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The Shadow Line: A Confession by Joseph Conrad (1917)

A sudden passion of anxious impatience rushed through my veins, gave me such a sense of the intensity of existence as I have never felt before or since. I discovered how much of a seaman I was, in heart, in mind, and, as it were, physically – a man exclusively of sea and ships; the sea the only world that counted, and the ships, the test of manliness, of temperament, of courage and fidelity – and of love.
(The narrator’s feelings in the early, optimistic, part of ‘The Shadow Line’, p.40)

When I turned my eyes to the ship, I had a morbid vision of her as a floating grave.
(The narrator’s feeling after weeks of being becalmed on a plague ship, page 92)

Conrad’s first novel was published in 1895 when he was 38 years old. By 1917 when ‘The Shadow Line’ appeared, he had published ten novels, six novellas and twenty-five or so short stories, so had a lot of experience under his belt. ‘The Shadow Line’ is often taken to be the masterpiece of Conrad’s late period, although he was to go on and publish four more long novels before his death in 1926 (aged 66).

Conrad coined the phrase ‘shadow line’ to mean the dividing line between youth and maturity, ‘that twilight region between youth and maturity’. A simple summary of the story is that it’s a first-person narrative by a young merchant officer who assumes his first command of a ship as captain, and the series of unfortunate and then disastrous events which follow.

Date: in the Officers’ Home the narrator and Giles read papers which are full of details of Queen Victoria’s first jubilee, which was in 1887. The settings of a lot of Conrad’s stories are much earlier than you assume.

Synopsis

Part 1. In port

The narrator has been mate aboard a merchant ship operating around the Malay Peninsula for 18 months when he impulsively quits his job, citing an obscure feeling of ‘life emptiness’ (p.49).

He arranges to catch a ship home but has 4 days before it leaves so goes to stay in the Officers’ Home. Here the sullen steward tries to keep a letter from him which turns out to be a request to go and visit the harbour master about a possible command. The steward had wanted to hide it because he wanted the command to go to the long-term resident of the Home, a captain named Hamilton who hasn’t paid his bill for ages. This situation and the subterfuge of the steward and the encouragement of old Captain Giles to confront the steward and ask for the message and then the way the steward feels almost suicidal when his little deceit is discovered and Captain Giles has to go and comfort him – all this may appear extremely tangential to a story about a young merchant seaman being given his first command, and yet it takes up a third of the entire narrative, up to page 45 of this 130-page text.

Some of the descriptions of this behaviour (the steward’s, Captain Giles’s) barely make sense and the immense amount of time spent describing this trivial incident warns the reader that the sometimes incomprehensible element in Conrad’s imagining and writing are very dominant here; and, more importantly, give you a strong sense that he’s padding his story out.

Anyway, the harbour master has been looking for him because a British ship’s captain died in Bangkok, there’s a vacancy for the captainship and his previous captain, Kent, strongly recommended him, despite being a bit upset that he’d chosen to leave.

So old Captain Giles helps him pack up his stuff, get some coolies to carry it down to the docks, where he jumps into the steam launch which takes him out to the ship which the harbour master has arranged will transport him to Bangkok. He is aboard it for four days and the captain never ceases his antagonistic hostile attitude because waiting for the narrator, delayed their departure by three hours.

Part 2. His disastrous command

They arrive in Bangkok, he leaves the transporter ship and steps aboard his command.

Putting my foot on her deck for the first time, I received the feeling of deep physical satisfaction. Nothing could equal the fullness of that moment, the ideal completeness of that emotional experience which had come to me without the preliminary toil and disenchantments of an obscure career.

He quickly meets Burns, the first mate, a nervous wanting man who puts him at permanent unease. Burns tells him the story of the old captain’s infatuation with a white woman in Haiphong which kept them there long past their time, how he came onboard after a week’s absence looking ill, and declined quickly during the subsequent voyage, dying in his cabin chair about noon. Towards the end he was full of hate and spitefully told Burns he wished the whole ship would go down with all hands. Now Burns is sullenly convinced the narrator has taken the vacant post which he coveted.

So bad karma but worse is to come, namely 1) endless delay due to ‘silly commercial complications’ in getting the ship loaded and underway, during which 2) the tropical heat brings a lot of the crew down with illness. The steward goes ashore with cholera and dies within the week. Burns is afflicted and, sullenly, resentfully, has to be taken ashore.

Finally after 6 weeks stewing in the humid heat, the captain insists Burns, still too ill to walk unaided, is returned to the ship and they are towed downriver to the estuary. He is excited, sleeps and wakes to the first day of his command etc, but the ship is still cursed. There is virtually no wind and so, like Coleridge’s ship:

Day after day, day after day
We stuck, nor breath nor motion
As idle as a painted ship
Upon a painted ocean

And they haven’t escaped the contagion. Two more of the crew come down with severe fever. The narrator makes a point of keeping burns, confined to his bed, informed of their lack of movement and is dismayed when the mate attributes it to the evil curse of the late captain.

They just can’t escape from the Bay of Siam. In particular the large mountain of Koh-ring stays within sight day after day, as if they’re bewitched, as if they’re under a spell, and Conrad very deliberately deploys words like magic, spell, bewitched, supernatural evil, evil spell, evil powers, purposeful malevolence, fiendish and so on to create a spooky atmosphere. Meanwhile the disease moves through the entire crew, except for healthy Ransome and the narrator, weakening them and leaving them with ‘a hunted, apprehensive look in their eyes’. Conrad lays on the ghost ship vibe with a trowel.

Eventually you realise that there is precious little plot here, instead the narrative is following the classic Conrad parabola from reasonably sensible, real-world affairs and business, larded with a bit of youthful naivete, which is then slowly and steadily crushed, as the sense of doom and fatedness and futility and slow-mounting horror takes control, until the narrator ends up having visions of the ship as a floating grave and wonders whether he’s going mad.

There were moments when I felt, not only that I would go mad, but that I had gone mad already; so that I dared not open my lips for fear of betraying myself by some insane shriek… (p.100)

It is the usual Conrad hysteria breaking through, the same terrifying hysteria which dominates the end of The Secret Agent.

Next thing that happens is he discovers four of the vials in the medicine chest which should contain quinine are full of some nondescript white crystals. Burns accuses the captain of selling off the quinine ashore for a pretty penny. This only moderate incident is made the peg for the narrator to blame himself immoderately. it feels willed, it feels as if Conrad needed a pretext to place the narrator in the next stage of his transition from youthful optimism to more weathered manhood.

The person I could never forgive was myself. Nothing should ever be taken for granted. The seed of everlasting remorse was sown in my breast. ‘I feel it’s all my fault,’ I exclaimed, ‘mine and nobody else’s. That’s how I feel. I shall never forgive myself.’ ‘That’s very foolish, sir,’ said Mr. Burns fiercely.

And you’re inclined to agree with Burns, the emaciated obsessive. But the narrator goes on becoming more hysterical. He quotes from the journal where he knocks off standard Conrad expressions of horror and futility:

All sense of time is lost in the monotony of expectation, of hope, and of desire… I emerge on deck the ordered arrangement of the stars meets my eye, unclouded, infinitely wearisome. There they are: stars, sun, sea, light, darkness, space, great waters; the formidable Work of the Seven Days, into which mankind seems to have blundered unbidden. Or else decoyed. Even as I have been decoyed into this awful, this death-haunted command… we were lost in the darkness… (p.97)

What doesn’t help is sick, emaciated Burns’ conviction that the ship really genuinely was cursed by the previous captain and that only when they pass the precise point on the map where burns buried his body at sea, only then will the spell be broken. Privately the narrator is now having Ancient Mariner visions of the entire ship’s crew dying, of it becoming a ghost ship, ‘my appalling vision of a ship floating with a dead crew’. Publicly he tries to keep control of himself and give orders in a calm, rational way.

