9

Secrets and Narrative Sequence

This lecture is probably the most arduous in the book. The subject is itsel difficult, and the occasion was a Chicago conference on ‘Narrative: The Illusion of Sequence’, which may sound dry but was about as grand, and also as interesting, as academic critics ever experience. My paper was immediately under moderately friendly attack from the late Paul de Man, but among the less contentious speakers were Paul Ricoeur, Hayden White, Jacques Derrida and Roy Schafer, the admirable psychoanalyst who wants to simplify the jargon of his trade, which is also concerned with narratives, though of a different sort. My lecture could be called aridly academic, but I include it as a reminder that in the Seventies I spent much time devotedly doing this kind of thing.

 

In the conduct of an invented story there are, no doubt, certain proprieties to be observed for the sake of clearness and effect.

Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes

Lucinda can’t read poetry. She’s good,
Sort of, at novels, though. The words, you know,
Don’t sort of get in like Lucinda’s way.
And then the story, well, you know, about
Real people, fall in love, like that, and all.
Sort of makes you think, Lucinda thinks.

George Khairallah, ‘Our Latest Master of the Arts’¹

The proprieties to be observed for the sake of clearness and effect are what enable Lucinda to get on sort of better with novels than with poetry. They ensure that words don’t get in the way of story and characters (‘real people’) – characters, for example, by falling in love, are what enable the story to continue. ‘And all’ is sequence, also closure: plot, in short. These are the things that make Lucinda think; these are the things that are admitted (unlike words, which remain in perpetual quarantine) to Lucinda’s consciousness; and what she is good at understanding is their message.

We are all rather more like Lucinda than we care to believe, always wishing words away. First we look for story – events sequentially related (possessing, shall we say, an irreducible minimum of ‘connexity’). And sequence goes nowhere without his Doppelgänger or shadow, causality. Moreover, if there are represented persons acting, we suppose them to be enacting an action, as Aristotle almost, though not quite, remarked; and we suppose them to have ‘certain qualities of thought and character’ (dianoia and ethos), the two causes of action - as Aristotle really did remark (Poetics, 49b36).

Hence the first questions we like to ask resemble those of Keats: ‘What leaf-fring’d legend … What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? … To what green altar …?’ There seems to be a mythos; these persons are acting, they seem to be trying to do something or to stop somebody else from doing it (the maidens are ‘loth’), and they are heading somewhere. The mythos appears to have the usual relation to ethos and dianoia. But Keats, and we after him, are unable to discover the plot because the arrangement of the events (synthesis ton pragmatón) is not such as to allow us. Still, it must have some bearing upon our world, a world in which, as our experience suggests, there is evidence of sequence and cause; too much wine is followed by burning foreheads and parching tongues, sexual excitement is not perpetual and may be followed by sadness. Since matters appear to be otherwise on the urn, we are obliged to think that the contrast is the point of the story, for unless it has something to do with our normal expectations and beliefs, it can have no point. It lacks a quality we expect in imitations of our world, where heads ache and one may be disgusted. What it lacks is intelligible sequence, and this lack or absence must be the most important thing about it. That the young man will never stop singing, never kiss, implies a world in which the tree will never be bare nor maidens’ beauty fade. Nothing in this sequenceless paradise has character – the ash, as Yeats put it, on a burnt stick. This utter eventlessness, this nunc stans, ‘teases us out of thought’, which is not quite ‘sort of makes [us] think’. We are nevertheless anxious that it should say something to us. What it says, we say, is that even in our world, the familiar world of chance and choice, it is an important though not self-evident fact that beauty is truth and truth beauty. The importance of the story on the urn, then, is that in its very difference it can tell us, by intruding into our sequence of scandal and outrage, intimations not obvious but comforting. We have, in the end, made it say something that suits us.²

I’ve been teasing Keats’s poem into thought, into parable. Even if the mythos is incomplete and the characters so far above breathing human passion that we can infer very little about ethos or dianoia, we make them all relevant to a world in which we behave as if causes operated and matters came to an end. If the story on the urn does not observe the proprieties, we shall none the less consider it strictly in relation to those proprieties; and that will enable it to say something to us. Of course the poem encourages us to do these things by ending with the sort of message that seems possible and proper.

Obviously our task, and the author’s, will be easier with a completed action, as Aristotle, with his talk of failure and success and of the progressive exposure of the agents’ ethos and pathos, would agree. And since we are not here to talk about immobile urns, I shall hereafter consider only invented stories in which the proprieties (as to connexity, closure, and character) are better observed. The first thing to say, I think, is that stories of this kind have frequently, perhaps to all intents and purposes always, properties that are not immediately and obviously related to the proprieties I have mentioned. This might seem self-evident; we are always asking questions of well-formed narratives that are not altogether unlike those put by the poet to his urn – questions about the persons acting, questions about cause, questions about what the story says. And although we are all very good readers, we argue about the answers, even if we agree that the story under discussion observes the proprieties. This is partly because most of the stories we care to discuss in this way have properties not so directly under the control of propriety. Good readers may conspire to ignore these properties; but they are relevant to my main theme, which is the conflict between narrative sequence (or whatever it is that creates the ‘illusion of narrative sequence’) and what I shall loosely, but with pregnant intention, call ‘secrets’.

