Ghost Effects

I want to define this expression 'ghost effect', by giving an example. It's well known that Conrad was fond of using the rhetoric of blindness ('inscrutable', 'black', 'dark', etc.) -- but why? Consider the following passage:

And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention. It looked at you with a vengeful aspect. I got used to it afterwards; I did not see it anymore; I had no time. I had to keep guessing at the channel; I had to discern, mostly by inspiration, the signs of hidden banks; I watched for sunken stones; I was learning to clap my teeth smartly before my heart flew out, when I shaved by a fluke some infernal sly old snag that would have ripped the life out of the tin-pot steamboat and drowned all the pilgrims; I had to keep a lookout for the signs of dead wood we could cut up in the night for next day's steaming. When you have to attend to things of that sort, to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality -- the reality I tell you -- fades. The inner truth is hidden -- luckily, luckily. But I felt it all the same; I felt its mysterious stillness watching me at my monkey tricks, just as it watches you fellows performing your respective tight-ropes for -- what is it? half-a-crown a tumble -- (14/32)

Within a closed system, a system of conventional meaning, this passage (and the entire book) would be empty pretty much unreadable: and, indeed, there still are people who think that Conrad is really writing about the simple 'failure' of certain knowledge or 'unknowability' -- that is, that Conrad is merely speaking about 'limitations' within an established system of knowledge. Looking directly at the passage, we see almost nothing but blackness -- 'stillness of an implacable force', 'inscrutable intention', ... 'it looked at me' ... 'I did not see it' ... 'the inner truth is hidden'. These certainly sound like descriptions or aestehtic events but, in fact, they actually empty out these events.

What I call ghost effects appear whenever we try look away from the materiality of the text -- in precisely the same way that Marlow has to look away from the mere incidents of the surface. But Marlow cannot look away, and neither, in the end, can we. Let me make myself clearer, as to what I mean here: we recognize that Conrad is playing games with blindness, which we are tempted to classify as 'an expression of limitation/failure'. But even this continues to be an expression -- and we imply this when we take the inevitable next step: we say Conradian blindness, implying a particular, distinguishable, and therefore visible (historicized) form of blindness. That is, there is the temptation to reduce this blindness to a historically defined (and visible) thing -- blindness of, say, the well-defined person Conrad.

The way I use the word 'tempted' in 'we are tempted to classify this', I make it sound like it's something that we have control over. But it's really, in the end, not a matter of personal choice, but of the nature of appearing, in literature: literature does not manifest presence, but is always characterized by its inability to manifest the object. That is, when we see the rhetoric of blindness, we see precisely that -- something 'of' blindness -- an expression of blindness, a statement of blindness, and so on. Literature is always a inadequate remainder or announcement of an event it cannot reach -- blindness, in this case.

But at the very moment that this historicization occurs, Conrad seems to reappear, as a ghost -- more precisely, as a ghostly voice (and not as a a transcendental understanding of structure, or of an era -- this would be the trascendental or emergent understanding implicit in Conradian ruins). That is, I want to point out that the above passage is precisely about this process we are talking about right now, historicization and ghost effects. Marlow, on the ship, cannot look away from the steering of the ship, from the navigation around these superficial elements. Yet, he feels the presence of this vast, inscrutable force. That is, what Marlow calls 'looking' is precisely what we above called 'visibility', or historical visibility -- the way that there seems to be an irresistable force making us reduce Conrad's blindness to a particular, historical form of blindness: we cannot look away. And, in fact, at the very moment that we seemed to have looked away from this blindness -- at the very moment that we seemed to have understood these Conradian 'games' involving blindness, and see Conrad as a (yet to be understood, holistic) historical 'perspective' -- we, at this moment, suddenly hear the voice shift and reappear.

Now -- to take a breath -- it's obvious that what I describe above, this (somewhat forced, some may argue) reading of the passage as an allegory of reading or of historicization can easily be ignored -- with no ill consequences. No one is hurt by the ignorance of this highly intellectual reading, and it seems to be of very little consequence. And we will most readily admit that such a reading is not obvious and apparent, but rather strings together via the ambiguity of several themes: visibility, blindness, surface, navigation. It is most certainly not a grammatical reading.

Yet, the way in which this reading appears, unsteadily, unconventionally, and with difficulty, is precisely what we are after. This may be connected with what Conrad calls the 'feeling' of the darkness which watches him. But the latter reading continues to appear from within the text, as that which the text had already contained: the allegorical meanings of these words, 'visibility', 'blindness', etc. This is a reading that risks, and -- I assert -- that Conrad himself risked. But what are the wagers?

A summary
Let's slow down and consider what exactly we are arguing here, since this little reading would be absolutely trivial if it merely strove to be a 'correct interpretation' of the text. Our primary goal right now, is the definition of this 'ghost effect' of the text, which I call the effect of something appearing as we look away. The moment that we have understood/'seen'/historicized the text, the text gains a secondary, meaning -- not a subtext, since this concept implies a separate, independent meaning -- but rather a secondary 'ghostly' meaning, an 'allegory of reading' that is parasitic upon the first reading: it is both [i]about[/i] the first meaning, and relies on the secondary definition of a set of key words.

This parasitism reduces the entire process to a failed attempt to look away. We want to look away from the text, but the secondary meaning brings us back at the moment of looking away -- so it turns out that we still are listening to the text. There is no development of the system, but rather a re-hearing of the voice -- we are being told, and we are again, merely announcing the visible, the superficial. And we would like to, once again, historicize this telling -- we would say this entire process is nothing but the dramatization of being unable to look away, or even perhaps the Conradian dramatizaiton of not being able to look away. But, of course, such efforts will be in vain.

We have therefore reached an aporia in our system. We are unable to look away, realizing that any transcendental mode of understanding (Conradian blindness, Conradian dramatization of failure) continues to be a reading of the text -- so that there is no meaning which would finally lie beyond the text, which would finally be capable of historicizing this text. Yet, in the ghost which reappears, this ghostly voice, ...