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\RTES SCIENTiA VERITA
The Rhetoric
of Joseph Conrad
by
James L. Guetti, Jr.

AMHERST COLLEGE HONORS THESIS NUMBER 2
The Rhetoric of Joseph Conrad
by
JAMES L. GUETTI, JR.

AMHERST COLLEGE PRESS
AMHERST • MASSACHUSETTS
MCMLX
I would like to acknowledge
my indebtedness to Professor Theodore Baird
for his guidance and criticism
in the writing of this paper
COPYRIGHT I960 BY THE TRUSTEES OF AMHERST COLLEGE
Published by Amherst College from a fund given by Harold F. John-
son, of the class of 1918, to make possible the publication of selected
Senior Honors theses. This essay was written by a member of the
class of 1959 as a part of his work for a degree with honors.
PRINTED BY THE STINEHOUR PRESS • LUNENBURG • VERMONT
Contents
Introduction 4
I Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain:
A Simple Adventure Story 5
ii Conrad's Rhetoric 9
in The Nigger of the "Narcissus":
Morality and Mystery 17
iv Lord Jim:
The Vitality of the Rhetoric 26
v Nostromo:
The Romantic View 35
Conclusion 44
Introduction
IT is not my intention in this discussion to attempt to present
a balanced view of Conrad. My basic consideration is a use
of language that is peculiar to Conrad—language that has been
called "magical" and "spellbinding" as well as "disparate,"
"repetitious," and "obscure." I shall attempt to describe this
language and its effects upon the meaning of the world of ad-
venture, upon the meaning, even, of life. I assume my reader's
acquaintance with the stories in the novels that I examine.
CHAPTER I
Rider Haggard's Allan Quatermain:
A Simple Adventure Story
E following brief remarks on Allan Quatermain will be
Jl useful, I think, in introducing my reader to the fundamen-
tal assumptions behind the world of adventure, that I may more
clearly demonstrate what Conrad makes of this world. I shall
begin with a short description of the excitement of the adven-
ture story. Secondly, I shall attempt to show that in the world
of Allan Quatermain a reader encounters two dominant moral
attitudes and similarly two attitudes of feeling or emotional re-
sponse. These polarities, if I may term them so, are implicit par-
ticularly in Allan Quatermain and generally in the world of ad-
venture.
The suspense of Allan Quatermain is founded upon the
deeds of Quatermain and his party in Africa: what the adven-
turers can do to combat the evil forces of attacking Masai, of
"Sorais of the Night," of the priesthood of the sun, and so forth.
The excitement of this story and of the adventure story in gen-
eral is the excitement of battle and hardship, of events charac-
terized by their finality. There are no halfway measures in this
world where Quatermain and his company are without the pro-
tection of civilization, and every action is ffall or nothing,"
ffdo or die," where the gap between life and death is very small,
where behavior is crude, unrestrained, unqualified by the com-
plex awarenesses or the subtleties of civilization and society.
The polarities or attitudes I have mentioned above are partic-
ularly dependent upon Quatermain's role as both narrator and
main character of the story; they arise from a basic dualism in
him. In speaking of Quatermain in the closing pages of the book,
Sir Henry Curtis describes him as follows: ''Tender, constant,
humorous, and possessing many of the qualities that go to make
a poet, he was yet almost unrivalled as a man of action. . . ."1
As a "man of action" who includes the qualities of a "poet,"
Quatermain declares at the outset that "human nature is like an
iron ring" and that one can never "increase its total circumfer-
ence" (p. 420). This is a simple statement, chiefly because of its
fundamental earnestness and faith in some sort of stability. Man
is conceived of as a constant, predictable creature in a world of
immutable laws. The magnificent Zu-Vendian stairway, for ex-
ample, is seen as proof of the fact that "energy and talent are
the natural stepping stones to grandeur" (p. 519). Whether or
not this and many other observations like it are false is not the
question. The point I wish to make here is that Quatermain's
observations totally exclude other possible observations and
form a rigid moral framework for the story.
These moral limits are accompanied in Allan Quatermain by
a very narrow range of feeling on the part of the narrator. We
are given, for example, a description of an eagle that comes
"dashing down like a cannon-ball upon some cowering buck
that is hidden in a patch of grass from everything except that
piercing eye. Still finer is the spectacle when the eagle takes the
buck running" (p. 553). The voice of the narrator which char-
acterizes the "man of action" assumes that this "spectacle"
could be nothing else but "fine." Here this very limited re-
sponse to experience is spontaneous and positive. Often, how-
ever, this narrowness of vision is completely negative, char-
acterized by a reluctance to feel in a certain way, by the exclu-
sion of any awareness of experience but the most "manly."
Quatermain's French cook, Alphonse, is an "arrant coward,"
i. H. Rider Haggard, Five Adventure Novels of H. Rider Haggard (New
York, 1951), p. 632.
and although the little man is sometimes pitiable, often comical,
Quatermain's reaction to him is only to be "thoroughly dis-
gusted." Good's "frivolities," which are charming at times, he
will not endure. This inflexibility of feeling often gives rise to a
terseness that is absurd. Upon the violent and tragic death of
Sorais, Quatermain most simply remarks, "Well, they gave her
a royal funeral, and there was an end of her" (p. 628).
In view of these remarks, the reader of Allan Quatermain
would not expect a great deal of difficulty in the resolution of
conflicts between the moral and the emotional. As an example,
Quatermain and Umslopogaas discuss their friendship: " fAy,
old wolf,' I said, 'thine is a strange love. Thou wouldst split me
to the chin if I stood in thy path tomorrow.' fThou speakest
truth, Macumazahn, that would I if it came in the way of duty,
but I should love thee all the same when the blow had gone
fairly home' " (pp. 581-82). A strange love indeed in the severe
world of adventure where friends pride themselves on their
ability to sacrifice their friendship.
And yet the world of adventure, as I have said, includes two
polarities, and the second is defined by Quatermain on his
deathbed, where he evidences a kind of reflection that if pre-
viously indulged at any other than the most leisurely moments
would have been fatal to his life as an adventurer. At the begin-
ning of the story, death was seen as an undesirable occurrence:
"Alas! when our time comes, most of us ... leave nothing but
bubbles behind, to show that we have been, and the bubbles
soon burst" (p. 439). Indeed, it would seem that life is most
attractive to men who fight so courageously for it and who live
each moment as if it was their last, but for the dying Quater-
main, this is no longer so: ".. . all fear of that end has departed,
and I feel only as though I were about to sink into the arms of
an unutterable rest" (p. 629). The life of adventure has been
much more rigorous than he would formerly have had us be-
lieve. It has included "tremors, all the heart-shaking fears" that
"have left me now." Of Alphonse, who has most often been the
"arrant little coward," he says, "I hope he will always think of
me as kindly as I think of him" (p. 622). Thus, upon his death-
bed Quatermain allows himself reflection, speculation, and flex-
ibility of feeling, all or any of which might have proved a fatal
opening in the clattering armor of the adventurer.
These, then, are the polarities of the world of Allan Quater-
main: on the one hand a world of duty, of spontaneous, unques-
tioning courage, and of unparalleled adventure; otherwise, a
world of enforced, constant struggle with fear, requiring con-
tinual effort, temporarily rewarded by sleep, and finally by death.
CHAPTER II
Conrad's Rhetoric
I SHALL begin my discussion of Conrad with a distinction
between story and meaning, in order to show that Conrad is
concerned with meaning in a way that Haggard is not. I shall
continue with a characterization of the confusing language—
language that is unsettling to a reader—with which Conrad's
narrator expresses this meaning, illustrating this analysis with
passages from An Outcast of the Islands and Almayer's Folly. I
shall then state that the basis for this confusion is a certain kind
of ambiguity peculiar to Conrad, and relate this ambiguity to
Conrad's use of the figure of speech.
Allan Quatermain is a story. Quatermain as narrator relates
a series of events as they have happened and presumably be-
cause they have happened. He does not as a rule compare or
contrast the experiences in Africa with other kinds of experi-
ence, or his characters with other kinds of people. This process
of comparing is the task of the reader; when I read Allan Qua-
termain, I finally make a general statement of how this world of
adventure relates to other worlds that already have a certain
meaning for me, and this statement is the meaning of the world
of Allan Quatermain^ a new meaning for me. Meaning does not
exist in a single body of experience, but in the comparison of
the new experience to other experience which has meaning. As
long as one is dealing with one group of new experiences, one
world, as is Quatermain in the greater part of his narration, he
is concerned not with meaning, but with story.
There is more to Conrad's writing than story. Conrad as-
sumes a story and the world in which it takes place. The world
of the Malay Archipelago, in which An Outcast of the Islands and
Almayer's Folly are set, is similar to Quatermain's Africa; it is a
world of animal passions, deceit, and sometimes of strength and
courage. To be sure, Sambir is a savage world on a much smaller
scale than Africa: there are no great battles, no heroes, and no
villains who are nothing but villains. Nonetheless, the evil of
Babalatchi, the fierce courage of Dain, and the purposeful sim-
plicity of Lingard combine to form a world of adventure. As I
have said, Conrad's narrator assumes this world and the events
which take place there. His concern is not with the story, but
with the meaning he can find in it. This is similar to my concern
with meaning when I say of Haggard's adventure story world:
ff. . . on the one hand a world of duty, of spontaneous, unques-
tioning courage, and of unparalleled adventure; otherwise, a
world of enforced, constant struggle with fear, requiring con-
tinual effort, temporarily rewarded by sleep, and finally by
death." Compare my remarks to the narrator's characterization
of Willems near the beginning of An Outcast of the Islands: CfHe
experienced that irresistible impulse to impart information
which is inseparable from gross ignorance. There is always some
one thing which the ignorant man knows, and that thing is the
only thing worth knowing; it fills the ignorant man's universe.
