The statement, ‘I'm a man’ … at most can mean no more than, ‘I'm like he whom I recognize to be a man, and so recognize myself as being such.’ In the last resort, these various formulas are to be understood only in reference to the truth of ‘I is an other’, an observation that is less astonishing to the intuition of the poet than obvious to the gaze of the psychoanalyst.¹

To be embodied, to become more clearly defined, to become less, to become more limited, more stupid.²

[I] turn to “The Secret Sharer” and study the story through its relation to Under Western Eyes. I believe that here too we can see the same isomorphic paradigm which overruns the boundaries of the text: both the fictional and the historical subjects, I would argue, are constituted within the same vectorial parallelogram, in a no man's land between an aesthetic and an ethical mode of being. Our point of departure is, once again, a reconstructed Bakhtinian theory of subjectivity. Bakhtin did not propose a theory of the subject or, for that matter, any other grand theory. To attempt a distillation of a conceptual system out of his eclectic surviving essays would involve both circumstantial and immanent difficulties: problems of access, translation, and attribution are compounded by what appears to be a temperamental aversion to the academic proprieties of system-building. But if all the above may lead to the dismissal of the project as unfeasible on historical or biographical grounds, it becomes all the more challenging when one realizes that the suspicion of systematicity is, in fact, fundamental and built into Bakhtin's philosophical outlook.³ The project is further complicated by changes at the receiving end as well: the canonization of Bakhtin as a prophet of Postmodernity, based on his writings of the 1930s and 1940s, is giving way to a more complex conception of his work with the belated publication of his earlier writings. The Bakhtinian corpus, as we now have it, seems to be fraught with ambivalence: on the one hand, a surprisingly avant-garde conception of the human psyche as a network of discourses; on the other, an equally forceful religious cross-current, a deep, incurable nostalgia for grounding.

True to his suspicion of abstract, universal conceptual systems, Bakhtin's point of departure for the relational process which he calls ‘architectonics’ is the phenomenal, embodied subject. Subjectivity, for him, is an ongoing event, a ‘meeting of two movements on the surface of a human being that consolidates or gives body to his axiological boundaries’.⁴ These two ‘movements’, or modalities of consciousness, are extrapolated from the aesthetic relation of ‘author’ to ‘hero’: within the modality which Bakhtin calls I-for-myself (hero) the subject can never become a given object for itself, can never coincide with itself, must always reach out beyond itself as ‘yet-to-be’:

I can remember myself, I can to some extent perceive myself through my outer sense, and thus render myself in part an object of my desiring and feeling—that is, I can make myself an object for myself. But in this act of self-objectification I shall never coincide with myself—I-for-myself shall continue to be in the act of this self-objectification, and not in its product. … I am incapable of fitting all of myself into an object, for I exceed any object as the active subiectum of it.⁵

The impossibility of self-representation from within—whether spatially, temporally, or axiologically—requires the second constituent ‘movement’, the modality of I-for-the-other. The integral subject, as Bakhtin refers to it, is authored through a reflective consciousness, through the framing gaze of a transgredient other/author positioned outside and beyond the subject. It is only the authored consciousness which is a closed, given totality. Only through the eyes of the others can the subject be given an objectified solidity of existence.⁶

Several significant aspects of Bakhtin's architectonics of the subject ought to be highlighted here: first, the identification of the I-for-the-other mode with aesthetics. ‘The aesthetic’, according to Bakhtin, is not an abstract conceptual category; it is a powerful psychic modality, as relevant to the study of subjectivity as it is to the study of texts:

It is only in a life perceived in the category of the other that my body can become aesthetically valid, and not in the context of my own life as lived for myself, that is, not in the context of my self-consciousness.⁷

Conversely, the position of I-for-myself is identified with an ethical modality, a non-coincidence in principle of ‘is’ and ‘ought’. Against that ‘whole, integral human being’, aesthetically framed by the transgredient other, Bakhtin positions the ‘ethical subiectum’ who is ‘nonunitary in principle’.⁸

The subiectum of lived life and the subiectum of aesthetic activity which gives form to that life are in principle incapable of coinciding with one another.⁹

The ethical subiectum is present to itself as a task, the task of actualizing himself as a value, and is in principle incapable of being given, of being present-on-hand, of being contemplated: it is I-for-myself.¹⁰

As I have suggested elsewhere, the relationship of these two modalities in Bakhtin's work is far from settled, and any attempt to homogenize the Bakhtinian corpus would have to account not only for the apparent transition from the aesthetic to the ethical, most evident in Bakhtin's altered perception of Dostoevksy's work between ‘Author and Hero’ (1924) and Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929), but with several knots of ambivalence within each of these two phases as well.¹¹

Most significant for the present discussion is Bakhtin's apparently seamless transition from a psychological frame of reference with a strong Lacanian note to a frame of reference relating to ‘axiological boundaries’. Bakhtin writes of the ‘dark chaos of my inner sensation of myself’; of the ‘boundless, “darkly stirring chaos” of needs and dissatisfactions, wherein the future dyad of the child's personality and the outside world confronting it is still submerged and dissolved’;¹² and of the constitution/authoring of the subject by the transgredient other/author.:

For self-consciousness, this integral image [of the self] is dispersed in life and enters the field of seeing the external world only in the form of fortuitous fragments. And what is lacking, moreover, is precisely external unity and continuity; a human being experiencing life in the category of his own I is incapable of gathering himself by himself into an outward whole that would be even relatively finished … the point … is … the absence in principle of any unitary axiological approach from within a human being himself to his own outward expressedness in being. … In this sense one can speak of a human being's absolute need for the other, for the other's seeing, remembering, gathering, and unifying self-activity—the only self-activity capable of producing his outwardly finished personality. This outward personality could not exist, if the other did not create it.¹³

If this inability of the subject to perceive its own spatial and temporal boundary lines (the back of its head, the moment of its death) is obvious to the point of triviality, the axiological translation of this spatio-temporal perspective is far more disturbing. The ‘self’, in Bakhtin's terms, is that ‘possible other who is with us when we look at ourselves in the mirror, when we dream of glory, when we make plans for our life; the possible other who has permeated our consciousness and who often guides our acts, our value judgments, and our vision of ourselves’.¹⁴ Selfhood, then, is no longer synonymous with authenticity.

