Masters of Disinterest: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Conrad's Victory but Were Afraid to Ask James

Conradiana, vol. 45, no. 3, 2015 © Texas Tech University Press

Masters of Disinterest: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Conrad’s Victory

but Were Afraid to Ask James

YAEL LEVIN

THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY OF JERUSALEM

This paper proposes to uncover the covert plot that binds two seemingly unre-lated texts, Henry James’s “The Lesson of the Master” and Joseph Conrad’s Victory. The purpose of such an exercise is twofold: the juxtaposition will allow for a rereading of Conrad´s novel and a re-evaluation of its philosophi-cal exploration of disinterest.

To return to “That harried concept of ‘disinterest,’” in George Levine’s terms (921), might be deemed counter-productive in an age that offers a range of critical deconstructions of the term. Prefacing her study of detachment in Vic-torian thought, Amanda Anderson acknowledges “feminist, postmodern, and pragmatist” arguments that view “scientific objectivity and critical rationality” as “forms of knowledge that fundamentally deny their own situatedness” and claims that “no individual or community can denude itself of its defining prac-tices, interests, and norms, all of which are historically variable” and “can never be understood apart from those forms of power and hierarchy that structure them” (24). If I return to this somewhat maligned philosophical principle, however, it is not in the name of historical revisionism but in order to demon-strate that the very suspicion that generates its deconstruction has its objective correlative in the principle itself. The perspective wrought of disinterest relies on distance—between style and theme, frame and image, discourse and con-tent. The performance of disinterest, then, draws attention to an underlying incongruity, dissonance, or incoherence in the text that generates a certain confusion or incredulity in the reader. The following analysis hinges on the understanding that ambiguity, as I will presently define it, is the inevitable by-product of the literary application of disinterest.

Conrad’s Victory and James’s “The Lesson of the Master” are both frustratingly

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ambivalent in their negotiation of disinterest. This paper will take up the long-standing critical attempt to pin down their respective philosophical commit-ments metonymically. It will begin by tracing significant similarities in the plotting and narrative makeup of the two works, a comparative analysis that will uncover a chiasmic link between them. Such an exercise will allow us not only to reread the works in a new light, but also to identify their underlying ambiguity, an ambiguity that will be treated here as the performative articula-tion of disinterest. The paper will then offer a brief overview of the critical reception of the two works and the telling critical divide they elicit. I will show that Victory follows the example of the short story in confounding readers’ attempts to pronounce its underlying aesthetic philosophy. Such resistance will be read not as ambivalence towards disinterest, but as the telltale sign of its application.

1. CORRESPONDENCES: MASTERS WHO DO NOT PRACTICEWHAT THEY PREACH

“The Lesson of the Master” is a story of artistic initiation. Hoping to learn something of the essence of good writing, Paul Overt seeks out the acquain-tance of the renowned novelist, Henry St. George. The latter readily dispenses the rules of aesthetic commitment, a condemnation of material ties that is made evident from the outset: “One’s children interfere with perfection. One’s wife interferes” (James 70). “[An artist],” he explains, “has nothing to do with the relative—he has only to do with the absolute; and a dear little family may represent a dozen relatives” (76). Arguing, then, that great art can be achieved only through the relinquishment of all ties, the Master presides over his young apprentice’s tutelage in the art of renunciation.

Victory does not follow the short story in thematizing writing but unfolds as an existential exercise—a testing of the relation between desire and being in the world, between participation and spectatorship. More so than this, per-haps, Victory offers itself as a cautionary tale on the deadly effects of clashing desires in a battle for a girl. I would like to suggest that there is something to be gained from the juxtaposition of the two works. Reading Conrad through James and James through Conrad, this section will trace a chiasmic link between the two plots. As is well known, James’s tale finally undoes its own premise by concluding with the suspicion that the theory of renunciation may be nothing but an elaborate ploy to get the girl. Overt discovers that though he thought himself to be the protagonist of a story of writing, he may have been the dupe in a story of triangular desire. An inverse trajectory will be teased out in Victory. Haunted by blank pages and deadly script, a novel that manifestly

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LEVIN—Masters of Disinterest 3

eschews a negotiation with poetics will be read as a case study of repressed writing. But if James’s tale is finally a story of triangular desire and Conrad’s of writing, the two texts appear to be philosophically coordinated. While both begin by espousing disinterest—promoting the Schopenhauerian-inspired maxim that “he who forms a tie is lost” (Conrad, Victory 200), both end with the suspicion that such a principle is inherently flawed. Heyst’s final words to Davidson offer a neat summary of what Paul Overt can only confusedly sus-pect: “Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love—and to put its trust in life!” (Victory 410). This section will conclude by tracing the manner in which the narrative stylization of the two works under-mines the thematic trajectory that leads to the rejection of disinterest.

