The cost of living is disillusionment.

—Conrad and Ford, The Inheritors

Although Conrad is popularly recognized as the Polish expatriate who became an English sea captain before turning to fiction, he actually spent only a little more than one year as a captain (not counting his steamboat experience in the Congo) in a maritime career that spanned almost two decades (ZN, 162). It is scarcely surprising, therefore, that his sea tales should emphasize the illusions of anticipation and the disillusionments of accomplishment. “The Secret Sharer,” “Falk,” and The Shadow Line chronicle how unfounded hopes dissipate in the trials of a first command. Moreover, they dramatize an incomplete initiation as each narrator attempts to reconstitute his sense of self following his encounter with confounding human experiences. In general, the reason Conrad's characters seldom make progress in their lives is that they are victims of the linguistic illusions endemic to goal-oriented existence. In Conrad's fiction, goal orientation leads to a counterproductive, grail-hungry fixation that isolates the protagonist in a state of anticipation, and thus he makes the least of the present moment. The closing scene of these stories of a first command compromises the narrator's efforts to embrace triumph in a world where duplicity and emptiness reign supreme. Thus, Conrad encourages his escape-oriented readers to grasp at the falling straws of victory while he pulls the rug out from under them.

“THE SECRET SHARER”

The psychological dimensions of “The Secret Sharer” have established it as one of Conrad's most frequently anthologized short stories and have inspired extensive critical controversy.¹ Contemporary criticism of “The Secret Sharer” has polarized into mutually exclusive viewpoints, with many commentators seeing Leggatt, “the secret self,” as an agent of the narrator's initiation into the rites of passage of mature self-command,² and other critics stressing the narrator's delusive egoism, which prompts him to risk the welfare of his ship to insure Legatt's safe departure.³ Although this long-running debate has not overshadowed the significance of the closing scene, with its enigmatic focus on the narrator's hat floating on the sea, it has partly obscured the integrity of Conrad's artistic vision and his emphasis on the self as an unknown and unknowable phenomenon, as objectified in the image of the disembodied hat.⁴ Conrad's original title, “The Secret Self,” offers a more helpful hint for comprehending his psychological perspective in this story—a perspective that is consistent with the theme of the unfathomability of human existence, which pervades much of his fiction. Conrad, by seeming to split selfhood into conscious (i.e., the narrator) and unconscious (i.e., Leggatt) exponents, associates the Western psyche with a polarized personal identity.⁵ The narrator becomes fixated on determining whether Leggatt is his higher, moral self or his lower, amoral self. Many critics share this fixation, but Conrad does not. Instead, he establishes the unfathomability of human identity and derides our convenient compartmentalization of the will into conscious and unconscious impulses.

Conrad's plot is too familiar to need recapitulation here, but I want to underscore the mirroring effect of the opening and closing scenes, which gives his ending a subtle sense of circularity, to use Turgovnick's term.⁶ The narrative begins with a view of a barren landscape suggestive of the isolation and estrangement of the narrator-captain's heightened self-consciousness. Prone to egoistic self-absorption, he views his first command as an opportunity to define his own identity by discovering his hidden potential. But the unexpected arrival of Leggatt initiates a crisis of self-command. In the closing scene, after the narrator sees his own floppy hat upon the water, he is once again alone with his ship, this time apparently in “perfect communion” with his first command. Yet his attention continues to dwell on the image of the floating hat and the unknown destiny that awaits Leggatt, now alone with his freedom. Hence the narrator remains divided, even at the end, when he speculates about his alter ego's eventual fate, as he had earlier wondered about his own.

Conrad's scenario should be viewed in the context of the late-Victorian preoccupation with “the true self,” “the better self,” or “the higher self.” Although Freud and Jung had made psychoanalysis an important concept by the time Conrad wrote “The Secret Sharer” in 1909, Western psychology had long been promulgating “the war in the members,” assisted by literary precursors such as Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; that is, they had polarized the individual personality into sharply defined dualisms: good versus evil, head versus heart, conscious will versus sub- or unconscious drives. Conrad exploits this dichotomizing tendency to full advantage, though he does offer significant hints of an opposing viewpoint when he strategically places two obtrusive references to a great Buddhist pagoda in his narrative. He juxtaposes the first reference with a view of “barren islets, suggesting ruins of stone walls, towers, and blockhouses,” that dominates the opening lines of the story (TLS [‘Twixt Land and Sea], 91). The narrator surveys

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 forever by some nomad tribe of fishermen now gone to the other end of the ocean; for there was no sign of human habitation as far as the eye could reach.

