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The Claims of Individuality

(1966)

“Over the years,” Said wrote, “I have found myself writing about Conrad like a cantus firmus, a steady groundbass to much that I have experienced.” There was much in Conrad’s life with which Said identified. Conrad had grown up under the shadow of imperial occupation; he had left his native homeland during his adolescence, and he had found himself eventually living and writing in a Western European culture in which he felt neither fully at ease nor at home.

Published in 1966, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography was Said’s first book, a revision of his dissertation, which he wrote at Harvard University under the direction of Monroe Engel and Harry Levin. It was, as Said wrote, “a phenomenological exploration of Conrad’s consciousness.” The book drew on the literary criticism of what was known as the Geneva School, a group of literary critics centered on Georges Poulet, Jean Rousset, and Jean Starobinski. Espousing a view of literature and criticism based on the philosophies of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, the Geneva critics held that literary works were embodiments of authorial consciousness. As J. Hillis Miller wrote, the Geneva critics saw literary criticism as the “consciousness of consciousness.”

In Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography, Said undertook the colossal task of examining eight volumes of Conrad’s letters so as to reconstruct Conrad’s conception of his own identity, as an accomplished writer, as an émigré, and as a Pole. Yet if Said read Conrad’s letters to understand the vicissitudes of Conrad’s life, he also saw his prose as the self-conscious expressions of a writer whose relationship to the English language and culture was never entirely stable.

Although the critic F. R. Leavis considered Conrad’s prose to be marred by imprecise diction and an insufficient grasp of idiosyncratic English, Said viewed Conrad’s relationship to the English language as an expression of Conrad’s experience of exile. For Said, Conrad’s writing conveyed an “aura of dislocation, instability and strangeness.” “No one,” Said later wrote, “could represent the fate of lostness and disorientation better than [Conrad] did, and no one was more ironic about the effort of trying to replace that condition with arrangements and accommodations.”

On November 1, 1906, having received an affectionately inscribed copy of The Mirror of the Sea from Conrad, Henry James wrote to his odd Anglo-Polish colleague: “No one has known—for intellectual use—the things you know, and you have as artist of the whole matter, an authority that no one has approached.” Conrad could scarcely have wished for more eloquent tribute to the mastery with which, in the little book of sea sketches, he had consciously mediated claims of memory and artifice. The Mirror of the Sea, however, was an agreeable item fashioned by Conrad out of what James called “the prodigy of your past experience.” To the casual observer—which James was not—Conrad’s experience was largely a matter of ships and foreign ports, seas and storms; that, anyway, was what The Mirror of the Sea seemed to be about. Yet to Conrad, and to his fellow expatriate James speaking from a shared community of “afflicted existence,” experience was a spiritual struggle filling what Flaubert had called the long patience of artistic life. When in The Mirror Conrad covered his deeply felt experience with a surface that showed very little of what his life had really cost him, he was acting like Almayer, one of his characters, who in erasing his daughter’s footsteps in the sand was denying the pain she had caused him.

Even in the best of Conrad’s fiction there is very often a distracting surface of overrhetorical, melodramatic prose that critics like F. R. Leavis, sensitive to the precise and most efficient use of language, have severely disparaged. Yet it is not enough, I think, to criticize these imprecisions as the effusions of a writer calling attention to himself. On the contrary, Conrad was hiding himself within rhetoric, using it for his personal needs without considering the niceties of tone and style that later writers have wished he had had. He was a self-conscious foreigner writing of obscure experiences in an alien language, and he was only too aware of this. Thus his extravagant or chatty prose—when it is most noticeable—is the groping of an uncertain Anglo-Pole for the least awkward, most “stylistic” mode of expression. It is also the easiest way to conceal the embarrassments and the difficulties of an overwhelmingly untidy existence as a French-speaking, self-exiled, extremely articulate Pole, who had been a sailor and was now, for reasons not quite clear to him, a writer of so-called adventure stories. Conrad’s prose is not the unearned prolixity of a careless writer, but rather the concrete and particular result of his immense struggle with himself. If at times he is too adjectival, it is because he failed to find a better way of making his experience clear. That failure is, in his earliest works, the true theme of his fiction. He had failed, in the putting down of words, to rescue meaning from his undisciplined experience. Nor had he rescued himself from the difficulties of his life: this is why his letters, where all of these problems are explicitly treated, are necessary to a full understanding of his fiction.