Before turning to the two texts, I would like to delimit my discussion of disinterest by offering a working definition of a term that has come to encom-pass many different and at times contradictory denotations. Though touching on the term’s history, the paper will follow Conrad’s focus on its articulation within Schopenhauerian philosophy. Schopenhauer writes that:

If, raised by the power of the mind, a man relinquishes the common way of looking at things, gives up tracing, under the guidance of the forms of the principle of suf-ficient reason, their relations to each other, the final goal of which is always a rela-tion to his own will . . . inasmuch as he loses himself in this object (to use a pregnant German idiom), i.e., forgets even his individuality, his will, and only continues to exist as the pure subject, the clear mirror of the object, so that it is as if the object alone were there, without any one to perceive it, and he can no longer separate the perceiver from the perception, but both have become one, because the whole con-sciousness is filled and occupied with one single sensuous picture; if thus the object has to such an extent passed out of all relation to something outside it, and the subject out of all relation to the will, then that which is so known is no longer the particular thing as such; but it is the Idea, the eternal form, the immediate objectiv-ity of the will at this grade; and, therefore, he who is sunk in this perception is no longer individual, for in such perception the individual has lost himself; but he is pure, will-less, painless, timeless subject of knowledge. (231)

Through the practice of ascesis, the subject achieves a unique and unencum-bered perspective that is seen as key to epistemological and aesthetic accom-plishment. The paper will follow the two works’ thematization of the relinquishing of all emotional bonds to others as the means to achieving this goal.1

“The Lesson of the Master” dramatizes an encounter between a young and upcoming writer and one of his idols, a great but “misguided novelist” (118)

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whose “later work” demonstrates a “comparative absence of quality” (117). The latter detail is significant; the Master has the authority of established genius together with the awareness of his fall from grace. It is with the full force of this awareness that he appeals to his apprentice:

Look at me well, take my lesson to heart—for it is a lesson. Let that good come of it at least that you shudder with your pitiful impression, and that this may help to keep you straight in the future. Don’t become in your old age what I have in mine—the depressing, the deplorable illustration of the worship of false gods! (141)

These false gods, he clarifies, are “the idols of the market; money and luxury and ‘the world’”; placing one’s children and dressing one’s wife” (141). The Master here lays out the binaries between interest and disinterest—between the aesthete’s principle of art for art’s sake and the vulgarity associated with the sacrifice of artistic integrity to market demands. St. George’s lesson is readily assimilated; Overt is primed for such indoctrination, as his view of life and art already resonates with such categorical binaries. “Why try to be an art-ist?” he asks Miss Fancourt. “As compared to being a person of action” “it’s so poor—so poor” (131). The divide drawn here between participation and spec-tatorship is telling, and will soon be taken up in our discussion of Victory. The full force of St. George’s words appears to hit the mark later on, however, when the young disciple assesses the chances of his suit for Miss Fancourt’s affections. She is “not for a dingy little man of letters,” he laments. “She’s for the world, the bright rich world of bribes and rewards” (145). Here the world is revealed as something more than the emblem of participation suggested before; it is now representative of the vulgarity of the material. It is this slip-page from action to vulgarity that offsets Overt’s blind admiration for the Master’s self-professed cage of a study. Perusing its vault-like insulation, he muses: “What good things I should do if I had such a charming place as this,” where “the outer world, the world of accident and ugliness, was so successfully excluded” (165). Overt’s decision to accept St. George’s challenge and sacrifice his feelings for Miss Fancourt in order to do “really good work” (169) brings his instruction to a close. The artist, St. George eulogizes in closing the discus-sion, is not a man. “The concentration, the finish, the independence he must strive for from the moment he begins to wish his work really decent” (169)—this is what defines the artist. And true to the Master’s lesson, it is by following this prescription and renouncing love and all worldly ties that Overt produces his masterpiece.

Heyst inherits the self-same theory of renunciation from his father. But where Kantian disinterest evolves in James’s tale into a state of mind akin to

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that espoused by Archibald Alison, as critical treatments of Victory have shown, the theory of renunciation tested here is in keeping with Schopenhau-erian philosophy. The first concerns itself with “that temper of mind which suits with “the aesthetic object. ‘That state of mind . . . most favorable to the emotions of taste . . . in which the attention is so little occupied by any private or particular object of thought, as to leave us open to all the impressions, which the objects that are before us can produce’” (Stolnitz 137). The second is “the power of leaving one’s own interests, wishes, and aims entirely out of sight, thus of entirely renouncing one’s own personality for a time, so as to remain pure knowing subject, clear vision of the world” (Schopenhauer 239). It is beyond the scope of this paper to offer a detailed description of the differences and similarities between these two approaches, an exercise that would involve a potentially tedious tracing of nuances. Any attempt to draw clear distinctions between the two would be hampered by the fact that, though rooted in two distinct branches of philosophy—aesthetics and ontology—the two systems of thought inevitably overlap. Alison’s aesthetics unfold as a “phenomenology, or the beginnings of one” (Stolnitz 138), and Schopenhauer’s phenomenology relies on “the method of genius, which is only valid and of use in art” (Scho-penhauer 239). Despite this evident connection, we might suggest a working differentiation of these two methods of philosophical engagement on the basis of their ends, a distinction that can be readily if reductively applied to the two authors under consideration here. In James’s short story disinterest provides the means to the beautiful; in Conrad’s novel it facilitates the pursuit of a fun-damental if elusive human truth.

In Victory it is Heyst’s father who presides over the protagonist’s life of renunciation. It is with a commitment to his instruction to “look on—make no sound” (Victory 175) that Heyst begins a life that should, but fails to become, “a masterpiece of aloofness” (174). But if the philosophical backdrop to Victory is its protagonist’s commitment to inaction, the novel is beset by schemes, manipulation, and a fair amount of mayhem—all because, as Nic Panagopou-los writes, “the characters of Victory, irrespective of gender or social role, are governed by the subconscious and irrational promptings of the [Schopenhau-erian] will, so that when a conflict arises between their reason and their instincts, the latter always triumphs” (10). It is precisely this triumph of will that is evinced in the power of the object of desire to yoke together the likes of Schomberg, Heyst, and Ricardo. “Schomberg of a few years ago,” the narrator informs us, “would never have risked anything of the sort. His genius ran to catering, ‘white man for white men,’ and to the inventing, elaborating, and retailing of scandalous gossip with asinine unction and impudent delight. But now his mind was perverted by the pangs of wounded vanity and of thwarted

