"Conrad under California Skies"

Paper Abstracts

Updated December 23

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.  

Conrad and Arendt: Identifying Persons Exemplary for their Evil
Gordon A. Babst

Colonialism and totalitarianism fundamentally altered the customary givens of human social relationships, yet these phenomena tend to be studied on the macro level.  Both Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness and Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem provide us with guideposts for understanding political evil starting at the level of the lone individual, even if these individuals stand at the pale of human comprehension. In addition, both writers offer an analysis of political evil that is neither couched in religious terms, nor grounded in a religious sensibility.  Plumbing the depths with Conrad and Arendt yields aspects important to understanding what must be avoided, and a politics best suited for doing so.

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. 

Unspeakable Writes:  Using Heart of Darkness in English 101
Michael Burke

This presentation will suggest various methods of including Conrad’s novella in a freshman composition course. It will use the experience of teaching the work in  linked freshman composition-history courses at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, in which eight small (18-22 student) sections of a first-semester composition were connected to an large (140 student) history class. Heart of Darkness was required for the history course but optional for composition instructors.  An unlikely choice for a first-semester composition course, the novella lends itself to a variety of approaches that can significantly alter student consciousness. The presentation will also include discussion of previous teaching experience with the novella at the U.S. Military Academy, where it was used in a variety of English courses as a cautionary tale for military officers in training. This experience led to the approach presented here.

The presentation has two objectives:  to suggest ways of integrating literature into a freshman composition class, coupling writing precepts to a complex example; and to offer ideas for making the work meaningful and interesting to a group of students who conventionally dismiss the text as too difficult or irrelevant, giving those students the tools and confidence to tackle equally daunting works of imaginative literature. 

It begins by discussing the rhetorical choices Conrad makes in placing Marlow’s narrative within a frame, focusing on the various narrators who tell and retell the tale. Within this context, the presentation offers a variety of teaching approaches, essay assignments, and supplementary items.  Teaching approaches include treating the work as an adventure story, as a critique of imperialism, as a discussion of race (suggesting that perhaps Marlow and Conrad come at race from somewhat different perspectives), an exercise in narrative technique, and as a work of epistemology. Essay assignments range from using the ideas of a one historian selected from those read in the history course to critique the work; writing a letter to Conrad (or to a character) to ask a question and speculate about the answer; to comparing a student’s obsession with one of those depicted in the text. Two other options for writing include critiquing the instructor’s perspective or developing an individualized approach to the work that conforms to one of the writing assignments in the course rhetoric, the Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing.  Supplementary items include photographs, maps, contemporary nonfiction accounts of the colonial experience, and films such as Apocalypse Now.  The presentation will include examples of successful and unsuccessful student approaches, suggesting reasons for their difficulty or success.

The presentation will contrast the success of using Heart of Darkness in a composition course with the relative failure of teaching the work in an introduction to fiction course taught simultaneously. The presentation responds to Leonard J. Davis’s 2006 Chronicle of Higher Education essay that discusses the many vexing issues raised by including this text—or any other canonical work that offends some contemporary sensibilities-- in any course. The presentation also responds to Zohreh Sullivan’s 1991 College English essay describing her evolving approach to teaching Conrad (“Theory for the Untheoretical:  Rereading and Reteaching Austen, Brontë, and Conrad”). It will include brief discussion of some of the essays included in Hawkins and Shaffer’s 2002 Approaches to Teaching Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness and “The Secret Sharer.”

Sickness, Suffering, and Schopenhauer: Conradian Pessimism and the 1910 Breakdown
James Caufield

This paper makes a speculative contribution to the discussion of Conrad’s 1910 breakdown by identifying and analyzing the prominent place of philosophical pessimism within his work, giving particular attention to Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, and Victory.  Like Hardy, Conrad sometimes makes very transparent allusions to the ideas of Arthur Schopenhauer, the post-Kantian German idealist whose fashionable pessimism was in vogue among artists and intellectuals from the mid-1870s until World War I.  The father of Axel Heyst in Victory offers one such example of an overt Schopenhauerism.  Less obvious but far more thematically significant in Conrad are the relations that obtain among clusters of characters, for example, in Lord Jim the group composed of Jim, Gentleman Brown, and Cornelius.  I argue that this cluster is intended to illustrate a very specific Schopenhauerian conception of character.  In The Secret Agent, the group including Mr. Vladimir, Mrs. Verloc, and Stevie again embody plainly pessimistic conceptions that I spell out in detail.  Lest one doubt that Conrad engaged in this sort of intellectual allegorizing, one can take the words uttered by Axel Heyst when he first sees the party of Gentleman Jones, Ricardo, and Pedro: “Here they are before you: Evil intelligence, instinctive savagery, arm in arm.  The brute force is at the back.”  After demonstrating this minor but far from negligible place of Schopenhaueran pessimism in Conrad’s work, I conclude with a few biographical observations that suggest likely links between the work and the life.

