CONRAD
513
of course, by killing off his heroes Conrad spares himself the
awkwardness of trying to depict love scenes when his mind is possessed
by fantasies of this sort.
The critics have been hard pressed to say why Conrad succeeds
despite his evasions, which they prefer to minimize. But the question
has been wrongly put: Conrad's evasions themselves serve a function
within his economy of "mutually paralyzed energies," and criticism
should
be
able to say what the function is. Conrad's uniqueness does
not consist in the virtues for which he is most often praised - vivid
detail, evocative scenery, suspense, moral concern, a sense of the
heroic - but in the fact that he carries these traits along in a nose
dive toward self-destruction. He is simultaneously terrified at existence
and a connoisseur of its heightened moments, at once a nihilist and
a raconteur. This tension is sustained by the "adjectival" rhetoric
which looks so foolishly obfuscating when it is extracted for analysis.
Even the memorable sentences, the ones that strike us as profoundly
true, serve to mediate among Conrad's contrary impulses. Take, for
instance, his haunting remark in
N ostromo
that "in our activity alone
do we find the sustaining
i~usion
of an independent existence as
against the whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless part."
That is classic Conrad, not only because it contains a flash of tragic
insight but also because it blurs responsibility: to think of oneself as
helpless within a metaphysical void is to assign an external cause for
one's prevailing depression. I suggest that this quasi-confessional mode
is Conrad's forte and that we are more affected by it than we may
care to admit. Conrad indulges our fears of isolation, neglect and
victimization by malign higher powers - the fears of an anxious
infant - without loca ting their source. There is something luxurious
about the Conradian
Angst;
it comforts us because it is shared, in–
deed it is built into the order of things, and we combat it with the
fellowship of our orphanage. Underlying everything is the seductive,
unmentionable thought that it is not so bad after one's fitful strivings
to sink back into the maternal nothingness.
a
This is not to deny what everyone feels, that Conrad is a stoic
writer, but rather to identify his chief antagonist . as the despairing
3. For a fuller psychoanalytic discussion of this side of Conrad, see Norman
N. Holland's essay, "Style as Character:
The Secret Agent,"
in the Summer
1966 Modern Fiction Studies.
