[In the following essay, Epstein considers the ways in which writing conveys sensory experience in “The Idiots” and “Amy Foster.”]

“A writing may be lost; a lie may be written; but what the eye has seen is truth and remains in the mind.”

Arsat's passionate declaration in “The Lagoon” is compelling in its simple testimony to the enduring truthfulness of impressions. And we all know that Conrad conceived of his task in writing as “before all, to make you see.” But what happens when impressions are, in fact writing? This article will consider how writing conveys sensory experience in two of Conrad's stories of “the bewildered, the simple, and the voiceless”;¹ and in the way in which his use of inarticulate protagonists is associated with a peculiarly intense apprehension of the indifference which greets human aspirations. The focus will be upon the status and achievement of language in a world which is known to our senses but conceived of in hope, dream, and illusion.

1

Conrad's early writing is often called impressionistic because it takes the “eloquence of facts”² he so admired in Maupassant in terms of how that factual voice declares itself to the senses, in the attempt to record truly “the stress and passion within the core of each convincing moment.”³ So in “The Idiots”, the writing seeks what is resistant, giving a sense of the eye squinting in the sunshine against the gleams thrown off by light striking hard surfaces. In his “Author's Note” to Tales of Unrest Conrad wrote that “The suggestion of [“The Idiots”] was not mental but visual: the actual idiots.” Both as facts and as occurrences of a moment, at the opening of the story the idiots are encountered upon the road in words that build this “suggestion” into a simple but brilliantly-lit depiction of a dour and stunted life. The lack of explanation, the attention to the event of seeing and hearing, make light, land, color, sound into immediate presences: “The sun was shining violently upon the undulating surface of the land. The rises were topped by clumps of meagre trees, with their branches showing high on the sky as if they had been perched on stilts”(57).⁴ A graceless and obstinate immobility is conveyed by a method that gives the reader no easy or privileged access to the intention that assembles the succession of pictures.

The feeling of a slightly disconcerting assault upon one's senses that is one effect of this approach to description, was brilliantly characterized by Ford Madox Ford in his introduction to “The Sisters,” in which he writes, “if you read Conrad sentence by sentence with minute care you will see that each sentence is a mosaic of little crepitations of surprise and that practically every paragraph contains its little jolt.”⁵ This comment rightly removes the emphasis from a simple mimetic correspondence between the words and any visual image they might create for the reader, whilst retaining in “crepitation,” “surprise,” and “jolt” a notion of a relationship between the activity of language and the material world, but one that can only find its embodiment metaphorically, in a reader's mental response.⁶ So the impressionistic jolt produced by the sighting of the first child could be ascribed to the vividness of the pictorial description:

“Here he is”, said the driver again.

In the long grass bordering the road a face glided past the carriage at the level of the wheels as we drove slowly by. The imbecile face was red, and the bullet head with close-cropped hair seemed to lie alone, its chin in the dust.

(57)

But more accurately, it is the forcible joining of unexpected verbal fragments—“face glided,” “bullet head … seemed to lie alone”—that creates the impression of raw seeing. And the last two items, “seemed to lie alone, its chin in the dust,” leave the reader uncertain whether the disembodied head is a subject for pity or the object of a brutal visual joke.

At the beginning of the story everything seems declared to the narrator's senses and withheld from his understanding. So the emergence of a moral perspective upon the exhibition of these local curios is, for the present, shoved aside by the brute experience of seeing their exposure in sunlight:

“Ah. There's another,” said the man, with a certain satisfaction in his tone, as if he had caught sight of something expected.

There was another. That one stood nearly in the middle of the road in the blaze of sunshine at the end of his own short shadow. And he stood with hands pushed into opposite sleeves of his long coat, his head sunk between the shoulders, all hunched up in the flood of heat.

(58)

The conjunction here of a great deal of rhetorically engaging alliteration and vowelling with an apparent utter detachment of attitude achieves an abruptly declaratory tone, leaving the reader tensely expectant for an explanation which does not materialize. A similarly scrupulous distance and neutrality are maintained as the idiot's unseeing gaze is bestowed upon the narrator's passing: “but he did not turn to look at us. Probably the image passed before the eyes without leaving any trace on the misshapen brain of the creature”(58). The comment, almost ostentatiously devoid of sympathy, foregrounds the issue of seeing analytically; but the most obviously mimetic achievement of the writing in this opening section is, in fact, aural not visual. The narrator's final sight of the idiots is startling in its meaningless intensity:

Their cropped black heads stuck out from the bright yellow wall of countless blossoms. The faces were purple with the strain of yelling; the voices sounded blank and cracked like a mechanical imitation of old people's voices; and suddenly ceased when we turned into the lane.

