Joseph Conrad and the Reader: Questioning Modern Theories of Narrative and Readership

Joseph Conrad and the Reader Questioning Modern Theories of Narrative and Readership

Amar Acheraïou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Joseph Conrad and the Reader

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Also By Amar Acheraïou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

RETHINKING POSTCOLONIALISM: Colonialist Discourse in Modern Literatures and the Legacy of Classical Writers

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Questioning Modern Theories of Narrative and Readership Amar Acheraïou

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Joseph Conrad and the Reader

© Amar Acheraïou 2009

No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN-13: 978 0 230 22811 5 hardback ISBN-10: 0 230 22811 9 hardback This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. 10 18

9 17

8 16

7 15

6 14

5 13

4 12

3 11

2 10

1 09

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

For Laetitia and Louise

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

This page intentionally left blank

List of Abbreviations

ix

Acknowledgements

x

Introduction

1

Part I 1

Conrad’s Conception of Authorship: Probing the Implications and Limits of the Death-of-the-Author Theory

Part II 2 3

5

6 7 8

11

Reception Theory: Reading as a Cultural and Ideological Construct

Polish Responses: Art and the Ethics of Collectivity British Reception: Englishness and the Act of Reading

Part III 4

Theoretical Perspectives

25 49

Aesthetic Ramifications, Narrative Entanglements, and Fictional Readers

Conrad’s Visual Aesthetics: Classical and Modern Connections A Cartography of Conrad’s Fictional Readers: Reading Hierarchy in Lord Jim, ‘Heart of Darkness’, Nostromo, and Victory Narrative Solidarity and Competition for Truth and Signification Conrad and the Construction of the Reader: Tension between Democratic Vision and Aristocratic Leaning Narrative Self-Consciousness and the Act of Reading: Examining Under Western Eyes through the Lens of the Poetics of Fielding, Sterne, and Diderot 8.1 Fielding, Sterne, and Diderot: literary novelty, verisimilitude, and truth 8.2 Fielding, Sterne, Diderot, and Conrad: moral and aesthetic didacticism vii

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

69

94 110 123

143 143 150

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Contents

viii Contents

161 167

Conclusion

185

Notes

193

References

214

Index of Names and Titles

223

Index of Concepts

227

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

8.3 Dramatic impulse in Under Western Eyes: text as stage, reader as active spectator 8.4 Narrative shock tactics: the ethics of negativity and the role of the reader

AF AG Amy C CL

HD JA JF K LJ MS N NLL NN OP PR PRR SA T TJ TS UWE V Y

Joseph Conrad, Almayer’s Folly (Dent: 1949) Joseph Conrad, The Arrow of Gold (Dent: 1947) Joseph Conrad, ‘Amy Foster’ (in ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Other Tales, Oxford World’s Classics: 1998) Joseph Conrad, Chance (Oxford World’s Classics: 1988) Joseph Conrad, Collected Letters, Vols 1–9, eds Frederick Karl and Laurence Davies (Cambridge University Press: 1983–2007) Joseph Conrad, ‘Heart of Darkness’ (Oxford World’s Classics: 1998) Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews (Random House: 1939) Denis Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist, trans. David Coward (Oxford World’s Classics: 1999) Joseph Conrad, ‘Karain: A Memory’ (in ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Other Tales, Oxford World’s Classics: 1998) Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (Oxford World’s Classics: 2000) Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea (Oxford World’s Classics: 1988) Joseph Conrad, Nostromo (Oxford World’s Classics: 2007) Joseph Conrad, Notes on Life and Letters (Dent: 1949) Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (Dent: 1950) Joseph Conrad, ‘An Outpost of Progress’ (in ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Other Tales, Oxford World’s Classics: 1998) Joseph Conrad, A Personal Record (Cambridge University Press: 2008) Joseph Conrad, ‘Prince Roman’ (in ‘The Lagoon’ and Other Stories, Oxford World’s Classics: 1997) Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (Oxford World’s Classics: 2004) Joseph Conrad, ‘Typhoon’ and Other Tales (Oxford World’s Classics: 2002) Henry Fielding, Tom Jones (Oxford World’s Classics: 1996) Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy Gentleman (Random House: 1940) Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (Oxford World’s Classics: 2003) Joseph Conrad, Victory (Oxford World’s Classics: 2004) Joseph Conrad, ‘Youth’ (in ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Other Tales, Oxford World’s Classics: 1998) ix

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

List of Abbreviations

While writing this book, I have benefited from the help and encouragement of many people. I most sincerely thank the following friends and fellow Conradians who have been supportive in various ways: John Stape, Keith Carabine, Don Rude, Wiesław Krajka, John Crompton, Jonathan Hart, Todd Bender, Nikolaos Panagopoulos, and Alexia Hannis. I am grateful as well to Cedric Watts and Deborah Romanick Baldwin for sending me copies of the papers they presented at the 2008 Joseph Conrad Society Conference (UK), respectively entitled ‘“Simple Ideas” in Conrad’s World? The Case of “Prince Roman”’ and ‘Under Western Eyes: the Haunted Haunts’. I would also like to express my gratitude to the editors of The Conradian and Conradiana for their permission to use overhauled material from two recently published essays: ‘Floating Words: Sea as Metaphor of Style in “Typhoon”’ (The Conradian 2004) and ‘Colonial Encounters and Cultural Contests: Confrontation of Orientalist and Occidentalist Discourses in “Karain: A Memory”’ (Conradiana 2007). Last but not least, I tenderly thank my wife, Laetitia for her unwavering support. I am deeply grateful for her warm affection, commitment, and valuable criticism which made this project possible. My five-year-old daughter Louise deserves also special thanks; she has the knack of gently reminding me that weekends are not for writing.

x

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Acknowledgements

Joseph Conrad and the Reader is the first book-length study fully devoted to Joseph Conrad’s relation to the reader, visual theory, and authorship. With regard to authorship, specifically, the leading view in modern literary criticism, notably in structuralist and poststructuralist theories, is Roland Barthes’s notion of the death of the author.1 This book revisits Barthes’s theory and uncovers its theoretical and empirical limits. It provides an alternative critical line that substitutes the idea of the writer’s demise with the theory of authorial dissemination, which is implied in several modern texts, including the writing of Flaubert and Conrad. My contention is that the theory of authorial diffusion advocated in the present discussion renders more fittingly the articulation of power and authority in modern literary texts. For rather than being redundant or impotent as deconstructionists claim, the modern writer remains a powerful epistemic and signifying enterprise. What happens in practice is that the author’s authority is merely reshaped and renegotiated in disguised, elusive forms. The other predominant topic in modern criticism, which deserves close critical re-evaluation, is the role of the reader. Over the last decades, dominated by deconstructionist approaches to texts, the reader has emerged as an overpowering interpretative agency. Following their proclamation of the author’s demise, deconstructionist theorists have ‘divinized’ the reader. They elevated him/her into an absolute interpretative authority of literary texts. As a result, the question of the production of textual meaning is mostly confined to the polarized transaction between reader and text. This monograph moves away from the deification of the reader. It resituates the latter as a component in a tripartite textual transaction, including text, reader, and author, but taking also into account the cultural, ideological, and political forces informing 1

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Introduction

Joseph Conrad and the Reader

every literary work and act of reading. In short, the critical line adopted in this study abandons the predominant insular, exclusionary approach to literary works in favour of an inclusive, holistic theoretical stance that considers the text in its multiple identifications. It also questions the deconstructionist doxa in connection with the important issue of reception theory. Joseph Conrad and the Reader is divided into three parts illuminating variously Conrad’s narrative form and reader theory. The first part gives a historic overview of authors’ perceptions of their audiences, from ancient Greece to the modern era. This relatively short, but dense, section deals centrally with the crucial issue of authorship and discusses the role of the reader in fiction and modern criticism at large. It examines Conrad’s perception of authorship and the reader in the light of modern theories of representation, conceptions of the author, and reader-response analysis. It offers a cross-examination of Conrad’s vision of the reader against the ideas of such leading theorists as Roland Barthes, Marie Louise Rosenblatt, Wayne Booth, and Wolfgang Iser. In the process, it explores the significance and shortcomings of these theorists’ views. The aim of this cross-examination consists of illustrating the ways in which Conrad anticipates a critique of those deconstructionist theoretical trends that have pronounced the author’s ‘irrelevance’ and deified the reader. In the main, this section shows how far Conrad adopts a reader-response analysis theory and a notion of authorship that together challenge the modernist and postmodernist theories of textuality, readership, and authorship. Such an observation may sound paradoxical, for many scholars have taken Conrad’s postmodernist streak for granted. In The Political Unconscious Jameson, for instance, famously argued that Conrad anticipated postmodernism: ‘A case could be made for reading Conrad not as an early modernist, but rather an anticipation of that later and quite different thing we have come to call variously textuality, écriture, postmodernism, or schizophrenic writing’ (1981, 129). Other critics have, since, frequently reiterated Conrad’s status as a precursor of postmodernism in terms that often undermine his multifarious, elusive literary identity.2 Admittedly, Conrad has in some ways anticipated postmodernism. However, we should not lose sight of the fact that Conrad’s aesthetics is no single, monolithic set that can be easily categorized. Rather, it has ramifications with various literary traditions and narrative modes, including those of ancient Greek poets. Because of these numerous filiations, Conrad cannot be readily fitted into any specific literary genre, nor can his works be explained strictly

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

2

3

by one specific mode of literary criticism or theory, whether modernist or postmodernist. That being said, Conrad’s writing displays features that are now identified as defining characteristics of postmodernist aesthetics. Judging from the open-endedness of his texts, their narrative indeterminacy, polyphonic orchestration, multi-layered signification, and contestation of absolute sites of knowledge and truth, Conrad might rightly be considered a forerunner of the postmodernist ethos. Conversely, in view of his handling of narrative strategies and perception of the reader, he may as well be said to have anticipated a critique of postmodernist theories of readership and authorship. Specifically, Conrad’s theory of authorship and, to some degree, his conception of the reader conflict with postmodernist author and reader theories. Above all, Conrad’s challenging conception of authorship, which posits the novelist as a proliferating consciousness rather than a total absence (as deconstructionist theorists contend) is highly significant in relation to reception theory, the focus of the book’s second part. Building on this fresh theoretical basis, Part I demonstrates that the deconstructionist celebration of the author’s death and the reduction of literary works to mere textuality cannot be taken at face value. The reason is that as tools of analysis deconstructionist theories are too exclusionary and limited to account accurately for the complex issue of authority and power in modern texts. Moreover, these theories prove especially unconvincing when they are brought to bear upon the reception of fictional works by the large reading public, critics, and reviewers. The deconstructionist idea of authorial dismissal, in particular, is unable to withstand any thorough theory of reception. For it is difficult to imagine how a reliable theory of reception of literary works could ignore the place of the author in his fictional universe, or overlook the writer’s insidious power, identity, and cultural background. Chapters 2 and 3, which constitute the book’s second part, focus on the reception of Conrad’s works in Poland and Great Britain. My central line of argument in this section is that culture and its attendant ideologies are the basis for any account of reception. Starting from this fundamental assumption, I show that the Polish and British reading publics, critics, and reviewers did not respond to Conrad’s texts as if they were merely strict linguistic artefacts devoid of all authorial origination and cultural, ideological, and political dimension. Their reading testifies instead to the extent to which culture, race, and ideology have contributed to shaping reading tastes and the reception of Conrad’s works both in his native land and in his adopted country.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Introduction

Joseph Conrad and the Reader

This section first explores Conrad’s ambivalent attitude towards his dual cultural heritage. It traces how Conrad projects in his works an elastic readership – Polish and British – in compliance with his multifaceted, resilient literary and cultural identity. The main issue here consists of uncovering the extent to which the act of reading for both Polish and British readers proves an overwhelming cultural, ideological, and racial construct. The reception of Conrad’s works in Poland was, I argue, determined by stringent cultural, political, and ideological forces that often led to mystified readings of his fictional works. This response confirms that the Polish reading public – past and present – has seen the act of reading and the ethics of collectivity, which unconditionally ties the individual writer to his community, as being closely connected. While exploring the intricate links between reading, ideology, and patriotism, I reveal how Conrad’s texts have been subject to essentialist readings generated by Polish readers’ adherence to a strict sense of Polishness. The third chapter follows a similar train of thought and examines British readers’ responses to Conrad’s fiction at the turn of the century in the light of British cultural and race politics embodied by the theory of Englishness. In discussing the reception of Conrad’s writing in Great Britain, the chapter investigates the overlooked cultural, ideological, and racial factors that stood in the way of Conrad’s popularity in his adopted country. This chapter teases out the intricate connections between the act of reading and Englishness, patriotism, and race politics. It traces how far British readers’ responses to Conrad were influenced by cultural, ideological, racial, and political contingencies that transcend more aesthetic considerations of his texts. And in this, Conrad may, ironically, be said to have become a victim of the very Englishness for which he was such an enthusiast. The book’s third part shifts the focus from reception proper to Conrad’s own conception of the reader and the act of reading, both in his fiction and in actuality. It connects Conrad’s notion of the reader and visual aesthetics to, on the one hand, the poetics of ancient Greece and Rome, and on the other to eighteenth-century fiction. The reason for this broad critical perspective is that both Conrad’s narrative form and reader theory are greatly indebted to these specific periods. It is ironic that these important connections have been so widely neglected in Conrad criticism, and Chapter 4 discusses at length this major, overlooked topic. It probes Conrad’s theory of narrative form and ethics of readership and visuality through the lens of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as with regard to ancient theories of representation. This chapter unearths the links between Conrad’s visual aesthetics

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

4

5

and classical theories of representation and audience as formulated by such poets as Homer, Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian. Together with investigating the relationships between Conrad’s aesthetics and ancient poetics, I show that Conrad conceives of fiction as a mega-poetics which encompasses a spectrum of artistic forms, including sculpture, painting, and music. In Conrad’s fiction the pictorial, visual, and verbal constantly interact and fuse. They form powerful synergetic relationships by which Conrad intends to make his reader see. This synergy of word and sight, sound and colour, and voice and gesture is explicitly rendered in Conrad’s literary credo, conveyed in the Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. This Preface exposes the complexity and theoretical ramifications of Conrad’s literary theory. Most importantly, it illustrates how Conrad’s visual aesthetics echoes strongly classical visual poetics or enargeia, defined by the ancient critics as the language’s power to create visual presence and strong emotions by bringing vividly the event before the ‘reader’s eyes’.3 In view of these close connections, we may argue that Conrad’s striving to make the reader see is continuous with the aesthetic inclination of classical poets and orators. And like the ancient writers, too, Conrad’s appeal to the immediacy of sight is intended to reduce the distance between the represented material and the visual presence. Through the same visual appeal Conrad also seeks to collapse the distance between speaker and hearer, shower and viewer. Furthermore, in line with the ancient authors’ distrust of the representational powers of language, Conrad’s emphasis on visual effects betrays an identical awareness of the limitations of language as a means of representation and communication. This awareness may precisely account for Conrad’s struggle – particularly in works like ‘Typhoon’ – to redeem the word by resorting to the expressive powers of gesture and visuality. Chapter 5 pursues Conrad’s perception of readership and visual theory in works such as ‘Heart of Darkness’, Lord Jim, Nostromo, and Victory. It offers a detailed examination of these reader-oriented narratives and maps out a cartography of Conrad’s fictional readers (nominal/ metaphoric, myopic/profound, horizontal/vertical). Along with probing the subtle interplay of the writing/narrating instances and the reading/ listening fictional audiences, this chapter explores and accounts for Conrad’s propensity to establish a hierarchy among his fictional readers. Chapter 6 elaborates on the issue of a reading hierarchy alongside the question of truth, meaning, and identity – major preoccupations in Conrad’s writing. The device of narrative hierarchy is characteristic of Conrad’s narrative method. It is paradoxically embedded in the overall idea of

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Introduction

Joseph Conrad and the Reader

narrative solidarity, crystallized in Conrad’s blending of voice and perspective, listening and hearing, and telling and showing. This chapter traces how far the overlap and collusion between these levels of perception partake of Conrad’s holistic conception of art and life. While unscrewing the nuts and bolts of this narrative solidarity, I unveil the ways in which the various voices feeding the story are tacitly competing for narrative power and authority. Uncovering these discursive concurrences should help us realize how Conrad at once promotes centrifugal truth and implicitly subjects this multiple, decentred truth to a centripetal agency. In short, Conrad fosters perspectivism and pluralistic representation, and is simultaneously tempted by a hegemonic narrative impulse. This ambivalence, which is at the heart of Conrad’s narrative method, is also perceptible in his conception of the real reader. Chapter 7 addresses specifically Conrad’s relation to and construction of his audience. It connects Conrad’s representations of his fictional readers, evoked previously, to his perception of the actual reader. Bringing together the fictional and meta-fictional levels should enable us to discover how Conrad’s fictional representation of narrator-narratee instances reflects his own relation to his real readers. This chapter discusses the interaction between these two dimensions, brings to light Conrad’s narrators’ ambivalence towards their audiences and examines the implications of this ambivalence. It then extrapolates from the fictional narrator-narratee relationships to probe Conrad’s own relation to his real-life readers. Conrad’s construction of the reader, as my argument goes, wavers between a democratic vision and an aristocratic leaning. Through subtle rhetorical devices and strategies of representation, Conrad – the ‘aristocrat of the mind’, as Morf (1976, 297) called him – constructs elect fictional readers, reminiscent of the actual privileged ‘coterie’ of readers that he knew would always be receptive to his allegedly elitist writing. The issue of Conrad’s elitism is here put centre stage and read in connection with such elitist writers as Flaubert and Stendhal,4 two leading novelists who left their mark on Conrad’s writing. Flaubert is a major influence on Conrad’s fiction generally and on his theory of readership in particular. Flaubert’s impact on Conrad received much critical attention,5 whereas Stendhal’s influence is not sufficiently explored. This chapter examines the affinities of Conrad’s ethics of readership with that of Stendhal and Flaubert and hints at the literary, cultural, ideological, and social forces that shaped these writers’ readership aesthetics. While discussing Conrad’s elitism in the light of the elitism of Flaubert and Stendhal, it also charts the areas of continuity and rupture between all

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

6

7

three writers’ conception of the reader. The aim is to determine how far Conrad’s relationship with his audience is, in essence, more in tune with Stendhal’s conception of the reader than with that of Flaubert – Conrad’s acknowledged master in relation to whom he is often evaluated. Furthermore, as it assays Conrad’s elitism and its implications, this chapter reveals the ways in which Conrad constructs an ideal reader or alter ego that is expected to shun literal readings in favour of vertical, deeper ones. Concomitantly, it demonstrates how Conrad is constantly torn between a liberal approach that encourages the readers to derive autonomously their own meanings and an insidious didactic impulse subtly guiding their interpretation. This ambiguity is manifest in such works as Lord Jim, ‘Heart of Darkness’, and Under Western Eyes. My belief is that the evoked ambivalent process testifies to Conrad’s perception of the ideal reader as both a discerning consumer of textual truths and a responsible producer of literary meaning. For all its ambivalence and elitism, Conrad’s theory of reader response in the end seeks to make the reader a dynamic partner and active collaborator in the construction of textual meaning. As he explicitly declared in his letters, Conrad expects his readers to be active, if not simply to become co-authors ‘writing the other half of the book’. Conrad’s perception of the reader as a dynamic, creative agency, intimated in this statement, can easily be discerned in his fiction; most prominently in such works as Under Western Eyes and Lord Jim, which are examined in detail in Chapter 8. This chapter focuses on narrative self-consciousness and the act of reading, which it assesses from a comparative perspective. It analyses these key issues in Under Western Eyes and Lord Jim in the light of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Fielding’s Tom Jones, and Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist. Meanwhile, it explores the methods and implications of these authors’ handling of the issues of narrative selfconsciousness, narrator-narratee relationship, stage theatrics, ethics of denegation, and irony. Basically, this chapter uncovers the ways in which narrative self-consciousness forms both a privileged mode of representation and a fundamental epistemic tool. It testifies to Conrad’s complex process of storytelling and theory of transmission and reception of knowledge. Under Western Eyes and Lord Jim are by far Conrad’s most sophisticated novels in regard to narrative method and, above all, to reader-response analysis. Through a close examination of the narrator-narratee and implied author-reader relationships in Under Western Eyes, I highlight the ways in which Conrad frames a reader theory that echoes the narrative methods of Sterne and Diderot in Tristram Shandy and Jacques the

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Introduction

Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Fatalist. The major concern consists of investigating the implications and paradoxes of these deftly orchestrated technical devices. Conrad’s articulation of the reader’s pact in his novels is highly sophisticated, to say the least. It is certainly much more elaborate than it is in Sterne’s work, which might have inspired Conrad. In Under Western Eyes in particular the reader’s pact is based principally on the art of selfdenegation, dramatized from the novel’s outset. The narrator openly disclaims all powers of imagination and further denies possessing the capacity to make the merest transition. This declaration implicitly deems the narrator, and via the narrator the writer, a helpless mediator of his fictional universe. At first glance, this assertion supposes the idea of authorial demise prominent in modern criticism. However, given the language teacher’s omnipresence and his constant comments and generalizations about the Russians, this implicit authorial demise announced in the first pages turns out to be no more than a rhetorical device. It is mostly intended to elicit the readers’ interest and spur them into active participation in the tale. The ethics of denegation, on which Under Western Eyes rests, is a powerful narrative strategy with far-reaching implications with regard to both authorship and reader theory. While uncovering the motives of Conrad’s ethics of denegation, I demonstrate that this rhetorical orchestration is a strong, dramatic gesture of affirmation rather than a sheer case of renunciation or denial. In the process, I show how Conrad’s recourse to the rhetoric of denegation – along with artifice, irony, and dramatic devices – serves to provoke and shock the reader into active participation in the process of meaning-making. This is strongly implied in the novel’s very structure. More exactly, Conrad’s narrative method in Under Western Eyes is staged in a manner that makes the work appear as a text in progress anticipating the reader’s active collaboration. As evidenced by the various theoretical devices evoked earlier, Conrad in this novel – and more generally in his writing – conceives of the reader as an entity in-the-making or state of becoming. He constructs the reader as a significant agency that should not only be constantly stimulated and interested in the story, but also compelled into collaboration and scriptural solidarity with the author. However, judging from his sophisticated narrative method we may rightly argue that Conrad in Under Western Eyes postulates a highly competent reader. He projects in this novel a reader who is apt to participate actively with the narrator/implied author in the arduous intellectual gymnastics suggested from the novel’s start.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

8

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Part I Theoretical Perspectives

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

This page intentionally left blank

Conrad’s Conception of Authorship: Probing the Implications and Limits of the Death-of-the-Author Theory

Reader-response theory is usually considered as a product of modernity and its heyday located in the 1970s. This is, of course, an oversimplification, since its roots go back to ancient Greece and Rome. Indeed, concern with the audience has been a major preoccupation since time immemorial. Throughout antiquity Greek poets were centrally preoccupied with their audiences, whom they sought to entertain and instruct. Plato and Aristotle were both aware of the educative value of tragedy, although their perceptions of this literary genre were different. Plato recognized that tragedy could serve as a means of instruction, but dismissed it as incapable of conveying or reflecting truth, which he deemed indispensable to the polis. Aristotle, on the other hand, viewed tragedy as a valuable tool of learning. For Aristotle, learning and entertainment were closely connected in tragedy, as he points out in Poetics.1 His tragedies were not only meant to produce strong emotions, such as fear and pity, but were also intended to educate these very emotions and thus contribute to the audience’s moral education – as was expected from every tragedian. This classical conception of the audience as in need of both entertainment and education is strongly echoed in eighteenth-century British literature. Both Fielding and Sterne, for example, sought to amuse as well as to educate and provide moral lessons for their readers. The classical notion of poetry as a means to teach and delight the reader is also prominent within Romantic literature, as is made clear in Shelley’s ‘Defence of Poetry’. In this work, Shelley refers to the poet’s imaginative power and considers the poet as a vehicle of the true and the beautiful. He also emphasizes the poet’s function as educator and legislator in society. 11

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

1

12 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

But poets, or those who imagine and express this indestructible order, are not only the authors of language and of music, of the dance, and architecture, and statuary, and painting: they are also the institutors of laws, and the founders of civil society, and the inventors of the arts of life, and the teachers, who draw into a certain propinquity with the beautiful and the true, that partial apprehension of the agencies of the invisible world which is called religion. (1887, 5) In Shelley’s conception, the poet is faced with a multiple task, encompassing artistic creation as well as social, political, educative, and moral functions. The didactic, moralistic streak central to Shelley’s ‘Defence of Poetry’ also pervades eighteenth-century fiction and Victorian literature in which the poet is likewise expected to provide the audience with both instruction and entertainment.2 Eighteenth-century literature and literary criticism can rightly be considered as the cradle of modern reader-response analysis. Although the reader had been taken into consideration in earlier periods, it is in the eighteenth century that readers started to be attributed a dynamic role. Most notably in Sterne, and to a lesser degree in Fielding, the reader is envisaged as an active and creative agent, impelled to participate in the aesthetic enterprise. Like most of his ancient and modern predecessors, Sterne, too, conceives of the reader as someone to be educated and taught moral principles. However, unlike earlier writers, Sterne expects his reader to engage in active collaboration with the author. Sometimes Sterne even assigns to the reader the role of a co-author, as in the closing scene of Tristram Shandy where he explicitly urges the reader to take up the pen and help the author finish the story (see Chapter 8 below). The notion of the reader as a dynamic agency, announced in Tristram Shandy, has become a prominent feature of modernist literature which compels the reader to be an active participant in the production of textual meaning. This conception of readership is also central to modern literary criticism; taken up by critics, it has reigned in literary discussions of narrative form and readership since the late 1960s and still holds an important place. The structuralists castigated New Criticism’s doctrine of ‘the poem in itself’ and Formalism’s ‘art for art’s sake’.3 They also condemned these movements’ neglect of the reader in their interpretative paradigm. As they sought to rehabilitate the reader, structuralists questioned New

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

He writes:

13

Criticism’s conception of the text as self-contained and its meaning as ‘inward’ and organic.4 The theory they propose accords an important role to the reader. It conceives of the literary text as a multiple site of representation where various cultural codes, linguistic conventions, and social norms disseminated by the author are productively at work. Within the structuralist and poststructuralist perception of the literary text, the reader is given pride of place as a producer of meaning. This privileged status is clearly stipulated in Barthes’s famous 1968 essay ‘The Death of the Author’. Echoing Nietzsche’s ‘Death of God’ formula, Barthes’s idea of the ‘death of the author’ betrays a Nietzschean undertone. Likewise, his perception of the reader as an active participant in the production of textual meaning reveals the inspiration of Sterne. Consciously or not, Barthes in this essay widely echoes Sterne’s reader theory. Like Sterne, who urges the reader to collaborate in the writing process and implicitly in the production of sense, Barthes stresses the reader’s function as a ‘producer’ rather than a mere ‘consumer’ of literary texts. However, whereas Sterne postulates a signifying enterprise that presupposes a close collaboration between writer and reader, Barthes builds his theory of textual meaning on the premise of the author’s demise. In this way, he indicates that the meaning-making process does not emerge from a fruitful partnership between author and reader, but from the ‘transaction’ between text and reader. The idea that sense is elicited exclusively through the transaction between the text and the reader holds a prominent place, not only in Barthes’s discussions of literary texts, but also in most modern reader-response theories, including the works of such influential theorists as Rosenblatt and Iser.5 To pursue this critical discussion, we might argue that in the formulation of Barthes’s theory the text turns out to be an absolute linguistic construct, existing on its own terms. This lacuna has already been pointed out by other critics, particularly by Rosenblatt, who reproached the structuralists and deconstructionist theorists for having ignored the view of the literary work of art as ‘a personal, transactional event in time’ (1978, 171). Above all, Rosenblatt blamed deconstructionists for ‘concentrat[ing] on openness of the text as a vide, an abstract form, a vessel, into which meaning derived from one or another code or metalanguage is to be poured’ (171). This charge can also apply to deconstructionist theorists such as Iser. Like Barthes, Iser reduces the text to an abstract semiotic construction in which indeterminacy and voids or blanks are seen as privileged sites of meaning and communication between reader and text.6

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conrad’s Conception of Authorship

To add to this, we might argue that the most manifestly undermined or mishandled component in Barthes – and more generally in deconstructionist theories – is the author of the literary work. Specifically, Barthes sees the author as the progenitor of a work, but not as a generator of textual meaning; a producer of literary material, but not a participant in the production of sense. Instead, he gives the text an absolute value and reduces it to a pure linguistic sign. To substantiate this extreme linguistic turn Barthes refers to Mallarmé, who he claims to have been the first to have shifted the attention from the author to language.7 Elaborating on Mallarmé’s ‘revolutionary’ poetic gesture, Barthes frames a theory of textuality that simply replaces the traditional author-God perspective with that of language-as-demiurge. In this manner, Barthes succumbs to a form of theoretical absolutism, for in the final analysis he merely articulates in a secular rhetoric the theological notion of language or Scripture as the originator of life, truth, and meaning. Revealingly, Barthes, like his fellow deconstructionists, substitutes one absolute for another, rather than – as he claims – collapsing all points of origin and authority. And to play a language-focused and reader-centric approach against the authororiented methodology, as the deconstructionist theorists do, may not be a very productive critical endeavour. It would, in my view, be more theoretically fruitful to adopt a holistic conception of writing that takes into consideration the multifaceted, elusive nature of power in literary texts. Following his deification of language, Barthes further abstracts the very idea of writing from all originating voice or authorial agency. He states in Image, Music, Text: ‘writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing’ (1977, 142). He later adds: ‘Linguistically, the author is never more than the instance writing, just as I is nothing other than the instance saying I: language knows a “subject”, not a “person”, and this subject, empty outside of the very enunciation which defines it, suffices to make language “hold together”, suffices, that is to say, to exhaust it’ (145). To reinforce the literary text’s autonomy, if not self-reflexivity, Barthes considers the author’s role as a past conjecture (145): The Author, when believed in, is always conceived of as the past of his own book: book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after. The Author is thought to nourish the book, which is to say that he exists before it, thinks, suffers, lives

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

14 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Conrad’s Conception of Authorship

15

Barthes does not end here his celebration of the author’s death or ‘pastness’, which some critics regard as a form of usurpation of power.8 Rather, he goes on to justify the writer’s demise on the grounds that any argument supposing the presence of an author is bound to impose a definitive meaning on the text: ‘To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. Such a conception suits criticism very well, the latter then allotting itself the important task of discovering the Author (or its hypostases: society, history, psyché, liberty) beneath the work’ (147). The first comment we may make at this stage is that Barthes’s rhetoric is not only sweeping and obscure, but also radical in its removal of the author. To speak, as does Barthes, of writing as being ‘the destruction of every voice’ or ‘point of origin’ is too vague and de-contextualized to be fully convincing. These generalized, unsubstantiated assumptions are misleading, and they can by no means withstand the rigour of the concrete context and diversity of literary writing. More specifically, one wonders what kind of writing Barthes is exactly referring to. Are not some texts more likely to tend to the construction and affirmation of points of origins than to their destruction? What about the distinction that Mikhail Bakhtin establishes between polyphonic and monological writing?9 Don’t Bakhtin’s monologic texts speak from specific ideological standpoints and promote dominant narratives of the self and society? Also, how can literary writing, known to be a highly charged linguistic, cultural, and ideological space of representation, be narrowed down to a ‘neutral, composite, oblique space’ and reduced to ‘the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing’? Can’t a text also be a constructive, multiple space of representation where identities, rather than being dissolved and denied through an ethics of negativity, positively assert themselves in their uniqueness as well as multiplicity? How can a writer existing in and responsive to the complex here-and-now of culture and geopolitics be so easily excluded from his/her work, or at best reduced to a mere linguistic sign or instance of writing? Rather than simply defining the author by absence or death, isn’t it more fitting to theorize authorial status in terms of both presence and absence, of effacement and diffusion, of ‘suspected presence’ and invisibility? Isn’t this chiaroscuro identification a more appropriate way of defining the status of the writer in modern writing?

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

for it, is in the same relation of antecedence to his work as a father to his child.

Through this strictly linguistic approach Barthes intends to free the literary text from the dictates of authorship. But he does so merely to replace one form of authorship, or presumed dictatorship – that of the writer – by another overwhelming agency – the reader. And given the hegemonic status that Barthes attributes to the reader, the new power proves equally dictatorial. In evicting the author, Barthes alienates the text from its creator and assigns to the reader a god-like position. The text becomes a signifying entity apparently able to function without the assistance or intrusion of an authorial presence. This presumably self-sufficient literary text is ultimately delivered to the reader who, in Barthes’s theory, emerges as an absolute interpretative enterprise. Liberated from conventional authorial injunction or guidance, Barthes’s overarching reader is in sole charge of educing the multiple meanings of the text thanks to the linguistic, social, cultural, and ideological codes inscribed in the literary work. Barthes’s literary theory, specifically his idea of authorial demise remains influential in contemporary literary criticism, including postmodern discourse. However, notwithstanding its contribution to literary criticism, Barthes’s theory betrays striking theoretical and empirical limitations that deserve close scrutiny.10 In elaborating on this discussion of the death-of-the-author theory in connection with Conrad’s ethics of authorship and readership I want especially to highlight the theory’s shortcomings, not only in connection with Conrad’s perception, but also with regard to modernist aesthetics at large. Perhaps the best way to start examining Conrad’s notion of authorship is by revisiting Flaubert’s view on the subject. The reason for this oblique proceeding is twofold. Flaubert, as is widely acknowledged, deeply influenced Conrad’s narrative techniques and conception of aesthetics. Moreover, like Sterne, Henry James, Maupassant, and Diderot, to name the most prominent, Flaubert is an outstanding experimentalist with narrative form. His theory of authorship, as we shall see, is strongly echoed in Conrad’s writing and declarations, as well as in literary criticism.11 Most significantly, Flaubert’s notion of authorship also resonates in Barthes’s death-of-the-author formula. Flaubert repeatedly insisted on the need for the writer to adopt aesthetic distance and guard against ideological and moral commitment. In keeping with the nineteenth-century positivist outlook, he advocated an objective literary stance, calling on the writer to maintain a distance from his fictional universe.12 In theory, the removal of the author from the work, advocated by Flaubert and reasserted by Barthes, seems sustainable. In practice,

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

16 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

17

however, Flaubert appears to be aware of the impossibility of completely severing a literary work from its creator. It is certainly this empirical impossibility that led Flaubert later to confess his own presence in his works and especially to identify closely with his writing. In his defence of the controversial Madame Bovary, Flaubert famously declared that ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi’. Similarly, he guiltily admitted to disseminating his ego in his writing.13 By recognizing the reality of his own constant presence in his works, after having initially promoted the theory of withdrawal, Flaubert demonstrates the difficulty of upholding the theory of complete separation of the writer and the work. Significantly, through his confession Flaubert implies that trying to abstract writing from its author, as does Barthes, is at best a chimera, if not a sign of critical myopia and ideological dogmatism, and at worst sheer mystification. Conrad follows in Flaubert’s footsteps and further elaborates on his French master’s theory of authorship. Like Flaubert, Conrad insists on the necessity for the novelist to detach himself from his works and avoid direct ideological and political commitment. And like his master, too, is Conrad’s consciousness of the writer’s inability to shut him or herself out of the imaginary written world. Notwithstanding Conrad’s constant presence in his works, a number of critics have hastily postulated his fictional exile. Michael Greaney, for instance, argues that ‘Marlow permits Conrad to relinquish the vantage-point of supervisory authorial presence, one might even suggest that the invention of Marlow anticipates the deconstruction of the Author performed in different ways by Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault’ (2001, 59). He continues: ‘Not unlike that other great modernist, James Joyce, Conrad is also “exiled” from his own fictive world’ (60). Like Conrad, who advocates authorial detachment, Joyce has referred to the writer as a detached presence lurking behind his work ‘paring his fingernails’ (1964, 215). Yet, there is a risk in concluding on this premise, as does Greaney, that Joyce and Conrad are ‘exiled’ from their writing. Admittedly, Joyce, like most modernist writers, is not a conspicuous presence. However, for all its detachment or apparent withdrawal from the depicted universe, Joyce’s voice resounds in his texts. It may be discerned in such works as A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and even in the highly experimental and sophisticated Ulysses. Stephen Dedalus’s rejection of the established institutions and their hegemonic discourses in A Portrait, for instance, reflects Joyce’s assault on absolute, monolithic discourses, including religion, imperialism, and nationalism. The ironic handling of the same themes in Ulysses likewise reveals a Joycean authorial undertone. As for Conrad, he is manifestly a diffused, roving

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conrad’s Conception of Authorship

18 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

I know that a novelist lives in his work. He stands there the only reality in an invented world amongst imaginary things, happenings and people. Writing about them he is only writing about himself. But the disclosure is not complete. He remains to a certain extent a figure behind the veil, a suspected rather than a seen presence – a movement and a voice behind the draperies of fiction. (PR 12) We might assume that in issuing this oblique statement about authorship, Conrad was thinking about his place in his own writing. With similar rhetorical flourish, Conrad in A Personal Record also anticipates a critique of Barthes’s notion of authorial demise, belying Greaney’s assumption of his ‘exile’. Conrad’s insistence on the writer’s presence in his works may be read as an anticipatory questioning of the deconstructionist mantra, which will come to celebrate the death of the author. Alternatively, this focus on the writer’s relevance might be seen to encourage autobiographical approaches to fictional writing. Conrad, however, carefully points out the complexity of fiction, which, in his view, requires more than simply pre-established material to be thoroughly grasped. The reader’s difficulty is further increased by Conrad’s deliberation on the place of the author in his fictional universe. By stressing that the ‘disclosure’ of the authorial presence is never complete, Conrad cautions the reader against expecting the author to be fully visible and translatable. He urges him/her to look upon the novelist as an actual, yet elusive presence discreetly navigating his literary work. As can be adduced from Conrad’s statement, the presence of the author in his writing goes unquestioned. It is the shape in which the novelist appears in his text that particularly focuses Conrad’s attention. And judging from his musing about this issue, we may safely argue that Conrad’s theory of authorship spelled out in A Personal Record is by far more nuanced and reliable than Barthes’s conception. As such, it may prove a more viable critical tool in interpreting modern writing. Unlike Barthes, who considers the writer dead or exiled from his fictional universe, Conrad argues rather that the author only melts away and disseminates.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

presence. Conrad’s voice, like that of Flaubert, resonates in his fiction, as will be shown in later chapters. While this voice cannot be located with certainty, it can nevertheless be easily detected in the comments, judgements, and sweeping generalizations often proffered by his narrators and characters. In A Personal Record Conrad acknowledges that fiction writers are always present in their writing:

19

The idea of authorial dissemination, suggested in Conrad’s declaration, has a significant theoretical value that has been overlooked in modern literary criticism. Bringing into focus this idea of authorial dissemination should help us profoundly to rethink modern theories of authorship and reader response. In short, it could serve as a corrective to the notion of authorial demise and to the allied conception of the reader as god predominant in modern criticism. In my view, the theory of authorship suggested by Conrad better describes the author’s status in both the modernist and postmodernist texts on which the theories of Barthes and the deconstructionists are often based. To pursue the cross-examination of Conrad and Barthes’s theories of authorship, we may further argue that where Barthes dismisses the writer as a total absence, Conrad grants the novelist a real, though unstable footing in his writing. In the process, he nonetheless guards against fixing the author in any specific place or determinate site of origin. For Conrad the author inhabits his writing as a roving figure wandering through the text in constant disguise. This idea of the author as a disguised occurrence is prominent in the extract above. Here, the author is ‘a figure behind the veil’ or ‘a movement and a voice behind the draperies of fiction’. These eloquent metaphors enhance the novelist’s pervasive and elusive image. They similarly reinforce his slippery, nomadic aura, as he steers undetected through the narrative with its enmeshed networks of communications, discourses, and meanings. The same metaphors of mobility, dynamism, and elusiveness also inform us about the status of the author as a site of power and authority. And in this respect, Conrad, unlike Barthes, clearly suggests that the author neither vanishes from the text nor is impotent within it. Most significantly, Conrad’s observation on the place of the author in writing can be easily generalized to most literary texts, including modernist and postmodernist fiction which is often considered to issue without authorial determination. In the end, what Conrad is suggesting is that by becoming a diffused voice, or, to use his own words, a ‘suspected rather than a seen presence’, the author acquires a privileged position of authority and power, one that operates centripetally, stealthily penetrating the various narrative strata and the text’s discursive layers. Authorial diffusion, as was suggested in Conrad’s theory of authorship, is not synonymous with authorial impotence. For what happens is that the author’s power simply becomes disseminated and difficult to locate. We may further state that this very dissemination, reflected in the author’s unfixed, roving condition, is finally less a symptom of powerlessness than a sign of a reshaped or renegotiated authority.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conrad’s Conception of Authorship

In other words, by distilling and disseminating his/her authorial potential throughout the text, the author’s power can be seen to be masked but not diminished. Thanks to this elusiveness, the writer as postulated by Conrad clandestinely infiltrates and occupies every site of authority and power within the text without running the risk of being detected or accused of becoming a conspicuous, overarching presence. For one thing, the fundamentally unseen nature of the author stressed by Conrad in A Personal Record puts the novelist in the privileged position of a hidden, yet powerful overseer, looking down on his fictional world, as would a mighty god over his creation. Precisely, by having no specific, fixed place in his text, the author is virtually everywhere. This implies that the author pervades the textual space and is actually present at each site of power and authority, presiding over the narrative. In this regard, there is good reason to argue that this type of elusive authorial power implied in Conrad’s theory predominates in both modernist and postmodernist texts. It is simply a matter of learning how to debunk death-of-the-author criticism in order to substitute a Conradian perception of textuality and authorship. Conrad’s theory of authorship as formulated in A Personal Record has significant implications both for his own aesthetics and for modern literary criticism at large. At first sight, Conrad’s unambiguous assertion of the novelist’s presence in the text seems attuned to traditional authororiented views of literature. We know how much the writing of the eighteenth century or the Victorian period, for example, is dominated by omnipresent and conspicuous authors directly addressing and indeed instructing their audiences (see Hodgson 2009). However, Conrad refers to the authorial presence in works of fiction in such a subtle way that it would be wrong to read his theory of authorship as an unequivocal endorsement of author-oriented texts. By insisting that the writer’s presence is unseen and diffused, Conrad breaks away from the conventional view of the novelist as a clear, fixed source of enunciation and authoritative determiner of meaning. At the same time, through his idea of authorial dissemination Conrad, who has been hailed as a precursor of postmodernism, anticipates the critique of deconstructionists’ conspicuous celebration of the author’s demise. In one fell swoop, then, Conrad undermines the conventional literary traditions which accord the author pre-eminence and questions those modern reader-centric critical trends that deconstruct the author. By and large, what Conrad finally suggests through the notion of authorship is a textual dynamics that unsettles (post)modernist and modern criticism’s exclusionary and radical views on texts. Barthes and

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

20 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

21

his followers, as we have seen, have excluded the author from his writing. They have ultimately ‘divinized’ the reader and established between the latter and the text a privileged relationship. As a result, the meaning of the text exists entirely within the polarized transaction of text and reader. Conrad, on the other hand, has a wider, more inclusive view of aesthetic relationships. His approach naturally involves the text and the reader, but also includes the author excluded from the transaction by Barthes and the deconstructionists. In Conrad’s poetic configuration, thus, text, reader, and author are conceived as partners in the same enterprise, each complementing the other. Within this enterprise, the author remains a roving presence discreetly contributing, together with the reader, to the construction of textual meanings. Alongside his integration of the author as a secret sharer in the shaping of sense, Conrad is acutely aware of the importance of the reader as an active collaborator and producer of meaning. All the same, Conrad does not go so far as to assign to the reader a hegemonic interpretative function. He envisages the reader primarily as a significant component in an important, multiple interpretative transaction involving text, author, and reader. Lord Jim and Under Western Eyes, as we shall see in Chapters 7 and 8, are good illustrations of Conrad’s conception of textual signification as a tripartite transaction. Significantly, Conrad’s implicit notion of textual meaning as a tripartite transaction bridges the gap in deconstructionist theories of literary texts as framed by Barthes and Iser, among others. As such, it proves a more appropriate and convincing theoretical tool. This holds true both when it comes to exploring the production of meaning in modern literary texts and when discussing the reception of literary works by the general public and professional critics. In this latter case, we may safely pronounce deconstructionist theories to be highly deficient, if not altogether unreliable. By adopting a strictly reader-centric approach and reducing literary works to their mere textuality, these theories ignore the text’s multiple identity, which lies in the tripartite transaction evoked earlier. The deconstructionist theorists’ exclusion of the author from their theoretical paradigm makes literary interpretation at best incomplete, and at worst, suspect, as it accords the reader a hegemonic role. From a strictly pragmatic or reception-theory point of view the limitations of such deconstructionist theory become even more striking. In this regard, we can legitimately ask how the general public, biographers, and professional critics or book reviewers relate in practice to a work of fiction. Do they view the literary work in strict deconstructionist terms, that is merely as a linguistic and reader-centric construct whose

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conrad’s Conception of Authorship

meaning is derived from the collaboration of text and reader, or do they see it instead as a tripartite transaction in which author, reader, and text together shape the text’s meaning and build its plural identity? In other words, would a text falling into the hands of these actual readers and critics be read solely as a strict, abstract linguistic entity detached from all point of origin and context, or would it rather be connected to its creator and the cultural, social, ideological, and political context in which it is produced? More concretely, can, for example, a French or British reading public or critic respond to a specific postcolonial text as they would to any other linguistic product, or does the author’s cultural, sociological, and ideological background weigh in the balance? Does the identity of the author as creator of the fictional work matter to these readers and critics, or is it superfluous? To put it bluntly, any viable literary approach ought to be holistic in perspective. Such a critical orientation should not only take into account the role of the reader and strict textuality, but must also have in view the author’s identity and role as a partial producer of meaning, the context in which the work of art is produced, and the text’s reception by the readers and critics. Such a holistic approach to writing may prove more realistic and convincing than a strictly linguistic and reader-centric approach. As will become clear in the following chapters, the reception of Conrad’s works in both Great Britain and Poland indicates the extent to which reading and interpretation of literary texts transcend mere textuality to encompass the author’s cultural background and the context in which the literary work is produced.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

22 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Part II Reception Theory: Reading as a Cultural and Ideological Construct

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

This page intentionally left blank

Polish Responses: Art and the Ethics of Collectivity

Scholarly discussions of the reception of literary works tend to focus on hard facts and statistics. They often neglect the underlying cultural, racial, ideological, and political factors that determine readers’ responses to fictional works. The various studies dealing with the reception of Conrad’s fiction are no exception.1 This chapter, which examines the reception of Conrad’s writing in Poland, aims to redress this balance. It lays emphasis on the overlooked cultural, ideological, and political factors that influenced Polish responses to Conrad’s writing. The overall objective is to trace how far the responses of Conrad’s Polish readers were determined by overpowering cultural and ideological constructs that leave little room, if any, for dialogical paradigms. Before discussing the reception of Conrad’s works in Poland, it is important to offer a brief outline of his relation to his native country. As shown in his letters, essays, and various declarations, Conrad’s relation to Poland was complex and tortuous. Throughout his life he had an ambivalent relationship with Poland, wavering between identification with and disengagement from her political destiny. From 1914 on Conrad grew closer to his native land, but even then his commitment to her was far from complete.2 Conrad assumed a dual loyalty to England and Poland, which dismayed those of his Polish countrymen who expected him to espouse monolithic assumptions of identity and nationhood. In various declarations he reiterated a composite, multifarious cultural identity in terms that discouraged easy categorization. In a letter to Kazimierz Waliszewski (5 December 1903) he wrote: ‘Both at sea and on land my point of view is English, from which the conclusion should not be drawn that I have become an Englishman. That is not the case. Homo duplex has in my case more than one meaning’ (CL 3, 89).

25

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

2

In this letter Conrad stressed his mixed cultural heritage and expressed the desire that his Polish and English compatriots would acknowledge him as a hybrid literary subject. Here as elsewhere in his letters and essays, Conrad eschewed the exclusive either-or dichotomy – a Pole or an Englishman – to which several Polish compatriots tended to confine him. He assumed more or less consistently a compound cultural self; in the process, he was, consciously or not, also constructing an ideal (Polish and British) audience which he expected to empathize with his motley writing and dual cultural identity. Conrad was, in other words, projecting an elastic readership in compliance with his resilient persona, or what he called his ‘plastic character’ (PR 5). But he must have been aware that readership is neither monolithic nor ideologically neutral. Many early Polish critics and articulate readers, including Wincenty Lutosławski, Eliza Orzeszkowa (née Eliza Pawlowska), and Viktor Gomulicki were disparaging of Conrad and his fiction. These intellectuals’ views are worth considering in detail for they shed light on the critical trend at the turn of the century. Born in Warsaw in 1863, Lutosławski studied chemistry and then turned to history and philosophy. He earned a masters degree in philosophy and lectured at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow and later at the University of Lausanne and in Geneva. After peregrinations in the United States and Europe, in 1919 he was offered the chair of philosophy at the Stefan Batory University in Wilno. During his teaching stints abroad Lutosławski became a fervent advocate of Polish culture. He thus followed in the steps of Adam Mickiewicz, the highly influential and celebrated nineteenth-century Polish Romantic poet who pleaded Poland’s cause and promoted its civilization during his lectures in France and Switzerland in the 1840s.3 Lutosławski was a zealous proponent of Polish ‘Messianism’ as propounded by Mickiewicz and Juliusz Słovacki.4 His academic writings are imbued with Romantic nationalism and patriotic fervour. Lutosławski was, as Gustav Morf pointed out, the first Pole to visit Conrad’s home, which he did in 1896. In 1899 he published an article, ‘The Emigration of Talent’, in Homeland, a nationalistic weekly. In this polemical essay, Lutosławski dismissed as traitors emigrant writers such as Conrad who lacked commitment to their native land. Lutosławski exploited chauvinism and spite to deny Conrad artistic genius. According to him, Conrad was at best ‘a second class writer’, and as such he was no great loss to Poland: We should not envy the English for a second class writer who, in any case, would not have enriched our literature since he himself admitted

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

26 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Polish Responses: Art and the Ethics of Collectivity 27

Lutosławski’s cultural nationalism is at a peak in this statement. As he downgrades Conrad’s creative potential, he implicitly undermines the British literary tradition into which Conrad inserted himself and into which he imported the ‘Polish spirit’: ‘[Conrad] began to write in English to make a living, and has given the English a number of novels sparkling with Polish spirit and from which Polish influence radiates to the race now dominating the world’ (cited in Morf 1976, 94). Lutosławski discerns pervasive Polish traits in Conrad’s fiction, but overlooks that this very feature was a deliberate design rather than the working out of some mysterious force or charm. Conrad wrote in a letter to J.B. Pinker, dated 7 October 1908, that his ambition was ‘to make Polish life enter English literature’ (CL 4, 138). As suggested here, Conrad’s proclaimed literary project had thus both poetic and ideological implications. Disseminating Polish themes in his works might, on the one hand, be read as a sign of fidelity to his Polish origins. On the other hand, the same aesthetic pattern can be interpreted as a boldly subversive gesture. It is intended to unsettle British cultural insularity and to destabilize the hegemony of the English idiom and literary tradition into which Conrad fitted himself (see Acheraïou 2004a). Conrad had mixed feelings about Lutosławski which he shared with Olivia Garnett in a letter of 20 October 1911: Yes. I had a letter and some books from Mr Lutosławski. I ought to have written to him before – tho’ really and truly I don’t know what he wants with me. I don’t understand him in the least. His illumination seems to me a very naïve and uninteresting thing. Does he imagine I am likely to become his disciple? He worries and bores me. But I won’t tell him that when I write (as I must do in common decency) because I believe he is a good man – though confoundedly inquisitive. (CL 4, 490) To Conrad then, Lutosławski (who died in Cracow in 1954) was manifestly an unwanted acquaintance. However, his discussion of the influence of Polish culture on Conrad’s works is nonetheless worthwhile, as he is among the first Polish intellectuals to have drawn attention to this important dimension of Conrad’s writing.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

that gain was the motive of his creative activity. We are rich enough to give many such writers to all the nations of the earth, keeping for ourselves only the best who will express their souls in Polish. (Cited in Morf 1976, 94)

The task of excavating Polish traces in Conrad’s writings has since become the focus of many Polish academics and intellectuals, from the translator of Lord Jim, Emilia Weslawska through to Gustav Morf, Zdzisław Najder, Adam Gillon, Wiesław Krajka, and Andrej Busza, to name only a few. Unlike these scholars, however, Lutosławski’s excavation of Polish influence in Conrad was intended less to reunite Conrad with Poland than to dismiss him as an alien. For Lutosławski, Conrad was a traitor; he committed the unpardonable sin of giving up his noble native tongue for a foreign idiom. In his logic, Conrad’s choice of writing in English cut him definitively from the soul of his ancestors’ land. In his assessment of Conrad, Lutosławski was reiterating the nineteenthcentury Polish Romantic writers’ Messianic conception of literature. Following the way trodden by this organic perception of poetics, he linked language and national spirit, idiom and territoriality, self and collectivity. Given the conflation of the linguistic and ideological spheres, it is no surprise that Conrad – who was untrammelled by the nationalist spirit animating such exiles as Mickiewicz and Słowacki – should be accused of betrayal by Lutosławski and other Polish intellectuals at the turn of the century. The Polish writer Orzeszkowa also virulently attacked Conrad. Orzeszkowa was a Positivist and a Polish patriot. Born into a landed family in 1841 near Grodno, she was educated at home and later at the girls’ boarding school in Warsaw. Orzeszkowa married a Polish patriot, Piotr Orzeszkowa. When the latter was arrested and exiled to Siberia during the 1863 Rising his estate was confiscated. A few years later Orzeszkowa was forced to sell the estate because of egregious taxes that the Russian government imposed on Polish landowners. From that time on, she devoted herself to fiction and journalism and was committed to the defence of Polish language and culture (see Safran 2000). In 1899 Orzeszkowa sent a letter to Conrad which, as Morf observed, he destroyed. In the same year Orzeszkowa published an article in Homeland in which she strongly indicted Conrad for distancing himself from his Polish legacy and turning a blind eye to his country’s plight. Orzeszkowa lived in the western provinces where the excesses of the Russification campaigns were at their greatest. Polish language and culture were heavily repressed by the imperial government, especially after the 1863 Rising. The intelligentsia and the szlachta to which Orzeszkowa (and Conrad) belonged were particularly targeted during these campaigns. This repression had served only to strengthen Orzeszkowa’s commitment to the preservation of her threatened linguistic and cultural heritage. Orzeszkowa’s staunch defence of her endangered national culture may

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

28 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

well account for her indictment of Conrad’s detachment from his cultural background. She blamed him for not putting his art in the service of the Polish cause and for failing to serve as a model for future generations, unlike exiled writers like Mickiewicz and Słovacki who sacrificed their individual aspirations for collective pursuits.5 Conrad read and held both authors in high esteem. He even referred to Słovacki as ‘l’âme de toute la Pologne’ (‘the soul of all Poland’; cited in Najder 1983b, 199); a phrase that might have had a lowering effect and an ironic sense to someone consistently accused by his compatriots of having sold his own soul to the English. Conrad was aggrieved by Orzeszkowa’s accusation, but strongly defended his position in a letter to Józef Korzeniowski (14 February 1901): I have in no way disavowed either my nationality or the name we share for the sake of success. It is widely known that I am a Pole and that Józef Konrad are my two Christian names, the latter being used by me as a surname so that foreign mouths should not distort my real surname – a distortion which I cannot stand. It does not seem to me that I have been unfaithful to my country by having proved to the English that a gentleman from the Ukraine can be as good a sailor as they, and has something to tell them in their own language. (CL 2, 322–3) Compelled by his critic to look deeply into his voluntary exile, Conrad stood up to the charge of betrayal with a display of affected sentimentality and forced patriotism. In this moment of intense emotion, Conrad emphatically asserted his Polishness. He went so far as to express pride in having, by sheer literary genius and maritime skills, shown the world what Poles of his calibre were capable of. On closer examination, though, this circumstantial burst of nationalism appears more as a pose than an unwavering devotion to any patriotic creed. In any case, no patriotic impulse from Conrad, however sincere, would be taken at face value by his Polish detractors. Nationalists like Lutosławski and Orzeszkowa had a clearly Messianic conception of literature and identity that excluded differentiating practices. Because they perceived literature and national consciousness as enmeshed, any deviation from this sacrosanct alliance would be likely to lead to cultural alienation, moral decay, and communal disintegration. Implicit in Orzeszkowa’s observation, thus, is the idea that Conrad, in groping his way to acceptance and literary fame abroad, had become ‘a lost soul’,6 to use Conrad’s own words. As such, Conrad’s dramatic

