SOURCE: Thomas, Mark Ellis. “Doubling and Difference in Conrad: ‘The Secret Sharer,’ Lord Jim, and The Shadow Line.” Conradiana 27, no. 3 (1995): 222-34.

One way Joseph Conrad rebelled against the (apparently unruffled) realism of the nineteenth century and contributed to the developing modernist aesthetic was to revaluate the doubling device of Gothic romance, lately adopted into the realm of novelistic conventions, especially in the popular novels of sensation. In revamping Gothic character doubling, Conrad puts the device to some new uses, to convey his deeply ironic vision of reality. In this way Conrad exemplifies a shift toward philosophical skepticism that characterized the late Victorian period and grew into existentialist modernism. Returning difference rather than similarity, Conrad's doubles are an important means of representing a world in which patterns of meaning are sometimes shown to be hollow and worthless. By way of discussing what it means that the signal relationship between Conrad's doubles is their difference, I shall identify the secret sharing in “The Secret Sharer,” note how doubles operate in Lord Jim as a crucial means of misprision, and finally discuss Conrad's late reversion to doubling in The Shadow Line.

Conrad reverses the polarity of the repetition-of-similarity that characterizes Gothic doubling, such as we see in James Hogg's 1824 novel, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, and in stories by Hawthorne, Poe, de Maupassant, and Chamisso. Conrad shows a clear “change from earlier ways of representing division and doubling” (Woodring 208): his doubles return difference. The trouble is, some of his fictional characters do not know that, and they pay highly for their misinterpretation. For them, final success or failure depends on whether the double is ultimately rejected or accepted, respectively. Of course, Conrad complicates what may sound like a false dilemma; in Jim, for example, he creates a character whose belief in symbolism and patterns of fate renders him incapable of avoiding a tragic and ultimately self-destructive situation, in which he interprets himself as having a double. Employing the doubling device ironically, Conrad “has made his narrator eagerly seize upon the concept of the double and use it, not to understand himself more completely, but to reinforce his initial attitudes toward himself and those he fears and mistrusts” (Eggenschwiler 33-34). It may be an understatement to say that Conradian doubling does not signal a healthy psychological self-interest in a character. Conrad's doubles fasten onto similarity as the salient factor in their doubling relationships and so ignore the more important differences. Furthermore, the act of misinterpretation functions self-reflexively in Conrad's work, insistently raising questions about the nature of interpretation and aesthetics.

To begin with “The Secret Sharer,” let me take issue with the commonplace reading that centers on identifying the novice captain and the stow-away, Leggatt, as doubles. I suspect that most readers direct their attention to that overt doubling between the captain and his secret guest. But Leggatt is a decoy, an obvious double that screens the latent and more significant doubling of the narrator with his earlier self. In focusing on Leggatt, readers re-enact the mistake of the captain, whose “striking impression of similarity or even identity between himself and Leggatt blurs the moral issue” confronting him (Lothe 62). I suggest that in this story of initiation—especially insofar as it is a story of initiation—the crucial doubling relationship exists between the captain and the narrator: that is, between the teller of the story and the man he was twenty years earlier. This is the important, widely overlooked doubling in Conrad's story.

The fact that the captain and the narrator are so significantly separated by time and narrative argues against identifying them as one and the same, single identity. The story is set twenty years in the past, so a critical understanding of the story grounded in Wayne Booth's familiar terms of a dramatized narrator would be misdirected here. The temporal distance between the narrator and the captain is simply too great to consider them identical.

The captain and the narrator are also separated by the narration, in the sense that the act of saying “I” creates a double of one's identity. That simple speech act mimetically represents a self in language at the same time it constructs an identity at the site of narrative enunciation. There are two selves in one enunciated “I”: the speaker and the referent. Critics including Jakob Lothe, despite the fact that he notes that “most critics of “The Secret Sharer” have dealt with the captain as a character,” and even acknowledges that “the functions and characteristics of the story's ‘I’ as narrator and character are not wholly compatible” (59), yet somehow allow the two to slip into one. Critical attention to questions about point of view sometimes cater to an impulse common to many interpretations of “The Secret Sharer,” namely the desire to locate a reliable authorial position at the story's center. But Conrad's story, while having a lot to do with point of view, finally frustrates the critical attempts to center its form.

