Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography by Said Edward W

Author:Said, Edward W. [Said, Edward W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT004130, Literary Criticism/European/General, Literary Criticism/General, LIT000000
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2012-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

Conrad’s interest in the quest I have been discussing comes to quasi-fruitful maturity in two of the last six stories he wrote before The Mirror of the Sea, “Typhoon” and “The End of the Tether.” Both are stories of old men in periods of inordinate trial. Captain MacWhirr in “Typhoon” is an uneducated man of no distinction; even his crew holds him in some disdain. But one great virtue is his ability to face what is before him with his whole being, totally incapable of scrutinizing either tradition or the past. When a typhoon is about to descend upon the ship, his literal mind can see no alternative but to go through it. His attempted study of books on typhoons is ludicrously inept, for he cannot bring himself to understand the details. Only the fact of the low reading on the barometer and his presumption of the ship’s danger trouble him. Jukes, his mate, is the interpreting man, bothered by questions of alternatives, of safety, of conflicting passions. The sustained climax of the story intensely conveys MacWhirr’s steady occupancy of his position in space (always on deck) and in time (moving steadily through a stormy period). Conrad’s awareness of the sacrifice MacWhirr must have made and continues to make for this choice of unreflecting fidelity to duty accounts for the seemingly irrelevant presence in the tale of MacWhirr’s wife and children. Always away from them, always a silly, mindless individual to them, MacWhirr’s unthinking modesty knows only that he has been through some kind of experience. His letters to them (and their reading of his incredibly prosaic storm letter ends the tale) are received with petulant patience. Yet Mac-Whirr has no past to live up to; everything is in the present for him. And this is what the tale advances and rejects almost at the same time. To occupy the present with a singleminded attention to immediate duty is the achievement of a man for whom thought—and broader awareness—is impossible.

Judged by itself, “Typhoon” seems to suggest that MacWhirr’s way is the best after all. Set against the more interesting and credible figures in Conrad’s other short fiction of this period, MacWhirr is a nonidealistically rendered individual of comparatively shallow gifts, a man temperamentally alien to Conrad himself. The dissatisfaction the reader feels at the callous treatment accorded MacWhirr by his family, especially after his unacknowledged heroism, is intensified to the point of impatient annoyance with MacWhirr and not, as might be hoped, with his family. So that while we admire MacWhirr for what he does now, we reject him for what he can never do then. To sum up: MacWhirr is in the present, on a ship in a catastrophic storm. This can be compared with Hervey’s immediate awareness of his wife’s betrayal. But whereas Hervey instantly leaves the immediate for the past, MacWhirr remains absolutely steady on course. There are a finite number of things to be done and he does them: to Jukes and the other sailors go the tasks of executing his orders with agony and difficulty.

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