The Grotesque in Conrad's Fiction Author(s): Elsa Nettels Source: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 29, No. 2 (Sep.

, 1974), pp. 144-163 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2933288 . Accessed: 01/09/2011 16:06
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he Grotesque in Conrad's Fiction

ELSA NETTELS

ONRAD

has

yet to be named a masterof the grotesque.In

recent books on the grotesque in literature by Wolfgang Kayser, Arthur Clayborough, and Philip Thomson, Conrad is not even mentioned.' Critics have analyzed the grotesque in the works of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Golding, and Sherwood Anderson, among others, but no one has made an extended study of the grotesque in Conrad's fiction.2 This is surprising in view of the importance in Conrad's fiction of characters and situations to which the novelist himself applied the term "grotesque" and which exemplify qualities by which twentieth-century scholars have identified the grotesque in literature. The distortion of persons and objects, the yoking of incompatibles, the fusion of the fearsome and the ludicrous, inducing in the reader a sense of dislocation and insecurity-those elements stressed by Kayser and Clayborough and others in their definitions of the grotesque-are pervasive in Conrad's fiction from Almayer's Folly to Victory and The Arrow of Gold. The grotesque is of essential importance in Conrad's treatment
1 Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature, trans. Ulrich Weisstein (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1963); Arthur Clayborough, The Grotesque in English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965); Philip Thomson, The Grotesque (London: Methuen, 1972). 2 Stanton de Voren Hoffman touches on the grotesque, but his main purpose is to analyze scenes of low comedy as symbolic of disorder, principally in "Heart of Darkness" and Lord Jim. His emphasis throughout is on burlesque, not the grotesque. See his Comedy and Form in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad (The Hague: Mouton, 1969). Donald C. Yelton discusses a number of images which produce effects of the grotesque in Conrad's novels. It is not his purpose to make a systematic study of the grotesque in the novels, however, and his discussion of the subject is limited to a few pages. See his Mimesis and Metaphor: An Inquiry into the Genesis and Scope of Conrad's Symbolic Imagery (The Hague: Mouton, 1967).

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of his central subject: the experience of the protagonist who suffers the destruction of those illusions of self and the world in which he once found security. To the protagonist, the grotesque usually manifests itself in two forms: in the appearance and actions of characters who contribute to the destruction of his illusions; and in the sinister or dreamlike quality which the world assumes in his eyes once his sense of security has been destroyed. In the novels, one manifestation of the grotesque is of course closely related to the other. It is helpful, however, to make the distinction: to consider first the characterswhom Conrad identifies as grotesque; then to examine the way he portrays the protagonist's consciousness of a grotesque world, particularly in the two novels, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes, in which grotesqueness of character in Conrad's fiction takes its most extreme form and in which the protagonist's sense of the world as dislocated and bizarre is most acute.

The qualities and effects that Conrad associates with the term "grotesque" can be most readily seen by examining a few passages f-romthe novels that portray characters identified as grotesque. The earliest such passage, from Conrad's first novel, Almayer's Folly, depicts a protagonist whose inflated view of himself, so little in harmony with his ineffectual character, is shown to be grotesque when it is symbolized by the shadow which exaggerates his sleeping figure. In the increasinglight of the moon that had risen now above the night mist, the objects on the verandahcame out stronglyoutlined in black splashesof shadowwith all the uncompromisingugliness of their disorder, and a caricatureof the sleeping Almayerappearedon the dirty whitewashof the wall behind him in a grotesquelyexaggerateddetail of attitude and featureenlargedto heroic size.3
3 Almayer's Folly, The Works of Joseph Conrad, Kent ed., 26 vols. (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1925), pp. 157-58. Citations in my text are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text, abbreviated as follows: AF, Almayer's Folly; AG, The Arrow of Gold; C, Chance; LJ, Lord Jim; N, Nostromo; NLL, Notes on Life and Letters; NN, The Nigger of the "Narcissus"; SA, The Secret Agent; SL, The Shadow-Line; UWE, Under Western Eyes; V, Victory; "HD," "Heart of Darkness," in Youth and Two Other Stories; and "ITW," "The Inn of the Two Witches," in Within the Tides: Tales. Doubleday, Page has issued various sets of the collected works-the Concord, the Canterbury, the Memorial, the Sun-dial, etc.-which are substantially the same as the Kent, though the volume numbers may differ.

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In its representation of the vanity of Almayer's dreams, this scene unites physical distortion with the theme of illusion so prominent in Conrad's later novels. This picture of disorder and distortion, rendered in sharp detail, also exemplifies Conrad's method of presenting grotesque figures such as those depicted in the following excerpts. Each figure is a caricature of "uncompromising ugliness" who assists in the destruction of the protagonist, a man rendered defenseless against evil forces, as Almayer is, by his effort to sustain illusions about himself in his own and others' minds. The passage below, from Lord Jim, presents Marlow's vision of the skipper of the Patna, a man whose cowardice, made comic here by his effort to force his enormous bulk into a small gharry, intensifies the horror of the scene on the disabled ship, the scene which reveals the illusory nature of Jim's ideal for himself. The little machine shook and rocked tumultuously,and the crimson nape of that lowered neck, the size of those straining thighs, the immense heaving of that dingy, stripedgreen-and-orange back, the whole burrowingeffect of that gaudy and sordidmass troubled one's sense of probabilitywith a droll and fearsomeeffect,like one of those grotesque and distinctvisions that scareand fascinateone in a fever. (LJ, 46-47) In the next passage, from Under Western Eyes, the protagonist Razumov encounters Nikita Necator, who is, like Razumov, a police spy masquerading as a revolutionary and who at the end maims Razumov when Razumov, unable to sustain a false identity, confesses his deception. The squeakystressput on the name "Razumov-Mr.Razumov"pierced the ear ridiculously, like the falsetto of a circus clown beginning an elaboratejoke. .. . The stolidityof his attitude, the big feet, the lifeless, hanging hands, the enormousbloodless cheek, the thin wisps of hair stragglingdown the fat nape of the neck, fascinatedRazumov into a stareon the verge of horrorand laughter.. . . how could that creature, so grotesqueas to set town dogs barkingat its mere sight, go about on thosedeadlyerrandsand slip throughthe meshesof the police? (UWE, 266-67) And in a final example, from Victory, Heyst watches as the man called Mr. Jones, who has destroyed the illusory safety of Heyst and Lena's island refuge, discovers that he himself has been betrayed.