It feels again and again in these stories that Conrad is giving way to the acute depressions which crippled him in real life. The stories, often with the thinnest of plots, are only as long as they are because draped in cascades of prose which repeats the same idea of horror and futility and anguish and despair again and again:

The memory is now that in those days life was sustained on invincible anguish, as a sort of infernal stimulant

Hundreds of sentences like these drown the reader in thick dark despair. For fifteen days the sick crew endure this hell of being completely becalmed and very ill. Conrad pops in a sentence or two explaining why this was the shadow line, the transition from youth to maturity.

It seems to me that all my life before that momentous day [when they set sail, 15 days earlier] is infinitely remote, a fading memory of light-hearted youth, something on the other side of a shadow. (p.106)

There’s little plot, just an ever-deepening intensification of the jet black atmosphere; literally, because, on that night, some kind of cloud covers the sky and stars and the narrator feels they’ve descended into hell.

The impenetrable blackness beset the ship so close that it seemed that by thrusting one’s hand over the side one could touch some unearthly substance. There was in it an effect of inconceivable terror and of inexpressible mystery… the closing in of a menace from all sides.

Anyway, wading through this hysteria the actual events are that the sky grows pitch black, then there’s an intense downpour of rain which extinguishes the last lights on the ship, plunging them into the blackness of hell etc. In this dark the narrator sees a Shape loom up from the floor, huge and shaggy, and screams with pure unadulterated horror.

Moments later it is revealed to be the emaciated mate, Burns, who’s wrapped himself in a thick coat. He repeats for the hundredth time his conviction that the old captain has doomed the ship and then bursts into hysterical laughter, an ‘insane screeching’. This daunts the drew who think the captain’s gone mad so the narrator has to quickly move to tell them it’s the mate, and ask for help to get him back below decks.

And then a wind comes, the first wind for 18 days, the masts fill and the ship starts moving. The narrator bounds up to the helm, helping Frenchy replace the exhausted Grumbal, while Ransome takes Burns below. He reports that Burns has finally fallen into a deep sleep. The reader guesses all this has happened because they’ve finally passed beyond the spot where the old captain was buried at sea and so broken the curse. And he goes on to state it explicitly:

By the exorcising virtue of Mr. Burns’ awful laugh, the malicious spectre had been laid, the evil spell broken, the curse removed. We were now in the hands of a kind and energetic Providence. It was rushing us on…

And so the ship sails swiftly through the foamy sea and, 40 hours later, arrives back at the same harbour it left 21 days earlier. Conrad describes the immense effort of the weak and feeble hands to reef in the sails and drop anchor. They are flying a signal for medical assistance flying on the mizzen so doctors boats come out to see them. The sick men are taken off. The narrator watches them feeling guilty and responsible. A doctor examines him and recommends a strong sedative for that evening.

Once on shore he bumps into old Captain Giles, which allows Conrad to bring the story round full circle. It also allows him to end it with something like normality, two seamen sharing a meal in the dining room of the Officers’ Home, trying to eclipse the way he has just put us through a steadily intensifying horror show.

When the narrator surprises Captain Giles by saying he’s aiming to recruit a new crew from a recently shipwrecked ship and cast off tomorrow to head for the Indian Ocean, Giles nods approvingly, ‘That’s the way. You’ll do.’

The very final passage of the narrative is the narrator signing Ransome’s termination of contract. Ransome was the only other crewman not afflicted by sickness, was as solid and dependable as a rock, from his clockwork cooking to his encouragement of morale, to his mucking into help with sails and steering. By the end he has become an allegorical figure of devotion to duty. But even he is mortal and is terrified that his faulty heart will give out at any moment. He shakes hands and leaves the ship to the narrator preparing for his next voyage.

And with this highly symbolic apothegm – that none of us know when our common enemy will strike – this harrowing and haunting story ends.

Resemblance to ‘The Secret Sharer’

Obviously the story has lots in common with The Secret Sharer, which also features a captain taking his first command, who becomes possessed by a strange obsession, and keeps going down to the cabin to update a sick man confined there, Leggatt in ‘Sharer’ and the wasted first mate Burns in this story.

Even the location in the Bay of Siam and the ominous and then supernatural power of the mountain island Koh-ring appear in both.

The Great War connection

Conrad wrote the novella after the outbreak of the First World War. His son, Borys, served in (and survived) the war, and ‘The Shadow Line’ is dedicated to him. So plenty of critics have interpreted ‘The Shadow Line’ as Conrad’s response to the Great War. This seems to me most obvious in the descriptions of the haggard band of sick and haunted men, worn down by their ordeal and yet doggedly loyal and dutiful, and the portrait of their pitying and reluctant officer.

Those who were able to walk remained all the time on duty, lying about in the shadows of the main deck, till my voice raised for an order would bring them to their enfeebled feet, a tottering little group, moving patiently about the ship, with hardly a murmur, a whisper amongst them all. And every time I had to raise my voice it was with a pang of remorse and pity.

It’s easy to take the disease which afflicts the ship as a metaphor of war:

The disease disclosed its low type in a startling way. It was not so with many of the men. The wastage of ill-health seemed to idealise the general character of the features, bringing out the unsuspected nobility of some, the strength of others, and in one case revealing an essentially comic aspect.

And this passage seems to be an unambiguous tribute to the suffering of the soldiers:

If I remember all their faces, wasting tragically before my eyes, most of their names have vanished from my memory. The words that passed between us were few and puerile in regard of the situation. I had to force myself to look them in the face. I expected to meet reproachful glances. There were none. The expression of suffering in their eyes was indeed hard enough to bear. But that they couldn’t help. For the rest, I ask myself whether it was the temper of their souls or the sympathy of their imagination that made them so wonderful, so worthy of my undying regard. (p.100)

The thematic structure

His critics follow Conrad’s claims in his boring prefaces that his stories are about ‘morality’ but they aren’t really, are they? They are far more accurately described as harrowing visions of horror and futility. The figure of Ransome is meant to be some kind of rock to which the narrator can cling, a symbol of what is, in the end, Conrad’s extremely simple Victorian belief that (as the editor of the Oxford World’s Classics edition, Jeremy Hawthorn puts it) ‘work has a moral force and action a therapeutic value’.

A kind of intellectual duality is built into the text, which obviously aims to contrast moral strength with moral dissolution, Ransome’s dutifulness with the narrator’s sense that he has failed, visions of sin and hell with Ransome conceived as an angel and old Captain Giles’s wisdom. These antitheses are all very cleverly worked out and inhabit what you could call the world of liberal sensibility. But the actual experience of reading the text has nothing to do with moral discriminations; it is extraordinarily intense and melodramatic. It is like being hurled into Samuel Beckett land, only even bleaker than Beckett land.

Ransome stepped back two paces and vanished from my sight. At once an uneasiness possessed me, as if some support had been withdrawn. I moved forward, too, outside the circle of light, into the darkness that stood in front of me like a wall. In one stride I penetrated it. Such must have been the darkness before creation. It had closed behind me. I knew I was invisible to the man at the helm. Neither could I see anything. He was alone, I was alone, every man was alone where he stood. And every form was gone too, spar, sail, fittings, rails; everything was blotted out in the dreadful smoothness of that absolute night. (p.113)

The text again and again immerses the reader in such feelings of existential dread, aloneness, crisis and collapse. It makes for an extraordinary experience.

