TONY TANNER
95
What interests me in this slight piece is another example of a character–
istic Conradian strategy-the ironic juxtaposition of what I referred
to
as opposed realms, or more exactly segments of the world in which life
in all its cultural aspects-linguistic, religious, ethical, etc.-is struc–
tured differently. Examples will be familiar-West and East, London
and the Congo, Switzerland and Russia. The one I am adding is the
bourgeois kitchen and the savage's wigwam, with a further related
subordinate pair of terms, the cooking of sanity and the diet of
unreason.
My source is once again Conrad's preface:
a sane view of life is, after all, elaborated mainly in the kitchen-the
kitchen of the small house, the abode of the preponderant majority of
the people ... a sane view of life can be no other than kindly and
joyous, but a believer in patent medicine is steeped in the gloom of
vague fears, the sombre attendants of disordered digestion.
Of course the tone is light, eminently domesticated we might say–
this is after all Conrad writing as Jessie's husband, the sane and
contented Western citizen. But if we isolate certain phrases and words
from the present context we can see that Conrad is drawing on a
vocabulary of opposed states of consciousness and mood which in
varying forms are operative throughout his major
fict~onal
work. On
the one hand-decency, good taste, correct appreciation, sanity of
mind, the preponderant majority, optimism, sanity, kindness and joy,
all these qualities or states being associated in this context with the
small house, the stable edifice of the settled bourgeois; on the other
hand-morose irritability, unreasonable violence, gloomy imaginings,
a haunted existence, vague fears, all associated in this context with the
wigwam, the temporary shelter of the restless nomad.
Any reader of Conrad will recognize how often he brings mental
attitudes and dispositions of these contrasting kinds together, forcing
them
to
form a context for his fictional space, thus undermining
whatever fixed ideas we might have about sanity, good taste, and so on,
and impressing upon us the disquieting psychic reality of unreason–
able violence, gloomy imaginings, vague fears. The juxtaposition of
the bland narrator of
Under Western Eyes
and the haunted Razumov is
a clean illustration of this pattern. And of course this enforced co–
presence of differing types of consciousness, different ranges of experi–
ence, differing assumptions, values, terminologies, helps to generate
that probing and disturbing irony which we associate with Conrad.
Although he appears to operate dualistically-London / the Congo-
