The clash of discourses

Abstract

The post-structuralist reader today might argue that the discourses in HD do not work to produce a set of harmonious voices in the text. They produce a hierarchy, and they work by clashes. This theory counters the traditional claims for unity of style or the voice of the author. The search for a unity in HD is problematic, not least because of the function of its structure of framing devices and conventional narrative patterns: the situated ‘oral’ narration, with narrator and narratees defined; the retrospective narrative discourse; the archetypal story patterns of Journey and Quest, Encounter and Ordeal, Enigma and Revelation, Life and Death Struggle, Survival and Return. The ironies of HD rely on these patterns while at the same time undermining them as stable models. For example, the modern twist of Marlow, the storyteller as wise Buddha figure without the lotus-flower, symbol of achieved enlightenment, relies on the narrative archetype of the Journey and the Revelation for its irony. These conventional patterns function as ‘strategies of containment’. In conjunction with Marlow’s Victorian ethics, such archetypal patterning may be seen as a symptom of a deep wish-fulfilment for the return to an older stable world, a world always prefigured in Conrad by the life on board ship. It is a kind of phantasm that may be deconstructed by discontinuities which make up the heterogeneous text of HD.