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passion. In this state of moral weakness Schomberg allowed himself to be cor-rupted” (Victory 97). The narrator here parodies the demands of Schopenhau-rien disinterest by testing them against a man without a moral compass whose very personality is the sum of his weaknesses. Schomberg is not a “subject of pure knowledge.” That the perversion alluded to here is arguably the one expression of real humanity in his character’s makeup cannot be taken at face value as a critique of Schopenhauerian philosophy. It is nevertheless telling that the narrator locates the seeds of corruption in this particular failing. The parody of the notion of a fatal flaw in Schomberg subversively mirrors the same as perceived in the protagonist. When Lena questions Heyst about his connection to Morrison’s demise, Heyst reflects: “I had, in a moment of inad-vertence, created for myself a tie. How to define it precisely I don´t know. One gets attached in a way to people one has done something for. But is that friend-ship? I am not sure what it was. I only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul” (199–200). Though the hotel-keeper’s weakness may be seen as little more than the carnivalesque doubling of Heyst’s virtuous enterprise, the slippage of the manifestations of corruption from Schomberg’s grotesque passions to Heyst’s charity demonstrates the inev-itable razing of moral concerns that is entailed by a whole-hearted commit-ment to Schopenhauerian detachment. And it is this contagion of corruption and its expression in a battle for the possession of Lena that lies at the heart of the novel’s action and its denouement. Ostensibly, then, Victory unfolds as a dramatization of the consequences of a failure to transcend, the inevitable con-sequences of allowing oneself “to be corrupted” as explored in the familiar plotting of boy meets girl, boy gets girl, boy loses girl. It is, in short, precisely the plot the young protagonist finds himself playing out in the final chapter of “The Lesson of the Master.”

On his return to London with his new manuscript, Overt learns that St. George and Miss Fancourt are engaged to be married. Given that he had adopted the Master´s theory of renunciation in relation to the very same object of desire only two years before, Overt is confounded:

“Was it a plan—was it a plan?” Sometimes he cried to himself, breathless, “Have I been duped, sold, swindled?” If at all, he was an absurd, an abject victim. It was as if he hadn’t lost her till now. He had renounced her, yes; but that was another affair—that was a closed but not a locked door. Now he seemed to see the door quite slammed in his face. (James 181)

Overt’s misery is that of the critic who finds that he has completely misread a narrative. A story of artistic tutelage is suddenly revamped as the vulgar rendi-

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tion of a triangular desire where he is not the victor but the loser. Though he appears to have the upper hand in the arena of artistic achievement, in this emerging plot St. George has not only vanquished his adversarial dragon, but also run off with the booty.

And yet, as this door only seems to have been “slammed,” Overt is left pro-foundly “troubled as to the degree of his right . . . to regard himself as a victim” (184). He cannot decide whether St. George has been sincere or “a mocking fiend” (187). This confusion is momentarily checked when Overt notes the Master’s “radiance” and perceives it not only as the marker of happiness, but also as the indubitable confirmation that “the author of ‘Shadowmere’ had now definitely ceased to count—ceased to count as a writer” (184). That the narra-tive concludes with the narrator’s report that St. George has not, in fact, pro-duced another work appears to confirm the veracity of the Master’s lesson. And yet, since the possibility that such a work would appear in the future remains, Overt’s and the readers’ doubts linger. And it is perhaps this doubt that inspires the narrator’s final words of reassurance where he states that, if such a work were to materialize, “Overt would be the very first to appreciate it: which is perhaps a proof that the Master was essentially right and that Nature had dedicated [Overt] to intellectual, not to personal passion” (188).

In Victory, the narrator offers the reverse judgment on Heyst. The latter’s “trouble,” we are told, is that he does not “seem” to have “the hermit’s voca-tion!” (Victory 31). Such reversal is in keeping with the chiasmus traced in this juxtaposition of the two works. Where the inability to practice detachment is perceived in the novel as a weakness, James’s protagonist’s inbuilt capacity to practice renunciation is viewed as a source of strength. The key to both James’s and Conrad’s protagonists’ achievement, then, is their ability to practice detachment and disinterest. The fact that the former’s success is as ironized as the latter’s failure not only bridges the gap between the two works’ underlying message, but also problematizes any attempt to pronounce what it is, exactly, that the implied authors are advocating. James’s message is caught in a herme-neutic double bind that can only be resolved by doing violence to the text’s underlying ambiguity. Conrad’s text offers its own hermeneutic challenges. We might choose to view Heyst’s final words in the novel as a ventriloquizing of the implied author’s verdict. Such an interpretation would regard Victory as promoting participation over detachment, involvement over aloofness, offer-ing a powerful challenge to the practice of aesthetic detachment. I would argue that though the overt plot appears to espouse action over detachment, the novel’s covert plot of writing dramatizes a gradual collapsing of the categorical boundaries between the two.

The story of triangular desire in “The Lesson of the Master” cannot be said

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to conform to Cedric Watts’ definition of a covert plot, “another purposeful sequence, but one which is partly hidden, so that it may elude readers . . . at the first and second readings” (30). James sets his two tales side by side, and they are both fittingly Overt. The plot that I wish to trace in Victory, on the other hand, does precisely what Watts describes. Though pertaining to epistemologi-cal, ethical, ontological, and even, as Panagopoulos has shown, aesthetic ques-tioning, what the novel does not appear to be is a story of writing. I would like to suggest that this might be viewed as a telling omission, the key to Heyst’s unconscious battle to assert his independence against his father’s paralyzing influence.