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Polish Responses: Art and the Ethics of Collectivity 29

display of patriotism is doomed to failure. His incidental patriotism is negated at the outset by the English idiom in which it is conveyed and by the foreign location – England – in which it is uttered. In short, Conrad was, for nationalists like Orzeszkowa, far too detached from his roots to qualify as a true patriot. A deracinated subject, he belonged both geographically and culturally elsewhere. Any claim of loyalty to Poland on Conrad’s part was therefore disqualified on the grounds of his deterritorialized condition. Orzeszkowa’s dismissal of Conrad as unPolish is, like Lutosławski’s, premised on her embrace of an organic conception of literature; one that binds together artistic activity and nationhood, each serving and symbiotically dependent upon the other. Orzeszkowa’s indictment of Conrad is, no doubt, extreme and objectionable, if only because art cannot be reduced to one single function or purpose – just as Conrad’s multifarious, derivative aesthetics cannot be traced back to one single source of inspiration. We should not, however, forget the harsh imperial context under which Orzeszkowa wrote her critique. Poland was under Prussian, Austrian, and Russian domination; territorial dispossession and political oppression dovetailed with aggressive acculturation. Orzeszkowa was struggling against imperialism, a situation that might well give rise to the use of literature as a weapon against oppression. Her anti-colonial rhetoric was consistent with Polish nineteenth-century Messianic thought which connected writing and political engagement. Since Orzeszkowa deemed writers unconditionally tied to their community, she expected Conrad too to privilege collective destiny over personal fulfilment, struggle for independence over individual quest for artistic recognition. Orzeszkowa’s theory of collectivity, binding every Polish writer to the country’s fate, demanded that Conrad – a naturalized British citizen with a confessed dual allegiance – show unqualified loyalty to Poland, as if his adoption of English culture and modes of thought had never taken place. From Orzeszkowa’s perspective, Conrad’s lack of commitment to Poland’s struggle for liberation was synonymous with treason. Her discourse reveals a manifest blurring of frontiers between the real and the ideal, the individual and the community, fiction and politics. From the point of view of the context of Orzeszkowa’s patriotic rhetoric, her condemnation of Conrad could appear justified. As a Pole, and a famous one at that, Conrad surely should support unreservedly his country’s fight for self-determination. However, when assessed from Conrad’s liberal aesthetic and philosophical standpoint, this verdict may seem excessive. Although, as Ford Madox Ford pointed out, Conrad was interested in and had a thorough knowledge of European politics,7 he frequently stressed the need to separate literature from politics and ideology. He

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

30 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

adopted the detached posture of a non-militant writer who perceives art as ‘an end in itself’ rather than as a means towards political or ideological ends.8 Conrad thus pursued his own individual and aesthetic aims rather than devoting himself, as was anticipated by his Polish compatriots, to self-negating nationalist goals. For one thing, Conrad shared neither Orzeszkowa’s conception of literature nor her ethics of collectivity. He espoused instead a notion of art and identity that distinguished private and public spheres, fiction and reality, art and ideology. By stressing the literariness of his fiction, Conrad clearly indicates that his writings are not political tracts, nor ideological pamphlets or literary manifestos. Rather, they are works of imagination that embrace literary, social, political, and ideological contexts exceeding the confines of both his native Poland and adopted England. In response to recurring complaints from his Polish compatriots about Poland’s absence from his works, he replied that his business was to write fiction not history: ‘As you know, I do not write history, but fiction, and I am therefore entitled to choose as I please what is most suitable in regard to characters and particulars to help me in the general impression I wish to produce’ (Jean-Aubry 1927, 77). Conrad argues for the freedom to choose his method, symbols, and themes free of political and ideological imperatives. He adopts a nonmilitant, elastic conception of art that contrasts sharply with Lutosławski and Orzeszkowa’s ideologically and politically determined theory of literature. For these Polish intellectuals struggling for Poland’s freedom, Conrad’s liberal vision of poetics must have appeared absurd and only of disservice to their own liberationist aspirations; high patriotic pursuits which demanded the writer’s self-effacement or sacrifice and devotion to his/her country’s destiny. The imbrication of literature and politics in the conception of art held by Orzeszkowa and the Polish nationalists contradicts aesthetic postures such as that advocated by Conrad. Because Orzeszkowa took as a given the writer’s duty and responsibility towards society, she found Conrad irrevocably guilty of breaching the bonds of solidarity with his struggling Polish community. In Orzeszkowa’s logic, Conrad had both betrayed his tongue and failed to write responsibly, that is propagandistically, in the manner of nineteenth-century Polish Romantic poets and those following in their footsteps. Above all, he had failed to show solidarity with Poland’s destiny, in contrast to his father Apollo Korzeniowski, Mickievicz, Słovacki, and all the Polish patriots who sacrificed their lives for their country. But Conrad was no Mickievicz or Słovacki. He made it clear from the start that his exile was not Messianic. Conrad did not leave his native country to fight from abroad for Poland’s liberation, as

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Polish Responses: Art and the Ethics of Collectivity 31

did Mickievicz and Słovacki. Rather, he was compelled by more individual pursuits and England offered him a liberal environment where he could begin anew and attain self-fulfilment. This egotistic leaning may largely account for Conrad’s lack of strong commitment to his native country’s strife. Orzeszkowa, Lutosławski, Gomulicki, and others castigated Conrad and his attitude to Poland’s fate in a rhetoric that cast him as alien. These painful early critiques, together with his visit to Poland in 1914 and the more hopeful prospect of Poland’s liberation in the looming horizon of war, contributed to Conrad’s changing attitude toward his native country from the First World War onwards. What is worth remembering in connection with Conrad’s relation to readership, however, is that while being uncommitted to Poland’s destiny at least until 1914, he was far from indifferent to the reception of his works in his native country. This is understandable in a writer whose stated objective was to be read by as many eyes as possible, British and non-British. He told Frank Doubleday in a letter of 21 December 1918: ‘I am sufficiently of a democrat to detest the idea of being a writer of any “coterie” of some small self-appointed aristocracy in the vast domain of art and letters. As a matter of feeling – not as a matter of business – I want to be read by many eyes and by all kinds of them, at that’ (CL 6, 333). Living in England and writing in English, Conrad was naturally catering for the British public. At the same time, following his proclaimed desire to reach a wider international audience he was secretly nurturing the hope of attracting, among others, a Polish readership. In a letter to E.L. Anderson, dated 14 November 1896, he wrote: I have heard from Poland – from to me unknown friends of my father. It’s like voices from some other world seen a long time ago in another existence. They heard of me through some American correspondents of Polish papers. About the books of course. The Warsaw Review (the one where 3 years ago I’ve read translations of Tennyson) asks me to translate myself. Can’t do it but it is a pleasure – something bright. (CL 9, 41) Two days later he wrote to Edward Garnett: ‘They have heard of me in Poland, through Chicago (of all the God-forsaken places!) and think of trying for translations of A[mayer’s] F[olly] and O[utcast]. So I am unofficially informed by a Warsaw friend. I can talk to the P. about that a little and size him up meanwhile’ (CL 9, 260). In the same year, both novels were reviewed in the Cracow Literary Review, which laid particular

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

32 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

emphasis on Conrad’s Polish origins, referring to his real name, Konrad Korzienowski, to his parents and to his birth in the Ukraine. A year later, An Outcast of the Islands was translated by Maria Gasiorowska. It was serialized in the Fashion and Fiction Weekly magazine, a Warsaw illustrated periodical read mostly by women, but it failed to attract much attention (Morf 1976, 255). Lord Jim was the next book to be translated into Polish, in 1904. Several other novels and short stories were translated in the succeeding years, including The Secret Agent which appeared in 1908, ‘Il Conde’ in 1911, and ‘Amy Foster’, translated under the Polonised title of ‘Janko Goral’, in 1914. Many more translations were to follow and in 1976 a complete collection of Conrad’s works was issued. Of all his works, Lord Jim is the novel that made the greatest impression in Poland. It was met with enthusiasm and had a significant impact on Polish readers. Besides being a source of much discussion and admiration, Lord Jim stirred the collective unconscious as did no other work by Conrad. According to Morf, Conrad sent the English version of Lord Jim to three people in Poland, including the editor of the avant-garde literary paper, Chimera, who wrote a favourable review. The novel’s themes as well as its artistic qualities and symbolism pleased the Chimera’s reviewer, Aniela Zagorska, and its readers. It also struck a chord within the members of the literary movement ‘Young Poland’ who were drawn to the novel’s symbolism. Morf writes that ‘Lord Jim, with its exotic atmosphere, its pathos, and its preoccupation with unconscious motives, fitted the mood of the modern Polish literati’ (1976, 257–8). Unlike An Outcast of the Islands, Lord Jim was popular. During World War Two, it even became a ‘cult’ novel for the young Poles engaged in the anti-Nazi resistance (see Najder 1983b; Morf 1976). The novel’s translator, Emilia Weslawska contributed to popularizing the novel. In the Preface to her translation, she explained the novel’s main themes and style in the following words: The theme of Lord Jim is the spiritual conflict and the story of the hero who, once carried off the way of duty by an incomprehensible force undergoes hellish torments, for the image of his misdeed is constantly before his eyes . . . One wonders whether a born Englishman would create a Jim imbued with such romanticism and sensibility. For that, one must have the dreamish Slavonic blood. (Cited in Morf 1976, 256) Weslawska set the tone of a trend of literary criticism that was to dominate Polish scholarship for decades. She summed up the novel in terms

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Polish Responses: Art and the Ethics of Collectivity 33

of the hero’s psychological and spiritual torments instigated by his jump from the Patna, to which Weslawska vaguely referred as a ‘misdeed’. Weslawska’s Preface puts the issues of the hero’s betrayal and guilt centre stage. But rather than accusing Conrad of treason, as did Lutosławski and Orzeszkowa, Weslawska reclaimed him as definitively Polish. She emphasized his literary genius and showered praise on the creator of Lord Jim for having instilled ‘Slavonic blood’ into his novel.9 Highlighting Lord Jim’s Polish fibre, she added that only a writer of Conrad’s calibre, steeped in the Polish literary tradition, was capable of exploring with such dexterity and sensibility these fundamental issues. According to Weslawska, it is not only the novel’s themes which are imbued with a Polish emotional response, but its style is also profoundly Polish in its Romantic and ‘Slavonic’ unruliness: ‘The work of our compatriot is like a capricious and unruly torrent, with a thousand leisurely bends followed by abrupt waterfalls . . . Although writing in a foreign language, too much in Conrad betrays feelings akin to ours to consider him as a foreigner’ (cited in Morf 1976, 256). The ‘Slavonic’, or more precisely Polish, flavour of Conrad’s style has since been widely investigated by Polish Conrad scholars, as have the key themes invoked by Weslawska, which she traces back to the Polish literary tradition (see Morf 1976; Morzinski 1995). What is yet of special note is that Weslawska’s argument both maintained a continuity with and diverged from earlier perceptions of Conrad’s works and character. Like Orzeszkowa and Lutosławski, Weslawska emphasized the Polish tinge of Conrad’s fiction, but unlike them she integrated him into his native community despite his writing in English or, to use Conrad’s own word, his ‘Anglicism’. Significantly, in both cases the rejection and integration of Conrad are predicated on an identical creed: patriotism. It is in the name of nationalism that Orzeszkowa and Lutosławski rejected Conrad as unPolish. It is on similar grounds that Weslawska brought him back into the fold. In the final analysis, both discourses reveal the ambivalence and elusiveness of the ideology of nationalism, which can be manipulated to serve antagonistic aims: inclusion and exclusion, appropriation and dismissal.10 Weslawska aims to rehabilitate Conrad as a ‘compatriot’ in the eyes of his Polish readers – a desire that Conrad himself expressed in a letter of 15 November 1903 to Kazimierz Waliszewski, a Polish journalist living in Paris: I consider it a great happiness and honour to return to my home country under your guidance (if I may express myself thus). And if

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

34 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Polish Responses: Art and the Ethics of Collectivity 35

Conrad wanted to be accepted by his Polish countrymen. Such acceptance would, he hoped, make him a ‘compatriot’ and, in due course, pave the way for a steady, sympathetic Polish readership. Today the issue of Conrad’s place in Poland appears less controversial than it was when Lord Jim was first published in Polish translation. Most scholars and readers in Poland now see Conrad as a British writer who was strongly influenced by his Polish cultural background. It is worth mentioning, however, that while Conrad’s double cultural legacy seems interiorized in Poland, the critical consensus on his cultural identity took a long time to shape, and is far from complete. Early in the century and well into the 1930s and 1940s when Conrad became popular11 in Poland a number of critics still regarded him as a traitor to his native country. Some intellectuals, including Gomulicki, continued to assess Conrad’s fiction along the paradigm of guilt and betrayal. Gomulicki reproached Conrad for betraying Poland and went further, denying him Polish belonging. As early as 1905 Gomulicki wrote an article entitled ‘A Pole or an Englishman?’ published in Homeland. He stated in connection with Lord Jim: ‘I was on the point of closing Conrad’s book, saying to myself quite dispiritedly: “No, this writer did not break away from Poland – he was never part of her”’ (cited in Najder 1983a, 196). Gomulicki hated Lord Jim and complained bitterly that the novel was purged of all reference to Poland and all things Polish. The implication is that given these erasures Conrad’s works offer Polish readers little, if anything, tangible to hold on to. Gomulicki specifically reproved Conrad for not directly addressing Poland in his fiction. In the same essay he voiced his painful disappointment at Lord Jim, protesting: ‘How much happier we would be to find Polish traits in Conrad’s works! But this is more difficult; in fact, well-nigh impossible’ (cited in Najder 1983a, 194). Gomulicki’s disappointment is reiterated in the 1930s by such intellectuals as Perlowski, who considered Conrad Polish on the grounds of his emotions and literary heritage, but dismissed him as alien when it came to political engagement.12 Lord Jim, as Gomulicki argues, is not pervaded with manifest Polish traces, although a number of past and present readers, including Weslawska, Morf, and Najder discerned vestiges of Polishness in the novel’s themes, symbolism, and structural patterns. While allusions to

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

you are prepared to take my word for it and say that during the course of all my travels round the world I never, in mind or heart, separated myself from my country, then I may surely be accepted there as a compatriot, in spite of my writing in English. (CL 3, 78)

Poland are frequent in Conrad’s political essays and letters,13 they are hard to find in his fiction. ‘Prince Roman’ (1911) is the only work which engages directly with Poland, and which Conrad might have written with a Polish audience in mind.14 Set in the 1830 Polish uprising against Russian domination, this tale relates the story of a heroic figure of Polish resistance, Prince Roman S– who enlisted anonymously in the army after his young wife’s death. He ‘joined the national rising from conviction’, as he said, and rose to the position of sergeant (PRR 173). Despite hunger and cholera, Prince Roman S– led his diminished squadron to the last remaining fortress, but he was later captured by the Russians and sentenced to twenty-five years’ hard labour in the Siberian mines. The evocation of a specific period of Polish history, insistence on the themes of patriotism, and struggle for Polish independence all reinforce the tale’s historical resonance. However, despite these references to Polish history ‘Prince Roman’ is anything but a historical document. It is essentially a fictional account in which literary invention and fragments of reality blend. Tracking down Polish traces in Conrad’s fiction, even in such Polish tales as ‘Prince Roman’, requires, therefore, caution and moderation. Literature is fabrication and verisimilitude; it consists of imaginary representations of the world rather than faithful rendering of life. As such, it is logical to expect fiction writers to mix imagination and reality regardless of the laws of historic plausibility. For this reason, it would be wise not to lose sight of the literariness of ‘Prince Roman’, despite identifiable references to Poland’s history, specifically the 1831 Rising. This caveat is also true of Conrad’s overall writings. With this in mind, the fact remains that the task of unearthing Polish traits in Conrad’s works necessarily requires a good knowledge of Polish literature, culture, and history. This leads me to admit – in concert with Krajka – that Polish scholars might be ‘best placed to appreciate and measure [Conrad’s] Polishness, and the relation between his work and Polish literature and culture’ (1993, 48). Granted, familiarity with their cultural and historical background gives Polish Conradians advantage over Western critics in this specific area of research. The question is: could Polish scholars deal dispassionately with the controversial issue of Conrad’s relationship with Poland? Could they be sufficiently objective and ideologically neutral to provide us with reliable accounts? Any discussion of Conrad’s relation to Poland in his fictional works inevitably involves a great deal of speculation. And on the whole, the speculations about Conrad’s use of Polish literary tradition in his works are insightful, even though some of the findings can be difficult to

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

36 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

ascertain and are sometimes far-fetched. The one certain thing, however, is that such intuitive research requires close attention to Conrad’s style, metaphors, and symbolic structures in order to unveil diffused Polish motifs and cognitive modes. A minute examination of Conrad’s aesthetics of indirectness may prove a prerequisite in this consideration. It is likely to help us discern under cover of Poland’s manifest absence the ‘suspected presence’ of Conrad’s native land. In other words, by groping through the network of echoes and shadows in which the image of Poland is veiled we should be able to get a glimpse of Conrad’s native land. This resurrected image of Poland, unearthed from the grey areas of Conrad’s texts, resurfaces as a fleeting image. It is conveyed by means of metaphor, allusion, blanks, and mythic constructions. We may argue in this regard that the tendency of many of Conrad’s characters to regress to mythic universes may read as a nostalgic yearning for a lost golden past, if not a lost Romantic Poland – appearing throughout his works in the guise of a pure, untainted Patusan or Sulaco (Acheraïou 2004a). As Conrad suggested in an interview with Marian Dabrowski, Poland haunts the interstices of his texts: English critics – and after all I am an English writer – whenever they speak of me they add that there is in me something incomprehensible, inconceivable, elusive. Only you can grasp this elusiveness, and comprehend what is incomprehensible. That is Polishness. Polishness which I took from Mickiewicz and Słowacki. My father read Pan Tadeusz aloud to me and made me read it aloud . . . Later I liked Słowacki better. You know why Słowacki? Il est l’âme de toute la Pologne, lui. (Cited in Najder 1983a, 199) Here, Conrad offers an eloquent answer to those Polish readers who complained about the absence of Poland in his works. Poland is diffused throughout his narrative. Together with the recurrent themes of honour, betrayal, and guilt that many Polish critics trace back to their literary tradition, Conrad resorts to subtle structural and symbolic devices to represent implicitly his native country. One possible explanation for not dramatizing Poland overtly in his fiction might lie in Conrad’s need to preserve intact the painful memory of his colonized country and mourn in secret its loss; or perhaps the tragedy was too difficult for him to put into words.15 The other reason, a practical one, was Conrad’s fear of not finding a public in Britain for literary works centred on Poland

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Polish Responses: Art and the Ethics of Collectivity 37

and Polish matters. Whatever the reasons, Conrad adopts in his writing a method of representation that consists in enveloping his traumatic memories of Poland in a veil of mist and silence which are eloquent signs of an unutterable loss or absence. The same elusiveness also reflects a reluctance fully to commit himself to the cause of Poland’s freedom, which he saw as only distantly his own. As mentioned above, after his 1914 visit to Poland Conrad became more involved in things Polish.16 Morf points out: ‘During the first world war, Conrad naturally became interested in the future of Poland. Contrary to his former convictions, there was now a possibility of a free Poland arising out of the turmoil of the war’ (1976, 104). Najder similarly observes that after 1920 Conrad maintained closer contacts with Polish writers, translators, and readers of his works. In the 1920s and 1930s Conrad was popular in Poland. He was much discussed by intellectuals and widely read by the public. His popularity grew during the Second World War; a period in which Lord Jim became an iconic text for the young Polish resistance. According to Jan Józef Szczepanski ´ Conrad stood for the ‘standard-bearer of his young compatriots’ (cited in Najder 1983a, 277) and his ‘books became a collection of practical recipes for men fighting lonely battles in the dark’ (279). Najder stressed in turn Conrad’s influence on the young Poles, arguing that during the Second World War Conrad became a ‘cult writer’ for the young men fighting the Nazis. Morf followed a similar line of argument in his discussion of Lord Jim: During the German occupation of Poland from 1939 to 1945, Lord Jim was giving courage and endurance to many Poles. During the Warsaw uprising of August, 1944, it was widely read and circulated by the partisans. The Polish army units which escaped to Rumania in 1939 and were being reorganized in the Middle East had a cultural committee. They printed some works, in Jerusalem, for the use of the soldiers and officers, and the first volume which came out was Lord Jim. (1976, 149) It is significant that Lord Jim should be the novel which appealed most to Conrad’s Polish readers, including soldiers and officers. The themes of heroism and sacrifice, central to Conrad’s book, were energizing moral forces for the Poles fighting the German and Russian invaders. Polish soldiers identified with Conrad’s hero, Jim; an identification which was encouraged by the novel’s editor, Wit Tarnawski. In his introduction to

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

38 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Lord Jim, Tarnawski took care to remind his readers that ‘Jim is one of us, he is a Pole’ (cited in Morf 1976, 149). The prominence of the issues of betrayal and guilt, of confession and search for self-rehabilitation might have led many Poles to interpret Lord Jim as a mediated dialogue between Conrad and his Polish readers. For instance, Morf in The Polish Heritage of Joseph Conrad referred to Lord Jim as a confessional novel: ‘Lord Jim is more than a novel, it is a confession. As a confession of a man tortured by doubts and nightmarish fears it must be understood, if it is to be understood at all’ (1965, 149). Morf reiterated this idea in The Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad where he interpreted Jim’s ordeal as Conrad’s implicit verdict on his own exile and guilt for abandoning his native country: Already in my book The Polish Heritage of Joseph Conrad, I had expressed the conviction that what attracted Conrad to this kind of story was the guilt feelings he must have had for deserting Poland, at the age of 17. He had not just deserted Poland by leaving the country for ever, he had also deserted the Polish language which was as sacred to every Pole, as Hebrew is to a religious Jew. (Morf 1976, 150) Morf pursues a Freudian interpretation of Lord Jim and further likens the precarious condition of the Patna to the state of Poland after the uprisings of 1831 and 1863. He assumes the role of therapist and judge. Persuaded that Conrad was pronouncing a verdict on his ‘desertion’ of Poland through his hero Jim, Morf engages in a deep psychological examination of the author. He pursues the task of assessing Conrad’s act of confession through a series of questions and answers that culminate in a definitive reconciliation of Conrad with his homeland. Morf’s final judgement on Conrad’s unconscious motivations is edifying. It is clad in the mantle of universal truth and delivered thus to the readers of Lord Jim: What effect did the writing of Lord Jim have on Conrad himself? Could he really unburden himself in this way? Did it provide him with the catharsis which he must have been craving? And after the publication of the novel, did he get the conviction that the nature of the conflict had been ‘seen’ and that the message had been understood? Did he succeed to make us understand not only Jim’s plight, but with it implicitly also the plight of Joseph Konrad Korzienowski? Do we not, by absolving Jim, also absolve the author of all blame? I think

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Polish Responses: Art and the Ethics of Collectivity 39

40 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Morf offers a telling example of an enthusiastic reader who probes a novel’s unconscious and engages in the construction of an ideal author from textual metaphors, symbols, and mythic, if not mystic echoes. Consciously or not, Morf induces the readers of Lord Jim to familiarize themselves not with the real, elusive Conrad of divided loyalties and impossible choices, but with an idealized, nationalized Conrad who, as interpreted by Morf, conveys a clear, conclusive message to his privileged Polish audience. In Morf’s reading, at the heart of the novel are Conrad’s confession and Poland’s generous pardon of her Prodigal Son. On an aesthetic plane, Morf and the Polish readers who interpreted Lord Jim in a similar vein engaged in what may be called a mystic ethics of reading; one which tends to connect organically text and author to an idealized communal spirit of wholeness and harmony. Following this type of reading, the author, in this case Conrad, is unconditionally reinserted into an ideal ‘imagined community’ and authoritatively assigned a singleness of belonging and spirit. Besides the evident influence of Freud and Jung, Morf’s interpretative grid might have been inspired by a Messianic sense of textuality and identity which blurs the frontiers between the individual writer and his community. Consequently, Morf’s interpretation of Lord Jim appears as the tacit projection of a collective reading unconscious that expects Conrad to settle accounts with his past through the medium of fiction. In other words, Morf reads Lord Jim as a kind of writing back intended to heal Conrad’s psyche and reconnect him definitively to his roots. He sees the novel as an act of reunion, if not communion, between Conrad and his Polish readers. For Morf, the book is tantamount to a solemn act of confession through which Conrad responds to his Polish community, tacitly begging for forgiveness, and seeking self-rehabilitation, as does Jim who confesses to Marlow and expects absolution of his guilt.17 We may mention in passing that this psychoanalytic trend of criticism, started by Weslawska and taken over by Morf and others, still retains currency in modern interpretations of Conrad. Christine de Vinne, for instance, views A Personal Record as a ‘confessional narrative’ (2002). It is worth noting in this respect that whatever its limitations this fictionas-confession model of criticism formulated by Morf must have fitted the spirit of the Polish reading public in the 1960s and 1970s, a period

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conrad succeeded in all these aims. Thanks to Lord Jim Conrad has become one of the most beloved writers in his own homeland. (1976, 158)

during which Conrad’s adoption was virtually complete and his works were widely read and discussed in academic circles. As noted above, from the 1930s onwards Conrad’s works received much critical attention and he was, on the whole, viewed positively by the Polish public. However, there were still critics, and among the most vociferous was the Marxist theorist and poet Jan Kott. In his September 1945 essay, entitled ‘The Lay Tragic Spirit’, Kott, who referred to Conrad as ‘the last bourgeois moralist’, criticized his concept of heroism and fidelity, arguing that Conrad’s ‘heroes’ served mainly to fatten up the companies they worked for, which ‘make money out of the others’ contempt for death’. Kott further dismissed Conrad’s idea of fidelity as ‘the fidelity of slaves’. During the period of ‘social realism’ in Poland (1949–55), Conrad was seen as ‘suspect’ and his works were deemed undesirable until 1955.18 From 1955 onward, Conrad’s works reappeared on the Polish scene: Chance, Lord Jim, ‘Typhoon’ and Nostromo were printed by the State Editorial Institute. With the 1974 publication of The Complete Works of Joseph Conrad in Polish, Conrad achieved quasi-canonical status in Poland. In the aftermath of the Second World War, several essays and books were published in Poland, all dealing with Polish influence on Conrad. The first book in this category was Róza Jabłkowska’s Joseph Conrad (1961), followed by Najder’s Conrad’s Polish Background (1964). Other books were to appear in the following years, including Stefan Zabierowski’s Conrad w Polsce (Conrad in Poland 1971) and Morf’s The Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad (1976).19 A key feature of much of this Polish scholarship is its propensity to take as a starting point the assumption of Conrad’s Polish cultural background as the essence of his thematic choices and philosophical outlook. Following the trend of criticism initiated by Weslawska, Najder, for instance, sees Conrad’s hero, Jim, as being directly derived from the Polish Romantic tradition. He connects him to Mickiewicz’s heroes, Priest Robak and Konrad in respectively Pan Tadeusz and Forefather’s Eve. While Conrad might have been influenced by Mickiewicz, as he himself admitted to having read and liked the author’s works, particularly Pan Tadeusz, this argument needs qualification, for Conrad plainly drew a number of his hero’s traits from other literary sources, specifically Flaubert and Cervantes. Flaubert is an acknowledged influence and Conrad had always looked to him as a literary model. Conrad had been familiar with Cervantes’s works since his childhood, particularly Don Quixote to which his father, Apollo Korzeniowski, introduced him. Arthur Symons, for example, observes resemblances between Jim and

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Polish Responses: Art and the Ethics of Collectivity 41

Don Quixote and Marlow and Sancho Panza. Jim manifestly concentrates the figure of Picarro as well as features of bovarysm,20 both blended in his persona to conceal his real identity to the Patusan community, including his beloved Jewel. Najder extends this discussion of Conrad’s debt to his original cultural background, arguing that his themes, motifs, and symbols likewise originate from the Polish literary tradition and folklore. In Conrad’s Polish Background (1964) he stresses that the motifs of solidarity, honour, patriotism, sacrifice, and exile abound in Polish classical literature. It is interesting to see how Najder in this book traces Conrad’s major themes virtually back to a single source – Polish literature and folklore – glossing over the myriad sources into which Conrad tapped when devising his thematics, characters, and narrative techniques. Most importantly, Najder even appears to overlook the fact that the Polish Romantic literature from which Conrad was seemingly borrowing was also fed by outside influences, among them the ancient Greeks and modern France and England (see Krzyzanowski 1930). Barbara Kocóvna follows Najder, stating: The faithfulness towards the tradition with which man is forever connected – whether he wants it or not – permeates the whole work of Conrad. Beginning with Almayer’s Folly, continuing with Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, and up to The Rover – everywhere we find that same idea that a man belongs to the soil from which he sprang before he went out into the world. (Cited in Morf 1976, 269) Starting from the dubious assumption that man is unconditionally faithful to his traditions, Kocóvna’s logic inexorably links Conrad organically to the land of his birth and stresses his ‘faithfulness’ to his Polish literary tradition. And being spiritually connected to Poland, Conrad was, according to Kocóvna, bound to reproduce in his works the essence of the cultural background that fashioned his spirit. Morf pursues still more exhaustively the exploration of Conrad’s debt to Polish culture and, he, in turn, evokes the venerable Mickiewicz, asserting Conrad’s debt to his Polish literary master. Discussing Conrad’s tales, including ‘Karain: A Memory’, which he reads through the lens of Mickiewicz’s ballads, Morf writes: In inspiration and pathos, both short stories remind one very much of Mickiewicz’s ballads, which . . . young Conrad knew by heart. In

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

42 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Polish Responses: Art and the Ethics of Collectivity 43

As he inserts ‘Karain’ into the tradition of Polish ballads, so Morf confirms Conrad as ‘a neo-romantic author who perfectly fits into the trends of Polish literature at the beginning of the century’ (1976, 267). The three Polish critics and articulate readers discussed above offer an exclusive picture of Conrad, centring the bulk of his thematic and symbolic output on a unique source: his original cultural tradition.21 Notwithstanding their relevance, these critics’ arguments inevitably provide us only with partial insights into Conrad’s multi-layered, elusive poetics. There is no denying that Conrad was influenced by his Polish cultural heritage, yet the themes that Najder, Morf, and others enumerate are universal and can be found in the literature of almost every nation, including the literature of France and England which also influenced Conrad.22 As Najder with Poland, so Yves Hervouet in The French Face of Joseph Conrad discussed Conrad’s literary influences at length and traced most of his themes and narrative techniques to French writers, particularly Flaubert, Maupassant, and France. Najder and Hervouet are certainly right in pointing to these legacies. However, French and Polish influences are but two sources among many others (see Chapters 5 and 8 below). In emphasizing the impact of Conrad’s original culture on his writing, Polish Conrad scholars such as Najder, Morf, Busza, and Gillon wanted to draw attention to an important thematic and ideological dimension neglected in Western scholarship. In this respect, Najder’s early work, specifically Conrad’s Polish Background (1964), represents a strong critical rebuttal, and one that often verges on cultural chauvinism.23 The views expressed in Najder’s monograph were in the main intended to remind Western readers of Conrad’s Polish roots and of the influence of Polish literary and social traditions on Conrad the man and the writer. However, while recognizing that ‘Conrad presents a mixture of different and remote traditions’, Najder tends to accord a lion’s share to Conrad’s Polish cultural and social background (1964, 1). Najder’s propensity to consider the Polish legacy as more influential on Conrad’s writing than either the French or British traditions is, in my view, tantamount to a nationalistic recuperation of Conrad.24 Najder further conditions any understanding of Conrad’s works on a prior knowledge of his

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

these beautiful ballads, war, exile, honor, love, treason, and revenge are the eternal themes. It does not come completely as a surprise, therefore, to discover that ‘Karain’ was actually inspired by a ballad of the famous Polish romantic. (1976, 126)

44 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Without dwelling on this complicated theoretical problem, I shall say that Joseph Conrad seems to present such a case. To understand what his work means, not in the sense of its reception nor in the terms of his presumed intentions, but in terms of what is the full implied cultural context of this work (its linguistic resources, literary forms and symbols, themes and motifs, & c.), we have to learn something about his national and social background. (1964, 1) That some familiarity with the Polish language, culture, and social traditions may help readers better to understand Conrad’s writing is beyond doubt. All the same, the Polish legacy stressed by Najder is only a part of a complex set of ‘formative forces’, including French and British cultural and social traditions, with which Conrad’s readers should be familiar. While each of these elements is important, none of them, however influential, can exclusively render ‘the full implied cultural context’ of Conrad’s writing – by which Najder means, in fact, the Polish literary, cultural, and social context. Najder’s attempt to give primacy to Conrad’s Polish heritage over his British and French legacy is even more marked in his discussion of Lord Jim. It is expressly conveyed in his gloss of Conrad’s use of the theme of ‘romanticism’ in this novel, which Najder exclusively ties to the Polish romantic tradition: The sense and – what follows – the literary value of this novel do not depend on whether it is or is not an expression of Conrad’s personal feeling of guilt; they depend on the knowledge of the literary and ideological origins of the general problems involved – on whether, for instance, we understand properly the way in which the word ‘romantic’ (one of the key words of the book) is used. And we cannot obtain this knowledge without learning about Conrad’s Polish background. (1964, 1–2) Jim’s romanticism may certainly be productively read through the lens of the Polish romantic tradition; it can just as well be efficiently assessed and easily understood by the standard of the Western literary tradition. All the more so as Jim’s relation to nature and his egoistic pursuits echo those of most romantic heroes found in Western literary works.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Polish cultural and social background. According to Najder, this original background is ‘the full implied cultural context of [Conrad’s] work’:

Obviously, Najder’s rehabilitation of Conrad’s Polish legacy is intended to counteract the views of such critics as F.R. Leavis who called Conrad a ‘cosmopolitan of French culture’ (1948, 189), which Najder found ‘crude and imprecise’ (1964, 1). Najder pursued his critique of Occidental academic approaches to Conrad’s writing in his later studies. In ‘Conrad and the idea of Honour’ he specifically blamed the Western critical tradition for failing accurately to locate the sources of Conrad’s ethics and aesthetics: Many critics simply fail to identify the moral and literary tradition to which Conrad belongs, and persist in interpreting him in the terms of, and as within, the conventions of middle-class nineteenth-century prose. And if one does not know the history and logic of the concept of honour, he certainly cannot appreciate what was new in Conrad’s handling of it. (1974, 104) According to Najder and to most Polish scholars, the szlachta tradition of honour or ‘chivalric values’ (1983b, 3) not only ‘sustained’ Conrad in the thick of his voluntary exile, but also profoundly shaped his identity and aesthetics: Leaving his home and country was for Konrad Korzienowski not tantamount to shedding all habitual attitudes. Polish szlachta and Polish intelligentsia were social strata in which reputation, one’s evaluation by one’s own milieu, was felt to be very important, even essential for one’s feeling of self-worth. Men strove strenuously to find confirmation of their own self-regard and image in ‘the eyes of others’ rather than basing them on their own consciousness. (1983b, 38) It is striking to see how Najder in this statement reduces a manifestly universal phenomenon to a strictly local conjecture. That within the szlachta tradition the individual acquires his self-worth from his social peers is undeniable. But is not this true of any social organization or caste? The answer is, of course, affirmative, since in every human community the individual’s value, even at its most original, is always socially engineered. As a social product, therefore, man exists mostly through the ‘eyes of the others’. That being said, I think what Najder is mainly attempting through this sociological insight is definitively to reinsert Conrad into the szlachta value system. Ironically, within

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Polish Responses: Art and the Ethics of Collectivity 45

Conrad’s emigrant condition this szlachta value system was at best a sub-text buried beneath layers of psychological, ethical, and cultural identifications, and at worst an alienating hiatus that caused Conrad to be seen as a perpetual exile and radical Other. Overall, Najder’s argument is clearly revisionist in intent and sets out to redress a critical balance absent from Western academic discussions of Conrad at that time. Its didactic tone aims at instructing Conrad’s (Western) readers in the correct way to read his fiction. Najder in this way hoped to spare these Western readers both grave misreadings of Conrad’s writings and aberrant ‘distortions’ of his outlook. For Najder and his followers, Conrad’s worldview can only be properly grasped in the light of his Polish ‘chivalric past’, and the romantic values of ‘honour, duty, fidelity, friendship’ in which Conrad was brought up (1983b, 30). At the core of Najder’s indignation is precisely Western scholars’ neglect of Conrad’s Polish idea of honour which, he contends, ‘stands at the heart of the ethical problems that he raised in his books’ (1974, 103). Najder’s argument in connection with Conrad’s handling of ethical issues needs to be moderated, for what Conrad calls his ‘ethical truth’ is in practice manifold rather than monological, as Najder would have it. Polish romantic values were manifestly part of Conrad’s ethical paradigm, but they were only one component of his complex, many-rooted ethics of being and meaning. Najder’s reproof of Western academics’ under-reading, if not misreading, of Conrad is later emulated, sometimes virulently, by other Polish or hyphenated part-Polish scholars. Stephen Brodsky’s essay, ‘Conrad’s Two Polish Pasts: a History of Thirty Years of Misrule’, is a good case in point. In this article, Brodsky reiterates most of Najder’s observations and tends to reduce Conrad’s entire thematics to the sole idea of ‘interior honor’. He writes: ‘The primacy of interior honor is the Polish precept upon which the Conrad canon turns’ (1996, 17). Throughout, Brodsky indicts Anglo-American scholarship for overlooking the Polish tradition of romance and chivalry on whose understanding alone, he contends, depend correct interpretations of Conrad’s works. In his exhortation to decolonize Conrad studies, Brodsky urges Polish scholars to ‘free critical theory from ideological strictures and resurrect Conrad’s reputation among the Poles’ (29). In this way, they would, in Brodsky’s words, ‘define the Conrad canon against a cultural background of an earlier past which for too long has been a heart of darkness for western scholarship’ (29). The words ‘free’ and ‘resurrect’ have a clearly Messianic resonance, characteristic of the nineteenth and early twentieth-century Polish romantic writers. They involve a reading back

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

46 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

that intends both to liberate Conrad studies from the grip of Western critical hegemony and breathe life into Conrad scholarship. In Brodsky’s contention, this could be achieved mainly by linking Conrad’s fiction to a primary scripture, that is Polish culture and literary tradition from which presumably originate the bulk of Conrad’s themes, modes of narration, and archetypes. Pursuing his diatribe, Brodsky attacks Western criticism for reducing Conrad’s works to the themes of ‘isolation’, ‘guilt’, and ‘duality’ which he considers peripheral preoccupations suited merely ‘for American scholars bred in a literary tradition molded by Puritan beginnings, revolution, the “frontier experience”, and alienation’ (13). Brodsky further assaults New Criticism, deconstructionism, and postmodern critical theory, which, according to him, ‘have continued a trend of destructive Conrad criticism’ (13). Brodsky, Najder, Morf, and their peers illustrate the intricate links between reading and ideology. More concretely, their interpretative endeavours reveal an inability to write dispassionately about Conrad’s Polish background. This conscious or unconscious interpretative turn confirms that reading and writing are not neutral activities, immune to jingoism and prejudice. In view of this, we might argue that these Polish scholars have finally yielded to the very ‘ideological strictures’ from which Brodsky wished to liberate Conrad scholarship. For their readings of Conrad prove widely determined by cultural, historical, and ideological considerations. They seem coloured by patriotism and tinged with ideological bias, which, in essence, is identical to the presumably reductive Western readings of Conrad that the Polish scholars were trying to dismantle. Ultimately, the Polish scholars’ discussion of Conrad’s relation to Poland leaves us with mixed feelings. Their attempt to rectify and add an important dimension to Western scholarly approaches to Conrad is certainly a healthy critical stance that can benefit us all. On the other hand, seeking to reduce, as they often do, the work of a complex writer like Conrad to one single interpretative pattern may lead to mystification and intellectual fallacy. To stretch this observation further, we may state that the Polish academics’ effort to re-orient Conrad scholarship betrays an appropriative gesture which involves, consciously or not, a rooting of Conrad’s poetics in a particular cultural matrix. Such critical orientation has a clearly essentialist resonance, feeding on nostalgia, myths of origins, and single truth. It fosters a reading practice that may both oversimplify and obscure the thematic and artistic density of Conrad’s fiction. Above all, this type of interpretation runs counter to Conrad’s plural, manifold ethics and aesthetics which challenge the very notion

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Polish Responses: Art and the Ethics of Collectivity 47

of essence or purity. Conrad often claimed not to belong to any specific literary tradition. He also frequently rejected all classification of his works within a specific literary category.25 By not affiliating himself with any particular literary tradition, Conrad borrowed from all traditions and made each his own. By foregrounding Poland’s influence on Conrad, Polish scholars forced Western readers to look into Conrad’s Polishness, long occluded in Occidental academic circles. However, by tracing most of Conrad’s themes and motifs back to a single primary source, they undermined the multifaceted and highly derivative character of Conrad’s aesthetics. It seems as though a pronounced sense of Polishness had precluded an objective appreciation of Conrad’s writing.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

48 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

British Reception: Englishness and the Act of Reading

As the previous chapter has shown, Conrad’s cultural identity has long been defined according to the either-or dichotomy by a number of his Polish compatriots. The British perception of Conrad is no less ambivalent and biased. Some readers and critics praised him for following in the tradition of major British writers; others dismissed him as a foreign writer who should have written his works in Polish rather than in English. In almost all cases, Conrad was regarded as simply Other, just as his own fiction appears alien and alienating for many a reader, Polish and British alike. The otherness of Conrad’s writing is manifest and can be detected on the thematic, linguistic, and ideological levels. Reading his works is, therefore, tantamount to exploring a multi-layered otherness. First, there is the otherness of the exotic, far-away colonial worlds that Conrad depicts and delivers for the consumption of his British audience. Next, comes the otherness of his style and multi-dimensional worldview. Conrad has a deep, multifarious artistic outlook. His style constructs palimpsests in which Polish, French, and English syntactic patterns coalesce to give his texts exotic resonance and heteroglossic quality. Finally, we have the otherness of Conrad’s own identity, an emigrant from Poland who chose to become a British citizen, grafting in this way a new layer of identification onto his original identity. These characteristics helped to shape Conrad the man and the writer. They endowed him with a density of character and outlook, which distinguishes him from other English writers. Above all, Conrad’s multi-layered otherness determines, more than Conrad perhaps anticipated, the reception of his works in England. Conrad’s decision to abandon the sea and become a writer was a radical leap. His was an extraordinary case within the English literary tradition in which most writers came from the intelligentsia. They were usually 49

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

3

the products of public schools that bequeathed to them ancestral English traditions and values. Thus, by birth and education as well as by training Conrad was an outsider with a rhizomic identity,1 that is one with Polish, French, and British ramifications. Nevertheless, he was an outsider with a strong commitment to his adopted country. He enthusiastically embraced British culture and learned English, which he later mastered and chose as the medium of his writing. Both his multicultural background and former profession were to become, to an extent, obstacles in the way of his acceptance by the insular British literary establishment and the British reading public. Conrad drew extensively on his maritime experience, and this led many of his readers to categorize him as a ‘sea writer’ – a label to which he strongly objected.2 His Polish and continental cultural heritage also widely informed his works, either in the form of Polonisms or narrative methods inspired by the Polish literary tradition or by French writers, such as Maupassant and Flaubert. Together, this myriad of features complicated the English readers’ understanding and appreciation of Conrad’s works. And precisely because of his un-Englishness and former profession Conrad often felt the need to justify his presence on the English literary scene and legitimize his writing in a medium not his own by birth. Conrad’s need for self-justification and the artistic anxiety that persisted throughout his writing career, as Conrad himself acknowledged,3 are prominently featured in A Personal Record. First serialized in 1908–09 in the English Review under the title ‘Some Reminiscences’, A Personal Record appeared in book form in 1912. In this text, blending selective, ‘loose’ personal reminiscences with fictional accounts, Conrad explores his Polish background, his life at sea, his vision of artistic creation, his aesthetic pursuits, and his philosophical outlook. Two particular events triggered Conrad’s decision to write this semi-autobiographical work: financial difficulties and a vicious and provocative attack on 10 August 1908 by a well-known English critic, Robert Lynd. In his review of A Set of Six in the Daily News Lynd wrote: Mr Conrad, as everybody knows, is a Pole, who writes in English by choice, as it were, rather than by nature. To some of us . . . it seems a very regrettable thing, even from the point of view of English literature. A writer who ceases to see the world coloured by his own language – for language gives colour to thoughts and things in a way that few people understand – is apt to lose the concentration and intensity of vision without which the greatest literature cannot

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

50 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

British Reception: Englishness and the Act of Reading

51

Conrad was shocked by the brutality of Lynd’s comments, to which he reacted dejectedly in a letter to Edward Garnett (21 August 1908): ‘It is like abusing a tongue-tied man. For what can one say. The statement is simple and brutal; and any answer would involve too many feelings of one’s inner life, stir too much secret bitterness and complex loyalty to be even attempted with any hope of being understood’ (CL 4, 107–8). Lynd’s cruel comment unites a cluster of cultural and racial prejudices that constituted commonplace British attitudes to foreigners during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and Conrad’s own explanation of his affinity for English in A Personal Record sounds like an answer to Lynd’s attack. Aiming to legitimize his close, privileged relation to English, he writes: The truth of the matter is that my faculty to write in English is as natural as any other aptitude with which I might have been born. I have a strange and overpowering feeling that it had always been an inherent part of myself. English was for me neither a matter of choice nor adoption. The merest idea of choice had never entered my head. And as to adoption – well, yes, there was adoption; but it was I who was adopted by the genius of the language, which directly I came out of the stammering stage made me its own so completely that its very idioms I truly believe had a direct action on my temperament and fashioned my still plastic character . . . All I can claim after all those years of devoted practice, with the accumulated anguish of its doubts, imperfections and falterings in my heart, is the right to be believed when I say that if I had not written in English I would not have written at all. (PR 4–5) Conrad rejects Lynd’s essentialist linguistic theory in terms that present his relationship with English as one of natural filiation, rather than a mere case of choice or adoption. He deems English an ‘inherent part’ of himself and thus establishes with this idiom a fusion that links him as organically to the language as any child to its mother tongue. In this way Conrad expects his British readers to regard him as a linguistic

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

be made. Mr Conrad, without either country or language, may be thought to have found a new patriotism for himself in the sea. His vision of men, however, is the vision of a cosmopolitan, of a homeless person. (Cited in Sherry 1973, 210–12)

and cultural insider, rather than an intruder and a rootless foreigner, as Lynd perceives him. Overall, Conrad’s insistence on his intrinsic, ‘natural’ aptitude in connection with English may be read as a vindication of the status of a proficient linguistic and literary subject that his detractor implicitly denies him. Through such strategies of self-justification and rehabilitation of his cultural identity, Conrad was seeking a sympathetic identification and sense of togetherness with his British readers; one that is predicated on a common idiom: English, the cement holding together the British community. In short, by claiming organic links with the English language, Conrad asserts his belonging to a shared English linguistic and cultural collectivity and national spirit. The whole justificatory process involves a pact of communion by which Conrad hopes to secure his readers’ sympathy and recognition. The hyperbolic tone of this declaration aside, Conrad’s crafty construction of a linguistic, literary, and cultural identity in A Personal Record is meant to impress on his readers a transparent, accessible self-image reflecting a harmonious dual cultural legacy. The ultimate goal is to create strong bonds with his readers and pave the way for acceptance and possibly popularity, which was still eluding him when ‘Some Reminiscences’ was serialized (that is, after thirteen years as a novelist). Conrad was hailed as a remarkable writer immediately after the publication of his first two novels, Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands. Both works were favourably reviewed, but the much-coveted literary popularity came to Conrad only late and was, to his disappointment, brought to him by Chance (1913);4 a novel which he did not rank among his masterpieces. It even looks as though Chance’s commercial success had a bitter aftertaste for Conrad. He told John Galsworthy in a letter of 19 March 1914: ‘Chance had a tremendous press. How I would have felt about it ten or eight years ago I can’t say. Now I can’t even pretend I am elated. If I had Nostromo, The Nigger or Lord Jim in my desk or only in my head I would feel differently no doubt’ (CL 5, 365). Conrad must have to some degree relished this long-awaited reputation, for Chance’s success, as he explained in the ‘Author’s Note’ (1920), saved him from the feared prospect of becoming ‘a writer for a limited coterie’ (xxxii).5 At the same time, Conrad seems to have felt some doubt at having won the public’s esteem through a novel that he did not himself consider representative of his canon.6 Perhaps what he regretted most was the realization that his commercial success was achieved at the cost of literary compromise. Conrad once proclaimed his willingness to abide by his literary ethos alone, rather than submitting to dominant reading tastes or following in other writers’ footsteps.7 Yet, in producing a novel

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

52 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

53

like Chance, based on a heroine, Flora de Barral, with a focus on romance and the topical issue of feminist struggle, Conrad deviated from his initial aesthetic position. He abdicated his literary principles to the reading taste of the multitude and heeded H.G. Wells’s advice by catering for the female reader, who, in Wells’s words, ‘makes or mars the fortunes of authors’.8 Much has been written about the reception of Chance and Conrad’s novels at large. There is, therefore, no need to dwell too long on how Conrad’s individual works were received. I shall instead explore the reasons that led English readers to respond to Conrad’s fiction in the way that they did. Emphasis will be laid on the neglected racial, ideological, and cultural factors constructing the responses of British readers and reviewers of Conrad’s works. John Dosier Gordan was among the earliest critics to address at length the reception of Conrad’s works in England and peripherally in the United States.9 In Joseph Conrad: the Making of a Novelist, first published in 1940, he devotes a long chapter to Conrad’s early writings, Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of Islands, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, Tales of Unrest, Lord Jim, ‘Youth’, and ‘Heart of Darkness’. As he examines the reception of these works, Gordan draws attention to English reviewers’ mixed sympathies.10 The reviews of Conrad’s early fiction varied from one journal to another, but they were broadly sympathetic. Gordan points out, for instance, how Almayer’s Folly was reviewed enthusiastically by T.P. O’Connor in his own paper, the Weekly Sun, as well as by such newspapers as the Birmingham Post, the British Weekly, the Daily Chronicle, the Manchester Guardian, and the Manchester Courier. Less laudatory were the reviews in the Athenaeum, the Saturday Review, the Sketch, the Speaker and the Spectator. The most radical position was held by the Academy and National Observer which dismissed the tale as ‘indifferent’ and the world it depicted as ‘poor’ (cited in Gordan 1963, 271). The assessment of Conrad’s later writings attracted similar critical variety. The reception of A Personal Record is a good case in point. The reviewer, W.L. Courtney, for example, criticized the book’s ‘fragmentary, inchoate’ character (Daily Telegraph, 31 January 1912), a complaint reiterated in the Nation which called the text ‘wild in its disorder’ (24 February 1912). Other reviewers saw the volume in a more favourable light and lauded its prose. The Standard wrote that there were ‘few living novelists writing in English with more distinction’ (6 February 1912). The Glasgow News went a step further to call Conrad ‘perhaps the greatest living writer of English prose’ (8 February 1912).11

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

British Reception: Englishness and the Act of Reading

The mixed critical attention emerging from the assessment of A Personal Record was a recurrent pattern in the reviews of Conrad’s works; even the commercially successful Chance had drawn ambivalent comments. And as was usually the case, in this novel, too, Conrad’s narrative method was the target of reviewers’ attacks.12 On the whole, however, reviewers had been generally positive in their responses to Conrad since the publication of his first novel, Almayer’s Folly. It was the common reader who continued indifferent to him. This was perhaps predictable, since Conrad was, according to Henry James, mostly writing for an elite audience.13 Henry James readily acknowledged Conrad’s literary talent, as did reviewers like T.P. O’Connor who referred to Conrad as a ‘writer of genius’ (cited in Gordan 1963, 289). The Speaker similarly praised Conrad’s genius and predicted that he would soon find a place in the English literary establishment if he were to produce other works of the value of Almayer’s Folly: ‘If Mr. Conrad can give us another story as striking and life-like as this, his place in our literature ought to be an assured one’ (cited in Gordan 1963, 275). Thanks to literary genius and a great deal of perspiration Conrad gradually secured a place on the English literary scene. He became a major British writer, if not an immensely popular one14 – at least not until late in his career. Chance’s commercial success and the sale of his manuscripts15 brought Conrad financial security, and in the years following the novel’s publication his literary reputation began to increase in both Britain and America.16 One may, however, rightly wonder why Conrad took so long to achieve his literary reputation. Among reviewers and critics who have discussed Conrad’s lack of popularity most have ascribed it to his style, narrative techniques, and philosophical outlook. The exotic quality of Conrad’s language, his a-chronological, multi-focal narratives, and his pessimistic worldview were obviously significant hurdles to wide popularity.17 They were daunting for English readers more accustomed to strict Victorian morality and narrative and reading conventions based on linearity and conclusiveness. The reviewer of the Spectator observed in this regard: ‘Mr. Conrad is a writer of genius; but his choice of themes, and the uncompromising nature of his methods, debar him from attaining a wide popularity’ (cited in Gordan 1963, 289). Similar complaints about Conrad’s works recurred in English periodicals throughout his writing career. For instance, while An Outcast of the Islands was praised for its power of description by the Citizen, the Daily Chronicle, the Manchester Guardian, the Athenaeum, and the Saturday Review, its narrative technique was unanimously condemned. The Saturday Review complained that the ‘story is not so much told as seen

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

54 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

British Reception: Englishness and the Act of Reading

55

Mr. Conrad . . . is diffuse. He spreads his story over a wilderness of chapters and pages. Instead of the few vivid touches with which Mr. Kipling paints a scene, his narrative wanders aimlessly through seas of trivial detail . . . When he resists his besetting sin of wordiness, he can be extremely effective . . . But . . . he seems to lose grip of his subject. The story melts away among a desert of words, and the desert alas is dry . . . The action is not quick enough, a serious charge to make against a book of adventure. Even schoolboys will probably have some difficulty in getting through it and we fear adults will find it impossible. (Cited in Gordan 1963, 279) Wordiness, prolixity,18 pessimism, perspectivism, and narrative distortions are plausible explanations for the lack of popular enthusiasm for Conrad’s writing, but these are by no means the sole inhibiting factors. The English readers’ and critics’ adherence to a strict sense of Englishness19 is another overlooked major impediment to Conrad’s popularity. Englishness is a cultural, political, and institutional construction. It promotes cultural patriotism and racial supremacy. And as an imagined construction, Englishness thrives on myths of purity and narratives of origins. Semantically, Englishness is a manifold concept which concentrates a number of values and virtues, habits of mind, and cultural traits that are deemed typical: the work ethic, the notion of the gentleman, love of freedom, and liberal spirit are some of the values usually connected with Englishness. The national ideal and the imagined collective identity embodied by Englishness foster a belief in cultural and racial uniqueness that at certain periods in history has given the British the feeling of being superior to other peoples. Some scholars trace Englishness back to the fourteenth century. At that period Englishness was articulated mostly against a radical religious and cultural opponent, Catholic France. Robert Colls argues: The first stirrings of a popular national consciousness occurred in the fourteenth century, in the writings and fighting experiences of the Hundred Years War. The French were the enemies within and without the Realm, and their national myths grew with ours. In England, the writing and anecdote of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were reformulated in the sixteenth century on behalf of a swelling Tudor

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

intermittently through a haze of sentences’ (cited in Gordan 1963, 279). The National Observer followed suit:

56 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

During Elizabethan expansionism in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, Englishness shaped itself against internal ‘barbarians’ – the Irish, Scots and Welsh – who required, in the conquerors’ eyes, improvement and elevation to the English cultural norm and degree of civilization. With British conquests in Africa and Asia, Englishness asserted itself in relation to a radical otherness that the British made it their duty to improve, racially and culturally. As an imaginary construction, then, Englishness was a valuable means of cultural and racial identification; it was also relentlessly reinvented and reproduced to fit new needs and purposes and amplified during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Doyle 1986, 93). Its intensity was such that most English people, including politicians, tended to use the terms ‘England’ and ‘English’ as shorthand for Great Britain.20 A type of cultural patriotism developed in which language, culture, and race were enmeshed in a quasi-mystic relationship. In the late Victorian and Edwardian periods in which Conrad lived and wrote, Englishness gained momentum for a number of reasons. Culturally and ideologically it was a time of tremendous transformations. Social unrest caused by unemployment, mass demonstrations, and feminist struggles was at its height. Added to these internal struggles were external threats, including disruptive cultural forces from the continent, particularly France, and the Boer War (1899–1902). The Boer War was an important destabilizing political factor and a major source of anxiety in relation to national identity. During the first two years of the conflict the British army was met with stiff resistance and lost thousands of soldiers (see Pakenham 1979), generating fears of the demise of the British empire and fuelling the debate on Englishness. Overall the response to internal and external threats was a resurgence of English patriotism which, as Kumar points out, was ‘conceived upon narrower ethnic and cultural lines’ (2003, 137). Many felt that the very foundations of Englishness were at risk, and, as might be expected, against crisis and insecurity Englishness was invoked, reproduced, and employed to serve as a bulwark against destructive alien forces. A product of his time, Conrad too was imbued with Victorian and Edwardian values and was fascinated by Englishness, which he perceived as his cultural and spiritual milieu. We might therefore surmise that it

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

State. By then, a Catholic world-order was seen to surround a beleaguered Protestant nation-state: Catholics, and the Irish, were now the enemies within and without. (1986, 29)

57

would have been particularly painful for Conrad to see his contemporaries denying him, tacitly or emphatically, that Englishness which he cherished. Lynd’s comment above is emblematic of this exclusionary rhetoric that constantly sent the Anglophile Conrad back to his foreignness. It is articulated in a style in which theories of language, race, and territoriality coalesce to assert an impermeable version of Englishness based on myths of linguistic and cultural purity. The mythic notion of Englishness promoted by critics and intellectuals like Lynd casts Conrad as linguistically and culturally inauthentic. It especially denies Conrad his belonging to the spirit of the place in which he lived, relegating him instead to the position of a rootless, ‘cosmopolitan’ writer. In Lynd’s formulation, ‘cosmopolitan’ had implicit racist connotations. How far Lynd’s parochial version of Englishness impacted upon the reception of Conrad’s works in Britain cannot be easily determined. The one certain thing, however, is that the dogmatic belief in cultural purity and supremacy in Britain at the turn of the century widely impeded Conrad’s popularity. Notwithstanding his detractors’ attacks, Conrad heartily embraced Englishness. For him, Englishness was not only a real, practical aspiration, but also a major theme in his fiction. Apart from Romance, written in collaboration with Ford, and which offers competing views of Englishness (Parfect 2006), most of Conrad’s works deal enthusiastically with English values and virtues. They are usually devoid of the ironic detachment that may be found in the fiction of writers such as E.M. Forster and Ford Madox Ford. Conrad’s Englishness looks, in short, static and monological, rather than dynamic and dialogic.21 He often tended to idealize it and take it for granted, as one would sacred dogma that demands unfaltering devotion.22 In ‘Heart of Darkness’, for example, the work ethic, a key component of Englishness, is lauded and contrasted with the inefficiency of the Belgians. Similarly, in Almayer’s Folly the English are regarded as better colonizers who know the secret of efficient work, or in the narrator’s words, ‘how to develop a rich country’ (AF 36). As in ‘Heart of Darkness’, in Almayer’s Folly and ‘Karain: A Memory’ Englishness is constructed against another apparently inept colonial rival, the Dutch. Englishness is also central to Lord Jim, Under Western Eyes, and several other works. In Lord Jim it is incarnated by Marlow, Brierly,23 and Jim. Some English commentators on Lord Jim went so far as to see in Jim Conrad’s promotion of a jingoistic form of Englishness.24 The theme of Englishness is even more obvious in Under Western Eyes. In this novel Conrad celebrates values commonly associated with Englishness – the concept of the

