Tragedy and comedy are, in Conrad's phrase, "but
a matter of the visual angle." Tragedy focusses on the
individual, comedy on the human community, but each must
partake of the other for completion. The aesthetic form
of a work of literature represents an order which prevails
against the chaos of events, producing in the reader a
tension between aloofness and involvement. Conrad's failure
to find a technique capable of fully achieving this tension
caused his early works to fall short of rendering a tragic
vision, but his discovery of the possibilities inherent in
the use of a narrator allowed his fiction from The Nigger
of the "Narcissus" to Lord Jim to transcend his earlier
limitations. By the time he wrote Under Western Eyes, Conrad
no longer needed a narrator such as Marlow to achieve distance
and was able to utilize his narrator in other ways. In doing
so, he was able to create a more traditional tragedy.
Almayer's Folly, the most successful of the "Maylayan"
novels, presents Almayer’s tragedy as ironic comedy,
and only occasionally falls into the cynicism to which its
pessimistic philosophy is prey. An Outcast of the Islands. however, despite advances in characterization and plot development,
is too overtly and discursively philosophical to
succeed. And The Rescue, with its romantically tragic
philosophy and tone, proved to be a cul-de-sac.
Breaking off from work on The Rescue. Conrad found,
in his experience as a seaman and in the employment of a
narrator, means of liberation that allowed him to write
an almost wholly positive work, a comedy of salvation through
communal effort. The somewhat inconsistently used narrator
allows the reader to comprehend both the decadent influence
of Wait, the "nigger", and the benign influence of Singleton,
who "steered with care," without losing sight of the tale as
aesthetic work. Marlow, narrator of "Heart of Darkness" and
Lord Jim, performs somewhat the same function, but is technically consistent and stands in a much more complex relation
to the story. "Heart of Darkness" provides the tragic point
of view to complement The Nigger's comedy.
Lord Jim represents Conrad's first achievement of
a sustained tragic vision, yet it is not a tragedy; its
center is divided between Jim's tragic experience and Marlow's
tragic awareness. The complex narrative method allows the
reader to participate in Marlow's search for understanding
through recognition of Jim as "one of us. " An image is
created which has the sculptural quality of lacking inherent point of view, but which is never completely sharpened. Jim
is important to Marlow for the romantic illusion to which he
is true and which seems to offer a possibility of finding
dignity. Stein's butterflies symbolize this dream, while
his beetles symbolize the counter-illusion of the realists
like Brown. Marlow, aware of the illusory nature of both,
seeks an integrated vision.
The language teacher of Under Western Eyes is used
differently from Marlow. He is ironically presented as an
impartial recorder of events, helping to clarify the political differences but human similarities between Russia and
the West. Razumov is unlike Jim in that he starts from a
"realistic" illusion of worldly success and is brought by
circumstances to a vision of human contact, a radical transformation,
and one of which he is fully aware. The novel
is a tragedy in the conventional sense and is a profound
treatment of the relation between a man and his society,
yet, despite such effective techniques as the use of Christian
allusions to establish a shared set of values, it lacks the
richness of Lord Jim. / Arts, Faculty of / English, Department of / Graduate
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UBC/oai:circle.library.ubc.ca:2429/41868 |
| Date | January 1970 |
| Creators | Chippindale, Nigel K. |
| Publisher | University of British Columbia |
| Source Sets | University of British Columbia |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text, Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | For non-commercial purposes only, such as research, private study and education. Additional conditions apply, see Terms of Use https://open.library.ubc.ca/terms_of_use. |
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