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PARTISAN REVIEW
kheim's book on
Pnmitive Classification
in which it is stated that "it
would be impossible to exaggerate ... the state of indistinction from
which the human mind developed." They go on to argue that "the first
logical categories were social categories ... it was because men were
grouped, and thought of themselves in the form of groups, that in their
ideas they grouped other things." Thus classification is "sociocentric, "
a projection onto things of ways in which men think about their
relations to other men. I stress this because one might infer from this
that if a man were in a situation in which all the usual ways of
thinking about his relations to other men have broken down so that he
no longer conceives of himself as part of a society, a clan, or even
<l
crew, no longer feels any kind of communality or group solidarity-in
such a situation the man might equally find that the habitual classifi–
cations of things simply have no meaning. To put it crudely-the
completely de-socialized man would find himself in a completely de–
categorized world. This is exactly what happens to Falk. He fell out of
the world and has experienced reality unmediated through hitherto
unquestioned taxonomies. He has confronted, not only the thing
classified, but "the thing itself." I am suggesting, then, that in
Conrad's story the breakdown of categories is intimately related to the
more obvious themes of the breakdown of a ship and the breakdown of
the human body.
To support this suggestion I want to refer to two brief passages in
the narrator's account. When he first took charge of his ship he found
everything in a mess.
In
particular, a violin case proved to be full of
unreceipted bills and possibly corrupt estimates, with no trace of a
genuine "fiddle" (I don't know whether Conrad intended the pun); and
an account book-which he hoped would enable him
to
order the
ship's affairs-turned out to be full of verse, "rhymed doggerel of a
jovial and improper character." Apparently a trivial point, but if we
note that what the narrator is encountering here is the wrong things in
the wrong containers, I think it is possible to see this as a minor
example of the failure or breakdown of categories I have been discuss–
ing. What should be the art container or category (the violin case)
contains bad economics (unpaid bills), while what should be the
proper economics container (the account book) contains bad art (dirty
poetry). Just as, on Falk's voyage, the carpenter unexpectedly turned
out
to
"contain" a murderer.
If
we may allow that "man" and "food"
are two categories which are usually considered necessarily distinct,
then cannibalism too becomes an example of the wrong things in the
wrong categories-i.e., man shifts into the food category, where he
