Conrad's Mystic Writing Pad
Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan
Within the wide spectrum of
psychoanalytic approaches to literature, none has been more discredited than the
approach through authorial subjectivity, which often produces highly
speculative, pathology-oriented readings, and—most problematically—tends to
reduce the literary text into a clinical case-study. If this reductionism were
not enough to drive the authorial subject beyond the pale, the exclusion of the
author has been ratified and sealed by the more general Postmodernist debunking
of the enlightenment conception of subjectivity in general, and the
well-publicized death of the Author in particular.
And yet it seems that for most readers—even for sophisticated professional
readers—the authorial figure is still very much there, and the practice of
reading, as I've learned in a life-time's engagement with Conrad's work, still
evokes a palpable sense of authorial presence in the text. Paradoxically, it
seems, the de-authoring and de-authorizing drive of poststructuralist theory has
not done away with the author, but opened up new ways of looking at the relation
of psyche and text, and new modes of psychoanalytic engagement, where the
question of authorial subjectivity is no longer a simple premise, but the
constitutive question of the text.
In the first part of the paper, following some theoretical observations, I would
propose a reading strategy of what I would call the "textual unconscious".
Rather than a quasi-archeological project which aims to disclose the "figure
behind the veil", the proposed strategy would direct the reading towards an
isomorphic relationship, an echo or a ripple effect, which boils over the edges
of both text and subject, where the workings of the textual unconscious become
visible. This proposal would lead to a discussion of Conrad's "mystic writing
pad", a term borrowed from Freud (1925), but somewhat modified and extended in
the context of the paper. Using the Freudian concept as a working tool (rather
than an interpretative metalanguage), I would offer some comments on the textual
unconscious in some of Conrad's major texts.
Skepticism and the Problem of Moralism: Conrad's Response to Galsworthy's A Man of Devon
Debra Romanick Baldwin
A writer sensitive to his environment, Conrad responded in different ways to the various moral claims of his age. This paper examines his response to A Man of Devon, an early collection of short stories by John Galsworthy, published in 1901. In a letter of 11 November 1901, Conrad accuses Galsworthy of allowing moralism to creep into his art due to excessive sympathy for his characters. Conrad writes: “You seem for [your characters’] sake to hug your conceptions of right or wrong too closely,” and he advises Galsworthy instead to adopt a more detached stance towards his characters and to embrace a more skeptical attitude in general: “Scepticism the tonic of minds, the tonic of life, the agent of truth—the way of art and salvation.” Although Conrad here introduces a tension between art and moralism, the letter's appeal to skepticism in the name of truth and salvation complicates any simple opposition between skeptical inconclusiveness and moral claim per se. This paper explores this fruitful tension by considering Conrad’s reading of A Man of Devon—and in particular, its central story, “The Silence”—and then juxtaposing Galsworthy’s treatment of his protagonist against Conrad’s own treatment of two similarly situated characters. This paper argues that the letter's exhortation to skepticism is not a metaphysical claim, but an appeal to psychological complexity, which offers its own competing moral vision.
In Other Words: Conrad, Derrida and Linguistic Estrangement
Katherine Isobel Baxter
Conrad makes use of multiple voices and there is nothing new in saying this. In weaving together these multifarious voices Conrad is, of course, enacting a modernist aesthetic. Bricolage, palimsest, unreliable narrators, intertextuality are tropes and modes which we recognise today as key features of modernism. This modernist multiplicity of voice, which texts like Lord Jim or The Waste Land present, is frequently read as embodying the potential for a precarious unity: they become fragments that can be used to shore up language, culture, or society against complete ruin, to borrow Eliot’s image. These voices, however fragmentary, can be put together, mosaic-like to create a whole that is unified. However, what I want to suggest in this paper is that Conrad’s voices, and particularly his multilingual voices, represent a deconstructive presence in his texts, indicating rather more precise issues in the cross-cultural communication networks of his time. To illustrate this point I enlist the help of Derrida, and in particular his essay Monolingualism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin.
Derrida, like Conrad, understands keenly the perpetual alienation of language, its externality to a speaking subject. Both writers come to know this through their own childhood experiences of cultural displacement, which although different bare significant similarities. Derrida’s theorisations of this linguistic estrangement are therefore particularly helpful in tracing the significance of Conrad’s representations of multilingualism. This paper examines Under Western Eyes and Nostromo in the light of Derrida’s discussions to demonstrate how Conrad explores the estrangement that language practices on its users and the failure of language to enfranchise its speakers. Such an examination allows us to see the multilingualism of his texts as more than simply an expression of a modernist aesthetic of polyphony.