(59)

An aggressively staccato arrangement of sound produces the sense of impact that something seen made upon the narrator. This is the impression; and to get the effect Conrad necessarily exploits the quite arbitrary yet reliable connections between the reader's mental registration of a sentence sound-pattern and a fictional world supposedly brought into being by sight. That is, until the final movement of the extract. Here, the sight of the purple faces and the sound of the yelling are suddenly cut off, not only semantically, but also by the enacting pause of the semi-colon; then the self-sufficient triplet “and suddenly ceased” represents the just perceptibly isolated moment of awareness of the absence of sound, followed by the more relaxed cadence of the final clause, “when we turned into the lane,” which acts as an explanation, finally, of the sensation just experienced.

Stephen Crane wrote of one of his descriptions in “War Memories,” “I bring this to you merely as an effect—an effect of mental light and shade, if you like: something done in thought similar to that which the French Impressionists do in colour; something meaningless and at the same time overwhelming, crushing, monstrous.” The expansion into the unexpectedly violent assertion of that final clause is closely matched in one of Conrad's own pronouncements, delivered in the famous letter to T. Fisher Unwin of 22 August 1896:

A picture of life is saved from failure by the merciless vividness of detail. Like a dream it must be startling, undeniable, absurd and appalling. Like a dream it may be ludicrous or tragic and like a dream pitiless and inevitable; a thing monstrous or sweet from which You cannot escape.⁷

Like much of Conrad, this reads in two ways. Of course, the insistently reiterated “like a dream” implies that nothing for Conrad would be merely an effect and, further, suggests a realm for depiction beyond the surface, one that is inaccessible to sense impressions alone. Written from the harsh Breton coast where he had completed “The Idiots” three months earlier, Conrad's statement about writing, however, also depicts man as the helpless harbinger of a succession of scenes that it is his fate to watch. The “merciless” quality Conrad seeks for his picture does associate these comments with an impressionist approach, implicit in which is a vision of life as yielding surfaces and moments, but as being fundamentally inscrutable; it can only be known as a succession of images which are the possession—yet which always elude the possession—of isolated consciousnesses. Moments of pure sensation are, in themselves, meaningless; and if life really is no more than a succession of perceived moments, it cannot be a shared story: we are fundamentally alone. But against this decomposing quality of prose “pointillism,” it is characteristic of Conrad to oppose the efforts of a narrator actively seeking to confer meaning on what he sees. That effort (significantly conceived as one of “imagination not invention”) is clearly an objectification of Conrad's own struggle to master his impressions and oppose a philosophy of mere contingency and solipsism to which his pessimism was prey. Such an enquiry into the re-presentation of impressions is beautifully caught for us when, in A Personal Record, Conrad considers the appeal for him of the Malay characters who were to people Almayer's Folly:

They came with a silent and irresistable appeal … It seems now to have had a moral character, for why should the memory of these beings, seen in their obscure sun-bathed existence, demand to express itself in the shape of a novel, except on the ground of that mysterious fellowship which unites in a community of hopes and fears all the dwellers on this earth?⁸

However, in “The Idiots” the major artistic impulse is towards the depiction of those moments that confirm only isolation and exile. In the letter to T. Fisher Unwin cited above, the next, much quoted, sentence runs, “Our captivity within the incomprehensible logic of accident is the only fact of the universe,” and the brief history of the Bacadous is Conrad's purest expression of that feeling. The story has much in common with Crane's sardonic little poem published three years later:

A man said to the universe:

“Sir, I exist.”

“However,” replied the universe,

“The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation.”

In “The Idiots,” the narrator's attempt to site the idiots in a moral universe is stridently naive: “They were an offence to the sunshine, a reproach to empty heaven, a blight in the concentrated and purposeful vigour of the wild landscape” (59). The tale, when at last it stands before its narrator, will indeed reveal heaven to be empty; and the earlier description had insisted upon a sensational account of an indecipherable world, after which “offence” and “purposeful” sound merely rhetorical. Concentration and purpose belong to Bacadou, Madame Levaille, and the Marquis of Chevanes. If the tale dramatizes man's attempt to leave his imprint on the earth, then in a material sense Bacadou does so—“It's a good farm,” we are told. But in that self-mirroring sense so necessary to man in Conrad's conception, he fails. So, after the birth of the third child, Jean-Pierre's lips were “more tightly compressed than before; as if for fear of letting the earth he tilled hear the voice of hope that murmured within his breast” (63). In a brutal manner “like a dream,” “The Idiots” presents the pitiless and inevitable progression from Jean-Pierre's vision of “two big sons striding over the land from patch to patch, wringing tribute from the earth beloved and fruitful” (61), to his comfortless realization, “Having to face alone his fields, he felt the inferiority of man who passes away before the clod that remains” (70).