Bakhtin's aestheticized, I-for-the-other mode of consciousness, and Lacan's concept of the mirror stage are, as I have noted above, strikingly similar:

The mirror stage is a drama whose internal thrust is precipitated from insufficiency to anticipation—and which manufactures for the subject, caught up in the lure of spatial identification, the succession of phantasies that extend from a fragmented body-image to a form of its totality that I shall call orthopaedic—and lastly, to the assumption of the armour of an alienating identity, which will mark with its rigid structure the subject's entire mental development.¹⁵

For Lacan too, the mirror stage is not a developmental phase, outgrown and discarded at infancy, but a paradigmatic mode of psychic operation which ‘reveals in demonstrative fashion the tendencies that then constitute the reality of the subject’.¹⁶ Lacan too is highly suspicious of this psychic mode which constitutes the ego and the ‘illusion of autonomy to which it entrusts itself’. Most strikingly, perhaps, Lacan also related the mirror stage to the appearance of the double.¹⁷

Bakhtin, however, is committed to an axiological conception of the subject. He cannot let go of the subject position which enables us to act out of a sense—illusory as it may be—of oneness, a bonding of I-for-myself and I-for-the-other. This is where the forensic aspect of subjectivity comes in, for it is the sense of internal coherence and agency which allows us to make ethical choices in the real world. Ideally, to paraphrase Bakhtin, these two ‘movements’ whose tensile relationship constitutes the subject-in-process, should balance and offset each other: the ‘possible other’ should normally be assimilated into the subject's yet-to-be mode of consciousness rather than framing and ‘consummating’ it to the point of impotence:

All these moments or constituents of our life that we recognize and anticipate through the other are rendered completely immanent to our own consciousness, are translated, as it were, into its language: they do not attain any consolidation and self-sufficiency in our consciousness, and they do not disrupt the unity of our own life—a life that is directed ahead of itself toward the event yet-to-come, a life that finds no rest within itself and never coincides with its given, presently existing makeup.¹⁸

In order to live and act, I need to be unconsummated, I need to be open for myself—at least in all the essential moments constituting my life; I have to be, for myself, someone who is axiologically yet-to-be, someone who does not coincide with his already existing makeup.¹⁹

The disintegration of this precarious vectorial balance, the takeover of the aestheticized, authored self, results in a loss of what Bakhtin calls ‘the inner stance’, a form of paralysis, uncannily presented as an emergence of a ‘double’:

[when] these reflections [i.e. the consciousness of the self as an other, as perceived through the eyes of the other] do gain body in our life, as sometimes happens, they begin to act as ‘dead points', as obstructions of any accomplishment, and at times they may condense to the point where they deliver up to us a double of ourselves out of the night of our life.’²⁰

This last point takes us to the process of subjectivity in “The Secret Sharer”, the complex interaction between these two modalities of consciousness, which boils over the borderlines of the text into the territory of the authorial subject. To understand the process, we should study the text against Under Western Eyes, its ‘other’ text. The circumstances in which the short story was written, in the midst of the novel, as it were, obviously beg the juxtaposition, but studies of the relationship between these two works have so far been confined to a thematic level predicated on issues of commitment, betrayal, and loyalty, which seem to emerge in both these texts.²¹ It seems to me that while there is, in fact, a mechanism of compensation at work here, this mechanism goes much deeper than the wish to balance or offset the ‘message’ of the novel; that the short-lived therapeutic function which the story may have had for its author derives from the relational dynamics within and between these texts.

As we have just seen, Under Western Eyes is ‘heterobiographical’ in that it is structured by its relationship with Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. The same relational paradigm which links the novel with its ‘other’ text obtains within the text, between Razumov and Haldin; on the border of the text, between the narrator and Razumov; and outside the text, between Conrad and his own Eastern ‘other’. Intertextuality and intersubjectivity coalesce when the voice of the other frustrates the desire for autobiography, invades the territory of the self and subverts its claims to sovereignty. The subject, like the text, is—to use a Bakhtinian formulation—‘wholly and always on the boundary’.²²

Taking this line a step further, I would argue that “The Secret Sharer” enacts the return of autobiographical desire. If, as I have speculated, the invasion of the subject by the voice of the other in Under Western Eyes was not only the structuring principle in the novel but the catalyst for the author's collapse on its completion, “The Secret Sharer” was written in an attempt to reclaim the ground lost in the writing of the novel, to regain the (non-existent) internal territory of the subject and its sovereignty. If in Under Western Eyes the boundaries between hero and author, self and other, are transgressed often enough to invalidate the very concept of an inner territory (cultural or psychic), the narrator of “The Secret Sharer” tries—with a degree of méconnaissance which applies to the author himself—to aestheticize and frame himself; to reclaim, or rather fabricate, an autonomous topos of subjectivity.