Champel-Les-Baines Ephemera
Martin Bock
Prior to his most serious nervous
breakdown in 1910, Joseph Conrad was treated for various nervous disorders in
1891, 1894, 1895, and 1907 at Champel-les-Baines, a hydrotherapy institute on
the outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland. This paper will focus on print ephemera
pertaining to Champel, housed primarily in the Centre d’Iconographie Genovese
collection of the Bibliothèque Publique et Universitaire, which
includes medical pamphlets, commercial advertising, etchings, photographic
images, postcards, and posters. These materials reveal European spa culture to
which Conrad retreated for therapy and relaxation during times of illness and
mental strain. Champel ephemera depict the social class of spa patrons, the
gendering of medical care, and the extra-medical activities enjoyed by the spa
community Conrad periodically joined. The presentation will include about 25
slides, most contemporaneous with Conrad’s visits to Champel.
Fragments of a Mosaic: Conrad and Pound
Yuet May Ching
In literary criticisms, Conrad and Pound are seldom discussed together, for the two authors worked with different genres, apparently employed different techniques in writing, and showed little or no interest in each other. But as modernist writers, both faced problems posed by modernity, one such problem being the fragmentation of the modern society and modern life; both were open to stimuli from non-occidental cultures; and both employed experimental techniques of writing which, when analysed closely, bore certain resemblances. Conrad in many works includes the presence of dynamite on board ship and on land. In Nostromo, there is the constant threat of blowing up a silver mine as a last resort of defense and offense. In The Secret Agent, the splintering effect of dynamite not only destroys the character Stevie, but lends a metaphor to the disrupted narrative flow. The novel Chance develops from an earlier version titled “Dynamite.” For Pound, the short lived Blast magazine that he contributed to was clearly explosive in its message and language. Comparison of stylistic features of the two writers reveals a similarity in the use of language fragments. Both in a way deform the English language, for neither strictly adheres to rules of English grammar. Yet despite their disruptive practices, they like to reunite with the readers, and involve them, even challenge them in interpretative processes. The paper proposes to study the fragmentation in content and style of the two writers as well as critique their attempts at promoting a certain hermeneutic of reading.
Sema E. Ege
Conrad had ‘affectionately offered’ The Secret Agent, ‘this simple tale of the XIX century’- to ‘H.G. Wells, ‘The Chronicler of Mr Lewisham’s love, the biographer of Kipps and the historian of the ages to come’.
Conrad’s words are not necessarily an acknowledgement of any indebtedness to his contemporary. In fact, they can be read as one of those ironic statements so characteristic of Conrad’s literary success; ‘affectionately’ particularly may be thought to be suggesting all that he disfavoured in Wells.
Such a reference encourages one to embark on a comparative study of Conrad, the master of suspense and psychological analysis and Wells, the producer of scientific romances, the utopian, the futuristic writer – or, in G.K Chesterton’s critical words, the writer of ‘a detailed biography of his great grandson, the babe unborn’ (which according to Chesterton resulted from being ‘frightened of the ‘Harsh heroism’ ‘of the past’ ‘that we cannot imitate’), or the ‘Journalistic writer’ as seen by the modernists. It is, however, possible to trace certain similarities between these two prolific authors as regards both theme and technique, though they seemed to be writing about different things in different forms.
One fundamental theme of both writers is human beastliness, spasms of hatred and anger, the desire to kill which was such a puzzle to man himself. Conrad’s work explores the powerful forces of the unconscious, the darkness within man, the mystery of evil. What he said of the East can be taken as his understanding of life and man: ‘The mysterious East, …. perfumed like a flower, silent like death, dark like a grave.’ ("Youth") Wells, the science student from T. Huxley’s laboratory, on the other hand, despite his yearning for/insistence on creating an ‘Intellectual elite’, ‘Men like Gods’, was always haunted by the fear that man is basically a brute, ‘a culminating ape, a type of animal more obstinately unchangeable than any other living creature’, that his ‘reasoning powers are about as much a truth-seeking tool as the stout of a pig and he may as well try to get to the bottom of things by them as a mole might by burrowing.’ So, as far as Wells was concerned, man’s savage elements inherited from his ancestors had taken the place of Original Sin. Hence, the literary output of both writers had a moral and philosophical significance in that sense, though Wells’s work may be said to lack the psychological depth of Conrad’s.
