of Nietzsche’s life is echoed in Conrad’s representation of Jim, raising a question regarding Nietzsche’s impulses. It is necessary to recognize the importance given to the fact that Jim’s father, like Nietzsche’s, is a Protestant minister. Both Jim and Nietzsche “came 20 As Michael Tanner notes in the introduction to Ecce Homo, the “oddness begins with the title, which is a clear reference to St John’s Gospel, where it is narrated that Pilate brought Jesus out with his crown of thorns for the Jews to see, and said to them: ‘Behold the man!’ So Nietzsche is evidently comparing himself to Christ, and whether seriously or in jest, the comparison remains equally blasphemous” (vii). 21 eh, 80. Section 8 of “Thus Spoke Zarathustra.” 22 eh, 5. Section 4 of “Foreword.” 23 Ibid. 24 eh, 6. Section 4 of “Foreword.”

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from a parsonage,” a place “of piety and peace,” and had fathers who possessed “certain knowledge of the Unknowable” (lj, 8). As R.J. Hollingdale argues, “Nietzsche’s origin in Protestantism must seem unquestionable” because “he is manifestly an outcome” of Protestant Christianity and “the inevitable end of the course inaugurated by Luther.”25 The question that Conrad raises with Jim, and which applies to Nietzsche, is the degree to which Jim’s father and the morality he teaches are the cause of the difficulties that Jim experiences. That Christianity is a condition of Jim’s existence is emphasized by the report of the letter Jim once received from his father. Conrad places the date of the letter that Jim received from his father, in which he warned against “temptation” which might lead to “total depravity and everlasting ruin” and commanded Jim never “do anything which you believe to be wrong,” just days before Jim left on the Patna (lj, 203). That is, Conrad puts the father’s last lesson immediately before Jim has an opportunity to become a hero through self-sacrifice. If we read the father as the voice of Christian morality, then in relation to Nietzsche, Conrad is asking us to consider how Nietzsche’s philosophy extends, rather than repudiates, the demands of Christian morality with which he was intimately familiar, especially as the son of a minister and, moreover, as the man determined to bring it to an end.26 Just as Marlow’s treatment of Jim alternates between a contempt for his seemingly youthful ideals and a pity for the tragedy of his life, Conrad illuminates Nietzsche’s life as a profound failure which nevertheless has qualities of heroism, recalling Marlow’s declaration: “I affirm he had achieved greatness” (lj, 136). Conrad’s representation of Stevie can be read as another commentary on Nietzsche’s life and thought, one that revisits questions raised in Lord Jim but explores them in a different manner. Knowing very well that there can be no easy distinction made between the man and his philosophy, Conrad makes some remarks similar to Nietzsche’s argument that there are no philosophies, only philosophers, and “every great philosophy” is “a confession on the part of its author.”27 In The Secret Agent we read that “prophetic phantasies” “can only interpret the mind of the prophet” and “the way of even the most justifiable revolutions is prepared by personal impulses disguised into creeds” (tsa, 73, 102). By 25 Hollingdale, “The Hero as Outsider,” 82. 26 Chamberlain emphasizes this detail in her discussion of Nietzsche’s relationship to Christian doctrine and practice. See pages 116–20 in Nietzsche in Turin: An Intimate Biography. 27 bge, 37. “On the Prejudices of Philosophers,” Section 6.

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confounding the distinctions between Nietzsche and Christ in Stevie, Conrad inquires into the psychology of the redeemer in terms of the self-sacrifice and self-destruction involved in the martyrdom of Christ and Dionysus. It is possible to see Stevie as the centre of The Secret Agent because he is the hero of the “humanitarian enterprise” – which is one way of describing Nietzsche’s attempts to deliver humanity from the suffering he identified in Christianity (tsa, 236). Some aspects of Stevie’s character echo Nietzsche’s life and thought. Readers recognize that Conrad draws on the famous story of Nietzsche’s mental breakdown in Turin, when he collapsed after embracing a horse, in representing Stevie’s encounter with the horse and driver.28 By the time Conrad was writing The Secret Agent, knowledge of the story was common among Nietzsche’s readers, especially since his death in 1900. But Stevie’s encounter with the horse and driver actually has a larger literary and biographical background. Because of his familiarity with Dostoevsky’s works Conrad would have been well aware of Dostoevsky’s preoccupation with fallen horses. As a young man, Dostoevsky witnessed a government courier beat a horse and driver. He called it “my first 28 For a brief account of Nietzsche’s incident with the horse, see Lesley Chamberlain (208–9). R.J. Hollingdale also includes an account in Nietzsche: The Man and his Philosophy, 282. As Jeffery Meyers explains, “Conrad probably knew that Nietzsche’s permanent mental breakdown in Turin in 1890 occurred after he had seen a horse being whipped, had thrown his arms around the pathetic beast and had collapsed in the street” (Joseph Conrad, 237). The problem of disentangling the sources of the horse incident in The Secret Agent is compounded because Nietzsche read Dostoevsky, calling him “the only psychologist, by the way, from whom I had anything to learn” (t, 110). Nietzsche was reading Dostoevsky in the years just before his breakdown in Turin. In Nietzsche in Turin, Lesley Chamberlain speculates that Nietzsche’s embrace of the horse was an autobiographical gesture which fulfilled a dream about the action which he had written about in a letter (209). Before his mental collapse, Nietzsche was preoccupied with suffering horses, having written a letter to Reinhard von Seydlitz about the subject in May 1888: “Yesterday I imagined a scene Diderot would have described as ‘maudlin morality.’ Winter landscape. An old carter, with an expression of the most brutal cynicism, harder even than the surrounding winter, is relieving himself against the side of a horse. The horse, poor abused creature, looks back gratefully, very gratefully” (Fuss and Shapiro, Nietzsche, A Self-Portrait from his Letters, 118). Chamberlain claims that Nietzsche was “willing his own life to the last conscious moment” by modelling the scene after his dream informed by his reading of Dostoevsky (209).

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personal insult, the horse, the courier,” and returned again and again to the incident in his writings.29 Conrad also had an experience with a suffering horse. In Joseph Conrad and His Circle, Jessie recounts a story of Conrad acting subconsciously and throwing his arms around a horse that was waiting with a driver outside the hospital while she was having surgery in November 1904.30 According to Ford Madox Ford, “that imbecilities should be uttered as to the lot of the suffering maddened” Conrad, a keen resentment for the suffering of others that the author shares with Stevie (jcpr, 20). The encounters with horses in the lives of the three authors are all interconnected with pity. Conrad conflates several stories in his representation of Stevie, making the character exceptionally difficult to unpack because of the remarkable literary history that Conrad draws upon. For the present discussion, I will focus on the fallen horse incident as part of Conrad’s inquiry into Nietzsche’s thought about pity and contempt; however, the fact that Stevie’s life is connected to the lives of both Nietzsche and Conrad cannot be forgotten. As in the criticism of Dostoevsky in Under Western Eyes, in which Razumov’s writing of a confession identifies the common concern that Conrad and Dostoevsky share, Conrad shows he is aware of the biographical, literary, and intellectual connections with Nietzsche because Stevie shares elements of both of their lives. The novelist’s and the philosopher’s common concern with suffering and pity, and the complications caused by the simultaneous presence of resentment, binds them together. In the account of Stevie’s encounter with the horse and driver in chapter 8 of The Secret Agent, Conrad provides readers with a kind of epigraph for the entire chapter. When describing Winnie’s and her mother’s initial reactions to seeing the horse and driver, Conrad writes that “the conveyance awaiting them would have illustrated the proverb that truth can be more cruel than caricature, if such a proverb existed” (tsa, 157). In the world of Conrad’s novel, the imaginary proverb is a serious consideration for readers. The scene is not as cruel as the truth, but something more pitiable and yet still related to the truth of the 29 Dostoevsky, The Notebooks for Crime and Punishment, 64. Dostoevsky rewrote his memory into Raskolnikov’s dream of the crowd that beats a small horse to death in Crime and Punishment and then told the story himself in the January 1876 edition of A Writer’s Diary. He recalls a similar incident yet again in The Brothers Karamazov when Ivan talks to Alyosha about suffering in the chapter before the famous Grand Inquisitor story. 30 Jessie Conrad, Joseph Conrad and His Circle, 90.

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story. When we read passages such as “the little stiff tail” attached to the horse “seemed to have been fitted in for a heartless joke,” it is important to recognize the conditional verb “seemed” (tsa, 164). The joke may very well not be heartless, and Stevie’s encounter with the horse and driver is not simply an expression of contempt. Obviously, depicting Stevie as an idiot might be read as derisive, but then the wound is also self-inflicted. Conrad makes Stevie’s life very difficult to read with any assurance, especially when we know his own experience is involved. In addition to the use of Nietzsche’s embrace of the horse, several details in the representation of Stevie reinforce the connection between Stevie and the great philosopher. As George Butte argues, the most important “Nietzschean trace” is Conrad’s invocation of “the mythological figure Silenus.”31 Butte convincingly connects Conrad’s repeated allusions to Silenus to Nietzsche’s preoccupation with Silenus in The Birth of Tragedy.32 Perhaps the most important aspect of the allusion is that Silenus is “Dionysus’s tutor and companion in his travels and revels.”33 Butte focuses on Conrad’s repeated use of the name in the conversations between Ossipon and the Professor which take place in chapters four and thirteen: the location of their meetings is “the renowned Silenus restaurant” (tsa, 92). The most important allusion occurs during Stevie’s meeting with the driver and horse. Although Butte recognizes that “this is Silenus modernized with a vengeance,” he has not unpacked the full significance of the passage.34 The allusion to Silenus seems curiously out of place when used to characterize the driver’s conversation with Stevie: “His jovial purple cheeks bristled with white hairs; and like Virgil’s Silenus, who, his face smeared with the juice of berries, discoursed of Olympian Gods to the innocent shepherds of Sicily, he talked to Stevie of domestic matters and the affairs of men whose sufferings are great and immortality by no means assured” (tsa, 164–5). In one sense, Stevie is an innocent shepherd receiving lessons on the gods and, more importantly, men who suffer greatly, recalling Nietzsche. But if the cab driver is playing the role of Silenus, that means his student and travelling companion, Stevie, is playing the role of Dionysus. It is hardly necessary to note Nietzsche’s infatuation with Dionysus, which began in The Birth of Tragedy and returns especially in the later writings 31 Butte, “What Silenus Knew: Conrad’s Uneasy Debt to Nietzsche,” 155. 32 Nietzsche’s account of the Silenus myth is in Section 3 of The Birth of Tragedy (22–3). 33 Butte, 156. 34 Butte, 163.

