514
FREDERICK CREWS
side of his own mind. The external sources of gloom, "the solitude
of the sea" and "the inscrutable eyes of the Most High" (I am
quoting the Author's Note to
Almayer's Folly),
are not so much
combated as they are sought out as metaphors of preexisting inhibi–
tion - and very precise metaphors at that, since psychologically they
amount to allusions to the parent figures with whom Conrad is unceas–
ingly in,:olved. The real agon in Conrad is the struggle against
inhibition. It is no small point in his favor that he always tried to
resist the impulse - indulged, for example, by Henry James - to
pretend that his taste for sexless irresolution was a superior achieve–
ment of some sort. Every Jamesian plot puts a thick moral varnish
on the necessities of the Jamesian temperament, but Conrad did what
he could to oppose the passivity which usually has the final say in
his works. Common human experience was sacred for Conrad, as it
distinctly wasn't for James, because he grasped at it for rescue from
the real destructive element, his instinct for failure.
When this aspect of Conrad's fiction is perceived, he is apt to
appear a psychological ironist, a student of the way the misfortunes
of nervous, lonely dreamers are determined, not by the cruel fates as
they imagine, but by their own masochism. There is evidence for
such readings; what is doubtful is that Conrad expected them. His
engagement in his plots would seem to have more to do with self–
exculpation than with dispassionate analysis. The semblance of irony
is thrown up by his need to review his misgivings about himself, but
when the misgivings become too insistent they must be replaced
by muddle. Conrad typically diverts our interest from the hero's
gloomy mind to his lush surroundings, which are stocked with mis–
placed energies; we expect confessions and instead we get tropical
storms. The very fact that the plots are so crammed with adventure
is comprehensible in this light. The hero is kept too busy staving off
real "savages" and villains to spare time for self-inquiry, and in
most cases we are finally meant to think of him as a victim of hard
luck. Thus Conrad avails himself of projection - into the landscape,
into "the whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless part" -
in order to blunt an insight _which would amount to self-analysis.
Conrad the celebrated realist brings to mind Genet's sardonic defini–
tion of verisimilitude: "the disavowal of unavowable reasons."
For the comfort of disavowal Conrad pays a price in stereotyped