Further, particularly in the years Conrad had produced his great works, Wells who saw adaptability as man’s liberator and believed in the uniqueness of phenomena, still had the habit of looking at things from diverse standpoints, the intention being to introduce a more complete/sounder view of the phenomena (he would regard his findings not as opposites negating each other but as complements) and make the mind flexible. The paradoxical way of analysing things would liberate consciousness from rigidity of mind which he saw as the greatest threat to man’s permanence in a universe whose working was still beyond his comprehension.
On the other hand, Conrad’s use of irony, unreliable narrator, particularly ‘double’, or symbols which invite multiple interpretations, or the disruption of narrative chronology, or certain ambiguities can be regarded as a kind of antithetical way of thinking, of drawing attention to paradoxes inherent in the nature of things. Hence, Conrad too may be said to be inducing his readers to think in a flexible way rather than in a strict positive-negative manner which had been common especially at the turn of the century.
Thus, the
paper -referring to such works as Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent, The
Secret Sharer, Under Western Eyes, ‘An Outpost of Progress’ etc and ‘The
Time Machine’, ‘The War of the Worlds’, ‘The Food of the Gods, ‘The
History of Mr Polly, etc.- will focus on these two fundamental aspects,
thereby revealing that Conrad and Wells, no matter what their differences
were, were fully conscious that life’s complexities were far too complicated to
be understood or solved by homo sapiens, though a secure moral
base was also most essential and urgently needed –a fact further substantiated
by Conrad’s comment that ‘There is always something beyond (the) books’,
so ‘uncommonly fine’, of Wells -‘the ‘realist of the Fantastic’, ‘and, as
such, a guide. I salute you’.
Racial Economies of Reading Romance: Conrad’s Creole Family Romance and “A Smile of Fortune”
Chris GoGwilt
This paper seeks to situate the puzzling family romance structure of “A Smile of
Fortune” within the broader trajectory of Conrad’s work. The family romance
that structures the early Malay fiction undergoes a marked shift around 1910 as
Conrad returns to the Malay settings of that earlier work (a return often
credited to the visit from Captain Marris in September 1909). “A Smile of
Fortune” helps explain this shift away from the interracial romances of the
earliest work and toward the marked emphasis on white heterosexual romances in
the later work.
This shift in the racial economy of Conrad’s family romances may be explained, in part, from a sociological perspective. Alice, in “A Smile of Fortune,” occupies an analogous sociological position to that of Nina in Almayer’s Folly and Lena in Victory: the girl who poses a social problem of “race and the education of desire,” to borrow the title-phrase of Ann Stoler book about how the middle-class European family is shaped by colonial constructions of race. Alice occupies a scandalous position in the social economy of the tropical “harbour” town because she challenges the legitimacy of the island’s economy of racial recognition. Although not explicitly specified, the Mauritius island setting of the story (which has led some readers to trace the story back to Conrad’s own romantic entanglement in Mauritius) reveals a specifically “creole” social economy that stands in revealing counterpoint to the mixed racial economy of the Malay family romance in Almayer’s Folly and the white racial economy of the European family romance in Victory.
This argument about the “creole” family romance of “A Smile of Fortune”—and its
relation to the family romance structures of Conrad’s work as a whole—is not
only a sociological argument about the changing geopolitical economy of race and
desire. The economy of race and desire in Conrad’s “creole family romance” is
also, and in fact primarily, an economy of reading. Focusing on the narrator’s
exaggerated description of what Alice has “learned” from her “reading” (“The
girl had learned nothing, … she knew nothing, she had heard of nothing” [60]), I
argue that this racialized and gendered economy of reading points to a problem
of Creole linguistic and literary form at the heart of Conrad’s contribution to
transnational modernism.
Joseph
Conrad: Racism and The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’
D.C.R.A.
Goonetilleke
At a time when issues of race/ethnicity have become particularly important across the globe, Conrad’s The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ is perhaps more relevant to present-day readers than his other major tales with sea settings. It also has priority because it is, in Henry James’ words, ‘the very finest and strongest fiction of the sea and sea-life that our language possesses – the masterpiece in a whole class’, a view which is not merely ‘typical of the affection in which the novel is held’ but is a reflection of the remarkable impact it has on the reader.