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"On the track!On the scent!"he cried,forgettinghimself to the point of executing a dance of rage in the middle of the floor. Heyst looked on, fascinatedby this skeletonin a gay dressing-gown, jerkily agitated like a grotesquetoy on the end of an invisible string. (V. 388-89) The reader familiar with the fiction of Dickens and Hoffmann and with analyses of the grotesque by their contemporaries sees that Conrad is working within traditions well established in the nineteenth century.4 In the passagesjust quoted and elsewhere one observes characteristicsby which Ruskin, Victor Hugo, and others identified the grotesque: the physical distortion like that of a caricature; the comic incongruity of action and appearance which calls to mind images of clowns and puppets; the impression of the outlandish confounding one's sense of reality. All Conrad's grotesque characters are physically abnormal; many are diseased or moribund.5 In most of these figures, the physical distortion and the diseased condition are the outward signs either of spiritual emptiness or of moral depravity. Impotent grotesques like the engineers on the Patna and Michaelis are ludicrous by virtue of the enormous disparity between their aims or pretensions and their mental and physical capacities. Others like Gentleman Brown, Ortega, and Mr. Jones are acknowledged outlaws-renegades and murderers. Like Almayer sleeping on the verandah, these physically grotesque figures are presented in precise detail (we recall the conjunction of "grotesque" and "distinct" in the passage from Lord Jim). Often they appear close-up, in glaring sunlight, which renders visible the stripes on their clothes and the hairs on their faces. There is nothing vague or shadowy about Conrad's grotesque figures, nor are they divorced from the everyday world. In their physical abnormality, however, they appear devoid of humanity. To those who observe them, the grotesque figures seem like apparitions or phan4 Twice in his novels Conrad acknowledges his debt to literary sources in his portrayal of grotesque figures. To Razumov, Madame de S-- is "like a galvanized corpse out of some Hoffmann's Tale" (UWE, 215); de Barral and his child at the side of his wife's grave are "figures from Dickens-pregnant with pathos" (C, 162). Also, see Yelton, pp. 83-84, 125. Yelton emphasizes the importance to Conrad of Flaubert's sense of the grotesque triste as well as the importance of Dickens' example. 5 A list of the most important of these characters includes James Wait and Donkin, NN; Kurtz, "HD"; the chief engineer of the Patna and Gentleman Brown, LJ; Michaelis and Yundt, SA; Madame de S--, UWE; Mr. Jones, V; and Ortega, AG.

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toms, fantastic beings, many of whom are further dehumanized in their resemblance to animals of a repulsive or predatory character. The mingling of human and nonhuman forms has been from the beginning a recognized characteristic of grotesque art. Conrad compounds the effect of the grotesque by identifying his characters with nonhuman forms which in themselves are physically abnormal. Mr. Jones is not simply a specter; he is a "starvedspectre" (V, 118), just as General Montero in Nostromo is not simply a caricature but "the exaggeration of a cruel caricature" (N, 122). The Carlist agent Baron H. in The Arrow of Gold (a figure "somewhat grotesque") resembles an "obese raven" (AG, 260). And Donkin, the archetypal shirker and fomenter of violence, is like a "sick vulture" (NN, 128) with shoulders that "drooped like the broken wings of a bird" (NN, 10). Like Dickens, Conrad depicts in his grotesque characters elements both comic and terrifying that inspire in the observers of these characters complex feelings of revulsion, fascination, contempt, and dread. The Patna skipper, who produces a "droll and fearsome effect"; Nikita, who brings Razumov to the "verge of horror and laughter"; the satanic sisters in "The Inn of the Two Witches," "grotesque in their decrepitude," who would have "been laughable if the sight of their dreadful physical degradation had not been appalling to one's eyes" ("ITW," 148), all illustrate Ruskin's definition of the grotesque as "in almost all cases composed of two elements, one ludicrous, the other fearful."6 Often the grotesque incongruity is suggested by the yoking of incompatibles, as when Wait shows a face "pathetic and brutal" (NN, 18) and Karl Yundt, a "moribund murderer," displays his "impotent fierceness"(SA, 42-43).7 Incongruous images make the fearful seem ludicrous, as when Schomberg, soon to send his evil guests to Heyst, assertshimself as "one inflates a collapsing toy balloon with a great effort of breath" (V, 130). Conversely, by clothing cadaverous figures like Mr. Jones and Madame de S-- in rich bright costumes, Conrad intensifies, by the incongruity, the gruesomeness of the figure. On occasion, charactersare deflated when compared to diminutive forms of mighty beings: the Patna skipper is like a baby
6 The Stones of Venice (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1900), III, 126. 7 Examples are numerous, especially in the last novels. In The Arrow of Gold, for instance, Therese, the sister of the heroine, is "piously ghoulish" (246); Azzolati is "the ruthless, the ridiculous financier" (119).