The persistence of an idea in the face of the facts is what the good part of the story is about. Bacadou's idea of having powerful sons is brought violently into collision with the reality of his idiot children. And the technique of composition ensures that the reader undergoes a mercilessly vivid encounter with the idiots before he has any access to the animating idea which, in fact, produced them. No one has expressed better than Ramon Fernandez the virtue of this approach: “Catching a glimpse is the best way of seeing because it is the best way of preserving the human element as if embalmed in our impression and at the same time respecting its living impenetrability.”⁹ Impenetrability is indeed the keynote of the vision in “The Idiots,” where nature gives no corresponding sign to man's presence. So, also, in “The Sisters,” Stephen turns his back on the sea because it does not give him the word, “the word desired, prayed for, invoked; the word that would give life, that would give shape, to the unborn longings of his heart.”¹⁰ Language, meaning, is a matter of human imposition, and the chances of success are not very high. When Bacadou shouts at the church for God to come out, “The song of the nightingales beat on all sides against the high walls of the church, and flowed back between stone crosses and flat grey slab, engraved with words of hope and sorrow” (68). The fluid song is repelled by man's structures, yet can accommodate itself around them; man's meaning, on the other hand, is a matter of fixing, trying to make words permanent by engraving them—an activity that extends by a nice syntactical ambiguity to his effect upon the nightingale's song too. The irony is deepened when we come to Madame Levaille who is more responsive to what moves granite than to what moves her daughter, giving a satiric as well as a pathetic thrust to Susan's cry, “Do you think I'm made of stone?” (73).

In “The Idiots” it is only the objects of the writer's satire, Madame Levaille and the Marquis of Chavanes, who wring any sort of meaning out of life. The logic of accident—an unlikely succession of idiot children—leaves the Bacadous howling amidst indifference. Susan's last utterance is “one shrill cry for help that seemed to dart upwards along the perpendicular face of the rock, and soar past, straight into the high and impassive heaven” (81). The vision of man in this tale is of a diminished creature who is not at home in his habitat, the potential tragedy in the story of patrimony receiving a sardonically reductive treatment. Conrad is almost comically unable to write the story of a woman's self-determination, although in Susan Bacadou we can see clearly the sort of interest that will later produce Winnie Verloc. In the final section, the attempt to amplify Susan's emotions by treating the landscape anthropomorphically is directly at war with the perception of earth's indifference which compels the detached visualization of the opening. The inability of either the characters or the narrator to articulate an effective cry of defiance at the impassivity of the universe limits the human scope of Conrad's achievement in the story, but it is also a condition for the peculiar intensity with which it briefly lights Stein's contemplation in the shadows: “Sometimes it seems to me that man is come where he is not wanted” (LJ 159).

2

The narrative strategy of all these stories—“The Idiots,” “The Lagoon,” “Karain,” “Amy Foster” and even, in a more complicated fashion, “Falk” and Heart of Darkness—is always to do with the disclosure of a dark hinterland to the visible scene. That which catches the light is forcefully presented by a primary narrator, only to have its impact complicated by a story retrieved from darkness by a second narrator. In fact, the “highest kind of justice to the visible universe,” “underlying” as its “truth” is, is not to be achieved by sustained looking: Conrad's descriptions are not as innocent as that. Meaning is a matter of human dreams and illusions that impose themselves upon the visible world: Conrad's tales become the story of that imposition.

The failure of “The Idiots” as a whole is the failure to narrate the disclosure. Conrad's belief in the existence of Karain and Arsat is so much greater than in the Bacadous that it permits their tales to escape the pessimistic sense of the human condition as being one of marginal attendance upon a gigantic accident, which is the overriding outlook of the French story. Their actions are the expressions of choice and have moral consequences: indeed action, leading to a sense of one's own story, is according to Conrad the only and the necessary detachment from the aimless revolution of the circumambient world. In the well known words from Nostromo, “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” (409). And of course Decoud, Conrad's most articulate character, when robbed of the possibility of action and marooned on the Great Isabel, succumbs to an absolute impressionism and consequently an absolute loss of his sense of self. We can gain some sense of the desperation in which Conrad felt he was writing for his life by turning from Decoud directly to his own moving attempt to assert his conception of himself in the letter to William Blackwood of 31 May 1902: his writing “is not the haphazard business of a mere temperament. There is in it as much intelligent action guided by a deliberate view of the effect to be attained as in any business enterprise.”¹¹ And we can now understand the insistence of his assertion in the same letter that his work is “nothing but action—action observed, felt and interpreted with an absolute truth to my sensations (which are the basis of art in literature),” which is a picture of the necessary struggle of his sense of self out of the impressions that assail him; yet an acknowledgement that, as an artist, he must allow his senses to be thus immersed.