Willems knew all about himself."1 Both of these passages, it
seems to me, are the statements of a reader—a reader who knows
the story from beginning to end and wishes to say something
meaningful about it. Conrad's narrator views his story and
Willems in much the same way as a reader might view Allan
Quatermain. As a further illustration, An Outcast of the Islands
begins:
When he stepped off the straight and narrow path of his peculiar
i. Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands (London, 1925), pp. 5-6.
10
honesty, it was with an inward assertion of unflinching resolve
to fall back again into the monotonous but safe stride of virtue
as soon as his little excursion into the wayside quagmires had
produced the desired effect. It was going to be a short episode
—a sentence in brackets, so to speak—in the flowing tale of his
life.... (p. 3)
The knowledge which the narrator evidences here is not only
of Willems' history, but of "honesty" and "virtue" in general.
He relates Willems' honesty to what he knows of honesty from
his total experience and he declares that Willems' honesty is
"peculiar," and that the "safe stride" of his "virtue" is "mono-
tonous." The tone of this passage is that of amused condescen-
sion; here the narrator's concern with meaning and his knowl-
edge of Willems take the form of irony, just as a reader might
be similarly but less artfully ironic about the activities of Qua-
termain's little band of adventurers. I have not quoted this pas-
sage, however, to examine Conrad's irony, but as an example of
the kind of knowledge with which Conrad's narrator begins his
story and as an illustration of this narrator's preoccupation with
meaning—a preoccupation that is identical with my position in
relation to a story like Allan Quatermain.
My next consideration is the often peculiar language which
Conrad's narrator uses to talk about his story. For the sake of
clarity I shall not examine the following passage as a whole, but
first in the light of one characteristic of the language, and then
to illustrate a second, and so on:
She looked at him with her big sombre eyes, in which there was
no responsive light. His thought was so remote from her under-
standing that she let the words pass by unnoticed, like the
breath of the wind, like the flight of a cloud. Woman though
she was, she could not comprehend, in her simplicity, the tre-
mendous compliment of that speech, that whisper of deadly
happiness, so sincere, so spontaneous, coming so straight from
the heart—like every corruption. It was the voice of madness,
of a delirious peace, of happiness that is infamous, cowardly,
and so exquisite that the debased mind refuses to contemplate
its termination: for to the victims of such happiness the moment
of its ceasing is the beginning afresh of that torture which is its
price. With her brows slightly knitted in the determined preoc-
11
cupation of her own desires, she said—"Now tell me all. All the
words spoken between you and Syed Abdulla."
Tell what? What words? Her voice recalled back the con-
sciousness that had departed under her touch, and he became
aware of the passing minutes every one of which was like a re-
proach; of those minutes that falling, slow, reluctant, irresis-
tible into the past, marked his footsteps on the way to perdi-
tion. Not that he had any conviction about it, any notion of the
possible ending on that painful road. It was an indistinct feel-
ing, a threat of suffering like the confused warning of coming
disease, an inarticulate monition of evil made up of fear and
pleasure, of resignation and of revolt.... (pp. 141-42)
The reader encounters here the conjunctive use of words of ap-
parently disparate meaning. Of Willems' whisper the narrator
uses the words "deadly happiness," and it is difficult to see in,
what sense they go together. Clearly they do not refer only to
Willems, for his awareness of his "happiness" is not that it'is
"deadly." "Happiness" describes Willems' feeling and thus re-
fers to the story, but "deadly" refers to the narrator's ultimate
knowledge that this happiness will prove deadly, his knowledge
of all that has happened and will happen to Willems.
This kind of disparity occurs again and again as the narrator
continues to speak of the whisper: "It was the voice of madness,
of delirious peace, of happiness . . . ." "Madness" and "deliri-
ous" contrast violently with "peace," and again the problem is
from what area these words derive their meaning. "Peace" de-
scribes Willems, but "madness" and "delirious" refer to the
narrator's knowledge of the real nature of this peace. A reader
may suppose that these words refer to either story or meaning
exclusively, and in this sense the phrase "delirious peace" is
paradoxical. Conrad's rhetoric refers both to the story and to
the narrator's meaning.
Another quality of Conrad's language which this passage il-
lustrates is a use of words of similar meaning, seeming repeti-
tion: ". . . of those minutes that falling, slow, reluctant, irresist-
ible into the past. ..." A reader might say that the elaboration
here is an example of the sound of words used to create a mood,
and this is certainly true, but there is ambiguity in this repeti-
12
tion as there was in the above disparity; the words refer not only
to time passing in the story but also to Willems' reluctance at
its passing ("reluctant"), to his decline as time passes ("fall-
ing"), and to the inevitability of his fate ("irresistible"). What
appears to be repetition is a number of subtle changes of refer-
ence and thus changes of meaning. This "disparate," "repeti-
tious," and ambiguous language is Conrad's rhetoric.
The qualities of Conrad's rhetoric are only partially explained,
however, by a consideration of to whom or what the language
refers. The tone, the voice which evidences the knowledge of
the story that I have mentioned above, lends force and vitality
to the ambiguity of this rhetoric; it cannot be seen simply as
verbal contradiction. "Deadly happiness" is uttered by a voice
of doom, and this changes to a scornful remonstrance of Wil-
lems with "debased mind." Then we have the resonant voice of
a puritanical moralist: "for to the victims of such happiness the
moment of its ceasing is the beginning afresh of that torture
which is its price." It is not simply the reference points in the
story or in the narrator's knowledge of story and meaning which
are important in examining this rhetoric, but the tone which
characterizes his feeling about the story. These feelings pervade
the tone of every passage, every description.
With these characteristics of Conrad's rhetoric in mind, I
examine another passage:
Above him, under the grey motionless waste of a stormy sky,
drifted low black vapours, in stretching bars, in shapeless
patches, in sinuous wisps and tormented spirals. Over the
courtyard and the house floated a round, sombre, and lingering
cloud, dragging behind a tail of tangled and filmy streamers—
like the dishevelled hair of a mourning woman, (p. 241)
This description creates a mood of vast dreariness, a feeling of
the animal nature of the sky. The final description of the cloud,
however, is carried even farther; the animal quality of the sky
becomes more than implication, nearer to meaning: "like the
dishevelled hair of a mourning woman." There is a reference to
Aissa here, mourning the death of Willems, or to all the mourn -
13
ing women of all time, so that this figurative description may
refer to the story, or to some higher, more general meaning.
Our awareness of this double meaning is generated by the in-
tensity of the descriptionptHe voice~6fligod saddened by his
knowledge, and by the signpost of a figure of speech, "like."
He seemed to be surrendering to a wild creature the unstained
purity of his life, of his race, of his civilization. He had a notion
of being lost amongst shapeless things that were dangerous and
ghastly. He struggled with the sense of certain defeat—lost his
footing—fell back into the darkness. With a faint cry and an
upward throw of his arms he gave up as a tired swimmer gives
up: because the swamped craft is gone from under his feet; be-
cause the night is dark and the shore is far—because death is
better than strife, (pp. 80-81)
In this passage the dramatic situation is described by the tone
of words like "dangerous and ghastly," for the meaning of these
words is vague, as is that of "shapeless things." This vague hor-
ror soon becomes a figure of speech with "He struggled . . . ,"
and the essential quality of this figure, and of all figures in Con-
rad, is that it does not merely raise the story to a higher mean-
ing, but changes the story, the event itself. At first, we might
say that this is an ordinary figure, that Willems is not falling in-
to the darkness of a deep crevasse, but into spiritual darkness,
yet the very elaboration and the vividness of this figure qualifies
such a simple meaning. Willems is a "tired swimmer." The
vividness here lends the significance of meaning and story to the
figure of speech in much the same way that the ambiguity of
Conrad's rhetoric is emphasized by its tone.
I examine this problem in another manner by considering the
following example:
Her hands slipped slowly off Lingard's shoulders and her arms
fell by her side, listless, discouraged, as if to her—to her, the
savage, violent, and ignorant creature—had been revealed clearly
in that moment the tremendous fact of our isolation, of the
loneliness impenetrable and transparent, elusive and everlast-
ing; of the indestructible loneliness that surrounds, envelops,
clothes every human soul from the cradle to the grave, and,
perhaps, beyond, (p. 250)
14
Here the narrator is concerned with both his character, Aissa,
and with the isolation of man in general. Aissa is not conscious
here of anything but her own private feelings, yet to the narra-
tor she appears as if she were conscious of man's isolation. In
this way the narrator relates his awareness to the girl, using this
general meaning to describe her private feelings.
The similarity of this figure to the rhetoric, to phrases like
"delirious peace" and "deadly happiness," becomes clear if we
remove the "as if" from the above passage. Without a signpost
to qualify the application of the narrator's meaning, we are
faced with the familiar problem of questioning and analyzing to
discover to whom or what this strange language refers. "As if"
tells us that this language is not "story" as I have defined it,
but this kind of signpost is absent from much of Conrad's writ-
ing. And even when such signposts are present, as above, the
tone of a passage may qualify their effect: despite the signpost
a given figure may seem to be the story. This is the source of the
unsettling which I mention in my introduction, the puzzlement
of the reader of Conrad. Thus what I have called "rhetoric" is-
really a figurative way of talking—a figurative language that by -
the effects of tone and descriptive intensity does not seem to be
figurative at all.
