Work, Inheritance, and Deserts in Joseph Conrad’s Fiction 9811925836, 9789811925832

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Work, Inheritance, and Deserts in Joseph Conrad’s Fiction e v e ly n t sz ya n c h a n

Work, Inheritance, and Deserts in Joseph Conrad’s Fiction

Evelyn Tsz Yan Chan

Work, Inheritance, and Deserts in Joseph Conrad’s Fiction

Evelyn Tsz Yan Chan The Chinese University of Hong Kong Shatin, Hong Kong

ISBN 978-981-19-2583-2 ISBN 978-981-19-2584-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2584-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. The registered company address is: 152 Beach Road, #21-01/04 Gateway East, Singapore 189721, Singapore

That which you inherit from your fathers You must earn in order to possess. Goethe, Faust, Part I, lines 682–683, p. 35.1

1 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Goethe’s Faust, Part I . 1808. Translated by Randall

Jarrell. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1976.

To Arjan, for everything.

Acknowledgements

Parts of the material in this book were previously published as journal articles and a book chapter. Chapter 3 is a reworked version of “‘A Manifestation of a Deep, Inborn Inherited Instinct’: Modernist Aesthetics and the Instabilities of Inheritance in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim,” Transcultural Studies, vol. 13, no. 2, 2017, pp. 197–216. Chapter 4 appeared in an earlier form in “Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo: Work, Inheritance, and Desert in the Modernist Novel,” Modernist Work: Labour, Aesthetics, and the Work of Art, edited by John Attridge and Helen Rydstrand, Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 113–129. Chapter 5 is adapted from “Anarchism and the Irony of Professional Work in The Secret Agent,” The Conradian, vol. 38, no. 2, 2013, pp. 18–35. An earlier version of Chapter 6 was published as “The Moral Dimensions of Sympathy as Inheritance in Razumov and Heyst,” The Conradian, vol. 44, issue 1, 2019, pp. 43–63. The ideas on irony in Chapter 4 and Chapter 6 first appeared in “The Ends of Irony: Kierkegaard and Conrad’s Razumov,” Conradiana, vol. 47, no. 2, 2017, pp. 79–93. Parts of the Introduction also draw on contextualizing material that first appeared in these essays. I would like to thank the publishers for permission to reuse the work. I would also like to express my gratitude to Jeremy Hawthorn, whose encouraging comments and suggestions on the ideas in this book at various stages of the writing process were of tremendous help. The work for the three essays published in 2017 and 2019 was supported by the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong (General Research Fund project code 14615715). I would like to extend my gratitude to the Council. ix

Contents

1

Introduction 1.1 From Work to Inheritance to Desert 1.2 Inheritances Put to Work 1.3 Coming Into One’s Desert Works Cited

1 5 10 18 25

2

“[T]he Rightful Due of a Successful Man”: Claiming Desert in Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands 2.1 Willems’s Delusions of Desert 2.2 Almayer’s Idylls of Idleness 2.3 Lingard’s Lost Legacy 2.4 Conclusion Works Cited

29 30 43 48 51 51

“A Manifestation of a Deep, Inborn Inherited Instinct”: Instabilities of Self-Making in Lord Jim 3.1 Jim’s Indeterminacy 3.2 The Jump: Continuities and Discontinuities Works Cited

55 58 65 74

Nostromo’s Great Expectations 4.1 Forging One’s Inheritance Through Merit 4.2 Constructing Deserts Works Cited

77 82 95 99

3

4

xi

xii

5

6

CONTENTS

“[E]ntitled to Undisputed Success”: Professional Being vs Doing in The Secret Agent 5.1 The Professor’s Professionalism 5.2 Anti-Bureaucratic Charisma and the Professions 5.3 The Irony of the Professions Works Cited The Moral Work of Affirming Inheritances in Under Western Eyes and Victory 6.1 Affirmation and Innate, Individualized Sympathy 6.2 Affirmation as Moral Work 6.3 The Costs of Innate Sympathy and the Pull of Complacency 6.4 Concluding Remarks Works Cited

Index

103 107 111 115 120 123 129 137 142 147 150 153

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Joseph Conrad‚ born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857‚ was a man of many inheritances who had to navigate multiple and often conflicting identities that were both acquired upon birth and attained throughout his life. Just a few facts about his life amply demonstrate this.1 Born in Berdichev, in an area that lies in present-day Ukraine and was occupied by Russia at the time, Conrad was Polish when this “was an ethno-linguistic and cultural, not a political, identity” (Stape 2). Coming from a lineage of Polish landed gentry, his father no longer owned land when he married Conrad’s mother. His parents suffered exile and surveillance at the hands of the Tsarist authorities for charges of dissidence, dying from tuberculosis within five years of each other in the 1860s. The back of a photograph Conrad wrote to his grandmother when he was almost six is signed “Grandson, Polak-Katolik [Pole-Catholic], and szlachcic [gentleman], Konrad,” testifying to “an allegiance to overlapping traditions” (Stape 14). Taking up sailing as a profession when he was sixteen, he first joined the French merchant service, and then the British merchant service a few years later, passing his master mariner’s examination and becoming a naturalized British citizen in 1886, and relinquishing his Russian subject status and some of the psychological burdens this 1 The following facts from Conrad’s life are documented in John Stape’s The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 E. T. Y. Chan, Work, Inheritance, and Deserts in Joseph Conrad’s Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2584-9_1

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symbolized for him. His travels provided material for many of his fictional works when he transitioned to becoming a writer in the early 1890s. The complex interactions between Conrad’s inheritances shaped a writer who was acutely conflicted about the claims that these ties exerted on him. Conrad was therefore also a man of two vocations, sailing and writing. As a multilingual European who started to learn English, his third language, only in his early twenties, he then subsequently wrote exclusively in this third language for his works of fiction. His two lines of work would at first glance seem to present two extremes, with the rigid hierarchy of sailing contrasting with the amorphous activity of writing. They seem so disparate from each other that, as Leonard Orr has pointed out, “It is difficult even for the most thoughtful and thorough of Conrad biographers to explain how it was that in 1889 the Polish Konrad Korzeniowski, having dedicated himself to life as a sailor, decided instead to take up writing fiction in English” (27). In fact, Conrad’s aristocratic background might account somewhat for the appeal of what Orr calls “the avocation of writing” (27). Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly, was, Conrad claims, “begun in idleness—a holiday task” (A Personal Record 69).2 Such subtle signposting to his aristocratic lineage in describing his new vocation, or such posturing as an aristocrat who took up the pen in his spare time, again surfaced in a letter to Kazimierz Waliszewski in 1903, when he recounts the amateurish impulse behind starting on what would become his first novel: “I began to write Almayer’s Folly like that, without bad intentions to occupy my mornings during a rather long stay I made in London after a three-year voyage in the South Seas” (Letters 3: 81–82).3 We can compare these statements with descriptions of his work that expressed the unrelenting despair Conrad often felt throughout the writing process. While working on his second novel An Outcast of the Islands (1896) in November 1894, for instance, he complains to Marguerite Poradowska that “One works hardest when accomplishing nothing. For three days, I’ve been seated before a blank page—and the page has stayed blank except for a ‘IV’ at the top. I am really on the wrong path….. What do you expect? I don’t feel the slightest enthusiasm. And

2 Pointed out in Orr 27. 3 Pointed out in Orr 27. I would like to thank Asako Nakai for suggesting these

references to me.

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that is fatal” (Letters 1: 185). Another letter to her in early 1895 states that “I have just written ‘XI’ at the head of a blank page, and blank it will remain, perhaps for ten days—or I don’t know myself. You see my idea of work” (Letters 1: 200). Reading these narratives of his work side by side with those from the previous paragraph, we can say that Conrad strategized his accounts of his own work: at times portraying himself as free from the necessity of work, of writing as an aristocratic leisurely activity, he also elsewhere lauds the seriousness and the sheer grit required of his second vocation of writing, and would often complain of the nearimpossible effort it took. For instance, in the Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus ” (1897), Conrad describes writing as requiring “complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance,” and says that “The sincere endeavour to accomplish that creative task, to go as far on that road as his strength will carry him, to go undeterred by faltering, weariness or reproach, is the only valid justification for the worker in prose” (6–7). As another example, in a later essay “A Glance at Two Books,” written in 1904, he proclaims that “a book is a deed,” and “that the writing of it is an enterprise as much as the conquest of a colony” (Last Essays 132).4 His fluctuating rhetoric positioned him as variously caught within and free from the binaries between work and leisure that were being consolidated throughout the nineteenth century, blurring the distinction between these for himself at a time when both work and the emergent idea of leisure for the masses instead of only for the rich became increasingly regulated activities. In March 1898, in a much-quoted passage from a letter to Edward Garnett, Conrad writes: “I sit down religiously every morning, I sit down for eight hours every day and the sitting down is all. In the course of that working day of 8 hours I write 3 sentences which I erase before leaving the table in despair…. After such crises of despair I doze for hours still half conscious that there is that story I am unable to write…. So the days pass and nothing is done” (Letters 2: 49). Conrad’s “working day of 8 hours,” frustratingly unproductive yet with a fixed, standard number of hours, represents the modern eight-hour workday that, as Gary S. Cross writes, “emerged between 1885 and 1920, becoming the nearly universal means of dividing daily economic obligation from personal freedom” (52). It was conceived not only in the backdrop of “increased productivity,” but also the result “of an

4 Pointed out by Najder 210.

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intellectual and political struggle over work and leisure” (Cross 52), with arguments on the one hand for the “unrestrained liberalism” of unregulated work “in the name of freedom to work and the extraterritoriality of the workplace” (Cross 21), and ones in favour of greater regulation on the other.5 Upon closer scrutiny, there are further correspondences between Conrad’s two vocations that might make the progression from sailing to writing seem less disjointed. The contrast between the ideals and values of the old type of sailing and the commercial style heralded by the arrival of the steam ship could be mapped onto the same contrast between writing as an art form and writing as a commercial activity—however nebulous the distinction is in reality. At the same time, the rigid hierarchy of the organization of the sailing profession belies the unpredictability and tempestuous vagaries of the reality of sailing work at sea, depicted in stories such as “Typhoon.” This is comparable to the unpredictability of the often tortuous writing process for Conrad, as well as of the reception of his writing. Conrad’s own life, therefore, presents a fascinating account of the first two of the three key issues of work, inheritance, and desert that this book focuses on. Having started with very briefly tracing some of Conrad’s inheritances and introducing his two disparate vocations, I must here state that this book will not consistently trace Conrad’s life in his works—apart from in Chapter 5, where an analysis of the Professor in The Secret Agent (1907) is paired with some discussion of Conrad’s professional values as a writer. The book instead mainly focuses on examining the intersections of the three key issues as they play out in characters’ lives in the six major novels discussed. Each chapter will explore how a novel engages these three themes to varying degrees as they intersect and shape characters’ identity and conflicts. Jointly, the chapters show how the combined themes drive plots that query the relationships between the internal aspirations of characters and their external realization. More specifically for this book, this is when, in the Conradian fictional universe, characters’ great expectations—desert that has been formulated using the reward signifiers of work and inheritance—fall flat, 5 These were not limited to workers themselves or to antagonists to rampant liberalism such as Marx, but also seen, for instance, in the efforts by Liberal governments to police competition “to prevent enterprises from gaining an unfair advantage over the competition by operating their works longer than the norm” (Cross 24).

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often spectacularly so.6 In these convergences between work, inheritance, and desert, each novel uncovers repeated and problematic formulas and patterns of self-making that demonstrate the psychological and personal costs of ambitions thwarted, of great expectations refuted—ambitions and expectations that were shaped by ideals of work and inheritance in society. The following section will first outline the links between the notions of work and inheritance that this book will focus on. Then, this Introduction will explore how the interactions between both, which drive characters’ conflicts in the major novels covered in this book, can generate a deep sense of desert in the characters that becomes a consistent theme across the novels examined.

1.1

From Work to Inheritance to Desert

When Marlow says in “Heart of Darkness” (1899) that work presents “a chance to find yourself” (72),7 his words invoke parts of Thomas Carlyle’s famous Gospel of Work. Carlyle’s public celebration of work, his “retriev[al] [of] the imaginative possibility of labour as a sacred and secure form of self-realization” (Shiach 33), is captured by idealistic rhetoric such as the following lines from Past and Present (1843), his analysis of what ailed British society in the midst of a severe economic crisis at the time: “Idleness is worst, Idleness alone is without hope: work earnestly at anything, you will by degrees learn to work at almost all things. There is endless hope in work, were it even work at making money” (126).8 However, as Morag Shiach has written, this harmonious view of work came at the cost of “abstraction”: it required the compromise of “withdrawing from the conditions under which modern labour was being performed,” because “[a]ttentiveness to the concrete social and economic relations of Britain... had led Carlyle to a practical and theoretical paralysis” (33). In addition, such ideals of work, founded on the view of industrious work as a way of self-creation, co-existed with a more ambivalent picture of work at the time. For instance, work was variously 6 The exception to this is Heyst, as I will discuss further down. 7 For a critical reading of Marlow’s words, see Michael John DiSanto’s Under Conrad’s

Eyes, which argues that “The idea of work is a contradiction: simultaneously the means to know and to not know; the most important expression of being and the most important avoidance of being” (56). 8 Quoted in Shiach 33.

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seen “as a primary tool of punishment for criminal offenders,” and at the same time could be “marketed as a moral benefit, a social duty, and a therapy against idleness, drunkenness, unruly behaviour, and immorality” (Fludernik 405). It could be, in a materialist view, “an ignoble, degrading, and punishing activity deservedly associated with the lower classes and to be shunned by respectable men and women,” but in an idealistic view, “a central element of social status, moral standing, and social usefulness constitutive of individual respectability” (Fludernik 462). Basing his argument on “Heart of Darkness” and The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” Rob Breton’s Gospels and Grit reads in Conrad’s works a continuation of the attitude to work in the Victorian period as embodied by Carlyle’s views. Refusing “to acknowledge industrial working conditions” (40), Carlyle instead focuses only on “Work for its own sake,” which “necessarily directs attention away from the real properties or conditions of production” (40). Breton argues that in Conrad’s writing a similar split exists between an idealized “Work” and the economic realities that undergird it, one that is never really bridged. The result is “the tendency to vacillate between the assumption of an unconditional, essentialist dignity of Work and the assumption of an inevitable economy that can only be tinkered with,” or “between the ideal and the real, final and contingent, visual and empirical; between assuming the realm of either freedom or necessity to the point where they get entirely cut off from each other” (95). Breton therefore observes how in Conrad’s works “a unified ideology of Work and the historicized impossibility of that sanctification coexist only because they never directly and dialectically connect, meet, or clash” (9). Breton’s analysis follows in the wake of a tradition of scholarship that has emphasized the complex picture of work in Conrad’s fiction. Although idealistic representations of work and its values feature prominently in stories such as The Nigger of the “Narcissus ,” where shirking from work duties is a condemnation of character (so that Donkin, for instance, is irredeemably described as “lazy,” possessing “talents for shirking work,” “the man that cannot steer, that cannot splice, that dodges the work on dark nights…. who is the last out and the first in when all hands are called,” “The sympathetic and deserving creature that knows all about his rights, but knows nothing of courage, of endurance” [15]), Conrad’s fiction indeed also provides more critical examinations of ideals of work. Paul L. Gaston sees Conrad’s fiction before “Heart of Darkness” as developing “his concern with th[e] ethical principle” of

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“the Gospel of Work,” culminating in “Heart of Darkness” in a narrative that “most thoroughly exposes the inadequacies of pious exhortations to work” (204). Cedric Watts also sees from The Nigger of the “Narcissus ” to “Heart of Darkness” a shift towards “a complicated critique of... the work ethic,” with Conrad examining “the possible dangers of that ethic” and asking the question: “What… comes ultimately of any man’s labours?” (54–55). Franco Marenco has discussed Conrad’s sense of disillusionment as traced across his writing in conjunction with the changes that industrialism and “the ideology of production” wrought, leading to a loss of “the honour of labour,” where toil is no longer exerted in combination with more lofty ideals such as intellectual creation (363–66). Such earlier analyses of the work ethic in Conrad’s writing were followed by critical examinations of professional values—which we can see as a subtype of ideals of work—in Conrad’s life and his works, as they simultaneously contained and contrasted with commercial and social status concerns. Louis Menand’s examination of Conrad and professionalism focuses on Kurtz’s occupational evolution, or regression, from a professional to the pre-professional figure of the early industrial entrepreneur in “Heart of Darkness.” Menand contextualizes this in the drive to create professional status for literature at the turn of the century on the one hand, and the perceived dangers of an overapplication of professional standards and norms imposed by institutions on the other (101–18). Later scholarship on Conrad and professionalism has focused, alternatively, on looking at Conrad as a male modernist who used modernist experimentation to gain the symbolic capital concomitant with esoteric knowledge,9 and as a precursor to modernism who aspired to verisimilitude as a way to gain professional status.10 The idea of work, then, provides a multitude of angles, complexities, and contradictions with which to analyse Conrad’s fiction, ones which we can say, at the risk of generalization but for the sake of concise summary, revolve around the interactions between what can be called the ideals of work (within which, as Marenco’s essay has emphasized, notions of toil and hardship may still be incorporated as part of the larger 9 For instance Joyce Piell Wexler’s Who Paid for Modernism and David Trotter’s Paranoid Modernism. 10 For instance Byron Caminero-Santangelo’s essay “Story-Teller in the Body of a Seaman: Joseph Conrad and the Rise of the Professions” and John Attridge’s essay “‘The Yellow-Dog Thing’: Joseph Conrad, Verisimilitude, and Professionalism.”

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“honour of labour” [366]) and the materialistic hollowness of work, in a period which saw a continuation of the drives to increased efficiency and production that had characterized most of the nineteenth century. This book will not repeat this approach, but scrutinizing Conrad’s characters closely, it seems to me that Conrad, instead of “isolat[ing]” ideals of work and “shield[ing] them from reality” (Breton 98), often directly portrayed the complex exchanges between these two sides in his characters’ lives—whether deliberately showing them as contradictory to each other, positioning them as critiques of each other, or importantly, portraying them as so intertwined and inseparable that it is difficult to say where one ends and the other begins. For instance, manifestations of “an unconditional, essentialist dignity of Work” (Breton 95) like Brierly in Lord Jim (1900) who adheres so closely to the code of honour in sailing that he cannot tolerate a tainting of that code even by another member of the same profession (Trotter 175) are problematic and in their own ways hollow, their unyielding devotion to the moral code of their work rendering them rigid and inadequate. Nostromo’s work in Costaguana embodies many ideals of work, such as honour, heroism, valour, and integrity, but this is done for very superficial reasons—his vanity at first, and greater monetary gain subsequently. Conrad’s portrayal of the Professor in The Secret Agent , who does not work for money, can be seen as the ultimate satirical portrait of an absolutist, monomaniacal work ethic—and the Professor is both to be admired and denigrated for it.11 Even the first two protagonists discussed in this book, Almayer and Willems, who seem the least ambiguous in that they do not disguise that their work is aimed directly at material rewards and social status, show influences of ideals of work gone awry. In The Problem with Work, a Marxist and feminist critique of work, Kathi Weeks’s approach in envisioning more salutary alternatives to work is to “refus[e] to distinguish between work and labor” in order to “block[] access to a vision of unalienated and unexploited work in the guise of living labor, one that could live up to the work ethic’s ideals about labor’s necessities and virtues and would be worthy of the extravagant praise the ethic bestows” (15). For all Conrad’s subscription to the work ethic and to ideals of work, which is expressed in particularly fervent and unwavering terms in his non-fictional writing, I see Weeks’s refusal as 11 As we will see in Chapter 5, Conrad states that “At the worst he is a megalomaniac of an extreme type. And every extremist is respectable” (Letters 3: 491).

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a useful alternative approach to examine Conrad’s portrayal of work across his fiction. Conrad’s idealism is then not merely a masking of the human cost of economic gain along the lines of predecessors such as Carlyle who “reali[zed] that there is no effective social institution of the rewarding of hard work,” “partly the result of the dissolution of the social to the point where cash payment is ‘the sole nexus between man and man’” (Shiach 32). And his materialistic depictions would then not just exclude ideals of work as if these exist in an ether, floating untainted above the material realities of work. Such binaries do not easily hold stable in his fiction: instead of deliberately eschewing the conflicts between them, he saw how they necessarily combined in real-world conditions, including in his own circumstances as a writer who made his living out of writing. In treating the notion of work, therefore, this book will not base its overall approach on a subdivision and categorization of work along the multitude of lines that crisscross each other, especially in Conrad’s fiction, for instance idealist and materialist, alienating and humanistic, fragmenting and wholesome, and even paid and unpaid.12 The only exception to this is when I talk more specifically about professionalism in discussing the figure of the Professor in The Secret Agent , a focus justified by the nature and method of the work that the Professor is engaged in. Instead of imposing set notions of work, or pitting a distinct conception of work, in an Arendtian fashion, against related notions such as labour and action, the book follows the shifting configurations of work as broadly conceived in the portrayals of each character. For instance, material rewards reign supreme for Almayer’s and Willems’s ideas of work, whereas the purpose of Jim’s unpaid work in Patusan is for the fulfilment of his heroic aspirations. Nostromo performs his heroic deeds, which greatly exceed his paid work role, at first for his vanity, as mentioned, with huge material gain—again much in excess of his formal salary—becoming his overriding goal only later on. The Professor violently pits his anarchist work against monetary gain, instead using it to gain a twisted sense of prestige and superiority. Ideas of work for Razumov and Heyst gradually move away from the notion of holding a job to the moral work they

12 It is difficult to apply a stringent definition of work to Conrad’s fiction, not least because even in a general sense it is hard to define work in a strict sense. For an interesting discussion on the difficulties in defining work, see Lars Svendsen’s introduction in Work. For instance, defining work as paid in this book would exclude the significant amounts of unpaid work done by many of the characters discussed.

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are compelled to do in order to come into parts of themselves, centred around their innate sympathy, that they wish to deny. As Russell Muirhead writes in Just Work, “Work cannot be hemmed in by natural definition or fixed like an element in the periodic table for, on the one hand, it reflects a historically contingent division of labor, while on the other, its every instance suggests the infinite expanse of the human mind and spirit. Even the drudgery of painting fences bends against the force of Tom Sawyer’s imagination” (4). This is the spirit in which this book will refer to the notion of work. The only boundaries placed around the notion of work, if they can be so called, are its intersections with the two other concepts, inheritance and desert, in order to generate renewed insights into the conflicts Conrad’s protagonists face. If we were to naturally extend the discussion from work to inheritance, the most obvious relationship would be one of contrast, where inheritance is taken in the traditional sense, of rank and wealth acquired via lineage, sometimes with the result that the beneficiary does not have to work, or work as hard, for a living. And indeed, this sense of inheritance, coming with the allure or stability offered by a private income or idle riches, applies to some of the protagonists discussed: Almayer, for instance, who marries Lingard’s adopted daughter for future wealth that never comes; and Heyst, who is rumoured to be a baron and who is evidently able to live off some form of a private income. However, even these characters to whom this sense of inheritance most applies work, out of necessity or not—including Heyst, who goes through a temporary stage of wishing to see if he can dedicate himself seriously to a coal business. This importance of work came with the larger valorization of work that has already been mentioned: the Gospel of Work in the nineteenth century that cut across class divisions, so that “work for all citizens turned into a common necessity and became a regular feature of life even among the upper bourgeoisie, since the ideology of work and no play started to be applied more widely across the social scale” (Fludernik 405).

1.2

Inheritances Put to Work

Thus, at first glance, the traditional idea of inheritance as determining social, financial, and class status in life seems to have become considerably less relevant by the time Conrad wrote his first novels. Despite the “persistence of inheritance plots in an era of industrial and urban expansion” in the nineteenth century, which “is indicative not only of the political

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strength of the landed classes, but of their ideological power” (Dolin 34), inheritance seems a passé concept in Conrad’s fiction, as befits the historical movement away from the ideal of inherited rank and wealth to the ideal of the self-made man (Perkin xxiii)—and this is usually a man in Conrad’s fiction—who forges his own path through his exertions and labour and against odds and environment, and which can be seen as the origin of more contemporary meritocratic ideals. This is reflected in Conrad’s novels, where there is often a deliberately brief description of the patrilineal background of male protagonists that seems to have limited bearing on the identities they try to construct for themselves. The common trope of inheritance and legacy in nineteenth-century fiction, then, with its role in the construction and assumption of male identity, would seem an outdated lens to use to read Conrad’s modernist fiction. Inheritance as a theme and plot device has thus understandably been focused on much more in the nineteenth-century novel, and not been subject to much scrutiny in modernist works such as Conrad’s. But work as a marker of identity started to present new dilemmas. For instance, it became much more difficult to differentiate the “true” gentleman from the actor, since this status of worthiness was now attained less often by the “inherited distinctions of family and rank,” and more by behaviour (Adams 53), including his behaviour at work. Conrad seems to play with the notion of the new gentleman in the aftermath of this change, applying the term “gentleman” to characters such as Gentleman Brown in Lord Jim and Mr Jones in Victory (1915), in so doing parodying the “Victorian preoccupation with defining a true gentleman” (Adams 53). In contrast, a more earnest representation appears in Victory, where Heyst, as mentioned rumoured to be a Swedish baron, is called a “genuine gentleman” by Davidson (42). As another example of the problems work posed as the primary shaper of identity, in the lines quoted from his letters earlier in this Introduction, Conrad refers to the unpredictability of labour, where the number of hours and the immense effort spent labouring lead to no concrete result in the external world. Such in nihilo labour, where time and effort go unrecognized, is the sincere modern worker’s nemesis rather than the aristocratic gentleman’s, whose work does not define him. It also departs from the nineteenth-century model of tightly regimented industrial labour, where output is directly proportional to the number of hours of work clocked in. In nihilo work severs the link between the motions and efforts of work and their anticipated product. It suggests a disconcerting failure to translate what is inside the worker

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(“that story I am unable to write” [Letters 1: 231] but that is already there, pre-existing non-materially inside Conrad) into the external world. It obfuscates the difference between workers and non- or anti-workers. For the characters examined in this book, Conrad shows the pitfalls of work as the mediator between oneself and one’s self-perceived desert, despite characters’ high expectations for it to be able to be used to come into one’s own. In fact, in the letters just referred to as well as in his fiction, Conrad often presents the failure in self-becoming through work as a failure in demonstrating an innate inheritance one is sincerely convinced one possesses or should possess—“that story I am unable to write,” to quote from his letter again, or, to take an example from his novel Nostromo (1904), Nostromo’s expectation to “get something great for [his work] some day” (179) beyond the salary that he believes does not reflect his true desert. The choice of the word “inheritance” here is based on its related uses in Conrad’s fiction. Apart from referring to it in the more traditional sense, denoting name, station, estate, and wealth acquired by familial lineage, Conrad also frequently enlists the help of the language and patterns of inheritance to describe innate ability expressed through labour and work in his fiction. As an example, the most extreme figure of the exercise of pure ability is the Professor in The Secret Agent , the focus of Chapter 5. His inheritance of “considerable natural abilities” (my emphasis) combines with the inheritance of his father’s “moral attitude” of the “righteousness” of his “rigid Christian sect,” which in him “translate[s] itself into a frenzied puritanism of ambition” that convinces him that “power and prestige,” which he sees as his desert, should be able to be attained “by sheer weight of merit alone” (66). In addition, the ideals and terminology of work often become entangled with those of inheritance. The young captain in Conrad’s The Shadow Line (1917), for instance, imagines of his work on a ship as “the man in command” that he is “like a king in his country, … an hereditary king, not a mere elected head of a state” (54). Such emphasis on the innateness of the captain’s work station, of his work as something he was both born into (as a kind of birth right) and born for (the fit between himself and his work), reveals the complex links between inheritance and work, instead of ideals of the latter simply supplanting those of the former.

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The relationships that this book shows Conrad establishes between inheritance and work in his fiction, as society transitioned from the aristocratic ideal to ideals of work,13 make up what would later be termed meritocratic ideals, and evolved from certain ways of depicting inheritance in nineteenth-century fiction. Inheritance, which John R. Reed calls an “over-worked device” in nineteenth-century fiction, was often used in it to mete out moral desert (268–88). In works such as Oliver Twist (1837–39) “the hero’s merit and birth… are two sides of the same coin” (Sadrin 39), and Oliver’s “inheritance at once sanctions his birth and rewards his merit” (42). In other words, external material inheritance reflects innate virtue. Although nineteenth-century protagonists must also prove their worth through tribulations and trials, the two forms of inheritance of inborn moral merit and material legacy very often translate into each other, because they are really each other’s corollaries. Self-discovery and self-growth parallel coming into one’s inheritance. The meritocratic premise, according to which rewards and resources are awarded commensurately according to ability and effort, is similar, although the focus is not primarily on moral worth but on ability that translates into merit in specific contexts through effort. One could even say that the literary trope of inheritance and the meritocratic ideal go hand in hand in nineteenth-century fiction, that inheritance discourses accommodated emergent meritocratic ideals—although the exact term “meritocracy” is a later twentieth-century coinage, appearing first in Michael Young’s book The Rise of the Meritocracy (1959), a satire of the meritocratic ethos, and summarized in Young’s mock formula that “I + E = M” (IQ plus Effort equals Merit) (94). An example of the links between the idea of inheritance and the meritocratic premise is the Victorian “science” of phrenology, where the assumption is “that people differed from each other in their innate abilities,” and “that these innate abilities were open to assessment,” subsequently “dictat[ing] the proper—or, more to the point, natural—stations for individuals in society” (Ruth 47). Another 13 Harold Perkin separates work ideals in British society as it transitioned from the nineteenth into the twentieth century into the industrial ideal and the professional ideal (3–4). Conrad’s characters, however, do not all draw on the main attributes of professional work, where a socially recognized and often esteemed, clearly demarcated line of work is highly hierarchically organized, with strict entry requirements and advancement standards, and where work ideals and codes of conduct prevail. Even characters who do clearly draw on the professional ideal, such as the Professor in The Secret Agent , as we shall see in Chapter 5, may not strictly speaking be recognized as professionals.

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example of the terminology of inheritance marrying the idea of merit is from Carlyle’s Past and Present referred to earlier, which contains a section entitled “Aristocracy of Talent,” where Carlyle describes the desirability and difficulties in establishing such a new class in society (23–28). What Conrad presented in his works can be seen as a continued refashioning of the literary trope of inheritance so that coming into one’s own is a process of the demonstration of one’s innate ability via work and labour—a process that, as we will see, Conrad represents as fraught with uncertainties and undesired outcomes. Even as what Susan E. Colón has described as “a shift from traditional aristocratic hegemony to that of a professional meritocracy” (76–77) was well underway, then, ideals of inheritance did not just disappear, with the two notions at times becoming entangled in literary fiction. Anthony Trollope’s “career-narratives” (Dames 263) are a case in point. These “cannot end on any secure or lasting achievement, since the very temporal pull of ‘career’ makes achievement itself a transitional stage to the next achievement” (Dames 263). The necessary sequentialism of careerism means that it becomes difficult to conclude these narratives without a sense of “personal stasis” (Dames 263). Nicholas Dames explains that “Trollope often solved this dilemma by allowing his careerseeking protagonists an avenue of escape: inheritance and landed leisure” (263). In another example of the workings of inheritance mixing with the professional discourse of self-making in Trollope’s fiction, Charley in The Three Clerks (1857) “buckles down to inherit the professional status bequeathed him as the son of a professional” (Ruth 97). The scientific exploration of the inheritance of traits14 —infamously culminating in theories of eugenics—led to the further entanglement between ideas of inheritance and work. As part of an ongoing debate at the time on the distinction between innate ability and effort—on which of these is inherited, part of “being,” and which of these is part of “doing”— Jennifer Ruth describes an argument between Charles Darwin and Francis Galton, with Darwin, after reading Galton’s Hereditary Genius (1869), writing to Galton that “I have always maintained that, excepting fools,

14 These scientific discoveries had, in Conrad’s time, resulted first in the word “pangene” (1889) and later “gene” (1909) to describe the “basic unit of heredity in living organisms” (OED, “gene”), with some of the basic patterns of genetic inheritance already well known due to the rediscovery of Gregor Mendel’s theories of patterns of inheritance. Some of these developments will be discussed in Chapter 3.

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men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work,” and with Galton retorting that “Character, including the aptitude for hard work, is inheritable like every other faculty” (3). These discussions were centred on the scope of inheritance, on how to know what is internal and inherited, and external and set apart from inheritance—a separation that is particularly difficult to draw because in order to know what one has inherited, one has to demonstrate this in the external world. In other words, in a rephrasing of Goethe’s words from Faust (1808) quoted at the beginning of this book, one cannot know that one owns an ability until one has put in the effort to use it and thus demonstrate it. Two similar difficulties drive the crises faced by Conrad’s characters. The first difficulty is of the recognition and realization of traits and abilities as merit by the external environment, and of the receipt of tangible rewards from these, for instance in terms of status and money. The process of attaining adequate rewards from innate ability is far from guaranteed, dependent on there being a suitable environment in which one’s inherited traits can manifest themselves, and being in part a game of chance, unpredictable and with uncontrollable outcomes. Second, innate ability, although seemingly deterministic in the sense that the person either possesses these or does not, is uncertain in the additional, more fundamental, sense I just referred to: one cannot know for certain what type of innate ability one really has inherited until one is able to prove this (to prove oneself, in other words) in the external world—and even then one may never be able to be absolutely certain, as other traits jostle with these abilities and as external conditions shift. Such uncertainties can create paradoxes of self-making that become major crises for Conrad’s characters: on the one hand one needs to work hard to make one’s inherent abilities evident, but on the other hand the material and social rewards anticipated are supposedly “always meant to be” (Ruth 5),15 possessed by and innate to oneself even before they show themselves. So when one fights to preserve a heroic identity one imagines as rightful to oneself, as Jim comes to do, although Marlow can interpret this as him fighting against his nature, Jim can as easily argue that he is fighting for who he truly, innately, is, that the right moment for his true nature to become recognized has not yet appeared. The tension between innateness and externality, and essentialism and constructionism, 15 Ruth here specifically discusses the case of the Victorian professional, a figure that will be explored in more detail in Chapter 5.

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in the notion of “inheritance” in the modern context emphasizes persistent doubts about what one can, and what one cannot become. Thus although at first glance “inheritance” denotes stability in that it refers to what is innate to oneself, what one outright owns, it in fact embodies several contradictions at once: it becomes both deterministic (one’s ability fixes what one can become) and self-expressive (one can discover who one is), both arduous (it takes hard work to make one’s abilities evident) and inevitable (because these rewards are based on one’s inherent abilities), both well-deserved (one worked hard for one’s rewards) and gratuitous (one gained rewards because of ability that one automatically came into). This book explores some of these contradictions and conflicts for Conrad’s characters as they seek to secure their own imagined selfhoods. Many of the characters covered in this book, as I will show with more extended examples below, embraced the meritocratic ideal—of inherent ability finding just and suitable externalization in society, where it becomes recognized as merit as such—in their attempts to establish their ideal identities for themselves through work. This becomes a new type of coming into one’s inheritance in a double sense: characters seek to prove themselves in that they seek to make manifest the abilities they believe innate to themselves (the first sense), to translate these into their rightful material inheritance in the external world (the second sense; and here I specifically use the term “inheritance” in an additional way—as one’s rightful desert, which I will expand further on in the next section). This often fails, and a disillusionment with work emerges that contrasts with the sense of work as deeply meaningful and as “the chance to find yourself” (“Heart of Darkness” 56). Two of Conrad’s later works, Under Western Eyes (1911) and Victory, show an even more relentless questioning of this possibility. For Razumov, even when “natural abilities” (Under Western Eyes 27) and individual aspirations match realistically available work, there are other inheritances such as his innate sympathy to which he has to account himself, which he cannot ignore because they have always been part of himself. For Heyst, a paternal inheritance of a philosophy of abnegation makes work impossible to commit to or derive a sense of identity from. Instead, his life’s work comprises trying to live up to this paternal inheritance, to properly earn it as a full ability that is his, to rephrase the words from Faust, so that he can use it to remain detached from any ties. Like for Razumov, however, this goal becomes impossible to fulfil because of his innate sympathy.

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There are, of course, many additional ways of exploring the notion of “inheritance”—cultural, national, ideological, and so on—but apart from also engaging with the notion in the traditional sense, as rank and wealth bestowed through familial legacy, this book is mainly interested in looking at the interactions between the idea of work and of inheritance as abilities and traits, of these as innate, “instinct[ual]” (Outcast 23), “inborn” (Nostromo 297), and “natural” (The Secret Agent 66; Under Western Eyes 27), or in a summative phrase from Conrad’s manuscript of Lord Jim, as “deep, inborn inherited instinct[s]” (109). Although strictly speaking, there is a distinction to be made between abilities being inborn or innate (from Latin’s natus, meaning to be born” [“innate, adj.”]), and inherited (to come into as an heir), in practice (including in Conrad’s practice) it is not often clear where the one would end and the other would begin, as that last quotation from his writing shows. The use of the word “inheritance” in this book for abilities and traits that are seen as “deep, inborn inherited instinct[s]” allows it to build on the shifts in the concept in the nineteenth century this Introduction outlined, and to explore emphases on familial inheritance in Conrad’s fiction that are related to the application of innate abilities through work (examples of which will be outlined in the first paragraph of the next section). It also allows further links to be made with the idea of desert, where, as mentioned, characters imagine their desert as a material inheritance that they should rightfully come into. The relationship that gets foregrounded between work and this renewed notion of inheritance emphasizes that work is not only about earning, but also about inheriting, so that the latter is not neglected in the stress on the former. Darwin’s view quoted earlier that “men did not differ much in intellect, only in zeal and hard work” (Ruth 3) would be an example of such a downplaying of the importance of inherited ability in portraying earning, or “zeal and hard work,” as the definitive factor in success. This tendency to minimize the influence of inheritance on rewards that recipients come to see as their desert has continued with the further consolidation of meritocratic ideology, as we will see in the next section on desert, attracting the criticism of contemporary philosophers, who point out that merit can create as much “a hereditary aristocracy” (Sandel 24) as the original aristocracy of birth and wealth. The concept of inheritance as used in this book, then, can also help drive new discussion on the idea of work in Conrad’s fiction. In Conrad’s fiction, both work and inheritance create a sense of desert, of rewards anticipated down the line. His characters’ crises often arise due

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to the negation of these by the plot, as Conrad consistently withholds the rewards that his protagonists feel themselves to deserve. Conrad’s fiction thus asks the question the political philosopher Joel Feinberg posed at the beginning of his famous essay “Justice and Personal Desert,” “What is it to deserve something?” (55), without, as we will see in the next section, giving a definitive answer.

