Use Of Different Methodologies To View The Literature Piece: Analysis Of Joseph Conrad’S Short Stories
This book is based on my graduation paper and is dedicated to my teachers and mentors who, although most already gone, are alive in my heart.
The thematic approach, Todorov [27] says in his Poetics, is concerned with what a work signifies. However, any introspective look int the theoretical aspects of themes and motifs seems disconcerting. There are different definitios of the theme and even more definitions of the motif, to mention only the fact that the Russian formalist consider “each recurrent sentence” or “word” as being a motif. And each definition is true to a certain extent, yet not exhaustive. This analysis proceeds traditionally, starting from the premise that there are in the literature certain patterns, recurrent themes, common places, a universal identity of the fictional structures and that each new reading represents a bringing up to date and a reorganization of the previous codes acquired through our literaty experience.
This is the method of archetypal criticism employed among others by Durand, Greymas and N. Frye, whose works provided the theoretical basis for this study. The approach is not prescriptive; it was not conceived as a poetics of arriving at the themes and motifs of the short-stories analysed; it is rather descriptive and interpretative. It tries to assess the way in which some of Conrad’s basic themes and motifs conform to the archetypes or change them, acquiring new significances. In structuring the material, two possible points of viewing literature have been adopted: The Horizontal View – which includes different short stories to be analysed according to the thematic principle and to read thematically means to read in relationship. However, because literatur tells the story of a man’s way in this world and the personal story is also the human story, the chapter is subentitled The Human Dimension. Human experience differs in its essence according to the different ages of human life, therefore, we have chosen to give special consideration to Youth and Old Age as to opposite poles of the human experience that appear in Conrad’s short stories. The Vertical View - is a way of viewing literature by going deeply into one aspect of a work and for such purposes we have chosen two of Conrad’s masterpieces: Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer. Initiation“Youth must yield up to experience”There is always at some time the sense of beginnings, the desire for something new, the belief in possibilities, the effort to achieve, the recognition of something we we have not known and we have not experienced before. This we may call initiation or discovery and of man’s ages youth is generally representative of it. For youth can and should be immature, it can and should have illusions, can and should see mishap as opportunity, as Conrad would say. Initiation as an archetypal theme, says Durand, is a ritual of successive revelations; it is carried out slowly and it usually comprises three basic stages:
- The innocent is launching on a totally unknown experience;
- He is passing through trials;
- Finally, he is gaining knowledge.
Discoveries begins with dramas as old as Eden, the story that tells of man’s desire to become more than he is and his consequent initiation into the essence of good and evil – often in the old symbol of the snake. In the literature of all times voyages are generally archetypal motifs linked with the idea of initiation. Voyage on SeaMany of Conrad’s short stories follow the pattern of the adventure tales of initiation. The most typical illustration is Youth (1898). Marlow, who appears here for the first time as Conrad’s story-teller, spins “the story or rather the chronicle of a voyage” [2], his first voyage as a second mate. The psychology of the innocent is roughly sketched. Exhausted and fascinated, he lives “the life of youth in ignorance and hope”, aware that he knew “ very little” by that time [3]; the young man’s seamanship and his common sense are mistrusted because they have not been tested yet. But the tests come up and every sort of nautical accident plagues the ship which is finally destroyed by combustion from wet coal. Initiation, Durand points out, generally comprises some crippling trials to mark a momentary victory of the evil forces, of death [4].
In the great naval battle, the combustion affects him physically for the young mate gets out of it “with no hair, no eyebrows, no eyelashes; my moustache was burn off, my face was black, my chin bleeding” [5]. Fire, like water, are archetypal motifs of purification; the cargo on fire is suggestive of the process of hardening which the young usually undergo. Finally, though derelict, the crew reaches the fabled East. The voyage is, no doubt, a symbolic one. “There are”, says Marlow, “these voyages that seem ordered for the illustration of life, that might stand for a symbol of existence. You fight, you work, you sweat, nearly kill yourself, trying to accomplish somehing and you can’t” [6]. The young mate discovers a less romantic East and learns that life means “ to do or die” – the symbolic motto written on the Judea – that “time passes” and that “illusions and youth and genius, achievements, simple hearts – all dies… no matter” [7]. The story is nevertheless a paean to youth and to the unquenchable endurance of men even in a hopeless cause, a lyrical account of a young man’s first voyage of initiation. Marlow’s retrospective view sees te poignancy of youth’s vivacity and freshness, its strength and faith and imagination, also hinting of the shadows to come. The now older and more mature Marlow acts as a kind of chorus in Greek tragedy, distancing himself frm the experience. Much wiser, he can recapture the flavour of his own youth being also aware of other aspects of it than its magical excitement: “Youth…. is more cruel, more pitiless, more bitter than the sea” [8]. This voyage of discovery and self discovery was experienced by Conrad himself. He too, had quixotic dreams of romantic adventure at sea. Yet, through experience, the romantic sailor turned into a mature and lonely thinker: “The ardour was transformed in a very different feeling. The romantic love perished and the illusions were gone” [9]. The voyage from Youth is carried on in The Shadow Line (1917), the latter also symbolic for the transition from youth to maturity and experience. Its subject is again a sea voyage, a voyage that is, as Conrad wrote, “exact autobiography”, an example like Heart of Darkness and The Nigger of the Narcissus of “my personal experience”[10].