We have seen that such an immersion can become solipsism, the view shared by artists as different as Pater and Maupassant that we are each locked in a world created by our own impressions. The partial fallacy of this view is that it assumes individuals construct their experience and view of the world entirely from their own sensations rather than from the shared social forms and categories provided by language. This is not the position of Conrad's maturity: Nostromo and The Secret Agent depict the self-enclosure created by people who construct their lives out of watchwords. Conrad saw acutely the fraudulence inherent in the generalizing tendency of language. He reserved his scorn for the great abstract nouns—glory, pity, progress, material interests—while acknowledging their power. Yet if the artist's “action” is to gain some degree of mastery over the visible universe, like Adam in the Garden his essential tools are substantives. It is this which makes a literature of pure impressions an impossibility, however much art must make its appeal by “an impression conveyed through the senses.” The imperative to trust substantives led Conrad to praise the security of “technical language … a flawless thing for its purpose,” a language “created by simple men with keen eyes for the real aspects of things they see in their trade.”¹² I want to emphasize “keen eyes,” “aspects,” and “trade” to indicate the active and expressive, rather than the receptive and mimetic, qualities inherent in language.

A glance at two approaches to the place of language in perception, one theoretical and one artistic, may serve to sharpen our response to Conrad's own uneasy but courageous position. Conrad's neglected contemporary, the linguistic philosopher Fritz Mauthner, engaged with the issue in these terms: “It is only language which makes us split and double the world into the adjectival and substantive world, which makes us speak of things apart from their properties.”¹³ In a strikingly similar insight, Margaret Atwood in Surfacing, a novel profoundly concerned with true seeing as opposed to Americanized male categorization, has her protagonist think, or sense, “Sight flowing ahead of me over the ground, eyes filtering the shapes, the names of things fading but their forms and uses remaining, the animals learned what to eat without nouns.”¹⁴

Mauthner expresses the aesthetic of an absolute and pure impressionism when he writes, “An apple is nothing but the cause of sensations: round, red, sweet etc.; it does not occur, apart from the sensations of which it is a cause, for a second time, it does not exist a second time.”¹⁵ This ultimately is a recipe for the dissolution of our characteristic human construction of world into word through the agency of memory. In Surfacing, the protagonist specifically repudiates the human:

The forest leaps upward, enormous, the way it was before they cut it, columns of sunlight frozen; the boulders float, melt, everything is made of water, even the rocks. In one of the languages there are no nouns, only verbs held for a longer moment.

The animals have no need for speech, why talk when you are a word.¹⁶

Perception here is represented as being so immediate, complete, and harmonious that language is sensation, no longer construction. This umbilical relation to the world may be an ideal, but Mauthner marks out the boundaries of such a sensory receptiveness by saying that “every new technical expression is strictly speaking descriptive, only an adjective. That one uses it as a substantive is already the beginning of its misuse. Human language would be more philosophical if it had no substantives at all.¹⁷ So any linguistic philosophy that seeks a “natural” and transparent transmission, yet accepts that we have got the language that we have got, has finally to concede defeat. Mauthner talks of “the essential inadequacy of language for the knowledge of the world,” and recommends “a suicide of language … Critique of language must teach liberation from language as the highest aim of self-liberation”¹⁸ Conversely, Margaret Atwood's heroine, not entirely wanted anywhere, imagines for herself finally a return to the city and to “the intercession of words.” As philosophic sceptic, we sense that at times Conrad came close to Mauthner's position; but as artist he tenaciously pursues the direction taken so reluctantly by Atwood's heroine.

The direction is, however ambiguously, towards an encounter with words and all their duplicities: for the artist there is no unmediated encounter with the phenomenal world. Conrad's own most extensive remarks on the subject come in an 1899 letter to Hugh Clifford which offers a striking commentary on the apparently simple enterprise of trying “to make you see.” Offering both praise and astute criticism of Clifford's “In a Corner of Asia,” Conrad writes:

You do not leave enough to the imagination. I do not mean as to the facts—the facts cannot be too explicitly stated; I am alluding simply to the phrasing. True a man who knows so much (without taking into account the manner in which his knowledge was acquired) may well spare himself the trouble of meditating over the words, only that words, groups of words, words standing alone, are symbols of life, have the power in their sound or their aspect to present the very thing you wish to hold up before the mental vision of your readers. The things “as they are” exist in words; therefore words should be handled with care lest the picture, the image of truth abiding in facts should become distorted—or blurred.

… the whole of the truth lies in the presentation; therefore the expression should be studied in the interest of veracity. This is the only morality of art apart from the subject.¹⁹

The first thing to say is that the extract indicates Conrad's extraordinary consciousness of the material presence of words; he pictures them for Clifford as lying in wait, offering more than mere exchange value if approached correctly. Some readers will want to seize upon words presenting “the very thing” and “the things ‘as they are’ exist in words” as evidence of a transparent and mimetic view of language, one that would accord with simple surface impressionism. But the passage taken as a whole demonstrates Conrad's much more subtle relationship to observed facts and employed language, one that leads away from sensations towards conceptions. Words do not contain the properties they refer to, they are, more strangely, “symbols of life” which in a comparatively static form “present” and “hold up” things before the readers “mental vision.” These symbols replace the solidity of things with their own form of life, one whose supreme claim is to be “the image of truth” that dwells mutely in facts; and finally, the realm of “truth” is removed entirely from the province of facts to that of “presentation.”

