Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
JIL LARSON
Western Michigan University
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom
http://www.cambridge.org
Notes 141
Bibliography 165
Index 173
vii
Acknowledgments
flirtation
Emotion in the ®ction of Schreiner and Hardy is indeed associated
with women, but it is a vital component of their intellectual and
ethical lives. Jude the Obscure develops another theme prominent in
the ®ction of late-century women writers: the idea that the New
Fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman writers 57
Woman's intellect becomes a weapon she turns against men as a
means of defending herself against patriarchal injustice and freeing
herself from constraints. In her relationships this exercise of power
leads the New Woman to become what Hardy calls ``an epicure in
emotions'' (180), usually with cruel consequences for the man or
men in love with her.
Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins, like ``The Buddhist Priest's
Wife'' and Jude, poses the question of what it would be like for a
woman to be in a relationship with a man without the complications
of gender and sexuality. Grand's Angelica Hamilton-Wells
employs her cleverness as a child to secure rights equal to those of
her twin brother. She grows up well-educated but restless, without
intellectual challenges. Like Sue's feeling that Jude is her counter-
part and Lyndall's bond with Waldo in The Story of an African
Farm, Angelica's twinship with a boy is key to her understanding of
gendered identity.25 As Teresa Mangum notes in her discussion of
the novel, ``Angelica . . . possesses potential for resistance because
she has experienced the formation of gender and the systematic
devaluing of women it enforces ®rsthand as an opposite sex twin''
(Married, Middlebrow, and Militant 134). When the newly arrived
choir tenor falls in love with her at ®rst sight, she disguises herself
as her brother and develops a close friendship with him. Later she is
unable to account for her behavior, though she admits to her desire
for excitement and her rebellion against those who would domes-
ticate her. Cross-dressing allows her a luxurious physical freedom;
it also enables a rare sort of intellectual liberty.26 She says to the
tenor, ``I have enjoyed the bene®t of free intercourse with your
masculine mind undiluted by your masculine prejudices and
proclivities with regard to my sex.''27 The consequences for her are
therefore positive, despite the guilt she suffers after her exposure.
For the tenor, however, the prank has psychologically painful
repercussions, and his experience with Angelica eventually leads to
his death.
Lyndall, the New Woman in The Story of an African Farm,
shares Angelica's yearning for more possibilities than life offers a
woman. Lyndall's mind and imagination help her satisfy this
58 Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880±1914
emotional hunger. Instead of literal role-playing, she mentally
multiplies herself by participating in forms of life completely unlike
her own ± transcending time, gender, and race, imagining herself a
medieval monk, a Kaf®r witch-doctor, and a variety of other selves.
``I like to see it all; I feel it run through me ± that life belongs to
me; it makes my little life larger; it breaks down the narrow walls
that shut me in'' (182). As both Lyn Pykett and Ann Ardis have
noted, this disruption of stable feminine identity occurs in much of
the New Woman writing and is often reinforced by its unconven-
tional narrative strategies.28 Although sel¯essness was expected of
the traditional Victorian woman, the late-century New Woman
paradoxically seeks to escape self through intellectual and emotional
experiments in self-actualization, even when these experiments are
hurtful to others.
Lyndall's restlessness is evident as well in her relationship with
the man she loves. She explains her feelings for him by stressing his
strength and power, even as she exerts her own power by refusing
to marry him, though she is pregnant with his child, and by
confessing that she became involved with him because ``I like to
experience, I like to try'' (206). This adventurousness, which is at
once calculating and emotionally self-indulgent, is what leads her to
describe herself as having no conscience (176), certainly an unfair
self-assessment, though it is true that she hurts those close to her
through her unconventional choices. She has enough of a con-
science to wish she were a better person, to prefer being good to
being loved (201). Schreiner encourages us to recognize Lyndall's
burden of guilt but also to question where the New Woman's
responsibility begins and ends in a patriarchal society that so
circumscribes women's freedom.
In her relationship with Jude, Sue is very much like Angelica
and Lyndall because she too feels emotional restlessness followed
by compunction. Like these other New Women, Sue is ``venture-
some with men'' (182). She enjoys tormenting Jude by having him
walk down the aisle with her as practice for her marriage to
Phillotson. She explains that she likes to do interesting things that
``have probably never been done before'' (180). But her pleasure
Fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman writers 59
evaporates when she realizes that her ``curiosity to hunt up a new
sensation'' causes Jude pain (180). Living with an openness to
possibility, Sue also strives to be responsible and compassionate.
The novel shows us how dif®cult it is for her to balance concern for
her own needs with her desire to avoid hurting others. The ethical
problems in her life exercise her emotional intelligence, particularly
within late Victorian culture with its confusing mixture of old and
new expectations for women.
All three of the women in these novels evade commitment and
seek to gain emotional satisfaction from their relationships with
men in daring, unpredictable, intellectually self-conscious ways.
Their behavior is understandable but also sadistically ¯irtatious.29
The novels waver between evoking admiration for these New
Women, and the new ethics of possibility that they bring to their
relationships, and judging them for turning their backs on a tradi-
tionally feminine ethics of care. In her study of Sarah Grand,
Teresa Mangum deplores ``the critic's power of erasure'' when
quoting Hugh Stut®eld, a literary critic for Blackwood's Magazine,
who patronizes Grand's characters in particular and the New
Woman in general. But there is nothing inaccurate in Stut®eld's
observations of the complex, ¯irtatious character of this new brand
of literary heroine:
The glory of the women of to-day as portrayed in the sex-problem literature
is her ``complicatedness.'' To be subtle, inscrutable, complex ± irrational
possibly, but at any rate incomprehensible ± to puzzle the adoring male, to
make him scratch his head in vexation and wonderment as to what on earth
she will be up to next, ± this is the ambition of the latter-day heroine.
(quoted in Mangum, Married, Middlebrow, and Militant 32)
Although I agree with Mangum about the sexist tone of this
commentary, I am not convinced that Stut®eld's reading of ``the
political struggles of the New Woman as a new and fairly trans-
parent form of ¯irtation'' is ``a distinctly sexist misreading'' (32).
The ¯irtation in these novels is fascinating because it serves the
political aims of these late-century women, even if only in a
compromised way. Far from being the agents of purposeful change
that Mangum's interpretation makes them, Grand's heroines, like
60 Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880±1914
Schreiner's and Hardy's, are indeed the ``victims of restless dis-
satisfaction'' of Stut®eld's description, though they are not merely
that. Their restlessness and experiments with new forms of ¯irtation
prompt their agency, which is exploratory and performative rather
than purposeful. They alternate between being victims and
agents.30 This instability is a mark both of their complexity and of
their ®n-de-sieÁcle predicament.
This ®ction encourages us to view ¯irtation, traditionally
thought of as ethically suspect (perhaps especially by feminists), in
a new light. In the New Woman novels I consider here, ¯irtation
coincides with the heroines' moments of advantage, power, and
self-fashioning, while the foreclosure of possibility that puts an end
to their intellectual and emotional playfulness and unpredictability
coincides with cultural containment and loss of even limited
agency. Writing about ¯irtation, Adam Phillips asks, ``what does
commitment leave out of the picture that we might want? If our
descriptions of sexuality are tyrannized by various stories of
committed purpose ± sex as reproduction, sex as heterosexual inter-
course, sex as intimacy ± ¯irtation puts in disarray our sense of an
ending. In ¯irtation you never know whether the beginning of a
story ± the story of the relationship ± will be the end; ¯irtation, that
is to say, exploits the idea of surprise'' (On Flirtation xviii±xix).
Surprise is sprung on the man by the woman in each of these
novels: Angelica surprises the tenor when he realizes that she is a
woman, not an enchanting boy. By refusing to marry or to make a
commitment, Lyndall surprises the father of her baby, who, she
realizes, will continue to love her as long as she resists his mastery.
