[In the following essay, Devers provides an interpretation of key symbols in “The Secret Sharer.”]

Despite the many critical articles written on “The Secret Sharer,” I believe I can shed more light on certain important symbols mentioned at various points in the story. The symbols I will treat are 1) Leggatt's name, 2) the masculine symbols of cigar and whiskers, 3) the scorpion in the inkwell, 4) the “sham delicacies”, 5) the captain-narrator's problem with hearing, 6) the liquor referred to in the interview with Archbold, 7) the white, floppy hat, 8) Koh-ring, and 9) the two ships. Almost everything I will say here revolves around a proper understanding of the double and how the double relates to the conscious and unconscious minds.

In dealing with past criticism of these symbols, I have sometimes reproduced in this essay symbolic meanings taken out of their contexts in articles or books. I have done this to indicate the scope of meanings attributed to the symbol, but it would take up too much space for me to give the various arguments, particularly the psychoanalytic ones, that have given rise to individual meanings. To get the full impact of critical reasoning on these matters, the article or book given in my “Works Cited” section should be consulted. Moreover, in listing critical meanings for a symbol, I have made no consistent effort to affirm or deny each one. Some meanings I think are parallel to my own, some seem to me to be far-fetched, and others mistaken. My method here is to present the various symbolic meanings from past criticism, in order, as I reiterate, to give the scope of responses to each from the critics, and then to make my own points, which will perhaps cut in entirely different directions.

Let me begin by taking up the issue of Leggatt. At first critics argued about his good or evil character. Then Lawrence Graver (1969) considered him in ambiguous terms before John Rosenman (1975), Joan Steiner (1980) and Steve Ressler (1984) showed more assertively that this had to be the case (151, 6, 179, 198). He is, after all, a murderer (and this is evil), but he also brings courage and instinctual spontaneity to the captain-narrator once he returns to the ocean of the unconscious and is thereby reintegrated into the captain's personality (and this is good).

Thus it follows that if Leggatt the character is ambiguous, “Leggatt” the name should be ambiguous as well. Several critics have pointed out that a “legate” is a messenger. Herbert Carson calls the mate “a legate or envoy of the captain's inner being” (12), John Rosenman says he is an “envoy from the captain's unconscious” (5), Mary-Low Schenck calls him a “messenger … from an ancestor or predecessor” (2), Thomas Dilworth says he is an “envoy promoting unity,” and perhaps, after the murder, “restraint” (216), Cedric Watts argues that he is a “legate … from some great power,” and is even a “supernatural visitant” (34), Steve Ressler calls him an “emissary from the unconscious … a harbinger … an inspirer” (197), and Mark Facknitz says he is “an ambassador of the Holy See” (120). All these suggestions view the name “Leggatt” as more or less positive, but if he is truly ambiguous, there ought to be negative suggestions as well.

Joseph Dobrinsky provides a negative interpretation by reading the name in a slangy way—“to leg it,” which “evokes a running away … a … charge of desertion” from Archbold, though he becomes a “legate” to the captain-narrator (42). My version is to divide the name into “leg” and “gatt.” The leg is, symbolically, the support of the soul (Olderr 79), and a “gat,” or “gatt,” is gangster argot for a pistol. According to A Dictionary of the Underworld by Eric Partridge, the word had been in use in America since at least 1904, so December of 1909, when Conrad was writing his story, was perhaps not too early for him to have heard or read the word (280).

Interesting possibilities come from another quarter. Owen Knowles, in his note on the naming of Archbold, tells us that John Frederick Archbold was a 19th-century author best known for his Pleading, Evidence and Practice in Criminal Cases, which was an established work of jurisprudence dating from 1822 (25). Knowles is convincing, I think, in arguing that Conrad based the name “Archbold” on this writer's name. Also, in Archbold's work, under the rubric “Homicide,” is found the name “Leggett,” which is mentioned in relation to “a case of alleged maltreatment of a seaman by the captain and mate of his ship” (27). I am tempted to think that Conrad was familiar enough with Archbold's Pleading, Evidence and Practice to have seen and used the name “Leggett” combined with “gatt” to get the effect he wanted.

