Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fic - Joseph Conrad [13]
Although “The Secret Sharer” has inspired a wide variety of interpretations, including political, sociological, and historical ones, by far the greatest interest in the story has been in its rich suggestiveness as a psychological tale. It has, accordingly, been subjected to a barrage of psychoanalytic interpretations. While Conrad maintained that he had no interest in the theories of Sigmund Freud, he was nonetheless intrigued by the complex duality of human consciousness, and this tale clearly reflects that interest. Throughout the story the narrator emphasizes his uncanny sense of identity with Leggatt—he characterizes the fugitive as his “other self,” his “double,” and his “secret sharer”; and he goes on to say of the duplicity necessitated by his efforts to keep Leggatt hidden, “the dual working of my mind distracted me almost to the point of insanity. I was constantly watching myself, my secret self.... It was very much like being mad, only it was worse because one was aware of it” (p. 170). In this respect the story, which Conrad had considered titling “The Second Self,” “The Secret Self,” and “The Other Self,” participates in the motifs of the Doppelgänger literary tradition, of which Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886) is a particularly influential example.
Some of the most interesting interpretive possibilities for the story, in fact, are based on the assumption that the young captain’s intense identification with his alter ego may render his judgment, and perhaps even his veracity, suspect. Indeed, the confidence with which he claims that he understands the circumstances of the killing and how to interpret them (based solely on Leggatt’s own exculpatory version of the events) is remarkable for the uncritical frame of mind it discloses: “I knew well enough... that my double there was no homicidal ruffian. I did not think of asking him for details, and he told me the story roughly in brusque, disconnected sentences. I needed no more” (p. 161). And when the captain of the ship on which the killing has occurred comes aboard and tells his version of the story, the narrator dismisses it by asserting that “[i]t is not worth while to record that version” (p. 173). Thus, the sole opportunity we have to hear a potential counternarrative to Leggatt’s account is suppressed. At the beginning of the tale the narrator describes himself as having been both “a stranger to the ship [and] ... a stranger to myself” (p. 155), and the circumstances with which he is subsequently faced will resolve precisely into a conflict between his professional duties to his ship and his moral duties to his conscience. Yet even though he has violated his professional code by sheltering a fugitive from justice and willfully endangered his crew, the story nonetheless concludes with his idealized vision of himself as experiencing “the perfect communion of a seaman with his first command” and of Leggatt as “a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny” (p. 193). That is, he appears to believe he has reconciled the seemingly contradictory exigencies with which he has been faced. Whether we concur that this judgment is sound or believe his representation of the events to be, either consciously or unconsciously, self-serving is an open matter. Indeed, much of the story’s artistry inheres in its tantalizing capacity for generating interpretations that differ from that offered by the narrator-captain.
Heart of Darkness
Heart of Darkness (1899) is one of the most broadly influential works in the history of British literature. The novella’s diverse attributes—its rich symbolism, intricate plotting, evocative prose, penetrating psychological insights, broad allusiveness, moral significance, metaphysical suggestiveness—have earned for it the admiration of literary scholars and critics, high school and college teachers, and general readers alike. Further, its impact can be gauged not only by the frequency with which it is read, taught, and written about, but also by its cultural fertility. It has heavily influenced works ranging from T. S. Eliot