SOURCE: Facknitz, Mark A. R. “Cryptic Allusions and the Moral of the Story: The Case of Joseph Conrad's ‘The Secret Sharer’.” The Journal of Narrative Technique 17, no. 1 (winter 1987): 115-30.

[In the following essay, Facknitz investigates references to the Old Testament in Conrad's “The Secret Sharer.”]

There is little theoretical work on allusion, and what there is tends to focus on obvious types—quotation, paraphrase, direct reference—none of which adequately describe Conrad's complex and generally cryptic use of Biblical allusions in “The Secret Sharer.” Indeed, so ‘missable’ are some of his allusions that in the huge commentary on the story only a few essays pay more than passing attention to allusions. Louis Leiter and Terry Otten explored references to the mark of Cain and the story of Jonah.¹ Paul Bidwell, following Leiter, illustrated the parallels between the story and parts of Exodus, from the beginning, when the captain stares out at the rushes from which Leggatt emerges, to the end, when Leggatt strikes out for a “promised land” on the other side of the wilderness.² There are many connections, subtle and widespread, between the story and a large and fundamentally Hebraic tradition as represented in particular by the five books of Moses, Jonah, and Isaiah. While critical discussion has centered on whether “The Secret Sharer” is a Doppelganger drama of deep psychological motives, or a rather quiet sailing adventure sprinkled with ironie and unambiguous symbols like the scorpion in the inkwell, the story has been short-changed because it has not been thoroughly explored as an allegory on divine and human law that swarms with Biblical tropes and archetypes of ritual that are apparent only through variously cryptic Old Testament allusions.³

Handbooks generally define four categories of allusion; topical, or current events; personal, or references to the author's life and circumstances; structural or imitative, as in Joyce's use of Homer's form in Ulysses; and metaphorical or figurative, the most common, which consists of one author preempting another's particularly fine figures. For allusion to work, the reader must be aware of the borrowing, and the general use is “to enrich a literary work by merging the echoed material with a new poetic context” (Miner 18) and this amounts to an “appeal to a reader to share some experience with the writer” (Cuddon 31). Allusions can be explicit or implicit, direct or indirect, clear or muddled, everything from epigraphs isolated on a page to recondite references that escape almost all readers.⁴

Allusion tends to reflect outward, telling us more about the author than his creation unless the allusion marks a thematic or narrative element that we can see because of light shed from the outside. In The Poetics of Quotation in the European Novel, Herman Meyer wonders if we can “attribute to the quotation the significance of a true structural element.” He continues: “Can the quotation … play an essential role in the total structure of a narrative work? Are quotations anything more than simply the raisins in the cake, and can their aesthetic effect go beyond the momentary delight that the raisins offer the palate?” (4) The questions might as well be rhetorical. Meyer decides that a novel “is not the mere product of organic growth” but the complicated result of a process that joins “the central, inchoate vision of the author” and “the multiplicity of traditional cultural values” (6). He calls the novel “a multiple totality, arisen out of multiplicity” whose “genesis is to a great extent a process of integration of heterogeneous elements” (6). Quotation, or allusion, can scarcely remain independent of such a process, no matter how emphatic its isolation as an epigraph or its clearly alien origin. The defining feature of allusion, Meyer decides, is its capacity to join in and stand aloof, and he writes “the charm of the quotation emanates from a unique tendency between assimilation and dissimilation: it links itself closely with its new environment, but at the same time detaches itself from it, thus permitting another world to radiate into the self-contained world of the novel” (6). The effect holds true whether the allusion is conspicuous or cryptic.

Ziva Ben-Porat shares Meyer's view, defining the literary allusion as “a device for the simultaneous activation of two independent texts,” and taking its function to be “to enhance and clarify thematic patterns, to provide the ironic regulating pattern, to add links to existing ones or to provide missing links, to establish an analogy or to supply a fictional world, whether it appears in veiled or overt form, concentrated or dispersed, local or all-inclusive” (127). According to Ben-Porat, allusion entails—by definition—two texts, a signal in the second that refers to the first, and “the presence of elements in both texts which can be linked together in unfixed, predictable patterns” (127). In short, allusion generates new meanings, and like Meyer, Ben-Porat sees allusion as much more than raisins in the cake or pedantic indications of the author's learning. Allusions are emphatic signs of intertextual links that must be taken as intentional.

In his theory of influence, Harold Bloom emphasizes the etymology of allusion, pointing out its kinship with play in words like ludicrous and elusion, and he situates the beginning of the sense of the world as “implied, indirect or hidden reference” in the early seventeenth century, adding that allusion's sense of overt or direct reference is incorrect but its currency is undeniable (Map 126). Plagiarism, Bloom argues, is a kind of allusion, and his sixth revisionary ratio—or apophrades, the return of the dead to houses they once inhabited—is sufficiently large to include allusion. Thus, in Bloom's theory, allusion is a kind of haunting, powerful and fearsome, and consequently capable of tremendous tropological impact, especially when used as a concealed weapon. Following the metaphors of Bloom's books, rather than the sign of the ephebe's subjugation, it is the stick with which the son beats the father.