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elephant (LJ, 37); Ortega is like a "little Prometheus" at whose liver sparrows peck (AG, 111). Perhaps the chief source of the contempt and fear inspired by Conrad's grotesque figures lies in the impression they create of persons not in control of themselves-an impression reinforced particularly in the later novels by comparison of charactersto mechanisms or automata: Madame de S - talks compulsively like a "galvanized corpse" (UWE, 215); Ortega's performance before the locked room seems "almost inconceivable . . . like the effect of a trick or of a mechanism" (AG, 318-19). In Ortega and others, the machinelike motion is the sign of obsession, almost to madness, by a fixed idea or passion. When the narrator of The Arrow of Gold understands Ortega's insane passion for Rita de Lastaola, he grasps the key to that "grotesque and sombre personality" (AG, 309); the -keyto the "grotesque psychology" of Schomberg (V, viii) is his mad hatred of-Heyst. Not only Ortega and Schomberg, but Kurtz, Gentleman Brown, Mr. Jones, de Barral (Chance), and Scevola (The Rover) illustrate the observation of Wolfgang Kayser that "the encounter with madness is one of the basic experiences of the grotesque which life forces upon us."8 With few exceptions, Conrad's grotesque figures, even the most deadly, are viewed from a vantage point from which they are judged fitting objects of scorn and contempt. Incompetents full of selfimportance, like Montero's followers, are satirized, as are predators who mouth noble sentiments, like Peter Ivanovitch (Under WVestern Eyes). Although lacking the satirist'sdetachment, observerslike Jim, Razumov, and Heyst consistently view their adversaries as being of a nature different from their own. Their very application of the word "grotesque" to such figures as Nikita and Mr. Jones indicates their sense of distance from and superiority to them. Nevertheless, one of the most important functions of the grotesque figures is to body forth in distorted form, as the shadow of Almayer is a distortion of the body, qualities and impulses present in the protagonist but repressed and often unrecognized by him. The fact that Conrad frequently locates the origin of grotesque figures in the irrational and unconscious-Donkin is a "startling visitor from a world of nightmares" (NN, 10), the Patna skipper belongs to the visions of delirium, Mr. Burns in The Shadow-Line is "grotesque
8 Kayser, p. 184.

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beyond the fantasies of mad dreams" (SL, 90)-suggests that the grotesque figures are to be seen as distorted shadows cast by the protagonists. James Wait, whom Conrad defined as "the centre of the ship's collective psychology" (NN, ix), is able to exert a "subtle and dismal influence" (NN, 34) because he incarnates a horror of death shared by most of the men on the Narcissus. The skipper of the Patna, "the incarnation of everything vile and base that lurks in the world we love" (LJ, 21), symbolizes potentialities in all men, including Jim, although Jim can never acknowledge this. The resemblances between Heyst and Mr. Jones, both of whom have rejected sanctions for action and have detached themselves from society, have often been noted.9 Schomberg, too, with his "lowspirited stoicism" (V, 119), his conviction that "life [is] a hollow sham" (V, 109), and his disposition to "let things take their course'^ (V, 109), also emerges as a gross caricature of the man he hates. The arrival of Mr. Jones only intensifies Heyst's sense of powerlessness and futility, which has called forth its grotesque embodiment in the spectral presence of his enemy. When Heyst's opportunity comes to kill Mr. Jones, "his very will seem[s] dead of weariness" (V, 390). Several of Conrad's protagonists-notably Marlow and Monsieur George, the narrator of The Arrow of Gold-are, however, able to resist and to triumph over their grotesque adversaries. Monsieur George, in recognizing "a most horrible fellowship" with Ortega (AG, 274), and Marlow, in accepting his bond with the appalling Kurtz, both gain a measure of control not only over their adversariesbut over the irrational impulses within themselves. But Jim, who can admit his guilt but never accept his imperfection, is defenseless against all his grotesque counterparts, from the engineer whose blubbering "I am one of them fearless fellows" is a travesty of Jim's self-confidence (LJ, 26) to the satanic Gentleman Brown with his lago-like gift of divining his victim's weakness. The precise shades of emotion evoked by Conrad's grotesque figures differ from novel to novel. The words used in conjunction with "grotesque"-for example, "appalling" (Wait), "vile" (Cornelius in Lord Jim), "atrocious" (Montero), "terrible" (General
9 See, for instance, Bruce Johnson, Conrad's Models of the Mind (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1971), pp. 170-73; John A. Palmer, Joseph Conrad's Fiction: A Study in Literary Growth (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 178-79; Paul Wiley, Conrad's Measure of Man (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1954), p. 156.

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T-- in Under Western Eyes), "shocking" (de Barral), "horrible" and "monstrous"(the two witches)-in themselves suggest the range of meaning of "grotesque" in Conrad's fiction. Despite the differences, however, it is possible to summarize the main characteristics and functions of Conrad's grotesque figures. Presented from the outside, they are set apart by their physical abnormality, usually the outward sign of spiritual deformity and often of madness. In their resemblance to nonhuman forms-animals or mechanismsthey seem both fearful and comic. In their relation to the protagonists, they have two important functions: they body forth in distorted form the dark irrational side of the protagonist's nature; and they also create the situations by which the integrity and strength of will of the protagonist are tested.