And Sue surprises the men in her life at every turn: by marrying
Phillotson as a way of getting back at Jude for concealing his own
marriage, by refusing to sleep with Jude even after leaving her
husband for him, by returning to Phillotson as a penance after the
death of her children. In each novel, the story of the relationship is
shaped not by the man's choice, but by the woman's restless dis-
content and unwillingness to be the traditional heroine in such a
story.
Although the men are hurt by this new kind of ¯irtation that
Fiction by Thomas Hardy and the New Woman writers 61
takes away their power, the novels also encourage us to recognize
the positive ethical consequences of a ``¯irtation that puts in dis-
array our sense of an ending.'' Temporarily, all three heroines win
for themselves a better kind of love and relationship by avoiding
commitment and imagining and enacting their own agency. The
sexual equality, friendship, and freedom that they achieve in their
relationships with the men they love is short-lived and contingent
on material conditions and circumstances beyond their control. But
this new kind of romantic relationship energizes potential, even if it
is potential that never fully blooms. Thus in New Woman ®ction,
¯irtation, a stage of courtship that the respectable, modest Victorian
woman was advised to disdain, ironically enough plays a critical
role in the development of a more feminist sexual ethics.
moral luck
Nicholas Rescher, who believes that courses of action only appar-
ently acquire moral status that depends on luck, offers several brief
narratives, including the following, to illuminate what philosophers
mean by moral luck:
Consider the case of a bank's night watchman who abandons his post of duty
in order to go to the aid of a child being savagely attacked by a couple of
men. If the incident is ``for real,'' we see the night watchman as a hero.
66 Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880±1914
However, if the incident is a diversion stage-managed as part of a robbery,
we might well consider the night watchman to have been an irresponsible
dupe. And yet from his point of view, there is no visible difference between
the two cases. How the situation turns out for him is simply a matter of luck
(Rescher, Luck 153).
But the luck of how it turns out has implications for the moral
assessment of his action, as unfair as this seems, given the man's
good intentions in both hypothetical cases. A similar example is
Thomas Nagel's story of the man who runs in to rescue a victim
from a burning building. If, in the course of the rescue attempt, the
man accidentally drops the victim from a window instead of
bringing him out alive, our moral evaluation of him as a hero is
bound to be different even though this difference is contingent
upon luck. ``Where a signi®cant aspect of what someone does
depends on factors beyond his control, yet we continue to treat him
in that respect as an object of moral judgment, it can be called
moral luck'' (Nagel, Mortal Questions 26). Kant, who argued for the
primacy of intentions, maintained that there could be no such thing
as morality subject to forces beyond the control of the agent: a will
is good ``only because of its willing'' not ``because of what it effects
or accomplishes or because of its adequacy to achieve some
proposed end'' (quoted in Nagel, Mortal Questions 24). This is a
view that reassures us with its clarity and its bracing emphasis on
our reasoned choices, and, as we shall see, it is a view that appealed
to Hardy in his compassion for those who must choose and act in a
haphazard world not of their own creating. Still, ready as always to
take ``a hard look at the worst,'' Hardy was equally compelled by
the more troubling and ethically complex view that the outcome
determines our understanding of what has been done. As Nagel
notes, the Kantian argument offers an inadequate response to a
basic problem in ethics for which there is no wholly satisfying solu-
tion (25). In novels that represent life tentatively, as ``a series of
seemings,'' Hardy views this problem from a multiplicity of angles,
and though his ®ction doesn't offer us the comfort of a single solu-
tion, it implicitly challenges the reasonable but reductive conclusion
that there is no such thing as moral luck.
Chance in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess 67
Nagel outlines four ways that luck can affect morality (28). The
®rst, which he calls ``constitutive luck,'' refers to the kind of person
one is, whether one is born, for example, with or without certain
capacities, inclinations, and talents. The second, ``circumstantial
luck,'' describes the circumstances and problems that occur in a
person's life. The third, ``causal luck,'' is the luck inherent in the
way antecedent circumstances affect choices and agency. The
fourth, ``resultant luck,'' is a term for the way one's actions turn
out.
Martha Nussbaum's claim that moral luck is internal as well as
external is especially relevant to Nagel's ®rst two categories, and it
has important implications for the novels because Hardy is fasci-
nated by the relationship between destiny and character. As we see
again and again in life as well as in Hardy's ®ction, misfortune can
be reversed in a minute, but its internal ethical effects ± its effects
on character ± often take much longer to heal: ``It takes a long time
to restore to the slave a free person's sense of dignity and self-
esteem, for the chronic invalid to learn again the desires and
projects characteristic of the healthy person, for the bereaved
person to form new and fruitful attachments''.6
To cite but one example of internal moral luck in Hardy's
novels, I will turn brie¯y to The Mayor of Casterbridge. Given the
novel's representation of historical as well as personal instability
during the Victorian period, it should come as no surprise that this
example portrays mobility in the British social class system not as a
matter of determination and choice but as dif®cult to predict,
control, or even trust. Elizabeth-Jane no sooner arrives in Caster-
bridge with her mother than she ®nds herself a prominent person,
stepdaughter to the mayor. Yet she doesn't rejoice in her new social
status or advertise it by buying herself ®ne clothes and knick-
knacks because her childhood circumstances combined with her
constitutive luck have shaped her fears, desires, and expectations
and thus determined how she responds to this surprising cir-
cumstantial luck: ``Her triumph was tempered by circumspection;
she had still that ®eldmouse fear of the coulter of destiny despite
fair promise, which is common among the thoughtful who have
68 Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880±1914
suffered early from poverty and oppression'' (Mayor of Casterbridge
158). Those who seek to deny the relevance of luck to morality
have argued that we should focus on character and intentions, the
internal rather than the external. But as we have seen, it is a mistake
to assume that this is a realm protected from chance: ``restricting
the domain of moral responsibility to the inner world will not
immunize it to luck'' (Nagel, Mortal Questions 32). Hardy's novels
make this point especially vivid.
Resultant luck, also prominent in Hardy's ®ction, is a particularly
controversial notion because of its implications for our theories of
justice. Although Nagel resists the dangerously simpli®ed view that
any action can be justi®ed or excused by history, he does maintain
that actual results shape our ethical assessments: ``That these are
genuine moral judgments rather than expressions of temporary
attitude is evident from the fact that one can say in advance how the
moral verdict will depend on the results'' (30; emphasis his). He
illustrates this claim by pointing out that if one negligently leaves a
baby unattended in its bath, we know in advance that if the baby
drowns one is morally culpable, whereas if there is no dire result,
the moral assessment and self-judgment are more likely to be
milder ± in that case, ``one has merely been careless'' (31). There is,
of course, something unsettling about the notion of responsibility
that is not dependent on human control, but it is true that people
take moral risks everyday, knowing that the outcome of their
choice can make a tremendous difference to what they have done
and to the consequences they will have to live with. In his compas-
sion, Hardy baulks at the idea of assuming responsibility in a
¯awed, contingent world, where it is virtually impossible to live a
good life ± or even to act at all ± without moral danger; his
honesty, though, coupled with his respect for the complex parti-
cularity of the stories he tells, keep him from clean, rational pro-
positions of the sort Rescher, for example, makes in his argument
against moral luck: ``If the signi®cant evaluation at issue results
from luck, then morality does not enter into it. And if it is moral
through being in some way within our responsibility and control,
then it is not a matter of luck'' (Luck 158). Studying Hardy's
Chance in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess 69
narratives, with their attention to the bizarre twists and turns of life,
shows us that separating morality and luck in this way is not as easy
as it sounds.