Conrad’s portrayal of the negro with his evocative name ‘Wait’ deteriorates from a projection of a personality with dignity and power (not dissipated by the term ‘nigger’) into the almost ludicrous figure of the nigger minstrel. Yet Conrad is able to articulate his major concerns, equivocalness and egoism-altruism, principally through Wait. Conrad contemplates the complex ironies of a case where pretence is hard to distinguish from the objectively true. At the same time, the tale carries a full load of information regarding conditions of work on board, officer-crew relationships, and conditions of the sea during storm and calm. Conrad pays a tribute to his erstwhile colleagues at sea and critically affirms aspects of the Merchant Service and positive values. The conventionality in Conrad’s attitudes to the negro would not have bothered ‘the (white) common reader’ in his time, but even today it detracts only slightly from the originality – as manifest in the choice of themes as in the rendering – which makes The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ a major work of fiction and Conrad’s first work of this magnitude.
“Dead men have no children”: Conrad’s “The Idiots” and “Amy Foster”
Ellen Burton Harrington
On the surface, these two Brittany-inspired tales appear to have little else in common: the former, an oft-denigrated melodramatic story that is a distant depiction of a family tragedy culminating in murder; the latter, a much appreciated, biographically tinged tale of a castaway’s ultimate rejection by his once-generous wife told by an imposing narrator. Yet “The Idiots” and “Amy Foster” share a preoccupation with the manner in which atavism and genetic inheritance might influence parental roles, and each culminates in the dramatic overthrow of paternal authority in the household leaving the reader with an ambivalent rendering of maternal authority. Initially, “The Idiots” chronicles the disruption of a bourgeois farmer’s ambitious plans for his land and inheritance by the birth of four mentally disadvantaged children, but when Jean-Pierre Bacadou’s otherwise conventional wife, Susan, murders him with her “long scissors” as he tries to rape her in the hope of conceiving an unafflicted fifth child, Conrad shows the way their contrasting parental assumptions lead to mortal conflict. To Bacadou, another child is the hope of the future of his farm, but, to Susan, a fifth child will only add to the unbearable household burden of four wholly dependent children who do not recognize her, another reminder of her failure as a mother. Ultimately, the whole family shows signs of atavistic regression, particularly in the ironic rendering of Lombrosian maternal passion, a concept that “Amy Foster” also recalls. There, the intelligent and cosmopolitan Dr. Kennedy offers a withering description of the “dull,” degenerate Amy that shows her to be undeserving of Yanko, her attractive, yet markedly foreign, castaway husband. Her abandonment of Yanko in what proves to be his final illness demonstrates her marked cruelty as she flees, elementally fearful of the influence Yanko desires over their infant son and finally representative of the kind of xenophobic intolerance that she initially countered. Yet her fear hinges on his desire to assert his paternal rights, since rather than fully assimilate to his new home, he desires to form a bond with his son exclusive of Amy that will allow him to pass on the cultural practices of his homeland. Kennedy’s final image of Amy characterizes her as “hanging over” the child who has the “fluttered air of a bird caught in a snare,” reaffirming the loaded image of her as the victor in a crude parental contest for possession of the child, a “dull brain[ed]” mother that has unfairly displaced a deserving father. In its own way, each story chronicles the way in which a mother brutally usurps her husband’s presumed authority in the household, preventing him from shaping what inheritance he will proffer.
“No need of words”: Joseph Conrad’s use of the typographical ellipsis in Under Western Eyes and “The Secret Sharer.”
Jeremy Hawthorn
seeming to say, “Between us
there’s no need of words.” (Under Western Eyes)
Nowadays, mention of an “ellipsis” in discussion of Conrad’s fiction is most likely to refer to the narratological force of this word, “where no text space is spent on a piece of story duration.” Conrad’s use of the typographical ellipsis – a mark of punctuation that indicates that something is missing from a text – can on occasions be understood as an example of narratological ellipsis, but it has many more uses than this. Nowadays we generally understand “typographical ellipsis” as a sequence of either three- or four points: [. . .]. But although the word “ellipsis” now refers to the omission of one or more words in a sentence, the OED reminds us that it was formerly used as the name of the dash when it indicated missing letters. Thus in Under Western Eyes (a novel obsessed with names and labels) it can be said that General T—, Madame de S— and Prince K— are all ellipsis-names.
In his letters Conrad repeatedly insisted on the importance of suggestiveness and deplored inappropriate explicitness in fiction. In general, then, we can say that a stylistic feature that confirms an absence while withholding explicit information about what might fill this absence should recommend itself to him.
What is immediately striking if one carries out a rough initial survey of Conrad’s use of the three- or four-point ellipsis is how very varied this use is. Almayer’s Folly contains very few typographical ellipses, while Under Western Eyes contains many more than much longer novels such as Lord Jim and Nostromo.