The bond between Conrad's protagonists and their grotesque counterparts indicates that Conrad shared Victor Hugo's belief that the portrayal of the grotesque is essential to a complete picture of life.'0 This belief finds expression in one of the most notable elements of Conrad's fiction: the creation of scenes tragic in their consequences but farcical in effect. The most memorable example of an episode grotesque in its incongruities is perhaps the scene of "low comedy" (LJ, 101) on the Patna which culminates in Jim's desertion of the ship and his jump into an "everlasting deep hole" (L1, 111).1"During the twenty-seven minutes upon which Jim's future life depends, the captain and his two engineers, in vain efforts to launch their lifeboat, engage in struggles "fit for knockabout clowns in a farce" (LI, 104). Utterly at odds with all Jim's dreams of heroic action, the scene confounds him as much by its "burlesque meanness" (LJ, 121) as by the images of disaster it evokes. To Jim, the situation is like a grotesque being with features and facial expression animated, as Gentleman Brown will later appear to be, by "a directing spirit of perdition that dwelt within, like a malevolent soul in a detestable body" (LJ, 31). The scene on the Patna indicates that Conrad's concern is not with grotesque charactersin themselves but with their effect upon
10 La Preface de Cromwell (Paris: Societe franSaise d'imprimerie et de librairie, 1897), pp. 191, 195. 11 For the fullest discussion of this scene, see Hoffman, pp. 56-47.

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the protagonist and with his experience of what Wolfgang Kayser has termed the grotesque or "estranged" world.'2 In novel after novel, Conrad makes his focus the mind of a protagonist who undergoes, as a result of the intrusion of grotesque figures, the sudden transformation of a world, familiar and secure, into a place of disorder and terror. Confounded like Jim when his confidence in the "everlasting security" (LJ, 17) of his world is shattered, Conrad's heroes confront, in Kayser'swords, an "alienated world" in which elements "familiar and natural to us . . . suddenly turn out to be strange and ominous."'3 Whether or not the protagonist triumphs over his adversaries,the effect of grotesque charactersand situations is to rob him of his mental equilibrium and to threaten his power to choose and act. Sensations like those suffered by Heyst when "everything round him had become unreasonable, unsettled, and vaguely urgent" (V, 258) are experienced by most of Conrad's. protagonists. In his discussion of the grotesque in French and German literature, Kayseranalyzesa number of themes, motifs, and devices which are also important in Conrad's portrayal of the estranged or alienated world: scenes of ruin and decay; remote exotic settings like jungles and tropical islands; social groups disrupted by such forces as storms, pestilence, famine, and war; mechanical objects which assume a life of their own; human beings reduced to mechanisms, as if they were "agents of something strange and inhuman";'4 and apparently illogical sequences of events, triggered by irrational or trivial acts, which make the whole world appear to be a demonic mechanism. Although Conrad, unlike Poe, Hoffmann, or Dostoevsky, never makes an insane consciousness the reflector of his action, he does evoke in most of his novels the impression of a world menaced by or on the verge of chaos. Pictures of corruption or disintegration are created by many of his settings: the ruinous houses of sinister quiet in Under Western Eyes and The Arrow of Gold; the rotting structures of the defunct coal company on Heyst's island; and the nightmare landscape of Patusan, fecund and spectral, where white coral shines like bleached skulls and graves are garlanded by flowers of shapes "foreign to one's memory" (LJ, 322). The terrify12 13 14

Kayser, p. 185. Ibid. Ibid., p. 197.

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ing sensation of tottering at the edge of an abyss beyond which lies unimagined horror overwhelms a number of Conrad's characters, from Nina Almayer to Marlow and Razumov. Almayer's dream, in which his next step into nothingness will bring the "crashingfall" (AF, 158) of his universe and the "anguish of perishing creation" (AF, 159), foreshadows Conrad's later evocation of dreamlike worlds of impending collapse. Not until "Heart of Darkness," however, does Conrad sustain through a whole story a protagonist's consciousness of moving through the fantastic landscape of a dream. Repeatedly Marlow stresses the unnerving effects of the nightmare journey through a "strange world of plants, and water, and silence" ("HD," 93). 'Whatmost oppresseshim is not the constant struggle against physical obstacles-terrible though these are-but the sense of being cut off from normal life, of losing one's own reality in a world of insane distortion: "We were cut off from the, comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse" ("HD," 96). Grotesque sights-the natives with faces like "grotesque masks" ("HD," 61); the emaciated body of Kurtz, "pitiful and appalling," animated by "grotesque jerks" ("HD," 134); the fabulous harlequin figure, grotesque because his very presence in the jungle is a fantastic incongruity-all work to create what Marlow calls the "dreamsensation" of the experience, "that commingling of absurdity, surprise, and bewilderment in a tremor of struggling revolt" ("HD," 82). Among Conrad's characters, Marlow is the most accessible to sudden glimpses into infernal regions, to sudden visions of a universe drained of light and bereft of order. Such visions come in Lord Jim as well as in "Heart of Darkness": Marlow, in Patusan, listens to Jewel's story and feels "a sudden dread-the dread of uiiknown depths.... For a moment [he] had a view of a world that seemed to wear a vast and dismal aspect of disorder" (LJ, 312-13). It is of the essence of Marlow's character, however, that he will not lose himself in "the chaos of dark thoughts," and the vision lasts only a moment: "I went back into my shell directly. One must" (LL, 313). Without exception, Conrad's protagonists, even the weakest like Almayer and Willems, struggle to keep their hold on -what Marlow calls "the sheltering conception of light and order