It is hardly surprising that “The Secret Sharer” should have become so widely anthologized, given its extremely neat structural and formal symmetries, its ostensible treatment of ethical questions, and its equally ostensible concern with psychology, all within the very manageable scope of a short story. But this combination of narrative mastery and apparent thematic weightiness, striking as it undoubtedly is, has produced a rather disturbing work, whose formal elegance ‘not only aestheticizes but actually anaestheticizes the call for ethical action’.²³ There is much about the narrator's interpretation of his own motivation and state of mind which is unconvincing; the conflict of loyalties in which he is caught is not resolved by any clear-cut choice; the ostensible act of liberation (whether of himself or of the fugitive is unclear) is highly ambivalent or downright morally suspicious; and the triumphant cadences on which the narrative concludes sound rather hollow when one realizes that the elegance of the resolution is aesthetic rather than ethical. The narrator Captain has put the lives entrusted to him at risk in the most outrageous way in order to save the life of his secret sharer; his future standing with his justly mistrustful crew is by no means assured; and it is only through an amazing stroke of underserved good fortune (rather than navigational mastery) that his final act does not end disastrously for his ship and her crew.

However, even readers who have refused to be anaestheticized by the neat structural symmetries of the story have only addressed the narrator's unreliability, exempting the author under the implicit assumption that there must be a good moral to a good story; that behind, or above, or below the conflicting elements there is an authorial/authoritative principle of organization; that the ambivalence of the narrative can be relegated to one phase in the dialectics of art and is eventually resolved on a higher, more sophisticated level of authorial construction.²⁴ Neat as such a resolution would be, there is little in the story to warrant it. The text seems to endorse the position of the narrator by default: there is no rhetorical dissociation of the story from the narrative; no authoritative embodied other who would dispute or challenge the narrator's interpretation and judgment; no hint of retrospective self-doubt in the narrator's discourse; no point of anchorage for that wishful assumption of higher organization.

Like Under Western Eyes, its ‘other’ text, “The Secret Sharer” explores the idea of borderlines, divisions, and boundaries. But the ubiquity of border states in the story, discussed in an excellent study by James Hansford, does not necessarily indicate an inner rift which needs to be mended as Hansford suggests.²⁵ I believe that it is precisely the obverse, a state of psychic ‘borderlessness’, which lies at the core of the narrator's anxiety; that the obsession with boundaries and their inscription is a symptom of the narrator's need to stake out a spurious territory of selfhood. The man who feels like ‘a stranger’ to himself is already deeply troubled at the outset of the narrative by his inability to make out the lines of division between land and sea, between rocks and ruins:

On my right hand there were lines of fishing stakes resembling a mysterious system of half-submerged bamboo fences, incomprehensible in its division of the domain of tropical fishes, and crazy of aspect as if abandoned for ever … there was no sign of human habitation as far as the eye could reach. To the left a group of barren islets, suggesting ruins of stone walls, towers, and block houses. … I saw the straight line of the flat shore joined to the stable sea, edge to edge, with a perfect and unmarked closeness.

(91)

The narrative moves in a cinematic fashion from the panoramic (the view of the land) to the scenic (the ship and her crew), and finally closes up on the perceiving individual. But that movement, normally designed to place and orientate the subject, only compounds the sense of physical and psychological disorientation as it removes all the potential points of reference outside the self and positions the narrator within three concentric circles of uncertainty: the mysterious aspect of the physical surroundings, the unknown ship and her crew, and his own self as captain.²⁶

It is this spatial anxiety, this threatening loss of ‘selfhood’, which generates the need to reinscribe the lines of division, to frame the self as an integral, distinct object. In Under Western Eyes the staircase—that threshold where subjects cross and invade each other's spaces—acquires chronotopic significance, strikingly similar to that which predominates in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.²⁷ In “The Secret Sharer”, however, there is no staircase. There is a stepladder which can be pulled up or lowered down into the water at the narrator's will. It is not a permanent avenue for the subject's traffic with the other, but a means of enclosure for the subject.²⁸ The very same ‘anxiety of borderlessness’ is shared, as I will argue later, by the author himself.

Put into a Bakhtinian frame of reference, the narrator's initial state of mind is clearly that loss of the ‘inner stance’, which is the enabling condition for all action.

A man who has grown accustomed to dreaming about himself in concrete terms—a man who strives to visualize the external image of himself, who is morbidly sensitive about the outward image impression he produces and yet is insecure about that impression and easily wounded in his pride—such a man loses the proper, purely inner stance in relation to his own body. He becomes awkward, ‘unwieldy,’ and does not know what to do with his hands and feet. This occurs because an indeterminate other intrudes upon his movements and gestures.²⁹

Like other Conradian characters—most notably Lord Jim—who have lost the ‘inner stance’, the narrator would revert to an aesthetic modality of consciousness. In order to recover a sense of his own selfhood, he would try to objectify and ‘author’ himself exotopically as an ‘other’, an object of perception, a hero in a text—whole, autonomous, and clearly delineated. He would need, in other words, to devise a human mirror for himself.