Conrad goes on to quote from Clifford's writing:

‘When the whole horror of his position forced itself with an agony of realisation upon his frightened mind, Pa’ Tûa for a space lost his reason—

and comments

In this sentence the reader is borne down by the full expression. The words: ‘with an agony of realization’ completely destroy the effect—therefore interfere with the truth of the statement. [My emphasis]. The word ‘frightened’ is fatal. It seems to me as if it had been written without any thought at all. It takes away all sense of reality …

Reality and truth, in other words, cannot be directly apprehended. Writer and reader here have to concern themselves with a “sense of reality,” “the truth of the statement,” which are the properties of the effects of the writing. In wishing Clifford to excise “frightened,” Conrad insists, “No word is adequate. The imagination of the reader should be left free to arouse his [Pa Tûa's] feeling.” Writing a narrative, then, is neither a simple record of impressions, nor just telling the story: it is being concerned that the effect of the words is to preserve the integrity of the subject while allowing sufficient disclosure for the story to be constructed in the reader's imagination. Reading Conrad's tales confirms his generally post-impressionistic position, one which acknowledges that a writer is dealing in a medium that actively interposes itself between sensations and extra-linguistic reality. The word, the idea, the story—this is the characteristic and resolutely human domain of the “rescue work” that emerges from behind his land and seascapes. At his most successful, Conrad employs sensationalist writing to expose human vulnerability and, by contrast, the often fraudulent but often necessary protection offered by conventional language. Such a device finds its full force when it is associated with inarticulate protagonists confronting the dismaying unresponsiveness of the world in which they live.

“A lie may be written”: seeing that betrayal is such an insistent concern of Conrad's fiction, it is tempting to think that adherence to sense impressions was as attempt not to compound betrayal in the writing. So “what the eye has seen is truth”; but to understand what has been seen involves “a conviction of our fellow men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality.”²⁰ Narrating a story to an audience may at least temporize with our existential solitude, even if it cannot dispel it. Conrad's most poignant expression of this is “Amy Foster,” in which Dr. Kennedy, and above all Yanko, try to construct a story, a life—and the tragedy is that Amy defeats them.

3

Both “The Idiots” and “Amy Foster” begin with an encounter on the road and proceed to retrieve the story behind their almost impenetrable subjects; but in “The Idiots” the disconcerting thrust into the confrontation is total while in “Amy Foster” the glimpse of the girl—“her dull face, red … as if her flat cheeks had been vigorously slapped” (229)—is given to a primary narrator while the telling of her story is dominated by a second narrator, Kennedy. Kennedy's discourse reveals itself as that of a receptive, enquiring, competent guide, opening with the relaxed certainties of an intelligence at ease with itself. Isaac Foster's affair is “scandalous enough to serve as a motive for Greek tragedy” (230); Amy's love “was love as the Ancients understood it” (232). Against these comfortable appeals to history and myth, the atmospheric impressionism given to the frame narrator is significant in establishing the silence and the unyielding passivity of land and sea in the face of human voicing. As the story is told,

Not a whisper, not a splash, not a stir of the shingle, not a footstep, not a sigh came up from the earth below—never a sign of life but the scent of climbing jasmine: and Kennedy's voice, speaking behind me, passed through the wide casement, to vanish outside in a chill and sumptuous stillness.

(234)

And what the whole tale dramatizes is how the security, both of the scientific outlook and of yarning with a friend, ebbs away to expose, but not to explain, the “inscrutable mystery” of human hearts. So, towards the end of his story, Kennedy pauses upon his own uncertainty, “I wondered …” and interrupts his tale-telling to look out upon the sea which, rather than the human understanding, is depicted “as if enclosing all the earth with all the hearts lost among the passions of love and fear” (254). Science ends in baffled assertion: “Physiologically now,” he said, turning away abruptly, “it was possible. It was possible.”