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which is our refuge" (LL, 313). In The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes, however, the protagonist is engaged in conscious deception by maintaining a false identity and is, as a result, more vulnerable to the power of grotesque charactersand situations and more ready to feel the world as hostile and alien.'5 As if to reflect the malaise of the protagonist, the world in which he moves permanently wears the "vast and dismal aspect of disorder" that Marlow glimpses only for a moment. It is in these two novels, then, that Conrad's methods of creating an estranged world in which characters are confounded, trapped, and destroyed can be most fully studied.

Among Conrad'snovels, The Secret Agent is unique in its picture of charactersat the mercy of a chain of events initiated by human acts but seemingly beyond human control. To a greater degree than elsewhere in Conrad's fiction, the characters' sense of their world as grotesque or estranged emerges from their plight as victims of what appears to be an infernal mechanism, empowered by the irrational fears it produces, working to no logical or foreseeable end. The very act which sets the mechanism in motion-Mr. Vladimir's command that Verloc bomb the Greenwich Observatoryis, as Mr. Vladimir states, intended to result in a deed of insane ferocity "so absurd as to be incomprehensible, inexplicable, almost unthinkable" (SA, 33). As Conrad observes in his Author's Note, it is an outrage that "could not be laid hold of mentally in any sort of way" (SA, x). The act of "shocking senselessness" (SA, 33) confounds all the charactersand ultimately subjects three of them -Verloc, Winnie, and Ossipon-to the terrifying experience of feeling the supports of their existence suddenly give way and life become a nightmare. The impression of the city as unhuman and hostile to man is evoked for the reader in the opening scene as Verloc begins his walk toward death through a "town without shadows" under the corrosive light of a "bloodshot" sun (SA, 11). The effect of Mr. Vlad15 In the dramatized version of The Secret Agent, the Assistant Commissioner describes the existence of a secret agent as "the nearest thing to living under a curse" (Scene 3, Act III). See The Secret Agent: A Drama in Three Acts (London: T. W. Laurie, 1923), p. 116.

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imir's instructions is to waken the somnolent Verloc to the horror of such a world, to induce in him a powerful sense of alienation and estrangement. His obsessive dread of the act he must perform renders the city to his haunted eyes an "inhospitable accumulation" of mud and bricks and stones, an "enormity" so unfriendly to human life that he apprehends it with a force "approaching to positive bodily anguish" (SA, 56). Eventually, the fear that produces the ghastly hallucination of Mr. Vladimir's face, pressed like a luminous seal on the "fatal darkness" (SA, 57), infects every part of Verloc's being. The "black care" that becomes his "fatal attendant" (SA, 186) not only isolates him from his wife and every other human being but also imposes itself like a wall or a veil between himself and the universe, cutting him off from the world apprehended by the senses (SA, 154, 174) and transforming the world of his "mental vision" into the "solitude of a vast and hopeless desert" (SA, 179). No less than her husband, Winnie Verloc suffers the disintegration of her world, but whereas Verloc experiences a slow mounting dread that paralyzeshim, Winnie, when she learns of her brother's death at Verloc's hands, receives a shock that instantly destroys her mental equilibrium. Estrangement, which in Verloc takes the form of isolation from the outer world of appearances, in Winnie is registered as violent disjunction within the self: "Her personality seemed to have been torn into two pieces, whose mental operations did not adjust themselves very well to each other" (SA, 254). For her, as for Verloc, shock alters "even the aspect of inanimate things" (SA, 249), but unlike Verloc, who shrinks from action, Winnie is impelled to action by grief and rage. Once her murderous passion has spent itself in the killing of Verloc, however, she too succumbs to an overpowering sense of the city as an alien world, "a black abyss"from which she is powerless to escape (SA, 271). With the appearance of Ossipon in the final scenes, Conrad introduces the last link in the chain created by the impact of one character'sacts upon the mind of another. As Mr. Vladimir's command destroys the mental balance of Verloc, as Verloc's act shatters the moral nature of Winnie, so Winnie in turn destroys the equilibrium of Ossipon, who comes upon her as she leaves the house after the murder of Verloc. Like a number of Conrad's characters confounded by a situation that defies comprehension, Ossipon has

