"The Secret Sharer" through Eastern Eyes

"The Secret Sharer" was written amidst the emotional turmoil Joseph Conrad embroiled himself in while writing Under Western Eyes. Conrad wanted to escape the Western terrain and give himself a break in the Eastern lands he knew from his earlier sailing days. In 'Twixt Land and Sea, Conrad comments on writing Under Western Eyes: "On emerging from it in a much enfeebled state I was inspired to direct my tottering steps towards the Indian Ocean, a complete change of surroundings and atmosphere" (viii). Conrad wrote about his remembered surroundings in the Indian Ocean as if he were painting a Chinese landscape. An examination of "The Secret Sharer" through Eastern eyes will describe how he paints the scenery so the reader envisions the environment from a Daoist perspective. Relationships that parallel the five Confucian relationships emerge in "The Secret Sharer" that, when in harmony, restore balance in the universe.

In the introduction to "The Secret Sharer", Conrad seems to make use of Chinese poetry, which is composed of complementary couplets, where each element of a line corresponds with its other part. Like a Daoist landscape poem, humans are present, but only as a part of nature. Opposing yin and yang elements are omnipresent; Daoist poetic couplets complement each other, and just when the setting seems perfect, a disturbance appears that alerts the reader to a change of scenery. A human presence, which is seen as a part of nature in both Chinese landscape painting and poetry, appears in Conrad's first line: "On my right hand there were lines of fishing-stakes resembling a mysterious system of half-submerged bamboo fences… " ("Secret" 269). This line is also the yang element of the first yin-yang pairing: the fishing-stakes emerging from the water representing the male, or yang essence, and the sentence beginning, "To the left a group of barren islets…" satisfies the female half of the first yin-yang pairing ("Secret" 269). Yang is male, positive, and associated with heaven, like the emergent poles thrusting upwards. Yin is female, negative, and connected with earth—the word barren is negative, making the islets, representing the earth, particularly yin. In addition to bamboo fences, another human element introduced in the first paragraph that clearly sets the scene in an eastern landscape, and also represents yin and yang, is the Paknam pagoda ("Secret" 269). The lofty mass of the pagoda, the yang component, appears to emerge from the distant reach of the river Meinam, the yin aspect, commonly represented by streams. The "half brown, half blue" of the land and sea beneath the "enormous dome of the sky" form yet another pairing ("Secret" 269). In the second paragraph, he couples "floated at the starting point of a long journey" with a "breathless pause at the threshold of a long passage" ("Secret" 270). In the next paragraph, he pairs "tide of darkness" with a "swarm of stars" ("Secret" 270). Daoist elements are common throughout the introductory section, but once the scene is set, the yin-yang parallel couplets tend to disappear from view, which suggests that Conrad was intentionally using this device to create the setting.

Finally, the disturbance, a surprise turn of events, another element in Chinese poetry, is revealed by the captain: "There must have been some glare in the air to interfere with one's sight, because it was only just before the sun left us that my roaming eyes made out beyond the highest ridge […]" ("Secret" 270). After the disturbance, Conrad returns to using a complementary couplet that completes the break between the landscape setting and the story: "quiet communion" and "disturbing sounds" ("Secret" 270). The gleaming object seen by the captain near the end of the setting signals the entrance into the body of the story.

Daoism and Confucianism both seek to restore and maintain the order of the universe. Daoism is a set of ancient philosophical principles that attempt to cooperate with the natural flow of life (Watts xiv). Qi, or spirit, is the energy that sets the dao in motion. When yin and yang, the female and male essence of qi, achieve equilibrium, the...