(TLS, 91)

This vista, so suggestive of disorder and abandonment, and perhaps foreshadowing Fitzgerald's “valley of ashes” in The Great Gatsby, reinforces the protagonist's sense of estrangement. Yet one detail stands out as the most imposing feature towering above the wasteland: “[A] larger and loftier mass, the grove surrounding the great Paknam pagoda, was the only thing on which the eye could rest from the vain task of exploring the monotonous sweep of the horizon” (TLS, 91-92). Vain is the key word in this description, for Conrad implies both vanity and futility. Conrad recognized that Western explorations of the East resulted in conquests testifying to the triumph of imperialistic vanity. He makes this apparent at the close of the first paragraph, as the narrator's “roving eye” (perhaps a pun on “I,” the narrator) follows the smoke of the tugboat that had left his ship safely anchored, until he loses it “behind the mitre-shaped hill of the great pagoda. And then I was left alone with my ship” (TLS, 92). The multiple denotations of “mitre” illuminate Conrad's subtle juxtaposition of Eastern and Western cultures. A mitre (or miter) is a ceremonial headpiece worn by bishops of the Western Church. However, it also signifies a ritualistic headdress formerly worn by Asiatics. The narrator, of course, is experiencing his first command as captain (captain is derived from the Latin caput, “head”). And, appropriately enough, he first views his secret self as a “headless corpse!” (TLS, 97).⁷

Conrad's second reference to the Paknam pagoda occurs midway through the second part of the story, when the narrator asks the mate “to take a compass bearing of the Pagoda” (TLS, 125). At this point, the protagonist feels inadequate to command the ship because his mind oscillates between the duties of navigation and thoughts of “the secret sharer” in his cabin. Here, the narrator's sense of a divided self conflicts with the representational aspects of the pagoda, objectifying Buddhist self-denial (especially the doctrine of anatta, the nonexistence of the self).⁸ Conrad's capitalization of “Pagoda” calls attention to the religious monument as a navigational cynosure, the spiritual significance of which is lost on a narrator who embodies the opposite of selfless devotion, for even his compassionate treatment of Leggatt has traces of self-congratulation. Moreover, the captain unconsciously reveals his obsession with externalizing selfhood early in the tale, while the first reference to the pagoda still lingers in our minds: “In this breathless pause at the threshold of a long passage we seemed to be measuring our fitness for a long and arduous enterprise, the appointed task of both our existences to be carried out, far from all human eyes, with only sky and sea for spectators and for judges” (TLS, 92). The narrator's “we,” in this case, refers to his ship and himself, indirectly excluding the crew from any noteworthy part in his “enterprise.” Covertly, Conrad exposes the essential nullity of the protagonist's vision of his responsibilities, indicating that the captain allows his vocation to define the meaning of life, and, in the process, to separate his fate from that of the crew. This egocentric impulse later manifests itself in his reckless navigation of the ship, which almost amounts to a suicidal urge, as he shaves close to the land in order to liberate his “double.” If the Buddhist references serve as an interpretive rubric, they unveil the captain's moral dereliction, his arrogant belief that he can sail the course of life under the pragmatic sanctions of his personal craving for success. Consequently, his psychological ordeal unfolds as a sham initiation into maturity, despite the positive rhetoric at the end of the story.