Morality is supposed to provide ``a shelter against luck.''7 It is
quite idealistic, though, to assume that human moral assessment can
operate with godlike knowledge of a person's life, character, and
intentions. Too lofty a conception of justice can lead to injustice,
for it sets us up as the sort of judge none of us can possibly be,
given our human limitations. Bernard Williams argues against the
moral resistance to luck on these grounds: ``Atheists say that in
forming ideas of divine judgement we have taken human notions of
justice and projected them onto a mythical ®gure. But also, and
worse, we have allowed our image of a mythical ®gure to shape our
understanding of human justice'' (Making Sense 243). Instead of
``purifying'' morality by keeping it safe from luck, Williams pro-
poses that it is more honest and just to realize that our choices and
actions are always subject to forces beyond our control, and if we
are ever to take responsibility, we must do so by considering the
actual consequences of our actions, intended or not.
Margaret Urban Walker similarly claims that there are positive
implications for our ethical lives if we embrace the concept of moral
luck rather than fear it as an unruly contradiction in terms. Those
who deny the existence of moral luck seek to protect what she and
Williams call ``pure agency'': ``Pure agents are free, on their own,
to determine what and how much they may be brought to account
for by determining the intentional acts and commitments they will
undertake, and recognizing the limits to their control beyond
these.''8 The consequences of this view of agency is that if a person
makes a commitment but refuses to take responsibility for the unex-
pected possibilities that the commitment entails, carefully separating
voluntary agency from luck, there is likely to be greater suffering
for others as well as a loss of integrity for the agent. For example, a
woman may decide to have a child but not be prepared for the bad
luck of caring for an ill and unusually dif®cult child, or a man may
enter voluntarily into a lighthearted friendship and unexpectedly
®nd himself burdened with the responsibility of coping with the
70 Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880±1914
grief of a friend who is suddenly also a bereaved husband (``Moral
Luck'' 245). How well we deal with luck is a mark of our goodness.
In a sense, Walker suggests, moral luck brings such virtues as in-
tegrity and grace into being: ``If integrity is the capacity required to
deal morally with the impurity of luck-ridden human agency, its
general absence should be a dis®guring of human life in ways broad
and deep. For the same reason, a way of conceiving agency that
attempts to banish the impurity that gives integrity its point should
produce under examination an alien and disturbing picture of moral
life'' (243).
In Hardy, the characters who accept the impurity of their agency
come closest to achieving wisdom and virtue. Ironically, Tess of the
d'Urbervilles proclaims in its subtitle that Tess is a ``pure woman,''
when actually her impurity and the impurity of her world bring
into being her virtues of compassion and integrity. Hardy is no less
paradoxical when he leads Henchard to recognize that Elizabeth-
Jane, his stepdaughter whose morality is so beautiful to him, has
her origins in the impurity and immorality of the wife-sale and the
subsequent illegitimate union of her parents. Henchard is disturbed
by Nature's ``contrarious inconsistencies'' and by the ``odd
sequence'' of events, but Hardy encourages us to see that just as
virtuous intentions can result in disaster, moral luck can follow in
the wake of recklessness and evil.
As judges and guides of judgment, Hardy's narrators are fasci-
nating in their responses to moral impurity. Their perspective
characteristically oscillates from distanced to intimate, and they
themselves are in that sense godlike: at once remote and involved.
But Hardy's narrators rarely assign blame, aware as they are of the
unpredictable messiness and vulnerability implicit in the lives of
even the most rational and ethically scrupulous of his characters.
The very fact that these careful moral deliberators are as likely to
bring about pain and undesirable consequences as are the less aware
and conscientious of Hardy's characters demonstrates his belief that
morality cannot be protected from luck and hazard.
Much has been written about chance in Hardy.9 But these studies
do not directly consider the role played by luck in the ethics of
Chance in A Laodicean, The Mayor of Casterbridge, and Tess 71
Hardy's ®ction, a topic that merits attention, especially given the
extensive examination the issue of moral luck has recently received
in philosophy. As different as they are in the stories they tell, A
Laodicean (1881), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), and Tess of the
d'Urbervilles (1891) share a concern with the ways that knowledge,
time, and timing ± all subject to luck ± affect moral choice and
judgment. Characters' attitudes toward the past are as ethically
signi®cant as their intentions regarding the future, and their
concern for personal history is ampli®ed thematically by Hardy's
own preoccupations with history conceived more broadly as
ancestry and the past of Wessex. Although one would think the
past would be more stable and determinate than an uncertain future,
in Hardy's ®ction it is as subject to change, chance, and unpredict-
ability as anything else. The novels suggest that life is like a game
of chance, and therefore suspense, risk, and hope are inevitable for
those who play and even for those who would rather sit on the side-
lines and watch. This analogy between life and gambling reveals
that, for time-bound humanity, agency is always impure. Neverthe-
less the analogy also enables Hardy to explore his characters'
passionate but thwarted desire for control, for pure agency.
In A Laodicean, William Dare, one of the few wholly unsym-
pathetic characters in Hardy, attempts to study and manipulate the
odds as a way of winning the game; his hunger for control and his
determination to plot a future for himself back®re, though,
revealing the dangers of the calculating, scienti®c approach to life
so prevalent in an age when technological progress and faith in
science were supplanting faith in God and his providential plotting
of human lives. More sympathetic characters who take this
approach appear in the other novels: Lucetta Templeman and
Angel Clare both seek power and control as moral agents but pay a
price for underestimating the importance of the unforeseen. All
three novels include episodes that will help us clarify the concept of
moral luck. Perhaps even more important, Hardy's narratives
compel us to practice ethical assessment under the most dif®cult
conditions. And in that way literature tests and extends the project
begun by moral philosophy.
72 Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880±1914
promises
Razumov's story begins with talk of reputation, the concept most
often linked in ethical theory to promising. Ironically, however,
118 Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880±1914
Razumov's worthy reputation as someone who can be trusted is
responsible for the nightmarish turn his life takes. For Haldin seeks
Razumov out, though he is a virtual stranger, on the basis of what
he has heard and assumed about his fellow student's character.
Haldin, political assassin in hiding, stands leaning against the stove
in the very room Razumov plans to enter to work on the prize-
winning essay that will secure his reputation as ``a celebrated old
professor, decorated, possibly a Privy Councillor, one of the glories
of Russia ± nothing more!''10 With the abrupt intrusion of Haldin
into Razumov's rooms, Conrad underscores the power of the
political to disrupt and control the personal, but he also stresses
how different one's public reputation can be from one's sense of
self. The good reputation Razumov has among the revolutionaries
seems completely out of his control and quite different from the one
he actively strives to attain.11
One of the effects of reading Part One of the novel, then, is that
we begin to question the moral commonplace that conscious
choices earn us the reputation we would wish to have. For very
particular reasons, Razumov wants to be recognized as a good
patriotic citizen; his aspirations are understandable because they are
those of Prince K-'s illegitimate son, who desires attention and
approval but cannot be openly acknowledged by his father. The
political contingencies of Razumov's life, however, confront him
with choices that deny him the future he plots for himself. Thus the
ethical import of the story of Razumov's unwilling political
involvement emerges less from an analysis of his choices than from
attention to the powerful social net that constrains them. ``A man's
real life is that accorded to him in the thoughts of other men,''
Razumov realizes before his encounter with Haldin, but his
modi®cation, ``by reason of respect or natural love'' (63), betrays
his naive optimism at this point. Later he comes to a better under-
standing of the complex and unruly forces that generate the
reputations we confer on each other.
Staking his life on the reputation of a stranger, Haldin asks
Razumov to secure the means of his escape, but he makes Razumov
a promise: ``I don't see how my passage through your rooms can be
Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 119
ever known. If I should be got hold of, I'll know how to keep silent
± no matter what they may be pleased to do to me'' (67). Agreeing
to seek out Ziemianitch constitutes Razumov's promise of help:
``You must give me precise directions, and for the rest ± depend on
me'' (69).12 From the beginning, then, Haldin and Razumov are
locked in a relationship of mutual dependence, a reciprocal agree-
ment to live up to one's word and not to name names (for Haldin,
an important part of Razumov's reputation is reserve).
