Why would I post some of my academic papers here? Why leave typos and thinkos and awkward sentences and stilted transitions open to a strange public that sometimes works very hard to let me know how that, if they'd paid to get in, they'd be barking hard for refunds and damages.
Why make it easier for the less scrupulous to plagiarize?
Why knock my most recent (today!) blog entries (entries!) off the recently shortened sidebar?
As I've been growing my genealogy wiki, I find myself making it into a scrapbook wiki, with entries for, say, the park I played in as a child (Dodge Park, Sterling Heights, MI), and the first place I saw vanilla cola (not Coke - Kroger, Montrose area, Houston, TX) in a 2-litre bottle, and where I bought all of
my clothes when I was 19 or 20 (Pier Ones everywhere). This is the diary and that's the database. (Dare I predict that personal wiki supplements to blogs will be all the rage by 2008?)
I back up my files to so many places - CDs, DVDs, email, S3, thumb drive... but when I go looking for a recipe or website or I don't know what, I find myself searching my own site. Maybe because it's public, what's posted here feels more preserved for the ages. Rather silly, very silly, but what a wonderful excuse to paste in some boring papers for keeping.
I'm not going to reread this paper before I post. Too stressful. I just look at the title and agonize over why I didn't either remove the "the" from the start or add another "the" before "writing process." I'm a little womity (nudge James Herriot) just typing about it.
Oh, and I'm not saying I agree with my stance. With almost every paper I write, I just try to imagine some possibilities that aren't incredibly obvious (to me) and discuss them.
This paper is about The Secret Sharer. I just hate that story. Joseph Conrad shows up in every other class I take, and yet I've never had (save Brit Lit 2322) a decent sprawl with Chaucer. Huff!
Okay.
(And yes, I was chided a little - good-naturedly - for the Stephen King reference, or at least for possibly implying that the sentiment originates with King.)
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The Writer and Writing Process in "The Secret Sharer"
Joseph Conrad was more than the soldier, the sea captain, and the Colonial observer whose occupations are shared by more than one of his fictional characters. Conrad was a writer. In "The Secret Sharer," the struggles and growth of the Captain as he discovers, converses with, and releases his "double self" Leggatt can be read as a metaphor for the writer who plucks an idea from within himself, shapes it into a character, and eventually separates from it through publication. However much an author may draw upon his or her experiences and beliefs, a fiction writer is obliged to obscure his or her personality in the text, thus engaging in a process of secret sharing between himself or herself and the personification of aspects of that self revealed in the work. This back-and-forth operation is realized in Conrad's short story through a protagonist who is both creation and creator and through Conrad's device of framing of stories within stories.
At the risk of lowering the bar by quoting a modern author who may never find lodging in the Western canon, "it is the story, not he who tells it" (King 9). Distance between the tale and its author is what keeps fiction out of the autobiographical section, despite a reader's suspicions, and a careful manipulation of that distance is what delights those readers who enjoy reverse engineering a text to expose its relationship to the creator and time and place of creation. Otherwise, distance has the simple role of showcasing a story away from any distraction that may come from the cult of author personality. For the writer who sifts through personal material in order to create work for public consumption, generating distance has the benefit of allowing an author to live independent of the published work (and vice versa).
Conrad begins this process of distance by making his Captain nameless. Instead of a name, the Captain is called by his title. This styling is important, for it reinforces the Captain's position as the person in charge. The reader should not identify him as specifically as, say, a "Walter" or a "Marcus," or any other name that risks unpredictable connotations, but instead the reader should focus on him as simply as the one who is in command. When we look to the Captain to find a glimpse Conrad's self, we should find a man in charge of a story, including the creation of characters. Mirrors may appear to be reflecting in mirrors when the reader perceives that Conrad, the author of record, begets the Captain, the narrator, who begets Leggatt the storyteller. It may even be argued that the skipper of the Sephora, with his own version of events, is a continuing link in the author chain, but since his is the other side of Leggatt's tale, his role may be better described as those balancing doubts and questions which a writer will allow to pursue any idea (here personified as Leggatt) worth considering.