Pain and intense effort are the profound keynotes of Conrad’s spiritual history, and his letters attest to this. There is good reason for recalling Newman’s impassioned reminder in the Apologia that any autobiographical document (and a letter is certainly that) is not only a chronicle of states of mind, but also an attempt to render the individual energy of one’s life. That energy has been urgently apparent, and pressing for attention ever since the publication in 1927 of Jean-Aubry’s Joseph Conrad, Life and Letters.

The abundant difficulties with which the letters teem are, nevertheless, the difficulties of Conrad’s spiritual life, so that critics are almost forced to associate the problems of his life with the problems of his fiction; the task here, different but related, is to see how the letters relate first to the man and then to his work. Each letter is an exercise of Conrad’s individuality as it connects his present with his past by forging a new link of self-awareness. Taken in their available entirety, Conrad’s letters present a slowly unfolding discovery of his mind, his temperament, his character—a discovery, in short, that is Conrad’s spiritual history as written by Conrad himself.

The accurate grasp of someone else’s deepest concerns is never an easy matter. But even in the case of a writer like Conrad, whose self-concern was so intense, it is possible to view his letters in the essential, even simple, terms of their internal disposition. To cite “pain” and “effort” as hallmarks of Conrad’s experience, for example, reveals little specifically of the man other than that he allowed himself repeated encounters with what caused pain and required effort. Yet there is a way of picturing Conrad in a characteristic and consistent stance or attitude of being, which enables us to perceive just what it was he was struggling against, and this way is to apply Richard Curle’s wise observation that Conrad “was absorbed . . . in the whole mechanism of existence.” In these terms not only is it possible to apprehend the degree and kind of Conrad’s pain and effort, but one can also discover the immediate reasons for them. Granted, of course, that Curle’s phrase is perhaps unintentionally wise, and granted that the letters are informal and personal rather than formal or systematic, a peculiar kind of “absorption” is everywhere apparent in Conrad’s letters, particularly since the existence to which he was committed was so manifestly enduring in its trials. For Conrad’s absorption, as I understand it, was that he consciously felt a large measure of unrestful submission to the complexities of life, on the one hand and, on the other, that he remained interested in the submission not as a fait accompli but as a constantly renewed act of living, as a condition humanisée and not as a condition humaine. “The whole mechanism of existence” further explains Conrad’s preoccupations by allowing him the assumption that life itself was the total of a series of particular occurrences. Certain of these occurrences, and especially those concerning his own welfare, were connected and informed by a mechanical and perverse inevitability; nothing like cosmic optimism could be attributed to the structures of such events. He was, he felt, simply a man tortured by a finite number of intolerably fixed situations to which he seemed to return everlastingly, and this very fact had a curious pull on him. The dynamics of these persisting situations are what gripped Conrad almost from the beginning of his recorded writings to their end. And it is both the situations themselves and the way they unfold (their metaphorical expression) that the letters record in prodigious detail.

There is more to be said about this haunting phrase, “the whole mechanism of existence.” From Conrad’s point of view—for the phrase has sympathetic echoes in the letters—it is a statement about a certain kind of conscious psychology. At first sight it is reminiscent of eighteenth-century mechanistic psychology, say of Hartley’s theory of association and elementary determinism. To the contemporary mind, however, the phrase appeals easily to the commonplaces of the Freudian or Jungian psychologies, to the “mechanism” of the unconscious, to the complexes, myths, archetypes, and rituals in which each individual is somehow implicated. Yet, in his remarkable study, The Emotions: Outline of a Theory, Jean-Paul Sartre points up the inherent contradiction in a psychology confined to the unconscious. He writes there: “It is the profound contradiction of all psychoanalysis to introduce both a bond of causality and a bond of comprehension between the phenomena which it studies. These two types of connection are incompatible.” Sartre’s distinction between causality and comprehension is a useful way of remarking that an analysis of a hypothetical cause does not logically make the effect comprehensible. If the unconscious can be said ultimately to determine the conscious—and this point is not at issue—we are hardly closer to comprehending the conscious as it presents itself to us. The literary critic is, I think, most interested in comprehension, because the critical act is first of all an act of comprehension: a particular comprehension of the written work, and not of its origins in a general theory of the unconscious. Comprehension, furthermore, is a phenomenon of consciousness, and it is in the openness of the conscious mind that critic and writer meet to engage in the act of knowing and being aware of an experience. Only that engagement, made in the interests of literary and historical fidelity, can prevent Conrad’s remark “I am living a nightmare” from being accepted (or dismissed) as a hyperbolic effusion, instead of as an authentic and intense fact of experience.

