Contextualizing and comprehending Joseph Conrad's "The Return."

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1996 by the Kid Billy

The device of figuring forth the ascendancy of a certain perceptual order by means of a stellar protagonist claiming the body of a lover is ancient. It can be observed in many diverse works, from the Aeneid, the book of Revelation, and Spenser's Faerie Queene, through Hoffmann's The Golden Pot and Mickiewicz's Pan Tadeusz.(6) Indeed, noting the way this device is manifested in the works of various authors provides a means (albeit reductive) whereby distinctions can be initiated that often separate teleologically biased works from those dramatizing dysteleological perspectives. A fine example of the latter is Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, in which Oedipa Maas's quest in San Narcisco for final understanding is eroticized rhetorically, as "the mind's plowshare" seeks futilely to "probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth," and those who have given up the search belong to "In amorati Anonymous" (95, 83). It is fitting, then, that the literature of nineteenth-century Europe, a culture under much revisionary philosophical stress, is pervaded by enactments of the "failed embrace,"(7) for efforts to seize another are often a sign of radical need. As Alvan Hervey is aware, "looking at his wife" means "looking within himself" (TU 172).

Efforts to achieve inclusive understanding in the Occident have long been conceptualized figuratively in terms of attempts to seize coherent, frequently gendered, surfaces that lurk with finality beneath layers of occluding partiality and error--cf., e.g., the impossible hope of Tennyson's "widowed" narrator in In Memoriam to penetrate "Behind the veil" (40.1; 56.28). Only late in the nineteenth century was the trope of epistemological stratification finally discredited, as "the Romantic . . . analytic dismantlement of the superstructure of western culture" proceeds in an effort to "dissolve the regnant constructs . . . of the past [and] far more important the ideologies which those constructs exemplified" (Peckham 363, 60). In the case of representations of truth as a spatial hierarchy, Nietzsche and Conrad accomplish the dissolution. The perceptual problem they assaulted can be summarized as follows: For millennia in European culture, various observations were made of phenomena whose physical attributes manifest a radically impermanent process (from ocean waves to active, or rotting, human bodies). Observers then abstracted from these observations the general concept "change," treating the specific instances of impermanence as if they were manifestations of a single, universal principle (e.g., Spenserian "mutability") lurking behind these instances and functioning as their noumenal cause. In On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) Nietzsche identifies this tropological move as the merely linguistic source of all manner of illusory, transcendental agents:

the popular mind [for example] separates the lightning from its

flash and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a

subject called lightning.... But there is no such substratum; there