According to Baier's de®nition, when we make a promise, ``there
is an immediate exchange of powers to harm, but not of the same
sort of power to the same sort of harm'' (200). This is usually true
in the sense that the person who has extracted a promise has the
power to damage the promisor's reputation, whereas the promisor's
power to harm need not be as dependent on a community that cares
about a person's trustworthiness. In other words, by breaking the
promise, the promisor could compromise the promisee's safety,
endanger lives, etc., whereas the promisee's power to harm is more
often dependent upon the value of reputation. In the story Conrad
tells, however, the matter becomes much more complicated. In this
political context, the power to harm is equalized because each man
promises to protect the other's life from a repressive regime's
ultimate power to harm. Although Haldin has sought out Razumov
to request a promise, the promise he makes in return cancels the
implicit threat to damage reputation with which a promise is con-
ventionally received, especially when we consider that Haldin does
not make his promise contingent on the loyalty of Razumov, whose
trustworthiness is not questioned for a minute.
Arguing with himself and rationalizing his decision, Razumov
breaks his promise only hours later. He turns Haldin in because he
has no desire to be trusted by revolutionary students, but does wish
to earn the trust of the czarist government. The moral rule does not
hold, though, because Razumov commits an act of betrayal only to
win admiration from his uncomprehending fellow students for
being Haldin's accomplice; ironically, breaking a promise
strengthens his reputation among the revolutionaries as much as
keeping it would have done. General T- notices, and later exploits,
120 Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880±1914
what he calls Razumov's ``great and useful quality of inspiring con-
®dence'' (91). Traditionally thought to be a virtue, this quality in
this context robs Razumov of will and agency. It also leaves him
feeling profoundly alone. He con®des in Mikulin, ``I begin to think
there is something about me which people don't seem able to make
out'' (129).
In contrast, Haldin keeps his promise but is eventually executed,
earning only martyrdom as his ethical reward. And until his death,
Haldin persists in thinking of his friend as ``magnanimous'' (101),
even when Razumov, after the betrayal, blurts out to Haldin words
that reveal that he is no revolutionary. When Razumov is referred
to obliquely, during the police interrogation of Haldin, as ``the man
. . . on whose information you have been arrested'' (125), Haldin
refuses to name him or to say anything at all about him. It is far
from clear that Conrad encourages us to see this resolve as an act of
heroism. In his mysticism, Haldin has described himself as
inevitably shaped by and shaping a political movement, resigned to
do the ``heavy work'' required of him by the community with
which he identi®es himself: ``It's you thinkers who are in everlasting
revolt,'' he says to Razumov. ``I am one of the resigned'' (70). Just
as Razumov's sense of agency is illusory, Haldin's political acts are
not necessarily free or individually motivated; in fact, his
resignation to the tide of revolutionary change reveals its obverse
during the interrogation ± resistance to authority that becomes a
kind of acceptance of coercion as a fact to be endured, a force that
de®nes one's role and identity.
In The Secret Agent (1906), the Professor speaks of humanity
with contempt because of its slavery to social convention: ``The
terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket. Revo-
lution, legality ± counter moves in the same game . . .''13 Haldin
sees himself as a game piece, ``moved to do this ± reckless ± like a
butcher . . . scattering death'' (70). His political rhetoric is
occasionally disrupted by pangs of conscience, but, as Busza points
out, both Haldin and Razumov ®nd their actions motivated by
ideologies that remove them ``from the restraints of an ordinary
formal conscience'' (``Rhetoric and Ideology'' 110). Haldin
Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 121
describes his bomb-throwing as a necessary strategy of his side,
which, he contends, will win because it has ``a future . . . a
mission'' (69). He risks his life gladly, knowing that his spirit will
simply migrate to another Russian body and go on warring against
tyranny; otherwise, ``where would be the sense of . . .
martyrdom?'' he muses (69). If during the interrogation Haldin had
broken his promise, lied, and betrayed Razumov (now obviously a
pawn in the government's game), the revolutionary cause would
have been better served. But the Professor's observation about the
power of conventionally de®ned social roles holds true in this case:
the job of secret police is to interrogate and torture, and the
terrorist's traditional defense and de®ance is silence. Despite the
teleology of Haldin's political rhetoric, the novel itself suggests that
this game is played out endlessly, futilely repeating cycles of
violence.
In his sense of himself as utterly alone and out of the game,
Razumov resembles the Professor. But social convention snares
Razumov, drawing him into his nation's political life without
mitigating his loneliness. The Professor ± in his single-minded,
anarchic quest for the perfect detonator ± seems, by contrast, to be
Conrad's creation of an unreal man who embodies the remote
possibility of escaping the social. Razumov is more painfully real.
His acts of making and breaking a promise implicate him in new
coercive social contracts and carry consequences that doom him to
be perpetually misunderstood. Most painful of all, Razumov
simultaneously feels helpless (no longer in control of his choices or
identity) and guilty. He thinks of Haldin's intrusion as beyond his
control, but he considers his own promise, with its implicit lie, an
act he might have forestalled ± if only he had known the
consequences: ``You don't know,'' he thinks. ``You welcome the
crazy fate. `Sit down,' you say'' (118). If for Haldin the future is a
foregone conclusion, for Razumov it abruptly changes from the site
of his glorious career to a mine®eld he cannot choose not to
navigate. The question Councillor Mikulin asks as Razumov moves
toward the door in the middle of their interview ± ``Where to?'' ±
is one Razumov cannot answer because he understands that if he
122 Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880±1914
was ever in control of the direction of his life, he is no longer. The
question underscores Razumov's despair at ®nding himself caught
in a squeeze between the lawlessness of autocracy and the lawless-
ness of revolution: ``The feeling that his moral personality was at
the mercy of these lawless forces was so strong that he asked
himself seriously if it were worth while to go on accomplishing the
mental functions of that existence which seemed no longer his
own'' (113). Conrad makes us acutely aware that normative moral
life, which is Razumov's initial aspiration, becomes impossible
within such a political context. After telling the story of the broken
promise that perversely wins Razumov social acceptance of the
wrong kind, Conrad takes us inside Razumov's struggle to regain
his sense of agency and moral personhood.
This struggle seems to begin even before Haldin is apprehended,
during those moments when Razumov tries to convince himself
that once this assassin leaves his room everything will return to
normal. Like Marlow concentrating on the work of repairing his
steamer, Razumov seeks refuge in the ordinary details of daily life,
recognizing in them ``an armour for the soul'' (94). But unlike
Marlow, he is tormented both by his inner life and by the outer
experience that should provide his armor. Under Western Eyes
dramatizes and counterpoints ethics as public (social contracts,
political allegiance, reputation, ideology, etc.) and ethics as private
(conscience, deliberation, self-deception, personal relationships,
etc.). ``Nobody doubts the moral soundness of your action,'' the
Prince assures Razumov, but of course Razumov himself is
tormented by doubt and by the secrets that burden him after the
betrayal. Before entering his rooms with the knowledge that he
must conceal the truth from Haldin, he reminds himself that ``life
goes on as before with its mysterious and secret sides quite out of
sight, as they should be. Life is a public thing'' (95). But Razumov's
tragedy is that his life has become too public ± no longer his: his
public reputation is what gives rise to his contact with Haldin, his
hope to please public of®cials (his only family) leads to his betrayal,
the police raid on his rooms reenacts Haldin's disruption of his
privacy, and when he feels compelled to agree to work as a spy he
Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 123
gives up his intelligence as an independent thinker to serve state
intelligence. Nevertheless, paradoxically, what Razumov ®nds most
unbearable is an inner voice relentlessly rationalizing and arguing
with itself. Even though he belongs to neither of the groups that
claim him, he must outwardly seem to belong, and the inner voice
obsessively warns him that a truthful self, which is private and
prohibited, is always in danger of leaking out. Ordinarily we think
of conscience as internalized social ethics, but in Razumov's case his
conscience is at odds with the social and political world he
negotiates.
