As
Eudora Welty once said, "The first thing we see about a story is its mystery. And in the best stories, we return at the
last to see mystery again. Every good
story has mystery--not the puzzle kind, but the mystery of allurement. As we understand the story better, it is
likely that the mystery does not necessarily decrease; rather it simply grows
more beautiful" (164). The implication of this awareness of “mystery” is
that the short story often seems to focus on a moment out of time, or on time
as mythically perceived, the way Ernest Cassirer and Mircea Eliade have described
it.
More so than in the novel, the short story
most often deals with phenomena for which there is no clearly discernible
logical, sociological, or psychological cause.
As Welty says, the "first thing we notice about our story is that
we can't really see the solid outlines of it--it seems bathed in something of
its own. It is wrapped in an
atmosphere. This is what makes it shine,
perhaps, as well as what initial obscures its plain, real shape"
(163). To Conrad’s Marlowe, sitting
Buddha-like on the deck telling the story of Kurtz in “Heart of Darkness,” the
"meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in
the likeness of one of those misty halos that, sometimes, are made visible by
the spectral illumination of moonshine."
Joseph Conrad confronts the
problem of manifesting the secret, hidden life in the external world explicitly
in his two most famous short works. In
"The Heart of Darkness" he creates a world like that of "Young
Goodman Brown," in which landscape symbolically represents the ultimate
reaches of psychic reality; moreover he develops a plot structure very much
like Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" and Melville's "Bartleby
the Scrivener," in which a realistic narrator confronts a metaphoric
extremist
In
"The Secret Sharer," Conrad seeks a method to reveal the secret
conflict of his protagonist by having the young captain project that conflict
outside of himself. Just as Hamlet
creates a play within a play to externalize his conflict so that he can cope
with it, the captain in Conrad's story creates the character of Leggatt to
provide him with the means by which he can deal with his own insecurity and
establish his own identity. Conrad
pushes to metaphoric extremes the common psychological phenomenon of inner
conflict creating a split in the self so that it seems as if there are two
separate voices engaged in a dialogue.
Leggatt,
whose name suggests he is a representative or emissary, is the objectified side
of the captain's Hamlet-like, preoccupied, subjective self. The story thus is torn between the plot,
which focuses on the efforts of the captain to protect and conceal the
mysterious stranger, and the mind of the captain, which obsessively persists in
perceiving and describing the stranger as his other self, his double. Although some critics have suggested that the
constant repetition of the similarity between the captain and Leggatt is
tedious and the weakest part of the work, the repetition is a purposeful Conrad
tactic of overdetermination to suggest both that Leggatt is a romance-like
symbolic projection of the captain's psyche and at the same time a real
character with his own objective existence to whom the captain reacts in an
obsessive way.
The story begins with the central motif of the
captain's lack of identity. He says he
is not only a stranger on the ship but also a stranger to himself, and he
wonders if he will "turn out faithful to that ideal conception of one's
own personality every man sets up for himself secretly." And indeed, many
metaphorical details in the story suggest Leggatt has been summoned forth from
the captain's unconscious as an aspect of the self with which he must deal.
For example, Leggatt is first seen as a silvery,
fish-like naked body emerging from the sea to whom the captain responds in a
matter-of-fact way, as if he were expecting him. The image of the captain looking straight
down into a face upturned exactly under his own is clearly an allusion to the
myth of Narcissus. However, instead of
the captain falling into his reflection, as in a number of German romantic
tales, the reflection comes out of the mirror-like sea and takes on a
problematical independent existence.
After Leggatt puts on one of the captain's sleeping suits, the captain
says, it was "as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the
depths of a somber and immense mirror."
In
Conrad's story the mysterious mythic emissary from the unconscious is presented
as an objective existence in the world, not as a dreamlike or allegorical
projection. Although we know that others
have seen Leggatt as an objective presence before the story begins, no one but
the captain sees him during the actual events of the story. The anecdote of the scorpion in the inkwell
is the mise en abyme in "The Secret Sharer" in which we see
the entire story reflected in miniature.
Leggatt comes out of the inky water of the sea, which represents both
the unconscious of the captain/Conrad and the inkwell source of all stories,
the Ocean of Story. At the end of
"The Secret Sharer," Leggatt's movement back into the sea,
representing the captain's reintegration of the split in his self, is his
movement back into the inkwell. Leggatt,
the oneiric creation of both the captain and the artist, says "I am off
the face of the earth now. As I came at
night so shall I go."
Making
manifest that which is hidden is the primarily structural force of "The
Secret Sharer." This
objectification of inner reality marks the beginning of the “modern” mythical
method of fictional narration, as Thomas Mann defines it in his famous essay,
"Freud and the Future." Mann
explicitly calls for a modern fiction that mixes the psychological and the
mythical, for he affirms as truth the Schopenhauer‑Freud perception that life
itself is a "mingling of the individual elements and the formal stock‑in‑trade;
a mingling in which the individual, as it were, only lifts his head above the
formal and impersonal elements."
Much of the "extra‑personal," Mann insists, "much
unconscious identification, much that is conventional and schematic, is none
the less decisive for the experience not only of the artist but of the human
being in genera. (421)."
Our
interest in fictional characters, Mann implies, is, regardless of the events in
which they are enmeshed, always centrally located in the process by which they
try to find their identity, the means by which they attempt to answer the age‑old
Oedipal question: Who am I? In such a process the two forces of the
subjective and the schematic are decisive.
As Robert Langbaum has described it, when you realize that introspection
leads to nothing but endless reflection, you see that the only way to find out
who you are is to don a mask and step into a story. "The point is," says Langbaum,
"at that level of experience where events fall into a pattern. . . they
are an objectification of your deepest will, since they make you do things
other than you consciously intend; so that in responding like a marionette to
the necessities of the story, you actually find out what you really want and
who you really are" (175).
This creation
of an "as-if" real character to embody psychic processes marks the
impressionistic extension of the romantic trend that began the short story form
earlier in the nineteenth century.
Much
of the reason for this sense of an elusive and mysterious “secret” life of the
characters of short stories derives from its origins in the folk tale and later
the romance form. Whereas the focus of
the novel is often on multiple inner consciousnesses, the focus of the short story
is more often on an obsessed inner consciousness. Characters in short fiction seem somewhat
like allegorical figures because of their obsessive focus on some single task:
Goodman Brown's journey into the forest, Old Phoenix's trip to get the healing medicine,
Bartleby's preference not to, Nick Adam's fishing trip at Big, Two-Hearted
River. The hidden story of emotion and
secret life, communicated by atmosphere, tone, and mood is always about
something more unspeakable, more mysterious, than the story generated by the
reader’s focus on characters and on what happens next.
The
genius of the short story form is that whereas short stories often could indeed be the
seedbeds of novels, they do not communicate as novels do. And if we try to read them as if they were
novels, they will never haunt us with their sense of that mysterious secret
life within all of us.
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