1.3

Coming Into One’s Desert

The most immediate literary precedent for an emphasis on desert lies in nineteenth-century literature, as we have seen, and indeed, like in literature from this period, most of the major characters examined in this book meet their various downfalls, which can be seen as their deserts for their various moral lapses, encompassing crimes, mishaps, and character defects. I propose, however, looking at desert not only from a narrative perspective, as a way to mete out moral desert to characters, but also from the characters’ own point of view, at the basis for their arguments for desert. One seemingly simple pattern (but always, as we will see in the chapters, complicated by individual characterization and circumstances) most commonly emerges from the characters’ claims to desert: characters think that they deserve rewards in the external world (whether of riches or of status and stature) because of innate abilities they possess‚ which‚ when applied to their work‚ they consider to be merits and which they imagine is of significant social benefit. In other words‚ their sense of desert has a meritocratic basis. An additional second pattern, mostly relevant for the two characters Almayer and Heyst, and to a lesser extent Nostromo and the Professor, emphasizes in particular the familial aspect of inheritance in creating a sense of desert. Almayer seeks to come into his “father” Lingard’s elusive riches, with the additional help of his work for Lingard as “a man of some ability” (Almayer 26). Nostromo, as we will see, comes to think that he has earned his right to a share of the Costaguana aristocracy’s riches, to join their ranks, through his exceptional abilities and heroic work. The Professor, as mentioned, is driven by a zealousness in part inherited from his father. And Heyst inherits his father’s philosophy of abnegation, which he needs to earn in order to possess it fully as an ability he can apply consistently in life to remain detached from commitments. However, because he is not able to embrace this philosophy to its fullest extent, it leads instead to suffering that he at first thinks of as

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deserved punishment, and becomes therefore an example of negative, not positive, desert. If we are to render the two patterns discussed into basic philosophical terms, we would get something like the traditional three-place model of desert in philosophy, “A deserves X in virtue of Y ,” a statement that reflects that the treatment of person A “be proportional to some desert basis ” (Kinghorn 49), where Y refers to inheritance (in the form of characters’ innate abilities and traits, and related patterns of familial legacy), and Z refers to work. This would summarize characters’ sense of desert in a basic way, but it would not account for how and why characters use work and inheritance as desert bases, or how Conrad’s narratives portray the validity of these desert claims. Briefly exploring ongoing philosophical debates on desert as relating to work and inheritance will help open up the discussion of these questions that will follow in this book. Joel Feinberg’s essays on desert, collected in Doing and Deserving and frequently credited for reigniting more contemporary debates on the notion—which, as Kevin Kinghorn states at the beginning of The Nature of Desert Claims, “has not been a central feature within the framework of most moral and political philosophers” (1), surprisingly the case given how commonly the notion is referred to in everyday life (1)—defined desert in the essay entitled “Justice and Personal Desert” as “a ‘natural’ moral notion” (56), “logically prior to and independent of public institutions and their rules” (87). Entitlement, on the other hand, is often defined as institutional (Rawls 273)16 in moral and political philosophy. This distinction between desert as “natural” and entitlement as institutional helps bring Conrad’s characters’ desert claims into greater focus: as we will see, most of these claims operate significantly off-the-grid, with characters fighting for what they think they deserve beyond the present application of institutional or procedural rules, although they often use moral vocabulary that is also used as legal and institutional terminology such as “rightful” (Outcast 187) or “right” (Under Western Eyes 69), “injustice” (Outcast 36; Secret Agent 62) or “justice” (Nostromo 177), “unfair” (Secret Agent 62), and even “entitled to” (Secret Agent 66) to describe their imagined deserts. These expected rewards might interact 16 Such definitions are not stable, however, with some philosophers such as David Cummiskey arguing that desert is based at least on “the point of the institutions and their rules” (18; pointed out in Kinghorn 31). See Kinghorn (30–37) for a discussion on these debates.

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with institutions in significant ways—the salaries Willems and Nostromo draw, for instance, take the form of a formal wage paid to them by the companies they work for. But characters’ sense of desert, in drawing on ideals and discourses of work and inheritance rather than the regular rewards that are currently granted to them by the institutions and official rules built around work and inheritance, almost always exceeds these formal entitlements, although we could say that characters strive to make the desert that they feel themselves to be owed fully recognized in future by all parties concerned, including by related institutions. Nostromo, to name just one example here, gradually comes to consider greater status and wealth to match his abilities as his rightful inheritance, due to him because of his exceptional, loyal work. Refusing Don and Donna Carlos’s sole claim to him as their adopted son, one could even argue, as we will see in Chapter 4, that he waits to be rewarded and adopted as one of the aristocracy’s kind by various father figures amongst the rich. Such a sense of desert is often based on merit, which is ability that is judged to be valuable in specific contexts, and which in a meritocracy can purportedly be put to use for the person’s and the greater good. For most of the characters examined in this book, desert specifically means what the person imagines should be the reward deriving from their meritorious abilities, but with two twists. First, even when the possession of such abilities is uncertain, or even when they not been properly put to use, characters often still think they deserve great rewards. Second, as a result, they also frequently imagine such rewards as necessarily forthcoming, as their future due; in other words, their desert often gets rendered in the future tense. For instance, as we will see in Chapter 6, Razumov subscribes to the meritorious ideals of work, believing that with his innate abilities and his hard effort, he deserves to gain the social status and stable living he has not received by birth. He sees the fruits of his work in the future as practically his, although these are not yet in his possession—his rightful inheritance, as it were, by the logic not of entitlement (since there is no institutional basis for the rewards that he sees as his even before he has attained them), but of desert. Desert is then not only “natural” in the sense of being pre-institutional, but also “natural” in the sense of being felt to be innate to characters, an inheritance that is a possession even before full manifestation in the external world. Yet the lack of voluntary control over inheritances is precisely what makes the idea that merit should lead to moral desert so problematic for John Rawls in A Theory of Justice. In what would become a well-known

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critique of the meritocratic ethos, Rawls argued that natural abilities are morally neutral because they are the product of contingency, with the possessor having done nothing to earn them. They are the result of the “natural lottery” of “distribution of abilities and talents” (64) if positive, and “bad luck” (276) if negative. Not even material “distribution according to effort,” “which seems intuitively to come closest to rewarding moral desert,” reflects desert: “the effort a person is willing to make is influenced by his natural ability and skills and the alternatives open to him. The better endowed are more likely, other things equal, to strive conscientiously, and there seems to be no way to discount for their greater good fortune. The idea of rewarding desert is impracticable” (274; my emphasis). Effort, then, in a view that aligns with Galton’s opinion mentioned earlier of “aptitude for hard work” as “inheritable like every other faculty” (Ruth 3), is also an unearned inheritance. Rawls therefore concludes that the rewards that result from such abilities do not constitute desert, it being “incorrect to say that just distributive shares reward individuals according to their moral worth.” The only claim that can be made is institutional, where “a just scheme gives each person his due: that is, it allots to each what he is entitled to as defined by the scheme itself” (275–76). Rawls’s view on desert would inform the views of other philosophers such as Michael Sandel, who in The Tyranny of Merit emphasizes the entrenchedness of the meritocratic ethos, which damages a sense of community and communal obligation, and explains how even Rawls’s argument that merit and its rewards are morally arbitrary is not sufficient to rein in meritocratic hubris in real-world social conditions.17 At another end of the political spectrum, Robert Nozick’s famous rebuttal in Anarchy, State, and Utopia of Rawls’s Justice argues that as long as people have acquired their rewards by just means, they are entitled to them. 17 “[E]galitarian liberalism,” Sandel writes, “does not challenge the self-satisfaction of elites after all.” Sandel lays out an example of such thinking by a “a wealthy CEO” who “justif[ies] his or her advantages to a lower-paid worker on the factory floor”: “I do not morally deserve my superior pay and position, but I am entitled to them under fair rules of social cooperation. And remember, you and I would have agreed to these rules had we thought about the matter before we knew who would land on top and who at the bottom [this refers to Rawls’s idea of the “original position” where everyone is behind the “veil of ignorance,” so that “no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like” {Rawls 11}]. So please do not resent me. My privileges make you better off than you would otherwise be. The inequality you find galling is for your own good” (143–44).

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By all of the above philosophical views, Conrad’s characters’ views of their desert would be misguided in one way or another: they would arrogantly assert ownership over something that they can claim neither real moral credit for, nor have earned as their entitlement. But any such critique would be rather superficial if it does not also address an important reason for their claims of ownership: the deep belief that desert is not only earned, but also innate to them, that characterizes Conrad’s protagonists. That is why, whether or not their application of their abilities through work ultimately results in the rewards or social acknowledgement they most desire, characters still hold fast to their beliefs in their desert. In Conrad’s works, then, inheriting is not neglected over earning in order to argue for desert. Desert itself becomes seen as a type of inheritance, as great expectations that characters see as rightful to them, claimed using interlinking codes of work and inheritance, of earning and being. This means that ultimately, all three key terms—work, inheritance, and desert—become signifiers of and justifications for material rewards for the characters examined. Far from thinking that “The idea of rewarding desert is impracticable” (Rawls 274), characters consider the idea of rewarding the desert that they have constructed as necessary, and their recalcitrance in their beliefs creates the irreconcilable dilemmas that this book examines. In Justice and the Meritocratic State, Thomas Mulligan also moves away from the binary between inheriting and earning in his argument for a meritocratic conception of justice and desert. Mulligan disputes Rawls’s view of merit as morally arbitrary, sees meritocracy as “a distinct... way of thinking about justice” (4), and states that “[i]t is simply not sensical to wonder what I did to deserve my essential properties; these are the very things that constitute my identity” (173). Therefore, inherited traits can justly lead to desert in the moral sense.18 As an example of such views as early as in the ancient world, Mulligan points out that Aristotle’s “teleological arguments for desert” claim that “the end (telos ) of the good in question… tells us who is the most meritorious, and thereby, the most deserving” (10). Aristotle’s views can therefore be read as in agreement with the position that we should “distribute social goods on the basis of merit, and when these goods are divisible, we should distribute them in 18 Mulligan is careful to distinguish between desert and entitlement, and emphasizes that he is talking about the former and not the latter when arguing that rewards for meritoriousness are morally deserved.

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proportion to merit.” This means that “[e]quality is of no fundamental moral relevance. It is just to treat people equally only in the special cases in which they are themselves equal in merit” (11). Applying this to the context in which he is writing, Mulligan sees this as aligning with the values that make up the foundation of the “national ethos” of the United States, which “is that each of us can enjoy a life of success and prosperity… so long as we are willing to work for it.” He admits that “Like all dreams, this one was imperfectly realized,” but this should not be “reason to abandon the ideal itself” (13). Conrad’s depictions instead acknowledge the limitations of a meritocratic model without resorting to a final turn to idealism. In the unruliness of the real world and of human psychological states, meritocratic ideals do not, indeed cannot, purely apply, and characters are condemned by their errors, with Mulligan’s exhortation that it would be an “injustice” (113) to deny people opportunities and second chances due to a criminal past sounding exceedingly idealistic. And although Conrad’s characters often subscribe to meritocratic ideology, they do not only believe that merit should lead to desert, they also believe in their desert no matter what, seeing it as innate to themselves. Characters’ subjective interpretation of merit and desert encourages us to examine their constructedness in a more fundamental way, beyond the opposing views that rewards accruing from a meritocratic scheme either constitute or do not constitute moral desert. This brings us to an alternative view of desert that can be glimpsed behind the various representations of desert-making that this Introduction has so far introduced. Desert is often construed as a teleological concept, the right result due to various actions, states, and conditions. Even characters’ views of desert as somehow inevitable and innate to themselves, as explained in the last paragraph, harbour this teleological quality of desert, because characters still need to work towards revealing, evidencing, and attaining it. However, there is also an anti-teleological strain to desert in Conrad’s works that is posited as an alternative, where, for instance, work to which one applies oneself is seen as rewarding in and of itself,19 and which the characters examined in this book rarely live up to. In The Shadow Line, for example, the young protagonist’s zeal 19 The points and passages from Conrad’s works in this paragraph, and the insight on desert as possibly anti-teleological in Conrad’s fiction, were suggested to me by Jeremy Hawthorn as the reviewer of this book. I am deeply grateful to him for his advice.

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to “be off at daylight to-morrow” the moment his “new crew comes on board,” because, he says, “There’s no rest for me till she’s out in the Indian Ocean and not much of it even then,” is wholeheartedly endorsed by Captain Giles. Giles agrees that “that’s the way. You’ll do,” and that “That’s what it amounts to” (104–5). In another example, in “Typhoon” (1902), in the midst of battling the titular storm on a steamship, Captain MacWhirr tells Jukes, the chief mate, not to be “put out by anything,” and repeats his advice to focus on the work at hand instead of letting himself be distracted by other concerns, no matter how difficult: “Keep her facing it. They may say what they like, but the heaviest seas run with the wind. Facing it—always facing it—that’s the way to get through. You are a young sailor. Face it. That’s enough for any man. Keep a cool head” (64). Grit, sheer effort, hardship, and strenuous labour all combine in this passage with the idea of doing the work for the sake of doing the work, instead of only “meeting trouble half way” (“Typhoon” 64) and letting oneself be distracted by what one can gain out of the work, that is, to think of desert teleologically, as an end goal to be attained out of the work. Ultimately, as the overview above has shown, Conrad’s critiques and representations of desert, as a concept shaped by characters using ideas of work and inheritance, are not easily framed in terms of any contemporary political or philosophical perspective, although such views can at times provide useful anchoring points for comparison. This is not least because instead of aiming at constructing normative rules on what should constitute desert in society, elucidating the fairest ways of distributing resources in society, or theorizing about related terms such as justice, Conrad was most interested in how the individual appropriated and then shaped desert. This same approach will be used in this book, with the chapters centred on individual characters’ struggles with the three key concepts, which they each engage with to varying extents, instead of strictly framing Conrad’s fiction within such philosophical discussions as presented above. Each chapter will focus on one to three major characters across seven of Conrad’s novels. These are, in Chapter 2, Almayer, Willems, and Lingard in Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands ; in Chapter 3, Jim; in Chapter 4, Nostromo and to a lesser extent Martin Decoud and Charles Gould; in Chapter 5, the Professor and to a lesser extent the Assistant Commissioner in The Secret Agent ; and finally, in Chapter 6, Razumov in Under Western Eyes and Heyst in Victory.

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Works Cited Attridge, John. “‘The Yellow-Dog Thing’: Joseph Conrad, Verisimilitude, and Professionalism.” ELH , vol. 77, no. 2, 2012, pp. 267–96. Caminero-Santangelo, Byron. “Story-Teller in the Body of a Seaman: Joseph Conrad and the Rise of the Professions.” Conradiana, vol. 29, no. 3, 1997, pp. 193–204. Carlyle, Thomas. Past and Present. London: Chapman and Hall, 1843. Colón, Susan E. The Professional Ideal in the Victorian Novel: The Works of Disraeli, Trollope, Gaskell, and Eliot. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Conrad, Joseph. Almayer’s Folly. Edited by David Leon Higdon and Floyd Eugene Eddleman. Cambridge University Press, 1994. ———. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, vol. 1. Cambridge University Press, 1983. ———. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, vol. 2. Cambridge University Press, 1986. ———. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, vol. 3. Cambridge University Press, 1988. ———. Conrad’s Lord Jim: A Transcription of the Manuscript. Edited by J. H. Stape and Ernest W. Sullivan II. Rodophi Press, 2010. ———. Last Essays. Doubleday, Page & Company, 1926. ———. The Nigger of the “Narcissus.” Edited by Allan H. Simmons. Cambridge University Press, 2017. ———. Nostromo. Edited by Jacques Berthoud and Mara Kalnins. Oxford University Press, 2007. ———. Notes on Life and Letters. Edited by J. H. Stape. Cambridge University Press, 2004. ———. An Outcast of the Islands. Edited by Allan H. Simmons. Cambridge University Press, 2016. ———. A Personal Record. Edited by Zdzisław Najder and J. H. Stape. Cambridge University Press, 2008. ———. The Secret Agent. Edited by Bruce Harkness and S. W. Reid. Cambridge University Press, 1990. ———. The Shadow Line. Edited by J. H. Stape, Allan H. Simmons, and Owen Knowles. Cambridge University Press, 2013. ———. Typhoon and Other Tales. Edited by Cedric Watts. Oxford University Press, 2002. ———. Under Western Eyes. Edited by Roger Osborne, Paul Eggert, Keith Carabine, and Jeremy Hawthorn. Cambridge University Press, 2013. ———. Victory. Edited by J. H. Stape, Alexandre Fachard, and Richard Niland. Cambridge University Press, 2016. ———. Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether. Edited by Owen Knowles. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

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Cross, Gary S. A Quest for Time: The Reduction of Work in Britain and France, 1840–1940. University of California Press, 1989. Cummiskey, David. “Desert and Entitlement: A Rawlsian Consequentialist Account.” Analysis, vol. 47, no. 1, 1987, pp. 15–19. Dames, Nicholas. “Trollope and the Career: Vocational Trajectories and the Management of Ambition.” Victorian Studies, vol. 45, no. 2, 2003, pp. 247– 278. DiSanto, Michael John. Under Conrad’s Eyes: The Novel as Criticism. McGillQueen’s University Press, 2009. Dolin, Kieran. Fiction and the Law: Legal Discourse in Victorian and Modernist Literature. Cambridge University Press, 1999. Feinberg, Joel. Doing & Deserving: Essays in the Theory of Responsibility. Princeton University Press, 1970. Fludernik, Monika. Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy. Oxford University Press, 2019. Gaston, Paul L. “The Gospel of Work According to Joseph Conrad.” The Polish Review, vol. 20, no. 2–3, 1975, pp. 203–10. “gene, n.2.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2021, www.oed.com/ view/Entry/77473. Accessed 18 August 2021. “innate, adj.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, September 2021, www.oed. com/view/Entry/96244. Accessed 17 September 2021. Kinghorn, Kevin. The Nature of Desert Claims: Rethinking What It Means to Get One’s Due. Cambridge University Press, 2021. Marenco, Franco. “‘Toil’ vs. ‘Consciousness’ in Conrad’s Work.” The Ugo Mursia Memorial Lectures, edited by Mario Curreli, 1988, pp. 363–80. Menand, Louis. “Literature and Professionalism.” Discovering Modernism: T.S. Eliot and His Context. Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 97–189. Muirhead, Russell. Just Work. Harvard University Press, 2004. Mulligan, Thomas. Justice and the Meritocratic State. Najder, Zdzisław. Conrad in Perspective: Essays on Art and Fidelity. Cambridge University Press, 1997. Orr, Leonard. “Almayer’s Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896).” A Joseph Conrad Companion, edited by Leonard Orr and Ted Billy. Greenwood Publishing Group, 1999. Perkin, Harold. The Rise of Professional Society. Routledge, 1989. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press, 1999. Reed, John R. Victorian Conventions. Ohio University Press, 1975. Ruth, Jennifer. Novel Professions: Interested Disinterest and the Making of the Professional in the Victorian Novel. Ohio State University Press, 2006. Sadrin, Anny. Parentage and Inheritance in the Novels of Charles Dickens. Cambridge University Press, 1994.

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Sandel, Michael. The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2020. Shiach, Morag. Modernism, Labour and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, 1890–1930. Cambridge University Press, 2004. Stape, John. The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad. Random House, 2010. Svendsen, Lars. Work. Routledge, 2015. Trotter, David. Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society. Oxford University Press, 2001. Watts, Cedric. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: A Critical and Contextual Discussion. 1977. Rodopi, 2012. Weeks, Kathi. The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Duke University Press, 2011. Wexler, Joyce Piell. Who Paid for Modernism: Art, Money, and the Fiction of Conrad, Joyce, and Lawrence. University of Arkansas Press, 1997. Young, Michael. The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033. Penguin, 1958.

CHAPTER 2

“[T]he Rightful Due of a Successful Man”: Claiming Desert in Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands

In Self-Help (1859), the popular Victorian guide to the right values and conduct for success, Samuel Smiles sets out the defining traits of the self-made man who succeeds from scratch by sheer industry. He writes: “Practical industry, wisely and vigorously applied, always produces its due effects. It carries a man onward, brings out his individual character, and stimulates the action of others. All may not rise equally, yet each, on the whole, very much according to his deserts ” (267; my emphases). The book is filled with examples of great self-made men, for instance Dr Johnson, “who came up to London with a single guinea in his pocket,” and who, Smiles states, said that “All the complaints which are made of the world are unjust; I never knew a man of merit neglected; it was generally by his own fault that he failed of success” (269). On the one hand, Smiles’s characterization of the self-made man seems a fitting rebuke of both Willems and Almayer, the two late-Victorian protagonists of Conrad’s first two novels whose varying degrees of “industry” are far from “wisely and vigorously applied,” but who continue to believe in rewards unjustly withheld even after failing professional and moral standards of conduct (Willems) or values of competence (Almayer). On the other hand, both characters would strongly contest the claim that their deserts have been definitively reflected as “due effects” in what they have been rewarded. As this chapter will show, in Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands —the latter of which, although published after Almayer’s Folly, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 E. T. Y. Chan, Work, Inheritance, and Deserts in Joseph Conrad’s Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2584-9_2

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is set before the events in Almayer’s Folly, and which this chapter will begin with and mainly focus on—Conrad investigates how the two characters’ deep sense of desert despite events in the external world judging otherwise arises through ideologies of work and inheritance.

2.1

Willems’s Delusions of Desert

At the beginning of An Outcast of the Islands , when Willems is still employed as Hudig’s right-hand man, the narrative describes him as having “an exalted sense of his duty to himself and the world at large” (15). Willems feels he owes it to himself and to others to continue down the path of material and social success in his job, down “[t]he road to greatness [that] lay plainly before his eyes, straight and shining” (18). The word “duty” stands out as odd in these sentences. Duty means a moral obligation, which begs the question of why Willems feels he owes his success to himself and to others. A second time when this word is used is after Willems starts embezzling money from his employer Hudig to temporarily cover up gambling losses, when he thinks that “his duty was not to be found out” (18). When he is, he states that his mistake was merely an “[i]diotic indiscretion,” “[a] sudden gust of madness,” and that “[h]e did not recognise himself there” (21). The novel, however, shows that Willems is precisely to be recognized in that “indiscretion,” that his ability, efficiency, and discipline at work can equally be applied to the labour of embezzlement, that “duty,” a moral concept, has become as empty of moral direction as his work. Although the moral concept of duty is obviously used ironically by Conrad, from Willems’s point of view, the choice of the word “duty” aptly captures his feelings. To weave “the splendid web of his future” (18) is not only to his advantage, but also a moral obligation, a narcissistic calling, that he has to fulfil. He owes it to himself and the world because this is the way it should be: he has superior ability and talent—he imagines like those of a “genius” (19)—and this is applied to his work for Hudig, from which his well-deserved rewards flow, and from which they should continue to flow. After Willems is fired, he intends to go where “[h]e would find an opening… for his abilities—and juster men to deal with than old Hudig” (30), thinking: “How well he saw the greatness of his work and the immensity of that injustice which was his reward” (36). The moral— and even legal—terms “juster” and “injustice” contrast starkly with the context in which they appear, when Willems is fired after his crime. His

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strong sense of desert leads him ironically to see the crime not in the embezzlement itself, which “was a very small matter” that “[h]e would soon put… right again”—merely “a slight deterioration” (18), but that he is subsequently found out and loses his position and the future he has imagined for himself. The “injustice” lies in that the mere “indulgence” that he imagines “should be extended to the weaknesses of genius” (19) is not extended. His sense of desert is so resilient that even towards the end in the jungles of Sambir, after his abandonment by Lingard, he only momentarily imagines, “in an access of despair so profound that it seemed like the beginning of peace,” a change in his views, “plan[ning] the deliberate descent from his pedestal, the throwing away of his superiority, of all his hopes, of old ambitions, of the ungrateful civilization” (265), without finally enacting this change in mindset. Apart from his misguided beliefs in his racial superiority—in spite of him claiming that he “prided himself upon having no colour-prejudices and no racial antipathies”1 —there are other reasons behind Willems’s steadfast sense of desert, reasons that relate to the shifts in the ideas of work2 and inheritance that the Introduction explored. Here, I will first discuss one obvious socioeconomic archetype, that of the self-made man, on which the characterization of Willems draws and which appears in a parodied form in Willems, in order to show how, even though this archetype contributes to Willems’s sense of desert, it cannot fully account for it. Willems’s background as a “small boy” who “came east fourteen years ago” with nothing “which he dared call his own,” and his subsequent rise, is explained at the very beginning of the novel: On the day when, with many misgivings, he ran away from a Dutch EastIndiaman in Samarang roads, he had commenced that study of himself, of his own ways, of his own abilities, of those fate-compelling qualities of his

1 A few examples of existing criticism that has highlighted this aspect in the characterization of Willems include Gail Fraser’s “Empire of the Senses: Miscegenation in An Outcast of the Islands,” which sees such racism as part of “Conrad’s portrayal of miscegenation” (133–143); Andrew Francis’s “Competing for the Prizes of Commerce and Overlordship: An Outcast of the Islands ” in Culture and Commerce in Conrad’s Asian Fiction, which maps this onto social and commercial status; and Andrew Michael Roberts’s Conrad and Masculinity, which sees this as inextricably intertwined with masculinity and imperialism. 2 The depiction of work in Outcast has attracted relatively less attention in scholarship on the novel, as compared to other works such as The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and “Heart of Darkness.”

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which led him toward that lucrative position which he now filled. Being of a modest and diffident nature, his successes amazed, almost frightened him, and ended—as he got over the succeeding shocks of surprise—by making him ferociously conceited. He believed in his genius and in his knowledge of the world. Others should know of it also; for their own good and for his greater glory. All those friendly men who slapped him on the back and greeted him noisily should have the benefit of his example. For that he must talk. He talked to them conscientiously. In the afternoon he expounded his theory of success over the little tables …. (15)

Willems’s exhilaration at his own unbounded success through work takes us back to the figure of theself-made man in the Victorian period who “mark[ed] one horizon of liberal reflection, in a dream of perfect autonomy and self-determination” (Adams 161) as this ideal was seen to replace fixed patterns of birth and inheritance. Being able to make oneself by work is at first glance a positive, heartening ideal that we have continued, for good reason, to advocate. As Russell Muirhead writes in Just Work, there being a “personal fit” between one’s work and oneself “is not about natural identities but general human capacities and the claims they generate. The basic insight is that individuals deserve something simply by virtue of the capacities they bear. In particular, they deserve that these capacities be cultivated and facilitated rather than thwarted and suffocated by the roles society offers” (68). However, this ideal was concerning in the Victorian period not just because it destabilized the old hierarchies and identities of inherited station and inherited wealth, but also because, taken to its utmost, the “fantasy of perfect autonomy” seemed one “in which ambition might trample every other human commitment, anything that might constrain one’s power of self-fashioning” (Adams 213). On the surface, Conrad’s critique of Willems’s fantasy of unlimited self-making—expressed potently in Willems’s belief that “A man of his stamp could carry off anything, do anything, aspire to anything” (17), and underscored by what Robert Hampson has called his “rootlessness” (107)—speaks to the conservative warnings against the Promethean extremes of the ideal of the self-made man in the Victorian period. In a letter in 1894, while he was working on the novel, Conrad describes Willems as “an ignorant man” with an “unrestrained, fierce vanity,” “who has had some success but neither principles nor any other line of conduct than the satisfaction of his vanity” (Letters 1: 185). Willems, with his

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immensely inflated ego, is the downside to the fantasy of unbridled self-fashioning characterized. The bitingly satirical portrayal of Willems’s self-importance suggests that there should be limitations to self-fashioning in place such as those of conduct and character, tests of which Willems, as “eminently corruptible” (White 137), fails: he embezzles money, and when he loses his work position, he acts as if there is nothing else left to define himself with, as if he has no selfhood outside of work, and betrays his benefactor Lingard’s interests in Sambir just to be able to work again. This is in direct contrast to positive Victorian constructions of the selfmade man whose decency and restraint stem from within, not without, sculpted to address the fear that the new liberalism that the ideal of the self-made man represented would go unchecked. To name an example of this in Victorian literature, Halifax in Dinah Craik’s John Halifax, Gentleman (1856) is described by Phineas, his friend, as “indebted to no forefathers for a family history; the chronicle commenced with himself, and was altogether of his own making” (Adams 161). But alongside this narrative of “the steady, inexorable triumph of discipline over economic disadvantage and aristocratic contempt” comes the stability of the foundation of gentlemanly character, one that proves deeper than work identity: when asked “Why cannot thee keep in thy own rank?,” Halifax says that “honest tradesman” is “only my calling, not me. I—John Halifax,—am just the same, whether in the tan-yard or Dr. Jessup’s drawing room” (Adams 161). The novel therefore not only points to “the egalitarian ideal informing Halifax’s ascent,” but also “reshap[es] the ideal of the gentleman along middle-class lines, and oppos[es] Halifax’s virtues to those of mere rank and inherited privilege” (Adams 161). This happens again in Smiles’s Self-Help, where “Smiles takes great pains to align his ideal with that of the middle-class gentleman,” and which “concludes with a chapter entitled ‘Character—The True Gentleman’” (Adams 213). The ideal of the gentleman therefore had an important role alongside the ideal of the self-made man: “to the propertied classes,” it helped act “as a constraint of unbridled ambition”; and “to the working man,” “as a badge of status” (Adams 214). Lacking such foundation of gentlemanly character outside of work, Conrad’s representation of Willems’s moral hollowness parodies the Victorian vision of the stable self-made man who is crucially also a gentleman without an aristocratic background, and who based on this receives his just deserts. Without such a positive ideal, Conrad’s tale is deconstructive of the ideal of the self-made man rather than a conservative

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warning against the excesses of this ideal—and the focus of deconstruction rests on Willems’s delusions, where his success goes to his head3 and he imagines that he is a “genius” (15). Willems’s persistent deep sense of desert also twists the discourses of justice and morality, and their extrajudicial corollary of sacrifice (Schramm 31) that often appear in Victorian fiction. When Lingard meets with Willems for the final time to give him his reckoning, the latter says to him: I have always led a virtuous life; you know I have. You always praised me for my steadiness; you know you have. You know also I never stole—if that’s what you’re thinking of. I borrowed. You know how much I repaid. It was an error of judgment. But then consider my position there. I had been a little unlucky in my private affairs, and had debts. Could I let myself go under before the eyes of all those men who envied me? But that’s all over. It was an error of judgment. I’ve paid for it. An error of judgment. (211)

Here, Willems’s argument for deserving absolution is a self-serving construct shrouded in moral language; his death at the end is neither sacrificial nor redeeming, and restores no (meta)narrative moral order, preventing the nineteenth-century literary tropes of either just deserts or “sacrifice,” “unmerited and excessive suffering” of which the goal is to “move[] a reader to the crucial task of moral renewal” (Schramm 31), from being established. So far, then, we have seen sources for Willems’s sense of desert validated up to a limited extent, without adequately accounting for Willems’s megalomania. Work, the conduit to rewards, is a source, since Willems does work hard and does have the ability for his work. The related ideal of the self-made man is another source, again since, as Conrad emphasizes in the novel, Willems possesses the talents and ability that make him a good employee of Hudig’s business. However, Willems’s sense of desert in fact much surpasses that deriving from the Victorian ideal of the selfmade man: as we saw from Smiles’s views in Self-Help at the beginning of this chapter, this ideal would merely dictate that one gets what one 3 Linda Dryden has called these Willems’s “delusions of wealth and power” (145) and reads these as part of Conrad’s overall strategy of subverting tropes of romantic heroism in the novel: “Willems’ romantic notions of heroic status are revealed as self-delusions” (145), so that “for all the invocation of the motifs of romance and adventure, the story is decidedly unromantic” (168).

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deserves, and if one does not get certain rewards, then one never really deserved them in the first place. Neither work nor the ideal of the selfmade man fully explains why Willems’s desert is so fixed in place, and why it remains stronger than ever even after major setbacks of his own making. Although Willems’s megalomania is obviously a major character flaw, I wish to go beyond simply categorizing it as such and suggest that a piece of the puzzle that is his megalomania is the notion of inheritance. Willems sees his continued success as his, even before he has earned this, without which there would seem to be a perversion of justice, of rightful claim. It is necessary, almost like a law of nature, to “go on unchecked toward the brilliant goal of his ambition. Hudig’s partner!” (19). These rewards are akin to a future inheritance that he must come into, already his even before they have come into his possession. Conrad’s critique focuses on Willems’s supreme confidence that he is, and will continue to be, “on the winning side,” having definitively “won” “the game of life” (16), that he has, in essence, overcome chance and contingency, and that his further rise is both inevitable and a full reflection of who he really is, representing his true deserts. In other words, this is the staunch belief that deserts are both earned and already fixed: that they are earned through work, but also that they comprise his fixed, unwavering right, no matter what happens—again before he has fully attained them. What is created is a tyranny of hermeneutics, because Willems makes up desert as belonging definitively to him, inscribing his desires freely into it. Willems makes use of the fuzzy boundaries between what Muirhead in Just Work points to as “natural identities” and “capacities” (68).4 In theory, one cannot know what one’s capacities are, cannot claim them as possessions, until they have been realized in the external world. But if one, like Willems, becomes fixated on the idea of a certain “natural identity” with purported native talents and ability, then one could try to lay claim to deserts as what one is owed due to these, even when the external environment does not consistently agree with such an assessment. In Willems’s case, the realization of his capacities in the form of his initial success at Hudig’s firm becomes the way in which he claims for himself

4 Muirhead’s use of “capacities” varies from referring to abilities to referring to what can be seen as fundamental human rights, “establish[ing] a minimal threshold” for “humanness” (69). Here I refer to the word in the former sense.

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the “natural identit[y]” (Muirhead 68) of a “genius” (Outcast 15) who can assert supreme desert. The term “natural identities” (Muirhead 68) and its inextricable link to the significance of birth returns us to the two types of inheritances that I categorized in the Introduction: the inheritance of riches and social station on the one hand, and of native talent on the other. Smiles outlines these inheritances in Self-Help when he writes: “There is really no more personal merit attaching to the possession of superior intellectual powers than there is in the succession to a large estate. How are those powers used—how is that estate employed?” (326). Desert is to be derived from working these two types of pre-existing inherited conditions, from diligent “industry” and effort instead of from these inheritances themselves. That is why, to draw on another example from Victorian fiction, needing to prove absolute self-making from scratch and his status as a fully selfmade man, Bounderby in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times (1854) needs to emphasize that he has somehow entirely earned, not inherited, his success, and why the exposé of him as a fraud consists in revealing that he has been claiming mendaciously to have suffered a severely deprived childhood, instead of the secure environment his mother raised him in. But Smiles’s statement does not take enough account of the importance—indeed, the decisiveness—of these inherited conditions in determining success or failure, of how inheritance greatly matters. The self-made man in the Victorian period bills himself on not relying on inheritance, on starting from zero—and Willems does not start from zero. So Conrad reiterates Willems’s inherent talent for his line of work of trade, writing that although “The boy was hopelessly at variance with the spirit of the sea,” “[a]s he grew older his trading instincts developed themselves astonishingly” (23; my emphasis). And he points out the crucial factor of Willems unknowingly being Hudig’s son-in-law in creating Willems’s initial success. Hudig, it turns out, had in fact been giving Willems preferential treatment because Willems had, without knowing her true identity, married Hudig’s half-Malay daughter, making his position as Hudig’s confidential clerk also a type of familial inheritance. The ostensible self-made man who succeeds through sheer ability and grit, then, is in fact at least partially the wife-made man. So Lingard expresses incredulity at Willems’s naiveté—a naiveté that bolstered Willems’s image of himself as “Willems the clever, Willems the successful” (34): “did you really think that Hudig was marrying you off and giving you a house and

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I don’t know what, out of love for you?” (36)—or even out of love purely for Willems’s abilities? However, even after Willems finds this out, he does not modify what he thinks he is owed, because he in fact does not think his desert is merely earned, due to him as a fully self-made man. Rather, such desert of greatness has become part and parcel of his identity. It is his inheritance, which he owns even before he has fully earned it. Instead, Willems’s so-called “greatness” that he was “always speaking about” (32) evaporates in one go with the loss of his position with Hudig, because there is little in Willems to define him apart from his work position. Conrad adds to this another nail in the coffin: Almayer’s Folly, published before but chronologically set after the events in Outcast, reveals how “[t]he old man’s [Lingard’s] banker, Hudig of Macassar, failed, and with this went the whole available capital” (21). Even without having been fired, therefore, Willems would have lost his cherished position at Hudig’s firm. To take a step back at this point, our analysis has allowed us to see that in Willems’s portrayal, work, inheritance, and desert operate circularly, being different signifiers of and justifications for material rewards. Willems applies his native talents to his work. This work and his native talents in his view jointly create desert. And this desert is his rightful inheritance, already his whether or not external rewards actually keep coming. The interrelationships between these concepts have additional historical roots than those discussed so far. Earlier, I called Willems’s sense of “duty” to himself a narcissistic calling. And indeed there seem to be undertones of the Protestant work ethic in Conrad’s depiction of Willems, of what Max Weber would, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904–05) published in German several years later, describe as the “duty in a calling” (108), which is also one’s duty towards God. Although there is no direct evidence that Conrad ever read Weber’s works, Weber’s thought, as Michael Levenson has pointed out, seems to show mutual affinity with Conrad’s under “the same historical pressures” (268). In fact, although Outcast was published before The Protestant Ethic, the links between how the Protestant work ethic arose throughout the centuries before the publication of his book, and the later meritocratic ethos, can help further account for Willems’s sense of desert. In The Tyranny of Merit, Michael Sandel describes how the Protestant work ethic became the basis for modern meritocratic ideals. Originally, he explains, “Luther’s stringent doctrine of grace” denied “salvation by good works and left no room for human freedom or self-making” (39). One is part of the elect

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or one is not; there is nothing one can do to change this status. This “resolutely anti-meritocratic” (Sandel 39) doctrine is what we, in the context of our discussion of Willems, can call a doctrine of inheritance. But the wealth that was originally taken to be the fixed sign of being one of the elect came to be seen as being able to be earned. The result was that “the Calvinist… himself creates his own salvation, or, as would be more correct, the conviction of it” (Weber 69).5 The harder one works at one’s calling, the greater one’s material rewards, which become an indication of one’s status of being one of the elect. Work and inheritance become two inextricable paths to the ultimate reward, salvation, which is one’s desert for being one of the elect and working hard at an industrious, productive life. Being combines with earning, instead of contrasting with it. Sandel outlines how this eventually evolved into our current “fiercely meritocratic work ethic” (39), one that emphasizes earning over the role of inheritance: the justification of rewards obtained through work is that “[m]y affluence is my due” (59), my moral desert, because I have earned it, not inherited it. Conrad’s depiction, on the other hand, sculpts a sense of desert in Willems that retains elements of both inheriting and earning, as more the way Weber described the Protestant work ethic. Willems works towards further success, but he is also already great, one of the elect, with what Weber would describe as “an absolute duty to consider oneself chosen” (66). He deserves continued future rewards no matter what—these belong to him even before he has fully attained them. This greatness, however, is no longer tightly linked to a person’s moral standing as within the Protestant model. A man who can “aspire to anything” (Outcast 17) is also a man of “no scruples” (Outcast 16), as Willems himself acknowledges. Willems’s conviction that he is one of the elect is why he cannot accept any of the new signs that point to a future other than that of success, including his new status of idleness. Willems’s insistence on seeing work as the determining factor for coming into his due rewards, his rightful inheritance, arises due to a misguided work ethic that is made to rule his life, and results in his failure to remake his idleness in Sambir into creative, instead of destructive, self-exploration, or even to see it as a transitional phase. As Hampson has written, Willems is unable to adapt to his new

5 Quoted in Sandel 40.

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environment, marred by “his desperate assertion … of an originary identity” (109). Willems is asked by Lingard to “help Almayer in his trading” “just to kill time till I come back for you. Only six weeks or so” (Outcast 43). This turns into three months, with Willems finding it impossible to bear “the deadly dullness of his life” (58) in Sambir after his “attempts to help [Almayer] in his trading” are “discouraged” by Almayer (57).6 Willems “missed the commercial activity of that existence which seemed to him far off, irreparably lost, buried out of sight under the ruins of his past success—now gone from him beyond the possibility of redemption” (58). If here in Sambir, as Andrea White has written, “in the hiatus created by his own moral vacuousness, Willems confronts the wilderness, within and without,” setting the first example of later instances in Conrad’s oeuvre of “the white adventurer [as]… susceptible to the wilderness” (138), this is also Willems’s confrontation with the loss of work, and with unemployed idleness. Doing nothing in the jungles of Sambir—seen by him as the opposite to the commercial hub of Macassar he worked in—is a bane to him, and instead of being leisure, or a mere temporary break, it is for him absolute torture: The man who, during long years, became accustomed to think of himself as indispensable to others, felt a bitter and savage rage at the cruel consciousness of his superfluity, of his uselessness; at the cold hostility visible in every look of the only white man in this barbarous corner of the world. He gnashed his teeth when he thought of the wasted days, of the life thrown away in the unwilling company of that peevish and suspicious fool. He heard the reproach of his idleness in the murmurs of the river, in the unceasing whisper of the great forests. Round him everything stirred, moved, swept by in a rush; the earth under his feet and the heavens above his head. The very savages around him strove, struggled, fought, worked— if only to prolong a miserable existence; but they lived, they lived! And it was only himself that seemed to be left outside the scheme of creation in a hopeless immobility filled with tormenting anger and with ever-stinging regret. (58; my emphases)

6 In so doing, Almayer could in some way be seen to cause his own demise: Willems’s subsequent betrayal of Lingard robs Almayer of work, leading to his deterioration, loss of his daughter Nina, and death. The trope of just deserts, and not merely of the vagaries of fortune, then applies even to Almayer as Almayer’s actions loop back to punish him.

