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

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

is no "being" behind doing, effecting, becoming; the "doer" is

merely a fiction added top the deed; when it sees the lighting

flash, it is the deed of a deed: it posits the same event first as cause

and then a second time as its effect. (45)

There is no longer any justification to assume that visible sensations necessarily announce the existence of a potential object of knowledge, for "the superficiality of existence [is] its essence" (Nietzsche, Gay Science 125).

As a result of Nietzsche's revision, human perception is now located within the very surfaces that its act of contemplation generates. To Conrad, it is (probably) a mistake to strive to escape from this "dream," this liminal "sea," in the hope of gaining access to some profundity beyond, for this is like trying to "climb out into the air," and precipitates figurative drownings (LJ 214). Indeed, even a visually accessible "fact dazzling, to be seen," is not solid, precisely defined, and static, but only a frothy, vacillating similitude, "like the foam on the depths of the sea, like a ripple on an unfathomable enigma" (HD 105). There is possible only anxious suspension within a dynamic surface, within the undulating, figurative integument that Conrad calls, in a letter to Edward Garnett, "the eternal something that waves" (144). Jacques Derrida concludes that the trope of a visually inviting, ideally penetrable veil should be displaced by a terminal veil in figurative suspension:

`Truth' can only be a surface. But . . . that truth which is not

suspended in quotation marks casts a modest veil over such a

surface. And only through such a veil . . . could 'truth' become

truth, profound, indecent, desirable. But should that veil be

suspended . . . there would be no longer any truth, only 'truth.'

(59)

In marked contrast, of course, Conrad's Jim (according to Marlow) seeks a final definition of self in terms of the abstractions "honor" and "faith," and imagines he has penetrated a veil, "beheld the face of that opportunity which, like an Eastern bride, had come veiled to his side" (LJ416). Jim's encounter is a fatal revision of Alvan Hervey's confrontation in "The Return" with a corporeal woman who "lifted her veil" (TU 140). Like much of Conrad's fiction, this tale dramatizes a tense quest for a means whereby a horrible "suspense . . . as if poised . . . to fall into some devouring nowhere" (TU 154) might be evaded. Although to Conrad, of course, such an enterprise is futile, the protagonist's questing generates much of the conceptual and rhetorical integrity of the story.

Consider merely the complexities present in the striking opening paragraph (TU 118-19), which establishes the terms that function aesthetically to unify the remainder of the tale. This passage describes that moment at the end of the day when prosperous men, who have sacrificed awareness and individuality in order to gain and wield economic power, and who thus have access to the "inner circle" in both a geographical and figurative sense, complacently fare homeward aboard public transportation. These men, who "appeared alike," travel on a train that, as it "rushed impetuously out of a black hole," suggests in its mechanical action the psychic compunctions of Alvan Hervey and his peers, all of whom look as if they had been "wearing a uniform" and behave as if they are "fleeing from something . . . suspected or concealed." Fittingly, the compartments of this train are segregated according to economic class, and hence embody the unpleasant facts that occasion this flight. For these are men who, like Hervey, exude that "tinge of overbearing brutality that is given by the possession of only partly difficult accomplishments; by excelling in games, or in the art of making money."