Consider first the rather obvious point that a story is always subject to interpretation. Stories as we know them begin as interpretations. They grow and change on the blank of the pages. There is some truth in the theory of iconotropy; if we doubt the evidence that it happened in remote antiquity, we shall not trouble to deny that it happened in later versions of myth, in folk etymologies, in daily gossip, and perhaps even in daily newspapers. Creative distortion of this kind is indeed so familiar as to need no more words. So is the practice of deliberate, conscious narrative revision, whether in narrative midrash or by historians. There is a perpetual aggiornamento of the sense. Interference with the original project may begin at the beginning; as Edward Said might say, its authority is subject to primordial molestation.³ We take this for granted in some matters, as New Testament critics assume that the parables had been distorted not only by the appended interpretations but even in their substance, before they were written down. Consequently the world divides between those who seek to restore something authentic but lost and those who conclude that the nature of parable, and perhaps of narrative in general, is to be ‘open’ – open, that is, to penetration by interpretation. They are, in Paul Ricoeur’s formula, models for the redescription of the world; they will change endlessly since the world is endlessly capable of being redescribed. And this is a way of saying that they must always have their secrets.

The capacity of narrative to submit to the desires of this or that mind without giving up secret potential may be crudely represented as a dialogue between story and interpretation. This dialogue begins when the author puts pen to paper and it continues through every reading that is not merely submissive. In this sense we can see without too much difficulty that all narrative, in the writing and the reading, has something in common with the continuous modification of text that takes place in a psychoanalytical process (which may tempt us to relate secrets to the condensations and displacements of dreams) or in the distortions induced in historical narrative by metahistorical considerations.

All that I leave to Roy Schafer⁴ and Hayden White. My immediate purpose is to make acceptable a simple proposition: we may like to think, for our purposes, of narrative as the product of two intertwined processes, the presentation of a fable and its progressive interpretation (which of course alters it). The first process tends toward clarity and propriety (‘refined common sense’), the second toward secrecy, toward distortions which cover secrets. The proposition is not altogether alien to the now classic fabula/sujet distinction. A test for connexity (an important aspect of propriety) is that one can accurately infer the fable (which is not to say it ever had an independent anterior existence). The sujet is what became of the fable when interpretation distorted its pristine, sequential propriety (and not only by dislocating its order of presentation, though the power to do so provides occasions for unobvious interpretations of a kind sequence cannot afford).

I do not know whether there is a minimum acceptable measure of narrativity. (On whom should we conduct acceptability tests? Wyndham Lewis’s cabdriver? Philippe Sollers? The president of the MLA?) What seems reasonable, however, is the proposition that there will always be some inbuilt interpretation, that it will increase as respect for propriety decreases, and that it will produce distortions, secrets to be enquired into by later interpretation. Even in a detective story which has the maximum degree of specialized ‘hermeneutic’ organization, one can always find significant concentrations of interpretable material that has nothing to do with clues and solutions and that can, if we choose, be read rather than simply discarded, though propriety recommends the latter course.⁵ In the kinds of narrative upon which we conventionally place a higher value, the case against propriety is much stronger; there is much more material that is less manifestly under the control of authority, less easily subordinated to ‘clearness and effect’, more palpably the enemy of order, of interpretative consensus, of message. It represents a fortunate collapse of authority (authors have authority, property rights; but they poach their own game and thereby set a precedent to all interpreters).

Whatever the comforts of sequence, connexity (I agree that we cannot do without them), it cannot be argued that the text which exhibits them will do nothing but contribute to them; some of it will be indifferent or even hostile to sequentiality. And although perhaps generated from some unproblematic ur-text, these nonsequential elements may grow unruly enough to be disturbing, even to the author. Such was the case with Conrad, to whom I shall return in a moment. He was certainly aware of the conflict between the proprieties and the mutinous text of interpretation. There is no doubt that sequence, ethos, and dianoia minister to comfort and confirm our notions of what life is like (notions that may have been derived from narrative in the first place) and perhaps even constitute a sort of secular viaticum, bearing intimately upon one’s private eschatology, the sense of one’s own life and its closure. Such are their comforts, and sometimes we want them badly enough to wish away what has to come with them: the treacherous text, with its displacements and condensations, its debauched significances and unofficial complicities. Because the authors may themselves be alarmed by these phenomena (but also because they need to please), we may enter into collusion with them and treat all the evidence of insubordinate text as mere disposable noise or use the evidence selectively, when it can be adapted to strengthen the façade of propriety.