We are told that the elder Heyst had not only “written a lot of books” (Vic-tory 33), but had written “of everything in many books—of space and of time, of animals and of stars” (218). In a near perfect chronological reproduction of the act of creation, Heyst’s father goes through the elements—from heaven and earth to day and night, to all living beings and the stars. The allusion to the story of creation is important and offers a clue to the father-son relationship. If Heyst the elder is god-like, we know his son to be an Adam fashioned in his image. As Davidson remarks, his life story “fits the son of his father, somehow” (33). And Heyst writes; he writes prodigiously. Four pages into the novel we are told that Heyst is “a ready letter-writer” and that he has “written pages and pages” (6) to his friends in Europe. Given this natural inclination and his father’s legacy, it is striking that the only evidence of his writing offered after the expository note is the “few lines in pencil on a crumpled piece of paper” (43) that Mrs. Schomberg clandestinely flings at Davidson when he comes to inquire about his friend. The secret note conveys the message “that an unfore-seen necessity” had driven Heyst “away before the appointed time” (43). I would argue that the transition from pages and pages of writing to a crumpled piece of paper marks a transition from the protagonist’s commitment to a life of spectatorship to one of participation, from drifting to acting. No longer the “unconcerned spectator” (185), he has become one of “the rest of us who act” (186). That writing appears to be the casualty of such a change is in keeping with the binaries traced in James’s story. And much like Overt, Heyst makes the painful discovery that the price he has had to pay for adhering to the mas-ter’s lesson is greater than he imagined. Haunted by his remorse for Morrison’s death, he muses that “though he had made up his mind to retire from the world in hermit fashion, yet he was irrationally moved by this sense of loneli-ness which had come to him in the hour of renunciation. It hurt him” (66). It is in this state of mind that Heyst first encounters Lena. In committing to her, a commitment attested to in this secret note, Heyst performatively rejects his father’s legacy. That Heyst’s note describes a deviation from his plan—a plan to

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return to Samburan and re-establish his hermitage—is as telling as the fact that it is hidden away in a crumpled piece of paper. In opting for a life of action Heyst represses writing.

The binaries I traced here between writing and action might seem fantastic in a novel that purportedly evades all things writerly. And yet these evasions are themselves strangely encoded into the text. The portrait of Heyst’s father is a case in point. We recall that it depicts “the profile of Heyst’s father, pen in hand above a white sheet of paper on a crimson tablecloth” (189). The blank sheet of paper that rests in the foreground may itself be deemed accusative, the incriminating traces of work not done. An odd turn of phrase that attaches to the description of the portrait’s power over the son further emphasizes the sug-gestiveness of the image. Picking up one of his father’s books, Heyst reads, “shrinking into himself, composing his face as if under the author’s eye, with a vivid consciousness of the portrait on his right hand, a little above his head” (218, my emphasis). That Heyst is conscious of the portrait on his right hand makes little sense—the portrait is hung on the wall behind and above him; his father is painted in profile; Heyst is holding the book with both hands. Several colorful interpretations are available in attempting to decipher Heyst’s sensa-tion that the full force of his father´s accusative stare is refracted onto his right hand. I see it as a condemnation of a writing hand that colludes with its mas-ter’s obstinate resistance to his calling. Such an interpretation is supported by Heyst’s emotional reaction to the metonymical expressions of this blank page, which, though most clearly represented in the portrait, recur in different shapes and forms. When entering his bungalow at dusk, like a writer suffering writer’s block, he finds the “sheen of the white tablecloth . . . very obtrusive” (357).

Another haunting sheet of paper makes an unchartered appearance in tan-dem with the arrival of Jones and his crew. Meaning to show them to their rooms, Heyst approaches one of the abandoned bungalows. A thinly veiled symbol of the unconscious, the door cannot be opened before Wang is sent off for a lantern and a key:

After working at the stiff lock, Wang applied his shoulder to the door. It came open with explosive suddenness, as if in a passion at being thus disturbed after two years’ repose. From the dark slope of a tall stand-up writing-desk a forgotten, solitary sheet of paper flew up and settled gracefully on the floor. (243)

That the paraphernalia of writing have been buried away and reappear at the moment of Jones’s invasion once again signals that a commitment to action is made at the expense of that other life, the life that has been repressed and

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locked away. The reopened room will serve the plot of adventure—it will not be used as a space of writing and contemplation.

This slippage from writing to action recurs in the passage describing the disappearance of Heyst’s revolver. We recall that Lena awakes one night to find Heyst rummaging through his writing desk. Heyst “could not have explained what had induced him to go to the drawer in the middle of the night. He had started up suddenly, which was very unusual with him” (255). The impulse to go to the desk in the middle of the night remains unexplained. The writing desk, however, unfolds not as the space of writing but of action. If it is empty, what is missing are not pen and paper, but the weapon that was hidden in a secret drawer. Finding that the desk drawers are empty, Heyst surmises that the thief must be Wang: “This moral stab in the back seemed to have taken some of his strength from him, as a physical wound would have done. He had no desire to do anything—neither to bring Wang to terms in the matter of the revolver nor to find out from the strangers who they were, and how their pre-dicament had come about” (259). By taking the weapon, Wang symbolically strips Heyst of “any line of action” (258) and in doing so, restores the desk to its original designation as a place of writing. In the absence of the weapon the desk is no longer the treasure chest that promotes the action. As a metonymi-cal expression of its owner, the transformation noted in the desk finds its par-allel in the man. Stripped of the ability to act, Heyst too reverts back to that spectator who “looks on” and makes “no sound.”