However, Bloom's central idea is that influence is primarily a matter not of imitation, admiration, and consciousness, but of “making a space for oneself,” of reaction to envy, and its operations are obscure and often unnameable. In The Anxiety of Influence he gives the central premise of his theory:

Poetic Influence—when it involves two strong, authentic poets,—always proceeds by a misreading of the prior poet, an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation. The history of fruitful poetic influences, which is to say the main tradition of Western poetry since the Renaissance, is a history of anxiety and self-saving caricature, of distortion, of perverse willful revisionism without which modern poetry as such could not exist.

(30)

But an allusion is never necessarily a misinterpretation, though it may actually be one by virtue of the author's error or idiosyncratic understanding. Bloom seems to recognize that allusion must be exempted, if not as a class, at least in the preponderance of particular instances. In “The Necessity of Misreading,” the final chapter of Kabbalah and Criticism, Bloom writes that “rhetorically considered tradition is always an hyperbole, and the images used to describe tradition will tend to be those of height and depth” (97). Thus he suggests that tradition stands over and behind the individual antipathies of competing pairs of poets and poems. If he is right, allusion is more nearly analogous to an appeal to a referee or the body of the law than to an anxiously pre-empted and re-directed trope. Anxiety shows itself not in a poet's urge to distance himself from tradition, but perhaps in an eagerness to rely on it, and to imply that one's work is valuable because of what is old in it, not what is new. In “The Secret Sharer” Conrad may be “swerving” from his contemporaries, or what he perceives to be the intellectual turpitude of his age, but for the most part the poet is Moses and the other book is the Pentateuch, and Conrad embraces the man and the text with enthusiasm and confidence that they will provide for him.

Bloom draws his examples from Romantic and post-Romantic poetry, and consequently he makes Milton “the great Inhibitor,” Paradise Lost a text of overwhelming power that in silencing the mundane reflections of later poets pushes them to new terrain. In other words, Milton's influence is negative. Since it is unlikely anyone can do the myth of the fall better, the strong poet will not try it. But the myths of the Bible rarely inhibit the utterance; rather they facilitate the sophistication and complication of narratives by providing broadly intelligible cultural counters which form a grammar of symbols accessible to a large audience, the people Conrad tried to reach, those willing to fork over half a crown for a good read. Such readers may not wish to elaborate an interpretation of “The Secret Sharer” based on its many cryptic allusions, but they may recognize the presence of Biblical allusions and be titillated by the fact. Indeed, allusions in general may be most important to this large ‘weak’ audience which, unlike the strong poet, reviles misprision and continues to believe that texts can reveal an author's intentions. Though Bloom's swerving or “clinamen always must be considered as though it were intentional and involuntary” (Anxiety 44-45), allusion offers no such paradox for it is as voluntary as it is intentional.

Yet, often it is hard for readers to know they are confronted with allusions, particularly if the allusions belong to that category Ben-Porat calls veiled and Meyer calls cryptic. The search for cryptic allusions is full of the same hazards as the most speculative of interpretive activity, and any case one bases on them can be easily weakened by counter-claims of circumstantiality. Since one finds cryptic allusions only after deciding that they are there, their use in an argument amounts to question begging. But if these are risks, is the interpreter barred from discussion of cryptic allusions? “The Secret Sharer” offers informative illustrations.

The example of the Sephora is particularly seductive and troublesome. Several readers have noted in passing that “Sephorah” bears a phonetic resemblance to “Zipporah,” Moses's wife, about whom little is known except that she saved her son on the return to Egypt by circumcising him with a flint (Encyclopedia Judaica 16: 1182), and Sephora is the variant spelling of Zipporah in the Douay Bible. In what respect is the ship like Moses's wife? Paul Bidwell has described analogies between Leggatt and Moses, but how is the ship that he leaves, on board which he killed a man in anger, and from whose bondage on a quiet night the risible captain Archbold allowed him to escape at all like Moses's wife? Such questions tempt one to conclude that Conrad was having us on or named the ship without really reflecting on how “Sephora” might be construed.