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

British Reception: Englishness and the Act of Reading

gentleman,25 moral rectitude, moderation, liberalism, and rationality – which he opposes to Russian cultural, political, and moral decay. Conrad, as becomes clear, generally invoked Englishness to promote England’s cultural supremacy and hone her image as an ideal colonizing nation. But he occasionally referred to Englishness to serve non-English interests. Whereas in ‘Heart of Darkness’, Lord Jim, and Almayer’s Folly Englishness is advocated in support of British imperial supremacy over other European imperial powers, in Under Western Eyes Englishness is mobilized against Poland’s oppressor, Russia. In each case, however, Conrad conceives of Englishness as an idealized exteriority geared towards enlightening barbaric peoples, or, as in Under Western Eyes, to countering Russia’s political, cultural, and moral obscurantism. Nowhere in his fiction is Englishness directly harnessed to strict domestic issues, as is the case in the writings of several of his contemporaries in which Englishness is often re-imagined to preserve and protect a national space felt to be under threat (see Haslam 2006). Writers such as Thomas Hardy, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy, Ford,26 Rupert Brooke, Alfred Austin, and Henry Newbolt all dealt centrally with the issue of Englishness, which they yoked to domestic realities. These authors participated, to varying degrees, in reproducing and promoting Englishness as a rampart against external and internal factors perceived to be besieging British culture and society. For example, such poets as Austin and Newbolt made it their priority to uproot the ‘art for art’s sake’ ideology forced on them by continental Europe, particularly France. They were eager to reconnect English art and culture with its authentic roots which, they believed, lay in the heart of the country. In many literary works of the late Victorian period and the early twentieth century, England and things English are at centre stage. The words ‘English’ and ‘England’ recurred with such frequency in fiction and newspapers that the notion of Englishness that they encompassed appeared as an overarching paradigm subjecting the texts’ available discourses to its idiosyncrasies. Brooke offers an eloquent illustration in his poem, ‘The Soldier’, written at the outbreak of World War I (and thus admittedly at a time when intense nationalism was brought into service to promote enlistment in the national cause). In this poem Brooke, as Brooker and Widdowson point out, uses the words ‘England’ or ‘English’ six times in 14 lines, and employs the phrases ‘for ever England’ and ‘an English heaven’ (1986, 116). Similarly, Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale (1908) focuses on Englishness alongside the notions of home and nation. English identity is in this narrative shaped in opposition to Catholic

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

58 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

59

France. The reconstructed Englishness is conveyed through the reunion of the two exiled English female protagonists, Constance and Sophia Baines, with their native land and its cultural heritage. There is in the writing of Bennett, Brooke, and more generally in a genre that has been called ‘country-house fiction’ a manifest retreat into England’s essence, presumably untainted by racial degeneration and the corrupt values of urban cosmopolitan life (see Hawkins 1986). This return to the heart of the country, which fitted the period’s rediscovery of folk culture,27 implicitly involves a reconnection with a cultural matrix and a golden literary tradition, with Shakespeare as its fountainhead. Unsurprisingly, at this period of particular insecurity, poetry and nation, writing and cultural essence were intricately connected. Contemporary literary taste and judgement were, in consequence, strongly conditioned by these essentialist quests and patriotic demands. Given the nostalgic flight into an allegedly pure English quintessence, we may understand why many of Conrad’s contemporary readers shied away from his fiction, set mostly in remote, primitive lands at a time when attention was focused on home and on preserving a threatened Englishness. Conrad was aware of his compatriots’ anxiety over national identity, as much as he was conscious of the reading public’s interest in ‘countryhouse’ fiction. That is probably why he shifted his attention to the domestic scene with The Secret Agent (1907), published at a period when pastoral fiction was prominent and the rural village stood as the symbol of a threatened Englishness.28 The Secret Agent indicates Conrad’s literary switch homeward, but instead of heading to the small country village or the heart of England, as most of his contemporaries did, Conrad locates his novel in the soulless, menacing cosmopolitan London of foreign anarchists and revolutionaries. The choice of an urban setting for his novel is understandable, as Conrad had no English roots in some small English village on which to draw, and no country house to which to retreat in the face of outside threats. Conrad’s scenic and thematic shift from the remote, exotic locales of his earlier fiction to the domestic setting of London involves a manifest aesthetic inflection which somehow suited the spirit of the age with its emphasis on the domestic scene and national destiny. However, despite its evident concern with the threats of anarchism and republicanism on English society, The Secret Agent’s focus on the local was apparently not profound enough to arouse English readers’ deep sympathies. Published at a time when Englishness was a predominant preoccupation and the ‘invasion novel’ the taste of the day,29 The Secret Agent could not expect to attract a wide audience. Its bleak, degenerate urban setting might

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

British Reception: Englishness and the Act of Reading

have been a source of disaffection for the English readers whose anxieties over a supposedly endangered national destiny were more likely to be soothed by the pastoral serenity of Galsworthy’s The Country House (1907) or the realism and authenticity of Hardy’s ‘country settings, rustic characters, sense of local tradition, realism, [and] colloquial speech’ (Perkins 1976, 163). The Secret Agent has no such bucolic characteristics. The un-Englishness of Conrad himself and the absence from this novel and more generally from his fiction of local colour or rusticity with which the average reader could identify might have been a further handicap in the way of Conrad’s popularity.30 Conrad voiced his disappointment with The Secret Agent’s commercial failure, declaring: The S[ecret] A[gent] may be pronounced by now an honourable failure. It brought me neither love nor promise of literary success. I own that I am cast down. I suppose I am a fool to have expected anything else. I suppose there is something in me that is unsympathetic to the general public . . . Foreignness I suppose. (CL 4, 9–10) Conrad implicitly accuses his English readers of racial prejudice. And judging from the frequency with which Conrad’s foreignness was reiterated by reviewers as well as by his collaborators and close friends his feeling of being the target of prejudice must be grounded. The fact that Conrad was not English by ‘birth’ and ‘temperament’ as were, for instance, Galsworthy or Hardy,31 must have weighed – unconsciously, at least – in the assessment of his fiction by English readers and critics. While Galsworthy and Hardy were deeply rooted in England, Conrad had pulled up what roots he had in a distant Poland. This may partly explain his difficulty in winning the hearts of his contemporary readers. Similar sentiments might also account for the same readers’ inclination to condone shortcomings in, say, Hardy’s works, that they would disapprove when they occurred in Conrad’s fiction. Angered by English complaints about the violence and pessimism of his works, Conrad once retorted to his critics by drawing an analogy between his philosophical outlook and Hardy’s worldview.32 He remarked that Hardy was just as pessimistic as he was, but that Hardy became popular despite his pessimism, while Conrad’s own bleak temperament proved fatal to the acquisition of a mass audience. Conrad seems to suggest that the British public, whose reading was consciously or unconsciously informed by racial bias, was less critical of Hardy’s home-grown negativity than they were towards Conrad’s foreign gloom.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

60 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

61

Conrad’s observations in relation to Hardy and, more generally, his response to his reviewers’ critiques reveal how far the act of reading can be seen to be contingent upon ideological, cultural, and racial assumptions. In the British context, his response brings to light the collusion between reading tastes and judgement, Englishness and patriotism – a collusion that was unfavourable to the reception of Conrad’s works. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the period during which Conrad began writing, patriotism was at its height. At its worst, it led to intense racism against foreigners, especially the Jews who emigrated from Central Europe. The waves of immigrants who poured into England at the turn of the century33 created a climate of fear and anxiety across the country. The influx of such large numbers led to the passing of the Aliens Act in 1905, which restricted the access of foreigners to England. During this period racial stereotypes and anti-Semitism were rife (see Gasiorek 2006). In this stew of racism and patriotic zeal Conrad’s anger at being constantly reminded of his foreignness becomes comprehensible.34 He complained in a letter to Edward Garnett (4 October 1907): I’ve been so cried up of late as a sort of freak, an amazing bloody foreigner writing in English (every blessed review of S. A had it so – and even yours) that anything I say will be discounted on that ground by the public – that is if the public, that mysterious beast, takes any notice whatever – which I doubt. (CL 3, 488) Conrad’s ‘homo-duplex’ identity must have been unsettled by English xenophobic rhetoric against immigrants from Russia and Poland, with whom Conrad might easily have identified. Although he was a British citizen, the oppressive atmosphere of patriotic zeal and racism of the late 1890s and early 1900s must have led Conrad at times to feel deeply alien in his adopted land. Thus, there is good reason to suggest that English racial prejudice contributed greatly to delaying Conrad’s acceptance and popularity in England. Admittedly, Conrad was not directly a victim of the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century British xenophobia, as might have been, for instance, a Polish miner or an Irish bricklayer. Conrad’s integration into his host society was unquestionable. He enthusiastically adopted English culture and most of its values to which he remained loyal throughout his life. His social integration is evidenced by his naturalization in 1886; marriage to an English woman, Jessie George, a decade later; his desire to become an English gentleman; and the choice of English as his medium of writing.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

British Reception: Englishness and the Act of Reading

He also made many British friends, with whom he socialized and collaborated, and from whom he received literary and financial support (see Stape 2007). This is the shining face of the coin. The darker obverse of liberal, inclusive Britain was painfully revealed to him both by distant critics of his works and by some of those closest to him. Several contemporary critics, fellow writers, and even friends saw Conrad – in his own words – as a ‘bloody foreigner’. His friend Bennett, who encouraged him in his career, described his manners as ‘Oriental’, an attribute that marked Conrad out as alien.35 The epithet was repeated by his friends Ford Madox Ford, Richard Curle, Henry Newbolt, and by Jessie Conrad, too, who referred to her husband as an ‘almost Oriental aristocrat’ (Meyers 1991, 136). H.G. Wells stressed Conrad’s ‘ineradicable’ foreignness. Kipling likewise insisted on Conrad’s un-Englishness, observing: ‘When I am reading him I always have the impression that I am reading an excellent translation of a foreign author’ (cited in Meyers 1991, 209).36 Similarly, in her obituary of Conrad in the Times Literary Supplement (14 August 1924), Virginia Woolf spoke of him as ‘our guest’. The obituary went as follows: ‘Suddenly, without giving us time to arrange our thoughts or prepare our phrases, our guest has left us; and his withdrawal without farewell or ceremony is in keeping with his mysterious arrival, long years ago to take up his lodging in this country’ (1924, 493). Woolf’s statement sounds like the incarnation of a most exclusive version of Englishness. Surprisingly enough, although Conrad spent over forty years on the British soil, Woolf still regarded him as merely ‘a stranger among us’, consigned to a state of perpetual exile or homelessness. It goes without saying that none of the remarks expressed by Kipling, Bennett, Wells, and Woolf is overtly racist. Nevertheless, the way these elite readers emphasized Conrad’s foreign origin can be read as indicating the persistence of xenophobic bias in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century England, even among Conrad’s highbrow commentators. These writers’ responses show, above all, how the narrow sense of Englishness with which they were imbued was unwilling fully to integrate otherness in its realm, even when the otherness in question was embodied by an enthusiastic Anglophile such as Conrad. Douglas Lormier (1978) remarks that the British grew more racist during the 1850s and 1860s. This racism, filtering through the works of authors such as Thackeray and Carlyle, increased steadily with British imperial expansionism and grew more intense with the empire’s crisis. Conrad addressed the issue of racism in works including Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, ‘An Outpost of Progress’, and ‘Heart of Darkness’.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

62 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

63

His handling of race politics generated much criticism and controversy. The Nigerian writer, Chinua Achebe notoriously accused Conrad of being a ‘thoroughgoing racist’ (1988, 8).37 This allegation is, of course, difficult to substantiate. For Conrad’s fictional representation of race in ‘Heart of Darkness’ (Achebe’s target in his article) and more generally in his work is ambivalent at worst. But what is most ironic with regard to the question of race politics is that Conrad, who was himself the target of prejudice on the grounds of his East-European origins, should be in turn so coldly dismissed as a visceral racist. Of Conrad’s writing, ‘Amy Foster’ is certainly the work that renders best the sense of Victorian and Edwardian cultural and ethnic exclusiveness. Notions of place, border-crossing, and transcultural relationships are of paramount importance in this short story. They are defining concepts on which hinges Conrad’s conception of culture, race politics, and collectivity. Published in 1901, ‘Amy Foster’ relates the predicament of a Carpathian mountaineer, Yanko Goorall. This poor, ‘innocent’ Central European immigrant, whose shipboard conditions resemble those of today’s ‘boat people’, had planned to emigrate to America, but the ship sinks, leaving Goorall as the sole survivor of the wreck. He is cast away on the coast of Kent, in the villages of Brenzett and Colebrook. For many days, Goorall hides in Hammond’s pig-pound, six miles from the sea. ‘Smith caught him in the stackyard at New Barns’ (Amy 164) and handed him to old Swaffer. The first observation we may make about Goorall is that he has obviously landed in the wrong place. He finds himself in a bewildering linguistic, mental, and cultural place. Likewise, the local people are unsettled by the Carpathian intruder who has drifted into their lives with his ‘queer’, ‘horrid-looking’ aspect and odd cultural and religious practices (Amy 158). Goorall’s intrusion into Colebrook’s self-enclosed community challenges the security of the inhabitants’ culture, causing them to adopt a politics of fear and hostility to counter what they see as a threatening difference. Goorall becomes for the insular Kentish community at best a mere museum curiosity, and at worst a fearsome ‘animal’, a ‘tramp’, and a ‘gypsy’ (Amy 154, 158, 159) that must be domesticated. The images of bestiality and marginality associated with Goorall cast the latter as a dangerous barbarian, eager to wreak havoc on Colebrook’s ordered society. Placed within its historical context, ‘Amy Foster’ registers the topical issue of immigration and the racist sentiment it generated in Britain at the turn of the century. The Kentish villagers’ adherence to a monoglossic notion of Englishness and their anxiety over otherness – embodied

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

British Reception: Englishness and the Act of Reading

by Goorall – reflect contemporary British attitudes towards immigrants. Through the depiction of his protagonist – emblematic of the East and Central European immigrant – Conrad relates the immigrants’ predicament in terms that reveal the harshness of Britain’s modern cultural and race politics. For the most part, he seems to parody English attitudes to emigration by presenting a disoriented, forlorn Goorall as a menace to society’s permanence. By this ironic handling of racial politics, Conrad indicates how far xenophobia feeds on irrational, fantasmatic assumptions that exclude foreigners, not for any real imminent threat they may pose, but because of the hidden anxieties that people often project onto the unfamiliar. Throughout he emphasizes the Colebrook inhabitants’ exclusionary practices and reveals the devastating physical and moral effects on the protagonist. Rejection and isolation are Goorall’s lot. He is ensnared in prejudice and is fittingly compared to ‘an animal under a net’ (Amy 154). Despite his predicament, Goorall is desperately trying to find a place in his new society and win the sympathy of the local inhabitants. In short, Goorall is displaying both in gesture and in (unintelligible) speech a manifest ethical orientation that seeks to bridge the gap between sameness and difference. His attempts at communion or desire to feel and literally touch the Other are expressively rendered in the scene where Goorall made a snatch at Mr Bradley’s pony’s bridle in order to stop the milk-cart and ask for help. But both in this specific instance and in the remainder of the narrative his struggle for acceptance is invalidated by his hosts’ contempt and rejection. The systematic interruption of the protagonist’s striving for friendship and solidarity increases the gulf between him and the villagers. This cultural gap is crystallized in his relationship with his English wife, Amy. The ‘innocent’, ‘unimaginative’ Amy is the only character to have shown compassion for the protagonist. And her marriage with Goorall has provided the latter with a ‘precarious’ standing in the community. Amy is initially seen engaged in friendship and compassion, eager to facilitate the outsider’s inclusion into his new community. But the situation changed dramatically with the birth of their son, Johnny. Instead of consolidating the couple’s union and strengthening Goorall’s integration, Johnny becomes the bone of contention, carrying the seeds of familial destruction. In the end, Johnny’s hybridity turns out to be the space of the impossible, as the identity foisted on him by his mother crystallizes lack and alienation, rather than fusion and plenitude. His very name is reduced to its simplest form, since all reference to his paternal side is erased.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

64 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

65

Through the erasure of Johnny’s father, Amy subscribes to a narrow sense of Englishness that excludes difference and dialogical modes of identification. Her retreat into the realm of sameness is more cogently rendered in the final scene where the dying protagonist is heard begging his wife to bring him his son and a glass of water. This poignant scene dramatizes the characters’ complete estrangement from one another. Even death, which is supposed to trigger the individual’s solidarity with his fellow beings, fails to draw Amy from her indifference. The manifest absence of reversibility grimly revealed in the closing scene conveys a profound sense of existential precariousness. It especially signals Amy’s inability to take difference on its own terms. Despite his attempts to cross over to the other side of the cultural divide, Goorall is relentlessly reminded of his otherness. He dies a lonely death and in the course of the narrative he remains indelibly foreign. The narrator states: ‘His foreignness had a peculiar and indelible stamp. At last people became used to seeing him. But they never became used to him’ (Amy 155). Without seeking to trace biographical connections38 or to identify Conrad with Goorall as does, for instance, Morf,39 there are nonetheless illuminating parallels between the ‘indelible stamp’ of Goorall’s ‘foreignness’ (Amy 168) and Conrad’s own ‘ineradicable’ foreignness. Conrad was, of course, no Goorall for, in contrast to his protagonist, he was culturally resilient and articulate enough to give his life a new direction in adverse circumstances. Yet, the protagonist’s problematic positioning within his new environment and the impact of local cultural and race politics on his life echo Conrad’s own condition as an émigré in England. To some extent, Goorall’s exclusion by his host community reflects Conrad’s own alienation, or, more precisely, the reluctance of his English critics and readers to accept him in his frayed complexity, that is as British and Polish, but, above all, as a transnational writer. This kind of multiple identification was, naturally, not compatible with the narrow views on culture and identity predominant in Britain at the turn of the century. This is no wonder, since a favourable reception of Conrad’s transnational identity would have required a redefinition of Englishness in terms broader and more inclusive than those of Lynd and the Colebrook villagers. Lynd’s attitude to Conrad, like the Colebrook villagers’ attitudes to Goorall, indicates how far Englishness, in its most extreme version, functioned as a coercive, alienating force. This alienating effect is also visible in the overall response of the British readers, highbrow and lowbrow alike, to Conrad’s works. The narrow sense of Englishness expressed in hostile terms by Lynd, but also by Woolf or Wells,

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

British Reception: Englishness and the Act of Reading

impeded Conrad’s popular success. It proved, above all, obdurate to Conrad’s multiple cultural identity and to the transnational character of his fiction. Obviously, in today’s Anglo-Saxon criticism Conrad’s ‘duplex’ nature is broadly assumed, although attempts to undermine or disregard the continental and Polish dimension of Conrad’s poetics are not uncommon in contemporary British scholarship. In most cases, these insular critical endeavours attempt to root Conrad’s fiction in the strict contexts of the Victorian and Edwardian periods in which he lived and wrote. The elision of the transnational dimension of Conrad’s writing betrays appropriative gestures, not unlike those commonly displayed by Polish scholars. Whereas until his death in 1924, British criticism viewed Conrad ambivalently, in contemporary British critical writing Conrad is accepted as almost completely ‘one of us’. His literary greatness is widely acknowledged and his works have generated varied, sophisticated interpretation. However, the fact remains that the polyglossic dimension of his works, multifarious artistic outlook, and transnational inclination of his poetics are not accorded the importance they deserve. I believe that this is largely the result of a propensity to read Conrad through a strictly modernist lens of fragmentation and linguistic bankruptcy, while his writing itself argues for a holistic approach to aesthetics and ethics. The sense of completeness inherent in Conrad’s poetics is intimated in his epistemic and ethical outlook. It is above all reflected in the blending of the ancient and modern, voice and perspective, listening and hearing, and telling and showing. Exploring Conrad’s sense of completeness requires equal attention to the multiple literary sources that informed his poetics and to the synergetic character of his modes of representation. This necessary undertaking should enable us to realize the ways in which Conrad’s murky poetics is in constant dialogue with the sirens of the remote past and the fragmented voices of modernity. The next chapter explores Conrad’s perception of the reader and the act of reading, with a particular emphasis on the classical and modern sources which impacted upon his aesthetics of readership and visual theory.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

66 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Part III Aesthetic Ramifications, Narrative Entanglements, and Fictional Readers

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

This page intentionally left blank

Conrad’s Visual Aesthetics: Classical and Modern Connections

In order properly to grasp Conrad’s visual aesthetics and reader theory, it is crucial to give due consideration to the multiple literary sources that informed his writing. There is ample evidence that Conrad read extensively and that he was an avid reader of both modern and ancient authors and texts. His father Apollo Korzienowski introduced him to the Polish Romantic classics, specifically Mickiewicz and Słovacki, as well as to Shakespeare1 and Victor Hugo, which he translated into Polish.2 Later, Conrad read the ancient Greek and Latin poets, the French Humanists, and modern British, French, and Russian writers, including Dickens, Marryat, Pascal, Flaubert, Maupassant, Anatole France, Stendhal, Balzac, and Turgenev. These authors affected Conrad’s writing in various ways. Conrad himself has acknowledged his debts through direct or implicit reference in his essays, letters, and fiction. For instance, the Shakespearean notion of the world as a stage is constantly reiterated in Conrad’s fiction, notably in Lord Jim, Under Western Eyes, ‘Karain: A Memory’, and Victory.3 He referred to Pascal in Under Western Eyes where the novel’s protagonist Razumov is associated with a ‘thinking reed’, a phrase echoing Pascal’s famous saying, ‘Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed’ (2004, 84). Dickens’s imprint can be felt in the grimy urban setting of The Secret Agent 4 and the influence of Flaubert and Maupassant permeates Conrad’s writing. While little or nothing has been written about Conrad’s debt to the ancient poets and eighteenth-century literature, his borrowing from nineteenth-century English, French, and Russian writers has been widely explored. Hervouet discussed at length the influence of Flaubert, Maupassant, and France on Conrad’s works and provided a catalogue of thematic and technical affinities between these authors. He stressed Conrad’s debt to his French models in a way that gives the impression 69

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

4

that Conrad merely repeated his masters’ lessons with no variation or innovation. Conrad was manifestly an extensive borrower, but one who took care to use his borrowings to achieve new goals. Conrad’s broad reading was highly influential and lent a synergetic character to his fiction. It left its mark on both his handling of themes and on his narrative techniques. Dante is among Conrad’s most obvious early influences. Dante’s Inferno resonates strongly in ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Victory (see Lothe 2001; Jackel 2004). Marlow’s journey across Africa looks like a descent into hell, or in Marlow’s words, a plunge into ‘the gloomy circle of some Inferno’ (HD 156). Though Marlow’s inferno consists of only three stages (as compared to Dante’s nine circles of hell), his movement from the Company Station to the Central and Inner Stations relates an escalation of horror which, to some extent, corresponds to the increasing levels of torment imposed on Dante’s sinners. The main difference, however, is that the sufferers Marlow depicts are not religious sinners but victims of imperialism and capitalist greed. Renaissance literatures and thought equally impacted upon Conrad’s aesthetics and philosophical outlook. Conrad was familiar with such European Humanists as Montaigne, Rabelais, Cervantes, and La Bruyère and their influence on him was manifest. Cervantes, as suggested earlier, left his imprint on Conrad’s characterization in Lord Jim. More generally, Conrad emulated the Humanists’ view of culture and civilization in novels such as ‘Heart of Darkness’, An Outcast of the Islands, and Almayer’s Folly, which deal with colonialism and transcultural encounters (see Hampson 2001; Acheraïou 2008). Conrad’s inclination to scepticism and spirit of inquiry into the nature of knowledge – key features of the Renaissance spirit – are major concerns in his fiction.5 Similarly, the Humanists’ notion of cultural relativity and their relative perception of the concept of barbarism constitute principal issues in Conrad’s works, especially in Almayer’s Folly, ‘Heart of Darkness’, and ‘Karain’ (Acheraïou 2008, 138–57). Conrad’s poetics and philosophical worldview also reveal affinities with Enlightenment thought and the spirit of the eighteenth century, characterized by scepticism and innovation in the arts and politics. It was an age that advocated liberty, toleration, humanitarianism, equality, and progress, many of which ideas found a favourable echo in Conrad’s writing. Not only philosophical ideas, but also several of the artistic experimentations of the eighteenth century, most of which had Greek and Roman roots, also found their way into Conrad’s works. Conrad borrowed from his literary precursors, reinvesting their themes

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

70 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

71

and techniques to achieve original expressive artistic and ideological effects. As Najder (1983a) pointed out, Conrad learned some Greek and Latin at school in Poland. He later read the Greek and Roman classical poets and philosophers whose mark can be discerned at the level of both form and content in his work. Conrad undoubtedly owes much to the ancient poetics and theories of narrative form, as will be shown. Like most Victorian and early twentieth-century writers, Conrad admired and drew on the classical Greek poets. Nevertheless, he was no Hellenist in the way that Matthew Arnold, Virginia Woolf or E.M. Forster could be. Conrad did not respond to Greek literature and culture with the high enthusiasm of a Hellenist; his relation to the ancient Greek world was subtler and more contained.6 Vestiges of the classical past are diffused in his writing, informing textual structure, characterization, and thematics. Conrad’s engagement with classical literature, myths, and history can be easily discerned in such works as ‘Heart of Darkness’, The Arrow of Gold, The Mirror of the Sea, and Nostromo. In ‘Heart of Darkness’, Marlow evokes Roman imperialism, which he connects to modern imperial Britain. In the same novella he refers to Greek legends, redeploying the Greek myth of the Three Fates to anticipate Marlow’s plunge into darkness. The horrors awaiting Marlow are anticipated by both the ‘ominous’ atmosphere of the Brussels offices and by the two women, ‘guarding the door of Darkness, knitting black wool’, that Marlow met there (HD 147). The Arrow of Gold echoes Homer’s Odyssey, as the narrator is repeatedly compared to a ‘Young Ulysses’ (AG 13). The Mirror of the Sea mentions the ‘Pillars of Hercules’ (MS 154) and invokes the Battle of Salamis (480 BC), which Conrad treats with ironic detachment: ‘It is very probable that, had the Battle of Salamis never been fought, the face of the world would have been much as we behold it now, fashioned by the mediocre inspiration and the short-sighted labours of men’ (MS 149). The Battle of Salamis, which saw the defeat of the Persian empire by Greece, was considered of great significance by most ancient and modern historians and writers, among them Albert Camus and Paul Valéry. It was interpreted as the victory of Greek civilization over barbarity embodied by the Persians and the Orient.7 Conrad departs from this Manichean vision of history in terms that reveal a scepticism about such idealistic perceptions of civilization. Nostromo contains references to Greek myths and legends and some critics have linked this novel directly to ancient historical narratives. Aaron Fogel argues that Nostromo was inspired by Thucydides’ narrative of the Peloponnesian war (431–404 BC) fought by democratic Athens

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conrad’s Visual Aesthetics

72 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

The counterpoint in Nostromo between dense realpolitik and scenes of ironically framed set speeches resembles Thucydides’ version of the classical irony about speech and action. Thucydides’ most famous problem scene is itself a colonial ‘forced dialogue,’ the Dialogue at Melos. Nostromo recalls Thucydides also in its intricate and demanding sentence style based on phrasal verbs; and in its historical context, that of a colonial world of ‘force’ and dismal dependency, in which political speech conceals its unfreedom by rhetorical flourish. (1985, 98) Fogel’s contextualization of Nostromo sheds light on Conrad’s subtle use of classical literature and history when framing his tales. However, while Fogel usefully refers to the interconnections between Thucydides and Conrad’s structural and thematic representations, he seems, nonetheless, to lose sight of the fact that Thucydides’ influence goes beyond the level of historical context, sentence structure, and speech and action to encompass Conrad’s overall theory of representation and visual perception. Specifically, the ancient poet’s narrative theory bears directly on Conrad’s visual aesthetics – an important aspect of his poetics that is central to Nostromo and predominant in his entire oeuvre. Before probing Conrad’s visual aesthetics, it is important to mention another critic, E.M.W. Tillyard who, many years before Fogel, also discussed Nostromo’s relation to classical writing. In The Epic Strain in the English Novel, Tillyard devotes an entire chapter to Nostromo. He examines the novel’s thematic and structural density and points to its epic scale, conveyed in the dense historical input, breadth of characterization, and remarkable handling of thought and action. Tillyard writes: Conrad’s treatment of the great themes of action and reflection, of material interests and moral idealism, recalls the Homeric theme in the Iliad of the irreconcilable virtues of heroic valour and the ordered domestic life. Conrad’s union of colour and romance and fairy-lore

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

and its empire against the Peloponnesian league, led by oligarchic Sparta: ‘The strongest and most similar text among all Nostromo’s ancestors may be The Peloponnesian Wars, and not the later histories which Conrad used for documentation’ (1985, 98). On the same page, Fogel draws parallels between Conrad’s handling of speech and action in this narrative and that of Thucydides:

Conrad’s Visual Aesthetics

73

Thematically, Nostromo displays manifest epic effects that testify to Conrad’s emulation of Homer’s poetics. Its thematic development, however, lacks the traditional epic progression towards a conclusion marked by heroic achievement and self-fulfilment. Despite its affinities with Homer’s epics, therefore, Nostromo differs importantly from the Iliad and the Odyssey in both thematic orientation and aesthetic and ideological trajectory. Whereas the Odyssey celebrates Hellenic military might and cultural supremacy, Nostromo is largely mock-heroic. It relates among other things the corruption of modern ideologies – capitalism and socialism – incarnated respectively by Charles Gould and Nostromo. If Homeric themes and motifs can be easily traced in several of Conrad’s works, it is in his narrative methods that the stamp of the epic poets is most perceptible. There are many striking similarities between Conrad’s narrative strategies and Homer’s mode of presentation suggestive of Conrad’s emulation of the ancient master. Conrad’s characteristic dualvoice narrative model, composed of a frame narrator and a named first-person narrator, supported by a host of secondary narrators, is a prominent narrative pattern in Homer’s Odyssey. In terms of method of representation and narrator-narratee/author-reader relationships, Lord Jim – one of Conrad’s most technically sophisticated works – is no doubt the novel which in narrative terms most closely resembles Homer’s Odyssey. The Odyssey is based on embedded narratives, with a ‘primary’ narrator and numerous secondary narrators maintaining the momentum of the story.8 Similarly, Lord Jim’s stratified narrative structure rests on an anonymous frame narrator complemented by Marlow’s voice which in turn brings in the voices of several other characters, including Stein, Jim, Brierly, and the French Lieutenant. Homer’s secondary narrators have limited knowledge9 of the depicted events; so, too, Conrad’s auxiliary sources of enunciation have only partial insights into Marlow’s mediated tale. The way in which Marlow orchestrates and passes on to the secondary narrators a single obsessive tale – Jim’s predicament after his jump from the Patna – echoes the role of Homer’s ‘primary narrator’ in the Odyssey. In this canonical text, Homer’s narrator ‘carefully distributes the presentation of one and the same story over different secondary narrators’ (De Jong 2004a, 23).

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

with irony and the most accurate eye for the living detail recalls Homer’s union of the fabulous with the actual in the Odyssey. (1958, 167)

Conrad’s debt to Homer is also reflected in his reiteration of the epic poet’s device of establishing a hierarchy between his primary and secondary narrators, on the one hand, and among his narratees, on the other. This is a recurrent pattern in Conrad’s texts and one of the utmost significance with regard to his perception of the reader. Conrad’s narratives, too, show affinities with Homer’s mode of representation. Homer’s omniscient narrator in the Iliad appeals to an implicit audience through the indeterminate second-person device (see De Jong 2004a, 22). In like manner, Conrad’s narrators in ‘Heart of Darkness’, Lord Jim, and Victory, among others, directly solicit their narratees in order to elicit their interest and sympathy. However, notwithstanding these obvious correlations, Conrad does not merely repeat the rhetorical devices of Homer and other classical writers, but employs them with variety and sophistication. Thus, if similarities between Conrad and Homer can be located with relative ease, differences too can easily be pinpointed. The first difference lies in the authors’ conception of their secondary sources of enunciation. While Conrad’s secondary narrators, specifically in Lord Jim, tend to bring some measure of novelty to the tale, Homer’s secondary narratives, particularly in the hymns, are on the whole merely iterative. As Rene Nünlist rightly observes, these secondary narrators ‘usually cover an aspect of the primary narrative itself’, such as ‘repeating internal analepsis’ (2004, 39). A second discrepancy can be discerned in the two authors’ conception of their primary narrators. Whereas Homer features a prominent, allknowing primary narrator, whose knowledge flows from the infallible Muses that inspire the poet, Marlow in Lord Jim or ‘Heart of Darkness’, for example, is neither omniscient nor reliable. Marlow is a limited vehicle of knowledge in these two stories; so are most of Conrad’s narrators. Owing to this epistemological deficiency, we may argue that the Conradian narrator is on the whole more Herodotean than Homeric. Time and again, Marlow in Lord Jim admits to lacking knowledge and understanding of his fictional material. Likewise, Herodotus’ narrator in Histories, although highly knowledgeable, displays limited knowledge or ignorance on several occasions, as when he answers his narratees: ‘As to the reply which the Lydians received from Amphiaraus . . . I cannot say what it was, for nothing is recorded of it, except that Croesus held that from this oracle too he had received a true answer’ (cited in De Jong 2004b, 106). Conrad is a sophisticated experimental stylist, and the idea of his deriving technical devices from such remote classical sources as Homer or Herodotus may come as a surprise. But modern literary theories have deep roots and Conrad was by no means the only modern writer to be

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

74 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

75

indebted to Homer and to the later Greek poets. Most key modern stylists from the eighteenth century onwards drew extensively on themes and narrative techniques used by Homer, Herodotus, Theocritus, Apollonius of Rhodes, Telemachus, and others. The technical experimentation that we tend to associate with modernity and modernism is not in fact specific to modern literature or to modern art. Several of the technical methods hailed as new in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and indeed in the twentieth century are classical legacies. They can be traced back at least to third-century BC Greece. Even the dramatized self-consciousness characteristic of modern and modernist narrators was common at that period. Hunter rightly observes that: ‘The poetry of Theocritus and his imitators is important evidence for a self-conscious concern in third-century and later Greek poetry with narrative experimentation’ (2004, 94).10 Cuypers discusses Apollonius of Rhodes and further remarks that Apollonius’ ‘Argonautica engages in an overt self-conscious, pervasive, and variegated dialogue with his narratees, his sources, and the Muses, in which he displays a distinct personality’ (2004, 61). The Herodotean narrator is likewise a self-conscious narrator, who often draws attention to his presence and appeals to his audience through such apostrophes as: ‘I will tell you’, ‘let so much be said about’, ‘I return to my logos’, ‘as I have said earlier’. In most of his intrusions Herodotus’ narrator self-consciously refers to his role as historian. He often explains, and sometimes apologizes, to his narratee for his digressions and narrative omissions. Most of these narrative devices recur in eighteenth-century fiction, specifically in the writings of Sterne and Fielding whose debt to classical authors has been well documented.11 In the same way as the Herodotean narrator, Sterne and Fielding’s narrators are prone to explain their narrative project to their readers and explicitly comment on their characters’ deeds.12 In Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews as well as in Tristram Shandy, the narrators’ main aim is to appeal to their audience’s interest, school them into good reading of character and situation, and teach them moral lessons. Conrad also often solicits his narratees/implied readers and his narrators’ relation to their audiences equally involves a measure of didacticism, although of a quite different kind, as we shall see. With regard to reader-response analysis, in particular, Conrad shows a keen interest – which he shares with Fielding and Sterne – in soliciting his audience’s attention and sympathy. As Conrad’s former friend and collaborator Ford Madox Ford once remarked, he and Conrad never lost sight of the reader.13 However, Conrad’s relationship with his reader is less overt than that of his predecessors. Whereas Sterne and Fielding

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conrad’s Visual Aesthetics

feature self-conscious narrators directly addressing, openly explaining, and frequently apologizing to readers who are named as such, Conrad almost never mentions the word ‘reader’ in his fiction or solicits his reader directly. Lord Jim and ‘Karain’ are exceptions to this rule and in both a Conradian narrator uses the word ‘reader’. Even here, however, the concept of reader is rhetorical and has little structural significance. A close investigation of Conrad’s poetics reveals that his ethics of readership is based on a dynamics of continuity and rupture, derivation and innovation; so, too, is the visual aesthetics underlying his reader theory. The way Conrad handles the ethics of readership alongside the attendant aesthetics of visuality shows so many affinities with classical and eighteenth-century visual theory that it is difficult not to suspect Conrad of either direct or indirect borrowing from these sources. Conrad incorporates visual effects in his works and his focus on eyes and seeing is indicative of the pictorial impulse of his poetics. A number of recent critics have drawn attention to Conrad’s close connections to visual arts. Richard Hand addresses at length Conrad’s relation to theatre (2005). He discusses Conrad’s theatrical adaptations and highlights his ambiguous attitude to drama. Meanwhile, he underlines Conrad’s preference for cinema over stage.14 Stephen Donovan in Conrad and Popular Culture examines Conrad’s relationship to the visual arts and points to the saturation of his works, notably Lord Jim and Under Western Eyes, with such visual instruments as ‘telescopes’, ‘electric lights’, ‘magic mirrors’, and ‘kaleidoscopes’. As he explores Conrad’s investment in visual culture, Donovan also refers to the influence of drama, photography,15 and cinema on his narrative methods. Conrad’s interest in visual technology, particularly cinema, is consonant with his overall enthusiasm for modern technical innovations. His harnessing of modern visual modes of representation to his art shows how far he was a genuine product of modern culture; a culture in which verbal and visual modes of communication feed upon each other. Michel (1987, 47) remarks: One of the most striking features of modern culture has been the intensive, almost compulsive, collaboration between practitioners of the word and practitioners of the image . . . We do find what amounts to a symbiotic relationship between verbal and pictorial modes in modern art and literature. Modernity, as Michel observed, saw a close collaboration between writing and painting, the verbal and the pictorial. Of course, Michel is not the

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

76 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Conrad’s Visual Aesthetics

77

Even though artists with colour and design, and writers with words and phrases, represent the same subjects, they differ in the material and the manner of their imitation; and yet the underlying end and aim of both is one and the same; the most effective historian is he who, by a vivid representation of emotions and characters, makes his narration like a painting. Assuredly Thucydides is always striving for this vividness . . . in his writing, since it is his desire to make the reader a spectator, as it were, and to produce vividly in the minds of those who peruse his narrative the emotions of amazement and consternation which were experienced by those who beheld them. (1936, IV. 347.3) Plutarch emphasized the painterly features of writing and insisted on the need for the historian or poet to provide vivid sketches that would provoke the visual sense of the reader who would thus be transformed into a spectator or viewer of the work. The pictorial quality of poetics, mentioned by Plutarch, is a key feature of modern arts, starting with eighteenth-century fiction. Sterne’s writing is a good case in point. His use of pictorial effects may have been stimulated by his earlier attempts at painting.16 Tristram Shandy offers an explicit instance of Sterne’s identification of his writing with painting. He states: ‘Writers of my stamp have one principle in common with painters. Where an exact copying makes our pictures less striking, we choose the less evil; deeming it even more pardonable to trespass against truth, than beauty’ (TS 91). Sterne’s employment of painterly devices did not, of course, go unnoticed. A number of writers and critics pointed out the ‘painterly’ nature of both Sterne’s short sermons, and long fictions such as Tristram Shandy. Scott, for instance, responded most enthusiastically to Sterne’s painterly descriptions. As Paul Franssen remarks, Walter Scott considered the pictorial feature of Sterne’s writing as ‘one of the greatest merits of [his] books’ (1990, 161). For Anna Laetitia Barbaud, Sterne ‘resembles those painters who can give expression to a figure by two or three strokes of bold outline, leaving the imagination to fill up the sketch’ (cited in Gerard 2006, 13). R.F. Brissenden evokes Sterne’s pictorial vocabulary, noting that he ‘often uses the language of the artist, speaking of strokes, tints, outlines, attitudes, lights, keeping, colouring and design with the

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

first to observe these interrelations, nor is modernity to be understood as the cradle of such syncretism. Many centuries ago, Plutarch referred to the close links between the two means of representation. He wrote in Moralia:

fluency and assurance of one who knows exactly what such terms mean’ (1964, 94). The focus on Sterne here is important for two main reasons: first, Sterne operates as a site of confluence of ancient and modern poetics; second, he is emblematic of the propensity of eighteenth-century writing to imitate the visual arts and make the reader ‘see’ (see Hagstrum 1958, 139–40; Gerard 2006). Sterne’s close attention to visual perception, his painterly diction, and sketch-like descriptions led some critics to call his narrative methods ‘impressionistic’.17 The association of Sterne with impressionism is highly significant. For it urges us not only to reconsider the view that Flaubert was the ‘founder’ of impressionism, but also Hervouet’s contention that ‘a number of Conrad’s techniques currently associated with the impressionist movement in painting or in literature have their source in Flaubert’ (1990, 197). If Sterne rather than Flaubert was the precursor of literary impressionism, this assumption needs some qualification. Drawing his own inspiration from the ancient Greek and Latin authors, Sterne was seen by many modern writers and critics as a prodigious stylist and experimentalist in narrative form. He was influential on several of his contemporaries and on later writers, among them Dickens, Thackeray, Marryat, and Carlyle. A number of modernist writers, including Woolf and Joyce, spoke of Sterne as a modernist avant la lettre (see Keymer 2002; Pierce and de Voogd 1996). Unlike Woolf and Joyce, Conrad never mentioned any connection to Sterne. But the absence of direct references to an author should not presuppose absence of influence. And in the case of Conrad, his affinities with Sterne – particularly in relation to his handling of the author-reader relationship – are such that it is hard not to infer a Sternean inspiration (these affinities will be studied in Chapter 8). In line with Sterne’s writing and the ancient poetics, Conrad’s fiction and outlook display painterly features that demand comparisons with painters and sculptors. The English poet, Arthur Symons, whose work Conrad admired, compared him to Rodin and praised the pictorial qualities of his descriptions: Only great painters have created atmosphere to the extent that Conrad has: and Conrad’s is if anything more mysterious, menacing and more troubling to the senses and to the nerves, than theirs; he creates thrilling effects by mere force of suggestion, elusive as some vague mist, full of illusion, of rare magic, which can become poisonous or sorcerous. (Symons 1925, 28)

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

78 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

79

Conrad also identified himself with Rodin as well as with Whistler. In a 1902 letter to William Blackwood, Conrad wrote: ‘I am modern, and I would rather recall Wagner the musician and Rodin the Sculptor who both had to starve a little in their day – and Whistler the painter who made Ruskin the critic foam at the mouth with scorn and indignation. They too have arrived. They had to suffer for being “new”’ (CL 2, 418). It is significant that both Conrad and Symons should equate the task of a writer with the work of a painter or a sculptor, and their rhetoric suggests analogies with the declarations of the Assyrian rhetorician and satirist, Lucian (AD 125–180). Lucian wrote in Greek, and his works were important influences on Swift and Rabelais, among other writers. For Lucian, as he states in The Way to Write History, an ideal historian ‘should be like Phidias, Praxiteles, Alcamenes, or any great sculptor’ (1905, 51). In addition to a capacity to present historical facts lucidly, Lucian’s historian must have the precision and expressiveness of illustrious Greek sculptors such as Phidias, whose Zeus Chryselephantine is considered as one of the world’s seven marvels. Lucian stresses that in order to give the raw historical material shape and create a powerful visual appeal for the reader or hearer, the historian has to organize his ‘solid facts’ skilfully and express them in the most vivid ways: The historian’s business is similar – to superinduce upon events the charm of order, and set them forth in the most lucid fashion he can manage. When subsequently a hearer feels as though he were looking at what is being told him, and expresses his approval, then our historical Phidias’s work has reached perfection, and received its appropriate reward. (51) Lucian sets stellar standards for the historian. He expects him to reach a degree of expressiveness and dexterity equal to those of Phidias (490– 430 BC). Similarly, Conrad anticipates the novelist to give his material as solid a shape as possible in the attempt to attain vividness and supreme visual impression. Conrad’s identification of his works with sculpture and painting is manifest, yet there is, curiously enough, no book-length study on this fascinating subject. Gillon is, to my knowledge, the only Conrad scholar to have examined the connections between Conrad’s aesthetics and painting. He rightly claims in Joseph Conrad that ‘painting was one of the arts Conrad had in mind when stating his artistic credo, in that same Preface to The Nigger’ (1982, 172; see also Gillon 1978). Before discussing

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conrad’s Visual Aesthetics

this Preface, let me note that Conrad’s interest in painting is suggested in the presence of painters and lovers of painting throughout his works, particularly in The Arrow of Gold, ‘An Outpost of Progress’, and ‘Heart of Darkness’. Kurtz, for example, the remarkable ivory collector, is also a journalist and a painter. Conrad’s painterly inclination is even more expressly conveyed in his 1920 Author’s Note to The Secret Agent where he described Nostromo as his ‘largest canvas’ (SA 229). The word ‘canvas’ and its variants recur in Conrad’s fiction. In ‘Karain’, for instance, the authorial narrator insists on the theatricality of the Malay world and compares its inertia to the ‘immobility of a painted scene’ (K 41). In Lord Jim, Marlow refers to the Bugis world as ‘a picture created by fancy on a canvas’ (LJ 241). In both cases, the terms ‘canvas’ and ‘painted scene’ describing the indigenous populations connote a colonial propensity to turn the natives into a static reality, fixed in an ahistorical, eternal now of backwardness and savagery. These direct references to painting reinforce the pictorial quality of Conrad’s fiction, which is evident both in his descriptions of events and in his style. Conrad’s style is strongly imagistic, a characteristic which, as he admitted, is far from a random occurrence. He told Arthur Symons: ‘I write by images’ (cited in Stape and Knowles 1996, 92). The pictographic quality of Conrad’s writing was reiterated in 1924 by Edwin Muir who observed: ‘Mr. Conrad writes in pictures, for the pictures come, and what he shows us is not action, but a progression of dissolving scenes, continuous and living, which in the end reflect action and give us a true apprehension of it’ (1924, 50). Many critics saw signs of impressionism in Conrad’s insistence on ‘pictures’, ‘images’, and sight. Cedric Watts notes that ‘Marlow’s emphasis on the difficulty of understanding and communicating his own individual experience aligns “Heart of Darkness” with the subjective relativism of the impressionist attitude’ (1977, 179). Todd Bender regards Conrad’s emphasis on gaze as a hallmark of his impressionism: ‘On many levels, Conrad’s privileging of sight is characteristic of the impressionist position’ (1997, 102).18 John G. Peters has elaborated on Conrad’s impressionistic outlook and underlined Conrad’s frequent use of impressionist methods of representation: non-linear narratives, limited perspective, and multiple focalization (Peters 2001). Conrad’s focus on sight is a recurrent pattern in his works, letters, and declarations about art. His theory of literature and visual aesthetics is eloquently framed in the Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’,19 a dense, rich formulation of a number of theoretical aesthetic precepts that came to be seen as Conrad’s literary credo. From the very outset,

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

80 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Conrad’s Visual Aesthetics

81

A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line. And art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential – their one illuminating and convincing quality – the very truth of their existence. (NN vii) According to Conrad’s definition, a fiction that aspires to the status of art should first of all render justice to the visible world. In short, it should, in its broader framework, follow the Aristotelian and Platonic principle of mimesis. For both Aristotle and Plato, mimesis is centrally concerned with showing rather than telling. In Conrad’s representations, mimesis or showing is not bent on a faithful rendering of the physical world, but geared towards grasping deep human emotions. From his standpoint, art should go beyond the visible material world to seize the ‘manifold truth’ underlying it. This elusive truth, Conrad suggests, could only be uncovered by exploring the ‘forms’, ‘light[s]’, ‘colours’, ‘shadows’ in which aspects this matter appears to the artist. Conrad obviously expects art to stimulate the reader’s senses, which he considers the primary target of all true art: Fiction – if it at all aspires to be art – appeals to temperament. And in truth it must be, like painting, like music, like all art, the appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments whose subtle and resistless power endows passing events with their true meaning, and creates the moral, the emotional atmosphere of the place and time. Such an appeal to be effective must be an impression conveyed through the senses; and, in fact, it cannot be made in any other way, because temperament, whether individual or collective, is not amenable to persuasion. All art, therefore, appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses, if its high desire is to reach the secret spring of responsive emotions. It must strenuously

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conrad distinguishes fiction from art, insisting that not every fiction is art. At the same time, he makes clear that for fiction to become art a set of conditions should be met:

82 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

In this Preface, as in most of his works, Conrad conceives of word and image as complementary means of representation and denotation. He combines the abstracting powers of the written word with the immediacy of the image to enlighten the reader. Overall, Conrad views true fiction as a mega-poetics that encompasses other arts: sculpture, painting, and music. As he defines it, fiction stands for a site of plasticity par excellence, where operates the synergy between word and sight, sound and colour, voice and gesture, form and substance. In turn, Conrad perceives the writer’s role as a symbiotic telling and showing activity, in which verbal and visual modes of representation collaborate to stimulate the reader into active and productive reading: ‘My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel – it is, before all, to make you see. That – and no more, and it is everything’ (NN x). Conrad’s Preface received a great deal of critical attention and this passage in particular has been much quoted. However, the discussion of the Preface has often turned out to be more descriptive than analytical. Furthermore, it is usually not sufficiently contextualized to bring to light the complexity and theoretical ramifications of Conrad’s literary credo. In the Preface Conrad was openly tending towards the same goal: appealing to the senses in the hope of attaining that ‘clearness of sincerity’ and power of suggestion that would ‘make the reader see’. Hillis Miller discussed Conrad’s visual theory, arguing: No reader of Conrad can doubt that he means to make the reader see not only the vivid facts of the story he tells but the evasive truth behind them, of which they are the obscure revelation . . . To see the facts, out there in the sunlight, is also to see the dark truth that lies behind them. (1985, 37) Miller further generalizes: ‘All Conrad’s work turns on this double paradox, first the paradox of the two senses of seeing, seeing as physical vision and seeing as seeing through, as penetrating to or unveiling the hidden invisible truth, and second the paradox of seeing the darkness in terms of the light’ (37). Watts in turn pointed to ‘the ambiguity of “see”, which can mean both “visualize” and (as in the exclamation “I see!”)