With Leggatt's arrival on board, the human mirror materializes. There is very little in the narrated events to justify the sense of inexorable fate, the mysterious coincidences, and the suggestions of the uncanny with which the narrative is so heavily fraught. These effects are produced entirely by the narrator's insistence on the bond of doubleness which seems to exist, a priori, between himself and the fugitive. Both men are young and similarly built; they have both been to the same school and are members of the same social class. But the resemblance ends there, and would certainly not justify the assumption of doubleness or the structural symmetry which is so heavy-handedly imposed on the narrative.³⁰ The narrator's observation of the general physical resemblance between himself and his ‘double’ is suspiciously overblown:

He had concealed his damp body in a sleeping suit of the same grey-stripe pattern as the one I was wearing and followed me like my double on the poop. Together we moved right aft, barefooted, silent. (100)

My sleeping suit was just right for his size. (100)

The shadowy, dark head, like mine, seemed to nod imperceptively above the ghostly gray of my sleeping-suit. It was, in the night, as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the depth of a sombre and immense mirror.

(101)

A few minutes after their first encounter, the narrator begins to refer to Leggatt—with no qualifying quotation marks in the text—as ‘my double’, my ‘other self’, the ‘secret sharer’, etc. (104, 105, 109, 111, 114, 115 ff.). It is precisely that insistence, the ‘overkill’ effect of the narrative, which calls for a suspicious reading and produces what appears to be a generic ambiguity in the text.³¹ But the sense of the uncanny which looms so large over the story is epistemological rather than ontological: Leggatt, the man, is real enough. It is the perception of Leggatt as the Captain's double which corrodes the substance of the tale.

The projection of identities goes both ways. The narrator Captain looks at his ‘double’ believing that ‘anybody would have taken him for me’ (115), superimposing this fabricated interchangeability on his dealings with the skipper of the Sephora and with his own crew (119-20). The more interesting and less explicit process which takes place is the Captain's willed identification with the fugitive. It is, in fact, he who takes on the other man's identity; it is he who becomes, in fact, the mirror of the other so that the other might become his ‘double’. In his need to objectify himself, to view himself from without in the absence of that ‘inner stance’ which is the necessary condition for all action, he fabricates and literally stage-manages this doubleness as he begins to mime the gestures of the other.

He rested a hand on the end of the skylight … and all that time did not stir a limb, so far as I could see. … One of my hands, too, rested on the end of the sky-light; neither did I stir a limb, so far as I knew. It occurred to me that if old ‘Bless my soul—you don't say so’ were to put his head up the companion and catch sight of us, he would think he was seeing double, or imagine himself come upon a scene of weird witchcraft; the strange captain having a quiet confabulation by the wheel with his own gray ghost.

(103)

Like Gentleman Brown in Lord Jim, another fictitious double who preceded Leggatt by a decade, the outlaw intuitively plays on this assumed doubleness, and the Captain narrator readily and uncritically responds:

You know well enough the sort of ill-conditioned snarling cur—He appealed to me as if our experiences had been as identical as our clothes. And I knew well enough the pestiferous danger of such a character [i.e. the dead man] where there are no means of legal repression. And I knew well enough that my double there was no homicidal ruffian. I did not think of asking him for details, and he told me the story roughly in brusque, disconnected sentences. I needed no more. I saw it all going on as though I were myself inside that other sleeping-suit.

(101-2)

Neither a reliable character witness nor an impartial judge in his readiness and need to acquit Leggatt, the narrator seems to be oddly insensitive to the distinct note of callousness in the other's account:

It's clear that I meant business, because I was holding him by the throat still when they picked us up. He was black in the face. … I wonder they didn't fling me overboard after getting the carcass of their precious ship-mate out of my fingers.

(103)

Though clearly aware of the temperamental and moral disparity between the fugitive and himself, the narrator Captain chooses to suppress it. But his occasional slips indicate that he is, in fact, conscious of Leggatt's potential for violence.³² His reaction to a near discovery (when the steward enters the bathroom unexpectedly and there seems to be no way to avert an encounter) indicates the extent of his self-deception: ‘My voice dies in my throat and I went stony all over. I expected to hear a yell of surprise and terror, and made a movement, but had not the strength to get on my legs. Had my second self taken the poor wretch by the throat?’ (120). This is clearly at odds with his repeated assertion that ‘my double there was no homicidal ruffian.’

When the skipper of the Sephora comes on board, the narrator meets his tenacious adherence to the law with derision:

His obscure tenacity on that point had it something incomprehensible and a little awful; something, as it were, mystical, quite apart from his anxiety. … Seven-and-thirty years at sea, of which over twenty of immaculate command, and the last fifteen in the Sephora seemed to have laid him under some pitiless obligation.

(119)

The young Captain narrator cannot see that he too should have been under the same ‘pitiless obligation’ which comes with the position of command. Having invested his sense of selfhood in this ‘double’, the narrator reduces the terms of the ethical dilemma into a bogus equation:

It was all very simple. The same strung-up force which had given twenty-four men a chance, at least, for their lives, had, in a sort of recoil, crushed an unworthy mutinous existence.

(125)

Eggenschwiler notes that his equation is reversed at the end of the story, when the narrator risks the lives of the crew to save the life of one man.³³ But this equation is unacceptable even if one chooses to believe Leggatt's version of the murder. If the supreme value of the communal ethos is that of discipline (hence the unworthiness of the ‘mutinous existence’ and the justification for the killing), isn't Leggatt himself guilty of mutiny in his refusal to let the law take its course?