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Morag Shiach notes that “the idea of ‘unemployment’ as a particular mode of social being ‘was first elaborated and analysed in the 1890s’” (4).7 For Willems, unemployment indicates a loss, a lack, a void, that he is desperate to fill. Willems becomes a “vagrant” after a career full of industry, and the deterioration in his physical appearance, as well as his “atavistic behaviour” (Schwarz, Conrad 7–8),8 matches this loss of self after his loss of work identity. In the face of his own stagnancy and unproductivity, Aïssa offers movement and mobility, and Willems’s relationship with her becomes an ironic and regressive depiction of the medieval Christian view as applied to the organization of clerics’ “strict routine of labour” that “free time was considered to expose one to attack by the devil in the form of temptation by evil thoughts, unruly desires, and sinful actions” (Fludernik 406–07). Productive labour being impossible, Willems’s energies are funnelled into sexual productivity instead, “with the brusque stirring of sleeping sensations awakening suddenly to the rush of new hopes, new fears, new desires—and to the flight of one’s old self” (Outcast 61). Through this, Willems “awakens” into an all-consuming obsession, so that “while she was near there was nothing in the whole world—for that idle man—but her look and her smile” (67; my emphasis). However, Aïssa, initially an outlet for his pent-up frustration and energies, subsequently becomes to him the emblem of non-productive idleness and wasting, the antithesis of productive work—that all-important marker of grace within the Protestant ethic—which Willems imagines the most important thing in his life. So Willems’s dreams swerve deliberately away from Aïssa’s: “She remembered his words, his eyes, his trembling lips, his outstretched hands…. He remembered the quaysides and the warehouses; the excitement of a life in a whirl of silver coins; the glorious uncertainty of a money hunt; his numerous successes, the lost possibilities of wealth and consequent glory” (263). She thus becomes someone whom he wishes to desperately rid himself of in order to claim his erstwhile status and its rewards. Defending himself in his final standoff with Lingard, in an episode that can be read as a figurative courtroom scene, Willems insists that “[t]he evil was not in me” (217), blaming instead Aïssa: “of all my life, of all my

7 Shiach is here quoting from Krashan Kumar’s “From Work to Employment and Unemployment: the English Experience.” 8 Quoted in Orr 37.

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past, of all my future, of my intelligence, of my work, there is nothing left but she, the cause of my ruin, and you whom I have mortally offended” (217). Andrew Mozina has discussed the scapegoat theme in Conrad’s works, pointing out that the scapegoat “is both a member of the community and an outcast, a remedy to ingest and a poison to expel,” and “functions as a marker or drawer of boundaries, a principle of opposition” (4). Here, the scapegoat Aïssa straddles several communities to which she is both an insider and an outsider. She is “half Arab, half-Malay” (Outcast 215), with her mixed descent representing the warring factions within Sambir. But by aligning herself with Willems, she also imagines herself to be “like white women” (148). Her simultaneous membership of and marginal position within communities renders her dangerous, threatening the boundaries around these communities, so that Willems, after calling Aïssa a “mongrel” (215), feels the need to assert the stability of his own identity: “I am white! All white!,” “proclaiming desperately under the frown of thickening clouds the fact of his pure and superior descent” (215). Such scapegoating of Aïssa and Aïssa’s subsequent sacrifice again do not result in the kind of literary resolution that leads to moral renewal. However, upon Willems’s death, Aïssa’s marginalization is rendered complete and harmless instead of potentially endangering, allowing for the stability of the new order of Sambir in which Lingard is no longer King. Aïssa’s mixed heritage does not only threaten the sense of racial superiority that Willems feels, it also threatens the great expectations that Willems feels he should come into by dint of his talents and imagined superiority in his past line of work. However, the depiction of Aïssa does not simplistically draw on the trope of the destructive female straddling social boundaries, but also helps to reveal the hollowness behind Willems’s work ethic, and his empty ideals. Willems’s mapping of idleness onto the figure of the exotic female is satirized as part of the novel’s disparagement of Willems’s reductively simplistic ideas about work and productivity. And Aïssa is allowed to be an advocate, for at least a short while, to the “judge” Lingard. As Heliéna Krenn points out, she does not only “poin[t] out the oppression her people suffer from the Europeans, she also shows up the injustice done to women. She does so by the example of her own life, which she uses to criticize the double standards by which men judge” (65). Instead of coming into what he sees as his desert, Willems is meted out the negative desert of exile by Lingard who, as a self-appointed judge in

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his final standoff with Willems, uses language that unmakes all the inheritances that have made Willems. Lingard disowns Willems as the result of his care, declaring him “my shame” (218), and sentences him to permanent exile in the jungles of Sambir, where “Nobody will be able to throw any of your villainies in my teeth; nobody will be able to point at you and say, ‘Here goes a scoundrel of Lingard’s up-bringing.’ You are buried here” (214). He also hints at as yet unknown qualities inside Willems that could erupt to the surface at any moment: “Who could suspect, who could guess, who could imagine what’s in you? I couldn’t! You are my mistake…. If I let you out you would go amongst unsuspecting men, and lie, and steal, and cheat for a little money or for some woman” (220). This unmaking, this winding back of the self-made man, becomes a stripping away that includes moral condemnation (Willems has “no heart” [219]), deracination (“You are neither white nor brown. You have no colour as you have no heart” [219]), and ultimately, even disembodiment: “You are not a human being that may be destroyed or forgiven. You are a bitter thought, a something without a body and that must be hidden” (218). This sentence, the pronouncement of negative desert, is handed down in a scene reminiscent of the courtroom, creating a hybrid judicial/extrajudicial setting. This is in contrast to the courtroom scene in the later Lord Jim, based, as Dale Barleben has written, on “the common law tradition of precedent,” which “creates an archive that both delineates and justifies violence against individuals at the hands of the law” (73), where “the law records and catalogues each confession, first, in trial transcripts, as evidence of the accused’s wrongdoings and, second, as legal precedent, by which to try forthcoming similar cases” (74), and where Jim is “vilified by the common law’s insistence that there is, in fact, a discernible and complete truth, and that this truth is always plain and always simple” (76). The scene in Outcast instead takes place out in the open in the remote jungles of Sambir with no one but Aïssa as spectator, who does not understand the language and is reduced to interpreting what is going on through other means. It also leans more towards the application of legal principles of equity, which, together with mercy, is distinct from common law (with equity remaining its own body of law even though the courts of common law and equity were combined in the Judicature Act in 1873) in that it “call[s] for attention to the particular rather than the general,” and “ask[s] for mitigating factors to be taken into account in deviating from proportional punishment or ‘just deserts’” (Schramm 29). Lingard, though like a judge pronouncing his ruling, arrives at his

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verdict based on his personal relationship with Willems, whom he declares “my mistake” (218). However, Willems’s appeal to the discretionary in his case, to the personal circumstances that led to his digressions, does not lead to mitigation, but to even greater severity in Lingard’s judgement—a possibility posited as early as by Aristotle, who “felt that the equitable correction of a general principle could potentially work towards the exacerbation of punishment if required by the circumstances of a given case” (Schramm 29). Indeed, for Lingard, his personal connection with Willems warrants increased severity: he announces to Willems that “No promise of yours is any good to me. I am going to take your conduct into my own hands. Pay attention to what I am going to say. You are my prisoner” (218). The other type of appeal to discretion, mercy, “always works to ameliorate the severity of a penalty” (Schramm 29), but Willems is explicitly not shown any. Lingard tells Aïssa that he spares Willems’s life “not in mercy but in punishment” (202). And after Lingard leaves, Willems thinks: “There was no mercy under Heaven. He did not want any” (266). The mercilessness of the “justice” meted out is described in Lingard’s leaving figure, which assumes biblical proportions, appearing to Willems “as very terrible, heartless and astonishing, with its unnatural appearance of running over the water in an attitude of languid repose” (223). By the end of the novel, the depiction of Willems’s sense of desert has in effect become a parody of the Victorian literary trope of well-earned just deserts, of great expectations that will surely come. At the same time, Willems is also a confirmation of this literary trope: believing blindly and fixedly in just deserts, he in fact gets the downfall, the negative desert, that is his moral due. As we will see in the next section, something very similar happens to the title character of Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly, set subsequent to the events in Outcast —with Almayer’s sense of desert, or his “folly,” again derived from both ideals of inheritance and work, if to differing degrees from their contribution to Willems’s sense of desert.

2.2

Almayer’s Idylls of Idleness

In A Personal Record (1912), Conrad describes his encounter with the man on whom Almayer would be based. This Olmeijer possessed “incredible assumptions, which rendered his logic impenetrable to any reasonable person” (75). In an imagined dialogue with him, Conrad says: “You were

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always an unlucky man, Almayer. Nothing was ever quite worthy of you. What made you so real to me was that you held this lofty theory with some force of conviction and with admirable consistency” (84). Such unyieldingness, which we have also observed in Willems, has been the subject of prior critical discussion. It has, for instance, been tied to the notion of race: as Harry Sewlall has written, Almayer’s and Willems’s downfalls “result from their inflexible notions of who they are. They see themselves as Europeans first and as human beings after” (89). Hampson has viewed Almayer’s rigidity as arising out of his “fetishising of originary identity,” as his stubborn “pride in racial origins” (105). Tod G. Willy has argued that Almayer’s refusal to merge himself with the local environment and society of Sambir, and his belief that he is racially and culturally superior, lead to his fall into “poverty, disrepute, and embitterment” (3). A. James M. Johnson has highlighted the “images of imprisonment and rigidity with which Conrad depicts Almayer’s dysfunction—his separation from life” (72), and quotes the novel when Nina observes “for the first time with a slight gasp of fear the unnatural rigidity of his features” (73). In this section, I outline how, like for Willems, Almayer’s unwavering sense of desert marks his demise, and discuss how again, the lesser explored ideals of inheritance and of work help shape this sense of desert. Although the attraction of the aristocratic ideal of idle wealth overwhelms Almayer’s life, in representing Almayer, Conrad is not just, like so many of his nineteenth-century forerunners, criticizing this aristocratic ideal by depicting the “allure” of the “paragons of a life of enervated ease,” which persisted throughout the nineteenth century (Adams 213), as an untenable and bygone dream. Rather, Almayer’s folly also comprises his injudicious assertion of desert arising from ideals of inheritance and work, constructed using similar moral language as Willems’s. At first glance, Almayer’s sense of desert seems to have little to do with work, just as Willems’s sense of desert prior to our discussion in the last section seemed to have little to do with inheritance. Almayer actively chooses to marry Lingard’s adopted Malay daughter in order to inherit Lingard’s riches, feeling “mad exultation at the thought of that fortune thrown into his hands” (Folly 11) as he does so. The daughter of a wealthier and more powerful man, in this case Lingard and in Willems’s case Hudig, is the conduit for Almayer’s imagined inheritance, creating a dependency on women that is used by Conrad to subvert both men’s overarching claims of desert. Almayer subsequently slips into the expectant position of Lingard’s son-in-law. The workings of family inheritance

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are thus reconstructed, as part what Daniel R. Schwarz has called “a search for the missing family” that takes in both Almayer and Willems the form of seeing in Lingard the father figure they lack (Rereading Conrad 125). Almayer’s sense of desert therefore derives more directly from the traditional sense of familial inheritance—although again, like for Willems, Almayer’s misguided sense of racial superiority as “the self-enclosed, racist European” (Johnson 77), his “folly of racism” (Henthorne 172), features prominently, resulting in his demise (Watts 52)9 ; and again, like Willems, he thinks he is inherently great: looking at his daughter Nina he sees “all the latent greatness of his nature in which he honestly believed” (144). Almayer’s dreams along the lines of the aristocratic rather than meritocratic ideal take the shape of imagining “the paradise of Europe… awaiting the future Eastern millionaire” (49), his riches symbolized by “the big mansion in Amsterdam, that earthly paradise of his dreams, where, made king amongst men by old Lingard’s money, he would pass the evening of his days in inexpressible splendour” (10). The logic of inheritance is extended to Nina, who becomes ostensibly the ultimate goal for Almayer’s expected wealth, and who is inscribed with his dreams of future riches and exalted position, in an imagined lineage flowing from Lingard, Almayer’s “father,” to Nina. Almayer, “while he looked into her future,” sees “pictures of events brilliant, happy, inexpressibly glorious, that would make up her life” (Outcast 253). Nina, Almayer envisions, “would be the richest woman in the East—in the world even,” and not his Malay wife who “sit[s] all day amongst her women in stupefied idleness” (Folly 22). The importance Almayer puts on familial inheritance takes the extreme form of his deification of Nina, so that he becomes “like a devout and mystic worshipper, adoring, transported and mute; burning incense before a shrine, a diaphanous shrine of a child-idol with closed eyes; before a pure and vaporous shrine of a small god” (Outcast 253). The irony, a narrative stroke used to further subvert Almayer’s sense of desert, is that the riches end up flowing the other way—they come from the dowry Dain pays for Nina, which Almayer does not benefit from. Here, Nina, under additional objectification, is, ironically, literally worth a fortune: Dain pays for her, to her mother, “a price worthy of a great prince,” so that he can claim her as “his property,” and

9 Pointed out in Orr 42.

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assert his “right to be in Sambir” (Folly 64) to collect her. Dain, then, comes to represent to Nina “the pledge of a bright and splendid future” (Folly 54) that she imagines she inherits through her marriage to him—in language uncannily similar to that which Almayer uses to dream of future greatness—instead of as Almayer’s daughter. Conrad, through his depictions of Nina and Mrs Almayer, uses the figure of the female to weaken Almayer’s claims to well-deserved riches, in effect bolstering the status of female characters without ultimately departing from the formula of female dependence on the male.10 Almayer’s position, however, is not only one of inheritance, but also of work, both of these necessary in the securing of his fortune. So Almayer thinks that “[h]e had sold himself to Lingard for these things—married the Malay girl of his adoption for the reward of these things and of the great wealth that must necessarily follow upon conscientious book-keeping ” (Outcast 237; my emphases).11 Work is still the necessary complement to inheritance, so much so that Almayer speaks of them in one breath, of them both as creating the path towards his well-deserved riches. Thus the odd phenomenon is established where Almayer works to earn his future inheritance—odd because inheritance is normally acquired automatically. But not in Almayer’s case. To be worked toward, inheritance then becomes anticipated, rendered in the future tense, as expressed when Almayer thinks: “He hated all this; he begrudged every day—every minute… of his life that went in payment of his future.… And yet all this was very precious to him. It was the present sign of a splendid future” (Outcast 232; my emphases). The final sentence resonates with Weber’s arguments in The Protestant Ethic, which, although published a few years after Almayer’s Folly, precisely pointed out that wealth came to be seen, as discussed earlier‚ as the present sign to grace, to the state of election, to future salvation.

10 As Heliéna Krenn has also written, “There is an obvious incongruity between the subordinate roles assigned to these women in the plan of the author and the determination with which they pursue their interests, and by which in consequence they are foils to the protagonists” (xvii). 11 This can be seen as another example of commercialism pervading characters’ lives at all levels, as Francis has argued in Culture and Commerce in Conrad’s Asian Fiction. In addition, as Dryden has written, “Almayer’s existence in Sambir belies the popular imperial romance message that the East is a place where utopian idylls can be created by white Protestant labour” (56).

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But of course Almayer’s dreams are the opposite to what the Protestant work ethic demands: an industrious life should be the goal, not idle riches, which are Almayer’s “unheroic” (White 122) ends. This explains Almayer’s jealousy of Willems, who, as Lingard’s protégé-son, might inherit a share of Lingard’s riches—and this jealousy in effect causes both his and Willems’s downfalls, because it leads him to deprive Willems of work while Willems is in Sambir. In addition, Almayer is not as able at his work as Willems is, nor does he revel in work like Willems does: Almayer describes his duties as “the burden of work” (Folly 77), and he does not possess Willems’s natural instincts for trade. Almayer’s “conscientious book-keeping” (Outcast 237) is of little use in Sambir’s unstructured environment: “He found out very soon that trade in Sambir meant something entirely different…. He found no successful magic in the blank pages of his ledgers; and gradually he lost his old point of view in the saner appreciation of his situation” (Outcast 237–38). This “saner appreciation,” however, does not include a reappraisal of his sense of desert, which Almayer uses moral language to assert. In Outcast, Almayer complains to Lingard about bringing Willems into Sambir, saying: “Your duty was to myself first. I married that girl because you promised to make my fortune” (132). He accuses Lingard of “hav[ing] no morality” (132)—despite Lingard’s act being one of assisting another human being in dire straits, someone he has taken under his wing since his childhood. Like Willems, Almayer strongly believes that thwarting his expectations is nothing less than immoral. When, because of Lingard’s loss of monopoly over his secret river passage, the riches Almayer imagines for himself become even more impossible and unattainable, Almayer still refuses to modify his notion of desert. If anything, it strengthens his conviction in his desert of riches, in a forceful and illogical process of hermeneutics, the tyranny of hermeneutics I referred to earlier when discussing Willems’s case. His wealth will come in the form of “the mountain of gold” he believes exists further inland, which he searches for “[g]uided by the scraps of information contained in old Lingard’s pocketbook” as Lingard disappears, assuring him that “the world was his” (Folly 48) still. The fortune Almayer is supposed to inherit gradually becomes the “gold he meant to secure yet, through his own honest exertions, for himself and Nina” (Folly 5; my emphases), again deferred to the future, and again through more work. At the end of Outcast, in a passage that would come to echo Razumov’s sense of moral outrage in Under Western Eyes at having his

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dreams of a stable future destroyed by Haldin’s confession, which will be discussed in Chapter 6, Almayer complains about Willems to “a chance visitor from Europe” (Outcast 282). He asks “why such damned things” as Willems “are ever born,” and exclaims: Here I am! Done harm to nobody, lived an honest life… and a scoundrel like that is born in Rotterdam or some such place at the other end of the world somewhere, … and ruins me—and my Nina; he ruined me, I tell you…. Where’s the sense of all this? Where’s your providence? Where’s the good for anybody in all this? The world’s a swindle! A swindle! Why should I suffer? What have I done to be treated so? (279)

Feeling that he has been swindled out of his deserts, the setbacks that continue to stack up in Almayer’s Folly are regarded by Almayer as an injustice to the bitter end, when he dies a lonely death. Sacrifice here, yet again, does not confer moral renewal or redemption, in contrast to the genres of romance and tragedy that “employ a rhetoric of sacrifice to surpass the boundaries imposed by justice” (Kertzer 18–19),12 the conventions of which Conrad draws on, but subverts. As Ian Watt has pointed out, this aligns Conrad’s perspective in Almayer’s Folly more with “the determinist perspectives which dominated the Naturalist novel,” rather than the conventions of popular romance on which parts of the novel’s narrative seem superficially to be based (50–51). From another angle, however, we could argue that moral order is to some extent reimposed—that just deserts are served, and Almayer’s “folly” of staunchly believing in a desert that never comes and was never meant to be is rebuked.

2.3

Lingard’s Lost Legacy

Lingard, the main character who brings Willems and Almayer together, and who is the father figure to both, has remained undiscussed as a focus of his own. In this brief section, I will show how Lingard provides an alternative, and more ambiguous, characterization of the three key concepts of work, inheritance, and desert. Lingard, as White has pointed out, cuts a much more admirable and heroic figure than his two protégés, but even he has his “heroism seriously qualified,” as Conrad makes clear “[t]he 12 Quoted in Schramm 26.

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misguidedness of Lingard’s idealism” (142). Here, I wish to probe this misguidedness further through the lenses of the three key concepts, to see if these might further account for his stubborn idealism. Lingard’s sense of identity and self-confidence is based on the secret river passage to Sambir that he has discovered, which allows him monopoly over the trade there and has made him rich and successful. “[A]mazed and awed by his fate that seemed to his ill informed mind the most wondrous known in the annals of men” (Outcast 159), this definitively proves that what he dictates must be correct: “His experience appeared to him immense and conclusive, teaching him the lesson of the simplicity of life. In life— as in seamanship—there were only two ways of doing a thing: the right way and the wrong way” (Outcast 159). Unlike Willems and Almayer, he knows fully that his success has been of a combination of luck’s and his own making. However, although his sustained success seems to paint him as less delusional, Lingard believes that such success demonstrates his inherent ownership of both merit and of luck—the latter usually regarded as a fickle instead of a fixed quality. He thinks: “It being manifest that he was wise and lucky—otherwise how could he have been as successful in life as he had been?—he had an inclination to set right the lives of other people” (159; my emphases). Applying these fixed qualities of wisdom and luck to work will come with assured success, seen by him, like his two protégés do, as a form of desert.13 This view is as absolutist as Willems’s conviction that he is definitively on the “winning side” (Outcast 16) of life. Expressed in the language of the Protestant ethic, the signs of grace—material wealth and success, attained through the vehicle of one’s calling—prove to Lingard that he is part of the elect. Such circularity of reasoning—material success demonstrates innate merit and luck, which create rightful deserts, which means one’s material success is one’s rightful inheritance, and should continue to be owned and accrued indefinitely—characterizes Lingard’s life in the two novels. The secret river passage, for instance, makes Lingard, and therefore, in a circle of hermeneutics, it is his, his to work and rule over, and his just deserts: “His river! By it he was not only rich—he was interesting. This secret of his which made him different to the other traders of those seas gave intimate satisfaction to that desire for singularity which he shared 13 Andrew Francis has described how Lingard continuously “attempt[s] to underwrite the contingency of life” (56) in his “guarantees, assurances, and undertakings” to others (56).

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with the rest of mankind, without being aware of its presence within his breast” (161). This also explains why Lingard sees himself as the only rightful king of Sambir: “dream[ing] of Arcadian happiness for that little corner of the world which he loved to think all his own,” he has a “deepseated and immovable conviction that only he—he, Lingard—knew what was good for them” (160). The figures of the self-made man, the rightful and singular heir to his position, the judge, and the colonizer overlap in Lingard, all based on the concrete evidence of his past overwhelming success. Therefore, when Willems wrongs him and destroys his monopoly over the river, Lingard considers it “his own sacred duty” (186) to “execute the verdict of justice. Justice only! Nothing was further from his thoughts than such an useless thing as revenge. Justice only. It was his duty that justice should be done—and by his own hand” (178)—“complete justice” (202). Prior to this, Lingard never needed to question himself, the signs of his success guaranteeing to himself the righteousness of his judgements. The repetitive emphasis on “justice” in the passages just quoted constructs the moral language Lingard uses to justify punishing a personal wrong done to him, reminding us of the moral language both his protégés use to justify their desert. “[E]quat[ing] himself with Law and Justice” (Schwarz, Conrad 7), Lingard cannot see that his punishment is revenge, not just unassailable “justice.” Because Lingard regards Willems as having stripped him of what he sees as his rightful desert, it exposes a moral blind spot that Lingard has possessed for a long time: a man does not live for years beyond the pale of civilized laws without evolving for himself some queer notions of justice. Nobody of those he knew had ever cared to point out to him the errors of his conceptions. It was not worth anybody’s while to run counter to Lingard’s ideas of the fitness of things… ; in those nooks which he filled, unresisted and masterful, with the echoes of his noisy presence. There is not much use in arguing with a man who boasts of never having regretted a single action of his life, whose answer to a mild criticism is a good-natured shout— “You know nothing about it. I would do it again. Yes, sir!” His associates and his acquaintances accepted him, his opinions, his actions like things preordained and unchangeable; looked upon his many-sided manifestations with passive wonder not unmixed with that admiration which is only the rightful due of a successful man. (187; my emphasis)

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The phrase “the rightful due of a successful man” summarizes Lingard’s skewed notions of justice, of just deserts, on the basis of his material success. Although Lingard here seems to be an example of the Nietzschean yes-sayer—Schwarz has called him “[t]he first of the apparent übermenschen that fascinated Conrad” (Conrad 7)—who endlessly affirms his life and regrets nothing, he is also a yes-sayer because the signs of material success have made him convinced that he is one of the elect. This is why Lingard is so certain that he will succeed yet again and find his next pot of gold in the mountains. The unyieldingness of the certainty of success works according to the logic of a compulsory, rightful inheritance that would not only be a moral outrage to take away, but that indeed cannot be taken away, that has been proven to be part of who he innately is (so that, surely, another form of success will soon come after this loss). Lingard’s absolutism does not leave any room for chance, contingency, and uncertainty, ironically in spite of Lingard’s own references to his luck, which, as mentioned, becomes seen as a fixed, stable, and wholly owned quality.

2.4

Conclusion

Willems, Almayer, and Lingard feel that they are deserving of, that they own, better futures, better outcomes, and happier endings due to them as part of the meritorious elect. In the two early novels covered in this chapter, Conrad inclines more towards presenting this as self-centred and delusional, as a fatal disregard of the fickleness of contingency in distributing rewards. In later novels, such as Lord Jim, as we will see in the next chapter, the notion of whether a character really deserves better or worse than is dished out by fate becomes much more nebulous, with the sharp satire of the characters’ beliefs in just deserts in Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands turning into a more complex probing of what constitutes desert.

Works Cited Adams, James Eli. A History of Victorian Literature. Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. Barleben, Dale. Staging the Trials of Modernism: Testimony and the British Modern Literary Consciousness. University of Toronto Press, 2017. Conrad, Joseph. Almayer’s Folly. Edited by David Leon Higdon and Floyd Eugene Eddleman. Cambridge University Press, 1994.

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———. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, vol. 1. Cambridge University Press, 1983. ———. An Outcast of the Islands. Edited by Allan H. Simmons. Cambridge University Press, 2016. Dryden, Linda. Joseph Conrad and the Imperial Romance. Macmillan, 2000. Fludernik, Monika. Metaphors of Confinement: The Prison in Fact, Fiction, and Fantasy. Oxford University Press, 2019. Francis, Andrew. Culture and Commerce in Conrad’s Asian Fiction. Cambridge University Press, 2015. Fraser, Gail. “Empire of the Senses: Miscegenation in An Outcast of the Islands.” Contexts for Conrad, edited by Keith Carabine, Owen Knowles, and Wiesław Krajka. East European Monographs, 1993, pp. 121–33. Hampson, Robert. Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad’s Malay Fiction. Palgrave, 2000. Henthorne, Tom. “‘There Will Be Fighting’: Insurgency and Postcoloniality in Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands.” Joseph Conrad, edited by Harold Bloom. Infobase Publishing, 2010, pp. 169–97. Johnson, A. James M. “The ‘Unnatural Rigidity’ of Almayer’s Ethnocentrism.” The Conradian, vol. 26, no. 2, 2001, pp. 71–78. Kertzer, Jonathan. Poetic Justice and Legal Fictions. Cambridge University Press, 2010. Krenn, Heliéna. Conrad’s Lingard Trilogy: Empire, Race, and Women in the Malay Novels. Garland, 1990. Kumar, Krishan. “From Work to Employment and Unemployment: The English Experience.” On Work: Historical, Comparative and Theoretical Approaches, edited by R. E. Pahl. Basil Blackwell, 1988, pp. 138–64. Levenson, Michael. “The Value of Facts in the Heart of Darkness.” NineteenthCentury Fiction, vol. 40, no. 3, 1985, pp. 261–80. Mozina, Andrew. Joseph Conrad and the Art of Sacrifice: The Evolution of the Scapegoat Theme in Joseph Conrad’s Fiction. Routledge, 2001. Muirhead, Russell. Just Work. Harvard University Press, 2004. Nadelhaft, Ruth. Joseph Conrad. Humanities Press, 1991. Roberts, Andrew Michael. Conrad and Masculinity. Macmillan, 2000. Sandel, Michael. The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2020. Schramm, Jan-Melissa. Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative. Cambridge University Press, 2012. Schwarz, Daniel R. Conrad: Almayer’s Folly to Under Western Eyes. Cornell University Press, 1980. ———. Rereading Conrad. University of Missouri Press, 2001. Sewlall, Harry. “Postcolonial/Postmodern Spatiality in ‘Almayer’s Folly’ and ‘An Outcast of the Islands.’” Conradiana, vol. 38, no. 1, 2006, pp. 79–93.

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Smiles, Samuel. Self-Help; with Illustrations of Character, Conduct, and Perseverance. 1859. London: John Murray, 1866. Watt, Ian. Almayer’s Folly: Introduction. Essays on Conrad. Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 20–63. Watts, Cedric. The Deceptive Text: An Introduction to Covert Plots. Harvester, 1984. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 1930. Translated by Talcott Parsons. Routledge, 2001. White, Andrea. Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition. Cambridge University Press, 1993. Willy, Todd G. “‘Almayer’s Folly’ and the Imperatives of Conradian Atavism.” Conradiana, vol. 24, no. 1, 1992, pp. 3–20.

CHAPTER 3

“A Manifestation of a Deep, Inborn Inherited Instinct”: Instabilities of Self-Making in Lord Jim

In Lord Jim, the eponymous protagonist is a parson’s youngest son aspiring to be a romantic hero. His lack of significant parentage, which he shares with Willems, drives his attempts to make himself anew through work. His representation therefore seems again at first glance to have broken free from the traditional importance of familial inheritance, in line with the social transition in the nineteenth century towards emphasizing work in defining one’s position and social station in life. Jim as youngest son does not inherit his living from his father, and he makes himself out to be very different from his birth and background in “a Country parsonage” (164) such that the narrator Marlow marvels at the family someone like Jim could originate from: “It seems amazing that he should belong to it [his old Essex home], he to whom so many things ‘had come.’ Nothing ever came to them [his family]; they would never be taken unawares, and never be called upon to grapple with fate” (257– 58). Although they are “bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh,” Marlow imagines them “gazing with clear unconscious eyes,” whereas he sees Jim as “of full stature, standing disregarded amongst their untroubled shapes, with a stern and romantic aspect, but always mute, dark—under a cloud” (258). As the Introduction explained, with work being supposedly able to lead to the rewards that previously were often attained through inheritances, which Conrad tellingly describes as Jim “com[ing] into another more © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 E. T. Y. Chan, Work, Inheritance, and Deserts in Joseph Conrad’s Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2584-9_3

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subtle greater inheritance” (Manuscript 109)1 in the novel’s manuscript, what one does to an even greater extent determines what one is— although this also renders what one is more unstable, especially if one lays claim to both heroic masculinity and gentlemanly status at the same time, as Jim does in the novel. As Tony Tanner has written, the term gentleman “clearly meant something, and something important, in Victorian England, at the same time as the word was getting more imprecise and its connotations more diffuse and uncertain, if not contradictory” (112). In the novel, gentlemanly status becomes a workable, and not necessarily inherited, concept. Jim, a parson’s youngest son, tries to assert his gentlemanly status as part of his heroic persona; conversely, his foil Gentleman Brown, “supposed to be the son of a baronet” (265), ends up a pirate and a criminal. Both try to escape the confines of the status that they inherited upon birth.2 In drawing on the idea of the manifestation of merit through work, Lord Jim again repositions the conservative trope of inheritance, moving it towards suggestions of greater self-determination: like in Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands , it now refers to innate aptitudes and abilities, the “manifestation of a deep, inborn inherited instinct” (Manuscript 109) that Conrad refers to in the manuscript, which Jim tries to capitalize on in his self-making and building of gentlemanly status. Yet in the novel, Conrad is also at pains to point out that gentlemanly worth is not entirely workable, buildable from scratch. We already get an inkling of the inadequacies of self-making when we see how “Lord” contrasts with the informality of “Jim,” undoing and even ridiculing the gentlemanly “Lord.”3 In addition, familial inheritance remains highly significant in the novel. When Jim professes himself a gentleman, he seems to be both referring to his parental legacy, and his own natural worthiness. To Marlow he says of his tale of the Patna episode: “‘Of course I wouldn’t have talked 1 Manuscript will be used in this chapter to refer to Conrad’s Lord Jim: A Transcription of the Manuscript. 2 Jacques Berthoud writes: “‘Lord Jim’ versus ‘Gentleman Brown’: the very terms of this opposition solicit a comparison. Jim, son of an Anglican cleric, nurtures a lordly selfimage utterly at variance with his real self; Brown, alleged son of a baronet, repudiates an inherited status” (xxix). This chapter questions the idea of Jim’s “real self” even further, suggesting that the narrative gives us sufficient doubt about Jim’s “real self” to both allow for and critique possibilities for self-making. 3 As Berthoud writes, the name “Lord Jim” turns him into a “walking parado[x]” (xxix).

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to you about all this if you had not been a gentleman. I ought to have known… I am—I am—a gentleman too…” which elicits a “hast[y]” and perhaps not entirely sincere “Yes, yes” from Marlow (102). Even suggestions of non-familial inheritances obtain a flavour of the traditional familial type: Jim admits that Marlow’s rich “middle-aged bachelor” friend (142), under whose employ he is for a brief period, is “[m]ore like a father” (144) to him than an employer. In the household, Jim “was called Mr James… as if I had been the son,” and Marlow imagines “the first stone of a castle in Spain” (143) as Jim’s inheritance—before Jim flees his new great expectations because one of the Patna crew starts to work in the area, not allowing him to pretend the Patna incident has not happened. Lord Jim therefore draws on the trope of inheritance in by now familiar ways when representing the issue of self-making in modernity, based on the manifestation of innate ability without entirely discarding symbolic frameworks of other types of familial inheritance. A hybrid example that shows Conrad’s mixed use of the tropes of traditional and workable inheritance is when Jim is offered Patusan by Stein, “which he himself had inherited from an old Scot” (Hunter 65) who declared publicly that “this is my son” (Lord Jim 156). Although this inheritance is strictly speaking non-familial, it is transmitted as though it is: both Stein and Marlow are obvious father figures to Jim. When Jim awkwardly demurs at first, Marlow tells Jim that “[i]t isn’t Stein at all. It’s giving you what you had made for yourself” (188). This statement can be interpreted in two ways: Jim deserves Patusan because he is a failure, or because he has shown himself to be at least to a certain degree worthy. After this inheritance, as we will see, Jim proves part of his proclaimed desert: the heroic identity he yearns for. Reading Lord Jim as a modernist inheritance novel reveals how the seemingly outdated historical trope of inheritance that is tied to a particular class structure is resurrected in ways that show it, as I have briefly exemplified, to be relevant in both old ways and new. Conrad’s manoeuvring of the trope of inheritance in Lord Jim is not so much a “strategy of containment” (Jameson 210) of the realities of modern self-making as an approach that enables the text’s very expression of the convolutions of self-making. What appears at first glance to be a liberating move away from traditional familial/parental inheritance to workable assets and ability in order to create the identity and rewards that one thinks one deserves is partially but deliberately overturned in the novel in a reversal to metaphors of familial/parental inheritance, as we have seen, and, as we

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will see next, in an undercutting of the very expressibility and knowability of one’s innate assets and ability, and thus also one’s deserts, in the first place. In other words, Conrad uses the trope of inheritance in combination with ideas of work and desert to express Jim’s crisis of self-making in modernity, as he did for the other characters examined so far. The ways in which the novel engages with the three notions reflect the constant pull between continuity and discontinuity in identity creation, and allow its contradictions to be more fully revealed. The three key concepts, as I will show, account for Jim’s critical status as one of the emblems of modernist ambiguity, of the complexities of the inner self that are impossible to penetrate and fix.