As a writer, Conrad’s job was to make intellectual use of what he had known, and “use,” in this Jamesian employment of the term, means rendering, making overt. It would not, furthermore, be overinterpreting James’s compliment if I emphasize that Conrad recognized the difference between the rendering of personal experience for public consumption on one side and, on the other, for the eyes of a few close friends. Now it is precisely with this process of making experience overt and intelligible for the benefit of his intimates that Conrad’s letters, and consequently my discussion, are concerned. First of all we should investigate the idiom of Conrad’s rendering of his experience: the words and the images he chose to express himself. In philosophical terms, this study attempts a phenomenological exploration of Conrad’s consciousness, so that the kind of mind he had, both in its distinction and energy, will become apparent. The great value of the letters, therefore, is that they make such a study possible by disclosing the background of speculation and insight that strengthens the fiction.

When “knowing” and “knowing for intellectual use” are spoken of in the same breath, when what is being described and the idiom of that description are taken together as an indissoluble unity, Conrad himself emerges from the letters as a significantly developing intellectual and spiritual reality. The mechanisms of existence he describes and his way of describing them are Conrad’s very own. At his most rhetorical (and surely in this the letters often surpass the works) there is a discoverable mind working habitually, though perhaps with less energy than usual. Far more often the flurries of “big” words he uses—such as life, the incomprehensible, the soul—carry with them the proud muscularity of the European tradition of empirical morality, for the important recurring touchstone here is Conrad’s sense of vécu: he has lived what he describes. Often he will bring the ceaseless activity of his mind to a kind of brief nervous stop, in much the same way that a man presenting a detailed argument stops because he needs to reflect, to take stock of what he has said. Then the movement of his thought resumes. Conrad saw in certain fiction, for example, the quality of an understated simplicity whose deeper recesses, like his own during those summary stops that fill the letters, cover a vital mechanism of lived knowledge. Yet he was bothered by the elegance of a rich narrative that went forward so smoothly and at the same time withheld its inner workings. No wonder that Maupassant was a discouraging master: “I am afraid I am too much under the influence of Maupassant. I have studied Pierre et Jean—thought, method, and everything—with the deepest discouragement. It seems to be nothing at all, but the mechanics are so complex that they make me tear out my hair. You want to weep with rage in reading it. That’s a fact!”

Despite the rhetoric, however, and the pauses it creates, to speak of Conrad’s spiritual and intellectual reality is also to recognize a long, remarkable continuity in his abiding concerns. For this continuity, eminently Conrad’s own, is precisely his emerging individuality, and this is the measure of his absorption in, and knowledge of, the mechanisms of existence. Conrad’s individuality resides in a continuous exposure of his sense of himself to a sense of what is not himself: he set himself, lumpish and problematic, against the dynamic, fluid processes of life. Because of this, then, the great human appeal and distinction of Conrad’s life is the dramatic spirit of partnership, however uneasy or indecorous, his life exemplifies, a partnership between himself and the external world. I am speaking of the full exposition of his soul to the vast panorama of existence it has discerned outside itself. He had the courage to risk a full confrontation with what, most of the time, seemed to him to be a threatening and unpleasant world. Moreover, the outcome of this dialectic is an experiencing of existential reality at that deepest level of alternative and potentiality which is the true life of the mind. Now the vocabulary and rhetoric of this experience (which I have called its idiom) is what the letters provide us with to such a degree that we are able to discover the contours of Conrad’s mind as it engages itself in a partnership with existence.