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music – which is the art of arts. (NN ix)20

83

“comprehend” or “gain insight”’ (1988, 131). Watts referred to Shelley and Schopenhauer to contextualize this assumption,21 but did not go back far enough in time to reveal how deep-rooted Conrad’s idea of the visual was. Donovan, too, discussed Conrad’s visual aesthetics and he similarly linked it strictly to modernity: Conrad’s ‘startling claim to have used cinema as a model invites us to rethink his much-analysed promise “to make you see” in terms of the challenge posed to literary representation by moving pictures’ (2005, 48). He continued: ‘Conrad’s emphasis in the Preface upon visual experience – fiction’s “beholders” and art’s duty to “compel men . . . to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and colour, of sunshine and shadows” – certainly becomes less mysterious when restored to the context of early cinema’ (60). Donovan explained Conrad’s emphasis on visual perception by invoking his ‘interest in optical entertainments and new technology around the time that he composed The Nigger of the “Narcissus” ’ (44).22 As he explored the interconnection ‘between Conrad’s literary project and popular visual entertainment’, he went on to claim, rightly so, that these ‘intersections between Conrad’s literary project and popular visual entertainment at the level of theme, narrative and lexical style find iconic expression in The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, above all, in the character of Donkin’ (2005, 61). Donovan has usefully pinpointed Conrad’s alliance of literary and visual modes of representation. In the process, he nevertheless tends to forget that Conrad’s enthusiasm for cinema and employment of cinematic techniques were motivated by a more down-to-earth preoccupation with the future of the reading public. Like most modernist writers, Conrad was afraid that this new medium – cinema – might drive people away from fiction reading. This modernist anxiety was strongly articulated by Virginia Woolf who complained that the public’s eyes had been mesmerized by the modern means of entertainment, specifically cinema and radio broadcasts (see Silver 1979; Zwerdling 1977). By instilling visual and cinematographic effects into his narratives Conrad was, thus, in practice, mainly seeking to attract an audience which had grown increasingly infatuated with the new technologies of communication and distraction. Conrad’s interest in visual arts is evidenced in his abundant use of techniques introduced by the new media. However, if Conrad manifestly drew on the technical novelties of his time, these modern techniques of representation are by no means his only source of inspiration. Conrad’s visual aesthetics is, in other words, not monological, as we tend to think;

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conrad’s Visual Aesthetics

rather, it is profoundly dialogic and multifarious, tapping simultaneously into various sources. For this reason, it needs to be fitted into the much wider aesthetic and intellectual frame that informed it. This frame naturally includes modernity, but also reaches back to the poetics of such poets and philosophers as Aristotle, Plato, Cicero, Plutarch, and Quintilian. Conrad, as we have seen, had an extensive knowledge of the ancient Greek and Latin writers. His wide-ranging reading had, in one way or another, exposed him to the ancients’ visual theories and experimentation with narrative forms. Conrad’s knowledge of the classical modes of representation must also have been reinforced by his French literary model, Flaubert. We know that Flaubert was a great admirer of the ancients and frequently encouraged his acquaintances to read the classics.23 His technical innovations, hailed as revolutionary by his contemporaries and later generations, were in large part derived from the Greek and Latin writers that he revered. Flaubert was, of course, well acquainted with Aristotle and Plato’s theorizing about narrative form. His exhortation to ‘reproduce’ the world and be ‘exposants’ (showers) instead of ‘discutants’ (tellers) is in the end a repetition of the classical theory of mimesis, with showing as its hallmark (163). It is in this respect striking that Hervouet did not mention that Flaubert’s own theory of fiction, which impacted upon Conrad, was highly derivative. Hervouet recognized that ‘Flaubert took from Plato the idea that the True, the Beautiful, and the Good are one and eternal’ (1990, 208), but failed to observe that several of Flaubert’s other technical strategies also had a classical foundation. Devices comprising the ‘witness technique’, the ‘emphasis on the visual’, and ‘the use of terms related to the making of pictures such as “vision”, “form”, “colour”’24 – deemed by Hervouet emblematic of Flaubertian style (1990, 201) – were common features in the work of ancient Greek and Latin poets. A thorough understanding of Conrad’s visual aesthetics and ethics of readership requires therefore an appreciation of the ancient visual theories and conceptions of the reader that fed into modern theories of representation, including those of Flaubert and Maupassant. This necessary contextualization should shed light on the deeper roots of Conrad’s literary credo articulated in the Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. It should especially help us to realize that Conrad’s goal of making the reader see is neither a peculiarly Conradian (or Flaubertian) preoccupation nor a specifically modern(ist) one. It was instead a central concern throughout Western literary and intellectual history, beginning with the ancient Greek and Roman poets. It gained importance and

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

84 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

85

unprecedented self-consciousness from the eighteenth century onwards, reaching its climax in twentieth-century writing. The ancient visual poetics or enargeia was, as we have seen, constantly invoked and given prominence by eighteenth-century authors, notably Joseph Addison, Sterne, Fielding, and Diderot. Most of these writers employed visual language in their writings. Conrad, whose aesthetics shows manifest affinities with classical and eighteenth-century authors, adopts in his narratives rhetorical procedures that find their roots in the classical notion of enargeia. As suggested in the passages taken from the Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ Conrad is, consciously or not, redeploying the classical principles of enargeia, defined by the ancient critics as the capacity of language to create visual presence and strong emotions by bringing vividly the event before the ‘reader’s eyes’. In its ancient conception, enargeia was a rhetorical device whose aim was to achieve clarity, immediacy, and strong emotional appeal to the audience. Most of these qualities are emphasized in Conrad’s Preface. The goal of enargeia for the ancient Greek and Latin orators was to have a vivid effect upon the audience’s senses, particularly their sight. Conrad’s striving to make the reader ‘see’ is, in consequence, continuous with the aesthetic inclination of the classical poets and orators. Cicero associated enargeia with ‘actuality’ and ‘illumination’ – both concepts are central to Conrad’s Preface. To Cicero, visual perception was fundamental and he gave sight primacy over the other senses: ‘Every metaphor is directed to the senses, but chiefly to the eye, which is the sharpest of all’ (De Oratore iii. 161). Horace likewise stressed the centrality of sight. He stated in Art of Poetry: ‘Actions may either be performed on the stage or reported when performed. What comes through the ear is less effective in stirring the mind than what is put before our faithful eyes and told by the spectator to himself’ (1989, 1.179). The Ciceronian idealization of sight was reiterated by Addison, Sterne, Fielding, and Diderot in the eighteenth century. All these authors assigned to seeing a privileged status. Addison reiterated Cicero’s observation that ‘our Sight is the most perfect of all our senses’ (cited in Bond 1965, 3:535). Addison’s observation should, of course, be placed in the context of the eighteenth century with its focus on visual aesthetics, stimulated by such technical innovations as the camera obscura which, as Wettlaufer rightly observes, led to ‘the general and consistent association of the camera obscura with painting’. This association ‘was reflected in the widespread use of painterly reference in descriptions of the mind and ideation’ (Wettlaufer 2003, 50). From ancient times to the modern era, therefore, rhetorical success was premised on the orator’s ability to appeal

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conrad’s Visual Aesthetics

86 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Vivid illustration . . . or, as some prefer to call it, representation, is something more than mere clearness since the latter merely lets itself be seen, whereas the former thrusts itself upon our notice. For oratory fails of its full effect, and does not assert itself as it should, if its appeal is merely to the hearing . . . and not displayed in their living truth to the eyes of the mind. (1921, VII. iii. 61–2) Conrad’s conception of rhetoric, narrative method, and reader response in his Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ is very close to the ideas of Quintilian. It clearly links the faculties of hearing and seeing, the goal of which connection is, Conrad states, to stimulate his reader’s auditory power and capacity for visualization. The ultimate effect consists of awakening the audience’s cognitive skills and stirring their deeper emotions. Enargeia, in its ancient rhetorical sense, was closely linked to production of the visually evocative language whose attainment was the aim of every orator. The Ciceronian phrase ‘to bring (something) before one’s eyes’ often recurred in Latin literary works. It meant offering a clear picture of an event so that the hearer could visualize it in the clearest possible ways. Rhetorical clarity and vividness were intended not only to make the audience see, but to convey the sense of a narrated event and enable its visualization in the mind’s eye. A primordial quality, sight, for the ancient Greek and Latin poets and orators, was conceived of as a dynamic process. It was an active mode of perception and its invocation was intended to trigger the audience’s emotional and cognitive involvement in the depicted reality. The Ciceronian emphasis on sight and the desire to make the audience ‘see’ are not only evident in Conrad’s Preface, but also permeate his fiction and letters. In a letter to Blackwood, Conrad stated: ‘I aim at stimulating vision in the reader. If after reading part 1st you don’t see my man then I’ve absolutely failed and must begin again – or leave the thing alone’ (CL 1, 381). For Conrad, seeing embraces a wide semantic field. It involves the physical act of looking at the material world and the intellectual effort of understanding, that is to say the capacity to see through and beyond the literalism of facts.25 In novels like Lord Jim, Under Western Eyes, and ‘Heart of Darkness’, which will be closely examined later,

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

efficiently to the hearers’ senses, particularly to their vision, or more precisely to their mind’s eye, as Quintilian observed in the Institutio Oratoria:

87

Conrad’s visual inclination is so pronounced that he seems to desire not only to turn the reader into an astute, proficient seer, but also to enable him/her to see with the same eye as the author. This is apparently a common temptation or aspiration among artists and writers. Conrad’s French master, Flaubert explicitly evoked his desire to ‘become literally an eye’.26 He also referred to the power of some writers to shift their readers from mere observers into visionary readers. Flaubert once spoke of Shakespeare as a poet who literally turns his reader into an eye. He enthusiastically declared that after reading such a great dramatist, ‘one is no longer a person but an eye’.27 Prior to Flaubert, Charlotte Brontë invoked this pictorial ideal, stating in response to a novel she had just read: ‘this book seems to give me eyes’ (cited in Wettlaufer 2003, 9). Conrad, in works with a marked dramatic resonance, such as Lord Jim and Under Western Eyes, also betrays a propensity virtually to transform the reader into an eye. The appeal to the immediacy of sight by both the ancient poets and those following in their footsteps, including Conrad, had many aims. Visual devices are employed that clearly intend to make the reader into an active observer, sometimes a voyeur.28 Most importantly, they seek to reduce the distance between the represented thing and its visual presence, as well as between the speaker and hearer, the shower and viewer. Thus, the core of enargeia resides not in mere description, but in going beyond a simple rendering of scenes and events, making the described phenomena tangible and vivid to the mind’s eye of the audience – a major tenet of Conrad’s poetics. The way Conrad’s literary theory is formulated in the Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ suggests that he was aware of the classical wisdom of counting on imaged, vivid speech, rather than disembodied abstract formulations in arousing the reader’s sensibility. In this, he seems to espouse Aristotle’s preference for words which create strong visual effects as opposed to abstractions that may dull the audience’s interest. Aristotle declared in The Art of Rhetoric that the public is more sensitive to ‘words that set an event before their eyes; for they must see the thing occurring now, not hear it as in the future’ (III. iii. x). The ancient poets’ use of words to create vivid images of their fictional material comprises part of an obvious effort to guide the audience’s perceptions, emotions, and understanding. At the same time, emphasis on the visual effect betrays the authors’ awareness of the limitations of language as a means of representation and communication. The classical authors’ discovery of the rhetorical power of language gained particular cogency in Western literature from the eighteenth century onwards.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conrad’s Visual Aesthetics

In the modern world of print, which saw orality superseded by writing, poets and novelists grew suspicious of the power of the written word. Many eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth-century writers, poets, and painters came to regard language as an inauthentic and impotent communicative instrument. John Ruskin, for instance, referred to this linguistic deficiency in these terms: ‘Words are not accurate enough, nor delicate enough to express or trace the constant, all-pervading influence of the finer and vaguer shadows’ (cited in Helsinger 1982, 1–2). In a similar vein, Eugène Delacroix declared: ‘We should bear in mind that language is imperfect in all its artistic expressions’ (1981, 254).29 Conrad was likewise acutely aware of the limitations of language, although in his early career he showed faith in its expressive and communicative powers. He once declared in a letter to Hugh Clifford (9 October 1899): ‘Words, groups of words, words standing alone, are symbols of life, have the power in their sound or their aspect to present the very thing you wish to hold up before the mental vision of your readers’ (CL 2, 200). When he became what he described as ‘more sophisticated’, so Conrad grew sceptical about the communicative abilities of language. He wrote to E.L. Sanderson on 21 November 1896: ‘Gone are alas! those fine days of “Alm: Folly” when I wrote with the serene audacity of an unsophisticated fool. I am getting more sophisticated from day to day. And more uncertain!’ (CL 1, 319). In most of his letters, essays, and novels Conrad emphasizes the failure of language as a means of representation and communication. His pessimism is expressly reflected in a letter to Cunninghame Graham (14 January 1898) where he declared: ‘Life knows us not and we do not know life – we don’t know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit’ (CL 2, 17). This linguistic powerlessness or bankruptcy is staged in novels like Lord Jim and Under Western Eyes where the respective protagonists, Jim and Razumov are constantly shown struggling to express their thoughts and feelings in a language that keeps failing them. During his trial, for example, Jim finds that speech is of no use to him. After the trial he still considers speech useless, probably aware of the difficulty of mending the consequences of his act through deficient words. Thought and speech become for Jim an excruciating exercise from which he struggles to free himself:30 He wanted to go on talking for truth’s sake, perhaps for his own sake also; and while his utterance was deliberate, his mind positively flew round and round the serried circle of facts that had surged up all about

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

88 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

89

him to cut him off from the rest of his kind: it was like a creature that, finding itself imprisoned within an enclosure of high stakes, dashes round and round, distracted in the night, trying to find a weak spot, a crevice, a place to scale, some opening through which it may squeeze itself and escape. This awful activity of mind made him hesitate at times in his speech. (LJ 23) Jim is entrapped and helpless, unable to escape his condition. Thought is at best a source of increased suffering; words appear bankrupt. He is unable to explain his dilemma and obtain release. Unable to articulate his pain, Jim withdraws and engages in a secret dialogue with himself. Marlow complains that Jim ‘was not speaking to me, he was only speaking before me, in a dispute with an invisible personality, an antagonistic and inseparable partner of his existence – another possessor of his soul’ (LJ 68). After the trial Jim undertakes what looks like a rehabilitative strategy. The path to recovery is paved by Marlow who helps Jim to find various jobs and finally, with the assistance of Marlow’s friend Stein, to settle in Patusan. In Patusan, Jim is attempting a heroic rebirth, which involves redeeming his fallen word and recovering a self-gratifying persona. Despite his failure, Jim still believes he can alter the course of his life. In Patusan, he regains authority and respect. He is a revered leader and verbal authority whose decisions equal God’s law. Like his protagonist, Conrad, too, retains faith in the power of language, although he is acutely conscious of the pervasive linguistic bankruptcy. He firmly believes in language’s capacity for regeneration and thinks that linguistic rehabilitation is still possible provided that the writer take to the task of reinvigorating the sound, shape, and meaning of his sentences. Conrad’s overall aesthetic orientation reflects his attempt to redeem language, as he keenly dramatizes the crisis of referentiality. Conrad both brings to light language’s impotence and refers to the underlying anxieties that it generates. His awareness of linguistic bankruptcy, suggested in his appeal to the immediacy and clarity of visuality, is a major preoccupation in his works. In most of his novels and short stories, Conrad enlivens the written medium through the infusion of powerful images and metaphors. ‘Typhoon’ is the story that best illustrates Conrad’s striving to reinvigorate language through a redeployment of energetic metaphors that appeal to the readers’ senses. The centrality of the typhoon metaphor around which revolves the whole narrative testifies to Conrad’s effort to redeem the written word by the vigour of

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conrad’s Visual Aesthetics

his imagery. And if we admit with Cicero that metaphors are primarily directed to the senses, and chiefly to sight, then the storm motif in ‘Typhoon’ is entirely aimed at the reader’s eye (see Acheraïou 2004b). ‘Typhoon’ reflects Conrad’s striving to find adequate language and an appropriate standpoint from which to relate the violence of the hurricane. From the beginning, the authorial narrator is shown confronted with the dilemma of having to render the eloquence of a devastating storm with words that became ‘worn out’ and ‘of a faded meaning’ (T 11). The difficulty of the narrator’s task is suggested by the faltering of his voice and his gaze in the thick of the storm. The extreme situation interrupts the narrative stream and breaks the coherence of our reading. The act of narration is constantly challenged by events, for the gales, clouds, and heavy swells flooding the ship reduce seeing and hearing to their elemental parts. The men on board can barely see or hear each other, and when the sounds of their shipmates’ voices reach their ears they come to them in fragments: On the bridge a knot of men, indistinct and toiling, were making great efforts in the light of the wheelhouse windows that shone mistily on their heads and backs. Suddenly darkness closed upon one pane, then on another. The voices of the lost group reached him after the manner of men’s voices in a gale, in shreds and fragments of forlorn shouting snatched past the ear. (T 27) Like Captain MacWhirr, who can barely grasp the meaning of the voices reaching his ears, at the height of the storm the narrator too finds his powers to communicate, to make the reader see and hear, lost in the power of the event. The reader is starved of information, the gaze receives only faint glimpses of events, the narrative voice fluctuates, and there is at times a sense that the act of reading has been suspended. This fragmented, faltering narrative perspective leads to a temptation to describe ‘Typhoon’ as impressionistic. Perhaps most strongly of all Conrad’s works, ‘Typhoon’ solicits the reader’s powers of visualization. It is a story characterized by dense visual emphasis, rich scenic presentation, and a powerful focus on the impact of the events upon the senses of the characters – and those of the implied readers. The visual orientation of ‘Typhoon’ suggests that in this narrative Conrad is less preoccupied with the events themselves than with their impact on the characters battling against the sea’s rage. He is still, however, primarily concerned with the events’ effects on the readers, whose

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

90 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Conrad’s Visual Aesthetics

91

As in most of my writings it is not the events that I am insisting on but their effect upon the persons in the tale. But in everything I have written there is always one invariable intention, and that is to capture the reader’s attention, by securing his interest and enlisting his sympathies for the matter in hand, whatever it may be, within the limits of the visible world and within the boundaries of human emotions. (T 219) Conrad’s effort to capture the reader’s attention and induce his/her collaboration involves a wider preoccupation with language and representation. Within this key poetic pursuit the crucial task of making the reader ‘see’ appears to be contingent on the artist’s capacity to find a new, reinvigorated idiom of expression. ‘Typhoon’ shows Conrad striving to re-energize the linguistic idiom, in the hope of making it correspond to the eloquence of facts which ‘can speak for themselves with overwhelming precision’ (T 7). The narrator’s search for a style ‘clear and definite’ enough to appeal to the reader’s powers of observation involves stripping the linguistic sign of stereotype, rhetorical inflation, and syntactic arbitrariness. The storm operates in this case as a fitting metaphor for linguistic regeneration. Its disruptive power is tantamount to a creative impulse unsettling the polished and policed surface of life and language. The hurricane is a dual symbol of destruction and reconstruction. It is a test for Captain MacWhirr and his crew and a cogent symbol of artistic creation – an energetic, violent one at that. The typhoon is both a centre and a means of decentring, as suggested by MacWhirr’s loss of bearings in the wake of the hurricane. The captain’s reaction offers insight into the might of the storm as a hyperbolic language calling into question rigid linguistic and literary conventions and destabilizing the very notion of centrality on which these rest. MacWhirr’s interrogative ‘Where’s his centre now?’ indicates that the captain’s former world of harmony and peace, symbolized by the Nan-Shan, has undergone a radical change. The ship, the only real centre and stable reference on an ever-changing sea, is now subject to wild currents, her movements becoming extravagant: They were all on the bridge when the real force of the hurricane struck the ship . . . They held hard. An outburst of unchained fury,

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

eyes are visibly Conrad’s prime target both in ‘Typhoon’ and his fiction as a whole. Conrad wrote in the Author’s Note (1919):

92 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

The centre that the Nan-Shan represents can no longer hold. She drifts randomly, and her very helplessness reflects human precariousness in the face of natural wrath. At the same time, the loss of all centre caused by the destructive storm may read as a liberating gesture releasing language’s creative potential. In describing the storm, the narrator lays emphasis on those spontaneous, direct, visual aspects which appeal to the readers’ senses. In the midst of the raging storm, we witness a linguistic frenzy; we hear words originating from dark corners and flowing in all directions. On the forepart of the bridge, Jukes speaks with a ‘blank’ and ‘forced’ voice that ‘seemed to flow away on all sides into the darkness, deepening again upon the sea’ (T 63). Words have constantly to fight their way through the heavy gales that overwhelm the characters’ voices: ‘The spell of the storm had fallen upon Jukes. He was penetrated by it, absorbed by it; he was rooted in it with a rigour of dumb attention. Captain MacWhirr persisted in his cries, but the wind got between them like a solid wedge’ (T 38). In this evocative depiction, language is reinvigorated and turned into a sharp expressive tool, seeking to match the vividness of sea language symbolized by the typhoon. To add dramatic intensity and visual density to the described event, the narrator increases the dynamic impulse of language by privileging active linguistic components – verbs – over its rigid signs – the substantive – as is illustrated in the following passage: The Nan-Shan was being looted by the storm with a senseless, destructive fury: trysails torn out of the extra gaskets, double-lashed awnings blown away, bridge swept clean, weather-cloths burst, rails twisted, light-screens smashed – and two of the boats had gone already. (T 32) The narrator’s description of the destructive effect of the storm on the Nan-Shan is framed in a technical language characterized by force and precision. Its imagistic, visual qualities are geared to creating a high emotional impact on its readers and enabling them to visualize the represented reality. The strong visual evocation endows the phrases with immediacy and power. Such a dynamic use of language, reflected in the

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

a vicious rush of the wind absolutely steadied the ship; she rocked only, quick and light like a child’s cradle, for a terrific moment of suspense, while the whole atmosphere, as it seemed, streamed furiously past her, roaring away from the tenebrous earth. (T 34)

93

relaxed syntax of the sentences describing the storm, partakes of the overall visual effect. Most of the verbal constructions in use are so sharp and vigorous that their activation seems to become action itself. This rhetorical strategy gives the impression that Conrad in ‘Typhoon’ employs language less to describe than to go beyond description. There looms in Conrad’s striving to transcend description and overcome the linear powers of language an implicit attack on the realist tradition embodied by the surrogate artist, Captain MacWhirr. Conrad offers a compelling portrait of MacWhirr, as both seaman and letter-writer: he stresses his ‘plain’ language and ‘ordinary’, ‘unruffled’ physiognomy, his limited imagination, ignorance of immoderate and passionate weather, dislike of images in speech, attachment to harmony and safety, constant quest for certitude, reliance on minute details and linear sequencing of events, and total dependence on the literalism of facts. Metaphorically, MacWhirr is a caricatured realist bent on a linear depiction of the smooth surface of existence. As never before, his dependence on harmony and order is severely challenged by the fierce storm assaulting the Nan-Shan. He can now, to his great dismay, ‘feel the disorder of that place where he used to live tidily’ (T 60). The storm washed away, among other things, MacWhirr’s ‘rulers, his pencils, the inkstand – all the things that had their safe appointed places’ (T 61). With the disappearance of these instruments of measuring and writing, the symbols of certainty and linearity, the surrogate realist artist – MacWhirr – is projected into the uncertain world of fragmentation, discontinuity, and indeterminacy – key features of Conrad’s poetics. These issues are examined in the following chapters and probed in connection with the fundamental question of narrative form and reader theory. The emphasis is laid on the notion of reading hierarchy, central to Conrad’s reader theory.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conrad’s Visual Aesthetics

A Cartography of Conrad’s Fictional Readers: Reading Hierarchy in Lord Jim, ‘Heart of Darkness’, Nostromo, and Victory Conrad’s writing teems with fictional readers of which two broad categories can be distinguished: nominal readers and metaphorical readers. The nominal set consists of characters reading all kinds of texts in the here-and-now of the fictional time. These texts range from letters and light fiction to historical documents and newspapers. The metaphorical, abstract, or rhetorical category of readers is composed of active observers and interpreters of allegorical scripts such as other characters’ faces, their body language, and their geographic, social, and cultural contexts. Most of Conrad’s narrators and detached intellectual characters such as Martin Decoud (N) and Axel Heyst (V ) fit into the category of rhetorical readers. It is worth bearing in mind, however, that characters and narrators can be nominal and metaphorical readers at the same time. The teacher of languages (UWE) and Marlow (HD) combine both features. The former read Razumov’s diary on which his narrative is based. He has read Peter Ivanovitch’s book on feminism and he regularly reads English poetry with his student, Natalia Haldin. Throughout he proves an active observer and explainer of the Russian drama being revealed to his British eyes, even though he often confesses to misunderstanding the Russian character. Marlow is a reader of various documents – Kurtz’s report commissioned by the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs and then Towson’s An Inquiry into Some Points of Seamanship which he found in a small hut where Kurtz stayed previously. He is also a metaphorical reader of the African jungle. Nominal readers include characters such as Singleton reading Bulwer Lytton in The Secret Sharer, Jim (LJ), Carlier and Kayerts (OP), Stevie (SA), Pedrito Montero and Captain Mitchell (N), and Natalia Haldin and Sophia Antovna (UWE). The list is not exhaustive, but it is indicative of Conrad’s central concern, not to say obsession, with reading and 94

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

5

95

readership. Above all, it offers hints about the reading hierarchy that Conrad establishes among his fictional readers. On a meta-narrative level, this reading hierarchy reflects Conrad’s distinction between two clearly differentiated reading publics: the common reader, whom Conrad usually despises, and an elect reader, whom he targets and whom he considers as in some sense his alter-ego. This elitist inclination is suggested in the hierarchy that Conrad establishes among his narratees or fictional audiences – a recurrent pattern that will later be addressed in detail. It is important to note, though, that Conrad has a complex, ambivalent conception of readership, which urges us to handle the binary common-elect reader with extreme caution. The bulk of Conrad’s nominal readers are given to reading light literature and popular newspapers; they are commonly portrayed as myopic, incompetent readers tied to surface reading and literal meaning. Even when they happen to read serious literature they usually fail to grasp its deep insights, as shown by Kayerts and Carlier in ‘An Outpost of Progress’. At home, Kayerts had been in the Administration of the Telegraphs for a number of years and Carlier was in the army; both characters later regretted their old life in Europe. In Africa, Kayerts becomes the chief of the trading station and Carlier is his assistant. The authorial narrator describes the characters’ meaningless life in the trading station and emphatically distances himself from these individuals over whose lives he has an omniscient view. Their absurd presence in Africa is emphasized as the narrator points to the uselessness of the very idea of planting a station in such a remote, desolate place. Furthermore, the two individuals in charge of the station are utterly unfit for the task. In the narrator’s words, Carlier and Kayerts are mere children, devoid of ‘independent thought’ (OP 8) and unable to ‘grapple effectually with even purely material problems’ (OP 7). The narrator also refers to Carlier and Kayerts as ‘two perfectly insignificant and incapable individuals, whose existence is only rendered possible through the high organization of civilized crowds’ (OP 6). The word ‘crowd’ is repeated a few lines further; its recurrence implicitly ties Carlier and Kayerts to the reading multitude of which Conrad is usually scornful. This analogy becomes all the clearer when these two characters come upon the torn books their predecessor had left in the station: They took up these wrecks of novels, and, as they had never read anything of the kind before, they were surprised and amused. Then during long days there were interminable and silly discussions about plots and personages. In the centre of Africa they made acquaintance

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

A Cartography of Conrad’s Fictional Readers

of Richelieu and of d’Artagnan, of Hawk’s Eye and of Father Goriot, and of many other people. All these imaginary personages became subjects for gossip as if they had been living friends. They discounted their virtues, suspected their motives, decried their successes; were scandalised at their duplicity or were doubtful about their courage. The accounts of crimes filled them with indignation, while tender or pathetic passages moved them deeply. (OP 11) Carlier and Kayerts are presented as inexperienced, inarticulate readers of fiction. From the outset it is clear that both are unfamiliar with serious literature. Carlier dismisses the books as sheer ‘nonsense’ and Kayerts does not even suspect the existence of such authors. The passage further stresses the two characters’ superficial, naive reading, noting that their reading practice does not transcend the base level of plot and character. Rather than stimulating profound conversations, the reading of Balzac, Dumas, and Fenimore Cooper1 generates puerile observations and melodramatic attitudes. These emotions range from surprise to tears, emotions more commonly associated with readers of Gothic and sensational literature, for which Conrad had a low regard. Carlier and Kayerts’s reading of popular print – the old copies of a home newspaper found among the books – displays similar lacunae. Instead of approaching the newspaper critically, they blindly swallow its colonial rhetoric: That print discussed what it was pleased to call ‘Our Colonial Expansion’ in high-flown language. It spoke much of the rights and duties of civilization, of the sacredness of the civilizing work, and extolled the merits of those who went about bringing light, and faith and commerce to the dark places of the earth. Carlier and Kayerts read, wondered, and began to think better of themselves. (OP 11–12) Carlier and Kayerts’s uncritical digestion of the civilizing rhetoric of colonialist discourse and their superficial reading of both literature and print are eloquently rendered through the image of myopia and near blindness. The narrator notes: They lived like blind men in a large room, aware only of what came in contact with them (and of that only imperfectly), but unable to

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

96 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

A Cartography of Conrad’s Fictional Readers

97

The same metaphor can be applied to several of Conrad’s nominal readers. In Nostromo Pedrito Montero is a naive reader of history, deriving little benefit from his reading of light historical works in the French language. Captain Mitchell is not a perceptive interpreter of local history either, for he ‘had not much penetration of any kind; characteristic, illuminating trifles of expression, action or movement, escaped him completely’ (N 242–3). Martin Decoud deems this sailor utterly ‘absurd’ (N 168) and the authorial narrator, who has an omniscient view of the characters and events, constantly derides his historic insights: ‘Almost every event out of the usual daily course “marked an epoch” for him or else was “history” ’ (N 84). The narrator continually reiterates Mitchell’s historical simplifications to mark him out as a poor reader of the history of Costaguana. In Victory, Heyst stands for an assiduous, but somehow ‘literalistic’ reader. He has read his father’s works and absorbed his scepticism and pessimism: For three years, after leaving school at the age of eighteen, he had lived with the elder Heyst, who was then writing his last book. In this work, at the end of his life, he claimed for mankind that right to absolute moral and intellectual liberty of which he no longer believed them worthy. Three years of such companionship at that plastic and impressionable age were bound to leave in the boy a profound mistrust of life. (V 73) Heyst is not necessarily an inefficient reader, but he is certainly an imitative one, since the reading of his father’s books seems to have contributed to moulding his personality. It has shaped his thought in a way that makes his philosophy of life appear as a replica of his deceased progenitor’s worldview. In Lord Jim, Jim’s reading has similarly widely impacted upon his professional conduct and philosophical worldview. Jim is another naive, shallow reader, this time of popular Romance fiction to which he partly owes the label ‘Romantic’ that sticks to him like a ‘secret sharer’. The anonymous narrator refers to Jim’s Romanticism on many occasions.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

see the general aspect of things . . . Things appeared and disappeared before their eyes in an unconnected and aimless kind of way. (OP 9)

Marlow also takes up the attribute and later Marlow’s friend Stein glosses the concept and reaches enigmatic conclusions. It would be understatement to say that Jim’s reading does not equip him with the adequate tools accurately to perceive and clear-sightedly to judge his experiences. Further, it leads him to nurture an idealized conception of himself, which proves fatal to his reputation and career. Jim’s Romantic core, perceptible during his two years of training, remains intact when he takes a berth as chief mate of the Patna. Early in the narrative, we are shown Jim on the bridge, his eyes roaming the Arabian Sea with the hunger of a Romantic conqueror. His Romantic musing is emphasized by the anonymous narrator who describes him as being ‘penetrated by the great certitude of unbounded safety and peace that could be read on the silent aspect of nature like the certitude of fostering love upon the placid tenderness of a mother’s face’ (LJ 13). The verb ‘read’ associates the sea with a script whose polished, serene surface is offered to Jim’s ecstatic senses. The narrator further underscores Jim’s wandering fancy, hinting at his intense visual activity, indifference to the future, and ‘excess of well-being’ procured by the ‘invincible aspect of the peace’ offering itself to him (LJ 15). In the meantime, he anticipates Jim’s fall: Jim paced athwart, and his footsteps in the vast silence were loud to his own ears, as if echoed by watchful stars: his eyes, roaming about the line of the horizon, seemed to gaze hungrily into the unattainable, and did not see the shadow of the coming event. (LJ 14) Jim’s gaze may well be stretching hungrily over the horizon, but it is dramatically lacking in profundity and foresight. Rather than seeing into the sea’s treacherous hidden depths, Jim trusts blindly to the apparent serenity of the surface and becomes engrossed in dreams of heroic feats: ‘At such times his thoughts would be full of valorous deeds: he loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary achievements. They were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality . . . There was nothing he could not face’ (LJ 15). Authorial irony is at its height in this passage, most caustically in the last sentence. From his idealistic perspective, Jim can withstand any ordeal, but this apparently unflinching determination falters when it is tried in reality. When the Patna hits underwater debris and is on the verge of sinking, Jim’s heroism, constructed as it is through the ingestion of Romantic fiction, is severely challenged by hard facts. Unable to meet the actuality of heroism, Jim

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

98 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

99

and the rest of the crew abandon the Patna and its approximately 800 Muslim pilgrims. Jim’s superficial reading of Romantic literature has led him to an excessive, false sense of self that dimmed his judgement. This thoughtless reading has contributed to his failure properly to understand his situation and accomplish his duty with honour. Because of his desertion of the Patna, in the wake of which he loses his sailing certificate, Jim does not qualify as a trustworthy seaman. Neither, in view of his linear, light-hearted reading of fiction, can he pretend to be a sharp reader. He personifies an unreliable reader; the very type that Conrad might wish his actual readers to avoid. Through Jim as well as Stevie, Captain Mitchell and Montero, Conrad dramatizes indigent reading habits against which he implicitly warns his real reading public. There is a sense that through the negative portrayal of his ‘nominal’ readers, Conrad hopes to discourage his actual readers from identifying with reading practices that skim the surface of the text, instead of engaging with textual depths and deeper meanings. Unlike these short-sighted readers, the category of metaphorical or rhetorical readers with which Conrad wishes his public to identify is depicted in a broadly favourable light. ‘Karain’, ‘Heart of Darkness’, Victory, Nostromo, Under Western Eyes, and Lord Jim offer eloquent examples. The rhetorical readers in these books are usually keen observers given to close scrutiny of other characters’ faces, which become a privileged reading space. They are often shown striving to penetrate their interlocutors’ eyes and minds or busy deciphering the settings in which their experiences take place. The anonymous English narrator in ‘Karain’ describes the Malay world in terms that turn the colonial territory into a stage set out before his eyes and those of his companions, Hollis and Jackson. He sees the protagonist, Karain, as a ‘noble savage’ and his world as a ‘monumental amphitheatre’ (K 44). Karain is reduced to a dramatic figure on constant display and theatricality becomes almost his second nature. The narrator remarks that Karain ‘presented himself essentially as an actor’, appearing before the Englishmen always ‘ornate and disturbing’ (K 40) and ‘faithful to the illusions of the stage’ (K 43). The idea of the Malay universe as a theatre is later combined with the image of this remote Oriental setting as a text offered to the scrutiny of the three Englishmen. The narrator is an active observer and rhetorical reader of the Malay world and the psychology of its people. He is also a cultural mediator and heuristic teacher. In the course of his narrative he is striving to penetrate the Malay culture, with the aim of conveying his cultural insights to his domestic audience and teaching them how

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

A Cartography of Conrad’s Fictional Readers

to see or read the Orient and things Oriental. The narrator’s strategy has a didactic leaning. In cutting his perceptions of the Orient into simple, graspable units he intends to help his readers to grapple with the exotic world he depicts. This practice includes singling out mental characteristics or physical and cultural traits considered typically Oriental; and he does so to help the British readers pin down their reading subject, that is the Malays and their universe. In an attempt to convey to his readers the character of the Malay people, the narrator boldly attributes to them characteristics such as primitivism, superstition, emotionalism, stagnation, and irrationality. We see this in the stereotyped vision of the Malay chief, Karain, who is paradigmatic of his race. It is also reflected in the association of the Malay world with a static, fossilized scene. The narrator’s overall strategy is reinforced by his tendency to amend the native discourses and inflect them to suit Western rhetorical demands. He edits Karain’s presumably obscure speech in order to inject clarity into it. He hopes in doing this to make it accessible and acceptable to his British audience. However, the narrator’s task of interpretation of the Malay culture and character proves daunting. He frequently complains about his inability fully to grasp his object of observation, Karain, lamenting the latter’s ‘absurd’ character and inaccessible sentences which he compares to ‘complicated arabesques’ (K 40). Significantly, as the narrator and his companions find the East impenetrable, so do Karain’s attempts to penetrate the Western world also turn out to be hopeless: We tried to enlighten him, but our attempts to make clear the irresistible nature of the forces which he desired to arrest failed to discourage his eagerness to strike a blow for his own primitive ideas. He did not understand us, and replied by arguments that almost drove one to desperation by their childish shrewdness. (K 52) The Britain that Karain understands through the mediation of the narrator and his companions is a baffling vision. The Western characters’ representation of Britain is as distorted a construction as the stereotypical depiction of the Malay world they deliver to the consumption of the domestic audience. The narrator observes: [Karain] multiplied questions; he could never know enough of the Monarch of whom he spoke with wonder and chivalrous respect – with a kind of affectionate awe! . . . We had to invent details at last to

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

100 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

A Cartography of Conrad’s Fictional Readers

101

The narrator remains a crucial vehicle of knowledge and power, monitoring and grossly distorting the facts that he conveys to the protagonist. Implicit in his commentary is the notion that the colonialist discourse he promotes is a construct that mystifies both colonizing and colonized histories. It boils down to a contrived rhetoric, prone to prejudice and the manipulation of truths. Its core message involves a dual act of denial, manipulating the representations of the native peoples and those of the colonizing world. As the narrator reinvents his stories of Europe in order to satisfy the expectations of the natives who, like Karain, expect to hear a Western tale of enlightenment and grandeur, so he rewrites the East as a world of exoticism and backwardness that will conform to the prejudices of European readers. In each case, the narrator is forging truths in an attempt to construct an ideal, sympathetic audience. Thus, his professed difficulty in penetrating otherness, symbolized by the Malay universe, is perhaps due less to a real incapacity to understand an enigmatic character, than to a deliberate misrepresentation of difference to suit his readers’ expectations. In short, the narrator and his acolytes are not inclined to represent the Malay reality they witness as faithfully as possible; instead, they construct this reality in the shape of familiar exotic ‘truths’ that Western readers can safely consume. Like the Malay world, Marlow’s Africa has all the appearance of a stage, as suggested by his constant reference to watching, veils, curtains, and gesture.2 On a strictly abstract level, Marlow’s journey across Africa functions as a metaphor of reading. Conrad’s emphasis on Marlow’s sense of observation and ocular penetration of the Dark Continent symbolically conceives of Africa as a metaphoric script. As a result, the motif of the journey takes the shape of a figurative act of reading. The early pages evoking Marlow’s departure to Africa offer an eloquent illustration: I left in a French steamer, and she called in every blamed port they have out there, for, as far as I could see, the sole purpose of landing soldiers and custom-house officers. I watched the coast. Watching a coast as it slips by the ship is like thinking about an enigma. There it is before you – smiling, frowning, inviting, grand, mean, insipid, or savage, and always mute with an air of whispering, Come and find out. This one was almost featureless, as if still in the making, with

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

satisfy his craving curiosity; and our loyalty must be pardoned, for we tried to make them fit for his august and resplendent ideal. (K 47)

102 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Gaze or watching predominate here, and the concrete topography of coast and jungle stretching before Marlow’s eyes takes the shape of a dense, disconcerting reading space. The jungle or metaphoric text for which it stands invites interpretation and the interpretative exercise proves particularly challenging. Marlow’s difficulty is signalled by the profusion of words implying indefiniteness, such as ‘enigma’, ‘mute’, ‘featureless’, ‘blurred’, ‘mist’ (HD 150). Marlow is often bewildered by the spectacle unveiling before him. The sounds emanating from the jungle and the various cultural manifestations he witnesses are signs resistant to his reading practice, impeding his cultural penetration and appropriation of Africa. Marlow’s interpretative confusion is perhaps best evidenced in the Central Station where he comes into contact with the six moribund black workers in the ‘grove of death’. He remarks of one of the dying blacks: He had tied a bit of white worsted round his neck – Why? Where did he get it? Was it a badge – an ornament – a charm – a propitiatory act? Was there any idea at all connected with it? It looked startling round his black neck, this bit of white thread from beyond the seas. (HD 157) Marlow is puzzled by the white fabric tied round the African’s neck and fails to ascribe to it any definite meaning. In this instance and in the remainder of the narrative, Marlow’s reading of African culture shows striking limitations and more often than not utter helplessness. This epistemic deficiency suggests the extent to which Western geographical penetration of the Dark Continent, figured by Marlow’s journey, is no guarantee of cultural comprehension or translation. Even as Marlow enters deeper into the African jungle, the heart of Africa remains a challenging, defiant text. Marlow’s numerous attempts to gain mastery over his surrounding environment prove fruitless. And his helplessness is revealed in his inability to make sense of the buzzing life of the continent he is journeying across: We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there. At night sometimes the roll of drums behind the

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

an aspect of monotonous grimness. The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark-green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf, ran straight, like a ruled line, far, far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist. (HD 150)

A Cartography of Conrad’s Fictional Readers

103

In Marlow’s formulation, Africa or the ‘prehistoric earth’ (185) is tantamount to an original transcript the meaning of which escapes him completely. Marlow stresses his incomprehension of the sounds and signs assaulting his eyes and ears in the following terms: The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us – who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember, because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign – and no memories. (HD 186) Marlow and his Western companions acknowledge their misunderstanding of their unfamiliar surroundings. They appear as disoriented readers groping for the meaning of a prehistoric script articulated in a grammar and semiotics belonging to a primeval verbal system. Sense appears difficult, if not impossible to elicit, as there is no cultural correspondence between the prehistoric transcript or subtext – Africa – and the metaphoric readers’ interpretative grids. Ultimately, the implied transaction between the metaphoric reader – Marlow – and the allegorical text – Africa – fails to reach fulfilment and generate understanding and transcultural meanings. And in view of this epistemic deadlock, Marlow and his companions are bound to guesswork and bafflement at best, and to textual misreading and cultural mistranslation at worst. If the African jungle in ‘Heart of Darkness’ stands for an allegorical text, in Victory it is the heroine who is likened to a metaphoric reading space. The narrator describes the heroine’s encounter with the protagonist Heyst at Schomberg’s hotel and relates their mutual attraction in these words: They looked at each other across a little round table with a surprised, open gaze, self-consciousness growing on them so slowly that it was a

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

curtain of trees would run up the river and remain sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our heads, till the first break of day. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could not tell. (HD 185)

104 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Sight is accorded prominence and judging from the two characters’ present delicate situation optical jouissance is the best they can hope for. Heyst is attracted to the heroine’s appearance. Like the teacher of languages (UWE) who is enchanted by Natalia’s Haldin’s voice, Heyst is enthralled by the heroine’s ‘exquisite’ voice: But her voice! It seduced Heyst by its amazing quality. It is a voice fit to utter the most exquisite things, a voice which would have made silly chatter supportable and the roughest talk fascinating. Heyst drank in its charm as one listens to the tone of some instrument without heeding the tune. (V 59–60) The narrator lays emphasis on the heroine’s voice, insisting on its beauty and enchanting effect on Heyst: The girl’s voice was charming when she spoke to him of her miserable past, in simple terms, with a sort of unconscious cynicism inherent in the truth of the ugly conditions of poverty. And whether because he was humane or because her voice included all the modulations of pathos, cheerfulness and courage in its compass, it was not disgust that the tale awakened in him, but the sense of an immense sadness. (V 62) Later, on the island to which he elopes with the heroine, the charm of her voice is still strong on Heyst: ‘He thought that if she only could talk to him in some unknown tongue, she would enslave him altogether by the sheer beauty of the sound, suggesting infinite depths of wisdom and feeling’ (V 160). While Heyst is spellbound by the girl’s voice, the heroine directs her attention to the protagonist’s eyes: ‘It’s your eyes that I was thinking of, for I’m sure I’ve never wished to forget anything till you came up to me that night and looked me through and through’ (V 70). She refers to intense visual activity and praises Heyst’s

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

long time before they averted their eyes; and very soon they met again, temporarily, only to rebound, as it were . . . So much for their eyes. As to the conversation, it had been perfectly insignificant, because naturally they had nothing to say to each other. Heyst had been interested by the girl’s physiognomy. (V 59)

105

skills of observation and penetrating gaze: ‘And you are clever. You spotted something at once. You saw it in my face, eh?’ (V 67). Heyst is a sharp examiner and fine reader of faces, a quality that helps him detect the heroine’s wretchedness during their first eye contact. He is also a surrogate artist prompted by the heroine to create her anew. When he has finally inquired about the girl’s name, Heyst hears his interlocutor replying: ‘They call me Alma. I don’t know why. Silly name! Magdalen too. It doesn’t matter; you can call me by whatever name you choose. Yes, you give me a name. Think of one you would like the sound of – something quite new’ (V 70). The heroine’s identity is loose, floating, lacking semiotic fixity. To resolve her identity crisis, she assigns to Heyst the Adamic power of naming and giving her a stable identity. Heyst takes eagerly to the task and is apparently conscious of the importance of his mission, as he later states: ‘There must be a lot of the original Adam in me, after all’ (V 133). Following a number of semiotic combinations, Heyst has finally found the heroine a name: ‘after several experimental essays in combining detached letters and loose syllables, he had given [her] the name of Lena’ (V 143). As suggested in this passage, Heyst the creator does not start from scratch, but merely reshuffles and edits the material in hand. The name Lena is, as we know, of Hebrew origin and was commonly used as a short form of Magdalena, the heroine’s original name. This is a fitting name, for it has a pleasant sonority, in accordance with the heroine’s wish, and connotes semiotic independence (since the mid-nineteenth century Lena was used in Europe as an independent name). Heyst’s creative process denotes a significant epistemological slant. Through his experimentation with letters and sounds he devises for the heroine a new identity and a secular one at that. For her name changes from the saintly (Magdalen, the follower of Christ) to the profane and modern (Lena). Heyst is an artistic figure who enjoys god-like status. He occupies a lofty position, looking with satisfaction at his accomplished creation, Lena. By giving the heroine a new name, Heyst symbolically initiates her rebirth. At the same time, through his labelling he somehow appropriates and domesticates her. However, Heyst’s possession of Lena is anything but complete. Indeed, like Marlow’s jungle, Lena is a resistant transcript. Her impenetrable eyes are a fortress against Heyst’s visual incursions: ‘What an impenetrable girl you are, Lena, with those grey eyes of yours! Windows of the soul, as some poet has said’ (V 156). Heyst’s incomprehension

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

A Cartography of Conrad’s Fictional Readers

106 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

That girl, seated in her chair in graceful quietude, was to him like a script in an unknown language, or even more simply mysterious: like any writing to the illiterate . . . His mental attitude was that of a man looking this way and that on a piece of writing which he is unable to decipher, but which may be big with some revelation. (V 169) Both in this statement and in the passages quoted earlier Lena is identified with a linguistic and textual construct delivered to the protagonist’s gaze. Here, she is literally assimilated to ‘a script’ that defies Heyst’s interpretation. On a strictly ideological level, Heyst’s difficulty of interpretation may indicate gender prejudice or misunderstanding. This is a plausible explanation given that Heyst openly admits to his unfamiliarity with the female world. During one of their conversations in Samburan, he bluntly tells the heroine: No, I’ve never killed a man or loved a woman – not even in my thoughts, not even in my dreams . . . To slay, to love – the greatest enterprises of life upon a man! And I have no experience of either. You must forgive me anything that may have appeared to you awkward in my behaviour, inexpressive in my speeches, untimely in my silences. (V 162) The attributes ‘awkward’, ‘inexpressive’, and ‘untimely’ are pregnant with meaning; they variously connote Heyst’s lack of understanding of the heroine’s universe. In a more abstract sense, on the other hand, the protagonist’s incapacity to decipher the script in front of him reflects an epistemic deficiency. It enacts the intricacies involved in the act of reading and textual interpretations – major concerns in Conrad’s works, especially in Lord Jim. Marlow in Lord Jim is also a rhetorical reader. Like Heyst in Victory or Marlow in ‘Heart of Darkness’, Marlow’s mediated narration of Jim’s story displays a strong visual inclination. As early as chapter three (LJ 12) the anonymous narrator puts sight centre stage. He focuses on Jim’s visual activity, describing his roaming eyes and Romantic flights. Attention to eyes, seeing, or failing to see is paramount in the following introductory pages and in the whole of Marlow’s narrative. Visual activity gains

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

of Lena is even more cogently articulated in the scene where he inquires about her moodiness:

A Cartography of Conrad’s Fictional Readers

107

He stood elevated in the witness-box, with burning cheeks in a cool lofty room; the big framework of punkahs moved gently to and fro high above his head, and from below many eyes were looking at him out of dark faces, out of white faces, out of red faces, out of faces attentive, spellbound, as if all these people sitting in orderly rows upon narrow benches had been enslaved by the fascination of his voice. (LJ 21) Jim is under the scrutiny of the members of the Court of Inquiry who are striving to learn the facts of his rash conduct. He is also watched by numerous eyes belonging to the public attending Jim’s hearing; the narrator compares the audience to ‘staring shadows’, highlighting the pressure that these gazes exert on the protagonist (LJ 21). The prosecution is an exacting experience; the questions Jim is asked are felt like bullets cutting through his flesh: ‘the terribly distinct questions that extorted his answers seemed to shape themselves in anguish and pain within his breast – came to him poignant and silent like the terrible questioning of one’s conscience’ (LJ 21). The unforgiving voices questioning Jim are a source of suffering and pangs of conscience; the staring eyes are harsh and unsympathetic. The narrator refers to the audience looking at Jim with ‘attentive eyes whose glance stabbed’ (LJ 21). But amidst this hostile verbal and visual environment whereby sounds and looks equate to daggers, Jim detects in the eyes of an auditor sitting apart a glimmer of genuine sympathy: Jim’s eyes, wandering in the intervals of his answers, rested upon a white man who sat apart from the others, with his face worn and clouded, but with quiet eyes that glanced straight, interested and clear. Jim answered another question and was tempted to cry out, ‘What’s the good of this! what’s the good!’ (LJ 24) A few lines further on we learn that Marlow is the person singled out by Jim’s eyes in what looks like an instance of visual communion. Marlow’s stare, the narrator remarks, is as inquisitive as the other staring eyes of the courtroom. However, the narrator implies that Marlow’s interest in

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

cogency in the police court where the official ‘Inquiry’ into Jim’s abandoning of the Patna is conducted. The narrator describes Jim in these words:

the protagonist is more laudable than the indifference of the wider audience since it stems from a healthy curiosity, ‘intelligent volition’, and humanity. As he exposes Jim’s predicament at the Court of Inquiry, the frame narrator sharply contrasts an indifferent, shallow audience – fully tied to facts and the surface of existence – to a humane, profound auditor drawn to man’s inmost depths. Thus, the narrator ranks Marlow above the wider audience staring coldly and superficially at Jim. He elevates him into a supreme judge, motivated not by the ‘superficial how’ that grips the Court of Inquiry’s attention, but by the ‘fundamental why’. The ‘how-why’ dichotomy is of the utmost importance. Metaphorically, it distinguishes the notions of superficial and deep readers, horizontal and vertical readings that seep through Conrad’s writing, especially in works like ‘Heart of Darkness’, Lord Jim, Victory, and Under Western Eyes. ‘Heart of Darkness’, for example, articulates on the perceptual levels of horizontality and verticality. Marlow’s journey follows a linear track, disrupted now and then by various misfortunes, including loss of direction and waiting for rivets which fail to materialize. This manifest horizontal trajectory is coupled with a vertical dimension, which gives Marlow’s journey a significant symbolic and epistemological value. Marlow proceeds horizontally from one station to the next in search of Kurtz. His epistemic pursuits rely on a linear gathering of facts about the protagonist, as much as they embrace the heights and depths of the reality he relates. We recall Marlow’s early declaration that his motivation is primarily to meet Kurtz and to hear his voice. This project later takes on a wider ontological dimension, for on finally coming into contact with Kurtz, Marlow is seen plunging vertically into Kurtz’s depths in an attempt to penetrate his soul and uncover hidden motives. Horizontal reading of character is in this way compounded with a vertical impulse, and Marlow ultimately leans toward the latter. Significantly, this vertical inclination distinguishes Marlow – the rhetorical, discerning reader – from the rest of the pilgrims or myopic readers, who are mainly drawn to external particulars. In Lord Jim, too, Marlow constantly draws attention to the two perceptual planes, as shown in the recurrence of the dichotomies: form-substance, surface-depth, shadow-light. Marlow’s epistemic pursuit as well as narrative strategy and interpretative practices often operate according to these two modes of cognition. He proceeds horizontally to glean information about Jim, but this initial stage of investigation and understanding is coupled with a deep, vertical orientation. This verticality is obviously what Marlow targets in this novel. Specifically, in

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

108 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

109

shunning the ‘how’ – the province of readers tied to horizontal reading – the metaphoric, perspicacious reader that is Marlow implicitly favours vertical reading that leans toward life’s heights and inmost depths. The implication is that Marlow is not only a higher judging agency apt to evaluate deeply human experience, but also a rhetorical reader inclined to vertical reading, eager to see beneath the surface of texts and facts. To ponder again the frame narrator’s narrative device, we may argue that his selective process, which deems Marlow a superior observer and judge, has deep ontological implications. It suggests a feeling of sympathy and solidarity with a failing human being – Jim – that Marlow considers paradigmatic of humankind. The same technical device has also significant narratological implications. It is a key feature of Conrad’s methods of representation based on a multiple, floating focalization and narrative hierarchy, as will be shown in the following chapter.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

A Cartography of Conrad’s Fictional Readers

Narrative Solidarity and Competition for Truth and Signification

Conrad is famous for his technical experimentation and sophisticated narrative methods. Several of his works are articulated around a dualvoice narrative, based on an authorial or frame narrator and a personal narrator, whose voice blends with secondary sources of enunciation. This kind of structural organization breaks down narrative linearity, epistemological unity, and linear reading. It creates a productive dialogical context where meaning and truth are set in dialectical relationships. In consequence, the overall narrative structure ramifies and radiates in several directions, allowing meaning and truth to proliferate. Lord Jim and ‘Heart of Darkness’, among others, are founded on a multiple focalization and their narrative planes are organized along a hierarchical paradigm. In both works, the frame narrator sets the scene of the tale and then recedes. He dwells on the margins of the text, occasionally emerging to issue a comment or generalization; intrusions that might be interpreted as the echoes of a persistent authorial presence haunting the narrative’s interstices. As shown in the first chapter, Conrad is a haunting presence in his fiction. His diffused, elusive voice is heard through narrators and characters as diverse as Marlow (LJ, HD, C), Decoud (N), Stein (LJ), or Heyst (V). The interplay of these various voices and perspectives creates a network of echoes and shadows where truth and meaning blur. Generally when the frame narrator fades, the yarn is taken up by a named narrator who tells his tale to a usually silent, attentive audience. A key characteristic of Conrad’s fiction is that his transitions from frame to personal narratives often take the shape of a finely staged rite of passage. This is manifest in the Marlow narratives. The frame narrator anticipates an elect narrator, whose narrative skills are frequently enhanced. After what looks like a brief ceremony of enthronement the frame or extra-diegetic narrator passes the yarn onto the chosen, usually 110

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

6

homodiegetic narrative voice (see Genette 1980 and 1982). ‘Youth’ offers a basic version of the dual-voice narrative construction. The anonymous narrator begins his telling of the tale with a general comment on the interpenetration of the lives of Englishmen and the sea. He then moves abruptly to the description of his listeners sitting with him around the mahogany table. As in ‘Heart of Darkness’, the frame narrator’s audience in ‘Youth’ comprises a director of companies, an accountant, a lawyer, and Marlow. Watts discerns ‘biographical continuity’ between the Marlow of ‘Heart of Darkness’ and that of ‘Youth’ where he is ‘reminiscing with mainly patronizing nostalgic relish about his romantic earlier self’ (1977, 32). After stressing the close bonds between men wrought by the sea, and the ‘fellowship of the craft’ uniting him with his unnamed companions, the authorial narrator unceremoniously passes the baton to Marlow who tells uninterruptedly a chronicle of his first voyage to the Eastern seas. Unlike Chance where Marlow is often interrupted by the frame narrator listening to his tale, in ‘Youth’ Marlow is not hindered in his storytelling. The frame narrator reappears only at the end of the story, issuing a comment that gives Marlow’s individual experience a polyphonic resonance and universal import: And we all nodded at him: the man of finance, the man of accounts, the man of law, we all nodded at him over the polished table that like a still sheet of brown water reflected our faces, lined, wrinkled; our faces marked by toil, by deceptions, by success, by love; our weary eyes looking still, looking always, looking anxiously for something out of life, that while it is expected is already gone – has passed unseen, in a sigh, in a flash – together with the youth, with the strength, with the romance of illusions. (Y 132) At the closure of Marlow’s Romantic reminiscence, the frame narrator, Marlow, and the listening audience converge in the same narratorial moment of truth in which the ravages of time are brutally recast before them. Their fading lives are nakedly reflected in the ‘polished table’ and their wrinkled faces painfully contrasted with Marlow’s idyllic memory of youth. While Marlow in ‘Youth’ looks nostalgically backward and shares with his audience a tale of exoticism and youthful vitality, in ‘Heart of Darkness’ Marlow’s memory is drawn to a bleak tale of exploitation and inhumanity. Structurally, ‘Heart of Darkness’ rests on a dual-voice

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Narrative Solidarity 111

pattern, but its overall design is more sophisticated than in ‘Youth’. The exterior narrator in ‘Heart of Darkness’ introduces and describes the passengers aboard the Nellie: the Director, the Lawyer, and the Accountant, members of the colonial enterprise from which the ‘ascetic’ Marlow is set apart (HD 136). After few lazy exchanges the five meditative passengers wait silently for the tide to rise. During this interval the anonymous narrative voice broods over the serenity of the day, the brilliance of the sky, and the ‘venerable’ Thames whose ‘tidal current runs to and fro in its unceasing service, crowded with memories of men and ships it had borne to the rest of home or to the battles of the sea. It had known and served all the men of whom the nation is proud, from Sir Francis Drake to Sir John Franklin, knights all, titled and untitled – the great knights-errant of the sea’ (HD 137). It then invokes the vital role that the river played for treasure hunters and colonial adventurers. The narrator hints at Britain’s place as a powerful maritime nation and refers to the Thames, metonymically England, as the point of departure from which the civilizing missionaries, or the ‘bearers of a spark from the sacred fire’ (HD 137), sailed to the earth’s dark places. This episodic account of the ‘greatness’ that flowed on the Thames is soon interrupted by the lights glimmering along the shore, and, most notably, by Marlow’s remark: ‘And this also . . . has been one of the dark places of the earth’ (HD 138). With this narrative intrusion, the initially detached Marlow steps into the role of a narrating subject, in charge of imparting to his silent audience his experience of darkness. Interestingly, before passing the yarn to Marlow the authorial narrator stresses his ‘primary’ narrator’s competency by insisting on his sophisticated telling methods: The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine. (HD 138) The audience is immediately warned that the meaning of Marlow’s tale does not originate from a centripetal perspective which authoritatively edicts truth, but derives from a centrifugal, fragmented consciousness in

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

112 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

which meaning is educed obliquely by way of sketches and glimpses. As a result, the sought-for truth turns out to be manifold and elusive. Though not openly dramatized, in Lord Jim, too, the meaning of Marlow’s mediated tale of Jim is centrifugal rather than centripetal. Meaning in this novel is, in short, adduced through a multi-faceted textual transaction. It results from the close collaboration of the internal, competing perspectives – embodied by the characters, narrators, and implicitly the author – and the reader’s external perspective. With regard to narrative structure, Lord Jim follows a pattern broadly similar to that of ‘Heart of Darkness’. After providing a sketch of the hero’s personality, the accident of the Patna and Jim’s trial, the frame narrator’s voice ceases. But before receding, the narrator paves the way for Marlow’s voice: That man there [that is, Marlow] seemed to be aware of his hopeless difficulty. Jim looked at him, then turned away resolutely, as after a final parting. And later on, many times, in distant parts of the world, Marlow showed himself willing to remember Jim, to remember him at length, in detail and audibly. (LJ 24) The transition from the frame narrator to Marlow is deftly orchestrated. Marlow is assigned the role of mediating Jim’s story and his account promises to be long, full of details, moving forward and backward. The authorial narrator implicitly prepares the audience to be patient and heed the slow-moving, not to say dragging, pace of Marlow’s tale. Generally, Conrad’s narrators have in mind a clear set of criteria when selecting their secondary narrators. These qualities preside over the selection of a personal narrator by a frame narrator, as much as they come to the fore in the case of a personal narrator choosing his auxiliary voices of enunciation. Even though the values that the narrators have in mind do not guarantee their access to the complete truth for which they are striving, they remain narrative prerequisites and fundamental ontological props. These values include trustworthiness at sea, outstanding skills of telling complex yarns, a healthy curiosity and a sharp, humane gaze, an ability for discernment and judgement, a capacity for detachment and objectivity, and the dexterity to draw information from other interlocutors without appearing intrusive or callous. These characteristics form a tacit narrative pact reminiscent of the maritime code of honour by which seamen abide. Most of Conrad’s personal narrators are endowed with these values. In Lord Jim, ‘Heart of Darkness’,

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Narrative Solidarity 113

and ‘Youth’ Marlow is described as an exemplary retired seaman. He can spin complex, inconclusive yarns, he has a humane outlook, and powers of observation above those of the ordinary mind. Marlow’s worthiness as a subjective narrative voice is predicated on these qualities, just as his own choice of secondary narrators is often made on similar grounds. Marlow in Lord Jim, ‘Heart of Darkness’, and Chance as well as the anonymous narrators in Victory and Notromo establish a strict hierarchy between their secondary narrators. They readily dismiss some as dubious while deeming others respectable. Given their direct contact with Jim, characters like Brown, Cornelius, and Chester (LJ) are useful sources of information, but Marlow finds suspect their coldness and grudge against humankind. Hence Marlow’s editing, for example, of Brown’s words before imparting them to his audience. The scheming Cornelius, who stresses Jim’s irresponsibility and childishness, brings some insight into Marlow’s narrative, yet he is by no means a valorized informant. The pitiless Chester, who conceives of life in strictly Darwinian terms, does not qualify as an honourable source of narration either, nor do Ricardo, Jones, and Schomberg in Victory, who lack basic humanity. Their ruthlessness and cupidity are disqualifying features. Marlow’s informants in ‘Heart of Darkness’ are variously deficient. The harlequin does not have much discernment and his complete devotion to Kurtz has clouded his faculty of judgement. Similarly, the accountant at the Company Station is so dependent on the surface of existence as to lack any penetrating insight into the complexity of life or to the imperial enterprise he serves. The manager of the station is not a reliable source because of his lack of humanity and constant scheming. In Nostromo, Captain Mitchell, though an indefatigable teller of tales, is not considered an efficient narrator, for he does not possess the required intellectual sharpness and discernment. He can perhaps, as he claims, ‘spin a yarn for hours’, but his historic account of the foundation of the Occidental republic is simplistic; it is devoid of the penetration that would assign to it credibility and scholarly authority (N 348). Powell and the Fynes in Chance are similarly despised informants. The story of Chance is a multi-layered structure; it is told by young Powell, a seaman who tells it to Marlow who in turn transmits it to the anonymous narrator and via him to us. Unlike ‘Heart of Darkness’ or Lord Jim where Marlow is fully implicated in the story he narrates, in Chance he is distanced from the related events. He detaches himself from the conflict in which Flora and Anthony are involved. But he shows throughout a propensity to generalizations and cynical views which betray an implicit intellectual involvement in the tale. Lothe discusses Marlow’s