To separate the captain and the narrator recognizes the great importance of the act of narration. A broader understanding of “The Secret Sharer” should result from recognizing it as a spoken narrative, since the tale bears the mark of an oral tradition. Mikhail Bakhtin's trenchant formulation regarding novelistic discourse holds true for short stories as well, that “the fundamental condition, that which makes a novel a novel, that which is responsible for its stylistic uniqueness, is the speaking person and his discourse” (332). Edward Said agrees that “The Secret Sharer,” like all “narratives originate[s] in the hearing and telling presence of people to each other” (“Conrad” 120). In this way, how “The Secret Sharer” means is, in the words of Peter Brooks: “dialogic in nature, located in the interstices of story and frame, born of the relationship between tellers and listeners. Meaning is indeed the implicit dialogue itself, the ‘set’ of the teller's message toward his listener as much as toward the matter of his tale.” (260)¹

In more ways than one, Conrad's unnamed narrator is a secret sharer. He shares the secret of his first command with us readers, his invisible audience. But if the definition of a secret keys on its concealment, it would seem to resist being shared. And in fact, the sharing, not the secret, carries more weight in Conrad's story. Critics who continue to look for the secret are misled; it is not the secret but the sharing of the tale that should claim our critical attention: “meaning will never lie in the summing-up but only in transmission” (Brooks 260). Another way of putting this point is that the meaning of the story is an event, and is not objective.

In sharing this story Conrad demonstrates several ideas beyond the limited interpretations of various of his characters. The significant contrasts between the captain and Leggatt (e.g., Leggatt kills one to save his crew, whereas the captain reverses the odds and risks his crew to save Leggatt) seriously undermine the captain's interpretation of them as doubles, for example. Conrad adds to his portrayal of the difficulties of interpretation with the parable of the scorpion. This brief, narrative digression tells of an interpretive doubling that fails to make sense of its problem, extending the pattern of Conrad's self-deceived doubles. This mysterious tangent also comments reflexively on the reader's role as a detective of sorts. What more fitting double for the careful, critical reader than the chief mate, whose “dominant trait was to take all things into earnest consideration”:

[The chief mate] was of a painstaking turn of mind. As he used to say, he “liked to account to himself” for practically everything that came in his way, down to a miserable scorpion he had found in his cabin a week before. The why and the wherefore of that scorpion—how it got on board and came to select his room rather than the pantry (which was a dark place and more what a scorpion would be partial to), and how on earth it managed to drown itself in the inkwell of his writing desk—had exercised him infinitely.

(Conrad, “Sharer” [“The Secret Sharer”] 651)

This parable shows the mate as both a writer and an interpreter—like the first-person narrator. In describing the mate's thinking about the scorpion, Conrad focuses on his method of interpretation. Operating as an analogue, the parable presents the difficulties Conrad's doubles pose for interpretation.

All these stories involve narrators engaged in the process of making sense of their earlier experiences, and the parable of the scorpion figuratively represents their (and our) critical activity. The first-person speakers who participate in the action of their stories are, presumably, learning something new about the significance of their own experiences through the process of relating them in narrative form. (Like doubling, narrative lends form to otherwise formless events.)

The chief mate's powers of observation and deduction are attested to when the second mate confirms his hypothesis that the Sephora is recently arrived from home and that her deep keel necessitates waiting for a high spring tide to cross the bar. Faced with the scorpion's improbable presence in his cabin, the mate tries to understand by putting himself in the place of the scorpion. Where aboard ship would I go if I were a scorpion, he seems to ask himself. (Why would a scorpion search for its cover of Conradian darkness in ink? Who knows?)

But the mate's rudimentary interpretive technique—to assume an essential similarity with the object of deduction, or desire—to double the Other, in short—proves inadequate for the situation. This doubling act of imaginative identification fails to explain the facts. The scorpion apparently thinks, if at all, somewhat differently from the mate. Like a methodical detective, the chief mate deduces along the lines of probability; accordingly, because he looks for a rational explanation to an irrational event, he is bemused. Yet, as I have already noted, the mate is not just an interpreter. He is also a writer; the scorpion drowns in his inkwell. Is Conrad making some statement about the irrationality of art? Does the mate's conundrum represent the author's own, misguided impulse to identify with the fictional characters who spring from his inkwell? Since Conrad returns to tell much the same story in The Shadow Line, his later re-reworking of biographical material suggests that, for Conrad, doubles perform psychologically as well as aesthetically to bring order to a series of events whose ultimate meaning remains elusive.

