Joseph Conrad and NarcissismSynopsisThis dissertation explores narcissism in Joseph Conrad, focusing on three novels The Secret Agent, Nostromo and Lord Jim. It argues that narcissism is an intolerable predicament, leading to either death or disillusionm
...m. Verloc is continually defined by those around him; he is an embassy spy, police informant and husband whilst still politically an anarchist. Stevie, Winnie’s mother and Michaelis are the only characters that are not ruled by motives of self-interest. Indeed, it is Stevie, who is the converse of the Professor’s dangerously rationalised vitriol. A simple “moral creature at the mercy of his righteous passion” (p.172), it would be reductive to dismiss him merely as an idiot. Kohut identifies empathy as a narcissistic transformation that provides “the recognition that to a large extent the basic inner experiences of other people remain similar to our own” (Kohut, p.451). Stevie’s genuine benevolence is evident in his reaction to the “Cab of Death” (p.170), which takes his mother to the almshouse: “Poor! Poor!” stammered out Stevie, pushing his hands deeper into his pocket with convulsive sympathy. He could say nothing; for the tenderness to all pain and all misery, the desire to make the horse happy and the cabman happy, had reached the point of a bizarre longing to take them to bed with him. And that, he knew, was impossible. For Stevie was not mad. It was, as it were, a symbolic longing; and at the same time it was very distinct, because springing from experience, the mother of wisdom (p.167). This empathy appears as a beacon to which to aspire and can be read as the antithesis to the reaction of the crew of the ‘Narcissus.’ Freud defined object-love as the exact opposite of narcissism; Stevie’s pure compassion for the cabman and his sister – “he prided himself on being a good brother” (p.172) – represents pure selflessness, a lack of interest in his own plight and a concern even for the cabman who acted “as if Stevie had not existed” (p.168). Stevie’s “innocent but pitiless rage” (p.169) is a danger to himself, yet in contrast to the Professor’s egotism, whose bomb inflates his sense of power; Stevie’s emotions are directed towards others. Like a newly born child, his isolation and loneliness, creates a wealth of object investment. In a letter to R.B. Cunningham Graham Conrad stated that: “[w]hat makes mankind tragic is not that they are victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.” This is subverted within Stevie, he is a victim of nature and he is not conscious of it. Conrad’s depiction of “what makes mankind tragic” is expressed more ostensibly in Nostromo: the consciousness of mankind is disrupted by the cold inhumanity of “the material interests of civilisation,” causing a crisis of identity. Conrad’s imagined world of Costaguana is subjected to political upheaval, threatening the future of the silver mines that are idealised by Charles Gould as central to the state’s future prosperity. The novel has a consequential ideological significance. Frederic Jameson emphasises the disjunction between the individual act and historical process. Jameson believes Nostromo and Decoud’s heroic act in attempting to save the silver “has been alienated and stolen from them even before they can achieve it.” This is certainly pertinent: individual characters are subject to the political and socio-economic unconscious. However, this defines the novel as merely an ideological construction. It seems problematic to subordinate the depth of detailed collective psychology of individuals to a purely ideological reading. Nostromo is ultimately a tremendous literary achievement. F.R. Leavis describes the novel as “one of the great novels of the language […] the novel is luxuriant in its magnificence […] the whole book forms a rich and subtle but highly organised pattern. Every detail, character, and incident has its significant bearing on the themes and motives of this” (p.210-11). Leavis rejects a sustained analytic exhibition of the inner complexities of the individual psyche; yet to do so ignores the essential human and emotional response to the novel. The subtle detail given to the compulsive quest for power and wealth in the novel is given emphasis by a psychoanalytic reading. It reveals the inherent dangers for humans to create their own spheres of satisfaction and meaning, which is the novels fundamental concern. Sulaco is “an inviolable sanctuary from the temptations of a trading world in the solemn hush of the deep Golfo Placido” (p.17), an idealised refuge which will be corrupted. Charles Gould’s initial intentions are seemingly sincere; he views the silver as an ideal purpose and the future servant of Sulaco. In idealising an economic function, Gould seems to mask his psychic needs and libidinous impulses behind the name of an ideal: I pin my faith to material interest. Only let the material interests once get a firm footing, and they are bound to impose the conditions on which they alone can continue to exist (p.81). There is desperation to define his terms in moral abstractions that he must believe, seeking to transform his own subjective needs into viable political theory. In embracing the Gould Concession, that which killed his father, there is clearly a psychological tension. He laments his father’s fading memory, “[h]is breathing image was no longer in his power” and is determined to make the