Three elements

As ever, the reader is struck by three really obvious elements of a Conrad story:

  1. it is very wordy, and the style is that of a non-native English speaker, with odd vocabulary (‘unexpugnable’) and unidiomatic word order which frequently reminds you of French rather than English
  2. the wordiness sometimes obscures the events, which themselves sometimes feel odd, not in a profound writerly way, but frequently in a cack-handed, surprisingly amateurish way
  3. although 130 pages long (in the Oxford Classics edition), like so many other Conrad novellas and short stories ‘The Shadow Line’ has a surprisingly large number of characters, named and unnamed

Cast

The unnamed first-person narrator, admits that he has the touchiness of youth. He describes himself as sullen and sarcastic, petulant and grumpy.

On his first ship

Its Arab owner, a Syed, the head of a great House of Straits Arabs, an old, dark little man blind in one eye, in a snowy robe and yellow slippers’.

The Captain, Kent, a man with a thick iron-gray moustache.

The second engineer, John Nieven, ‘a sturdy young Scot, with a smooth face and light eyes’, ‘a fierce misogynist.’

The chief engineer, ‘young, too, but very thin, and with a mist of fluffy brown beard all round his haggard face’, ‘a confirmed dyspeptic’.

Ashore

Unnamed official in the Harbour Office who is sad the narrator is signing off from his ship.

Chief Steward of the Officers’ Home, ‘an unhappy, wizened little man, who if put into a jockey’s rig would have looked the part to perfection’.

The dozing stranger who Giles says is an officer from some Rajah’s yacht.

Hamilton, well-groomed aloof permanent resident of the Officers’ Home who a) regards everyone else as ‘an outsider’ and b) to the despair of the Steward, has never paid his bill.

Captain Giles, seasoned old expert navigator round the Malayan seas.

Mr R, the Head Shipping Master, secretary to…

The Harbourmaster, Captain Ellis, who sends for him and asks if he wants to captain the skipperless ship in Bangkok.

En route to Bangkok

The unnamed captain of the unnamed ship which transports the narrator to Bangkok, ‘a thin, long-armed, long-legged man, with a closely clipped gray beard.’

His command

The steward.

Burns, the first mate, ‘His long, red moustache determined the character of his physiognomy, which struck me as pugnacious in (strange to say) a ghastly sort of way.’

The previous captain, now dead: ‘He was a peculiar man – of sixty-five about – iron gray, hard-faced, obstinate, and uncommunicative. He used to keep the ship loafing at sea for inscrutable reasons. Would come on deck at night sometimes, take some sail off her, God only knows why or wherefore, then go below, shut himself up in his cabin, and play on the violin for hours – till daybreak perhaps. In fact, he spent most of his time day or night playing the violin. That was when the fit took him. Very loud, too.’ (p.58)

The former captain’s white woman in Haiphong, seen only in a photograph.

The doctor of the Legation and Consulate.

Ransome the cook, a fit handsome man who, however, cried off being a dull seaman because he has a heart condition’. Ransome becomes the stoutest, bravest, most loyal and dutiful of the crew throughout the nightmare voyage.

The second officer, ‘a callow youth with an unpromising face.’

Frenchy, a short, gingery, active man with a nose and chin of the Punch type’, ‘To see him coming aft to the wheel comforted one. The blue dungaree trousers turned up the calf, one leg a little higher than the other, the clean check shirt, the white canvas cap, evidently made by himself, made up a whole of peculiar smartness, and the persistent jauntiness of his gait, even, poor fellow, when he couldn’t help tottering, told of his invincible spirit.’

Gambril, ‘the only grizzled person in the ship’.

Vivid phrases

Like diamonds in mud Conrad continually comes up with vivid images.

Captain Giles… began to haul at his gorgeous gold chain till at last the watch came up from the deep pocket like solid truth from a well. (p.27)

The doctor’s glasses were directed at me like two lamps searching the genuineness of my resolution. (p.71)

Cosmic visions

As usual I spotted a couple of Conrad’s cosmic comparisons, the astronomic similes which seem to lift you clean off the surface of the earth and into another dimension or genre.

The darkness had risen around the ship like a mysterious emanation from the dumb and lonely waters. I leaned on the rail and turned my ear to the shadows of the night. Not a sound. My command might have been a planet flying vertiginously on its appointed path in a space of infinite silence. (p.74)

As I’ve repeatedly said, his bleakness often becomes so intense as to carry him out of the realm of realistic literature altogether and into the realm of science fiction.

There was still no man at the helm. The immobility of all things was perfect. If the air had turned black, the sea, for all I knew, might have turned solid. It was no good looking in any direction, watching for any sign, speculating upon the nearness of the moment. When the time came the blackness would overwhelm silently the bit of starlight falling upon the ship, and the end of all things would come without a sigh, stir, or murmur of any kind, and all our hearts would cease to beat like run-down clocks. (p.108)

Conrad’s style

In the first half of the story Conrad’s aim is to make the narrator appear naive and innocent; part of this strategy is to make him feel superior and quick to judge all the other characters. He has the arrogance, the cocksureness of youth. When he is offered the captaincy it makes him feel like he is walking on air, floating with happiness, feels as if he’s in a fairy tale etc. In the second half, well, I’ve described and quoted how the story collapses into horror and terror.

Clunkers

As usual, a lot of the text is only borderline English and Conrad fairly often writes sentences that cross the border, into being non-English and sometimes almost incomprehensible.

‘Well, no,’ I conceded, restraining a desire to laugh at that something mysteriously earnest in delivering the conclusions of his wisdom as though it were the product of prohibited operations. (p.41)

The doctor’s round, full face framed in a light-coloured whisker was the perfection of a dignified amenity. (p.66)

These occasional weirdnesses have a charm of their own. Alternatively, sometimes his sentences aren’t incomprehensible, they’re just poorly written and phrased.

Seizing eagerly upon the elation of the first command thrown into my lap, by the agency of Captain Giles, I had yet an uneasy feeling that such luck as this has got perhaps to be paid for in some way. (p.83)

I said to myself disdainfully that it should take much more than that to affect in the smallest degree my fortitude. (p.86)

French word order

In English we tend to put adjectives and adverbs before the noun or verb. In French they do it the other way round. Very often Conrad writes sentences with the adjective or adjectival phrase following the noun in a pronounced and foreign-feeling way.

He turned to me his face grotesque beyond the fantasies of mad dreams… (p.90)

Ransome’s unperturbed voice uttered pleasantly the words…

Poor quality wisdom writing

Conrad has a related habit which is writing something which starts out looking like it’s going to be a quotable bit of wisdom writing, but then turns out to be disappointingly banal or flat. To be harsh, he sounds like a man who, in the first fifteen years of his career, had written everything interesting and shocking and insightful he was ever going to write, and is now just going through the motions.

People have a great opinion of the advantages of experience. But in this connection experience means always something disagreeable as opposed to the charm and innocence of illusions. (p.65)

It starts off with the flow and feel of something which is going to be profound but ends up, in fact, being both obvious and clunkily phrased.

Credit

The Shadow Line by Joseph Conrad was first published as a serial in the English Review from September 1916 to March 1917 and published in book form by J.M. Dent in 1917. Page references are to the 1985 Oxford World’s Classics paperback edition.

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The Secret Sharer: An Episode from the Coast by Joseph Conrad (1909)

Plot

The first-person narrator has only just been given his first command, as captain a ship which, as the narrative opens, has just been towed down the Meinam river and anchored in the Bay of Siam. The next morning it is scheduled to sail south through the archipelago and into the Indian Ocean.

