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Edward Said, who is of course dealing with only one author in
Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography,
feels the need for a
methodological principle; and since his subject is one man's fictional
use of his spiritual development, Said's allegiance is to "psychographic"
criticism, the analysis of "certain configurations in the author's conscious–
ness, configurations that persist into and enliven the fictional creation."
Said's analysis of consciousness is influenced by Sartre's; it aims, I
think, to preserve Conrad's self-conception, the process of his self-awareness
and
his
existential project as they inform his fiction. Very well. First of
all Said attempts to reconstruct conception, process and project from
Conrad's massively numerous correspondence. And here initial flaws
develop: Said's commen ts on the letters give us phrases like "terrifying
revelation" and "pessimistic vision of a remorseless process," or this
sentence on Conrad's reaction to the War: "With anxious thoughts of
the war often making him ill, he found himself in 1916 still uncertain
of the exact course subsequent history would take." Are we to assume
that a good antibiotic would have made him a Tiresias? The phrase
is silly; it is of course pcrhaps mostly negligent, but with a negligence
characteristic of the kind of lazy emotional adjectivism that is being
presented as analysis of consciousness.
When Said turns to the fiction (the shorter fiction only:
this,
he
claims, shows Conrad at his most controlled, most conscious, and pro–
vides an especially close parallel to the different spiritual phases defined
by the letters), another problem arises: can you read your analysis of
an author's consciousness into the texts while claiming to examine them
as texts, in their artistic autonomy? A critic like Georges Poulet,
in
his
attempt to seize and reconstruct the consciousness of a writer, makes no
pretense at reading the writer's works as autonomous and complete units;
he frankly violates their autonomy in search of something else, and does
not subsequen tly try to reconstitute them as objects of
literary
analysis.
It seems to me that Said is using two optics at once without being aware
of it, and the result is an interpretive circle very like what we were used
to in a more traditional "life and letters" biography: the fiction becomes
a sort of spiritual thermometer for measuring Conrad's progress ("The
Secret Sharer," "A Smile of Fortune," "Freya of the Seven Isles" are
"reflections of Conrad's final, prewar unhappiness") and the readings of
this thermometer are offered as analyses of the texts. At its best,
Said's method gives an original interpretation of
The Shadow Line;
but
mostly it seems to me dangerously to encourage psychological platitude.
In the quest for a methodological principle
which
will permit a
synthesis beyond commentary and facile psychologizing, we are led to
Rene Girard's
Desire, Deceit, and The Novel.
Girard's original percep-
