redefines his beliefs through experience. But because in 1894 and 1895 Conrad had difficulty embracing a consistent set of values, his narrator's commentary does not always move toward a consistent philosophic position, but rather may posit contradictory perspectives. Quite frequently, the omniscient voice of the first two novels, Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, explores characters and action from the perspective of a man committed to family ties, the work ethic, sexual constraint, individual responsibility, and racial understanding. Yet these basic humanistic values are often at odds with the artistic tentativeness and moral confusion that derive from Conrad's uncertainty and anxiety. The unresolved tension between, on the one hand, Conrad's own personal concerns and, on the other, his attempt to objectify moral issues is revealed in conflicts between the values expressed by the narrator and the implications of his plot and setting.
Conrad's early artistic code, the original preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897), is remarkable for its emphasis on creating a community of readers. Seen in the context of his own fear of loneliness and of not communicating, it reflects his decision that fiction will not only enable him to arrest the flux and turmoil within himself but also relieve him of his sense of isolation. Conrad defines art as 'a single-minded -689- attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.' The artist's mission is to reveal the experience that unites all men and, in particular, to make the reader aware of the common humanity each shares with mankind. Conrad hopes for a community of responsive temperaments to verify the effectiveness of his creation; this hope may be behind the intensity of the famous but elusive assertion, 'My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel-it is, before all, to make you see.'
Conrad's 1914 preface to the American edition makes clear that he meant the tale's focus to be on the crew's response to Wait: 'In the book [Wait] is nothing; he is merely the centre of the ship's collective psychology and the pivot of the action.' Sentimentalism is the peculiar form of egotism that preys upon the crew's response to Donkin's poverty at the outset and that causes the men to sacrifice their integrity in a desperate and pathetic effort to forestall Wait's inevitable death. Neither Wait nor Donkin has an identity independent of that conferred by the crew's sentimentalism; they flourish because the crew responds to them. Wait is in a parasitic relationship with the crew: 'Each, going out, seemed to leave behind a little of his own vitality, surrender some of his own strength, renew the assurance of life-the indestructible thing!' Once the crew responds to Donkin with a 'wave of sentimental pity,' 'the development of the destitute Donkin aroused interest.' When he responds to Wait and Donkin against his better judgment, the sailor-speaker embodies Conrad's own fear of sentimentalism. After he had completed The Nigger but before it had begun to appear in the New Review, Conrad wrote 'I feel horribly sentimental… I want to rush into print whereby my sentimentalism, my incorrect attitude to life… shall be disclosed to the public gaze.' Just as the eternal truths of Singleton and Allistoun triumph over the 'temporary formulas' of Donkin and the crew's misguided sentimentalism, the fiction writer must eschew fashionable aesthetic philosophies: 'Realism, Romanticism, Naturalism, even the unofficial Sentimentalism… all these gods must… abandon him… to the stammerings of his conscience and to the outspoken consciousness of the difficulties of his work,' Conrad wrote in his 1897 preface. The speaker-crew member, and possibly Conrad too, wants to believe that the crew's experience with Wait represents a confrontation with death. If he were to lower the -690- rhetorical ante, he would be left with his nominalistic adventure tale, which boldly reveals his own mediocre behavior. Sympathy with Wait almost causes the men, including the crew member, to refuse duty. Thus their catatonic fear of death, evoked by the presence of Wait, displaces the captain as master. Although the men detest Wait as a possible malingerer, they irrationally equate preserving him with forestalling their own deaths.
Conrad discovered that the voyage experiences of his sea career could free him from the debilitating restraints of shore life and be an ordering principle for his new career as a writer. Like the passing of a period in a man's life, a ship's docking is a kind of prolepsis of her final death. But when Conrad presents his narrative to his readers, the created world and the self embodied in that world achieve a kind of immortality.