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Twilight of the Idols and Ecce Homo. In the autobiography Nietzsche identifies himself explicitly with Dionysus, and of course, soon after his collapse began signing letters with that name instead of his own.35 Conrad uses the classical allusion to invoke Dionysus and thereby invokes the ghost of Nietzsche’s presence in Stevie. Like Nietzsche, who thought of himself as the one thinker willing to question all prior valuations, the existence of God, and even truth itself, Stevie is the one character in The Secret Agent who is unceasing in his demand to know: unlike everyone else, “he wished to go to the bottom of the matter” (tsa, 169). We should recall that Conrad adopts a similar position in the preface to the novel, declaring he will not avoid investigating motives and giving explanations. Despite his limitations with language, Stevie is described as having an “intellectual enterprise,” an idea which is reinforced when Conrad tells us that “his intelligence was very alert” (tsa, 169, 170). The question at the centre of Stevie’s “intellectual enterprise” is the same one that preoccupied Nietzsche from the time he wrote The Birth of Tragedy: how to make sense of the enormous amount of human suffering. The fact that Stevie’s intellectual effort is caused by his encounter with the poor driver and the emaciated horse raises interesting questions about how Conrad understands the significance of the encounter and suffering in relation to his own life. Stevie, Nietzsche, and Conrad all seem to share a common point of origin for their thinking: their inquiries begin with the problem of suffering in the world. Stevie’s inquiry begins where Nietzsche’s long and sustained inquiry into suffering terminated: embracing the horse was the final expression of his overwhelming concern with suffering in the world. There are several interconnected passages in which Conrad explores Stevie’s pity for suffering, revealing an analogy with Nietzsche. Unlike Winnie, who “did not investigate her brother’s psychology,” Conrad is determined to investigate the causes behind Stevie’s thought (tsa, 167). In the penultimate paragraph of chapter 1, Conrad provides some insight into Stevie’s psychology. Stevie becomes part of the “comedies of the streets” as Conrad parodies Nietzsche’s collapse and his own experience in Stevie’s fascination with “the dramas of fallen horses, whose pathos and violence induced him sometimes to shriek piercingly in a crowd, which disliked to be disturbed by sounds of distress in its quiet enjoyment of the national spectacle” (tsa, 49). An allusion to 35 See pages 684–7 of Walter Kaufmann’s The Portable Nietzsche in which he quotes one of the letters to Overbeck of 6 January 1899 that Nietzsche signs “Dionysus,” as well as “The Crucified.”

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Nietzsche’s anxiety about suffocating from pity, which I quoted earlier, is included in the observation that “a brusque question caused [Stevie] to stutter to the point of suffocation.” (tsa, 49). In the passage Conrad conflates Nietzsche’s collapse with his great fear of suffocating from pity which he expressed in Beyond Good and Evil. In the representation, Conrad is likely drawing on his own experience because, following the completion of Nostromo, in November 1904, he was “quite unwell with something resembling asthma” and once “had a very bad fit of it” that forced him “to come home in a cab with [his son] who most tactfully seemed not to notice my gasps and chokings.”36 Throughout this period, Conrad felt “half dead mentally and very shaky physically with a sort of choking fit every day” (cljc 3, 184). Conrad’s illness did not follow the trajectory of Nietzsche’s collapse into madness – though he later suffered a temporary collapse after writing Under Western Eyes – and yet the combination of personal suffering and near suffocation suggests a remarkable connection between the two thinkers. At the very least, we should recognize that Conrad’s experience may have resulted in a special kind of insight into Nietzsche’s condition. These concerns are connected to Stevie’s adventure involving the fireworks at the end of the passage. The fireworks incident can be read as a parodic echo of Nietzsche’s self-satisfied idea of himself as an explosive at the centre of Western culture, but the comedy is qualified when we learn that “it seems that two other office-boys in the building had worked upon [Stevie’s] feelings by tales of injustice and oppression till they had wrought his compassion to the pitch of that frenzy. But his father’s friend, of course, dismissed him summarily as likely to ruin his business. After that altruistic exploit Stevie was put to help wash the dishes in the basement kitchen, and to black the boots of the gentlemen patronizing the Belgravian mansion. There was obviously no future in such work” (tsa, 50). Does Conrad suggest that there is no future in the work of writing that he and Nietzsche share? There is genuine pathos in Stevie being made the scapegoat in the affair and receiving all the blame and punishment. There is a particular humour in thinking of how Conrad’s and Nietzsche’s thought is likely to ruin the business – commercial and intellectual – of the world, because of the questions they raise about compassion. What room is there in the world for writers such as Conrad and Nietzsche? Of course, this incident anticipates Stevie’s later “altruistic exploit” with Verloc. 36 cljc 3, 172. He mentions his problem with choking again in a letter to Ford Madox Ford dated 22 November 1904 (cljc 3, 183–5).

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The fragmented structure of The Secret Agent can cause readers to misread the trajectory of Stevie’s character and its place in the action of the novel. Because Conrad shows us Verloc’s meeting with Vladimir first in the sequence of events in the novel, the scene appears to be the cause of the explosion which follows. We should avoid the temptation to narrowly focus on the dialogue between Vladimir and Verloc, and perhaps also the dialogue between Ossipon and the Professor, in which the latter reveals he provided the explosive materials for the bomb Stevie carried; though important, these scenes are not the whole story. In chapter 8, Conrad complicates our understanding of the cause of the explosion. The encounter with the horse is an equally important cause, though it is temporally displaced and not revealed until after we know of Stevie’s death. By making Stevie’s actions actively contribute to the trajectory of the novel, Conrad raises questions about how Stevie is partly responsible for his own death. For Conrad, Stevie is both a victim and a self-sacrifice. In a passage recalling Nietzsche’s final collapse in Turin, Stevie is overwhelmed by the suffering he witnesses: The contemplation of the infirm and lonely steed overcame him. Jostled, but obstinate, he would remain there, trying to express the view newly opened to his sympathies of the human and equine misery in close association. But it was very difficult. “Poor brute, poor people!” was all he could repeat. It did not seem forcible enough, and he came to a stop with an angry splutter: “Shame!” Stevie was no master of phrases, and perhaps for that very reason his thoughts lacked clearness and precision. But he felt with great completeness and some profundity. That little word contained all his sense of indignation and horror at one sort of wretchedness having to feed upon the anguish of the other – as the poor cabman beating the poor horse in the name, as it were, of his poor kids at home. And Stevie knew what it was to be beaten. He knew it from experience. It was a bad world. Bad! Bad! (tsa, 168)

Unlike Nietzsche and Conrad, two masters of style, Stevie’s thought is closer to the inarticulate Jo in Bleak House. Intellectually, he cannot imagine a Dionysian philosophy to account for the suffering he witnesses. His rational inadequacies work against his emotional capacity for sympathy; here Conrad reverses Nietzsche’s condition wherein an immense capacity for rational, deliberate thinking conceals the presence of profound feelings of pity. Like Stevie, Nietzsche and Conrad understand suffering intimately, having experienced its cruelties first hand in their physical illnesses and mental distresses. Unavoidably, there is an element of identification in the sympathy for the suffering Stevie witnesses in the world, but

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it is not simply a self-regarding pity. As Conrad comments earlier, “experience” is the “mother of wisdom” (tsa, 165). Conrad suggests that a sensitivity toward suffering in the world is rooted in personal experience. In Stevie’s sympathy for suffering, Conrad illuminates the two-fold, Janus-faced character of Nietzsche’s thought. Standing “beside the private lamp-post of the Charity,” Stevie is in the one location which is anathema to Nietzsche’s philosophy: charity, Christian or otherwise, is only for the weak and resentful in Nietzsche’s view (tsa, 166). The causes of Stevie’s “convulsive sympathy” are made plain in a remarkable passage that cannot be read too carefully because Conrad’s style brilliantly synthesizes Nietzsche’s thought in a highly compressed way: At the bottom of his pockets his incapable, weak hands were clenched hard into a pair of angry fists. In the face of anything which affected directly or indirectly his morbid dread of pain, Stevie ended by turning vicious. A magnanimous indignation swelled his frail chest to bursting, and caused his eyes to squint. Supremely wise in knowing his own powerlessness, Stevie was not wise enough to restrain his passions. The tenderness of his universal charity had two phases as indissolubly joined and connected as the reverse and obverse sides of a medal. The anguish of immoderate compassion was succeeded by the pain of an innocent but pitiless rage. Those two states expressing themselves outwardly by the same signs of futile bodily agitation, his sister Winnie soothed his excitement without ever fathoming its twofold character. (tsa, 166–7)