Not only is it the narrator’s first command but the rest of the crew have served together for at least 18 months and all know each other well. In other words, he feels like, and is treated as, the outsider, the stranger of the crew.

Overnight he appoints himself to the first watch and sends his officers off to bed. Before they go, the second mate remarks that the ship’s rigging they could see some distance away, as the sun set, belongs to the Liverpool ship Sephora carrying a cargo of coal. Then they go off to their cabins.

While quietly walking the decks, observing the vast calm flatness of the Bay, the narrator notices the rope ladder over the side hasn’t been taken up. It was last used by an officer on the tug who towed them down the river and took their last letters with him.

Now, looking down, the narrator sees what looks like a naked corpse bobbing in the sea alongside the ladder. When he says something the corpse moves and lifts his head. In a normal voice i.e. not hailing it, the narrator asks the man to come up which he does, then goes to get a spare sleeping suit to hide his nakedness. Two points: the stranger is now dressed identically as the captain, in the latter’s second sleeping suit, so that anyone coming across them would think he was seeing a figure and its reflection in a mirror. And so, from this point onwards the narrator describes him as his ‘double’.

Second thing is that, somehow, the captain both dresses him and invites him down into his cabin without waking anyone, without alerting his officers, without informing anyone. As the minutes tick by he realises what a strange thing this was to do, how difficult it will be to latterly tell anyone, and how the situation is forcing him into a secret collusion with the stranger.

The stranger openly tells his name, which is Leggatt. And explains that he has swum all the way from the Sephora, stopping off at a couple of the small islets in the Bay on the way. Why? Because he killed a fellow crew member, and proceeds to tell his story. This crewman was a particular type, well known and disliked at sea:

He was one of those creatures that are just simmering all the time with a silly sort of wickedness. Miserable devils that have no business to live at all. He wouldn’t do his duty and wouldn’t let anybody else do theirs.

The climax of their feud came when they were rigging a fore-sail as a last desperate expedient after many of the mainsails had been blown off in a terrible storm, and the cur made yet another remark, at which Leggatt hit and felled him, then grabbed his throat just as a big sea hit the ship and washed them across the deck. The sea took minutes to clear at which point the rest of the crew found the two still locked together, with Leggatt’s hand round the other’s neck who was quite dead.

There was a near riot, Leggatt was nearly lynched but locked in a cabin where he was kept prisoner for seven weeks. Only now as they docked in the Bay was the sailor who brought him his food slack enough to forget to lock the door. Leggatt ate the food then strolled out into the deck and, nobody spotting him, jumped overboard and swam. A strong swimmer he made it to the nearest islet before the crew had launched a boat, and hid when they came close to the islet. Once they gave up their search (it was a dark night) and rowed back to the ship, he set out swimming towards the lights of the narrator’s ship, and here he is.

Something in Leggatt’s story touches a chord in the narrator. He realises Leggatt was doing the best for his ship, in fact claims that his act of setting the reef sail saved his ship and the 20 crew aboard it, and yet if he’s handed over to the authorities he’ll be convicted and hanged.

This speaking of heart to heart reminds me of the less fortunate bond which develops between the evil Gentleman Brown and Jim in Lord Jim, when the former describes how just one mistake may damn a man, unwittingly reminding Jim of his great moral lapse. Something similar here…

Anyway, the narrator explains that he is almost as much a stranger on the ship as the swimmer, then they both realise they are exhausted. He helps the swimmer into his bed, pulls to its curtains, then falls asleep on the couch. Just like Jim, an almost unconscious act sees him committed and compromised.

Next morning begins his life of secrecy for the steward knocks and enters with his morning coffee making the captain panic lest the steward see the curtained bed. When the steward returns a little later the captain is red-faced and embarrassed. When he steps out on deck he sees the steward conferring with the first and second mate, and they stop talking when they spot him coming. In other words the senior crew already think that something’s up and this makes the captain evermore nervous and self conscious.

And, as is his way, Conrad rams the central idea home with multiple variations on the same words and phrases:

  • It was, in the night, as though I had been faced by my own reflection in the depths of a sombre and immense mirror.
  • It occurred to me that if [the second mate] were to put his head up the companion and catch sight of us, he would think he was seeing double.
  • I was doubly vexed.
  • I felt dual more than ever.

Now the captain’s cabin happens to be L-shaped with the door opening into the small part of the L where the captain has his desk and chair and receives visitors, with the longer part accessed by a door and called the state room, extending to the side of the door i.e. out of sight of anyone appearing in the doorway. So the man he starts referring to as ‘the secret sharer’ is able to hide over the next few days in the long part of the L.

Next day a dinghy arrives bearing the captain of the Sephora. The narrator invites him into his cabin and hears him out as the other captain, Captain Archbold tells the story of the murder on board his ship and the young man who got away. Obviously there is a huge irony in that the secret sharer is sitting quietly, hidden in the back of the long L, just a few yards away as the Sephora’s captain says all this.

(Incidentally, during this colloquy the narrator lets slip a very important fact, remarking that the other captain’s name was something like Archbold but at this distance of years I hardly am sure. Aha! So the narrator is setting this story down, in whatever manner he’s doing it (written text, telling it to someone) years after it occurred.)

Anyway the interview with the captain is edgy because he thinks the other suspects him of something. He thought about pretending surprise at everything the man said but decided this level of playacting would be beyond him and so settled for blasé acceptance. Although he does put on one deceit, which is to pretend he is hard of hearing, forcing the other captain to speak up, so that his secret sharer can hear everything.

Still the man has a funny mood about him. It’s only later that the narrator realises that he, the narrator, bears a passing resemblance (‘a mysterious similitude’) to Leggatt, and is of the same age, and so the Sephora‘s captain might have been disconcerted (another aspect of the double theme).

To allay what he feels are the man’s suspicions the narrator insists on very loudly showing him his bathroom and his stateroom, announcing it loudly enough to give the secret sharer time to hide. Now he’s riled, the narrator insists on giving the Sephora’s captain a guided tour of the entire ship, presenting it as a new young captain’s pride in his command, with the sub-text of making it abundantly clear that Leggatt isn’t aboard, before seeing the doubtful man over the side and into his dinghy. The captain hesitantly says he’ll probably report the man’s loss as suicide, jumping overboard and drowning etc.

But unfortunately the four crew who came aboard with the Sephora‘s captain had mingled with his crew and spread the news about the murder and the runaway murderer to all his hands. Now if he’s discovered there’ll be no talking his way out of it, and so the tension is ratcheted up to very intense. His second mate quizzes him about the story and the narrator is aware he is giving unsatisfactory answers even as he speaks, only making the man more suspicious.

He can’t wait to get below, away from his suspicious crew and realises that ‘on the whole I felt less torn in two when I was with him’ (p.202).

For the 24 hours since they anchored the ship has been becalmed but now a wind gets up and the narrator has to take command and start giving orders. Over the next four days he lives increasingly on tenterhooks, going through a ridiculous rigmarole whereby the secret sharer hides while the steward serves coffee and cleans the bathroom, then slips into the bathroom before the steward comes back to tidy up the stateroom.

On deck the narrator finds himself going to whisper something in the ear of the first mate, as if whispering to his secret self, causing the man to shy back. He catches the mate making the ‘mental’ sign, tapping his forehead to the chief engineer. The steward, subjected to the narrator’s apparently random whims and panics, becomes quite demoralised.

Slowly the narrator begins to wonder if he’s going out of his mind. On several occasions he discovers the sharer sitting so silently and still he wonders if he’s hallucinating him. And at moments like this the story seems to be channelling an Edgar Allen Poe tale of the macabre.

