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

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

In "The Return," that is, Hervey expects profitable "returns." He justifies such expectations metaphysically, since "on judgment day . . . hearts . . . shall return . . . to the Inscrutable Creator," and he assumes his supplication "I want to know," and his "desire to see, to penetrate, to understand," are contained within a cosmos that allows "profitable . . . illusions" and "the return of idealized perfections" (TU 174, 146, 139, 183). Confusing finances with apperception, Hervey shares with most denizens of Western European culture the assumption that words and numbers directly refer resolvently to external things, that his demand, "What's the meaning of this?" (TU 168), with its absurd definite article and pronoun, is meaningful. Even after he conceives of knowledge as entailing figuratively more than two dimensions, "walls concealing passions," and thinks of "his most cherished convictions . . . as the narrow prejudices of fools," he continues to maintain the traditional epistemological assumption that something comprehensible and final, albeit temporarily "veiled," exists behind the "dark curtain [that] seemed to rise before him," to be eventually "unveiled" (TU 135, 137, 133, 168).

Much of his life, Hervey has experienced "longing," "desire," "yearning" (TU 120, 153, 173). Small wonder, then, that he is prompted to marry, which to him meant "to get . . . something" (TU 153), for the Women's Property Act of 1870 had done little to alleviate the financial vulnerability of women after marriage (see Pearsall 175 ff.). Still, after his wife's disorienting conduct he realizes that "his immense desire" is not for some "thing," but rather for final refuge, for "great tenderness, deep as the ocean, serene and eternal . . . what he had wanted all his life" (TU 178). And he conceives of such a refuge as a "gift," thereby abandoning the "pitiless materialism" that has dominated his mature life for something "immaterial and precious" (TU 121, 178-79).

In other words, Hervey wishes to remain a conceptual flatlander within the two-dimensional world to which he is accustomed, largely "unable to look . . . at a fact . . . or a belief otherwise than in the light of . . . [his] own glorification" (TU 123). The petrific illumination cast by his "Rigid principles" is embodied manageably and (thus) morally in the "marble woman, decently covered from neck to instep with stone draperies [and] lifeless toes [that] thrust out blindly a rigid white arm holding a cluster of lights" (TU 157, 123). This figure definitively anticipates Kurtz's painting of I woman bearing a torch, Jewel's lighted torch, and Edith Travers's "blazing torch" (HD 79, LJ 300, R 393)--Conrad's way of figuring forth the urgent desire for a static certitude that men hope can be imposed invalidly upon phenomenal flux by feminine accomplices who only briefly can be enticed into embodying such desire. Hence, Hervey's wife can only temporarily be reduced to collaborative statuary, abolish her female essence and seem to be "an obelisk," for the torpid glow cast by the "crude gas flame that resembled a butterfly" cannot arrest her psyche (TU 120, 124; cf. TH 60). Consequently, a pall is cast figuratively over familiar surfaces, and Hervey inevitably must experience disorientation, as fatuous illumination fails and he is repeatedly "appalled" (see TU 127, 130, 136, 185).