Despite the analogies between Conrad and Nietzsche in the representation of Stevie, which suggest a close relation between the two writers, Conrad perhaps achieves some critical distance from Nietzsche in this passage. Does Conrad come to understand his own experience in fictionalizing it? In detailing Stevie’s physical reaction, the first sentence invokes Nietzsche’s arguments about resentment: incapacity and anger are both elements of resentment. Stevie is resentful, like Nietzsche, at the state of his culture and ends up “turning vicious” toward it. And like Nietzsche, he experiences a “morbid dread of pain” at the centre of his reaction. What is concealed and revealed at this moment? Stevie’s psychology has “two phases.” In Nietzsche’s writings one phase dominates, and, perhaps sharing Winnie’s tendency toward not knowing, readers do not fathom that Nietzsche’s reaction has a “twofold character.” Nietzsche’s “pitiless rage” toward things Christian and German conceals the “anguish of immoderate compassion.” Is it accurate to think that, unlike Stevie, Nietzsche is wise enough to “restrain” at least some of his “passions,” counting pity among them? Echoing an idea central to

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Nietzsche’s philosophy, Conrad reveals the fundamental interconnection between pity and resentment, knowing that the two cannot be readily separated. Bringing Nietzsche’s ideas to bear on his philosophy, Conrad offers a brilliant commentary. He is essentially correct in his judgment that “being no sceptic, but a moral creature, [Stevie] was in a manner at the mercy of his righteous passions” (tsa, 169). Nietzsche, too, for all his claims to the contrary, is a moral creature, being at the mercy of his morbid dread of pain and suffering and not able to completely control his passions. We might well ask: and Conrad too? However well Nietzsche controlled these passions for many years, in the end they overwhelmed him. Conrad’s choice to make Stevie an idiot, whose characteristic activity is drawing circles (partly a parody of Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal recurrence of all things), can be read as a criticism of Nietzsche’s exceptional intellectual effort. In Conrad’s novel, Stevie is exceptional, but in the same sense as Nietzsche describes Christ: for his childishness, innocence, and unsophisticated mind. The differences between Nietzsche and Christ collapse in Conrad’s representation of Stevie as he explores the similarities in their self-sacrifice.37 While Stevie’s conflicted response to the cab driver and the horse echoes aspects of Nietzsche’s life and thought, Stevie’s actions echo aspects of Christ’s life and thought. The self-sacrifices embodied in Dionysus and Christ are mixed in Stevie. In connection with this, it is important to recognize that Stevie is doubled with Michaelis,38 the potential scapegoat whom Inspector Heat attempts to blame for the explosion in the park.39 Like Stevie, Michaelis has “no more selfconsciousness than a very small child, and with something of a child’s charm – the appealing charm of trustfulness” (tsa, 121). Conrad inscribes Christ-like qualities into both characters. The representation of Michaelis echoes Nietzsche’s treatment of Christ because the character 37 In “Dionysus versus the Crucified,” Girard also discusses at length the identification of Dionysus’s and Christ’s martyrdom in Section 1052 of The Will to Power. 38 As Knoepflmacher argues, “it is no coincidence that [Michaelis] should be the friend of the humanitarian madman, Stevie” (Laughter and Despair, 261). See Tracey Jordan’s observations concerning Conrad’s doubling of Stevie and Michaelis, especially pages 63 and 73 of “Conrad’s The Secret Agent: Kids, Chaos, and Cannibalism.” 39 Watson explores this problem is discussing how “Michaelis, like Stevie, might even have come to seem like a kind of saviour” (“Fundamental Information,” 235).

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is noted for “the innocence of his heart and the simplicity of his mind. Nothing that happened to him individually had any importance. He was like those saintly men whose personality is lost in the contemplation of their faith. His ideas were not in the nature of convictions. They were inaccessible to reasoning. They formed in all their contradictions and obscurities an invincible and humanitarian creed, which he confessed rather than preached, with an obstinate gentleness, a smile of pacific assurance on his lips” (tsa, 121). The evocation of Christ’s example in Michaelis is complicated by Michaelis preaching ideas that echo Nietzsche’s philosophy: “All idealization makes life poorer. To beautify it is to take away its character of complexity – it is to destroy it.”40 As in the representation of Stevie, Conrad uses aspects of a double to mix Nietzsche’s and Christ’s lives. It is important that Verloc places Stevie in Michaelis’s cottage in the days leading up to the explosion where he enjoyed “a damp villegiature in the Kentish lanes under the care of Mr. Michaelis” (tsa, 185). If Michaelis continued to preach his faith to Stevie along the lines of the examples that Conrad shows readers in the novel, then Stevie’s lessons with Verloc must have been supplemented by Michaelis’s faith, which at least partly resembles Nietzsche’s faith. In relation to Stevie’s martyrdom, the most important aspect of his character may be his faith in Verloc. Through Winnie’s idealization of Verloc and Stevie as “father and son,” Conrad develops an analogy to invoke the relationship between God and Christ (tsa, 179). In this parodic variation Conrad carefully includes some telling details. “Verloc was good” for Stevie because “his mother and sister had established that ethical fact on an unshakable foundation. They had established, erected, consecrated it behind Mr. Verloc’s back, for reasons that had nothing to do with abstract morality. And Mr. Verloc was not aware of it. It is but bare justice to him to say that he had no notion of appearing good to Stevie. Yet so it was” (tsa, 171). With nothing but “reverential compassion” and “reverence and awe” for Verloc, Stevie feels himself in “close communion with the mystery of that man’s goodness” (tsa, 172, 176, 172). There are details that hint at how to read this parody of Christ’s life throughout the novel, but the two most telling are the Catholic jokes: in the embassy documents, Verloc is signified by the symbol of a triangle, which is an allusion to the Holy Trinity, and Stevie “sat at 40 tsa, 73. In “Form, Ideology, and The Secret Agent,” Terry Eagleton identifies Michaelis as “close to a Marxist” (158). I do not think that this precludes the possibility that Michaelis’s ideas might also have their origins in Nietzsche’s thought as well.

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[Verloc’s] right” at the table, just as Jesus sits at the right hand of the Father (tsa, 177). The humour of representing Verloc and Stevie as God the Father and Christ the Son extends to Verloc providing the explosive which enables Stevie to destroy himself. Recalling how God sent his son to die, in effect arranging Christ’s self-sacrifice, Verloc puts the explosive in Stevie’s hands, assisting in Stevie’s self-destruction. The explosion that obliterates Stevie must be read in this double way: he is a victim of the different plots put into motion by Vladimir, Verloc, Winnie, and his mother, but he also causes the explosion himself. The latter is an important part of Conrad’s reading of Nietzsche. Nietzsche considered himself the thinker who explodes ideals and repeatedly compared his criticism with war. In the “Foreword” to Twilight of the Idols, he explains that the “idle hours of a psychologist” are the cause of a “new war,” and that consequently “this little book is a grand declaration of war” (t, 32). He intends to explode the ideals of his century. In a much more dramatic manoeuvre, in the final part of Ecce Homo entitled “Why I Am A Destiny,” Nietzsche declares “I am not a man, I am dynamite.”41 As “the most terrible human being there has ever been,” he knows a “joy in destruction” equal to his “strength for destruction”; this joy makes him the “destroyer par excellence.”42 There are a large number of interconnected passages in The Secret Agent about explosions. Nietzsche’s analogy is related to Vladimir’s “philosophy of bomb throwing” and the Professor’s search for a “perfect detonator,” which act as oblique commentaries on Stevie’s self-destruction at the centre of the novel (tsa, 66, 94). Like Brierly and Bob Stanton in Lord Jim, these two characters illuminate important aspects of Stevie’s psychology. Significantly, these two men only talk of destruction and never act on their desire themselves; they are merely advocates for destruction. Stevie is the only one in the book who explodes anything and his action implies some tendency toward destruction, or to be more specific, self-destruction. The explosion that disintegrates Stevie is central to the expression of Conrad’s criticism of Nietzsche. By deliberately concealing a direct view of the explosion and providing only the officer’s speculation that Stevie “stumbled against the root of a tree and fell,” Conrad forces readers to look for the cause of Stevie’s self-destruction not in the physical act but in the psychological cause (tsa, 108). Ossipon’s report of Stevie’s death is crucial: “The fragments of only one man, you note, Ergo: blew himself up” (tsa, 95). Conrad even italicizes the last phrase 41 eh, 96. “Why I Am a Destiny,” Section 1. 42 eh, 97. “Why I Am a Destiny,” Section 2.