Unfortunately there is a fundamental problem with any “rough initial survey” based on editions of Conrad’s fiction (such as the Dent Collected Edition) that descend from unreliable texts such as the Heinemann-Doubleday Collected Edition. Not one of the 12 ellipses in the Dent edition of Almayer’s Folly, for example, appears in the Cambridge edition of the novel, although ellipses do appear in the Cambridge edition that are not to be found in the Dent edition.
The paper will argue that readers and critics face particular problems when considering the typographical ellipses and dashes found in Conrad’s fiction, as these signs seem often to be considered the disregarded foot-soldiers of prose, sacrificed, introduced, or replaced (on occasions apparently at whim) by those heartless Generals: copy editors, typesetters, and textual editors. Examples taken from “The Secret Sharer” will demonstrate that significant changes of meaning and effect result from non-authorial deletions, insertions, and substitutions of these signs.
The main part of the paper will, however, focus on Under Western Eyes – the novel in which the frequency of ellipsis-use is highest in Conrad’s œuvre. The paper will argue that the novel’s thematic focus on secrecy and spying foregrounds the natural and automatic human activity of filling in gaps and explaining absences. (Just as General T— tells Razumov not to be away from Haldin for too long in case his suspicions are aroused, so too Miss Haldin does not want to be away from her mother for too long – for the same reason.) Two early letters written by Conrad make the same point that the author writes only half of the work – the rest being the creation of the reader. The obsessive use of ellipses in the novel does not just reflect the fact that characters are always leaving gaps in their accounts that others attempt to fill, it also forces the reader too to become a secret agent, perpetually completing unfinished sentences just as Razumov, against both his will and his interests, finds himself unable to resist completing Mikulin’s cunningly incomplete utterances.
The paper
will list a range of different uses to which the typographical ellipsis is put
in the novel. It will attempt to distinguish between those examples in which the
“decision to omit” is apparently that of the narrator, and those in which it can
be attributed to a character. It will also explore the paradox that while on
some occasions the absence indicated by an ellipsis is there because “[b]etween
us there’s no need of words,” on other occasions it is there because a speaker
runs out of words, or is interrupted, while on yet other occasions it is there
because words are too dangerous to use.
Two Cinematic Versions of "The Secret Sharer"
Joseph Kestner
Gene Moore, in his edited collection Conrad on Film (1997), lists over eighty screen adaptations of narratives by Joseph Conrad from Polish, French, British, Italian, and American production companies, both for TV and feature-film release.
Of these films, two English-language versions of “The Secret Sharer” are currently accessible, one copyrighted 1973, directed by Larry Yust for Encyclopedia Britannica starring David Soul (29 minutes); and the other dated 1952 as one-half of a duo-drama film entitled Face to Face directed by John Brahm. The part devoted to “The Secret Sharer” stars James Mason (45 minutes).
The focus
of this paper is to study both film versions, examining parallels, differences,
modes of adaptation, screenplays, and cinematic practices. The paper will
incorporate material from personal interviews with director Larry Yust.
The Interruption of
Writing: Uncanny Intertextuality in Under Western Eyes
Yael Levin
The action of Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes opens in a scene of interrupted writing. Haldin’s unwarranted appearance thwarts Razumov’s plan to begin work on what is to be a prize-winning essay, the means to a name and a future. This paper shows that the spring of action that inaugurates a story of betrayal, a fictional case study of the tyrannical fate dealt in Tzarist Russia, may be read as the start to another, covert plot, one that self-reflexively and obsessively tells a story of writing. The crisis of writing harbors the premise that the writerly instinct is linked to an experience of interruption, an acute and paralyzing sense of a lack of privacy. Razumov’s initial encounter with Haldin unfolds as the first in a series of scenes of dramatized intertextuality, all serving to represent the subject’s performative reiteration of the discourses in which he is immersed. By tracing the expressions of uncanny intertextuality in the novel this paper readdresses the notion of the writing subject and his plight for creative agency. Pitting theories of intertextuality against influence, the paper also revisits existing interpretations of the novel that highlight Conrad’s Oedipal struggle with Dostoevsky and suggests that by calling our attention to this troubled relationship, the text distracts us from an additional story, one in which the struggle to write is not fought as a battle of independence against a father figure, but is rather a condition of language where everything has already been said and written. Such a reading does not offer a consoling teleology toward originality and creativity, but rather the acceptance that to write is to repeat, to be other.