As in “The End of the Tether,” Conrad's manipulation of topographical features contributes to the moral tension of the narrative. In the closing scene, the “towering shadow of Koh-ring” replaces the great Paknam pagoda as the dominant image (TLS, 141). Koh-ring, a fictive island, objectifies the mystery of the narrator's “secret self,” the enigmatic fugitive who is preparing to swim away as silently as he had arrived. From another vantage point, Koh-ring suggests an over-whelming oblivion, an external void: “[T]he black southern hill of Koh-ring seemed to hang right over the ship like a towering fragment of the everlasting night. On that enormous mass of blackness there was not a gleam to be seen, not a sound to be heard” (TLS, 139). As in The Shadow Line, the ship's motionlessness and the eerie presence of Koh-ring unite to create an eerie sense of nothingness. Moreover, Conrad compares the vessel to “a bark of the dead floating in slowly under the very gate of Erebus” (TLS, 140). Erebus, the nether region of darkness and damnation, seems an appropriate destination for a divided captain and his perplexed crew, as Conrad again defines Koh-ring in negative terms as “the great shadow gliding closer, towering higher, without a light, without a sound” (TLS, 140). Yet, as soon as the narrator speculates that Leggatt may have already departed, the ominous shadow begins to veer away from its near collision, and now that the brooding black mass no longer threatens catastrophe he forgets Leggatt as he recalls that he is a stranger to his own ship (TLS, 141). Conrad associates Koh-ring, the unknown island, with the nameless ship, with Leggatt (the “secret self”), and with the captain, who had earlier confessed to estrangement as he wondered if he would actually measure up to his “ideal conception” of himself (TLS, 94). Here Conrad compounds the sense of mystery with the risk of imminent catastrophe: the ship is threatened by “the black mass of Koh-ring like the gate of the everlasting night towering over her taffrail” (TLS, 142). In this context, the Koh-ring reference suggests oblivion once again. Yet Conrad links the threat of oblivion and its prevention once more to the secret sharer, albeit indirectly, when the narrator discovers his own white hat, now forsaken or lost by Leggatt. The hat becomes the “saving mark” for the captain, for “it was saving the ship, by serving me for a mark to help out the ignorance of my strangeness” (TLS, 142).⁹ His “ignorance,” of course, refers to his confusion over how to prevent the ship from running aground. But, in a wider sense, the narrator's ignorance about his true priorities has been apparent throughout the tale. Neither Koh-ring nor the pagoda nor the mysterious felon hiding in his cabin can distract him from his naive egoism. Only the imminent possibility of annihilation, perhaps suggesting loss of self-esteem, rouses him to action. And even then, the captain only gives orders while “standing still like a statue” (TLS, 142). He speaks the proper commands and then sees his white hat marking the spot where his secret sharer had plunged into the water. Ironically, Conrad presents the fugitive's freedom as Leggatt's “punishment”—an intriguing displacement of the guilt the captain should be feeling for his reckless conduct as master of the ship.

True to the circular pattern of the narrative, Leggatt first appears by arising from the sea and departs by plunging into the sea. As the captain's secret self, he stands for the unknown self hidden inside every individual behind the thin veneer of civilized self-consciousness. The white hat that floats on the sea of consciousness, like the tip of an iceberg, represents only a small fraction of total identity. Unknown and unknowable, the self seems, like the menace of Koh-ring and the selfless sublimity of the pagoda, an awesome and even terrifying prospect. The narrator's hat covers the secret self for a short time only. It is more than an emblem of a secret partnership between the captain and Leggatt, for it comes to objectify the futile attempt to comprehend the unknowable in rational terms. Early on, the narrator labels the fugitive a “mystery,” for Leggatt seems to have arisen from the bottom of the sea of the unconscious. The narrator learns precious little from the fugitive. More often than not, he must fill in the important blanks in Leggatt's account. In structuring his narration, Conrad shows that he is not primarily interested in the power of blackness (evil) but in the power of blankness (the void, both inner and outer). The captain's psychological ordeal takes him to “the very gateway of Erebus,” a land of nether darkness leading to Hades, to assume command of his first ship (TLS, 143). Conrad views the undiscovered self as a darkness lying beneath the surface of consciousness and defying all attempts at exploration. The captain, who converses with the secret self at such length, imagines his double departing as “a free man, a proud swimmer striking out for a new destiny” (TLS, 143). But such an optimistic view only reflects his own incorrigible egoism, a stubborn and unfounded sense of pride in his own dreams of accomplishment. The captain, who hopes he can fulfill his ideal conception of himself at the outset of the tale, still engages in wishful thinking at the close, after he has irresponsibly endangered his crew to fulfill his fantasy.