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in order to emphasize its importance. Stevie blew himself up. Along with the other causes of Stevie’s death, we should read the act as selfdestructive. In chapter 4 when this revelation occurs, all Conrad has given us is the consequences of a relatively anonymous act. Through the inverted chronological structure Conrad makes us attend to the “motives” and “explanations” which he insists that we think about in the “Author’s Note” to the novel (tsa, 38). In making Stevie the embodiment of the man as dynamite, Conrad is rethinking Nietzsche’s claim that “great men” are “explosive material.”43 Nietzsche argues that The great human being is a terminus […] the genius – in his works, in his deeds – is necessarily a prodigal: his greatness lies in the fact that he expends himself …. The instinct of self-preservation is as it were suspended; the overwhelming pressure of the energies which emanate from him forbids him any such care and prudence. One calls this “sacrifice”; one praises his “heroism” therein, his indifference to his own interests, his devotion to an idea, a great cause, a fatherland: all misunderstandings …. He flows out, he overflows, he uses himself up, he does not spare himself – with inevitability, fatefully, involuntarily, as a river’s bursting its banks is involuntary. But because one owes a great deal to such explosive beings one has bestowed a great deal upon them in return, for example a species of higher morality …. For that is the nature of human gratitude: it misunderstands its benefactors. (t, 109. Section 44)

Importantly, Nietzsche identifies himself as a great man (he is more explicit in identifying himself as dynamite in Ecce Homo). Once again, Nietzsche rejects the notion of the great man being identified as a hero, but Conrad is not so certain. In The Secret Agent, the idea of “heroism” is displaced onto Stevie’s mother, whose self-sacrifice is repeatedly identified, with joking seriousness, in those terms (tsa, 156, 161). This might be a way of telling readers not to identify Stevie as a hero. Nevertheless, it is difficult to avoid the question in relation to Stevie’s action: is this heroic or idiotic self-sacrifice? As with Jim, Conrad does not answer the question. In effect, there may be an equal amount of truth in both readings. If we attend to the structure of the novel and Conrad’s lessons in the “Author’s Note” about the importance of causes, then we should be able to recognize that Stevie’s fragmentation is partly caused by his overwhelming compassion and his morbid dread of pain. If we read the novel with Verloc at the centre then Stevie is to a large degree a passive 43 t, 108. “Expeditions of an Untimely Man,” Section 44.

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element in Verloc’s plot and therefore a victim of a barbaric and brutal act. If we read the novel as Winnie’s and her mother’s story, then Stevie is also a victim of Winnie’s and his mother’s quasi-religious teachings about Verloc as the embodiment of the good. However, if we focus on the evidence that Conrad provides concerning Stevie’s state of mind and the frustration that he experiences in his intellectual enterprise, then Stevie’s inability to counter his sympathy contributes to his selfdestruction. Conrad insists on the double reading, just as he insists on the collapsing of Dionysus and the Crucified. Stevie moves from compassion to rage; hence Conrad’s telling description that “at odd times he clenched his fists without apparent cause, and when discovered in solitude would be scowling at the wall, with the sheet of paper and the pencil given him for drawing circles lying blank and idle on the kitchen table” (tsa, 179). That Stevie stops drawing circles is another allusion to Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence. Nietzsche’s idea is that a person must will all things exactly the same, without change, which means willing all the suffering in humankind yet again. Though coming from different intellectual directions, Stevie and Nietzsche arrive at the same place. At the end they both stop drawing circles. Through Stevie, Conrad suggests that Nietzsche could no longer affirm the idea of eternal recurrence and the joyful repetition of all suffering. In effect, Nietzsche finally came into contact with his antithesis and could not longer hold himself from the very Christian compassion for suffering which he had repudiated in his philosophy. Although moving toward a humanitarian goal, Stevie’s work with Verloc is also an expression of his rage against the conditions that make suffering possible. In a strange way, Stevie attempts to explode values but only destroys himself. Conrad’s contempt and pity for Nietzsche is apparent: he recognizes that in Nietzsche’s great campaign against Christian morality the only certain consequence was that Nietzsche destroyed himself. Perhaps Conrad also doubted the effectiveness of his own critique of modern civilization. With the insights of Conrad’s reading of Nietzsche in mind, the two accounts Nietzsche writes concerning the death of God are troubling. Both are difficult to read with any certainty because of the question of how much identification and projection occurs. How many roles is Nietzsche playing? How much in the description of the death or murder of God applies to Nietzsche’s collapse? The earlier, and undoubtedly more famous, of the two passages is in The Gay Science, in Section 125. It is the story of the madman who “ran around the marketplace crying incessantly, ‘I’m looking for God!’” and meets only those “who did not believe in God” (gs, 119. Book 3, Section 125). To his own question of

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“where is God?” the madman answers “we have killed him – you and I! We are all his murderers” (gs, 119–20). The madman’s connection with Nietzsche, as an untimely man, is revealed when he realizes that “I come too early” and “my time is not yet” because “this tremendous event is still on its way” (gs, 120). That is, the unbelievers that the madman meets have not thought sufficiently about the problem, nor have they realized the implications of God being dead. The importance of the passage is in Nietzsche’s insight that God was killed collectively, that he was a victim. The later account written in Thus Spoke Zarathustra should be read as a rethinking of the first, and not as a separate or alternate account. The murderer of God, the ugliest man, thinks himself a victim of pity. In part 2, section 25, Zarathustra recalls a story about how “then spoke the devil to me” saying “God is dead: of his pity for humankind God has died” (z, 112). When Zarathustra meets the ugliest man, pity is emphasized yet again. The ugliest man demands of Zarathustra “say then: who am I ” and Nietzsche tells us “when however Zarathustra had heard these words – what do you think then took place in his soul? Pity overcame him; and he sank down all at once” (z, 279. Part 4, Section 67). Meeting God’s murderer overwhelms Zarathustra with the thing that Nietzsche feared. Is it a moment of identification? The ugliest man, like the madman, is and is not Nietzsche, who has two roles in the passage, divided between Zarathustra and the ugliest man, and this is why the two men cannot part. Like Marlow and Jim, the two men are mutually necessary. And like Marlow’s response to Jim, Zarathustra’s response is divided: “Even this man has loved himself, as he has despised himself – a great lover I think he is, and a great despiser” (z, 282). The ugliest man’s repudiation of pity echoes Nietzsche’s own, and he complains not of enduring persecution, but suffering from everyone’s “pity”: “Their pity is it from which I flee away” (z, 280). He murders God because “His pity knew no modesty; he crept into my dirtiest corners. This most prying, over-intrusive, over-pitiful one had to die” (z, 281). Thinking as Conrad might for a moment, it is important to recognize how Nietzsche identifies the reason for God’s death as pity. God died from pity, or because of his pity. And Nietzsche too? Conrad gives us compelling reasons to see pity and contempt at the centre of Nietzsche’s antithetical relationship with Christ.

Conclusion: Future Work

my hope in writing this has been to expand our understanding of the connections between Conrad and nineteenth-century thought. In exploring his responsiveness to earlier writers, I have emphasized Conrad as a reader and examined his work to discover how he answers to the art and thought of others. Novelists have much to teach us about how we think: Conrad reveals much about other artists and writers specifically, and about the nature of thinking, knowing, and making art in general. He is one of the most penetrating thinkers we can read to gain a better understanding of the complexities inherent in Carlyle’s arguments about work and heroes or in Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity. He is also one of the best thinkers we can read if we are interested in the fundamental questions about our living and knowing. Evidence of the complexity of his thinking about life, language, and literature is found throughout his major novels. This work fills a significant gap in contemporary scholarship on Conrad by exploring Conrad’s relationships with Carlyle, Dickens, George Eliot, and Nietzsche, all of which have yet to be more fully understood. Conrad’s thought is rooted in his knowledge of these writers and his art offers a reassessment of their work. Criticism concerned with ideas and the history of ideas does not receive much attention at the present time. Ian Watt’s comment, that “the critics of the last few decades have not been very interested in literary and intellectual history,” is as true now as it was when he wrote it.1 My arguments focus on Conrad as a writer interested in ideas and emphasize Conrad’s participation in an intellectual tradition that includes writers who made vital contributions to the development of Western culture. The intellectual climate in which 1 Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, ix.

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Conrad wrote would not have existed had it not been for those writers. And it is just as significant that the intellectual climate in which I am writing today would also not exist had it not been for them. Although Brian Spittles is right to argue that at times “it is not easy to see these writers’ presence in Conrad’s work,” once the connections are recognized they accumulate at a compound rate.2 This study presents some of those connections and there are many more worth examining at length. Conrad is remarkably adept at rewriting the thoughts of other writers and critically reworking their ideas and structures in his novels. Some of the transpositions or transfigurations are more radical than others, making it difficult to perceive when Conrad has a particular writer in mind or when he conflates the ideas of several writers. Though perhaps his rewriting of Dostoevsky is not as well disguised as his responses to Carlyle and Nietzsche, our perception of the now seemingly obvious connection between Conrad and Dostoevsky is conditioned by the long critical history on the links between their works. A critical effort of the same kind is still necessary for the other writers included in this study; we are far from fully understanding the nature of Conrad’s thought about any of these writers. Among the gaps in the criticism, the lack of sustained, book-length critical comparisons of Conrad and Dickens, comparable to Michael Goldberg’s work on Carlyle and Dickens, is the most surprising. Perhaps the assumption is that Conrad’s indebtedness to Dickens is obvious, partly because of Conrad’s explicit admiration in A Personal Record, so it is hardly worth a careful commentary; however, the relationship between the writers is complex and well worth an effort to identify the significant points of contact and divergence in their thought. Because Conrad transforms significant ideas and structures found in his predecessors, reading his work in relation to writers such as Carlyle or Nietzsche enriches our understanding of how his art works, why it is written as it is, and what he thinks. If my arguments are convincing, then Conrad’s thought should be reassessed in light of the kinds of connections that I have been discussing, not simply because the connections are interesting in themselves but because Conrad’s writing is preoccupied with the intellectual history which he has inherited. The work of writing that Conrad undertakes is fuelled by his preoccupation with nineteenth-century ideas. In one sense, the question of how Conrad views his role as an author is very much at issue. One implication of my argument is that Conrad’s idea of himself as a writer is shaded or inflected with a sense of transmission and re-examination. His innovations 2 Spittles, Joseph Conrad: Text and Context, 57.