The Teacher of Languages as Heteronym
Anne Luyat
How far does an author’s responsibility extend
in telling a story of bloodshed and betrayal? When he created, as the
intermediary between himself and the narration in Under Western Eyes, the
heteronym of a translator-narrator who claimed he had had little or no part in
the creation of the text, Joseph Conrad allowed the reader to see behind the
self-deprecatory linguist’s mask of textual innocence. The Teacher of Languages
intrudes upon his painstaking narration of Razumov’s story in order to comment
upon its strange nature and on what he feels to be its abnormal source in the
Russian character and scheme of things. By allowing an unexpected source of
strangeness to impinge on the text, Conrad maintains the subjective stance which
the narrator has assumed and does not allow his perception to become an
objective one. According to the American philosopher Richard Rorty, the concept
of strangeness due to abnormal sources is essential to a narration in order for
the emotions expressed in it to acquire the intensity needed to bring readers
out of themselves and able to identify with the full force of a text’s cultural
and political questioning. In order to help determine what will count as truth,
Conrad brings forward the narrator’s subjective stance from within the heart of
the story so that it can be processed in public terms, thus foreshadowing a
basic tenent of post-structural theory _ the play of difference.
"Ce n’est pas ce qu’on a vécu qui est important mais ce don’t on se souvient et comment on s’en souvient”
Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Secrecy and intimate alterity in "The Secret Sharer"
Richard Pedot
In "The
Secret Sharer", intimate alterity - a relationship in which the other is lodged
within the same and vice versa, with no hope of their ever coinciding with each
other - primarily refers to the murky bond between the young captain and Legatt,
the runaway, the double who, the captain says, "was not a bit like me, really".
It defines the odd connexion of law and crime, of authority and dereliction of
duty, and more generally of the known and the unknown, and thus points to the
very secret that the story invites the reader to share. The host of nooks and
thresholds - that is to say: of opportunities for concealment and trespassing -
in the captain's cramped and crooked stateroom images that relation and
undermines the notion of the secret as something hidden awaiting solution (like
an enigma) or revelation (like a mystery). Sharing a secret, as Derrida reminds
us, means sharing nothing that we can know about nor work out (Donner la mort),
something that is bound, to use the captain's words before Legatt gets on board,
to "swim away beyond our ken". The representation or interpretation of the
secret, I would add on the strength of Conrad's dramatisation of the issue, is
of necessity bounded by the secret of representation and interpretation which
the figure of the threshold - be it real or metaphorical - exemplifies. The
purport of this paper is to discuss the way Conrad's story toys with the clichés
of secrecy in fiction - including that of the threshold - to bring out the
aporias of secret sharing, both in and with fiction.
The Composition and Publication History of Joseph Conrad’s A Set of Six
John Peters
Although the literary quality of the stories that make up A Set of Six (1908)
will never be mistaken for that of Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), The Secret
Agent (1907), “Heart of Darkness” (1899), or any of Conrad’s other best works,
nevertheless, many readers have underestimated the value of A Set of Six, and
these stories have generally attracted little notice in Conrad scholarship in
comparison to Conrad’s more well-known works. The stories in this collection,
however, deserve more attention than they have as yet received. They have their
own merits and provide a good deal of information about important themes that
run throughout much of Conrad’s work, including his ideas concerning alter egos,
anarchism, politics, and the typically incomprehensible nature of human
existence. In addition, they exhibit some important narrative techniques not
found elsewhere in his fiction.
All but “The Duel”
were written between Conrad’s work on two of his most important novels:
Nostromo and The Secret Agent. “Gaspar Ruiz,” “The Informer,” and “An Anarchist”
especially shed light on some of the ideas that appear in those two novels. The
same tension between individuals and political movements that exists in Nostromo
and The Secret Agent exists in these stories as well, as does the same sharp
skepticism toward politics in general. In addition, the plight of Paul in “An
Anarchist,” who is mistakenly thrust into a camp of anarchists, and of D’Hubert
in “The Duel,” who becomes enmeshed in a seemingly endless duel, resemble that
of Razumov in Under Western Eyes (1911), who becomes implicated in a political
assassination in which he has played no part, when Victor Haldin suddenly
appears in Razumov’s rooms and sets in motion a series of events over which
Razumov has little control. In each instance, a character finds himself
unwittingly thrust into an absurd set of circumstances, in which he tries
(mostly unsuccessfully) to make sense of a seemingly senseless world.
An understanding of A Set of Six’s composition and publication history can help to appreciate what Conrad was trying to do in these stories, but it and can also help to illuminate the major works (Nostromo and The Secret Agent) that frame their composition. Furthermore, since Conrad was at work on The Mirror of the Sea (1906), Chance (1913), A Personal Record (1912), ’Twixt Land and Sea (1912), and Under Western Eyes during the writing and/or publication of A Set of Six, a knowledge of its composition and publication history can shed light on Conrad’s efforts regarding those works as well.