In his need to ‘find refuge in the other and to assemble—out of the other—the scattered pieces of [his] own givenness, in order to produce from them a parasitically consummated unity’ (‘Author and Hero’, 126), the narrator has trapped himself within the aestheticized mode of consciousness. The other has become, in Bakhtin's terms again, a ‘usurping double’, forcing the narrator to articulate a position in conflict with the communal ethos to which he is committed by vocation. The fabricated mirror-relationship born out of the psychic need for self-objectification now becomes a question of what Bakhtin would call ‘axiological authority’. What, we should ask, is the source of axiological authority for the subject who is inevitably constructed within the narrative of the other? What kind of agency may be assumed if there is no such thing as an autonomous, sovereign topos of subjectivity? What guarantees do we have for the benevolence of the authorial Other?

Though fully aware of the seductions of aesthetics, Bakhtin, unlike many of his Postmodernist successors, views the need for a meta-narrative as incurable.³⁴ In his search for an anchor which would lend some axiological validity to the narrative of the other, the ‘authored’ or ‘aestheticized’ mode of being, which he recognizes as an inevitable constitutive movement of subjectivity, Bakhtin makes a rather wobbly distinction between the ‘fabricated’ Other whose axiological authority is entirely fortuitous and spurious, and the Other as the potential communal narrator of one's story:

What renders the other an authoritative and inwardly intelligible author of my life is the fact that this other is not fabricated by me for self serving purposes, but represents an axiological force which I confirm in reality and which actually determines my life.³⁵

The other who possessed me does not come into conflict with my I-for-myself, so long as I do not sever myself axiologically from the world of others, so long as I perceive myself within a collective (a family, a nation, civilized mankind). In this case the axiological position of the other within me is authoritative for me; he can narrate the story of my life and I shall be in full inner agreement with him. So long as my life proceeds in indissoluble unity with the collective other, it is interpreted, constructed, and organized … in the plane of another's possible consciousness of my life; my life is perceived and constructed as a possible story that might be told about it by the other to still others (to descendants). My consciousness of a possible narrator, the axiological context of a possible narrator, organizes my acts, thoughts, and feelings where, with respect to their value, they are involved in the world of others.³⁶

But neither the voice of the communal narrator nor his axiological authority are strong enough to trigger an anagnorisis. The apparent turning-point in the story is reached when the time comes for the ship to get under way and for the Captain to take action. To understand the sense of paralysis which overwhelms him at this point, we should turn once again to the Bakhtinian diagnosis of what he describes as the loss of the ‘inner stance’ in terms of a bodily action performed in space:

Inner sensation of self remains the foundation—the proper world of action—during intense external action: it dissolves within itself or subordinates to itself everything that is externally expressed, and it does not allow anything external to complete itself in a stable intuitable given either within or without myself. Focusing on one's own exterior in performing an action may even prove to be fatal, a force that destroys the action. Thus when one has to perform a difficult and risky jump, it is extremely dangerous to follow the movement of one's own feet: one has to collect oneself from within and to calculate one's own movements—again from within. … The external image or configuration of an action and its external, intuitable relation to the objects of the outside world are never given to the performer of the action himself, and if they do irrupt into the action-performing consciousness, they inevitably turn into curbs or ‘dead points’ of action.³⁷

If we may translate the spatial into an axiological frame of reference, as Bakhtin clearly does, if becomes clear that the Captain narrator has reached the ‘dead point’ of action.

It's to no commander's advantage to be suspected of ludicrous eccentricities. But I was also more seriously affected. There are to a seaman certain words, gestures, that should in given conditions come as naturally, as instinctively as the wincing of a menaced eye. A certain order should spring to his lips without thinking; a certain sign should get itself made, so to speak, without reflection. But all unconscious alertness had abandoned me.

(126)

In order to set himself free from a psychic paralysis, the narrator Captain paradoxically needs to take the assumption of doubleness to its ultimate conclusion. The floppy white hat which he puts on the exposed head of his ‘double’ becomes a metaphoric vehicle for that cast-off identity.

All at once my strained, yearning stare distinguished a white object floating … I recognized my own floppy hat. … 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. … The hat was meant to save his homeless head from the dangers of the sun. And now—behold—it was saving the ship, by serving me for a mark to help out the ignorance of my strangeness.

(142)

Miraculously and improbably, the trope of identity becomes a mark of distinction. The discarded hat is no longer a vehicle for transposed identities, but a distinct physical object whose very separateness from the perceiving subject turns it into a reference point outside the self, an aid marking the position of the ship, enabling the narrator to recover his subject position as a member of the community.

If one feels uncomfortable with this triumphant and neat conclusion of the narrative, it is no doubt because of the double bind which seems to operate here. The young Captain narrator seems at last to reject the aestheticizing fantasy of selfhood, to realign himself with the voice of the authorial/authoritative collective other. But at the very point where he sets out to exorcize the double, the narrative swerves once again in the direction of the uncanny: the ship is not saved through his navigational skills but by a most unlikely miracle, which belongs to the same order of phenomena as the appearance of the mysterious double, the improbable avoidance of discovery, and other projections of fantasy. The exorcism of the usurping double is not a truly liberating act; it is little more than an empty gesture performed by a narrator who is still deeply captivated in the realm of the aesthetic.

The extrapolation of subjectivity from the textual to the biographical site requires some theoretical orientation regarding the vexed question of authorial presence and representation and the relationship between the writing and the written subject. As in Under Western Eyes, the form of authorial presence which permeates the text and overruns its boundaries is ‘heterobiographical’ precisely in that it does not represent an intact kernel of selfhood but points to the very absence of that kernel, a form of desire for self-presence which is the ultimate metaphysical need. Far from a discovery or a recovery of selfhood through a rite de passage, the text is an abortive gesture towards an empty topos of subjectivity.