The nature of the personal experience is moral initiation, one of Conrad’s dominant literary themes. Its main ideas are stated with such unusual expliciteness that it hardly seems to call for any analysis. It deals with the passage from ignorant and untested confidence, through a major trial, to the very different confidence of mature self command. The transition is symbolically stated under the motif of a “shadow line”: “… time goes on till one perceives ahead a shadow line warning one that the region of early youth must be left behind” [11]. The psychology of innocence and youth and innocence is clearly more complicated than that established in Youth. It is a period of life in which moments of boredom, weariness, of dissatisfaction, are likely to come. “Rash moments” that seem to have the character of “divorce, almost of desertion”. He throws up a job for appearantly no reason as “a bird flies away from a comfortable branch”. Life at sea seems “a waste of days and no truth can be got out of them”. “I was young enough to think that” [12]. And like in Youth, the particular experience has a more universal application for “all mankind has streamed that way. It is the charm of universal experience from which one expects an uncommon or personal sensation” [13]. The young refuse to see the shadow line ahead by rebelling against all involvements, detached from earthly goings on, blind to the implications of theirs or of others’ actions. The exposure of the whole complex of conflicting emotions which characterize the outset of the penumbral transition from late youth to committed adulthood is Conrad’s professed theme. Wiser in the end, the newly trialed captain confesses that “A man has got to learn everything and that’s what so many of those youngsters don’t understand” [14]The young mate is eager to prove himself worthy in the ultimate test of his profession. And his test is provided by the life at sea: “Sea /is/ the only word that counted and the ships, the test of manliness, of temperament, of fidelity” [15]. Typical of adventure tales of pursuit and initiation is the young hero, unexperienced, facing tests of physical and moral courage and an old man – usually older, but not necessarily – acts as a guide, teacher, protector of the younger one. The relation between the two involves a bond of loyalty.
The older man is the initiator, intimae with the rituals and perils the young friend must learn with his help. In archetypal stories of initiation nearly always this partner is a man of great physical courage who has survived in a difficult struggle. A relation between such a figure and the hero would appear to be central in any literature concerned with the theme of initiation. It is found in the pairs of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, Ishmael and Queequeg, John Kemp and Thomas Castro in Romance. Usually with Conrad, the pair initiator-initiated takes the form of a “partner”, a “doppelganger”, a “secret sharer”, for all of them are agents of some initiation. This voyage also takes the air of initiation ceremony, a trial of manhood. The mate’s former colleagues try to assume in turn the role of initiators for they all attempt to understand and assist him in the light of their own character. The mysoginist second engineer who gloomily suspects that sex is the great shadow-line which the narrator is approaching or the dyspeptic first engineer, who was young too, and for whom the great sickness of youth can be cured with a bottle of patent liver medicine, or the more experienced captain, who shares greater insight and who says that “he hoped I would find what I was so anxious to go and look for” [16]. Yet, his true initiators remain captain Giles who looks “like a church warden” and has “the appearance of a man from whom you would get some sound advice…. an expert in intricate navitation, as good as the best if not a little better” and also Ransome, on board of the new ship on which he embarks as a captain.
For here again we hae a first command – the motif being recurrent in Conrad’s short stories. Command is a strong magic and he has always enisaged it as a result of promotion, of a slow course, that is, of a gradual experience – the reward of a faithful service. “And now here I had my command most unexpected”, i. e. yet unexperienced. He meets all kinds of difficulties in getting the ship ready to sail and even when he is clear off the harbour, an unreasonable lack of wind makes it impossible for him to move out into the open sea. The trials are only beginning for him. He gradually comes to realize that his new role as a captain, which he had first envisaged as the indeed magical solution of all his life problems actually involves an intricate network of moral imperatives, psychological discoveries and social responsibilities which had until then been too much in the future to be real, but which now crowd thickly upon him. The shadow line has unexpected depth. It cannot be crossed easily and quickly. Confident in his capacities, the young captain pays little attention to Giles’ devices of initiation for he thinks that “the sea is pure, safe, and friendly”.