The ambiguity of the name “Leggatt,” then, would indicate that he is a spiritual messenger offering support for the soul, with a phallic, pistol-packing, homicidal capacity. I think such a paradox was intended by Conrad to express the potentiality of the unconscious as it works from underneath on the conscious self. It is simultaneously the place which communicates spiritual self-confidence and projects ideals, and the site of the repressed but murderous passions of the Oedipal conflict.

This reading goes beyond previous ones in establishing the full negative potential of Leggatt, which is energizing to the captain-narrator. Leggatt's passionate hatred, which allows him to throttle the insubordinate seaman despite being swept along the ship by a wave—for fully ten minutes—features the same clenchedness of purpose as the captain-narrator exhibits in sailing into the very mouth of Erebus at Koh-ring, near the end of the story. After testing himself under that stress and emerging from it unscathed, the same negative capacity must be a component of his deep-seated confidence and decisiveness of command when he heads the ship into the open sea.

Symbols of masculinity in the story are the captain-narrator's cigar and the whiskers of the chief mate and Archbold. To Charles Hoffman the cigar is associated with the captain-narrator's “complacent sense of well-being” (653), while Barbara Johnson and Marjorie Garber see it, in their psychoanalytic study, as phallic in an Oedipal sense (633). James White characterizes it, when it falls into the sea, as indicating the end of an act of insemination that will result in the gestation and birth of Leggatt, symbolically, from the womb of the captain-narrator (40). No critics have as yet looked at the whiskers of the mate and Archbold in a symbolic sense.

I want to propose that though Leggatt is a male, he comes from the water, the feminine element, whose fluidity suggests like qualities of mind, such as intuition and association. When the captain-narrator looks over the edge of his craft and discerns the man at the bottom of the rope ladder, his uninitiated, ideal-focused, rational male mind is simply astonished, overwhelmed, by the recognition of this messenger from the unconscious—that is why the cigar in his teeth, a symbol of masculinity, falls into the ocean with a hiss. From that time forward, the captain-narrator is aware that there is an unconscious, and this new understanding, bringing with it feminine modes of thought, so to speak (the aforementioned intuition and association), and increased access to feeling and empathy gratifies him with new wisdom. He becomes, in cahoots with Leggatt, a despiser not of reason, but of those for whom reason is the be-all and end-all, the mental faculty of uppermost value and reliability.

This is where the whiskers come in. Like cigars, whiskers are identified with men, and the two bearers of whiskers in the story—the chief mate and Archbold—are linked with each other (Leiter 162) and alike scorned by the captain-narrator. Both are so hung up on reason, the former on causation (the scorpion in the inkwell) and the latter on the entire efficacy of the law, that neither has been able to discover the deeper ocean of the unconscious and the modes of thought and feeling and instinctual spontaneity that reside there, much less to integrate such into their personalities.

Conrad is saying here that men become wiser and see reality clearer when they augment their reason with feeling, when they discover the feminine side of themselves, and when they recognize the unconscious with all its potential for influencing conscious action. When men can do this, they can escape the rigid and unimaginative thought patterns of the mate, and the cowardice and pride of Captain Archbold.

The captain-narrator has lost, with his extinguished cigar, much more than Hoffman's “complacent sense of well-being”; he has lost his male-exclusive orientation. Johnson and Garber's study also doesn't deal with this regendering, but James White's version corroborates it. For if Leggatt is symbolically reborn from the womb of the feminized captain-narrator, my point is strengthened. The loss of the cigar can therefore be seen as revealing the psychic gender-duality of the captain-narrator. The whiskers show the resulting contrast with both Archbold and the mate.

Indeed, “The Secret Sharer” as a story offers a comparison/contrast of the two captains. Each has the same doppelganger, Leggatt, but each treats him diametrically opposite of the other. The story is meant to show the personal differences between the one who accepts his double and the one who denies him. The mate is thrown in to offer a foil—as another non-accepter—on the captain-narrator's own ship.

