In re-reading “The Secret Sharer” by Joseph Conrad in preparation for a teaching assignment, the final conditions surrounding the floppy hat, namely its return appearance to guide the narrator's ship to safety, dredged up a homily from my childhood. In its vulgar voice (no doubt in confusion with the callous harangue attributed to Marie Antoinette), it echoed, “Cast your bread upon the waters and it will come back cake.”

A popular book of proverbs led me to Ecclesiastes 11:1 which reads, “Cast thy bread upon the waters; for thou shalt find it after many days.” Later that summer, I read Frank Kermode's review of The Sixties, the last journals of Edmund Wilson, which revealed that Wilson asked that the last chapter of Ecclesiastes be read at his funeral.¹ In that very same last paragraph of the review, Kermode, in noting Wilson's persistent interest in books to the very end of his life, refers to Conrad's Nostromo. While the reference was a negative one, for it appears that Wilson thought the novel a “weariness of the flesh,” Conrad and Ecclesiastes are clearly embedded in the psyche of Kermode, if not in the sensibility of Wilson himself.

Furthermore, the King James annotated Ryrie Bible states that “Cast thy bread upon the waters” is a metaphorical expression taken from the grain trade of a seaport town, and Ecclesiastes contains as many as 28 references to man's earthly life “under the sun” in which all is vanity or transitory. Both the maritime nature of the metaphor and the numerous references to man's earthly life “under the sun” in Ecclesiastes provide the physical and moral context for the creation of Conrad's central symbol in “The Secret Sharer”:

And I watched the hat—the expression of my sudden pity for his mere flesh. It had been 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. Ha! It was drifting forward, warning me just in time that the ship had gathered sternway.²

Traditional interpretations have ignored the biblical underpinnings of the soft, floppy white hat. Ted Boyle acknowledges the symbolic importance of the hat in the last few pages of the story. It falls off as Leggatt swims away, and the captain/narrator uses it as a mark in swinging his ship away from the treacherous shore which is Leggatt's only means of escape. However, Boyle asserts that the cap is a symbol of the paradoxical nature of the captain's relationship with Leggatt.³ Had the cap fit Leggatt, as did the captain's sleeping suit, had it not fallen off Leggatt's head, had the captain and Leggatt indeed been doubles, the captain's ship would have torn its bottom out on the rocks of Koh-ring (an island off the coast of Cambodia). Had the captain not given his cap to Leggatt, had he not sympathized with this fugitive, he would not have had the opportunity to bring his ship through the dangerous reefs off Koh-ring and would never have mastered his ship. Thus, the hat serves as the vehicle for the narrator's passage from youth to maturity, from inexperience to experience as the ship's captain.

Joan E. Steiner submits that the hat suggests an ultimate reintegration of the narrator's personality. The narrator must subdue his overly introspective land self.⁴ By consciously facing danger and challenging his vulnerability, he overcomes his crippling sense of duality (externalized by the presence of Leggatt) and demonstrates his ability to command, thereby finally earning the respect of his crew.

Psychological interpretations of the story, exploring the concept of the alter ego as a second self or the opposite side of a personality—Leggatt being the dark or criminal face of the narrator—abound, and the floppy white hat continues to serve as yet another sign of one or another variation of the secularly grounded duality theory.

Dwight Purdy has singularly and resolutely written about Conrad's penchant for biblical allusion. Purdy writes that Chaucer and the King James Bible would be required reading for a European wishing to become an English writer, and that the rhetoric of biblical allusion is a thoroughly intentional aspect of Conrad's art.⁵ Yet, according to Purdy, except for the parallels between Cain and Abel and Leggatt and his victim in “The Secret Sharer,” and the references to Job in Victory, and the attribution of Marlow's “one of us” to the text in Genesis, not much has been said about Conrad's scriptural allusions.⁶ In his illuminating work on Conrad and the Bible, Purdy does not include the floppy white hat in his repertoire of biblical allusions.⁷

Perhaps this is because intertextuality is the very condition of literature; all texts are woven from the tissues of other texts, whether their authors know it or not.⁸ Intertextuality is not, or not necessarily, a merely decorative addition to a text, but sometimes a crucial factor in its conception and composition. “The Secret Sharer,” for example, contains blatant—almost verbatim—references to the Cain and Abel story in Genesis:

Behold, thou hast driven me out this day from the face of the earth; and from thy face shall I be hid; and I shall be a fugitive and a vagabond in the earth; and it shall come to pass, that everyone that findeth me shall slay me.

And the Lord said unto him. Therefore whosoever slayeth Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold. And the Lord set a mark upon Cain, lest any finding him should kill him.