The sense of estrangement which overtakes Kennedy in his narration is borne throughout the tale by Yanko, for whom, knowing “nothing of the earth, England was an undiscovered country” (233)—a phrase which recasts the breezy assurance of the earlier description of Kennedy as “the companion of a famous traveller, in the days when there were continents with unexplored interiors” (228). Yanko is tragic because his career faithfully reproduces the picture of the human condition outlined in Conrad's statement to Cunninghame Graham in the letter that opens, significantly enough for “Amy Foster,” “You are the only man—in this or in any other country—who took any effective interest in [my fortunes]”:

What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. To be part of the animal kingdom under the conditions of this earth is very well—but as soon as you know of your slavery the pain, the anger, the strife—the tragedy begins.²¹

Yanko's consciousness makes his story painful to himself, the knowledge that he utters “human accents” that are of no more account than parrotting. Deprived of comprehendable language, emerging from the sea to find his place among the animals, his first action in the story, like a birth, is to struggle “instinctively like an animal in a net, and this blind struggle threw him out into a field” (233). His condition is to crawl “on all fours” and to find a welcome in the bleating of sheep. He hides in Hammond's pig pound. Yanko has to work his way back up the evolutionary tree and the ladder to social respectability; and his experience of arriving on the south coast of England is in fact a birth into consciousness of man's plight,his struggle with existential loneliness and alienation. Nothing corresponds. Yet if Yanko's enforced inarticulateness is the artistic means by which his recognition of his plight is made so intense, it is his assertion of human identity—individual and national—which is the ground of his tragedy. Yanko is a vital force of life in the story, and he is invested as far as is artistically possible with a vulnerable openness of seeing unmediated by familiarizing language. Kennedy's simulation of Yanko's account of his journey out of eastern Europe is Conrad's purest piece of impressionism (235-36).²² The crucially generalizing nouns are gone, the words for naming train, station, ship. Instead the reader encounters the form and substance of such things, the presence of “the iron track … a bench in a house of bricks … steam machines … the side of a thing like a great house on the water … bare trees in the shapes of crosses.” The condition for the vivid immediacy of this telling is Yanko's ejection into an utterly unfamiliar succession of experiences of which he can take no possession by organizing and reducing them into the ordinary currency of language that we exchange instead of impressions. This is the world occurring once only and existing as nothing but the cause of sensations; and the sensibility expressed is that of a child, unable, because it does not occur in vividly pictorial form, to perceive the system behind the event. So the passage acts as a touchstone of innocence within the story in the manner in which it renders the impact of experience as a struggle into language. For the rest of us, the struggle is against the habits of received language so that experience can be faced more nakedly.

In fact Yanko never fully inhabits language in the unfolding of his story. Even when his “sort of anxious baby-talk” is replaced by “great fluency,” he still speaks “the words of an unearthly language.” The child may become the man, but only to learn yet more painfully how utterance fails to shift what surrounds him, and what that is is an impenetrable refusal of the cry of life. Yanko remains alien, unhabituated, undulled; unfitted to the melancholy round to which the people of Brenzett have reduced the world. To Smith he jabbers “in a most decomposing manner” (240); and, indeed, the composition of this mean-spirited little community can only be maintained by actually locking him up. Unlike Yanko, Smith finds the language to control the experience of the encounter, placing him first as “an unfortunate dirty tramp,” and then as “an escaped lunatic.” When, more kindly, the young ladies from the Rectory try to bring Yanko within the pale of language as they see it, the presentation is comically to their disadvantage: the parenthetical “(one of them read Goethe with a dictionary, and the other had struggled with Dante for years)” (244-45) is shortly followed by Yanko's “flood of passionate speech … pleasant, soft, musical” (245).

But to be without the protection of linguistic and social familiarity is to be ejected into a life of unmediated impressions which seems to Kennedy to be “an existence overshadowed, oppressed, by everyday material appearances, as if by the visions of a nightmare” (247).²³ A vital openness leaves Yanko at the mercy of impressions, the most abiding of which is that of Amy's “golden heart.” Authentic utterance is what Yanko yearns for and seeks to find with his son; and Kennedy, in relating the tale, is striving for “that full utterance which through all our stammering is of course our only and abiding intention” as Marlow says in Lord Jim. They are both defeated by the silence and the fear of life embodied in Amy. Yanko, like a wild bird, lives vividly in the present; but his song has “a melancholy human note” of consciousness.

He was different; innocent of heart, and full of goodwill, which nobody wanted, this castaway, that, like a man transplanted into another planet, was separated by an immense space from his past and by an immense ignorance from his future. His quick, fervent utterance positively shocked everybody.

(249)

In “The Idiots,” dogged life that scarcely dares to express itself or its purpose is mocked by the contingent conditions of human life on this planet; in “Amy Foster,” the offer of vivid life is rejected by a community so dulled and turned inward that it can only retreat into mockery before the new and different. The bleakly sardonic philosophy of the earlier story has indeed been humanized in that denial and rejection have been made human responsibilities.