Conrad's captain, like Lord Jim and the narrator of The Shadow Line, lives vicariously in his speculations on whether he can measure up to his ideal self-image. In this connection, Leggatt represents neither a higher, ideal self nor a lower, instinctive self, but rather an unknown self, whose nature may or may not ultimately manifest itself. Among the other parallels between “The Secret Sharer” and Lord Jim is the similarity of a small detail in Conrad's novel and a dominant emblem in his short story.¹⁰ For at the climactic moment of Jim's indecisiveness aboard the beleaguered Patna, he loses his hat to the gale force of the wind and, shortly thereafter, in a kind of mental fog, jumps into the lifeboat (LJ, 110).¹¹ Conrad employs this minor detail to signify that Jim's “cowardice” is an unpremeditated act, a deed accomplished without rational deliberation. Jim consistently tells Marlow that he was not aware of his decision to jump. Throughout the novel, Jim has trouble justifying his act because his cowardice undermines his heroic self-image. But Marlow perceives that the impetus to desert the Patna came from Jim's unknown self, the enigmatic phenomenon that lies beneath Jim's ideal self-concept. This is why Jim's plight so intrigues Marlow (and Conrad), for Marlow recognizes Jim's heart of darkness, the unknown or true self, as the mystery within every individual. Conrad conveys this idea more overtly in “The Secret Sharer.” Just when the captain wonders whether his inner self will prove compatible with his ideal self-image, the secret self emerges from the dark water, looking like “a headless corpse!” (TLS, 97). From this point on, until the captain sights his own hat floating on the sea, he acts unreasonably, recklessly endangering his ship and crew in an irrational and unlawful attempt to shelter and eventually liberate a fugitive stranger he thinks of as his secret self. The narrator's act of crowning Leggatt's head with his own captain's hat prior to the fugitive's departure climaxes his irrational abdication of power and authority. Only when the narrator sees his disembodied hat on the sea, and he no longer holds parlance with an imaginary or real double, does he make the proper decisions for his ship. Just as Jim loses his hat (i.e., his head) in his act of cowardice, and just as Leggatt is struck by “a bit of the forecastle head” as he grapples with an obstreperous crewman on board the Sephora—“a crash as if the sky had fallen on my head” (TLS, 102)—so, too, the narrator parts with his hat (his head, or rational self) prior to regaining command of the situation.¹² But he never regains the hat itself, which floats on the ever-shifting surface of the sea, representing the protean flux of existence.

The narrator's fortuitous sighting of his floppy hat saves the ship from wrecking and at the same time saves him from the incipient madness that hovers over him during his stay on board the ship. Even at the outset, the captain's sense of being a stranger to his vessel and to himself appears quasi-pathological. Conrad emphasizes the narrator's estrangement, which makes the novice captain feel “unrelated” to everything else. Leggatt's arrival signals the presence of a nightmarish doppelgänger, the “grey ghost” (TLS, 103) who haunts the narrator's consciousness, arousing both curiosity and insecurity in long fits of intense introspection. After deciding to shelter Leggatt covertly in his own L-shaped cabin, the captain becomes aware of an embryonic psychological division: “I sat there … trying to clear my mind of the confused sensation of being in two places at once” (TLS, 111). And shortly thereafter he says: “I was doubly vexed. Indeed, I felt more dual than ever” (TLS, 112). The comic yet eerie feeling of being beside himself leads the narrator into a conspiratorial arrangement with his alter ego: “The Sunday quietness of the ship was against us; the stillness of air and water around her was against us; the elements, the men were against us—everything was against us in our secret partnership; time itself—for this could not go on forever” (TLS, 123). Soon the narrator's paranoia about his secret partnership gives rise to an outright absurdity, his feeling that the crewmen (who still obey their captain and have no knowledge of Leggatt) oppose his command. Again and again, his divided consciousness prevents him from fully concentrating on his duties:

I was not wholly alone with my command; for there was that stranger in my cabin. Or rather, I was not completely and wholly with her. Part of me was absent. That mental feeling of being in two places at once affected me physically as if the mood of secrecy had penetrated my very soul. … I felt that I was appearing an irresolute commander to those people who were watching me more or less critically.

