Generic Transformations in Under Western Eyes and “The Secret Sharer”: Echoes of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” and Dostoevsky’s “The Double”

Abstract

KARL MARX FAMOUSLY opens his 1852 essay Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis with an ironic riposte to a comment of Hegel's. Hegel, he notes, somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as were, twice. Marx comments dryly: He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce (1962: 247). There is something satisfyingly appropriate in the way in which Marx illustrates a repetition that paradoxically produces something utterly different by reference to generic transformation. Writers often recycle material, consciously and unconsciously using elements from other writers in their own work. But in the case of great writers such borrowings are typically transformations. If over half a century ago the influence of F. R. Leavis's The Great Tradition (1948) encouraged us to believe that the greatest works of literature (amongst which Leavis numbered Under Western Eyes but not Secret Sharer) were influenced only by other great works and writers, a later generation of critics has generally accepted that Claude Levi-Strauss's concept of bricolage (1972: 17) probably provides a more accurate picture of composition. Writers are bricoleurs, odd-job men and women who find the materials that they need in the clutter of their culture and who adapt these materials to their purposes without necessarily having any respect for their original functions.Conrad was a notorious borrower, and he had the clutter of more than one culture to rummage through. His borrowings from French, Polish, and Russian culture have been extensively documented, and his reading of other literatures was far from negligible. But his borrowings were also transformations, and in his writing a phrase, a passage, a motif borrowed from another writer is often as different as Napoleon Bonaparte was from his farcical successor Louis Bonaparte. Furthermore the use to which Conrad put borrowings from a single source varies from work to work, and this variation is often linked to generic transformation.Thus one may abstract sentences or short passages from works by Conrad and be struck by how close a resemblance they bear to one another, or how close a resemblance they bear to elements from the work of another writer, only to realize that in their textual contexts the resemblance is far less striking. Take, for example, the following sentence: felt with that a mysterious contact was being established between our two mental personalities (cited in Higdon and Sheard 1987: 174). These words bring Secret Sharer to mind, and perhaps the sentence from Secret Sharer that they most direcdy evoke is: A mysterious communication was established already between us two - in the face of that silent, darkened tropical sea (87).The first quoted sentence is not, however, from Secret Sharer but is part of a cancelled sequence in the typescript of Under Western Eyes that describes a lengthy discussion that takes place in a cafe between the Teacher of Languages and Peter Ivanovitch. The two sentences may appear strikingly similar in isolation, but who would claim that the relationship between these characters has much, if anything, in common with that between the captain-narrator of Secret Sharer and Leggatt? It is perhaps the word displeasure that gives the game away: the mysterious communication that the captain-narrator of Secret Sharer reports having been established between himself and the fugitive Leggatt is not, the reader is given to understand, a source of for either character. As Leggatt remarks to the captain: didn't mind being looked at. I - I liked it (95).The passages are, then, both similar and different. Their similarity serves to confirm that readers and critics have not been wrong to detect significant points of contact - echoes, resemblances, shared references - between the two works. In both Under Western Eyes and Secret Sharer characters experience a mysterious sense of identification between themselves and another character. …