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

114 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

detachment in Chance and argues that ‘this lack of serious involvement makes the narrative of Chance at once less intense and less persuasive’ than that of ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Lord Jim (1989, 37). A few pages later, Lothe concludes that ‘the narrative method of Chance is distinctly inferior to that of the earlier novella’ (39). Lothe’s observations need to be moderated, for their critical significance tends to be undermined by the value judgements underlying them. Assessing the merits of a narrative method by simply comparing it to another technical device, as does Lothe, might be misleading, if only because narrative techniques are devised to achieve poetic goals that usually differ from one story to the next. With regard to Chance in particular Conrad stressed the relevance of his narrative method and insisted that his technique and worldview were intricately linked in this book. In the ‘Author’s Note’ to the novel he stated: ‘In doing this book my intention was to interest people in my vision of things which is indissolubly allied to the style in which it is expressed’ (xxxiv). Deeming Chance’s narrative method ‘less persuasive’ or ‘inferior’ therefore does not render Conrad justice. For the multiplicity of narrative layers, insistence on Marlow’s detachment, and his tendency to generalization all connote a fundamental aesthetic and ideological orientation that may not have been achieved by such techniques as those employed in ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Lord Jim. The three-frame narrative structure,1 rather than an inferior design, constitutes in fact an efficient means of representation and a valuable mode of distancing. Graham Hough rightly refers to the narrative method in Chance as being made of ‘layers of protective covering to an essentially simple heroic vision’ (1960, 220). We may extend this observation to suggest that Conrad’s interposition of layers of protection between Marlow and his fictional material is premised on specific aesthetic and ideological choices. These protective layers allow Marlow to keep his distance from the novel’s themes of love, Romance, and the underlying feminist struggle – a terrain which proves not only too slippery for Conrad to tread, but also inconsistent with his proclaimed literary aspirations.2 Marlow’s role in Chance well serves Conrad’s artistic and ideological aims, although he is haughty and cynical towards those around him, particularly the secondary narrators. Marlow is, as Greaney points out: ‘openly scornful of those storytellers, like Fleet Street reporters or gossiping spinsters, who combine a naïve attachment to “information”, or to superficial visual impressions, with a vulgar habit of actively seeking out such material’ (2001, 110). Marlow keenly distinguishes this set

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Narrative Solidarity 115

of informants given to superficial recording of information from those worthy narrators, including himself, whose gaze inclines towards depths and acquisition of fine knowledge. He states that ‘Information is something one goes out to seek and puts away when found as you might do a piece of lead: ponderous, useful, unvibrating, dull. Whereas knowledge comes to one, this sort of knowledge, a chance acquisition preserving in its repose a fine resonant quality’ (C 88). In line with the paradigm of values outlined above, Marlow downgrades this inferior category of tellers (Powell, the Fynes, the gossiping spinsters, and the like) while emphasizing his own narrative skills and intellectual superiority. His sense of superiority is even more strongly expressed in the parallel he draws between himself and a journalist. He asserts: ‘[A pressman’s] business was to write a readable account. But I, who had nothing to write, permitted myself to use my mind as we sat before our still untouched glasses’ (C 87). We are familiar with Conrad’s scorn for journalism and journalists, and Marlow sounds like Conrad’s mouthpiece here, castigating through the pressman’s literalism an entire profession (see Donovan 2005). Parallel to this despised category of informants, we find a number of secondary narrators who possess a superior narrative profile. While in Chance and ‘Heart of Darkness’ it is difficult to think of any valorized source of narration apart from the hegemonic Marlow, Victory and Lord Jim offer examples of valued secondary narrators. In Victory, Heyst’s tale is told by an exterior narrator, seconded by Davidson, an auxiliary source of information that feeds into the anonymous narrator’s narrative. After the death of Morrison, Heyst’s partner in the Tropical Belt Company, it is rumoured that Heyst is indirectly responsible for Morrison’s death. Following the allegation, Heyst withdraws into the island of Samburan where he lives with his Chinese servant, Wang. To satisfy his curiosity the narrator goes to Davidson to inquire about the subject. In chapter four, the narrator introduces us to Davidson and proceeds carefully to distinguish himself and the superior group to which he belongs from the rest of the inhabitants. He asserts: ‘A few of us who were sufficiently interested went to Davidson for details. These were not many’ (V 25). Davidson is a precious source of information. A valuable eyewitness, Davidson is the only character to come into contact and to talk with Heyst on the desolate island. At this stage, we learn much of Heyst’s history through Davidson’s perspective, which gives him an advantaged standpoint in the narrative. To heighten his informant’s credibility, the narrator frequently reminds us of Davidson’s intellectual honesty, sharp powers of observation, humane outlook, moderation, and capacity for

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

116 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

sympathy and solidarity. He even talks of Davidson as ‘having developed the affection of a self-appointed protector towards Heyst’ (V 31). After the first insights into Heyst’s life on the island, the narrator and Davidson part and do not see each other for three months. When they meet again, Davidson tells the narrator that he has seen Heyst. And in this instance, too, the narrator’s inquiry confirms Davidson’s humane proceedings: ‘Before I could exclaim, he assured me that he had taken no liberty, that he had not intruded. He was called in. Otherwise he would not have dreamed of breaking in upon Heyst’s privacy’ (V 42). The attribute ‘humane’ and its variants are repeated on a number of occasions (V 56; 152), each time with the aim of adding credence to Davidson’s narrative proceedings. According to the narrator, Davidson’s humaneness remains intact, as does his objectivity: ‘Davidson did not feel called upon to defend Heyst. His proceeding was to enter into conversation with one and another, casually, and showing no particular knowledge of the affair, in order to discover something about the girl’ (V 48). In Lord Jim, Marlow is presented in the frame narrative as a sympathetic man, a man of profound judgement with averred narrative skills. A trustworthy retired seaman, Marlow is also an experienced, intelligent, and humane investigator with a capacity for solidarity. He stands, above all, for an extraordinary teller of stories. His tale, unlike the seamen’s yarns which usually ‘have a direct simplicity’ (HD 30), is of a complex and distorted cast, embedding many voices and levels of signification. Brierly, one of Marlow’s informants, is likewise a trustworthy and celebrated seaman who has always risen heroically to the demands of his profession. Marlow meets with Brierly in order to be enlightened about Jim’s case, but his account is too categorical to find favour with Marlow. In the latter’s view, Brierly’s harsh condemnation of Jim tends to undermine the complexity of the concepts of duty and honour. The French Lieutenant, another secondary narrator consulted by Marlow, mixes fact and abstract considerations when assessing Jim. His judgement is less absolute than that of Brierly or Chester, who dismisses the protagonist as being ‘no earthly good for anything’ (LJ 122). Although he finds Jim’s desertion ethically culpable, the French Lieutenant, unlike Brierly, does not consider Jim to be no more than a coward who should be left to rot in shame and indifference. Rather, he emphasizes the relative quality of both fear and honour – key concepts recurring in the assessment of Jim by various characters. Marlow’s friend and privileged informer, Stein goes even further to tone down Marlow’s criticism of Jim, insisting that he, too, failed many times: ‘And do you know

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Narrative Solidarity 117

how many opportunities I let escape; how many dreams I had lost that had come in my way? . . . Everybody knows of one or two like that’ (LJ 157). Though he confirms Jim’s Romantic inclination, Stein refuses to blame him on this very account: ‘He is romantic . . . And that is very bad . . . Very good, too’ (LJ 156). The ambiguity of Stein’s observation indicates how far the assessment of Jim retains its complexity and openendedness. This leads me to argue that, contrary to Daleski who finds Stein ‘important structurally’ but ‘not . . . of much consequence thematically’ (1977, 95), Stein fulfils a fundamental structural and thematic role that complements and competes with the novel’s available discourses. An important interior narrator and useful structural device, Stein contributes widely to the novel’s thematic denseness, particularly through his references to the elusiveness of the self which he invokes when discussing Jim’s case with Marlow. However, Stein, like the French Lieutenant and Brierly, is unable fully to enlighten Marlow. His explanations are ambivalent and enigmatic. Each of the auxiliary narrators feeding Marlow’s narration offers insight into Jim’s character, giving the latter psychological density and adding dramatic strength to the tale. Nevertheless, none of these revelations can pretend to a complete knowledge of the investigated case; not even Marlow, for whom Jim remains an insoluble mystery, can claim as much. There is as much truth in Stein calling Jim ‘romantic’, as in Brown considering him a ‘hollow sham’, and just as much validity in Marlow’s associating Jim with a moral hero as in Brierly’s ideas of his treachery. Jim’s portrait, as it emerges from the perceptions of the secondary narrators is multi-faceted. The image of both his personality and action remain incomplete; an incompleteness that complicates the reader’s interpretation. To extrapolate from the notion of Jim as a metaphoric transcript, we may argue that in promoting the relativity of perception and evaluation, Conrad encourages a non-linear reading of character and text. The impressionistic mode and multiple focalization on which Marlow rests lend vividness to his narrative as much as they question monological assumptions of identity, signification, and reading. The protagonist’s identity becomes elusive. At the same time, following the fragmentation of the narrative consciousness, the text’s meaning undergoes an endless process of growth. It escapes authoritative codification and finite reading. Lord Jim’s narrative stratification and migrating focalization, its conflation of antinomian modes of representation (oral/written, literal/ symbolic, subjective/objective), and Marlow’s reliance on multiple informants all contribute to making the novel’s meaning always open,

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

118 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

constantly plural. In the light of this consideration, we may assert that the main issue in Lord Jim is less what Marlow’s tale means as how it means. Instead of providing clear-cut answers to the key issues it addresses (responsibility, fear, honour, duty . . .) this novel becomes, therefore, like life itself, a relentless epistemic quest or perpetual interrogation. Marlow’s inconclusive attempt to elucidate Jim’s case reinforces the narrative’s epistemological indeterminacy, indicating that Conrad in Lord Jim conceives of meaning, identity, and reading as elastic, everexpanding entities. In this novel, and generally in Conrad’s fiction, meaning is provisional, originating not from a single authoritative source that purveys knowledge unilaterally, but from a multiple consciousness in which ‘truth’ is disseminated through a myriad of competing truths or perceptions. Even Marlow, who holds a central position in the narrative, offers only a fallible perspective. He remains a limited knowing subject, powerless to confer absolute validity either on his own claims or on those of the tale’s competing voices. Each fragment of information, every segment of signification that he obtains from his secondary narrators and his own observations, preserves its uniqueness and relative value. The protagonist’s identity is equally precarious and hard to pin down. Marlow’s difficulty in seeing completely and of fixing Jim’s moral identity combines with the inability to evaluate his action, both reinforcing the novel’s epistemological and ontological uncertainty. This fundamental indeterminacy, a defining feature of the postmodernist ethos anticipated by Conrad, reflects Conrad’s endorsement of relative truth and judgement – a central issue in Lord Jim and his fiction at large. All through his long narrative Marlow’s epistemic quest is frustrated. He confesses: ‘I wanted to know – and to this day I don’t know, I can only guess’ (LJ 58). Instead of complete knowledge, Marlow has to content himself with fragmentary truths and guesswork. As a metaphoric reader and interpreter of Jim’s character and conduct, Marlow is thus compelled to rely on vague, transient impressions. His object of observation or script becomes an obscure sign, perceived only dimly. From the outset Marlow expresses his difficulty in obtaining a clear picture of Jim: ‘I had another glimpse through a rent in the mist in which he moved and had his being’ (LJ 94). He later proves utterly helpless, admitting: ‘I cannot say I had ever seen him distinctly – not even to this day, after I had my last view of him’ (LJ 161). At the narrative’s close, his understanding of the protagonist remains inadequate: ‘It is impossible to see him clearly – especially as it is through the eyes of others that we take our last look at him’ (LJ 247).

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Narrative Solidarity 119

Marlow has no doubt a limited perspective, but as a narrative voice he clearly enjoys supreme status.3 He functions as a synchronizing centre of consciousness distributing roles and coordinating the various viewpoints into a stratified narrative structure over which he has control. With his frequent commentary, evaluation, and editing of his secondary narrators’ observations Marlow slips into the role of a prominent narrative agency and guide to the reader. The dramatized multiple viewpoints are in theory given equal discursive and ideological weight, but in practice Marlow’s views prevail over the secondary narrators’ evaluations. In other words, Marlow is at once involved with the humanity surrounding him and sitting in the lofty position of an ultimate judge and assessor of human emotions. He is an elect figure, distancing himself from the rest of the narrators that he puts in the service of his tale. Throughout he adopts an apparently democratic approach, which triggers a polyphonic environment, while holding tightly to the reins of the narrative. He frequently moderates and sometimes alters his informants’ views to suit an aesthetic and ideological project which pivots around the dialectics of multiplicity and oneness, indeterminacy and fixity. As in Lord Jim, the other Marlow narratives, specifically ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Chance, are characterized by frequent intrusions, intense editing, and evaluation of the secondary sources fuelling the narration. Recourse to these various rhetorical devices derives from Conrad’s promotion of a narrative hierarchy over which Marlow presides. It is worth noting, however, that propensity to generalization and editing is by no means limited to the stories in which Marlow is a primary narrator. The anonymous narrators in Victory, Nostromo, and ‘Karain’, for instance, resort to similar tactics to assert their supremacy. In Victory the narrator frequently reasserts Davidson’s value as secondary narrator. At the same time, like Marlow in Lord Jim or Chance, he often qualifies Davidson’s observations, edits them, or draws attention to their limitations. For instance, he states that ‘the excellent Davidson had discovered the fact without discovering the reason’ (V 152). In alluding to Davidson’s limited perspective the authorial narrator gestures to the relativity of perception and judgement. Through constant evaluation of his secondary narrator, on the other hand, he tends to confirm his own narrative supremacy and re-establish his control over the act of telling. The unnamed narrator in ‘Karain’ displays a similar tendency to generalization and editing of his auxiliary voices of enunciation, but the tale’s narrative structure is more complex than that of Victory. ‘Karain’ is narrated by an anonymous Englishman and is based on the latter’s reminiscences of the story of the eponymous Malay chief. In this story

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

120 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

the voice of the narrator blends with those of his two, named, countrymen, Hollis and Jackson. The three voices intertwine with Karain’s reported speech, forming an embedded, polyphonic narrative fabric. This manifest polyphonic structure alongside the tale-within-a-tale pattern on which ‘Karain’ is based make it difficult to tell with certainty which words are Karain’s and which are the narrator’s. In this layered structure, the source of enunciation is split into an inner narrative and an outer frame; the two levels interact productively and establish symbiotic relationships. Orientalist and Occidentalist discourses are set in dialectical relationships; the first is represented by the narrator and his acolytes, the second, represented by Karain, is fully directed against the Dutch colonizers. The dramatization of these discourses involves a balancing act whereby the narrator allows some ground for the speechless periphery to make itself heard by the vocal centre. In this way, he provides the Malays – notably their chief, Karain – with a space in which to voice their vision and prejudices about the West. In view of this rehabilitating strategy, Karain is reinstated as the locus of enunciation, endowed with the authority to speak about his world and Europe. In enabling Karain to recover the power of gaze and voice – privileged vehicles of colonial ideology and symbols of supremacy – the narrator somehow shifts the protagonist from characteristic indolence and passivity into the realm of language and power. He enables him to emerge as a speaking and seeing subject, offering us the opportunity to learn about the West, not from the centre, as is usually the case in colonial literature, but from the colonized margin. All the same, the narrator still maintains a position of narrative authority, preserving intact his power to edit at will his informants, including Karain. The narrator’s apparent striving for narrative balance is thus underpinned by a hegemonic impulse, a defining feature of several of Conrad’s narrators.4 From the outset, the anonymous narrator in ‘Karain’ gives the impression of a democratic narrating subject, but, like Marlow in Lord Jim or the narrator in Victory, he turns out to be an overpowering, controlling narrative agency. In consequence, Karain, who claims to be a voice of authority that ‘speak[s] openly and without fear’ (K 63), is anything but in full control of his enunciation. The narrator retains a supreme narrative status which finally makes Karain appear merely as an authorized spokesman delivering by proxy a verdict against Dutch colonialism. The narrator’s design involves both mystification and appropriation of the protagonist’s words. After mentioning that Karain ‘spoke at last’, the narrator adds: ‘It is impossible to convey the effect of his story. It is undying, it is but a memory, and its vividness cannot be made clear

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Narrative Solidarity 121

to another mind, any more than the vivid emotions of a dream’ (K 60). He later elaborates on his justificatory rhetoric, cautiously insisting that ‘this is, imperfectly, what [Karain] said’ (K 62). This statement echoes Marlow’s declaration about Jim: ‘He related facts which I have not forgotten, but at this distance of time I couldn’t recall his very words: I only remember that he managed wonderfully to convey the brooding rancour of his mind into the bare recital of events’ (LJ 78). Marlow seems to be aware of his constant intrusions and invokes poor memory and passing time to justify his versions of the protagonist’s and characters’ accounts. In the end, his rhetorical precautions appear mostly as artful maneouvres meant to consolidate his grip on the narrative. In ‘Karain’, too, the narrator’s insistence on his inability to render plainly Karain’s story, seemingly due to poor memory, serves an identical purpose. Through this crafty deliberation he establishes himself as a voice of authority, with the power to hone, amend, and edit the protagonist’s tale. Thanks to this privileged status, the primary narrator in ‘Karain’ acquires a supreme epistemological power, deftly incorporating the Malay tales which he re-tells in his own accent. Simply put, the narrator distances himself from the protagonist’s reported speech and subtly incorporates it into his narrative. As he, literally, brackets and keeps at a distance the protagonist’s words, the narrator comments on and edits the contents. In this way, his voice retains its ascendancy and overwhelms Karain’s memory on which the tale is based. The narrative solidarity conveyed through the blending of narrative voice and perspective, showing and telling, reveals Conrad’s holistic approach to art and life. At the same time, the overlap of these levels of perception and cognition betrays the narrative voices’ competition for power and authority. This ambivalence may read as Conrad’s ambiguous positioning in relation to the possibilities of truth and knowledge. Conrad seems to be at once promoting centrifugal truth and subjecting this multiple, decentred truth to a centripetal epistemic agency. The dynamics of centripetal and centrifugal forces informing Conrad’s epistemic enterprise is also inherent in the vertical and horizontal axis mentioned in connection with Conrad’s nominal and metaphoric readers. As we shall see in the next chapter, these various contingencies – centripetal/centrifugal, vertical/horizontal – strongly determine Conrad’s construction of the reader in his writing.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

122 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Conrad and the Construction of the Reader: Tension between Democratic Vision and Aristocratic Leaning Before probing the complex issue of Conrad’s construction of the reader in his writing, it is worth noting that Conrad’s poetics is manifestly reader-conscious, revealing intricate relationships between implied author and reader. However, we would need also to clarify that Conrad’s works are not as overtly reader-oriented as could, for instance, be said of the fictions of Fielding, Sterne, or Balzac. These three writers tend to establish close relationships with readers by repeatedly soliciting them, using such conventional phrases as ‘dear reader’. Sterne in Tristram Shandy constantly calls upon his readers in order to secure their companionship, to instruct them, and to manipulate their perceptions. Similarly, Fielding in Tom Jones frequently appeals to and seeks to establish a sustained dialogue with his audience in order to entertain and educate them. Balzac’s works, too, are permeated with explicit addresses to the reader. In The Comedy of Manners, for example, the word ‘reader’ is used several times, and it was Balzac’s obsession with the reader that led Zola to refer to Balzac’s works as a ‘véritable causerie avec le public’ (sheer chitchat with the readers). In contrast, Conrad almost never addresses his readers directly. His relation to the audience articulates instead around a gamut of theoretical and narrative devices subtly orchestrated by his primary narrators. Among these are the omnipresence of nominal and metaphoric readers, the pervasiveness of narrator-narratee/implied author-reader relationships, the narrators’ frequent appeals to their (fictional) audiences in order to draw their attention and sympathy, regular switches from oral to written modes of narration, and the construction of ideal readers through elaborate rhetorical designs. The way the narrator-narratee relationship is staged in Conrad’s fiction reveals a sophisticated, productive narratological approach, replete 123

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

7

with narrative and meta-narrative implications. It rests on a hierarchical paradigm, identical to the one on which is founded the relation between his primary and secondary narrators. Conrad’s handling of the narrator-audience relationship is a twofold design. He tends to value the primary narrators’ competence over that of his audience. At the same time, he relentlessly measures his narratees’ listening and interpretative skills against one another in order to separate the competent from the inefficient ones. In several of his works, Conrad expresses a desire for a harmonious community of tellers and listeners as a means to compensate for the linguistic bankruptcy and the breakdown of authentic communication characterizing modern print culture. A key modernist preoccupation,1 Conrad’s quest sounds like a craving for the ideal form of communication that anonymous ancient poets enjoyed with audiences before the invention of the printed text. Conrad’s desire for collaborative relationships with his readers and his focus on orality, sight, and body language all indicate his leaning toward this form of ancient poetic communication. An Outcast of the Islands and Lord Jim are, in this respect, eloquent illustrations. In the former, the authorial narrator depicts the Malay speakers and listeners gathered in Lakamba’s courtyard as a harmonious speech community, free of the divisions that tend to plague Conrad’s fictional audiences. In Lord Jim, too, the Bugis society into which Jim inserts himself is featured as a cohesive, authentic linguistic community where communication seems to thrive on collaboration and reciprocity. However, when it comes to depicting narrator-narratee relationships Conrad offers a completely different picture. Instead of cohesion and reciprocity, he shows instances of communication mostly based on division and hierarchy between narrator and audience – features reflecting Conrad’s eroded faith in the power of words and authentic intercourse. The first observation is that in the narrator-narratee relationships dramatized in Conrad’s works the narrator is often considered sharper and more clear-sighted than his audience. This is manifest in works such as Victory and Lord Jim. In these texts the teller-listener paradigm goes beyond the conventional narrative frames of works like ‘Heart of Darkness’ or ‘Youth’, based on garrulous tellers of yarns and docile, effaced audiences listening attentively to the stories. In Victory, the authorial narrator valorizes Davidson and the small humane group of listeners of which he is a member, while openly dismissing the gossipy, calumnious audience at Schomberg’s hotel as unworthy of his tale. The selective strategy adopted by the authorial narrator in Victory in connection with his audience – a recurrent pattern in Conrad’s fiction – is

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

124 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

125

even more marked in Lord Jim. In this novel, Marlow – though himself acknowledged as offering only a limited, fallible perspective – does not miss a single opportunity to reassert his presumed superiority over his listeners. Early in the novel, we hear Marlow telling his story to his audience on the veranda. This audience is composed of the frame narrator, an unnamed host, and other anonymous auditors listening patiently to the tale. Marlow talks profusely and often solicits his addressees, but the latter remain virtually silent. As in ‘Heart of Darkness’ where all that Marlow wrests from his audience is a single formal remark by an anonymous listener telling him: ‘Try to be civil, Marlow’ (HD 184),2 in Lord Jim the unnamed host is the only one of the listeners to utter a comment. He does so more out of courtesy and in compliance with the conventions of oral tradition than from a real desire for exchange: ‘He paused again to wait for an encouraging remark perhaps, but nobody spoke; only the host, as if reluctantly performing a duty, murmured – “You are so subtle, Marlow”’ (LJ 69). For Bakhtin, speech and writing are always acts of communication and instances of productive dialogism (Bakhtin 1981, 1990). According to Bakhtin, our discourse always anticipates a response or ‘answerability’ from the Other. Marlow, here, is presumably not seeking reciprocal intercourse with his audience. His rhetoric in the end amounts to a self-reflexive, if not tautological, act of telling in which eloquence and performance seem to be the ultimate goal. In this particular instance, Marlow’s veranda listeners are not conceived of as active participants, but as mere passive listeners and consumers of his tale. Even the host’s remark, which gives the illusion of active participation, lacks dialogical potential. It is merely appreciative and serves to confirm Marlow’s competency as a yarn spinner. Brief as it is, the listener’s comment seems to suggest agreement with Marlow’s opinion on Jim. The implication is that the reader at this stage is being invited to take a similarly sympathetic and appreciative view of Marlow’s narrative. Although the host’s comment has an ironic twist, almost a sneer, its tone confirms rather than destabilizes Marlow’s position. If he obliquely demands that Marlow stop beating around the narrative bush and get on instead with the facts of the story, his intervention is obviously meant to give the audience the illusion of playing a dynamic part in a story mediated single-handedly by Marlow. The other implication is that in order to establish his narrative authority at this early stage Marlow has to appear as confident and knowledgeable as possible. He has thus to assert his narrative credentials by enhancing his telling skills and displaying ‘encyclopaedic competence’ and control over

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conrad and the Construction of the Reader

his topic. This is a fundamental step, since it enables Marlow to stress his worth as a raconteur in order to elicit the interest of an audience that may otherwise have been discouraged by his long, slow-moving tale. What matters most for Marlow at this stage, then, is not so much initiating dialogue with his audience, as setting the tone of his lingering narrative and constructing a company of attentive, acquiescent listeners.3 Marlow’s propensity to undermine reciprocity with his collective audience is reiterated later in the narrative. The following statement offers a good illustration: With these words Marlow had ended his narrative, and his audience had broken up forthwith, under his abstract, pensive gaze. Men drifted off the verandah in pairs or alone without loss of time, without offering a remark, as if the last image of that incomplete story, its incompleteness itself, and the very tone of the speaker, had made discussion vain and comment impossible. (LJ 246) We might reasonably wonder why Marlow’s deliberation does not require a comment from his narratee. The answer might lie in his own inconclusive, disconcerting story. Besides, the tone of Marlow’s voice, as made clear in this quote, does not encourage the listeners to respond, probably because they are not considered fit to fill in the blanks in Marlow’s story. After all, Marlow could not possibly envisage his listeners – who display the features of a common, mediocre audience – other than as passive, undiscerning consumers of his tale. For these reasons, dialogue between Marlow and his subtly despised group of listeners cannot take place; neither can the communion between Conrad and the common reader. According to Conrad this is because the ordinary reader expects stories with ‘closed ends’ and definite meaning, instead of inconclusive tales such as those told by Marlow in Lord Jim and ‘Heart of Darkness’. In a letter to Norman Douglas (29 February 1908), Conrad referred to the ‘inconceivable stupidity’ of the ‘ordinary reader’ who, in his words, expects ‘a full close’, ‘the nail hit on the head’ (CL 4, 52).4 In Lord Jim the hierarchy between Marlow and his audience is maintained throughout. He considers himself highly skilful and dismisses his audience as unreliable. Like the narrators of Chance and Victory, who blame their respective narratees for being witless and superficial, Marlow in Lord Jim often shows contempt for his audience whom he deems unfit to grasp Jim’s riddle. He forges his own truths to uphold his narrative

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

126 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Conrad and the Construction of the Reader

127

‘It seemed to me that I must jump out of that accursed boat and swim back to see – half a mile – more – any distance – to the very spot...’? Why this impulse? Do you see the significance? Why back to the very spot? Why not down alongside – if he meant drowning? Why back to the very spot, to see – as if his imagination had to be soothed by the assurance that all was over before death could bring relief? I defy any one of you to offer another explanation. (LJ 84) In this statement, Marlow undertakes a sustained inquest into the psychology of the protagonist’s act, while carefully defying his listeners’ interpretative skill. As he challenges his addressees, he tacitly incites them to become active participants in the story. But this does not mean that Marlow considers his listeners equal partners or viable interpreters of Jim’s mediated tale. On the contrary, he still views them as inferior and often reasserts his supremacy. All the while, Marlow preserves his narrative authority despite his lingering doubts about the protagonist, but mistrusts his listeners’ ability properly to grasp the intent of his complex tale. Marlow goes even further to discredit their listening, comprehending, and interpretative competence. He bluntly tells his reticent veranda audience: My last words about Jim shall be few. I affirm he had achieved greatness; but the thing would be dwarfed in the telling, or rather in the hearing. Frankly, it is not my words that I mistrust but your minds. I could be eloquent were I not afraid you fellows had starved your imaginations to feed your bodies. I do not mean to be offensive; it is respectable to have no illusions – and safe – and profitable – and dull. (LJ 164) Marlow accuses his addressees of being unimaginative and dull, attributes that Conrad applies to the average reader. Marlow distrusts his audience’s faculty of understanding and judgement, but must have found their silent presence indispensable, for they are after all his raison d’être as raconteur. And this ambivalence too is not without its reflection in Conrad’s own attitude vis-à-vis the average reader whom he at once despises and hopes to seduce into buying his novels.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

authority, while denying his addressees the privilege of intellectual discernment and deep psychological insight into Jim’s conduct:

All through the narrative Marlow maintains his narrative supremacy. He does not budge from his haughty attitude towards his audience. He, for instance, talks of his first encounter with Jim as the type of experience that is the privilege only of individuals of his calibre. Marlow obviously does so to reassert his prestige in order to enhance his reliability as a storyteller and conduit of knowledge and truth. Marlow reiterates his condescending attitude when he refers to Patusan to which Jim withdraws after the Patna episode. He insists that the place is so completely cut off from civilization that only scientists or wandering sailors of his (superior) kind could be interested in such a remote spot. Likewise, in his gloss of Stein he distinguishes himself from eminent European scholars who know Stein the scientist but remain unfamiliar with the man’s life and character, with which he is himself well acquainted. He boasts his close ties to Stein, who forms a valuable narrative link as he becomes Marlow’s eye-witness in the novel’s second part. To further disqualify his audience, Marlow associates them with the mass, or what he calls the ‘common mind’ (LJ 143) – a phrase connoting images of superficiality and mediocrity. On a meta-narrative level, the attitudes towards their audiences of Marlow and the authorial narrators of Victory and Chance echo Conrad’s own perception of the actual reader – the average type – at whom he usually scoffed. According to several reviewers, the common reader found Conrad’s works ‘stiff reading ’and ‘too strong meat’ (Gordan 1963, 301). Conrad discussed his relation to the British general public extensively in his essays and letters. His opinions on this subject are as diverse as they are ambivalent. As made clear in his letter to Frank Doubleday, mentioned earlier, and on many other occasions, Conrad argued that his writing was not designed for a privileged elite. He insisted that it was intended for highbrow and popular audiences alike. However, following the commercial failure of his works Conrad occasionally claimed that he did not want to be popular. This change of heart might merely have been a sign of distress, for Conrad strove unremittingly for literary and commercial success. Thus, like any writer living by the pen, Conrad tried to secure a wide readership. And in order to elicit the general public’s interest he did not hesitate to overstate the supposedly ‘unliterary’ or popular vein of his writing, as he wrote in a letter to Alfred Knopf (20 July 1913): ‘When it comes to popularity I stand much nearer the public mind than Stevenson who was super-literary, a conscious virtuoso of style; whereas the average mind does not care much for virtuosity’ (CL 5, 257). Whatever his opinions on literary reputation, Conrad did, in practice, hanker to some degree after popularity and commercial success. And if

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

128 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

129

he were to achieve this goal he certainly could not afford to cater only for the elite. As some critics pointed out, his works appealed to the highbrow reader as well as to the working classes. Stephen Donovan notes: ‘Conrad’s work always appealed strongly to working-class readers . . . and . . . he would eventually earn considerable sums from serializing his works in mass-circulation periodicals such as the Daily Mail and Harper’s Magazine as well from selling the rights to four novels to Hollywood’ (2005, 7). That Conrad’s fiction was read across social categories is undeniable. This does not mean, however, that Conrad was sympathetic to or had a positive view of working-class readers who bought and read his books. Indeed, in view of his declarations, we can safely argue that Conrad was, on the whole, deeply scornful of the wider British public, which he variously labelled ‘a great multitude whose voice is a shout’ (CL 3, 13), and ‘the Democracy of book-stalls’ (CL 5, 173). In his observation on British readers, Conrad could be said to be following in the steps of his French literary models: Anatole France, Flaubert, and Maupassant, each of whom showed contempt for the general reading public. Interestingly, these nineteenth-century French writers’ scorn for the common reader was to become a key feature of literary modernism. Modernist writers, who promoted an elitist, aristocratic view of art and culture, consistently inveighed against the average reader, and like these modernists, Conrad held disparaging views of the general public throughout his life, denying them a capacity for discernment, scepticism, and intelligence – qualities that he regarded highly.5 In a letter to John Galsworthy, Conrad evoked the virtue of scepticism, which he defined as ‘the tonic of minds, the tonic of life, the agent of truth – the way of art and salvation’ (CL 2, 359). While, in this letter Conrad does not explicitly speak of the common reader as lacking this fundamental quality, in his fiction, specifically in Nostromo, he is definite about it. He bluntly states that ‘the popular mind is incapable of scepticism’ (N 303).6 It is evident that Conrad’s unflattering remarks about the common reader contradict his apparent democratic vision of readership that he evoked in his letters and essays. This democratic view is conveyed in his letter to Doubleday. It is also suggested in Lord Jim where he depicts Marlow as the embodiment of democratic virtue. Marlow criticizes the Court of Inquiry for focusing on the externals and neglecting the fundamental human aspect of the affair which grips his attention. In the process, he stresses his democratic approach to people and life in the following terms: ‘I have met so many men . . . and in each case all I could see was merely the human being. A confounded democratic quality of vision

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conrad and the Construction of the Reader

which may be better than total blindness, but has been of no advantage to me, I can assure you’ (LJ 69). Marlow’s ‘democratic quality of vision’ enables him to see Jim’s tragedy as unique, while the court, in his opinion lacking such discernment, deems it a case among others to be assessed exclusively on the basis of fact and hard evidence. Marlow’s liberal approach, stressed here, is dramatized throughout the narrative. It can be detected in his handling and perception of the narration as an act of solidarity in which various voices of enunciation collaborate. This dramatized democratic impulse should nonetheless be taken with a pinch of salt. Marlow’s conduct as both narrator and character might be liberal in essence, but it is far from promoting consensus and equality between the various participants in the narrative enterprise. The strict hierarchy that Marlow establishes between his secondary narrators and among his narratees betrays an elitist inclination, which is emblematic of Conrad’s aristocratic vision of culture, poetics, and readership. In a recent introduction to Victory Mallios addressed Conrad’s ‘poetics of democracy’. He observes that Victory ‘is the book that first allowed Conrad to become popularly produced as a “master” literary figure, the book that first enabled Conrad to become “one of us” in a way that transcends elitist boundaries frequently associated with “art”’ (2003, xiii). It is true that Victory manifestly increased Conrad’s popularity and was a commercial success, thanks to its various theatrical and cinematographic adaptations. For this reason, we may agree that Victory has to some extent become ‘of the people’, judging from the mass-consumption it generated. This observation needs, however, to be tempered. Victory’s mass-production certainly brought this novel and, by the same token, Conrad to wider public notice. All the same, Conrad’s apparent ‘poetics of democracy’, especially in relation to novels like Lord Jim, cannot be taken at face value. For in practice this poetics boils down to rhetorical design and artful construction. It consists of a mask, if not a hoax, behind or through which the elitist Conrad seeks to secure a large audience while continuing to cater for the privileged few with whom he shares a community of spirit and outlook. We should bear in mind that Conrad hated democracy, just as he despised the ordinary reader.7 At the same time, he was aware that the literary reputation and commercial success for which he yearned depended on that despised mass readership. This doubleness of vision may account for Conrad’s inconsistency in relation to his poetics in general and with regard to his attitude to his reader in particular, his wavering between a feigned democratic aspiration and a disguised aristocratic inclination. Conrad’s overall approach to

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

130 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

131

his reader shows affinities with both Flaubert and Stendhal, although in essence his reader theory is, in my view, more Stendhalian than Flaubertian. As many critics have remarked, Flaubert has forthrightly dismissed the common reader as too shallow to be solicited by his stellar writing. Flaubert could afford to reject the common reader, for, as he frequently observed, he did not write for a living, but merely for pleasure, poetic beauty, and posterity.8 Like Flaubert, Stendhal was writing for the elite. He dedicated both Le Rouge et le noir and La Chartreuse de Parme ‘to the happy few’ (Stendhal 2007, 162). But, unlike Flaubert, neither Stendhal nor Conrad, who lived by the pen, could afford to be completely indifferent to their general public, even if they deeply resented it. Stendhal was, of course, aware that the reading public was of two distinct kinds: ‘the happy few’ made up of the readers of the Parisian salons, and the average reader, embodied by the woman on ‘the fifth floor’, or charwoman. Nevertheless, despite his apparent contempt for the common reader, Stendhal, as Parmentier rightly notes, did not exclusively target the public of the Parisian salons, but sought instead to appeal to as large a public as possible. In short, Stendhal wanted to be read and understood by both ‘the Marquise’ and women of modest background (Stendhal 1986). The ambivalence of Stendhal’s aesthetics of readership is echoed in Conrad’s own attitude to his readers. Like Stendhal and Flaubert, Conrad, as we have seen, despised democracy. And like these elitist writers, too, Conrad scorned the reading multitude, while for financial reasons he considered it a necessary evil. The ambiguity probably explains why Conrad occasionally felt compelled to make a rhetorical accommodation toward his general public, aware that they were, in spite of everything, potential buyers and consumers of his fiction. Whereas in his letters and essays Conrad expresses an ambivalent attitude towards the average reader, in his fictional depictions of the narrator-narratee relationships he reveals a more marked elitism. This is suggested in his narrators’ condescension to their audiences. It is also reflected in the narrators’ desire for a more sophisticated audience than the one that they are addressing in the here-and-now of the fictional time. Lord Jim, Under Western Eyes, and Victory all offer illuminating examples. They are by far Conrad’s most sophisticated and elusive narratives in regard to the poetics of readership. Under Western Eyes will be thoroughly analysed in the last chapter of this study. My present emphasis is on Lord Jim and Victory which shed light on Conrad’s reader-response theory and his democratic narrative leaning. Lord Jim may be defined as an odyssey of writing and telling. From a narratological standpoint, at least, this novel can compare with Homer’s

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conrad and the Construction of the Reader

Odyssey and Iliad. Marlow’s narration is an odyssey of telling because it consists of a long, labyrinthine tale that embraces a complex chronotope – the pre-Patusan and Patusan space time-sequences – each adding to the tale’s thematic, symbolic, and epistemological denseness. Besides, for its actualization Marlow’s narrative brings into play a large number of narrative voices and perspectives. All these contribute to the polyphonic character of the novel and increase its poetic, ontological, and epistemic dialogism. Lord Jim is also an odyssey of reading. It is permeated with readers, both fictional and metaphorical. It likewise teems with all sorts of listeners and audiences, offering concurrent readings of Jim’s case. Above all, Marlow’s whole narrative enterprise is odyssean in essence, precisely because it consists of a prolonged, complex progress towards finding a profound, sympathetic audience for his mediated story of Jim. In Lord Jim, but also in works like Victory or Nostromo, the transition from a democratic impulse to an elitist orientation is finely staged. In the latter novels this important narrative twist is conveyed through the shift from a collective, dull, and undiscerning audience – metaphoric of the common reader – to a select, attentive listener, emblematic of the highbrow reader to whom Conrad addresses his writing. After jeering at his collective, superficial addressees the authorial narrator in Victory finally sees his narrative reaching a prestigious audience. In the closing scene his auxiliary narrative voice, Davidson is in the presence of a privileged listener, ‘a high official on his tour’ who comes to hear Heyst’s story at first hand: ‘Davidson was talking with an Excellency, because what was alluded to in conversation as “the mystery of Samburan” had caused such a sensation in the Archipelago that even those in the highest sphere were anxious to hear something at first hand. Davidson had been summoned to an audience. It was a high official on his tour’ (V 325). In Nostromo, too, Captain Mitchell, though not a competent historian, finds himself at the story’s close lecturing ‘the privileged passenger’ on the history of Sulaco (N 349). This privileged addressee is metonymic of the elitist reader that Conrad projects in Nostromo and generally in his writing; one who is capable of filling in the gaps or lacunae of Mitchell’s historical accounts. More markedly, in Lord Jim Marlow’s earlier audiences finally narrow down to a single privileged individual whom Marlow trusts with Jim’s letters: At first he saw three distinct enclosures. A good many pages closely blackened and pinned together; a loose square sheet of greyish paper with a few words traced in a handwriting he had never seen before,

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

132 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

133

and an explanatory letter from Marlow. From this last fell another letter, yellowed by time and frayed on the folds. He picked it up and, laying it aside, turned to Marlow’s message, ran swiftly over the opening lines, and, checking himself, thereafter read on deliberately, like one approaching with slow feet and alert eyes the glimpse of an undiscovered country. ‘. . . I don’t suppose you’ve forgotten,’ went on the letter. ‘You alone have showed an interest in him that survived the telling of his story, though I remember well you would not admit he had mastered his fate.’ (LJ 246–7) Before discussing this statement and the letter’s symbolism, it is worth recalling that the eighteenth century – from which Conrad derives so much poetic inspiration – was the age of letter-writing (see Brant 2006; Anderson et al. 1966). This is well illustrated, for instance, by Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes and by the numerous letters and letter-writers found in the works of authors like Fielding and Sterne. In the eighteenth century, letters had various purposes. As a literary mode of expression, they had the advantage of directness and immediacy. Carol Sherman refers to the letter’s ‘generic relation to dialogue’, arguing: ‘The writer of a letter aims directly at its recipient, and the reader of the epistolary fiction frequently puts himself in the place of the person addressed, thus conspiring toward the verisimilitude of the addressee’ (1976, 23). Together with increasing the effect of verisimilitude, the use of letters in fiction intends to heighten the works’ communicability or dialogism. Furthermore, the presence of letters in a fictional work tends to erase generic boundaries, for this literary form, as Donald Davie rightly observes, ‘depends on blurring the stylistic distinction between conversation and written prose’ (1952, 13). In keeping with the eighteenth-century tradition Conrad saturates his works with references to letters and letter-writers. The letter motif is a recurrent pattern in ‘Heart of Darkness’, Nostromo, ‘Typhoon’, and Suspense, to name a few. Kurtz in ‘Heart of Darkness’ hands Marlow a packet including personal letters; in Nostromo Martin Decoud writes a long letter to his sister in Paris, detailing Costaguana’s social, economic, and political context; Jukes in ‘Typhoon’ writes a letter to his wife relating the destructive effects of the typhoon on the Nan-Shan; Cosmo Latham in Suspense, like Decoud in Nostromo, sends a letter to his sister. The list is not exhaustive, but gives an indication of the omnipresence of letters and letter-writers in Conrad’s works. These letters serve various goals,

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conrad and the Construction of the Reader

ranging from simple exchange of factual information between relatives and spouses to important aesthetic considerations. From a structural point of view, these letters introduce narrative freshness and sophistication.9 Decoud’s letter in Nostromo, although merely recapitulative, injects variety into the novel’s omniscient narration. In ‘Typhoon’, too, Jukes’s letter fulfils a similar function. In much the same way as the storm comes to break the monotony of sailing on a calm sea, Jukes’s letter brings narrative variation, interrupting the ‘somewhat monotonously authorial’ telling of the tale (Lothe 1989, 115). In so doing, it gives the narration an irregular and polyphonic undertone. Along with endorsing perspectivism and provisional meaning through the device of narrative variation, Conrad in ‘Typhoon’ fosters multiple reading. For Jukes, who is ultimately in charge of relating the event to the reader from the position of a privileged eye-witness, has a fallible perspective. He lacks both the authorial omniscient power to generalize and the capacity to understand: ‘outside the routine of duty he doesn’t seem to understand more than half what you tell him’ (T 13). Conrad’s choice of an unreliable narrator to operate the link between the narrative and meta-narrative unsettles the omniscient voice and destabilizes the reader. The latter, initially taken up by a seemingly confident and reassuring narrator, is ultimately abandoned to an unreliable source of enunciation. The reader is put in the uncomfortable position of being unable to dismiss Jukes’s narration with a pinch of salt, and having instead to interrogate the text and make sense of it unaided. In this, the implied reader of ‘Typhoon’ is left in a position identical to that of the privileged man in Lord Jim, since he, too, is left to his own devices by Marlow’s meandering tale. From a wider aesthetic standpoint, therefore, the letters in Lord Jim, Nostromo and ‘Typhoon’ fulfil an important narratological function. They form a connective tissue that strings together the textual and metatextual. As such, the letters re-orient the reader’s reading trajectory in a significant way. More concretely, these letters shift the reader’s focus from narrative as something happening in the fictional here-and-now to the meta-fictional of the there-and-thereafter of actual reading into which the letters project the récit. The narrative that we have been following step by step thus abruptly leaves its customary space-time sequence to integrate a meta-fictional dimension. It is ultimately precipitated into the meta-narrative space-time pattern suggested by the letter motif and the correspondents to whom the letters are addressed. Since in most cases these addressees are not embodied characters in the plot, they may be rightly assimilated to surrogate readers. Given their liminal position,

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

134 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

135

we may refer to these characters in possession of the letters as parafictional readers, since they literally operate parallel to the fictional readers and meta-textual audiences. In the three works discussed above the letters connote a change from orality to writing, from the collective to the singular. They reveal a key narrative moment that signals the receding of voice in favour of gaze, the ending of oral narrative, and the emergence of the reader and the act of reading. In Lord Jim, in particular, the interplay of voice and gaze, writing and orality in the scene showing the ‘privileged man’ reading the letters that Marlow sent him is consistent with the overall narrative mode on which the whole story is based (LJ 246). We remember the initial transfer from authorial voice to Marlow’s narration and the subtle orchestration of his narrative competency. This transition institutionalizes Marlow as a privileged voice of narration whose narrative act takes place when the authorial voice fades, allowing him to spin his subjective yarn. Likewise, in the case of the ‘privileged man’, the reading act, which the letters imply, truly begins with the cessation of Marlow’s voice. At this moment, he can start his reading, both unimpeded and unaided by Marlow’s initial reflections, comments, questions or editing. The ‘privileged man’ that Marlow addresses resembles the prestigious reading agency for which he had been striving from the start. He embodies the subliminal reader that Conrad projects in his fiction. The ‘privileged man’, or more fittingly ‘the privileged reader’, to evoke the frame narrator’s own words, possesses all the required features of a supreme reader (LJ 256). He is not only attentive and subtle, but also sympathetic – virtues that Conrad usually ascribes to his elect audience. This reader emerging at the nodal point of Marlow’s narrative is the ideal type in almost every respect. He seems sufficiently congenial to condone Jim’s weaknesses, and competent enough to see deeply into things. The privileged reader’s superior status is conveyed by way of topographical references and, most importantly, by the sight trope, a key feature of Conrad’s poetics, as shown in chapter four: ‘The privileged man opened the packet, looked in, then, laying it down, went to the window. His rooms were in the highest flat of a lofty building, and his glance could travel afar beyond the clear panes of glass, as though he were looking out of the lantern of a lighthouse’ (LJ 246). In this statement, Marlow inscribes the privileged man’s abstract act of reading within an ethics of mobility by drawing attention to his visual and physical dynamism. The man’s alert eyes refer to the centrality of gaze in his interpretative initiative, while the movement of his feet, though slow, intimates a patient, careful reading endeavour. This is a

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conrad and the Construction of the Reader

telling depiction and everything in it is articulated in a rhetoric that enhances the value of the privileged man as observer. He is obviously the antithesis of the common reader as embodied in the audience on the veranda. The ultimate, subliminal reader that Marlow projects in this climactic scene has instead his full visual and intellectual potential engaged in his interpretative enterprise. He possesses ‘alert eyes’ and occupies a strategic place of observation. Living on the highest floor of a lofty building, he enjoys a dominant standpoint. His wide perspective has an extensive grip on both his physical surrounding and on textuality or narrative sub-text – symbolized by the letters in his possession. The privileged man is literally positioned above the common mind onto which he could look down at leisure. At the same time, his uncommon station assigns to him the privileged yet daunting task of going through the myriad yellowed, embedded letters to grasp their intent. The letters look like an uncharted territory and the privileged man’s reading act amounts to a determinant solitary undertaking. With Jim’s letters in hand, ‘the privileged reader’ is positioned to have access to the protagonist’s reflections, psychology, and affects. Meanwhile, he is to carry out his interpretative task unaided and handle his new situation ‘like one approaching with slow feet and alert eyes the glimpse of an undiscovered country’ (LJ 247). As suggested in this scene, Conrad conceives of the act of reading as a quest and a voyage of discovery in which curiosity,10 excitement, and challenge blend. The fact that ‘the privileged reader’ approaches the letters as someone does an unexplored territory indicates his eagerness and anxiety to probe unassisted the letters’ contents. And, if he abides by Marlow’s example as a rhetorical reader of Jim’s case, ‘the privileged reader’ is in turn expected to live up to his demanding interpretative task. We recall how Marlow is determined to pursue his interpretation of Jim’s conduct despite the difficulty of understanding the metaphoric script that the protagonist stands for. Marlow articulates his predicament and simultaneously points to his determination to cling on to his deciphering of the protagonist: ‘I cannot say I had ever seen him distinctly – not even to this day, after I had my last view of him; but it seemed to me that the less I understood the more I was bound to him in the name of that doubt which is the inseparable part of our knowledge’ (LJ 161). Like the narrators in Homer and Herodotus, Marlow in Lord Jim uses the device of the narrative alter ego.11 He seems to project himself onto the privileged man – in the same way as a great deal of Conrad’s outlook shades into Marlow’s perceptions of events, characters, and audience. For the most part, Marlow seems to stand for Conrad’s alter ego, since he

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

136 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

137

both impersonates a surrogate writer and incarnates the gentleman that Conrad wanted to become. Najder observes: ‘Marlow, a model English gentleman, ex-officer of the merchant marine, was the embodiment of all that Conrad would wish to be if he were to become completely anglicized.’ Najder further nuances his argument and goes on to dismiss this projection as mere wishful thinking and fantasy: ‘And since that was not the case, and since he did not quite share his hero’s point of view, there was no need to identify himself with Marlow, either emotionally or intellectually’ (1983b, 231). Najder’s comment needs qualification, for I believe that Marlow functions in many respects as a vivid impersonation of Conrad the man and the writer. Indeed, so many of Conrad’s views, attitudes, and emotions in relation to aesthetics, ethics, and reader theory are invested in his narrator that it is difficult not to see Marlow as an alter ego or even a substitute author. The identification of Conrad with Marlow is, of course, implicit and can in no way be adduced from irrefutable textual evidence. In contrast, Marlow’s close connections to Jim can more easily be substantiated. Early in the narrative, Marlow refers to Jim as his ‘secret sharer’. Attempting to explain why he has attended the trial, Marlow says: ‘“Oh yes I attended the inquiry,” he would say, “and to this day I haven’t left off wondering why I went. I am willing to believe each of us has a guardian angel, if you fellows will concede to me that each of us has a familiar devil as well”’ (LJ 26). He later refers to Jim as a younger version of himself, claiming filiation, ‘a youngster . . . of the sort whose appearance claims the fellowship of these illusions you had thought gone out, extinct, cold, and which, as if rekindled at the approach of another flame, give a flutter deep, deep down somewhere, give a flutter of light . . . of heat!’ (LJ 94). Throughout, Marlow strengthens the bonds of friendship and solidarity with his protégé, as suggested in the prison metaphors of ‘vigil’ and ‘condemned man’ (LJ 111) and in the binary ‘man’ and ‘child’ (LJ 95). Concretely, Marlow’s care for Jim is especially expressed in his readiness to help him to find work and verbalize his dilemma. Marlow provides Jim with moral comfort at the Malabar hotel. This scene enacts a narrative nexus, not unlike those key occurrences relating Marlow’s encounter with Kurtz in ‘Heart of Darkness’ or that of the teacher of languages with Razumov in Under Western Eyes. The three narrative moments point variously to the close identification of the respective narrators with the protagonists. Whereas in the case of the teacher of languages and Razumov the doubling is subtly suggested (UWE), in the case of Marlow and Kurtz (HD) and Marlow and Jim (LJ) it is prominently staged. Marlow and Jim’s lives have gradually become as entangled as

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conrad and the Construction of the Reader

those of Marlow and Kurtz in ‘Heart of Darkness’. In this novella, Marlow finally acknowledges Kurtz as his dark side and promises to remain loyal to him, which he does as evidenced by his lying to the Intended. Marlow’s loyalty to Jim (LJ) also remains intact and is reflected in the Malabar hotel episode where Marlow is shown trying to understand and soothe the protagonist. In the hotel room where the discussion between Marlow and Jim takes place, Marlow has created a favourable situation of exchange allowing Jim to put his dilemma into words, relating it aloud so as to exorcise the ghost within. Acting like a psychoanalyst at this specific meeting with Jim, Marlow talks mainly to prod the protagonist into conversation. He wants Jim to confide in him and disclose the secret of his jump from the ship. Most importantly, in this nodal narrative moment Marlow moves from an omnipresent speaker to an attentive listener. And his willingness to listen has apparently a high therapeutic value, as implied in Jim’s enthusiastic response: ‘“You are an awful good sort to listen like this,” he said. “It does me good. You don’t know what it is to me. You don’t” . . . words seemed to fail him’ (LJ 94). In the course of his discussion with Jim, Marlow listens compassionately. As Lothe observes, Marlow also comments, endorses, interrogates, and generalizes on Jim’s case, thus blending his own interpretation with his protégé’s account (1989). Narratologically, the Malabar scene is of the utmost significance; so too, are the encounters between Marlow and Kurtz in ‘Heart of Darkness’ and between the teacher of languages and Razumov in Under Western Eyes. These narrative occurrences reveal the extent to which the tellerlistener paradigm in Conrad’s fiction is dynamic and resilient. The three narrators switch from their initial role of garrulous speakers to that of privileged listeners. When Marlow finally meets Kurtz he is enthralled by the protagonist’s eloquent, dying voice. During his discussion with Razumov the teacher of languages likewise turns into a privileged listener of the protagonist’s tale. In Lord Jim, too, Marlow is an elect auditor who, as he confesses, has been ‘singled out’ from the ‘insignificant multitude’ by the protagonist, just as the frame narrator initially singled him out at the Court of Inquiry to narrate Jim’s story: ‘I felt a gratitude, an affection, for that straggler whose eyes had singled me out, keeping my place in the ranks of an insignificant multitude. How little that was to boast of, after all!’ (LJ 244). Marlow in Lord Jim consistently views Jim as his mirror-image. Similarly, he implicitly regards the privileged man as an alter ego, or more precisely as the extension of his own reading consciousness. Marlow’s

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

138 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

139

remark to the privileged man before handing him the letters – ‘You alone have showed an interest in him that survived the telling of his story’ (LJ 247) – sounds like a self-description. So described, the privileged man impersonates the elite reader that Conrad constructs in Lord Jim and more generally in his fiction. And judging from the arrangement of the letters and from his specific geographic location, the reading awaiting the privileged man is expected to tend vertically, rather than merely skimming over the surface of things and following the linear arrangement of words. The privileged man’s verticality is entailed in the embedded, multilayered structure of the letters in his possession. But Marlow’s endorsement of vertical reading is first intimated in his giving primacy to the ‘why’ or deep investigation of Jim’s case over the ‘how’ which sticks to the literalism of facts (see Chapter 5 above). Through Marlow’s emphatic dismissal of the literality of the Court of Inquiry, Conrad implicitly urges his readers to transcend horizontal reading in search of hidden textual meanings, which haunt his narrative’s interstices and silences. As in the Court of Inquiry, so too in the discussion engaging Brierly and Marlow about the notions of courage and selfhood Conrad dramatizes the horizontal-vertical binary. Brierly subscribes to a linear, exclusive perception of identity fully defined by unquestioned professional, social, and moral conventions. This strict definition of selfhood leads Brierly to see the failing Jim as a coward and an incompetent seaman. Marlow, who is attentive to the vertical dimension of identity and textuality, instead praises the protagonist’s courage to face his failure and cast an inward look: ‘Indeed very few of us have the will or the capacity to look consciously under the surface of familiar emotions’ (LJ 162). Marlow implies that Jim’s capacity for self-assessment and his willingness to look into his inmost self distinguish him from the literalistic, myopic multitude, including Brierly, who is tied to the surface of familiar emotions and conventional notions of selfhood. It is obviously this character that Marlow has in mind when he says: It’s extraordinary how we go through life with eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts. Perhaps it’s just as well; and it may be that it is this very dullness that makes life to the incalculable majority so supportable and so welcome. Nevertheless, there can be but few of us who had never known one of these rare moments of awakening when we see, hear, understand ever so much – everything – in a flash – before we fall back again into our agreeable somnolence. (LJ 105)

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conrad and the Construction of the Reader

If Brierly’s mode of being is likely to provide people with a sense of coherence and stability, it may equally generate solipsism. Indifference to alterity, displayed by Brierly’s attitude to Jim, may cause the individual, as Marlow remarks, to go through life with ‘eyes half shut, with dull ears, with dormant thoughts’. Three faculties are mentioned in this comment: seeing, hearing, and thinking – all three are fundamental means of communication and communion with our fellow beings. Yet, each time only half the faculty is involved, showing how the need to preserve a superficial, stable social envelope impedes deeper engagement with others. Since identity, signification, and textual interpretation are enmeshed in Lord Jim, Marlow’s overall representation consistently brings together these important dimensions. In both his exchange with Brierly and in the remainder of the narrative, Marlow, and through him Conrad, seems to discourage limited conceptions of selfhood and monolithic approaches to textuality and meaning. Marlow consistently compels us to see the characters and the text unfolding before us not only as a linear development, but most importantly also as vertical contingencies that demand the enlistment of all our interpretative faculties: seeing, hearing, and thinking. In this, Marlow’s narrative and poetic inclination seems to reflect the core of Conrad’s ethics and aesthetics. In keeping with Conrad’s deep artistic pursuits, Marlow – a writer by proxy – exhorts his audience to see beyond the surface of things and people instead of assessing the human condition according to externals.12 He extols them to peer into life’s mysterious depths in order to discover the complexity of existence and identity. Metaphorically, Marlow’s exhortation of his audience to see into life’s inmost depths sounds like Conrad’s invitation to the reader to uncover the hidden meanings of his narrator’s mediated narrative. He does so by goading us to delve vertically into the tale’s subtext and to heed the novel’s blanks and silences, rather than simply relying on the linear power of words and literal facts. Marlow’s vertical impulse, his limited perspective, his endorsement of relative truth and multiple meaning, and his insistence on the tale’s lack of closure crystallize the postmodernist ethos anticipated by Conrad. These key features reflect Conrad’s endorsement of an elastic poetics that promotes multiple, dialogical readings.13 Through the same features Conrad postulates a subliminal readership; one which he expects to be both perspicacious and creative. Marlow’s final words to his audience are eloquent in this respect. In encouraging his listeners not to expect a single, definite message from his tale, Marlow could be Conrad’s mouthpiece, fostering non-finite readings of text and character: ‘That was all then – and there shall be nothing more; there shall be no message, unless