(TLS, 125-26)

The unnerved captain, haunted by the ghostlike presence of Leggatt, even wonders whether he alone can see the secret sharer: “I think I had come creeping quietly as near insanity as any man who has not actually gone over the border” (TLS, 130). At this point, the narrator's rhetoric recalls Marlow's assessment of his vicarious role in Kurtz's tragedy. Like Marlow on the Congo river voyage, the narrator fears he may “go irretrievably to pieces” (TLS, 135). But once he gives Leggatt his own hat and the final scene commences, all references to madness cease, for the menace of Koh-ring has now replaced Leggatt's situation as his primary concern. The captain saves the ship, to be sure, but from a peril created by his own self-division.

While “The Secret Sharer” does unfold as a symbolic descent into the self, Conrad ironically alludes to the seductive and sedative illusions of Western civilization, which support the myth of attaining self-knowledge and self-command. He stresses words such as inscrutable, wonder, mystery, enigma, incomprehensible, strange, shadowy, illusion, uncertain, elusive, and darkness, for his aim is to make the reader see the unfathomability of human identity, which resists distillation into linguistic formulations. “The Secret Sharer” ends ambiguously. Like Marlow bidding farewell to the enigmatic personality of Jim, who is both hero and coward, Conrad's narrator never fully comprehends the secret self who seeks immersion in the destructive element of the sea. The narrator may believe he has achieved a kind of reintegration of the self as a result of Leggatt's plunge, but this cannot be synonymous with authentic maturity. In a story that features imposing psychological details such as the Buddhist pagoda and the towering mass of Koh-ring and emphasizes the motif of the double, Conrad forces us to confront the void, within and without. In the search for final answers to the questions of human existence, the answers are only provisional. Like Poe, whose narratives often terminate in an apocalypse of nothing, Conrad lures us to a door that remains closed, even to the most ingenious penetration, and despite the triumphant note at the end leaves us grappling with a mystery rather than revelation.

Notes

1. The tale has been institutionalized as a seminal work in the doppelgänger tradition, which includes Poe's “William Wilson,” Dostoevsky's The Double, Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Stevenson's Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Conrad made this categorization inevitable with his incremental repetition of phrases such as “my double,” “my other self,” “my secret self,” “the secret sharer,” and “my second self,” which appear on more than thirty occasions in the story. For an insightful commentary on Conrad's exploration of the self in this story and related fiction, see, in particular, chapter 1 (“The Journey Within”) of Albert Guerard's Conrad the Novelist (1-59) and Meyer's chapter on “The Secret Sharers” in BCM (154-67).

2. See, in particular, Carl Benson, “Conrad's Two Stories of Initiation,” PMLA 69 (1954): 46-56; Louis H. Leiter, “Echo Structures: Conrad's ‘The Secret Sharer,’” Twentieth Century Literature 5 (1960): 159-75; Charles G. Hoffmann, “Point of View in ‘The Secret Sharer,’” College English 23 (1962): 651-54; Robert A. Day, “The Rebirth of Leggatt,” Literature and Psychology 13 (1963): 74-81; Daniel Curley, “The Writer and the Use of Material: The Case of ‘The Secret Sharer,’” Modern Fiction Studies 13 (1967): 179-94; Gloria R. Dussinger, “‘The Secret Sharer’: Conrad's Psychological Study,” Texas Studies in Language and Literature 10 (1969): 559-608; Mary-Lou Schenck, “Seamanship in Conrad's ‘The Secret Sharer,’” Criticism 15 (1973): 1-15; H. M. Daleski, Joseph Conrad: The Way of Dispossession (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1976), 171-83; Terry Otten, “The Fall and After in ‘The Secret Sharer,’” Southern Humanities Review 12 (1978): 221-30; and Joan E. Steiner, “Conrad's ‘The Secret Sharer’: Complexities of the Doubling Relationship,” Conradiana 12 (1980): 173-86.

3. See, for example, Porter Williams Jr., “The Matter of Conscience in Conrad's ‘The Secret Sharer,’” PMLA 79 (1964): 626-30; J. D. O'Hara, “Unlearned Lessons in ‘The Secret Sharer,’” College English 26 (1965): 444-50; Robert D. Wyatt, “Joseph Conrad's ‘The Secret Sharer’: Point of View and Mistaken Identities,” Conradiana 5 (1973), 12-26; Frank B. Evans, “The Nautical Metaphor in ‘The Secret Sharer,’” Conradiana 7 (1975): 3-16; and David Eggenschwiler, “Narcissus in ‘The Secret Sharer’: A Secondary Point of View,” Conradiana 11 (1979): 23-40.