The Shadow-Line: Conrad’s Reflection
Chris Potts
While other critics have treated Joseph Conrad’s The Shadow-Line as a representation of a crossing-over from youth to adulthood, or, in the exceptional case of Josiane Paccaud-Huguet, as a reaching of the limit of mastery (that is, as a linear text in either case), this study takes the novella to be a reflection not only in the sense of an autobiographical recalling from memory, but, perhaps more significantly, of something like in structure to Hegel’s circular phenomenology. To elaborate this analog, I draw a parallel between Hegel’s description of “the movement of a being that immediately is,” which “consists partly in becoming other than itself” and “partly in taking back into itself this unfolding or this existence of it” and the deep structure of Conrad’s text (Hegel 61-62). In the opening movement of The Shadow-Line, I argue, Conrad doubles and re-doubles himself, othering it as a function of an error, a metaphorical step out of line; in the second movement Conrad reflects his self-othered selves into himself, figuratively reconciling himself to them and closing the gap barring subject from object and thought from being through an act of forgiveness. Taken this way, as being underwritten by a circular logic not unlike that which exists at the very core of Hegel’s phenomenology, it becomes clear that Conrad’s The Shadow-Line is no simple bildungsroman; rather, it is a work that faces down death, “[tarries] with the negative,” mending rather than merely figuring the tear, which, from Descartes forward, menaces the ordering project of philosophy and so troubles the modern subject’s conceptualization of itself and its relation to its environment (Hegel 59).
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm. “Phenomenology of Spirit.” The Hegel Reader. Trans. A.V. Miller. Ed. Stephen Houlgate. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
Although both Turgenev’s political novels and Conrad’s Under Western Eyes are much concerned with words, the title of the latter puts emphasis upon eyes – that feature of the face that almost every character is described in terms of. Both writers’ major figures stumble clumsily with language, their agitated outbursts are made up of pauses, repetitions and broken fragments which, disappearing into highly charged silence, seem to offer the reader little solid information, hence the reader is bound to strain after the reality beneath the spoken words. As facial expression is used in close combination with speech, a listener provides a continuous commentary of his reactions to what is being said by small movements of the eyebrows and mouth, indicating puzzlement, surprise, disagreement or pleasure. Looking, which is also closely coordinated with verbal communication, plays an important role in communicating interpersonal attitudes and establishing relationships. The making or breaking of eye contact is always directly related to the state of mind and good faith of the characters concerned. The human face as a mask that can both hide or emphasise the main traits of human personality and thoughts was used by Turgenev and Conrad. With them, every character’s face at any given moment offers both the opportunity and the challenge to be read. This becomes an important feature of their narrative method, whereby information about the character can be read from his physiognomy, without the narrator’s interference, and the process of narrative transmission thus imitates the cognitive process in real life. In the society depicted in such novels as Under Western Eyes, Virgin Soil and Smoke where secrecy and hypocrisy are a universal condition of man, face reading becomes an essential factor. The references to eyes as well as words and outside look indicate something about the characters concerned and can be considered as a means attributing a moral significance to physical appearance. As eyes are closely related to communication and knowledge, comments about the characters’ eyes implicate their knowledge and honesty with which they communicate with other people.
Turgenev as well as Conrad’s emphasis on visual and sensory impression can be seen as one of their attempts to bridge the gap between the consciousness of the artist and his audience: although individuals interpret the external world in somewhat different ways, it nevertheless provides a common basis for communication. This is a motivation for Turgenev and Conrad’s use of senses – what can be termed their “descriptive impressionism”. The reader should pause for a sigh, for a smile as well as for a look, i.e. the situation in which he is made to live vicariously should appeal to his emotions and senses. Thus, despite the conviction that other minds are ultimately unreachable, both writers believe that the artist can penetrate to the deepest reaches of his receptor’s consciousness and objectify his vision in visual and sensory impressions and clearly rendered situations.
The New Religion in Zygmunt Krasiński’s The Undivine Comedy and in The Secret Agent
Jean M. Szczypien
Conrad had stated in a letter dated 7 November 1906 to Sir Algernon Metheun, the publisher of The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (1907), that the novel was “purely a work of imagination” (Letters 3: 371) (his emphasis). That “imagination” had been fed works of Polish Romanticism since Conrad’s childhood. Conrad surely knew Zygmunt Krasiński’s The Undivine Comedy. The overall design of The Secret Agent is patterned after this Polish drama. Conrad also incorporates motifs and characterizations from the play into his novel. Each author recognized, as Gareth Stedman Jones explains, that “Socialism had . . . emerged out of post-Christian movements of religious reform in Britain and France at the beginning of the nineteenth century” (8) and each author had contempt for these socialistic currents. Krasiński’s disdain is incorporated into the characterization of Leonard, one of his most vicious revolutionaries. Conrad in turn patterns Comrade Ossipon after Leonard.