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

140 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

141

such as each of us can interpret for himself from the language of facts, that are so often more enigmatic than the craftiest arrangement of words’ (LJ 248). Marlow’s comment sounds like Conrad’s inducement to readers to engage in a solitary, independent interpretation and form their own picture of the events related in Marlow’s fragmented narration. This is quite in keeping with Conrad’s conception of the reader as an active collaborator to the text’s meaning.14 Following Sterne’s urging of the reader to take up his pen and finish the story in Tristram Shandy,15 Conrad in his fiction, specifically in Lord Jim and Under Western Eyes, also expects his projected elite reader to write the book’s ‘other half’ (CL 1, 370).16 In Lord Jim, Marlow encourages his audience actively to ‘fit [together] the pieces’ of his ‘fragmentary’ information in order ‘to make an intelligible picture’ (LJ 250). In so doing, he envisions a dynamic, articulate, and autonomous reader who is apt to write his fiction and shape his own truths from the fragmented material at his disposal.17 For this reason, Marlow can be read as Conrad’s mouthpiece. Through Marlow Conrad exhorts the reader to become an active producer of meaning, or more precisely, he anticipates his reader to be both a discerning consumer of textual truths and a responsible producer of literary meaning. At the end of his narration, Marlow performs a significant narrative gesture. He didactically presents the truths or ‘pieces’ of his fragmentary narrative as many helpful ingredients that the privileged, elect reader is invited to keep at hand and build into a coherent, meaningful whole. In Lord Jim Conrad shapes a dynamic transaction between reader and text in a way that anticipates modern theories of narrative and readership as articulated by theorists such as Booth, Barthes, Rosenblatt, and Iser. As we have seen, these leading theorists stress the productive, dialogic relation between text and reader and regard textual meaning as originating exclusively from these two polar positions. However, in celebrating the death of the author, excluding the author from the construction of textual meaning, these theorists disagree with Conrad, who not only stresses authorial presence in his writing, but also implicitly perceives the author as a secret sharer in building literary sense. Conrad in this way articulates a tripartite textual transaction which, as mentioned previously, encompasses text, reader, and author, each collaborating in the overall signifying enterprise. Lord Jim offers interesting insights into the workings of this complex tripartite textual transaction. The projected signifying totality intimated by Marlow’s representation brings together the narrator and audience, the writer and reader, in what looks like an ideal instance of

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conrad and the Construction of the Reader

communication, if not communion. The reader is exhorted to make a close reading of the text and derive textual meanings from a personal interpretation as well as from the clues provided by the narrator. More important still, the reader is not only expected to be an active, discerning interpreter, but also a surrogate writer. The Conradian notion of the reader-as-writer, evoked earlier, blurs and makes porous the frontiers between writing and reading, writer and reader – elite reader, that is. As suggested in Lord Jim’s final scene and in Conrad’s letter to Cunninghame Graham (see note 16), Conrad assimilates writing and reading to a symbiotic enterprise. For him, an accomplished, ideal aesthetics is a dynamic construction in which text, writer, and reader converge and collaborate to shaping meaning. It is in the spirit of this close collaboration that Conrad invites the reader to become a writer and write the other half of the book. This creative effort that Conrad demands of his readers makes reading a privileged act of solidarity. It requires the collaboration of the reader’s faculties of cognition and perception – seeing, hearing, and thinking – as well as the cooperation of the writing and reading agencies. Owing to this reciprocal relationship emphasized by Conrad, reading his works amounts to a productive, dialogic act in which the implied author’s indeterminate representations and the reader’s discerning interpretation of them interact and converge. The very act of seeing, which in this case means mostly seeing beyond the text’s surface, thus acquires an important symbolic dimension. It reveals Conrad’s striving for communion with his actual elect reader, a striving reflected in Marlow’s search for a superior, congenial audience. It is evident that in the end Conrad, like Marlow, not only wants to help his readers see, but also seeks to secure the complicity and solidarity of his audience’s gaze. In other words, Conrad obviously intends to make his readers see, as he proclaimed in the Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. Most importantly, he bids his readers to ‘see’ with him and to establish a community of sharing and mutual understanding.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

142 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Narrative Self-Consciousness and the Act of Reading: Examining Under Western Eyes through the Lens of the Poetics of Fielding, Sterne, and Diderot

Conrad’s implicit encouragement of the reader to ‘see’ with him, evoked in the previous chapter, testifies to his conception of reading and writing as acts of solidarity. This intersubjective inclination reflects Conrad’s promotion of a participative poetics that tends to a shared vision and reciprocal understanding with his audience.1 Conrad’s participative poetics is the focus of the present chapter. It is examined within a broad literary and cultural context that should allow us to grasp its complexity and ramifications. The approach is comparative and consists in studying Conrad’s technical experimentation, reader-response theory, sense of the dramatic, and narrative self-consciousness through the lens of the works of three major eighteenth-century writers: Fielding, Sterne, and Diderot. My contention is that these authors’ literary and reader theories widely influenced Conrad’s poetics, although Conrad nowhere acknowledged a debt to them. And since writing is essentially an act of appropriation and adaptation,2 Conrad’s eighteenth-century influences were, unsurprisingly, themselves indebted to earlier literary traditions. They drew on ancient Greek and Roman poets as well as on Rabelais, Cervantes, and Swift. They assimilated the epic and dramatic forms they borrowed and ushered their narrative forms in new directions.3

8.1 Fielding, Sterne, and Diderot: literary novelty, verisimilitude, and truth Figures of transition, Diderot, Sterne, and Fielding are no doubt the most vocal representatives and the greatest experimental stylists of the new literary genre – the novel – which developed and became institutionalized 143

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

8

in the eighteenth century. They articulated a number of aesthetic and narrative theories, many of which had a marked impact on nineteenth and twentieth-century writers, including such sophisticated experimentalist authors as Conrad, Joyce, and Woolf. Diderot and Sterne were not only acknowledged as great innovators, but they themselves strongly claimed their originality in both their fiction and letters. Despite his manifest borrowing from previous literary traditions,4 Fielding was also eager to stress his originality. He writes in Tom Jones: For all which I shall not look on myself as accountable to any court of critical jurisdiction whatever: for as I am, in reality, the founder of a new province of writing, so I am at liberty to make what laws I please therein. And these laws, my readers, whom I consider as my subjects, are bound to believe in and to obey; with which that they may readily and cheerfully comply, I do hereby assure them that I shall principally regard their ease and advantage in all such institutions. (TJ 68–9) To reinforce his literary innovativeness Fielding presented his fiction as representing a radical break with both earlier and contemporary literary traditions. And along with satirizing contemporary drama and politics, in both his plays and novels Fielding attacked his fellow writers and inveighed against Romance. The first two prefatory chapters of Joseph Andrews, meant to legitimize the work’s structure and essence, set out to distinguish this novel from allegedly inferior productions. After respectful references to Cervantes, Scarron, Lesage, and Marivaux, with whom he identifies, Fielding stresses his own originality by claiming to have initiated a new literary genre – ‘the comic prose epic’ – ‘which I do not remember to have seen hitherto attempted in our language’ (JA xxiii). In Joseph Andrews Fielding distinguishes his writing from Burlesque and Romance. The novel begins as a parody of Richardson’s Pamela, but also serves to denounce the extravagances of Romance and the literature of his day as exemplified by Richardson – a critique emulated in the early nineteenth century by writers such as Scott in Waverley.5 In keeping with the seventeenth-century fiction theorists’ condemnation of Romance,6 Fielding criticized ‘that species of writing which is called the marvellous’ (TJ 346) and urged authors and readers to keep in sight the principles of reality and plausibility: ‘First, then, I think it may very reasonably be required of every writer that he keeps within the bounds of possibility; and still remembers that what it is not possible for man to perform, it is scarce possible for man to believe he did perform’ (TJ 346). He further

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

144 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Narrative Self-Consciousness and the Act of Reading

145

As truth distinguishes our writings from those idle romances which are filled with monsters, the productions, not of nature, but of distempered brains . . . we would avoid any resemblance to that kind of history which a celebrated poet seems to think is no less calculated for the emolument of the brewer, as the reading it should be always attended with a tankard of good ale. (TJ 131) Both in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, Fielding lays emphasis on the realistic effect or truthfulness of his narratives. In his Preface to Joseph Andrews, he notes that ‘every thing [in this story] is copied from the book of nature, and scarce a character or action produced which I have not taken from my own observations and experience’ (JA xxxi). On the same page, however, Fielding shows that imitation or verisimilitude, not strict copying of life, is his main concern: ‘I have used the utmost care to obscure the persons by such different circumstances, degrees, and colours, that it will be impossible to guess at them with any degree of certainty’ (JA xxxi). Fielding’s acute concern with truth and plausibility shows the importance of verisimilitude as a key device in his fiction. A crucial component of Fielding’s works and eighteenthcentury literature at large, verisimilitude is, as we know, common among ancient Greek poets. Aristotle made ample use of this literary device, which, according to him, constitutes the essential quality of works of the imagination.7 The issue of verisimilitude, central to Fielding’s writing and literary theory, is also a prominent feature of the works of Diderot and Sterne. Diderot, as many have pointed out, admired Sterne and was influenced by his works, especially Tristram Shandy whose imprint on Jacques the Fatalist has received wide critical attention (see Fredman 1973). In both works Sterne and Diderot were self-consciously trying to create the illusion of reality. In Jacques the Fatalist Diderot openly states that his aim is to reproduce actual experience. As he promises to adhere strictly to the truth principle, he summons his reader, too, to remain within the bounds of truth and plausibility. Throughout, Diderot maintains the illusion of reality. Following Aristotle’s distinction between history and poetry, Diderot sharply contrasts two literary genres, the ‘novel’ and ‘history’, favouring the second over the first.8 Diderot’s preference for history had been expressed many years earlier in Pensées détachées sur la peinture

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

highlighted his adherence to the truth principle which he found lacking in the Romance genre he rejected:

(1748), where he declared: ‘All things being otherwise equal, I prefer history to fictions’ (cited in Fredman 1973, 110). Concerning Jacques the Fatalist Diderot emphatically informs the reader that this work is not a novel, but a history and a true one at that, as the narrator frequently reminds the reader: ‘It must be obvious by now that I’m not writing a novel, since I am not doing what a novelist would not fail to do. The reader who takes what I write for the truth might well be less mistaken than the reader who concludes that it is a fable’ (JF 12). A few pages later the narrator repeats his warning: ‘Now, Reader, if you’re thinking that this horse is the horse that was stolen from Jacques’s Master you’d be wrong. That’s how it would happen in a novel sooner or later, in this way or in another. But this isn’t a novel, as I think I’ve already told you and now repeat’ (JF 34). In rejecting the novel, defined as a fictitious account of marvellous adventures of human experience, Diderot tries to impose the history genre – as a more serious and reliable species of writing – on the reader and on his own work; such reliability is owed to its being seemingly based on truth rather than fantasy.9 The narrator tells us that his project is to tell the truth and be true to the reader; an objective he emphatically claims to have fulfilled. The narrator frequently reiterates that telling the truth is his main pursuit. In the following quote the word ‘truth’ is repeated three times further to emphasize the verity of his narration. And as he seems to agree with the reader that truth may at first sight look too cold and dull a value on which to base fiction, he hastens to add that truth is also of great interest for anyone who is sharp enough to see beyond the surface: ‘truth, you’ll say, is usually cold, ordinary, and flat’, but ‘truth has its interesting side, which a writer will latch on to if he has genius’ (JF 31). Diderot’s insistence on truth assigns to his narrative a moral value, which marks it as radically different from the Romance that many seventeenth-century writers regarded as a source of lies and religious corruption. Pierre Nicole, a seventeenth-century French theologian, author, and moralist, declared that novelists were corrupters of faithful souls and ‘brazen murderers’ (1667). The idea of literature as a vehicle of moral instruction alongside the notion of verisimilitude, both central to Diderot’s work, are also prominent in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. In this novel Sterne occasionally invests his narrator’s distorted, erratic narration with familiar topographical details and local colour that give the story concrete grounding. Diderot and Sterne’s promotion of the verisimilar is based on a crafty blending of realistic effect and artifice. Their astute combination of the

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

146 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

147

verisimilar with satire creates a double perceptual mode that makes the reader’s eye and mind constantly waver between surface and depth, form and content, appearance and reality. And given their propensity to verisimilitude, it is little wonder that Sterne and Diderot should be considered as the precursors of nineteenth and twentieth-century realism.10 Like Fielding, Sterne and Diderot were ardent seekers of aesthetic novelty, which they proclaimed in their fictions and letters. Yet, their narrative experiments are much more elaborate and sophisticated than those of Fielding. Sterne and Diderot self-consciously posed as conduits of change and literary rejuvenation. They openly challenged the existing literary traditions and norms of narrative which they sought to reform. An anti-conformist, Diderot was a radical reformist, ambitious to transform not only contemporary literary traditions, but also the Church and French politics. Even before his imprisonment, as Sherman notes, Diderot ‘had been evolving new uses of literary forms for the presentation of ideas considered inimical by the government and the church’ (1976, 34). Diderot was, in short, promoting artistic freedom and critical thinking. In an article ‘Encyclopédie’, which appeared in 1774 in volume five of his Encyclopédie, Diderot attacked religious superstition and moral and political repression in France. He described the new weapon against superstition, tradition, and error and sought to reform what he saw as a religiously, politically, and intellectually corrupt society. In keeping with his overall reformist project, Diderot wanted, for instance, to transform the French theatre, both by ‘introducing Shakespearean drama to an audience schooled in Corneille’ and freeing it from the ‘stiffly acted imitations of a genre that had reached its climax a hundred years before’ (Fredman 1973, 9).11 He also strove to break free of traditional and contemporary literary genres, specifically the genre of Romance and the dominant rococo aesthetics. Diderot’s English influence, Sterne, was moved by an identical spirit of literary innovation and social reform, although in regard to social and political issues Sterne was less outspoken than was Diderot. In terms of aesthetics, Sterne and Diderot advocated a rupture with previous and contemporary literary trends. Both Jacques the Fatalist and Tristram Shandy are highly experimental novels which flout established artistic norms. These elaborate works were deliberately devised as examples of literary novelty. This is suggested in the authors’ conscious disregard for chronology, repeated digressions, focus on the verisimilar, indirect methods of characterization, and manipulation of the reader’s perceptions.12

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Narrative Self-Consciousness and the Act of Reading

Sterne and Diderot indulged in such unprecedented technical experimentation that several modern critics and modernist authors came to regard these two eighteenth-century stylists, especially Sterne, as the greatest ever innovators of narrative form (see Hartley 1966). Sterne and Diderot both inveighed against the eighteenth-century’s assumptions of ‘good taste’ and rules of fiction writing. Their claims to originality, promotion of a lively language and dynamic prose, and challenge to the established norms of writing are expressly conveyed in their fiction, particularly in Tristram Shandy and Jacques the Fatalist, and also in their letters. The two novels reflect their authors’ endorsement of the freedom of creation and narrative experimentation. They invoke the right of writers to exist as artists on their own terms, rather than being confined within established rules and traditions. In Tristram Shandy, the narrator openly asserts his literary novelty at the outset, asserting a severance of links with the ancient forms of narrative: Horace, I know does not recommend this fashion altogether: But that gentleman is speaking only of an epic poem or a tragedy; – (I forget which,) – besides, if it was not so, I should beg Mr. Horace’s pardon; – for in writing what I have set about, I shall confine myself neither to his rules, nor to any man’s rules that ever lived. (TS 7) Sterne’s distancing of his poetics from that of Horace – the favourite poet of the eighteenth century – is of the utmost significance. The period’s considerable enthusiasm for the Roman author was reflected in the translation and imitation of his works by such leading eighteenthcentury writers as Swift, Batteux, Turgot, Diderot, and Addison.13 In refuting the literary ancestor and icon of the eighteenth-century literary establishment, Sterne performs a major aesthetic gesture that forms the structuring principle of his overall poetic project in Tristram Shandy. Metaphorically, this important poetic endeavour stands for a foundational literary act that epitomizes the idea of rupture and renewal proclaimed by Sterne, Fielding, and others. For by symbolically killing the literary ancestor, that is Horace, Sterne legitimizes himself as a conduit of newness and source of literary authority. In other words, by openly contesting previous literary models and contemporary popular literary conventions, Sterne argues for an alternative narrative form: subjective, self-consciously experimentalist writing through which he somehow announces his birth as an original writing agent. This is a

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

148 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

149

fundamental claim in Tristram Shandy. As he rejects Horace’s legacy, Sterne also asserts the writer’s right to difference and poetic independence. He writes: ‘Every author has a way of his own in bringing his points to bear’ (TS 16). At the narrative’s close, he reaffirms this right and expresses the wish that his story may finally ‘be a lesson to the world, “to let people tell their stories their own way”’ (TS 659). Sterne posits himself as an instructor whose theories of literature are intended for all the writers and readers of the universe. He speaks from the standpoint of a posthumous writer whose lessons and struggle for creative freedom should serve as a beacon to the future generations. And judging from the enthusiasm with which Sterne is received by twentieth and twenty-first-century critics and writers, and considering the impact his narrative methods and literary theories had on these writers, we can safely argue that Sterne’s plea for the liberation of aesthetics from its conventional shackles was not made in vain. Sterne’s search for literary innovativeness is even more cogently expressed in the following comment, where he admonishes past and contemporary writers for following slavishly in the footsteps of the ancients: Shall we for ever make new books, as apothecaries make new mixtures, by pouring only out of one vessel into another? Are we for ever to be twisting, and untwisting the same rope? for ever in the same track – for ever at the same pace? Shall we be destined to the days of eternity, on holydays, as well as working-days, to be shewing the relics of learning, as monks do the relics of their saints – without working one – one single miracle with them? (TS 355–6) Sterne’s originality has been recognized by many modern critics and writers, among them Woolf and Joyce, who praised Sterne’s literary innovativeness and acknowledged that several modern technical devices originated with him.14 Numerous modern critics followed suit and some went so far as to regard Sterne as supremely ‘postmodernist’. These critics tend to read Sterne’s fiction as a site of deconstruction of textuality, meaning, and identity (see Pierce and De Voogd 1996). Sterne’s innovation with regard to narrative form and reader theory is unquestionable, yet it is far from radical. It builds instead on ancient forms, which it adapts and to which it adds sophistication. Despite his proclaimed originality, Sterne did not start from scratch. Rather, he borrowed widely and brought freshness to the available contemporary and ancient literary traditions.15 Sterne recognized the importance of tradition as a source

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Narrative Self-Consciousness and the Act of Reading

of inspiration and creativity. Like Fielding and others before him, Sterne admitted the benefits of literary and cultural appropriation and found it all too natural to imitate and borrow from, even to plagiarize, the ancients.16 In the quote above, Sterne implies the inevitability for writers of revisiting and appropriating the ancient poetics. At the same time, he says that authors should not simply take the ancient poets for models, but must reshape the classical poetics and ‘work miracles’ with it. As an original construction based on a fine blend of the ancient and the new, Sterne’s own fiction seems to fit this projected picture.

8.2 Fielding, Sterne, Diderot, and Conrad: moral and aesthetic didacticism Sterne, but also Fielding and Diderot to a lesser degree, all serve to connect classical and modern poetics. Their influence on modernist writers, particularly on Conrad’s theory of reader-response analysis, is undeniable, although Conrad does not acknowledge this. And since there is no irrefutable documentary evidence attesting to the influence on Conrad of these eighteenth-century authors, I shall try to educe these affinities through analogy and comparison of these writers’ handling of their narrative methods. I focus on Under Western Eyes which is analysed in the light of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist. The reason for this cross-examination is that Conrad’s aesthetics of readership and method of character presentation in this novel show so many affinities with the reader-response theory of Fielding, Sterne, and Diderot that we might rightly suppose these writers’ influence upon Conrad. Yet, before bringing to light these equivalences, let me point out some key differences between Conrad and these likely eighteenth-century influences. The first major difference is that whereas Conrad sees fiction as a work of imagination with no specific moral, ideological, or political goals, Fielding, Sterne, and Diderot perceive literature as a strong pedagogical tool through which the reader should be taught moral lessons and led along the path of reason and truth. Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, Tristram Shandy and Jacques the Fatalist are, in varying degrees, moralist and didactic works. Their didacticism is conveyed through the profusion of moral injunctions to the reader, restatements, summaries, and frequent use of repetition, whose pedagogical virtue is commonly acknowledged. To state the obvious, Fielding is a strongly didactic writer. In Tom Jones, for instance, he consistently points out the vices in his characters in order that the reader might learn to shun them. The novel’s playful and

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

150 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Narrative Self-Consciousness and the Act of Reading

151

Let this, my young readers, be your constant maxim, that no man can be good enough to enable him to neglect the rules of prudence; nor will Virtue herself look beautiful unless she be bedecked with the outward ornaments of decency and decorum. And this precept, my worthy disciples, if you read with due attention, you will, I hope, find sufficiently enforced by examples in the following pages. (TJ 122) Similarly, in Joseph Andrews the reader’s instruction is centre stage as Fielding blends entertainment with education. In this he follows such ancient authors as Aristotle, Plutarch, and Nepos as much as he heeds the example of good modern books and biographies such as those that he cites – the history of John the Great or the life of ‘an Earl of Warwick’. In all these, he remarks, entertainment and instruction intertwine: Our own language affords many of excellent use and instruction, finely calculated to sow the seeds of virtue in youth, and very easy to be comprehended by persons of moderate capacity. Such as the history of John the Great, who, by his brave and heroic actions against men of large and athletic bodies, obtained the glorious appellation of the Giant-killer; that of an Earl of Warwick, whose Christian name was Guy; the lives of Argalus and Parthenia; and above all, the history of those seven worthy personages, the Champions of Christendom. In all these delight is mixed with instruction, and the reader is almost as much improved as entertained. (JA 4) Fielding’s insistence on the need to mix amusement and education and his propensity to lead his reader to virtue and truth reflect his welding of fiction writing and the truth principle, with the first serving as a vehicle to the second. Fielding’s stress on the realistic rendering of facts and characters shows how far seemingly truthful representations of reality, as opposed to the fanciful meanderings of the Romances he condemns, are central to his novel and theory of narrative form. According to Fielding, a good fiction writer should pursue three basic goals: faithfully to reproduce manners and characters, to be an indefatigable truth-seeker, and, above all, to attain this truth in the writing. In Tom Jones Fielding clearly tells the

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

entertaining tone aims not only to amuse the reader, but also to offer a lesson in what is true and right:

reader early in the narrative that his aim is ‘to guide our pen throughout by the directions of truth’ (TJ 103). Concern with truth, authenticity, and narrative credibility is a major preoccupation in this novel. The achievement of the sought-for truth – the aim that every worthy literature should tend to, according to Fielding – is crystallized in the happy reunion of Tom Jones and Sophia Western, on the one hand, and with that of their respective relatives and friends, on the other. Sterne’s fiction, too, is deeply moralistic, yet his didacticism is less overt and insistent than Fielding’s. A devout Christian, who became a priest in 1738, Sterne was, no doubt, a fine moralist, but his rhetorical dexterity tends to mask the staunch moralist underneath. The didactic strain of Sterne’s writing is conveyed in a subtle, elusive rhetoric. In Tristram Shandy, for example, Sterne makes clear that he does not write merely to amuse his readers, but most of all to ‘instruct’ them. In short, Sterne’s objective in his writing is, as Fredman rightly observes, ‘to teach and convince by way of the feelings’ (1973, 36). Sterne’s ‘idealization of sensibility’,17 reflected in Toby and Trim’s inclination to natural, tender feelings, serves a moral purpose. It ushers the reader in the direction of empathy and natural feelings rather than indulgence in cold cerebration, of which Sterne, in line with Aristotle, is contemptuous.18 As suggested in Tristram Shandy, Sterne’s didacticism is coupled with a desire for individual and social reform. However, just like Fielding, who condemns the blemishes of individuals without calling religious and social institutions into question, Sterne criticizes society’s vices but puts the blame on his fellow countrymen rather than on the institutions of the state: ‘the very foundations of our excellent constitution, in church and state, were so sapped as estimators had reported. . . . Why? why are we a ruined people? – Because we are corrupted’ (TS 151). In the end, Sterne seeks mainly to reform and improve these institutions corrupted by contemporary sins better to serve the dominant morality. All the more so as his objective in this disorienting novel and his fiction at large is to lead his readers to realize that there are fundamental truths with which they cannot tamper. In short, for Sterne there are vices that the reader should shun and virtues that he is impelled to embrace and abide by in the course of his reading. And this pedagogical goal, overtly stated in Tristram Shandy, challenges the postmodernist views of Sterne as an exemplary liberal writer who imposes no single truth or categorical creed on his reader.19 All in all, Sterne in his works, specifically in Tristram Shandy, often proves a heuristic teacher, instructing his readers on life and morals by way of humour and satire. Thus, if Sterne, for example, criticizes false

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

152 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

153

learning and attacks Catholicism in this novel, it is mostly in order better to present to his readers Anglicanism as the religious creed par excellence and England as the best of places. Contrasting England to France which he is journeying across, the narrator states: ‘O England! England! thou land of liberty, and climate of good sense, thou tenderest of mothers – and gentlest of nurses, cried I, kneeling upon one knee, as I was beginning my apostrophe’ (TS 546).20 Sterne here gives vent to his staunch patriotism and deep attachment to his native country; a sentiment to which he expects his readers to rally. By and large, Sterne, like Fielding, wants his readers to be entertained and expects them to derive instruction and morals through their reading. At the novel’s outset the narrator declares that the two following chapters of his story ‘contain such a sketch of his life and conversation’, but purposefully adds that this story ‘will carry its moral along with it’ (TS 24). Later, he readily links literature and instruction, bluntly stating: ‘I write to instruct’ (TS 85–6). The moralist Diderot similarly subscribes to the eighteenth-century notion of art as instruction through entertainment. And like Fielding and Sterne, Diderot regards the novel as properly a channel of truth and virtue, attributes that he finds deeply wanting in the frivolous contemporary novels of which he is highly critical. In ‘Eloge de Richardson’ (1762), written in memory of Richardson’s death the previous year, Diderot stresses the novel’s moral vocation and praises in this context the works of Richardson which educate the mind and soothe the soul.21 It is worth noting that the didacticism underlying the fiction of Diderot, Sterne, and Fielding is not confined to the social and moral sphere, but extends to the aesthetic realm. Tom Jones, Tristram Shandy, and Jacques the Fatalist display a marked aesthetic didacticism. In each of these works the reader is to a large extent envisaged as a consumer of fiction to be fed with seemingly plausible histories.22 The reader is also, and perhaps more importantly so, perceived as a subject to be morally formed or reformed. Although the audiences addressed in all three novels are on some occasions directly called upon to use their imagination and powers of penetration,23 they are, on a deeper level, not postulated as fully autonomous reading agencies. In other words, the reader in these works is perceived mostly as a dependent, incompetent reading subject in need of the author’s tutoring and constant guidance. It is for this reason that the narrators take the reader by the hand from beginning to end, carefully revealing the various turns and twists of their narrative experimentations. In Tom Jones, for example, the novel’s aesthetic didacticism is rendered in the several warnings and guidelines the narrator provides for

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Narrative Self-Consciousness and the Act of Reading

the reader. The narrator establishes a kind of reading pact with his readers, unveiling before them the ‘hows’ and ‘whys’ of his narrative project. As early as chapter two, we hear the narrator cautioning the reader ‘not to be surprised if, in the course of this work, he shall find some chapters very short, and others altogether as long; some that contain only the time of a single day, and others that comprise years; in a word, if my history sometimes seems to stand still, and sometimes to fly’ (TJ 68). The narrator further insists on the need and frequency of his digressions. In the process, Fielding authoritatively reduces his readers to his own ‘servants’ and at the same time defies his critics whom he regards as both ‘dictatorial’ and poor judges of his works:24 Reader, I think proper, before we proceed any farther together, to acquaint thee that I intend to digress, through this whole history, as often as I see occasion; of which I am myself a better judge than any pitiful critic whatever; and here I must desire all those critics to mind their own business, and not to intermeddle with affairs, or works, which no ways concern them; for till they produce the authority by which they are constitute judges, I shall plead to their jurisdiction. (TJ 33) Moreover, like Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, Fielding incessantly comments on his characters and the events. He often justifies his intrusions and deliberate omissions in most authoritative terms: When any extraordinary scene presents itself (as we trust will often be the case), we shall spare no pains nor paper to open it at large to our reader; but if whole years should pass without producing anything worthy his notice, we shall not be afraid of a chasm in our history; but shall hasten on to matters of consequence, and leave such periods of time totally unobserved. (TJ 68) In order better to guide his readers’ understanding and help them find their bearings in the long, dense narrative, the narrator relentlessly reminds them of what went before and what is in store. He systematically provides introductory notes for each chapter, summing up the themes, events, and moral nature of the related material. Fielding also justifies his omissions and digressions, in this way drawing attention to the act of writing and his own narrative skills. By so eagerly directing the audience’s reading trajectory, Fielding betrays a strong didactic and

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

154 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Narrative Self-Consciousness and the Act of Reading

155

Before I proceed farther, I shall beg leave to obviate some misconstructions into which the zeal of some few readers may lead them . . . Upon the whole, it is not religion or virtue, but the want of them, which is here exposed. Had not Thwackum too much neglected virtue, and Square religion, in the composition of their several systems; and had not both utterly discarded all natural goodness of heart, they had never been represented as the objects of derision in this history, in which we will now proceed. (TJ 110–11) Sterne’s attitude to the craft of narration reveals, in some respects, affinities with Fielding. His overall approach to his fictional material and to the reader is nevertheless far more complex and elusive. In Tristram Shandy, for example, Sterne frequently challenges and plays tricks on his reader, but, like Fielding, he eagerly guides his audience through the tale’s broken structure. He does so by didactically informing them about the intricacies of his narrative progression. And in keeping with Fielding, who encourages his readers to skip chapters they do not find accommodating, Sterne warns, right at the beginning, that less inquisitive and more impatient readers might benefit from passing over the first chapter: ‘To such, however, as do not choose to go so far back into these things, I can give no better advice, than that they skip over the remaining part of this chapter; for I declare beforehand, ’tis wrote only for the curious and inquisitive’ (TS 7). Like Fielding, too, but less laboriously, Sterne often reminds the reader of what went before and informs him of new scenes and events on which they are entering. This passage is quite telling: ‘It is so long since the reader of this rhapsodical work has been parted from the midwife, that it is high time to mention her again to him, merely to put him in mind that there is such a body still in the world’ (TS 35). Later, Tristram moves onto his uncle Toby and warns the reader that ‘to enter rightly into my uncle Toby’s sentiments upon this matter, you must be made to enter first a little into his character, the outlines of which I shall just give you, and then the dialogue between him and my father will go on as well again’ (TS 64).

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

moralistic inclination. He proves at once a teacher assisting his readers’ understanding of the story and a fervent moralist steering the same readers to the right ethical stance. This pedagogic goal is explicitly rendered in the scene where the narrator warns his audience against misreading:

In both statements Sterne proves profoundly didactic, and his didacticism is couched in an inflated rhetoric of justification. In resorting to these justifications, Sterne aims to familiarize the reader with the working of the narrative, while presenting the various devices and technical innovations in which he indulges as indispensable, if not inevitable. For instance, after warning the reader that his narration will be ‘digressive’ as well as ‘progressive’, Sterne pedagogically elaborates on the importance of digressions in order to convince his reader of their usefulness: Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine; – they are the life, the soul of reading! – take them out of this book, for instance, – you might as well take the book along with them; – one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer; – he steps forth like a bridegroom, – bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail. (TS 73–4) Sterne goes even further, considering digressions as both the ‘soul of reading’ and the essence of life itself: Could a historiographer drive on his history, as a muleteer drives on his mule, – straight forward; – for instance, from Rome all the way to Loretto, without ever once turning his head aside either to the right hand or to the left, – he might venture to foretell you to an hour when he should get to his journey’s end: – but the thing is, morally speaking, impossible. (TS 36–7) Most importantly, in order more fully to familiarize his reader with the secret of his art of narrative form, Sterne cautions his audience not to confuse digressions with narrative disorder. In the process, he both reiterates the fairness or legitimacy of this digressive impulse and reasserts the internal orderliness of his apparently chaotic narrative enterprise: tho’ my digressions are all fair, as you observe, – and that I fly off from what I am about, as far, and as often too, as any writer in Great Britain; yet I constantly take care to order affairs so that my main business does not stand still in my absence. I was just going, for example, to have given you the great outlines of my uncle Toby’s most whimsical character; – when my aunt Dinah and the coachman came across us, and led us a vagary some millions of miles into the very heart of

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

156 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

157

the planetary system: Notwithstanding all this, you perceive that the drawing of my uncle’s Toby’s character went on gently all the time; – not the great contours of it – that was impossible, – but some familiar strokes and faint designations of it, were here and there touched on, as we went along, so that you are much better acquainted with my uncle Toby now than you was before. (TS 73) Sterne’s aesthetic didacticism is maintained throughout the narrative. As he consistently instructs the reader on the mechanics of his narrative – Sterne compares his narration to a machine – he carefully stresses that his ‘frisky’ digressions, as opposed to his contemporaries’ ‘weak’ ones (TS 640), do not disrupt narrative balance or threaten the reader’s reading coherence. According to him, the digressions preserve instead the text’s internal unity, while producing a dynamic prose in which the reader is called upon to play an active part: For which reason, from the beginning of this, you see, I have constructed the main work and the adventitious parts of it with intersections, and have so complicated and involved the digressive and progressive movements, one wheel within another, that the whole machine, in general, has been kept a-going; – and, what’s more, it shall be kept a-going these forty years, if it pleases the fountain of health to bless me so long with life and good spirits. (TS 74) Sterne wants to convince his reader that the antagonistic forces – digressive and progressive – introduced into the narrative do not threaten its coherence because the two forces are, he remarks, united to serve the same aesthetic and moral purpose: ‘By this contrivance the machinery of my work is of a species by itself; two contrary motions are introduced into it, and reconciled, which were thought to be at variance with each other’ (TS 73). He also justifies his own omissions on similar grounds. When explaining the reason for not narrating his father’s journey to Auxerre, Tristram states: But the painting of this journey, upon reviewing it, appears to be so much above the style and manner of any thing else I have been able to paint in this book, that it could not have remained in it, without depreciating every other scene; and destroying at the same time that necessary equipoise and balance, (whether of good or bad) betwixt

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Narrative Self-Consciousness and the Act of Reading

158 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

The bulk of the rhetorical caution marshalled in the various statements reinforces Sterne’s didacticism as much as it reveals his anxiety about disorienting his readership with his erratic narrative. By way of repeated digressions, Sterne forces the reader to swing constantly backward and forward. And like Fielding and Diderot, Sterne neither loses control of the narrative nor releases his reader from his tight grip. He frequently warns his reader about the development of the narrative and authoritatively orients his reading; the aim of which is to educate and teach morals to his audience. In the final analysis, the propensity of Sterne, but also of Fielding and Diderot, to provide their readers with reading grids boils down to two major pedagogic aims: first, it intends to secure the readers’ understanding and reading coherence by directing their gaze through their distorted narratives; second, it seeks to preserve the reader’s ethical integrity by goading them to moral fulfilment and by persistently reminding them of the appropriate line of conduct. The emphasis on the moral vocation of fiction pervading the works of Fielding, Sterne, and Diderot constitutes one of the main differences between eighteenth-century poetics and twentieth-century fiction, including Conrad’s writing. Like most modernist writers, Conrad undoubtedly owes a great deal to the major stylists of the eighteenth century. He is, however, manifestly in rupture with their model of fiction as a vehicle of amusement25 and morality. Of course, this does not mean that Conrad’s fiction has no ethical orientation; it simply demonstrates that it is difficult to tell for certain what the moral intention of Conrad’s texts is.26 Whereas Sterne and Fielding’s works are openly geared towards moral instruction and support of the established institutions, Conrad’s fiction is suspicious of conventional structures of morality, that is of religious institutions and their dogma. More concretely, Conrad is drawn to a set of ethical virtues which he promotes in his writing. Central among these are the notions of solidarity, self-respect and ‘inner worth’ or moral courage, which stand out as fundamental principles within Conrad’s ethical paradigm. The crucial notion of moral courage, for instance, is prominent in such works as ‘Heart of Darkness’, Lord Jim, and Under Western Eyes. In all these tales, this virtue is dramatized and valorized. In ‘Heart of Darkness’ the demonic Kurtz ultimately looks into his inmost depths and bravely acknowledges his horrors on the threshold of death. Similarly, in Lord Jim Marlow assimilates Jim’s

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

chapter and chapter, from whence the just proportions and harmony of the whole work results. (TS 325)

159

ability to face his professional blunder to an act of moral courage. In Under Western Eyes, too, the language teacher interprets in the same light Razumov’s confession of his betrayal of Victor Haldin, at a time when his safety as a double agent is not even at risk. The old teacher expresses his admiration for the protagonist’s inner strength in the following terms: ‘Well, call it what you like; but tell me, how many of them would deliver themselves up deliberately to perdition (as he himself says in that book) rather than go on living secretly debased in their own eyes?’ (UWE 278). In Lord Jim, Under Western Eyes, and ‘Heart of Darkness’ Conrad promotes a web of ethical virtues, but does not support, either implicitly or explicitly, any institutionalized morality. His distancing of fiction writing from morality is reflected in a letter to E.V. Lucas (6 October 1908) where he emphatically stated that ‘An author is not a monk’ (CL 4, 137). In contrast to the works of Sterne, Fielding, and Diderot, therefore, Conrad’s writing is not sustained by any clear moral imperatives by which author and reader are extolled to abide.27 As a result, Conrad’s readers are not expected to follow any definite line of moral conduct, nor are they explicitly ushered in any specific reading trajectory. Rather, in most of his novels, particularly in Lord Jim (as discussed in the previous chapter), the reader is usually left to his/her own devices, summoned alone to educe meaning and morals from the stories. Conrad occasionally informs his audience of his various digressions, narrative editing, and temporal and spatial shifts. For instance, Marlow in Lord Jim explicitly draws our attention to his editing of Brown’s reported speech. He explains the need to tone down the brutality of the character’s discourse before imparting it to his audience: I am sorry that I can’t give you this part of the story, which of course I have mainly from Brown, in Brown’s own words. There was in the broken, violent speech of that man, unveiling before me his thoughts with the very hand of Death upon his throat, an undisguised ruthlessness of purpose, a strange vengeful attitude towards his own past, and a blind belief in the righteousness of his will against all mankind, something of that feeling which could induce the leader of a horde of wandering cut-throats to call himself proudly the Scourge of God. (LJ 270) Marlow deconstructs and reconstructs Brown’s discourse, omitting the violent part of his speech that might have been offensive to his auditors’ delicate ears. Marlow’s decision to refine Brown’s speech sounds like Conrad’s concession to those British readers who complained about

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Narrative Self-Consciousness and the Act of Reading

the harshness of his fictional universe and accused him of being ‘a poseur of brutality’ (CL 4, 114).28 Marlow’s editorial decision echoes Conrad’s voice, which intrudes occasionally upon the narrative to soften its tone and make it more palatable to his audience. In Under Western Eyes, too, the teacher of languages deliberates at length on the Russian character, but carefully points to this digression and apologizes to the reader. The language teacher further insists ‘but this is a digression, indeed’, in case the reader does not realize it. In the examples evoked above, Conrad sounds like Fielding or Sterne. But Conrad’s explicit references to the text’s internal mechanics are more of an exception than a rule; and even when they do occur they are carried out less conspicuously than is the case with his eighteenth-century precursors. Most of the time Conrad’s editorializing and digressions are barely signalled. They are discreetly performed and it is left to the reader to discover and reckon with them. However, this is not tantamount to saying that Conrad’s writing is free of didacticism. On the contrary, Conrad’s profound ambition to make the reader ‘see’ itself carries a didactic undertone, since it assigns to Conrad the role of a teacher in charge of opening his readers’ eyes and cultivating their senses. In the main, Conrad’s aesthetic didacticism consists not merely in striving to make his reader see, but in teaching him how to see into things. We can further state that unlike the openly morally-oriented works of Diderot, Fielding, and Sterne that tend to teach the reader what to be, Conrad’s aesthetically elusive and epistemologically indeterminate fiction seeks to teach his audience the how and why of being. He implicitly incites the reader to engage in critical, deeper reading of the fictional material presented to him, as well as gazing with conscious eyes into the murky waters of our existence.29 Thus, for all their challenging and exhortation to active collaboration of their readers, Fielding, Sterne, and Diderot are finally mostly concerned with furnishing their readers with good examples and sound moral instruction. As such, they seem most inclined to turn their audience into iterative readers. They expect their audiences to become repositories of moral probity and truth, rather than inspiring them to grow into creative producers of meaning and originators of their own ethics of being and reading. Conrad, by contrast, is manifestly not focused on the moral function of writing and reading. He is more strongly motivated by the secular aim of inducing his readers to develop into efficient and critical interpreters of text and life. In other words, Conrad exhorts his audience to become creative builders of their own identity as readers and active generators of their own ethics of being and

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

160 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

161

textuality. He is keen to instruct his readers on how to look into things and interpret them autonomously, rather than merely teaching them to appreciate fictional material in the light of the moral precepts and reading guidelines furnished to them. And for Conrad a good reader is not a reader who sticks to plot and strict reading guidelines, but one who targets verticality and depth. This objective is, of course, not openly stated in Conrad’s fiction or essays, but it is strongly suggested in some of his books, particularly in Under Western Eyes. Ideologically, Conrad clearly breaks away from the constricting notion of eighteenth-century fiction as combinative of instruction and morality. From an aesthetic standpoint, however, he is in a large measure following in the footsteps of such great stylists as Fielding, Diderot, and Sterne. Specifically, Conrad’s style, use of language, character presentation, narrative form, and relation to the reader in Under Western Eyes recall those of Jacques the Fatalist, Tristram Shandy, and Tom Jones. More exactly, Conrad’s novel displays a marked dramatic impulse and manifest narrative self-consciousness which are reminiscent of the works of Fielding, Diderot, and Sterne. In a more general sense, Conrad’s fictional representations and declarations in essays and letters bear so much on those of Sterne and Fielding that they offer the impression of repetition with only slight variation.

8.3 Dramatic impulse in Under Western Eyes: text as stage, reader as active spectator The works of Fielding, Sterne, and Diderot show a strong dramatic impulse and a conspicuous narrative self-consciousness, the result most obviously of the authors’ close connections to theatre and, in the case of Sterne, to the love of self-publicity.30 Fielding wrote several plays and his early work as a dramatist contributed to his dramatic presentation of character and plot.31 In Tom Jones, Fielding speaks of his narrative as a reflection of ‘this great theatre of Nature’ (TJ 285) and invokes the Shakespearean notion of the world as a stage: The world hath been often compared to the theatre; and many grave writers, as well as the poets, have considered human life as a great drama, resembling, in almost every particular, those scenical representations which Thespis is first reported to have invented, and which have been since received with so much approbation and delight in all polite countries. (TJ 283)

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Narrative Self-Consciousness and the Act of Reading

Fielding frequently likens his fictional representations to reflections of ‘the theatrical stage’ (TJ 283). He further indulges in dramatic associations and speaks of his hero in scenic tropes: ‘Poor Jones was rather a spectator of this elegant scene than an actor in it’ (TJ 611). Sterne’s dramatic inclination is even more marked. Tristram Shandy teems with references to stage, curtains, and scenes, which give it a strongly theatrical resonance. From the outset, Sterne refers to his text as ‘dramatic’ and conceives of his characters as actors on a stage: Let that be as it may, as my purpose is to do exact justice to every creature brought upon the stage of this dramatic work, – I could not stifle this distinction in favour of Don Quixote’s horse; – in all other points, the parson’s horse, I say, was just such another, – for he was as lean, and as lank, and as sorry a jade, as Humility herself could have bestrided. (TS 18–19) The novel’s dramatic density is more vigorously rendered still in the following statement which refers to the preceding discussion between Toby, his brother, and Dr Slop about women and their role and rights. I have dropped the curtain over this scene for a minute, – to remind you of one thing, – and to inform you of another . . . Writers had need look before them, to keep up the spirit and connection of what they have in hand. When these two things are done, – the curtain shall be drawn up again, and my uncle Toby, my father, and Dr. Slop, shall go on with their discourse, without any more interruptions. (TS 149) Sterne’s dramatic impulse makes his prose dynamic and the resulting theatrical impression is reinforced by the narrative’s conversational and exclamatory tone.32 Diderot in Jacques the Fatalist also conceives of his novel as a stage. This theatricality is suggested in the dialogue form of the text, the prominence of gesture, and the abundance of scenic frames. The novel’s dramatic intensity is hardly surprising, given Diderot’s fondness for the theatre which, as mentioned earlier, he tried to reform. He wrote many plays and influential works on the theatre, and his passion for this art persisted throughout his life. Diderot’s enthusiasm for drama may account for his emphasis on visuality and gesture as privileged modes of communication in Jacques the Fatalist and in his writing at large.33 Overall, Diderot in this

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

162 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

163

novel and more generally in his fiction and essays regards writing and the act of reading as akin to stage performance. In his ‘Eloge à Richardson’, Diderot elaborates on his visual theory and further equates writing with painting. In the same essay he also associates the act of writing and reading with dramatic performance. As Alexandra Wettlaufer rightly argues, Diderot tends to see ‘the act of reading as a theatrical experience and frequently refers to the reader as “spectateur”’ (2003, 91). The notion of text as stage and reader as spectator evoked in relation to Diderot, Fielding, and Sterne is also central to Conrad’s fiction, notably in ‘Karain’, Victory, Lord Jim, and Under Western Eyes. These works are pervaded with references to gaze, gesture, veils, and curtains, rendering narrative scenes as theatrical performances. Not only do these works have dramatic form in terms of plot construction and character portrayal, their narrators often appear as fine dramatists, with their eyes constantly on the audience and its reactions. As with Diderot, the dramatic quality of Conrad’s works is hardly surprising given his interest in theatre – and the possible influence of his theatrical seventeenth-century literary forebears. Despite his apparently ambiguous attitude to theatre,34 Conrad was keen on drama and his ‘highest ambition’, as he confessed, was to turn one of his tales into an opera. Notwithstanding his protestations at having ‘any pretension to dramatic gifts’ (CL 7, 296) and ‘detest[ing] the stage’ (CL 4, 218), Conrad maintained in practice a sustained interest in this form of art. He even completed theatrical adaptations of several of his works. The theatre’s appeal, together with the influence of these eighteenth-century writers, contributed greatly to his dramatic presentation of character and the management of plot in his works. Victory, Lord Jim, and Under Western Eyes are all characterized by a dense dramatic impulse conveyed through the novels’ conversational tone, visual density, and insistent appeal to the readers’ sense of sight. Conrad’s dramatic leaning is expressed more or less explicitly. In Lord Jim, for example, Marlow openly assimilates his tale to a theatrical performance. In this crucial narrative moment whereby textuality and theatricality are conflated, Marlow shifts from a narrative voice volubly mediating Jim’s tale to a discreet shower or puppeteer displaying his creation – Jim – to the readers-turned-spectators. Marlow tells his disoriented audience: ‘I am telling you so much about my own instinctive feelings and bemused reflections because there remains so little to be told of him. He existed for me, and after all it is only through me that he exists for you. I’ve led him out by the hand; I have paraded him before you’ (LJ 163). Marlow’s last sentence is edifying. Its focus on the visual or

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Narrative Self-Consciousness and the Act of Reading

showing somehow transforms Marlow into a stage performer soliciting the viewers’ eyes and senses. Lord Jim offers a good example of Conrad’s dramatic inclination, but it is certainly Under Western Eyes which best reflects this visual impulse. The novel teems with references to eyes, the stage or drama, and spectators of all kinds. The Russian character – embodied by Razumov – and his country’s politics, around which the narrative revolves, are treated with intense theatricality. The protagonist is shown acting out his part under the constant surveillance of the revolutionaries and the autocrats who are themselves performing Russian politics against the foreign backdrop of Geneva. The teacher of languages, who mediates to us Razumov’s story, refers to the Russian political actors as performers in a sordid play of violence and crime. He fittingly compares Russian politics to ‘an obscure drama’ (UWE 251) – a qualification that reiterates an earlier remark: ‘The thought that the real drama of autocracy is not played on the great stage of politics came to me as, fated to be a spectator, I had this other glimpse behind the scenes, something more profound than the words and gestures of the public play’ (UWE 248). In his ‘Author’s Note’ to Under Western Eyes Conrad discusses the teacher’s indispensable function to the plot, arguing: [The old professor] was useful to me, and therefore I think that he must be useful to the reader both in the way of comment and by the part he plays in the development of the story. In my desire to produce the effect of actuality it seemed to me indispensable to have an eye-witness of the transactions in Geneva. (UWE 282) What Conrad does not say explicitly on this occasion is that the language teacher contributes widely to – not to say fully constructs – the dramatic intensity of the novel. He plays a key role and throughout he combines the function of a homodiegetic narrator with that of a detached mediator relating Razumov’s tragic story by relying on the protagonist’s diary, which he presumably edits to suit his narrative and ideological project. The language teacher emphatically presents himself as a privileged observer, or, more precisely, as a helpless spectator of the Russian characters and politics unfolding before his Western eyes. On relating the first encounter between Razumov and Natalia Haldin, the teacher complains: He had lowered at last his fascinated glance; she too was looking down, and standing thus before each other in the glaring light,

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

164 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Narrative Self-Consciousness and the Act of Reading

165

The language teacher laments his deficient powers of observation and his difficulty in understanding the Russian character. He compares himself to ‘a traveller in a strange country’ (UWE 125) and consistently reiterates his Western legacy to mark the Russians as radical others. Talking about the absurdity and cruelty of Russian politics, he declares: ‘To us Europeans of the West, all ideas of political plots and conspiracies seem childish, crude inventions for the theatre or a novel’ (UWE 81–2). These remarks about Russia serve to increase the gap between this despised country and Western Europe. They also testify to the teacher’s prominence and narrative self-consciousness, while drawing attention to his role as a baffled spectator of the Russian drama. It is important to note that the various dramatic devices scattered throughout the narrative – including the motif of narrator-as-spectator – are far from random occurrences. They are instead well thought out designs that Conrad deliberately uses in the pursuit of specific artistic as well as ideological aims. Contrary to his other works, where dramatic effects are diffused in the narratives without being explicitly stressed, in Under Western Eyes Conrad openly confesses to having consciously enhanced the novel’s dramatic impulse. He discussed his narrative method and aim in writing Under Western Eyes and told Macdonald Hastings in a letter of 24 December 1916: My artistic aim was to put as much dramatic spirit into the form of a novel as was possible without apparently departing from the form. It is the dramatisation of the inner feelings – and also of ideas, brought out in scene and dialogue as near as possible without the novel ceasing to be a novel and becoming a hybrid and unsatisfactory freak of presentation. I tried to keep close to scenic effects all the time. And it is in order to keep always before myself the effect of a ‘performance’ that I invented the old teacher of languages. (CL 5, 696) This novel is as intentionally oriented toward the dramatic as it is narratologically self-conscious. Its pronounced dramatic character and

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

between the four bare walls, they seemed brought out from the confused immensity of the Eastern borders to be exposed cruelly to the observation of my Western eyes. And I observed them. There was nothing else to do. (UWE 254)

intense narrative self-consciousness are both major devices through which Conrad hopes to achieve ‘an effect of virtuosity’ which, he declared, was his key objective in this book. The emphasis on the visual that continues from the title page of Under Western Eyes,35 its conversational tone, its subtle game with the reader, and close attention to the characters’ body language all constitute scenic effects by which Conrad constructs his novel’s theatricality. But what specific artistic goal underlies Conrad’s desire always to have this dramatic effect in sight? Manifestly, behind Conrad’s striving to achieve intense dramatic effect in this novel lies, as has been pointed out, a strong concern with readership, since in 1911, when this novel was published, popularity and commercial success were still eluding Conrad. It looks as though his fundamental artistic aim in Under Western Eyes was to find that ideal recipe which would prove irresistible to the taste of his recalcitrant reading public. The book’s polygeneric character, in which Swiftian political satire finely blends with aspects of the Gothic and the psychological novel, indicates a desire to reach a wide audience. Most importantly, it is specifically the novel’s increased sense of the dramatic which stands out as the main vehicle through which Conrad expects to draw his audience’s interest. And Conrad’s main preoccupation in this novel is precisely to find the appropriate dramatic tone, or, in his own words, to create a forceful ‘dramatic scene’ that would grip his readers once and for all. Conrad expressed his desire for such a scene to Macdonald Hastings: ‘I too have been thinking about it and it strikes me that there will have to be a scene (I don’t see it) some scene, the scene which everybody will want to go and see. We will have to invent it, contrive it, discover it’ (CL 6, 135). Conrad’s craving for a scene that would enthrall his audience may account for his deployment of dense dramatic effects and astute orchestration of character, events, and author-reader relationship in Under Western Eyes. In this novel – more than anywhere else in his fiction – Conrad is clearly intending to establish a close relation with the reader via rhetorical and stage theatrics. These devices aim to draw the audience’s interest and shock them into active participation. The novel’s tempo is suggested from the first sentence. The narrator abruptly tells the reader: ‘To begin with I wish to disclaim the possession of those high gifts of imagination and expression which would have enabled my pen to create for the reader the personality of the man who called himself, after the Russian custom, Cyril son of Isidor – Kirylo Sidorovitch – Razumov’ (UWE 3).