The composition of the story has been dated by Keith Carabine, in an admirable feat of critical sleuthing, as the three weeks between the first and the nineteenth of December, 1909. ‘Given the evidence of the manuscripts, we can safely presume Conrad began the story on or just after his fifty-second birthday, December third, and completed the holograph by the fifteenth.’ Carabine adds in a footnote, ‘I favor his birthday if only because Conrad seems to have been fond of symbolic gestures.’³⁸ I would suggest that the full significance of that symbolic gesture is all the more striking when one relates it to Conrad's ‘quest for completeness or inner unity’ and to the ‘tenuousness of [his] sense of self’ as diagnosed by Bernard C. Meyer:

That Conrad was intensely preoccupied by mirrors and reflections needs no emphasis. Undoubtedly his most explicit ‘mirror’ story is “The Secret Sharer” which is, in essence, the story of a double or mirror image of the self. … What is implied in “The Secret Sharer”, and for that matter in all of Conrad's kindred tales, is the complementary role played by the ‘Other’, the double, or the mirror image in rounding out the incomplete self of the protagonist.³⁹

In a letter to William Rothenstein on 15 November 1909, shortly before the writing of “The Secret Sharer”, Conrad wrote: ‘Twenty months have gone already over a novel and now I must finish it—or I am totally undone.’⁴⁰ This is as neat an inversion as any analyst may wish for, as Conrad was to be psychologically ‘undone’ just when he finally did finish the novel. On the completion of Under Western Eyes Conrad had a serious nervous breakdown. The process of writing had opened a crack in his psychic and cultural inner space, that ‘sovereign territory’ he had tried—like his protagonist—to stake out for himself. The tortured, drawn-out process of writing, and Conrad's inability to bring the novel to a close, indicate the enormity of the psychic threat it entailed for the author, the danger which materialized in a psychotic crisis when the novel was finally finished. “The Secret Sharer” was written on the brink of that breakdown as a futile gesture of self-enclosure, a last-ditch attempt to shore up the subject position which had crumbled in the writing of the novel.

Judging by Conrad's reports of a regained ‘sense of confidence’ and a ‘marked mental improvement’ shortly after the completion of the story, it appears that the writing did have a distinctly (albeit temporary) beneficial effect on Conrad's health and state of mind, an effect which is undoubtedly due to at least in part to a sense of accomplishment, but might have something to do with the different relational dynamics set in this short piece.⁴¹ The most interesting letter in this respect is the one written to Pinker on 12 December 1909: ‘I am now feeling as well as I have not felt since the Lord Jim days—which were the last good ones.’⁴² The allusion to Lord Jim is highly significant: Jim is the proto-Conradian character who aestheticizes himself, who perceives himself as a literary hero, and whose failure in action is related to his consciousness of the self as an other.⁴³ On 17 December 1901 Conrad wrote a letter to the painter William Rothenstein:

Here I've been 2 years writing a novel which is not yet finished. Two Years! Of which surely one half has been illness complicated by a terrible moral stress. Imagine yourself painting with the Devil jogging your elbow all the time. … [Conrad apparently refuses Rothenstein's offer to visit him.] I speak to you here as to a second self and thus I cannot conceive you taking it ill. Perhaps I am unreasonable. But to-day in the second week of my 52[nd] year, a failure from the worldly point of view and knowing that there can be no change—that this must go on usque ad finem—I may perhaps be allowed a little unreason.⁴⁴

It was not unusual for Conrad to transpose his fiction into his letters, and the mere use of the phrase ‘second self’ in a letter during the writing of the story is not puzzling in itself. What is more interesting is the relationship which had prompted the use of the expression. Rothenstein was a friend, but he was not closer to Conrad than many others, and surely not closer than Galsworthy, to whom Conrad wrote at the same time. Why, then, did Conrad use this epithet for Rothenstein rather than for his closest friend? I believe that the answer lies in the same need which has prompted the writing of the story. William Rothenstein had painted Conrad's portrait in the summer of 1903, when Conrad was beginning to emerge and receive recognition as a public figure.⁴⁵ Rothenstein had, in Bakhtin's terms, ‘consummated’ Conrad: in painting his portrait he had given him form and substance; he had—quite literally—framed him and fixed his ever-elusive selfhood for the world and for himself to see. Rothenstein must have been for Conrad that other whose excess of vision he needed to regain a sense of a unified subject.

A similar conclusion might be drawn in view of Conrad's references to “The Secret Sharer” in his letters of that time as ‘very characteristic Conrad’ and ‘a good specimen of Conrad’.⁴⁶ This is not merely sales talk. The writer who had more than once fiercely objected to being labelled and tagged as ‘a writer of the sea’ was now setting up a non-existent ‘Conradian’ essence which readers would presumably be able to recognize. Conrad's references to himself in the third person, from ‘outside’, as it were, may be seen as further evidence of this need to objectify and frame his authorial persona. Another interesting document is the letter written by Conrad to Edward Garnett on 5 November 1912, shortly after the publication of the story:

“The Secret Sharer” between you and me is it. Eh? No damned tricks with girls there. Eh? Every word fits, and there is not a single uncertain note. Luck, my boy, pure luck.⁴⁷

This is an odd letter for Conrad to write, not so much in what it says, but in its tonality and rhetoric. The voice we hear sounds entirely out of character. It is not the familiar Conradian voice with its elaborate courtesy and refinement, its careful qualifications and modulations, and its formality, which sometimes borders on stiffness even when writing to friends. What we have here seems to be the voice of another persona: its nearly vulgar bluffness, its deliberate colloqualism, and its emphatic cockiness make it sound like the utterance of a ventriloquist's dummy, a puppet which becomes a character on its own. I believe that this change of voice is another symptom of the author's need to counter the absence of subject position and set up a persona for himself. “The Secret Sharer” is a last-ditch attempt to mend the fences, to enclose and frame the sovereign territory of the self which, as Conrad was to learn very shortly afterwards, is entirely and inescapably permeable.

