The Secret Sharer, Nietzsche, and Conrad’s New Man

Albert G. Guerard rates The Secret Sharer, along with Heart of Darkness and The Shadow Line, “among the first and best—one is tempted to say only—symbolist masterpieces in English fiction.”¹ It deserves a special place on that list, in my view, in that it puts into fictional form one of the most momentous movements of mind in modern times: the emergence into awareness of the unconscious in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a logical extension of Darwin’s revelations about human origins.² The Secret Sharer is doubly remarkable in that Conrad tossed it off in just ten days,³ with a nervous system strained to the breaking point by the pressure his agent, J. B. Pinker, was putting on him to finish Under Western Eyes or be cut off from the income Pinker was doling out in advance of publication. Frederick R. Karl explains that Conrad could write with rapidity “when he knew his mind exactly,”⁴ although one may wonder how a man heading for a complete nervous breakdown could know his own mind coolly and rationally enough to write a novella with the artistry, psychological intricacy, and cultural sensitivity of The Secret Sharer.

In fact, I believe that Conrad found help in writing the story from another mind he seems to have known pretty well, a mind that had projected, though in a quite different form, a similar protagonistic figure, something of a pioneer, like Leggatt, in encountering and coming to terms with the unconscious, with its tangled web of both vital and dangerous promptings. In what Conrad said about the genesis of The Secret Sharer one may read a hint that he borrowed the idea for the story: he “started looking for a subject” to take up and earn some income “for the very purpose of easing the strain” of his impasse with Pinker over Under Western Eyes, “and this one turned up” (CL4:297). What turned up, as I shall demonstrate in what follows, was the curiously-jumbled account of a shadowy persona who goes step-by-step through the same difficulties as Conrad puts Leggatt through in The Secret Sharer: a feeling of alienation from the people around him and of the need to hide the newly-discovered instinctual component of his selfhood from a society bent on repudiating it, a painful division between the self he has discovered and the self society expects him to be, a struggle in his own mind against his own conscience—the ingrained conditioning of the moral structure of his society so hostile to the selfhood he now recognizes—and finally the need to violate the very laws of his society in order to be himself, to take full control of himself, and thus to become a fully responsible, fully functioning leader in society. The mind Conrad found so congenial to his own that he would reflect it in his own story, the mind that created the psycho-cultural drama Conrad fictionalized in The Secret Sharer, is that of Friedrich Nietzsche, the philosopher who cast such an imposing shadow over the intellectual world around the turn to the twentieth century.

It seems curious, in view of the return of interest in Nietzsche in recent decades,⁵ that no one would have noticed the close likeness between the two lines of argument: Nietzsche’s in the main body of his work and Conrad’s in The Secret Sharer. In fact, it’s all there in The Secret Sharer: everything from anticipation of the rational man, together with the rope ladder that both Conrad and Nietzsche use to identify the unconscious, to the final garden of paradise where each is envisioning a fruitful, peaceful state of mind after resolving their conflicts.⁶ Moreover, Conrad seemed hostile to Nietzsche when he mentioned him in letters, as when he wrote of “the mad individualism of Nietzsche” (CL2:188) and connected Nietzsche’s legacy with the superiority complex of the Germanic tribes.⁷ But Conrad was not above berating writers who found their way, in one way or another, into his own...