Whether beginning from a general meaning or a moment in
the story, all of Conrad's figures, that is, his rhetoric, are finally
positioned between this meaning and the story. The narrator,
we may suppose, begins with a determination to apply to his
story all the meaning that he has gleaned from his total experi-
ence. These two poles are definite: a body of meaning taken from
other experience and an awareness of the events of the story.
The process of blending the two, however, is more vague; it
must begin with the comparison that a certain meaning is as if
it applied to, or is like, or seems to be like a moment or moments
in the story. Conrad's rhetoric, with or without figurative sign-
posts, is the result of the process of comparison which lies be-
tween meaning and story. Again, the rhetoric does not simply
suggest great meaning, but changes the story; the reader never
15
encounters the simple story with which Conrad presumably be-
gan, but the result of relating meaning to a story. The world of
Conrad is a world which refers ambivalently to a story and to
many universal meanings, a dreamworld of mysterious ambiguity.
I shall apply the distinctions I have made to a final example:
Almayer's head rolled from shoulder to shoulder in the oppres-
sion of his dream; the heavens had descended upon him like a
heavy mantle, and trailed in starred folds far under him. Stars
above, stars all round him; and from the stars under his feet
rose a whisper full of entreaties and tears, and sorrowful faces
flitted amongst the clusters of light filling the infinite space be-
low. How escape from the importunity of lamentable cries and
from the look of staring, sad eyes in the faces which pressed
round him till he gasped for breath under the crushing weight
of worlds that hung over his aching shoulders?2
It is perhaps a little unfair to support my assertion that the
world of Conrad's rhetoric is a dreamworld with a passage de-
scribing a dream, but if the reader will withhold his judgment
for a moment I shall show how similar this dream is to the figur-
ative language I have discussed. The narrator begins by labeling
the passage "his dream," as he might begin a figure "as if," to
show that this is not the story. But then the figure becomes the
story, the "heavens" actually descend, and the result is, like the
rhetoric, between the story—the faces which Almayer sees—
and a higher meaning—the meaning of the universe, the eter-
nity of the stars. Here, as elsewhere in figures and rhetoric,
Conrad's narrator, with his knowledge of all meaning and his
high, fateful tones of voice, is the god of a universe of meaning.
Here meaning and story comprise a dream, but every figure,
the rhetorical device of this narrator, is like a dream in its mys-
tery, its ambiguous hovering between meaning and story.
2. Joseph Conrad, Almayer's Folly (London, 1925), p. 158.
16
CHAPTER III
The Nigger of the "Narcissus":
Morality and Mystery
I CONCLUDED the preceding discussion by saying that the
narrator's rhetoric positions the world of Conrad "between
meaning and story." On the one hand, this means that the story
is elevated, transformed into a dreamlike world. In my discus-
sion of The Nigger of the ** Narcissus" I shall deal first with this
"elevation" in an attempt to define the mysterious dreamworld
more clearly. Then I shall show that the rhetoric creates an-
other kind of mystery — a "moral" mystery.
The sailing ship Narcissus is well under way when James
Wait, the "nigger," makes his first appearance to the reader
after the mustering of the crew in port:
He seemed to liast^n_-£ke rp.tf^t of departing light by his very-
presence; the setting sun dipped sharply, as though fleeing be-
fore our nigger; a black mist emanated from him; a subtle and
dismal influence; a something cold and gloomy that floated out
and settled on all the faces like a mourning veil. The circle
broke up. The joy of laughter died on stiffened lips.1
This is clearly rhetoric, a figurative manner of speaking, and yet
"seemed" or "as though" do not begin to qualify the tone which
catches all the gloom of the "nigger's" pervading presence.
Waitjjgcpmes a god of the-night, from whichjthe surr mustHfee,
and then a kind of swamp-being that exudes the very essence of
. i. Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (London, 1925), p. 34.
17


horror, sadness, and despair. The way in which I talk about this
passage demonstrates very well what I mean when I say that
Conrad's is a dreamworld^
,The members of the crew visit Wait in his separate cabin, and
in the process of describing this cabin the narrator says: "The
little place, repainted white, had, jn jhe night, the brilliance of
a silver shrine where a black idol, reclining stiffly under a blan-
ket, blinked its weary eyes and received our homage'/ (p. 105).
The narrator conceives of the_crew's visits as the worship of an
idol, and the reader encounters the actual image of men wor-
shipping an idol, the horror of an idol that is alive and blinks
wearily at their homage.
As a final example, the narrator describes the visit of the
evangelical cook to Wait's cabin:
His heart overflowed with tenderness, with comprehension,
with the desire to meddle, with anxiety for the soul of that black
man, with the pride of possessed eternity, with the feeling of
might. Snatch him up in his arms and pitch him right into the
middle of salvation. . . . The black soul—blacker—body—rot—
Devil. No! Talk—strength—Samson. . . . There was a great din
as of cymbals in his ears; he flashed through an ecstatic jumble
of faces, lilies, prayer-books, unearthly joy, white shirts, gold
harps, black coats, wings. He saw flowing garments, clean
shaved faces, a sea of light—a lake of pitch. There were sweet
scents, a smell of sulphur—red tongues of flame licking a white
mist. An awesome voice thundered!. .. (pp. 115-16)
As this passage begins the rhetoric is ironic: the "pride of pos-
sessed eternity" is spoken of in conjunction with "the desire to
meddle," and "unearthly joy" with "white shirts." Soon, how-
ever, the vision actually appears before the reader's eyes: "a
smell of sulphur—red tongues of flame licking a white mist."j
Here the vividness of story is imparted to the vision of a ship's
cook whose evangelism amounts to insanity, and this is no long-
er ironical.
These are three particular aspects of the dreamworld of TJie
Nigger of the "'Narcissus". This world in which a man becomes
a witch-god and a living idol, and in which the insane vision of
a cook actually appears, is, generally speaking, a world in which
18
moments in the story become moments of a fantasy that is in-
credibly vivid. All the while that this is happening the story is
still going on. Before and after the worshipping of the idol, the
members of the crew come and go to and from the cabin, and
when the insane vision is over the cook is still a cook. The mys-
tery here is not simply in the fantasy, but in the relationship of
the story with the dreamlike qualities of rhetoric and figure—
the ambiguity of a world which changes from story to fantasy
and back again. I shall now consider the effect that this ambi-
guity has on theNmoraJ>_s£tu^
The Nigger of the '"Narcissus" begins with a moral opposition:
the code of the sea versus the eflife" of the land. In his descrip-
tion of Old Singleton and men like him the narrator says:
They had been strong, as those are strong who know neither
doubts nor hopes. They had been impatient and enduring, tur-
bulent and devoted, unruly and faithful . . . —they had been
men who knew toil, privation, violence, debauchery—but knew
not fear, and had no desire of spite in their hearts. Men hard to
manage, but easy to inspire; voiceless men—but men enough to
scorn in their hearts the sentimental voices that bewailed the
hardness of their fate. (p. 25)
We may contrast the men of the sea with men like Donkin:
They all knew him! He was the man that cannot steer, that can-
not splice, that dodges the work on dark nights; that, aloft,
holds on frantically with both arms and legs, and swears at the
wind, the sleet, the darkness; the man who curses the sea while
others work. The man who is the last out and the first in when
all hands are called. The man who can't do most things and
won't do the rest. The pet of philanthropists and self-seeking
landlubbers. . . . The independent offspring of the ignoble free-
dom of the slums full of disdain and hate for the austere servi-
tude of the sea. (pp. 10-11)
The reader will note the similarity of the code of the sea and a
ship's company to the code of the man of action in Allan Qua-
termain\^>Q\\\ emphasize duty, strength, and courage in a world
of savage natur^y Also, the rewards for keeping these codes are
similar: the joking loyalty and weary happiness of a ship's fore-
castle is very like the fierce comradeship of the little band of ad-
19
venturers in Africa. A reader, however, may not always respond
favorably to the man of action or the code of the sea. As I said
in my discussion of Allan Qiiatermain, the adventurous man
may be seen by a reader as cruel to the point of sadism, and
terse and unfeeling to the point of absurdity. He may also be
seen, of course, as very unfortunate and pitiful. In this sense the
adventure story and, more important, the code of the adventure
story require a limited kind of response on the part of the reader
in order to exist at all.
Just as Conrad's narrator assumes a story, he assumes the
moral structure of the adventure story, in this book the code of
the sea, and acts as a reader in expressing his responses to this
morality. (The above description of Singleton and the men of the
sea is a eulogy of their code^the voice of a very poetic reader of
sea stories, wonderfully sensitive to the inarticulate heroism of
the men of sailing ships. This very sensitivity, however, pre-
vents the narrator from limiting his responses to eulogy. His
awareness of the meaning of his story is much too complete and
varied, and to this awareness the mustering of the crew becomes
a "roll-call to unquiet loneliness, to inglorious and obscure
struggle, or to the more trying endurance of small privations
and wearisome duties" (p. 15). If the passages above are the re-
sponses of the poetic man of action, and I think we may say so,
this last passage is the response of the man of reflection, the man
for whom the hardships of the sea are distasteful, "obscure,"
and "inglorious."