To conclude this discussion, we should turn once again to the subject in process. The story, I have argued, is both a symptom and a diagnosis. Its symptomatic quality lies in the placebo effect of self-enclosure: the isomorphic relationship between the narrator's spurious attempt to frame and objectify himself through a fabricated mirror image; and the author's abortive attempt to shore up a ‘very characteristic Conrad’ against the invasion of the Eastern other. But the story is also a diagnosis of the role of metaphysics in the dynamics of subjectivity. Metaphysics, to reverse the Derridean formula, is the ether of subjectivity. Taken only one step further, the ‘aesthetic’ modality, the enabling condition for Bakhtin's ‘authored’ subject, can be extended to what is conventionally taken as a metaphysical framework, ‘a powerful point d'appui’ outside the subject.⁴⁸

An aesthetic event can take place only when there are two participants present; it presupposes two noncoinciding consciousnesses. … When the other consciousness is the encompassing consciousness of God, a religious event takes place (prayer, worship, ritual).⁴⁹

A whole, integral human being is the product of the aesthetic, creative point of view and of that point of view alone. … A whole, integral human being presupposes an aesthetically active subiectum situated outside him (we are abstracting from man's religious experience in the present context).⁵⁰

“The Secret Sharer” is indeed a good story with a good moral. But it is not yet another compact version of the Bildungsroman, a coming into one's own.⁵¹ What it offers is a perception of subjectivity as a Möbius strip, where the desire for an illusory kernel of being, an ‘aestheticized’ or ‘authored’ selfhood, traverses and surfaces through an ethical, ‘yet-to-be’ mode of consciousness, which offers no respite from responsibility. The tensile relation between these two modalities may be the missing link in the Postmodernist critique of the transcendental subject. The need for grounding is a concomitant of our innate non-self-sufficiency; it emerges out of our very constitution as discursive, responsive beings, creatures who live on their borderlines. The need to be authored and authorized from without cannot easily be thrown overboard as dead metaphysical ballast. Having lost our moorings, the need for anchorage is still with us.

Notes

1. Jacques Lacan, “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis” (1948). In Ecrits: A Selection (1966), trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977), 23.

2. Bakhtin, “Notes made in 1970-1”, in Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, trans. Vern W. McGee, ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 147.

3. I am referring to a paper given by Prof. Vitali Makhlin at the 7th International Bakhtin conference in Moscow in June 1995, which significantly addressed Bakhtin's work in terms of “a theory which surpasses theoreticism’ and a ‘system which surpasses systematicity”.

4. “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity”, in Art and Answerability: Early Philosophical Essays by M. M. Bakhtin, trans. and notes by Vadim Liapunov, ed. Michael Holquist and Vadim Liapunov; supplement translated by Kenneth Brostrom (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 91.

5. Ibid., 38.

6. “Author and Hero in Aesthetic Activity”, 126.

7. Ibid., 59, italics in source.

8. Ibid., 83; see also 118.

9. Ibid., 86.

10. Ibid., 100; see also 109.

11. “Bakhtin's Homesickness: a Late Reply to Julia Kristeva”, Textual Practice 9, no. 2 (1995), 223-42.

12. “Author and Hero”, 50.

13. Ibid., 35-6.

14. Ibid., 152.

15. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience” (1949), in Ecrits: A Selection, 4.

16. “The family” [1938], quoted in John Muller and and William J. Richardson, Lacan and Language (New York: International Universities Press, 1982), 30. “The Family” is a transitional paper between Lacan's work on paranoia and the paper on the mirror stage, where the clinical observations are extended from the developmental to the ‘ontological’ sphere.

17. Lacan, “The Mirror Stage”, 3.

18. “Author and Hero” 16.

19. Ibid., 14; see also 16.

20. Ibid., 15-16; see also 59-60, 152 on the “usurping double”.

21. Steve Ressler, for example, considers the short story as an “affirmative”, if not altogether problem-free version of the novel and analyses the relationship primarily in terms of thematic compensation: “The Secret Sharer”, he argues, offers hope where Under Western Eyes is irredeemably pessimistic; the narrator of the story is free from the burden of Conradian scepticism or the moral pressure which weigh Razumov down; and the emphasis in the short story is on courageous, self-authenticating action rather than on moral consciousness. “Conrad's ‘The Secret Sharer’: Affirmation of Action”, Conradiana, 16, no. 3 (1984), 195-214.

22. M. M. Bakhtin, “Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book” (1961), in Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics (1929; 2nd ed. 1963), ed. and trans. Caryl Emerson, introd. Wayne C. Booth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), Appendix II, 287.

23. Cedric Watts, “The Mirror-tale: an Ethico-structural Analysis of Conrad's ‘The Secret Sharer’”, Critical Quarterly, 19, no. 3 (1977), 36.

24. For a sampling of these “suspicious” readings, see Cedric Watts, “The Mirror-tale”. David Eggenschwiler, “Narcissus in ‘The Secret Sharer’: a Secondary Point of View”, Conradiana, 11, no. 1 (1979): 23-40; Michael Murphy, “‘The Secret Sharer’: Conrad's Turn of the Winch”, Conradiana 18, no. 3 (1986), 193-200.

