CONRAD
525
have nowhere to go but around in a circle on his autoerotic bicycle.
Lesser writers than Beckett, having forfeited much of the power of
latent reference, are rapidly exhausting the power to shock. Aesthetic
complexity would seem to be one of the casualties of desublimation.
If
this is so, then we have Conrad's neurosis and the style of his
culture to thank, not of course
fo~
his genius, but for the special
quality of his appeal. In the manuscript of "Heart of Darkness," im–
mediately after Marlow's plea that women be kept apart in their
beautiful world, Conrad had added a typically lurid but singularly
revealing outburst: "That's a monster-truth with many maws to
whom we've got to throw every year - or every day - no matter
- no sacrifice is too great - a ransom of pretty, shining lies...."
That he decided to suppress the remark instead of merely editing out
some of its agitation may indicate nothing more than a shrewd assess–
ment of his readership, but that he wrote it in the first place is a
mark of his true inner situation. Lying to (and about) women, the
quintessential article in the Victorian
modus vivendi,
was so im–
portant to Conrad for his own reasons that he found himself actually
putting the requirement into so many words; his curse and opportunity
was his need to deal at close range with the gaping monster of
his
fantasies. Whoever begrudges him his distracting maneuvers has not
sufficiently understood the precariousness of the civilized equilibrium
he sought to maintain. In retrospect Conrad's lurking skepticism about
the strength of conscious decency looks so warranted by public events
that we may feel tempted to credit him with a clairvoyant modernity,
a vision of general collapse, but precisely because he writhed under
the nightmare of history he could not be its interpreter. He did not
formulate contradictions, he lived intensely with them and transcribed
them into the terms of art. To demand of him something more static
and placid, as the bulk of our criticism has implicitly done, is only
to manifest in a subtle way what our civilization is now proving with
brutal plainness: an incapacity even to imagine what it is like to be
human and oppressed.