Next let us take up the scorpion in the inkwell, which is first and foremost a symbolic construct of the chief mate's mental relationship with his unconscious. The fluid is the unconscious, and the scorpion is the benefit he derives from the fluid. Given the traditional symbolic meanings for the scorpion—death, darkness, evil, the Devil, treachery, etc.—there will not be much good derived from it (Olderr 117, Cooper 145). And given the quite appropriate identification between the mate and Archbold, the same would apply to the captain of the Sephora.

Louis Leiter has noted the similarity between the scorpion in the inkwell and Leggatt in the ocean (164-5). Seeing this analogy fully, we become aware that the reason-bound, male-circumscribed chief mate (and Archbold) derive negative benefit from their unconsciouses, while the captain-narrator receives untold benefit from Leggatt. The mental expansion of recognition of the ocean of the unconscious is contrasted with the dark and poisonous ink in the minuscule, by contrast, inkwell.

But there is another dimension of meaning, here. Robert Wyatt first mentions in the criticism (1972) that Leggatt complains to the captain-narrator of swimming around “like a crazed bullock” in a “thousand-[foot] deep cistern” (16). Wyatt then links this image with the scorpion in the inkwell, to make the point that the chief mate's “dogged curiosity” about the scorpion is more commendable than the captain-narrator's “too-easy acceptance” of the presence of Leggatt (16). I think this is a mistaken reading, as I have already explained, but the analogy of the crazed bullock and the cistern definitely echoes the scorpion in the inkwell. What I think Conrad was actually about, here, was first of all to indicate the immense “improvement” in size between the cistern and the inkwell, and the betterment in symbolic suggestiveness between a bullock and a scorpion.

But a bullock is still a steer, a castrated male, which differs little from an ox, and we remember that this epithet was used to describe the mutinous sailor at the foresail: “I turned around and felled him like an ox. He up and at me …” (Conrad 102). Thus Leggatt is identified with the mutinous sailor and is seen as impotent—unless he is rescued by someone to whom he can tell his story and be “seen” (111) and “understood” (132). The implication of this is that without being recognized, the unconscious cannot be of value to anyone. The messenger from there who saves the ship can be no better than the mutineer that gets in the way of saving it, if nothing gets through to the conscious mind.

Once the messenger from the unconscious is recognized, however, valuable transferences may take place that are fructifying for both parties. The legate can deliver his message, so to speak, of the personal capacity for both good and evil, and this can be transforming to the personality of the receiver. The resulting changes turn the ox-bullock into a bull, a symbol of fertility, and so make the individual who receives the message confident, courageous, instinctively sure, and finally a fully puissant male, who is capable of a mature sexual relationship.

Taking their cue from Robert Rogers (44), Barbara Johnson and Marjorie Garber have pointed out that the captain-narrator's relationship with his ship suggests a parallel with his potential relationship with a woman:

… the woman is the ship. … Initially uneasy with “her,” the narrator establishes a secret bond with his double, upon whose departure the uneasiness passes:

And I was alone with her. Nothing! no one in the world should stand now between us, throwing a shadow on the way of silent knowledge and mute affection.

(635, or Conrad 143)

The captain-narrator, through the agency of the secret sharer, becomes fully sexually mature, but we see that this felicity is withheld from Captain Archbold. He has spurned acceptance of Leggatt, and is not at home with his ship (he is indecisive about setting the foresail) and possibly not with his wife either, for as Leggatt says, “Devil only knows what the skipper wasn't afraid of (all his nerve went to pieces altogether in that hellish spate of bad weather we had)—of what the law would do to him—of his wife, perhaps” (107).

Conrad has managed, through the medium of the scorpion in the inkwell and parallel references such as the bullock in the cistern and Leggatt in the ocean, to indicate the positive results of the captain-narrator's acceptance of Leggatt, and what the negative effects of not accepting him (the flaws in character of the mate and Archbold) might have been.

