Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1996. Vol. 1. Eger Journal of English Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 24)

Tibor Tóth: Conrad's 'Secret Garden'

of them and yet not dominating them. The strategy in itself is an enormous lie, since the protagonist's meditation persists from the opening lines to the last line, because the central theme is not altered, it remains intact. The function of this relatively sophisticated network of discourses is to maintain the hero's right to interpret the end of the search for self as a beginning for an identical search. The terminology used here does not belong to Conrad's time, since it is extensively based on modernist and postmodernist views. Marlow's interpretation of the Company and Kurtz reminds us of what the narrator of the Nigger of the Narcissus suggested: to be conscious is to be over-civilised, to dominate through lie. This is why his critique is conducted in the very terms of what it sets out to condemn. He ends, therefore, by participating in the violence of its conceptual imposition.

4

4 The horror generated by this lie becomes visible for Marlow only when mirrored by Kurtz's despair. The two discourses have already created two different, but overlapping narratives characterised in turns by realism and mythology. The attempt to support the realistic discourse with the mythological one ended in corruption of both discourses, decomposing interpretation and even perception. To dominate the chaos resulting from this strategy, Conrad shifts from ethics to aesthetics, a shift which passes unnoticed at the level of the two parallel narratives, but imposes itself as the only governing principle through the reformulated consistency in the relationship of the protagonist and the material he is re-telling us. Marlow becomes conscious of his privileged position as the narrator retrospectively telling a story. Marlow's aesthetic consciousness has the power to redeem only if he negates that the dark power he tried to dominate through his perverse insistence on its mythological interpretation fell back on him. This explains the presence of the third discourse, which can only be interpreted when reversing the logic of the two already identified ones. Deconstruction of the two grand narratives does not come as a surprise to us since, as we have already noticed, both the mythological and the realistic discourses contained the antagonistic 4

4 Waugh, Patricia: Practising Postmodernism Reading Modernism

, London: Edward Arnold, 1992, 90 175