The trials, nevertheless, begin to afflict him more seriously: the disease plays capriciously with the crew, reaching the nadir when the captain discovers that the quinine bottles contain a worthless powder. The fright is even twofold as he has also to face the adversity of the outside weather; he discovers the evil powers of calm and pestilence as the ship is trapped in the Gulf of Siam, by aweful doldrums and the place is symbolic for the acion of The Secret Sharer also ocurs here. The motif of the dead sea becalmed and bewitched – as in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – is symbolic for the spiritual apathy, impotence, discouragement, failure of heart, which most of Conrad’s significant heroes ar likely to experience – either physically like Ransome, or spiriually like the captain. In a moment of introspection, the captain under trial reflects that “I always suspected I might be no good”. Calmness as well as darkness and storms are commonplaces for human experience in Conrad. And from this experience, the young captain, like Marlow in Youth, has come out crippled; he feels “old” and disturbed because “experience means always something disagreeable as opposite to the charm and innocenc of illusions” [18]. The loss of Edenic innocencebrngs painful exactions and not opportunities for dreams. The discovery which he makes is that comand means self-command and that “there is precious little rest in life for anybody”; that “man should stand up to his bad luck, mistakes, consciousness” [19]. It is a severely qualified truth he arrives at, but it is not a victory won for all time because the following shadow line awaits for us perpetually, each test, each new experience having its shadow line.
The motif of the ship as a microcosm/ “The Ship as intimacy”
In archetypal terms, the ship as well as the house is a symbol of intimacy, according to Durand [20]. Different instances of an equivalence are to be found throughout Conrad’s work. The four stern ports of the Diana in Falk “might have been the windows of a cottage in the country. The tiny white curtains and the greenery of flower pots behind the glass completed the resemblance… She was a home” [21]. Yet, the ship is something more than only a place of living; she is a living soul, a double, a superdetermination of he who abides there. The same Diana has the “arcadian felicity”, “innocence” and patriarchality of her German skipper and owner, whereas Falk’s centaur-like face has become inseparable of his dashig tug. “Without his head and torso on the bridge she looked mutilated” [22]. In The End of the Tether captain Whalley’s aristocratic temperament has about it the nostalgia of the “white-winged flock of clippers that lived in the uncertain life of the winds” [23]. The ship, like other symbols of intimacy, has feminine features, i. e. it becomes tender, warm, intimate, as the car for instance, or the house [24]. Like these, ships generally have feminine names and like women,, they take the feminine gender. The Fair Maid, Judea, Arcadia, Diana, Sissie, Melisa, Blanche, Stella, all exhibit feminine characteristics. Of the lost Judea, Marlow thinks with pleasure and affection, but also with regret “as you would think of someone dead that you have loved” [25].
In the Shadow-Line, the Melissa is for her captain an object of care and possession, of responsibility and devotion: “She was waiting for me like an enchanted princess…. and I was like a lover, looking forward to a meeting… She was a harmonious creature in the lines of her fine body… like some rare women she was one of those creatures whose mere existence is enough to awaken an unselfish delight” [26]. The Nan-Shan, an “old girls was as good as she was pretty” [27], whereas Jasper’s brig Bonito “sailed like a witch and like some fair women of adventurous life famous in history” seemed to have the secret of perpetual youth. So there was nothing unnatural in Japer treating her like a lover [28]. To him the love for the ship even overpasses the love for woman and this is the hybris that will drive him mad. A ship traditionally stands for adventure, hope, and freedom. It is a means of initiation – Caron’s ship takes the souls of the dead into the world of darkness. The symbol is often employed in Conrad’s short stories – the most typical example being Heart of Darkness – but always associated with the idea of toil and endurance.
