moral intensity to the English novel and its traditions of manners and morals. He recognized the role in human conduct of repressed desires, unconscious motives, and unacknowledged impulses. Because he wanted to dramatize how a writer comes to terms with words and meaning, he focused on the teller as much as the tale. Focusing on the problems of how we understand, communicate, and signify experience, he anticipated essential themes in the philosophy, linguistics, criticism, and literature of our era. He understood the potential of the novel for political and historical insights and thus enlarged the subject matter of the English novel. When he dramatized the dilemma of seeking meaning in an amoral universe, he addressed the central epistemological problem of the twentieth century. To achieve a more intense presentation of theme and a more thorough analysis of characters' moral behavior, he adopted innovative techniques, including nonlinear chronology and the meditative self- dramatizing narrator he called Marlow.
Lacking a father, a bachelor until he was thirty-eight, an exile from his native land who felt guilty for deserting not only his homeland but -685- 0020his father's political heritage, Conrad is particularly concerned with loneliness and isolation. Perhaps the passage from the German writer Novalis that serves as the epigraph to Lord Jim and is repeated in A Personal Record should serve as the epigraph to Conrad's whole career: 'It is certain my conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it.' The desperate reaching out to an alter ego who might sympathetically respond to his frustrations-the pattern of his letters to Edward Garnett and R. B. Cunninghame-Graham-defines a central structural and thematic component of his work: a lonely soul-be it Marlow, Jim, the Captain in 'The Secret Sharer,' Razumov, Heyst, or Captain Anthony-reaches out for another who, he hopes, will recognize, understand, and authenticate him.
In the 1890 to 1930 period, the author's struggle with his subject becomes a major determinant of novel form. Thus, in the 1898 to 1900 Marlow tales-as in D. H. Lawrence's The Rainbow (1915), James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925) — each author writes to define himself or herself. The writer does not strive for the rhetorical finish of earlier novels but, instead, like Rodin in such sculptures as Balzac (1895) invites the reader to perceive a relationship between the creator and the artistic work and to experience the dialogue between the creative process and the raw material. While the Victorian novelist believed that she had a coherent self and that her characters could achieve coherence, the modernist is conscious of disunity in her own life and the world in which she lives. The novelist becomes a divided self. He is both creator and seeker, the prophet who would convert others and the agonizing doubter who would convince himself while engaging in introspective self-examination. Even while the writer stands detached, creating characters, we experience his or her urgent effort to create a self. Thus the reader must maintain a double vision. He must apprehend the narrative and the process of creating that narrative. In such diverse works as the Marlow tales, The Rainbow, and To the Lighthouse (1927), the process of writing, of defining the subject, of evaluating character, of searching for truth, becomes part of the novel. Yet, as Woolf writes in 'Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown' (1924), 'where so much strength is spent on finding a way of telling the truth, the truth itself is bound to reach us in rather an exhausted and chaotic condition.' 'Finding a way'-the quest for values and for aesthetic form-becomes a major modernist subject. -686-
Conrad believed that 'another man's truth is a dismal lie to me.' To understand why Conrad thinks each of us is locked into her or his own perceptions and that all values are ultimately illusions, perhaps we should examine Conrad's ironic image of the cosmos as created by an indifferent knitting machine-an image he proposed in an 1897 letter to his optimistic socialist friend Cunninghame-Graham:
There is a, — let us say, — a machine. It evolved itself (I am severely scientific) out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold! — it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled. I feel it ought to embroider, — but it goes on knitting. You come and say: 'This is all right: it's only a question of the right kind of oil. Let us use this, — for instance, — celestial oil and the machine shall embroider a most beautiful design in purple and gold.' Will it? Alas, no! You cannot by any special lubrication make embroidery with a knitting machine. And the most withering thought is that the infamous thing has made itself: made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart…
It knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted time, space, pain, death, corruption, despair and all the illusions, — and nothing matters, I'll admit however that to look at the remorseless process is sometimes amusing.