There is a more intriguing possibility. Conrad was a fastidious writer, and since the narrator and his ship are ostentatiously anonymous, it is likely that Conrad was very deliberate in giving Leggatt and the Sephora their names. Sephirah is the singular form of Sephiroth, which in the philosophy of the Kabbalah are the ten attributes or manifestations of God, the ways in which He enters into relation with the world, or, as Gershom Scholem puts it, they are “the potencies and modes of action of the living God” which express “the dynamic unity of God” and reveal the “process in which God emerges from his hiddenness and ineffable being to stand before us as the Creator” (100). The word is derived from the Hebrew, saphar, to number or to count, a fact made intriguing by the many instances of marking time and distance in the story, which Conrad tends to do with such strikingly resonant numbers as seven, forty, and one hundred twenty-three. Though it is perhaps incautious to specify, one of the clearest possibilities is that of the ten Sephiroth, the ship should be compared ironically to the emanation called Gevurah (power) or Din (judgment), whose defining quality is rigor, whose color is red, and which is associated with Isaac, all of which provide analogues to Leggatt who is surely rigorous, red in his anger and murderousness, and the junior to the captain who spares him. Moreover, its non-ironic opposite, or mirror Sephirah, is Hesed (love, mercy) or Gedullah (greatness), whose defining quality is grace, whose color is white, and which is associated with Abraham. Indeed, the opposition of son to father, of violence to calm, and of red to white, are a common motif, repeated often in the Old Testament, most notably perhaps in Isaiah: “‘Come now, and let us reason together,’ saith the Lord: ‘Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow’” (1).

There is a third phonetic resemblance. The Sefer Torah is the most sacred book of the Jews, carried about in the ark around which hangs the drapery of the tabernacle. It is the Pentateuch, or the five books of Moses, which tell the story of the creation, the flight out of Egypt, and the arrival of the Jews on the shores of the Jordan after forty years wandering in the wilderness. Most important to “The Secret Sharer,” they give the law to the Jewish people and form the mythological nexus of the first major phase of Judeo-Christian culture. This third possibility will tend to emphasize the theme of a conflict between divine and human law as well as sea and land, and urges a closer look at the images of lights, altars, drapery, robes, and the written word.

In the Pentateuch the law is God's, and it extends far beyond ten commandments to include very particular proscriptions about diet and specifies punishments for crimes as diverse and mundane as incest and robbery. Indeed, there is no distinction between divine and human law, for human law is God-given, and God's law is sufficient for all occasions. The secular law alluded to in “The Secret Sharer” is another matter. As the subtitle states, the story is “an episode from the coast,” that line where two realms meet. The story suggests the line between human and divine law, a distinction as different as sea from land, or profane from sacred, and it does this very clearly in the contrast between the characters of the narrator and Captain Archbold.⁵ Archbold is the principal representative of profane authority (he says to Leggatt while still on the Sephora, “I am the law here”), and his strength is embodied figuratively by the twelve jurors whom Leggatt knows are not capable of judging him as a peer. Archbold's authority is actually based in a bourgeois complacency, a righteousness that is pretentious and ill-founded. His name is ironic, and perhaps not his name at all but one which the narrator accepts for its sardonic precision. His physiognomy betrays a debased or attenuated nature, for he has “a thin red whisker all around his face” and a “rather smeary shade of blue in his eyes” (115-116). He may try to puff himself, but Conrad lets us know “he has not exactly a showy figure; his shoulders were high, his stature but middling—one leg looked slightly more bandy than the other” (116). The narrator intimidates Archbold, who for all his authority looks “vaguely around” and convinces the narrator that “a spiritless tenacity was this man's main characteristic” (116). Indeed, rather than speak as a judge or law-giver, Archbold speaks “in a manner of a criminal making a reluctant and doleful confession” (116). In the terms of this argument, Archbold is a modern travesty of a priest, one who knows the gestures and spoken formulas of piety but who is finally “spiritless,” alienated from the real substance and mystery of law and mercy.

The captain/narrator is a much more powerful man; he makes correct choices intuitively and speaks with a natural sense of superiority and right. He forces Archbold to stop mumbling and to speak his deceitful version in a loud, clear, incriminating voice, and so Archbold relates that in his long years as captain he has never had to face such a thing as an officer murdering a seaman and he seems particularly outraged that this should happen on an English ship while a woman was on board. He speaks fatuously about his “painful duty” of having to bring Leggatt to justice and misses the point entirely when he claims the ship was saved by “a special mercy” of God when in fact Leggatt saved the ship by ordering the foresail reefed. As a fellow captain, the narrator is tempted to sympathize but he recalls Leggatt's hidden presence and thinks of him as “the unsuspected sharer of my cabin as though he were my second self” (117). Thus, at the crucial moment in his career, the narrator follows the better instinct that abiding Leggatt represents rather than the conventional wisdom of Archbold. As several commentators have mentioned, Leggatt's name bears a close resemblance to legate,⁶ an emissary, in particular an ambassador of the Holy See. As an emissary, and as an inheritor or legatee, Leggatt represents a sterner tradition than Archbold. Indeed, Leggatt is a fugitive of Archbold, and in choosing to conceal and protect Leggatt the narrator makes a spiritually correct choice. After seeing the nerve-wracked Archbold off his ship, the narrator goes to his cabin, learns Leggatt's truth, and thereupon the wind rises. His first command has begun in earnest only after he spurns Archbold.

