Few if any writers in the English language have been cited,
praised, chided, or marvelled at more routinely than Joseph Conrad
for the perplexing evasiveness, contradictoriness, and
indeterminacy of their fiction. William Freedman argues that the
explanations typically offered for these identifying
characteristics of much of Conrad's work are inadequate if not
mistaken. Freedman's claim is that the illusiveness of a coherent
interpretation of Conrad's novels and shorter fictions is owed not
primarily to the inherent slipperiness or inadequacy of language or
the consequence of a wilful self-deconstruction. Nor is it a
product of the writer's philosophical nihilism or a realized
aesthetic of suggestive vagueness. Rather, Freedman argues, the
perplexing elusiveness of Conrad's fiction is the consequence of a
pervasive ambivalence toward threatening knowledge, a protective
reluctance and recoil that are not only inscribed in Conrad's tales
and novels, but repeatedly declared, defended, and explained in his
letters and essays. Conrad's narrators and protagonists often set
out on an apparent quest for hidden knowledge or are drawn into
one. But repelled or intimidated by the looming consequences of
their own curiosity and fervour, they protectively obscure what
they have barely glimpsed or else retreat to an armoury of
practiced distractions. The result is a confusingly choreographed
dance of approach and withdrawal, fascination and revulsion,
revelation and concealment. The riddling contradictions of these
fictions are thus in large measure the result of this ambivalence,
their evasiveness the mark of intimidation's triumph over
fascination. The idea of dangerous and forbidden knowledge is at
least as old as Genesis, and Freedman provides a background for
Conrad's recoil from full exposure in the rich admonitory history
of such knowledge in theology, myth, philosophy, and literature. He
traces Conrad's impassioned, at times pleading case for protective
avoidance in the writer's letters, essays, and prefaces, and he
elucidates its enactment and its connection to Conrad's signature
evasiveness in a number of short stories and novels, with special
attention to The Secret Agent, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Under
Western Eyes, and The Rescue.
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