Ostensibly also at odds are the groups constituting the political
world from which he struggles to free himself. During the interview
with Mikulin that leads to his employment by the government,
Razumov beholds in his mind's eye an image of his brain as a ®gure
being torn asunder on a rack. The thoughts that accompany this
vision, however, return us to the idea that from Razumov's vantage
point revolutionaries and autocrats are more alike than different.
Whereas the of®cials remain suspicious of him even as they are
willing to use him, the revolutionaries ardently embrace him
because their utopian illusions blind them to the qualities in
Razumov that they would rather not see. But while nervously dis-
coursing to Mikulin, who ®nds it easy to get people to talk,
Razumov confuses the groups that have him on the rack:
With a great ¯ow of words he complained of being totally misunderstood.
Even as he talked with a perception of his own audacity he thought that the
word `misunderstood' was better than the word `mistrusted,' and he repeated
it again with insistence. Suddenly he ceased, being seized with fright before
the attentive immobility of the of®cial. `What am I talking about?' he
thought, eyeing him with a vague gaze. Mistrusted ± not misunderstood ±
was the right symbol of these people. Misunderstood was the other kind of
curse. Both had been brought on his head by that fellow Haldin. And his
head ached terribly. He passed his hand over his brow ± an involuntary
gesture of suffering, which he was too careless to restrain. (121)
As Jeremy Hawthorn has noted about this novel, the characters'
bodies are often more direct and expressive than their words;
gestures reveal, while language tends to distance, conceal, and
deceive.14 But the novel also represents language, despite the malle-
124 Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880±1914
ability that makes it susceptible to manipulation, as slippery ± un-
predictable and uncontrollable. In the wake of his broken promise
(which he rationalized to himself with carefully chosen words),
Razumov is misunderstood by the revolutionaries, though he
would prefer that they mistrusted him, and mistrusted by the autho-
rities whose trust he had hoped to earn. Although the two groups
are pulling him in opposite directions, to Razumov they appear
identical in many ways, not the least of which is the way they are
both conspiring to make a liar of him.
lies
While Razumov's experiences in Part One of the novel are initiated
by the promise that Haldin exacts from him, and characterized by
Razumov's suddenly keen understanding that life is a ``public
thing,'' the second and third parts of Under Western Eyes represent
Razumov's employment as a double agent, his entry into a social
contract that renders his life too private to be shared. Hence, lies
and deception become the focus of this section of the narrative.
Conrad returns in this novel to the ®gure he used for lying in Heart
of Darkness: the taste of something rotten. When Sophia Antonovna
says to Razumov, ``You must have bitten something bitter in your
cradle,'' he absently accepts her explanation. But when he adds,
``Only it was much later'' (250), he has traced the source of his life's
bitterness to his broken promise and the lies to Haldin which in
turn necessitated more lying. Razumov proves to be a liar at once
consummate and deeply reluctant.
In his recent Bakhtinian reading of Under Western Eyes, Bruce
Henricksen observes that the narrative method of this novel under-
mines our ``desire to attribute individual ownership to . . .
words.''15 By making the novel a translation and a narrative ren-
dering of Razumov's notebook and several other documents and in-
terviews, Conrad reminds us of Bakhtin's point that ``every word is
a shared word'' (Henricksen, Nomadic Voices 138). The novel does
stress the transindividual nature of language, but the argument that
Conrad thwarts our efforts to identify who owns particular words
Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 125
raises an interesting problem for those of us studying the novel's
thematics of lying. How do we identify Razumov, or anyone else in
the novel, as a liar when it is so dif®cult to determine which words
are his ± ``his'' both in the sense of resulting from relatively free
choice and in the sense of his and not someone else's (for example
the language teacher's)? Conrad seems simultaneously to encourage
us to condemn the verbal act of lying and to be skeptical of our
judgment as we wonder whether we are being lied to ourselves
about the agent of deceit. Henricksen's view of the novel's
unanchored language is more optimistic: by af®rming ``the
civilizing power of discourse in the face of silence,'' his argument
responds to what he seems to view as an overemphasis on the
novel's moments of coerced speech and writing: ``. . . all language
in the novel is shared language carrying signi®cance and values that
escape the control of any individual,'' and this dialogism is what
makes freedom possible by disempowering monologic discourse
(138, 149). My own sense is that the novel's ending does offer some
hope of community by af®rming just such an ideal of shared
language, but the possibility is realized only when Razumov is able
to gain a measure of ethical agency by escaping from oppressive
social control and what he feels as the coercion to speak lies. That
we as readers often have been left wondering about the ownership
of words makes the moment late in the novel when Razumov
confesses, ``owns up'' to his broken promise and lies, all the more
powerful.
In moral philosophy, a liar is most simply and traditionally
de®ned as a person who has chosen untrue words for which he or
she then becomes responsible. As much as the speech acts in Under
Western Eyes invite a poststructuralist reading, Conrad's treatment
of lies also raises old-fashioned, pragmatic questions of conscience
and responsibility. In her book on lying, Sissela Bok draws a
distinction between ``the freeloading liar and the liar whose
deception is a strategy for survival in a corrupt society,'' but she
goes on to make the important point that what she calls the ``free-
loading liar,'' the liar who is deceitful but expects everyone else to
be honest, is related to the type (like Razumov) who feels coerced
126 Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880±1914
into lying: once enough persons choose to lie, the rest of their
community will ``feel pressed to lie to survive'' (Lying 25).
Razumov's resentment clearly communicates that sense of
pressure. As if against his will, he ®nds himself again and again
identi®ed with what he hates. He admits that he despises Haldin
because ``to keep alive a false idea is a greater crime than to kill a
man'' (127). What he means is that he hates the utopian visionary in
Haldin, but the phrase ``to keep alive a false idea'' becomes a
perfect description of Razumov's own purpose in life after his act of
betrayal. By holding back the truth about his visit to Ziemianitch,
Razumov keeps alive for the autocracy, despite its suspicion, the
false idea that he is free of any complicity in Haldin's crime. By
posing as a revolutionary in Geneva, as Haldin's accomplice,
Razumov takes in everyone with his masquerade but is overcome
by self-loathing because he knows that ``to keep alive a false idea''
has become his vocation and supplanted the noble career he chose
for himself. Razumov also reenacts what he thinks of as Haldin's
lesser crime. As many readers have recognized, while Haldin
``kill[s] a man'' by throwing the bomb at Mr. de P ±, the corrupt
Minister of State, Razumov ``kill[s] a man'' by ®ngering the political
criminal.
Both before and after Haldin's death, Razumov obsessively
refers to him as a phantom ± one that is harmless because he can be
walked over, or convenient because he can be blamed as a
``haunting, falsehood-breeding spectre'' (289). But these ways of
characterizing Haldin are of a piece with Razumov's pattern of self-
deception; he repeatedly lies to himself about Haldin as a means of
distancing himself from the man's humanity and evading ethical
deliberation. Taking comfort in his recollection that Haldin
believed in an afterlife, Razumov forgets the nature of that afterlife
as Haldin described it: the migration of the soul of one revolu-
tionary into the body of another. But we might read Razumov's
excruciating internal struggle of the novel's second and third parts
not as a haunting by Haldin but as an uncanny instance of in¯uence,
of Razumov's character being inhabited and reconstructed by a
migrating revolutionary soul. This is a strong image of coercion,
Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 127
though by the end of the novel the blurring of the boundary
between Razumov's character and Haldin's is cast in a more
positive light. The ``phantom'' that ruins Razumov's life later lends
him his courage.16
Razumov resents whatever force it is that seems to compels him
to lie; at war with it is his impulse to tell the truth. At one point, in
conversation with Peter Ivanovitch (who accepts Razumov, in that
resonant Conradian phrase, as ``one of us'' [215]), Razumov declares
his identity with Russia, but then immediately regrets his words:
``That was not the right sort of talk. All sincerity was an impru-
dence. Yet one could not renounce truth altogether, he thought,
with despair'' (215). In Under Western Eyes, as in his other political
novels, Conrad considers the problem of how and why truthfulness
is incompatible with politics, why honest men (and sometimes
women) ®nd themselves caught up in lies when they become
entangled in political contexts.