This also begins the period of Leggatt's seclusion that ends with the near approach to wilderness and Leggatt's release. During the week in the cabin, Leggatt wears the captain's linen, eats foods that were reserved for a special purpose, and sleeps in his bed, closed in upon himself and kept safe from the eyes of the unworthy by drapery as well as by the fortuitous L-shaped construction of the cabin. Above the bed a single light swings from the bulkhead, suggesting a tabernacle flame as surely as does the binnacle light that illuminated the two men in pajamas during their first conversation while still on deck. Each light illuminates them as a pair and as they exchange secrets. Finally, the most important light, which like a tabernacle light is always lit, is the riding light which Leggatt—because he is a strong swimmer, constitutionally incapable of going in circles or committing suicide by drowning—strikes out for after jumping from the Sephora and ridding himself of his old clothes in a gesture he calls “suicide enough for me” (108).

At the nameless ship he is not sure where he has arrived, but on learning that the captain has not turned in “he seemed to struggle with himself,” and then, finding that he was speaking to the captain, and that the captain was in a sense there waiting for him, Leggatt whispers “By Jove” and announces his name in a voice that was “calm and resolute” (99). Very quickly the bond between them is deep and their communication instinctive:

A mysterious communication was established already between us two—in the face of that silent, darkened tropical sea. I was young too; young enough to make no comment. The man in the water began suddenly to climb up the ladder, and I hastened away from the rail to fetch some clothes.

(99)

What is important about this set of images is not that they are obviously appropriate to the context of a sailing story but that Conrad urges us to note so many details—the destruction of the original clothes, Leggatt's phosphorescent nakedness, the identical linen worn by each man—indeed, that the narrator is out on deck alone and in his pajamas—and then the journey into the sanctum sanctorum, each phase marked by dialogue in the course of which the narrator learns Leggatt's deepest secrets. This is a ritual which each is capable of accomplishing instinctually because each is motivated by a deep, unquestioned necessity, for, unlike the bewildered Archbold, Leggatt and the narrator are not mimicking obsolete ceremonies; rather, they are special men whose inborn understanding of the forms and motives of their actions authenticates the ritual. While they may fear failure because of interruption from outsiders, they never once doubt the significance of their companionship or, for that matter, question the propriety of their acts.

Perhaps most intriguing about the Biblical line of speculation is that it leads to seeing some powerful analogues in Leggatt. Louis Leiter discusses the direct allusion to Cain, and it should be emphasized that God visits his mercy on Cain,⁷ for when Cain complains he “shall be a fugitive and vagabond in the earth” and everyone will try to murder him, God promises “whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold” (Genesis, 4:14-15). Consequently, He sets His mark upon Cain, “lest any finding him should kill him.” But this is Leggatt's analogy, apt to an extent, and yet even Leggatt seems rather disdainful of it, mentioning it in the same breath with his comments on Archbold's nagging wife:

Oh, yes! She's on board. Though I don't think she would have meddled. She would have been only too glad to have me out of the ship in any way. The “brand of Cain” business, don't you see. That's all right. I was ready enough to go off wandering on the face of the earth—and that was price enough to pay for an Abel of that sort.

(108)

God also visits his mercy on Jonah,⁸ a slightly more abstruse allusion that several readers have noted. But unlike Leggatt, Jonah whimpers, and he is bad luck to his ship because he is dead weight, and someone of limited intelligence who in the course of his brief book of the Bible repeatedly insults God and is shown proof of his mercy no fewer than three times.

In other words, the allusions are informative, but they can be taken only so far, and in trying to push them one risks excluding at least three other less obvious allusions, powerful parallels to Leggatt—Isaac, the leper of Leviticus, and the scapegoat.⁹ In Genesis (22) God tempts Abraham, telling him to take his son Isaac to Meriah and sacrifice him on a mountain which God will make known. Abraham, of course, shows his devotion by denying his fatherly feeling in favor of a larger authority than the heart or even common sense, and because of the power of his faith God rewards him by saying “I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore; and thy seed shall possess the gate of his enemies; and in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed; because thou hast obeyed my voice.” Thus, in broad strokes, we see repeated the narrator's affection for the younger Leggatt, who resembles him, as a son should, physically and in his character. We also see the narrator's success in a test of his secular power as a captain who takes charge of his vessel and in his simultaneous obedience to the mysterious and absolute authority of a voice that speaks only to him and requires of him the apparently absurd and potentially disastrous gesture of going into the lee of the land and placing Isaac/Leggatt at God's mercy.