Conrad was concerned with the dilemma of transforming the «freedom» of living in a purposeless world from a condition into a value. And Marlow enabled him to examine this dilemma in 'Youth' (1898), Heart of Darkness (1899), and Lord Jim (1900). Writing enabled Conrad to define his values and his character. He uses his narrators and dramatic personae to objectify his feelings and values. Marlow is a surrogate through whom Conrad works out his own epistemological problems, psychic turmoil, and moral confusion; his search for values echoes Conrad's. Thus he is a means by which Conrad orders his world. He is defining not only the form of the story but the relation between Conrad's past and present selves. The younger Marlow was explicitly committed to the same conventional values of the British Merchant Marine to which Conrad had devoted his early adulthood, but the mature Marlow has had experiences that have caused him to reevaluate completely his moral beliefs. That Marlow is a vessel for some of Conrad's doubts and anxieties and for defining the problems that made his own life difficult is clear not only from his 189 °Congo diary and the 1890 correspondence with Mme Poradowska, but even more so from the letters of the 1897 to 1899 period, selections from which have already been quoted.
The meaning of several other novels, most notably The Nigger of the Narcissus and The Rescue (1919), depends on understanding the way that Conrad's emotional life becomes embodied in the text. In Nostromo the suicidal despair of Decoud reflects a mood that Conrad had -691- known many times in his novel-writing years. Even such an objective work as 'The Secret Sharer' (1910) becomes more meaningful once we recognize that it has an autobiographical element. At the outset of his voyage, the captain not only relives emotions Conrad once felt during his first command but reflects the uncertainty and anxiety that Conrad experienced in the period when he wrote it.
'Youth,' the first short story after Tales of Unrest (1898) was completed, addresses the dour view of European life presented in Tales of Unrest. Marlow is the heir of the white men of such early Conrad stories as 'The Lagoon' (1896) and 'Karain: A Memory' (1891) — those sensitive, if disillusioned, men who neither live passionately like the natives nor believe in any sustaining ideals. «Youth» is about Marlow's efforts to create a significant yesterday so that his life will not seem a meaningless concatenation of durational events. Marlow's narrative reflects his need to «arrest» time and preempt the future. Somewhere past the middle of his life, Marlow attempts to discover a symbolic meaning in the past voyage of the Judea. He wishes to believe that his first journey to the East was one of 'those voyages that seem ordered for the illustration of life, that might stand for a symbol of existence.' As Marlow recalls his great adventure, he discovers that, in spite of the voyage's failure, it not only contains great significance for him but enables him to recapture on occasion his feeling of youthful energy. Conrad takes a good-natured, ironical view of the supposedly mature Marlow's attempts to expose his own youthful illusions. While he purports to take an objective and detached view of a meaningful experience of his youth, the mature Marlow is revealed as a romantic sentimentalist. Conrad shows us that reality is partly subjective and that our illusions and oversimplifications are as real to us as so-called objective facts.
The primary subject of Heart of Darkness is Marlow, but the presence of Conrad is deeply engraved on every scene. Marlow's effort to come to terms with the Congo experience, and especially with Kurtz, is the crucial activity that engaged Conrad's imagination. Marlow's consciousness is the arena of the tale, and the interaction between his verbal behavior-his effort to find the appropriate words-and his memory is as much the action as his Congo journey. Both the epistemological quest for a context or perspective with which to interpret the experience and the semiological quest to discover the signs and symbols that make the experience intelligible are central to the tale. - 692-
For a contemporary reader, Heart of Darkness raises important questions because at first it seems to present women and blacks from a perspective that is reductive and even sexist and racist. We need to understand that the views expressed by Marlow are not Conrad's, and indeed are a dramatization of a perspective that Conrad uses ironically. Yet it is important to acknowledge that Conrad does not adequately separate himself from Marlow's view of women, a view that assumes that women are more sentimental, myopic, and domestic than their male peers. Marlow seems to believe that it is the male role to protect the women from the more searing truths and to help them live in their illusions. If we understand Marlow's patronizing attitude toward women as naive and simple, can we not use the text to show the difference between authorial and resistant readings-that is, between how texts are read when they are written and how they are read now? Does the lie to the Intended reveal Marlow's sexism? Is Conrad aware of Marlow's sexual stereotyping, even if he means the lie to the Intended to be a crucial moment of self-definition for Marlow? In a situation where opportunities for heterosexuality are limited, what does Heart of Darkness say about male bonding among the whites and about miscegenation? Are we offended that one of Kurtz's 'abominable practices' is the taking of a savage mistress? If we can understand the agon as an enactment of how