Ironically, the group most honest in its witnessing of tyranny
and unnecessary human suffering is also the group most evidently
mired in dangerous illusions, most likely to lie to itself and to be
taken in by lies. Haldin's initial misreading of Razumov, which is
repeated by the revolutionaries in St. Petersburg and Geneva, does
tremendous harm to Razumov, to Haldin's family, to the revolu-
tionary cause. But, as Hannah Arendt argues in ``Lying in Politics,''
the urgent need to bring about future change is often linked to
denial of present reality: ``the deliberate denial of factual truth ± the
ability to lie ± and the capacity to change facts ± the ability to act ±
are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source:
imagination.''17 An imaginative writer from a family of political
activists and artists, Conrad must have been acutely aware of this
interconnection.18 In much of his ®ction, political involvement is
made possible by imaginative activity that occludes clear vision of
facts but enables action. ``Action is consolatory,'' as de®ned by the
narrator of Nostromo (1904). ``It is the enemy of thought and the
friend of ¯attering illusions.''19
In Under Western Eyes, however, skepticism about those caught
up in revolutionary action (expressed most often through
128 Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880±1914
Razumov's scorn or the language teacher's disapproval) is in
dialogue with voices defending the revolutionaries for attempting
to combat what Nathalie Haldin calls ``the absolutist lies,'' even if
the process entails countering lies with lies. She attempts to get the
language teacher to recognize what his Western perspective
obscures:
I believe that you hate revolution; you fancy that it's not quite honest. You
belong to a people which has made a bargain with fate and wouldn't like to
be rude to it. But we have made no bargain. It was never offered to us ± so
much liberty for so much hard cash. You shrink from the idea of revolu-
tionary action for those you think well of as if it were something ± how shall
I say it ± not quite decent'' (157).
Through her friendly mockery of the language teacher's de-
contextual ethics ± a sort of English drawing-room moral code of
manners, being ``honest'' and ``decent'' by not being rude or raising
objections ± Nathalie makes it clear that she resents his efforts to
protect her from political involvement. At the same time, Peter
Ivanovitch, the man attempting to lure her into involvement, is a
pseudo-feminist hypocrite and liar, a ``revolutionary'' who is as
much a tyrant as any of the representatives of autocracy. Despite
her innocence, Nathalie understands how ruthless political institu-
tions create networks of cruelty and suffering even among those
who de®ne themselves against oppression. In a novel that lacks a
clear sense of narrative authority, the epigraph helps us gauge
where the implied author's sympathies lie: ``I would take liberty
from any hand as a hungry man would snatch a piece of bread.''
Conrad quotes Nathalie here, and though much of the novel's satire
is directed against the revolutionaries, her idealism and passionate
urgency are granted respect. Her ``revolutionary faith is expressed
too winningly for us to feel that Conrad is merely indulging her.''20
If Haldin's spirit lives on, perversely and stubbornly, in
Razumov, it ®nds a more welcoming home in Nathalie, who
envisions a future not only just but merciful: ``Revolutionist and
reactionary, victim and executioner, betrayer and betrayed, they
shall all be pitied together when the light breaks on our black sky at
last. Pitied and forgotten: for without that there can be no union
Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 129
and no love'' (327). Razumov's response to these words is ``I hear,''
and their promise of forgiveness helps him to wrest a sense of
agency from his growing belief that he is merely a manipulated
player in a cosmic practical joke, a belief that gains strength after
the news of Ziemianitch's death but develops alongside his desire to
free himself from living a lie.21
Razumov's ®rst response is relief when he hears that Ziemianitch
has committed suicide and is now assumed to have been Haldin's
betrayer: the safety this error confers on Razumov will free him
from the need to tell any more direct lies. But he also ®nds that the
story Sophia Antonova passes along has afforded him a ``glimpse
into the utmost depths of self-deception'' (273), and Ziemianitch's
quintessentially Russian slide into mysticism ®lls him with ``a large
neutral pity'':
This was a comedy of errors. It was as if the devil himself were playing a
game with all of them in turn. First with him, then with Ziemianitch, then
with those revolutionists . . . He interrupted his earnest mental soliloquy
with a jocular thought at his own expense. ``Hallo! I am falling into
mysticism too'' (274).
Razumov, who has prided himself on being sober, clear-eyed, and
± as his name suggests ± rational, ®nds himself in a situation so
bizarre that at ®rst he can only make sense of it by subscribing to a
vision of the future that is as fatalistic as the Russian peasants' or as
assured of its providential success as the revolutionaries' or auto-
crats'. Yet this belief in Providence is only tentative ± an occasion
for self-mockery. In her reading of the novel, Lisa Rado makes
much of Razumov's ``transcendent vision of his own destiny''
(``Walking Through Phantoms'' 89), but the words she ascribes to
the novel's protagonist are actually Mikulin's: ``I believe ®rmly in
Providence. Such a confession on the lips of an old hardened of®cial
like me may sound to you funny'' (283±84). The latter of these two
sentences (which Rado does not quote) underscores once again
how much the government of®cials resemble the revolutionaries
and how distanced Razumov feels from both groups.
When he hears that Sophia Antonova, whom he thinks of as ``the
respectable enemy,'' the most intelligent of the revolutionaries,
130 Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880±1914
believes in him, Razumov admits to Nathalie that he is struggling to
resist the temptation of belief in Providence:
Things then are going as well as possible. Everything conspires to . . . Ah!
these conspirators . . . they would get hold of you in no time! You know,
Natalia Victorovna, I have the greatest dif®culty in saving myself from the
superstition of an active Providence. It's irresistible . . . The alternative, of
course, would be the personal Devil of our simple ancestors. But, if so, he
has overdone it altogether ± the old Father of Lies ± our national patron ±
our domestic god, whom we take with us when we go abroad. He has
overdone it. It seems that I am not simple enough . . . That's it! I ought to
have known . . . And I did know it'' (325).
ethical agency
If three-fourths of the novel undertakes an ethical inquiry into
promising and lying as speech acts, the fourth part concerns
Razumov's choice to confess to those who have been deceived and
face the consequences. In keeping with the novel's constant inter-
play of the ethical and the political, the private and the public, the
nonverbal and the verbal, Razumov actually confesses twice. His
®rst confession takes place during what he considers a private inter-
view with Nathalie (the language teacher is eavesdropping, but
Razumov is oblivious to him until after the confession when he
132 Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880±1914
mutters, ``How did this old man come here?'' [328]). In this con-
fession, the truth struggles on his lips (327), but he communicates it
without words, simply by pressing ``a denunciatory ®nger to his
breast with force'' (328). His second confession is written, a voluble
outpouring and a preliminary to the publicly spoken confession he
makes to the revolutionaries gathered at the Laspara house.
Before considering the signi®cance and the consequences of these
confessions, it is crucial to notice what a key role the structure of
Under Western Eyes plays in a reader's ethical response to Razumov.