3.1

Jim’s Indeterminacy

In many ways, the novel actively invites readings of Jim as an excessively romantic character, and Patusan as an exotic site of unrealistic romance. But looking at Conrad’s reworked use of the trope of inheritance as innate ability undermines the stability of such readings, and leaves the key question that keeps coming up in the novel, whether Jim is really “good enough” (Lord Jim 240) to be the romantic hero he wishes to be and sets out to make himself into, much more unsettled. I am of course not trying to claim that readings of Jim’s obvious romance are unjustified, but evaluations of Jim’s abilities pointedly do not remain static throughout the novel. Descriptions such as Jim having dreams of “gorgeous virility, the charm of vagueness,” which “passed before him with a heroic thread” and “carried his soul away with them and made it drunk with the divine philtre of an unbounded confidence in itself” (21) undoubtedly support the view of Jim’s dreams as “impossible” (67). In the first part of the novel, Jim repeatedly cycles into an almost self-willed failure after his fateful jump from the Patna, and his goals seem disproportionate and unachievable in real life, an unmanageable break from his up bringing and humdrum family background. However, there is also positive evidence that emphasizes the naturalness and spontaneity of Jim’s gifts, just enough to obscure the answer to the question of whether Jim is “good enough.” In language with Darwinian and Spencerian undertones, the narrative reiterates Jim’s physical fitness. Marlow’s elderly friend and brief employer of Jim admiringly observes that “Jim kept his freshness in the climate. Had he been a girl… one could have said he was blooming—blooming modestly— like a violet, not like some of these blatant tropical flowers” (142). The

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narrative reiterates that “[h]e had heroic health” (185): Marlow emphasizes that “physically he is very fit. His health is always excellent” (150). And Jim’s failures are temporarily reversed when Patusan is introduced in the second half of the novel, a place that enables Jim to fulfil some of his dreams through his heroic work, show for a limited time that he is indeed “good enough,” and achieve some of the prominence he imagines as his true desert. In Marlow’s words, the Patusan period is an “astounding adventure” that confounds but is “true” (258), where Jim achieves “extraordinary success” and is able to confirm “the reality of his existence” (312–13). This would still seem to corroborate the critical consensus of Patusan as an unrealistic place, one that enables Jim’s dreams only because it is so removed from the world Jim comes from.4 This is a view that finds abundant textual support. However, I do wish to foreground the unique language Conrad uses to describe how Jim’s dreams are enabled in Patusan. The terms Conrad uses to describe the naturalness of Jim’s abilities and inner potential in the novel, which explode to the surface as he rises to the opportunities and work provided to him by Patusan, are rife with references to inherent ability and notably removed from romance. So Marlow says: “I was more struck by the other gifts he had displayed. He had proved his grasp of the unfamiliar situation, his intellectual alertness in that field of thought. There was his readiness, too! Amazing. And all this had come to him in a manner like keen scent to a well-bred hound” (188; my emphasis). The new blank context of Patusan proves to be the canvas Jim needs to showcase his talents through his work, talents which are crucially described as innate to Jim in this telling metaphor, having always already been there. In the manuscript of Lord Jim, the connection I have drawn between Patusan and Jim’s natural abilities is made even stronger. It was as though he [Jim] had been born to such opportunities. As a matter of fact he was born in an Essex parsonage which had been in the family for generations and he may have inherited that … if he had not been the youngest of many boys. Its peace and serenity missed him but he had come

4 For instance, Mark Wollaeger writes insightfully that “we can read the collapse of Jim’s communal order on Patusan as the revenge of the real on Jim’s idealized art, the triumph of the anarchy Marlow glimpsed beyond the pale over the reordering power of the romantic” (115).

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into another more subtle greater inheritance which though it could not save him from doubt yet fitted him for the opportunity and caused him to set about making peace in Patusan with a display of courage, prudence and wisdom so unconscious that it could be nothing but a manifestation of a deep, inborn inherited instinct. (Manuscript 109; my emphases)

The “subtle greater inheritance” which departs from direct patrilineal inheritance can refer to both Jim’s inheritance of the opportunities in Patusan by Stein’s and Marlow’s arrangements, and his “deep, inborn inherited” ability to make Patusan work for him, to prove himself through his work there. As critics such as Andrew Mozina have recognized, Patusan is “where Jim makes his most convincing attempt to bind together the real and the romantic” (45). It is possible to acknowledge the romance of Jim and Patusan, while at the same time seeing Jim’s dreams as at least partially actualizable (and therefore realist in that sense), and Patusan as a site of actualization, of becoming real, and therefore not merely a romantic place. Patusan becomes what we would call an opportunity society for Jim in modern parlance, in which the recognition of one’s abilities rests on whether one has the talents that match the work opportunities available in the first place. This opportunity society interpellates and brings out Jim’s innate abilities, which previously had not found the chance to come to the surface. To borrow a phrase from the novel, to draw on one’s natural and inherited abilities to demonstrate (gentlemanly) worth, “[a]bility” cannot stay “in the abstract” (9) and must be evinced in the external world. Marlow’s question as to whether Jim “were nothing more rare than brass” (40) can only be answered after Patusan, when parts of Jim turns out to be rare. This is the difference between the rare butterfly specimens Stein collects whose rarity value is immediately obvious, and Jim’s rarity which is showcased only in this new context, when Marlow can “affirm he had achieved greatness” (171) in building the undeniable “reality of his existence” (313) which is “romantic beyond the wildest dreams of his boyhood” (258). Jim’s qualities are of a kind which would not flourish in the outside world. The opportunities Patusan provides contrast starkly with those in the hierarchical profession5 of sailing in the outside world, which in its rigidity favours the likes of Brierly instead, the young captain

5 Chapter 5 will discuss values of professionalism in greater detail.

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who unlike Jim “had never in his life made a mistake, never had an accident, never a mishap, never a check in his steady rise….. At thirty-two he had one of the best commands going in the Eastern trade…. He had saved lives at sea, had rescued ships in distress” (49). The contrast Marlow draws between Jim and people who have “no illusions—and [are] safe—and profitable—and dull” (171) is also one between Jim and the otherwise honourable and esteemed Brierly. The non-familial/familial inheritance (from the father figure of Stein) of the Patusan opportunities becomes linked circularly to inherent worth: Jim deserves Patusan because he has merit, but he also has merit only because Patusan shows him to, and is the place where he can finally “believe I am equal to all my luck” (229), and come into the deserts he imagines for himself. Marlow says of Jim after Gentleman Brown’s machinations cause Dain Waris, the son of the local leader, to die that “he was overwhelmed by his own personality—the gift of that destiny which he had done his best to master” (257). His personality and destiny are described here as a “gift” which nevertheless needs to be “master[ed],” as if it is not an unconditional gift in the first place, and this phrase aptly captures the conflict between the possession of inherent abilities and their expression through one’s work, abilities which although seemingly stable because innate, are in fact itself also unstable because dependent on proper expression. This gap between Jim’s inherent “ability” and its empirical demonstration in the world outside of Patusan shows the flaws in the meritocratic ideal which underpins the idea of the selfmade man‚ not only in terms of the difficulty of defining and measuring merit, but also of the unknowability and slipperiness of innate potential. However, despite the assertiveness of statements on Jim’s abilities in Patusan, the novel as a whole ultimately refuses to settle for a conclusive reading of Jim’s worth and deserts. In this, the novel makes full use of the potential contradictions in the notion of inheritance, in what I would posit as a crucial component in the modernist ambiguity in the novel: as discussed in the Introduction, inheritance is, as the root of the word suggests, innate to oneself, yet at the same time it can be extrinsic since it may still need to be earned and proven for one to call it one’s own, which Jim attempts to do through his work, and unstable since it is open to interpretation. Thus whether Jim is “good enough”—whether his dreams of himself are merely pipe dreams or realizable dreams—is bound by his inherited traits, and simultaneously unbound, because one cannot know for sure (and therefore inheritance again becomes a concept to be inscribed into rather than a predetermined one), and because inherited

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abilities are highly subject to a context with the right conditions for their manifestation. Inheritance places realism and romanticism side by side, denying neither but also definitively confirming neither. If, as Marlow says, “there is so little difference” between “truth” and “illusion” (169), the ways in which both mesh together is precisely why we cannot answer the question of whether his innate abilities should lead to commensurate rewards in the external world, or how to be sure of these inheritances in the first place. This is in stark contrast to the representation of Brierly, who “was acutely aware of his merits and of his rewards ” (49; my emphasis). He attains these without ambiguity, until he comes face to face with the dishonour of Jim’s Patna trial, after which he commits suicide—perhaps because he doubts whether he would have passed the same test (DiSanto 180), or perhaps because he cannot tolerate the “indecency” of Jim’s trial for the profession of seafaring (Trotter 175). It is also juxtaposed with the representation of Cornelius, whose desert is definitively denied by the novel’s description of his “nature” of “innate irremediable abjectness” (244), but who “considered himself a very deserving but ill-used person, entitled by his abilities to a better position” (167). For Jim, Conrad’s point is very different. Marlow, in order to comfort Jewel, Jim’s partner, after Jim’s death, claims that “nobody is good enough” (240)— not just referring to ability, but desert, of whether we are deserving or “good enough” for the rewards we claim—because there is no objective way of measuring desert. This comes right after the narrative says that “She knew him [Jim] to be strong, true, wise, brave. He was all that. Certainly. He was more. He was great—invincible—and the world did not want him, it had forgotten him, it would not even know him” (239). Jim possesses all these abilities, but will have no external recognition for them. Jewel thinks one should naturally result in the other, but Marlow knows better, throwing doubt even on Marlow’s presumption earlier that Marlow himself does “have the right to think myself good enough” (244). In the famous conversation between Stein and Marlow in which Stein diagnoses Jim as “romantic,” Stein explains that the difficulty lies in the fact that “[w]e want in so many different ways to be” (161). His words hint at the countless possibilities life can take on—but also, in fact, at the utter unknowability of one’s inherited potential, aptitudes, and abilities. Seemingly denoting stability and innateness, the novel instead shows inheritance, and its manifestations through work, to be highly unsure. Seeing Jim as a failure or a success become not mutually exclusive views,

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but mutually necessary within the novel. The naturalness and unaffectedness of Jim’s charm, health, youth, and abilities are emphasized—as well as the possibility of uncertainty, and even adulteration, in Jim’s innate makeup. Although initially “his prospects were good,” because “[h]e was gentlemanly, steady, tractable, with a thorough knowledge of his duties,” he also “when yet very young, became chief mate of a fine ship, without ever having been tested by those events of the sea that show in the light of day the inner worth of a man, the edge of his temper, and the fibre of his stuff ; that reveal the quality of his resistance and the secret truth of his pretences, not only to others but also to himself” (14; my emphases). How can one probe to this deepest layer of a person’s innate being? Marlow professes himself stumped in his evaluation of Jim: “He looked as genuine as a new sovereign, but there was some infernal alloy in his metal. How much? The least thing—the least drop of something rare and accursed; the least drop!” (40). Not only does the Patna incident keep haunting Jim even in Patusan, leading to his downfall at the hands of Gentleman Brown despite his success there, the possibility of “the least drop of something rare and accursed” (40) renders the reliability of Jim’s abilities uncertain even as the narrative sets them up. In contrast, Jim’s foil, Gentleman Brown, is much more clearly delineated to the reader by Marlow. As the “supposed… son of a baronet” (265), Brown emphasizes this inherited aristocratic status, insisting on introducing himself as “Gentleman Brown” (259) to Marlow. In so doing, he shows how far he has remade this inheritance in his own image, becoming a “buccaneer” (265) who violently flouts standards that the label of a gentleman (or even “Captain” [286], the other title he insists on) imposes, a label that Jim tries so hard to attain and own fully. While “[s]ome great men owe most of their greatness to the ability of detecting in those they destine for their tools the exact quality of strength that matters for their work” (290), Marlow writes in his letter to an unnamed member of the audience to whom he started telling Jim’s story to, “Brown, as though he had been really great, had a satanic gift of finding out the best and the weakest spot in his victims” (290; my emphasis), and Brown makes full use of this ability that makes him pseudo-eminent, even pseudo-übermenschean, in his role as a pirate. However, Brown’s “arrogant temper of his misdeeds and a vehement scorn for mankind at large and for his victims in particular” (265) makes him a parody rather than a sincere representation of the Nietzschean übermensch. Brown is intent on exerting an endless and ruthless force of “overcom[ing] them all” (288),

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for instance “rob[bing] a man as if only to demonstrate his poor opinion of the creature,” and “bring[ing] to the shooting or maiming of some quiet, unoffending stranger a savage and vengeful earnestness” (265). Jim’s mistake is to see only part of the fuller picture that is Brown’s character, focusing on reading Brown as a person who has, like himself, tried to carve out his own individual path to desired rewards while being beaten down by circumstance. In his conversation with Brown, Jim’s opinion that “You don’t deserve a better fate” (287) is immediately rebutted by Brown: “And what do you deserve, … you that I find skulking here with your mouth full of your responsibility, of innocent lives, of your infernal duty?” (287), bringing Jim’s shame out into the open. Jim’s autobiographical assessment of Brown leads to his conclusion that Brown deserves a second chance, like himself. We could therefore say that Brown is Jim’s alter ego, uncannily similar to yet also dissimilar from him: breaking free from his birth on the one hand, and creating his deserts through his exertions which make use of his abilities on the other hand, he tries to forge a unique destiny that in the end also turns out to be a trope rather than the unique individuality of the übermensch. Brown’s intense antipathy towards Jim at first sight arises because Jim represents everything Brown himself has rejected in order to create and consolidate his individualism and power, and he feels that he must bring about Jim’s downfall as punishment to justify his own right, his own deserts, and his own path away from the ruts of his inherited social identity. So he tells Marlow: “I could see directly I set my eyes on him what sort of a fool he was..… He a man! Hell! He was a hollow sham. As if he couldn’t have said straight out ‘Hands off my plunder!’ blast him! That would have been like a man! Rot his superior soul! He had me there—but he hadn’t devil enough in him to make an end of me. Not he! A thing like that letting me off as if I wasn’t worth a kick!” (259). By dragging Jim down, “Brown took his revenge upon the world which, after twenty years of contemptuous and reckless bullying, refused him the tribute of a common robber’s success” (303). Through it he “balanced his account with the evil fortune” (304), which for his labours of tyranny “had yielded him nothing in the way of material advantage except a small bag of silver dollars” (266), stamping on “this awful outbreak… a superiority as of a man who carries right—the abstract thing—within the envelope of his common desires,” so that “[i]t was not a vulgar and treacherous massacre; it was a lesson, a retribution” (304)—in other words, an assertion of his deserts, of proper and rightful

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remuneration and recognition, for his abilities applied to his labours as a fearsome pirate. The non-teleological, or even anti-teleological, strain to desert that would value work and its efforts for their own sake, and which the Introduction suggested can be glimpsed at times across Conrad’s fiction as a subtle alternative to the teleological view of desert as the end goal of work, is lost to both characters. Such an anti-teleological view is set up and contrasted with Jim’s endless grasping for what he thinks should be his deserts when the beginning of the book says that Jim, in first going out to sea, finds this not quite living up to his expectations: “[E]ntering the regions so well known to his imagination,” Jim “found them strangely barren of adventure” (14). Although “the prosaic severity of the daily task” at sea “gives bread,” this is the byproduct of such labour, with the “only reward [being] in the perfect love of the work” (14). “This reward,” however, “eluded him” (14), and we can, in light of our discussion, even suggest that this is presented as Jim’s fatal flaw, the crack that propagates and causes his life to fall apart again and again. It distracts him from the work at hand and leads him to seek ways of (self-)recognition that culminate in his fatal identification with Brown, whom he gives the second chance that he also wishes to have in order to prove that he can “maste[r] his fate” and forge his desired deserts, which “he seemed to have come very near at last to” (207) achieving prior to Brown’s arrival.

3.2

The Jump: Continuities and Discontinuities

Jim’s ceaseless attempts at evidencing his desert are enabled by the reworked trope of inheritance in the novel, which ends up harbouring both stability and instability, fixity and upheaval, continuity and discontinuity. Historically, if one were to have to prove, as Jim tries to, that one is exceptionally worthy, discontinuous from one’s background, in one sense this had become very possible because one could now do so through showing one’s innate talents via work. Innate ability seems to allow for a break from the traditional constraints of inheritance as it can come out of nowhere, and in the novel sets Jim up for fulfilling his initium, his new beginning,6 through his self-making. However, in another sense, 6 This is inspired by Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality as new beginnings symbolized by birth (7–11). However, I do not explicitly draw on it here because the concept of natality does not stand alone in Arendt’s writing, but is discussed as just one out of several

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such self-making had also become extremely difficult because of the uncertainty in making one’s talents manifest in the outside world. And as discussed in the Introduction, it is not merely the expression of inner aptitudes into the outside world through one’s work that may be unreliable, but also the interpretation (as we saw in Marlow’s epistemological impasse above) of what inner aptitudes one has in the first place because of the ultimate unknowability of one’s inherent talents, in what establishes the ambiguous modernist hermeneutics in the novel. The irony of applying the potentiality of new beginnings to Jim’s process of self-making is that the unexpectedness of this potential is removed as Jim rigidly draws on, inscribes, and interprets his abilities as absolutely needing to lead to certain desert in the external world, without allowing for any leeway. Jim strives for a perfection and fulfilment of a fixed plot, which he cannot act outside of, based on a fixed idea of who he inherently is, and proving this inheritance. The openness of the idea of the new beginning, of the initium, is both the very seed for Jim’s dreams, and for his destruction. As the narrative emphasizes, there is simply no way to be absolutely certain as to the full spectrum and extent of one’s inherited abilities. Thus the simultaneous freedom and limitlessness, and determinism and fatalism, that appear in the novel, and the intermeshing of realist and romantic perspectives. The novel’s famous aesthetics of “breaks, silences, gaps, and inconsistencies” (Greaney 97) revisited by critics over the past decades mirror the collapses in Jim’s self-making, but my focus on the dual nature of continuity and discontinuity in inheritance highlights how these are not complete ruptures, that Conrad sets out to show them as filled in, patched over, continuous to some extent. The novel is full of huge gaps that Jim jumps, or attempts to jump. The most prominent jump is of course Jim’s infamous leap from the Patna, which changes the whole course of his life, but there is also the emphasis on the gap between the mundanity of his family background and the grandeur of his aspirations and dreams, and between inherent abilities he claims that are a break from his humdrum parentage, and their external expression. The abruptness of these jumps has often been emphasized in critical readings of the novel. Fredric Jameson has famously called the shift between the Patna episode and the Patusan context “a tangible ‘break’ in the “conditions of human existence” (11). Later on in this chapter, I will, nevertheless, briefly reference the way Arendt sees natality as defined by contingency.

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narrative of Lord Jim” (206) and has characterized Jim as bovarystic (211), as a romantic who is overreaching. But as I have shown, Conrad shows how Jim is to some extent able to hurdle over these vast chasms. There is a notable thread of continuity—both at times in support of Jim’s claims and at other times going against these—which deserves more acknowledgement. The Patna episode, for instance, is both continuous (showing something inherent inside Jim which at that moment erupts to the surface) and discontinuous (it defies reason, and contains elements of randomness), emphasizing aspects of the self’s innateness while highlighting the very unpredictability in the notion of the self. Patusan also provides the opportunity for jumps that Jim succeeds at making—before he of course fails to sustain his success as Gentleman Brown enters his new world—in contrast to the gradualism epitomized in Brierly’s measured ascent to the top of his profession. And throughout, there remains the niggling doubt, never fully settled, that Jim’s background does define him, that there really is nothing “rare” about him, that the answer to Marlow’s question to Stein, “But is he?,” is far from Stein’s answer, “Evident!” (164), that although Jim tries and pretends, he may after all be, and will always be, nothing more than a parson’s youngest son. Viewed in this way, the co-existence of these breaks with continuities makes them less rupturing than they may seem at first glance. It is easy to identify what we have come to think of as the modernist stylistics in Conrad’s aesthetics—the discontinuity, the layered narration, the ellipses, the unarticulated, the ambiguous, the opaque, the “hopeless difficulty” (Lord Jim 30) of clear expression. But alongside this, the structure of Jim’s self-making shows Conrad’s strategic and narrative insistence on certain continuities (such as Jim remaining pinned down by his background) that can likewise be seen as modernist, in the sense that they also express the limitations of human action in modern self-making, as part of what Paul Armstrong has called “[m]an’s inability to master his destiny or to achieve wholeness” (8) in his fiction. The question of whether the progression of inheritance was gradual, or could be abruptly discontinuous, was at the time Lord Jim was written and published being hotly debated, as part of the continued legacy of conflicting theories on heredity and evolution in the nineteenth century. Some of the debates have been used to read the modernist project, both closer to Conrad’s own time and in more contemporary criticism. Charles Darwin, whose impact on Conrad has been detailed extensively by Allan Hunter and Redmond O’Hanlon, advocated the model of gradual

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change by natural selection. In On the Origin of Species (1859), he states: “Whatever the cause may be of each slight difference in the offspring from their parents—and a cause of each must exist—it is the steady accumulation, through natural selection, of such differences, when beneficial to the individual, that gives rise to all the more important modifications of structure” (128). He explicitly contrasts this with jumps in heredity: “As natural selection acts solely by accumulating slight, successive, favourable variations, it can produce no great or sudden modification; it can act only by very short and slow steps. Hence the canon of ‘Natura non facit saltum’ [nature does not make a jump]..… We can plainly see why nature is prodigal in variety, though niggard in innovation” (346–47; my emphases). Inheritance thus allowed for changes, but only in a progressive and paced manner across generations: “Why should not Nature take a sudden leap from structure to structure? … [N]atural selection acts only by taking advantage of slight successive variations; she can never take a leap, but must advance by the shortest and slowest steps ” (145–46; my emphases). T. H. Huxley, famed biologist and the biology tutor of Conrad’s friend H. G. Wells, whose views on ethics and evolution have been related to those in Conrad’s fiction by Hunter and John Griffith, was instead the proponent of the evolutionary and hereditary concept of saltation, or big discontinuous leaps (Provine 11–12) that could appear across one generation—and therein, as I will explain in a moment, lies the possibility of further understanding Jim’s positioning of his innate abilities vis-à-vis his humdrum background, which he wishes to break free from—instead of gradually accumulated across many. This became one of the main sticking points between him and Darwin—Huxley was otherwise such a staunch supporter of Darwin’s theory of evolution that he was called “Darwin’s bulldog” (White i). Huxley writes in his 1860 review of On the Origin of Species: As a general rule, the extent to which an offspring differs from its parent is slight enough; but occasionally, the amount of difference is much more strongly marked.… In each [case], the variety appears to have arisen in full force, and, as it were, per saltum…. There seems to be, in many instances, a prepotent influence about a newly-arisen variety which gives it what one

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may call an unfair advantage over the normal descendants from the same stock. (35–37)7

Thus he says of Darwin’s dictum: “Mr Darwin’s position might, we think, have been even stronger than it is if he had not embarrassed himself with the aphorism, ‘Natura non facit saltum,’ which turns up so often in his pages. We believe, as we have said above, that Nature does make jumps now and then” (77).8 This became one of the major disputes in biology, culminating at the end of the nineteenth century in the row between the so-called Neo-Darwinists who believed in hereditary gradualism, and the Mendelians (after Gregor Mendel, whose discovery of the inheritance of recessive and dominant traits seemed to support the model of discontinuous inheritance) such as William Bateson and Hugo de Vries who believed saltationism was the primary driver of change (Bowler 110–27). We can readily recognize this emphasis on discontinuity in inheritance in modernist criticism.9 The early critic T. E. Hulme, for instance, took issue precisely with the “universal application of the principle of continuity” (423)10 in explaining change, departing from the Darwinian emphasis on gradualist variation and instead drawing on Hugo de Vries’s idea of mutations to justify “his theory of discontinuity” (Whitworth 212). The emphasis on discontinuity would seem to correspond well with Jim’s representation—although I will also discuss the limitations of this match in a moment. On the one hand, we have Brierly, who is the prime example of the possessor of definite and demonstrated innate ability and who embodies the gradualism in professionalism, where one showcases one’s inherent aptitude through progressive and continuous variation, climbing rungs on the career ladder rapidly but one by one. On the other hand, we have Jim, the dubious possessor of unstable ability, who tends to jump in his work. Jim abnegates, voluntarily or otherwise, steady measured progress through abiding by rigid codes of conduct. In Patusan, he does work which requires individual and exceptional adaptation to the sporadic and unpredictable nature of opportunities, where 7 Quoted in Bulmer 276. 8 Quoted in Bulmer 276. 9 See, for a comprehensive discussion, William R. Everdell’s The First Moderns: Profiles

in the Origins of Twentieth-Century Thought. Everdell writes that “the heart of Modernism is the postulate of ontological discontinuity” (351; quoted in Abbott 9). 10 Quoted in Whitworth 212.

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one may rise to the occasion, and suddenly confirm an inner potential not previously demonstrated before. Therefore, Jim seems to be the prime representative of modernist discontinuity, and a legacy of saltationism rather than Darwinian gradualism, as H. Porter Abbott has suggested (1– 18).11 Abbott says of the Patna jump: “One moment Jim is on the ship, the next he is in the boat. One moment Jim is one kind of a person, the next he is another kind of a person, with no way of scaling the cliff back to the person he was” (2). Jim’s representation demonstrates the unpredictability brought about by extra-causal, extra-narratable, antiteleological chance variation, or what Abbott calls “causal singularities” (15). As George Levine has also argued, Darwinian gradualism contained its own contradictions, and Conrad foregrounded these in his fiction, in contrast to his nineteenth-century predecessors who favoured its progressive continuity. Since “the source of new generation in this world” is no longer “through divine act,” but “through chance variations,” Darwin’s gradualist model in a way refutes itself: “the true generating power of Darwin’s theory is what cannot be reduced to law, nor accounted for by gradualism” (Levine 249–50). Conrad’s “techniques of disruption, discontinuity, of elaborating a radical distrust of language, lead to a vision of the world that undercuts the gradualism in which Darwin and Victorian realists had invested so much,” demonstrating how “we are all trapped in a network of chance upon which it is impossible to look disinterestedly” (Levine 269). But in a twist, chance variations are not the only element of disruption undercutting Darwinian gradualism. Abbott points out the discontinuity present in the very continuous causality of Darwinian gradualism: the “causal complexity” of its system is really “so extreme as to frustrate all efforts to narrativize it without distortion” (15). This means that modernists’ “causal singularity,” when causality seems to break down, may in fact be the only way to do justice to the “infinite complexity of causation” in Darwinian gradualism (Abbott 15)—and thus can be seen to harbour a continuity of its own. Thus we come full circle: discontinuity leads us back to continuity. Likewise, the idea of the “jump” is, as we have seen, neither wholly liberating nor entirely discontinuous, although Jim’s way of self-making seems initially to attest to the freedom in the many possibilities afforded 11 Abbott discusses saltationism as a pre-Darwinian account of change and argues that Jim’s jump from the Patna “evoke[s] the same pre-Darwinian mystery of agency as one self appears to displace another” (8).

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by scientific ideas of discontinuous variation and workable gentlemanly status. A fate that allows sudden changes can be horrifying, as Jim’s leap from the Patna shows. Leaving aside the many unanswerable questions that this jump has left generations of critics debating (was this jump a contingent rather than a voluntary act? Is it fair that Jim should be judged for an act so ambiguous that it defies rational dissection? Does Jim, in other words, deserve his punishment for an act neither entirely voluntary, nor entirely involuntary?), the crucial point to note here is that while what Abbott points out, that Jim changes from one person to another in one single moment, is entirely true, it is at the same time suggested that no matter how much you try to jump, you cannot really escape from who you are: your inherent nature circumscribes your possibilities for metamorphosis. On the one hand, Jim’s desert claims (to gentlemanly status, to heroic stature) represent gaps that are continuous because they have been partially bridged, because he achieves some success; on the other, Jim’s desert claims represent gaps that are unbridgeable not just because they are excessively romantic, but also because of certain continuities in Jim’s innate self (“the least drop of something rare and accursed” [40]) that cannot be disposed of and prevent him from attaining the full success he desires, from coming into his imagined deserts. Jim, jumping from one job to the next before finally succeeding in Patusan, ultimately has even that success taken away from him by Gentleman Brown, as if the taint that is inside of him, the “vein of subtle reference to their common blood, an assumption of common experience; a sickening suggestion of common guilt, of secret knowledge that was like a bond of their minds and of their hearts” (291) cannot but eventually rear its ugly head. The novel’s seeming critique of gradualism in Brierly is not a full endorsement of saltationism: there are grave limits to Jim’s attempts to remake himself through his jumps. Inheritance must still be at least partially gradual and continuous, after all—and Jim showcases this continuity as well as discontinuity. Reading Lord Jim alongside one of the biggest debates in biology at the time therefore provides yet another way of reconciling the romanticism in the novel with its realism: Jim is simultaneously circumscribed and defined, “of the right sort” and “one of us” by descent (63), and also at the same time limitless, “capable of anything” (209), and infinitely ambiguous because of the uncertainties of inheritance, especially as this is applied to work, itself often utterly unpredictable (unless one is exceptionally steady, capable, and reliable like Brierly, though Brierly himself

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defies predictability in the end in his sudden suicide). The jump in fate Jim demands in his own life is not only to be read as delusional, but also attests to the endless possibilities afforded by ideas of discontinuous variation and workable gentlemanly status—as well as endless impasses, of course, in a turnaround tribute to Darwinian gradualism, since one can never definitively tell if one possesses the “inborn” abilities for who one wants to be, and these “inborn” (Manuscript 109) abilities do effectively circumscribe one’s possibilities. The pre-eminence of the contingent as a hallmark of modernist aesthetics, as the source of instability and ambiguity, is therefore qualified in a reading of the novel that takes such issues of inheritance into account. I mentioned the idea of the new beginning, of the initium, earlier to theorize self-making as being premised on breaking free from the constraints of one’s background, and Conrad’s stipulations as to the limitations of this freedom: the difficulties and uncertainties in the expression of innate ability, and in the interpretation of what one is capable of in the first place. There is an additional caveat Conrad’s probing of the innate emphasizes. If we turn briefly to Hannah Arendt’s concept of natality, of the newness symbolized by birth, we see that this is premised on contingency and randomness, which allow human nature, personal identity, and what we are inherently capable of not to be entirely dependent on others’ control—without this meaning that natality suggests complete independence from others, as it is in Arendt’s view ensconced in a web of human interconnectedness and communication. This contingency, evaluated positively by Arendt, is a necessary basis for action in humans: it “means that the unexpected can be expected from him, that he is able to perform what is infinitely improbable” (Arendt 178). It means that humans feel they can define and create themselves, to enact selfmaking. If their abilities had been set in stone and defined, this would give no basis for such self-agency. If we just take this characteristic without applying a full Arendtian framework to our discussion, we can clearly see analogies between this and Jim’s claim for a break from his background and parentage, and his constant attempts to remake himself through his work, his perpetual insistence that his jump from the Patna should not define and mark him. Yet the moment something is realized, it ceases to be contingent because it now is. It may have arisen out of contingency, but in its realization it is no longer so, turning from possibility to certainty. When Jim

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changes in one split second from one person to someone else, contingency at that single point of realization becomes inherency, innate to us, and therefore deterministic. Initial unexpected potential becomes realized expression—and if that realization is an identity that characters do not like, how much scope is there for them to reenact a new beginning and start over? Conrad’s fictional universe emphasizes how characters do not possess endless reserves of new beginnings, the capacity for endless surprises and newness. Jim’s jump from the Patna condemns him for the rest of his short life—for him, there is no turning back from that moment. So gradually, before Patusan, hopping from job to job, Jim “lost some of that elasticity which had enabled him to rebound back into his uncompromising position after every overthrow” (152). Although on the surface chance and inheritance seem polar opposites, with chance immediately associated with disruption and lack of control, and inheritance with stability and continuity, Conrad points to the close connections between the two. Like inheritance, chance can be continuous and discontinuous: it disrupts, but also becomes stable once it settles and gives rise to one form, one path, now to the exclusion of other possibilities, from which any further future paths must branch. The portrayal of Jim, who remains “under a cloud” (312), therefore highlights the possibility for gradualism and saltationism in inheritance without settling for either side. Conrad’s representation both engages with and complicates the relevant historical debates discussed, and continues to undermine later binaries in critical views12 (Lord Jim’s romanticism vs realism, its stability vs contingency, its coherence vs fragmentation, its continuity vs discontinuity, and so on). By representing inheritance as both continuous and discontinuous, Conrad holds possibilities of Jim’s endless potential and of Jim’s inevitable failure in place simultaneously, keeping them in epistemological suspense and enabling Jim’s status as a modernist emblem of ambiguity whose desert status remains unclear, so that questions of whether Jim is “good enough” (240) or whether he deserves the heroic status he worked so hard to come into remain unanswered. Thus the turning point of Jim’s jump from the Patna, that ultimate moment of “causal singularity” (Abbott 13), can both prove

12 Michael John DiSanto has similarly argued that in the novel, “Conrad rewrites Darwin’s and Nietzsche’s arguments about the instincts for self-preservation and selfdestruction” in such a way that “confound[s]” these “antithetical structures” (163).

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and at the same time not prove who he is. Echoing Hamlet’s famous question, Jim both is and is not. Jim “was not clear. And there is a suspicion he was not clear to himself either” (Lord Jim 135). Language emphasizing both contingency and inherent merit continue to jostle with each other till the very end of the novel: Jim “was… very fine; very fine—and very unfortunate” (135); he “was capable of anything[,] … equal to his fortune, as he—after all—must have been equal to his misfortune” (209). Nothing conclusive about Jim can be asserted, yet conclusions are made: “[h]e passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic. Not in the wildest days of his boyish visions could he have seen the alluring shape of such an extraordinary success!” (312). Such conflicting statements are not simply contradictory, but simultaneously true. Jim ultimately cannot concretize his imagined abilities and imagined identity to his satisfaction in his work, but this does not necessarily mean he is not “good enough” (240)—or does it? Inheritances are complex, and some of them may remain “in the abstract” (12), waiting for the right opportunity, the right type of work in the right context, to be expressed—or not. Jim’s abilities, his “more subtle greater inheritance” than “an Essex parsonage” (Manuscript 109), are thrown into doubt even while their potentiality remains endlessly affirmed.

Works Cited Abbott, H. Porter. “Narrating Conversion in an Age of Darwinian Gradualism.” StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 2010, pp. 1–18. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 1958. University of Chicago Press, 1998. Armstrong, Paul B. “Conrad’s Contradictory Politics: The Ontology of Society in Nostromo.” Twentieth-Century Literature, vol. 31, no. 1, 1985, pp. 1–21. Berthoud, Jacques. Introduction. Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad. Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. xiii–xxxi. Bowler, Peter J. The Mendelian Revolution: The Emergence of Hereditarian Concepts in Modern Science and Society. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. Bulmer, Michael. Francis Galton: Pioneer of Heredity and Biometry. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Conrad, Joseph. Conrad’s Lord Jim: A Transcription of the Manuscript. Edited by J. H. Stape and Ernest W. Sullivan II. Rodophi Press, 2010. ———. Lord Jim. Edited by J. H. Stape and Ernest W. Sullivan II. Cambridge University Press, 2012.

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Darwin, Charles. On the Origin of Species. 1859. Edited by Gillian Beer. Oxford University Press, 2008. DiSanto, Michael John. Under Conrad’s Eyes: The Novel as Criticism. McGillQueen’s University Press, 2009. Everdell, William R. The First Moderns: Profiles in the Origins of TwentiethCentury Thought. University of Chicago Press, 1997. George Levine, Darwin and the Novelists: Patterns of Science in Victorian Fiction. Harvard University Press, 1988. Greaney, Michael. Conrad, Language, and Narrative. Cambridge University Press, 2002. Griffith, John W. Joseph Conrad and the Anthropological Dilemma: “Bewildered Traveller.” Oxford University Press, 1995. Hulme, T. E. Collected Writings. Edited by K. Csengeri. Clarendon Press, 1994. Hunter, Allan. Joseph Conrad and the Ethics of Darwinism, Croom Helm, 1983. Huxley, T. H. Darwiniana. London: Macmillan, 1860. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell University Press, 1981. Mozina, Andrew. Joseph Conrad and the Art of Sacrifice. Routledge, 2001. O’Hanlon, Redmond. Joseph Conrad and Charles Darwin: The Influence of Scientific Thought on Conrad’s Fiction. Salamander, 1984. Provine, William B. The Origins of Theoretical Population Genetics. University of Chicago Press, 2001. Tanner, Tony. “Joseph Conrad and the Last Gentleman.” Critical Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 1, 1986, pp. 109–42. Trotter, David. Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society. Oxford University Press, 2001. White, Paul. Thomas Huxley: Making the “Man of Science.” Cambridge University Press, 2003. Whitworth, Michael. “Physics: ‘A Strange Footprint.” A Concise Companion to Modernism, edited by David Bradshaw. Blackwell Publishing, 2003, pp. 200– 20. Wollaeger, Mark. Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism. Stanford University Press, 1990.