Secrets, in short, are at odds with sequence, which is considered as an aspect of propriety; and a passion for sequence may result in the suppression of the secret. But it is there, and one way we can find the secret is to look out for evidence of suppression, which will sometimes tell us where the suppressed secret is located. It must be admitted that we rarely read in this way, for it seems unnatural; and when we do we are uncomfortably aware of the difference between what we are doing and what the ordinary reader not only does but seems to have been meant to do. To read a novel expecting the satisfactions of closure and the receipt of a message is what most people find enough to do; they are easier with this method because it resembles the one that works for ordinary acts of communication. In this way the gap is closed between what is sent and what is received, which is why it seems to many people perverse to deny the author possession of an authentic and normative sense of what he has said. Authors, indeed, however keenly aware of other possibilities, are often anxious to help readers behave as they wish to; they ‘foreground’ sequence and message. This cannot be done without backgrounding something, and indeed it is not uncommon for large parts of a novel to go virtually unread; the less manifest portions of its text (its secrets) tend to remain secret, tend to resist all but abnormally attentive scrutiny, reading so minute, intense, and slow that it seems to run counter to one’s ‘natural’ sense of what a novel is, a sense which one feels to have behind it the history and sociology of the genre. That history has ensured that most readers under-read, and the authors in turn tend to condone under-reading because success depends upon it; there is public demand for narrative statements that can be agreed with, for problems rationally soluble. By the same token the authors are often suspicious of over-readers, usually members of a special academic class that has the time to pry into secrets. Joyce said he had written a book to keep the professors busy; but James would not have said so, nor would Conrad, in whom the struggle between propriety and secrecy is especially intense, nor Robbe-Grillet, who claims to write for the man in the street. This measure of collusion between novelist and public (his de facto contract or gentleman’s agreement is with la cour et la ville not with l’école) helps one to see why the secrets are so easily overlooked and why – given that the problems only begin when the secrets are noticed – we have hardly, even now, found decent ways to speak of these matters.

If anybody thinks this is an exaggerated account of the matter, let him reflect that Forster’s A Passage to India had a very unusual success on publication and gave rise to lively arguments about its account of Indian life and politics; yet it was a good many years before anybody noticed that it had secrets. What is more, I spend much of my time among learned men who were devoted colleagues and friends of Forster and who know Passage well, but they never seem to talk about its secrets, only about its message and what, in their view, is wrong with that message.

 

It is time, however, to consider a single text in more detail, and I shall henceforth be talking about Under Western Eyes. This novel was not, in 1911 or I think since, what could be called a popular success, though it offers a decent measure of connexity and closure (falling off a little, it must be allowed, from the highest standards of propriety). Its political and psychological messages are gratifyingly complex; one can engage in an enlightened critical conversation about ethos and dianoia without talking about much else and so pass for an intelligent professional giving an effective ‘reading’. Indeed that, until recently at any rate, was what the normal institutional game consisted of. Nor is it without interest; but the game is conducted within a very limited set of rules, in the establishment of which the author as well as the institution has played a part. Under these rules it is not obligatory to talk of secrets. There are handier, more tangible or manageable mysteries.

Under Western Eyes wants to allow this game to be played, but it also gives due notice that a different game is possible; it indicates, by various signs, that there are other matters that might be considered and that, though ignorable, they are detectable, given the right kind of attention. So it is a suitable text for my purpose, which is to consider the survival of secrecy in a narrative that pays a lot of attention to the proprieties which, according to its narrator, should be observed ‘for the sake of clearness and effect’. Conrad took a high view of art and a low view of his public, which is why writing fiction seems to have been a continual cause of misery to him. It forced him into a situation sometimes reflected in his characters, a dedoublement. There is one writer who labours to save the ‘dense’ reader (one equipped, so to speak, with only Western eyes) from confusion, disappointment, and worry; and another dedicated to interpretation, to secrets, though at the same time he fears them as enemies of order, sequence, and message. There must be a strict repression of all that contests the supremacy of these features, ‘else novel-writing becomes a mere debauch of the imagination’, as Conrad told Mrs Garnett, who was worried about the ‘self-imposed limitation’ of the method employed in Under Western Eyes.⁶

I am already operating, and will continue to operate, a crude distinction in the readership, actual or potential, of Under Western Eyes. There is a larger public which Conrad, although he despised it, wanted to read his book. To some extent he abrogates authority (which the common reader values highly) by interfering as usual with the ‘normal’ sequence of the story and by installing an unreliable narrator; all narrators are unreliable, but some are more expressly so than others;⁷ the more unreliable they are, the more they can say that seems irrelevant to, or destructive of, the proprieties. They break down the conventional relationship between sequential narrative and history-likeness, with its arbitrary imposition of truth; they complicate the message. They are more or less bound to bore or antagonize the simpler reader, who feels that he has been left outside and cannot, without pains he is unwilling to take, gain access on his own terms, the observance of a due sequaciousness being one, and another the manifest presence of authority, so that he need not reason why. Some such explanation will suffice for the cold public reception of Under Western Eyes; it has not grown much warmer in these days, for all that the book is now regarded as a classic.

Saying what is a classic is the business of a second group of readers, the professionally initiate. They perform other tasks, of course. One is finding things out, in the manner of Eloise Knapp Hay and Norman Sherry. And I hope we should all rather know than be ignorant of what they tell us; it is a first principle of literary criticism that no principle should stand which prevents our being concerned with what stimulates our unaffected interest – for example, in what Conrad, when he was not writing Under Western Eyes, thought about Russia, Slav ‘mysticism’, and Dostoevsky; or what Conrad originally planned to write, what he took to be the point of what he did write, and what, having written it, he cut. What he saw with his Eastern eyes is a legitimate subject of concern, though at present we are concerned with what he wrote in Under Western Eyes. And other members of this group assume the responsibility of saying what that was and how it is most profitable for us to think about it.