Old Singleton has remained at the ship's wheel for more than
thirty hours. He lurches into the forecastle and falls, and the
narrator says: "he lay on his back, staring upwards in a contin-
uous and intolerable manner." What kind of man sees this
"staring" as "intolerable"? Certainly not the ideally limited
reader of adventure stories. The willingness to undergo hard-
ship, the keeping of the code of the sea, which Singleton dem-
onstrates, is at once courageous and embarrassing for this nar-
rator, strong and unendurable. Similarly, the narrator is moved
to sadness and pity when he says of Singleton: "He looked afar
20
upon it, and he saw an immensity tormented and blind, moan-
ing and furious, that claimed all the days of his tenacious life,
and, when life was over, would claim the worn-out body of its
slave...."(p-99)-
\JThese qualifications of the moral structure of the world of ad-
venture at sea have their basis, as I have said, in the narrator's
expression of his knowledge of and feeling for the meaning of
his storyj This cosmic awareness sometimes takes, as it does
above, the form of pity, and at times it goes beyond pity: the
hardship of the crew becomes "unendurable" and the sea code
a "merciless dream":
In an unendurable and unending strain they worked like men
driven by a merciless dream to toil in an atmosphere of ice or
flame. They burnt and shivered in turns. Their eyeballs smarted
as if in the smoke of a conflagration; their heads were ready to
burst with every shout, (pp. 92—93)
On the one hand the story is elevated to the "merciless dream"
of men working feverishly in fire and ice; on the other the rhet-
oric qualifies the moral structure of the story: the code of the
sea becomes the "merciless dream" in a response that is in vio-
lent contrast with eulogy]The narrator describes the ship in the
storm: "And devastated, battered, and wounded she drove
foaming to the northward, as though inspired by the courage
of a high endeavor ..." (p. 94). The figurative use of "as though
inspired" here does not elevate the striving of the ship and
crew, for that this striving is courageous is implicit in the moral
code of sailing ships, and besides, there is something unques-
tionably courageous and moving about this moment in the
story: "she drove foaming to the northward." The qualification
of the courage resulting from the figurative usage implies that
for the narrator courage is beside the point when a graceful ship
is battered by a great stormCCourage here is another kind of
"merciless dream" that drives men and ships to extremities that
are painful to the narrator/ —.
With this in mind, let us examine another passage: \And
nothing in her was real, nothing was distinct and solid but the
21
heavy shadows that filled her decks with their unceasing and
noiseless stir: the shadows darker than the night and more
restless than the thoughts of men?/(p. 145). This is the dream-
world of shadows, a phantom ship floating in the moonlight, but
the unreality of ship and story is followed by the unreality of the
''restless thoughts of men," an ''unreality" that has a serious
effect on the moral code of this ship and of ships in general. A
moral code that is unreal, that is a "merciless dream," is no
code at all, for the awareness that "courage" is a kind of dream,
an illusion, destroys its absolute quality as an unchanging rea-
son for strife to the point of death—and destroys its quality as
a foothold for the reader in a world of fantasy, of phantom ships,
insane visions, and blinking, living idols. This "destruction"
and the resulting uncertainty is the result of the same all-en-
compassing, cosmic awareness and the same kind of rhetoric
which elevate the story to a dreamworld, so much so that, as
most of the above examples illustrate, elevation and "destruc-
tion" occur simultaneously.
The Nigger of the "'Narcissus" is an excellent book with which
to examine this moral uncertainty for three reasons. The first of
these is that this book is incredibly rich in the rhetoric and fig-
ures, which, as I have shown, simultaneously elevate the story
to a dreamworld and destroy the moral code of the sea. Sec-
ondly, there are moments in this book when uncertainty is im-
plicit in the story, when the lives of the crew, and thus the ex-
istence of the code to which they aspire, hang in the balance, as
in the following passage:
Singleton dug his knees under the wheel-box, and carefully
eased the helm to the headlong pitch of the ship, but without
taking his eyes off the coming wave. It towered close-to and
high, like a wall of green glass topped with snow. The ship rose
to it as though she had soared on wings, and for a moment rest-
ed poised upon the foaming crest as if she had been a great sea-
bird. Before we could draw breath a heavy gust struck her, an-
other roller took her unfairly under the weather bow, she gave a
toppling lurch, and filled her decks. Captain Allistoun leaped
up, and fell; Archie rolled over him, screaming:—"She will
rise!" She gave another lurch to leeward; the lower deadeyes
22
dipped heavily; the men's feet flew from under them, and they
hung kicking above the slanting poop. They could see the ship
putting her side in the water, and shouted all together: —
"She's going!" (pp. 57-58)
If the ship were to sink, the men would be lost and the story
would end, certainly, but more important is the general signifi-
cance of each member of the crew as a man of action whose very
nature depends upon his ability to contest the elements with his
code of strength and courage. If he dies, his code dies with him.
In this manner the above passage and many other exciting mo-
ments like it in the story dramatize and accompany the moral
uncertainty of which the reader is conscious throughout most
of the book.
My third reason for choosing this book to illustrate the moral
mystery of Conrad's world is that the crew's response to their
"nigger" is very like the reader's response to Conrad's rhetoric:
just as the seamen are puzzled in their attempts to give Wait's
sickness a final meaning, the reader is confused by the ambigu-
ities of the language which he encounters. "He was demoral-
ising. Through him we were becoming highly humanised, ten-
der, complex, excessively decadent: we understood the subtlety
of his fear, sympathised with all his repulsions, shrinkings, eva-
sions, delusions—as though we had been over-civilized, and
rotten, and without any knowledge of the meaning of life" (p.
139)- The men of the Narcissus are completely demoralized by
their "nigger"; their discipline, the code of the sea, is almost
destroyed in their near-mutiny. This process of demoralization
begins with doubt, the inability to place James Wait in the ab-
solute scheme of life on a sailing ship. This inability is the result
of the complexity of the crew's response to Wait, complexity
expressed in language of disparate arid repetitious meaning,
Conrad's rhetoric: "that pitiful, that limp, that hateful burden"
(p. 72).
The reader, of course, does not become "decadent" or "rot-
ten," but otherwise the above passage characterizes his response
to Conrad's writing exactly. He is puzzled by the rhetoric, he
23
encounters^ narrator who demonstrates a sensitivity to all of
the meanings of human experience and to whose language he
must respond with a similar complexity of awareness^The am-
biguity which is the result of(tfiis complexity effects for the
reader the dissolution of thQ^soliUejnoral code of the sea with
which the narrator begins^ When we consider that^he code of
the sea is at least typical of all moral codes for which men en-<^'
dure hardship, and indeed, the godlike tones of the narrator
imply that it is the most important of all codes, then this disso-
lution becomes very serious .^Absolute courage becomes at the
most a hint at the existence of courage, at the least an illusion.J
and we are faced with the prospect of men struggling with the
"immensity" of the sea for the sake of a suggestion or an illu-
sion. x Throughout the larger part of this book the reader has no
"knowledge of the meaning of life" for which men strive, or
rather he is aware that this meaning may be only illusion, a
"merciless dream."
Up to this point I have spoken as if this moral mystery were
the final meaning of The Nigger of the ** Narcissus" . I have done
so deliberately, in order to give this uncertainty the emphasis
which it has as a reader encounters itQVhen we have closed the
book, however, all three of the uncertainties which_I mention
above have been resolved. Through Captain Allistoun's resolute
courage and a sTipefKurnan effort by the crew the partially cap-
sized Narcissus is righted and resumes the voyage home. As
the ship nears the island of Flores the "nigger" dies in accord-
ance with that part of the sea code which proclaims that a sailor
on the brink of death will die upon first sight of land, and the
near-catastrophic demoralization of the crew dies with him. The
general moral uncertainty which the reader feels is finally erased
by the return to England, the end of the story and the triumph
of the code of the sea:
Under white wings she skimmed low over the blue sea like a
great tired bird speeding to its nest. The clouds raced with her
mastheads; they rose astern enormous and white, soared to the
zfcnith, flew past, and, falling down the wide curve of the sky,
seemed to dash headlong into the sea — the clouds swifter than
24
the ship, more free, but without a home. The coast to welcome
her stepped out of space into the sunshine./(pp. 161-62)
Little need be said of this passage except that it is wonderfully
descriptive and inspiring writing. The reader encounters the
final inspiration in the last lines of the book when the narrator,
as ajmember of the crew:, says goodbye to the Narcissus: "Good-
bye, brothers! You were a good crowd. As good a crowd as ever
fisted with wild cries the beating canvas of a heavy foresail; or
tossing aloft, invisible inXhe night, gave back yell for yell to a
westerly gale" (p. 173)/Despite all previous doubt and uncer-
tainty, the "meaning of life" could not be clearer for the reader
here. This is the final reward for the man of action: the absolute
knowledge of the ultimate victory of courage. J
The reader of The Nigger of the ^Narcissus^f moves from an
absolute moral order to the moral uncertainty of a dreamworld,
•4. and finally returns to the morality and meaning with which he
beganj If the uncertainty through which the Narcissus passed
were simply dramatic—the uncertainty of the storm, for exam-
ple—the triumph of the code of the sea would be complete and
unquestionable. Indeed, this seems to be so as one reads the
closing pages of the bookQHowever, the uncertainty here is that
of a world in which the narrator responds scornfully, ironically,
and compassionately to men struggling in phantom beauty and
phantom horror, aided only by moral strength that seems to
exist only as suggestion or illusion. When moral and dramatic
uncertainty is combined with a phantasmagoric dreamworld,
with a world of insane visions and beings exuding evil like a
"black mist," the result is terrible mystery, and when this mys-
tery is contrasted with the inspiring security and solidarity of
an absolute moral order that is all the more emphatic for its suc-
cess after near failure, we have the final ambiguity of The Nigger
of the ** Narcissus". Morality is at once a part of a dreamworld
and thus illusory, and finally cornpellingly sound. For me, how-
ever, the moral solidarity apparently effected by the triumph of
the code of the sea is tenuous; there is more than a hint of doubt
in my final appreciation of this victorious coming to safe harbor/
25
CHAPTER IV
Lord Jim: The Vitality of the Rhetoric
MY primary concern in this chapter is to show that Mar-
low's role as the narrator of Lord Jim is in effect a dram-
atization of the formulation of the rhetoric and an indication of
the vital conflicts behind the disparate meanings and figurative
approximations of which the rhetoric is composed. I shall begin
by stating that Marlow has all of the fundamental qualities of
narrators previously discussed, and then show how these quali-
ties result in his general inability to place Jim in a scheme of
meaning, an inability expressed in Conrad's rhetoric and dram-
atized in Marlow's attempts to find an "excuse" for Jim. Next I
shall state that the effect of this inability is intensified by the
reader's response to Jim's death, and that Marlow's uncertainty
as to the justification for the death, that is to say, the uncertain-
ty of his general response to Jim's imagination, is the final am-
biguity of Lord Jim particularly and for the imaginative man in
the world of adventure generally. I shall then suggest that there
is a threefold parallel among Jim's imagination, Marlow's sensi-
tivity, and the complex responses of Conrad's narrators in gen-
eral. Finally, I shall propose that the inseparability of Marlow's
positions as a remote interpreter and a participant relates to the
general inseparability in the rhetoric of great meanings and
vital uncertainty.