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in artistic form are simultaneously rethinkings of old forms. Conrad is very much the writer as rewriter because he deliberately and repeatedly takes stock of his predecessors’ works and writes critical responses to their ideas. Part of Conrad’s originality as a writer is his ability to think about questions or ideas that troubled Carlyle or Nietzsche in ways those writers did not, to explore the causes and consequences of their ideas in a new or different light. Making sense of Conrad’s relationship with the nineteenth century is particularly challenging because his revaluation simultaneously extends, quarrels with, and combats the ideas of that century. Whatever the measure of his resistance to Carlyle’s or Nietzsche’s thought, he is indebted to those writers and his work never entirely escapes from their shadow. There is no need to rediscover Conrad as a Victorian or to confirm his place in Modernism, but there is a real need to reveal some of the subtle shades in Conrad’s art and thought and show how different elements of his work are amplified depending on which of the authors Conrad is brought into conversation with. The attempt to label Conrad as a backward-looking Victorian or as a ground-breaking Modernist is undermined by the changes in our perception of him which depend on the writer with whom he is placed in conversation and which idea is made the focus of the discussion. Regardless of the chronological distance between Conrad and another writer, the same kinds of difficulties remain. Although writing at opposite ends of the Victorian age, Conrad and Carlyle can appear at times remarkably similar in their basic assumptions, for instance, about the fundamental significance of work and hero-worship. Yet, while Carlyle sees work and hero worship as prescriptions or cures for the disease plaguing his culture, Conrad sees them very much as participating in the disease. Studies such as mine should be undertaken not merely to illuminate certain elements of Conrad’s art, but also to inquire into how and why a critical comparison of a pair of writers such as Conrad and George Eliot reveals important questions inherent in the art of both writers that would not be recognized through another kind of inquiry. By entering into a conversation with the art and thought of his predecessors, Conrad answers an implicit invitation to engage in dialogues and respond to the assumptions informing their thought. In effect, Conrad’s work can be read in light of Leavis’s idea that the implied question “this is so, isn’t it?” is always answered with “yes, but ….” Of course, there is always the possibility of an outright no, but even the negation implies that there is some idea Conrad is resisting. To read Conrad with another writer is to hear two sides of a dialogue and to

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recognize that only these two writers would have such a dialogue. One way of reading would see this conversation as complete in itself, but this viewpoint could be sustained only until another writer is introduced. For instance, we might recognize that Dostoevsky responds to one of Dickens’s ideas, and then Conrad respond to both of them, providing readers with an opportunity to listen in on a remarkable conversation about ideas that still inform and trouble our thinking today. Much more work is necessary to illuminate Conrad’s responses to nineteenth-century writers. Leavis’s argument that “Dickens may have counted for more in Conrad’s mature art than seems at first probable” should be extended to include the other authors discussed in this study, with the qualification that much work on Conrad and Dostoevsky is already in circulation.3 Certainly, the dialogue with Dickens is not confined to The Secret Agent. In Chance, Conrad writes a remarkable variation on the set of problems Dickens explores in Little Dorrit, and other works, focusing on Dickens’s representations of his child-heroines. The two writers share a preoccupation with the difficulties of engaging in conversations, and their exploration of the relationship between working and living is part of their shared inheritance from Carlyle. The almost morbid concern with human suffering and cruelty throughout Conrad’s works is intimately related to the questions that Nietzsche and Dostoevsky raise about the horrible wounds we inflict on ourselves and others because of passions such as resentment. Nietzsche’s attack on faith and Dostoevsky’s defence of faith are also key problems in Conrad’s thought. From the ambivalence of Marlow’s mixed faith and doubt in Jim to Heyst’s skeptical detachment from the world, Conrad is constantly writing about the nature of faith and doubt and the consequences of living with one or the other or in between competing demands made by both. George Eliot’s concern with the entanglements for the individual in public life is taken up by Conrad, and there is a shared interest in the nature of gossip in their work. The importance of the gossip surrounding Kurtz, Jim, Monygham, Razumov, and Heyst and the contributions it makes to the narratives demonstrate that Conrad repeatedly returned to a problem that is fundamental to Eliot’s work. Exploring how Conrad’s thought about his predecessors might develop and change through the writing of the different novels is also well worth consideration. For instance, his thought about Carlyle is not confined to the criticism of hero-worship and work in Heart of Darkness but is repeated in variations in many of his novels, and the thought might 3 Leavis, The Great Tradition, 29.

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change depending on the sets of conditions with which Conrad is preoccupied at the time. For instance, the exploration of heroism in Lord Jim revisits Carlyle’s insistence on the importance of greatness, and the fact that Jim’s early failures to become a hero are interconnected with his work as a sailor shows that Conrad is reworking Carlyle’s ideas again. The relationship between work and greatness informs the representation of Charles Gould, who becomes the king of Sulaco because of his drive to make the working of the mine a success. And again, Razumov hopes to become recognized through his work before his life is disrupted by Haldin’s confession. The value of Peter Ivanovitch’s work and the nature of his greatness is a central problem in Under Western Eyes because the narrator and Tekla both raise questions about these Carlylean concerns. The pervasive presence of these subjects in Conrad’s works makes it possible to argue that the ideas are as much Conrad’s as they are Carlyle’s. Conrad’s thought is saturated with the ideas and he writes about them repeatedly. The question of how Conrad conceptualizes history, and his conversation with previous writers about the subject, is an especially promising focus for criticism. Throughout his novels, there is no mistaking that Conrad is preoccupied with Carlyle’s questions about what it means to write “the biography of one of our great men” (n, 180). Carlyle’s idea that “history is the essence of innumerable biographies” informs Conrad’s thought about the nature of history, which he returns to repeatedly in his novels by examining the weight of the past on the present.4 Carlyle’s concern with history is in understanding our relationship to the past and he sees biographies as a form through which we learn about our “forefathers,” those who shaped the world before it became our world. In Conrad’s thought, Carlyle’s ideas of history are combined with Nietzsche’s arguments about the disadvantages of history and the significant presence of human resentment toward the past, the potential for revaluing the past, and the difficulties of redeeming or repudiating the past. Exploring the significance of Conrad’s early reading of Shakespeare’s plays, especially the histories, and Sir Walter Scott’s novels is likely very important for understanding his thought. In Conrad’s novels, questions regarding history are often explored through the relationships between fathers and sons; in varying degrees, the life of the son is determined by his relationship to the words and actions of the father. For example, the lives of Jim and Charles Gould are shaped by letters they receive from their fathers advising them about their future 4 Carlyle, “On History,” 5.

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conduct, Stevie’s life is influenced by Verloc because Winnie encourages a father and son relationship between them, Razumov’s early hopes are informed by his keen awareness of being an orphan and the absence of his father, and Heyst’s life is formed by the education provided by his father. The focus on these kinds of relationships recalls Shakespeare’s preoccupation with the succession of the crown from a father to a son, and the mixture of identification with and repudiation of his father found in Prince Hal in both parts of Henry IV. It also recalls Scott’s exploration of the nature of inheritance in Edgar Ravenswood’s adopted resentment when he takes up his father’s desire for revenge against William Ashton in The Bride of Lammermoor. Conrad writes a number of variations on Shakespeare’s and Scott’s historical narratives. Undoubtedly, the continued reading of Shakespeare’s works over a number of years was important in the development of Conrad’s understanding of English language and literature. A sustained comparison of these two great writers, building on the work started by Thomas Shultheiss and Adam Gillon, is needed to explain the significant connections between them, not just in terms of echoes or allusions but through an examination of the shared questions at the centre of their works. Undoubtedly, the significance of Conrad’s early reading of Scott is also a question worth exploring at length, especially in thinking about the preoccupation with remaking the historical novel that Conrad shared with George Eliot. Both authors draw on their knowledge of Scott in refashioning the novel as history. When critics such as Yves Hervouet question the causes of Conrad’s borrowings from other writers, the emphasis falls too much on recognizing that Conrad alludes to or echoes other writers and not enough on puzzling through how Conrad is critically responding to the thoughts of his predecessors. Part of the problem might be explained by Carlyle’s criticism of our tendency to allow words to harden into things so that “creative” writing and “critical” writing are separated into distinct categories (oh, 90–1). As I have discussed, Conrad is deeply suspicious of categorical distinctions and the relationships between antithetical terms. Though Conrad wrote critical essays, his best criticism is in the novels. Applying the distinction of creative and critical writing to his works obscures the kind of art Conrad makes. Undoubtedly, Conrad’s extensive reading informs his writing, and his responsiveness to the works of other writers manifests an effort to re-examine their ideas and forms. Although the search for echoes and allusions and other borrowings is useful in establishing connections between Conrad and other writers, the work of making sense of Conrad’s heuristic responses is vitally important for understanding his art and thought. Throughout this