(Gen. 4:14-15)

When the narrator recognizes his own floppy hat as the saving mark for his ship, he says:

But I hardly thought of my other self, now gone from the ship, to be hidden forever from all friendly faces, to be a fugitive and a vagabond on the earth with no brand of the curse on his same forehead to stay a slaying hand … too proud to explain.

(60)

No such direct parallels between Ecclesiastes and the floppy white hat are noted in Conrad criticism. Nonetheless, the hat, a crucial catalyst of resolution for the story, fits the action, imagery, and spirit of this biblical text.

Ecclesiastes 4:9-10 admonishes that man is his brother's protective keeper:

Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow; but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.

At the very beginning of “The Secret Sharer,” the narrator, who had made the unconventional request as captain to keep nightwatch in order to get on good terms with the ship of which he knows nothing, observes that the rope ladder put over the side for the master of the tug when he comes to collect the ship's letters has not been hauled in as it should have been. The oversight enables Leggatt to take hold of the ladder and be “lifted” to safety; in addition, these unusual circumstances enable the narrator to meet his “second self” whose escape brings self knowledge and, ultimately, mastery of his ship.

Upon hearing from Leggatt the circumstances of the murder of a mate of the Sephora, Leggatt's ship, the narrator neither condemns nor judges Leggatt; nor will Leggatt allow himself to be returned to England and judged by an English tribunal of “an old fellow in a wig and twelve respectable tradesmen.” (51).

What can they know whether I am guilty or not—or of what I am guilty either … What does the Bible say? ‘Driven off the face of the earth.’ Very well, I am off the face of the earth now. As I came at night so I shall go. …

(51-52)

When the narrator is horrified at Leggatt's request to be marooned among the islands off the Cambodge (Cambodian) shore and tries to dissuade him from taking that treacherous course of action, Leggatt responds:

Can't? … Not naked like a soul on the Day of Judgment. I shall freeze on to this sleeping suit. The Last Day is not yet—and … you have understood thoroughly. Didn't you?

(52)

Indeed, the narrator has understood because he recognizes the message of Ecclesiastes that God alone will eventually judge all men. In the meanwhile, men must live “under the sun” when and where all is vanity or transitory or fleeting. The floppy white hat symbolizes humankind's earthly “under the sun” dealings. It fell off Leggatt's head—perhaps he will not need it in the shadier location to which he will be travelling—but it served to be the salvation of the narrator's ship and his symbolic passage to self awareness.

The floppy white hat, described in the novella as both enduring (“phosphorescent”) and transient (“evanescent”) thus symbolizes the essential admonition of Ecclesiastes which is that when you look at life with its seemingly aimless cycles and inexplicable paradoxes and injustices, you might conclude that all is futile since it is impossible to discern any purpose in the ordering of events. Nevertheless, life is to be enjoyed to the fullest realizing that it is a gift of God and recognizing that God will eventually judge all men.

And it is into such a paradoxical eventuality that Leggatt escapes. Ironically, Conrad calls Leggatt's freedom a “punishment” and describes the land that Leggatt will make his new destiny as a “towering black mass like the very gateway of Erebus” (61). Of course, the unknown awaits Leggatt on an island off the Cambodge shore. Uncharted, the island might be the home of cannibals or head hunters, although Conrad tells us that “on that enormous mass of blackness there was not a gleam to be seen, not a sound to be heard” (58). Proudly and existentially, Leggatt chooses the blessing of freedom over captivity, knowing full well the misfortune that may befall him as he swims toward the black mass that might very well be the darkness of Hades.

The floppy white hat has been the bearer of spiritual clarity and enlightenment, as well as the reward for a commitment to brotherly love, however shaky it proves to be. Thus, an intelligent understanding of “The Secret Sharer” requires a profound apprehension of the Book of Ecclesiastes, for the floppy white hat reflects the pervasive messages of this biblical text.

Notes

1. Frank Kermode, “The last journals of Edmund Wilson, who intended to die at his desk,” The New York Times Book Review, 8 August 1993, 11-12.

2. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness & The Secret Sharer (New York: The American Library, 1950), 60, hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

3. Ted Boyle, Symbol and Meaning in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad (The Hague, The Netherlands: Mouton & Co., 1965), 142.

4. Joan E. Steiner, “The Secret Sharer' Complexities of the Doubling Relationship,” in Joseph Conrad, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), 110.

5. Dwight Purdy, “Paul and the Pardoner in Conrad's Victory,” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 23:2 (Summer 1981): 197.

6. ———, “Conrad's Bible,” Philological Quarterly 60:2 (Spring 1981): 225.

7. ———, Joseph Conrad's Bible (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984).

8. Davil Lodge, The Art of Fiction (New York: Viking, 1993), 98-99.