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father's claim; the mother's transformation, under this threat, from
ward to protectress, while the hero-son becomes more infantile; the
pseudosolution of denying female "castration" (Lena's acquisition of
the knife, plus the eroticization of her foot); and a self-immolation
that is meant to cancel all filial presumption. Implausible as these
strategies may sound to "literary" ears, they are common in Conrad's
art - in his life, too, for that matter. But their immediate importance
for
Victory
is that they explain its bizarre episodes and Conrad's
failure to see how they must strike the reader. He cannot detach him–
self adequately from Jones's antifeminine ravings and Ricardo's fetish–
ism because, quite simply, they are his own; all he can do is to foist
them off onto exaggeratedly "other" antagonists of his exaggeratedly
Christlike hero. To perceive what Conrad must have been wrestling
with in the act of writing is to see why he repeatedly assures us, with
subtle cavils, of Heyst's respect for his father's memory, and why
Heyst behaves as if he were not so sure of
his
unimpeachable right
to Lena and why Lena herself is uncomfortably convincing in her
pretense of wanting to abandon Heyst. The novel's aesthetic incom–
pleteness is a consequence of its censored self-debate: the details that
stand out as blemishes are coherent only as replies to charges that
Conrad has suppressed in the interest of his dubious tranquillity.
It may be possible now to appreciate the link between Conrad's
artistic freedom and his capacity to manage psychological insight.
Given his makeup, he had to deal regularly with obsessional themes,
and he could never distance himself from them in the manner, say,
of Thomas Mann. But he could, at his best, harmonize them with
a plot which was manifestly "about" a psychic bondage of some
sort, even if it had to end in equivocations. The trouble with
Victory
is that Conrad wants no part whatsoever of the forces that are
tyrannizing over his plot; the result of his divided purpose is a sulky
and confusing reticence. In all his finest novels and tales he is moving
toward, not away from, a recognition that character
is
destiny. In
these works the charged language, the undercurrent of
double-entendre
which was bound to be present anyway, works
with
the momentum
of the plot, and we are carried through an experience that feels single
and whole.
Here, however, Conrad's cultural remoteness from us becomes
pertinent. Conrad was on the whole a good Victorian, which
is