In Heyst’s oscillation between seeing and acting we have a rehearsal of a separation evident throughout the Conrad canon. Everywhere demonstrating the principle that “the onlookers see most of the game” (Conrad, Lord Jim 224), the Conradian storyteller relies on a certain voyeuristic distance from the action. Douglas B. Park comments on this:

To be a looker-on at a game is a common stance for Conrad’s narrators, even in the earlier fiction, and much more so in the later–for example in Nostromo when Decoud becomes the narrator, or throughout The Secret Agent. And the Heyst who voyages into the heart of dark New Guinea and returns not with “The Horror!” but with a portfolio of sketches (8), or the Heyst who, according to his own wishful memories, used “in solitude and in silence . . . to think clearly . . . seeing life outside the flattering optical delusion of everlasting hope, of conventional self-deceptions” (82), obviously echoes such notions of narrative freedom and detachment. (154)

Kurtz and Jim need Marlow to live to tell their tale; if they submit to “the destructive element” (Lord Jim 214) he can make do with a peep over the edge before he “draw[s] back [his] hesitating foot” (Conrad, Heart of Darkness

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101). Thomas Moser writes that “the simple betrayer such as Jim or Nostromo cannot really understand what he has done, let alone express it. For this rea-son, he requires an interpreter, someone more subtle to explain the failure to the reader. Jim has Marlow” (21). And indeed, it is recalled that Jim’s own attempts to write are soon abandoned:

“An awful thing has happened,” [Jim] wrote before he flung the pen down for the first time; . . . After a while he had tried again, scrawling heavily, as if with a hand of lead, another line. “I must now at once . . .” The pen had spluttered, and that time he gave it up. (Lord Jim 340–41)

Such a separation is evident outside the cycle of Marlovian tales, in the dyad of Razumov and the English teacher, the separation of the main narrative in The Arrow of Gold from the framing notes, and elsewhere.

In Victory, too, the separation between seeing and doing is drawn along an epistemological continuum. The narrator comments, “It is not the clear-sighted who lead the world. Great achievements are accomplished in a blessed, warm mental fog, which the pitiless cold blasts of the father’s analysis had blown away from the son” (Victory 92). As Marlow and the English teacher’s ample reflections demonstrate—the leaders or doers are the ones who are great and perish. Those who practice detachment are burdened with the role of reflecting and documenting. They follow from a safe distance and bear witness. But where the works mentioned channel these two facets of human experience in two separate psyches, Heyst carries the burden of promoting the two thematic clusters alone. Having set his eyes on Lena, he notes the change within:

Formerly, in solitude and in silence, he had been used to think clearly and some-times even profoundly, seeing life outside the flattering optical delusion of everlast-ing hope, of conventional self-deceptions, of an ever-expected happiness. But now he was troubled; a light veil seemed to hang before his mental vision; the awakening of a tenderness, indistinct and confused as yet, towards an unknown woman. (82)

Heyst is here described as experiencing that loss of vision that is consequent upon the creation of the doom-heralding tie. It is a forceful illustration of the disintegration of the Schopenhauerien “subject of knowledge” (Schopenhauer 231). With one fell swoop Lena effectively—if unconsciously—cancels out Heyst’s father’s influence and his legacy. The Heyst that had committed to his father’s decree, we recall, had shared the ascetic’s clear-sightedness. But the character who gives in to his loneliness and establishes a tie no longer sees very clearly.

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If we have so far traced the manner in which the novel follows the well-established binaries between seeing and blindness, between writing and acting, it is important to note that though it initially adheres to this separation, Victory tests and I believe concludes with an alternative kind of script, one that is not the product of detached reflection but of performance. This other writing is generically determined; it deals in the tragic. Clues to this paradigmatic shift are already evident in the figure of the father. If Heyst the elder is a writer who advocates disinterest, much like St. George, he does not seem to practice what he preaches. We recall that he is not only a writer, “thinker,” and “stylist,” but also a “man of the world” who had begun by “coveting all the joys, those of the great and those of the humble, those of the fools and those of the sages” (Vic-tory 91). His writing career, then, seems to be the product not of detachment but disenchantment:

For more than sixty years he had dragged on this painful earth of ours the most weary, the most uneasy soul that civilisation had ever fashioned to its ends of disil-lusion and regret. One could not refuse him a measure of greatness, for he was unhappy in a way unknown to mediocre souls. In this work, at the end of his life, he claimed for mankind that right to absolute moral and intellectual liberty of which he no longer believed them worthy. (91)

The portrait sketched above is not that of the “pure subject of knowledge.” Living side by side with the most unhappy of men, the son would associate the life of the writer with disillusionment and misery. Writing, in this sense, may be seen more as a product of loss than of an aesthete’s pose. Ironically, this is clear in Heyst’s reflections on his successful detachment from his father’s influence:

The oldest voice in the world is just the one that never ceases to speak. If anybody could have silenced its imperative echoes, it should have been Heyst’s father, with his contemptuous, inflexible negation of all effort; but apparently he could not. There was in the son a lot of that first ancestor who, as soon as he could uplift his muddy frame from the celestial mould, started inspecting and naming the animals of that paradise which he was so soon to lose. (173–74)

If naming and losing are the key to this alternative script, Lena is clearly Heyst’s masterpiece. We recall that, “after several experimental essays in com-bining detached letters and loose syllables” (186). Heyst gives her the name of Lena, thereby forging her new identity wherein she “can only be what” he thinks she is and wouldn’t “be in the world at all” if he were to “stop thinking

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of [her]” (187). In keeping with the generic determinism noted above, it is perhaps fitting that the one script that he is finally able to decipher is the one that marks her death. Finding Lena after the last skirmish, Heyst and David-son stand “side by side, looking mournfully at the little black hole made by Mr. Jones’s bullet under the swelling breast of a dazzling and as it were sacred whiteness” (405).