There are a great many books on Conrad, and I shall mention few of them. Albert Guerard’s Conrad the Novelist, though it appeared in 1958, still seems to be a standard work, and not surprisingly, for it is a perceptive and resourceful book.⁸ But it is characteristically uninterested in narrative secrets. On Under Western Eyes it makes plain that the author’s first interest is in the psychopathology of Razumov; and it would have been possible to quote Conrad in defence of this preference. Razumov, the loner, the man of independent reason undermined by the shocks of Russian despotism and anarchy, is ‘psychologically … fuller’ than Lord Jim (p. 232). The design of the story (synthesis tón pragmatón) is commended because Razumov is enabled to keep quiet during his long period on the rack of guilt and fear, but to confess when every threat to his security has been removed. ‘It would be hard to conceive a plot more successfully combining dramatic suspense and psycho-moral significance.’ Mythos, ethos, dianoia: all present and sound.

Even the dislocated narrative sequence is said to have some advantages: by concealing what a more straightforward rendering of the fable would have revealed, it enables us to observe Razumov in Geneva before we find out that he has accepted employment as a spy for Mikulin. Such are the rewards of entrusting the narration to an observer who is not only limited and prejudiced but pretends to neither omniscience nor omnicommunicativeness. But these rewards are obtained at a cost, for the old language teacher ‘creates unnecessary obstacles by raising the question of authority’ (p. 248). He is a clumsy device for ensuring fair play to the Russians by reminding us that their actions are being reported through a rather ‘dense’ medium. On the other hand, first person narration, in the extended form here employed, gives ‘eyewitness credibility and the authority of spoken voice’ (p. 249).

Here is a contradiction, interesting though perhaps only apparent. Authority doesn’t normally ‘raise the question of authority’. They have it very oft that have it not. Yet there is a sense in which Conrad does both claim and renounce authority. Having it makes for clearness and effect; Conrad admired Trollope.⁹ Not having it is to risk a debauch of the imagination. The contradiction of the critic replicates a conflict in the author. Writing under conditions even more agonizing than usual, Conrad said that ‘following the psychology of Mr Razumov’ was ‘like working in hell’. The point to remember is that following the psychology required him to do many other things at the same time, or it would not have been so hellish. When a critic devoted to clearness and effect argued that Chance should be cut by half, Conrad replied sarcastically that yes, given a certain method, it ‘might have been written out on a cigarette paper’.¹⁰ Clearness and effect he sought, out of need, and desire too; but there was also the pursuit of interpretations. Hence the doubling I spoke of. In the hell of composition we see one writer committed to authority, another involved in debauch.

What is the critic to say when confronted with the evidence of debauch committed behind the back of authority? Guerard is not like Lucinda, the words do get in his way to some extent. Early in the book Razumov sees the phantom of Haldin lying in the snow. He tramples over it. Gaining from this act an intuition of Russia’s ‘sacred inertia’, he decides to give Haldin up to the police. The phantom crops up from time to time in the course of the novel but can always be disposed of by reference to the psychological difficulties arising from the first hallucination. Or can it? When Razumov and Sophia Antonovna, in the garden of the exiles’ villa at Geneva, are discussing whether there will be any tea left for her indoors, Razumov remarks that she might be lucky enough to find there ‘the cold ghost of tea’. Guerard finds this odd and describes it as ‘mildly obsessive’. So it is, but fortunately it can be got rid of, psychologized as ‘hallucination, psychic symbol, or shorthand notice of anxiety’. In such ways are the ghosts and phantoms subjected to the needs of clearness and effect, buried in the psychology. I shall dig them out in a minute or two.

There are other ways of exorcizing secrets. Near the end of the book Razumov says he had been in a position to steal Natalia’s soul. Guerard speaks of the Dostoevskian power of this moment of diabolism but is anxious to be rid of it, for it does not comply with what Roy Schafer might call his ‘guiding fiction’, his interpretation principle. Guerard dismisses Razumov’s remark by arguing that Conrad, here, writing for the first time in Razumov’s person, ‘returned imaginatively’ to his original plan for the novel, in which Razumov was to marry Natalia, so stealing her soul. The diabolism is, therefore, an irrelevant intrusion, a fault, a vestigial survival. Also near the end of the book, Razumov has the notion that the old language teacher is the devil. Of this second diabolistic conjecture Guerard says nothing, which is the more usual way of dealing with these awkwardnesses.

To attend to what complies with the proprieties, and by one means or another to eliminate from consideration whatever does not, is a time-honoured and perfectly respectable way of reading novels, especially when it is quite a task (as it often is in Conrad) to establish within proper bounds all the tricks and deviations which interfere with one’s view of the fable. It is therefore not surprising that good readers, sensing that there is more going on than they have accounted for, show signs of strain. Guerard admires Under Western Eyes but admits that, having such a narrator, it lacks ‘the rich connotative effects and subtly disturbing rhythms of Lord Jim’ (p. 252). On the other hand, this ‘self-effacing and more rational prose has the great merit of not interfering with the drama of ideas or with the drama of betrayal and redemption’. Under Western Eyes, that is to say, is unsubtle but clear and effective.

This is an extraordinary notion, and for a good critic to hold it is evidence of a strong though uneasy desire not to let the words get in the way – it is, after all, a refined version of Lucinda’s view of the matter. To an eye undimmed by, or awakened from, the proprieties, this novel positively flaunts the ‘irrationality’ of its prose. It becomes ‘readable’ in the way Guerard wants it to be only when, by every possible means, attention to its secrets is repressed. Guerard’s psychologizing of the phantom and his exorcism of the devil are of a piece with his decision that the prose is self-effacing and rational, lacking in resonance and connotation.