It is characteristic of Conrad's fiction to raise intriguingly vague questions about the nature of existence; Ian Watt describes this trait as “intense and sustained thoughtfulness”: “We surely also sense in Conrad's narratives an intense and sustained thoughtfulness, whose larger tenor may indeed, as Forster says, sometimes seem obscure, but whose seriousness nevertheless persuades us that we are in the presence of something beyond mere ‘opinions’” (Watt, “Story and Idea” 120). Add to this insight the point that Conrad's tendency to raise unanswerable questions reflects his historical context:

Conrad was born into an age of doubt, and the climate of opinion became increasingly skeptical as the century drew to an end. In England, as Walter Houghton has written, Victorians were ‘uncertain about what theory to accept or what faculty of the mind to rely on; but it never occurred to them to doubt their capacity to arrive at truth.’ After 1870, however, with the growing influence of scientific and historical attitudes, as well as the modern disciplines of sociology, anthropology, and psychology, ‘faith in the existence of ultimate truths’ and in the mind's ability to apprehend them was seriously undermined by a deeply skeptical relativism.

(Wollaeger 7-8)

If “The Secret Sharer” is about the emergence of an adult identity (and doubling necessarily raises issues of identity), it links identity to (inside/outside) issues of relating to one's past and raises questions about how one lives with others. It is interesting how this dialectic of self and society, a familiar element of Victorian fiction, is complicated by Conrad's ambiguity. Partly due to Conrad's penchant for vaguely framing individual issues on a cosmic scale, “The Secret Sharer” exhibits an ambiguity that continues to defy critical attempts to fix, or locate, its meaning.² The hint of modernist irony some readers find, for instance, in the young captain's unquestioning welcome of a stranger who is a self-confessed killer, invites a search for an authorial center, whose perspective would frame the irony and limit the range of possible inferences. But should this center be the captain, or the narrator? Does Leggatt represent the ideal “morality of the sea” (Simmons 210; cf. Curley)? Or is Captain Archbold the moral center of the tale (see O'Hara)? And in a story where a single “I” constructs both the captain and the narrator, is such a unity of identity possible? The impossibility of situating an agent of unimpeachable authority renders any point of reference unstable, and the range of possible meanings increases while the means of deciding among them disappears. All this would seem to have a delegitimizing effect on any particular act of interpretation. If so, it appears that Conrad's story admonishes its readers not to rest easy with any one interpretation, but like the mate, to exercise infinitely their interpretive muscles.

In Lord Jim the distinction between narrator and protagonist is much easier to maintain, though some may question whether Marlow and Jim also verge on a doubling relationship. The novel features a full complement of characters, ranging from Little Bob Stanton and the French lieutenant to Dain Waris and Cornelius, whose salient relationship to Jim is their difference from Jim, not their similarity to him. In short, they are foils, not doubles. These faux doublings do not discredit doubles as an important critical device for reading the novel, however. Doubles are a part of the novel's beginnings, as we see in Watt's description of Lord Jim's “Composition and Sources,” which contains its own interesting sets of repetitions. One of the main sources of Jim's character is “a series of memoirs … all of them largely based on the writings of Sir James Brooke” (Watt, Conrad 267). The series of repetitions extends further, for “Brooke was himself a confessed imitator of Stamford Raffles,” founder of Singapore (Watt, Conrad 267-68). This coincidental pattern informs and reinforces the pattern of doubling in the novel itself: the almost genealogical line from the old Scot Alexander M'Neil to Stein to Jim.

No, the problem in Lord Jim is not that doubles do not exist—they do—but instead that they form the basis of a false hermeneutic for Jim himself. Jim recognizes the repetitions around him, but his interpretation of them inadequately centers on similarities and fatally disregards differences. It may be that Jim is predisposed to perceive doubles because he has been trained to see them by his early reading of romantic adventure stories. Apparently, some “light holiday literature” contributes to his choosing the sea as his vocation, and aboard ship he would “live in his mind the sea-life of light literature … always an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book … he loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary achievements. They were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality” (ch. 1; 7, 17). Here, as the novel prepares for some of its eventual ironies, we learn of Jim's capacity for self-delusion. Jim is not alone, however, in his misperception of doubling.