CHAPTER 4

Nostromo’s Great Expectations

In Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, the eponymous protagonist is officially an employee of the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company in Sulaco, a city in the fictional South American country of Costaguana. His supervisor Captain Mitchell says that Nostromo was appointed “the foreman of our lightermen, and caretaker of our jetty. That’s all that he was” (Nostromo 12). But of course that is also not “all that he was”: Mitchell adds that “without him Señor Ribiera would have been a dead man,” and that Nostromo “became the terror of all the thieves in the town” (12). Nostromo’s more unofficial title is that of Capataz de Cargadores, and under that name he performs heroic deeds and maintains capitalist order against all odds. But when Decoud says that “[Nostromo’s] work is an exercise of personal powers; his leisure is spent in receiving the marks of extraordinary adulation” (138), we start to get the sense that although Nostromo’s work is an excellent fit with his abilities, he misapplies it in his emphasis on its performativity, on receiving “extraordinary adulation.”1 Nostromo does not exactly find himself through work, as

1 As Jeremy Hawthorn has pointed out, “[w]hereas at the start of the novel Nostromo was the role he played, by the end of the novel his public self is separate from his private self” (69). His role-playing therefore persists throughout, but is more fully integrated in his personhood at the beginning.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 E. T. Y. Chan, Work, Inheritance, and Deserts in Joseph Conrad’s Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2584-9_4

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nineteenth-century idealizations of work indicate is possible.2 For him, work becomes merely part of performing a heroic persona, which he very successfully executes, in contrast to Jim’s more patchy achievements. Nostromo’s work is then not so much “initially a creative activity that constituted true liberty and permitted him to realize his potential as a social individual,” reflective of him as a “fully integrated social being” (Lord 208–09), but rather the superficial hallmark of his persona. Upon swimming back from the Isabel islands to the shore of the mainland after his mission to keep the silver from the mine in Sulaco out of the hands of the revolutionaries, he can then shed his previous social identity like mere clothes, thinking that “everything that had gone before for years appear[s] vain and foolish, like a flattering dream come suddenly to an end” (Nostromo 298). The most obvious symptom of this misfit with his work, despite the thorough aptness of it on the surface, is the way in which Nostromo is paid. Nostromo may be an employee with the Company, but most of his work, his heroism, is not done for direct remuneration (he is, after all, just “the foreman of our lightermen” [Nostromo 12]); rather, it is performed to show that his persona is deserving of additional unofficial rewards, of which “extraordinary adulation” (138) is only the first step.3 Nostromo expects not regular payments which are commensurate with the services that he renders, nor even irregular payments in the form of the people’s adoration, but to “get something great for it some day” (179; my emphasis), as he tells Decoud later. His efforts seemingly comprise work and labour, therefore, but are really more about his great expectations that are in excess of direct rewards, about coming into his own one day, like a future inheritance he feels he deserves and 2 For Marx, for example, in The Economic Manuscripts of 1844, labour fulfils man’s “species being” (Shiach 32), while for Carlyle in Past and Present, “the whole soul of man is composed into a kind of real harmony the instant he sets himself to work” (Shiach 35). 3 The unconventionality of Nostromo’s work can be read in a multitude of ways. For instance, Joshua Gooch reads in this flexibility of work the figure of “the improvisory worker,” of “the opportunist” (270). In a different evaluation from this chapter’s reading, Timothy J. Wagner sees Nostromo’s initial work as reflective of “the spiritual value” of labour, which unfortunately cannot be separated from “the drawbacks” of its “material value” (220). It could also be seen as part of what Fredric Jameson reads as the “feudal ideology of honour” in Conrad’s fiction (205). By reading Nostromo’s desire to come into his deserved greatness as a different iteration of the inheritance plot, this chapter adds a new interpretation to extensive existing criticism.

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must receive. This excess comprises Nostromo’s claims to his “inheritance,” in both senses of the word: the innate abilities and merit he possesses—what Jennifer Ruth has called “embodied property” (41) when discussing Charlotte Brontë’s The Professor (1857)—which, when properly demonstrated, will yield an inheritance in the form of social status and rewards. Upon closer scrutiny, Nostromo constantly invokes the trope of inheritance when he talks of the services he has rendered the rich Europeans in Costaguana. So to Giorgio Viola, he says: “The old Englishman who has enough money to pay for a railway? … I’ve guarded his bones all the way from the Entrada pass…, as though he had been my own father” (93; my emphasis). Ironically, there is again a disconnect between his regular pay and his heroic services: although “the rich Englishman.… was very pleased with [him],” Nostromo’s “wages were not due till the end of the month,” and thus he “had no money” to spend at that point (214). On yet another occasion, he says, “I have sat alone at night with my revolver in the Company’s warehouse time and again by the side of that other Englishman’s heap of silver, guarding it as though it had been my own” (93; my emphasis). The similes here indicate not only the scarcity and quality of his service, but also what he in fact expects: in treating the rich people as his family, he comes to expect to be seen as family; in treating this silver as his own, he starts to act as if it is his own. Nostromo’s work becomes the inheritance he makes for himself far beyond his mere salary. So Decoud astutely calls Nostromo’s charismatic, “picturesque” work his “investment,” and Dr Monygham observes that “[h]is prestige is his fortune” (230). Nostromo’s lack of significant parentage (he is a “Man of the People” with “no parentage to boast of” [Nostromo 410], as “he firmly believed,” “cheated… out of his orphan’s inheritance” by his uncle [300]), which seems to free him from the encumbrances of inheritance, becomes the very reason why Nostromo draws on the trope of inheritance. Nostromo needs a concrete inheritance precisely because he has none to “boast of” (410); he needs to remake the very notion for himself precisely because this is his vacuum. To turn charisma into great material rewards— certainly greater than what being the foreman of the lightermen can give him—Nostromo relies on ideas of adoption and inheritance.4 Despite the 4 Josiane Paccaud-Huguet sees Nostromo as part of a series of Conradian characters “whose symbolic alienation from family continuity must be understood as a liberation from

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apparent relationship of “filiation” (Jameson 263) between him and the Violas, he rejects their unofficial adoption of him, considering neither Giorgio who encourages him to perform the heroic actions that “my son would have” (Nostromo 339) (Giorgio himself being “the immaculate republican, the hero without a stain” [401]), nor Teresa who says that she “has been like a mother to him” (15), truly worthy of being his new parents. When Giorgio interpellates him as a son by saying “My son would have been just such a fine young man as you, Gian’ Battista, if he had lived,” Nostromo negates this appropriation with a misrecognition of the subtext: “What? Your son? But you are right, padrone. If he had been like me he would have been a man” (94). When Teresa lies on her deathbed and asks for him, he drags his feet so much that Dr Monygham “snarl[s]”: “You may go to her or stay away. There is very little to be got from talking to the dying” (181), unmasking the reason why Nostromo does not consider Teresa worthy of his time, and why he can show greater kindness to a strange woman he has never met to whom he gives all his remaining money (179). Teresa has misjudged him. She sees him as fulfilling set duties, no less those defined by paid work: “He had seemed to her courageous, a hard worker, determined to make his way in the world. From gratitude and the ties of habit he would become like a son to herself and Giorgio” (183). The reason why “He had not walked along the way of Teresa’s expectations” (183) is because his expectations become much greater than what she tries to fix him to. Nostromo at that point in the narrative seems instead to be holding out for unofficial adoption by the rich Europeans in Costaguana, to be seen as fully one of their own. The novel states that with “his daring, his courage, his act that had set these ships in motion upon the sea, hurrying on to save the lives and fortunes of the Blancos, the taskmasters of the people, to save the San Tomé mine; to save the children” (353), deeds with which Nostromo saves Sulaco from the Monterist revolution, “[i]t might be said that… he was only protecting his own” (14). These words the dependency of parentage and conventions” (65). She similarly thinks that Nostromo, however, is still entrenched in family relations, albeit highly problematic ones: although he “has two foster families in Sulaco,” “the Violas and the English community,” the former “[place] him in the untenable position of a substitute for the lost son who died at sea,” whereas the latter is a “grotesque form of parentage” (66). Neither side considers him as his own individual (68). See also Bernard Constant Meyer’s Joseph Conrad: A Psychoanalytic Biography for a discussion of symbolic parentage in the novel.

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return the reader to the beginning of Nostromo’s history in Sulaco which establishes his claims—claims he ironically does not finally redeem. “[H]is own” does not just refer to his job and his friends in this adopted home, but also his share in the “material interests” (188) of Sulaco, derived from the immense wealth of the San Tomé mine. Nostromo expects “that the Señor Administrador of San Tomé will reward me some day” (179), that the work he has delivered should mean that he should have “been taken into account” (302)—and in what way, what kind of “account,” we start to see more fully once we read his narrative as one of coming into his great expectations, his well-earned, well-deserved inheritance. This chapter further examines the relationship between ideas of work and of inheritance in the novel, captured by the claim—summed up in the two lines in Faust quoted at the beginning of the Introduction and demonstrated in Nostromo’s actions—that one can work for and earn one’s inheritance (instead of just one’s salary, which becomes inconsequential to Nostromo). It shows how this belief gives rise to Nostromo’s identity conflicts, and how it allows the novel to critique assumptions of desert deriving from both the ideologies of work and of inheritance. The chapter will continue to explore the two senses of the notion of inheritance focused on so far: inheritance as familial legacy in the form of rank and wealth, and as innate ability. The applicability of the first sense to Charles Gould, the inheritor of the mine, and to Martin Decoud, an initially wayward member of the aristocratic ruling class, is apparent and will be examined further on. But this first sense is also relevant to Nostromo because work proves an inadequate mediator between merit and rewards and an inadequate method of self-making, so that Nostromo’s anticipation of great expectations, of coming into his deserts through what I have called unofficial adoption by the rich Europeans, needs to come to the aid of his self-fashioning. The second sense of inheritance applies because the idea of coming into one’s own through work necessarily depends on the idea of a capable self that finds adequate external recognition, to refer back to Marlow’s words on work as “a chance to find yourself” (72) in “Heart of Darkness”—yet as we have seen in previous chapters inherent abilities and their external recognition are far from certain, stable or reliable.

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4.1

Forging One’s Inheritance Through Merit

Nostromo’s path shares some similarities with the Victorian inheritance plot. His great expectations of social status and wealth derive from the idea of a deserved, but deferred, inheritance, where one proves one is intrinsically worthy of obtaining these great rewards, of coming into one’s own—just as in the Victorian novel, as we saw in the Introduction, inheritances often “function[ed] as the reward of virtue” (Dolin 117). But the difference is that Nostromo’s great expectations are an inheritance that he actively tries to forge for himself—the rewards themselves (at first mainly to be well-regarded, and then more concretely to get his fortune) are his goal. The idea of inheritance marries the idea of work, so that the one takes on the ideals and values of the other, creating a different mode of remuneration that combines both patterns of legacy and work. By showing how this process of claiming one’s inheritance goes awry, Nostromo foregrounds the potential conflicts between work and inheritance, the latter of which could arguably be seen, as the Introduction explained, as a morally arbitrary form of non-work. The cultural reiteration of the work ethic, first, as Weber argued, as part of the religious mission under Protestantism to answer one’s calling through work, and then subsequently as a secular form of vocation, expressly sees work as not morally arbitrary.5 In its ideal conception, the rewards reaped from work are fair, just, and morally well-deserved, with input (in terms both of quality and quantity) proportional to earnings and rewards, whether earthly or heavenly. The problem is, of course, that work rarely attains this ideal state; one needs to look no further than Marx’s critique of capitalist production as exploiting workers’ labour rather than achieving such commensurateness. As we saw in Chapter 2, even Weber’s argument in relation to the origins of the Protestant work ethic points to the contradiction in the idea of earning one’s inheritance, which Nostromo’s ill-fated combination of the ideals of inheritance and of work tries to attain. “[T]ireless labor in a calling” cannot itself be a means to the attainment of “one’s state of grace,” the relevant inheritance in this case, yet it is at the same time “the best possible means of attaining.… assurance of” 5 Hughes, Sharrock, and Martin write that according to Weber’s account, “In other societies [beyond Western Europe and the United States], work and the pursuit of wealth are regarded as necessary evils, as means which provide the good life; they do not in themselves make up the good life. In modern capitalism, by contrast, work has a morally positive character” (95).

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it (Weber 77–78). Inheritances cannot really be directly earned, but the belief in them can be—and what Nostromo actually earns is precisely a deep belief in his desert, an anticipation of great expectations, rather than the actual reward. Reading Nostromo’s expectations as an anticipated inheritance explains the seeming contradiction between Nostromo’s initial carelessness with the monetary side of his service, his “disinterested[ness] with the unworldliness of a sailor” (Nostromo 297), and his later desire for deferred rewards. He is at first uncaring about money “not so much from the absence of mercenary instincts as from sheer ignorance and carelessness for tomorrow” (297), but then comes to expect it down the line as his great expectations, the belief in his desert referred to in the last paragraph, are triggered. His vanity, from which all his actions derive, can then without conflict be simultaneously “an unpractical and warm sentiment” and “materialistic and imaginative” (297). But his claims are extremely precarious, because Nostromo’s “investment” (160) into his worthy persona may not pay off: unlike being paid directly for one’s work, one cannot exert much direct control using one’s own actions over whether one attains these great expectations or not. After saving President Ribiera, one of the landed aristocracy, Nostromo asks Decoud “moodily,” “And how much do I get for that, señor?” (164). The answer is, unfortunately, very little, because the rich do not ever think of Nostromo as one of their own. When Decoud says that Nostromo “promised me that if a riot took place for any reason… his Cargadores, an important part of the populace, you will admit, should be found on the side of the Europeans,” Mrs Gould at first has trouble making sense of this: “He has promised you that? … What made him make that promise to you?” (159). She cannot conceive that Nostromo considers himself one of the rich Europeans, or at least deserving of being one of them, and not merely their wage worker. Mrs Gould’s surprise indicates that the allegiance Nostromo imagines, which transcends commercialism and operates based on the in-group logic of inheritance, is not one that is reciprocated by the rich. Decoud on the other hand astutely observes that “Upon the whole… I suppose he expects something to his advantage from it. You mustn’t forget that he does not exercise his extraordinary power over the lower classes without a certain amount of personal risk and without a great profusion in spending his money.… He told me… that he had come here to make his fortune. I suppose he looks upon his prestige as a sort of investment” (159–60). This is an investment in a future inheritance, much like a character who

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acts in a certain way to ensure his rich relative leaves him with his fortune might behave. The new way of remuneration Nostromo seeks is then notably opposed to direct commerce. Inheritances are not easily earned, unlike wages—and indeed, cannot be earned directly like them. From this derives the irony of Nostromo being repeatedly called “invaluable” (Nostromo 73), or essentially priceless. His services are so crucial, his achievements so great, that a price tag cannot really be put on them. This anti-commercialism has been read in different ways. For instance, Tamás Juhász reads Nostromo as gradually progressing from archaic to modern commerce, while also going back and forth between these modes (166–74). Ursula Lord sees Nostromo as changing from a state of full being and social integration to one of alienation and enslavement to material and commercial interests (207–9). This is of course not a clear-cut change. Even prior to the change, Nostomo’s anti-commercialism is superficial, as we have seen. And after it, being paid directly for his heroic feats remains out of the question for Nostromo. This would make Nostromo not “invaluable for our work—a perfectly incorruptible fellow” (94), but potentially corruptible and partial, selling his services to the full no differently from other tradespeople. It would do away with the prospect of great expectations down the line which Nostromo keeps anticipating—until he becomes so disillusioned that he purloins the silver he has been hired, again not for any direct reward, to guard. Nostromo’s refusal to negotiate directly with the market can be seen as both part of the appeal to the idea of inheritance in the novel, and of the absolutely individuating nature of his work. Rather than a commodity on the marketplace, his work uniquely defines him, so that he is “the only man fit for” (142) performing such unconventional and drastic deeds as saving the silver. His gradual disillusionment with the anti-commercial reward of mere individuation, his diminishing hopes of “get[ing] something great… some day” for being the only man who “could have been even thought of for such a thing” as saving the silver, becomes a source of bitterness that justifies his appropriation of the silver: since “[t]here was no one in the world but Gian’ Battista Fidanza, Capataz de Cargadores, the incorruptible and faithful Nostromo, to pay such a price” (360)— that of putting his own and Decoud’s lives in danger and abandoning Teresa on her deathbed—no one else deserves the silver but him. The anti-commercial act of saving the silver shows his individual worth—a worth that, ironically, he finally puts a money value on with the worth

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of the silver. His superficial rejection of direct market evaluation—even when he is finally fully cognizant of his desire for money, and finally fully fears the “poverty, misery, and starvation” (334) the dying Teresa has prophesied—is so perverse that although he heroically saves Sulaco from the Monterist revolution, and is asked by Gould “what he could do for him” (351), he does not name a price. The blighted inheritance of the silver must ironically be his covert fortune because that is part and parcel of the persona he wants: someone who does not do anything for personal gain, who will accept higher status if given it as reflective of his person but will not ask for it. So Nostromo must pretend to do his heroic work for the sake of the work only, keeping up the semblance of “disinterested[ness]” (160) which Mrs Gould is utterly convinced of, but of which Decoud is more doubtful. This is not truly the anti-teleological view of desert that would see work as its own reward, referred to in the Introduction and in Chapter 3, but rather the semblance of it, a front that Nostromo feels he must keep up. My position on Nostromo here pulls back somewhat from Lord’s view that before Nostromo’s revelation that “he has been betrayed by the owners of the silver,” he was “the relic of a pre-monetary world of glamour, adventure, independence, and unquestioning loyalty” (207)—in other words, that he is, in Mrs Gould’s view, “disinterested, and therefore trustworthy” trustworthy” (160). Although it is true, as the dying Teresa Viola observes, that the rich “have been paying [Nostromo] with words” (186), not money, they may be seen, in Decoud’s words again, as “a sort of investment” (160). These words are promissory notes, to be redeemed for Nostromo’s great expectations, a form of coming fully into his own, an expectation of greatness that Nostromo had even prior to his complete sense of betrayal by the rich, when he was not fully certain yet what he would get. Nostromo’s corruption by the silver is thus less of a narrative break or a character change,6 and more a culmination and realization of the logic by which he has worked all along. The silver epitomizes the conflicts between ideas of work and inheritance that Nostromo has been trying to combine throughout the novel. Thinking that he deserves and has successfully obtained the inheritance of the silver for himself, he cannot nevertheless escape from having to continue to work for it, thus proving that he does not outright possess 6 Gooch explains how Nostromo has often been read as “a failed character” because of this change (286).

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his inheritance after all. Having embezzled it, Nostromo must take care to “grow rich very slowly” (360) as he puts it, so that others do not find out. “[T]he difficulty of converting it into a form in which it could become available” means bizarrely that he works it just as Charles Gould works the mine, needing to take lengthy “voyages along the coast” in his schooner as “the ostensible source of his fortune” (375), while really using them to sell his silver piece by piece. Laundering the silver becomes his new job. He has to draw on the silver as if it is a salary, withdrawing small amounts from it at regular intervals. Yet at the same time he owns all of it, as a simultaneously well-deserved and yet also an illegitimate inheritance. So the original relationship between paymaster and labourer is reproduced: “the silver of San Tomé was provided now with a faithful and lifelong slave” (359). His desire to be equal to that which owns him, his “yearn[ing] to clasp, to embrace, absorb, subjugate in unquestioned possession this treasure” (379), ensures it. The tragedy of Nostromo’s situation arises from his assumption, as part of meritocratic ideals, that work can lead to commensurate rewards— even that of inherited social station that one was traditionally born into. But even fully demonstrated merit such as Nostromo’s is not definitive enough of social identity in the context of Costaguana, nor as significant, or as stable, as traditional forms of inheritance. In the face of the recalcitrance of traditional inheritance, the case of Nostromo probes how much “chance” there really is to “find yourself” in work (Heart of Darkness 72) if this self is supposed to be one that is able to obtain the rewards one deserves through one’s work. Work under capitalism exploits Nostromo’s abilities but does not reward him accordingly, no matter what meritocratic ideals imply is now possible. Nostromo remains merely “[a] most useful fellow” (Nostromo 34) to all the Europeans he is “lent” to by Captain Mitchell (34). Even Mitchell who calls Nostromo “my Capataz de Cargadores” (my emphasis), “devoted to me, body and soul” (35), reiterates Nostromo’s instrumental value as a “perfect handy man” (230). Nostromo becomes caught in an identity crisis: he creates an exceptional persona, but discovers the limits of self-making when he is not acknowledged by the rich as anything other than an exceptional servant. His nickname “Nostromo” sticks to him like the curse of the silver: meaning boatswain in Italian, also possibly derived from nostro uomo or “our man” (432), Nostromo as “man of the people” seems destined to be excluded from the ranks of the rich aristocrats, “the hombres finos —the gentlemen” (313), the circles he thought himself worthy of entering as part of his

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great expectations. He only fully realizes his permanent outsider status in these circles, as only “[t]he best dog of the rich” (337), upon returning from the Isabel islands after taking the silver there for safety: “Kings, ministers, aristocrats, the rich in general, kept the people in poverty and subjection; they kept them as they kept dogs, to fight and hunt for their service” (298), crucially without commensurate reward. “[T]he interest” (327) of the rich, Nostromo recognizes, is not his own. Birth still predetermines socioeconomic position; the meritocratic promise does not necessarily hold true. Finally, his hopes dashed, instead of waiting for the “great” inheritance of which he deems himself worthy, he ends up appropriating the silver he was supposed to save, in doing so taking the “curse” (187) of this silver upon him—itself the accursed inheritance of Charles Gould, the owner of the mine, who received it as a legacy from his father who told him to stay well away from it. 4.1.1

Embodying vs Ironizing Inheritances

With his aristocratic lineage and his inheritance of the Sulaco mine, Gould seems the opposite of Nostromo in his social position. Indeed what sets them apart is their relationship to money: while Nostromo must obfuscate his desire, once he develops this, to obtain financial rewards for his exceptional services, to maximize profit must be Gould’s ostensible reason to all the investors for exploiting the mine, even while his real purpose is very far removed from “simple profit in the working of a silver mine” (Nostromo 51). Yet like Nostromo, Gould must still work his inheritance, one that is also an investment into uncertain future rewards from the mine, situated as it is in its politically explosive context. The San Tomé mine is the archetype of the inheritance that must be proven and earned (to become “mine,” in wordplay suggested by Aaron Fogel [114]), occupying the simultaneous ontological status of an inheritance and not yet an inheritance, something which connects Gould to his father and yet separates them. Gould Senior, who “had been weak,” “must be put completely in the wrong” (56). The mine must be described in new language: not that of exploitation and moral depravity, but stability, prosperity, and moral integrity. As Gould puts it, “We are in now for all that there is in us ” (63; my emphasis). Whereas his father “knew nothing of mining,” “had no means to put his concession on the European market” (42), and warns Gould “never to claim any part of his inheritance” in Costaguana because of the curse of the perpetually granted concession (44), Gould imbues the

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mine with “hope, vigour, and self-confidence” (45), makes it his express mission to find out everything he can about mining, in the end transforming it into “the Treasure House of the World” (374). His becoming the “King of Sulaco” (105) continues his family’s legacy where it failed in the past: as the narrative repeatedly reminds the reader, Gould’s uncle, declared the President of Sulaco when Costaguana was a Federation, had been shot by the dictator Guzmán Bento; and Gould’s father, “for a long time one of the most wealthy merchants of Costaguana” (41), lost the bulk of his wealth to subsequent political regimes. Gould’s fight to earn his inheritance is, like Nostromo’s, a striving for a desired identity: “he felt that the worthiness of his life was bound up with success” (64). This is in contrast to the comparatively indifferent financial investors of the mine who put in capital but little effort and little personal attachment. Gould does not use the multinational corporate structure to obfuscate his ownership; rather, he is the mine. This is why “the talk of these wealthy and enterprising men discussing the prospects, the working, and the safety of the mine” makes Mrs Gould “impatient and uneasy, whereas she could talk of the mine by the hour with her husband with unwearied interest and satisfaction” (53). This is also why Gould declares he could “never have disposed of the Concession as a speculator disposes of a valuable right to a company—for cash and shares, to grow rich eventually if possible” (55). Such actions would demonstrate legal and financial ownership, but not the personal or moral ownership that reflects his inner worth, “the almost mystic view he took of his right” (288). The former type of ownership gives rise to mere institutional entitlement, whereas the latter creates an argument for his inheritance being his moral desert. Yet his full embracing of the mine as his inheritance and the ultimate definition of his personhood is also why the mine is able to take over his entire life and identity, so that Mrs Gould sees “clearly the San Tomé mine possessing, consuming, burning up the life of the last of the Costaguana Goulds; mastering the energetic spirit of the son as it had mastered the lamentable weakness of the father” (373). Such full embracing is because Gould, unlike Decoud, cannot use an ironic approach to distance himself from his inheritance, to keep it apart from his personhood. Gould, “like his father,” “had no ironic eye,” and his “innate gravity” means that the “parody of civilized institutions… offended his intelligence, his uprightness, and his sense of right,” and he could not bring himself to be “amused at the absurdities that prevail in

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this world” (271). His sincere and complete dedication to the full responsibilities of his inherited position and resource of the mine comes at the cost of being consumed by these. In contrast, Decoud’s “affectations of irony and scepticism” (357) help him to navigate his inherited position and his work as a journalist without allowing these meaningfully to define him—but with such use of irony comes also the danger of the loss of identity, a danger that Decoud is not finally able to contain. As the rest of this section shows, Decoud’s consistent employment of irony creates his different relationship with the three ideas of work, inheritance, and desert from Nostromo’s and Gould’s, and points to Conrad’s alternative exploration of these key terms. Like Gould, Decoud initially seems Nostromo’s opposite in terms of his social position: a Costaguanero aristocrat with a private income, he has no need to work for pay, and instead dabbles in journalism from faraway Paris. “[I]rony and scepticism” (357) are the strategies that Decoud uses to keep his inherited position and the commitments this entails, which include his work as a journalist, at arm’s length, while still making full use of the material advantages his inherited position comes with. However, this also results in a life “whose dreary superficiality is covered by the glitter of universal blague,” and “a mere barren indifferentism posing as intellectual superiority” (111). To upper-class Costaguaneros, he is “the son Decoud,” and because of that considered “a talented young man” (111). In reality, the narrator reveals, “he was an idle boulevardier,” merely a pseudo-journalist “in touch with some smart journalists, made free of a few newspaper offices, and welcomed in the pleasure haunts of pressmen” (111), composing, for instance, from the safe distance of Paris for “[a]n important Parisian review” an article on the political turmoil of Costaguana “in a serious tone and in a spirit of levity,” while disguising his irony so that “his French friends would remark that evidently this little fellow Decoud connaissait la question à fond” (112). Decoud can laugh at the disastrous social upheavals in his native country—considering it “screamingly funny, the blood flows all the time, and the actors believe themselves to be influencing the fate of the universe” (112)—without renouncing his membership of his native country’s aristocratic class. In characterization that foreshadows Razumov’s “railing” and “irony” (214) in Under Western Eyes (where Razumov, once implicated by Haldin’s confession, uses irony to remain detached from the community of revolutionaries he finds himself in in Geneva), Decoud, although “imagin[ing] himself Parisian to the tips of his fingers,” “was in danger of remaining

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a sort of nondescript dilettante all his life” because of “push[ing] the habit of universal raillery to a point where it blinded him to the genuine impulses of his own nature” (Nostromo 112). Such ironic distancing, where Decoud can say and do things without really meaning them, while at first beneficial for Decoud’s peace of mind, is then detrimental to his individual growth and deeper self-knowledge. Initially without Nostromo’s or Gould’s strong sense of desert, of deserving particular rewards by dint of status, abilities, or hard work (although Harry Marten has pointed out that Decoud “feels the need to be regarded as a man of stature” [83]), Decoud can noncommittally live his life in material and emotional comfort. He is indeed “in danger” of doing so until he is “selected for the executive member of the patriotic small-arms committee of Sulaco” (112) in the midst of another wave of revolutionary upheaval in the country, an non-meritocratic appointment that surprises even himself as “the height of the unexpected, one of those fantastic moves of which only his ‘dear countrymen’ were capable,” because, as he exclaims to his sister, “What do I know of military rifles?” (112). The enlistment of his help to procure firearms to guard against revolutionary factions is due purely to his inherited social station instead of any demonstrated ability. Such automatic employment again contrasts with Nostromo’s appointment to tasks to save Sulaco from revolutionary forces. Decoud’s subsequent “earnestness and ability… in carrying out his mission, which circumstances made delicate, and his want of special knowledge rendered difficult” (113) is, it is suggested, in large part due to his desire to prove himself to Antonia, whom he has not seen for eight years but who made a deep impression on him “as a tall girl of sixteen” because “she flew out at him about the aimlessness of his life and the levity of his opinions” (114). His realization after meeting Antonia again that he loves her imperils his ironic detachment. Decoud subsequently uses the work endowed him by his inherited position to earn what he calls “my reward, which no one but Antonia can give me” (178). But, as we will shortly see, this earning still involves keeping the ideals and commitments of his position as “the son Decoud” (111) at bay. Geoffrey Harpham has argued that irony “resists moralization,” accounting for “the anxiety of moralistic criticism when it confronts irony,” which “characteristically responds to ironic detachment by urging that irony ought, in normal or ideal circumstances, to be neutralized or stabilized through the principled conversion of doubt into certainty” (94). The anxiety Harpham points out arises out of the fear that irony, as

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Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, will “distanc[e] ourselves from our commitments in a way that may always endanger those commitments” (153).7 Decoud exemplifies such irony, and, as I have suggested, he employs this to detach himself from his inherited position, to remain somewhat loose from its ties, to pretend to be superior to it even while making use of the material advantages it yields. Michael DiSanto has written on the representation of Decoud that “Without faith in anything or anyone, including himself,.… Decoud might be read as Conrad’s agreement with Kierkegaard’s warnings, which he makes repeatedly, against doubting everything” (123). By looking briefly at some of Kierkegaard’s warnings, we will see that Conrad’s representation is also not a simple promotion of the stabilization of irony, a stabilization which might otherwise, at least in theory, have led to a more salutary relationship with inheritance and work. The course that Kierkegaard proposed in The Concept of Irony (1841) together with his cautioning against pure negative irony is to master it. If ironic detachment is unmastered, it means relativizing one’s life, values, and social roles without committing oneself in any way, to avoid any moral tie. Kierkegaard espoused a form of mastered irony, or “ethical” irony (Frazier 5), in which uncertainty and meaning coexist. This type of irony plays a crucial role in personal and moral development, and in a person’s attainment of individuality and autonomy. Interpreting Hegel’s theorization of irony “as the infinite absolute negativity” (Kierkegaard 261) or “pure irony” (Kierkegaard 253), Kierkegaard argued that ethical development using irony is possible, but predicated on containing the danger of detachment and negativity which irony poses, crucially without removing from irony the sting of detachment and criticality. In two revealing metaphors, he compares irony to pruning and to the acts of the surgeon (Frazier 141). He writes: “As soon as irony is controlled, it makes a movement opposite to that in which uncontrolled irony declares its life. Irony limits, finitizes, and circumscribes and thereby yields truth, actuality, content; it disciplines and punishes and thereby yields balance and consistency” (326). If irony is mastered, the ironic attitude, where one puts oneself at some remove from one’s entrenched situations, can be used to distance oneself from what one has so far taken for granted

7 Quoted in Frazier 2.

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and the social norms and rules into which one is situated, directing one closer to the “truth” (Kierkegaard 328). Kierkegaard describes mastered irony as a “purification that rescues the soul from having its life in finitude even though it is living energetically and robustly in it” (326). This occurs not just on a personal level (“soul”), but also on an external social level (“finitude”), with commitment spanning across these. It helps to place “the appropriate emphasis on actuality” (Kierkegaard 328) instead of eschewing it: although ideals attached to inherited and work identities are not fully actualizable, for instance, we can still strive for them without falling out entirely with the social world. Using irony at every stage, we can live without renouncing the internal world (with one’s own beliefs, and one’s traits, such as Gould’s “innate gravity” [Nostromo 271] or the “genuine impulses of [Decoud’s] own nature” [Nostromo 112]) or the external world (with its customs and its contingencies). Renouncing either would mean giving up the most difficult enterprise of being both a social and an individual human being: of how to balance and reconcile the two. As Brad Frazier writes, Kierkegaard’s ethical use of irony provides “the mean between the radical disengagement of a pure ironist and the unreflective social conformity of a commonplace person” (136). Mastered irony as conceived by Kierkegaard in Concept therefore plays a crucial part in the process of attaining ethical selfhood, of balancing continuous critical reassessment of one’s inherited and work identities with sincere commitment to them. This avoids an unreflective “immediate” existence (Kierkegaard 204) where we merely go through the motions of life. It also means we do not disengage ourselves completely, which would be witheringly negative irony, causing progressive separation from the actual world (Soderquist 173–74). Gould’s example shows that being purely idealistic and devoid of doubt and scepticism towards one’s inheritances and one’s work is not without its problems, and that ironic distancing can have some use in preventing one’s consumption by these. Does Conrad, then, use Decoud’s “struggle with commitment,” which “explicitly dramatizes the tension between skepticism and belief” (Wollaeger 123), as a stepping stone to point to a more productive type of ironization of one’s inheritances and work identities, akin to Kierkegaard’s idea of mastered irony? When Decoud returns to Costaguana on the ostensible pretext of seeing the arms sale through to the end, and comes face to face with the sincere and idealistic Antonia, he finds himself revisiting both his

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inherited identity as a Costaguanero aristocrat and his work identity of journalist. Antonia made as a child, and makes as an adult upon his return, such an impression on him because of her “frank” (115), serious, unironizing nature, and this reveals Decoud’s latent desire to reduce his “raillery” (112), to temper his deep scepticism, to attenuate the negativity of his irony. Thus, we find brief moments of partial dialling back of negative irony in the novel, in what we can see as Conrad’s experimentation with the extent to which it can be “mastered” without losing its critical edge, and with how much it can help one to commit oneself to one’s inheritances and work identity without compromising one’s selfhood. For instance, upon Decoud’s return, it is as if “the adopted child of Western Europe” (114) returns to parts of his birth that he has kept safely at arm’s length so far: he “felt the absolute change of atmosphere,” and “submitted to being embraced and talked to without a word,” being “moved in spite of himself by that note of passion and sorrow unknown on the more refined stage of European politics” (114–15). He subsequently declares to Mrs Gould that “he felt no longer an idle cumberer of the earth” (115)—on the surface as if he has mastered his irony, as if he has returned to and re-embraced his native inheritances and the work as a journalist that comes with these. However, like for Nostromo, there is an obvious performativity in Decoud’s words and actions, and in his assumption of his role as “the Journalist of Sulaco,” highlighted by the mocking tone the narrator uses to describe him “going to and fro on the business of his august calling” (116). Decoud showcases himself to both Antonia and Mrs Gould, asking the latter in a self-conscious manner “whether she could not detect in him that day a marked change—an air, he explained, of more excellent gravity” (115), and seeing himself through her eyes, “assur[ing] her” that is “actually beholding at that moment the Journalist of Sulaco” (115; my emphasis). His newly rediscovered patriotism is likewise performed as if he is now a professional actor in the “theatre of civil war” (207): the narrative describes Decoud as histrionically “breath[ing] out the words, ‘Pro Patria!,’” as he “confront[s] with a sort of urbane effrontery Mrs Gould’s gaze, now turned sympathetically upon himself” (116). And although Antonia fulfils the trope of the ideal(ized) woman figure directing the lost male towards higher meaning, a trope that would return in the form of Natalia in Under Western Eyes , Antonia is Decoud’s ultimate desired reward, not his commitment to his work or the cause to defend his country from General Montero’s advances. On the one hand, then,

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Decoud’s erstwhile irony ceases to be the safely distancing type it was before because Antonia has led him closer to the commitments his inherited station entails. He can no longer look upon Sulaco’s turmoil with detached amusement: the “crudeness” of “[t]he reality of the political action,” which “seemed closer, and acquired poignancy by Antonia’s belief in the cause,” “hurt his feelings,” so that “[h]e was surprised at his own sensitiveness,” and realizes that “I am more of a Costaguanero than I would have believed possible” (128).8 On the other hand, Decoud’s turn to the “cause” is merely practical, so that “His disdain grew like a reaction of his scepticism against the action into which he was forced by his infatuation for Antonia. He soothed himself by saying he was not a patriot, but a lover”. (128) Decoud is therefore an example of failed “mastered irony,” a failure that is underscored by the narrator’s use of biting irony throughout to describe the limitations of Decoud’s commitments, showing “a radical skepticism that the narrator never relinquishes” (Wollaeger 128). Whereas Gould is an unironical person who merely uses his appearance of “aloofness” (271) to pretend that material interests are his concern, Decoud is a deeply sceptical person who is incapable of mastering his irony in spite of “his passionate devotion” (192) to the sincere, serious, and idealistic Antonia. Decoud’s return to the social commitments that come with his inherited position does not lead to a “critical reengagement in [his] social roles and other features of the communities to which [he] belongs” (Frazier 171). There being little that Decoud finds worthwhile in his existing inherited status and work identity to commit himself more seriously to, he does not use “mastered irony” to recreate and reshape these for himself, instead only going through the motions of patriotic actions for his final “reward” (Nostromo 178) of Antonia. Conrad withholds the possibility for Decoud of an irony which is able to balance moral and committed ownership of inheritances with a critical questioning of them. Conrad’s persistent experimentation with portraying a lack of irony on the one hand, and unmastered negative irony on the other, questions the extent to which irony can really be mastered, and where the balance

8 This latter realization, as we will see in Chapter 6, partially foreshadows the moment Razumov asks himself whether it is “possible that I have a conventional conscience” (Under Western Eyes 222), when he comes to realize the innate sympathy he possesses, which prevents him from shrugging off his betrayal of Haldin by mere rationalization of his actions.

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between these extremes could lie. That there are no conclusive models of balanced irony in Nostromo (and this is true, as we will briefly see in Chapter 6, in Under Western Eyes as well) suggests that Conrad, unlike Kierkegaard in Concept, is sceptical of possibilities to use irony productively. This is despite the fact that Conrad seemed to be aware—like Kierkegaard—of the damaging effects of unmastered irony. Decoud’s particular uses of irony add to the persistent experimentation with how to portray the impossible challenges of the self’s navigation with inheritances and work identities in the quest for desired rewards that we have so far observed in this book. In the end, Decoud dies of silence and emptiness, a silence that is so deep that it cannot be effectively subjected to the ironic detachment he has been engaging in so far to sustain a vain and empty selfhood. He becomes “A victim of the disillusioned weariness” (359), “not fit to grapple with himself single-handed” (356). His gradual progression towards death on the Great Isabel takes the form of the narrator unpeeling his social identities one by one, starting with his inherited family position and his profession (“The brilliant ‘Son Decoud,’ the spoiled darling of the family,” “journalist of Sulaco” [356]), and the one reward (“the lover of Antonia” [356]) that he tried to use all these identities to work towards. Having “recognised no other virtue than intelligence,” he “had erected passions into duties” (357), building the latter on the basis of his love for Antonia instead of critically exploring what duties he himself wishes to commit himself to, and how. None of these matter now, since “Both his intelligence and his passion were swallowed up easily in this great unbroken solitude of waiting without faith” (357).

