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FREDERICK CREWS
"persona" or a saint, the critics discern that "Heart of Darkness" is
really a grail quest or a protoexistentialist essay or an attack on
Christian hypocrisy or a critique of imperialism. In fundamental
respects these interpretations are alike. All are concerned with some
equivalent of salvation - a subject whose appeal these days seems
restricted almost exclusively to people on the academic ladder.
All
take for granted the greatness and the single-minded didacticism of
Conrad's novella. None tries to think of Conrad as a troubled man
who worked amid the prejudices of his age and the exigencies of his
own nervous mind. The critics have paid him their highest compli–
ment: he has been graduated from an author to an Assignment.
It should be noted, however, that the most refreshing exceptions
to this trend are provided by Americans who share their colleagues'
feeling that Conrad's mysteries can be decoded. The pivotal issue is
whether Conrad himself grasped the deeper consistencies of his art. In
Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline,
Thomas Moser concluded
with a certain embarrassed surprise that Conrad's celebrated "later
affirmation" makes excellent sense as a pseudoaffirmation, a whistling
in the dark. By exposing a disparity between statement and emotional
tone, Moser threw into question the whole genteel enterprise of under–
standing Conrad through his "views." Not surprisingly, Moser's book
has been something of a black sheep among Conrad studies, but now
it has been confirmed and expanded in many directions by Bernard
C.
Meyer's
Joseph Conrad; A Psychoanalytic Biography.
It
is a telling
reflection on literary study today that this book, which aspires merely
to say what Conrad personally was like, should provide insights into
his fiction that go beyond anything offered by his professional critics.
Being a psychoanalyst, Dr. Meyer takes for granted a continuity be–
tween the author's psychic life generally and the symbolic world of
his fiction; this simple assumption, without which no incisive criticism
is possible; has not been drummed out of him by graduate training
in "English."
In making Conrad fully and plausibly human for the first time,
Dr. Meyer's book will give a jolt to many critics whose readings,
though they purport to be independent of biographical trivialities, in
fact rely heavily on a sentimental view of the stoical mariner Conrad.
It ought to be harder from now on to take this line. The Conrad who
recommended stoicism was
in
his private life a hypochondriac and