4. The discovery of the floating hat is a weakness in the story, according to Daleski, “for it makes [the narrator's] achievement of knowledge too much a matter of chance—and turns the highest kind of seamanship into a tightrope of contingency” (Joseph Conrad, 183). He does suggest, however, that the hat represents the narrator's pity for Leggatt, which ultimately saves the novice captain.

5. Daleski attributes the “moral blurring” of the captain's sense of duty to “Conrad's preoccupation with the psychological aspects of his story, the preoccupation clearly revealing itself in the title of the story and the numerous references in the tale itself to second selves and doubles. His concern, indeed, is with the coexistence in the individual psyche of radically opposed qualities” (Joseph Conrad, 174).

6. Jakob Lothe, Conrad's Narrative Method (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), also sees the closing scene as part of the “circular movement” of the story and adds that “[t]he ending of ‘The Secret Sharer’ places a renewed emphasis on the importance of the visual” with regard to the hat and the looming mass of Koh-ring (64). He contends that the suspense of the final scene distracts us from a full realization of the serious moral problem of the captain's dereliction of his duties in order to save Leggatt (65). Thus, the moral ambiguity of the narrative remains unresolved.

7. Norman Sherry, Conrad's Eastern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), notes that the Paknam was a ship commanded by Captain Joshua Lingard, an exponent of European dominion in the Orient (116-17).

8. Symbolically, the pagoda (a Far Eastern version of the Buddhist Stupa, or ceremonial burial mound) projects the transiency and uncertainty of existence and consecrates the wisdom of Buddha as the sole means of deliverance from the beguilements of time. Conrad refers to the Paknam pagoda frequently in his three tales of first command: “Falk,” “The Secret Sharer,” and The Shadow Line.

9. Guerard points out that “in Jungian psychology a hat, in dreams, represents the personality, which can be transferred symbolically to another” (Conrad the Novelist, 25).

10. Leggatt, like Jim, is a parson's son who dreads the thought of his father learning of his disgrace. The narrator's reminding of Leggatt that “[w]e are not living in a boy's adventure tale” (TLS, 131) calls to mind Jim's adolescent romantic dreams of adventure both before and during his first voyage. And just as Jim protests against the idea that his desertion of the Patna could be fairly judged by a rational court of inquiry, Leggatt also questions the validity of any supposedly impartial jury: “What can they know whether I am guilty or not—or of what I am guilty either? That's my affair” (TLS, 131-32). Leggatt thanks the narrator for his compassion and empathy in language echoing Jim's similar gratitude to Marlow: “It's a great satisfaction to have got somebody to understand. You seem to have been there on purpose. … It's very wonderful” (TLS, 132). Wonderful, indeed, for to Marlow Jim is “one of us,” and to the narrator of “The Secret Sharer” Leggatt seems his “own reflection” (TLS, 101). Small wonder, then, that the captain risks everything to assist the fugitive's escape from arrest on the charge of manslaughter, just as Marlow makes every effort to find Jim a position far away from gossip about the Patna incident.

11. Conrad also links Jim's desertion of the Patna to the dark cloud of unknowing that approaches the ship just before the catastrophe. He uses a similar dark cloud for much the same purpose in The Shadow Line and likewise Koh-ring as an omen of the captain's disastrous course in “The Secret Sharer.”

12. Conrad delights in playing games with hats and heads. He uses incongruous hats as emblems of absurd anarchic sensibilities in The Secret Agent, a cartwheel hat to objectify the harlequin's manic-depressive temperment in Heart of Darkness, and the “rakkishly hatted head” of the “old ruffian” as an index of a yarn-spinner's crochety personality in “The Partner.” For a discussion of Conrad's playful use of hats, see William Bysshe Stein, “The Secret Agent: The Agon(ie)s of the Word,” boundary 2 6 (Winter 1978): 521-40.