The leper (Leviticus 13) emphasizes Leggatt's status as an outsider. Lepers can be healed by Aaron and his sons, the priests, and their lepers' scall will show white when they are cleansed, red when they are unclean, while anyone who happens to have a red spot on a bald forehead is called “utterly unclean.” Like a Jonah, the leper threatens the community's safety, and so he is cast out. First, however, he undergoes a series of purges or cures under the supervision of the priest—maneuvers that effectively rule out temporary or less harmful skin conditions—but if “the plague is in his head,” then he is excoriated and sent away:

And the leper in whom the plague is, his clothes shall be rent, and his head bare, and he shall put a covering upon his upper lip, and shall cry, “Unclean, unclean.” All the days wherein the plague shall be in him he shall be defiled; he is unclean: he shall dwell alone; without the camp shall his habitation be.

Because of his violence and his superiority, Leggatt is unfit for the community of the Sephora, and to the extent to which Leggatt represents the youthful hotheadedness which the narrator must discard in order to be a good captain, Leggatt must be cast out, though certainly not scorned or ridiculed. Set ashore in the loose, sacramental clothing of the sleeping-suit, Leggatt appears ill-prepared for life “without the camp,” and so the captain in his generosity—and perhaps because he wishes to resist the ritual motifs of casting out—presses him to take money and the hat. Leggatt, however, seems reconciled to being an outcast. He takes the money to placate the captain; whether he intends to leave the hat in the water remains one of the principal invigorating mysteries of the story.

By this point many readers have found their patience tested. For example, they may object that the similarities between the leper of Leviticus and Leggatt are few, and they occur at such a broad level of generality as to be uninformative. Indeed, writing about cryptic allusions can be like trying to skin live frogs with vaseline on one's hands. Moreover, there is little defense against someone who objects that this or that allusion is not cryptic at all, but a willful projection of the interpreter's idiosyncratic and self-serving designs upon a text. And interpretations that draw on cryptic allusions are circumstantial, based on an accumulation of sometimes hare-brained associations, and no case can ever be valid because validity depends on direct evidence and cryptic allusions are, by definition, indirect. The same sorts of objections arise against subjective or affective modes of inquiry; the difference is that in this case the interpreter implies the claim to objectivity by referring to a source text—Paradise Lost, the Old Testament, for example. In other words, one writes about formal elements, but formal elements that are as hard to validate in the context of interpretation as personal affective responses to a text. This does not, however, mean that cryptic allusions are idiosyncratic responses, located solely in the consciousness of a self-serving reader, for at the very least the analogies hold at an archetypal level.

Still, cryptic allusions must be anchored to be intelligible, or even plausible. Readers who agree that there is anything to the discussion of the name of the Sephora agree more readily than they would if they were not convinced of allusions to Cain, Jonah, and Moses. Once revealed, the systematic use of explicit and cryptic allusions indicates that we are reading an allegory, for there are now two surfaces, a primary, mimetic surface of incident on which takes place a sea story and a drama of doubles, and a second, symbolic surface where the shoddy sureties and moral compromises of the present struggle with ancient mysteries and divine law. One sees, for example, the impotence of Archbold's claims to moral authority in contrast to the faith of Abraham and the precious blood of Isaac.

The scapegoat's relation to Leggatt is more thorough, more specific, and more clearly intentional than the Isaac and leper allusions. In Leviticus (16) the Lord tells Moses to speak to Aaron, to bring him to the tabernacle ready for a sacrifice. There “he shall put on the linen coat, and he shall have the linen breeches upon his flesh … these are the holy garments; therefore shall he wash his flesh in water, and so put them on.” Among the several animals brought for sacrifice are two goats, and they are set apart as offerings in expiation of sins. Lots are cast over the two goats and chance decides between them. One goat is reserved for the congregation, and is sacrificed for it and consumed by it. The second goat is God's, and it is not killed; rather,

Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel … and shall send him away by the hand of a fit man into the wilderness; and the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited; and he [Aaron] shall let go the goat into the wilderness.

After this ritual, Aaron takes off his holy garments, washes himself, and returns to camp and to the more ordinary duties to his congregation. The goat wanders in the wilderness, with all the sins of Israel on his head, subject to God's mercy and the sign of his mercy.

This connection sets several key details in a special light. It explains why Leggatt is neither self-pitying nor truly arrogant. Leggatt might have occasion to bemoan the accident of his character and the chance circumstance of the storm that lead him to murder, but as the scapegoat he knows that he is not in control; indeed, he has been chosen for an important task. Yet there is no room for pride. His superiority to others comes from chance, and the captain understands this, and shares with him a matter-of-fact acceptance that they are men who have been given gifts of strength, courage, and understanding which equip them for special duties. Thus Leggatt sees the necessity of his journey into the wilderness:

I want no more. You don't suppose I am afraid of what can be done to me? Prison or gallows or whatever they may please. But you don't see me coming back to explain such things to an old fellow in a wig and twelve respectable tradesmen, do you? What can they know whether I am guilty or not—or of what I am guilty, either? That's my affair. What does the Bible say? ‘Driven off the face of the earth.’ Very well. I am off the face of the earth now.