In my initial discussion of Conrad's narrator and rhetoric, I
26
stated that this narrator begins with a body of meaning taken,
we may suppose, from his total experience, and with a thorough
knowledge of the story. My examination of The Nigger of the
t(Nardssus" demonstrated that we must add another quality to
a general concept of Conrad's narrators: acute sensitivity to
story.
All three of these qualities are evident in Marlow, the princi-
pal narrator of Lord Jim, who occupies two positions in the
book. On the one hand, he is a teller of tales for whom the story
of Jim is an old one. More important, however, is his position
as a participant in the story, for his responses to each moment
in the story are a dramatization of how he has come to tell the
story as he does; an understanding of his position in the story
is an understanding of the basis for the rhetoric that he applies
to the story. These two positions, taleteller and participant,
may only occasionally be distinguished from one another in
Lord Jim, and later in this chapter I shall discuss this insepara-
bility, and its general relevance to the rhetoric.
The "body of meaning" which Marlow applies to Jim at the
outset is essentially the code of the sea, and his,-^'knowledge of
story" is his secondhand familiarity with the story of Jim's de-
sertion of the steamship Patna and eight hundred pilgrims.
Marlow's high regard for the code of the- sea gives rise to an
immediate and almost instinctive response to Jim's hearing:
"Nothing more awful than to watch a man who has been found
out, not in a crime but in a more than criminal weakness."1
Jim's weakness is "more than criminal" because he has broken
the fundamental, elevated trust of the sea; he must lose his
honor. From the very general phrasing of the above passage,
we may suppose that Marlow has seen "founclput" men before,
and at this point his feeling for Jim seems to be a general pity
for any man in this situation. Marlow's general pity, however,
soon becomes a very personal concern which may be called sym-
pathy. He cannot reconcile his knowledge of the desertion, or
i. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (London, 1925), p. 42.
27
the "facts" of the case at the hearing, with his sensitive appre-
ciation of the figure of Jim at the hearing:
And all the time I had before me these blue, boyish eyes looking
straight into mine, this young face, these capable shoulders, the
open bronzed forehead with a white line under the roots of clus-
tering fair hair, this appearance appealing at sight to all my
sympathies: this frank aspect, the artless smile, the youthful
seriousness. He was of the right sort; he was one of us. (p. 78)
The conflict engendered in Marlow by these extremely dispa-
rate awarenesses creates a tension which is best expressed in his
own words: ". . . a quiet bearing that might have been the out-
come of manly self-control, of impudence, of callousness, of a
colossal unconsciousness, of a gigantic deception" (p. 78). Mar-
low's awareness of Jim can be expressed only in the disparate
meanings of Conrad's rhetoric, qualified by "might have been."
Jim's bearing might be "manly self-control"; this assumes that
he is acutely conscious of his condemnation and yet is strong
enough, man enough, to endure it. Yet there is a point at which
this self-control becomes too sure, thus "impudence." Marlow
realizes also in this passage that Jim simply may not care what
those around him think, or that he may not know, or that he
may wish to appear not to know.
Marlow's inability to find a single meaning in these conflict-
ing possibilities creates a feeling of uncertainty in him, and as
this uncertainty increases he begins to question the standard
by which Jim has been condemned, the code of the sea. The un-
certainty expressed by the rhetoric in the above passage is dram-
atized by Marlow's investigation of the history of Jim's lost hon-
or, a search for some undiscovered fact that will excuse the de-
sertion. He begins by visiting the drunken chief engineer of the
Patna at the hospital and is confronted with a delirious de-
scription of the pilgrims on the crippled ship: "All pink. All
pink—as big as mastiffs, with an eye on the top of the head and
claws all round their ugly mouths. Ough! Ough!" |p. ij^LMar-
low hurries away from this nightmarish visiojpan^^tiortly
thereafter discusses Jim's case with Brierly—?fBig Brierly^—the
*
28
captain of the crack ship of the Blue Star Line" (p. 57)—who
vehemently contradicts Marlow's assertion that there is a "kind
of courage" in Jim's "facing it out": " 'Courage be hanged!'
growled Brierly. 'That sort of courage is of no use to keep a man
straight, and I don't care a snap for such courage. If you were
to say it was a kind of cowardice now—of softness'" (p. 67).
Positive as this condemnation would seem, Brierly nevertheless
offers Marlow money to help Jim make his escape, and later,
with his assertion that "Such an affair destroys one's confidence"
p. 68) still sounding in Marlow's ears, Brierly commits suicide.
In this manner, the uncertainty expressed by the rhetoric of
Marlow's interpretations is not only dramatized but intensified
by his investigations. The engineer's nightmare of that moment
on the Patna, the sel£-desj:ri^ and a number of
other conflicting judgments and awarenesses of Jim's case create
a still more powerful confusion. At dinner with Jim, Marlow
realizes that the desertion was caused by Jim's incredibly active
imagination, his vivid awareness of what might happen, but
there is no satisfaction in this realization, for Marlow's imagina-
tive re-creation in the narrative of the scene on the Patna is
, at least as terrible, we may suppose, as Jim's original conception
of the same scene. As an example of this: "He stood still looking
at these recumbent bodies, a doomed man aware of his fate,
surveying the silent company of the dead" (p. 86). Marlow and
Jim are alike in the complexity and vividness of their imagina-
tions, in the magnitude of their ideals and in their acute aware-
ness of danger; Marlow is always conscious of this likeness, espe-
cially in the case of sensitivity to danger and struggle: "Which
of us here has not observed this, or maybe experienced some-
thing of that feeling in his own person—this extreme weariness
of emotions, the vanity of effort, the yearning for rest? Those
striving with unreasonable forces know it well . . ." (p. 88).
Thus the uncertainty concerning Jim's lost honor becomes
Marlow's uncertainty as to what he would have done in the
same situation.
The uncertainties of Marlow's participation in and interpre-
29
tation of Jim's story are finally intensified for the reader by Jim's
ambiguous death. The first event leading directly to his death
is Jim's meeting with the unscrupulous cutthroat, Gentleman
Brown, who declares that he has been forced to come to Patusan
because he "was afraid once in my life." In his consciousness of
his lost honor Jim cannot forget that this was also the cause of
his coming to Patusan, and for this reason he identifies himself
with Brown: "Men act badly sometimes without being much
worse than others . . ." (p. 394). Of this identification Marlow
says: "And there ran through the rough talk a vein of subtle
reference to their common blood, an assumption of common ex-
perience; a sickening suggestion of common guilt, of secret
knowledge that was like a bond of their minds and of their
hearts" (p. 387). Because of this bond, Jim releases Brown,
promising complete responsibility for the latter's action to the
chief of the village. In the treachery, which the reader expects,
Brown deliberately and cruelly moves down the river and mas-
sacres a now harmless party of natives, including the chief's son.
In spite of the terrible pleas of the woman he loves, Jim surren-
ders himself to the chief to be shot, and so fulfills his promise
of responsibility and satisfies his acute and imaginative con-
sciousness of his honor.
Jim dies for his honor; yet the reader may feel that the death,
the "bond" with Brown, and all the other events leading up to
the death are foolhardy. What is it that has caused Jim, in the
eyes of the reader, to throw his life away? Paradoxically, it is his
overwhelming desire to be honorable and courageous, the pri-
mary cause of success in the world of adventure.
Jim's imagination is his downfall throughout the book. It was
the cause of his desertion of the Patna, for it made unbearable
the threat of the storm and the scurryings of the captain and the
engineers; because of his vivid consciousness of what might hap-
pen Jim could not endure the flaked, rotting bulkhead that sep-
arated him from death. When he deserted the ship he was flee-
ing from his own thoughts. Again, imagination was the cause of
his death; he was unable to see Brown simply as a ruthless crim-
30
inal, and, more important, his imaginative conception of pre-
vious dishonor had become so intense that only death would
satisfy it.