If you’re looking out for this kind of thing, you find it almost anywhere. Eloise Knapp Hay, for example, rightly asks why Razumov’s cover story, during the preparations for his visit to Geneva, should include an eye disease and a visit to an oculist (so far as simple plotting goes, any non-ocular meeting-place would have done just as well; indeed, no specification of this sort was, strictly, needed at all).¹¹ What Hay, having noticed this, makes of it is that Razumov, during these visits, is being commissioned ‘to use his own eyes to spy for the state’ (p. 294), and she mentions the young man’s earlier discomfort at the stares of the goggle-eyed general who interviewed him on the night he betrayed Haldin. But to leave it at that simple allegorical level is precisely to refuse the kind of covert invitation of which this text has so many. Another of Hay’s interesting observations is that behind the description of Russia as ‘a monstrous blank page awaiting the record of an inconceivable history’, there may lie an observation of Mickiewicz’s to the effect that Russia was ‘a page prepared for writing’ - an alarming thought, since one could not know that the devil would not cover the page before God did (pp. 287 – 8). But she is content to observe that in Conrad ‘the question is posed differently’, without allusion to God and the devil. Here again, properly interested in the relation of Conrad’s figure to its presumable source, she omits to ask what that relation is doing in the book and what it may have to do with the elements of diabolism. So too, she quotes the famous letter to Cunninghame Graham, in which Conrad says that to serve a national ideal, however much suffering it may cause, is better than to serve the shadow of an eloquence that is dead, a mere phantom (p. 20). We may think of Conrad as painfully finding out in the writing of Under Western Eyes what the novel was; he did so by writing it, black on white, as if it were Russia, and by meditating on eyes, phantoms, and devils, as surely as by deciding to cut all the American material from the final version; it was Russia he was writing on.

The secrets to which these words and ideas are an index have no direct relation to the main business of the plot; as some analysts would say, they are not kernels but catalysts or, as Seymour Chatman calls them, ‘satellites’. But they form associations of their own, nonsequential, secret invitations to interpretation rather than appeals to a consensus. They inhabit a world in which relationships are not arranged according to some agreed system but remain occult or of questionable shape. There is a relatively clean, well-lit plot – rectangular like the room in which its climax occurs, almost without shadow, having, like Switzerland, no horizons, for they are cut off by crude and impassable barriers like the Jura, by conventional closure.

Such a plot may be suitable for the citizens of a tedious democracy, either Switzerland, where they sit colourlessly uncouth, drinking beer out of glittering glasses, obvious in an obvious light, or England, which has made its bargain with fate, so much liberty for so much cash, knowing also that it is entitled to the obvious. Such a nation deserves novels like the view of Geneva on which Razumov turns his back in contempt, finding it ‘odious – oppressively odious – in its unsuggestive finish; the very perfection of mediocrity attained at last after centuries of toil and culture’. But this novel contains another plot, misty, full of phantoms, of which the passage about the blank page of Russia forms a part, as would be manifest if anybody considered it in relation to the large number of allusions (they even look, when one is looking for them, obtrusive) to blackness and whiteness, paper and ink, snow and shadow – and to writing itself.

These are secrets from which, by a curious process of collusion, we avert our attention. It was a welcome surprise to find in an excellent paper by Avrom Fleishman proof that an effort of attention is after all possible.¹² Fleishman observes that the ‘artlessness’ of the narrator is not a guarantee of factuality so much as a hint that the text is extremely artful; he sorts out the interrelations between the various documentary sources the old man is supposed to be using, notes the hints of falsification and omission, and emphasizes the abnormal interest of the novel in the acts and arts of writing, as when Razumov, prompted to write by Laspara, composes his first (Russian) spy report in the shadow of the statue of the (Genevan) writer Rousseau. He also argues that the novel moves out of writing into speech, as indeed it does: the inspiration mentioned in the last off-key conversation between the narrator and Sophia is drawn in with the breath, Razumov is no longer a writer but a beloved speaker. Fleishman draws back finally (perhaps needlessly) from his own proposal that the book suggests an ‘ultimate despair of written language, and of the art of fiction …’

And indeed it is obvious that Under Western Eyes (rather than any character in it) is obsessed with writing and also with deafness – deafness not only of the ears but of the eyes (Ivanovitch seems to speak from his eyes; Sophia Antonovna seems to receive ‘the sound of his voice into her pupils instead of her ears’; at the grand climax the narrator is blinded by his own amazement, but the slamming of a door restores his sight). There is a hint that we may, though we probably won’t, read for more than mere evidence of Razumov’s psychological condition. If we are willing to do so, we shall find over the plot the shadow of a secret that has resisted being made altogether otherwise than it is for the sake of readers who want the work to be throughout like beer in a glittering glass. I have been giving instances of subtler, more learned modes of inattention; even good readers find means to dispose of the evidence rather than work upon it. It would be easy to give more: for example, the explanation of all the souls and phantoms of the text as part of a refutation, or parody, of Crime and Punishment. This can be used to sterilize larger portions of Conrad’s text. I do not mean to argue that no such observations ought to be made. Like the psychological and political readings, they belong squarely to a tradition of ordinary reading that may be perfectly intelligent; a person might run his life in accordance with what he concluded from such readings, as Lawrence claimed he might do from his reading of Anna Karenina. I object only to their use as means to purge secrets from the text.