Witness Jim's relationship with Captain Brierly and his later negotiations with Gentleman Brown. Big Brierly was “‘one of those lucky fellows who know nothing of indecision, much less of self-mistrust’” (ch. 6; 43). Accustomed to action rather than reflection, Brierly sits “exasperated” at Jim's trial (ch. 6; 52). His exasperation is not aimed at the defendant, however. Like Marlow, he responds sympathetically to Jim: “‘Why are we tormenting that young chap?’ he asked. This question chimed in … well to the tolling of a certain thought of mine …” (ch. 6; 49). (Brierly's suggestion that he and Marlow instigate Jim's escape brings Marlow to consider for the first time that Jim's submission to the court of inquiry requires an admirable degree of courage.)

In marked contrast to Jim, Brierly “had saved lives at sea” (ch. 6; 43). Yet he commits suicide. Marlow supposes that in the courtroom, “he was probably holding silent inquiry into his own case” (chap 6; 44). Apparently, Brierly finds something in Jim's case that forces him for the first time to reflect, and he “takes the Conradian virtue of sympathetic identification to a fatal extreme” (Wollaeger 87). Misperceiving himself as a potential repetition of Jim's case, and unaccustomed to reflection and “self-mistrust,” Brierly suffers a devastating effect from his suspicion. In a sense, Brierly's private guilt and punishment come from a dread of repetition.

Many critics have noticed that Jim's acceptance of death results from his having seen in Gentleman Brown a repetition of his own situation. Gentleman Brown repeats Jim's questions back to him. Giving his own name, he adds, “‘What's yours?’” By returning identity, he puts them on the same plane: “‘We are all equal before death’” (ch. 41; 274). The question that gives Brown the most leverage is “‘What made you come here?’”; it increases in importance and expands in its implications as Brown repeats it: “‘And what did you come for?’” (ch. 41; 274, 275). Jim's unvocalized answer to this question raises in his mind and the reader's the spectre of the Patna, and this recollection weakens his bargaining position.

But Jim's negotiations are already doomed when he fails to recognize Brown's irreducible difference from himself. Brown's reference to his sense of responsibility to the men in his ship forges the link of sameness; it stops Jim, who “stood thinking for a while” before asking the question of what brought him (read “them”) here to begin with. This question repeats and revises the earlier “What made you come here?” Now their shared isolation implies penance. They are there, Jim's question suggests, because they are guilty: what had Brown “done … to be hazed about so” (ch. 41; 276). Brown's answer, that he has come here because he is afraid of prison, is a blustery evasion with just the right appearance of honesty; he could not have known the sympathetic chord it would strike in his romantic interrogator.

Jim originally misinterprets Brown because he focuses on their similarity. Brown's subsequent treachery requires Jim to reinterpret Brown (and himself, since he has accepted Brown's gambit that they are similar), and then Jim perceives that he has made a mistake in thinking that a white man once fallen from his position of responsibility can ever completely reinstate himself as trustworthy. In tragic fashion the force of this reinterpretation comes down upon his own head, because he still has not abandoned the premise that he and Brown are similar in some fundamental way: “Jim cannot accept Brown as both a version of himself and as wholly other” (Wollaeger 117). Jim's fatally mistaken premise leads only to his death.

What is crucial to note in the cases of Brierly and Jim is that their disastrous ends do not come about solely because they have seen something awful in their hidden selves. Instead, it is their perception of an echo of themselves, as it were, that robs their existence of meaning. They have seen their potential for sameness but failed to discern or give adequate emphasis to the differences between their characters that give them individual meaning. The repetition each sees in his respective nemesis entangles him in a series of infinite regressions of one to the other that irrevocably destabilizes his sense of self. Each man loses his integrity, in the sense of the ability to integrate the identity's variety. The loss of integrity in this sense leaves them brittle, lacking the adaptability that might have come from repetition of difference. Feeling fixed by static repetition of sameness, Jim and Brierly self-de(con)struct in a double bind. Even their escape from fate paradoxically requires a fatalistic choice, as death, the ultimate sameness, is the only alternative they see to living a doubled life.