25. James Hansford, ‘Closing, Enclosure and Passage in “The Secret Sharer”, The Conradian, 15, no. 1 (1990), 30-55.

26. In his reading of the story, Jeremy Hawthorn has rightly noted the “split between perceiving and perceived self”. Multiple Personality and the Disintegration of Literary Character (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), 85. It is, I believe, an observation that can apply not only to the process within the text, but to the dynamics of subjectivity “outside” it.

27. Bakhtin, “Notes Toward a Reworking of the Dostoevsky Book”, 299.

28. The narrator's pretence of deafness in his exchange with the skipper of the Sephora (118-19) may also be related to this “undoing” of Under Western Eyes. If Razumov's literal deafness marks the ultimate invasion of the other's discourse (as literary clairvoyance is often accompanied by a literal blindness), the narrator's pretence recoils on him as it ironically serves to accentuate the impotence of his willed self-enclosure.

29. “Author and Hero”, 59-60.

30. This has been discussed in detail by Eggenschwiler in “Narcissus in ‘The Secret Sharer’”.

31. In his discussion of the doppelgänger motif in the story Paul Coates argues that “‘The Secret Sharer’” is “‘a key example of the way in which the transition from realism to modernism generates uncertainty in writers”. Conrad, he writes “cannot decide whether his doubling should be discreetly latent (realistic) or manifest (proto-modernist); driven towards the modernist problematic by the independent logic of his subject-matter, he shies away from direct confrontation with it. His work is laboured and indecisive, hovering between realism and fantasy, unable either to unite them to separate them”. The Realist Fantasy: Fiction and Reality since Clarissa (New York: St Martin's Press, 1983), 115.

32. Murphy rightly notes that narrator wilfully suppresses the Skipper's different version of the incident on board the Sephora, judging it “unworthwhile” to record it. Murphy, “Conrad's Turn of the Winch”, 196.

33. David Eggenschwiler, “Narcissus in ‘The Secret Sharer’”, 32, 35.

34. The recognition that “a person's consciousness awakens wrapped in another's consciousness” is one of the consistent themes of Bakhtin's work down to his very last writings. (“Notes made in 1970-71”, 138). For an illuminating discussion of this disturbing aspect of Bakhtin's work see Caryl Emerson's “Problems with Baxtin's Poetics”, Slavic and East European Journal, 32, no. 4 (1988), 503-25; and Ann Jefferson, “Bodymatters: Self and Other in Bakhtin, Sartre and Barthes”, in Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, ed. Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 152-77.

35. “Author and Hero”, 153.

36. “Author and Hero”, 155. The smooth assimilation of Bakhtin into the Post-modernist canon is somewhat incongruous in view of his explicit ideological position on this issue, which is decidedly on the conservative side. A strikingly similar view of the narrative of communality as a substitute for metaphysical narratives has been offered by Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue (1981; 2nd ed., London: Duckworth, 1985).

37. “Author and Hero”, 44-5.

38. Keith Carabine, “‘The Secret Sharer’: a Note on the Dates of its Composition”. Conradiana, 19, no. 3 (1987), 210, 212.

39. Bernard C. Meyer, Joseph Conrad: A Psychoanalytic Biography (Princeton: NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 321.

40. Joseph Conrad, Collected letters, ed. Frederick R. Karl and Lawrence Davis, vol. 4 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 290.

41. A letter to Galsworthy on 10 Dec. 1909: “I have been working rather well of late. I took off last week to write a short story. Razumov is really nearing the end … I am aware of a marked mental improvement”, Collected Letters, vol. 4, 294. A letter to Galsworthy on 14 Dec. 1909: “I've just finished the story—12000 words in ten days. Not so bad. I had to lay aside Razumov for a bit tho’ I didn't think it would take 10 days. No great harm done tho! Doing something easy has given me confidence”, Collected Letters, vol. 4, 296.

42. Collected Letters, vol. 4, 298.

43. For a relevant discussion of Lord Jim see Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 34-47.

44. Collected Letters, vol. 4, 299- 300.

45. Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle trans. Halina Carroll-Najder (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 292.

46. A letter to Pinker, undated but probably written on Wednesday, 15 Dec. 1909, Collected Letters, vol. 4, 298; a letter to Perceval Gibbon, written on 19 Dec. 1909, Collected Letters, vol. 4, 301.

47. Letters from Joseph Conrad, ed. Edward Garnett (London: Nonesuch Press, 1928), 263.

48. “Author and Hero”, 31.

49. “Author and Hero”, 22.

50. Ibid., 82-3.

51. Paul Coates argues that “Conrad's story is too ready to give hostages to the moralism that sees in its merely a rite de passage; he interprets the decomposition of the personality as merely a temporary phase—teething troubles of the captain's first command—detached from the deeper level at which there exist fundamental rifts in the structure of character. Conrad hides the trail that leads from his captain-hero to the self-conscious narrators of modernist fiction” (116). I believe that this critique should be directed at the interpreters of the story rather than at the author. Josiane Paccaud's-Huguet's discussion, to take just one instance, is couched in Lacanian terminology, but concludes on a note which is totally alien to Lacan's work, with a presentation of the resolution as an “achievement of selfhood”. “Under the Other's Eye: Conrad's ‘The Secret Sharer’”. The Conradian, 12, no. 1 (1987), 62.