Let me now give one or two more detailed instances of the way in which this novel advertises and conceals its secrets. As the story of Razumov’s treachery reaches its crisis, the narrator pauses to note that his job is ‘not in truth the writing in the narrative form a precis of a strange human document, but the rendering … of the moral conditions ruling over a large portion of this earth’s surface; conditions not easily to be understood, much less discovered in the limits of a story, till some key-word is found; a word that could stand at the back of all the words covering the pages, a word which, if not truth itself, may perchance hold truth enough to help the moral discovery which should be the object of every tale’. He stops, scans Razumov’s journal, then takes up his pen again, ready to set down ‘black on white’. Then he says that the key word is ‘cynicism’.

Even in a novel so benignly disingenuous from the preface on (but perhaps it is not benign; in a sense it hates its readers), this passage is remarkable. Playing the role of straight narrator, the old man repeatedly veers close to the position of his occult double. ‘A large portion of the earth’s surface’ is a periphrasis easily divested of its originating notion, Russia; the case is more general. He sees that the point of the narrative is not solely or primarily psychological but wanders away from the insight to speak of ‘moral conditions’. He speaks of a key word; pauses, as it were, unwittingly speaks one of the key words of the book he is in (‘black on white’), then lapses into the obvious or irrelevant ‘cynicism’. For a real secret he substitutes a pseudosecret, though in doing so he cannot help telling the attentive reader that there is a secret there. Readers as ‘dense’ as he himself is will be happy with ‘cynicism’. They will get on with sequence while the double busies himself with secrets and key words such as ‘soul’, ‘eyes’, and ‘black and white’. Indications that these words have a special function are various. They occur with quite abnormal frequency; they are used in such a way as to distort the plausibility of narrative and especially of dialogue. Some instances may be explained away as evidence of Razumov’s stressed condition (‘what I need is not a lot of haunting phantoms that I could walk through’ is the kind of remark that certainly suggests stress of some kind). But in others it is simply astonishing that anybody capable of reading could fail to observe the gross distortions in what they think of as ‘self-effacing and rational prose’.

Let us look at a continuous passage; it is ripped from the midst of a longer one, so one must allow for an even greater measure of eccentric insistence in the context of the whole: ‘We shall get some tea,’ says Ivanovitch, leading Razumov to his mistress’s drawing room. They cross a black-and-white tessellated floor. Ivanovitch’s hat, black but shiny, stands outside the drawing room, which is ‘haunted, it is said, by evoked ghosts, and frequented, it is supposed, by fugitive revolutionists’. (We may remember that the villa itself ‘might well have been haunted in traditional style by some doleful, groaning, futile ghost of a middle-class order’.) The white paint of the panels is cracked. Ivanovitch, from behind his dark spectacles, speaks of the true light of femininity. His mistress has brilliant eyes in a death’s-head face, they gleam white but their pupils are black. Ivanovitch speaks as if from his invisible eyes. The lady ‘ghoulishly’ eats the cakes Ivanovitch brought in his hat. Razumov gives a moment’s thought to Tekla, the dame de compagnie: ‘Have they terrified her out of her senses with ghosts, or simply have they only been beating her?’ He is aware of having to come to terms with phantoms, with the ghastly. His interlocutors appear to understand nothing of what he says; Ivanovitch is as if deaf. The purpose of the revolutionary movement, it seems, is to ‘spiritualise discontent’, and the lady declares herself, in matters of politics, a ‘supernaturalist’. She can see Razumov’s soul with her ‘shiny eyes’. What does she see? asks Razumov. ‘Some sort of phantom in my image? … For, I suppose, a soul when it is seen is just that. A vain thing. There are phantoms of the living as well as of the dead.’ He then tells them he has seen a phantom. Soon he leaves, passing the top hat, ‘black and glossy in all that crude whiteness’, and looks at the chequered floor below.

I’ll pause there and admit that this is a very partial account of Razumov’s visit, meant to bring out what a ‘normal’ reading largely ignores. The easiest thing to notice is the unidiomatic quality of the writing. ‘Haunted … by evoked ghosts’; ‘Have they terrified her out of her senses with ghosts, or simply have they only been beating her?’; ‘Some sort of phantom in my image?’ How are we to explain these oddities? I suppose the ‘evoked ghosts’ might be put down to Conrad thinking in French; possibly also ‘simply have they only been beating her’; but however they got there we are, I think, obliged to read them, not wish them away. Both the remark about Tekla’s scared appearance (was it caused by evoked ghosts?) and the character of the phantom the second-sighted lady might see in Razumov are, one might have thought, almost intolerably odd if one is reading this as a sequence-advancing, psychology-investigating dialogue. But our reading may be so sequence-connected that we can screen them out by thinking of psychology rather than the words. Conrad helps us to psychologize them out of the way by making Razumov enter into a dangerous, though censored, account of his encounter with Haldin’s phantom. But only our recollections of anarchists of the period, their flirting with the occult and with feminism, can explain the interest in seeing souls coming to terms with phantoms; unless we decide, as we ought, that the emphasis on eyes and seeing is otherwise, and occultly, related to the virtually uncontrolled dispersion of souls, spirits, phantoms, ghosts, ghouls, and so forth. Here, against the repetitive black and white (against ink on paper, against the page we are seeing) are crowded the evidences of things unseen and the huge variety of eyes that may or may not see them. It is not an easy thing to talk about such a constellation of irrational figures, but it must somehow be done if we are to read secrets as well as sequence – to avoid attributing all these phenomena to Razumov’s ‘nervous exhaustion’.