(131-132)

Beyond human desire, fear, the reach of secular law and worldly judgments, Leggatt accepts his condition and his destiny. When the captain makes a perfunctory objection that he can't jump ship and swim to shore, Leggatt recalls his special garments: “Can't? … Not naked like a soul on the Day of Judgment. I shall freeze onto this sleeping-suit. The Last Day is not yet—and … you have understood thoroughly. Didn't you?” (132). The captain is ashamed of his momentary doubt, and promises to set him as close to shore as possible the following night. Leggatt expresses the bond between them, their common understanding and purpose:

“As long as I know that you understand,” he whispered. “But of course you do. It's a great satisfaction to have got somebody to understand. You seem to have been there on purpose.” And in the same whisper, as if we two whenever we talked had to say things to each other which were not fit for the world to hear, he added, “It's very wonderful.”

(132)

Once Leggatt was made to swim for the riding-light by his natural incapacity to take his own life or to wander aimlessly; now, after a week of sequestration, he recognizes his soul-mate and the wonderful beauty of their special purposes.

The priest takes the scapegoat to the wilderness and leaves him there at the edge of the unknown. The chart which the captain and Leggatt lay on the bed is incomplete, vaguely suggestive but never specific or unambiguous. A sea chart, it will only show the most significant land features visible from off shore, such as the twin mountains and low point of Koh-ring. As they look at it, it is “half-unrolled,” and the captain is only speculating when he says the land must be inhabited or there ought to be a town not far up the mouth of a river. These are surmises which the chart cannot affirm or contradict, but meanwhile Leggatt's thoughts are elsewhere; in fact, he is “following with his eyes his own figure wandering on the blank land of Cochin-China, and then passing off that piece of paper clean out of sight into uncharted regions” (134). There may be human succor on Koh-ring and there may not; it no longer matters to Leggatt, for henceforth wherever he goes will be symbolic wilderness.

In recalling how he pressed his hat on Leggatt's head, the captain paraphrases the story of Cain in Genesis and compares the hat to the “brand of the curse on his sane forehead” (142). In the terms of the story of the scapegoat, the analogous function appears in the gesture of the priest soaking his hands in the blood of the sacrificed animals and pressing them upon the head of God's goat, thus transferring the sins of the people to the scapegoat. In other words, it may be that the captain chooses a convenient and commonplace analogy—indeed, Archbold's wife's analogy—but the “fit” is not wholly comfortable. Leggatt resists—he tries to dodge and fend—and then suddenly desists and accepts the hat. There is no sense in Cain struggling against receiving the sign of protection by God; in fact, it is easier to see the captain as a priest or even the second goat than as God. Moreover, why would Cain wash away the brand, or once having granted it, why would God turn right around and wipe it away? A goat will naturally shy and fidget, but once convinced of his sacred purpose may resign himself. In these terms, the hat floating in the water, which marks the line between the secular and sacred worlds, suggests the washing away of the sins in the still darkness right at the “very gate of Erebus,” or right on the edge of the other world. To the extent Leggatt is a scapegoat, the moral seems to be that we are ultimately granted a mercy congruent with our faith. Simply put, if the hat goes on as sin, it comes off as redemption; in more literal terms, it goes on as a garment, and comes off as a light. When the captain looks for a sign by which to judge the ship's motion away from the wilderness, he sees not the steady phosphorescence of Leggatt which he saw at the beginning of the story, but the at-first faint and then flashing phosphorescence of the hat. Because of the evanescent knowledge that the hat gives him, the captain issues correct orders, finds the authority to silence the nearly mutinous trepidation of the first mate, and so guarantees “the way of silent knowledge and mute affection, the perfect communion of a seaman with his first command” (143).

The current view of Conrad's religion is that he had little, for he turned away from what Frederick Karl calls the “severe” Catholicism (26) of his family and his early spiritual education was a “mixed influence” of “country, mother, and religious mysticism” (44n). But this does not argue that Conrad eschewed religious symbols, and we can be sure that Conrad, in the same period that he wrote “The Secret Sharer,” was capable of disdain for anyone who would cheapen or subvert the mysteries of the human spirit. A sardonic review, “The Life Beyond,” looks at a vulgar piece of theosophy, Existence After Death Implied by Science, by Jasper B. Hunt, M.A. In his review, Conrad tells the Daily Mail's readership that though the author warns the book is not philosophy, metaphysics, nor natural science, Conrad could not say what it was except that it was a “breathless” and “constantly elusive argument.” Hunt's coarse vision of the hereafter exasperates Conrad:

Can you imagine anything more squalid than an Immortality at the beck and call of Eusapia Palladino? That woman lives on the top floor of a Neapolitan house, and yet our poor, pitiful, august dead, flesh of our flesh, bone of our bone, spirit of our spirit, who have loved, suffered and died, as we must love, suffer and die—she gets them to beat tambourines in a corner and protrude shadowy limbs through a curtain. This is particularly horrible, because, if one had to put one's faith in these things one could not even die safely from disgust, as one would long to do.