My next subject is the “sham delicacies” fed to Leggatt. Robert Day, in an article in 1963 which presages much of what James White will say in 1989, asserts that these tins of food constitute womb-imagery, in that the captain-narrator is the mother nourishing the child (in fetal position) in the captain's own cabin (78). Mark Troy says “The airtight, artificial aspect of his (Leggatt's) meals measurably heightens his role as catalyst rather than participant” (45). Johnson and Garber claim the delicacies represent Leggatt's past, “unsuited to present realities” (638). Finally, James Wright calls them, in his listing, the “Unusual Food Craving of Pregnancy” (41).

My thinking about the sham delicacies takes a different tack from these critics. I think the unusual food indicates that Leggatt is indeed out of place in the upper world of the conscious self. The atmosphere “up there” is rarified for him, since it is not where he belongs; his proper home is in the ocean of the unconscious. To indicate this displacement, Conrad has Leggatt consume “stewed chicken, pate de foie gras, asparagus, cooked oysters, sardines” (127)—all more suitable to the refined taste buds of someone from a more exalted social class, or on the psychological level, someone who represents the conscious mind.

When Captain Archbold comes to visit the captain-narrator's ship, and they have a conversation in the narrator's cabin, the unnamed captain, ostensibly to allow Leggatt to hear more easily, claims that he is hard of hearing so that Archbold will speak unnaturally loudly, and this will allow the eavesdropping Leggatt to hear him more easily. Both Robert Wyatt and Michael Murphy argue that the captain-narrator is the one who is really deaf, since he pays so little heed to what Archbold is saying (21, 195). This reading (in consonance with J. D. O'Hara's earlier interpretation), goes counter to mainstream critical assessments in that it makes the captain-narrator an unreliable narrator.

If this is indeed true, and the real hero of the tale is Archbold, the whole emphasis on the double is eviscerated, and the story has no point. It is hard to make a hero out of Archbold, unreliable narrator or not. No, the real point behind the deafness ploy is to indicate that Archbold is so far from his unconscious that he has to raise his voice to be heard by it, despite the fact that it is within. This emphasizes the difference between the two captains in relation to the double, in that the captain-narrator and Leggatt normally converse in whispers.

Archbold takes another shot from Conrad when he turns down proffered liquor and drinks water instead. “’Thanks! No.’ Never took liquor” (116). The point, here, is that liquor breaks down the barriers between the conscious mind and the unconscious, and so would predispose the drinker to some knowledge of the hidden nature of his own psyche. By refusing the “spirits,” Archbold shows his “spiritless tenacity,” (116) and his circumscribed sobriety.

Among the symbols in the story, by far the most critics have attempted to explain the captain-narrator's white, floppy hat—so many critics, in fact, that it would be unwieldy to try to include all of their attributions here. Two versions of what the symbol means, however, preponderate in the commentary.

The first is the “pity,” “compassion” or “humanity” of the captain-narrator. This is clearly justified in the light of his statement that the hat was “the expression of my sudden pity for his mere flesh” (142).

The second version says that the white, floppy hat is the Jungian symbol for the personality. But this creates a problem, since those who argue this don't tell how such an attribution would be meaningful. Does the captain lose his personality when he loses his hat? An alternative Jungian meaning, according to J. C. Cirlot who wrote A Dictionary of Symbols, is that a hat symbolizes the thinking that goes on under it (134). This more specific symbolic meaning could suggest that the captain-narrator's thinking is inappropriate for Leggatt, especially where he is going, and furthermore, that the captain-narrator has shed, with the loss of the hat, his pre-sharer thinking.