Behind the human drama, however, the impression of cosmic indifference persists powerfully in “Amy Foster,” and it is the occasion of the appeal and the protest that eludes any convincing expression in “The Idiots.” In the ironic breach between Yanko's final “Why?” cried “in the penetrating and indignant voice of a man calling to a responsible Maker” (256), and the answer, which is “a gust of wind and a swish of rain”, we approach the terrain of Lear's heath and his cry, “Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?” It is important to see in Conrad's story how, although all the quickenings of sympathy are associated with Yanko, the story comes to rest in the mystery of Amy herself and “the terror, the unreasonable terror, of that man she could not understand” (255).²⁴ Conrad's choice of title, “Amy Foster” rather than “A Husband” or “A Castaway,” puts the emphasis, finally, where it should be. It insists, ironically enough considering the serialization in a Christmas edition of the Illustrated London News, on the essential pessimism of the tale that follows.

Amy's tenderness to Yanko is equivalent to that which she shows for Mr. Smith's “outlandish” grey parrot, whose “peculiarities exercised upon her a positive fascination” (231). Love of Yanko exercises “a powerful spell” over her, an “enchantment,” a “transport”; but the dream that sustains Amy's “mysterious forgetfulness of self” (232) is one from which she is “awakened,” it is extinguished by a deeper fear of otherness that stops her ears to “human accents”. The irreducible mystery of her fear is allowed to haunt the concluding pages of the tale, finding its most pointed moment in her soft exclamation during Yanko's illness,“Oh, I hope he won't talk” (255). As Sanford Pinsker has written, “Amy belongs to that camp of silence that ultimately destroys those who would articulate their experience in words.”²⁵

And Kennedy too, though not an unreliable narrator—whether “we see as Kennedy sees” (McLauchlan) or find him guilty of “rhetorical overkill” (Pinsker)—is a defeated one.²⁶ His response to that last utterance of Amy's reveals him berating himself for a failure of imagination: “I don't know how it is that I did not see—but I didn't. And yet, turning in my trap, I saw her lingering before the door, very still as if meditating a flight up a miry road” (255). Seeing is, of course, much more than eyesight—it involves the whole human imagination. The “as if” shows Kennedy attempting—with hindsight—to interpret, to fit his impression into the story. But it escapes from him. It is not just that Kennedy failed to be there at the right time, but that Amy's silence is a stronger force than the flickers of Kennedy's understanding. There is a silence at the back of the tale that throws into belittling relief all the talking required to convey it. It is, finally, the silence of a devouring inertness and a region of darkness that swallows up all impressions.

It is there in the fatality that ejects Yanko from an apparently safe anchorage. Despite coming to anchor “correctly by the chart” (241), the Herzogin Sophia-Dorothea is inexplicably rammed: “A completeness without a clue, and a stealthy silence as of a neatly executed crime, characterize this murderous disaster” (241). The Admiralty charts that represent “the patch of trustworthy bottom … by the irregular oval of dots enclosing several figures six, with a tiny anchor engraved among them, and the legend ‘mud and shells’ over all” (228), which are invoked in the opening paragraph as a secure orientation, are almost comic in their miniaturizing neatness. What seamen actually see is a dilapidated windmill and a Martello tower; what is out of sight will prove to be a scene of human disaster. The sentence draws attention to the necessary but purely symbolic nature of the guide offered; and so in the story as a whole we are left with our map of language for a silent terrain. But “nothing more curious or strange than a signpost” may cause one to “peer attentively” when “walking in a mist,” says Kennedy early on, trying to explain why “a curious want of definiteness” first made him notice Amy's face (231). Equipped only with such signposts, Kennedy increasingly finds himself saying “I don't know,” until, in the last two paragraphs all assurances of interpretation are absorbed and nullified by Amy's silence. “And she says nothing at all now. Not a word of him. Never. Is his image gone from her mind … ? It is impossible to say whether this name [Johnny] recalls anything to her” (256).

While Conrad's protagonists suffer under the force of their impressions, his articulate narrators bear the burdens of an incomplete consciousness. In the letter to Cunninghame Graham already alluded to, Conrad exclaims “if only we could get rid of consciousness.” Czeslaw Milosz, a poet soaked in Conrad, puzzles the problem a little further in his 1986 poem of the same name. The brief third section offers something of an answer, less bleak but more equivocal than the chirpy Stephen Crane poem, to Stein's gloomy reflection:

I think that I am here, on this earth,
To present a report on it, but to whom I don't know.
As if I were sent so that whatever takes place
Has meaning because it changes into memory.(27)

“Amy Foster” endorses this pained and tentative, yet finally positive, vision of the place on this earth of its most self-conscious inhabitant. The poem illuminates the relation between impression and articulation and the puzzled observer who, in assembling his words and pictures, finds himself constructed anew by them. In the construction lies the slight gleam of hope in contemplating “the supreme disaster of loneliness and despair.”

Notes

1. A connection between “The Idiots” and “Amy Foster” has been suggested by many critics, most pointedly by Richard Hernden in “The Genesis of Conrad's Amy Foster,” Studies in Philosophy, 57 (1960): Hernden links the two stories with The Secret Agent in “the plot of the unsuccessful marriage.” The taciturn Verlocs and the inarticulate Stevie clearly deserve a whole article, so I have deliberately avoided them here.