(69)

But finally reports of musically inclined zombies in South Italy are less of a concern to Conrad than the larger prejudice they reveal, a growing inclination to carry “humility towards that universal provider, Science, too far.” Conrad continues in Biblical tones, and his prescription is anti-empirical, ancient, catholic:

We moderns have complicated our old perplexities to the point of absurdity; our perplexities older than religion itself. It is not for nothing that for so many centuries the priest, mounting the steps of the altar, murmurs, “Why art thou sad, my soul, and why dost thou trouble me?” Since the day of Creation two veiled figures, Doubt and Melancholy, are pacing endlessly in the sunshine of the World. What humanity needs is not the promise of scientific immorality, but compassionate pity in this life and infinite mercy on the Day of Judgment.

(69)

Conrad held on to this view. In “Author's Note” to “The Shadow Line”—which he paired with “The Secret Sharer” as his two quiet tales of the sea—he writes disparagingly of “the mere supernatural,” which he calls “a manufactured article, the fabrication of minds insensitive to the intimate delicacies of our relation to the dead and to the living, in their countless multitudes,” as well as “a desecration of our tenderest memories” and “an outrage on our dignity” (ix-x).

Such statements reveal a preference for religious practice unspoiled by pseudo-science and the degrading urgencies and moral compromises of the industrial age. Similarly, “The Secret Sharer” is a dogmatic assertion of the superiority of tradition. In the allegory, tradition is challenged and sullied by the alliance of complacency, represented chiefly by Archbold, and technological and social progress, that together despoils the archetypes of the marine journey and the wilderness of the sea. (A Liverpool ship, the Sephora is out of Cardiff, an industrial city, and she is loaded with coal, which in the tropics could only be used to fire steam engines.) By rejecting the claims of Archbold and the prosaic human law he declaims, and by turning away from Bangkok and the Sephora and toward the wilderness, Leggatt and the narrator choose to enact ancient and pristine rites of renunciation and absolution. In all cases where a Biblical allusion may be ‘in force,’ Leggatt is a temporary sojourner or traveller. He is forgiven, he is chosen for a special purpose, and he is made ready for his purpose by an unalterable fact of his character or his history. As Cain, he is forgiven a great sin and granted the protection of God; as Moses, he is granted sight of the promised land; as Jonah, he learns that God's mercy extends even to the obdurate; as Isaac, he is the sign of his father's faith; as the leper, he has the promise that “he shall be clean” (Leviticus 14); and as the scapegoat, he bodies forth forgiveness. In all his guises, he stands for redemption. Finally, the allusions reveal that “The Secret Sharer” is an uncommon tale for Conrad, rare in its power of affirmation, and, because of its optimism, an uncommonly cheerful phosphorescence in the rather gloomy sea of Conrad's work.

Notes

1. In discussing the analogy narrator: Leggatt = Abel: Cain, Terry Otten decides that the story's tension depends on a paradox, specifically that the narrator's “salvation from stasis can come only by a Fall, only by shattering the innocence that enslaves him and renders him spiritually impotent” (223). In his brilliant essay, “Echo Structures: Conrad's ‘The Secret Sharer,’” Louis Leiter discovers the correspondence between psychological and Biblical readings, for he finds that “murder and disobedience are deliberately confused by means of the fusion of archetypes, and they become … symbolic of any moral weakness which would not permit man to know his most secret self and the constant threat which that inner self imposes on personality” (172). Like this argument, Leiter's argument takes as one of its premises the possibility that several archetypes can be activated simultaneously. It is not clear, however, how Leiter decides that with the transference of the hat, “archetypes separate, and the story plunges toward its climax, each archetypal role clearly distinguishable from the others” (174).

2. Paul Bidwell shows that “Leggatt, like Moses, finds it necessary to escape an inexorable law by entering the water” and that both “are saved by accidental and sympathetic discovery by one who might normally be expected to be an enemy” (29). In concluding, Bidwell comments that “the dilemma of a man who is celebrated for having brought his people a law which said, ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ and yet who had himself been forced to kill, is a particularly Conradian irony” (33).