What I think needs to be emphasized, however, is that the white, floppy hat is expendable—neither the captain-narrator nor Leggatt have any need for it after its use in helping the ship change course. Why? The answer can be found in looking carefully at the two modifiers of the hat: “floppy” and “white.” Jacky Martin is correct, I think, in stating that the “floppy” hat is an image of the captain-narrator's “own weakness” (63). His self-consciousness, his questioning his own commands, his feeling of being in two places at the same time, his worries about insanity—all indicate that his thinking is “floppy”—he has no firm instinctual confidence before the sharer is once again recommitted to the sea. After that point, which marks his reintegration of the self, he has benefited from an infusion of the sharer's qualities, and so has outgrown the hat.

As for the “white” modifier, it symbolizes the conscious mind, the aware, rational mind (as John Palmer has suggested, 228), the same kind of mind that the chief mate and Archbold have. He has no more use for this kind of mind, either, since with his reintegration of self he has become cognizant and accepting of his unconscious self. The white of the hat is now obsolete; it would have to admit an admixture of the black of the unconscious for it to be appropriate to the new captain-narrator.

When we consider Leggatt, the hat has never been suitable—maybe that is why he dodges and fends it off when the captain first tries to put it on his head. The captain thinks that it can protect Leggatt's head from the sun while he is wandering on Koh-ring, but in technical reality, Leggatt is simply returning to the ocean again, to the unconscious, to the darkness from whence he came. He will never need a hat of any kind.

More meaning can be found in this business of the hat if we consider the suggestion of Louis Leiter that the hat constitutes the “mark of Cain” set upon his head by a compassionate God to stay the hand of would-be assassins (169-170). Such thinking appears to be justified in the light of the following passage:

I recognized my own floppy hat. It must have fallen off his head … and he didn't bother. Now I had what I wanted—the saving mark for my eyes. But I hardly thought of my other self, now gone from the ship, to be hidden for ever from all friendly faces, to be a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth, with no brand of the curse on his sane forehead to stay a slaying hand … too proud to explain. (142) [Emphasis mine] The significance of this is that the captain is identified with God in bestowing the hat, but the secret sharer abrogates the mark by abandoning the hat, and therefore repudiates the Godness of the captain. Symbolically this is good, because it establishes that the conscious mind and the conscious self are most manifestly not God, for such arrogation would lead to ego-inflation. It further establishes that the inspiriting of the captain-narrator, as well as the awareness of a capacity for personal evil, both have come by the agency of the secret sharer, and not from either the outside world or the conscious mind of the captain-narrator.

Thus the hat becomes a complex symbol that indicates a discarding of the captain-narrator's previous mental condition, and at the same time provides an indication that the captain-narrator's conscious mind was not, and is not, the seat of the Godhead. Conrad seems to be saying that that is the unconscious, from which Leggatt has come as an emissary.

In such a symbolic work as “The Secret Sharer,” it is unlikely that any name is not meaningful. “Koh-ring” is no exception. Josiane Paccaud sees a pun between the work “anchoring” in the story, and “Koh-ring” (61). Gustav Morf argues that “the black mass of Koh-ring” was linked in Conrad's mind with the last portrait of his father, Apollo Korzeniowski, which featured that patriot-zealot as being dressed in black, with long black hair and a tremendous black beard (284). Jacky Martin has suggested that

Koh-ring might be the ultimate hiding-place where the two men [the captain-narrator and Leggatt] would be permanently reunited in damnation. If this reading is justified, then Conrad's error in spelling on his manuscript substituting Ko-rong (co [jointly] [w.]rong] for Ko-ring (jointly joined in a ring) would become extremely revealing. (64) The suggestions of being “wrong” and damned together I am convinced is almost the opposite effect Conrad was after, but among all critics, only Martin had anything to say about Ko-ring (actually Koh-ring) suggesting “jointly joined in a ring.”

What I think Conrad had in mind in deliberately changing the name of the island from “Koh-rong” to “Koh-ring,” was to suggest a symbolic linkage between the name “Archbold,” which gives us a bold upward loop, and “Koh-ring,” which gives us the lower completion of the loop, to create a ring. The upper loop contains the conscious mind (which is all that Archbold recognizes), and the lower loop (identified with Erebus, night, darkness) frames the unconscious and its messenger, Leggatt. The captain-narrator, by dint of his acceptance of Leggatt, benefits from his access to the entire ring, and so finds psychic balance, fullness, and instinctual health.

