Conrad's mysteries

«What I wish to discuss here is the religious conception, a conception to which Conrad was irresistably drawn as providing the only morally acceptable account of experience, as it informs, and is qualified by, the rationalist outlook to which the author was intellectually committed. The tension that makes itself felt on the personal level as a compulsion to seek secular solutions to problems which are essentially religious in character manifests itself in the public domain of the written word as a radical ambivalence regarding certain areas of experience, an ambivalence which at times assumes the status of a formal dialectic in the author’s work. Introduced into experiential contexts which they fail to compose except parodically, the religious metaphors and mythic patterns of which the author avails himself serve to articulate a searching critique of modern life, illuminating the shortcomings of a world in which they can often survive only as caricatures.» (from the Introduction)