I have argued that while Victory’s overt plot dramatizes clashing male desires over an object of desire, the covert plot traces a slippage in the life of the writer from detachment to disenchantment, from disinterest to misery, from the accusative force of blank pages to a deadly script. We might do well to test such a trajectory against the earlier story. “The Lesson of the Master” may similarly be relegated not to the “giving up [of] personal happiness” (James 174), but rather the embracing of the pain of privation. Overt’s book is completed not at the moment of disinterested renunciation, but precisely when the fear of loss emerges and he is “on the point of rushing back to London” (177). It is “on this occasion“ that “a certain belief in himself disengaged itself whimsically from the serried erasures of his first draft.” Confirmed in his belief that “if he could write so well under the rigor of privation it might be a mistake to change the conditions before that spell had spent itself ” (178), Overt voids the plan to rush back and stays behind to finish his book.

This exercise in unearthing the covert plots of writing and disinterest in Victory may be seen as a feat of over-interpretation. Why, indeed, am I picking on Heyst? In approaching Heyst early on in the novel, Morrison finds himself in a similar predicament. He justifies himself to the protagonist thus: ““Upon my word, I don’t know why I have been telling you all this. I suppose seeing a thoroughly white man made it impossible to keep my trouble to myself. Words can’t do it justice; but since I’ve told you so much I may as well tell you more” (Victory 14). The insistence on Heyst’s whiteness throughout the novel relates, of course, to that racial marker that assembles the major players. Tony Tanner perceptively connects this leitmotif to Heyst’s practiced detachment. He writes, “Heyst thought to have no connection with earthly affairs and passions’ and, like other Conradian quixotic idealists, he is habitually dressed in spotless white” (125). But much as Morrison’s words to Heyst demonstrate, this motif of detachment contains its antithesis. The color not only marks the protago-nist’s neutrality, but also his role as a blank page that repeatedly serves as a canvas for projections. Heyst’s many epithets testify to this, as do the multiple and often contradictory stories told of him by Schomberg, Ricardo, Morrison, Lena, and Davidson.

I have attempted to tease out the tensions inherent in James’s and Conrad’s texts in order to highlight the layered and contradictory nature of their treatment

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of disinterest. These thematic tensions are intensified by stylistic measures that further complicate any attempt to pin down the implied authors’ verdicts on the self-same aesthetic principle. As we have seen, the plot twist in James’s story leaves its protagonist at a loss as to the veracity of the master’s lesson. James mirrors this thematic ambiguity in the stylization of his tale, which in Shlomith Rimmon’s terms, assumes the form of an “impossible situation” (XI). Such taxonomy of ambiguity is produced by the co-presence of two mutually exclusive yet equally plausible interpretations of a given text. “The Lesson of the Master” may be read in one of two ways: choosing to dwell on Overt’s artis-tic achievement as reported in the tale’s concluding paragraphs, we might view the story as advocating disinterest. The master’s lesson has proven true. If, on the other hand, we choose to focus on Overt’s failure in the plot of triangular desire, we might see the story rather as challenging the merits of the master’s lesson and the aesthetic practice it advocates. Both readings are equally valid; they are equally supported by textual detail. By encompassing textual evidence to support two antithetical readings, “the impossible situation” denies a defini-tive and all-encompassing interpretation. In “The Lesson of the Master” we cannot choose one interpretation over another without doing violence to the text. To do the text justice we must allow the implied author’s pronouncement on disinterest to remain open.

Victory similarly confounds its readers’ attempts to pinpoint the implied author’s verdict on disinterest, but it does so not by offering two contradictory solutions to its central enigma, but rather by preaching one thing and practic-ing another. In other words, it pits theme against style, content against dis-course. We have seen that the blank pages that haunt the novel testify to the implied author’s investment in the separation of seeing and doing, writing and suffering. The network of symbols we have traced may be seen as indicative of the implied author’s conviction that writing and participation are mutually exclusive. Such separation is once again demonstrated in the staging of Heyst’s last reported action. In burning down the house and that last page of writing on Lena’s breast, Heyst secures his place in the ranks of those who act rather than those who write. We might argue that in this act Heyst follows the exam-ple of St. George. We recall the latter is reported to have burned a manuscript his wife deemed inferior, confirming the suspicion that a commitment to one’s spouse heralds the sacrifice of one’s finest work. Much like James’s celebrated author-character, Heyst’s tale unravels by dropping disinterest and adopting the realization that though emotional bonds may be destructive, they are the key to human experience.

Victory, however, does not conclude here. Undermining the thematic tra-jectory outlined above, Heyst’s tragedy is framed by Davidson’s narration, an

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eye-witness report of the events surrounding Heyst’s demise. This strikingly disinterested account is made to the auspicious audience of a “high official on his tour.” Responding to “the excellency”’s question as to whether he knew Heyst very well, Davidson remarks: “The truth is that nobody out here can boast of having known him well . . . He was a queer chap. I doubt if he himself knew how queer he was. But everybody was aware that I was keeping my eye on him in a friendly way” (Victory 408). Where Heyst is sacrificed on the altar of experience, Davidson remains the detached witness, a friendly onlooker who is there to conclude that “there is nothing to be done” and sum up (412). His outlook, then, is that of the aesthete, the spectator whose role it is to nar-rativize the ruins. Such embedding proves what Conrad already intimates in his preface. The charm of the artist’s object can only be destroyed by “extrane-ous exertion.” It is with the “perfect idleness” (xvii) of the spectator that its charm is restored. It is in this spirit that Davidson’s report brings the novel to a close. Spoken in perfect idleness, his words restore the object’s charm by salvaging it from the pile of ashes that mark Heyst’s extraneous exertion.