Conrad's narrative method functions to delay his audience's most
severely judgmental response until the fourth and ®nal part of the
story, so that it coincides with, and is complicated by, Razumov's
self-judgment and confession. Not until this section do we learn, for
example, that Razumov reenacts Haldin's request for help by mali-
ciously asking Madcap Kostia to steal money (which Razumov later
discards) to help him get out of Russia, even though this event
takes place very early in the chronology of the story. Our full sense
of the moral signi®cance of this act comes through Razumov's own
confession: ``He was a fool, but not a thief. I made him one . . . I
had to con®rm myself in my contempt and hate for what I
betrayed'' (331). In the earlier sections of the novel our judgment of
Razumov, for one reason or another, remains tentative. In Part
One, we share to a certain extent his sense of violation and
bewilderment. In Part Two, because the narrator ± in the back-
ground for much of Part One ± steps forward as the language
teacher ignorant of Razumov's act, motivation, and true identity,
we see Razumov simultaneously through the eyes of an uncompre-
hending European and in Part Three, through the eyes of the
Russian revolutionaries in Geneva who implicitly trust and admire
him. We are of course aware of the irony in his gift of inspiring
con®dence, but because there is a gap between Mikulin's question,
``Where to?'', and Razumov's realization that he has little choice
but to cooperate with authority, we have no certain knowledge at
this point that Razumov is a police spy, and even if this fact is
inferred, the reader encountering the novel for the ®rst time is left
in the dark about motivation. The result of this narrative strategy
Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 133
for most readers is probably that they judge Razumov, but also
understand him; for much of the novel readers are in fact made
acutely aware of the moral degradation he undergoes because of the
lies he seems destined to tell. Only in the fourth part are the novel's
readers, along with its characters, fully enlightened about the extent
of Razumov's responsibility and the element of malice in his
motivation.
The act of confession is itself complexly motivated. By having
Razumov engage in the dangerous self-indulgence of telling the
truth to himself by writing in a journal, Conrad makes it clear that
Razumov desires to confess for his own sake, not to make himself
physically secure (Ziemianitch's suicide has done that), but to rid
himself of the sensation that he is suffocating in lies. Still, in his
letter to Nathalie, Razumov describes the confession as yet another
coercion to speak. On the personal level what coerces him is con-
science: he heeds a moral imperative. Within the social and political
context the pressure comes from Nathalie ± from her trust in
Razumov and her belief in her brother's revolutionary cause.
Both Razumov's self-revelation to Nathalie written in his journal
and the language teacher's narration of the events of that night of
confession suggest a mirror-image repetition of the night Haldin
was betrayed. Realizing that ``you don't walk with impunity over a
phantom's breast'' (334), Razumov decides that Haldin is haunting
him not as an insubstantial spirit but as Nathalie ± she is the soul
destined to carry on her brother's work. She is not merely deluding
herself, however, when she says to Razumov, ``it is in you that we
can ®nd all that is left of his generous soul'' (321), as ironic as the
words seem in this context. The dead man's presence is nearly
palpable for both of them just before Razumov reveals the truth ±
they simultaneously recognize Haldin in each other. Remarkably,
Razumov becomes the courageous and generous soul Nathalie
believes him to be, and she exhibits courage and generosity through
con®dence in him similar to that expressed by her brother. After
lying to Mrs. Haldin by conveying the news of Ziemianitch's
suicide, Razumov comes upon Nathalie suddenly and unexpectedly:
``Her presence in the ante-room was as unforeseen as the apparition
134 Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880±1914
of her brother had been'' (318). Appropriately, their conversation
begins with Nathalie's fear that her mother will become unhinged
and begin hallucinating, seeing her son as a phantom. For the ®rst
time, it occurs to Razumov that he had a choice: ``I might have told
her something true,'' he admits of his interview with Mrs. Haldin,
indirectly beginning his confession to Nathalie and thereby
regaining for himself a measure of ethical agency and political
freedom, even though by this time he is understandably skeptical of
any romantic notion of free will. Agency ± power to change the
course of his life ± is still trammeled by others. ``You were
appointed to undo the evil by making me betray myself back into
truth and peace,'' he addresses Nathalie in his journal. ``You! And
you have done it in the same way, too, in which he ruined me: by
forcing upon me your con®dence'' (331). He recognizes that he
betrayed himself when he betrayed Haldin; only another betrayal of
self ± this time inauthentic self ± can release him from his ``prison
of lies'' (334). His vow of revenge was ``I shall steal his sister's soul
from her'' (331), but instead her soul/Haldin's soul is forced upon
him.
In the novel's conclusion, Conrad underscores an identity
between Razumov and Haldin ± son of autocracy and revolutionary
martyr ± which was earlier presented only ironically as Razumov's
reluctant pose. Conrad imagistically merges these doubles by
having Razumov deliberately wait until midnight to run down the
stairs of his lodgings just as Haldin did in St. Petersburg and by
leaving us with one ®nal, sinister repetition of the staircase imagery
that became one of Razumov's ®xations after gazing at the statue in
the General's room, Spontini's ``The Flight of Youth.'' After
detonating Razumov's eardrums, Nikita and the men who assist
him rush with Razumov ``noiselessly down the staircase'' (339).
Thus Razumov reenacts what Haldin must have experienced when
hustled away to his punishment by the police. Following the public
confession to the revolutionaries, Razumov becomes, like Haldin, a
victim of brutality. This seems to be Conrad's way of vividly repre-
senting Razumov's hard-won capacity for empathetic identi®cation.
Razumov is simultaneously punished by both sides in the
Lies and ethical agency in Joseph Conrad's Under Western Eyes 135
political struggle (Nikita ``killed ± yes! in both camps'' [348]). His
words before he is attacked are his most con®dent assertion of
agency: ``. . . today I made myself free from falsehood, from
remorse ± independent of every single human being on this earth''
(338). Paradoxically, Razumov's sense that he had been robbed of
independence, enmeshed in the lives of others, coexisted with his
unbearable loneliness. Deaf and crippled, he can no longer deny
what Tekla recognizes immediately: ``He'll need somebody'' (343).
At the end of Under Western Eyes Conrad narrates alternatives to
the novel's earlier suggestion that the political is opposed to the
ethical. Tekla, in her devoted care of Razumov, and Nathalie, in
her ``compassionate labours'' in Russian jails and homes, ®nd forms
of social involvement that mitigate suffering. From what we hear of
Razumov at the novel's end, we can gather that his relationships
with those around him have changed. In his freed intelligence and
new ability, despite his deafness, to engage in genuine dialogue
with the revolutionaries who visit him, Razumov is no longer
strangled by his own words.24 As Sophia Antonova reports, ``He
talks well'' (347).
Writing about the Aristotelian idea that our ties with others, our
lack of self-suf®ciency, are not to be transcended but recognized as
a virtue, Martha Nussbaum observes that ``politics is about using
human intelligence to support human neediness'' (Love's Knowledge
373). That seems close to the de®nition we are left with at the end
of the novel, and it clearly brings together the political and the
ethical, the public and the personal. Razumov's agonized wish to be
``independent of every single human being on this earth'' is like
wishing to be immortal, and Nussbaum seem right to suspect ``that
there is an incoherence lurking somewhere in the wish; that what
we actually love and prize would not survive such translations.
That we may be doomed or fortunate to be human beings simply,
beings for whom the valuable things in life don't come apart so
neatly from the fearful and terrible'' (368). Conrad's novel
heightens our awareness of this truth in the way it shapes our
desires as we read. Through its structure, dramatized choices,
internal monologues, relationships and dialogues, the narrative
136 Ethics and Narrative in the English Novel, 1880±1914
moves its readers to want Razumov to escape from his claustro-
phobic prison of lies, even as we are made to understand the risks
that any confession in this political context would entail. We are led
to see the virtue in taking such risks. By satisfying the desires of its
implied readers, the novel's ending entangles the valuable ±
Razumov's truth-telling and the ethics of care and human
connection that this act enables ± with the terrible ± a crippled
neediness that marks as ironic Razumov's desperate wish to
transcend humanity. His insistently nontranscendent life reminds us
that we cannot escape the need for an ethics and politics of some
sort.