mine a success because he “owed it to the dead man’s memory” (p.66). Despite this justification and his undoubted commitment, his need to revive the mine can at times seem irrational. As he once idealised his father, he now idealises his own motives and Decoud astutely recognises, Gould “could not believe his own motives if he did not make them first part of some fairy tale” (p.184). J. Laplanche and J.B. Pontalis describe the idealisation of parents as “heavily marked by narcissism;” however, it is certainly different to previous examples. He directs his libidinous energies to the mine, not his wife; he willingly embrace illusions which “somehow or other help them to get a firm hold of substance” (p.203). His idealisation of the inanimate and the abstract can perhaps be viewed as a defence mechanism, suggesting a lack of faith in the possibility for love, friendship and self-development. Conrad suggests the sacrifice of these values is the consequence of material interests, but it is not a simple dialectic. Bruce Johnson’s claim that Charles Gould is “essentially apolitical” seems to exaggerate his psychology. Gould is highly aware of the political situation, even if his ultimate motive is personal. Nevertheless, Johnson’s exploration of self-image is highly discerning, revealing the novel’s similarity to Lord Jim in “man’s various attempts to be self-caused and self-founded, to become in-itself” (p.120). Nostromo and Martin Decoud both personify this struggle. Decoud is introduced as an “idle boulevardier” (p.134) who “was in danger of remaining a sort of nondescript dilettante all his life” (p.135). His position as a journalist is seemingly false, for he only “turned journalist for the sake of Antonia’s eyes” (p.172). Nostromo’s transformation from the Italian “Capataz” (p.25) to “Captain Fidanza” (p.419) represents a cynical realisation of his material value within Sulaco. This awareness is enforced by circumstance, yet also embodies a deeper insecurity. Nostromo needs to be re-assured of his worth. He confesses to Monygham that he fears he is “nothing to anyone” (p.374). The name Fidanza has the Latin root, fidelitas, or loyalty, the value he implicitly renounces. Whereas the Professor clings onto his detonator in order to corroborate his contradictory belief, the silver lures Nostromo because it substantiates his ego. When his narcissism is deprived of adulation, he desperately needs something material and permanent to represent his endeavour. Jocelyn Baines’s contention that Nostromo can be “summed up in a few words” is easily dismissed. His position within Costaguana is complex, Mitchell and Gould treat him like a human instrument; he is crafted into a child of materialism. His surrogate family, the Violas, address him by his rightful name, Giovannia Battista Fidanza, offer him a home and treat him as a replacement for the son they had lost. Giorgio Viola’s shooting of his ‘son’ can perhaps be viewed as Nostromo being killed by his surrogate father, having betrayed his surrogate mother, evoking an intriguing comparison with Freud’s view of the immortality of the ego: The child shall fulfil those wishful dreams of the parents which they never carried out – the boy shall become a great man and a hero in his father’s place, and the girl shall marry a prince as a tardy compensation for her mother. At the most touchy point in the narcissistic system, the immortality of the ego, which is so hard pressed by reality, security is achieved by taking refuge in the child (‘On Narcissism’, p.85). It is an indication of Conrad’s tragic vision that this model is absolutely subverted. If Nostromo could tell Giselle his secret, he feels that he could break the spell of the treasure that holds him in enslavement to the silver. However, his psyche requires the libidinal attachment to the silver, it compensates for the adulation he once received. His conflict and lack of unity is represented in his position within Freud’s archetype: he is a corrupted hero in his father’s place and as the prince, he will marry his surrogate sister. Incest is an evident motif of narcissism, since it is essentially an autoerotic act and involves the objectification of the partner. There is an alternative to Ovid’s myth of Narcissus, Pausanias’s version presents Narcissus as falling in love with his twin sister, who looks exactly like him both in aspect and adornments. Nostromo is sexually attracted to Giselle Viola because with her he can compensate for his subjugation to the silver by being the dominant authoritative figure that he cannot be for Linda, the older Viola daughter to whom he is officially betrothed. This should perhaps not be overstated and it should be reiterated that Conrad preceded Freud’s essay on narcissism; however, such similarity and effective alteration is unerring. Nostromo’s affection for Giselle is described in the language of the unreal or impossible, it is essentially a fantasy; they dream of living far away in “a white palace above a blue sea” (p.443). This theoretical context emphasises and reveals Conrad’s concern with the fundamental failure of consciousness to distinguish itself from a projected existence. Marlow’s affirmation in Heart of Darkness – “you must fall back upon your innate strength, upon your own capacity for faithfulness” – almost anticipates Decoud’s calamity. Conrad purposely imbues him with an importance: unlike Nostromo or Charles