Mistranslations of Subjectivity: The Textual Unconscious in Conrad’s Work

Abstract

The article engages with Freud’s “Mystic Writing Pad” (1925) as an interpretative point of departure for reading the unconscious labour of the text in three of Conrad’s novels. The distinctive commonality of these texts is the occurrence of a form of mistranslation, known in translation theory as “false cognates”, or more colloquially, “false friends” or “faux amis”. The readings offered in this context highlight aporetic moments in these novels, moments of undecidability, where the use of false cognates seems to cross the boundary-lines of narrative levels, and cannot be exclusively assigned to either the character, or the narrator, or the author. These aporetic moments are, I suggest, textual equivalents of the physical points of contact in Freud’s model of the “mystic writing pad”. The convergence of metalepsis with linguistic distortion in the narration indicates, in all three cases, a reverberation of unconscious anxiety about paternity and filiation and desire for a grounding of subjectivity, which boil over and across the different layers of the text, challenging the ontological distinction between the textual and the psychic, and generating a process of transference which implicates the reader as well.