THE DOUBLE-STAGING OF IMPERATIVES IN JOSEPH CONRAD’S “THE SECRET SHARER”
THE DOUBLE-STAGING OF IMPERATIVES IN JOSEPH CONRAD’S “THE SECRET SHARER”

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this essay is to explore the interplay between the personal secret-sharing that forms the overt subject of Joseph Conrad’s celebrated short-story “The Secret Sharer” and the impersonal sharing that occurs continuously between two distinct “imperatives”: the territorial, which controls the overt actions of the protagonists, and the symmetrical, which guides the covert activity of Conrad himself. Its methodology is inspired by Robert Ardrey’s classic study of the quest for territory in The Territorial Imperative (1966), on the one hand, and, on the other, by Marcel Jousse’s study of human beings as a bilaterally symmetrical species in L’anthropologie du geste (2008), on the other. The captain’s failure to claim uncontested “communion” with the territory represented by his ship will lead to his fulfilling it via the “mysterious communication” that he achieves with Leggatt as a substitute “territory.” His determination to prevent the discovery of his designated double by the members of his crew is accompanied throughout the story by Conrad’s inviting his readers to discover the innumerable doubles that contribute to its design. These doubles oscillate between the high visibility of the “two bunches of bananas [that] hung from the beam symmetrically” and the low visibility of Leggatt’s “headless corpse” at the beginning of the story and his "homeless head” at the end.

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