508
FREDERICK CREWS
For Conrad, however, this is evidently a difficult undertaking.
Everyone recognizes - in passing - that his fiction is pervaded with
uneasiness, but something about Conrad urges his critics to hurry on
to the "moral issues" which are taken so very seriously. One can
read a great deal of commentary before coming across any sustained
discussion of the wishes and fears that lie behind his art, energizing
it and yet warping it into something quite distinct from dramatized
philosophy or nautical talespinning. We are told over and over that
Conrad preferred responsibility and discipline to self-indulgence, but
what must have been painfully defensive for Conrad somehow comes
out sounding merely thematic. The final Conradian gesture, whether
of courage or duty or tragic pessimism or human solidarity, gets most
of the attention while the mental turmoil that precipitated it gets
lip service. What is engaging about Conrad for me and I daresay for
others is the part of his imagination that is prior to this withdrawal
into gesture - the part that Marvin Mudrick refers to darkly, without
explanation, as Conrad's "suppressed ... nightmares." But it is one
thing to sense this fact and another to bring it into critical focus. On
the whole the "close analysis" of our time has been devoted not to
understanding anxiety but to mollifying it.
A prime instance is F. R. Leavis' widely quoted chapter on
Conrad in
The Great Tradition.
Leavis is made uneasy by Conrad's
"adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mys–
tery," but it wouldn't occur to him to inquire
why
Conrad writes this
way. He is too busy showing that despite his imperfections Conrad is
a great novelist, since he produced "work addressed to the adult
mind." What the adult mind seems to approve is a combination of
tangible realism (a "vivid essential record, in terms of things seen
and incidents experienced by a main agent in the narrative, and par–
ticular contacts and exchanges with other human agents . . .") and
bracing moralism ("he does believe intensely, as a matter of concrete
experience, in the kind of human achievement represented by the
Merchant Service - tradition, discipline and moral ideal . . .").
Leavis wants to convince himself that behind the expansive adjectives
sit good English nouns, "firm and vivid concreteness" and characters
"each having a specific representative moral significance." This cling–
ing to the palpable and the banal is in a curious sense a plausible
response to Conrad, who wanted to see his fiction as Leavis sees
it
and