Gould, Decoud cannot even seriously entertain the abstract ideal. He perfectly fits into Hillis Miller’s model of scepticism; asserting he has “no faith in anything except the truth of his own sensations” (p.195). Decoud shares with Kurtz a lack of faith in an external idea; his cynical detachment from the community is punished in a horribly appropriate way: After three days of waiting for the sight of some human face, Decoud caught himself entertaining doubt of his own individuality. It had merged into a world of cloud and water, of natural forces and forms of nature. In our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion of an independent existence as against the whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless part […] His sadness was the sadness of a sceptical mind (p.409). Decoud’s lack of belief reveals a division between the constructed and private selves, exposing a realisation that his life has been defined by insincerity and dishonesty. Potential mirrors surround him; the “glittering surface” (p.411) of the Placid Gulf and the circling sky encroach upon him, revealing his “want of faith in himself and others” (p.408). They intensify this incurable revelation to his ego, resulting in a suicidal emptiness that craves an escape. His sleeplessness is significant to his demise; it has “robbed his will of all energy, for he had not slept seven hours in the seven days” (p.409). Freud contends that sleep “is a narcissistic withdrawal of the positions of the libido on to the subject’s own self” (‘On Narcissism’, p.76). Decoud’s only reaction to his isolation is, therefore, a return to his former egoism. Even when confronting death and caught in a state of mind “in which the affectations of irony and scepticism have no place” (p.409), he is unable to recathect his libidinal impulse. When he is finally able to break the silence with the “hollow clatter” (p.411) of the sculls in the gulf, there is no consolation. It is his consciousness, his self-knowledge of his narcissism, which forces his death. There is supreme irony in his death, since he can finally assert a sense of identity, albeit nihilistically: “He believed in nothing” (p.411). His final thought – “’I wonder how that Capataz died’” (p.411) – suggests a degree of empathy and consideration, which could perhaps, if incorporated within his ego earlier, have prevented his surrender to desolation. Decoud’s death is a crushing acknowledgement of the limits and finiteness of the self. He suffers what Johnson calls the “terrifying sublimation which awaits the man who cannot idealise his actions,” (p.119) suggesting the gluttony of the self-image. The inability to direct the libido to the external causes a damming of the ego. Nostromo and Decoud both die alone, destroyed by their inability to discover faith in another fallible human, rather than in their desperate egoism. Giorgio Viola, Dr. Monygham and Emilia Gould are capable of investing their activities with “spiritual value” (p.268), yet they still arrive at a position of isolation, subject to the vicissitudes of an indifferent cosmos. Charles Gould survives, unlike his fellow egoists; however, he is afflicted by “the energetic concentration of a will haunted by a fixed idea” (p.315) – trapped within the destructive cycle of attempting to be faithful to an image of himself. The narrator’s remark that a “man haunted by a fixed idea is insane” (p.315) is equally applicable to Lord Jim, the story of a young, guileless and idealistic first mate who abandoned ship in a crisis. Jim eventually dies a heroic death in the far off country of Patusan in the Malay Archipelago. In a somewhat faucet echo of Charles Gould’s dilemma, Jim is caught within a struggle to represent his father’s expectation. Marlow infers “the tone of his references to “my Dad” was calculated to give me a notion that the good old rural dean was about the finest man that ever had been worried by the cares of a large family since the beginning of the world.” However, his father is described enigmatically, a man who “possessed such certain knowledge of the Unknowable” (p.10). Jim is intent that he “can never face the poor old chap” (p.65) following his disgrace. Whereas Gould idealised his father and lived within his breathing image, Jim seeks to evade his formative influence. He sees himself “saving people from sinking ships,” suffering as “a lonely castaway, barefooted and half-naked” and always being “an example of devotion to duty” (p.11). A projection and vision that actively desires adversity, torment and “unflinching” heroism must surely be more than an adolescent response to “a course of light holiday literature” (p.11). Although his future endeavours mirror much of what he craves, it is visualisation that rejects reality and finds the conditions of the world itself inadequate. It is a belief in a destined identity, what Freud recognises as the formation of an ideal within a person by which he measures his actual ego, that suggests remoteness from instinct and ultimate repression: He is not willing to forgo the narcissistic perfection of his childhood; and when, as he grows up, he is disturbed by the admonition of others and by the awakening of his own critical judgement, so that he can no longer retain that perfection, he seeks to recover it in the new form of an ego ideal. What he projects before him as his ideal is the substitute for the lost narcissism of his