As Julia Kristeva explains, “When [Bakhtin] speaks of ‘two paths merging within the narrative,’ [he] considers writing as a reading of the anterior literary corpus and the text as an absorption of and reply to another text.” Kristeva adds, “A text cannot be grasped through linguistics alone” (Desire 69). The Secret Agent is thus an assimilation of The Undivine Comedy and a trenchant response to that drama, a devastating commentary on our secular modernist culture.
Conrad, Joseph. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. 1903-1907. Ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies. Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1988.
Stedman Jones, Gareth. Introduction. The Communist Manifesto. By Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Ed. Gareth Stedman Jones. London: Penguin Books, 2002.
Nostromo, The Revenge for Love, and the Nationalisms of Modernism
Carl Watts
My paper argues that Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo and Wyndham Lewis’s The Revenge for Love exhibit a retrenchment of constructed nationalisms that are directly linked with the participation of the novels’ nation-states in post-national economic and political systems, with each involving a manipulation of hybridity or heterogeneity to depict political units that are at once intensely national(ist) and striving for an existence beyond that of the individual nation-state. I contend that Nostromo’s Occidental Republic is simultaneously a national construct and an integrated component of global capitalism and that The Revenge for Love includes increasingly essentialized national communities in its vision of political entities colluding within greater post-national ideological systems.
The paper intervenes in analyses of the nation in the modernist novel by looking beyond the historicizing tendency of recent work in this field, instead privileging a comparatively parsimonious theoretical model of the nation. In so doing, I show that the national project of the Occidental Republic as manifest in depictions of the landscape, history and inhabitants of the region is based on the creation of national origins that are directly linked with productive involvement in emerging global capitalism. I then implicate the form of each text in such a process, examining Nostromo’s fractured narrative structure and The Revenge for Love’s satire as linked to the portrayal of the nation as a continuation of a necessarily mythical golden age. Finally, I move on to read the latter text’s emphasized notions of national character as related to the nature of modern states’ participation in transnational political systems. I conclude by showing that this element of Lewis’s text corresponds to the Occidental Republic’s story of national origins as bound up with participation in incipient global capitalism. Throughout, I situate each text in relation to the greater modernist tendency to valorize uncertain or fabricated elements of the past as part of the often-cited call to “make it new,” as well as the parallel tendency of the new modernist studies to expand into the realm of postcolonial literatures while in fact retaining Eurocentric notions of prescience or literary merit by grafting them onto visions of global hybridity.
Authorial Unrest in Tales of
Unrest
Aaron Zacks
By the spring of 1896, Joseph Conrad had published two novels, both under the imprint of T. Fisher Unwin. Though they received mild praise from critics, these novels yielded little profit. It was at this point, with the encouragement of Unwin's reader, Edward Garnett, that Conrad resentfully took up writing short stories for magazine publication. He had completed two stories, The Idiots and An Outpost of Progress, by early August when he wrote with bitterness to Garnett that he had [i]n desperation, [taken] up another story [The Lagoon]. I must do something to live (CL1 296). Conrad was soon to begin another story, about a slave ship, and on 15 August the author wrote to Garnett that all the[se] short stories (ab initio) were meant alike for a vol., which Unwin had already agreed to publish (CL1 300).
Over the next two years, Conrads conception of his short story collection changed drastically as he navigated the unfamiliar Anglo-American literary, and when Tales of Unrest appeared on 4 April 1898 it was a substantially different object than the unified volume Conrad had initially conceived. The primary reason for this was acceptance of the slave ship story, The Nigger of the "Narcissus," by W. E. Henley, editor of the New Review, which prompted Conrad to expand the story so much it could not fit in the volume.
My essay reads Tales of Unrest, the individual stories and the volume as a whole, as documents reflective of the uncertainties and challenges their author faced in the early years of his writing career. I examine how the shape of Conrad's first story collection was influenced by his dealings with various agents of the publishing process and also how his employment of narratorial perspective, particularly in "Karain: A Memory," gives expression to the unrest Conrad experienced early in his career, before the relative comfort afforded to him by the House of Blackwood.
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