Conrad uses this elaborate ironic trope to speak to the late-Victorian belief that the industrial revolution is part of an upwardly evolving teleology; this belief is really a kind of social Darwinism. According to Conrad, humankind would like to believe in a providentially ordered world vertically descending from a benevolent God-that is, to believe in an embroidered world. But we actually inhabit a temporally defined horizontal dimension within an amoral, indifferent universe-or what Conrad calls 'the remorseless process.'
Conrad dramatizes that humans always judge one another in terms of their own psychic and moral needs at the time that they are making judgments. But notwithstanding the fallibility of all judgments, we must strive to make objective judgments and to sustain values and ideals, even if we know that we will always fall short of them. Thus, when Conrad writes that all is illusion, he means that all we can do is make working arrangements with the cosmos, and that there are no absolute values derived from an external source. But he does not mean that all values are equal. Similarly, merely because we cannot discover an absolute, final, original reading, it does not follow that all readings are equal. Rather, as readers, even while acknowledging that our readings are a function of our limitations, we must strive to establish judg-687- ments and values within complex texts. By affirming the value of the search for meaning in the lives of his characters within his imagined world, Conrad is rhetorically enacting the value of this search in reading texts.
Conrad's first two novels, Almayer's Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896), reflect his state of mind and reveal his values. In these early novels, narrated by a conventional omniscient narrator, Conrad tests and refines themes and techniques that he will use in his subsequent fiction. In a way that will become characteristic of Conrad's early works, he uses fictional material from his own adventures as his source material. He not only draws upon his experience when he sailed as mate with the Vidar (1887–1888), but bases the title character of his first novel on a man he actually knew. While these two novels seem to be about remote events, they actually dramatize his central concerns.
Sambir, the setting for Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, is the first of Conrad's distorted and intensified settings. Like the Congo in Heart of Darkness and Patusan in Lord Jim, Sambir becomes a metaphor for actions that occur there. It is also a projection of Conrad's state of mind as it appears in his letters of 1894 through 1896: exhaustion and ennui alternate with spasmodic energy. Conrad's narrator is in the process of creating a myth out of Sambir, but the process is never quite completed. Like Hardy's Egdon Heath, Sambir is an inchoate form that can be controlled neither by man's endeavors nor by his imagination. The demonic energy that seethes within the forests is a catalyst for the perverse sexuality of the novel's white people and their subsequent moral deterioration. With its 'mud soft and black, hiding fever, rottenness, and evil under its level and glazed surface,' Sambir refutes the romantic myth that beyond civilization lie idyllic cultures in a state of innocence. Sambir's river, the Pantai, is a prototype for the Congo; the atavistic influence it casts upon white men, drawing out long-repressed and atrophied libidinous energies, anticipates the Congo's effect on Kurtz. Sambir's primordial jungle comments on the illusion shared by Dain and Nina, as well as by Willems and Aissa, that passionate love can transform the world. Sambir's tropical setting seems to be dominated by the processes of death and destruction, and the jungle's uncontrollable fecundity expresses itself in devolution rather than -688- evolution. The dominance of the Pantai and the forest implies that Conrad's cosmos is as indifferent to man's aspirations as the cosmos of his contemporary, Hardy, whose Jude the Obscure was also published in 1895.
Before he created Marlow, Conrad had difficulty controlling the personal turmoil that we see in his letters of the 1894 to 1896 period; he feels isolated in a meaningless universe; he is cynical about man's motives and purposes on this earth; he senses that he is an artistic failure; he doubts his ability to communicate even while expressing his desperate need to be understood. If his speaker's commentary is not always appropriate to the dramatic action that evokes it, it is because Conrad is using his speaker to explore his own bafflement in a universe he regards as amoral, indifferent, and at times hostile. In the first two novels, when Conrad uses the narrator as a surrogate for himself to place an episode in an intellectual and moral context, he is often testing and probing to discover what the episode means. Conrad subsequently learns to capitalize on his reluctance to be dogmatic; he dramatizes Marlow's process of moral discovery and shows how Marlow continually formulates, discards, and