childhood in which he was his own ideal (‘On Narcissism’, p.88). There is little textual material relating to Jim’s childhood; therefore, such analysis is merely suggestive. However, Jim represents the quintessential ‘hero’ and this offers an instructive psychoanalytic context within which to view him. It is his own critical judgement that ensures he refuses to go “to his people [family] for help” (p.65). Following his jump and subsequent break out, he adopts the identity of “Jim the water-clerk,” he “had, of course, another name, but he was anxious that it should not be announced” (p.10). However, in attempting to escape his self-knowledge, he suffers the isolation of a human soul. His numerous attempts to elude the self – as a fictional hero, a sailor of courage and honourable hero and lover in Patusan – suggest the danger and instability of the formation of an egoistic image. Any assessment of Jim is unequivocally related to an assessment of Marlow. Similarly to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, the relation between the narcissist and the endeavour clearly fascinates Conrad. Although Marlow eventually diagnoses his obsession with Jim’s story as “the feeling that binds a man to a child” (p.101), there is more than merely a paternal affection that compulsively forces him to “go grubbing into the deplorable details” (p.43) of Jim’s act. Marlow himself has difficulty in comprehending his own story, yet he has complete control over the part of the story he tells (there is of course a first third-person narrator). He refuses unambiguous judgement by indulging in phrases such as “magnificent vagueness” (p.101), “glorious indefiniteness” (p.101), and “the Irrational.” Jim’s transgression threatens Marlow in as much as the mariner code in which he places sovereign value does not accommodate the possibility of Jim’s jump. However, he is drawn to Jim and he trusts him “on the strength of his looks” (p.39). It is this ocular judgement in which we, following Marlow, are required to have peculiar faith: I watched the youngster there. I liked his appearance; I knew his appearance; he came from the right place; he was one of us (p.38). Conrad’s syntactic arrangement is interesting, offering an insight into Marlow’s seduction by Jim. The initial intuitive attraction transforms into recognition of his breed. He defines him as one “whose very existence is based upon honest faith, and upon the instinct of courage”(p.38). This is an inference drawn purely from his appearance. Marlow’s “own instinctive and bemused reflections” (p.171) are a parallel anguish to Jim’s torment of failure; the desperation of Marlow’s telling convinces us of the profoundly intimate ways in which Jim’s failure to honour the sailor’s code threatens Marlow’s sense of self. There is perhaps the faintest insinuation of homoeroticism in Marlow’s search and concern for a young man who resembles what he himself once was. Marlow is attracted to Jim’s aesthetic stature; he is “clean-limbed, clean-faced, firm on his feet, as promising a boy as the sun ever shone on” (p.36). A Freudian reading might also be tempted into an account of narcissism, yet this aspect is not the primary dynamic of their relationship. Marlow is not using Jim to ensure the immortality of his ego; he is trying to ensure the endurance of the code that permeates and is essential to his ego. Marlow’s attempt to fashion Jim in his own image consists of constantly trying to reduce him to merely “one of us.” His conversation with the French lieutenant is extremely revealing; the lieutenant is seemingly unable to find words for what he is trying to say, however, he suggests that “one may get on knowing very well that one’s courage does not come of itself” (p.115). It insinuates one is reliant upon others to confirm a sense of conviction, an implication that pierces Marlow’s self-belief: I had risen, too, and, trying to throw infinite politeness into out attitudes, we faced each other mutely, like two china dogs on a mantelpiece. Hang the fellow! he had pricked the bubble (p.115). Marlow claims he is struck by the utter futility of conversation; however, he is confronted by a fellow seaman, a potential mirror, who refuses to reciprocate his projection. Conrad presents a succession of characters that refuse to conform to Marlow’s strict ideal. Unlike the lieutenant the Malayan steersmen do not deny heroism, they are unaware of its existence and espouse simple conceptions of duty because they accept “things exactly as they are” (p.125). Marlow’s bubble has been “pricked” and his narcissistic deprivation becomes a burden that must be expiated in some way. Captain Brierly, who is presented as the epitome of success both professionally and in terms of character, is perhaps struck by a similar realisation. His response of suicide is described as a “plan of evasion” (p.118); Marlow assumes the ego-diminishing assumption of powerlessness and nihilism, eventually concluding it is impossible “to see him [Jim] clearly” (p.255). He constantly searches for reassurance whilst telling his tale, a listener remarks “he paused again to wait for an encouraging remark perhaps, but nobody spoke” (p.76). David Thorburn interprets the essence of Lord Jim as “the ache for human contact, for a sharing of solitudes.” This is apposite, but seems slightly understated. Marlow is not merely searching for the communion of close association; his desp...