Conrad, ‘The End of the Tether’  and Wells, ‘The Mind at the End of the Tether’*

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’.
 

The Rescue:  The Physics of Sensation and Literary Style

Hugh Epstein

In keeping with the conference theme of breakdown and ‘les stérilités des écrivains nerveux’ (Conrad to Gosse 23.03.05), this paper will discuss The Rescue (1920), one of Conrad’s least read and least liked novels, which caused him such difficulties yet whose art is both typical of and central to the achievements of the greater novels. Garnett praised the opening chapter as ‘clearly and forcibly seen’ (26.05.96), but Conrad indicatively replied, ‘The progressive episodes of the story will not emerge from the chaos of my sensations’ (19.06.96). Although thematically the novel could be seen readily to invite a Darwinian reading of ‘fitness’, I primarily situate Conrad’s scenic handling of its episodes through vivid rendering of encounters with sights and sounds within nineteenth century developments in physics, rather than evolutionary biology. Through close reading of some episodes that centre on Carter and on Mrs Travers as focalizers, I discuss the nature of Conrad’s fictional evocations in the light of the ideas of Hermann Helmholz, Alexander Bain, Karl Pearson and Ernst Mach to show that Conrad’s writing in The Rescue engages creatively with emerging ideas in the physics of sensation. A paper devoted to analysis of style, not to the detailed working out of plot and theme and overall interpretation, the longer passages for examination will be provided. Conrad’s empiricist dictum of ‘an absolute truth to my sensations’ (to Blackwood 31.05.02), when brought to the test of writing The Rescue, is shown at times to be in conflict with his own philosophical and temperamental idealism, creating an anxious relationship with the relativity that these advances in physics promoted. In my readings of passages from The Rescue I hope to display an aspect of the richness of this undervalued novel when read not for character but for the ‘event’.

The Heterotopia of the Double: Conrad, Malick, and the Sublime

Patrick Fuery

If such a thing exists as a Conradian sublime then surely two of its most striking attributes would be the relation of civilization to nature, and the Othered, doubled self as site of conflict. This paper will explore the idea of a Conradian sublime in ‘The Secret Sharer’ and Heart of Darkness. It will then comparatively suggest that we can find a similar sensibility in Terrence Malick’s cinema, particularly The Thin Red Line and Badlands.

Kant, one recalls, argued that the sublime – the version of terrible beauty that agitates and abrades – can never be represented: “But since this fundamental measure is a self-contradictory concept … it follows that where the size of a natural object is such that the imagination spends its whole faculty of comprehension upon it in vain, it must carry our concept of nature, to a supersensible substrate (underlying both nature and our faculty of thought) which is great beyond every standard of sense. Thus, instead of the object, it is rather the cast of the mind in appreciating it that we have to estimate as sublime” (Kant Critique of Judgement). For Kant, and subsequent theorists, the sublime exists not in the (aesthetic or natural) object, with its signifiers of disturbing beauty, but in the ‘cast of mind’ that emerges in the attempt to perceive and understand it. In Conrad we find narratives that develop both a representational mode of the sublime (including nature, doubles, and madness) and a cast of mind through which they can be encountered. It is the agitation of the reader that secures the sublime effect; however the sublime itself operates at a number of different levels.

Both ‘The Secret Sharer’ and Heart of Darkness present a version of Foucault’s heterotopia – spaces which exist outside the order of civilization, continually questioning and redefining its processes and identities. His examples include graveyards, brothels, travelling fairs, and ships: “… the ship has been at the same time not only the greatest instrument of economic development … but the greatest reservoir of imagination. The sailing vessel is the heterotopia par excellence.” (Foucault ‘Different Spaces’). The heterotopias of ‘The Secret Sharer’ and Heart of Darkness include the ship, islands, and jungle – all spaces where the doubled self can emerge to hold discourse. At the same time these spaces and selves are components of the sublime; allowing, just, a representational version both within and outside of the social order. In Malick’s films we witness a similar heterotopic construction and sublime effect.