Eventually the sharer, in one of their whispered encounters in the cabin, declares he wants the narrator to steer his ship in among the islands off the coast of Cambodia. And this leads to the thrilling climax of the story when the narrator insists on taking the ship not only in among the islands, but perilously close to land in order to give Leggat, for whose survival he now feels entirely responsible, as good a chance as possible of swimming to land. With no wind she risks drifting ashore and comes so close to the vast dark shape of the legendary mountain Koh-ring towers over the ship and terrifies the crew, all of whom he’s ordered up on deck.

Only when he sees the hat he gave to the secret sharer floating in the water does he realise the Leggatt, as they’d arranged, had slipped out of the cabin, through the sail lofts and shimmied down a rope into the water, only then does the narrator order a change of course away from land, to the vast relief of the crew, and only then does he truly, for the first time, step into his command.

Conradian hyperbole

Conrad easily display what you could call a cosmic mentality by which I mean his descriptions easily become hyperbolic, invoking the world, the earth, all nature, the universe and so on. If you like this sort of thing it gives the stories a huge symbolic power. Those who don’t like it so much criticise it as overblown.

just within the bar, the tug steaming right into the land became lost to my sight, hull and funnel and masts, as though the impassive earth had swallowed her up without an effort, without a tremor.

with tropical suddenness a swarm of stars came out above the shadowy earth, while I lingered yet, my hand resting lightly on my ship’s rail as if on the shoulder of a trusted friend. But, with all that multitude of celestial bodies staring down at one, the comfort of quiet communion with her was gone for good

‘It was a sea gone mad! I suppose the end of the world will be something like that.’ (p.203)

Then stillness again, with the great shadow gliding closer, towering higher, without a light, without a sound. Such a hush had fallen on the ship that she might have been a bark of the dead floating in slowly under the very gate of Erebus. (p.215)

A queer interpretation

Maybe it was intended to be, and in Conrad’s day was read as, a sort of macabre psychological study, almost verging in the horror genre, what with its claustrophobic doppelganger (recalling those late-Victorian doubles, Dorian Gray or Jekyll and Hyde, among many others).

In the modern age it’s hard not to read it as a gay story, a story about a gay man in a crushingly heteronormative world who has to keep his identity and/or lover secret from absolutely everyone, who lives a double life, who goes in terror of making the slightest slip which reveal his true character to the World of Men. And the burden of having to be one thing to all men out on deck, when all he wants to do is slip back into his cabin and the luxury of privacy.

At night I would smuggle him into my bed place, and we would whisper together… (p.205)

A sudden brisk shout, ‘Mainsail haul!’ broke the spell, and in the noisy cries and rush overhead of the men running away with the main brace we two, down in my cabin, came together in our usual position by the bed place… (p.208)

We remained side by side talking in our secret way – but sometimes silent or just exchanging a whispered word or two at long intervals… (p.209)

Our eyes met; several seconds elapsed, till, our glances still mingled, I extended my hand and turned the lamp out. (p.213)

Our hands met gropingly, lingered united in a steady, motionless clasp for a second… No word was breathed by either of us when they separated. (p.213)

A non-queer interpretation

The Secret Sharer is, apparently, Conrad’s most interpreted story. A simpler interpretation is that the narrator’s Freudian unconscious somehow emerges in physical form, or at least that’s his story. Of course nobody else on board ever sees him, so he may well not exist in the real world; he may well be more like the ghost the narrators describes him as.

The emergence of his unconscious into such a prominent role signals the narrator’s nervous anxiety on taking over his first command. The secrecy is symbolic of his attempts to get a grip on his irrational fear and anxiety. The other officers noticing his odd behaviour is just that because he does behave oddly and badly, to begin with.

On this reading it is the near shipwreck on one of the islands around Koh-ring which signals the narrator’s successful initiation, a rite of passage. Whatever actually happened that imperilled his ship, the event acquires a huge psychological importance because passing through it successfully allows him to suppress his unconscious fears, which had come to life in the shape of a ghostly doppelganger, back into his unconscious, to reintegrate conscious mind and unconscious terrors, the ego and the id, and thus emerge, blooded and seasoned, for the first time as the captain in command of himself and his ship.

The foreyards ran round with a great noise, amidst cheery cries. And now the frightful whiskers made themselves heard giving various orders. Already the ship was drawing ahead. And I was alone with her. Nothing! no one in the world should stand now between us, throwing a shadow on the way of silent knowledge and mute affection, the perfect communion of a seaman with his first command. (p.217)

The shadow (a term in Jungian psychology) has been rejected, overthrown, thrown overboard, leaving the captain with the self-knowledge he so sorely lacked at the start of the story (‘a stranger to myself”) and able to act in the world.

Notes

Leggatt says he comes from a parsonage in Norfolk, as did Jim in Lord Jim and the similarities don’t end there. Like Leggatt, Jim is involved in a scandal at sea, goes on the run (well, to escape his notoriety in distant ports) and is helped by a friendly captain (Marlow).

The Sephora is mentioned in an anecdote in Lord Jim, chapter 13, where it is said to have sunk after a collision, during which one particular crew member swam back to the ship to valiantly rescue a young woman paralysed with fear on the deck.

The L-shaped room becomes associated with L for Leggatt or, if the entire thing is a phantasy, does the L-shape suggest the name of his imagined double to the narrator’s troubled mind?

Credit

Written in 1909, The Secret Sharer by Joseph Conrad was first published in two parts in Harpers magazine in 1910. Page references are to the Oxford World’s Classics paperback edition of ‘Typhoon and Other Stories’, revised and republished in 2008.

Related links

Conrad reviews

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The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud (1900)

Note: to avoid misunderstanding, I believe Freud is a figure of huge cultural and historical importance, and I sympathise with his project of trying to devise a completely secular psychology building on Darwinian premises. Many of his ideas about sexuality as a central motive force, about the role of the unconscious in every aspect of mental life, how repressing instinctual drives can lie behind certain types of mental illness, his development of the talking cure, these and numerous other ideas have become part of the culture and underlie the way many people live and think about themselves today. However, I strongly disapprove of Freud’s gender stereotyping of men and women, his systematic sexism, his occasional slurs against gays, lesbian or bisexuals and so on. Despite the revolutionary impact of his thought, Freud carried a lot of Victorian assumptions into his theory. He left a huge and complicated legacy which needs to be examined and picked through with care. My aim in these reviews is not to endorse his opinions but to summarise his writings, adding my own thoughts and comments as they arise.

***

‘Tell me some of your dreams and I will tell you about your inner self.’
(E. R. Pfaff, quoted on page 134 of The Interpretation of Dreams)

Long

The Interpretation of Dreams may be an epoch-making book but it is far too long, running to 871 pages in the Pelican Freud Library (783 of actual text, 86 of appendix, bibliographies, index of dreams, and general index).

The first quarter or so is a vast review of the many, many theories of dreams held by people throughout Western history (seers and prophets and oneiromancers, historical philosophers and writers, right up to present-day psychologists such as Havelock Ellis), with Freud’s own commentary designed to itemise and categorise all aspects of dreams (their confused illogical nature, how we forget them soon after waking and so on).

Only about page 200 does there come the decisive insight delivered via his own dream about a patient he names Irma, namely that every dream has meaning because every dream is a wish-fulfilment. This is followed from page 200 onwards by an equally extensive series of actual dreams derived from his patients, described in great detail each with a painstaking decipherment.