To navigate a ship involves labour and sacrifice. The ship, the house on waters, worn by time and always on the verge of dismemberment, she exists as civilization exists in an ironic security, in the ultimate threat of the unstable sea. Hence the dramatic character of the ship. On the rocking maternal sea, the ship often appears as a cradle. To the young mate in Youth, the Judea seemed as if he had “been born in her, reared in her” [29] whereas the Nan-Shan rocks under the terrific typhoon, “like a child’s cradle” [30]. The ship as a cradle may symbolize retreat and escape against destruction. “Like an island” or a “virginal planet” [31], it offers the possibility of salvation. To save the human race, Noah built his arc. Conrad’s ships also carry a whole humanity, men of different colours and nations – English, German, Chinese, Malay – of different ages and capacities. The Narcissus, “a fragment detached from the earth went on lonely and swift like a small planet. She was alive with th elife of those beings who trod her decks; and like that earth which had given her up t the sea, she had an intolerable load of regrets and hopes. On her lived the timid truth and audacious lies; like the earth, she was unconscious, fair to see and condemned by men to an ignoble fate” [32]. Like in society, on the ship there is a certain hierarchy with te captain at the top. In his “loneliness of command” as a symbol of authority, he is “a God-like figure”. On the ship he commands and the maritime code of every nation forbids hs orders to be questioned. There are also unwritten laws, like in society, moral laws which oblige as well. In The Secret Sharer, the imperative of transcendent law, that of “man and sky” are recognized, as the ship is an isolated society defined in its relation to the universe. What happens to a ship’s company when organized life comes to an end, Conrad shows in Falk or The Nigger of the Naracissus. The ship then no longer counts as socety but as individuals.
The motif of the sea as destructive element
The sea and its life is a recurrent presence from Conrad’s first book to the last. A long tradition of sea literature had been developed before him by Cooper or Melville but it was Conrad who made that tradition more conspicuous in English than in other modern literature; in England, because here “men and the sea so interpenetrate… men knowing something or everything about the sea” says Marlow in Youth [1]. Conrad, and Henry James was the first to recognize it, brought the tale of the sea at the rank of serious craft. The sea was the supreme experience in his life but also the most powerful symbol of his art. As a traditional symbol, the sea is maternal and feminine. In many cultures she stands as an archetype of reintegration into the natural cycle, of rebirth, of purification. Conrad’s suicidal protagonists choose one or two elements: fire and water [2]. There is a symbolic cleansing of the soiled self, a sort of expiation for the transgression and a rebirth in The Secret Sharer, whereas The Narcissus cannot finish her voyage till the body of Wait – like the living bodies of Legatt or Jonah had been deposited in the sea. At the grammatical level, the sea as well as the ship, have the feminine gender. Due to its perpetual rocking, the sea is a sheltering, caressing element.
So it appears with Poe and sometimes with Conrad. But with the latter, the continuous rocking brings forth a sense of illusion and instability: “In no other kind of life is the illusion more wide of reailty, the disenchantment more swift, the subjugation more complete” [3]. This points to a familiar antithesis in Conrad’s tales and temperament: the rival claims of appearance and reality, of dreams and recognition of the fact that the only impression that the sea leaves I that of fatigue and boredom. “Impenetrable and heartless, the sea has given nothing of itself to its suitors of its precarious favors. Unlike the earth it cannot be subjugated at any cost of patience and toil. Its lessons are usually endurance, responsibility, vigilance”. The sea interpenetrates with life and becomes a factor in the problem of existence because both men and ships live in “an unstable element”. Weakened vigilence from the part of the crew may end in a catastrophe. Calms and fine weather at sea are also misleading – the splendid veils of things which may hide evil forces. In “low mimetic literature”, says Frye, the running streams are replaced by Conrad’s “destructive element”, generally with some leviathan or “bateau ivre” on it [5]. With powerful implications, Conrad’s “destructive sea”, like Hardy’s “heath”, are bound to expand over many works into an archetypal symbol [6]. Often in his work, he sea is associated with the idea of destruction, cunning and falseness, capable of betraying the generous ardour of youth: “the sea plays with men till their hearts are broken and wears stout ships to death” [7]. The sea is a primary, elemental force and its inhuman power is “too great, too mighty for common virtues… she is the expression of indifference in nature” [8]. There are few who can stand it and among them is the truly unimaginatie captain MacWhirr, only because the sea had never tried to startle the “silent man”. He had never had a glimpse of the strength and wrath of the passionate sea until the typhoon. So it figures in the storms that come upon the Nan-Shan or the Narcissus. “The merciless seas made for the ship roaring wildly and mischievously as a madman with an axe”, men looking wretched in a hopeless cause, like “vermin fleeing before a flood” [9].
These are passages that deserve a place among the classical pictures of the sea: The Odyssey, The Tempest, Moby Dick. Here stems the tragic vision of life, which Conrad, like Melville, shared. He was inclined to see the world in dark colours, like all the writers formed at the school of the sea. These writers have an acute cosmic sense, and human life, seen against the life of the universe, has the length and power of a mere spark. The world is more simple, reduced to its essences, but meantime, more complex, because of these destructive forces they perceive. This makes them meditate more gravely upon death than the people on land do. They also share an acute feeling of loneliness and therefore, they seek the necessary solidarity against dangers. The influence of the destructive sea is thus considerable.