The question at this point is what does Marlow make of this
imagination, which, as I have said, is so much like his own acute
sensitivity? Stein, a respectable old acquaintance of Marlow's,
expresses this response to Jim: "I understand very well. He is
romantic" (p. 212). Stein implies that Jim is laboring under a
distorted illusion very far from reality, but immediately follow-
ing this he states, "A man that is born falls into a dream like a
man who falls into the sea." At this point Marlow realizes most
clearly that all men like Stein and himself—imaginative men in
a world of adventure—must have illusions in order to endure
this world, and that these illusions are always subject to chance.
The "Dark Powers," as Marlow calls them, may at any time pre-
sent a man with situations like those in which Jim first lost his
honor and then his life—situations in which, for the imaginative
man, there is "Not the breadth of a hair between this and that...":
between honor and dishonor, life and death.
It is demonstrated at various points in the story that life
without imagination can and does exist. The two native helms-
men of the Patna, for example, are not afraid because they are
unconscious of danger. Their place is only that of taking orders;
for them Marlow's and Jim's code of the sea is a set of simple
laws for the breaking of which they will be punished. For Mar-
low, the prospect of such a life is insipid: ?f. . . it is respectable
to have no illusions—and safe—and profitable—and dull."
In summary of my discussion to this point, we are presented
with Jim, a man of great imagination moving in a world of dan-
ger and adventure. This imagination acts upon both the danger
and the code of the adventure world, and both become incred-
ibly powerful. The more powerful the danger the more difficult
it is to overcome, and the code must grow, become more and
more of an illusion, until it is so distant from the reality of ex-
perience that it blinds the sensitive man, and eventually de-
stroys him. To live with imagination in a world of adventure is

31
to live with chance—the doubt of what one's own action would
be if he were faced with the situations which Jim encounters at
the cost of his honor and his life. And even if it were possible
for Jim or Marlow to restrict his response to that of the crude
man, this restriction would destroy the glamor of the world of
adventure in another way: without the idyllic embellishments
of a vivid imagination, the glorious code of the sea becomes a
set of simple laws which anyone can and must follow. For Mar-
low this situation is both unbearable and, because of his uncon-
trollable sensitivity, impossible.
Just as Jim's destruction is the result of imagination and sen-
sitivity, Marlow's inability to give Jim and his story a single and
final meaning is the result of these same qualities. Jim's death
for honor fails because it may be seen as overly romantic and
foolhardy; Marlow's search for a final meaning is thwarted by
his own particular "exquisite sensibility." Although Jim and
Gentleman Brown are clearly very different kinds of men, Mar-
low's inability to give Jim's suffering quest a final meaning is
based upon the same faculty which confuses Jim about Brown:
the complexity of the response of the imaginative man to his
experience.
In this manner Marlow dramatizes in Lord Jim the "why" of
the rhetoric, the problem behind its formulation. More impor-
tant, however, Lord Jim illustrates that Conrad's rhetoric al-
ways implies a personal, dramatic uncertainty. I base this state-
ment first upon the general inseparability of Marlow's two posi-
tions in Lord Jim. In an aside to his listeners Marlow says of his
search for an "excuse":
I see well enough now that I hoped for the impossible—for the
laying of what is the most obstinate ghost of man's creation, of
the uneasy doubt uprising like a mist, secret and gnawing like a
worm, and more chilling than the certitude of death—the doubt
of the sovereign power enthroned in a fixed standard of con-
duct, (p. 50)
The only certainty that Marlow has, even as a narrator remote
in time from his story, is the certainty that there was and is
doubt. The only difference between the Marlow desperately in-
32
volved in a search for the meaning of Jim's life and the Marlow
relating the story is the storyteller's detachment in space and
time from the world he describes—a detachment evidenced in
Marlow's asides of bitter philosophy and clucking irony: ". . . it
may be that it is this very dulness that makes life to the incalcu-
lable majority so supportable and so welcome" (p. 143). This
detachment, however, does not qualify Marlow's uncertainty
when he is most earnestly concerned with Jim; whether involved
in an investigation of Jim's desertion or relating the story under
the stars, Marlow's essential attitudes toward Jim are always ex-
pressed in the complex, ambiguous meanings of Conrad's rhet-
oric. The "obstinate ghost" of doubt exists for Marlow, in his
thoughts and in his speech, in the present as well as in the past.
The inseparability of Marlow's positions illustrates a related
inseparability in the rhetoric and in Conrad's narrators in gen-
eral. No matter how remote or knowledgeable a given passage of
Conrad's rhetoric may seem, the same passage simultaneously
characterizes a personal involvement in the dramatic uncertainty
of its qualified meaning: ". . . a quiet bearing that might have
been the outcome of manly self-control, of impudence, of cal-
lousness, of a colossal unconsciousness, of a gigantic decep-
tion "(p. 78). We encounter in this passage the godlike tone so
familiar to readers of Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Is-
lands, the same suggestion of great meanings so familiar in Con-
rad. In this respect the rhetoric of Lord Jim is no different from
that of other books I have discussed. What Lord Jim does make
%
overwhelmingly clear, however, is the significance of the simple
qualifying phrase "might have been," which is at once the cause
and the result of Marlow's search for meaning. The reader of
Conrad must deal with his own "obstinate ghost"—the ghost of
"as if" or "it seemed." The figurative signposts and the dispar-
ity of the rhetoric are ever-present indications of the vital un-
certainty behind the voices of doom or the distant ironic tones
of Conrad's narrators, although, to be sure, the final ambiguity
of the story in Lord Jim makes this vitality all the more appar-
ent. The point I wish to make here is that in each book I have
33
discussed the rhetoric is tinged with a vitality which refutes a
characterization of Conrad's rhetoric as simply a manner of
speaking or a literary "device."
In The Nigger of the ** Narcissus", the uncertainty, the dream-
like horrors of the storm and the "nigger" are partially qualified
by an event in the story, the Narcissus'* triumphant return to
port. This event provides the narrator of Nigger with a foothold,
although a precarious one, I think, in the chaos of Conrad's
world of adventure. There is no security of this kind in Lord
Jim\ the greatest possible mystery for man in a world of adven-
ture is left unsolved, and Conrad thus demonstrates an ability
to endure this mystery without qualification. The basis for this
capacity of toleration is not immediately evident. It may be, I
suggest, for Conrad, as it is for Marlow in the closing pages of
the book, simply the wistful security of the storyteller, engen-
dered by the sense of a world's remoteness in space and time,
and by the sense that all is finished: "And that's the end. He
passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, un-
forgiven, and excessively romantic" (p. 416). Here is the very
strange serenity of an adventure that is over—the last, unques-
tioned respite—the final, unthinking security of an man who
has passed through the world of adventure. It is a very limited
kind of security, but it is all that Marlow has at the end of Lord
Jim. Whether this is the basis for Conrad's ability to endure the
mystery of Lord Jim, his honor, his death, and the "Dark Pow-
ers," remains a question, for Conrad is somewhere behind Mar-
low, removed, through him, far from the story.
Again, the vitality of the uncertainty in Lord Jim is the prod-
uct of Marlow's very personal concern with Jim's story, not
simply an interpretive interest but a desperate questioning of
his own moral standards and capacities, a questioning of the
meaning of his own world, his own life. The vitality of the rhet-
oric is not always as emphatic in the novels I have considered as
it is in the dramatic conflicts of Lord Jim, but vital uncertainty
is constantly implied in the disparate, repetitive, and figurative
qualities of Conrad's rhetoric.
34
CHAPTER V
Nostromo: The Romantic View
TT yNFORTUNATELY I cannot give Nostromo the compre-
\J hensive treatment which it certainly merits. My con-
cern remains Conrad's rhetoric and the problem with which, as
the preceding chapters demonstrate, it is so fundamentally re-
lated: man and his illusions in the world of adventure. I shall
demonstrate that in Nostromo Conrad evidences the persistence,
despite the complexity of his sensibility and Nostromo's seem-
ingly unheroic deeds in the latter part of the book, of a romantic
view of Nostromo, and, we may suppose, of the world of adven-
ture in general.
Using as illustrations the various responses of the characters
to Nostromo and Conrad's general presentation of him, I shall
characterize his fabled, romantic nature. In the same manner I
shall then show how Conrad qualifies this view. Nostromo's ro-
mantic quality persists here, however, and is based upon his least
illusory aspect—the unquestionable heroism of his accomplish-
ments. Next I shall state that as Nostromo begins to decline, as
his actions become unheroic, the narrator's perspective changes
so that the "magnificent capataz" remains a romantic figure. The
destruction of Nostromo is powerfully suggested to be the prod-
uct of forces from without, and thus although he changes from
the active master of his life to its passive victim, he is a romantic
hero in both cases. I shall contrast Nostromo with Lord Jim,
35
and conclude this discussion by suggesting that Conrad's ro-
mantic view of Nostromo is evidence of his acceptance, whether
consciously or unconsciously, of this view as the most real, de-
spite his previously demonstrated awareness, as in Lord Jim, of
its illusory nature.
In a conversation which concerns Nostromo, Martin Decoud
says, "The heroes of the world have been feared and admired."1
Nostromo is a hero, and each character fears or admires him in a
different way. Nostromo's given name, Giovanni Battista, is also
the name of his patron saint, and for Signora Theresa Viola at
one moment in the story he is a saint. Her fearful, plaintive re-
monstrance of him has the quality of prayer: "Oh! Gian' Bat-
tista, why art thou not here? Oh! why art thou not here?" (p.