2. THE IMPOSSIBLE SITUATION: CRITICAL RECEPTION

In “Conrad’s Victory: The Anatomy of a Pose,” Park grapples with the critical commonplace dating back to the 1950s wherein, much like Conrad’s other late novels, Victory is classified as inferior to the works of the major phase. Park does not necessarily disagree with the influential work of Douglas Hewitt, Thomas Moser, and Albert Guerard who promoted the achievement and decline theory. But he does offer new terms with which to articulate and pro-cess Victory’s perceived shortcomings. He writes:

Conrad’s own final detachment in a novel that reveals detachment as fruitless must be suspect, and is perhaps the basic reason why Victory does not possess the status or, for many readers, the appeal of the earlier fiction where Conrad is still an ener-getic explorer of his own imagination. (169, my emphasis)

Park finds fault with the novel due to the inherent incongruity between Con-rad’s attitude and his message—that mismatch between style and content that I outlined above. It is not only this underlying duality, however, that Park condemns. His point concludes with a telling rejoinder on critical suspicion of disinterest; it is the honesty underlying an author’s exploration of his own imagination that the novel lacks. The practice of disinterest is suspect, in Park’s words, as it practices a falsification—a pretense. In the place of an author’s absolute commitment to the novel’s message, Conrad not only distances

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himself from the lesson he appears to endorse, but actively undermines it in the manner of its treatment.

Park’s words here once again demonstrate the performative power of disin-terest. If his words draw attention to the metafictional play involved in the application of disinterest—his is not an attempt to interpret so much as to comment on the novel’s composition—I would like to turn now to the herme-neutic challenge that such a performance entails. For it is precisely the incon-gruity Park identifies that I believe contributes to the critical confusion the text generates. More so, perhaps, than any other Conradian text, Victory generates an ambiguity akin to that associated with the works of Henry James. As men-tioned above, such ambiguity is convincingly explored in Rimmon-Kenan’s The Concept of Ambiguity and its study of “the impossible situation,” where a single text generates two mutually exclusive yet equally plausible interpreta-tions. Such a paradoxical reading situation inevitably creates a critical divide: readers often become allied with and entrenched in one of two oppositional interpretative camps.

In keeping with Rimmon-Kenan’s work on James, such an effect is evident in the critical divide surrounding “The Lesson of the Master.” If noted Jamesian critic, Adeline Tintner famously asserts that St. George’s espousal of disinterest “speaks for Henry James” himself (125–26), other critics argue that, in fact, the story undermines the sanctity of aesthetic disinterest. Vivienne Miller writes that in “The Lesson of the Master,” James’s intention is “clear” (17, my empha-sis). “In the final balance,” James “seems to have tipped the scale in favour of Life. . . . Marian’s and St. George’s human happiness is too vibrantly glowing, St. George’s masculinity and sexuality too potent, for the renunciation of life to appear anything but sterile and morbid.” Miller sees the story, then, as demon-strating that “the ability of the artist to detach himself from the forces of life that threaten to overwhelm him comes to be seen by James as an essential requirement of the successful artistic nature” (10). Similarly, Craig A. Milliman argues that “Paul fails miserably with the ‘text’ of Henry St. George because he continually subverts the evidence of the great man’s words and actions to his own aesthetic creed, violating Mark Ambient’s principle that the artist, in order to get at the truth, should portray life as it is rather than mold it into an aes-thetically palatable form” (88).

The question of Victory’s espousal of disinterest has generated its own criti-cal debate, one that is likewise divided between those who see the novel as promoting the principle and those who see it as its forceful condemnation. William W. Bonney’s reading of the novel is a case in point. Contesting “tradi-tional readings” that view the novel as a challenge to the philosophical merit of detachment, Bonney argues that, “by skillfully manipulating an inconsistent

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narrative technique . . . Conrad . . . validates the detachment of the human narrators.” He goes on to claim that “the catastrophic events of the final pages confirm what the various points of view have implied throughout, that, indeed, ‘he who forms a tie is lost’” (188).

If Bonney’s critique is launched against “traditional readings” that view the novel as a condemnation of disinterest, and therefore provides a useful demon-stration of the divide evident in the critical response to the novel, it is impor-tant to note that critical responses to the novel continue to shuttle back and forth between these interpretative camps. Tony Tanner has since argued that “Victory offered, among other things, a dramatic testing of a man pervaded, and perhaps perverted, by Schopenhauerian philosophy; and a demonstration of how, amidst the contingencies of actual, acted, life, such a philosophy could be found hopelessly, fatally, wanting” (125).