The literary focus

It isn’t till page 363 that Freud takes the further step of asserting that almost all the dreams of most of his patients ultimately derive from fantasies about their parents. Here he stop for three pages to describe the legend of Oedipus and then to assert that something like Oedipal feelings occur in all his patients.

No sooner has he finished making the shocking claim that all of us, to some extent or other, go through a phase of loving the parent of the opposite sex and hating the parent of the same sex, than he moves on to a similar version of the same story, retold thousands of years later, and culturally rearranged and overlaid, to become Hamlet, then going on to mention other Shakespeare plays, Goethe, German literary critics and so on. (Goethe and Shakespeare are both mentioned about 20 times in the text, along with writers as diverse as Schiller, Heine and Zola, Jonathan Swift and Rider Haggard, the Bible, poetry in general, the music of Wagner 3 times, Mozart 4 times, Offenbach and so on.)

In other words, right from the start Freud’s conceptions of the mind were heavily conditioned and shaped by literature and by cultural forms (myths, legends, religion, folk tales) as much as, or more than, by ‘science’.

It is entirely characteristic of Freud’s focus on culture as source and subject to be investigated that, in the preface to the Third Edition, he speculates that new material for the book will not be generated by, for example, widening the types of patients he treats or the fast-expanding number of analyses being carried out by his followers i.e. scientific evidence based on patient data. No, he says the next edition will have to:

afford a closer contact with the copious material presented in imaginative writing, in myths, in linguistic usage and in folklore.

Autobiographical

Also, it is astonishingly autobiographical. Freud shares with the reader a surprising number of the most important experiences from his life, starting with the place and date of his birth followed by quite a few poignant memories from his childhood and youth. More than that he shares, and analyses at length, upwards of 30 of his own dreams, many of which show him in a less than flattering light, many of which are embarrassingly candid about his ambitions, his delusions of grandeur, his sense of failure, and so on and so on. As Paul Roazen puts it:

‘The Interpretation of Dreams is one of the great autobiographical studies in the history of mankind; in it Freud drew freely on his inner life in an effort to construct a psychological system relevant for all of us.’ (Freud and His Followers by Paul Roazen, page 35)

For Roazen this over-sharing was a heroic achievement and sacrifice the great man made on our behalves. But many critics have pointed out the weakness of a theory which relies so very heavily on just one person’s life and experiences and feelings, and on his own interpretation of them, and the fragile basis of the claim to extrapolate them into universal principles underpinning all of human nature.

Introduction of key concepts

The book is important because it represents Freud’s first full-length description of the unconscious and the vast role it plays in the mental life of human beings. His theories about the unconscious would be elaborated and developed right up to his death 40 years later, but this is the first, primal statement of its central role.

Freud wrote to his colleague and confidant Wilhelm Fliess, who played a vital role as sounding board for his developing ideas in the 1890s, that the Interpretation of Dreams was substantially finished by 1896. It was published in 1899 but Freud was careful to ensure that it had ‘1900’ on the title page; he was very aware of his image and reputation and that the arrival of a new century heralded the dawn of a new age. All these considerations were in the mind of this very ambitious man.

And yet, after all this careful planning, only 351 copies were sold in the first six years.

Freud began writing this immense book while on holiday in the summer of 1985 at the Schloss BelleVue near Grinzing in Austria. Later he jokingly wrote to Fliess suggesting that a plaque be put on the wall of this castle reading: ‘In this house on July 24 1895 the secret of dreams was revealed to Dr Sigmund Freud’. (Mentioned in a note by the editors on page 199.)

Early days

Personally, I find Freud’s theory of dreams, his confidence that every dream represents a wish and that virtually all dreams can be decoded into various kinds of libidinal fantasy, optimistic and implausible. There feels to be a lot of pseudo-science in it. It feels very dated. For Freud, though, his ‘discovery’ that dreams have meaning, that they were suppressed and distorted wishes, was his big intellectual breakthrough, and the existence of the unconscious was always tied up for him with the breakthrough of dream interpretation.

When I came to Freud it was through the later metapsychological works and the second theory initiated by Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). By comparison with the sophistication of the second theory, with the greater role it assigns to the Death Drive, the Nirvana Principle, the greater account taken of violence and aggression (prompted by the catastrophe of the First World War), the sociological theorisation of the psychology of groups and crowds – compared with all this, going back to his early dream theory seems a little embarrassing, almost childish.

Nonetheless, the final 50 or 60 pages of the Interpretation take us deep, deep into what is in effect a new theory of human nature and existence, which is visionary and strange. But the hundreds and hundreds of pages of sometimes clunky dream interpretation which precede them are often cringe-inducing. Specially when he makes his stock sexist comments about women and their innate inferiority to men…

Executive summary

The Interpretation is important because it introduces several central ideas of Freud’s theory, namely the unconscious as a reservoir of instinctual wishes and desires which have been repressed from the conscious mind by censorship. These repressed urges try to re-enter the mind when the censorship is relaxed during sleep, but even then can only do so in garbled and distorted form.

So all dreams have two layers or levels which Freud defines as manifest content and latent content (p.381).

The manifest content is the narrative or series of images which we remember on waking, maybe write down or recount to a therapist. The latent content refers to the underlying ‘meaning’ of the dream.

The work of psychotherapy is to dig below the surface or manifest content to try and establish the meaning of the latent content i.e. to discover the wish lying behind the dream.

Freud then categorises the ways in which the ‘censorship’ garbles the latent content of the dream. It does this through distinct processes which he labels as:

  • Condensation – can happen in many ways, for example many ideas or wishes may be represented in one dream, or two or more people or ideas may be combined in one representation
  • Displacement – the fundamental notion that latent content, the expression of the wish underlying all dreams, is distorted and ‘displaced’
  • Representation – a great variety of ways in which images, words, sounds, word and phrases can represent the dream-wish
  • Secondary revision – not part of the process of censorship, this is what happens as the mind returns to consciousness and, half-asleep, tries to ‘make sense’ of the half-remembered dream by rearranging its elements into something closer to a coherent narrative

The comprehensive nature of this rewriting of the repressed wish explains why people can often make no sense at all of their dreams, so completely censored and disguised have they been.

Using the talking cure, free association and dream interpretation, the therapist can analyse a patient’s dreams, uncovering the secret wish which lies behind them and find a way into the reservoir of all our drives and urges and the words and images and behaviours which have become attached to them. Hence Freud’s famous declaration:

The interpretation of dreams is the royal road to a knowledge of the unconscious activities of the mind.

THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS

The text is immensely schematic, divided and sub-divided and sub-sub-divided into numbered parts, sections, sub-sections, sub-sub-sections, as if to conceal the relative simplicity of what Freud was proposing under a mountain of academic apparatus. He recognised the work’s unmanageable length and published a much shorter version On Dreams in 1901, revised and expanded in 1911. The fact that the abbreviation is a mere slip of a thing at 53 pages in the English translation strongly hints at the redundancy of most of the material in the longer work. It’s there to bludgeon the reader into submission with the sheer quantity of ‘evidence’.

Part 1. The scientific literature dealing with the problems of dreams

The ancients had two theories: dreams as helpful messages from the supernatural or diabolical fantasy. These were said to emanate from gates of horn and of ivory, respectively.

A) The relation of dreams to waking life

Dreams seem at the same time totally removed from waking life yet continue many of the concerns of waking life.

B) The material of dreams: memory in dreams

Dreams often preserve memories much more clearly than waking life and yet what is remembered is often trivial.

C) The stimuli and sources of dreams

1. External sensory stimuli

For example, alarm clock prompts dreams of church bells etc. But why do the same external source prompts different dream-imagery?