What I ask you to believe is that such oddities are not merely local; they are, perhaps, the very ‘spirit’ of the novel. If one follows Razumov a little way from the encounter just described, one finds him talking to Tekla with her striped cat and terrified eyes and then with Sophia Antonovna, whose black eyes and white hair are mentioned almost as often as she is. It is in this interview that the ghost of tea occurs. Razumov has just mentioned that his mind is a murky medium in which Haldin appears as a featureless shadow. He adds that Haldin is now beyond the reach of feminine influence, except possibly that of the spiritualist lady. ‘Formerly the dead were allowed to rest, but now it seems they are at the beck and call of a crazy old harridan.’ ‘Let us hope,’ says Sophia humorously, ‘that she will make an effort and conjure up some tea for us.’ The figure arises naturally from the talk about the spiritualist lady. But it continues. ‘There has been tea up there … If you hurry … instead of wasting your time with such an unsatisfactory sceptical person as myself, you may find the ghost of it – the cold ghost of it – still lingering …’ And two pages later Razumov again tells her that she risks missing ‘the mere ghost of that tea’. In her reply Sophia uses the figure yet again. Then they speak of ghouls, ogres, vampires. She denies that she is a materialist; she is described as Mephistophelian. Finally Razumov tells the story of his escape; it is in truth the story of Haldin, gliding from Razumov’s room as if he were a phantom, at midnight; the flame gutters as he passes. She listens but as if with her eyes not her ears – with her black impenetrable eyes glowing under the white hair. At one point Sophia tells him to ‘wait until you have trodden every particle of yourself under your own feet … you’ve got to trample down every particle of your own feelings’. These are words private to Razumov, not possible to her; only he, and perhaps Councillor Mikulin, knows about that trampling. Are we inclined to seek, in the body of the plot, a reason why Sophia should use such an expression? No, for any notion that she had access to secret police information about Razumov would extravagantly spoil the plot. No; here an expression private to Razumov (if we stick to conventional characterization) – evidence as to his peculiar psychological state – has bled into the texture of the book and attached itself to Sophia. I wonder if anything quite like it can be found in the English novel till Virginia Woolf. Note, too, the repetition (‘trodden’ … ‘trample’): it is an indication that we are to pause and take note of it.

I have mentioned elsewhere¹³ the oddity of Natalia Haldin’s remark - that when she went to the villa she didn’t at first see a soul, but then Tekla came in, and she did see a soul. Perhaps Conrad was not aware that the idiomatic expression ‘I didn’t see a soul’ is incapable of a positive transformation. That doesn’t matter; ‘seeing a soul’ is another important key phase. The oddity of the expression is a way of directing attention to it; it must not be swept away by talk of Conrad’s English. So with the other key words, the repetitions – four ghosts of tea are surely beyond a joke. The frequency with which ‘soul’, ‘ghost’, and related words are used has not altogether escaped attention; but if one reflects that they occur (if one allows not only ‘spirit’ but ‘inspired’) well over a hundred times in the novel (sometimes in grotesquely thick concentrations), besides several ghostly apparitions, people appearing as if they had risen from the ground, and so on, it becomes obvious that the attention has not been very sustained. Of course, all these usages are somehow related to the appearance of Haldin’s phantom in the plots of action and psychology; but they must not be totally subsumed in them. Indeed, on any reasonably minute and careful reading they cannot be, for they distort the dialogue and are incompatible with any psychology that could be thought appropriate to Razumov, who is always sane. Nor should one forget the frequency of associated key words. I have counted well over sixty references to eyes – the eyes of all the principal characters are incessantly mentioned or described – and to seeing. Black on white occurs twenty-four times expressly and many more less directly – in references to snow and darkness, light in dark rooms, and, as I have said, ink on paper. All this adds up to a quantitatively quite large body of text which on the face of it contributes nothing to sequence – clogs it, indeed.

It would be to inflict even more laborious reports on you to specify at any greater length the character of the ‘secret’ material in Under Western Eyes. My purpose is to supplement the ‘straight’ reading, which irons out such considerable quantities of text. Conrad, when he began the book, called it Razumov; but when it was done (on the last page of the manuscript, in fact) he changed the title to Under Western Eyes. He had found out what he was doing. Most readers silently restore the old title, being readier to think about Razumov than about eyes. They want something clearly seen, a message to be apprehended with civilized ease. Let us look at the underside of one more scene, Razumov’s confession to Natalia.