3. Indeed, some find the story so straightforward as to call it flawed. Frederick Karl, for example, complains that “The Secret Sharer” is “obvious” for Conrad was “travelling very familiar and sure ground,” adding that his “only fault was in making every point a stated point and every psychological-ethical commentary a labored verbal explanation” and finally bemoaning the fact that the story lost its power “in a welter of amateur behaviorism” (Karl and Magalaner, 84). Douglas Hewitt's view is more moderate and more nearly typical. Hewitt sees the narrator of the story as “faced by the realization of a bond between him and Leggatt, but he finds a solution; at the end of the story he frees himself from the haunting presence of his ‘other self’” (70). Of the psychological interpretations, Edward Said's strongly suggests the archetypal extensity of the psychological allegory which I treat in Old Testament terms. Said summarizes the effect of the story as “the acceptance of a fact of past experience [which] is taken in and used to alleviate unrelieved tension in the present.” Indeed, at moments Said places his interpretation at the shadow line between the psychological and anagogic spheres: “Lastly, a convincing image of human kinship, modally altered to one expressed in terms of action and sympathy as opposed to action and thought, sends the figure from the past back into the unknown, free from constricting troubles, and sends the present consciousness into the future, armed with reassured mastery” (132).

4. Ordinarily allusions are assumed to be decipherable and the responsibility for making sense of them falls to the reader. For example, in Continuing Presences: Virginia Woolf's Use of Literary Allusion, Beverly Ann Schlack writes: “vivid as traffic signs, [allusions] direct us to important aspects of textual meaning, and they remind us of our obligation as good readers, for they were not deliberately put there to be deliberately ignored” (x). In The Art of Allusion in Victorian Fiction, Michael Wheeler is similarly sure of his ground when he states “the critic who examines allusion is mapping areas which are open to inquiry and indeed often explicitly invite examination” (7).

5. J.L. Simmons shrewdly argues that a special natural law inheres at sea, explaining “there is no leisure to weigh the merits: the voyage has begun and with it the moral life of the sea. Judgment must be simple, more than simple, it must be instinctive” (212).

6. Mary Low-Schenk, for instance, see Leggatt as “an envoy or messenger” who in this case “bequeaths to the captain … nothing less than the authority of command” (2).

7. Porter Williams, Jr. makes the same point, reminding his readers that “the traditional brand upon Cain's forehead was really a mark of God's compassion and not a stigma, except in the sense that a crime had made such a protective mark necessary. Both murderers, Cain and Leggatt, have asked for protection and received it” (28). It is worth noting the extreme fluidity of this archetypal relationship, for it is as consistent for Williams to assume the murdered sailor corresponds to Abel as it is for Otten, emphasizing the analogy of brotherhood, to see the narrator as Abel. In fact, this apparent contradiction repeats the central conflict of the subtext: allusions can be ironic and serious. For example, as the sign of Archbold, the Sephora is ironically named; as the sign of Leggatt's origins and his specialness, the ship's rubric is serious.

8. Leiter describes the parallels with Jonah very succinctly: “Jonah's moral weakness arose from his disobedience; Leggatt's moral defection lies in his murderous disposition … Jonah flees his Lord; Leggatt flees from the captain's retribution and from the threat of law. Jonah, after spending three days in the whale, is coughed up and reconciled with his God; Leggatt, after spending a number of days in the narrator's cabin, bathroom, and sail locker, is lowered into the water, signalizing the reconciliation of the narrator with that other part of himself, the moral, controlled, ethical forces with the threatening, amoral forces of his personality” (171).

9. The allusion to the scapegoat has been noted by Leiter, but rather than look specifically at parallels between Leggatt and the scapegoat as it appears in Leviticus, Leiter bases his discussion on one in Kenneth Burke's The Philosophy of Literary Form, a strategy that leaves his argument unnecessarily abstract and obscure.

   Nor should one infer that only Biblical allusions are active in “The Secret Sharer.” In “Conrad's Secret Sharer at the Gate of Hell,” Thomas R. Dilworth uses biographical and internal evidence to reveal allusions to Rodin's Le Penseur and La Porte de l'enfer, in which work Dilworth sees a secondary and fascinating allusion to Dante, and this, for example, leads him to some very rich speculation on the Italian resonances of Leggatt's name:

   The name may also derive from an Italian word of a different Latin root, legare, to bind or restrain—the past participle of which is legate. The word is used through the Inferno as a metaphor for the condition of the fallen soul. The sinner is said to have failed because of “some vital obstruction that binds,” the shades have “their hands tied” (legate), the soul itself is bound, its neck bound. In the Paradiso, Dante is warned against allowing emotions to bind the intellect. Leggatt's reason has been bound in this way and his unbreakable grip on his victim's throat signifies the ambivalent fraternal bond that is man's common nature. As a prisoner, Leggatt is physically unrestrained. He becomes self-restrained once he understands his passionate nature. The captain, in emphatically becoming Leggatt, likewise becomes legato, exercising courageous self-restraint at the gate of Erebus.

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