618
FREDERICK CREWS
to say that he was earnestly overwrought about maintaining
order and decency in his mind, and was apt to mistake the effects
of repression for the structure of the universe. Even in his own time
he was not a "modern." He lived long enough to call Lawrence's
writings "Filth. Nothing but obscenities" ; and he used his resonant
prose to shore up semblances of the piety which
all
the great modem
writers began by smashing. There was no real choice involved in
his
continuing to work his customary vein, telling fireside tales of ad–
venture after Joyce and Lawrence and Yeats and Eliot had turned
their backs on the philistine public of their day. Conrad and the
hypocrite lecteur
needed each other's company;
in
order to have
access to his creativity he had to believe he was engaged in validating
common mankind's good opinion of itself.
His critics, by and large, have shared this opinion, and some
have gone so far as to suggest that it is precisely his conventionality
that guarantees his stature: Conrad still tells a story, he speaks to
Everyman, he still believes in virtue, etc. It is questionable whether
this popular reasoning, which ignores everything latent and cherishes
the hollowest conscious avowals, really protects Conrad's standing; it
seems rather to turn him into the complacent bore he sometimes
aspired to be. To put supreme value on obstacles which he set against
the deepest current of his art is to forfeit any hope of explaining
his
power. It would be better to take account of his Victorianism from
the beginning, which means above all to recognize that the Conradian
experience, while intense and cathartic, is built around taboos that
have lost much of their sacredness. Given the Victorian rules of the
game, Conrad's grandiose but barely sustained duplicity with himself
can be understood as the enabling condition of his narrative energy.
In order to pose this issue concretely, let me return in some
detail to "Heart of Darkness," which is surely Conrad at his best.
TIlls is not to say that its intellectual content is especially profound
or even clear; on the contrary, the one definite point that emerges
from the cacaphony of explication is that the appeal of this story
cannot rest on its ideas. I suppose it was by working in an irresolute
state that Conrad managed to keep the source of his inspiration so
extraordinarily open. What matters, in any case, is that nearly every–
one can respond to the symbolic experience at the base of his plot and
feel the consonance between overt and latent emphasis.
As
a delibe-