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

166 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Narrative Self-Consciousness and the Act of Reading

167

Conrad was keenly aware of the importance of setting the tone of his narratives from the very first paragraph. Ford Madox Ford claimed that openings for him and Conrad were highly important: ‘Openings for us, as for most writers, were matters of great importance, but probably we more than most writers realised of what primary importance they were . . . At any rate the opening paragraph of book or story should be of the tempo of the whole performance’ (1964, 181–2). And in order immediately to grip their readers’ interest Conrad and Ford thought that ‘our ideal novel must begin either with a dramatic scene or with a note that should suggest the whole book’ (1964, 182). The teacher of languages’ introductory statement is consistent with Conrad’s artistic goal. And his deployment of surprise and shock tactics aligns Under Western Eyes with eighteenthcentury literature, notably the works of Sterne and Fielding, in which the devices of surprise and shock are prominent features. Many of Sterne’s devices in Tristram Shandy count on surprise for their effect: his rapid transitions, constant interruptions, and digressions are all, in some measure, shock tactics, designed to keep the reader alert. Fielding also resorted extensively to surprise effects and stressed the importance of this device. Conrad heeded Fielding’s advice that the more a writer could surprise the reader the more likely he was to attract or retain the reader’s attention. Following Alexander Pope’s observation on the need for poetry to blend the real with the surprising,36 Fielding wrote in Tom Jones: ‘Within these few restrictions, I think, every writer may be permitted to deal as much in the wonderful as he pleases; nay, if he thus keeps within the rules of credibility, the more he can surprise the reader, the more he will engage his attention, and the more he will charm him’ (TJ 352). In Fielding’s theory of narrative, fancy (or imagination) is to be subjected to the laws of plausibility. The two should combine productively to ‘surprise’ and ‘charm’ the audience. While Conrad is, as we have seen, not informed by the same moral agenda as that of Fielding and Sterne, his aesthetic project is inspired by narrative devices found throughout the works of his eighteenth-century predecessors. Like Sterne and Fielding, Conrad in Under Western Eyes relies on surprise effects to entice the reader into active engagement in the story. And just as he makes his narrator’s narrative project a self-conscious undertaking, Conrad obviously expects his reader to engage actively and self-consciously in the story. Conrad’s emphasis on the written aspect of the language teacher’s

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

8.4 Narrative shock tactics: the ethics of negativity and the role of the reader

narrative magnifies the role of his narrator whose consciousness filters the events mediated to us. In consequence, the teacher’s narrative mode proves self-conscious to the point of becoming almost tautological. That is to say, the language teacher focuses so much on his act of narrating and incomprehension of the Russians that he tends to become the focal point of the reader’s attention, eclipsing the protagonist and his Russian compatriots. He is such an overwhelming presence that his deliberations on the Russians and on the events turn out to be monological, neither questioned nor contradicted by the novel’s characters. The teacher’s omnipresence and self-centredness are crystallized in his narrative self-consciousness, which constitutes a key feature of Under Western Eyes, and is a recurrent pattern in several other of Conrad’s works. In stating this, I am going against Donald Yelton’s claim that ‘alongside such near contemporaries as James, Gide, Proust, Joyce, and Thomas Mann, Conrad appears to be wanting in artistic self-consciousness and in articulateness about the aesthetics of his craft’ (1967, 14). In fact, it is easy to recognize that several of Conrad’s narrators are in varying degrees self-conscious narrators, constantly drawing the readers’ attention to the act of narrating and their narrative performance. Marlow’s selfconsciousness in Lord Jim, for example, increases progressively, bringing the reader and fictional auditors to focus more strongly on his own bewilderment about Jim’s conduct than on the protagonist’s predicament. Marlow seems even to be conscious of this self-reflexivity and egocentrism. In the course of his narration he becomes aware of the fact that he is ‘telling [the reader] so much about [his] own instinctive feelings and bemused reflections’ as to himself become a prominent presence (LJ 163). Marlow in ‘Heart of Darkness’, too, is markedly self-conscious, always directing our attention to his narrative act and cultural and epistemic disorientation. That being said, neither the personal narrator of Lord Jim nor that of ‘Heart of Darkness’ can really rival the teacher of languages who offers us the most eloquent case of publicized narrative self-consciousness in Conrad’s writing. The teacher’s narrative self-consciousness, suggested from the outset, is maintained and intensified throughout in a way that makes the narrator appear more as a dramatist than simply a narrator telling a tale to his audience. As we have seen, the devices of surprise and shock on which Conrad relies in this novel are aimed at inducing the active engagement of the reader in the story. They are especially meant to manipulate the readers and play tricks on them in what looks like a game of wit through which the language teacher underlines the artifice of the text. More than anywhere else in his fiction, Conrad in Under Western Eyes attempts to

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

168 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

169

establish a close, complex relationship with the reader through a marked narrative self-consciousness and techniques of reader manipulation reminiscent of those used by Sterne in Tristram Shandy. We remember how in this novel Sterne is eager to guide his reader through his distorted narrative by means of summary, repetition, explanation, and warning. We also recall how he is inclined from the beginning to set up a close relationship with his reader by constant personal appeals and through establishing a reading pact with his audience; a pact which has significant aesthetic, ideological, and moral implications. In Tristram Shandy this reading pact consists in a sort of a coda whereby Tristram informs his audience of the nature and intention of his narrative project. Overall, he seems to abide by the reading pact. Occasionally, however, he deviates from its explicit and implicit rules in ways that reflect Sterne’s intention of fooling the very same reader whom he otherwise takes by the hand and tries to instruct. Sometimes, Tristram explicitly acknowledges his breaking of the narrative pact. In those circumstances he becomes conscious of having imparted to the reader certain particulars which are later starkly contradicted: I told the reader, this time two years, that my uncle Toby was not eloquent; and in the very same page gave an instance to the contrary: – I repeat the observation, and a fact which contradicts it again. – He was not eloquent, – it was not easy to my uncle Toby to make long harangues, – and he hated florid ones; but there were occasions where the stream overflowed the man, and ran so counter to its usual course, that in some parts my uncle Toby, for a time, was at least equal to Tertullus – but in others, in my own opinion, infinitely above him. (TS 478) At other times, Tristram unilaterally and defiantly disregards the pact: All I contend for is, that I am not obliged to set out with a definition of what love is; and so long as I can go on with my story intelligibly, with the help of the word itself, without any other idea to it, than what I have in common with the rest of the world, why should I differ from it a moment before the time? – When I can get on no further, – and find myself entangled on all sides of this mystic labyrinth, – my Opinion will then come in, in course, – and lead me out. (TS 488–9) In this statement Tristram insists on his not being obliged to define love; a right that the reader cannot but grant him, since Tristram is

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Narrative Self-Consciousness and the Act of Reading

after all in a position of authority that the audience is in no power to contest. Like Diderot’s narrator, who plainly informs his reader that he is at his mercy,37 Tristram emphatically reminds his audience of his power over them; an assertion of narrative and epistemic authority which enables Tristram to say and not to say what he wishes. By stating that he is not defining the word ‘love’, Tristram leaves the reader no choice but to follow him in the general understanding of the word. At this stage the reader does not, of course, expect to find any such definitions in the following pages. However, as the narrative unfolds and even when his story’s ‘intelligibility’ is not at risk, Tristram seems tempted by oblique definitions. For example, during his lengthy discussion of the term love at the narrative’s close, he appears to offer, through analogy and associative ideas, definitions of the idea that he initially saw neither need nor obligation to define. Tristram has, in this case, his father elaborate on the issue of love, distinguishing the ‘rational’ version from its ‘natural’ counterpart (TS 612). Tristram’s father further refers to Plato and other ancient authorities to substantiate his argument: As the ancients agree, brother Toby, said my father, that there are two different and distinct kinds of love, according to the different parts which are affected by it – the Brain or Liver – I think when a man is in love, it behoves him a little to consider which of the two he is fallen into . . . I wish, Yorick, said my father, you had read Plato; for there you would have learnt that there are two Loves – I know there were two Religions, replied Yorick, amongst the ancients – one – for the vulgar, and another for the learned; – but I think one Love might have served both of them very well. . . (TS 610–11) Tristram’s ambivalence about his authorship and audience is even more marked in the scene where Tristram again broaches his narrative skills and equates writing books with humming a song. In this instance Tristram feigns diffidence with regard to the art of writing, saying that he is in doubt as to whether his tune is ‘high’ or ‘low’: For my own part, I am but just set up in the business, so know little about it – but, in my opinion, to write a book is for all the world like humming a song – be but in tune with yourself, madam, ’tis no matter how high or how low you take it . . . – so on I hummed – and a tolerable tune I thought it was; and to this hour, may it please your

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

170 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Narrative Self-Consciousness and the Act of Reading

171

The issue of writing, a key concern in this statement, is central to Tristram Shandy. Tristram himself is highly preoccupied with his identity as a social being and narrator as well as writer. Both he and Yorick are writing figures and the motif of the journey is metaphoric of writing and reading. Obviously, Tristram in particular is conscious of the act of writing, which, in Sterne’s view, is mostly dialogical, or more precisely, conversational: ‘Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation’ (TS 110). The novel’s dialogism is crystallized in the close relationship that Tristram entertains with his reader. The latter is perceived as a disciple to be instructed and as a partner to be stimulated or manipulated into active reading. The close relationship that Sterne and Diderot tried to establish with their audiences was, as has been pointed out, nothing new in itself. It was common among the ancient Greek and Roman poets and in more recent periods was widely practised by predecessors such as Cervantes, Rabelais, and Fielding, all of whom directly addressed their readers. Diderot and Sterne, however, unlike their predecessors, did not restrict themselves to conventional remarks and formal addresses to their audience. Rather, they engaged deeply with their addressees and drew their attention to the narrators’ narrative performance and writing-in-progress. To elaborate on Tristram’s earlier evocation of the art of writing, we may argue that his rhetoric of denegation constitutes a deft, manipulative method of representation that deserves close scrutiny. Given his manifest narrative skills and dexterous use of language and situation, Tristram’s confession to ignorance in the field of history writing can certainly not be taken at face value. His uncertainty as to whether he sings/writes highly or lowly appears in this instance less a case of incompetence than a design to confound the reader. For Tristram’s dramatized diffidence is strongly undercut by consistent observations reminding us of his narrative proficiency, the friskiness of his digressions, and his minute descriptions. In the final analysis, his claim to diffidence turns out to be a hoax, for deep down he has never doubted his narrative credentials. This is evidenced in the following statement where he explicitly holds the reader fully responsible for any inadequate understanding: If the reader has not a clear conception of the rood and the half of ground which lay at the bottom of my uncle Toby’s kitchen-garden,

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

reverences, had never found out how low, how flat, how spiritless and jejune it was. (TS 325–6)

172 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Tristram’s narrative paradoxes, his simultaneous propensity to claims and counter-claims, his professed ignorance in matters of narrative and writing, his self-consciousness as both narrator and writer, and his intricately manipulative attitude to the reader are all strongly echoed in Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. Yet, despite these manifest Sternean echoes, the artistic affinities between Sterne and Conrad have been widely overlooked in Conrad’s scholarship. To my knowledge, Stape and Najder are among the very few scholars briefly to have referred to Sterne’s likely influence on Conrad’s narrative methods.38 This neglect is all the more striking as a number of intertextual approaches to Conrad’s works have been undertaken in the last few years. These studies explored – among other topics – Conrad’s use of devices from the theatre, painting, and cinema, along with his borrowing from previous writers, including Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, and Flaubert. The connections of Conrad’s aesthetics with the writing of Sterne, and generally with the works of eighteenth-century British and French writers, have instead received no critical attention. As regards Under Western Eyes, in particular, most of the intertextual approaches to this novel have focused on its debt to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.39 There is no doubt that the interpretation of Under Western Eyes in the light of Dostoevsky’s novel is justified given the many thematic and structural parallels between the two works. Yet Dostoevsky is one influence among others. Indeed, in terms of narrative form and reader-response analysis, Conrad certainly owes more to Sterne and, to a certain degree, Diderot than he does to the Russian novelist. Nor, judging from his technical devices in Under Western Eyes, is it difficult to suspect the influence of Sterne. And in view of these striking similarities, I am tempted to assert that the Sternean mode of narration, specifically in Under Western Eyes is achieved less by reading Sterne second-hand, through Polish translations, as Najder argues, than by direct absorption of the author in the original. We may also reiterate in passing that the fact that Conrad did not acknowledge Sterne’s influence should not beguile us into believing that his narrative methods were unaffected by those of Sterne. With regard to plot and theme, Under Western Eyes obviously bears the imprint of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. On the other hand,

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

and which was the scene of so many of his delicious hours, – the fault is not in me, – but in his imagination; – for I am sure I gave him so minute a description, I was almost ashamed of it. (TS 461–2)

173

in relation to the mode of presentation, technical devices, and readerresponse analysis, Conrad’s novel is definitely in line with Tristram Shandy. Like Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, as well as Diderot’s Jacques the Fatalist, which is influenced by Sterne’s novel, Under Western Eyes is centrally concerned with narrative identity, writing, readership, and authorship. But, while drawing on Sterne and Diderot’s narrative experiments, Conrad in this novel articulates theories of narrative, authorship, and readership that go beyond those stipulated by his eighteenth-century predecessors. Sterne and Diderot, as we have seen, painstakingly inform their audiences of the nature of their poetics, telling them what these narratives are and, most importantly, what they are not or should not be taken for. The two writers insist, for example, that their tales are not conventional, linear stories, but a-chronological, digressive works whose appreciation requires unconventional reading habits. From the outset, Sterne states that his book or ‘history’ (TS 86), as he calls it, is not designed in the tradition of ancient epics or Horace’s odes, but is rather a ‘strange’, non-traditional tale fraught with digressions. Diderot, in turn, tells the reader that his book is not a novel but a history; the latter being favoured over the former and considered more reliable. In like manner, Conrad’s teacher of languages in Under Western Eyes obliquely induces the reader to believe that the story he is about to read is not a conventional narrative based on the strict powers of imagination and invention, but a faithful translation and an uncorrupted mediation of Razumov’s diary. And from the start, the teacher is, like Tristram, eager to draw his audience’s attention to himself as a narrating and writing subject. Furthermore, like Tristram, who equates writing with artifice from the first paragraph, the teacher of languages stresses the contrived nature of fiction. He does so by playing on the notions of truth and verisimilitude. The language teacher strives to convince his audience that his narrative, unlike other fictional productions, is a truthful rendering of human experience. He emphatically informs us that his narrative is not the fruit of sheer fancy, but an authentic account based on the protagonist’s real story that he consigned to his diary: ‘The very words I use in my narrative are written where their sincerity cannot be suspected’ (UWE 158). The language teacher lays emphasis on the value of Razumov’s memorandum as a source of his narrative for two interrelated reasons: first, by insisting on the diary’s sincerity the teacher intends to give his narrative a realistic effect that will lure the audience into believing that they are

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Narrative Self-Consciousness and the Act of Reading

reading a tale based on an authentic, uncorrupted account; second, by presenting himself as a mere translator or mediator of the protagonist’s diary, he expects to pass as an objective, and thus credible, narrator in the eyes of his audience. The realistic effect is further increased by the teacher’s presentation of the diary as a faithful mirror of the protagonist’s immediate social and political reality, rather than as the result of flights of fancy. The narrator remarks: The origin of Mr. Razumov’s record is connected with an event characteristic of modern Russia in the actual fact: the assassination of a prominent statesman – and still more characteristic of the moral corruption of an oppressed society where the noblest aspirations of humanity, the desire of freedom, an ardent patriotism, the love of justice, the sense of pity, and even the fidelity of simple minds are prostituted to the lusts of hate and fear, the inseparable companions of an uneasy despotism. (UWE 6) As such, the diary endows the teacher’s fictional material with ‘actual’ social, political, and ideological substance. At the same time, it enables him to preserve an apparent neutrality in relation to the Russian world he mediates to his Western readers. Interestingly, the old teacher’s concern with objectivity echoes Conrad’s own preoccupation with the same issue. He declares in the ‘Author’s Note’: My greatest anxiety was in being able to strike and sustain the note of scrupulous impartiality. The obligation of absolute fairness was imposed on me historically and hereditarily, by the peculiar experience of race and family, in addition to my primary conviction that truth alone is the justification of any fiction which makes the least claim to the quality of art or may hope to take its place in the culture of men and women of its time. (UWE 281) Conrad further insists on his distance from his fictional material, arguing: ‘I had never been called before to a greater effort of detachment – detachment from all passions, prejudices, and even from personal memories’ (UWE 281). Conrad should certainly be credited with efforts of detachment from his fictional material in Under Western Eyes. All the same, his presumed emotional distance from his subject is, like that of the teacher of languages himself, anything but complete.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

174 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

175

In the book’s first part, in which he is simply mediating to us Razumov’s journal, the old teacher may to some extent be granted a degree of neutrality. But as he becomes a participant in and witness to the events, his claim to objectivity becomes more spurious. From the second part onwards, in particular, the language teacher ventures a set of stereotypes and generalizations about the Russians, such as their being ‘prone to talk too much’ or being inclined to ‘cynicism’, which testify to his involvement in the material he relates.40 Meanwhile, through his focus on Russia’s moral, social, and political condition the teacher increases the realistic principle of the whole narrative. For by presenting Russia as a concrete social, moral, and political entity, the professor wishes the reader to know from the start that the topic at stake is not some purely fantasmatic, generic East-European locale, but an actual Russia with whose moral and political decadence he wants to familiarize his Western audience. The teacher’s use of the protagonist’s journal as a sub-text to his narrative enables a privileged distancing posture that serves to increase the effect of verisimilitude staged from the very beginning. The professor’s claim that he is deprived of both the imagination and the verbal power that would enable him to create such a story is intended to reinforce the effect of verisimilitude. It is also meant to attract the reader’s attention to the central question of narrative identity and to the status of the writer and writing. And both in his attitude towards his narration and in his relationship with the reader, the language teacher resembles narrators in Sterne and, to some extent, in Diderot. In Under Western Eyes, Conrad gives his narrator a Shandean cast, but moves his narrative experimentation in new, more radical directions. For, rather than seeking moral instruction and the reconciliation of opposites and preserving reading coherence, as Sterne ultimately does in Tristram Shandy, Conrad in Under Western Eyes leaves the reader to his own devices. Further, he compels the reader to grasp a bewildering social, political, and ideological context which apparently defies even the teacher’s interpretative powers. Both Sterne and Diderot conspicuously point up the artifice of their writing. They reveal the mechanics of their narratives in order to enhance their originality and validate the new kind of fiction they advocate. Overall, through their emphasis on writers and writing the two eighteenth-century authors tend to sanctify the role of the writer – the innovative author that Sterne and Diderot claim to embody. Conrad instead uses identical devices widely to interrogate the very idea of writing and authorship. Conrad’s inquiry into the status and ‘usefulness’ of fiction that permeates Under Western Eyes is reminiscent of

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Narrative Self-Consciousness and the Act of Reading

176 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

And oh! dear Ted – it is a fool’s business to write fiction for a living. It is indeed. It is strange. The unreality of it seems to enter one’s real life, penetrate into the bones, make the very heart beats pulsate illusions through the arteries. One’s will becomes the slave of hallucinations, responds only to shadowy impulses, waits on imagination alone . . . And one goes through it with an exaltation as false as all the rest of it. (CL 2, 205)41 Here, Conrad questions the writing of fiction as a way of making a living. He shows how the writer’s life becomes entangled with the business of writing to the extent that the real man becomes the ‘slave’ of the author. Judging from his general suspicion of writers and a more particular distrust of language in Under Western Eyes, we may argue that Conrad in this novel calls into question, on first appearances, at least, the very words which form the staple of writing. In a letter to Edward Garnett (20 October 1911) Conrad declared that in Under Western Eyes he was ‘concerned with nothing but ideas’ (CL 4, 489). This assumption accounts perhaps for the language teacher’s distrust of words as a means of expression and communication: Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. I have been for many years a teacher of languages. It is an occupation which at length becomes fatal to whatever share of imagination, observation, and insight an ordinary person may be heir to. To a teacher of languages there comes a time when the world is but a place of many words and man appears a mere talking animal not much more wonderful than a parrot. (UWE 3) In a strictly rhetorical sense, by distrusting language the teacher is questioning the essence of his own narrative, based, after all, on words. But on a deeper level, the teacher’s attitude to words is so convoluted that it should not be taken at face value. First, because the very ideas with which Conrad is concerned in this novel cannot, in practice, exist on their own terms. For they strongly depend for their clarity, logic, and persuasion on the power of words. Later in the narrative, the teacher of languages even provides evidence of the power of words that he apparently distrusts. In

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

his observation about fiction writing in a letter to E. L. Sanderson of 12 October 1899, where he declared:

Narrative Self-Consciousness and the Act of Reading

177

The task is not in truth the writing in the narrative form a précis of a strange human document, but the rendering – I perceive it now clearly – of the moral conditions ruling over a large portion of this earth’s surface; conditions not easily to be understood, much less discovered in the limits of a story, till some key-word is found; a word that could stand at the back of all the words covering the pages; a word which, if not truth itself, may perchance hold truth enough to help the moral discovery which should be the object of every tale. (UWE 50) And as the teacher observes a few lines further on, the word that sums up the moral of his tale is ‘cynicism’. According to him, this word is emblematic of the Russian character and Russia’s moral and political condition. Thus, within the context of his overall discussion of language, the narrator indicates that words, as vehicles of truth and moral discovery, still preserve their potential. He nonetheless insinuates that as a means of poetic expression they have lost their edge. Viewed as a whole, the teacher’s apparent distrust of words appears more like a reflection on modern linguistic bankruptcy, than a complete condemnation of words as such. For one thing, the language teacher, and via him Conrad, in no way dismisses words as wholly useless. Rather, by emphasizing language’s powerlessness he implicitly seeks to reinvigorate writing by rehabilitating the eroded power of words with the efficacy of gesture and sight. This hypothesis sounds plausible given the novel’s dramatic impulse and the attention accorded to gaze and body language, which often come to the rescue of the characters’ failing words, particularly those of Razumov. Most important of all is Conrad’s constant play on surface and depth, the verbal and non-verbal, and denial and assertion. All these are eloquent signs of an aesthetic construction that erects paradox into a fundamental narrative principle. This very paradox is embodied in the ethics of negativity on which the narrative method of Under Western Eyes is based. The language teacher’s ethics of negativity articulates first and foremost around the status of language and writing. It revolves around the questions of narrative identity and the narrator’s status and, implicitly, of the status of fiction as well. This is conveyed in the language teacher’s repeated comments on his narrative function and conception of writing.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

this case, he simply asserts that some words in Razumov’s journal contain essential truths, if not the very truth he wishes his readers to grasp:

178 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

In the conduct of an invented story there are, no doubt, certain proprieties to be observed for the sake of clearness and effect. A man of imagination, however inexperienced in the art of narrative, has his instinct to guide him in the choice of his words, and in the development of the action. A grain of talent excuses many mistakes. But this is not a work of imagination; I have no talent; my excuse for this undertaking lies not in its art, but in its artlessness. Aware of my limitations and strong in the sincerity of my purpose, I would not try (were I able) to invent anything. I push my scruples so far that I would not even invent a transition. (UWE 75) Like Marlow in Lord Jim who denies having the gift of imagination,42 the language teacher emphatically disclaims any artistic ability. The old professor further stresses the realistic effect of his narrative by insisting on its artlessness and his lack of creative talent. This denial recalls Tristram Shandy’s initial claim to ignorance in matters of book writing. And like Tristram’s representation, the teacher’s strategy of denegation serves fundamental narrative, aesthetic, and ideological goals. One of these consists, as in Sterne’s novel, of seizing the reader’s attention by utilizing devices of surprise and shock. The same strategy also involves other aesthetic and ideological aims, as we shall shortly see. Before discussing these aims at greater length, it is perhaps worth remembering that, like their respective narrators, Sterne and Conrad in their letters and essays openly referred to this ethics of negativity. In a letter of 14 January 1908 to Pinker, Conrad asserted: ‘I have no charm, no flow of wit or of facetiousness or mere patter to fill in chinks with . . . I have no literary tradition even which will help to spin phrases – the chewed up silly phrases. I am not a “Sedulous Ape”’ (CL 4, 21). This series of denials cannot, of course, be taken at face value. The first, in which Conrad claims to have ‘no charm’ or ‘flow of wit’ is echoed in Under Western Eyes where the teacher of languages denies having any artistic genius or even the capacity to make the slightest transitions. The second consists in denying the possession of any literary tradition. Conrad’s native country, Poland, has a rich literary tradition, and England, in which he chose to settle, boasts an outstanding literary tradition, with Shakespeare as its iconic figurehead. To these may be added French literature, with which Conrad was familiar, as well as the ancient Greek

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

As early as the first page he claims to lack the gifts of imagination and expression. In the second part he adds:

179

and Roman literary lore from which he borrowed extensively. In practice, Conrad’s hyperbolic denial of having any literary tradition is, therefore, rather a case of rhetorical excess than an expression of a real, empirical lack. In other words, through this denial Conrad paradoxically affirms his affiliation with multiple literary traditions, instead of confining himself to one single source. His strategy of denegation in the end appears as a force of assertion of difference and multiplicity, key features of Conrad’s art and outlook. Correspondingly, Conrad’s insistence on not being a ‘Sedulous Ape’ reads both as an implicit acknowledgement of borrowing from other authors and as an oblique assertion of his originality, no matter how problematic such a concept may sound in our postmodern world.43 Conrad’s strategy of denegation, conveyed by the teacher of languages, recalls Sterne and Diderot’s rhetoric about their own writing. Both openly stressed their literary originality and engagement with a kind of écriture spontanée that undermined the restrictive rules of writing that were dominant in the eighteenth century. Sterne’s claim to this sort of spontaneous writing is emphasized in his letters and fiction, specifically in Tristram Shandy. In his letters Sterne claimed that his writing was governed by his pen, phrasing his sentences ‘hot as [they] came from my Brain, without one correction’. The idea of random writing entailed in this statement is prominent in Tristram Shandy: ‘In a word, my pen takes its course; and I write on as much from the fullness of my heart, as my stomach. –’ (TS 455). In a similar vein, Diderot told Meister that La Religieuse was written ‘au courant de la plume’ (cited in Fredman 1973, 149). Diderot and Sterne’s pretension to literary impulsiveness, if not randomness, is, of course, starkly contradicted by their own actual rewriting and the careful correcting of their manuscripts evidenced in their correspondence. Above all, the artlessness they advocate is even undermined, to an extent, by the fictional works that are presumed to embody it. If Jacques the Fatalist’s spontaneity is reflected in its oral quality and narrative fluidity, its contrived nature is visible in the author’s sophisticated interpolation of various perceptual and cognitive modes which reveal the existence of elaborate underlying writing devices. Likewise, Sterne’s claim to penning things as they spring from his mind, is unsettled by Tristram’s deep concern with narrative order and balance. In a similar way, Conrad’s strategy of denial does not seem to stand firm either. His language teacher, who mediates to us Razumov’s journal, proves highly inconsistent; he is at once effaced and omnipresent, detached and intrusive, humane and cynical, serious and mocking.44 The teacher often sees his own assertions about his status and narrative

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Narrative Self-Consciousness and the Act of Reading

performance belied. His disclaiming of imaginative and verbal powers, for instance, can certainly not be taken for granted, nor can his claim to a faithful rendering of Razumov’s journal. There are strong suggestions and explicit textual evidence that the old teacher does not faithfully reproduce the protagonist’s diary. Although proficient in Russian, the teacher occasionally confesses to being unable to translate certain words or ideas from the protagonist’s document. Such a confession implies that the professor has edited the journal’s content and given his imagination free rein whenever the difficulty of translation arose. The teacher’s editing of the protagonist’s document is clearly indicated in this statement: ‘On looking through the pages of Mr. Razumov’s diary I own that a “rush of thoughts” is not an adequate image. The more adequate description would be a tumult of thoughts – the faithful reflection of the state of his feelings’ (UWE 18). The teacher here explicitly draws our attention to his critical reading of Razumov’s journal, as he authoritatively replaces seemingly inadequate phrases by more appropriate ones. We might fairly suspect that there could have been other instances in which the teacher altered the content of the protagonist’s diary without admitting as much. The teacher’s neutrality, which is undermined by this editorializing, is further destabilized on two other major counts. The first relates to his distrust of the powers of language and the second to the issue of verbosity, which he considers a Russian characteristic. The teacher can easily be discredited in connection with the former, for he possesses sufficient linguistic resourcefulness not only to amend the protagonist’s diary, but also to generalize commandingly and lengthily about Russia and things Russian. As to verbosity, the teacher gradually grows so wordy that his voice and frequent comments could be said to haunt the text.45 The language teacher’s narrative inconsistency no doubt makes him appear unreliable in the eyes of his audience. At the same time, this inconsistency is required by the novel’s sensitive topic – Russian politics. It is above all necessitated by Conrad’s own aesthetic project, focused on the questions of narrative identity, authorship, and reader theory. These issues are central to the novel and are embedded in the narrator’s ostensible strategy of denegation. As such, the narrator’s rhetoric of denial and self-depreciation forms a fundamental structuring principle, with significant ideological and aesthetic implications. It constitutes a privileged distancing posture through which the old teacher expects to achieve aesthetic and ideological neutrality. However, for all its ingenuity and sophistication, the narrative mode, clothed in opaque diction and enmeshed in a cluster of ironies, is anything but objective. This is

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

180 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

181

evidenced by the teacher’s omnipresence and in his stereotypical generalizations about Russia, which reflect Conrad’s own hatred and contempt for the country. The anti-Russian comments scattered through the narrative certainly question any pretension to neutrality, which the narrator nonetheless frequently reiterates. Yet the most challenged disclaimer is surely the one concerning the teacher’s professed inability to operate the slightest of transitions. The dexterity with which the transition from St Petersburg to Geneva is managed leaves, indeed, no doubt as to the teacher’s narrative skill. In the fourth part, the reader has been smoothly transferred to the new topos, Geneva, without hearing a squeak or detecting any faltering in the narrative. The phrase ‘where to’ performs an important narrative function. Used by Razumov in response to Mikulin at the end of Part One, this phrase creates dramatic effect and suspense. It also functions as a crucial narrative connector, facilitating the transition from Russia to Geneva and preserving, by the same token, narrative fluidity and balance. The teacher’s deployment of the diary device and ethics of denegation constitutes a fitting design for Conrad’s handling of Russian characters and politics. They allow him to assert truths about Russia, without openly committing himself. Specifically, for Conrad the ethics of denegation proves a suitable means of articulating his reader theory. In view of the rhetorical and narrative dexterity involved in shaping this ethics of denegation, we may safely argue that Under Western Eyes is not only Conrad’s most stylistically self-conscious work, but it is also his most sophisticated book in terms of narrative experimentation and readerresponse analysis. In this overtly dialogic, if not dialogued,46 book Conrad engages in a game of wit with his reader, whom he sees as both a useful partner with whom to collaborate and an adversary to fool and manipulate. This rhetorical joust, suggested by the language teacher’s relationship with his audience, has a Greek resonance. It recalls the eiron, a character in Greek drama who succeeds in defeating his opponent, the alazon, by resorting to self-depreciative modes of representation identical to those deployed by the language teacher in Under Western Eyes. At one level, the teacher’s claim to narrative and artistic inefficacy, couched in repeated depreciative rhetoric, somehow puts the reader at an advantage. It assigns to the reader some authority as a writing and reading subject. For by pretending to lack artistic skills, an apparent gesture of modesty, the teacher of languages implicitly expects his readers to make up for his deficiency, goading them to bring into action their own interpretative competence and discerning skills.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Narrative Self-Consciousness and the Act of Reading

In keeping with Sterne’s ethics of readership, Conrad seems to exhort the reader literally to step into the place of the writer. In Under Western Eyes, Conrad anticipates that his reader will ‘write the other half of the book’, just as Sterne in Tristram Shandy invites his reader at the novel’s end to finish the story. Besides, like Sterne, who justifies his rhetorical gesture by invoking a want of imaginative and descriptive powers, Conrad in Under Western Eyes looks to involve his reader by emphasizing his language teacher’s artistic and narrative inefficacy. In the end, both Conrad and Sterne, through their provocative, dialogic prose, promote a participative aesthetics in which writer and reader would write each ‘the other half of the book’ – or more fittingly perhaps, both would work as a team and together shape the text’s meaning. If Sterne and Conrad’s theory of writing as a collaborative effort or act of solidarity involving reader and author is appealing, the method on which it rests may appear more questionable. To say the least, the strategy employed by Sterne and Conrad in pursuing their participative poetics of readership is convoluted, if not altogether unsettling. The critical reception of these two novels is indicative of the demands of their reading theory on the readers and critics of their times. Tristram Shandy was very popular in the eighteenth century and has remained so, including in the twentieth century. From its publication onwards, it drew as much praise as it elicited bitter criticism. Such key Romantic figures as Scott, Coleridge, and de Quincey regarded Sterne favourably. Most modernist writers, as we have seen, were also enthusiastic about Sterne and readily saw in him a precursor of modernist and postmodernist aesthetics. But Sterne’s poetics, as might be expected, was not to everybody’s liking. When the first volumes of Tristram Shandy appeared in 1760, Horace Walpole, for example, dismissed the novel as ‘insipid’ and ‘tedious’; he called the third and fourth volumes of Tristram Shandy ‘the dregs of nonsense’ (cited in Lewis and Williams 1952, 44). Other readers and critics, like William Mudford, an English writer, translator, journalist and editor, pointed out Sterne’s ‘incoherency’, ‘fantastic irregularity’, and ‘deviation from all established rules of composition’. Mudford further concluded that to ‘analyse his volumes may be pronounced impossible’ (1811). Burke likewise found Sterne’s book disconnected and rather exacting for the reader: ‘The author perpetually digresses; or rather having no determined end in view, he turns from object to object, as they happen to strike a very lively and very irregular imagination. These digressions so frequently repeated, instead of relieving the reader, become at length tiresome’ (cited in Howes 1974, 106). The unreadability of Tristram Shandy was later stressed by other

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

182 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

183

critics, including Quennell who claimed that ‘taken as a whole, [Tristram Shandy] is probably one of the least readable of works to which critics of the past decided to allot an important place on our bookshelves’ (Quennell 1943). Broadly speaking, most of those who criticized Sterne found his novel distinctly reader-unfriendly. What is most striking in the context of our discussion is that much of the criticism levied on Sterne’s novel is echoed in twentieth and twentyfirst-century scholarly observations on Conrad’s theory of readership in Under Western Eyes. After correctly observing that Conrad’s novel is written for ‘perspicacious’ readers, Frank Kermode, for instance, goes on to conclude that this text ‘hates its [general] readers’ (1983, 146). David Leon Higdon follows suit in regarding Under Western Eyes as a work in which the reader is ‘a potential victim’ (1987). Higdon’s idea of the reader as a ‘victim’ is taken up by Greaney who argues that ‘the real victim of the novel, it would appear, is that obtuse dullard, the occidental reader, a complacent empiricist with no appetite for secrets whose myopic western eyes scan the text in vain for anything resembling story, plot or life-like character’ (2001, 166). Greaney further associates Conrad’s reader in this novel with a ‘scapegoat’ (168). Greaney, Kermode, and Higdon are right in observing that Conrad in Under Western Eyes, perhaps more than in any other of his books, is potentially addressing a sagacious audience. The game of wit he establishes from the start with the implied reader, the cluster of ironies he weaves into his narrative fabric, the text’s dense dramatic input, and the strenuous interpretative effort demanded of the audience all indicate that Conrad in Under Western Eyes targets an elite readership. However, it may be reductive to interpret Conrad’s complex reader theory in this novel exclusively through the ‘victim’ and ‘scapegoat’ tropes, for at least two reasons. The first reason is that the question of victimization, if victimization there is, is not a one-way process as Greaney, Kermode, and Hidgon contend. It is instead a two-tiered design, since both the reader and the narrator are equally the subject of authorial derision. In other words, in Under Western Eyes the narrating, writing, and reading agencies are variously prey to Conrad’s irony and rhetorical designs. As a result, both authorship and readership are called into question and destabilized. And this is due to the fact that Conrad’s deeper intention in this work is anything but simply to valorize the narrator/implied author and victimize the reader. Rather, through his old teacher’s ethics of negativity and subversive tactics Conrad tends paradoxically to reinvigorate the writing and reading instances. All in all, although the theory of authorship and readership is in this novel framed mostly in antagonistic or adversarial

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Narrative Self-Consciousness and the Act of Reading

184 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

terms, Conrad’s objective is anything but to lock the author and reader in rigid and sterile relations of power and enmity, as many critics assumed. On the contrary, Conrad’s ultimate goal is to release the potentialities of both writing and the act of reading by disconcertingly resorting to the ethics of negativity, narrative self-consciousness, and devices of shock and surprise.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Conrad’s handling of reader-response theory, authorship, visual aesthetics, and narrative form at large demonstrates the presence of a constant dialogue with ancient as well as modern author and reader theories. In framing these various delicate issues, Conrad engages in a dynamics of continuity and rupture, imitation and challenge, borrowing and renewal. Conrad’s writer figure is certainly different from the all-knowing, omnipresent ancient Greek poet who was inspired by the Muses and keen to entertain and instruct his audience. Rather, the authorial figure that Conrad projects is more in keeping with the Flaubertian type, lurking behind the work and maintaining a detached posture towards the written fictional universe. Conrad’s theory of authorship, expressed in A Personal Record, postulates the author’s presence in the writing, which he theorizes through the tropes of absence/presence, dissemination, elusiveness, and unidentified origination. These key tropes consolidate the image of the author as a diffused consciousness. They serve also to increase the reader’s difficulty in determining the exact sources of the text’s discourses and truths. Conrad’s idea of authorial dissemination involves various ideological, aesthetic, and theoretical implications. As a conceptual tool, the notion of authorial diffusion is indispensable to modern critical discussions of authorship. Although it may sound anachronistic to speak of authorial presence in a postmodern era that celebrates the author’s death, the relevance of Conrad’s theory to contemporary criticism is beyond doubt. Its usefulness lies precisely in reminding us that authority and power, whether authorial or otherwise, are always chameleon-like, functioning stealthily, by means of veiling and subtle manipulation. Even those who claim to deconstruct power and authority in discourse often, knowingly 185

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conclusion

or not, shape their own authoritative discourses in ways that anticipate recognition, if not obedience. In literary texts and more broadly in society, power and authority are often disseminated and tend to operate in disguised forms. As such, the notion of authorial diffusion is certainly more likely to account for the condition of authorship and authorial power in modern texts than is the predominant theory of authorial redundancy. The reason is that the critical tenet of the proponents of authorial demise in the end amounts to a critic-centred, dismissive, and facile approach to the complex issue of literary authority and power. Manifestly, Conrad sees the author as a proliferating consciousness and his idea of authorial diffusion entails a three-fold rupture. By identifying the author as a diluted presence with no fixed anchor, Conrad clearly eschews the conventional author-centred critical literary traditions, which lay emphasis on personality and elevate the author to the status of a demiurge. By stressing authorial relevance and dissemination, on the other hand, he anticipates a questioning of both modern critic-centred approaches to literary texts and reader-centric theories. According to Conrad, the modern writer is not dead, nor exiled, nor epistemologically irrelevant, as deconstructionist theories contend. The modern author instead haunts the interstices of his/her indeterminate, multi-layered narratives. This image of authorial ghostliness reinforces our belief that the writer in modern texts never ceases to be a potential epistemic and signifying site of power. Such an author tends to operate as an insidious, potent presence seeping unobtrusively through the narrative. His/her power remains effectual, but is judiciously disguised. Judging from the way it is formulated in A Personal Record, Conrad’s theoretical stance in connection with authorship is in stark contrast to postmodernist or deconstructionist theories. Whereas these theories define the author through the politics of exclusion, negativity, and demise, Conrad harbours a rhetoric of inclusion and affirmation in which the author appears as a lively, positive identification. He sees the writer as an invisible presence discreetly, but efficiently, acting on the various layers of authority and power invested in the text. By urging us to view the author, not in terms of absence or death but in terms of diffusion or dissemination, Conrad proposes an important alternative literary theory that has profound significance with regard to reader and interpretation theories. And in this, Conrad’s theory of authorial diffusion certainly proves both theoretically and empirically fruitful. It is not only more efficient for theorizing the writer’s status in modern literature, but also more fitting when it comes to addressing the

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

186 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

187

intricate ways in which authority and power are constructed in writing. For this very reason, Conrad’s theory of authorship has an outstanding critical value, as much as it holds significant libratory potential. It simultaneously frees the notions of author and reader from the hegemonic, dictatorial status usually attributed to them by the author-oriented and reader-centric approaches. Conrad’s version of authorship implies the relativity of both the author’s power and reader’s agency. Through the notion of authorial dissemination, Conrad posits the author as a discreet participant in textual meaning; in the meantime he grants the reader a dynamic, creative role. Deconstructionist theorists see meaning as being exclusively located within the strict confines of the reader-text conjecture. Conrad, who anticipated postmodernist aesthetics, seems to include instead the author in the overall epistemic process. According to him, sense-shaping is not a dual agency, but a tripartite signifying enterprise encompassing author, text, and reader. Lord Jim and Under Western Eyes in particular illustrate Conrad’s articulation of this tripartite transaction and highlight its aesthetic and epistemological dimension. If through his challenging theory of authorship, Conrad anticipated a critique of deconstructionist bias, his reader theory furnished deconstructionist reader-response analysis with a precious theoretical arsenal. In other words, Conrad developed a reader theory that today constitutes the backbone of deconstructionist theories. Along with promoting textual indeterminacy, dialogism, and multiple meaning, Conrad projects in his fiction a dynamic, creative reader; a reader called upon to collaborate with the author in the shaping of meaning. Where deconstructionist theorists, notably Barthes, conceive of the author and reader as mutually exclusive, if not annihilating each other, Conrad regards the reader and the author as part and parcel of the same signifying enterprise. In other words, while in Barthes’s theory the reader’s very existence or legitimacy is premised on the author’s demise, Conrad envisages the coexistence of the reader and author within the same intellectual paradigm. By assigning to the reader a significant, but relative role, Conrad fleshed out a reader theory that liberates readers from the serfdom in which Fielding and eighteenth-century writers more generally confined them, as well as from the dictatorial role ascribed to readers by deconstructionists. Thus, within Conrad’s participative poetics, the reader is not divinized or accorded a dictatorial status. Rather, the reader is mostly integrated as an important, but relatively interpretative, signifying agent. Most importantly, Conrad, following Sterne, sees the reader as the author’s secret sharer, expected to ‘write the other half of the book’. In this way,

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conclusion

Conrad conceives of writing as an intersubjective, symbiotic undertaking, just as he views reading as an act of solidarity. As implied in Conrad’s texts, the act of reading results from the cooperation of the horizontal and vertical dimensions, as well as from the convergence of the author’s indeterminate representations and the reader’s discerning interpretation of them. Conrad’s concern with the reader and readership is a major preoccupation in his essays, letters, and fiction. His works are pervaded with fictional readers and their abundance testifies to Conrad’s actual obsession with readership. Among Conrad’s fictional readers can be discerned two major categories: nominal readers and metaphoric or rhetorical ones. The nominal readers consist of readers literally indulging in various readings. In The Secret Sharer Singleton is reading Bulwer Lytton; Jim in Lord Jim reads Romantic literature; Stevie in The Secret Agent reads newspapers. Another key feature of Conrad’s texts is the profusion of scripts, real and metaphoric. Real scripts range from books to newspapers and letters. The letters usually consist of two kinds: the missives that the characters deliver to each other, as those that Marlow sends to the privileged man in Lord Jim, or letters sent by the characters to their relatives and vice versa (Decoud’s letter to his sister in Nostromo; Jukes’s letter to his wife in ‘Typhoon’). These letters possess an important narrative value, since they serve often to introduce narrative variation to the storytelling process. The letters also involve deep implications for Conrad’s overall reader theory. They connect the textual and meta-textual levels in a way that shifts attention from the intra-textual reader, implied by the various fictional readers and audiences, to a para-fictional reader. Neither embodied in the story, nor completely outside it, the para-fictional reader stands parallel to both the intra-textual and actual reader. Technically, the parafictional reader is on the threshold of two existential states, the fictional and meta-textual. His liminality is highly significant, for it serves as a site of transition that metaphorically opens the text into the actual space and time of the real reader. Metaphoric scripts, on the other hand, range from a narrator associating the sea with a text, as does Marlow in Lord Jim, to a character being likened to a script, as is the case with Lena in Victory. In this novel Lena is identified with a linguistic and textual construct that challenges Heyst’s interpretation, in the same way as Jim in Lord Jim is a metaphoric script defying Marlow’s scrutiny and comprehension. Just as the characters’ faces are frequently assimilated to textual spaces, so, too, nature in Conrad’s writing often takes the shape of a metaphoric text or subtext. Both the African jungle in ‘Heart of Darkness’ and the nature of

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

188 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

189

the Malays in ‘Karain: A Memory’, for instance, are figurative scripts. As a result, Marlow and the unnamed English narrator become rhetorical readers indulging in what looks like a figurative reading of their respective topographies. Unlike Conrad’s nominal readers, who are deemed shallow and myopic, his rhetorical readers are usually described as astute observers of their material world and the human psyche. However, as if to emphasize the demands of reading and interpretation, Conrad constantly draws attention to his rhetorical readers’ interpretative difficulties, as made clear in Lord Jim, Victory, or ‘Heart of Darkness’. Conrad’s sharp distinction between literalistic, incompetent nominal readers and ‘perspicacious’ rhetorical readers betrays an elitist approach to readership. In his fictional works, this authorial elitism is suggested in Conrad’s narrators’ propensity to consider themselves smarter than the audiences they address. This is implied in Marlow’s attitude to his veranda audience. Furthermore, Conrad’s inclination to narrative hierarchy is also intimated in the narrators’ eagerness to valorize some of their secondary narrators and demean others. Marlow in ‘Heart of Darkness’, Lord Jim, and Chance as well as the anonymous narrators in Victory and Nostromo scrupulously follow this scheme of evaluation. The elitist impulse of Conrad’s reader theory is even more strongly evidenced in the conspicuous hierarchical structure into which his narrators fit their audiences. Conrad’s narrators not only see themselves as more perspicacious than their addressees, but also tend to regard some of their narratees as being superior to others. This is manifest in works such as Victory and Lord Jim. Like the narrators of Chance or Victory, who dismiss their respective general audiences as witless and superficial, Marlow in Lord Jim mistrusts his addressees’ perceptions and faculties of interpretation. The narrators’ attitude to their fictional audiences in Lord Jim, Victory, and several other works may rightly be said to reflect Conrad’s own relation to his actual readers. Specifically, the narrators’ scorn for their immediate audiences, who in practice correspond to the average reader, is reminiscent of Conrad’s disparaging views of the general public. Conrad’s opinions on the common reader are widely expressed in his essays and letters. And though ambiguous, Conrad’s view of the general public is broadly unfavourable. On the whole, Conrad’s contempt for the average reader proceeds from his adherence to an aristocratic vision of culture, society, and readership. This aristocratic leaning is never conspicuous; rather, it is always conveyed with tact and finesse. It usually operates parallel to an apparent

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conclusion

liberal impulse that tends to flatten out the distinction between the common and the elite reader. Thus, despite occasional bursts of intellectual liberality in which he insisted on catering for both the highbrow and lowbrow reader, Conrad in practice disregarded the general public. He wrote mostly for the ‘happy few’, in the words of Stendhal, who influenced Conrad’s reader theory. This tacit, insidious elitist impulse strongly undermines Conrad’s emphasis on the popular vein of his writing, or, more precisely, his claim to being ‘one of the most unliterary writers’. Of course, considering the stylistic sophistication, marked trans-textuality, symbolic density, and cosmopolitan character of his writing Conrad’s assumption of un-literariness cannot be taken at face value. Notwithstanding Conrad’s rhetorical justifications, therefore, it is most unlikely that his works might have been primarily destined to a popular audience. Unlike his non-fictional works, Conrad’s fiction leaves no doubt as to his targeting an elite audience. Under Western Eyes, Victory, Nostromo, and Lord Jim are cases in point. In Under Western Eyes, in particular, Conrad resorts to narrative self-consciousness, ethics of denegation, intense theatricality, direct engagement with the reader, and use of surprise tactics and concurrent webs of irony. All these devices, most of which are borrowed from Sterne, Diderot, and Fielding, postulate an elite reader whom Conrad regards as his alter ego. In Victory, the elect reader that Conrad projects in his writing is suggested in the prestigious ‘official’ who comes to hear Davidson’s story at first-hand; in Nostromo he is embodied in the ‘privileged passenger’ listening to Captain Mitchell’s ‘pompous’ historic account. Conrad’s striving for a supreme audience is even more manifestly conveyed in Lord Jim; a narrative which can fittingly be defined as an odyssey of both telling and reading. This novel can, indeed, rightly qualify as an odyssey of reading; it is full of readers, fictional and metaphoric, and contains a profusion of listeners and audiences of various kinds. All these agencies offer competing readings of Jim’s case, while Marlow pursues his long search for a sympathetic, profound audience to his mediated story of Jim. In Lord Jim Conrad’s odyssey in search of a sympathetic, highly-valued reader reaches its happy destination. This is crystallized in the presence of ‘the privileged reader’ to whom Marlow sends a batch of letters. The ‘privileged man’ embodies the virtues of congeniality and perspicacity, and as such he personifies the subliminal reader that Conrad projects in his fiction. Marlow in Lord Jim, Under Western Eyes, and ‘Heart of Darkness’ variously demonstrates that Conrad’s subliminal reader has a daunting task

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

190 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

191

in store. In the bulk of these narratives, the subliminal reader is encouraged to transcend the strictly horizontal textual development of plot and character and is exhorted to attend to the more demanding vertical reading of text, context, and human psyche. Marlow’s insistence on the importance of the ‘why’ of Jim’s affair, neglected by the Court of Inquiry, is of the utmost significance. It sounds like a tacit invitation to the reader to go beyond the ‘how’ – the mere level of fact and evidence – in assessing the protagonist; one may add, in probing the human condition. Conrad’s urging of the reader to heed the verticality of human experience is entailed in his visual theory laid out in the Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. In this Preface Conrad openly stated that his literary ambition was to make the reader ‘see’. Gaze in this case implies both the physical act of looking at something and the epistemic impulse of seeing into things. In this literary credo Conrad reveals a sense of artistic wholeness, reflected in the blending of the pictorial, visual, and verbal. Through this synergy Conrad expects to bring vivid pictures before his reader’s eyes and to create an intense impression of visual presence. Conrad’s sense of aesthetic wholeness, which is not to be confused with oneness,1 pertains to his overall holistic approach to art and existence. This holistic vision is suggested in his author and reader theory, as well as in the characteristic narrative solidarity discussed earlier. It is, above all, reflected in the fusion of the modern and the ancient, which gives Conrad’s poetics a multi-layered structure and polyphonic resonance. This web of connections includes the eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers as well as the ancient Greek and Roman poets. More concretely, Conrad’s reader theory and narrative form at large owe a great deal to Sterne, Diderot, Stendhal, and Flaubert. Similarly, his visual theory, which blends harmoniously word, sight, colour, and sound, is widely of ancient Greek and Roman inspiration. Of course, Conrad also drew on modern visual techniques, especially photography and cinema. And as did his eighteenth and nineteenth-century French and British influences, Conrad also tapped into the ancient visual aesthetics or enargeia, understood as the capacity of language to create vivid visual impressions before the ‘reader’s eyes’. Conrad’s emphasis on the connections between the verbal and the visual was a recurrent concern in ancient Greek and Latin texts. These interrelationships were consistently broached by Homer, Aristotle, Thucydides, Quintilian, Cicero, and Plutarch, to name a few. The very notion of making the reader see, central to Conrad’s Preface, is a classical legacy, possibly derived from Conrad’s own reading.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Conclusion

The classical notion of enargeia, central to Conrad’s aesthetic theory, fulfils various functions. Like the ancient poets, Conrad employs enargeia to increase the clarity, vividness, and immediacy of the depicted events. He equally uses this device to compensate for language’s deficiency or powerlessness. In ‘Typhoon’, for example, Conrad resorts to visual devices in order to re-energize his narrator’s depictions. Conrad’s effort to capture the reader’s attention and elicit his/her collaboration entails, therefore, a wider preoccupation with language and representation. Within this key poetic pursuit the crucial task of making the reader see appears to be contingent on the artist’s capacity to find a new, reinvigorated idiom of expression. It is important to stress that the various modern and ancient ramifications highlighted in this study do not serve to illustrate a case of artistic derivation. Rather they draw attention to the density, depth, and trans-epochal character of Conrad’s poetics and aesthetic outlook. These ramifications, which reinforce the multi-dimensionality of Conrad’s aesthetics, complicate any attempts at classifying Conrad within a specific literary category. Above all, they discourage any unilateral, zealous insertion of Conrad into a determined national culture or literary tradition.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

192 Joseph Conrad and the Reader

Notes

1. On the notion of the death of the author, see Barthes (1977) and Bannet (1989). 2. On Conrad and postmodernism, see also Krajka et al. (2001). 3. See Aristotle (1991), Quintilian (1987), and Bann (1989). 4. Conrad’s admiration for Stendhal was expressly conveyed in his Notes on Life and Letters: ‘Stendhal’s mind was of the first order . . . Stendhal was preeminently courageous. He wrote his two great novels, which so few have read, in a spirit of fearless liberty’ (NLL 8). 5. Flaubert’s influence on Conrad has attracted critical attention since the 1920s. In his short monograph Joseph Conrad, Hugh Walpole declared: ‘Flaubert’s effect on [Conrad’s] style is quite unmistakable’ (1929, 77). Many critics have since widely explored these connections. Jameson discussed Flaubert’s influence on Conrad’s thematic and stylistic methods. On examining Lord Jim, he stressed ‘the Flaubertian accents’ in this novel, referring, for example, to Jim’s ‘bovarysm’ (1981, 211–13). For a thorough study of Flaubert’s influence on Conrad, see Hervouet (1990).

1. Conrad’s Conception of Authorship: Probing the Implications and Limits of the Death-of-the-Author Theory 1. For more information on the didactic function of tragedy in classical literature, see Johnson (2006). 2. On Victorian literature and didacticism, see Kumar (2002). 3. For a concise historical view of Formalist and New Criticism theories, see Rosenblatt (1978) and Davis and Womack (2002). 4. Frye contends that ‘in all literary verbal structures the final direction of meaning is inward’ (1957, 74). 5. Rosenblatt and Iser have likewise engaged in rehabilitating the reader’s role and accorded the reader a central position in interpreting literary texts. Rosenblatt defines this transaction between text and reader as an ‘ongoing process’ (1978, 17) and summarizes it as being ‘basically between the reader and what he senses the words [in the text] are pointing to’ (17). Unlike Barthes and Iser, Rosenblatt does not reduce the text to a mere linguistic or semiotic component. Nevertheless, her reader-centric approach is similarly dismissive of the author, since it does not envisage the author as a partner in the production of textual meaning. In keeping with Barthes, Iser locates the meaning of a text within the transaction between reader and text. He states: ‘We could then maintain, at least tentatively, that meanings in literary texts are generated in the act of reading; they are the product of a complex interaction 193

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Introduction

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

between text and reader, and not qualities that are hidden in the text and traced solely by that traditional kind of interpretation I have described’ (Iser 1989, 4–5). Significantly, in Iser’s theory, too, the author is not conceived of as a collaborator to sense-making (see also Iser 1980). Iser argues: ‘The indeterminate sections, or gaps, of literary texts are in no way to be regarded as a defect; on the contrary, they are a basic element of the aesthetic response . . . This means that the reader fills in the remaining gaps. He removes them by a free play of meaning-projection and thus himself provides the unformulated connections between the particular views’ (1989, 9–10). He continues: ‘Whenever the reader bridges the gaps, communication begins. The gaps function as a kind of pivot on which the whole text-reader relationship revolves. Hence, the structured blanks of the text stimulate the process of ideation to be performed by the reader on terms set by the text’ (34). Barthes writes: ‘In France, Mallarmé was doubtless the first to see and to foresee in its full extent the necessity to substitute language itself for the person who until then had been supposed to be its owner. For him, for us too, it is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality (not at all to be confused with the castrating objectivity of the realist novelist), to reach that point where only language acts, “performs”, and not “me”. Mallarmé’s entire poetics consists in suppressing the author in the interests of writing (which is . . . to restore the place of the reader)’ (1977, 143). Seán Burke rightly states, obviously with Barthes and deconstructionist theorists in mind: ‘Thus, when critics deliberately banished the original author, they themselves usurped his place, and this led unerringly to some of our present-day theoretical confusions. While before there had been but one author, there now arose a multiplicity of them, each carrying as much authority as the next’ (1995, 111). It is almost a truism to say that Bakhtin’s pioneering study on carnival and heteroglossia greatly influenced modern reader-response theories. In his theory, Bakhtin distinguishes two categories of texts, dialogic and monologic. According to Bakhtin, monological works are dominated by single, controlling voices and tend to represent the official ideological stance of the author’s culture. In the process, Bakhtin nonetheless adds that monological writings may also depict characters speaking from various standpoints. In contrast, dialogic texts create a polyphonic space where the discourses of the dominant culture and ideology interact and compete with the voices of popular culture (Bakhtin 1981, 1990). It is important not to lose sight of the ideological and political dimensions of Barthes’s theory, which are often overlooked in literary criticism. We should specifically remember that Barthes’s death-of-the-author mantra was produced in the boisterous French cultural and political climate of the 1960s. As such, Barthes’s struggle to free the text from the shackles of authorial dictatorship ought to be read in the light of the overall struggle of 1960s French intellectuals, including Barthes, to release French society from stifling political, social, and moral constraints. Celebrating the death of the author, as does Barthes, is in the end tantamount to a rallying cry against the repressive

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

194 Notes

195

political, religious, and ideological absolutes that were current on the French cultural scene. 11. Following Flaubert and Conrad’s theories of authorship, Booth argued that the author is a constant presence in his writing: ‘In short, the author’s judgment is always present, always evident to anyone who knows how to look for it. Whether its particular forms are harmful or serviceable is always a complex question, a question that cannot be settled by any easy reference to abstract rules. As we begin now to deal with this question, we must never forget that though the author can to some extent choose his disguises, he can never choose to disappear’ (1961, 20). 12. Hervouet rightly observed that ‘the rise of objectivity in the nineteenthcentury literature is related to the erosion of the old certainties, particularly in religious and ethical matters’ (1990, 190). See also Kindt and Muller (2006). 13. Flaubert stated: ‘Mon moi s’éparpille . . . dans les livres’; he added ‘j’ai toujours péché par là’ (1981, 461). Many critics have pointed out Flaubert’s omnipresence in his works. As early as the 1960s, for instance, Booth showed that Flaubert’s omnipresence was expressed in his overt intrusions, generalizing observations, addresses to the reader, and judgements on the characters (1961).

2. Polish Responses: Art and the Ethics of Collectivity 1. The impact of cultural and racial factors on the reception of Conrad’s works in England is overlooked in both past and recent scholarship. 2. Conrad occasionally engaged in direct diplomatic action in favour of Poland’s independence. During his short stay in Vienna, for instance, he discussed the Polish issue with M. Marian Bilinski, a civil servant. Their conversation, as Conrad wrote in his letter to Teodor Kosch (18 October 1914) was ‘mainly about how the Polish question should be presented in England . . . It will be necessary to look around, sound the hearts and minds of influential people and only then start to act, if any action is possible in this question which is so close to our hearts’ (CL 5, 416). Conrad pleaded the cause of Poland in his adopted country and, as he stated in a letter to Richard Curle (20 August 1916): ‘I too have dipped my fingers in diplomacy by writing a memorandum on the peace settlement on the Eastern front which got into the F.O.’ (CL 5, 638). 3. In 1840 Mickiewicz lectured at the College de France where he held the chair of Slavonic literature. Prior to this appointment, he held a chair of Latin at the University of Lausanne. During his lectures in both France and Switzerland he unremittingly pleaded Poland’s cause and reminded the West of his country’s contribution to Western civilization (see Krzyzanowski 1930, 99). 4. Messianism refers to a system of thought and belief that cherishes the ideal of liberty and sacrifice for the Polish cause. Poetry is viewed within this system as indissolubly linked to national destiny. Krzyzanowski writes: ‘Polish romantic poetry is undeniably full of nationality and of the necessity for it . . . It became for the Poles a treasure house of national ideals cherished by one generation after another as a remembrance of heroic endeavours in the past

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Notes

5. 6.

7.

8. 9.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

as well as a promise of a happier future’ (1930, 107). The poetry of Mickiewicz is a privileged vehicle of Polish Messianism. His pamphlet, Books of the English Pilgrimage ‘formed and proclaimed the fundamental views of the philosophical and political system called Polish Messianism’ (Krzyzanowski 1930, 96–7); see also Zaborowski (2004) and Nowak (2005). Both Mickiewicz and Słowacki joined the 1848 Rising in Pozan. They sacrificed their possessions and individual pursuits for Poland’s independence. In a letter to Gordon Gardiner (8 October 1923) Conrad claimed to have refused to join a club restricted to members of the Church of England and a Catholic Society: ‘I am afraid I am a lost soul . . . I have got to stand between the two, a prey to the first inferior devil that may come along’ (CL 8, 191). Ford stated that Conrad was ‘above all things else . . . a politician’ and ‘a student of politics, without prescription, without dogma, and, as a Papist, with a profound disbelief in the perfectibility of human institutions’ (1964, 57). Conrad told Warrington Dawson in a letter dated 20 June 1913: ‘Art for me is an end in itself. Conclusions are not for it’ (CL 5, 237). Conrad would have preferred the word ‘Polonism’ to ‘Slavonism’, as he stated in a letter to Charles Chassé (31 January 1924): ‘As to the references to my Slavonism, I am certain you wrote in all sincerity, like many English critics who had been raising the same point some years ago, but not so much lately . . . What I venture to say is that it would have been more just to charge me at most with “Polonism”’ (CL 8, 290–1). Thus the patriotic impulse is strongly at work in both categories of readers; those who rejected Conrad’s fiction as non-Polish and those who enthusiastically reintegrated him into the fold. Each group of readers assessed Conrad’s fiction within a strict patriotic interpretative frame that conflated the aesthetic and the ideological. Krajka insightfully remarked that ‘before 1948 [Conrad] was read by the élite, intellectuals and youth; after 1956, by a great many lovers of literature among the general public’ (1993, 49). Perlowski wrote: ‘It was accepted that any Pole might seek his livelihood elsewhere, that he might write in a foreign language and even become famous as a result. Yes, the better known he was abroad, the more effectively he could serve the Polish cause . . . But years went by and Conrad did not fulfil our expectations. His later works, which accounted for his fame in England, seemed to us different and more remote. His thoughts and feelings were more English. Our disappointment grew as this writer, forgetting his home country, merged more and more with his English environment, to such a degree that he even began delivering in real earnest inspired speeches on its behalf. In all his works there was no mention of Poland. We were baffled. But none of us suspected that things would get even worse when he finally remembered Poland’ (cited in Najder, 1983a, 158). See Conrad’s A Personal Record (PR), ‘A Note on the Polish Problem’ and ‘The Crime of Partition’ (NLL). In a conference paper entitled ‘“Simple Ideas” in Conrad’s World? The Case of “Prince Roman”’, Romanick Baldwin discussed Conrad’s relation to the reader and perceptively argued that ‘the narrative first distances readers from Prince Roman’s story, establishing them as outsiders, in order to move them

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

196 Notes

15.