This is not to argue that Conrad meant for Leggatt to be regarded as purely figurative by the reader. Johnson and Garber refer to both Leggatt and the skipper as "fantasies of the narrator," reinforcing the concept that the Captain creates his tale at least partly from his mind, just as Conrad invented the words spoken by the Captain (634). However, interpreting Leggatt as non-existent is unnecessary for our purpose: he may exist as a person for the reader while taking a metaphorical role as a product for the same reason that Conrad could use his real life experiences to create fiction. These overlapping echoes of authors and their protagonist-doubles are consistent with the theme of "echo structure" put forth by Leiter, although he sees the Chief Mate as standing on equal footing with Leggatt as echoes of the narrator's personality (162). If so, perhaps the Mate is the writer's logical, non-fanciful side who quickly and painstakingly tries to "evolve a theory" about everything, from a drowned scorpion in the inkwell to the presence of the Sephora (Conrad 389-90). His perspective is therefore given minimal coverage in the story, for he represents that part of the writer which must be ignored if full creativity is to take place.
Conrad continues creating distance by employing a first person point of view for his "Captain-Author." In first person viewpoint, the reader is placed in intimate contact with the I-narrator's authoritative mind while the living writer of the story is protected from such scrutiny. In third person point of view, the reader may form ideas about the author while reading, but a story in the first person can be sufficiently distracting to deflect these judgments to the narrator instead. (This is not to say that authors using the first person have such concern for their privacy that they wish to trick the reader into not making connections between the author's life and his or her work.) Conrad creates this distance twice. First he distances the readers from himself by putting them in the hands of the Captain's "I," and then the Captain does the same by turning over some of the longest passages of dialogue to Leggatt's first person narration, thus becoming becoming a mere witness-narrator, and even further distance is created by the tone of retrospection used by each storyteller (Friedman 138, 150).
When reading the Captain as one on the journey of an author, his actions and setting can take on new roles perhaps not found in an initial surface reading of the story. The rope ladder becomes the pen (or keyboard). It is the physical object used to touch inspiration as well as free it. The rope already has a literary connotation, for it is the item left overboard for the tugboat master who carries letters from the ship. If the rope is an accepted means of publication, then its unexpected appearance in the water at night, when the Captain walks the deck alone, implies that in isolation the Captain finds that he has more to say (or write) than he has already said. (Presumably the idea that isolation is associated with writing need not be justified.) The Captain, like any writer who hesitates to troll his or her personal depths, is discomforted by the ladder's presence, but he also acknowledges that it is his fault, that it would not be there if he had not been made his authority as captain (or as writer) a priority (Conrad 391). That the ladder cannot be easily removed transforms it into the idea that cannot be shaken, with Leggatt being that idea at the rope's end. The Captain's surprise in finding a person at the end of the ladder is comparable to a writer's unpredicted flash of inspiration.
The "sleeping water" and "naked man" in the "glassy shimmer of the sea" all conjure ideas of the water as a dormant body holding intimate thoughts and the potential reflection of self and surroundings (Conrad 391). Think of Leggatt as the personification of a writer's idea, and the opening dialogue between the two men is amusing, now read as the idea wishing to call upon its creator (in asking for the captain) instead of the other way around. Those who are compelled to write – especially those authors who can never answer the popular question, "Where do you get your ideas?" – may relate to such a scenario. The Captain, knowing better than to interfere with the muse, makes no attempt to stop Leggatt from climbing the rope. Instead he hastens to care for Leggatt by fetching clothes, and he lets Leggatt's self-possession become his own, so phrased that either man may be said to now possess the other (Conrad 392). (Whether the idea drives the writer or the writer drives the idea is best debated by those who have not tired of the chicken and egg question, but the uncertainty of which action comes first is raised in the Captain and Leggatt's actions all the same.)
