Constructing Intelligibility Within the Unintelligible: Identity as an Enabling Restriction in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and The Secret Agent Open Access
Gilbert, Geoffrey P. (2013)
Abstract
While identification of paradox in Conrad's work is significant, it is more important to ask what it is doing. Conrad posits the human experience as inscrutable. His characters, forced to confront the uncertain world, always fail. Though this sense of inevitable failure has invited interpretation of Conrad as pessimistic--and even nihilistic--there is a recognizable pattern that governs the failure he presents. Conrad's characters are depicted as moral, law abiding citizens of society. The social systems that organize their world, whether they are moral or legal, always fail them. Revealed as insufficient, the systems are gestured to as the source of paradox and contradiction in Conrad's fictional worlds. I argue, however, that, while it is significant that these systems are flawed, it is even more telling that Conrad's characters never cease to rely on them.
Conrad portrays identity as the human quality that does not allow his characters to escape the need to rely on these hopelessly flawed systems. Identity is positioned as the narrative by which the individual understands himself and the world around him; it allows the individual to face the uncertainty that Conrad sees in the world. Identity, however, is not able to transcend the social systems that organize the world, as they are the only tools available that can make the world appear intelligible. Marlow is Conrad's only character who seems capable of identifying this restriction, yet he is unable to face the uncertain world without identity. That Marlow's critical capacity falls short, as he chooses to retreat within a consoling fiction rather than attempt to imagine criteria independent from the ordering systems of his society by which he can identify himself, exhibits the totalizing nature of the inscrutability that, for Conrad, defines humanity. Identity enables the individual to function within an uncertain world, but it also restricts him from being able to understand that world and the forces that act upon him within it.
Table of Contents
Introduction 1
Contextualizing Failure: The Paradoxical Creation of Meaning 11
A Delimiting Response: The Enabling Restrictions of Identity 34
Conclusion 63
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