JOSEPH CONRAD AND THE METAPHYSICS OF TIME

Abstract

In The Secret Agent, when the Professor boasts that he relies only on death and so is free of all human weakness, Comrade Ossipon bitterly re? minds him that he, like all men, is bound by All that man has to make him human is his scurvy, shabby, mangy little bit of time. It marks the confines of his and without it he has nothing, eternity is a damned hole.1 Ironically, even the Professor's search a precise detonator to regulate his time bombs betrays his humanity and his frailty through his dependence on This dependence, which may be demeaning or ennobling depending on the spirit with which it is accepted, challenges all characters in the novels of Joseph Conrad. They discover that they are essentially historical beings, beings-in-time: time is the fabric of their existence. They must struggle to organize and direct their lives amid the flow of circumstance, to waste time irresponsibly would be an awful waste of life (WT, p. 70). They must judge their actions in temporal terms, as does Mrs. Gould in Nostromo when she asserts: for to be large and full, it must contain the care of the past and of the future in every passing moment of the present. Our daily work must be done to the glory ofthe dead, and the good of those who come after (N, pp. 520-21). Only then will be given moral and emotional con? tinuity; only then will time be full. Mrs. Gould's sympathetic of the full and the Professor's mad of a which is timeless, anarchic and empty, the two extremes between which we can reconstruct Conrad's metaphysic of Conrad's interest in time has long been recognized. Technically, his time-shifts and multiple perspectives?his eccentricities of recital, in Henry James's gracious phrase?have been dissected, catalogued, and reassembled.2 But Conrad insisted in his Author's Note to Chance that his eccentric style is indissolubly allied to his vision of things. It

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