The linguistic pessimism inherent in the novel's view of the
psychological traps of modern political life ± in which listening
becomes a form of espionage, and talking a way to lie, manipulate,
and coerce ± is relieved by what Avrom Fleishman calls ``an
encouragement to change'' in the novel's ®nal vision of community
and uncoerced communication (Conrad's Politics 242). The
optimism of the conclusion of Under Western Eyes is quali®ed but
not deconstructed by the horrible fact of Razumov's physical muti-
lation and by the association throughout the novel of speech acts
with political pressure and undermined ethical agency. Conrad's
hope for social change was contingent upon recognition of the
importance for both individual and community of keeping promises
and telling the truth, even though his novel reminds us that doing
so will often seem impossibly dif®cult.
Afterword
141
142 Notes to pages 3±5
focuses on the ethics of particular writers to develop a theory about the
ethics of a particular historical moment.
8 In his study of the 1890s, John Stokes calls attention to ``the rhetorical
magnetism of the single word `new''' during this ®nal decade of the
century (In the Nineties [Chicago and London: University of Chicago
Press, 1989], 15).
9 For studies that treat concerns of the Victorian ®n de sieÁcle in relation to
those of the late twentieth century, see Elaine Showalter's Sexual
Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de SieÁcle (New York: Penguin,
1991) and the essays collected in Cultural Politics at the Fin de SieÁcle, ed.
Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1995).
10 Edmund Gosse's childhood, as he describes it in Father and Son (1907),
furnishes a classic example of story deprivation, for in his family the
reading of ®ction was strictly prohibited. As Plymouth Brethren, his
parents considered both storytelling and novel reading to be sinful
activities. His mother had been a natural storyteller as a girl but success-
fully repressed this instinct, much to Gosse's dismay. He himself eagerly
devoured ®ction wherever he could ®nd it during his boyhood; he
describes reading a sensation novel, for instance, while kneeling on the
bare ¯oor of an attic peering at the pages which had been torn from the
book to line an old trunk (Father and Son [New York: Penguin, 1983], 49,
59).
11 Siebers argues that ``to emphasize the story as story, giving all weight to
its detail and none to generalization, cuts it loose as an example from
ethical theory'' (Morals and Stories 46). Still, he demonstrates through his
reading of fables in Morals and Stories that morals are often inadequate to
stories. That is Nussbaum's point, too. In a discussion that follows her
reading of The Golden Bowl, she usefully contrasts a generalized moral ±
``All daughters should treat their fathers as Maggie treats Adam here''
(blunt and inadequate) ± with what she calls ``a direction of thought and
imagination'' that does justice to the particularity of the scene: ``All
daughters should treat their fathers with the same level of sensitivity to
the father's concrete character and situation, and to the particularities of
their histories, that Maggie displays here'' (Love's Knowledge 166±67).
Again, detail and context are crucial.
12 Margaret Urban Walker, ``Moral Understanding: Alternative `Epistem-
ology' for a Feminist Ethics,'' in Eve Browning Cole and Susan
Coultrap-McQuin, eds., Explorations in Feminist Ethics: Theory and
Practice (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 169.
13 As early as the 1960s, Iris Murdoch ± herself a novelist as well as a
philosopher ± called for a moral philosophy that was more attentive to
Notes to pages 5±11 143
human relationship, particularity, and emotion, all of which she felt had
been compromised by the overly theoretical orientation of contemporary
ethics. In his recent study of moral psychology and moral theory,
Lawrence A. Blum makes the point that, unfortunately, Murdoch's
charge is still true twenty years later. See Murdoch's The Sovereignty of
Good (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970) and Blum's Moral
Perception and Particularity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994).
14 Virginia Held, Feminist Morality: Transforming Culture, Society, and
Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 16±17.
15 Seyla Benhabib shares Held's wariness even as she draws from post-
modernist ideas in constructing a model of communicative ethics
attentive to issues of gender: ``Postmodernism is an ally with whom
feminism cannot claim identity but only partial and strategic solidarity''
(Situating the Self: Gender, Politics, and Communicative Ethics [New
York: Routledge, 1992], 15). Women would only make a virtue out of
necessity, for instance, if they embraced the postmodern vision of self as
fractured and opaque.
16 Martha C. Nussbaum, ``Feminists and Philosophy.'' Review of A Mind of
One's Own: Feminist Essays on Reason and Objectivity, Louise M. Anthony
and Charlotte Witt, eds., in New York Review of Books, 20 October 1994:
60.
17 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1984), 22.
18 About pseudo-objectivity, or an appeal to an essentialism that might not
even exist, MacIntyre points out that ``when men and women identify
what are in fact their partial and particular causes too easily and too
completely with the cause of some universal principle, they usually
behave worse than they would otherwise do'' (After Virtue 221).
19 Terry Eagleton, ``The Flight to the Real,'' in Ledger and McCracken,
eds., Cultural Politics 12.
20 Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), xvi.
21 Nussbaum shares Rorty's view of what happens ethically when we read
novels. She makes the further point that for self-examination we need the
sort of emotional distance a narrative can provide: ``A novel, just because
it is not our life, places us in a moral position that is favorable for
perception and it shows us what it would be like to take up that position
in life'' (Love's Knowledge 162).
22 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodern Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), 11.
23 Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1984), 8.
144 Notes to pages 12±22
24 Anthony Cascardi has pointed out that even Fredric Jameson, who writes
in The Political Unconscious of the need to get beyond ethics, refers to the
``moral'' of his book (``Always historicize!''): ``The stoic refusal of desire
that we confront in the form of historical necessity does not in the end
eliminate the desire to sublimate or transform necessity into something
more meaningful or valuable, like a `moral''' (``Ethics and Aesthetics in
Joseph Conrad,'' Western Humanities Review 49.1[Spring 1995], 19).
25 Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (New York: Penguin,
1979), 150.
26 Catherine Gallagher shows us that in the early Victorian period, too, a
new theory of morality and culture and a new practice of realism were
born at the same time; see Gallagher, The Industrial Reformation of
English Fiction, 1832±1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985),
xiii.
27 John Kucich, The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction (Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 248.
28 Thomas Nagel, Mortal Questions (Cambridge: Cambridge University
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29 Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays, vol. 1 (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
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Index
173
174 Index
Eagleton, Terry, 7, 32, 42, 94, 159 n. 15, Mayor of Casterbridge, The, 16, 67±8, 70,
161 n. 24 71, 82, 86±91, 158 n. 31
Egerton, George, 153 n. 28 Return of the Native, The, 80, 152 n. 24,
Eldridge, Richard, 114 158 n. 31
Eliot, George, 72 Tess of the d'Urbervilles, 16, 54, 70, 71,
Adam Bede, 146 n. 16 72, 80, 82±6, 152 n. 24, 157 nn. 26 and
Daniel Deronda, 154 n. 35 28
Eliot, T. S., 41, 148 n. 30 Hare, R. M., 10
epistemology, 31, 33, 75 Harpham, Geoffrey, 1±2
Erikson, Erik, 48 Hawthorn, Jeremy, 123
evolution, 30, 31, 32, 33, 38, 79, 150 n. 13 Hay, Eloise Knapp, 161±2 n. 4, 163 n. 20
``Hedonism, New,'' 40
feminist ethics, 4±7 Heidegger, Martin, 95
Fernando, Lloyd, 149 n. 2, 154 n. 35 Held, Virginia, 5
Fleishman, Avrom, 136 Henricksen, Bruce, 124, 164 n. 24
¯irtation, 49, 56±61 heredity, 37, 38
formalism, 1±2 history and ethics, 20±43
Foucault, Michel, 46, 145 n. 10 Hopkins, Gerard Manley, 37
Freedman, Jonathan, 16, 94, 160±1 n. 21 Hume, David, 116, 117
Freud, Sigmund, 30±1, 146±7 n. 19 Husserl, Edmund, 95, 101, 106±7