Marlow's famous summing up of Jim as “one of us” (ch. 5; 33), seen in light of my argument about Conradian characters who define themselves in terms of others, suggests that Marlow is unable to come to terms with what he thinks of Jim precisely because he also sees himself in the other man. The novel's repetitionary negotiations of similarity and difference operate to no clearer advantage for Marlow than for any other of Conrad's characters (or readers).³ Thus, Conrad's repetitionary structure in Lord Jim is a modernist means of conveying the utter unknowability of another person, showing that Marlow's narration is scuttled in its somewhat Victorian attempt to glean ethical, moral, and perhaps aesthetic significance from its presentation of Jim.⁴

In turning to The Shadow Line, we again confront some of the difficulties that faced us in “The Secret Sharer” regarding the identity of the narrator and the protagonist. These two fictions feature problematic first-person narration, which itself may seem to be a form of doubling. Is it important, or even possible, to know if this protagonist is the young Conrad? I find that the already obscured issues associated with doubling are only muddied further by much of the biographically oriented criticism on Conrad and its specious claims of ontological priority (il n'y a pas d'hors-texte). The stories themselves demonstrate the importance of focusing on critical differences, which I have already shown divide the protagonist from the narrator in “The Secret Sharer.” I shall apply the same distinction to the narrator and the protagonist of The Shadow Line, but first I should address whether the parallels between the two works have anything to do with the other repetitions under discussion.

Remarking on the numerous, striking parallels between The Shadow Line and Conrad's life and works, critics have sometimes noted that the narrator of The Shadow Line seems to be the same as in “The Secret Sharer,” “Falk,” and “A Smile of Fortune” (Ingram 227) and that The Shadow Line, “The End of the Tether,” and “Falk” tell the same story (Sherry 213). Many seize on Conrad's letter stating that “the whole thing [The Shadow Line] is exact autobiography” (Ingram 83). I recognize the extent to which The Shadow Line reworks Conrad's earlier material, biographical as well as artistic, but at the same time I heed Said's caution against just the sort of naive identifications that spell disaster for Conrad's characters: “Yet, if the preceding tales are recollections and interpretations of past experience, reworkings of it, The Shadow Line is a reworking of not only a single past experience, but also of the whole experience contained in the other works” (Said, Joseph Conrad 166).

The fact that Conrad reworks familiar themes with familiar devices in The Shadow Line may be our cue to some critical difference. Given the many likenesses between The Shadow Line and “The Secret Sharer,” what sets the latter story apart from the earlier? The important differences between “The Secret Sharer” and The Shadow Line lie in their narration, beginning with their narrators and the most significant difference, that the two men are divided in their regard of their doubles. “The Secret Sharer” captain welcomes Leggatt; his counterpart in The Shadow Line struggles against his double. As in “The Secret Sharer” and even in Lord Jim, in The Shadow Line doubling participates in both the beguiling illusion of symmetrical fates and the code of professional ethics so important to Conrad's moral purpose.

Clearly, like Lord Jim and “The Secret Sharer,” The Shadow Line tells a coming-of-age story. Less clear is the way in which, also like the other tales, The Shadow Line depicts problematic attempts at interpretation. As I have said, Conradian doubling is red herring, a false hermeneutic trail, constituting part of the test of maturity each of these of Conrad's heroes undergoes. Decidedly unlike the other two heroes, the captain in The Shadow Line resists the doubling that others around him (and even, at times, the narrative discourse itself) seek to impose on him. The Shadow Line represents his resistance against interpretation and the role of doubling in that resistance.

Specifically, The Shadow Line's young captain struggles to reject the notion that the dead captain's spirit, or his curse, holds any doubling influence over himself or any power over his ship. Significantly, for the critical reader as well, the aboriginal appeal of symmetry must be resisted; once again, doubling is a key to misunderstanding. One reason for this may be Conrad's deep philosophical skepticism: “The dissolving identities of Conrad's characters project in fictional form Hume's dismantling of the stable Cartesian cogito as a nexus of shifting relations and perceptions” (Wollaeger 13). Conrad's doubling frustrates interpretations based on similitude, and his repetitionary narrative negotiations favor difference rather than similarity, because his stories question the basis of a solid, unified self. Perhaps the self, like narrative meaning, is a process, an event everchanging in time.

