512
FREDERICK CREWS
whose voice, whispered from beyond the grave, utters her insistent
claim upon her son's return." The fathers of these heroes, like Con–
rad's own father, tend to have outlived the mothers for a while and
then died or departed, leaving the sons to brood over their intimidat–
ing high-mindedness and disastrous fanaticism. This concern with the
poIlthumous grip of the parents amounts to an oblique assigning of
blame for the inhibition which characterizes Conrad's protagonists
and is never adequately explained on "realistic" grounds. Conrad
tells us in effect that his characters cannot involve themselves emo–
tionally because they suffer from fixation; they are too busy fending
off resentments and longings toward the departed elders to permit
themselves anything more than the most furtive encounters with their
contemporaries.
It is startling to see how all the peculiarities of the Conradian
world fall into place in this perspective. Like Hemingway, Conrad
wavered between a maudlin
Weltschmerz
and a defensive assertiveness
about the importance of manly style; the two attitudes are psycho–
logically consistent in that one is an antidote to the other. The value
of action for such a writer is measured by the inertia that must be
overcome to achieve it. Manhood is always in doubt, and its recon–
firmation can only be made believable in an exclusively masculine
ambience hedged with rules and physical difficulties. Hence the other–
wise inexplicable feeling in Conrad that nautical duty and discipline
and trial constitute a welcome respite from something more fear–
some. In a word, that something is sexuality. Conrad can permit him–
self to imagine a love relationship only if
it
is a matching of racial
opposites - that is,
if
it contains an alibi to the accusation of being
latently incestuous. When the lovers are of similar background they
lock themselves in what
Dr.
Meyer calls a morass of inhibition, "all
the while engaging in a ruminative chatter that at times approaches
sheer double-talk." But Conrad's precautions do not stop here. His
heroes, for all their exotic adventures, amount to virtual eunuchs,
while his heroines tend to be awesome, androgynous, self-sufficient
monoliths who can he fought over but not fertilized. His heroes'
mortality rate rises sharply as they approach these Brobdingnagian
ladies, who evidently pose a menace more forbidding than any hazard
of the male world. Death is at once a symbol of castration and the
SUrt~st
escape from it, a flight from incest and a return to it - and,