 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.
 

Navigating Trauma in Joseph Conrad's Fiction:  A Voyage from Sigmund Freud to Philip Bromberg               

Carola M. Kaplan

“Woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love—and to put its trust in life!” This statement, which anticipates the ideas of contemporary relational theorists, was in fact written by a novelist who long preceded them--Joseph Conrad-- in his 1915 novel Victory.  In this literary work, Conrad revises his earlier treatment of trauma as a singular cataclysmic event in the life of a potentially heroic adult, usually male (as depicted in Heart of Darkness,  Lord Jim, and Under Western Eyes) to a conception of trauma as the corrosive effect of a child’s repeated exposures to emotionally invalidating caregivers. In this revision, Conrad departs from a view of trauma that accords with Freud’s account of a single shocking incident--witnessing the primal scene, surviving a train wreck, fighting in a war—to a concept of trauma as a series of mundane but nevertheless toxic childhood occurrences or reoccurrences, a view that accords closely with the contemporary understanding of trauma by relational theorists, most notably that of Philip Bromberg. Thus Conrad’s novel presciently anticipates the corrective vision of contemporary psychoanalytic theory, which has supplanted Freud’s rather sensational narratives with a more subtle and nuanced understanding of trauma as a long-term lack of validation in childhood that forecloses adult possibilities.

In his earlier works, including Heart of Darkness (1898), Lord Jim (1900), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911), Conrad presents a series of protagonists, each of whom receives a single and singular psychological shock that radically disrupts a previously unperturbed existence. In Heart of Darkness, the seaman Charlie Marlow, anticipating a comradely meeting with the exemplary Kurtz, encounters instead a rapacious colonial agent, gone mad with greed and lust.  In Lord Jim, the eponymous ship’s officer and would-be hero, in an act of cowardice that shocks him as much as his peers, jumps ship in a crisis, abandoning the six hundred passengers in his charge. In Under Western Eyes, the apolitical protagonist, Razumov, is undone by the precipitous act of an importunate fellow student and revolutionary, who compromises Razumov’s  neutrality by seeking his help.

But in Victory (1915), Conrad presents not a solitary would-be hero, but two unheroic yet sympathetic characters, a man and a woman, who fail in a more mundane undertaking--in their effort to love and understand each other and to forge a life together-- because of the traumatic deprivations and depredations of their respective childhoods. Both these characters have experienced psychological trauma in childhood, as Bromberg defines it:  “the precipitous disruption of self-continuity through the invalidation of the patterns of meaning that define the experience of ‘who one is’” (Bromberg Spaces qtd. in Dreamer 33). As children, both suffered continual rejection by parental figures of crucial aspects of self; and so, as adults, both are undermined by a dissociative structure of self that prevents them from recognizing as “me” sequestered self-states essential for their well-being: Lena cannot experience herself as worthy or lovable; Heyst cannot experience himself as engaged, loving, or effectual. Thus, in this later novel, Conrad’s concern is not with a single potentially heroic male figure wrestling with his conscience, whose actions reverberate in the larger world, but with the relationship of a man and a woman, wrestling with the phantoms of childhood trauma, in order to secure domestic happiness.

In the figure of Lena, a love-starved orphan and waif, whose only solace in childhood was the religious teaching that makes her feel guilty for her unconsecrated love as an adult, Conrad creates a poignant portrait of a woman whose harsh upbringing has left her feeling insecure, unworthy, and unsure of who she is. She therefore looks to her rescuer and half-hearted lover, Axel Heyst, to define who she is, even asking him to give her a name. In Bromberg’s terms, Lena experiences as “not me” a self (or cluster of self-states) that is worthy and lovable, but she hopes that by securing Heyst’s love she will finally be able to claim these qualities as parts of “me.” In consequence, Lena all too willingly sacrifices herself, ostensibly to ensure the safety of her lover but, more fundamentally and less consciously, to secure his love and enduring devotion.