The critical divide surrounding Victory has recently been revisited, a return that testifies once more to the novel’s ability to generate striking opposition. In Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity, Peter Mallios sketches a com-parative phenomenon in the critical reception of Victory in the United States at the time of the Great War. The critical divide generated by the novel here came to be assimilated to the political debates surrounding the question of U.S. for-eign policy. The impossible situation in Victory was thus channeled to the opposing discourses of isolationism and participation. Mallios explains:

Whereas for Mencken the title of Conrad’s Victory, the most important text in Con-rad’s U.S. popularization, signals an ironic blast at precisely this kind of culture of righteous war promotion and patriotic self-galvanization, Doubleday seizes the reverse opportunity. By presenting Victory in the image of the Winged Victory, as the later “Share in the Victory” poster makes deadly clear, Doubleday not only thor-oughly aligns Conrad with U.S. war preparation and promotion efforts; Doubleday also suggests that Conrad´s works are somehow fundamentally of and about, framed and inscribed by, the experiences, hardships, and values of war in itself. (131)

That Victory served the American public as both emblem of war and its great-est vilification is surely an extreme example of the powerful effects of its underlying ambiguity.

Offering a charming summary of the ironic impenetrability of James’s lan-guage, Kevin Ohi suggests that the writer’s aestheticism “is to be found in its thwarting of our effort to decode in it a definitive statement about aestheti-cism” (748). Though only metonymically relevant to our discussion here, Ohi’s point brings to the fore the performative nature of artistic attitudes and their

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contribution to a particular class of reading effects. The distance between an author’s attitude and his work, between stylization and content, between a message and its frame, renders readers like Park suspicious. There is some-thing about the practice of disinterest that simply does not sit well with the critical reader. Writing on Modernism, an era most closely associated with the practice of impersonality and detachment, George Levine admits:

The artist, of course, is not dispassionate. Often the artist is driven precisely by pas-sion, and it is hard to imagine a great artist who is fully cold-blooded about his/her creation—although modernist art often aspired to create the illusion of such austere distance. The artist, like everyone else, is inhabited by assumptions and perspectives that are culturally shared, and by prejudices and personal limits that make it impos-sible to be utterly ‘impersonal.’ (924)

The artistic practice of distance is viewed by the critical reader as an illusion at best, and a hoax or falsification at worst. It is precisely this unease, however, that attests to the performative success of the principle whose application gen-erates it. That the artist will not identify himself with his creation, that he will detach himself from the message underlying his text or disentangle himself from its purported lesson, creates an underlying tension between two underly-ing significances—one that is the product of the work’s theme, the other, its stylistic frame. The reader may choose to champion one of the two, or admit to a sense of being duped. Such is the inevitable outcome of a chasm at the heart of the work, an unbridgeable divide between two equally plausible inter-pretations or between style and content, image and frame. It would seem, then, that the application of disinterest to a work of art must generate incredu-lous, suspicious, or even confused readers; the reward, however, is that they are all, at the very least, interested.

NOTES

1. It is beyond the scope of this paper to give a full account of the conceptual slippagebetween disinterest and detachment. In his defense of disinterest Levine appears to associate the latter with the articulation of disinterest within the field of aesthetics. He writes: “It has always seemed to me ironic that the area of human experience most directly concerned with pleasure and feeling has been the most strenuously and pervasively allied to the conception of detachment: Keats’ negative capability, Eliot’s distinction between the man who suffers and the poet who creates, Schiller’s celebration of play, Kant’s invention of a whole third realm—judgment—hovering tenuously but crucially between reason and understanding. But of course, as Eagleton suggests, it is precisely the danger of aesthetic irrationalism— corporeal rather than intellectual—that requires particular attention” (911). Beyond aesthetics,

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the practice of ascesis noted in relation to the Schopenhauerian subject of pure knowledge may also be seen as a form of detachment. As this paper straddles the fine line between aes-thetics and epistemology (a distinction discussed below) my use of the term will signal the abnegation of desire (be it physical or emotional) as a means to achieve the clarity associated with disinterest.

WORKS CITED

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Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. London: Dent, 1946.———. Lord Jim. London: Dent, 1946.———. Victory. London: Dent, 1948.James, Henry. The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories. London: Penguin, 1986.Levine, George. “Saving Disinterest: Aesthetics, Contingency, and Mixed Conditions.” New

Literary History 32:4 (2001): 921.Mallios, Peter Lancelot. Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity. Palo Alto: Stanford

University Press, 2010.Miller, Vivienne. “Henry James and the Alienation of the Artist: ‘The Lesson of the Master.’”

English Studies in Africa 23:1 (1980): 9–20.Milliman, Craig A. “The Dangers of Fiction: Henry James’s ‘The Lesson of the Master.’”

Studies in Short Fiction 27.1 (1990): 81–88.Moser, Thomas. Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline. Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1957.Ohi, Kevin. “The Author of ‘Beltraffio’”: The Exquisite Boy and Henry James’s Equivocal

Aestheticism.” ELH 72.3 (2005): 747–767.Panagopoulos, Nic. “‘Will’ and ‘Representation’ in Victory.” The Conradian 26.1 (2001):

17–32.Park, Douglas B. “Conrad’s Victory: The Anatomy of a Pose.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction

31:2 (1976): 150–169.Rimmon, Shlomith. The Concept of Ambiguity—The Example of James. Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1977.Schopenhauer, Arthur. The World as Will and Representation. Trans. E. F. J. Payne. New

York: Dover, 1969.Stolnitz, Jerome. “On the Origins of ‘Aesthetic Disinterestedness.’” The Journal of Aesthetics

and Art Criticism 20.2 (1961): 131–143.Tanner, Tony. “Joseph Conrad and the Last Gentleman.” Critical Quarterly 28.1,2 (1986):

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St. George and the Dragon.” Journal of Narrative Technique 5 (1975): 116–27.Watts, Cedric. The Deceptive Text: An Introduction to Covert Plots. Brighton: Harvester,

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Masters of Disinterest: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Conrad's Victory but Were Afraid to Ask James

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