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perpetrated by the European civilizers, fell ill, and lingeringly suffered
on his return. Out of all this turmoil may have come the discovery of
writing as a means of recovery by retrieval and objectification of the
past.
Karl calls Conrad a "marginal" man, by which, I think, he means
something like Robert
J.
Lifton's concept of "protean man," that is,
the characteristic unattached personality of modern times. But he is less
interested in general cultural causes than in Conrad's private psychic
determinants.
In
the tradition of Freud he believes in the primacy of the
first chapter in a life-narrative, though, as I have noted, he is not keenly
interested in his subject's sexuality. Conrad's marginality, says Karl,
came out of his early sense of his condition as an orphan and a Pole.
Losing both parents by the time he was twelve, Conrad absorbed the
lesson of their tragic exile and suffering.
In
later life he would
duplicate the patterns of their illnesses in himself and in his family .
And yet he would try to avoid their fate; he would be strenuously un–
political and suspicious of romantic idealism, having seen its tragic
cost in the case of his father, and the failure of patriotism and heroism
illustrated by the entire history of Polish nationalism. Here, for Karl, is
the iterative scenario of Conrad's life. The abortive suicide at twenty–
two is explained as Conrad's attempt to cut himself off, finally, from
the claims of Poland. His breakdown at fifty-three is attributed to
immersion in early memories brought on by the composition of his
only Slavic novel,
Under Western Eyes
(the writing of the book was,
Karl says, stimulated by the illness of Conrad's son, a reminder of his
own childhood).
One may object to the application of this thesis to Conrad's
fiction.
Lord Jim's
romantic Stein seems to Karl simply Tadeusz
Bobrowski, Conrad's conservative, unimaginatively benevolent uncle,
and Jim is identified with Conrad's father even though Apollo Korze–
niowski sacrificed himself for the public cause while Jim failed to
maintain a personal ideal of conduct.
Nostromo
is reduced to "a testing
out" of the Korzeniowski model and of Conrad's own reaction to his
father's career, with Decoud acting the Bobrowski cynic to Gould's
idealism. Karl's discussion of
Secret Agent
slights analysis of that
complex novel to emphasize the role of its "incorruptible" professor, a
" type that lay so deeply incapsulated within his psyche from earliest
days." According to the same principle, in
Under Western Eyes
dim
memories of his mother became Nathalie Haldin and her devotion to
Apollo was duplicated in Nathalie's love for her brother.
Conrad's fiction does have a peculiar relation to actuality and is,
