CONRAD
509
would have been grateful for such cooperation.'! Whereas most critics
merely underrate the atmosphere of
guilt
and depression that encircles
Conrad's world, Leavis is positively determined to ignore it. His
favorite novel,
N
ostromo,
has "a certain robust vigour of melodrama
... completely controlled to the pattern of moral significance."
"There is plainly no room in
N
ostromo
for the kind of illustrated
psychology that many critics think they have a right to demand of
a novelist...." In short, there is plainly no room in Leavis for
Conrad.
The American academic reply to Conrad's problematic quality
is more businesslike and complacent than Leavis': explication re–
places value-judgment. Take, for example, the three casebooks in
which scholars quarrel politely over what "Heart of Darkness" truly
means. The specific job is to decide whether Conrad wanted us to
be just like his narrator Marlow or to look down on him as morally
inadequate. Since Conrad was in fact much too involved with Marlow
to conceive of either of these cautionary ideas, the issue is agreeably
difficult to settle; recourse must be had to patterns of imagery and
allusion, in which, it is supposed, the author's lessons have been
imbedded. Thus for one critic the allusions to the
Aeneid
constitute
the hidden key; for another it is the allusions to the
I nierno;
for an–
other it is the allusions to Buddhism, which show us some remarkably
flattering things about Marlow which are not even hinted in the
literal plot.
2
Depending on whether they find Marlow a satirized
1.
But for Conrad the matter wasn't so easy. "Even writing to a friend -
to a person one has heard, touched, drank with, quarrelled with - does not
give me a sense of reality. All is illusion - the words written, the mind at
which they are aimed, the truth they are intended to express, the hands
that will hold the paper, the eyes that will glance at the lines. Every image
floats vaguely in a sea of doubt - and the doubt itself is lost in an unex–
plored universe of incertitudes [Letter to Edward Garnett]." This is Leavis'
"gallant simple sailor" whose genius was "a unique and happy union of sea–
man and writer."
2. "Although qualified to enter nirvana, like the true Bodhisattva, Marlow
remains in the world to work for the salvation of all people. In his stage
of enlightenment he teaches what his descent into the imperfections of the
human soul has taught him - egoless compassion. Cancelling out all per–
sonal desire and fear, he has made available to humanity the gift of complete
renunciation. To every suffering, striving creature, trapped in the karmic
processes (enslavement to matter), he offers the inexhaustible wisdom of
selflessness."