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the sensation of sinking into depths where he struggles to keep his footing (SA, 279). When the truth of the situation finally flashes upon him, he, like Winnie, suffers an overwhelming shock, which in him registers itself as an insane terror, recalling at its height the delirium of the Patna engineer: Ossipon "positively saw snakes now. He saw the woman twined round him like a snake, not to be shaken off" (SA, 291). Ossipon is successful in shaking off Winnie, as Winnie is successful in killing Verloc, but Ossipon too is a victim of the "madness and despair" that destroys the others. "He was menaced by this thing in the very sources of his existence" (SA, 307). The impending degeneration of Ossipon is merely stated, not vividly rendered as are the mental states of Verloc and Winnie, but his fate is clearly meant to be another piece in the pattern created by the successive acts of Mr. Vladimir, Verloc, and Winnie. Throughout the novel, the impression of characters powerless to control a mechanism they have set in motion is reinforced when they themselves seem like machines.'6 Verloc answering the shop bell not only moves like an automaton but also has "an automaton's absurd air of being aware of the machinery inside him" (SA, 197). Terror reduces Ossipon to a mechanism whose words come "as though he had released a catch in order to speak" (SA, 294). The news of Winnie's suicide transformshis brain into a machine which he cannot control but can only observe as if it were "suspended in the air before him ... pulsating to the rhythm of an impenetrable mystery" (SA, 310). Conversely, machines assume a terrifying life of their own: the speaking tubes with "gaping mouths" (SA, 97) menace the Assistant Commissioner; the broken-down cab subjects Winnie and her mother to such violent motion that the world outside seems to collapse behind them (SA, 156); and the explosive mechanism of the bomb blows up Stevie. The sinister life in such mechanisms beyond human control is perfectly represented by the player piano in the Silenus bar which twice executes a tune without human agency when the deaths of Stevie and Winnie are announced. The violence of the incongruity of the trivial music and the ghastly deaths indicates the chief source of the grotesque in The
16 For a detailed discussion of the implications of the images of mechanisms, see David L. Kubal, "The Secret Agent and the Mechanical Chaos," Bucknell Review, 15, No. 3 (1967), 67-77.

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Secret Agent. Indeed, in no other novel does Conrad exploit incongruities so extreme and so numerous to produce a world and characters which confound the reader's sense of what is normal and rational. The physically monstrous figures, like Michaelis and Yundt, are absurd beyond Conrad's other grotesques in their espousal of changes they are utterly powerless to effect, and the grotesque situations such as that of Winnie and Ossipon struggling on the shop floor surpass scenes in the earlier novels in the enormity of the contrast of those elements, ghastly and farcical, which are yoked to produce effects of grisly comedy. Finally, in no other novel does Conrad so consistently create grotesque effects through the resources of the mock-heroic style. The extreme disparity between the squalid lives of the charactersand the epic world evoked by references to Ulysses, Penelope, and Virgil's Silenus not only intensifies the desolate horror of the situation, but also makes the horror bearable. The violent incongruities in scenes such as the cab ride-a "perfection of grotesque misery" (SA, 170) in which the grandiloquent style is most shockingly at odds with the pitiful miseries it inflates-intensify the reader's sense of a world out of joint, in which nothing fits, everyone is at cross purposes, and the whole chain of events confounds the reason. Like The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes places its protagonist in the midst of physically grotesque persons and subjects him to a sequence of events set in motion by a violent act and leading to consequences no reason could foresee. The tone of this novel, however, is different from that produced by the sustained irony of The Secret Agent. In Under Western Eyes, the picture of an estranged world is created not primarily by physically grotesque characters and situations nor by mock-heroic style but by the protagonist's consciousness of distortion and incongruity. Indeed, of all Conrad's novels, Under Western Eyes gives the fullest, most sustained picture of grotesque realities as they are reflected by a tormented consciousness. The protagonist Razumov, whose mind is the stage of the action in three of the four parts of the novel, is admirably conceived to serve as the mirror of the estranged world of the novel. Like Jim, he is at the mercy of a powerful imagination which, when his life is menaced, subjects him to intense visions of ruin; like Marlow, he struggles to resist the power of the irrational and the bizarre-

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he is one of those men who "keep an instinctive hold on normal, practical, everyday life" (UWE, 10)-and his very horror of the grotesque strengthens its hold on him. Thus, when Haldin suddenly appears, like an apparition, in Razumov's rooms, confesses that he is the assassin of the Minister-President, Mr. de P--, and seeks Razumov's aid, Razumov succumbs to an overpowering sense that his very existence has been undermined, that his life has been "permanently endangered" (UWE, 21). Not only does the appearance of Haldin, with whose ideas and acts Razumov has no sympathy, threaten Razumov with the loss of everything he has strived to achieve-recognition as a scholar, a place in the hierarchy of the regime, his very identity, in fact-but this utterly unforeseen intrusion also induces in Razumov a demoralizing sense of helplessness, a feeling that he has lost control of his life and is at the mercy of any "destructive horror" that might suddenly walk in upon him (UWE, 78). His sense of his world suddenly becoming unstable and sinister is expressed in familiar terms-in sensations of falling to the bottom of an abyss (UWE, 23), of feeling the moral supports of his life collapse (UWE, 76), and of living through the disconnected sequences of a dream (UWE, 315). To contain Haldin in his rooms is like "harbouring a pestilential disease that would not perhaps take your life, but would take from you all that made life worth living-a subtle pest that would convert earth into a hell" (UWE, 32). What transformsRazumov's world of sober realities into a nightmare realm peopled by phantoms and demons is not, however, simply the presence of Haldin but Razumov's betrayal of Haldin. It is not Haldin himself but Razumov's decision to give Haldin up to the police that inspires in Razumov a "suspicious uneasiness, such as we may experience when we enter an unlighted strange place" (UWE, 35). It is the betrayal, by which he strikes at himself as well as at Haldin, that renders the world phantasmagoric to Razumov's eyes, a place where a grotesque like the student with a nose like "painted cardboard"seems "a vision out of a nightmare" (UWE, 72, 75). Even the trivialities of everyday existence become strange and menacing: "when he had got back into the middle of things they were all changed, subLlyand provokingly in their nature: inanimate objects, human faces, the landlady, the rustic servant-girl, the staircase, the streets, the very air" (UWE, 298). Far from easing his tortured state, his interviews with General