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study, I have focused on Conrad’s critical thinking about the ideas he inherits from his predecessors. In each of the novels, Conrad poses questions again, suggesting that the ways in which the questions were posed in the past have changed for him. The inquiries into the problems do not remain the same, so Conrad’s thought about the value of work, the use of the confession, and the relationship between faith and doubt will produce different answers to these fundamental human problems. Simply reproducing the ideas in the previous forms is not possible. As Carlyle argues in Sartor Resartus, new clothing must be found for existing ideas and convictions if they are to remain vitally alive. The ideas must be embodied in new forms, re-examined and refashioned to test their value and meaning. Nietzsche’s revaluation of values is another form of Carlyle’s retailoring, but his revaluations are often destructive in nature. Nietzsche continues the skeptical work of the eighteenth century that Carlyle wants to counter. In Conrad’s work of revaluing and retailoring, we can recognize a continual testing of ideas and his ability to rethink the relationships among various ideas and challenge many received opinions regarding fundamental values. One significant problem in contemporary criticism is that works of art are subjected to investigations or interrogations based on a theory or a combination of theories without sufficient doubts about whether the work of art is critical of, or repudiates, the very ideas informing these readings.5 Reading Conrad as I do raises difficult questions about the practice of using theories to explain art. Conrad may be critical of the ideas which form the basis of a theoretical reading of his work. As if recalling Carlyle’s or Nietzsche’s preoccupations, Conrad thought “formulas and theories are dead things” and connected them with “illusion and self-deception” (cljc, 1, 421). Conrad’s skepticism toward ideas extends to theories in general and should cause us to question the formulas we adopt when reading his work. For instance, anyone who has studied the history of ideas knows that the fundamental assumptions informing Derrida’s deconstruction or Foucault’s genealogical methods can be traced back to important passages in Nietzsche’s philosophy. If Conrad is critical of Nietzsche’s thought, then this raises difficult questions about whether theories rooted in and extending Nietzsche’s ideas are reading Conrad or whether Conrad is reading those theories. Conrad’s criticism of Nietzsche anticipates the work of later writers, so we cannot assume that, because those theorists are writing later than 5 For an examination of the problems involved, see Graham Bradshaw’s argument in the introduction to Misrepresentations.

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Conrad, their thought is more valuable or more insightful. At the very least, we should attend to the objections that Conrad makes in his art to ideas that we might bring to bear on his novels in our reading. In essence, this means engaging in a real conversation with Conrad to understand how his perspective stands in relation to our own, so that rather than dictating the terms of the discussion, we might question the terms of our criticism. This is the very real difference between a dialogue and an interrogation, a matter which Conrad repeatedly reflects upon in Under Western Eyes and Nostromo. Perhaps the elementary question is about authority and the hierarchy of values we create among different forms of thinking and knowing which implicitly inform our judgments in reading. At least since Freud’s time, the critic as analyst has been identified as the important thinker and knower and the artist has lost his or her claim to being the voice of wisdom and judgment. Very few people today would seriously consider Carlyle’s argument for the poet as a prophet and hero as a claim worth considering. However, there is a very real question of whether we have actually ceased to revere authors or simply exchanged our worship of poets and novelists for an admiration of analysts and critics. Implicit in my argument is the idea that Conrad is a major thinker and makes an impressive claim to being one of the best critics of several major nineteenth-century thinkers that we can read. Conrad has much to teach us about reading Dickens’s Bleak House or Nietzsche’s relationship with Christ in The Anti-Christ, and potentially offers insights that are lacking in contemporary critics. Questions such as “How and why does Conrad think?” or “What problem does Conrad raise?” are the fundamental basis of my inquiry. If I am right in arguing that Conrad teaches us how to read other authors with more care and deliberation, then he is also showing us how to attend to his own works in the same way. Through the process of exploring the conversations among Conrad and his nineteenth-century predecessors, I have begun to realize just how difficult it is “to think by myself” (uwe, 107). Thinking about Conrad’s art as criticism has taught me “it is not very easy, such thinking. One has got to be put in the way of it, awakened to the truth” (uwe, 107).

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Index

Antichrist, 207, 208, 209 Arnold, Matthew, 13, 32 Assistant Commissioner: Conrad and Dickens, 73; marriage, 84–5; not knowing, 66, 84–6; work, 18–19, 83–6 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 22 Barthes, Roland, 30 Beer, Gillian, 165–6, 171 Berman, Jeffery, 136, 138–9 Berthoud, Jacques, 105 Beyond Good and Evil, 199, 201, 202, 215 Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 165, 168, 170, 185, 190 The Birth of Tragedy, 8, 213–14 Blackwood, William, 4, 8, 34, 96, 99; letters to, 8n17, 96 Bleak House: Captain Hawdon/Nemo, 71; Conrad’s response to, 17–18, 66–95; as critical inquiry, 71–2, 74; Esther, 17, 66, 68, 88–91; Inspector Bucket, 17, 66, 73, 76–9, 84, 88, 93; Jo, 17–18, 60, 70–1, 87, 88, 94, 195, 216; Lady Dedlock, 18, 78, 81–3, 85, 89–91; Snagsby, 66, 87–8, 90; Tom’s revenge, 70,

73; Tulkinghorn, 66, 67, 71, 81–5, 88 Bob Stanton: analogous to Jim, 177–8; death, 178 Breton, Rob, 13–14 Brierly: analogous to Jim, 177–8, 179– 80, 182, 184, 189; self-sacrifice, 179–80, 182, 189; suicide, 31 The Brothers Karamazov, 9, 142, 150, 160, 212n29; characters from, 127; Dimitry Karamazov, 142; Grushenka, 142 Burke, Edmund, 32 Butte, George, 192, 213 Carlyle, Thomas: in Conrad’s letters, 8, 36–7; Conrad’s response to, 17, 33–65; Conrad’s use of his bureau, 3–4; criticism of categories, 25; cultural therapeutics, 45; Nietzsche’s criticism of, 36, 207n18 Casaubon: connection with Eliot, 118–19; Eliot’s sympathy for, 114– 15; gossip, 127; killed by Eliot, 107; marriage, 98, 100, 111, 121, 130, 148; undermined by Ladislaw, 107 Chance, 11, 227 “Characteristics,” 28, 33n2, 45, 68, 72

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Index

Charles Gould: analogous to Eliot, 118; engagement, 110–11; father, 111, 115–16, 228; fixed idea, 128; not executed, 107; passion for mines, 113, 117–18; rewriting of Lydgate, 116–17; work, 116–18, 228 Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 28, 133 Childlike: in Conrad, 49, 111; in Eliot, 110–11; in Nietzsche, 207 Christ, 209, 211; innocence of 218. See also hero, scapegoat, selfsacrifice Christianity, 209, 210, 217 Colvin, Sidney, 8 The Concept of Anxiety, 102–3, 129 Condon, Matthew, 164 confession, 132–62; complicated form of, 133–4, 137, 159–60, 230; critical reassessment of, 18; and documents, 137–8; of Dostoevsky, 145; doubtful for Eliot, 101; as extraordinary act, 161; forced, 23–4, 157–8; of Heyst’s father, 200–1; and love, 145, 151–5, 161–2; of Monygham, 128; of Nietzsche, 202–3; of Nostromo, 113; of philosophers, 210; of Rousseau, 135–6, 140; variations on Dostoevsky’s scenes, 144–5, 151–5 Conrad in the Twenty-First Century, 16 Conrad, Jessie, 212 Crick, Brian, 25; on conjugal and fraternal love, 152n33; on Conrad, 68, 69, 79, 84, 85; on George Eliot, 114; on Wuthering Heights, 149n32 Crime and Punishment, 9, 18, 195; Conrad’s response to, 132–62; heroines in, 140–4. See also Sonya Marmeladov, Raskolnikov “The Crime of Partition” (Conrad), 7 Culture and Anarchy, 125

Daniel Deronda, 13 Darwin, Charles: accessible in nineteenth century, 165; as classifier, 166; not in Conrad’s letters, 7; Lord Jim, 18; post-Darwinian world, 171; read alongside Conrad, 25; revaluation, 26; self-preservation and selfsacrifice, 163, 172–3, 174, 176–7, 178, 180 Decoud, 18, 97; analogous to Eliot, 120–1; as dilettante, 104, 106; disbelief, 108; love, 111–13; rewriting of Ladislaw, 106–7; selfpreservation/destruction, 125–6; solitude, 121–6 Degeneration, 196 The Descent of Man, 28, 172–3, 176 detectives, 71–87 Dickens, Charles: child-heroines, 227; Conrad’s affection for, 17; Conrad’s knowledge of, 8; in Conrad’s letters, 7; Conrad’s reading of, 4–6; Conrad’s response to, 66–95; Conrad’s work rooted in, 66, 96, 224, 225, 227; criticism of the age, 14, 26, 67; detectives, 72– 8, 88; as disciple of Carlyle, 36; dramatizing voices, 22–3; Eliot’s criticism of, 113; judgment of, 50–1; little discussion in relation to Conrad, 11, 27, 224, 225; named in Chance, 11; Shakespeare, 68–70 Dionysus, 19, 211, 213–14, 218, 222; and the Crucified, 194, 204–5 Dorothea: Antonia, 111, 113; Celia, 101; Eliot’s identification with, 101, 114; Emilia Gould, 18, 97, 103–4, 106; Ladislaw, 106–7, 109, 110, 111–12, 128; marriage, 98, 110, 148; sympathy, 104–5

Index Dostoevsky, Fyodor: antagonist for Conrad, 132–6, 196; beaten horse, 211–12; connected to Conrad, 9– 12, 27, 132, 225, 227; Conrad’s caricature of, 138–40, 142–6; in Conrad’s letters, 7–8, 7n15, 9n20, 135; Conrad’s response to, 18, 132–62; Eliot’s characters, 127; extraordinary man, 50, 65, 155, 157, 159, 206; faith, 123; idealizing female characters, 141–3, 148–9; in Nietzsche’s work, 207n18; Russian intellectuals, 26, 28; salvation, 143, 146, 153; See also The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot dynamite, 220–1 Ecce Homo, 19, 194, 204–5, 214, 220–1 The Ego and the Id, 165, 168, 170, 185 Eliot, George: as analyst, 119–20; in Conrad’s letters, 8, 8n17; Conrad’s response to, 96–131; criticism of the age, 14, 26; criticism of Dickens, 113–14; purpose of artist, 99; See also Middlemarch Eliot, T.S., 30 Emilia Gould, 18; Decoud, 107–8, 112–13; Dorothea, 97, 103–5; engagement, 110–11, 115–16; idealized by Monygham, 128–30; isolation, 108, 112–13; in marriage, 107–8; seeing peasants, 105–6; selfprojection, 102; sympathy, 98, 102, 104, 105–6 Emmett, V.J., 44 engagement scenes, 109–13 extraordinary man: in Crime and Punishment, 155–7; Dostoevsky’s repudiation of, 65, 156–7; Razumov as, 152, 157–62; self-sacrifice, 159, 161–2; in Under Western Eyes, 155

