The Sjuzhet as a Conradian Mode of Thinking

Abstract

The Sjuzhet as a Conradian Mode of Thinking H. M. Daleski There are countless ways in which novelists may make narratives think for them. One obvious and direct way is through the use of narratorial commentary. George Eliot in Middlemarch, for instance, after a sustained and powerfully dramatic representation of her heroine in a narrative of nearly 900 pages, cannot refrain finally from telling us, through her narrator, what she thinks about the life depicted, and, moreover, from generalizing the thought: Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of a young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. (896) Charles Dickens, though he too is much inclined to narratorial commentary, uses a complex structural strategy to make his narrative think for him in Bleak House. He employs an alternating, contrasted, double narrative, one with an external, third-person narrator and the other with an internal, first-person narrator, the former using the historic present and the latter the retrospective past. The divided narrative as a whole evokes pronouncedly separate social worlds. But the two narratives move slowly closer and closer together until they finally become one, and thus what the narrative emphatically thinks is the inescapable oneness of the various groups presented, a oneness that is Dickens's large implicit theme. Joseph Conrad's mode of thinking in the two texts I propose to discuss, Lord Jim and Nostromo, is through his manipulation of the sjuzhet.1 The [End Page 151] sjuzhet is by now an old-fashioned term, and it may be as well to recall that it is defined in contradistinction to the chronological order of all that occurs in a narrative when this is reconstituted after the completion of a reading of it (i.e., the fabula), the sjuzhet being the actual order we encounter in the text as it is. I choose to use this Russian Formalist distinction in preference to Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's adoption of Gérard Genette's terminology relating to temporal order in narrative (40) because of the particular intricacy of the selected Conrad texts. Rimmon-Kenan says, with admirable clarity, "An analepsis is a narration of a story-event at a point in the text after later events have been told. . . . Conversely, a prolepsis is a narration of a story-event at a point before earlier events have been mentioned" (46). The problem about applying this distinction to Conrad's two texts is the notion of the "story-event," as the following instance in Lord Jim suggests. Marlow says that the devil has let him in for "the inquiry thing, the yellow-dog thing—you wouldn't think a rnangy, native tyke would be allowed to trip up people in the verandah of a magistrate's court, would you?" (34). This is nominally a prolepsis since we do not meet the yellow dog for some 35 pages, but if so it is highly problematic. When we encounter "the yellow-dog thing" in apposition to "the inquiry thing," we take it to be a rather far-fetched and certainly obscure figure for the Court of Inquiry that is trying Jim. Then, when we come to the actual yellow dog, we discover that the mangy tyke's "tripping people up in the verandah" of the court is merely Marlow's metaphor for what transpires. When they leave the courtroom, Marlow's companion, noticing the yellow dog, loudly comments: "Look at that wretched cur," whereupon Jim, walking ahead of them, spins round and aggressively says to Marlow, "Did you speak to me?" (70). It is Jim, of course, who is metaphorically "tripped up" by his sense of shame and embarrassingly gives himself away. The yellow dog, therefore, is real enough, but its initial tripping up of people in the verandah of the court is a non-event, unless we wish to call Marlow's use of the metaphor a "story...