Accordingly, as an initiation story, The Shadow Line charts the protagonist's entry into time, for in taking command he has to enter the realm of action (narrative events) from the realm of speculative interpretation (discourse). The effect he imagines himself having on the ship, of bringing it into time, may also be claimed for the maturing and empowering effect of command on him: “She was there waiting for me, spell-bound, unable to move, to live, to get out into the world (till I came), like an enchanted princess … I had barely heard her name, and yet we were indissolubly united for a certain portion of our future, to sink or swim together!” (Shadow Line 58-59). At the nadir of his trial, the captain says to Ransome: “‘I am losing the notion of time’” (Shadow Line 155). To lose time completely would mean entering eternity, a realm where complete identification between the living and the dead captains might be possible. To lose time would mean leaving the field of action: narrative events take time. Time makes possible a narrative of change for good or ill, which for Conrad's protagonist entails the exercise of free will. Without free will, the captain would succumb to fatalism, to determinism—in short, to doubling. Instead, the captain rebuffs the attempts of his crew to double him with his predecessor and resists their supernatural, doubling explanations for the ship being becalmed.

The supernatural is a crux of difference between Conrad's modern doubles and earlier Gothic ones. Conrad attempts to distance himself from the Gothic in subsequent editions of The Shadow Line by responding to criticism of the supernatural atmosphere of the novel by saying that he did not intend for “this story … to touch on the supernatural” (“Author's Note” 39). Conrad capitalizes the “Supernatural” later in his preface, and as the phrase shifts from generic description to proper name, one realizes that Conrad is writing about Gothic uses of the supernatural in romance. Conrad wants to avoid charges of spiritualism while embracing “the marvellous” and acknowledging life's “mysteries” (“Author's Note” 39). This qualified disavowal of supernaturalism is instructive and revealing, but any “Author's Note” is questionable as an interpretive guide, and no extra-literary afterthought can supplant the evidence of the work.

The supernatural and the doubling with which it is associated are present in Conrad's narrative as part of the protagonist's test. But Conrad's supernatural does not offer an escape from the materiality of the challenge of survival on the sea. The supernatural in Conrad is no indication of a separate and unknowable realm of reality as the seat of all teleological closure and unifying interpretation. Rather, it belongs to the mystery of this world, even in its intimations of the possibilities of other realms, as seen in the very real madness that overcomes Mr. Burns. To succumb to the supernatural or to accept doubling is for Conrad an abdication of free will, a failure of existentialist morality and professional ethics

With Conrad's protestations in perspective, we can begin to understand the important role played by the supernatural element in The Shadow Line. Lothe, who points out that “the narrator [is] a firmly outspoken opponent to any sort of supernatural explanation of the distress which confronts both captain and crew,” associates the novel's “covert, supernatural plot … not only with Burns's superstition and Ransome's Christ-like quality, but also with the peculiarly menacing and damaging influence emanating from the late captain” (128, 132). The supernatural and the imagination form a cluster of images threatening the wellbeing of the ship and crew. Nowhere are these images more powerful than in the doubling between the protagonist and the dead captain. The act of resisting the doubling is a part of the narrator's initiation. Blaming another, or fate, for one's danger and difficulty is a way to evade professional and moral choices. For the narrator, self-differentiation is the beginning of duty. That the protagonist's resistance to doubling is presented in moral terms shows, I believe, the narrative endorsing a similar interpretive strategy.

In “an extract from the notes” recorded at the time, the narrator nearly despairs of triumphing over indifference as he battles the paralyzing sameness of the calm: “… the days wheel over us in succession, whether long or short, who can say? All sense of time is lost in the monotony of expectations, of hope, and of desire—which is only one: Get the ship to the southward! Get the ship to the southward!” (Shadow Line 142, 143). The captain discovers that his is not a malaise he can overcome once and for all; instead, he must recognize it and battle it anew each time the doubling force of repetition threatens his individual will. The seriousness of this self-renewing conflict is measured in the complex way indifference suggests its antithetical moral resistance while it threatens moral dissolution (Berthoud 25). As Jacques Berthoud points out, the concluding advice from Captain Giles, “‘A man has got to learn everything’ … is no conclusion: what has been learnt is that the lesson is never done” (22).

What is the effect of a double? I hope this essay offers some insights into the question with which it began. The narratives under discussion here indicate that doubling isolates whoever perceives others in a relation of sameness, and that isolation ironically impairs the capacity of the individual subject to exercise free will in the duties of independent command. Doubling exerts a destabilizing influence rendering interpretation problematic.