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T-- and Mikulin only intensify his torment, subjecting him to the gnawing anguish of knowing himself suspect and forcing him to sustain a false identity as a revolutionary in the pay of the imperial police. Naturally given to viewing his own thoughts with detachment, he suffers as a result of the betrayal the sense of being split into two persons: a frenzied actor and a dispassionate, sardonic observer of the self whose sudden compulsions to speak can sometimes but not always be controlled. This double consciousness, which makes him appear to the narrator at one point as though "he were turning the knife in the wound and watching the effect" (UWE, 351), subjects Razumov to the most horrifying of all the visions that assail him, the vision of his own brain "suffering on the rack-a long pale figure drawn asunder with terrific force in the darkness of a vault, whose face he failed to see" (UWE, 88). Razumov is the victim of unenlightened egoism which impels him to seek his own security at any cost. At the same time, however, he is the victim of external forces: the revolutionary ardor embodied in Haldin and the power of the autocracy, equally destructive and irrational, incarnate in General T--, "the embodied power of autocracy, grotesque and terrible" (UWE, 84). To Conrad, both autocracy and the revolutionary passions it breeds were abhorrent; therefore, he portrayed Razumov as a prisoner trapped between two intolerable alternatives, between the "lawlessness of autocracy . . . and the lawlessness of revolution" (UWE, 77). The deathlike nature of the forces which have claimed Razumov is expressed most obviously by the physical distortion which marks the revolutionaries no less than the goggle-eyed General TIn Razumov's fevered vision, the abnormality of the grotesque figures is heightened, but these figures seem macabre and bizarre to others besides Razumov. The sinister and ludicrous aspects of Peter Ivanovitch are noted by Nathalie Haldin and the narrator as well as by Razumov; Madame de S--, to Razumov "a witch in Parisian clothes" with a "grinning skull" (UWE, 215), is also seen by the narrator as a physical grotesque: "the painted, bedizened, dead-faced, glassy-eyed Egeria of Peter Ivanovitch" (UWE, 161). In fact, the presence of the narrator, who conveys Razumov's story
to us, confers upon the picture of the estranged world reflected

by Razumov's mind the authority of an impartial and detached observer. In Parts II, III, and IV, in which Razumov, Nathalie Haldin

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and the narrator all serve as reflectors, what emerges is a composite vision of a world which seems in its distortion to mirror the tormented mind of Razumov but which is in its nature unstable and sinister, rendered grotesque by certain effects more pervasive in Under Western Eyes than in any of Conrad's other novels. RazuDnov's sense of the world as sinister and strange is intensified when

ordinary acts of speaking and listening appear to be distorted: when Peter Ivanovitch's voice seems to issue from beneath his spectacles, not from his lips (UWE, 216); when the squeaks of Nikita's voice seem to come from his distended stomach (UWE, 266); when Razumov's own voice appears to reach Sophia Antonovna through the pupils of her eyes (UWE, 257). Sounds proceed from unexpected places; at other times, the scenes are rendered dreamlike by unearthly silence: the city through which Razumov moves in search of Ziemianitch, transformed by the falling snow into a world without sounds; the "weird scene" (UWE, 30) of the beating in which the violence of Razumov's blows only accentuates the silence and the immobility of the shadows on the wall; the room of General T--, in which Razumov has the sensation of the floor moving beneath him and in which a soundless clock preserves the "grave-like silence" (UWE, 46). Scenes in the novel notable for their sharp contrastsof black and white, their distortion, their qualities of silence and immobility, repeatedly suggest the dreamlike effects of surrealist painting. The descriptions of the Chateau Borel, for instance, achieve effects remarkably similar to those of Chirico's early metaphysical paintings. The sense of eerie silence and of empty space that seems ominous is evoked by the appearance of the Chateau Borel as a place deserted yet guarded, with its windows shuttered, its door wide open. Inside, the emptiness of the abandoned place is haunted by the sound of a voice which seems to Nathalie as though "left behind by the departed inhabitants to talk to the bare walls" (UWE, 144). Here, as in Chirico's paintings of towers and streets and squares, the intensity of lines and shapes, rendered with supernatural clarity, enhances the strangenessof the world: The landing was prolongedinto a bare corridor,right and left, desolate of perspectives white and gold decorationwithout a strip of carpet.The very light, pouring through a large window at the end, seemed dusty; and a solitary speck reposing on the balustradeof white marble-the

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glossy in all that crude whiteness.
. .