Such a reading also provides a justification for the name “Archbold,” since the captain of the Sephora is most emphatically not “bold.” With this coupling with Koh-ring, Archbold can be seen as one-half of the equation, the half relating to consciousness and reason.

Seeing the island named Koh-ring in such a way surely makes more sense than “anchoring” (because they don't anchor there), Conrad's father dressed in black, or the home of the damned captain-narrator and his double, especially since the end of the story shows the captain as being free, potent, and anything but damned.

Let me add here that the flirtation with disaster at Koh-ring gives us another example of Conrad's emphasis on the symbolic over the literal. Literalists have always faulted the captain-narrator for endangering his ship and men by taking her in too far towards shore in what seems a kind of self-indulgent effort to allow Leggatt to swim in more easily. From the standpoint of rationality, there is really no excuse for this, but symbolically it is all-important. Symbolically, it means that the captain can master fears of the unconscious better than anyone else on his ship, and therefore demonstrates a courage and belief in his double—that is, the integrity of the self—beyond all others. Hence he is the best person to command the ship. While Archbold in extremis is ineffective, the captain-narrator illustrates by contrast, his worthiness to command. That is the meaning Conrad would have us come away from the story with, rather than being trapped in the literal.

Finally, let us take up the subject of the two ships; where they eventually go and what they do is meaningful in contrast. At the beginning of the story the captain-narrator watches the tug that has just brought his ship down the River Meinam retreat back up the river until it is lost to sight behind the “mitre-shaped hill” of the Paknam pagoda (91-92). In two days, the Sephora will take the same route, presumably behind the same tug. It will sail into the land to be “swallowed up” (92). The captain-narrator's ship, on the other hand, will sail, under its own power, towards another hill on the island of Koh-ring, which resembles the “very gate of Erebus” (140).

The point Conrad seems to be making is that the Sephora is moving towards the ideal (both the pagoda, a Far-Eastern temple, and its mitre-shapedness suggest religion and the spirit) but it is also moving up the river towards the land, which symbolizes convention, custom, fixed-mindedness. It is also being towed, which means there is effort involved in going upstream that is not expended by the ship—it is being taken where it is going. And taken, we suspect, by the pressure of conformity to the values of the land: the law, for instance, the church, tradition, etc. This is Archbold's direction in life.

The captain-narrator's ship, on the other hand, is moving towards the gates of Hell, situated under another, darker, hill. Instead of pursuing the ideal, the captain-narrator is moving towards the unconscious, symbolized by its threatening aspect, its overpowering blackness, its identification with Hell (but also the place from which ideals are formulated and projected). His ship is also moving under its own power, as this courting of the dangerous is self-willed. What it yields makes the captain fortunate in two ways: he discovers his own capacity for evil, but with this self-knowledge comes integration of body, mind and spirit. Swept away are his superficial and romantic notions of the ideal self that he mentioned at the beginning of the story (94). These are replaced with instinctual decisiveness, a balanced view of reality, a fully potent sexuality, and strong faith in himself. As he sails off, he sails with nature and the inspiriting wind.

Some critics have seen the symbols in this story as relating to Conrad himself, others as sustaining an adventure story, and yet others as supporting the view that Archbold is the real hero of the tale. I hope to have shown here that those interpretations are secondary or else false. A totally cogent reading can be made seeing these symbols as delineating the relationship between the conscious mind and the double, which is the emissary of the unconscious mind.

Conrad has an important point to make in this story, and symbols have borne the burden. As G. Jean-Aubry, in his Life and Letters, quotes Conrad: “The nearer a work approaches art, the more it acquires a symbolic character. … All the great creations of literature have been symbolic, and in that way have gained in complexity, in power, in depth and in beauty” (II, 205).

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