An even more poignant figure in his profound inability to chart his own life course is that of Axel Heyst., who is too paralyzed emotionally to declare or even acknowledge the love Lena so desperately needs from him. Indeed Heyst’s childhood was far more traumatic than Lena’s because he was raised by a cynical and despairing father who considered all human enterprise futile and all human relationships toxic. Heyst speaks to Lena of his father’s “capacity for scorn”:  “It was immense. It ought to have withered this globe. I don’t know how many minds he convinced. But my mind was very young then, and youth I suppose can be easily seduced—even by a negation” (196). Not surprisingly Heyst in adulthood becomes, as Conrad describes him, a “man of universal detachment” (“Author’s Note” x), with “a profound mistrust of life.” (91). Heyst exemplifies what Bromberg refers to as a dissociative personality structure. From the cumulative discomfirmation by his father of all loving and trusting self-states Heyst experienced as a child, he came to see all tender feelings, all deep attachments, as “not-me” (see Bromberg Dreamer 7).

Many Conrad critics, following Thomas Moser in Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline (1957), continue to divide Conrad’s work into his major and minor phases.  For these critics, Conrad’s fiction up until and including Under Western Eyes, constitutes his major work. For them, Conrad’s shift to writing romance novels represents a decline. To counter this assertion, I maintain that Conrad continued to explore the concerns of his earlier novels in the form of romance, in none more fully or more perceptively than in Victory. In Victory, Conrad returns to the theme of childhood deprivation, as suggested by Razumov’s musings in the first section of Under Western Eyes (1911), but avails himself of the more intimate perspective of the romance form to explore this theme in greater depth. I would further maintain that the figure of Axel Heyst, in his childhood deprivation and adult isolation, is a figure close to Conrad’s heart and person. Conrad himself admits about the novel, “its nearness to me personally” (Author’s Note ix).  Further, he avers: “I wouldn’t be suspected even remotely of making fun of Azel Heyst. I have always liked him” (Author’s Note xi) And surely Conrad’s assertion in Victory, “The habit of profound reflection, I am compelled to say, is the most pernicious of all the habits formed by civilized man.” (xi), suggests his kinship to Heyst. Indeed, I would argue that Axel Heyst, even more than Yanko Gooral in “Amy Foster” and Razumov in Under Western Eyes, is a disguised portrait of Joseph Conrad.  Through exploring Heyst’s ineradicable isolation and emotional vulnerabilities, Conrad explored his own; and in doing so he provided a subtle and insightful portrait of the tragic legacy in adulthood of childhood trauma.

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 Encyclopaedia 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

Reflections on Conrad's place in contemporary English literary heritage tourism

Tim Middleton

This illustrated paper examines the current state of play as regards

Conrad's presence in literary heritage tourism in England.   It is part of a

larger book project on literary places in contemporary culture.

Having briefly established the context for the paper via consideration of regional tourism data  and recent scholarship in the field,  I will develop a comparative study of the presentation  of Conrad and Thomas Hardy via reflection on the galleries devoted to them at, respectively, the Canterbury Museum and Dorset County Museum.

Having outlined how Conrad is currently showcased my paper concludes with a speculative section that outlines some of the ways that accessible Web 2.0 tools can be used to add value to the existing tourist offer.  I'm also keen to canvas audience opinion on my paper's outline for a revised Conrad tourism experience in Kent since I hope to develop these ideas in  the field with the Canterbury Museum through a (bid-dependent) funded knowledge transfer project.

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.

Turgenev and Conrad’s Emphasis on Visual Impression

Brygida Pudełko

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.

Unexpected Intertextuality: The Trope of the Book in the Jungle in Conrad and After

Brian Richardson

   In this paper I will examine Conrad's compelling depiction of the effects of reading in "An Outpost of Progress." Here, African trade station managers Kayerts and Carlier come across a number of abandoned novels. They become fascinated by the books, and discuss the characters as if they were actual people. They also come across imperial propaganda, and are again unable to read the material critically. Their failures and deaths (murder and suicide) suggest an allegory of reading, modernism, and critique that also appears elsewhere in Conrad.

   The figure of the book in the jungle is subsequently taken up by a wide variety of authors and deployed in a number of ways that offer a series of commentaries on Conrad's practice. These include Evelyn Waugh's Kurtz-like figure in the Amazon, Alejo Carpentier's the abandoned book in Alejo Carpentier's rewriting of "Heartof Darkness" in his novel *The Lost Steps*, Alain Robbe-Grillet's postmodern reworking of the passage in *Jealousy*, and Pauline Melville's critique of Waugh in *The Ventriloquist's Tale". Taken together, the reworkings of this powerful trope constitute a continuing debate on reading, ideology, and aesthetics in a colonial context that keeps returning to and reflecting on Conrad's image and theme.

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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