161

silk top-hat of the great feminist-asserted itself extremely,black and

. [Razumov] stepped on the first

step and leanedhis back againstthe wall. Below him the greathall with its chequeredfloor of black and white seemed absurdlylarge and like some public place where a great power of resonanceawaits the provocation of footfalls and voices. (UWE, 226). Scenes like these, and like those in which Razumov sees the phantom of Haldin, come as close as anything in Conrad to the fantastic and the supernatural. Like all Conrad's fiction, however, Under Western Eyes is realistic in the sense that action is always to be explained in natural terms: in none of Conrad's works are natural laws suspended. Charactersdo not awaken to find themselves turned into insects or their noses detached from their faces. Whereas Gregor Samsa and Major Kovalyov are grotesque in worlds in which normal reality has been displaced, Conrad's protagonists inhabit a world in which pink toads exist only in the visions of delirium and the distinction between sanity and madness is always made. All Conrad's novels are informed by a point of view which distinguishes between the normal and the abnormal, whether the narrator is the omniscient author or a character like Marlow, who declares in Chance that "the normal alone can overcome the abnormal" (C, 429). The existence of a point of view which distinguishes between rational and irrational, sane and insane, allows Conrad to make another kind of distinction in his treatment of the grotesque. In each of the novels, he renders experience from two perspectives: from one viewpoint, grotesque characters and situations appear to be simply bewildering or frightening; from a second, the grotesque is seen to be part of a pattern or to assume meaning in terms of a conception of the universe. In a number of the novels, the characters are capable of seeing their lives from only one perspective. Almayer, Willems, and Verloc, for instance, know themselves confounded or menaced. They can register frustration, bewilderment, and fear, but they cannot register much more than their immediate emotions and sensations. Only the perspective of the omniscient author affords a view of the pattern their experience of the grotesque creates. In Chance, the two perspectives are maintained by different characters within the novel. The principal actors, Flora de Barral, Roderick Anthony, de Barral, and young Powell, can feel the uneasiness

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and fear bred by the peculiarities of their situation, but only the narrator Marlow, who remains detached throughout the novel, can appreciate in the trial of de Barral "the cumulative effect of absurdity" (C, 82), recognize in Flora's life the pathos and absurdity of a "tragi-comical adventure" (C, 310), and provide what the logical mind craves, "the evidence of rational linking up of characters and facts" (C, 310).17Several of Conrad's protagonists, notably Marlow in "Heart of Darkness" and Razumov, can view their situation from both perspectives, experience bewilderment and horror, and at the same time analyze their sensations and generalize on their meaning. Razumov, who at one point feels himself watched by "another self, an independent sharer of his mind" (UWE, 230), is capable of generalizing on the precarious nature of human existence even as his mind is defenseless against the sudden intrusions of the phantom vision of Haldin. Marlow, with the advantage of retrospective vision, in "Heart of Darkness" is able simultaneously to experience again the shocking impact of grotesque sights and to reflect on the idea of life-"that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose" ("HD," 150)-to which his journey has led him. In an essay on The Secret Agent, Thomas Mann pointed to Conrad's novel as illustrative of "the striking feature of modern art," that it "sees life as tragi-comedy, with the result that the grotesque is its most genuine style."18Several of Conrad's characters,notably Decoud in Nostromo and Marlow in Chance, give the term "tragic comedy" to the dramas they observe. There are marked differences in tone and mood from novel to novel, however, and the grotesque is used to different ends. Conrad's fiction illustrates C. S. Lewis's observation that "the grotesque is a ridge from which one can de19 scend into very different valleys." The "flabbydevil" ("HD," 72) which in "Heart of Darkness" produces conditions Marlow calls grotesque inspires in him feelings of contempt and revulsion that make the folly and cruelty of European imperialism a "sordid farce"
17 Conrad indicates what is essential in maintaining a perspective like Marlow's when he notes of Gould in Nostromo: "He had no ironic eye. He was not amused at the absurdities that prevail in this world" (375). 18 Past Masters and Other Papers, trans. Helen T. Lowe-Porter, Essay Index Reprint Series (1933; facsimile rpt. Freeport, N.Y.: Books for Libraries Press, 1968), pp. 240-41. 19 English Literature in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), p. 415.

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("HD," 61). Likewise, grotesque characters and situations help to create the impression of the "cruel futility of things" (N, 364) in Nostromo, but in this novel the value to the characters of what is sacrificed-the marriage of the Goulds and the lives of Decoud, Nostromo and Avellanos-turn a vain struggle into a "tragic farce" (N, 364). In contrast, the outcome of Chance is fortunate; the villain de Barral-grotesque in appearance and in his morbid obsession with one idea-is an antagonist fit not for tragedy but for the "sinister farce" of the courtroom where the "grotesque details" of his swindles, when revealed, excite laughter verging on hysteria (C, 81). Ortega pounding at the locked door at the climax of The Arrow of Gold likewise releases rather than intensifies the repressed emotions of his hearers, and because, unlike de Barral, he is powerless to do more evil, he is a comic, not a sinister, figure in a "ferocious farce" (AG, 322). Different as are the effects created in Conrad's novels, however, all Conrad's narrators view a world in which elements of the ludicrous, the pathetic, and the tragic are mixed; in which ignoble charactersreveal the flaws of the potentially noble; in which scenes of low comedy mark moments of high tension; and in which hopes and aspirations, both generous and base, are defeated by human weakness and folly and by the operation of what Conrad's characters see as blind destiny or chance. Given the human condition, man's best recourse, according to Conrad, is to preserve a view of life at once skeptical and compassionate. On occasion, observerslike Marlow and Decoud attempt to assert their detachment by viewing men's misfortunes as a kind of infernal joke. The vision which best sustains the observer, however, is more complex: a vision of man as ludicrous or pathetic in his pretensions and ignorance but as worthy of respect in his struggle to maintain himself in the face of adversity. The feelings which such a view inspires in the characterswho share Conrad's powers of detachment are summed up by the Assistant Commissioner in The Secret Agent, who sees men's pretensions as vanity "deserving of scorn, wonder, and compassion" (SA, 100). In evoking this complexity of feeling in Conrad'sfiction, the grotesque plays an essential part.

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