Marlow reaches a similar conclusion in his digression on the topic of moonshine: “It is to our sunshine, which—say what you like—is all we have to live by, what the echo is to the sound: misleading and confusing whether the note be mocking or sad. It robs all forms of matter—which, after all, is our domain—of their substance, and gives a sinister reality to shadows alone” (Jim ch. 24; 177). His neoplatonic complaint placidly accepts the substance/form duality but finds another—reality/shadows (sun-/moonshine, or sound/echo)—more threatening. Only one more step is needed, and it may be inferred from what Marlow says, to suspect the first duality is the first term of a second, and then to suspect the interchangability of all the terms. Conrad's doubling narratives require us to suspect that possibility. Once we glimpse that possibility, reality may never seem the same.

Notes

1. Brooks is referring to Heart of Darkness, but his point is relevant to “The Secret Sharer,” which similarly foregrounds its own narration.

2. In a condescending letter to Richard Curle (24 April 1922) Conrad expounds on the value of vagueness: “Didn't it ever occur to you, my dear Curle, that I knew what I was doing in leaving the facts of my life and even of my tales in the background? Explicitness, my dear fellow, is fatal to the glamour of all artistic expression, robbing it of all suggestiveness, destroying all illusion … [N]othing is more clear than the utter insignificance of explicit statement and also its power to call attention away from things that matter in the region of art” (Ingram 101). In another letter four years earlier (one year after The Shadow Line), Conrad had written a justification for his vagueness: “a work of art is very seldom limited to one exclusive meaning and not necessarily tending to a definite conclusion” (Letter to Barrett H. Clark, 749).

3. Allow me to clarify a point of terminology: for a number of reasons I find the old word “repetitionary” the best word to describe the sorts of repetition discussed here. I have adopted “repetitionary” to avoid the pejorative connotations of the alternatives, “repetitious” and “repetitive.” Bruce Kawin's proposed distinction between “repetitious” and “repetitive” (the former referring to “repetition to no particular end,” and the latter to repetition that recurs “with equal or greater force” [4]), helpful for its linkage of repetition and change, is nevertheless insufficient for my understanding of repetition, which allows for dimensions of significance unaccommodated by Kawin's number-line metaphor. Furthermore, since the terms “repetitious” and “repetitive” are already familiar to most readers as synonyms, their distinction seems arbitrary and artificial. “Repetitionary,” though similar to the other two in its denotation (see OED), has the advantage of being more rare and therefore less likely to be confused with other, unspecialized references to repetition. It never means “tedious” (the sense of Kawin's “repetitious”); “repetitionary” (the last time in quotation marks, I promise) emphasizes the form of the tropes, figures, and images generated in the negotiations between similarity and difference.

4. Mark Wollaeger's book, which came out after I had written this essay, deals with some of my own concerns and conclusions, particularly regarding Gentleman Brown and “the play of similarities and differences” in Lord Jim. In this instance, I am borrowing Wollaeger's terms for Marlow's values (92)96).

Works Cited

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Berthoud, Jacques. “Introduction.” In The Shadow-Line. Edited by J. Berthoud. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. Pp. 7-29.

Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York: Vintage, 1984.

Conrad, Joseph. “Author's Note.” In The Shadow-Line. Ed. Jacques Berthoud. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986. Pp. 39-41.

———. Letter to Barrett H. Clark. 4 May 1918. In The Portable Conrad. Ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. pp. 748-50.

———. Lord Jim. 1900. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958.

———. “The Secret Sharer.” 1912. In The Portable Conrad. Ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987. Pp. 648-99.

———. The Shadow Line: A Confession. 1916-17. New York: Doubleday, 1922.

Curley, Daniel. “Legate of the Ideal.” In Conrad's “Secret Sharer” and the Critics. Ed. Bruce Harkness. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1962. Pp. 75-82.

Eggenschwiler, David. “Narcissus in ‘The Secret Sharer’: A Secondary Point of View.” Conradiana 11 (1979): 23-40.

Ingram, Allan, ed. Joseph Conrad: Selected Literary Criticism and The Shadow-Line. London: Methuen, 1986.

Kawin, Bruce F. Telling It Again and Again: Repetition in Literature and Film. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972.

Lothe, Jakob. Conrad's Narrative Method. Oxford: Clarendon, 1989.

O'Hara, J. D. “Unlearned Lessons in ‘The Secret Sharer.’” College English 26 (March 1965): 444-50.

Said, Edward W. “Conrad: The Presentation of Narrative.” Novel 7.2 (Winter 1974): 116-32.

———. Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1966.

Sherry, Norman. Conrad's Eastern World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966.

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