Quest of the Spirit: From Suffering to Acceptance

85. Too Young to Hope, Too Old to Dream: Conrad's Axel Heyst

                                                  Axel Heyst: Existential Hero in Conrad's Victory

           "Ah, Davidson, woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love—and to put its trust in life!" (Conrad 338-339). This sad passage from Joseph Conrad's Victory (Doubleday & Company 1921) echoes the sentiment of protagonist Axel Heyst as he tragically learns that purpose and meaning derive from the human heart, not facts or philosophy. The hero unfortunately realizes that one cannot retreat from life. Responding with courage and compassion in a moment of crisis requires both awareness and responsibility. Lord Jim's reaction that night on the Patna set in motion a train of events that ultimately determined his fate. In a similar respect, so do the sailors aboard the Narcissus, as they stoically await their fate as a result of the suffering and death of black crewman James Wait. In Conrad's Victory, existential hero Axel Heyst also confronts choices that conflict with his ideals. Writing in his Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (Doubleday 1914), Conrad suggests that purpose of life hinges upon the concept of heroism. "To snatch in a moment of courage, from the remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life is only the beginning of the task. The task approached in tenderness and faith, is to hold up unquestioningly, without choice and without fear, the rescued fragment before all movement, its form,, and its color, reveal the substance of its truth—disclose its inspiring secret: the stress and passion within the core of each convincing moment" (14). Heyst's decision to act on behalf of two suffering victims denotes his moment of courage and awareness which marks the turning point in his life. By coming to the assistance of a destitute trader named Morrison in need of capital to re-purchase his boat, and a young woman helplessly trapped and persecuted in a sinister traveling orchestra, Axel makes choices out of compassion, an attitude which defies his philosophy of aloof-ism, and ultimately pays the price for his unfortunate fate. A victim of inn-keeper Schomberg's jealousy over a young woman he rescues from oppression, and the greed of thieves who believe he has murdered Morrison for his fortune, Heyst discovers that his first acts of kindness have ironically become a sword of Damocles initiating him into a world of corruption, compelling him to redefine his place in the universe and prompting him to act upon his own moral prerogatives. Despite the accidental murder of the woman he loves and the insurmountable threat posed by the criminals, Heyst chooses his own form of existential victory in a conflagration with the body of his beloved. Like Shelley's Frankenstein, Heyst, in a Byronic act of defiance, makes one final choice that seals his fate. Like Hamlet, Axel must decide "whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or . . . by opposing, end them." This, too, is Heyst's moral dilemma. In essence, Conrad's term victory for the title echoes his fatalistic view of life in this tragic tale of sadness, irony, and loss.

            As in Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and Nostromo, Conrad employs irony and fate, or coincidence, to enhance the protagonist's futile quest for meaning. The author describes the main character's existential qualities in the following passage: "For fifteen years Heyst had wandering, invariably courteous and unapproachable, and in return, was generally considered a 'queer chap. ' He had started off on these travels of his after the death of his father, an expatriated Swede who died in London, dissatisfied with his country and angry with all the world, which had instinctively rejected his wisdom" (75). In essence, Conrad here develops the anti-hero theme associated with subsequent existential personalities. Angry, anti-social, and individualist in this respect, Heyst determines to "drift, altogether and literally, body and soul, like a detached leaf drifting in the wind-currents under the immovable trees of a forest glade; to drift without ever catching on to anything." Thinking to himself, the protagonist decides, "This shall be my defense against life" (76). Like Hamlet, Axel is a thinker who values his ideals more than those of the world, content to live apart from its corruption, that is, until called upon to respond otherwise. Conrad uses coincidence or fate to alter the course of his life. Had he not met Morrison who at the time was being swindled out his boat, had he not witnessed the oppression of a young woman in a traveling orchestra, had he not become an innkeeper's obsessive object of scorn, and had he not inspired the courage of an otherwise shy innkeeper's wife, Heyst would never have known the opportunity to choose and act heroically. These unexpected occurrences contradict the main character's philosophy of intellectual isolationism. This compulsion to act out of compassion denotes the initial phase of his psychological transformation, or coming of age. Up to this point, Heyst adheres to his father's philosophy of life of "hard, cold facts," which provided for him a means of withdrawing from the emotional world—a world of commitment and loyalties. His rejection of this ideology comes ironically too late to save himself or woman he attempts to rescue. Coincidence, here as well, directs a stray bullet that takes her life (335), just as it did in taking the life of Nostromo.