Conrad's Fatherless Sons: Betrayal by Paternity and Failure of Fraternity in under Western Eyes

Abstract

THE TRAUMATIC ABSENCE or betrayal of the father is a key theme in Conrad's works, from Almayer's Polly (1895) onwards. Eord Jim, for example, presents an array of unsatisfactory fathers - Jim's naive, hypocritical parson father; Stein, whose romantic injunctions prove unequal to salvaging Jim; and Doramin, who relinquishes to Jim his own son's right to succession. But in no work does Conrad explore this theme more fully than in Under Western Eyes, in which all fathers - biological, social, and political - fail or betray their sons. Razumov's father, who refuses to acknowledge his natural son, is cowardly and unable to protect him. Haldin's father is dead - and his death has undone his family. Further, father figures in Russia, including General T- and Mikulin, are either cruel or untrustworthy; and father figures in the West, whether the actual Teacher of Languages or the spectrally present Jean-Jacques Rousseau, are either ineffectual or misguided. Finally, the State as father is either cruelly autocratic, as is Russia; or complacently materialistic, as is Switzerland.Given the failure of patriarchy and patriarchal institutions, the novel considers the possibility of an alternative order, a society of brothers, as first proposed by Haldin to Razumov. But the novel, as it unfolds, demonstrates that such an alternative structure is doomed to fail. In the absence of the father, there can be no brotherhood: the sons - Razumov, Peter Ivanovitch, Yakovlitch - do not share power but rather bicker, batde, and flounder. And the sisters - Natalia, Tekla, and Sophia Antonovna - lacking any place in society, create their own, but at the expense of procreation and social continuity. The collapse of generations results in the loss of generativity: paralyzed men and disaffected women do not marry nor have children. That Conrad, in the course of writing the novel, came to the above awareness is demonstrated by his rejection of the original marriage plot.In a 1908 letter to John Galsworthy, Conrad explains his first conception of the novel: "The Student Razumov meeting abroad the mother and sister of Haldin falls in love with that last, marries her and after a time confesses to her the part he played in the arrest and death of her brother" (CL4 9). In rethinking the thematic elements, Conrad moved away from the earlier version, in which Razumov and Natalia marry, to the final version in which Razumov's confession leads to Natalia's rejection and his destruction.Yet, on closer examination, Under Western Eyes is not about the failures of patriarchy and patriarchal institutions. For indeed in the Russia Conrad depicts there is no patriarchy. Patriarchy implies law and social order. But, as Conrad points out in his 1905 essay "Autocracy and War," "there never has been any legality in Russia" (Notes on Life and Letters 84): "From the very first ghasdy dawn of her existence as a state she had to breathe the atmosphere of despotism, she found nothing but the arbitrary will of an obscure autocrat at the beginning and end of her organisation" (82). An obscure autocrat" with "an arbitrary will" is the antithesis of the law-giving and law-enforcing father of patriarchy, who acknowledges his children, directs their course, imposes obligations, confers privileges, and assures their future."Autocracy and War" proceeds to expatiate on the hopelessness of human lives lived in the shadow of Russian autocracy:Russia . . . has not the right to give her voice in a single question touching the future of humanity, because from the very inception of her being the brutal destruction of dignity, of truth, of rectitude, of all that is faithful in human nature has been made the imperative condition of her existence. The great governmental secret of that Imperium ... has been the extirpation of every intellectual hope. (82-83)Unsurprisingly, Under Western Eyes, the novel about Russia that Conrad published five years later, embodies these bleak pronouncements in the lives of his Russian characters. …