247

Faulkner, William, 12 Fear and Trembling, 177, 182 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 12 Ford, Ford Madox, 3, 5–6, 10, 197, 212 Foucault, 30, 230 Frank, Joseph, 141 Freud, Sigmund, 18, 25, 79, 89, 231; anticipated by Conrad and Dickens, 68; Carlyle, 45; on child at play, 190; on compulsion to repeat, 183, 185; first discoverer, 185; postFreudian world, 171; on selfpreservation/destruction, 165, 167–8, 170–1; Garnett, Constance, 9 Garnett, Edward, 9; article on Nietzsche, 196; Conrad’s letters to, 7n11, 7n13, 7n15, 8n16, 9n20, 21, 31, 34n3, 37, 132; interest in Nietzsche, 197 The Gay Science, 68n3, 114, 173 Goldberg, Michael, 225 Goldberg, Samuel, 15 Gould, Charles. See Charles Gould Gould, Emilia. See Emilia Gould Guerard, Albert, 20, 139 Haldin, 31, 65, 133, 137, 155, 159; betrayal of, 151, 153, 159–62; description of Natalia, 153; description of Razumov, 152; doubled with Razumov, 153–4, 161; forced confession, 23, 157, 160, 228; infecting Razumov, 158–9 Hawkins, Hunt, 27 Heart of Darkness: brick maker, 58, 59, 60, 61; chief accountant, 57–8, 59, 60, 61; grove of death, 10, 35, 58, 60, 61–4; Kurtz, original and sham,

248

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50–1; Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, 10–11; origins in Carlyle’s arguments, 35; Russian harlequin, 51–2; sickness, 46–7, 49; See also Kurtz, Jim hero, 17: Carlyle as, 42–3; Christ as, 206–7; Conrad’s conflicted response to, 157; as divinity, 208; Dostoevsky repudiates, 206; false, 49–50; Haldin as, 155; Jim as, 130, 163–91, 194, 206–8, 228; Kierkegaard on, 182; Kurtz as degenerate hero, 10, 47–50; little American monkey, 173; looks into things, 50, 74; as man of letters, 12, 41–3, 71, 73; Natalia as, 155; needs an audience, 41; Nietzsche as, 206, 210; Nietzsche on, 221; in the nineteenth century, 204; Peter Ivanovitch as, 138–9; place for, 49; poet as, 231; Razumov as, 155, 157; savagery, 48–50; self-sacrifice, 164–5, 173–5, 206, 210; sincerity, 52–4; Stevie as, 92, 194, 211, 221; as teacher, 41, 42, 44; unconscious, 45, 50; work, 62; as writer, 41; See also extraordinary man heroism: comprising conflicting instincts, 163, 170–1, 174–7, 189–91, 206, 208; conditions for, 49, 185–9; Nietzsche on, 221; not knowing, 45; records of, 10; Stevie’s mother, 221; work, 65, 74, 228 hero-worship, 17; Carlyle’s role, 42–3; conditions for, 49; as dangerous idea, 52; health/illness, 44–5, 226; of Kurtz, 51–3; in Marlow’s thought, 35; skepticism toward, 35–6; throughout Conrad’s works, 227–8 Hervouet, Yves, 20–1, 229 Heynes, Michiel, 164

Heyst, Axel, 19, 194, 197–201, 203 Heyst’s father, 19, 193, 197–201, 203 historical novel, 229 history, 10, 11, 13, 17, 228–9 history of criticism, 9–11 history of ideas, 230 Hunter, Alan, 181 Iago, 69–70, 76, 77 idiot, 206–7; Stevie as, 95, 213, 218, 221 The Idiot, 95, 195, 206, 207n18; Nastasya Filipnova, 127; Prince Myshkin, 195, 206, 207n18; Rogozhin, 127 idleness, 55–6, 58–60 influence, 19–22, 26–7 Inspector Heat: authors, 73; as expert, 76, 78; the familiar, 79–81, 93, 103; not knowing, 66, 85–6, 103; Stevie’s remains, 79–80; work, 17–18 intellectual context, 26–8 Ivanovitch, Peter. See Peter Ivanovitch James, Henry, 6, 13, 30 Jim: analogous to Bob Stanton and Brierly, 177–80, 182; assassination, 190–1; Christ, 204, 206–8; confession of, 137, 157–8; Darwin, 172–4, 176–7; death of, 19, 171, 180–2, 188–91; distance from reader, 47; as divinity, 207–8; father, 210, 228; George, 181–2; as hero, 65, 163–5, 170, 174–6, 187, 208, 228; as idiot, 206–7; jumps repeatedly, 181–5; lies, 168–9; the modern, 163; Monygham, 130; Nietzsche, 194–5, 204, 206, 208–10; Nostromo, 124; in Patusan, 49, 65, 184–5, 187–9, 207– 8; as scapegoat, 164; Scott’s heroes, 131; self-preservation/destruction,

Index

249

163–91; subject for Marlow, 23, 175, 183, 223; trajectory of life, 170–1 joke, 4; at expense of Carlyle, 37, 39; Catholic, 219; Dedlock and Verloc, 90; Dostoevsky as feminist, 140; heartless, 213; narrator’s role in Under Western Eyes, 150 Joseph Conrad and His Circle, 216

destruction, 163–95; See also Bob Stanton, Brierly, Jim, Marlow, Stein Lydgate, 18,121, 130; Bulstrode, 97, 104, 124–5; Charles Gould, 116– 17; Eliot, 118–19; engagement to Rosamond, 109–11; marriage to Rosamond, 121–2; worships Dorothea, 128

Karl, Frederick, 6 Katz, Michael, 28 Kaye, Peter, 11–12, 13–14 Kierkegaard, Søren, 40, 102–3, 123, 129, 177, 182 Kimbrough, Robert, 27 Kintzele, Paul, 41 Kurtz, 43–4; Conrad’s response to Carlyle, 17, 36, 39–41; as degenerate hero, 47–50; gossip, 227; heroworship, 44, 51–2; sincerity, 53–4; work, 54, 56–8, 61

Marlow: against ideas, 31; choice of nightmares, 39–41; as critic/ prophet, 35, 53; distinctions, 169; doubled with chief accountant, 57– 8; doubled with harlequin, 51–2; extraordinary disclosure, 183; fireman, 60; in grove of death, 61–5; health/sickness, 44–7; hero-worship, 52–3; idea of heroism, 175–6; the Intended, 34; Jim’s confession, 157–8; Jim’s execution, 164; judging Kurtz, 50, 53–4; knowing/not knowing, 35, 56, 60–1; Nietzsche, 192, 210; readiness for death, 188, 190; representation of Brierly, 179– 80; retelling Jim’s story, 23; rooted in Carlyle, 11, 17, 35; Sartor Resartus, 37–9, 43–4; seeing for Carlyle, 64–5; surface-truth, 74; work, 54–65; in “Youth,” 37–9, 61; Zarathustra, 223 Marmeladov, Sonya. See Sonya Marmeladov The Merchant of Venice, 69 Middlemarch: Bulstrode, 97, 104, 124– 5, 126–7; Conrad’s response to, 96– 131; Miss Noble, 110, 114; Mrs Bulstrode, 108; Rosamond, 109, 111, 121–2, 127. See also Dorothea, Casaubon, Lydgate, Will Ladislaw Miller, J. Hillis, 175 Monygham, 18, 97; pursuit of idea, 124, 128–31; self-preservation/

Lawrence, D.H., 6, 14 Leavis, F.R., 14, 226; on Conrad, 26; on Daniel Deronda and The Portrait of a Lady, 13; on Dickens and Conrad, 227; on influence, 19; on Middlemarch, 101 Levine, George, 27, 32, 96–7, 103, 106 Little Dorrit, 227 Lord Jim, 8, 16, 49; Carlyle, 17, 26, 65; Chester and Robinson, 169; confession, 137, 157; critical edition of, 27, 28; epigraph for, 33; ideas in, 31; Jones, 179–80; knowing, 47; Nietzsche, 18–19, 193, 194–5, 204, 206–210; Patna, 27, 31, 124, 176, 179, 181, 184, 186–8, 189–90, 210; Patusan, 49, 65, 124, 164, 175, 182, 184, 187–9, 207–8; repetition in, 169, 185–6, 189; self-preservation/