Razumov’s face is pale, his eyes dark. The inner room is dark by contrast with the well-lit anteroom; Mrs Haldin’s face is white against the undefined dark mass of her chair. Razumov has been writing and stopped to come and talk, so entering the writing, the black on white, of the narrator. He is safe; the phantom on the snow has been walked over, though the phantom’s mother is white as a ghost. Natalia enters, like a ghost (‘her presence … was as unforeseen as the apparition of her brother had been’, with a pun on two senses of ‘apparition’).¹⁴ She had done the same in the garden of the villa; she ‘had been haunting him’. They stand in the rectangular box of a room with its white paper and lack of shadows. They are trapped, we might say, in a rational plot – the narrator has them captive ‘within the boundaries of his eyes’. Razumov says that he was born clear-eyed but has seen apparitions. Natalia’s eyes are trustful, as always. She says that her brother’s soul is in Razumov, reason benignly possessed by spirit. There they stand, boxed in a Western room, brought out of a ‘confused immensity’ for the benefit of Western eyes. They do not see the old man. Natalia removes her veil. Her eyes are lustrous; he listens, as if to music rather than speech. She explains that her mother expects to see her dead son. ‘It will end by her seeing him.’ ‘That is very possible,’ says Razumov. ‘That will be the end. Her spirit will depart.’ He speaks of the phantoms of the dead. Natalia’s veil lies on the floor between them. ‘Why are you looking at me like this … ? I need … to see …’ He begins the confession: more phantoms. The old man intervenes; Razumov stands with the veil at his feet, ‘intensely black in the white crudity of the light’. He seems to vanish. He goes home and writes more in his journal. In its pages, we are told of eyes, phantoms, his temptation to steal Natalia’s soul. Was the old Englishman the devil (‘I was possessed’)? Natalia has saved him; she is an apparition (‘suddenly you stood before me’), and the old man a ‘disappointed devil’. He wraps the writing in the veil.

At midnight (when spirits walk) he runs down the stairs into the storm, the rain enveloping him like a veil. Later, deafened, he again runs into the storm, which has transformed the dull civility of Geneva. Lightning blinds him; he ‘puts his arm over his eyes to recover his sight’; he wanders into a drift of mist, walking ‘in a phantom world’.

This is of course psychological disclosure, but if it is only that it is full of irrelevant information, of redundancies, of what, if its business consists of sequence and psychology, is a feebly bloated rhetoric. I have spoken of secrets; but they are all but blatantly advertised. The book has a semblance of Geneva, but in the end it yields to Russia, misty, spiritual, its significance occulted; it is without horizon, only by trickery and collusion got into a square, well-lit box. The writing of the book, the covering of the monstrous blank page, is a work of ‘strange mystic arrogance’; it gives the Western eye its box, its civilized mediocrity, but keeps its secrets also. It is a controlled ‘debauch’; we may ignore this aspect if we choose and read it as Genevans or Englishmen would read it. It is a question of the form of attention we choose to bestow; of our willingness to see that in reading according to restricted codes we disregard as noise what, if read differently, patiently, would make another and rarer kind of sense. And the text, almost with ‘cynicism’, tells us what is there, confident that we shall ignore it.

‘The illogicality of its attitude, the arbitrariness of its conclusions, the frequency of the exceptional, should present no difficulty to the student of many grammars … There is a generosity in its ardour of speech which removes it as far as possible from common loquacity; and it is ever too disconnected to be classed as eloquence.’ I adapt these words from the passage near the beginning of the book in which the old language teacher speaks of the Russian character and the Russian use of language. He apologizes for the digression, which we should know is not a digression, exactly as we know it is not ‘idle to inquire’ why Razumov should have left his written record. He is telling us (or rather the double is telling us, ventriloquially) that a large part of what he says is precisely what we are not willing to attend to. He, who claims a professional mistrust of words, is talking about the book he is in, the black on white. He is necessary; for, as Razumov remarks, ‘there may be truth in every manner of speaking. What if that absurd saying [that he himself might be a ‘chosen instrument of Providence’] were true in its essence?’ What if the old Englishman should be the father of lies?

It seems to be the case that there is in this book a ‘manner of speaking’ that is horizonless, misty. Is there some great idea that unites all the key words, the language with which the text is obsessed? One could make shift to discover such a truth, perhaps. Black on white is the manuscript or the book; the reading of black on white (including the seeing into its soul or spirit) is a hearing with the eyes of what is said rather than written, since it is not seen. It is in the veil that covered Natalia’s eyes that the manuscript is wrapped. The secrets of the book are phantoms, inexplicably appearing, ignored, trampled down, turned into lies by the father of lies, a diabolical narrator. For the reading of such a book we have the wrong kind of eyes. It despises its Genevan readers, with their requirements of brightness and obvious structure, their detached, informed interest in alien ‘mystery’.

And at this point why should we not add some biographical evidence? Conrad was in one of his greatest crises as he turned Razumov into Under Western Eyes and had a severe breakdown when he finished the book. Part of the trouble was poverty; not enough people read his books. They were not sufficiently obvious. So this book provides an accurate prophecy of its own reception which is the reception of all such works; like the language teacher, like Lucinda, we distrust words, think it better to ignore them if they seem wild or misty. And like the language teacher, we are surprised at the book’s end, which is the ending of another story than the one he had seemed to be in charge of. The actual black on white defeats the narrator’s attempt to achieve parsimony of sequence, squareness, limit. It seems that a god and a devil wrote simultaneously, another dedoublement if you like, and one that, somehow, the good reader must emulate; for if he does not he will, by concurring in the illusions of limit and authority, deny the god (the hidden god of secrets) his due. Thus may a novel complain against the common-sense way we read it, though this is the kind of reading it seems also to solicit by appearing to respect the proprieties and to aim at ‘clearness and effect’.