4.2

Constructing Deserts

Decoud’s demise underscores how highly deconstructable the inheritances are on which characters’ identities and desired rewards depend. This is true not just of material inheritances such as Gould’s mine, a fickle inheritance that requires Gould’s full submission to it in order to become Gould’s full possession, but also of the idea of innate abilities on which merit-based claims to desert often rely, which may exist, and which may be applied successfully in the external world—but which may also not. For Nostromo, without due recognition of his abilities by the external world, without the praise bestowed upon him by others’ admiring gazes and words, it is as if the extraordinary person with the extraordinary abilities Nostromo thought himself to be never was, accounting for his identity

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crisis when he swims back from the Isabel islands after his rescue mission to save the silver. Although Nostromo takes centre stage in Conrad’s representation of these issues, there are in fact many examples of desert seeking and claiming in the novel. One could say Nostromo is about people seeking what they believe to be their due, their desert. General Montero stages a coup because “he only wanted his share” (132). As we have seen, Decoud, “if successful” in the counter-revolution, expects “to receive my reward, which no one but Antonia can give me” (178). Pedrito Montero sees “in the elevation of his brother” the means “to acquire a serious fortune for himself” because he “meant to have his share of [the] prosperity” of Sulaco (277–78). The emphasis on rewards and deserts from chapter ten of the book onwards, which returns the narrative to the golden era of Sulaco prosperity after the failed Monterist revolution, is especially pronounced. Sulaco is now a stable, independent state, and a prosperous Captain Mitchell (re)counts the dues to every significant person who has helped defeat the Monterist revolution. Mitchell himself “hold[s] seventeen of the thousand-dollar shares in the Consolidated San Tomé mines,” “enough to keep me in comfort to the end of my days” (341–42). Dr Monygham opines that “we who played our part in it had our reward” (363). The success of his reward, the safety of Mrs Gould and continued time spent with her, allows him to say that “I am rewarded beyond my deserts” (363). All this counting of rewards deliberately sets up the questions: has Nostromo received his deserts? Does he deserve his great expectations, so that his purloining of the silver can be seen as a type of moral justice? Nostromo is not mentioned until well into the chapter, when Mitchell says that “He has done for Separation as much as anybody else, and… has got less than many others by it” (346). Because of him “There are people on this Alameda that ride in their carriages, or even are alive at all today”; because of him “the ‘Treasure House of the World’… was saved intact for civilisation—for a great future” (347). To address these questions, we should refer back to the distinction between entitlement and desert made in the Introduction. Entitlements are often formally defined as institutional and arise because “as persons and groups take part in just arrangements, they acquire claims on one another defined by the publicly recognized rules” (Rawls 273). The goal of a “just scheme” of entitlements to be striven for is to “satisf[y] their legitimate expectations as founded upon social institutions” (Rawls 273).

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The problem with entitlements, however, is that “what [people] are entitled to is not proportional to nor dependent upon their intrinsic worth” (Rawls 273). “[I]ntrinsic worth” is instead the domain of desert, which is often, as the Introduction explained, defined as a moral concept. Dr Monygham distinguishes between institutional legality and morality when he comments on the capitalist institutions in Sulaco: “There is no peace and rest in the development of material interests. They have their law and their justice. But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral principle” (366). Nostromo and Gould both feel they must earn their inheritances because both wish to prove their ability beyond mere entitlement (that is, Nostromo’s wages and Gould’s paternal legacy), to claim their desert, a desert that should reflect their intrinsic worth. That is why for Nostromo not getting what he sees as commensurate rewards for his efforts is a moral outrage. “They keep us and encourage us” (301), Nostromo complains, as if “work[ing] all day and rid[ing] about at night” (301) will finally bring the right rewards beyond mere regular wages; but they do not. That is also why Gould thinks of appropriating his inheritance as a moral quest: “The mine had been the cause of an absurd moral disaster; its working must be made a serious and moral success” (50). The Goulds feel they are “morally bound to make good their vigorous view of life against the unnatural error of weariness and despair” (56) that marked Gould Senior’s handling of the mine. Gould, as Decoud observes, “attaches a strange idea of justice” to the mine (177), with “justice” referring to Gould’s quest for justice as a social institution in Sulaco, but also “justice” as private justice, as his just and moral desert. As Mrs Gould thinks, their goal is “to keep their prosperity without a stain on its only real, on its immaterial side” (56), where the social institutions that create the stable environment for the creation and ownership of wealth coming from the San Tomé mine and the integrity and morality of the Goulds are one. The creation of “[a] better justice” (63) in Sulaco simultaneously reflects the Goulds’ moral status. Conrad’s depiction of Nostromo’s efforts to attain his great expectations, his overreaching desire to prove extra-institutional desert, questions the implicit meritocratic ideals that underpin Nostromo’s quest for recognition (like that of an heir, as we have seen) by the rich. We have already observed how inherited rank and wealth prove too intractable to overcome, leading finally to Nostromo’s sense that “He had been betrayed!”

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(301). But in addition, Conrad highlights the constructedness of recognized merit, and even of some of Nostromo’s so-called inherent abilities. For instance, Nostromo says that he is “going to make [the removal of the silver] the most famous and desperate affair of my life” (191, my emphasis). The affair is not such, but will be constructed as such so that Nostromo can forge his own desired merit, so that he can satisfy his vanity: He was a valuable man. What better recognition could he expect? His vanity was infinitively and naïvely greedy, but his conceptions were limited. Afterwards his success in the work he found on shore enlarged them in the direction of personal magnificence. This sailor led a public life in his sphere. It became necessary to him. It was the very breath of his nostrils. And who can say that it was not genuine distinction? It was genuine because it was based on something that was in him—his overweening vanity.… Each 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, and that disdain of the natives which helped him so much in the line of his work and resembled an inborn capacity for command. It made him appear incorruptible and fierce. (297; my emphases)

Language that points to inherency jostles with language that suggests dissemblance. Nostromo’s qualities reflect “genuine distinction” which is “based on [the vanity] in him,” that is inherent in him. All the other qualities that in others’ eyes make up his heroic identity are merely a façade, “resembling” but not truly constituting “an inborn capacity,” attached to this inherent vanity “[w]ithout [which] he would have been nothing.” What others consider Nostromo’s innate abilities are then built on a shaky foundation. So in the boat with Decoud in their joint mission to save the silver, in their fraught situation and with no other onlookers, “Something deeper, something unsuspected by everyone, had come to the surface” (203). The passage, then, further complicates the view of work as self-discovery. Nostromo’s qualities depend on external observation and recognition, on what “outward show” to put on, on what counts as “picturesque” (300), which guides his actions and behaviour. What can seem “inborn” may in fact be the result of social interpellation, so that work creates a performative self instead of revealing the self. Social recognition is then not necessarily, as we might expect, the result of natural ability that successfully manifests itself, but can also create the

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semblance of natural ability. Indeed, as Michael Sandel has written, “those qualities most plausibly regarded as essential to a person’s identity… are often heavily influenced by social and cultural factors” (74–75). A little later, Conrad would deconstruct even the most basic and inborn quality of vanity: “even that had been simply sensuous and picturesque, and could not exist apart from outward show” (Nostromo 300). Yet at the same time, even as the narrative describes Nostromo’s merit as an “outward show,” it also asks whether it can in fact still be seen as “genuine distinction” (297) in the sense that it is successfully executed and thus, in its realization, becomes real. The distinction between natural ability and social recognition is blurred even as Conrad sets it up. In the end, no matter what Nostromo does, he cannot earn his right to be adopted by the great families he serves and saves into a better position, those same families whose fortunes depend so much on his effort. Exceptional work, with Nostromo “not ‘one in a thousand,’” but “absolutely the only one” (Nostromo 325), does not yield dependable rewards, the great expectations he yearns for. Work cannot be the perfect mediator between oneself and one’s self-perceived desert, and cannot be used to come into one’s imagined own. Nostromo’s attempts to earn the inheritance that he thinks is his due, however, drive his worthiness as a novelistic hero. Had Nostromo only taken the path of steady work, he would likely have ended up like Captain Mitchell; had he literally been the son of one of the rich families, he would likely have ended up like the other aristocrats in Sulaco. Nostromo’s eventual refusal of paid work, when he rejects Mitchell’s suggestion that he should take up his old post as the Capataz de Cargadores again by stating that “I am too tired to work just yet” (350), sets up the radical refusal of paid work by the Professor in Conrad’s next novel, The Secret Agent . The Professor becomes so disillusioned with the extreme disengagement between his paid work in various laboratories and his “exalted convictions of his merits” and of his “genius” (62) that he breaks away from formal institutions altogether, and forges his own path as an anarchist.

Works Cited Armstrong, Paul B. “Conrad’s Contradictory Politics: The Ontology of Society in Nostromo.” Twentieth-Century Literature, vol. 31, no. 1, 1985, pp. 1–21. Colón, Susan E. The Professional Ideal in the Victorian Novel: The Works of Disraeli, Trollope, Gaskell, and Eliot. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

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Conrad, Joseph. Nostromo. Edited by Jacques Berthoud and Mara Kalnins. Oxford University Press, 2007. ———. Under Western Eyes. Edited by Roger Osborne, Paul Eggert, Keith Carabine, and Jeremy Hawthorn. Cambridge University Press, 2013. ———. Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether. Edited by Owen Knowles. Cambridge University Press, 2010. Cottom, Daniel. Social Figures: George Eliot, Social History and Literary Representation. University of Minnesota Press, 1987. DiSanto, Michael John. Under Conrad’s Eyes: The Novel as Criticism. Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2009. Dolin, Kieran. Fiction and the Law: Legal Discourse in Victorian and Modernist Literature. Cambridge University Press, 1999. Fogel, Aaron. Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue. Harvard University Press, 1985. Frazier, Brad. Rorty and Kierkegaard on Irony and Moral Commitment. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Gooch, Joshua. “‘The Shape of Credit’: Imagination, Speculation, and Language in Nostromo.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol. 52, no. 3, 2010, pp. 266–97. Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. “Abroad Only by a Fiction: Creation, Irony, and Necessity in Conrad’s The Secret Agent.” Representations, vol. 37, 1992, pp. 79–103. Hawthorn, Jeremy. Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness. Edward Arnold, 1979. Holmgren, Margaret. “Justifying Desert Claims: Desert and Opportunity.” The Journal of Value Inquiry, vol. 20, no. 4, 1986, pp. 265–78. Hughes, John A., Sharrock, Wes, and Martin, Peter J. Understanding Classical Sociology: Marx, Weber, Durkheim. Sage, 2003. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. 1981. London: Routledge, 2002. Juhász, Tamás. Conradian Contracts: Exchange and Identity in the Immigrant Imagination. Lexington Books, 2011. Kierkegaard, Søren. Kierkegaard’s Writings, II: The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates/Notes of Schelling’s Berlin Lectures. Princeton University Press, 2013. Lord, Ursula. Solitude Versus Solidarity in the Novels of Joseph Conrad: Political and Epistemological Implications of Narrative Innovation. McGill-Queen’s Press, 1998. MacIntyre, Alasdair. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. Open Court Publishing, 1999. Marten, Harry. “Conrad’s Skeptic Reconsidered: A Study of Martin Decoud.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, vol. 27, no. 1, 1972, pp. 81–94.

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Meyer, Bernard Constant. Joseph Conrad: A Psychoanalytic Biography. Princeton University Press, 1967. Paccaud-Huguet, Josiane. “Nostromo: Conrad’s Man of No Parentage.” The Conradian, vol. 18, no. 2, 1994, pp. 65–76. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press, 1999. Reed, John R. Victorian Conventions. Ohio University Press, 1975. Ruth, Jennifer. Novel Professions: Interested Disinterest and the Making of the Professional in the Victorian Novel. The Ohio State University Press, 2006. Sadrin, Anny. Parentage and Inheritance in the Novels of Charles Dickens. Cambridge University Press, 1994. Sandel, Michael. Liberalism and the Limits of Justice. Cambridge University Press, 1998. Shiach, Morag. Modernism, Labour and Selfhood in British Literature and Culture, 1890–1930. Cambridge University Press, 2004. Soderquist, K. Brian. The Isolated Self: Truth and Untruth in Søren Kierkegaard’s On the Concept of Irony. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2013. Wager, Timothy J. “‘There Is Meaning in Endeavour’: Conrad’s Artistic Labor.” Conradiana, vol. 30, no. 3, 1998, pp. 213–226. Weber, Max. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Other Writings. 1905. Edited and translated by Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells. London: Penguin, 2002. Wollaeger, Mark. Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism. Stanford University Press, 1990. Young, Michael. The Rise of the Meritocracy, 1870–2033: An Essay on Education and Equality. Penguin, 1961.

CHAPTER 5

“[E]ntitled to Undisputed Success”: Professional Being vs Doing in The Secret Agent

In December 1893, The Speaker, discussing an anarchist conference held in London, described anarchism as a “combined appeal to visionary aspirations and criminal instincts” (716). This was a period of intensifying international anarchist activity, and less than two months before the Greenwich Bomb Outrage. A few years later, in 1897, there were two more violent anarchist incidents: an explosion in London and the assassination of Spanish politician Cánovas del Castillo. In response, another essay entitled “The Literature of Anarchism” in The New Review, which serialized Conrad’s The Nigger of the “Narcissus” in the same year, calls anarchism “a faith, which on the one hand is passionately advocated by men like Kropotkin and Réclus, and on the other is acted on by ruffians” (281). Both examples point out the dual nature of anarchism, which made for controversy at the time not least because the “scientific basis” and secular “gospel” (The New Review 281) of its work problematically mirrored the ideology of legitimate forms of work at the time, in particular those of the rising professions. The French thinker Proudhon was allegedly the first person to use the word “anarchist” to describe himself; he immediately reaffirmed his declaration as a “serious profession of faith” (McLaughlin 132). His use of the French word profession draws upon its literal meanings of public declaration, promise, and avowal, from which many modern professional structures and ideals derive. In English, the word has generally been used © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 E. T. Y. Chan, Work, Inheritance, and Deserts in Joseph Conrad’s Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2584-9_5

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throughout the centuries to describe the vows taken upon entering a religious order. Before the nineteenth century, when used as a term for specific occupations, the word most often referred to the three ancient professions of medicine, law, and the Church.1 The expansion of industrial society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries led to the translation of the term into a wider socioeconomic realm, so that Samuel Taylor Coleridge commented in 1832 that there had been a “silent revolution” in Britain’s social structure “when the Professions fell off from the Church.”2 Where “the clergy no longer monopolised learning,” the gradual disassociation between religion and the professions led to “the advent of a more diversified society” (Corfield 244). The word “profession” came to refer to a much wider variety of well-delineated and organized occupations that required specific “learning” and expertise, and that often derived prestige from qualifying certification, accounting for the prestige value of the word in English (Perkin 23), whereas in French the word evolved to mean any employment. It is also the word from which the appellation of the Professor in The Secret Agent so suggestively derives. In Chapter 3, we very briefly mentioned professionalism when referring to Brierly’s attitude towards his work and its values. In this chapter on The Secret Agent , we examine professional values much more closely through the figure of the Professor. This chapter shows how professionalism’s greater emphasis on the specific application of abilities can lead to an even greater sense of disconnect between the self and one’s work, when one does not quite feel that one’s profession matches one’s innate self, or that the rewards one has obtained from one’s professional work adequately reflect one’s deserts. As social historians such as Harold Perkin have argued, the Victorian period was a time when notions of professional work and values were gaining prominence and undergoing large changes under the influence of an increase in the need for brainworkers and the concomitant organization and bureaucratization of intellectual labour. To enter a profession became less associated with answering a religious calling 1 The OED lists the first meanings of the word as “senses relating to the declaration of faith [and] principles,” and “any solemn declaration, promise, vow.” All the instances it lists under these are religious. 2 The OED quotes from Walter Besant’s Fifty Years Ago (1888): “New professions have come into existence, and the old professions are more esteemed. It was formerly a poor and beggarly thing to belong to any other than the three learned professions.”

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than with qualifications and certification that would ensure, in a competitive commercial environment that was the legacy of nineteenth-century laissez-fairism, a decent and stable remuneration for services rendered (Perkin 439). The emphasis on standards of remuneration tied to set qualifications connects professionalism particularly strongly to the rise of meritocratic ideals we have discussed so far in this book: now, the professions claimed, it was possible to rise through their well-organized ranks on the basis of merit and ability, rather than traditional inheritance (Perkin 3–4). This chapter suggests that the representation of the various types of anarchism in The Secret Agent shows some of the problems that had emerged with the rise of the modern professions, including the mismatches between work, inheritance, and desert we have observed so far in this book. These anarchisms, with their rules, organizations, and ideals, can be read as forms of “profession,” albeit illegitimate, that people who could not or did not want to make it in legitimate professions, but who had set expectations of desert, could choose as their “work.” The narrative describes Ossipon, for instance, as a quasi-doctor, quasi-scientist, and quasi-lecturer: he is an “ex-medical student without a degree; afterwards wandering lecturer to working-men’s associations upon the socialistic aspects of hygiene; author of a popular quasi-medical study” (40–41). Anarchist work provides the appearance of purpose and service and the possibility of using these to eke out individual prestige and money. Conrad does not, however, only use such representations to ridicule characters’ anarchist work: if anarchism in the novel (excepting the Professor’s work) is a parody of sorts of modern professional society, such parody, as I will discuss, also shows how the notion of “profession” in modern society has become degraded into mere acts and empty ideals. As this chapter will demonstrate, the Professor’s extreme form of anarchism, where he applies what he thinks is his superior innate genius, which he sees as real whereas the work of the police and other anarchists is merely a charade, becomes a way of creating what he sees as his supreme desert—“his entitle[ment] to undisputed success” (66). In the novel, the Professor tells Ossipon that “The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revolution, legality—counter moves in the same game; forms of idleness at bottom identical. He plays his little game—so do you propagandists. But I don’t play; I work fourteen hours a day, and go hungry sometimes” (58). Words implying amateurism (“game,” “idleness,” “plays”) are contrasted with the Professor’s claims to real work,

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seemingly the only truly “professional” work because of its technical and scientific precision and intricacy, and the Professor’s unqualified devotion to it. The Professor’s inheritance of “considerable natural abilities” combines with a different paternal inheritance to create his unyielding sense of desert, the most rigid yet of all the characters examined so far, a type of extreme subscription to meritocratic ideology: as the Introduction briefly mentioned, the Professor’s father, the “rousing preacher of some obscure but rigid Christian sect,” had been “a man supremely confident in the privileges of his righteousness,” which “[i]n the son… translated itself into a frenzied puritanism of ambition” under the influence of “the science of colleges” (66). Read with this description of the Professor in mind, the result of Conrad’s “ironical treatment” (Letters 3: 491) of anarchism in The Secret Agent is not only the deflating of anarchist goals in the novel as selfserving ideology, but also a more general reconsideration of the potential for irony (rather than a satisfactory integration of parts of the self) in any professional work, at a time when both established and aspiring professions often claimed expert “scientific” and noble servitude of humankind. Although as I mentioned in the Introduction numerous critics have written on Conrad and the rise of the professions in his time, the issue has yet to be explored more fully in The Secret Agent , in which the topic figures prominently. The novel collapses the Victorian differentiation between new secular modes of so-called noble service that are named “professions” and other work done solely for the sake of money, which are supposedly not deserving of the term. An early example of this distinction in the OED entry for “profession” comes from F. D. Maurice’s Lectures on the Education of the Middle Classes (1839), in which he states that a “Profession in our country… is expressly that kind of business which deals primarily with men as men, and is thus distinguished from a Trade, which provides for the external wants or occasions of men” (186). Refusing to take the concept of “profession” for granted, the “ironical treatment” (Letters 3: 491) in the novel of “drop[ping] anarchism into London life, and show[ing] that life suddenly losing its transparency and precipitating its murkier essence” (Berthoud 106), interrogates the notion of a “profession” and claims to professional ideals, as well as the rewards promised by a combination of professional and meritocratic ideology, and the deep sense of desert this sets up.

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These conflicts surrounding professionalism as a subtype of work are another form of the conflicts surrounding the concepts of work, inheritance, and desert that we have explored in this book. On the one hand, being a professional is to some degree akin to inhabiting an inherited position, what with the specific abilities professionals must possess (which, although they will develop them further, exist in a nascent form in these professionals even before their training and admission, and show their innate propensity and talent for their profession), and the closed hierarchy they become part of (so that the young captain in The Shadow Line, to repeat a quotation that also appeared in the Introduction, feels like he is “an hereditary king, not a mere elected head of a state,” and “a member of a dynasty feeling a semi-mystical bond with the dead” [54], his professional predecessors). On the other hand, professionals must also earn their position, going through a lengthy education, arduous training, and a rigorous qualification process, like Conrad did to become Master Mariner. This is the contradiction referred to in the Introduction that Jennifer Ruth has highlighted: the Victorian professional is supposedly already born with aptitudes and abilities that determine his profession, and yet has to have the patience and diligence to work hard and navigate the bureaucracy of professional systems, to behave strenuously in a certain way to become what he supposedly already is (5). And once he does, he will come into his deserts: the rewards of a good salary and social status that the professions try to guarantee their members through the very hierarchy and rules they set up will supposedly arrive, which, by the very reasoning of how one is also born with the abilities of a professional, are rewards that were already one’s own even before they were earned through work. However, the actual rewards obtained do not always match one’s sense of who one innately is, of one’s rightful deserts. In the Professor’s figure, in particular, Conrad depicts an extreme reaction to what happens when such professional ideals are subscribed to, but when what one sees as one’s deserts are not come into.

5.1

The Professor’s Professionalism

The secularization of the notion of “profession” presented both opportunities and problems for the modern professions. The word was still linked to its cousin, if not its twin, “vocation.” “Vocation” possesses the meaning of a higher calling and worthwhile devotion to and service in a line of work, which assumes a degree of unity between public and

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private benefit. However, this assumption could no longer remain as easily unquestioned. Conrad’s own anxiety about the meaning of professional work has been detailed by Byron Caminero-Santangelo, who describes Conrad’s attempts, in what could be seen as his participation in professional ideology and rhetoric, to claim professional status for his work. Conrad posits writing as a “unique moral service” and “real work,” as a vocation performed for higher ideals and lasting, universal values such as, using Conrad’s words, “truth,” “fidelity,” and “conscience” (CamineroSantangelo 198), which go beyond the mere transient, commercial, or political. This was despite his frequent critique and satire of fixed norms (Caminero-Santangelo 203), and the rigidity of procedures of institutionalization and standardization that accompany the process of professionalization to ensure that professions retained their monopoly over services and their image of rigorous competence. The problem is that such bureaucratization cannot fully describe the ideals and individual belief and execution of them that are necessary to fulfil professionalism’s “unwritten”3 requirements. In Lord Jim, for instance, certification does not guarantee a member’s willingness to abide by the code of honour of the profession of seafaring and is not able to exclude people such as the captain of the Patna, who is stripped of his certificate only after he dishonourably abandons his ship. This is the gap between the espousal of ideals that is a hallmark of professionalism and their realization that I propose to call the irony of professionalism: the high-flown professional ideals of meaningful and fulfilling service, almost inevitably conflict with their actualization. In addition, when professional ideals set up expectations for desert that are not in the end fulfilled, such lofty idealism can generate a particularly acute sense of injustice.

3 Here, “unwritten” is taken from the title of Unwritten Laws and Ideals (1899), a compilation of essays on a number of professions by experts in their fields. Outlining the history of their professions, they describe in the book the values and codes of honour that, although not formally regulated, nevertheless are claimed to underpin them. The book includes chapters on the three traditional professions (medicine, law, and the Church), as well as on, for example, vice-chancellors, schoolmasters, “boys at public schools,” banking, music, and art. The title’s pairing of “unwritten” with “laws” may seem contradictory, but shows that much of the status of professional work lay in ideals that derived their power more from their silent but assumed presence rather than regulatory precision, although formal rules of course existed alongside these.

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The Professor’s type of anarchism is a case in point. It is described as an act of retaliation against modern professional society that initially deluded him with its ideals of meritocracy: Of humble origin, and with an appearance really so mean as to stand in the way of his considerable natural abilities, his imagination had been fired early by the tales of men rising from the depths of poverty to positions of authority and affluence. The extreme, almost ascetic purity of his thought, combined with an astounding ignorance of worldly conditions, had set before him a goal of power and prestige to be attained without the medium of arts, graces, tact, wealth—by sheer weight of merit alone. (66; my emphases)

But his ambitions for success within existing professional codes are repeatedly thwarted, so that he feels cheated by their meritocratic premise: having been once assistant demonstrator in chemistry at some technical institute, [he] quarrelled with the authorities upon a question of unfair treatment. Afterwards he obtained a post in the laboratory of a manufactory of dyes. There too he had been treated with revolting injustice. (62; my emphases)

The unsatisfactory rewards and recognition for his work—scientific and technical in nature, making some use of his “natural abilities”—result in his sense of “revolting injustice” being inflicted upon him, since they do not match the deserts of “power and prestige” that he knows to be his to come into, because he believes that these are not only to be earned, but already his rightful inheritance. Instead of reconciling himself to the prosaic fate of enacting an obedient, careful, slow rise, the Professor creates his own profession in the form of his anarchism. It is the only work able to match his exalted notions of his merit and vocational zealousness, which is described in a combination of secular and religious terminology that encapsulates the original sense of “profession,” as his “frenzied puritanism of ambition” that “He nursed… as something secularly holy” (66). Such descriptions resonate with Weber’s in The Protestant Ethic, where, as we have seen, Weber argued that the Protestant Reformation led to the transference of the values of Puritan asceticism to secular vocations, which became seen as secular forms of religious work. But work in modern society, he posited, had lost this original religious drive, resulting in a

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meaningless servitude to a mechanized society in which people are but “little cogs, little men clinging to little jobs and striving towards bigger ones.”4 The social notion of “profession” now failed to live up to its original meaning. The secularization and the opening up of the professions led to an additional anxiety of meaning: that of choice, which comes with what, at first, seems greater freedom, but also with the responsibility and need to find one profession that grants the possibility of expressing oneself to one’s satisfaction. Fredric Jameson describes this as “the secularization of life under capitalism and the breaking up… of the older tradition-oriented systems of castes and inherited professions” from the end of the eighteenth century onwards (238). The result was that “for the first time people (but mainly men) must weigh the various activities against each other and choose their professions” (238). Jameson relates this to the disappearance of the belief in “innate passions and inborn vocations,” so that “to wonder what to do with your life is already to commit yourself in advance to a certain ontological dissatisfaction with any of the ultimate possibilities” (59). The Professor’s battle against society can be interpreted as deriving from this loss of past traditional structures of society, which in modern times have made way for a dizzying array of choices (for him all nonchoices), leading to his violent attempt at anti-mimesis. Nothing will do except for his vision of what he should be doing and what he should get, based upon his image of himself, of what he deserves: His struggles, his privations, his hard work to raise himself in the social scale, had filled him with such an exalted conviction of his merits that it was extremely difficult for the world to treat him with justice—the standard of that notion depending so much upon the patience of the individual. The Professor had genius, but lacked the great social virtue of resignation. (62; my emphasis)

The idea of just deserts again becomes something to be inscribed into, with the self read as needing to come into great expectations that are owned even prior to being obtained and extracted from the outside world because of the “struggles” and “hard work” he has already put in, and his belief in his superior “merits.” Here, the narrative confirms that the Professor does have “genius,” unlike the early character Willems 4 From a 1909 speech by Weber, quoted in Levenson 268.

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whose belief in his own “genius” is not validated by Conrad. But the mismatch between actual rewards and the Professor’s bottomless sense of desert remains. No actual profession can match such expectations. Patience and “resignation,” those Puritan values of self-denial that the Professor ironically lacks, would have meant a steady, humble dedication to a profession and conformity to its bureaucratic rules. But the Professor is not interested in lengthy servitude without immediate reward: he wants recognition commensurate with his merit, in the here and now, right away. And this very un-puritan attitude, coupled with Puritanism’s zealousness, is exposed in Conrad’s ironic use of the word “puritanism” (66) in describing the Professor’s ambition. This, in turn, reveals the ironies, the fissures between being and doing, of professional identity in modern society.

5.2 Anti-Bureaucratic Charisma and the Professions Weber’s notion of charisma, which he was the first to use for sociological analysis, sheds light on what institutionalized and bureaucratized forms of work lacks, for both the Professor in his extreme example and the Assistant Commissioner as a more qualified one. This is one of the sources of the gap we observe in these characters between being and doing, inheritance and work, and one’s sense of desert and one’s actual awards. Exploring this gap using the idea of charisma not only allows a deeper understanding of the novel, but also re-examines some of the interpretations of Conrad’s attitudes towards professionalism. For instance, arguing for Conrad’s awareness of and active engagement with this lack of fit between the self and one’s profession through what he calls in his Author’s Note “the ironic method” (7) in The Secret Agent would portray a different writer from that emerging from David Trotter’s Paranoid Modernism. In his study, Conrad’s “paranoia,” induced by the anxieties of professional identity, is uncritically reproduced in Lord Jim as a result of his “madness” (165). In line with the following discussion, Conrad did show a desire, in fiction and in real life, for charisma to counter “professionalism’s discontents” (Trotter 108), as Trotter persuasively argues. Yet Conrad did not succumb entirely to the self-indulging fictions of paranoid anti-mimetic thinking. Even when social mimesis is challenged and individual difference asserted (186), in The Secret Agent , the narrative is aware

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of the inadequacies of charisma itself and always of the inescapability of irony. Weber describes charisma as a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a “leader.” (241)

“Since,” he writes, “it is ‘extra-ordinary,’ charismatic authority is sharply opposed to rational and particularly bureaucratic authority, and to traditional authority” (244). It is “in radical contrast to bureaucratic organization,” with “no formal and regulated appointment or dismissal, no career, advancement or salary” (112). Perkin briefly discusses Weber’s concept, positing in professional ideology a limited form of charismatic persuasion, one that may be less strong but that, if successful, can last and be reproduced institutionally (6). This tempered, weaker form is the “office charisma” from the symbolic status that derives from successful professional organization (Kim 85), for instance the social status endowed to Conrad’s professional certification as Master Mariner, which Weber contrasted with the pure charisma defined above. Weber exemplified this with the “priest” figure, who belonged to the structures of his Church, opposing this to the pure charisma of the “prophet” figure who stands alone (Hendel 185–86). Such limited bureaucratic charisma becomes problematic for the Assistant Commissioner, who denounces “The distaste, the absence of glamour” in his work, which “extend from the occupation to the personality” (89). His yearning for real charisma is described as a misfit between himself and his profession: “His real abilities, which were mainly of an administrative order, were combined with an adventurous disposition. Chained to a desk in the thick of four millions of men, he considered himself the victim of an ironic fate” (89). He is deprived of work that would do justice to himself, so that he can truly come into his own. The Assistant Commissioner’s search for elusive “glamour” is to reach a state of consummation between self and work, “when our appointed activities seem by a lucky accident to obey the particular earnestness of our temperament,” and we can “taste the comfort of complete self deception”

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(89), when what we think we deserve matches what we actually obtain. This “glamour,” like Weber’s “charisma,” is described as anti-structural and anti-bureaucratic, attributed to the Assistant Commissioner’s working past “in a distant part of the globe”: it “had the saving character of an irregular sort of warfare or at least the risk and excitement of open air sport” (89). But had he been able to attain this ideal in London, the narrative still claims that the Assistant Commissioner’s “ironic fate” would not have ended: because it would still be a form of “self-deception,” it would always fall short of a perfect accord between who the Assistant Commissioner is and what he does. There seems therefore something already disingenuous, even ironic, about the original sense of the word “profession,” glimpsed in the word’s roots. The word “profess” can carry an “implication of insincerity,”5 with professionals publicly avowing service ideals that they may not privately believe in. Émile Durkheim in The Division of Labour in Society (1893) posited this as the conflict in the notion of a vocation between “the hereditary tendencies of the individual and the social function he will fulfil” (310). The apparent freedom in modern social organization comes hand in hand with debilitating limitations: we supposedly have unlimited choices, but only some of these will fit our “tastes and aptitudes” (Durkheim 311). Therefore, Durkheim says that “If no account is taken of them, if they are constantly frustrated in our daily occupation, we suffer, and seek the means of bringing that suffering to an end” (311). This frustration with the inability to express himself fully in his work leads to the Assistant Commissioner’s attempt at charisma-creation, charisma he both yearns for and thinks he deserves, and which form rewards in excess of the formal remuneration from his work. He interprets the bomb affair as “a providentially given starting-point for a crusade” to satisfy “his own crusading instincts” (168), to elevate his work and mould it into something more fitting for himself, in what Chief Inspector Heat calls, in language that makes explicit the unprofessionalism of his behaviour, “the unofficial conduct of his immediate chief” (154). The Professor also, through his work, attempts to procure “the appearances of power and personal prestige” (67), where the phrase “personal prestige” is again comparable to Weber’s “charisma.” In conformity to available non-options is no “personal prestige” and too little space for

5 See the entry “Profess, v.” in the OED.

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self-expression and his sheer ambition, a far cry from what he thinks he deserves. The bureaucratized “priest” figure in professional society, chosen not just for his merit, but also for his willingness to conform to the structures and regulations of the institution to which he belongs and who, at best, has only the limited type of office charisma, is insufficient as an ideal. Instead, the Professor seems to aspire to the pure charismatic authority embodied in Weber’s “prophet” figure.6 His attempt to create a society based upon an extreme type of social Darwinism is to reset a specious pseudo-meritocracy into an absolute meritocracy, in Durkheim’s words a society “in which each individual will have the place he merits and will be rewarded according to his deserts” (339). However, Durkheim’s idealistic vision of the supposed outcome of such a society, “where everyone will consequently co-operate spontaneously both for the common good and that of the individual” (339), is nonexistent in the Professor’s sole self-interested goal of “destroy[ing] public faith in legality” (66). Instead, the means by which he attains charisma in his own mind are overwhelmingly more important, and in a process of self-hermeneutics already prove to him that he is what he desires to be: through “exercising his agency with ruthless defiance” (67), he can gain the appearance of having secured a knowable, fixed path for himself which will yield him exactly as much as he gives and all the “personal prestige” he desires, creating a near-perfect match with his bottomless sense of desert. Hence, he boasts to Heat that “I am doing my work better than you’re doing yours” (77). Through such assertions of his work ethic, through the act of working hard for a clear ideal, the Professor intimates that he is the only true worker, the only true believer in his work, and, as mentioned, thus the only “professional” in the literal sense. This is the attempt to completely close the gap between being and doing, inheritance and work, and one’s sense of desert and actual external rewards. Durkheim’s contemporary, and overly optimistic, emphasis is on the possibility of the professions, with their idea of both an intrinsic and meaningful calling, to provide “the necessary link between the ‘cult of the individual’ and the collective needs, characterized by increasing economic interdependence” (Larson 61). In contrast, Conrad portrays disenchantment with a society in which there is always an ironic gap between oneself and one’s profession, in which, as 6 For a discussion of the distinction between these two types of charisma in Weber’s writing, see Hendel 185–87.

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Fredric Jameson retrospectively puts it, “What we call private life or the new subjectivity of individualism is objectively simply this distance which permits them to hold their professional activities at arm’s length” (238; my emphasis). The Professor’s version of absolute anarchism attempts to create a new type of professionalism in which this “distance” does not exist, where the notion of “profession” is not separate from his so-called private life, but one by which he entirely defines himself. But Conrad’s satirical descriptions of him suggest once more that the ironic gap cannot disappear even with the Professor’s radical acts and thinking: the Professor’s rewards are merely, in what reminds us of the discussion in the last chapter on Nostromo’s abilities, “the appearances of power and personal prestige” (67; my emphasis). In contrast to the lack of satisfaction from the professions for modern brainworkers such as the Professor and the Assistant Commissioner, Chief Inspector Heat is comfortable with his position and its opportunities. He is “not very wise—at least not truly so,” yet this is ironically to his advantage: “True wisdom, which is not certain of anything in this world of contradictions, would have prevented him from attaining his present position. It would have alarmed his superiors, and done away with his chances of promotion. His promotion had been very rapid” (69). Mediocrity and insincerity make for a reliability that has allowed Heat to flourish in the very bureaucracy that the Assistant Commissioner abhors, yet this also means that Heat is the least representative of the professional ideals of the police force.

5.3

The Irony of the Professions

The Secret Agent thus reflects a late-Victorian society in which the notion of “profession” has become an irony, highlighting the fissure between being and doing, inheritance and work. There is something un-becoming about the way the notion is now applied to the modern context, in that there is a misfit between characters and their professional roles that they cannot ever fully become or embody, and much of the novel’s tragicomedy derives from this. The irony derives from the conflict between the idealistic interpretation of the notion of a profession and the actual realization of professional work. As an example, Vladimir asks the overweight Verloc: “What do you mean by getting out of condition like this? You haven’t got even the physique of your profession” (22).

