Power, Truth and Play in Under Western Eyes

This paper analyzes the relation between language, reality and truth in Under Western Eyes by exploring the way in which opposed verbal-ideological positions in the novel struggle to impose differing narrative and interpretative frameworks on an extra-discursive reality. In the course of that struggle, I argue, this extra-discursive space reveals itself as intrinsically indeterminable, and therein undermines any particular perspective's claim to interpretative authority. As such, my analysis inevitably also challenges the tendency in the secondary literature to read Kirylo Sidorovitch Razumov's final confession as a mode of discourse that provides a positive resolution to the problem of establishing the truth-value of opposing verbal-ideological structures in the novel. As I will show, readings of this kind not only radically underestimate the extent of Conrad's skepticism, but also, and more importantly, fail to see that the novel in fact uses that skepticism as a way to introduce an interpretative position altogether independent of the logic of such particular perspectival hegemony. Instead of simply replicating the struggle between different points of view within the novel, as traditional interpretations do, my analysis shows how the novel's very denial of epistemic priority to any particular position lays bare a higher interpretative perspective dependent on them all. Such a perspective does not seek to establish a distinction between truth and lies, but rather, as is proper to all fiction in the mode of play, to tell the former through the latter.

I.

Already the narrator's initial presentation of Razumov is caught in a tension between world and cognition that makes any claim to epistemic certainty problematic:

Mr Razumov was supposed to be the son of an archpriest and to be protected by a distinguished nobleman—perhaps of his own distant province. But his outward appearance accorded badly with such humble origin. Such a descent was not credible. It was, indeed, suggested that Mr Razumov was the son of an archpriest's pretty daughter—which, of course, would put a different complexion on the matter. This theory also rendered intelligible the protection of the distinguished nobleman. All this, however, had never been investigated, maliciously or otherwise. No one knew or cared who the nobleman in question was.

(Under 6)

The structure of the passage is striking. An initially inexplicable event (Razumov's birth) is explained by two different theories. The first, which interprets Razumov as "the son of an archpriest," is rejected as incompatible with facts, such as "his outward appearance" (Under 6). Instead, a second theory is introduced, according to which Razumov is the "son of an archpriest's pretty daughter," and which can assimilate both the elements disruptive of the first (Razumov's appearance) and those previously left out altogether, namely "the protection of the distinguished nobleman" (Under 6). It is, furthermore, interesting to note the echo of Razumov's "appearance" in the "complexion" attributed to the second theory, which postulates his descent from the "pretty" archpriest's daughter: the positive correspondence between thought and world is here secured by the perception of a formal attribute shared by both realms rather than the compliance with logical rules or factual conditions (Under 6). That such a formal criterion for truth implies a subjective determination of the world is made clear three pages later, when the unverified hypothesis of Razumov's birth is presented as fact by the same narrator: "Officially and in factwithout a family (for the daughter of the archpriest had long been dead)" (Under 10). On the following pages, moreover, Razumov goes on to interpret his encounter with Prince K——under the aegis of this hypothesis turned fact, reading the latter's "condescending murmur" and "distinct pressure of the white, shapely hand just before it was withdrawn" as "a secret sign" (Under 12).Although never clarified or confirmed, this "secret sign" solidly establishes the Prince as Razumov's father for the remainder of the novel (Under 12).

The narrator's interpretation of Razumov and Razumov's of Prince K—— are paradigmatic for a vast amount of the interpretations found throughout the novel: an absence of...