Construing Conrad's "The Secret Sharer": Suppressed Narratives, Subaltern Reception, and the Act of Interpretation
2001; University of North Texas Press; Volume: 33; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-1512
Autores Tópico(s)Joseph Conrad and Literature
ResumoSecret Sharer may well appear be profoundly multivalent, even the of self-contradiction. It at the same time both a writerly text invites a wide variety of incompatible interpretations and, curiously, a readerly text quite explicitly about accuracy in interpretion as it repeatedly stages, thematizes, and evaluates interpretive acts. The critical literature, however, has generally tended exemplify, the first of these statements rather than explore implications of the latter. The paradox in this treatment of the text, I will go on argue, the larger hermeneutical principles it ultimately affirms are ones cast doubt on the validity of many of the interpretive stances it seems have solicited. The widely recognized multiplicity of different readings this text seems indulge itself threatened by a profound skepticism the work invites us consider. (1) The metadrama of the fortunes of reading also has larger implications for reflections on the precise genre of this odd tale, its position in modern literary history, and its status as evidence in more general interpretations of Conrad's life and oeuvre. We may begin with a look at some of the various acts and tropes of reading, interpretation, and understanding are present in the text. (2) The first character the introduces us the first a man who characterized by his fascination with interpretation: His dominant trait was take all things into earnest consideration ... As he used say, he `liked account himself for practically everything came in his way (p. 94). (3) This depiction comes in the middle of, and occasioned by, an interpretive situation: the captain, having just spotted the mastheads of another ship, announces its presence (surprising the reader as much as the characters), and the mates set work trying explain the ship's unexpected presence. The chief mate's hypothesis, the vessel drew too much water cross the sandbar except at the top of the spring tides, immediately corroborated by the second mate-whose accurate but unexpected knowledge itself in need of additional explanation (The tugboat skipper told me when he came on board for your letters, sir [p. 94]). Wondering whether his peremptory dismissal of his officers from the deck would be construed not as generosity but rather eccentricity (Goodness only knew how absurdly whiskered mate would `account' for my conduct [p. 97]), the captain himself walks into a mystery. The side ladder down; furthermore, it can't be pulled up. The captain astounded and, just like that imbecile mate, tries to account for it. At the bottom of the ladder of course yet another enigma in the person of Leggatt; in the rest of this essay, I suggest the narrative of his life both more ambiguous and more amenable distinctively modernist interpretive strategies than has generally been accepted. The simultaneous importance and unreliability of the imagination has been a staple of Conrad criticism since Guerard, as has a sensitivity the limited perspectives of first-person narrators; nevertheless, the vast majority of interpreters have in varying degrees been seduced by the rhetoric of this captain-narrator. (4) To get the other, obscured narratives in the work (and the class-inflected sensibilities of those try utter them), it necessary first move beyond the captain's point of view-and I use this term in both its psychological and narratological senses. We must instead revisit two earlier and rather neglected critics of The Secret Sharer, Robert D. Wyatt and Michael Murphy, whose arguments have not been cited, appreciated, or developed as fully as they deserve be. (5) Murphy argues the captain is in some important respects an unreliable narrator (p. 193); he does not claim the is lying, but simply he not telling the whole story (p. …
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