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Verloc’s obesity is the physical manifestation of what lies beneath his participation in various professions, but his loyalty to, and embodiment in, none. He treats his work as merely instrumental to ensure his own comfort, and in doing so becomes a mere instrument for various parties, dehumanized despite, or rather because of, his various conflicting “professions.” As another example, the Assistant Commissioner goes to an Italian restaurant where he describes customers’ “personality” as not “stamped in any way, professionally, socially or racially,” so that “It was impossible to form a precise idea what occupations they followed by day and where they went to bed at night” (115). When he thinks about his own “pleasurable feeling of independence” here, it is in terms of his temporary liberation from his work identity: “he himself had become unplaced. It would have been impossible for anybody to guess his occupation” (115). He is able to shed his professional identity with relief because this is far from who he is. In modern society, the disconnect between being and working seems to make it impossible to achieve reasonable wholeness and satisfactory expression of oneself. Even if one is somehow able to choose a profession that is fitting, and thus un-ironic, the question always remains whether one can possibly live up to its ideals or whether reality dictates a necessary falling short, as is the case for many of the anarchists’ professions of visionary change. Institutionalized professions mirror the forms of anarchist work in the novel in this respect. Their service ideals, once bureaucratized, often become mere routine acts, mere pretence. This is noticeable in the Assistant Commissioner, who knows, after years of work, the little “glamour” (89) there is to be found in a profession that he has performed as if it were meaningful in itself; and Inspector Heat, whose lucid awareness of his corruption does not prevent him from contentedly masquerading as a good police officer. This constant deficit between idealism and realization, the unrelenting falling short of absolute self-determination and self-expression, is the main source of irony in the lives of characters who profess their aspiration to various ideals in their work. In contrast, the Professor can be seen as an arch-professional of sorts, who, rather than compromising and allowing this modern ironical misfit to exist, instead chooses to renounce existing society violently, creating and fully subscribing to a new professional myth for himself in order to crowd out irony and wholly live up to the ideals of his choice of vocation, to completely control his rewards so that they match his sense of desert. When he tells Ossipon that “the trouble is…

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that you have no character whatever” (57), he is referring to the gap between who anarchists like Ossipon are and who they claim to be, so that in the very act of professing, they must always be found lacking, being mere charades and caricatures. In Conrad’s words, “they are shams” to whom the label “revolutionaries” cannot be applied (Letters 3: 491) because they do not satisfy the requirements of this label. For the Professor, the practicable solution to the ironic split between being and doing, between inheritance and work, is by embracing one goal, that of inventing “the perfect detonator,” and of devoting himself wholeheartedly to it. He celebrates this for its being “a good definition” and “so precise,” unlike the goals of the other anarchists, whose work is bogged down with “all your committees and delegations” (58). Thus, he claims, “It is I who am the true propagandist” (58). Conrad accordingly stated, despite the at times satirical descriptions of the Professor, that “I did not intend to make him despicable. He is incorruptible at any rate. In making him say ‘madness and despair—give me that for a lever and I will move the world’ I wanted to give him a note of perfect sincerity. At the worst he is a megalomaniac of an extreme type. And every extremist is respectable” (Letters 3: 491). But the remaining irony is that despite his accusation of Ossipon and others, the Professor, in his exercise in overdetermination in order to make himself “extra-ordinary” (Weber 244; my emphasis), has abstracted all character out of himself too: in his extreme attempt to close the gap between being and doing, to fully control the rewards that he feels are his due, to come into what he sees as his true deserts, the Professor makes himself wholly one with his profession by transforming himself into it, embodying it, becoming, in effect, a walking bomb. Instead of being able to reshape conditions so that his individuality is somehow in harmony with his profession, he has, in the worst possible way, instrumentalized himself into mere doing. Attempting to be defined by who he is, to reach the state of pure being where he is able to express his innate ability and genius, he ironically dehumanizes himself, thus becoming a symptom of the very dehumanization, the stripping away of being in a bureaucratized society, that he is trying to counter. The disorientation Ossipon experiences towards the end of the novel, when he no longer sees the purpose and meaning of the deceptive anarchist work he has done unquestioningly so far, can also be described in terms of professional irony. This is what Jonathan Lear has called the “ironic moment,” when suddenly the meaning of one’s routinized way

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of performing one’s work becomes unfamiliar, and when one’s “practical knowledge is disrupted” (18). And it is this ironic split that Conrad attempted to keep at bay in his own capacity as a professional writer. In the novel, irony allows him to destabilize claims to professional service, showing him to be aware of the problematic paradoxes in the idea of a profession. But in his non-fictional prose, his own profession of writing is shielded from irony by his consistent tone of sincere idealism in a language of integrity that claims a perfect fit or unity between himself and his profession despite, or even because of, its toil and hardships. This too is a form of rhetorically constructing rewards for oneself so that these can better match one’s interpretation of what one deserves. In describing writing, a pursuit fraught with vicissitudes and not certifiable despite its publishing houses, literary agents, and reviewers, it is possible to recognize in Conrad’s assertions of this perfect unity a counter-ironic rhetoric of singular professional dedication. The purpose is perhaps to keep the ironic split between being and doing in modern professional society at bay. This unity is lacking in the characters in The Secret Agent . In A Personal Record, Conrad writes: “I have a positive horror of losing even for one moving moment that full possession of myself which is the first condition of good service” (15). CamineroSantangelo suggests that this describes Conrad’s loyalty to reality and truth in the rigorous and professional pursuit of novel-writing (200). It should be added that lacking “full possession of myself” would also mean that Conrad would be suspended in the irony of professionalism, which he must ward off: between being and completely embodying his identity as a writer, of writing as his natural identity, and merely acting like a writer. This is also why such non-fictional prose seems at times to mirror the singularity of vision that the Professor ascribes to his anarchism. In another example, in a letter written in 1903 in response to a request to explain his “method of work,” Conrad describes this as “based on truth” and rooted in his “remorseless fidelity to the truth of my own sensations.” Calling the books he has written over the last eight years “bitter failure[s],” he writes that “what I do lay claim to is this: that no one who, either in kindness or antagonism, has read any ten pages of my writing, intelligently, can fail to see what I am trying for” (Letters 3: 13). His work does not necessarily culminate in a decisive result, but the decisiveness of the acts themselves attests to his sincerity, crucial to the serious,

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idealistic pursuit of a profession that is intrinsically, not just materialistically, meaningful. In the anarchic realms of imaginative writing, the only certainty lies in the writer’s impulse and values and in his hard work, regardless of its reception. Therefore, even if the results cannot be guaranteed by any fixed external standards, nor by the public’s judgement, who “cannot pronounce on the question of intellectual worth or artistic quality” (Letters 3: 13), the fact that Conrad is a sincere professional cannot be doubted. It is not only guaranteed by his working methods, but also by who he is. In this, Conrad can still control the outcome of his writing and can still “lay claim to” (Letters 3: 13) something solid that he sees as his desert, without being able to control the actual material rewards that accrue from writing. As another example, in A Personal Record, Conrad writes, closely mirroring the statement quoted in the previous paragraph, that “I have tried to be a sober worker all my life—all my two lives. I did so from taste, no doubt having an instinctive horror of losing my sense of full self-possession, but also from artistic conviction” (101). There is no distinction made in such declarations between his professional identity as a writer and himself as a person. Like the Professor, he is his profession. But his singular goal, unlike the Professor’s in his narrative, is presented unironically, even counter-ironically. Therefore, aspects of The Secret Agent do not merely confirm what criticism on Conrad and professionalism has shown about some of his other fictional works, namely his doubts about bureaucracy and the anxieties about his professional identity in an occupation of which the professional status was not entirely certain. The novel also shows Conrad’s re-evaluation of the meaning of the word “profession” in his historical context, revealing the split between being and doing it attempts to conceal. The novel questions whether it is possible to partake of fulfilling professional work that we choose ourselves and that can adequately express our innate abilities. It also asks whether and how, with fewer of the traditional external restraints to dictate our choice of profession, meaningful contribution is still possible. And it depicts what can happen when external rewards do not match our expectations, based on our sense of who we are, of our deserts. Such questions, as we have seen, in turn applied to Conrad himself. Could his own “profession” of writing in English provide him an integral self, which, in his case, also meant its accompanying national and linguistic identity that he could use to anchor the other facets of his multicultural heritage? Could the outcomes give him something solid to claim as his own? Complaining to Edward Garnett in

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August 1908 about a review by Robert Lynd of A Set of Six (1908), in a much commented on episode in his writing career,7 Conrad wrote: “a fellow in the D[ai]ly News… calls me God only knows on what provocation a man without country and language…. I thought that a man who has written the Nigger, Typhoon, The End of the Tether, Youth, was safe from that sort of thing” (Letters 4: 212). Hoping that his professional work would ground him linguistically and culturally, he instead still had to face such instances when it seemed he could not write himself a wholly integrated self, could not define himself entirely through writing, and could not obtain the desert he thought he had earned. This may account for the occasions in his non-fictional prose of rhetorical conflation of his identity with the singular goal of writing: “I daresay I am compelled, unconsciously compelled, now to write volume after volume…. Leaves must follow upon each other as leagues used to follow in the days gone by, on and on to the appointed end, which, being Truth itself, is One—one for all men and for all occupations” (A Personal Record, 30).

Works Cited “Anarchism in London.” The Speaker, 30 December 1893. Berthoud, Jacques. “The Secret Agent.” The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad, edited by J. H. Stape. Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 100– 21. Conrad, Joseph. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, vol. 3. Cambridge University Press, 1988. ———. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Edited by Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, vol. 4, Cambridge University Press, 1990. ———. The Secret Agent. Edited by Bruce Harkness and S. W. Reid. Cambridge University Press, 1990. ———. The Shadow Line. Edited by J. H. Stape, Allan H. Simmons, and Owen Knowles. Cambridge University Press, 2013. Corfield, Penelope J. Power and the Professions in Britain 1700–1850. Routledge, 1995. Durkheim, Emile. The Division of Labour in Society. 1893. Macmillan, 1984. Hendel, Ronald S. “Prophets, Priests, and the Efficacy of Ritual.” Pomegranates and Golden Bells, edited by David P. Wright, David Noel Freedman, and Avi Hurvitz. Eisenbrauns, 1995, pp. 185–98.

7 For a recent discussion, see Niland.

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Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. 1981. Routledge, 2002. ———. “The Vanishing Mediator: Narrative Structures in Max Weber.” New German Critique, no. 1, 1973, pp. 52–89. Kim, Sung Ho. Max Weber’s Politics of Civil Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Larson, Magali Sarfatti. The Rise of Professionalism. University of California Press, 1977. Lear, Jonathan. A Case for Irony. Harvard University Press, 2011. Levenson, Michael. “The Value of Facts in the Heart of Darkness.” NineteenthCentury Fiction, vol. 40, no. 3, 1985, pp. 261–80. McLaughlin, Paul. Anarchism and Authority: A Philosophical Introduction to Classical Anarchism. Ashgate, 2007. Niland, Richard. “‘Who’s That Fellow Lynn?’: Conrad and Robert Lynd.” The Conradian, vol. 33, no. 1, 2008, pp. 130–44. Perkin, Harold. The Rise of Professional Society. Routledge, 1989. Pitcairn, E. H., editor. Unwritten Laws and Ideals of Active Careers. London: Smith, Elder, and Co., 1899. “profess, v.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2021, www.oed.com/ view/Entry/152045. Accessed 25 August 2021. “profession, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2021, www.oed. com/view/Entry/152052. Accessed 25 August 2021. Roylance-Kent, C. B. “The Literature of Anarchism.” The New Review, September 1897. Ruth, Jennifer. Novel Professions: Interested Disinterest and the Making of the Professional in the Victorian Novel. Ohio State University Press, 2006. Trotter, David. Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society. Oxford University Press, 2001. Weber, Max. Economy and Society. 1922. University of California Press, 1978.

CHAPTER 6

The Moral Work of Affirming Inheritances in Under Western Eyes and Victory

A close reader of Under Western Eyes and Victory will discover that Conrad often invokes the notion of inheritance when describing Razumov and Heyst, two protagonists who can be called each other’s counterparts. Razumov has been disinherited from rank by birth because he is purportedly the illegitimate son of a Prince, and uses his lack of inheritance to justify his choice on who to be. So he says: “I happen to have been born a Russian with patriotic instincts—whether inherited or not I am not in a position to say” (81).1 Because of his muddled parentage, who can say what he has inherited from his parents or not? He claims his only inheritance is his country, “an inheritance of space and numbers.… [u]nder the sumptuous immensity of the sky” (33), and his only possessions are his “natural abilities” (27), on which he “depend[s] entirely… for his place in the world” (27). Apart from that, he is a tabula rasa: “I haven’t inherited a revolutionary inspiration together with a resemblance from an uncle” (53), he asserts, which he thinks absolves him from engaging with the volatile political context of late Tsarist Russia. He is “content in fitting [himself] to be a worker” (54) and thinks he should be left to define his

1 Here, a rare explicit distinction is made between something that is innate and something that is inherited, that comes to one by descent. Razumov knows he possesses these “patriotic instincts,” and it is possible, though this cannot be ascertained, that he has inherited these from his parents.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 E. T. Y. Chan, Work, Inheritance, and Deserts in Joseph Conrad’s Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2584-9_6

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own identity and path by his studies and “hardworking, purposeful existence” (272), in the hope that these will be rewarded with a good job in the civil service of Tsarist Russia. This he naively assumes to be meritocratic, and he neglects to consider “the dangers menacing the stability of the institutions which give rewards and appointments” (6). When Haldin comes into his room one day after having assassinated a member of the ruling aristocracy, Razumov, in fear of the “security” (272) of his stable, comfortable future, betrays Haldin to the police. Sent to Geneva to act as a spy for the police, Razumov cannot shake off this betrayal. Although he tries to rationalize his actions in betraying Haldin by telling himself that he never asked for Haldin’s confidence, and that his betrayal is a form of “retributive justice” (201), he keeps having to fight the niggling sense that he has done something irredeemably, morally wrong, in what Jeremy Hawthorn has described as “a willed ignoring of insistent potential knowledge on the margins of consciousness” (225). After a tortuous path, he gradually comes to suspect that he does in fact have “a conventional conscience” (222), arrived at, clarified, and reaffirmed as his only when it comes to be first questioned, betrayed by himself, and negated. This innate faculty of “a conventional conscience” casts a whole new light on his relationship with Haldin, and with him, the revolutionary context and movement of his time. Crucially, his discovery of his love for Natalia— what we can call an awakening of latent sympathetic faculties in someone who has “never known any kind of love”—is the catalyst that leads to his confession, an act that he calls “sav[ing] me” (272). Natalia, he writes in his last letter to her, was, like he himself to Haldin, completely vulnerable to him: “There was no longer anything between you and me. You were defenceless…. I thought of you. Defenceless” (273). His eventual acknowledgement that he identifies with Haldin, that “[i]n giving Victor Haldin up, it was myself after all whom I have betrayed most basely” (274), comes through sympathy with her, “through [whom] I came to feel this so deeply” (274), and whom Haldin “liv[e]s on through” (272). Something similar happens in Victory. In a mirror image of this moment of moral realization that Razumov has, Heyst feels compelled to save Lena from the sexual advances of Schomberg—what the narrator calls “in its essence the rescue of a distressed human being” (55)—and takes her to live with him on his remote island. Although Tony Tanner has called Heyst’s decision to save Lena “clearly a sexual involvement, no matter how his ‘impulse’ towards her is rationalised as compassion or sympathy” (119), sympathy here does not constitute mere rationalization.

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The first time Heyst sees Lena from afar, he is “surprised into a sympathetic start” (71; my emphasis) after observing her jump up because Mrs Zangiacomo seems to pinch her on stage after the first half of a performance by their Ladies Orchestra, upon which he decides to approach her, acting “upon the same sort of impulse which years ago had made him… accost Morrison, practically a stranger to him then, a man in trouble, expressively harassed, dejected, lonely” (72). Like Razumov, he is initially oblivious to the deep-seated source of his response: “It was the same impulse. But he did not recognize it” (72). But he arrives at this sympathetic position from the opposite direction to Razumov: being his father’s “impressed descendant” (152), having inherited his father’s philosophy of detachment, he starts off living an “unattached, floating existence” (30) on a private income, and resists the interpellations of any particular person or context. As a result, he “was like a feather floating lightly in the work-a-day atmosphere which was the breath of our nostrils” (61). Yet this paternal inheritance is not Heyst’s only relevant inheritance: “Heyst was not a hermit by temperament. The sight of his kind was not invincibly odious to him…. [H]is detachment from the world was not complete” (40). He is, in fact, “temperamentally sympathetic” (70). Crucially, Conrad describes his sympathetic side as innate to him as well, although it is newly realized by him when he reflects on his act: he thinks that “[t]here must be a lot of the original Adam in me, after all” (151), and, “with the sense of making a discovery, that this primeval ancestor is not easily suppressed…. If anybody could have silenced its imperative echoes, it should have been Heyst the father with his contemptuous, inflexible negation of all effort. But apparently not” (151; my emphases). His paternal inheritance and his primordial inheritance are put into opposition here, and now conflict. Thus his “sense of loneliness.… hurt him” not just in itself, but because “[n]othing is more painful than the shock of sharp contradictions that lacerate our intelligence and our feelings” (68), the contradictions between his paternal inheritance and his innate sympathetic nature. In both of these instances, sympathy (referring to fellow feeling or suffering, and thus related to, and often synonymous with, the word “compassion”) is posited as an innate or even primeval inheritance, as part of the characters’ psyche that they were previously oblivious to, and which comes as a surprise to them as it is rediscovered by them in the act of love or compassion. Thus Razumov’s assertion to Natalia in his letter that “I am not converted” (274)—a statement that claims that he has not

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in fact changed, that what he discovered through love and sympathy with her was of himself all along; and Heyst’s feeling of surprise, and his acting on “impulse” (72). In this chapter, I shift to a more explicitly moral emphasis in exploring the central themes of work, inheritance, and desert than has been applied so far. I explore the broader moral ramifications of Conrad’s representation of sympathy, a particular theme in both novels that, as its own focus, is underexamined,2 but is important for being the source of the existential crises of both protagonists. More specifically, I focus on Conrad’s portrayal of sympathy as an innate inheritance, in conjunction with the other representations of inheritance introduced in the first two paragraphs. In these two novels, sympathy as an inheritance acts as a foil to the reward of the protagonists’ desired life paths. It leads to Razumov being unable to apply the combination of his “natural abilities” (27) and “hardworking, purposeful existence” (272) as a student to “acquire distinction” and “become a great reforming servant of the greatest of States” (231), which he sees as his rightful, future desert. Here, the logic we have observed of work and innate ability acting as justifications for desert, which becomes itself seen as a type of inheritance but is ultimately denied the character, again applies, but with the trait of sympathy thwarting Razumov’s recovery of his plans after he betrays Haldin. It also leads to Heyst being unable to live up to his paternal inheritance, the abnegation he strives for as his life’s philosophy, which would be his deserved reward if he could live up to it in his actions, but which he does not attain, being unable to resist forming sympathetic bonds. This leads to his deep disappointment and distress, to being “hurt by the sight of his own life, which ought to have been a masterpiece of aloofness” (151), and to him thinking himself “lost” because he has “formed a tie” (172). Razumov’s subscription to meritocratic ideals—to “Study. Advance. Work hard as if nothing had happened… [,] acquire distinction, become a great reforming servant of the greatest of States” (231)—is more obvious than Heyst’s, whose most extensive attempt at greatness through work is less for personal wealth or status, and more for a “great stride forward for these regions” through exploring and mining “tropical coal” (21). 2 Numerous scholars have written, however, on character of Stevie in The Secret Agent in this respect. See, for instance, Jacques Berthoud’s essay “The Secret Agent ,” Geoffrey Galt Harpham’s essay “Abroad Only by a Fiction: Creation, Irony, and Necessity in Conrad’s The Secret Agent,” and Michael John DiSanto’s Under Conrad’s Eyes.

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Heyst becomes the “manager in the tropics” (21) of “the Tropical Belt Coal Company with offices in London and Amsterdam, and other things about it that sounded and looked grandiose” (33). In this position, he is, in contrast to his previous status as an unattached wanderer, “very concrete, very visible,” “rushing all over the Archipelago, jumping in and out of local mail-packets as if they had been tramcars, here, there, and everywhere. Organizing with all his might” (35–36). His “sudden display of purposeful energy.… was impressive” (36), but ends in the “languid course” of liquidation of the company (20–21), and his selfexile on the island of Samburan, the company’s erstwhile coaling post. His unsuccessful enterprise in the “coal business” (41) becomes one of the several sources of his “suffer[ing] from failure” that takes the form of “the gnawing pain of useless apostasy, a sort of shame before his own betrayed nature,” “unknown to men accustomed to grapple with the realities of common human enterprise” (67). Work, in betraying the latent desire in him for social ties, has made full, wholehearted commitment to his desired path of abnegation no longer possible. For Heyst, therefore, unique amongst the characters we have analysed so far, work and his clashing inheritances of innate sympathy and a philosophy of abnegation become his reasoning not for positive, but for negative desert, for punishment in the form of being pulled apart by his inability to commit fully either to “life” (349) or to detachment. Razumov’s and Heyst’s battle with their innate sympathy means that their moral journey is initially suspended, awaiting their affirmation and active ownership of their inheritance. Sympathy is resisted by them because it clashes with their own complacent life goals, and needs to be turned back to, and, as I will show, affirmed in the Nietzschean sense— faced, embraced and willed in a process of self-discovery, and repurposed as their own as part of the project of self-making and self-becoming, of “becom[ing] what [they] are” (Large xvii).3 This gives a new sense to the notion of work discussed so far in the book: instead of work as a job or social position, it becomes moral work that Razumov and Heyst need to perform in order to come into the maturation that is both their reward and their punishment. The approach taken in this chapter is therefore a broad appropriation of the concept of affirmation as moral work for

3 “How to Become What You Are” is the subtitle of Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo.

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the purposes of generating new insights into reading the two protagonists. I make the argument for the relevance of the concept of affirmation in reading Razumov’s and Heyst’s responses to their innate sympathy without claiming that Nietzsche, with his own complex and convoluted relationship with sympathy, would have recommended the course that Conrad puts his protagonists through, or that Conrad made sure his representations fit Nietzsche’s views. Through owning up to their innate sympathy, Razumov and Heyst “become what [they] are” (Large xvii)‚ come into their own—an “own” that was previously unknown. This chapter confirms the view that Conrad celebrates the two characters’ moral maturation after their long journeys of self-discovery, as important studies such as George A. Panichas’s Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision have argued. Such moral maturation happens after turning away from the idea of work as a job or social position: it does not come about until Razumov is forced to let go of his dreams of stable government work, and Heyst’s enterprise fails. At the same time, as I will show, looking at how the two protagonists futilely resist, and then come to affirm, their innate sympathy adds an important caveat to this view: it shows the significance Conrad’s representation also attaches to the mental peace and comfort of a more morally complacent position, one that he of course does not finally endorse. Sympathy in these two novels is a crucial narrative device, both key to the characters’ self-discovery—the “self” here being latent, unknown, and needing to be brought to light— and ultimately self-destroying—the “self” here being one’s desired self, the self one knows one wants to be. The latter, for Razumov, is to merely be “a worker” (54) so that he can aspire to “becom[ing] a great reforming servant of the greatest of States” (231), and for Heyst, “to be a masterpiece of aloofness” (151). Razumov’s and Heyst’s processes of affirming their sympathetic responses allow them to grow into more morally complex human beings than they were before, but the processes are also portrayed as so overbearing that they cannot be ignored or turned away from, even when both protagonists try in an attempt to preserve their desired selfhoods. Desert again becomes two-pronged: the fates that Razumov and Heyst think should be their deserts because of certain inheritances they can build on (Razumov’s “natural abilities” [27], and Heyst’s paternal inheritance which he must work hard at to fulfil entirely) clash with the actual outcome of moral maturation and their downfalls, their deserts as a result of their moral work of affirming of their innate sympathy.

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6.1 Affirmation and Innate, Individualized Sympathy Conrad’s emphasis on sympathy as automatic, unconscious, and actively resisted upon its surfacing can be briefly and usefully contrasted with the “moral sense or conscience” that Darwin thought would develop out of humans’ inherited, “instinctive sympathy” (82) in the presence of their intellect.4 Darwin posits that “Although man… has no special instincts to tell him how to aid his fellow-men, he still has the impulse, and with his improved intellectual faculties would naturally be much guided in this respect by reason and experience” (82; my emphasis).5 Although procedural knowledge of moral acts are not inherited, the sympathetic impulse is, which then guides moral action in the presence of human beings’ other inheritance, that of intellect. This view led to his optimistic evaluation of the evolution of sympathy: “as man gradually advanced in intellectual power…; as he regarded more and more, not only the welfare, but the happiness of his fellow men; as from habit, following on beneficial experiences, instruction and example, his sympathies became more tender and widely diffused, extending to men of all races, to the imbecile, maimed, and other useless member of society, and finally to the lower animals, so would the standard of his morality rise higher and higher.”6 Conrad’s portrayal, focusing on the individual, instead highlights the need for additional steps on the part of the sympathizer to make sympathy into more fully developed moral conscience. And these steps, as the two protagonists’ tortuous moral journeys indicate, are at the individual level not as 4 DiSanto has discussed how Conrad’s fiction engages with Darwin’s and Nietzsche’s views on self-preservation and self-sacrifice (163–91), and how it questions “the antithetical relationship between Dionysus and Christ that is central to Nietzsche’s late writings (19; 192–223). He also reads in the elder Heyst Conrad’s critique of the Nietzschean “conflict between, and collision of, pity and contempt” (203). Although my focus is on Heyst the son in this chapter, DiSanto’s argument reminds us of the possibilities of reading not just Heyst the son, but also the elder Heyst, in a Nietzschean way. 5 Quoted in Richards 210. For a discussion on Nietzsche’s response to Darwin’s notion of sympathy, see Dirk R. Johnson’s Nietzsche’s Anti-Darwinism (140–71). 6 As Redmond O’Hanlon has also written, “Conrad would not agree with Darwin’s...

prediction of the strength of the moral sense in ‘future generations,’ for whom there is ‘no cause to fear that the social instincts will grow weaker, and we may expect that virtuous habits will grow stronger, becoming perhaps fixed by inheritance. In this case the struggle between our higher and lower impulses will be less severe, and virtue will be triumphant’” (45). The quotations are from Darwin’s The Descent of Man (1871).

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straightforward as Darwin’s optimistic macroscopic view of the evolution of sympathy would suggest. Razumov, using precisely his “reason—[his] cool superior reason” (34) to conclude that “every obligation of true courage is the other way” (36), decides to “give [Haldin] up” (36)— because for him to owe Haldin anything, “[t]here must be a moral bond first” (36), and he reasons there is none. He does not deserve to have his plans for a stable career, which is his desert for his hard work and “natural abilities” (27), taken away from him, and he asks himself with outrage: “am I to have my future, perhaps my usefulness ruined by this sanguinary fanatic?” (34). Heyst, although he saves Lena as he did Morrison, cannot shake off being “the son of my father,” “born or fashioned, or both” as “a man of universal scorn and disbelief” (172). His goal is for his life “to be a solitary achievement,” to “pas[s] through life without suffering and almost without a single care in the world. Invulnerable because elusive” (86). He sees his inherited sympathy as something to be fought, feels consternation at seeing “the very scorn… falling away from me year after year” (172), and continuously attempts to disown his moral actions. He can come into his paternal inheritance of wandering detachment, claim it as his desert, if only he can earn it in his every action, and live up to it. What such latent and innate sympathy in the two characters requires to effect moral growth and fuller self-becoming is, in fact, their active affirmation of it as theirs, a form of moral work instead of an emphasis on work as a job or social position. I am conscious that, in reading the Nietzschean theme of affirmation in Conrad’s fiction, I am following in the footsteps of studies that preface their discussion with a disclaimer about the lack of direct evidence for the influence of Nietzsche on Conrad’s fiction. In Edward Said’s words, reading Nietzsche and Conrad together means “showing similarities and affinities between the two writers” without providing “circumstantial evidence of actual borrowings to show how Conrad not only read but made use of Nietzsche” (71). But there is good reason why despite this problem critics keep coming back to connections between the two thinkers. As George Butte has written in his reading of The Secret Agent , although tracing Nietzsche’s ideas in Conrad’s fiction cannot be “grounded in any one conclusive historical linkage,” there is at times “an accumulation of probabilities, circumstantial and textual” that allow readers to be persuaded that “Conrad seems to argue with Nietzsche about the best human response to knowing the worst of our condition” (155). However, to assume that Conrad read all of Nietzsche’s major works carefully and that he was responding to them

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in detail would be to fall into the trap that Owen Knowles has highlighted in reading Conrad and Schopenhauer together: that it is highly unlikely that Conrad engaged in “sustained grappling… with the sometimes tortured abstractions of [Schopenhauer’s] The World as Will and Idea,” because it is hard to “believe that Schopenhauer’s magnum opus was ever likely to have been the focus of Conrad’s habitual or prolonged study, still less one of his bedside books” (77–78). Instead, my aim is, like Nic Panagopoulos’s in The Fiction of Joseph Conrad: The Influence of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, not to “trac[e] instances of borrowing in Conrad’s work,” but to “she[d] light on the philosophical presuppositions which underlie them” (19), so as to probe more deeply the ramifications of the choices I have shown Conrad made in representing Razumov’s and Heyst’s innate sympathy. If it is true, as Panagopoulos says, that it is “beyond doubt” that “Conrad knew about Nietzsche’s main ideas,” “but not that he had actually read any of his works first hand” (18), then the best method is to explore the analogies between what Razumov and Heyst undergo when facing their innate sympathy, and “indirect manifestations” (as Knowles [78] says of Schopenhauer’s influences on Conrad’s fiction) of Nietzsche’s idea of affirmation. The idea of affirmation that Nietzsche first put forward in The Gay Science (1882), and which would find its epitomic depiction in the figure of Zarathustra, would require that one’s inheritances should neither be automatically assumed or denied, but actively engaged with and embraced, or in his terms “willed” or “overcome,” as a crucial step towards self-becoming.7 Conrad’s affinity with the idea of affirmation

7 Simon May describes this process and its moral implications: “maximally to affirm, through the kind of life we lead, the reality of our nature, nurture, and life-circumstances, and hence of our individual past, is, for Nietzsche, not the antithesis of personal freedom but its precondition. ‘Freedom of the will’—which, for him, means mastery of ourselves and thus of circumstances—is unattainable without maximally expressing what he calls the ‘necessity’ of our own nature. Moreover, to develop the self-discipline to ‘promise’ ourselves, and so to live out our highest axiological allegiances, however hard the truths and tasks they entail, is also to be self-responsible” (21). The quotations here are from Nietzsche’s The Genealogy of Morality (1887). Ernst Bertram’s very early study of Nietzsche explores this conflict between Nietzsche’s commitment to both change/transformation and tradition/inheritance, so that Nietzsche can both say that “only he who changes will remain akin to me” [quotation from Beyond Good and Evil {1886}], and also subscribe to “the affirmation of being determined by

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may not stretch so far as to demand the willing of life’s eternal recurrence,8 to embrace the idea of one’s life happening over and over again, which Nietzsche called the “highest attainable formula” (Ecce Homo 65; ch. 3, par. 1),9 and we should not be excessively prescriptive in our readings of this affinity. But the larger idea behind affirmation, of making the choice to interpretively embrace one’s life, tragedy and all, appears early in Conrad’s oeuvre. Otto Bohlmann points out the spectacular entrance the theme of affirmation makes towards the end of “Heart of Darkness” (102), where Marlow chooses to read Kurtz’s final words as “an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions” (“Heart of Darkness” 118; my emphasis). Marlow’s forceful reading of Kurtz’s words as Kurtz’s “affirmation” of his entire life, horrors and all, arises due to Marlow’s own interpretive act of affirmation, of “affirm[ing] that Kurtz was a remarkable man” (118)—which then becomes the meaning and significance of Kurtz’s life and Marlow’s tale. Nietzsche, in The Gay Science, calls someone who can achieve such “willing” or “overcoming” of given conditions a “yes-sayer” (157; bk. 4, par. 276), but this is not a complacent acceptance of one’s inheritances. Nietzsche’s “willing” is much more strenuous than mere acknowledgement. Expressed most fully in late works such as Ecce Homo (1908), it requires one to see all one’s conflicting inheritances—including ones that one may hate—as crucial to the shaping of one into who one is, and thus to the creative project of self-making. In contrast, although inheritance is not unimportant, automatic, unreflective inheritance is unimpressive, even if this is in the form of innate ability; so he says: “Do not talk about giftedness, inborn talents! One can name great men of all kinds who were very little gifted. They acquired greatness, became ‘geniuses’ (as we put it), through qualities the lack of which no one who knew what they were would boast of: they all possessed that seriousness of the efficient workman” (Human, All Too Human 86; vol. 1, par. 163). So too Nietzsche derides the person who merely inherits customs, who is one’s ancestors” (12). Bertram’s insight is that “[i]nheritance from two conflicting components defines his life for him as a task, a distinction, a fate” (14). He also discusses this with respect to Nietzsche’s views of his own lineage. 8 For an analysis of Stevie’s compassion for suffering in relation to Nietzsche’s philosophy, including his idea of eternal recurrence, see DiSanto 192–223. 9 Quoted in Reginster 13.

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for instance virtuous only in the way society defines virtue, who “does what is customary as if by nature, as a result of a long inheritance” (Human, All Too Human 51; vol. 1, par. 96). Instead, “Become who you are!” (Zarathustra 192; pt. 4). For this one must work one’s inheritances, and overcome them, making them truly one’s full possessions. Such self-becoming is a dynamic, anti-teleological process that is open to surprise; “[b]ecoming what you are” even requires “that you have not the slightest inkling what you are” (Ecce Homo 31; ch. 2, par. 9). We can see, then, why Wang, Heyst’s servant in Victory, cannot be an example of Nietzschean affirmation: Conrad represents Wang’s “mind” as “very clear but not far-reaching,” “made up according to the plain reason of things such as it appeared to him in the light of his simple feeling for self-preservation untrammelled by any notions of romantic honour or tender conscience” (265–66). Whereas for Nietzsche, the “ideal of a life free from contradiction and becoming is life-negating” (Reginster 46), there is nothing for Wang to affirm or overcome in his “obedience to his instincts, the powerful simplicity of purpose which made his existence appear almost automatic in the mysterious precision of its acts” (Victory 158). In contrast, Razumov’s and Heyst’s inheritances threaten to tear them apart. Their instinctual, innate sympathy is not to be simply ignored or eradicated, but to be affirmed and overcome as moral work, in order to achieve fuller self-discovery, self-mastery, and self-creation. The moments of sympathetic realizations described earlier jumpstart the process of affirmation of Razumov’s and Heyst’s other inheritances as well, so that they become more fully themselves, this being a desert they come into due to their moral work that is both a reward (because it leads to fuller moral being) and a punishment (because these identities are not what they consciously want for themselves). Razumov’s innate sympathy forces him to realize that having been disinherited from rank by birth because he is purportedly the illegitimate son of a Prince does not free him up to define himself only by his hard work as a student for the goal of becoming a government bureaucrat, that he cannot stay detached from the political upheaval he has inherited together with his Russian nationality, and that he cannot just turn away from his responsibility towards fellow human beings even when he has not invited their attentions. Attempting to refuse the loyalties and duties that others impose on him, he finds that there are allegiances whose call on him he must engage with. Having mistaken these calls as volitional ones, he discovers he cannot opt out of them, that they were always part of who he was even

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before he realized it. Heyst’s inability to ignore his sympathy for Lena is also an inability to ignore who he already was, including the innate need for love and companionship he feels alongside his instinctual sympathy for Lena. The individualized sympathy that Conrad represents as crucial to the moral awakening of the two protagonists is different from the general compassion Schopenhauer advocated, on which he based his philosophy of detachment and which was for him the bedrock of morality. Conrad’s criticism of Schopenhauerian detachment is particularly obvious in Victory, where the elder Heyst, as many critics have pointed out, is clearly based on Schopenhauer, who advocated a renunciation of life as a means to lessen suffering. For Schopenhauer, the desire to decrease universal suffering leads to a loss of individuality and resignation, an “extreme will-lessness,” “removing the sense of uniqueness and security that the typical unenlightened human being invests in ‘his vanishing little person, his unextended present, his momentary comfort ’” (Janaway xxxix; my emphasis). Schopenhauer’s italicized words here are particularly relevant as a critique of Razumov, who desperately clings on to what he thinks is his predictable, secure existence, but also to some extent Heyst, who thinks he can remain “like a feather floating lightly in the workaday atmosphere which was the breath of [others’] nostrils” (61). But Conrad could also be interpreted as criticizing Schopenhauer’s idea of compassion, which is unsatisfactory, stripped as it is of individuality. As Christopher Janaway writes, “[c]hoosing to sacrifice oneself in order to save other lives is a passionate and personal act,” and it can be difficult to see “why (or how) would the suffering of any living thing matter to the will-less subject whose individual personality and capacity to be motivated have been extinguished” (xxxix). Conrad stresses that it is only in individual specificity that Razumov’s and Heyst’s innate sympathetic faculties are awakened, jumpstarting their moral work; without it, they would have continued to lie dormant, and so would their other inheritances. So Razumov says to Natalia that it is “[y]ou alone in all the world to whom I must confess” (274). This confession comes at a point in the narrative when Conrad stresses that Razumov is finally safe because Ziemianitch, a witness who could have implicated him, has committed suicide. At this, Razumov is initially immensely relieved, thinking that “[a]n incredible chance has served me. No more need of lies. I shall have only to listen and to keep my scorn from getting the upper hand of my caution” (186). Razumov knows that he could, if

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he chose to, continue his life as an ostensible revolutionary and develop his budding romance with Natalia. But it is also his love for Natalia that finally proves the catalyst for his renunciation of this false position. Natalia and her “light” and “truth” (235), Razumov says, were “appointed to undo the evil by making me betray myself back into truth and peace” (234). This turn towards honesty is a “betray[al]” because it renounces the Razumov who is consumed by an “irony which is the negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all action” (214). In other words, his sympathetic response to Natalia counters the destructive “irony” (201) that threatens his entire being—a destruction we also observed in Chapter 4, where negative irony for Decoud, who uses it to distance himself safely from his inheritances, ends up “blind[ing] him to the genuine impulses of his own nature” (Nostromo 112), so that he has no firm personality or values to fall back on once he has become isolated on the Great Isabel. Here, in Under Western Eyes , the confession turns back on negative irony—the mere acting out of identities that are false to Razumov, and the pretence that Razumov must keep up of sharing values that he disagrees with—so that Razumov no longer has to make constant use of his scornful detachment to juggle violently conflicting identities. This allows Razumov to “belon[g] to himself” (198) again, “ma[king] [himself] free from falsehood” and “independent of every single human being on this earth” (279)—and we can therefore see this as an attempt to reset his selfhood to his “natural abilities” (27) as his original starting point. However, the cost of such a violent negation of irony—or the attempt thereof—is the destruction of Razumov’s social identities and standing, rendering these “natural abilities” (27) of little use. This also means that, like for Decoud in Nostromo, Razumov’s final renunciation is not an example of Kierkegaard’s mastered irony as he explained it in The Concept of Irony and as introduced in Chapter 4 in this book. Mastering irony would mean that the ironic attitude, where one puts oneself at some remove from one’s entrenched situations, is retained and used to distance oneself from what one has so far taken for granted and the social norms and rules to which one has become accustomed, directing one closer to the “truth” (Kierkegaard 328). Instead, Conrad presents us with a scenario where Razumov finds it impossible to arrive at and declare the “truth” without destroying irony altogether. Similarly, in Victory, Heyst’s moral awakening comes about because of his individual response to Lena. Upon their first meeting, Heyst asks a clearly vulnerable Lena: “couldn’t you defend yourself somehow?” (75).