250

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destruction, 124; suffering, 127–8; sympathy, 100, 102, 113, 127 Moser, Thomas, 27 motives, 75 Mozina, Andrew, 164 narrator (Under Western Eyes): descriptions of Peter Ivanovitch, 140, 142; devotion to Natalia, 146, 147– 50; doubled with Peter Ivanovitch, 147; story as confession, 137–8; watching a love scene, 149, 152 Natalia, 134, 137, 148–50; idealized by narrator, 148–9; idealized by Razumov, 150–2; imposed upon, 134, 146–7 “The Natural History of German Life,” 99, 113–14, 119, 120 negative grammar, 68–71, 76, 87–90, 94 Nicholas Nickleby, 7 Nietzsche, Friedrich: Conrad’s response to, 192–223; death of God, 222–3; intellectual influence of, 195–7; post Nietzschean world, 171; publication dates of translated works, 196n8 Nietzsche in England 1890–1914, 196 Nordau, Max, 196 Nostromo, 18; dying confession, 113; isolation, 121–6; self-preservation/ destruction, 125–6 Nostromo, 5, 18, 96–131; Antonia, 18, 102, 107, 109, 111–13; chief engineer, 4; Conrad’s illness, 131; dialogue, 231; Hirsch, 124–7, 130; history, 17; ideas, 31. See also Decoud, Charles Gould, Emilia Gould, Monygham, Nostromo Notes from Underground: confession in, 158; critical edition of, 28; Liza, 141, 143

not knowing, 65; concealed, 86; as dominant instinct, 66, 92–3; heroism, 45; Marlow, 47, 54; movement away from, 75–6; necessity of, 74; negative grammar, 68–71, 88–90; Nietzsche, 193, 201, 217–18; sympathy, 97, 1–23; 113; work, 56 Novalis, 33, 41, 54; Carlyle’s translations of, 33n2 Nussbaum, Martha, 14–15 “An Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question,” 63–5 O’Hanlon, Redmond, 165 The Old Curiosity Shop, 7 Oliphant, Margaret, 8 Oliver Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches, 10–11, 28 On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, 25, 28, 33, 39, 41, 52, 62 “On History,” 28 ordinary: Dostoevsky’s valuation of, 65, 157; life in Conrad, 98–9; life in Eliot, 98; Raskolnikov, 155–6; Razumov as, 155, 157–62 Othello, 69, 76, 77 Our Mutual Friend, 7 Past and Present, 55–6, 62, 73n13, 167n8 Personal Record, A: admiration of Dickens, 225; confessions, 136; reading, 4, 7 Peter Ivanovitch, 14, 18, 65; confession of, 133, 137–8, 148–9; as critique of Dostoevsky, 134, 137–40, 142–7 The Pickwick Papers, 7 pity: of Carlyle, 64; Christianity, 206, 209–10; contempt for, 19, 90, 192– 5, 197–204, 222; difficulty of, 127;

Index for egoism, 114–15; God, 223; horses, 212, 214–16 ; for material things, 118; Nietzsche’s repudiation of, 123, 126, 191, 195, 197–204; for the “poor” in Eliot, 114–15, 125; resentment, 97, 100, 195, 212, 218; self-preservation/destruction, 202, 206; suffocating from, 202; in Victory, 197–204; Zarathustra, 223 “Poland Revisited,” 7 postcolonial readings, 15–16 Raskolnikov, 195; beaten horse, 160; confession of, 134, 144, 151–4; Dostoevsky, 145; extraordinary man, 155–7, 159; murders, 143–4; Peter Ivanonitch, 144–5; prison escape, 142; Razumov, 150–4 Razumov, 18, 31, 134; compelled to write, 23, 135–6; confession to Natalia, 136, 137, 151–5; doubled with narrator, 146; doubled with Ziemianitch, 146, 160–2; as extraordinary, 155, 157–62; journal of, 133, 137–8; like Haldin, 154, 157–60; love for Natalia, 150–4 Renner, Stanley, 25 resentment: toward Haldin, 154; inflicting wounds, 227; toward Kurtz, 47; toward Ladislaw, 98, 104; the past, 228; pity, 97, 100, 195, 212, 218; in Scott, 229; toward the silver, 113; slave morality, 198–9; Stevie, 217–18; for suffering, 212; sympathy, 97, 100, 105, 116, 124–5 revenge, 229; and Razumov, 151, 153–4, 161, 164 Robinson, Ian, 14 Rorty, Richard, 14 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 135–6, 140, 161

251

Said, Edward, 13, 26 Sartor Resartus, 17, 26, 42; clothes philosophy, 37–9, 51, 59n30, 65, 230; gospel of work, 55; structure of, 42, 43; Teufelsdröckh, 37–8, 42, 43, 51 scapegoat, 164; Christ as, 208; Jim as, 194; Michaelis as, 218; Nietzsche as, 208; Razumov as, 150; Stevie as, 194, 215; Ziemianitch as, 161 Scott, Walter, 4, 130–1, 228–9 The Secret Agent, 17–18, 19, 46, 192–5, 204, 206, 210–23; dedication to, 4; Michaelis, 86, 95, 218–19; Ossipon, 87–8, 91, 94; Professor, 46; Verloc, 66, 85–6, 91–3; Vladimir, 83, 216, 220; See also Assistant Commissioner, Inspector Heat, Stevie, Winnie Verloc “The Secret Sharer,” 160, 193 self-preservation/destruction, 124–6, 163–91; indistinguishable, 163, 165, 167, 170–1, 174; Jim’s jumps, 180–5; knowing/not knowing, 84, 87–8, 92, 94; Nietzsche’s attack on, 173–4; restoration, 185–9; work, 58 self-sacrifice, 204; Christ, 208, 210, 218, 220; as Dostoevsky’s ideal, 141–3, 154; extraordinary, 159–62; not knowing, 92; self-preservation/ destruction, 19, 130, 163–5, 171–4, 177–8, 180–1, 183, 189, 191, 206, 211; sympathy, 106, 110, 128 Shakespeare, William, 5, 6, 24, 228–9; negative grammar in, 68–70 “Signs of the Times” (Carlyle), 62–3, 68 signs of the times, 71, 74; diseased, 17 Silenus, 213 sincerity, 35, 52–4 Sonya Marmeladov, 134, 142, 145, 159; embodies Dostoevsky’s ideals,

252

Index

140–1, 143, 149; faith in Raskolnikov, 144; idealized heroine, 140– 1, 143, 154; Natalia, 151–2; Tekla, 145–6, 162 Spittle, Brian, 225 Stanley, H.M., 62 Stanton, Bob. See Bob Stanton Stevie, 17–18, 19, 67; analogous to Jo, 94–5, 216; as brother/son, 91–3; Christianity, 204, 206; as idiot, 94– 5, 206, 218; knowing, 68, 75, 90, 94–5, 214; literary precedents, 195, 206, 211–14; Nietzsche, 210–22; as scapegoat/victim, 194–5; and selfpreservation/destruction, 206, 216, 220–2; as subject of inquiry, 71, 79 Stein: as caricature, 18–19; categorical distinctions, 67; representative of Darwin and Nietzsche, 166–7, 208; sends Jim to Patusan, 184, 208 Stone, Donald, 13 suffocate, 202, 215 sympathy, 96–131; antithetical terms, 97; Conrad and Nietzsche, 192–3; Eliot’s form, 118–20; Eliot’s idea of, 99, 101; as fixed idea, 128–30; as a form of fear, 79–81; as a form of possession, 114–15, 128; identification, 77–8, 81, 102–3, 135–6, 178; isolation, 108, 121–6; judgment, 192, 195; knowing/not knowing, 94, 113–18; love, 109–13; resentment, 97, 100, 105, 116, 124–5; seeing, 104–6; self-destruction, 98– 9, 222; self-sacrifice, 172–3; suffering, 98–9, 216–17; tolerance, 100 Tekla, 17, 32, 65, 162, 228; confides in Natalia, 137; as figure of selfsacrifice, 154; relationship with Peter Ivanovitch, 134, 145–6, 160

Thackeray, William, 4 Thatcher, David, 6, 196 therapeutic, 45, 50, 74 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 209, 223 truth, 35–6 Twilight of the Idols, 166, 173, 214, 220 Under Western Eyes, 9, 13, 17, 18, 65, 191, 132–62, 212, 228, 231; and Conrad’s collapse, 215; and ideas, 31–2, 132–3; Kostia, 31, 137; Mikulin, 23, 137, 150, 160; See also Haldin, narrator (Under Western Eyes), Natalia, Peter Ivanovitch, Razumov, Tekla, Ziemianitch VanWangenen, Donna, 136, 138–9 Victory, 19, 192–4, 197–201, 203–4 Virgil, 213 Walton, James, 78 Watt, Ian, 29–30, 224 Weinstein, Philip, 181 Whalley, George, 21–2, 24, 30, 67 What Is To Be Done?, 28, 133 Will Ladislaw, 97–8, 101, 109–12, 115; Decoud, 18, 104, 106–7, 120; Monygham, 128 will to power, 142, 209 The Will to Power, 205 Winnie Verloc, 17–18; maternal vigilance, 67, 91–3; not knowing, 66, 70–1, 75, 85, 90–4; rewriting of Esther, 88; rewriting of Lady Dedlock, 90–1; suicide of, 87 Woolf, Virginia, 6, 12 work, 34–5, 54–65; avoidance of, 58– 9; clothing, 37–8; to death, 64–5; of detectives, 71–2, 74, 78, 81–3, 85– 6, 88; devotion to, 57–8; dirty, 130; for distinction, 158, 161; easy, 186;

Index grove of death, 61–5; knowing/not knowing, 17, 54–7, 59–60, 74, 76, 86; loss of, 153–4; passion for, 104; of writing, 8, 65, 136, 215, 225 Wuthering Heights, 149

253

“Youth” (Conrad), 11, 37–9, 61 Ziemianitch: beaten by Razumov, 160; doubled with Razumov, 160–2; as feminist, 146