18). There is something magical about Nostromo, something
that may be described only in unique superlatives. For Giorgio
Viola, the leonine "Garibaldino," Nostromo is simply and com-
prehensively "the incorruptible." Captain Joe Mitchell, Nos-
tromo's "proud discoverer" and a singularly unimaginative
man, is infatuated with Nostromo's seemingly boundless capa-
bility: "He carried all our lives in his pocket. Devotion, cour-
age, fidelity, intelligence were not enough. Of course, he was
perfectly fearless and incorruptible. But a man was wanted that
would know how to succeed. He was that man, sir" (p. 540).
Nostromo's ability to succeed in any venture is seen in this pas-
sage as more than the result of human virtues ("courage, fidel-
ity, intelligence"); it is mysterious, incomprehensible, more
than human. In Mitchell's elaborate oral history of the revolu-
tion, Nostromo is the master of the fortunes of Sulaco, and this
idea has a good deal of factual basis: in depriving Colonel Sotillo
of the silver, Nostromo also deprives him of his ability to act;
when he could have constituted an ominous threat to Sulaco,
Sotillo is harmlessly and distractedly dragging the bottom of
the Placid Gulf for the treasure. Nostromo's ride to General
Barrios at Cayta is, of course, the actual turning point of the
revolution.
i. Joseph Conrad, Nostromo (New York, 1951), p. 212.
36
Through the viewpoints of the characters, the reader contin-
ually encounters glimpses of this fabled and magnificent man.
Here and there appear accounts of his shining black whiskers,
his great revolver, and his bloodcurdling laugh. He is often seen
very mysteriously in the glimmering light of a flame: "The
flame showed a bronzed, black-whiskered face, a pair of eyes
gazing straight . . ." (p. 47). This mystery is heightened by
Conrad's tantalizing presentation of the man. For the greater
part of the first half of the book, the reader is never sure where
Nostromo is or what he is doing; he appears and disappears, a
dark, spectral figure on a ghostly silver horse: ". . . the short
flick of yellowish flame in the dusk was powerless against the
muffled-up mysteriousness of the dark figure with an invisible
face concealed by a great sombrero" (p. 203). Flame, as every
other opposing force, is powerless against Nostromo; he is un-
paralleled in his every quality, mysteriously everywhere at once;
he seems more than a man. Conrad creates in Nostromo a ro-
mantic archetype, a master of life with the generosity and au-
dacity of a Robin Hood and the persistent strength of an Ajax.
In opposition to Nostromo's fabled greatness, Conrad pre-
sents us with the Nostromo of the story, devoid of embellishing
awarenesses, who often evidences a brusqueness that is close to
cruelty:
"Querido," she murmured, caressingly, "why do you pre-
tend not to see me when I pass?"
"Because I don't love thee anymore," said Nostromo, delib-
erately, after a moment of reflective silence.
The hand on the mare's neck trembled suddenly. She dropped
her head before all the eyes in the wide circle formed around the
generous, the terrible, the inconstant capataz de cargadores,
and his Morenita. (p. 141)
Here the narrator describes Nostromo in a tone that is clearly,
although gently, mocking. There is, however, a hint of genuine
admiration for the immensity of the man despite his cruel in-
considerateness. Nostromo's unconcern for his "Morenita" is
the familiar, and perhaps accepted, unconcern of a great man
for a small matter.
Nostromo himself qualifies the myth of his generosity when
he says to Martin Decoud: "But, old or young, they like money,
and will speak well of the man who gives it to them" (p. 274).
Behind his generosity, and, in fact, behind his every heroic
quality, lies an incredible vanity, an overwhelming desire to be
well spoken of, a passion for prestige and reputation. No one
realized this more clearly than Decoud, the iconoclastic Parisian:
"Then it dawned upon me that perhaps this man's vanity had
been satiated by the adulation of the common people and the
confidence of his superiors!" (p. 251).
If, however, we question Nostromo's courage and fidelity be-
cause these and every quality which he exhibits are based upon
his gigantic vanity, and realize that his mastery of the carga-
dores and the common people in general stems on the one hand
from his brutal efficiency and on the other from his awesome
disinterestedness and detachment, we are finally faced with his
real, practical value—his infinite resource, his unique ability to
accomplish any task, no matter how hazardous—a value which
is evident even to the skepticism of Monygham:
At this supremely critical point of Sulaco's fortunes it was borne
upon him at last that this man was really indispensable, more
indispensable than ever the infatuation of Captain Mitchell, his
proud discoverer, could conceive; far beyond what Decoud's
best dry raillery about "my illustrious friend, the unique capa-
taz de cargadores," had ever invented. The fellow was unique.
He was not "one in a thousand." He was absolutely the only
one. (pp. 506-7)
Despite our unequivocal awareness of his motivation, Nostromo
is an unquestionably singular man. Our knowledge of his vanity
may possibly lessen our appreciation of the fables which sur-
round him, but as Monygham says, Nostromo is more than the
product of the greatest "infatuation"; he is more than fable—a
romantic figure indeed. If an action is truly heroic we take little
notice of the ambiguities of its motivation, perhaps for the very
reason that this motivation is ambiguous. The heroism of Nos-
tromo's accomplishments is unquestionable.
This fundamental heroism of act is Nostromo's great triumph;
38
it is this that makes him a romantic master of life in the first
part of the book. As soon, however, as Nostromo departs from
the harbor of Sulaco with the silver, his deeds abruptly cease to
be heroic, and in the light of my discussion to this point, we
would expect the complete destruction of his romantic quality.
Yet although he is clearly no longer a hero in the sense of mas-
tery, he remains a romantic figure in the manner which I shall
demonstrate.
Isolated in the deserted fort in which he has slept after leav-
ing Decoud on the Great Isabel, Nostromo is overwhelmed with
a sense of betrayal and guilt; he feels he has been abandoned by
every friend and admirer, and he is mystically conscious of Sig-
nora Viola's death and his failure to comply with her wish that
he summon a priest: fCThe magnificent capataz of cargadores,
deprived of certain simple realities, such as the admiration of
women, the adulation of men, the admired publicity of his life,
was ready to feel the burden of sacrilegious guilt descend upon
his shoulders" (p. 470). There is condescension here, but there
is also a suggestion of pity, for a few pages before the narrator
has said: ffEach man must have some temperamental sense by
which to discover himself. With Nostromo it was vanity of an
artless sort. Without it he would have been nothing. It called
out his recklessness, his industry, his ingenuity , , ," (p. 461),
The sympathetic understanding which we encounter here ef-
fects a shift of emphasis in Nostromo's romantic nature that is
most clearly evidenced below:
He stood knee-deep among the whispering undulations of the
green blades, with the lost air of a man just born into the world.
Handsome, robust, and supple, he threw back his head, flung
his arms open, and stretched himself with a slow twist of the
waist and a leisurely growling yawn of white teeth; as natural
and free from evil in the moment of waking as a magnificent and
unconscious wild beast. Then, in the suddenly steadied glance
fixed upon nothing from under a forced frown, appeared the
man. (p. 458)
This description of Nostromo as a magnificent and com-
pletely innocent animal constitutes a striking juxtaposition of
39
his well-known strength and a new awareness of his basic sim-
plicity and innocence. When the narrator begins to Bunder-
stand" Nostromo's romantic nature, when he dwells sympa-
thetically upon the vanity behind the heroism, when admira-
tion, condescension, or even disdain become a form of sym-
pathy, then the emphasis shifts from Nostromo to the over-
whelming elements with which he must struggle, and his ro-
mantic quality begins to change. Nostromo's decline, a series of
aritiheroic actions which completely dissolves his masterful as-
pect, in fact preserves his romantic quality. The last sentence of
this passage makes it clear that Nostromo is a strong and inno-
cent man who is becoming evil, but the phrasing implies that
this quality is something which infuses him from without, over
which he has no control. In short, we have been introduced to a
new conception of Nostromo—the victim of his fate—which
makes him a hero, despite his unheroic actions, because he ap-
pears to be struggling with and perhaps is a product of mon-
strous forces. To imply that a man is subject to forces from with-
out which can only be designated as "fate" makes him greater
than life, and is at least as romantic a view as to imply his mys-
terious power over all, that is, to imply that life or fate is subject
to him.
Nostromo is not, certainly, a completely innocent victim, but
neither is he unequivocally guilty. His silence concerning the
whereabouts of the silver is caused in part by his childlike con-
sciousness of being used and discarded, and in part by Mony-
gham's peremptory questioning. His crime is of a completely
passive nature, a product, one might say, of circumstances. This
is also the case in his abandonment of Decoud on the Great Isa-
bel. Decoud is, of course, the only other person who knows of
the silver, but this is incidental to the urgency of Monygham's
pleas, the crucialness of Sulaco's fortunes, and, most important,
Nostromo's conception of his triumphant return to Sulaco with
General Barrios. Again, we may say that it is his monstrous
vanity that is at fault, yet the knowledge that vanity works his
destruction is a principal ingredient in the new romantic view.
40
Nostromo's passive nature at this point in the story seems to
refute any conception of him as the moving force of his actions;
vanity has become a part of the external forces that move him
helplessly about. It is Nostromo's concern for his reputation
that lies behind his concealment of the silver; his only thought
of becoming "rich" is that he must do so "slowly." And it is
his concern for his reputation which causes his return to the
Great Isabel to determine what has happened to Decoud, yet,
again, this concern seems to come from without, "as if an out-
cast soul, a quiet, brooding soul, finding that untenanted body
in its way, had come in stealthily to take possession" (p. 552).