2. In his exemplary article “Making you see Geneva: the sense of place in Under Western Eyes.” L'Epoque Conradienne, December 1988, Paul Kirschner shows how Conrad's fidelity to factual “truth” serves his expressionist art. This is, of course, the mature Conrad at his best; in this earlier work that I am dealing with here more of the focus of the writing is upon the sensory quality of sense impressions.

3. The Preface to The Nigger of the “Narcissus”. I have not noted all the references made to the Preface.

4. All page references from Tales of Unrest, The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, Typhoon and Other Stories, Lord Jim, and Nostromo are to the Penguin Modern Classics editions, Harmondsworth, England.

5. Ford Madox Ford, Introduction to The Sisters (New York: Crosby Gaige, 1928). To judge from Conrad's letters, “The Idiots” was written within six weeks of “The Sisters” having been “laid aside”.

6. Vygotsky is surely convincing when he writes, “The nature of meaning as such is not clear. Yet it is in word meaning that thought and speech unite into verbal thought … A word does not refer to a single object but to a class of objects. Each word is therefore already a generalisation. Generalisation is a verbal act of thought and reflects reality in quite another way than sensation and perception reflect it.“L. S. Vygotsky, Thought and Language (Cambridge; MIT Press, 1962), p. 5

7. Conrad to T. Fisher Unwin, 22 August 1896, The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad: Volume 1, ed. Fredrick Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 303.

8. A Personal Record (London: Dent, 1923) p. 9

9. Ramon Fernandez, “The Art of Conrad,” originally published in La Nouvelle Revue Francaise, 1 December 1924, collected in R.W. Stallman, The Art of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Symposium (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1960). In Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives (London: Faber & Faber, 1979), Fredrick Karl says, “Conrad could not deal simply in glimpses, although he would have liked to”(p. 456).

10. “The Sisters”, p. 43

11. Conrad to William Blackwood, 31 May 1902; Karl And Davies, Letters, 2, p. 417.

12. The Mirror of the Sea,(London: Dent, 1923), pp. 13 and 21.

13. Fritz Mauthner, “Worterbuch der Philosophie.”, 1910, quoted by Gershon Weiler, Mauthner's Critique of Language(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 169. Fritz Mauthner (1847-1923), born a Jew in the linguistic border area of Bohemia, shared with Conrad an admiration for Bismarck as a man of action who scorned reverence for words, theories, and ideologies. However, there can be no question of influence, or a debt on Conrad's part: Mauthner was a very isolated figure whose works were only published in German. The point in referring to Mauthner is to highlight a counterpart in linguistic philosophy to Conrad's own most skeptical remarks about language. Mauthner's view is that as everyone is acquainted only with his own private sense impressions, there is always a certain lack of correspondence between the impression and the public word used to describe it. It follows that we are able to describe correctly neither the outside world nor our own experiences. Although Mauthner's work had little direct influence, it plays a part in the deep questioning of the adequacy of language which is so characteristic of our century. We know that Beckett read Joyce selections of Mauthner's writing, apparently to Joyce's approval; and “Mr. Maut” makes an appearance in Finnegan's Wake (p. 319).

14. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (London: Virago Modern Classics, 1972), p. 150

15. Mauthner, quoted in Gershon Weiler, p. 169

16. Surfacing, p. 181

17. Mauthner quoted in Gershon Weiler, p. 153

18. Mauthner quoted in Weiler, pp. 159 and 296

19. Conrad to Hugh Clifford, 9 October 1899; Karl and Davies, Letters, 2, p. 200.

20. A Personal Record, p. 15.

21. Conrad to Cunninghame Graham, 31 January 1898; Karl and Davies, Letters, 2, p. 30.

22. Readers of Conradiana will already know Gail Fraser's excellent article “Conrad's Revisions to ‘Amy Foster’”, 20 (1988) which was published after my own essay had been largely written. Her detailed commentary on this particular passage shows how Conrad worked to increase the feeling of encounter and alienation through the use of a less idiomatically English syntax than he had initially conceived.

23. The analogy with Robert Graves's well-known poem “The Cool Web” is striking.

24. A section of the manuscript quoted by Gail Fraser reveals Conrad's concern with the mystery of alien people that confronts a castaway: “… of another race (of another people) whose tongue, thoughts manners are a (mystery) complete and momentous mystery.” I want to suggest that the revised ending of “Amy Foster” amplifies Amy's mystery so that it dominates the view point of the whole tale.

25. Sanford Pinsker, Conradiana 9 (1977).

26. Juliet McLauchlan, Polish Review 23 (1978).

27. Czeslaw Milosz, “Consciousness,” from Unattainable Earth (Nieobjeta Ziemia, 1986), The Collected Poems, Penguin, 1988.