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Her response, “They are too many for me,” invokes in him both a sense of the suffering “out of the common experience of mankind,” and a very specific response to her in particular: “by virtue of her voice, [her words] thrilled Heyst like a revelation” (75). Heyst imagines “the illusion of human fellowship on earth vanish before the naked truth of her existence, and leave them both face to face in a moral desert as arid as the sands of Sahara, without restful shade, without refreshing water” (78). The feeling of compassion here departs from a general sense of “human fellowship,” moving towards the particularity of Lena towards whom Heyst feels such an overwhelming sense of responsibility that he imagines them alone in a “moral desert,” and is radically different from “that form of contempt called pity” his father advises him to take on before Heyst can succeed in fully possessing “[a] full and equable contempt” (152). So when Heyst thinks that “[h]e could not defend himself from compassion” (78), this is compassion towards a specific individual. We see Conrad’s description deviating from the general compassion that Janaway writes is too impersonal, based on the idea of suffering as universal. The personalized perspective of Razumov’s and Heyst’s sympathy also distinguishes it from the utopian vision of “the day when all discord shall be silenced” (285) that Natalia, in her sympathy for suffering, takes on in Under Western Eyes , but that Conrad suggests in its universal extrapolation becomes problematically diffuse—much like Schopenhauer’s notion of compassion, although without the result of detachment and resignation. The importance of individualized sympathy is underscored in Conrad’s essay “Autocracy and War,” where he writes that “our sympathetic imagination” is the only thing that can lead to the “triumph of concord and justice,” but is also “strangely impervious to information,” instead responding much more readily to immediate sights such as that of “[a]n overworked horse falling before our windows,” or “a man writhing under a cartwheel in the street” (84). Because “imagination, luckily for our peace of mind, has remained a slumbering faculty,” “[d]irect vision of the fact, or the stimulus of a great art, can alone make it turn and open its eyes heavy with blessed sleep” (84). But even when sympathetic imagination is stimulated, “that saving callousness which reconciles us to the conditions of our existence will assert itself under the guise of assent to fatal necessity or in the enthusiasm of a purely aesthetic admiration of the rendering” (84), will thwart moral action and growth. That is why the fuller affirmation of their innate sympathy in Razumov and Heyst is presented as so important, but why it must also be initiated by encounters

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with particular individuals, by appeals such as Lena’s to Heyst: “You do something…. I don’t care what it is, but you must do something” (78).

6.2

Affirmation as Moral Work

Following Nietzsche’s ideas, we can read both protagonists as becoming morally more mature and complex human beings, becoming more fully themselves, through the process of affirmation jumpstarted by their sympathetic impulses. This is a coming into their inheritance of innate sympathy through actively affirming it, creating a desert of moral maturation that is both a reward and a curse. Both protagonists’ paths can be seen as addressing the thought-provoking question Ludwig Schnauder suggests derives from Conrad’s fiction: “How can we be responsible for something that we have not consciously willed”? (93). Conrad’s answer from our discussion above seems to correspond to Nietzsche’s advocation of affirmation: conscious willing is a morally productive process even for those inheritances we did not initially recognize and did not take responsibility for. Echoing the overall argument throughout this book, affirmation renders the automacy of inheritance deliberate and endows it with deliberate responsibility: one is, and therefore one is to accept, one’s inheritances, yet one should also not automatically take them on, and work to make them one’s own, to personally own them and take responsibility for them. This, instead of work in the way Razumov thinks of “[w]ork[ing] hard” (231)—to make use of his abilities, to study hard, to get a government job—is the moral work that the two protagonists engage in. To get a better idea of the moral ramifications of such a position, affirmation in essence asks for individual ownership even over the crucial parts of the self that are the product of contingency. Razumov and Heyst initially take their inheritances to be voluntary, assuming inheritances they want, and ignoring or avoiding ones they do not without having willed them first, in what distinguishes this attitude from affirmation. They try to attain moral immunity from inheritances they have not chosen, which upon gradual emergence they try to deny as part of themselves. They subscribe to the view that there is a moral distinction between choice and non-choice in what they should be held responsible for, that is, that choice creates responsibility, and that non-choice abnegates it. Razumov considers himself accountable merely for the consequences arising out of “the only thing he could call his own on this earth,” namely “[h]is solitary

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and laborious existence” (69), since this is the only thing he has actively opted in to. When this is destroyed, he “ask[s] himself furiously: “By what right? … In what name?” (69). His sense of injustice draws on a sense of fairness and justice based on choice, on “belong[ing] to himself” (231), “on the free use of his intelligence” (70), and abnegates on responsibility arising from random bad luck, from “some destructive horror—walking in upon me as I sit here” (Under Western Eyes 66), or some “drunken man” holding on to one “because something about your appearance has taken his fancy,” ruining the choices he made to “[s]tudy,” “[a]dvance,” “[w]ork hard” (231) in order to come into his bright “future” of “usefulness” (34). Heyst is an “observer of facts [who] seemed to have no connection with earthly affairs and passions” (61), having opted out of everything that would create meaningful attachment. His goal in life is not “to be tempted into action” because “all action is bound to be harmful” (56); that is, all action creates moral commitment, whereas nonaction absolves him from responsibility. But Conrad, in his representation of the protagonists’ responses to their innate sympathy, shows how choice cannot be the sole determinant of responsibility, that it is not possible to, in the words of contemporary philosopher Richard Arneson, only “hold individuals responsible for the foreseeable consequences of their voluntary choices” (88).10 From the moments of Haldin’s or Lena’s appearance, there can no longer be a clear binary division between voluntary and involuntary choice and commitment: the apparent full voluntariness of Razumov’s confession to Natalia, and of Heyst’s decision to save Lena, is qualified by Conrad’s portrayal of sympathy in the two protagonists as inherited and therefore, at least initially, involuntary. Moral ownership through affirmation, moral work instead of, for instance, Razumov’s unreflective allegiance to solitary hard work—where one actively wills what one has already inherited, including inheritances that are the product of chance and not initially voluntarily chosen, that one may be born with or into, in order to make them part of the creative project of selfbecoming and to take full ownership over one’s life—does not make this distinction. However, if affirmation is so valuable, such a crucial tool in selfbecoming, then why does Conrad seem to present it negatively despite also portraying its obvious benefits in leading to the characters’ moral

10 Quoted in Lippert-Rasmussen (74).

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growth? Firstly, both Conrad and Nietzsche understood the grave challenges to selfhood that the faculty of sympathy posed. Indeed, Nietzsche’s writings read as his own arduous journey to come to terms with sympathy and compassion, both of the instinctual kind that “noble” individuals (Zarathustra 31; pt. 1) such as Zarathustra feel, and of the kind that are part of tradition or “act[ing] in accordance with custom” (Human, All Too Human 51; vol. 1, par. 96). They testify to the great difficulty and complexity of the process of affirmation, and are too complex to have enabled critical consensus on his position on sympathy or compassion. For this reason, and because it would take us away from our reading of Conrad, I cannot offer here an extended reading of Nietzsche’s position on sympathy across all of his works, and a brief analysis needs to suffice as a counterpoint to our discussion of Razumov’s and Heyst’s processes of affirming sympathy. Nietzsche’s rebuttal of the second type of sympathy—sympathy as part of social custom—can be seen across his work, and most famously and prominently in his Genealogy of Morality (1887), where he analyses the development of morality as a historical phenomenon. His much more subtle and complicated engagement is with the first type of sympathy, the innate sympathy that Razumov and Heyst also possess. This type is perhaps best exemplified in his famous representation of Zarathustra, whose deeply compassionate nature is paired with his drive for self-creation. Coming to terms with his innate compassion is Zarathustra’s final challenge at the end of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85), as Nietzsche was to look back to in his autobiography Ecce Homo (1908): “I count the overcoming of compassion among the noble virtues: I wrote about one instance as ‘The Temptation of Zarathustra,’ when a great cry of distress reaches him and compassion… wants to ambush him and lure him away from himself. Keeping control here, … this is the test… Zarathustra has to pass—the real proof of his strength (12; ch. 1, par. 4). Such overcoming of sympathy is open to multiple readings. Although many scholars have concluded that Zarathustra here dismisses his sympathy, Christopher Frazer has argued that Zarathustra’s overcoming is not destruction; Zarathustra, he asserts, will still be compassionate, this being part of his nature, and although “[c]ompassion may cause him real misery, … when properly harnessed, it helps rather than hinders Zarathustra’s creativity” (73), his project of self-making. Bernard Reginster, while similarly emphasizing that Nietzsche’s engagement with sympathy is not straightforwardly antagonistic, nevertheless

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points out that Nietzsche often, like in this instance, represents compassion as a “‘temptation’ or a ‘danger,’ an enticement to take leave of our ‘own way’” (189), and that Nietzsche thought that “there are values (‘noble’ or ‘masterly’ values) that compete with ‘moral’ values, thereby challenging their claim to be the ‘highest values’” (188). However, the danger that affirming sympathy poses is presented differently for Razumov and Heyst. Although their inherited empathy jumpstarts their moral work, both are two nay-sayers who are forced to be yes-sayers by circumstance rather than by self-willing, and significantly, both are reluctant “willers” or “yes-sayer[s]” (The Gay Science 157; bk. 4, par. 276) till the very end. So Razumov, even in his final letter to Natalia, condemns Haldin for taking away “the truth of my life from me who had nothing else in the world” (272). And Heyst attempts to become even more detached after saving Lena, in itself an act that is only a partial willing of his innate sympathy because it leads him to feel “emptiness, desolation, regret” (185) and he disparages it: “I shall never lift a little finger again. At one time I thought that intelligent observation of facts was the best way of cheating the time which is allotted to us whether we want it or not; but now I have done with observation, too” (56). When Lena dies, he finds his “fastidious soul… even at that moment kept the true cry of love from his lips in its infernal mistrust of all life” (347). Both protagonists have been forced to undergo what we can call self-affirmation, but failed Nietzsche’s relentlessly exacting standards that require that “you must have no regrets, must not disown any part of yourself (‘I would not want to abandon an action after the event’ [quotation from Ecce Homo 19; ch. 2]); rather, you must aim for absolutely inclusive self-ownership” (Large xvii). As Panagopoulos has written, despite how works such as Victory show that Conrad’s view is “more Nietzschean [than Schopenhauerian] as it advocates affirmation rather than denial of the will to live” (21), “we see in Conrad’s fiction an unremitting struggle to redeem and re-affirm existence coupled with a deep scepticism as to the possibilities of doing so” (19). The two characters’ remaining reluctance, and indeed inability, to come fully to terms with all of their inheritances points not only to the extreme difficulty in Nietzsche’s call to affirm and overcome one’s inheritances, but also to the undesirability in having to do this. On the one hand, then, we see how there is some congruence between Conrad’s representation of the two protagonists and Nietzsche’s rebuttal of Schopenhauer’s brand of compassion that seeks to abolish suffering: “we would prefer it to be heightened and made even worse than

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it has ever been,” Nietzsche writes, because “don’t you know that this discipline has been the sole cause of every enhancement in humanity so far?” (Beyond Good and Evil 117; pt. 7, par. 225).11 The life journeys of Razumov and Heyst confirm that suffering makes for moral maturity and self-discovery. On the other hand, suffering is not represented as desirable, and indeed, as I will explain in a moment, in creating two heroes with modest ambitions, with achievable ideas of desert, Conrad induces readers to sympathize with their ill-fated suffering. Although we have seen how Conrad undercuts Razumov’s claim of unfairness and Heyst’s deep sense of regret, of not getting the deserts of a stable government job or the mental peace and detachment they have tried to work towards, what is striking is also how Conrad’s depiction encourages readers to view their claims sympathetically. Conrad’s representations—and this is where I think they detach from Nietzschean affirmation—encourage us also to see the attractiveness of not, as Stein puts it in Lord Jim, “in the destructive element immerse” (163), because some of our inheritances put our desired lives into danger or even destroy them, as they do to the protagonists. In what we can call complacency, turning a blind eye to some of one’s inheritances, not acting on them, not making the transition from inherited sympathy to fully affirmed sympathy, can have a protective aspect—especially considering that sympathy makes one extremely vulnerable when, as Heyst puts it, “[t]he world is a bad dog. It will bite you if you give it a chance” (59). This deep scepticism is of course not a position that Conrad consistently remained at—and indeed, this chapter has re-emphasized the importance of moral growth as charted against detachment in the two novels. But our readerly sympathy for Razumov’s and Heyst’s desire for moral complacency or disengagement is readily inspired because they do not mismatch ability and aspirations, do not overreach, and really do seem to deserve their desired deserts, unlike other Conradian characters. Jim who jumps off the Patna yet still desires to be a romantic hero; Nostromo who flaunts his disdain for material wealth and status while coming to covet these; the Professor in The Secret Agent who craves so much influence and power he needs to invent the whole new social identity of true anarchist for himself—all these heroes can be read as dreamers whose reality does not fully match their wild desires. Razumov and Heyst, however,

11 Quoted in Reginster 186.

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do not commit acts out of keeping with their desired roles—“to be a worker” (54) for Raumov, and to be a mere “observer of facts” (61) for Heyst—prior to the turning points in their lives. They aim for a steady, predictable existence, and do well in this until they are faced with their moral crisis of how to negotiate their conflicting inheritances: in Razumov’s case his abilities and diligence, and his undiscovered, latent “conventional conscience” (222) which brings with it the baggage of the revolutionary context of late Tsarist Russia in the form of Haldin and Natalia; in Heyst’s case his paternal legacy of abnegation, and his sympathy and innate need for love. The two characters’ very modest ambitions also generate a greater sense in the reader that these characters do not deserve their fates, that to some extent they should have been left alone to chart the course of their lives, that they should have been allowed to choose which inheritances to engage with, and which to ignore for their peace of mind. So coming to full terms with their conflicting inheritances is a violent process on an unwilling Razumov who “beg[s] to be excused” (54) and a reluctant Heyst who until the very end wishes to be as uninvolved as possible, to stick to his father’s philosophy despite his taking on responsibility for Lena, and who even with a dying Lena in his arms cannot bring himself to commit more fully by telling her he loves her. Although affirmation and overcoming can lead to self-becoming, Conrad’s representation also shows, alongside the benefits, that such affirmation and overcoming are destructive and prevent a comfortable life, and crucially, prevent rather than enabling self-becoming if the self is taken to be who Razumov and Heyst want themselves to be. Therefore, the innate nature of sympathy in Conrad’s portrayal threatens selfhood as much as it matures and develops it. Conrad shows both the supremacy of sympathy in the making of a morally deeper, reflective self; and at the same time its obstructive effect in the making of a balanced, comfortable, and relatively stable self. The result is, as discussed, moral deserts that become both their reward and their punishment.

6.3 The Costs of Innate Sympathy and the Pull of Complacency Although I am not in this chapter trying to argue that Conrad espoused complacency or unreflectiveness for the sake of comfort in life, I do

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wish to suggest that his representations help question Nietzsche’s ultimate recommendations on what to do with one’s inheritances. Constantly to do the moral work of “willing” by harnessing, controlling, and overcoming our inheritances, for Razumov and Heyst starting from their innate sympathy onward, is a gargantuan task that leads to greater self-awareness and self-becoming, but at the very high price of a relatively harmonious life. Conrad shows us both that inheritances ultimately cannot be voluntary, yet imagines the placidity of the soul when they are, even if this placidity cannot be sustained, and would come at the great cost of moral unreflectiveness in Razumov, and what both Conrad and Nietzsche would call a denial of life in Heyst. Complacency in this way provides a mental buffer against precarity in life. Thus what Conrad’s caveats address, I think, is that behind Nietzsche’s idea of affirmation as “valu[ing] becoming and impermanence” (Reginster 15) lies in effect a celebration of precarity. Conrad’s depiction problematizes the celebration of the anti-teleological vision that more recent uses of Nietzsche in political and social theory commend—and that go against earlier readings of Nietzsche such as Rawls’s that see Nietzsche’s perfectionism as having the singular teleological goal of “human excellence” even at the cost of other claims, such as justice (Conant 186). As a prominent example, Aletta Norval’s compelling Aversive Democracy discusses this anti-teleological drive in Nietzsche’s and others’ writing, this view of self-becoming as having no fixed destination or end in sight, in her argument for the project of “processual perfectionis[m]” (144) in the quest for democracy, which becomes a continuous process towards the perfect that can never be attained. We have seen this liberating impulse in Nietzsche’s idea of affirmation in this chapter: although he believed in the determinism of inheritances, he also emphasized the endless process of overcoming them in the creative project of self-making. But such an anti-teleological vision can also be terrifying: life as endless and unending strife and struggle, as unrelenting moral work with no final goal in sight, can be terrifying. Razumov thinks this when he sees himself as having lost all control over his own life, as being “at the mercy of these lawless forces” (66). Heyst thinks this when, reflecting on his involvement with the late Morrison, he concludes that “he who forms a tie is lost” (172), must henceforth be subjected to unpredictable outcomes, even as Heyst acknowledges the immeasurable value of his new “tie” Lena, “that human being so near and still so strange, [who] gave him a greater sense of his own reality than he had ever known in his life” (153).

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The Nietzschean vision of endlessly willing a perfection that cannot be attained in any finality is certainly a difficult way to live a balanced human life. Conrad’s portrayal depicts very vividly for us the difficulty, indeed even impracticability, of such a task. The comforts, predictability, and the sense of control—“that desire of safety, of an ordered life” (Under Western Eyes 61)—that one can exercise in complacency, when work is what we have consciously chosen for ourselves, and when this leads to deserts that are both desired and within reach, have their significant moments of appeal in the two novels. And we find this to be true in most practical aspects of daily modern life as well: precarity is a condition that many of us living in modernity actively try to avoid—our obsession with insurance of all kinds is perhaps the best example of this. Thus to be allowed to be morally complacent and strive for steady social and financial stability and success in one’s future as in Razumov’s case, or to drift unattached through life on a private income as in Heyst’s case, remain strangely attractive ideals to the two protagonists even after their fuller moral awakening. To limit oneself, to have a very clear goal in one’s life (as opposed to “hav[ing] not the slightest inkling what you are” [Ecce Homo 31; ch. 2, par. 9]) and know the desert that this will lead to, constitutes a different type of living: it involves working with, and within the limits of, select inheritances instead of overcoming all. It means not immersing oneself in the destructive element from which heroes are made. Conrad’s depictions show how Rawls may have had a point in viewing Nietzsche as a perfectionist, even an elitist, in A Theory of Justice (285–86)12 : for Razumov and Heyst, affirming their inheritance of innate sympathy is not at all desirable, takes gigantic effort, and leads to both protagonists’ downfalls. It is not for the faint of heart. Moments of complacency, when the two protagonists are unaware of, unconcerned about, or detached from, some of their irrevocable inheritances, are of course not moments Conrad can stay stationary at—complacency as a way of life is too problematic, too little heroic, to characterize a fictional hero. So Wang could not be a protagonist, although Heyst cannot help but “env[y] the Chinaman’s obedience

12 Rawls writes critically: “The absolute weight that Nietzsche sometimes gives the lives of great men such as Socrates and Goethe is unusual. At places he says that mankind must continually strive to produce great individuals. We give value to our lives by working for the good of the highest specimens” (325).

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to his instincts” (158), his utter harmony with his life and surroundings. Complacency also, in surprising resonance with Norval’s argument, comes to be seen by Razumov as a despicable social value underpinning Genevese society, tainting what seems otherwise a picture-postcard view of the outskirts of the town: The whole view, with the harbour jetties of white stone underlining lividly the dark front of the town to the left, and the expanding space of water to the right with jutting promontories of no particular character, had the uninspiring, glittering quality of a very fresh oleograph. Razumov turned his back on it with contempt. He thought it odious—oppressively odious in its unsuggestive finish, the very perfection of mediocrity attained at last after centuries of toil and culture.13 (159; my emphases)

The stagnant perfection of Genevese society, which the English narrator himself describes with slight disdain as “the perfected mechanism of democratic institutions in a republic that could almost be held in the palm of one’s hand” (138), is insipid and not to be looked up to. These inconsistencies, which we can see as part of the well-known pull in Conrad’s fiction between detachment and engagement, or its “dialogics” (Wollaeger 194) between scepticism and moral idealism, remain, as is often the case in Conrad’s fiction, unreconciled. Although we readers are encouraged to critique their complacency, it is difficult to fault Razumov’s and Heyst’s “desire of safety, of an ordered life” (Under Western Eyes 61), for wanting to work steadily towards earning these deserts, for wishing to opt out of instances of unchosen moral responsibility. Complacency prior to the entry of Haldin and Lena into the two protagonists’ lives, prior to the willing of sympathy, creates moments, however temporary, however superficial, of mental harmony, peace, and balance. Conrad never unquestioningly endorses complacency, but its value appears across his fiction. His famous narrator Marlow, for instance, can 13 Jeremy Hawthorn, in his review of my book manuscript, points out that this passage from Under Western Eyes might have been on Robert Pendleton’s mind when he links the novel to a famous sequence in the film The Third Man (1949): “One is tempted to surmise that Under Western Eyes may even have been a direct inspiration to [Orson] Welles’s famous improvised gloss on the Conradian contrast between the banality of democracy and the intensity of autocracy: ‘In Italy for thirty years under the Borgia they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce … ? The cuckoo clock’” (83).

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be seen as at least to some extent complacent when he lives out, vicariously and safely, others’ perilous adventures and toil—when he can, in essence, consume the dilemmas of others that are the result of their conflicting inheritances without taking these on himself. The English narrator in Under Western Eyes does something similar: fascinated by Razumov’s grappling with his conflicting inheritances, he is obliged to take none of these on despite his participation in the tale, despite having his own sympathetic faculties engaged and feeling “sorry for” him (146). So too the anonymous narrator in the first part of Victory follows Heyst’s shifts from observer to participant closely, but is safe from any obligation or danger himself. Something similar on a higher narrative level can be said for us readers who sympathize with Conrad’s protagonists: we vicariously (perhaps even voyeuristically) experience the tragedies they undergo, but we are able to stay safely on the sidelines while judging their risks, their dangers, from the vantage point of secure readerly detachment. As Suzanne Keen has argued on the link between novel-reading and the empathy14 novels arouse, “fictional worlds provide safe zones for readers’ feeling empathy without experiencing a resultant demand on real-world action” (4); “[t]he very nature of fictionality renders social contracts between people and personlike characters null and void” (16). We readers do not ourselves “in the destructive element immerse” (Lord Jim 163); we are mere spectators despite our sympathy with characters, which is much safer for our sense of selfhood than Razumov’s and Heyst’s. The paradox is that such safe detachment is to some extent necessary for our deep yet unobligated sympathy for characters such as Razumov and Heyst, because without this detachment we may not feel it safe, and thus allow ourselves, to experience this sympathy. But one thing we tend to ignore, and that I think Conrad’s complex portrayal reminds us of, is that some level of complacency—where we choose what inheritances to embrace as ours, and to other inheritances turn a blind eye—is often employed by many of us to lead a comfortable, peaceful life. It puts boundaries around the work one does, instead of the endless

14 Keen distinguishes between empathy, “the spontaneous, responsive sharing of an

appropriate feeling,” and sympathy, “the more complex, differentiated feeling for another” (4). The distinction between sympathy and empathy appeared later in common usage in English, and Conrad neither used the term “empathy” in these two novels nor, I think, distinguished semantically between empathy and sympathy in his representation of Razumov’s and Heyst’s sympathy. I therefore did not apply this distinction in this chapter.

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moral work Nietzsche espoused. It leads to a clearer, more controllable sense of desert. In other words, it safeguards “security” (Under Western Eyes 272) and is a bulwark against precarity—although complacency is ultimately not morally admirable, is always in need of questioning, and is not finally espoused by Conrad’s portrayals.

6.4

Concluding Remarks

In these final two novels that this book has examined, Conrad’s experimentation with making characters’ sense of desert not grandiose, but modest, for Razumov involving the ambition of a government job that perfectly matches his abilities and effort, for Heyst to flit unattached through life on a private income, moves us away from asking how and why characters think they deserve greatness, and returns us to an examination of what desert is when ambition and ability finally match. Desert emerges as an uncontrollable concept even when the possessor does not engage in what I have throughout this book called a tyranny of hermeneutics. Here, the anti-teleological strain to desert in Conrad’s works that was first mentioned in the Introduction, where, for example, work is seen as rewarding in and of itself, again eludes these two protagonists. In addition, the solipsism of the final two protagonists does not protect the desert they wish to come into. In fact, their cases highlight how desert often acts in a web of what Kevin Kinghorn calls “shared acknowledgement” (205), a crucial component of the notion of desert in the narrative account of desert he proposes. Kinghorn argues that the traditional three-place model of desert in philosophy referred to briefly in the Introduction, which describes the conditions of desert as “proportionality between treatment and desert basis,” is inadequate in “explain[ing] why people make desert claims” (206; my emphasis). It fails to address “the concern common to desert claims.… for the shared acknowledgment that some person (or object) possesses some particular trait or has performed some particular action” (205). Making desert claims, then, is so that what people consider as a truthful narrative about their possession of “some particular trait,” or about “some particular action” they have performed (205), is “acknowledged by all affected parties” (212; my emphasis). Kinghorn thus phrases his proposed model of desert as follows: “The truth about A possessing Y should be acknowledged by A receiving X ” (205), where Y is the “trait” or “action” that gives rise to

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desert claims, and X is the treatment person A thinks he or she should receive. I write about Kinghorn’s model of desert at the end of this book not because I think it can offer us the ultimate key to understanding Conrad’s depictions of desert and its relationships to work and inheritance, but because it very usefully highlights the unpredictable factors going into desert claims that Conrad also highlights—contrary to some of the social ideologies in Conrad’s time that claimed a more straightforward relationship between a person’s innate ability and its corresponding rewards, such as the ideal of the self-made man discussed in Chapter 2, or the professional ideals discussed in Chapter 5. With the condition that the “truth” about what a person possesses “should be acknowledged,” Kinghorn emphasizes the communal and narrative dimensions of desert claims, of these requiring “shared acknowledgement” (205). Conrad’s characters indeed desire—and this holds true even for the solipsistic Professor, Razumov, and Heyst, as I will explain in a moment—“the shared acknowledgement” (205) of their imagined traits (which in the case of Conrad’s characters are often emphasized as innate or natural, as we have seen) and action (often in the form of work that makes use of their traits), which is part of their quest for what they see as their desert. They do not merely wish to possess the (material) rewards they think are due to them; they want proper acknowledgement by the appropriate parties of these traits and actions. However, traits, as Conrad’s fiction highlights, can at best not be fully known or prove unstable, and at worst be entirely made up; and action in the form of characters’ work can be governed by traits that are beyond characters’ control (for instance Jim’s jump from the Patna, or Razumov’s inability to shake off his choice to betray Haldin). In addition, if characters’ desert claims can be read as a battle against what Kinghorn calls “a false narrative” (212) of themselves, Conrad’s portrayals emphasize not only that characters’ personal narratives of themselves can be sorely misguided, but also, again, that having them acknowledged by others is utterly out of characters’ control. Willems, for instance, fails to convince Lingard that he is really not such a bad person and is therefore deserving of a second chance, and dies in obscurity in the jungles of Sambir. Almayer dreams in vain not only of riches, but of others acknowledging his and Nina’s elevated social status, instead of looking down on him as insignificant and on Nina as a “half-caste” (Folly 15). Jim’s most ardent desire is to have his heroic status fulfilled in the eyes of others, but he instead dies in ignominy in Patusan, and in obscurity outside of

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it. Nostromo desires proper recognition for his abilities and work, his subsequent stealing of the silver frustrating him because of its illicitness. The Professor’s biggest fear is that others should not know of his greatness—yet his line of work all but guarantees obscurity until the moment he explodes, which may never come. Razumov finds the path that Haldin’s confession has forced him on so unjust that he feels he must reveal this “truth” (Under Western Eyes 274) to everyone even though they will not agree with his evaluation. Heyst cannot bear the solitude that is his father’s legacy, because this is a position that leaves him in a social void that lacks any “shared acknowledgement” (Kinghorn 205). The punishment even to those who achieve some degree of what they think of as their desert—Jim’s Patusan fame, Nostromo’s silver, and the Professor’s illicit anarchism—is the relative obscurity of it, that others do not know (or, for Jim, that his heroic status would immediately dissipate outside of Patusan)—in other words, Kinghorn’s “shared acknowledgment” (205) is insufficient, or lacking, stripping these rewards of significant validity. Thus we also have Brown’s desperation to be fully heard out by Marlow in Lord Jim, his “fear that I would get tired of waiting and go away, leaving him with his tale untold, with his exultation unexpressed” (260), and, with his tale fully told and acknowledged by Marlow, Marlow’s solemn statement that “Brown lived to be seen by me, and I can testify that he had played his part to the last” (305). Such destabilization of the deserving subject and of desert itself, so that desert is not simplistically seen as determined by the adequate demonstration of innate ability through work, is part of the “Truth” (A Personal Record 30) that we could say Conrad wants to convey in his fiction, but this deconstructive vision of desert is not relished. Compared with Nietzsche’s espousal of affirmation, of endless and goalless self-making no matter what inheritances the self might throw up, Conrad shows how terrifyingly insecure it can be to be faced with the precarity of work, the uncertainty of inheritance, and the unpredictability of desert. It is destructive to live by a fixed idea of deserving great rewards, as the cases of Willems, Almayer, Nostromo, and the Professor show; it can be nightmarish to live one’s life as if one is full of unlimited potential, as Jim does; it can be terrible to have to affirm fully parts of oneself that one would rather ignore and turn a blind eye to, as Razumov and Heyst discover. In this way, Conrad’s works, refuting throughout characters’ attempts to control and force into submission ideas of work, inheritance, and desert that seem open for them to inscribe into, and that seem to

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promise endless possibilities of self-making, finally also puts us face to face with the tragedy of such openness, an openness that turns out to be an illusion.

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Frazer, Christopher. “The Compassion of Zarathustra: Nietzsche on Sympathy and Strength.” The Review of Politics, vol. 68, no. 1, 2006, pp. 49–78. Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. “Abroad Only by a Fiction: Creation, Irony, and Necessity in Conrad’s The Secret Agent.” Representations, vol. 37, 1992, pp. 79–103. Hawthorn, Jeremy. “Artful Dodges in Mental Territory: Self-Deception in Conrad’s Fiction.” Conradiana, vol. 37, no. 3, 2005, pp. 205–31. Janaway, Christopher. Introduction to Vol. 1, The World as Will and Representation, by Arthur Schopenhauer. Translated and edited by Judith Norman, Alistair Welchman, and Christopher Janaway. Cambridge University Press, 2010, pp. xii–xlvi. Johnson, Dirk R. Nietzsche’s Anti-Darwinism. Cambridge University Press, 2010. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford University Press, 2007. Kierkegaard, Søren. Kierkegaard’s Writings, II: The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates/Notes of Schelling’s Berlin Lectures. Princeton University Press, 2013. Kinghorn, Kevin. The Nature of Desert Claims: Rethinking What It Means to Get One’s Due. Cambridge University Press, 2021. Knowles, Owen. “‘Who’s Afraid of Arthur Schopenhauer?’: A New Context for Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Nineteenth-Century Literature, vol. 49, no. 1, 1994, pp. 75–106. Large, Duncan. Introduction to Ecce Homo, by Friedrich Nietzsche. Translated by Duncan Large. Oxford University Press, 2007, pp. xi–xxviii. Lippert-Rasmussen, Kasper. Luck Egalitarianism. Bloomsbury, 2016. May, Simon. Nietzsche’s Ethics and His War on “Morality.” Clarendon Press, 1999. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Beyond Good and Evil. 1886. Translated by Judith Norman. Edited by Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman. Cambridge University Press, 2002. ———. Ecce Homo: How to Become What You Are. 1908. Translated by Duncan Large. Oxford University Press, 2007. ———. The Gay Science. 1882. Translated by Josefine Nauckhoff and Adrian Del Caro. Edited by Bernard Williams. Cambridge University Press, 2001. ———. Human, All Too Human. 1878–80. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. Cambridge University Press, 1986. ———. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. 1883–85. Translated by Adrian Del Caro. Edited by Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin. Cambridge University Press, 2006. Norval, Aletta. Aversive Democracy: Inheritance and Originality in the Democratic Tradition. Cambridge University Press, 2007. O’Hanlon, Redmond. Joseph Conrad and Charles Darwin: The Influence of Scientific Thought on Conrad’s Fiction. The Salamander Press, 1984.

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Panagopoulos, Nic. The Fiction of Joseph Conrad: The Influence of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Peter Lang, 1998. Panichas, George A. Joseph Conrad: His Moral Vision. Mercer University Press, 2007. Pendleton, Robert. Graham Greene’s Conradian Masterplot: The Arabesques of Influence. Macmillan, 1996. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Harvard University Press, 1999. Reginster, Bernard. The Affirmation of Life: Nietzsche on Overcoming Nihilism. Harvard University Press, 2006. Richards, Robert J. Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior. The University of Chicago Press, 1987. Said, Edward. “Conrad and Nietzsche.” Reflections on Exile. Granta Books, 2001, pp. 70–82. Schnauder, Ludwig. Free Will and Determinism in Joseph Conrad’s Major Novels. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2009. Tanner, Tony. “Joseph Conrad and the Last Gentleman.” Critical Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 1, 1986, pp. 109–42. Wollaeger, Mark. Joseph Conrad and the Fictions of Skepticism. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990.

Index

A Anarchism, 103, 105, 106, 109, 115, 118 Arendt, Hannah, 9, 65, 72 Aristocracy, 17, 18, 81, 83, 86, 87, 89, 93, 99, 124 Aristotle, 22, 43 C Carlyle, Thomas, 5 Charisma, 79, 111–114 Conrad, Joseph characters Aïssa, 40–43 Almayer, Kaspar, 8–10, 18, 24, 29–51, 148, 149 Almayer, Mrs, 46 Assistant Commissioner, 24, 111–113, 115, 116 Avellanos, Antonia, 90, 92–95 Brierly, 8, 60–62, 67, 69, 71, 104 Brown, 11, 56, 61, 63–65, 67, 71, 149 Cornelius, 62

Decoud, Martin, 24, 77–79, 81, 83–85, 88–98, 135 Donkin, 6 Gould (Senior), 87, 97 Gould, Charles, 24, 81, 85–90, 92, 94, 95, 97 Gould, Emilia, 83, 85, 88, 93 Haldin, Natalia, 93, 142 Haldin, Victor, 124 Heat, Chief Inspector, 113–116 Heyst (the elder), 125, 129, 134 Heyst, Axel, 9–11, 16, 18, 24, 123–150 Hudig, 30, 34–37, 44 Jewel, 62 Jim, 9, 15, 24, 42, 55–74, 78, 148, 149 Jones, 11 Kurtz, 7, 132 Lena, 124, 125, 130, 134–138, 140, 142, 143, 145 Lingard, 10, 18, 24, 31, 33, 34, 36, 37, 39–51, 148

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd. 2022 E. T. Y. Chan, Work, Inheritance, and Deserts in Joseph Conrad’s Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2584-9

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INDEX

Marlow, 5, 15, 55–64, 66, 67, 81, 132, 145, 149 Maroola, Dain, 45, 46 Mitchell, Captain Joseph, 77, 86, 96, 99 Montero, General, 93, 96 Monygham, Dr, 79, 80, 97 Morrison, 125, 130, 143 Nina, 39, 44–46, 48, 148 Nostromo, 8, 9, 18, 20, 24, 77–99, 115, 141, 148, 149 Ossipon, Alexander, 105, 116, 117 Professor, The, 4, 8, 9, 12, 18, 24, 99, 103–120, 141, 149 Razumov, 123–150 Schomberg, 124 Stein, 57, 60–62, 67, 141 Verloc, 115, 116 Viola, Giorgio, 79, 80 Viola, Teresa, 80, 84, 85 Waris, Dain, 61 Willems, Peter, 8, 9, 20, 24, 29–51, 55, 110, 148, 149 Ziemianitch, 134 early life, 1 sailing work, 4 works Almayer’s Folly, 2, 24, 29–51, 56 “Autocracy and War” , 136 “A Glance at Two Books” , 3 “Heart of Darkness” , 5–7, 16, 31, 81, 132 Lord Jim, 8, 11, 17, 42, 51, 55–74, 108, 111, 141, 146, 149 Nigger of the “Narcissus,” The, 6, 31, 103

Nostromo, 12, 17, 19, 77–99, 135 Outcast of the Islands, An, 2, 24, 29–51, 56 Personal Record, A, 2, 43, 118–120, 149 Secret Agent, The, 4, 8, 9, 12, 13, 17, 19, 24, 99, 103–120, 126, 130, 141 Shadow Line, The, 12, 23, 107 “Typhoon” , 4, 24, 120 Under Western Eyes , 16, 17, 19, 24, 47, 89, 93–95, 123–150 Victory, 11, 16, 24, 123–150 writing as work, 2, 3, 6, 7, 108, 119, 120

D Darwin, Charles, 14, 58, 67–69, 114 Darwinian gradualism vs saltationism, 70 Desert in philosophy, 13, 18–24, 37, 38, 99, 147–150 Dickens, Charles, 36 Durkheim, Émile, 113

G Galton, Francis, 14 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 15, 144

H Hulme, T. E., 69 Huxley, T. H., 68

I Irony, 45, 66, 84, 89–95, 106, 108, 112, 115–118, 135

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K Kierkegaard, Søren, 91, 92, 95, 135

Protestant work ethic. See Work ethic Puritanism, 111

L Law, representations of, 19, 40, 42

S Schopenhauer, Arthur, 131, 134, 136, 140 Self-made man, the ideal of the, 11, 29, 31–37, 42, 50, 148 Smiles, Samuel, 29, 33, 34, 36 Sympathy, 10, 16, 94, 124–131, 133, 134, 136–146

M Marx, Karl, 4, 78, 82 Merit and meritocracy, 11, 13–24, 105, 106, 109–111, 114, 124, 126 Modernist aesthetics, 58, 61, 66, 67, 70, 72, 73 N Nietzsche, Friedrich, 128–133, 137, 139–141, 143, 144, 147, 149 P Professional values, 4, 7, 103–120

T Trollope, Anthony, 14 W Weber, Max, 37, 38, 46, 82, 83, 109–114, 117 Work ethic, 7, 8, 23, 37, 38, 41, 47, 49, 65, 82, 85, 114, 147