2. Internal (subjective) sensory excitations

3. Internal organic somatic stimuli

News from internal organs, often warning of disease. But how are these messages conveyed?

4. Psychical sources of stimulation

Present definitions of psychical stimulation do not suffice.

D) Why dreams are forgotten after waking

It is natural that the intensity of daytime experiences blots out dreams. More importantly, everyone proceeds to reconstruct partially remembered dreams, stringing together half-memories in usually very misleading ways.

E) The distinguishing psychological characteristics of dreams

Dreams perceived as immediate experience. Lack of critical self-consciousness. In dreams we don’t think, we experience.

Crazy chains of association. Logic and causation which we (mostly) demand in conscious life are conspicuous by their absence.

Regression to earlier impulses. The tremendous virtuoso intensity of dream experiences. Freud reviews a wide range of views about dreams, from total disparagement to hymns to dreams’ poetic intensity.

F) The moral sense in dreams

Some say people lose all moral sense in dreams and behave with shocking amorality; others say you act in dreams according to your character. Dreams often show us insight into our deeper feelings, unknown to our conscious selves. Dreams reveal illicit desires, as in saints’ confessions of being miserable sinners. In dreams our instinctual life is exposed. We acquiesce in desires we spend our waking lives controlling and resisting.

G) Theories of dreaming and its function

The ancients thought dreams are sent from the gods as a guidance to action. More recently three schools have emerged:

  1. Rational. The dream-mind works just like the conscious mind but deprived of the sense-data of consciousness
  2. Mechanistic. Sleep relaxes the conscious control and dreams are responses of different parts of the mind to the passing sensory stimulants of the night. Or dreams are the excrescence of all the semi-cogitated impressions and thoughts of the day.
  3. Dreams are a holiday for the mind. Rest and recuperation.

H) The relations between dreams and mental diseases

Patients sometimes cured during the day continue their pathological behaviour in dreams or while asleep. ‘The madman is a waking dreamer’ etc. Dreams and psychoses are both fulfilment of wishes.

2. The method of interpreting dreams: analysis of a specimen dream

The aim which I have set before myself is to show that dreams are capable of being interpreted. (p.167)

Lay interpretation confined to symbolic reading (for example, pharaoh’s seven fat and seven lean kine; also mentioned p.448) and decoding (treating dream-language as a code).

Outline of the technique of free association.

An extended analysis of Freud’s own dream, the ‘dream of Irma’s injection’ interpreted to show how it conflates evidence to justify Freud’s treatment of her, i.e. a wish to be impregnated (pages 180 to 199).

3. A dream is a fulfilment of a wish

Elaboration of Freud’s fundamental insight, that every dream is the symbolic fulfilment of an unconscious wish. Examples of children’s dreams. The point is dreams may express wishes, but so comprehensibly distorted and garbled as to usually be unrecognisable to the dreamer.

4. Distortions in dreams

If all dreams are wish-fulfilments, why do some present as the opposite – wishing the death of a loved-one, anxiety dreams etc?

Because the wish is distorted. There are thus at least two aspects to a dream, the manifest content (the coherent narrative we make from the dream imagery) and the latent content (the real concern), and there is always an element of repression or censorship. This is the dream-work, which translates latent content into the manifest content we experience and remember.

The similarity of distortion in dreams and the hallucinations or obsessions of neurotics.

5. The material and sources of dreams

A) Recent and indifferent material in dreams

Frequent occurrence of material from the day before, the ‘dream-day’; but radically disguised or itself masking other meanings. Thus the concept of displacement.

B) Infantile material as a source of dreams

The deeper one carries the analysis of a dream, the more often one comes upon the track of experiences from childhood which have played a part among the sources of that dream’s latent content.

C) The somatic sources of dreams

All dreams are in a sense dreams of convenience. They serve the purpose of managing the processing of unconscious content in such a way as to preserve sleep. Dreams are the guardians of sleep.

If dreams are prompted by internal somatic stimulation, why do we not dream continuously of flying (the working of the lungs) etc? Because somatic stimulation is brought into the formation of a dream only when it fits with the ideational content derived from the dream’s psychic sources; only when it’s needed.

D) Typical dreams

He reviews:

1. Embarrassing dreams of being naked

2. Dreams of the death of persons whom the dreamer likes (childhood rivalries)

It is in this section that Freud describes the fierce emotions and rivalries attributable to children, which can spill over into hostility against their parents:

Being in love with the one parent and hating the other are among the essential constituents of the stock of psychical impulses which is formed [n childhood] (p.362)

He starts to invoke the Greek myths and this leads up to page 363 on which he posits the central role of the Oedipus legend.

It is the fate of all of us, perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father. (p.364)

3. Other typical dreams

4. Examination dreams

6. The dream-work

Freud reviews the different mental processes he claims are at work in dreams, which collectively he calls the ‘dream-work’:

A) The work of condensation

Seen at its clearest when it handles words and names. In dreams words are often treated like things, chopped up, compressed etc.

B) The work of displacement

A dream is often differently centred from the dream-thought which lies behind it. The work of displacement as well as condensation are the result of the censorship imposed on the unconscious wish material.

The kernel of my theory of dreams lies in my derivation of dream-distortion from the censorship. (p.418)

C) The means of representation in dreams

Dreams do not have any of the methods with which we construct narratives or logical arguments at their disposal.

The most striking example of absence of logic is the absence of the negative, meaning that no means yes, that something can be represented by its exact opposite: the process of reversal (p.429) This can apply to causality where normal cause and effect are reversed.

Or dream images can appear by a process of similarity or consonance of even a tiny part of it with something else (p.431).

The common sensation of running but never getting anywhere.

Dreams are completely egoistic. They deal with the dreamer and only the dreamer (p.434).

D) Considerations of representability

Some dreams make use of ‘primeval’ imagery, being similes reaching back to remote antiquity (p.462).

Wherever neuroses make use of such disguises they are following paths along which all humanity passed in the earliest days of civilisation. (p.463).

E) Symbols in dreams: some further typical examples

Tempting to think that recurrent symbols in dreams may be universal symbols, specially when they recur in ‘popular myths, legends, linguistic idioms, proverbial wisdom and current jokes’ (which gives you a good sense of Freud’s evidence base).

Freud proceeds to give a lexicon or handbook of symbols, starting with the King and Queen who are, of course, the dreamer’s parents, moving on to how playing with a little child, especially beating it, betokens masturbation, and so on.

  • a hat is symbolic of a man, or the male genitals
  • a little one is the penis
  • being run over is coitus
  • buildings, stairs and shafts represent the genitals
  • female genitals represented by a landscape
  • castration dreams
  • urinary symbolism
  • staircase dreams
  • flowers represent the genitals (p.496)
  • dreams of flying or floating have a very varied meaning

He makes the ‘shocking’ claim that psychoanalysis makes no qualitative distinction between normal and neurotic life i.e. there is no ‘normality’ i.e. we are all on a spectrum (p.493).

And the centrality of sex in all these hundreds and hundreds of examples:

The more one is concerned with the solution of dreams, the more one is driven to recognise that the majority of the dreams of adults deal with sexual material and give expression to erotic wishes. (p.520)

F) Some examples: calculations and speeches in dreams

The special significance of numbers in dreams.

Speech rarely makes sense in dreams, being recombinations of words or phrases taken from other sources.

G) Absurd dreams: intellectual activity in dreams

Obviously many dreams are absurd or absurdist in content, but Freud tries to identify different reasons for this, often to do with negative or contradictory elements in the motivating dream content.