Nostromo is powerless. The appearance, as the capataz re-
turns with Barrios, of the boat that carries him to the island—
the boat that he left with Decoud—is seen in the light of his
mysterious fate: "That empty boat, coming out to meet him
mysteriously, as if rowed by an invisible spectre, exercised the
fascination of some sign, of some warning, seemed to answer in
a startling and enigmatic way the persistent thought of a treas-
ure and of a man's fate" (p. 549). This meaning is qualified, of
course. Conrad's awareness of what he is doing with Nostromo,
we may suppose, is much too sensitive for an unequivocal state-
ment of the presence of mystery. This qualification is perfectly
acceptable on a logical level, but the magic of Conrad's descrip-
tion has a much more powerful effect than logic could ever
qualify—the echoing, eternal, romantic tones of "a treasure and
of a man's fate."
Nostromo's reputation has been destroyed, the satisfactions
of his vanity shattered, and what was once the secret of his mas-
tery is now the secret of his destruction: "A transgression, a
crime, entering a man's existence, eats it up like a malignant
growth, consumes it like a fever. Nostromo had lost his peace;
the genuineness of all his qualities was destroyed" (p. 585).
Nostromo is a hollow man subject to the caprice of his fate, and
this view acts upon his unheroic deeds to create a romantic
hero. The destruction of his genuineness is seen in this passage
as the intrusion of a malignant force upon his life. His only
41
value at this point is his treasure, and in clinging to it he is
finally destroyed. In making a hateful visit to his hoard at night,
he is shot by his old friend Giorgio, now the lighthouse keeper
of the Great Isabel, who believes him to be Ramirez, an unwel-
come suitor of the old man's younger daughter, with whom,
ironically, Nostromo is in love.
On his deathbed Nostromo says, "I die betrayed—betrayed
by—." He cannot finish this sentence, nor can the reader ex-
cept with a word like "fate." We may say that it was his mon-
strous vanity that destroyed him, yet this vanity has been trans-
formed into a part of the seemingly external, terrible force
whose slave he has been. Nostromo's betrayer was something
immense and inscrutable, continually, hypnotically suggested
by the rhetoric—his decline and fall—that of an unfortunate
hero struggling with insurmountable destiny.
The contrast of Nostromo with Lord Jim becomes most appar-
ent by considering the answers to the question of betrayal. For
Nostromo, the most fitting, and yet inadequate, answer is "fate."
If, when he was dying, Jim had uttered this same, questioning
declaration, the reader's only response would have been "your-
self." Jim's imagination, his own "romantic view," was the
cause of his death, but he never could have been a romantic fig-
ure because all the romance of his life, and death, was within
him. The necessarily external, fabling, heroic perspective which
creates a romantic figure was shrouded in his being.
Conrad's views of Nostromo encompass the entire scale of the
possible romantic views of man. The "magnificent capataz" be-
gins as a doer of heroic deeds, and his romantic nature is evi-
dent despite our awareness of his apparently unheroic motiva-
tion. He ends as a romantic hero despite his unheroic actions;
heroism is implicit in his hapless subjection to a merciless fate.
Nostromo's nature as a romantic figure changes from that of the
conqueror to that of the slave, but he is nonetheless romantic in
both cases. The romance of Nostromo is the product of Con-
rad's romantic view, which in turn is the product of his admira-
tion, understanding, and sympathy for man in the world of ad-
42
venture. In spite of his awareness, we may suppose, of Nostro-
mo's heroic nature as illusion and of the illusory nature of man's
ideas and ideals in general, Conrad demonstrates in his presen-
tation of Nostromo an acceptance of the romantic world as the
greatest reality. It is an acceptance which is often qualified by
an "as if" or a "seemed," but in tone and vividness it is unequiv-
ocal. By inquiring into the meanings of the romantic world of
adventure, Conrad finally returns to this world despite the an-
swers to his inquiry, his return balanced by and all the more
wonderful for the ambiguities through which he has passed. It
is of course impossible to say whether Conrad was aware, in a
more abstract, intellectual sense, of what he was doing. What he
has done, however, is apparent, and for me the following quota-
tion has relevance: "The final belief is to believe in a fiction,
which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else."2
2. Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous (New York, 1957), p. 163.
43
Conclusion
IN my opening chapter on Conrad's rhetoric, I characterized
his language as a product of that comparison which lies be-
tween story and some sort of final meaning. This is, I think, a
useful way of talking as long as we do not assume that Conrad
was conducting a deliberate search for meaning as he wrote. I
have not considered whether or not the highly dramatized un-
certainty of The Nigger of the **Narcissus" and Lord Jim was
Conrad's own uncertainty. The question remains whether or
not the romantic view which Conrad may be said to express in
Nostromo was also behind the terrible uncertainties of Marlow's
desperate search for meaning in earlier novels. The answer to
this question is a subject for another paper.
In tracing the qualities of the rhetoric in a few of Conrad's
better-known novels, I have shown that the rhetoric can be a
means of creating dreamlike fantasy, that it may, as in Lord Jim,
reflect uncertainty, a crucial failure to achieve some final mean-
ing, and that it may, as in Nostromo, create a romantic world in
spite of many apparently "final" meanings. I shall now attempt
to characterize more conclusively the ambiguity and vitality of
Conrad's rhetoric.
The analogy which comes immediately to mind in describing
the vitality of Conrad's language is the experience of listening to
the conversation of a great poet. One constantly feels that he is
44
in the presence of a great mind, and he lingers on every word
that the poet utters. There is a constant overtone of something
unexpressed in explicit detail and yet present in every syllable.
One turns to a friend with a knowing smile that says, ffHe
means more than he is saying." The poet's language is ffalive";
a single word may almost instantaneously evoke in a single lis-
tener many responses ranging from cynical humor to pathos to
satisfaction. Yet there is also at times an uncertainty as to just
how much more, and what more, this great man means. This
uncertainty contributes to the vitality of the poet's language; it
prevents a listener from staying with a single meaning so that he
is kept moving continually. The apparent presence in the lan-
guage of countless, untold subtleties of meaning together with
this uncertainty form a language which is ffalive."
Another way of describing this ffaliveness" of Conrad's rhet-
oric is in terms of irony. In listening to the hypothetical poet I
mention above, we often smile at what seems to be a humorously
ironical remark, and in the next instant frown because we are
uncertain that the irony is really there, or perhaps think that
there is something else. Similarly, although there is irony in
Conrad that is unequivocal, there is a qualified irony that sug-
gests sympathy, or understanding, or admiration, and so forth.
When a narrator says ^intolerable" of Lord Jim, the reader
may illustrate the power of Conrad's rhetoric by being simul-
taneously amused, uneasy or embarrassed, and sympathetic.
Our responses to this single word, of course, are founded on
those of the narrator to Jim throughout the book. Because of
Conrad's narrators' complex awareness of so many great mean-
ings, the uncertainty here is not simply whether or not a given
final meaning applies, but whether any meaning is great enough
to characterize the ambiguities which Conrad presents. This is
what I mean when I say that in encountering Conrad's rhetoric
we are simultaneously conscious and uncertain, as we are in the
presence of a great poet, of something not expressed, something
that is paradoxically before meaning in its uncertainty and be-
yond meaning in its intensity of tone and description—a vague
45
and illusory potential. Conrad's rhetoric expresses this seem-
ingly unlimited and seemingly inexpressible potential.
This quality may be found not only in the disparate and fig-
urative meanings of Conrad's rhetoric but also is a quality that
exists implicitly in his romantic dreamworld. This romantic
world is not predominantly a world of meanings—of good or
evil—but a world of immense feelings and deeds in which there
is always something magical and mysterious. The dreamworld
which Conrad creates is an unlimited world, both in the sense
that life becomes fantasy and a man becomes a witch-god who
exudes a mist of evil, and in the sense that this world does not
have a ''meaning" in the final sense that I have used the word.
In the romantic conception of Nostromo's death he remains a
hero, destroyed by a mysterious force which can only be desig-
nated as "fate." No matter what we say of this death—that it is
unfortunate, pitiable, or even tragic—our meanings can never
fully characterize his destruction; there is something more, a
mystery. Nostromo's existence and destruction is more than
life, a creation of something ambiguous and magical that refutes
a single or final meaning.
It is little wonder, I think, that in Nostromo Conrad may be
said to return to the romantic view when we consider that it is
in this romantic world alone that Nostromo may remain a hero
despite his unheroic actions and his monstrous vanity, in this
world alone that the code of the world of adventure, with which
Conrad is so basically concerned, may be reconciled with the
''constant inspection and criticism of experience"1 that is also
fundamental to his writing—a "reconciliation" which actually
consists of the elevation of a world beyond the relevance of
meanings like "courage." In Conrad's romantic conception
Nostromo is beyond a question of courage; in this conception
human values and meanings of life are not significant. A mean-
ing like courage becomes instead a part of the vague and limit-
less potential that resides in the romantic patterns of victory
i. T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (New York, 1932), p. 262.
and defeat. The mystery and the intensity, both visual and tonal,
of this world result in the "aliveness" that I have mentioned;
the spell which Conrad weaves with the expression of this vague
and yet vital potential is, generally speaking, similar to the spell
surrounding a great poet, or perhaps any truly great sensibility.
In the writings of Joseph Conrad we encounter many great,
qualified meanings and an immense range of feeling expressed
in the rhetoric, language that, whether characterized by dis-
parate meanings or by the figurative descriptions of a romantic
dreamworld, is infused with incredibly vital meaning and feel-
ing. The world of Conrad's rhetoric is a world that in its uncer-
tainty seems between the experiences and the meanings of life,
and in its mysterious intensity seems a world beyond meaning
and life, in which the ambiguities of life become the limitless
potential of a romantic dream.
47

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