Conrad's Captain is a finished product, but his interactions with Leggatt show that he is still in the process of crafting his tale. The Captain's interruptive suggestions and questions as Leggatt tells his story and Leggatt's use of "brusque, disconnected sentences" correspond to the inner dialogue of the writing process, such as the initial questions raised through brainstorming with the mind's answering thoughts, which of course never occur in neatly constructed paragraphs (Conrad 394). The Captain "did not think of asking (Leggatt) for details" because this would be unnecessary; in this collaboration, it is understood that the Captain is empowered to fill in the blanks.
A further comparison of objects is found in the purpose of the Captain's stateroom. Beyond the obvious reason for Leggatt hiding there, that the Captain stows an accused murderer in his private chambers with little deliberation is in step with the writer who hides his ugly, unfinished work until he or she deems it acceptable. The stateroom is restricted, a metaphor for the closed space where unready thought can avoid judgment. Literally, the Captain does not know Leggatt well enough to decide what to do with him, and figuratively the writer has yet to determine what will happen next.
The stateroom is not a perfectly secure place, though. The Captain's steward – the name signifying one who takes care of the Captain, perhaps symbolic of a writer's usually trusted friend – is allowed limited access to the room and nearly discovers Leggatt. If discovered, the Captain and the writer could lose their positions and authority or credibility – one for harboring a criminal, and the other for possibly harboring criminal thoughts, or at least some aspect of the writer's personality that does not normally live above the surface.
Meanwhile, if the skipper of the Sephora is the other side of Leggatt's story, the embodiment of "spiritless tenacity" whose input forces Leggatt's character into a clearer shape, perhaps he is also the alert reader who will not only out the writer's flaws but will make connections between the writer and the protagonist (Conrad 401). The Captain is at his most nervous and controlling when others come close to Leggatt. He cries, "This way! I am here, steward!", attracting attention away from Leggatt while making it clear that he is exactly where he says and nowhere else (Conrad 399). For the skipper, the Captain gives a deceptive tour that implies revelation, and he uses the "fact" of a hearing injury, a supposedly personal detail, to appear to answer an undesired question. The writer's task is always to direct the reader's focus to what the writer wants us to see, and only that.
No story outside of Scheherazade's is meant to be written forever, and eventually the Captain must determine a fate for Leggatt. Here we see the problem of the writer who is not sure when to stop writing, who has become emotionally attached to his or her characters and sees the many futures available to them, and who also frets over the potential annihilation of something so carefully tended. Likewise, the Captain has some desire to stay with Leggatt, and he fears for Leggatt's safety when he leaves. If Conrad's revelation of the writing self in this story is intentional, it could be argued that he makes a small joke in having the Captain give Legatt three sovereigns. First, while a common enough coin of the period, the name echoes the sovereignity that Leggatt will now have over himself. Second, what writer can resist the idea of payment being given to an idea? Finally, a drop of writer's privilege makes an appearance at the crucial moment of peril when the Captain cannot tell if the ship is moving to safety and cannot spare a moment to find a piece of paper to mark his spot. In perfect deus ex machina, he hopes for something to use and just then sees his own abandoned white cap appear on the shadowy water, as if summoned from the symbolic unknown below.
While it may be presumptious to assume that all fiction writers are devout (consciously or otherwise) to the adage "write what you know," that Conrad put himself into his narrators is considered general knowledge among his many scholars. How deliberately he may have reflected upon the act of writing within "The Secret Sharer," however, has found little discussion so far. Whatever Conrad's intentions, his methods and characters fall into the solitary, watchful, unpredictable, introspective, and cathartic journey of writing. It is because of Leggatt's story that we remember the Captain, and it is because of the Captain (and many other characters) that we remember Conrad.
Works Cited
Conrad, Joseph. "The Secret Sharer." Reading Narrative Fiction. New York: Macmillan Company, 1993. 388-415.
Friedman, Norman. Form and Meaning in Fiction. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1975. 135-166.
Johnson, Barbara, and Marjorie Garber. "Secret Sharing: Reading Conrad Psychoanalytically." College English 49 (1987): 628-640.
King, Stephen. Different Seasons. New York: Signet, 1982. 9.
Leiter, Louis H. "Echo Structures: Conrad's 'The Secret Sharer'" Twentieth Century Literature 5 (1960): 159-175.
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