The dream-work produces absurd dreams and dreams containing individual absurd elements if it is faced with the necessity of representing any criticism, ridicule or derision which may be present in the dream-thoughts. (p.576)

H) Affects in dreams

It is commonly observed that the mood induced by a dream lingers longer than most of the details into the waking day.

I) Secondary revision

This occurs at the end of the process of dream-construction and is the application of conscious thought processes to the dream material. Just before waking the renascent ego tries to gloss over inconsistencies in the dream narrative, trying to create sense out of absurdity.

So it’s not part of the censor’s work, not part of displacement and condensation; it comes after that and re-arranges elements of the dream, but has the practical effect of scrambling it even more, making dream interpretation even harder (pages 641 and 642).

7. The psychology of the dream process

The dream-work is not simply more careless, more irrational, more forgetful and more incomplete than waking thought; it is completely different from it qualitatively and for that reason not directly comparable with it. (p.650)

A) The forgetting of dreams

Forgetting details of a dream is a common experience. But Freud is convinced that more is retained than we commonly think and that in the therapeutic situation more can be reclaimed than you’d expect. And often the so-called ‘forgetting’ of a dream is really only the work of the censor and repression; with sensitive work it can be recalled.

Can we interpret every detail of a dream, or every dream? No. Because the power of repression and resistance is so severe. But you can interpret much more than you’d initially believe.

B) Regression

Freud works through a series of diagrams meant to convey the relationship between dream wishes, memories, the preconscious, the unconscious and so on. By ‘regression’ Freud means that, with the motor system i.e. active use of the body, shut down in sleep, wishes express their outcomes not in (sleeping) body but by bouncing back into the psyche. Regression refers to internally generated images which are fed backwards into the cortex as if they were coming from the outside. He goes on to distinguish three types of regression:

  1. topographical regression
  2. temporal regression, the harking back to earlier psychic structures
  3. formal regression, where primitive methods of expression and representation take the place of the usual ones (p.699)

He concludes by making the picturesque but now discredited claim that some element of dreams also connects us with primeval memories of our ancestors.

We may expect that the analysis of dreams will lead us to a knowledge of man’s archaic heritage, of what is psychically innate in him. Dreams and neuroses seem to have preserved more mental antiquities than we would have imagined possible; so that psychoanalysis may claim a high place among the sciences which are concerned with the reconstruction of the earliest and most obscure periods of the beginnings of the human race. (p.700)

C) Wish-fulfilment

It may be intuitively agreed that a dream expresses a wish, albeit heavily disguised by the censorship, but Freud goes on to address the paradox that anxiety and negative dreams can also express wishes. He devotes 2 pages to explaining the definition of a ‘wish’ as it first comes to be experienced by the screaming baby, considered as an inchoate organism seeking the most basic physical satisfactions.

During which he makes the kind of comment that I like, namely that ‘thought is after all nothing but a substitute for the basic physical wish’.

D) Arousal by dreams: the function of dreams: anxiety dreams

Further clarification of why anxiety dreams and other dreams with acutely negative affect are, nonetheless, expressions of a wish. The anxiety is an index of the force of the repression needed to keep the unacceptable wish material under wraps.

E) The primary and secondary processes: repression

In technical and difficult phraseology, Freud repeats the basic idea that the primary system (the unconscious) is concerned with securing the free discharge of the quantities of excitation which are troubling it, while the second system, attempts to inhibit this discharge (p.759).

The primary process endeavours to bring about a discharge of excitation in order that, with the help of the amount of excitation thus accumulated, it may establish a ‘perceptual identity’ with the experience of satisfaction. The secondary process, however, has abandoned this intention and taken on another in its place – the establishment of a ‘thought identity’ with that experience.

All thinking is no more than a circuitous path from the memory of a satisfaction (a memory which has been adopted as a purposive idea) to an identical cathexis of the same memory which it is hoped to attain once more through an intermediate stage of motor experiences. (pages 761 to 762)

These final pages take us deep, deep into Freud’s most theoretical musings about the nature of the mind and of thought, which tend to undermine the possibility of ‘reason’ at all, because he makes all the activities of the mind arise from a really primeval stratum of primitive needs, as transmuted into wishes, as repressed and distorted into a thousand and one memories, behaviour patterns, obsessions and so on. Nobody can think rationally, because this unconscious swamp is the basis of all human thought.

I’m not sure it’s worth reading the preceding 750 pages to get here, but they are in a sense the preface to a deep dive into a truly other vision of human nature, the human mind, human existence. All thinking is, in a sense, repeated attempts to recapture the primeval, primitive physical satisfactions of the baby which have been so thoroughly repressed that they can never be achieved. All humans are, in a sense, condemned to search endlessly for the unfindable. Hence [Freud doesn’t say this, I’m saying this] the universal notion of The Quest found across all human cultures.

F) The unconscious and consciousness: reality

The unconscious is vast and the basis of the psyche. The conscious mind is a small, fragile blip floating on the great unknown ocean of the unconscious.

The unconscious must be assumed to be the general basis of psychical life. The unconscious is the larger sphere which includes within it the smaller sphere of the conscious….The unconscious is the true psychic reality. (p.773)

Typically, Freud immediately goes on to say that this explains a lot of creative process too, with numerous poets and composers describing how their great works ‘came to them’ without planning, unexpectedly, whole and complete. Well…the unconscious!

The conscious mind is like a kind of sense organ for the perception of psychic qualities. It is entirely typical of Freud that this dense and difficult conceptualising gives way, on the page before last, to yet another reference to Greek mythology, and to the story of Zeus castrating his father, Kronos. Literature and myth are never far away in Freud’s writings. And are often a welcome respite from the more difficult technical passages.

And one of the oldest traditions of dreams, which he mentioned right at the start, 780 pages earlier, widely believed in the ancient world that they predict the future. Do they? No, not in a literal sense, no. And yet, in another sense:

By picturing our wishes as fulfilled, dreams are, after all, leading us into the future. But this future, which the dreamer pictures as the present, has been moulded by his indestructible wish into a perfect likeness of the past. (last sentences, page 783)

Criticism

The same period (1895 to 1900) saw the zenith of detectivehood in the fictional figure of Sherlock Holmes. Very widespread was the idea human personality as a mystery, a puzzle to be solved.

And the idea of psychic division into two opposing parts, light and dark, good and bad: the döppelgänger or split personality abounds in the stories of the time: Jeckyll and Hyde and The Secret Sharer and Dorian Gray and all the characters in Holmes leading respectable lives while concealing depths of vice and criminality.

After the long dull review of existing dream literature, Freud’s exposition his new theory of the interpretation of dreams contains steadily more and more personal material, including candid stories of antisemitism. He shares with us his identification with Hannibal; he describes himself as a conquistador; the narrative of the dream of Irma’s injection is above all a wish to be justified.

Surprisingly, maybe, there is no mention of the Oedipus Complex and little mention of childhood sexuality. He added notes about these to all the later editions, but reading the text as first published makes you realise how very bare of all his theories it is, or to put it another way, what a huge edifice of complex psychological theory it was to grow into.

Throughout the book you can see Freud extending the mechanisms revealed by his own dream analysis in order to derive a psychology of all stages of life; in particular pushing the source of almost all dreams back into childhood. The nature of childhood fantasy and its connection with childhood sexual feelings were to become central to the development of his theory over the next five years.

Credit

All Freud’s works have complicated histories in translation. The Interpretation of Dreams was first translated into English in 1953 as part of The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. References in this blog are to the revised version, published in 1976 as Volume 4 of the Pelican Freud Library.

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by Simon on June 16, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on June 16, 2023

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