16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23.

197

gradually into shared experience and affective understanding of patriotism shaped by the concrete particulars of the story’ (2008). Conrad was grieved by Poland’s predicament, as he told Marian Dobrowski: ‘When I ponder the present political situation, c’est affreux! I can’t think of Poland often. It feels bad, bitter, painful. It would make life unbearable’ (cited in Najder 1983a, 201). Najder (1983b) rightly points out that before 1914 Conrad mentioned Poland in his published work only three times: in ‘Autocracy and War’ (1905), in A Personal Record (1908–09) and in ‘Prince Roman’ (1911). In terms echoing Morf, Wit Tarnawski saw A Personal Record as reflecting the ‘settlement of an outstanding debt to his native country’ (cited in Najder and Stape 2008, xliv). The State Editorial Office in Warsaw republished Lord Jim in 1949, followed by The Mirror of the Sea and The Shadow Line in 1950. Morf discussed the influence of Polish culture on Conrad in The Polish Heritage of Joseph Conrad, first published in 1930. His 1976 monograph pursued and extended this discussion. The term ‘bovarysm’, coined in reference to Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, connotes duplicity and elusiveness, key features of several Conrad’s characters. In contrast to Lutosławski, Orzeszkowa, and Gomulicki, Zagorska, Morf, and Najder, among others, reclaimed Conrad as completely ‘one of us’ and unreservedly reintegrated him into the Polish culture and literary tradition. They laboriously traced most of Conrad’s themes and symbols to his native cultural tradition. And they did so in terms that betrayed essentialist appropriative gestures and Messianic as well as mystic notions of textuality. After having previously stressed Conrad’s deep Polish roots, Najder in his recent works tends to emphasize the author’s continental dimension, following in the steps of Hervouet, among others. In this way Najder intends to situate Conrad as an essentially European rather than a specifically British writer. In ‘Joseph Conrad: a European Writer’, Najder rightly observes that Conrad must have certainly ‘felt at home in several European civilizations’ (1997, 167). Judging from his multi-faceted poetic, epistemic, and existential scope, Conrad is, in my view, more fittingly defined as a trans-continental author who defies nationalistic appropriations and insular critical perspectives. In this monograph, Najder clearly aims to undermine Conrad’s French and British legacy in terms that are sometimes extreme, if not simply erroneous. Discussing the impact of Flaubert and Maupassant on Conrad’s writing, Najder writes: ‘The influence of Flaubert and Maupassant, although undoubtedly strong and consciously absorbed by Conrad, was in fact doubly limited: it concerned mainly matters of literary technique, and affected almost exclusively his early and still immature books’ (1964, 28). Hervouet demonstrated that the impact of these writers on Conrad went well beyond the mere level of style (1990). To further reinstate the true measure of Flaubert and Maupassant’s influence on Conrad, it is important to bear in mind that this influence was certainly not limited to the ‘early’ and ‘immature’ works, as Najder contends. Rather, Conrad’s later and major books also strongly echo his French masters’ writing, especially with regard to reader theory, as shown in this study.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Notes

24. Najder’s undermining of the influence of the French language on Conrad’s prose, for instance, is emphatically rendered in this statement: ‘The alleged “Gallicisms” of his English are in fact not gallicisms but simply polonisms; it is enough to set Conrad’s original text side by side with a Polish translation to observe idiomatic borrowings and syntactical influences’ (1964, 29). Conrad, as Najder states, obviously borrowed idioms and syntactical constructions from his native language. At the same time, anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of French could appreciate that Conrad’s English is strewn with French syntactic structures. 25. Conrad declared in a letter to Richard Curle (17 July 1923): ‘I have always tried to counteract the danger of precise classification, either in the realm of exoti[ci]sm or of the sea; and in the course of years here and there I have had helpful paragraphs and articles in that sense. But they never amounted to much. Neither were my protests very effective’ (CL 8, 136).

3. British Reception: Englishness and the Act of Reading 1. There are of course, honourable exceptions to this generalization about English writers, for example, neither Hardy nor Dickens, nor many women writers would have had this kind of elitist background. The adjective rhizomic is used here in a Deleuzian sense to mean multiple, non-dualistic ways of conceiving identity and knowledge. 2. Conrad declared in a letter to Sir Sidney Colvin (1 March 1917): ‘Perhaps you won’t find it presumption if after 22 years of work I may say that I have not been very well understood. I have been called a writer of the sea, of the tropics, a descriptive writer, a romantic writer – and also a realist. But as a matter of fact all my concern has been with the “ideal” values of things, events and people. That and nothing else’ (CL 6, 40). Conrad was apparently expecting such categorization of his works, as he pointed out in a letter to Richard Curle (14 July 1923): ‘Indeed, the nature of my writing runs the risk of being obscured by the nature of my material. I admit it is natural; but only the appreciation of a special personal intelligence can counteract the superficial appreciation of the inferior intelligence of the mass of readers and critics’ (CL 8, 130). 3. In a letter to Agnes Tobin, dated 21 July 1911, Conrad stated: ‘I am awfully in arrears with my N.Y.H [erald] novel [Chance]; and it makes me anxious. But all my writing life has been one long anxiety’ (CL 4, 461). 4. Chance sold about 13,000 copies during the year 1914–15; it fared far better than Under Western Eyes (1911), for instance, which sold only one-third as many copies. Conrad seems to have sensed that Chance could be a popular and commercial success. In a letter to J.B. Pinker (7 April 1913), Conrad declared that this novel is ‘the sort of stuff that may have a chance with the public. All of it about a girl and with a steady run of references to women in general all along, some sarcastic, others sentimental, it ought to go down’ (CL 5, 208). It is also important to remember that the publicity and promotion orchestrated by Conrad’s American publisher, Frank Doubleday contributed widely to Chance’s commercial and popular success.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

198 Notes

199

5. Conrad wrote in the ‘Author’s Note’ to Chance: ‘What makes this book memorable to me apart from the natural sentiment one has for one’s creation is the response it provoked. The general public responded largely, more largely perhaps than to any other book of mine, in the only way the general public can respond, that is by buying a certain number of copies. This gave me a considerable amount of pleasure, because what I always feared most was drifting unconsciously into the position of a writer for a limited coterie; a position which would have been odious to me as throwing a doubt on the soundness of my belief in the solidarity of all mankind in simple ideas and sincere emotions’ (C xxxii–xxxiii). 6. In a letter to J.G. Huneker (late June 1913) Conrad referred to Chance as ‘my girl-novel’ (CL 5, 236). This labelling clearly distinguishes this book from his characteristically masculine fiction. 7. Conrad stated in a letter to T. Fisher Unwin (28 May 1896): ‘My style may be atrocious – but it produces its effect – is as unalterable as – say – the size of my feet – and I will never disguise it in boots of Wells’ (or anybody else’s) making. It would be utter folly. I shall make my own boots or perish’ (CL 9, 32). 8. H.G. Wells reviewed An Outcast of the Islands in the Saturday Review and offered Conrad the following advice: ‘Since you don’t make the slightest concessions to the reading young woman who makes or mars the fortunes of authors, it is the manifest duty of a reviewer to differentiate between you and the kind of people we thrust into the “Fiction” at the end, the Maples and the Shoolbreds of literature . . . If I have indeed put my finger on a weak point in your armour of technique, so that you may be able to strengthen it against your next occasion, I shall have done the best a reviewer can do. You have everything for the making of a splendid novelist except dexterity, and that is attainable by drill’ (cited in Gordan 1963, 281). It appears, as Greaney remarks, Conrad ‘deliberately . . . played up the romantic content of “girl-novel” in order to appeal to a female readership’ (2001, 99). 9. For recent approaches to the reception of Conrad’s works, see Billy and Orr (1999), Peters (2006), and Simmons (2006). 10. Conrad’s opinion of reviewers wavered throughout his career. Initially he looked eagerly to the reviews of his books, for he valued highly the role of the critic. In a letter to Barett H. Clark (4 May 1918), Conrad wrote: ‘it is the critic’s affair to bring to its [the story’s ‘final effect’] contemplation his own honesty, his sensibility and intelligence . . . If his conscience is busy with petty scruples and trammelled by superficial formulas then his judgment will be superficial and petty’ (CL 6, 211). However, in a letter to Alfred Knopf (20 July 1913), Conrad spoke disdainfully of reviewers, declaring that ‘the majority of writers of notices in newspapers are men of average tastes’ (CL 5, 257). Conrad’s most caustic critique of the reviewers is expressed in a letter to H.G. Wells (20 October 1905): ‘The worst of our criticism is that it is so barren. Most of our reviewers seem absolutely unable to understand in a book anything but facts and the most elementary qualities of rendering’ (CL 3, 289). Beyond superficiality, Conrad also reproached the critics for indulging too easily in comparison and categorization of his writing. He wrote in a letter to J.B. Pinker (18 November 1920): ‘I know how the minds of professional

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Notes

11. 12.

13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

critics work. They live on comparisons, because that is the easiest method of appreciation. Whereas I hate them, even if made in my favour’ (CL 7, 206). For further information on the reception of A Personal Record, see Najder and Stape (2008) In ‘The New Novel’, Henry James criticized Conrad’s method in Chance, pointing out the imbalance between the novel’s complex technique of exposition and the simplicity of the story. He referred to Marlow’s narrative as a ‘prolonged hovering flight of the subjective over the outstretched ground of the case exposed’ (cited in Sherry 1973, 267). The review in the Glasgow News of 5 February 1914 likewise criticized Marlow’s narrative technique: ‘Somehow Chance suggests a scaffolding that people watch being constructed intricately for days, only to find that at the end it was designed for nothing more than the placing of a weather-cock on a steeple’ (cited in Sherry 1973, 283). Henry James pointed out Conrad’s elitism in a letter to Edmund Gosse in 1902, stating that Conrad’s production ‘has all been fine, rare and valid, of the sort greeted more by the expert and the critic than . . . by the man in the street’ (cited in Gordan 1963, 303). Conrad himself seemed to be aware that his sophisticated narrative methods could not appeal to or be understood by the average reader. He declared in a letter to H.B. Marriott Watson (28 January 1903): ‘My conviction is that the general reader does not care anything for method. And rightly so. Why should he (having his own heavy grindstone to turn) bother his head about what he cannot possibly understand’ (CL 3, 13). In his early writing career Conrad believed that he would make a financially successful artistic life, yet after the commercial failure of Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands he felt that he would never be popular (see Conrad’s letter to the Baroness Janina de Brunnow, 2 October 1897; quoted below, Chapter 7, note 7). It is worth mentioning in this respect that in the last decade of his life Conrad’s financial situation improved greatly. Curle remarked that Conrad ‘was really very well off during the final eight years of his life – one year he actually made more than £10,000 – and he stood out more and more as a figure in the public eye’ (1968, 136). Indeed, shortly before his death and in the following years, Conrad enjoyed a growing reputation in both Britain and America and his books sold extremely well. As Gordan reports, between 1923 and 1938 Conrad’s American publishers affirmed having sold 12,669 copies of Almayer’s Folly, 35,800 copies of The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, 59,150 copies of ‘Youth’, and 109,300 copies of Lord Jim. ‘During the same period subscription sets have sold approximately 1,157,401 volumes, containing . . . many copies of the books above listed’ (1963, 309). According to Ray: ‘At his death, Conrad left an estate of £20,045’ (1993, 17). From 1911 to 1918 Conrad sold his manuscripts to John Quinn, and from 1918 on to Thomas Wise (see Billy and Orr 1999). Conrad went to the United States in May 1923. During this promotional visit instigated by his American publisher, Doubleday, Conrad could sense his American readers’ enthusiastic response. In a letter to Alfred A. Knopf (20 July 1913), he stated that ‘I have had in the U.S. a very good press – invariably!’ (CL 5, 257). Conrad also referred to the ‘boom in Joseph Conrad in France’. Curle pointed out Conrad’s pessimism and ascribed the ‘fatalistic melancholy’ of his fiction to his Polish background (Manchester Guardian, 2 February

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

200 Notes

18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

201

1912). The Glasgow News also labelled Conrad ‘a pessimist’ and associated this feature with his Polishness (8 February 1912) (cited in Najder and Stape 2008, xli). In 1896, the Saturday Review criticized Conrad’s prolixity in these terms: Conrad ‘has still to learn the great half of his art, the art of leaving things unwritten’ (cited in Gordan 1963, 279). The review implied that Conrad was lacking a fundamental trait of Englishness: understatement. Riede highlights that ‘Englishness is a closed system, a game played by absolute, defined rules learned on the playing fields of Eton, and is characterized by a laconic disposition to rest upon received opinions’ (2006, 212). The conflation of the terms ‘British’ and ‘English’ was such even during the twentieth century that politicians were pressured to favour the inclusive word ‘British’ over the insular ‘English’. But the old habit was persistent, as illustrated by the famous advertisement in The Times of November 1914, which run as follows: ‘Englishmen! Please use “Britain”, “British”, and “Briton”, when the UK or the empire is in question – at least during the war’ (cited in Hanham 1969, 130). On Ford and Forster’s attitudes to Englishness, see Brown and Plastow (2006). John Crompton drew attention to the inclusive dimension of Englishness in his discussion of the notion of the ‘gentleman’ in his essay ‘Faith, Virtue and the Conduct of Life’ (2003). Similarly, Allan Simmons elaborated on the inclusive potential of Englishness in ‘The Art of Englishness’ (2004). While pointing out the inclusive character of Englishness in connection with Conrad, Simmons interprets Conrad’s relationship with Englishness in terms of ‘negotiation’ and mutual ‘transformation’. As a preliminary remark, it is important to note that Conrad, as an emigrant, had no choice but to negotiate his new existence within the established social and cultural norms. That being said, Conrad had benefited from the generosity and inclusiveness of British society, and this has been frequently stressed in Conrad criticism. What is, however, overlooked is that Conrad was equally a helpless victim of the same society’s xenophobia and exclusionary practices. In this respect, it is important to bear in mind that Conrad’s negotiation of Englishness, evoked by Simmons, was above all based on extremely unbalanced power relationships. To venture an analogy, Conrad’s relation to Englishness was somehow similar to the cultural and commercial transactions between the Malays and Dutch in ‘Karain: A Memory’. Balanced and inclusive in appearance, these transactional relationships, like Englishness itself, were in practice deeply coercive and exclusionary. Crompton refers to Brierly as ‘seemingly the epitome of Englishness’ (2003, 153). In 1900, the Academy gave vent to its jingoism, associating Jim with those heroic ‘men who are engaged in relating the East to the West; those strange links with the two civilizations; voluntary exiles from this country, denationalizing themselves that the British flag shall find trade wherever it penetrates’ (cited in Gordan 1963, 295). Berberich argues that ‘while Englishness and gentleman seem inextricably linked – the gentleman has always . . . been considered a quintessentially English phenomenon’ (2006, 195). In the light of this consideration, we may understand why Conrad’s dream of becoming an English gentleman

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Notes

26.

27.

28. 29.

30.

31.

32.

33. 34.

remained unfulfilled. It is yet worth noting that the notion of ‘gentleman’ has some degree of elasticity. As Crompton remarks: ‘The concept of “the gentleman” in England partly involves social class’, but ‘it is possible for a man of humble birth to become a gentleman by absorbing and upholding the gentlemanly code. Social mobility has for centuries enabled men of lowly origin to become gentlemen, through ability, acquired wealth, and merit in the services, including the merchant navy’ (2003, 146). Ford’s vision of Englishness is ambiguous and thus differs from the almost uniform, monological version of the rest of the authors mentioned here. For more details, see Brown and Plastow (2006). According to Colls, there was a ‘revival’ of interest in ‘folk studies’ and local anthropology at that period. He attributes this revival to social and political unrest, which led to a retreat into England’s ‘racial and rural essence’ (1986, 47). Morton states: ‘The village that symbolizes England sleeps in the subconscious of many a townsman’ (1984, 2) Haslam notes: ‘In the first decade of the twentieth century “invasion literature”, novels and pamphlets that envisioned the defilement of the island, enjoyed record sales figures from a fascinated and appalled population during the years 1900–14’ (2006, 48). The Spectator attributed Conrad’s lack of success to his themes: ‘Mr. Conrad’s matter is too detached from “actuality” to please the great and influential section of readers who like their fiction to be spiced with topical allusions, political personalities, or the mondanities of Mayfair, – just now the swing of the pendulum is entirely away from the slums, and almost altogether in the direction of sumptuous interiors. Mr. Conrad, in a word, takes no heed to the vagaries of fashion or of pseudo-culture – he only once mentions an author and only once makes a quotation – he eschews epigrams, avoids politics and keeps aloof from great cities. His scenes are laid in unfamiliar regions, amid outlandish surroundings.’ The Outlook ascribed Conrad’s lack of popularity to his subtle artistry and elusiveness: Lord Jim’s ‘qualities are of a peculiarly refined and half elusive kind which may well prove unattractive to the multitude’ (cited in Gordan 1963, 297). In contrast to Conrad’s precarious English identity, Hardy’s Englishness could not be doubted since, as Whibley remarked, he belonged ‘by birth and temperament to the soil of England’ (1995, 419). The Citizen (2 May 1896) described The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ as ‘darkly pessimistic’; so, too, did the Illustrated London News, which complained that ‘the school of fiction-brutality to which he belongs is not given to idealizing fact’ (Gordan 1963, 279 and 288). Similar descriptions were applied to Tales of Unrest which was deemed ‘a disagreeable book’ (Literary World); ‘unbearably sinister’ (Spectator); ‘grim beyond endurance’ (Book Buyer) (cited in Gordan 1963, 294). According to Gainer, immigration ‘into England trebled between 1899 and 1902’ (1972, 2–3). What was most distressing for the Anglophile Conrad was to be lumped together with the despised, unwelcome Jews. As Curle remarked, several people explicitly identified Conrad with the Jews from Eastern Europe: ‘Many

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

202 Notes

35. 36.

37. 38.

39.

203

people, for instance, could not get out of their heads the idea that Conrad, just because he came from Poland, must be a Jew – and this, of course, annoyed him intensely’ (1968, 178–9). For detailed studies on the theme of isolation and alienation, see Gillon (1960) and Krajka (1992). Kipling’s observation is repeated with little variation by the essayist and short story writer Christopher Morley: ‘Conrad’s prose . . . seems always like a notable translation from the French’ (1918, 243). Such reflections might have been spurred by Conrad’s own observation on his writing. He told W.E. Henley who published The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ in his Review: ‘When I write I think in French and then translate the words of my thoughts into English. This is an impossible process for one desiring to make a living by writing in the English language’ (cited in Ford 1964, 32). On Conrad and race politics, see also Firchow (1999). Several critics pointed out the biographical elements in ‘Amy Foster’. Najder (1964), for instance, referred to the presence of ‘an autobiographical component’ in the tale. Karl, in turn, stated that ‘despite Conrad’s attempts to intensify the size of the story through mythical references and the aura of the incomprehensible, “Amy Foster” works best at its simplest level, which also corresponds to very personal elements in Conrad’s own development’ (1979, 514). Carabine discussed these biographical connections, arguing: ‘biographical and psychological commentary . . . has obscured the links between the historical, political and cultural aspects of what Conrad called his “peculiar experience of race and family” and his nodal idea of “irreconcilable differences”’ (1992, 198). Morf asserts that ‘like his heroes, like Almayer, like Yanko Goorall, Joseph Conrad had to fight alone; he knew it’ (1965, 96). This argument needs to be tempered, for there is plenty of evidence that Conrad was tremendously assisted in his literary career by a host of British writers and friends.

4. Conrad’s Visual Aesthetics: Classical and Modern Connections 1. Conrad admitted that The Two Gentlemen of Verona was the first Shakespeare work he read when he was in exile with his parents (see Gillon 1976). 2. Conrad’s father translated Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Hugo’s Les Travailleurs de la mer. 3. Several critics have explored the influence of Shakespeare on Conrad. Schultheiss was among the first to draw attention to Shakespearean echoes in Conrad’s works in his essay ‘Lord Hamlet and Lord Jim’ (1966). Gillon elaborated on the connections between Conrad and Shakespeare. He drew attention to Shakespearean resonances in Conrad’s fiction, arguing that ‘Conrad’s use of Shakespearean archetypes in Lord Jim, The Shadow Line, Under Western Eyes, and other works reaches a culminating point in Victory’ (Gillon 1976, 85). 4. On the thematic and symbolic correspondences between Conrad and Dickens, see Daleski (2001). 5. On Conrad and scepticism, see Wollaeger (1990).

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Notes

6. Authors including Matthew Arnold, Haggard, Woolf, and Forster established close connections with ancient Greek literature, culture, and society. Their writings often invoked and re-imagined the ancient Greek world in an idealized form in order to serve contemporary aesthetic and ideological purposes. These could range from cultural and social reforms to aesthetic reinvigoration and the bolstering of imperial conquests (Acheraïou 2008). 7. For more information on the battle of Salamis, see Isaac (2004) and Acheraïou (2008). 8. Among the Odyssey’s secondary narrators are Nestor, Manelaus, Agamemnon, and Odysseus. See De Jong (2004a). 9. De Jong points to the Odyssey’s internal narrators’ restricted knowledge: ‘They do not know the future, cannot read the minds of other characters, and cannot be present everywhere. Occasionally these restrictions are effectively exploited: the fact that on his way home from Troy Nestor becomes separated from Odysseus makes it impossible for him to tell Telemachus about the whereabouts of his father, and therefore necessitates the youth’s visit to Menelaus. But more often they are circumvented by allowing the internal narrators to use their ex eventu knowledge. Thus Nestor knows what lies ahead of him in Od. 3.160–161, Odysseus can read the mind of his companions in Od. 10.415–417, and knows what took place on Mt. Olympus in Od. 12.374–390’ (2004a, 19) 10. Hunter refers to Apollonius’ exploration of the ‘rhythms of a long epic narrative and the limits of epic “repetitiveness” and authorial discretion . . . Callamachus’ experiments with the inherited modes of form and voice imposed by genre and metre, and seeks to recuperate within hexameter and elegiac poetry some of the narrative techniques of archaic and classical choral lyric, notably that of Pindar and the choruses of Attic tragedy, which had long since died out’ (Hunter 2004, 94). 11. On Fielding and the ancient writers, see Olds Bissell (1969; originally published in 1933). In this monograph, Olds Bissell points out the influence of Homer and Aristotle on Fielding’s critical theories and refers to the impact that poets like Lucian, Plutarch, and Virgil had on his Burlesques and parodies. For a more recent study, see Mace (1996). 12. Herodotus’ narrator calls customs ‘very wise’ (1.63.2), advice ‘very useful’ (1.170–1), the death of Polycrates ‘unworthy of himself and his designs’ (3.125.2), and the blinding by the Thracian king of his own sons a ‘monstrous deed’ (8.116.1). See De Jong (2004b, 105). 13. Ford claimed that in his collaboration with Conrad: ‘Our eyes were for ever on the reader’ (1964, 69) 14. Conrad told Richard Curle: ‘I prefer Cinema to Stage . . . The Movie is just a silly stunt for silly people – but the theatre is more compromising since it is capable of falsifying the very soul of one’s work both on the imaginative and on the intellectual side’ (1968, 113). 15. On Conrad’s relation to photography, see Donovan (2005, 28) 16. Similarly, Diderot, who was influenced by Sterne, also associated writing with painting. He declared in the salon of 1767 that he always tried to arrange his characters in his head as if they were on canvas (see Fredman 1973). 17. On Sterne and impressionism, see Sichel (1910).

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

204 Notes

205

18. As far as impressionism is concerned, it is important to note that although he adopted what could be read as impressionist techniques in his fiction, Conrad’s reactions to this artistic trend were negative. See CL 1, Peters (2001), and Matz (2007). 19. In this Preface Conrad articulated an artistic credo and reiterated his dismissal of formulas: ‘It is evident that he who, rightly or wrongly, holds by the convictions expressed above cannot be faithful to any one of the temporary formulas of his craft. The enduring part of them – the truth which each only imperfectly veils – should abide with him as the most precious of his possessions, but they all: Realism, Romanticism, Naturalism, even the unofficial sentimentalism . . . all these gods must, after a short period of fellowship, abandon him – even on the very threshold of the temple – to the stammerings of his conscience and to the outspoken consciousness of the difficulties of his work’ (NN x–xi). 20. Watts refers to Walter Pater who stated in ‘The School of Giorgione’ (1877): ‘All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music.’ Watts adds that ‘this notion, deriving from Schopenhauer, had become an aesthetic commonplace by the 1890s; it was argued that music manifests that invisibility of form and content to which the other arts aspire’ (Watts 1988, 131). On Conrad and music, see Di Gaetani (1977) who points out the Wagnerian influence on Conrad. 21. Watts quotes Schopenhauer who wrote: ‘the artist lets us see the world through his eyes. That he has these eyes, that he knows the inner nature of things apart from all their relations, is the gift of genius, is inborn; but that he is able to lend us this gift, to let us see with his eyes, is acquired, and is the technical side of art’ (cited in Watts 1988, 131). 22. Conrad remarked: ‘Trusting then in your sense not to condemn me I will repeat that fundamentally the creator in letters aims at a moving picture’ (cited in Schwab 1965, 346). 23. Flaubert revered Homer and Shakespeare and looked upon both as paragons of poetic expression, if not simply the ‘conscience’ of the world. He was deeply convinced that only such classics were worth reading and studying. He advised Amélie Bosquet: ‘Devote yourself to the classics . . . Do not read any thing mediocre’ (1973, 302). 24. Thucydides, for instance, highly valued the accounts of eye-witnesses in his historical works. The device of the eye-witness, alongside the classical visual and rhetorical strategies evoked earlier are, of course, central to Conrad’s literary credo in the Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’. 25. From the outset of his career Conrad was committed to ‘complete, unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance’, to ‘an unremitting never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of sentences’ (NN, ix). 26. Original phrase: ‘être oeil, tout bonnement’ (1981, 169). 27. ‘On n’est plus l’homme, on est oeil’ (1973, 339). 28. On Conrad and voyeurism, see Acheraïou (1998) and Hawthorn (2007). 29. My translation. Original: ‘Il ne faut pas oublier que le langage (et j’applique ceci au langage dans tous les arts) est imparfait.’ 30. For a thorough study of Conrad’s relation to language, see Billy (1997).

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Notes

206 Notes

1. Conrad expressed his admiration for J. Fenimore Cooper in a letter to Arthur Symons (3, 10, or 17 August 1908): ‘F. Cooper is a rare artist. He has been one of my masters. He is my constant companion’ (CL 4, 101). Conrad’s enthusiasm for Cooper’s works was expressed earlier in a letter to David Garnett (22 December 1902): ‘We have sent off three volumes of the “Leather-Stocking Tales” – one from each of us – with our love to you. You have promised me to read these stories and I would recommend you to begin with the Last of the Mohicans – then go on with the Deerslayer and end with the Prairie. I read them at your age in that order; and I trust that you, of a much later generation, shall find in these pages some at least of the charm which delighted me then and has not evaporated even to this day’ (CL 2, 467). 2. ‘Heart of Darkness’ is Conrad’s work which best illustrates the importance of gesture as a privileged means of communication. We recall how, faced with the impossibility of communicating in English with the black tribesmen, Marlow resorts to gesture to convey his message. The attempt seems successful, as Marlow further stresses the communicative value and efficiency of gesture, arguing that none of his gestures were lost on his audience.

6. Narrative Solidarity and Competition for Truth and Signification 1. For a detailed analysis of Conrad’s narrative methods in Chance and in his novels at large, see Lothe (1989). 2. As pointed out in Chapter 2, Conrad claimed vigorously that he would never submit to the taste of the multitude or fit into the shoes of other writers; a claim which is starkly contradicted by the type of story and literary genre he adopts in Chance. 3. In Conrad’s works, voice and perspective establish symbiotic relationships, feeding upon one another to sustain the narrative flow (Acheraïou 1998). 4. For a detailed analysis of Conrad’s narrative method and representation of otherness in ‘Karain: A Memory’, see Acheraïou (2007).

7. Conrad and the Construction of the Reader: Tension between Democratic Vision and Aristocratic Leaning 1. Virginia Woolf is perhaps the writer who best illustrates this modernist inclination to recover the ancient ideal poetic communication. By the 1930s, as Silver points out, Woolf ‘had begun to speculate how one might recover the mutually sustaining, collaborative relationship anonymous poets had enjoyed with their audiences before the invention of the printed text and authorship, a relationship that had required the audience to listen intently

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

5. A Cartography of Conrad’s Fictional Readers: Reading Hierarchy in Lord Jim, ‘Heart of Darkness’, Nostromo, and Victory

2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

207

to the spoken word and to watch closely the body language of actors, a relationship that had derived from the “song making instinct” and the desire both to sing and to listen’ (1979, 426–7). Watt claims that ‘Marlow’s story can be considered as an abortive quest to escape from the breakdown of society’s modes of reciprocity’ (1979, 245) Bette London’s notion of a ‘yes men’ audience fits well Marlow’s listeners (1990, 43). Conrad’s dislike of ‘closed ends’ echoes the views of his French master, Flaubert who regarded conclusions as a sign of stupidity and shallowness. In a letter dated 18 October 1905, Conrad warned Norman Douglas: ‘Don’t forget my dear fellow that your point of view in general is the unpopular one. It is intellectual and uncompromising. This does not make things easier. People don’t want intelligence. It worries them – and they demand from their writers as much subserviency as from their footmen if not rather more’ (CL 3, 286). In another letter to Norman Douglas (24 July 1905), Conrad referred to ‘the imbecility of human nature’ (CL 3, 277). As Hervouet observed, Conrad’s denying the popular mind a capacity for scepticism echoes Anatole France’s view that ‘only cultivated minds could bear scepticism’ (‘le doute n’est supportable qu’aux esprits cultivés’ (1990, 161). In response to the commercial failure of his first two novels, Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, Conrad declared in a letter to the Baroness Janina de Brunnow (2 October 1897): ‘the future is anything but certain, for I am not a popular author and probably I never shall be. That does not sadden me at all, for I have never had the ambition to write for the all-powerful masses. I haven’t the taste for democracy – and democracy hasn’t the taste for me. I have gained the appreciation of a few select spirits and I do not doubt I shall be able to create a public for myself, limited it is true, but one which will permit me to earn my bread. I do not dream of fortune; besides, one does not find it in an inkwell. But I confess to you I dream of peace, a little reputation, and the rest of my life devoted to the service of Art and free from material worries’ (CL 1, 388–9). As many have remarked, Flaubert’s concern with posterity was common in nineteenth-century France. The period was also characterized by the ‘serious’ writers’ suspicion and contempt for the average reader. See Brombert (1988) and Conroy (1985). Watts correctly remarked: ‘Narrative variation is needed to enable Conrad to speak more freely and eloquently; the modulation helps Conrad to distinguish himself from the novel’s authorial narrative voice’ (1977, 187). We may further state that narrative modulations in Conrad’s writing reflect in essence the epistemological relativity on which Conrad’s ethical and aesthetic outlook is based. Like Anatole France, Conrad also regards curiosity as a supreme value. In Chance he describes it as ‘the most respectable faculty of the human mind’ (C40). For a detailed study of narrative alter ego in Homer and Herodotus, see De Jong (2004a and 2004b). Marlow, who targets life’s depth, is obviously above the general public, whose superficiality Conrad laments in a letter to Richard Curle (17 July 1923): ‘You

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Notes

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

know how the public mind fastens on externals, on mere facts, such, for instance, as ships and voyages, without paying attention to any deeper significance they may have’ (CL8, 136). Conrad declared in a letter to Barrett H. Clark (4 May 1918): ‘Coming now to the subject of your inquiry I wish at first to put before you a general proposition: that a work of art is very seldom limited to one exclusive meaning and not necessarily tending to a definite conclusion’ (CL 6, 210-11). Conrad wrote in a letter to Harriet Mary Capes (22 March 1902): ‘I have just re-read Your gracious message. I can not believe that I deserve so high a commendation. That you should give it to me is not my merit but yours alone – for the reader collaborates with the author’ (CL 2, 394). Sterne in Tristram Shandy explicitly tells the reader: ‘– And the story too – if you please: for though I have all along been hastening towards this part of it, with so much earnest desire, as well knowing it to be the choicest morsel of what I had to offer to the world, yet now that I am got to it, any one is welcome to take my pen, and go on with the story for me that will – I see the difficulties of the descriptions I’m going to give – and feel my want of powers’ (TS 654). Interestingly, in Jacques the Fatalist Diderot also solicits his reader’s collaboration in terms echoing Sterne’s: ‘Look, Jacques said over and over that it was written on high that he’d never finish the tale, and I now see that he was right. I can tell, Reader, that you are not best pleased. Well, why don’t you pick up his story at the point where he left it yourself, and continue it as you think best? Or go and call on Mademoiselle Agathe, find out the name of the village where Jacques is being held, see Jacques, and question him’ (JF 236–7). Conrad stated in a letter to Cunninghame Graham (5 August 1897): ‘To know that You could read me is good news indeed – for one writes only half the book; the other half is with the reader.’ Brooks stated: ‘The story is, after all, a construction made by the reader . . . from the implications of the narrative discourse, which is all he ever knows’ (1985, 25). See also Iser (1980).

8. Narrative Self-Consciousness and the Act of Reading: Examining Under Western Eyes through the Lens of the Poetics of Fielding, Sterne, and Diderot 1. Conrad strove for popularity despite a manifest contempt for the general public. Throughout his career he tried to attract a wide audience, but he was aware that his writing was not often understood or only inadequately so by his readers. On many occasions he expressed a desire to win his public’s sympathy and understanding. In some of his writing this desire to be understood is explicitly conveyed by his protagonists. The phrase ‘I want to be understood’ recurs, for instance, in both Lord Jim and Under Western Eyes. And Jim and Razumov’s pleas for understanding echo Conrad’s own appeal for his readers’ empathy and discernment. 2. Shakespeare borrowed extensively from earlier and ancient poets. He imitated and appropriated writers as varied as Ovid, Plutarch, and Holinshed. Even

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

208 Notes

3. 4.

5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

209

the ancient writers like Ovid, Aeschylus, and Euripides borrowed from and reshaped earlier myths. See Bullough (1957–75) and Sanders (2006). See Stedmond (1967) and Hartley (1966). Fielding tapped into modern as well as ancient sources. He was influenced by authors as varied as Cervantes, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Molière, Swift, and Lesage. His ancient influences, on the other hand, include Lucian, Plutarch, Nepos, Virgil, and Juvenal. On Fielding and the classics, see Fielding (1937, 189) and McKeon (1960). As is evidenced in Waverley’s sublime landscapes and in the hero’s Romantic portrait, Walter Scott in this novel draws on Romance and Gothic forms, but turns to caricature these traditions he tries both to assimilate and domesticate. In 1824, Scott contributed an essay on ‘Romance’ to the fifth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in which he attempted to make a generic distinction between Romance – in which we may include its Gothic sub-genre led by its precursor Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Gregory Lewis – and the novel, represented by works by authors such as Richardson and Burney. In his essay Scott pointed out that Romance ‘with its roots reaching back to the chivalric tales of the Middle Ages relied on colourful incident to the point of disregarding the dictates of plausibility’. His definition of Romance is well in keeping with the seventeenth-century conception of this genre: ‘We would be rather inclined to describe a romance as a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents; being thus opposed to the kindred form of the Novel which we would rather define as a fictitious narrative, differing from the romance, because the events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human existence’ (see Scott 1834, 129). Many seventeenth-century writers looked down on Romance as a vehicle of irrational flights and moral corruption. See Sherman (1976) and Fredman (1973). On Aristotle’s notion of the verisimilar, see Poetics. What we call today ‘roman’ or ‘novel’, as Maureseth notes, was called ‘histories’ by seventeenth and eighteenth-century theorists (2007, 189). According to Hobson: ‘What seems evident is that the concept of “truth” comes in fact to mean historical truth. History and Romance are consciously separated and it is between these two that the novel moves’ (1982, 89). On Diderot and Sterne’s influence on nineteenth-century realism, see Fredman (1973), Walder (1995), and Watt (1957). Diderot declared that the theatre had with the passing of centuries grown stiff and dull: ‘les acteurs s’arrangent en rond . . . et arrivent à pas comptés et mesurés . . . Ne soyez donc plus symétrisés, raides, fiches, compasses et plantés en rond’ (cited in Kempf 1964, 61). In his letters Sterne also stressed his originality when discussing his later work, A Sentimental Journey which, he declared, was to be ‘something new, quite out of the beaten track’ (Curtis 1935, 301). Sherman remarks: ‘Swift, Batteux, and Turgot translated him, Diderot and Wieland imitated him, Addison used his topics in the Spectator’ (1976). See also Gay (1967, 39).

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Notes

14. Woolf showered praise on Sterne’s work, particularly Tristram Shandy, which she regarded as a precursor of modernist aesthetics. She declared that Sterne was ‘singularly of our age’. Similarly, in his memoir, ‘My Friend James Joyce’, Eugene Jolas recounts a conversation he had with Joyce concerning work in progress in which Joyce drew an analogy between his work and that of Laurence Sterne (1948, 3–18). 15. Sterne no doubt introduced freshness into contemporary narrative forms and pushed further a number of literary devices recurrent throughout Western literary traditions, starting with the ancient Greek and Roman poets. Yet, it is important to remember that several of the devices we tend to associate with Sterne’s fiction are not his invention, but age-old devices that Sterne reworked to suit contemporary literary, moral, and commercial interests. Narrative self-consciousness, digressions, close author-reader relationship, and emphasis on verisimilitude – prominent features of Sterne’s aesthetics – were, as mentioned earlier, common devices in ancient writing. Sterne’s originality consisted, then, not in inventing these devices, but in treating them in a new light and bringing a new level of sophistication to them. On Sterne and the classical writers, see Stedmond (1967). 16. In Tom Jones (Book 12), Fielding broaches and defends literary plagiarism, which was, of course, a common practice in the Western literary tradition from the high Middle Ages onwards (see Stedmond 1967). 17. On poetic sensibility, see Ress (2002) and Ahern (2007). 18. See Aristotle (1991), Lloyd (1978), and Sherman (1999). 19. Kundera, for instance, enthusiastically claimed that Sterne in Tristram Shandy ‘does not make us believe in anything: neither in the truth of the characters, the truth of the author, nor the truth of the novel as a literary genre: everything is put in question, everything is put in doubt, everything is a game’ (1986, 13). This comment needs to be moderated, for Sterne’s novel is far from collapsing the truths enumerated by Kundera. A close examination of the novel’s discursive layers shows, indeed, that Sterne’s apparent contestation of these literary truths – authorship, the novel genre – is undercut by a diffused, persistent impulse that simply seeks to legitimize the presumed literary novelty and new form of authorship self-proclaimed by Sterne. On a more global ideological level, it also becomes evident that behind Sterne’s subversive rhetoric lies a subtext of conformity and endorsement of the moral, political, and ideological truths on which the society in which the writer lived was founded. 20. Sterne disliked French polite society’s ‘artificiality’ and ‘insipidity’. He wrote: ‘Here every thing is hyperbolized – and if a woman is but simply pleased – ’tis je suis charmée – and if she is charmed ’tis nothing less, than that she is ravi-sh’d – and when ravi-sh’d (which may happen) there is nothing left for her but to fly to the other world for a metaphor, and swear qu’elle étoit toute extasiée – which mode of speaking, is, by the bye, here creeping into use, and there is scarce a woman who understands the bon ton, but is seven times in a day in downright extasy – that is, the devil’s in her – by a small mistake of one world for the other – ’ (Curtis 1935, 161–2). 21. Original: ‘[des œuvres] qui élèvent l’esprit, qui touchent l’âme, qui respirent partout l’amour du bien’ (Diderot 1968, 29).

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

210 Notes

211

22. This eighteenth-century notion of fiction as consumption and reader as consumer of fiction is conveyed from the early pages of Tom Jones and Tristram Shandy. Both Fielding and Sterne compare their books to cookery; and both stress that their writing is a dish of outstanding quality. 23. At the close of the narrative, Sterne in Tristram Shandy, exhorts his reader to complete the story; so, too, Diderot in Jacques the Fatalist urges his reader to active collaboration: ‘Look, Jacques said over and over that it was written on high that he’d never finish the tale, and I now see he was right. I can tell, Reader, that you are not best pleased. Well, why don’t you pick his story at the point where he left it yourself, and continue it as you think best?’ (JF 136). 24. This denigratory rhetoric recalls Conrad’s own pejorative opinion of the reviewers and critics of his works. 25. Conrad saw literature as anything but amusement. In a letter to Arthur Symons (7 February 1911), he wrote: ‘to be amusing is not in my line. That’s why the public fights shy of my writing I suppose’ (CL 4, 411). 26. Conrad stated that ‘at the heart of fiction . . . some sort of truth can be found’ (NLL 6). 27. Some critics contend that in Conrad’s fiction ethics and aesthetics are closely connected. Karl, for example, argued that Conrad was leaning to that ‘devotion to craft wherein art and morality meet in commitment, responsibility and lawfulness’ (1960, 36). Yet, we should be careful not to think of Conrad as a moralist in the way that Diderot or Fielding can be. The ethical and poetic qualities of Conrad’s works are so entangled and elusive that it is difficult to locate them with precision and confidence. 28. In a letter to Arthur Symons (29 August 1908), Conrad wrote: ‘Thus I’ve been called a heartless wretch a man without ideals and a poseur of brutality. But I will confess to you under seal of secrecy that I don’t believe I am such as I appear to mediocre minds’ (CL 4, 114). 29. This Conradian existential and ethical stance is strongly echoed in Stein’s rhetoric in Lord Jim, famously summed up in his much-quoted phrase ‘how to be’. 30. On theatricality in Sterne and Diderot, see Tadié (2003) and Menil (1995). 31. Baker notes that Fielding ‘learned from his own practice in imitating Restoration drama’. He goes on to observe: ‘Fielding puts his characters before us by making them speak and act; he makes them expose their essential traits in the first few syllables. The character drawing is in the dialogue itself, and the dialogue is always shapely’ (1924, 20). 32. Conversational and exclamatory modes are features of eighteenth-century prose, and Sterne and Diderot were recognized to be emblematic of this ‘loquacious’ age. Sterne, for instance, conceives of good writing as a conversation. He writes in Tristram Shandy: ‘Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation’ (TS 110). 33. Diderot accorded gesture a central place in his works. According to him, some gestures are so meaningful that they can in no way be rendered in words, however eloquent these may be (see Diderot 1875–77, 350–4). 34. Conrad declared in 1897: ‘I greatly desire to write a play myself. It is my dark and secret ambition’ (CL 1, 419). However, Conrad’s relation to the theatre was an ambiguous one. Curle stated: ‘If Conrad did not care much for poetry

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Notes

35.

36. 37.

38.

39.

40.

41.

42. 43.

he cared still less for the drama. He thought play writing the lowest of all forms of art – if, indeed, he thought it a form of art at all . . . He was driven almost to distraction during the rehearsals of The Secret Agent by the inability of the actors to catch, or to interpret, his meaning’ (1968, 113). The gaze is clearly of central thematic importance in this novel and many critics have pointed out Conrad’s constant reference to eyes and seeing (see Acheraïou 1998; Hawthorn 2007). Pope stated: ‘The great art of all poetry is to mix truth and fiction, in order to join the credible with the surprising’ (2006, 201). Diderot’s narrator openly states that the reader is at his mercy: ‘You see, Reader, I’m into my stride and I have it entirely in my power to make you wait a year, two years, three years, to hear the story of Jacques’s love affairs, by separating him from his Master and making the both of them undergo all the perils I please. What’s to prevent me marrying off the Master and telling you how his wife deceived him?’ (JF 4). In their introduction to A Personal Record, Najder and Stape alluded to Sterne’s likely influence on Conrad, arguing: ‘Structurally, the four first sections of the reminiscences follow the same pattern: a series of loose associations is artfully linked together by returns to the topic of Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly (more precisely, of its manuscript), and interspersed with “learned” digressions. Whether Conrad was consciously following a demonstrably Sternian mode cannot be proved but seems likely. He may even have done so without thinking about Tristram Shandy [1760–67] and A Sentimental Journey [1768] and by relying on memories of his early reading’ (2008, xxxvii). Najder and Stape further state that Conrad’s ‘reference in Chance to “A sort of anti-sentimental journey” suggests, however, a knowledge of the original’ (xxxvii). Dostoevsky’s influence on Conrad had attracted critical attention as early as the 1920s. Hugh Walpole wrote: ‘[Conrad] has been influenced by the Russian writer continuously and sometimes obviously. In at least one novel, Under Western Eyes, the influence has led to imitation’ (Walpole 1929, 114). The language teacher’s moral identity has elicited much critical discussion and caused controversy among Conrad scholars. Kermode in ‘Secrets and Narrative Sequence’ identified the professor with ‘Satan’ and called him ‘a diabolical narrator’ (1983, 153). Carabine rejected Kermode’s observation, arguing that Kermode has misread the novel. Carabine writes: ‘the old teacher (inadvertently) functions as a secret agent in Conrad’s novel, working to release the protagonist from the false identity imposed on him by Mikulin, “the Enemy of Mankind”, who is the truly satanic tempter in this text’ (1996, 244). Hawthorn rightly observes that ‘of all Conrad’s novels this is the most deeply felt, and that in his grappling with these questions Conrad is also grappling directly with the usefulness and morality of fiction itself, with, in short, the worth of his second vocation’ (1979, 103). Marlow states: ‘As to me, I have no imagination (I would be more certain about him today, if I had)’ (LJ 135). Within a postmodernist critical perspective no writing can pretend to originality; all boils down to a repetition and reworking of preceding texts and literary discourses. See Sanders (2006).

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

212 Notes

213

44. For a recent discussion of the language teacher’s inconsistencies, see Watts (2009). 45. The notion of haunting is central to Under Western Eyes. As Watts points out, this novel ‘is a remarkably haunted text . . . Within Under Western Eyes, modes of haunting inform the plot, the thematic structure, and the ironic meshwork. This novel presents the largest and most complex instance of Conradian Gothic’ (2009). 46. In stating that Under Western Eyes is a dialogued text, I am dissenting from the views of Fogel and Greaney among others. Fogel regarded Under Western Eyes as a ‘set of anti-conversations’ (1985, 184) and Greaney considered it as ‘a pre-emptive travesty of this ideal of dialogue as an interpersonal, reciprocal, and consensual form of intellectual exchange’ (2001, 153). My argument is that from a strictly reader-response perspective, Under Western Eyes is profoundly conversational and its creator is essentially concerned with establishing a sustained, complex, and intersubjective intellectual exchange with the reader.

Conclusion 1. Conrad stated in a letter to Warrington Dawson (20 June 1913): ‘And the fact is my dear Dawson (when I say Dawson I mean Powell too) that I don’t believe in the oneness of life. I believe in its infinite variety’ (CL 5, 237).

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Notes

Achebe, Chinua (1988) ‘“An image of Africa”: Racism in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”’, in Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965–67 (Oxford: Heinemann) 1–13. Acheraïou, Amar (1998) Voix et regard dans l’oeuvre romanesque de Joseph Conrad (Phd thesis, unpublished) (Paris : Sorbonne Nouvelle). Acheraïou, Amar (2004a) ‘The Shadow of Poland’, in Wiesław Krajka (ed.) A Return to the Roots: Conrad, Poland and East-Central Europe (Boulder: East European Monographs) 47–70. Acheraïou, Amar (2004b) ‘Floating Words: Sea as Metaphor of Style in “Typhoon”’, The Conradian 29(1): 27–38. Acheraïou, Amar (2007) ‘Colonial Encounters and Cultural Contests: Confrontation of Orientalist and Occidentalist Discourses in “Karain: A Memory”’, Conradiana 39(2): 153–67. Acheraïou, Amar (2008) Rethinking Postcolonialism: Colonialist Discourse in Modern Literatures and the Legacy of Classical Writers (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Ahern, Stephen (2007) Affected Sensibilities: Romantic Excess and the Genealogy of the Novel, 1680–1810 (New York: AMS Press). Anderson, Benedict (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso). Anderson, Howard Peter et al. (1966) The Familiar Letter in the Eighteenth Century (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press). Aristotle (1968) Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Aristotle (1991) The Art of Rhetoric (London: Penguin). Baker, Ernest Albert (1924) The History of the English Novel (London: H.F. & G. Witherby). Bakhtin, Mikhail (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: Texas University Press). Bakhtin, Mikhail (1990) Art and Answerability: Early Essays of Mikhail Bakhtin (Austin: Texas University Press). Bann, Stephen (1989) The True Vine: On Visual Representation and the Western Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Bannet, Eve Tavor (1989) Structuralism and the Logic of Dissent: Barthes, Derrida, Foucault (Basingstoke: Macmillan). Barthes, Roland (1977) Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana Press). Bender, Todd K. (1997) Literary Impressionism in Jean Rhys, Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad and Charlotte Brontë (New York: Garland) Berberich, Christine (2006) ‘A Modernist Elegy to the Gentleman? Englishness and the Idea of the Gentleman in Ford’s The Good Soldier’, in Denis Brown and Jenny Plastow (eds) Ford Madox Ford and Englishness (Amsterdam: Rodopi) 195–210. Billy, Ted (1997) A Wilderness of Words: Closure and Disclosure in Conrad’s Short Fiction (Lubbock: Texas University Press). 214

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

References

215

Billy, Ted and Leonard Orr (eds) (1999) A Companion to Joseph Conrad (Westport: Greenwood Press). Bond, Donald (ed.) (1965) Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, 3 vols, (Oxford: Clarendon). Booth, Wayne (1961) The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Brant, Clare (2006) Eighteenth Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Brissenden, R.F. (1964) ‘Sterne and Painting’, in John Butt et al., Of Books and Humankind: Essays, Poems Presented to Bonome Dobree (London: Routledge) 93–108. Brodsky, Stephen (1996) ‘Conrad’s Two Polish Pasts: a History of Thirty Years of Misrule’, in Alex S. Kurczaba (ed.) Conrad and Poland (Boulder: East European Monographs) 9–31. Brombert, Victor (1988) The Hidden Reader: Stendhal, Balzac, Hugo, Baudelaire, Flaubert (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Brooker, Peter and Peter Widdowson (1986) ‘A Literature for England’, in Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (eds) Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920 (London: Croom Helm) 116–63. Brooks, Peter (1985) Reading for the Plot: Design and Invention in Narrative (New York: Vintage). Brown, Denis and Jenny Plastow (eds) (2006) Ford Madox Ford and Englishness (Amsterdam: Rodopi). Bullough, Geoffrey (1957–75) Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (New York: Columbia University Press). Burke, Seán (1995) Authorship: From Plato to the Postmodern (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Carabine, Keith (1992) ‘“Irreconcilable Differences”: England as an “Undiscovered Country” in Conrad’s “Amy Foster”’, in Simon Gatrell (ed.) The Ends of the Earth: 1876–1918 (London: Ashfield) 187–204. Carabine, Keith (1996) The Life and the Art: a Study of Under Western Eyes (Amsterdam: Rodopi). Colls, Robert (1986) ‘Englishness and the Political Culture’, in Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (eds) Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920 (London: Croom Helm) 29–61. Colls, Robert and Philip Dodd (eds) (1986) Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880– 1920 (London: Croom Helm). Conroy, Mark (1985) Modernism and Authority (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Crompton, John (2003) ‘Faith, Virtue and the Conduct of Life: Englishness in Lord Jim’, in François Gallix (ed.) Lord Jim. Joseph Conrad (Paris: Ellipses) 139–54 Curle, Richard (1968) The Last Twelve Years of Joseph Conrad (London: Russell & Russell). Curtis, Lewis Perry (ed.) (1935) Letters of Laurence Sterne (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Cuypers, M.P. (2004) ‘Apollonius of Rhodes’, in Irene de Jong, R. Nünlist and A. Bowie (eds) Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature: Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative, Vol. 1 (Boston: Bibliotheca Classica Batava) 43–62. Daleski, Hillel Matthew (2001) ‘Conrad, Dickens, and the Signifier as Siren’, in Gail Fincham, Attie De Lange and Wiesław Krajka (eds) Conrad at the

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

References

Millennium: Modernism, Postmodernism, Postcolonialism (Boulder: Social Science Monographs) 197–214. Daleski, Hillel Matthew (1977) Joseph Conrad: the Way of Dispossession (London: Faber and Faber). Davie, Donald (1952) Purity of Diction in English Verse (London: Chatto & Windus). Davis, Todd F. and Kenneth Womack (eds) (2002) Formalist Criticism and ReaderResponse Theory (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). De Jong, Irene (2004a) ‘Homer’, in Irene de Jong, R. Nünlist and A. Bowie (eds) Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature: Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative, Vol. 1 (Boston: Bibliotheca Classica Batava) 13–24. De Jong, Irene (2004b) ‘Herodotus’, in Irene de Jong, R. Nünlist and A. Bowie (eds) Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature: Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative, Vol. 1 (Boston: Bibliotheca Classica Batava) 101–14. De Vinne, Christine (2002) ‘Begging the Question of Confession; Joseph Conrad’s A Personal Record’, Prose Studies 25(3): 82–99 Delacroix, Eugène (1981) Journal 1822–1863 (Paris: Plon). Di Gaetani, John Louis (1977) Richard Wagner and the Modern Temper (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press). Diderot, Denis (1875–77) Œuvres complètes, 20 vols (Paris: Garnier Frères). Diderot, Denis (1968) Œuvres esthétiques (Paris: Garnier). Donovan, Stephen (2005) Conrad and Popular Culture (Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Doyle, Brian (1986) ‘The Invention of English’, in Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (eds) Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920 (London: Croom Helm) 1–28. Fielding, Henry (1937) Henry Fielding: Miscellaneous Writings, Vol. 1 (New York: The Library Guild of America). Firchow, Peter (1999) Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in ‘Heart of Darkness’ (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky). Flaubert, Gustave (1973) Correspondance, Vol. 1, ed. Jean Bruneau (Paris: Pleiade). Flaubert, Gustave (1981) Correspondance, Vol. 2 (Paris: Pleiade). Fogel, Aaron (1985) Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Ford, Ford Madox (1964) Joseph Conrad: a Personal Remembrance (New York: Octagon Books). Franssen, Paul (1990) ‘Great Lessons of Political Instruction: the Earl of Clonwell Reads Sterne’, The Shandean 2: 152–201. Fredman, Alice (1973) Sterne and Diderot (New York: Octagon Books). Frye, Northrop (1957) The Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Gainer, Bernard (1972) The Alien Invasion: the Origins of the Aliens Act of 1905 (London: Heinemann Educational). Gasiorek, Andrzej (2006) ‘Ford Among the Aliens’, in Danis Brown and Jenny Plastow (eds) Ford Madox Ford and Englishness (Amsterdam: Rodopi) 63–82. Gay, Peter (1967) The Enlightenment: an Interpretation – Vol. 1, The Rise of Modern Paganism (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson). Genette, Gérard (1980) Narrative Discourse: an Essay in Method (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Genette, Gérard (1982) Figures of Literary Discourse (New York: Columbia University Press).

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

216 References

217

Gerard, William Blake (2006) Laurence Sterne and the Visual Imagination (London: Ashgate). Gillon, Adam (1960) The Eternal Solitary: a Study of Joseph Conrad (New York: Bookman Associates). Gillon, Adam (1976) Conrad and Shakespeare, and Other Essays (New York: Astra Books). Gillon, Adam (1978) ‘Conrad as Painter’, Conradiana 10(3): 253–66. Gillon, Adam (1982) Joseph Conrad (Boston, MA: Twayne). Gordan, John Dozier (1963) Joseph Conrad: the Making of a Novelist (New York: Russell & Russell). Greaney, Michael (2001) Conrad, Language, and Narrative (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hagstrum, Jean H. (1958) The Sister Arts: the Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Hampson, Robert (2001) Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad’s Malay Fiction (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Hand, Richard (2005) The Theatre of Joseph Conrad (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Hanham, H.J. (1969) Scottish Nationalism (London: Faber and Faber). Hartley, Lodwick (1966) Laurence Sterne in the 20th Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press). Haslam, Sara (2006) ‘England and Englishness: Ford’s First Trilogy’, in Denis Brown and Jenny Plastow (eds) Ford Madox Ford and Englishness (Amsterdam: Rodopi) 47–62. Hawkins, Alun (1986) ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (eds) Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920 (London: Croom Helm) 62–88. Hawthorn, Jeremy (1979) Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press). Hawthorn, Jeremy (2007) Sexuality and the Erotic in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad (London: Continuum). Helsinger, Elizabeth (1982) Ruskin and the Art of the Beholder (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Hervouet, Yves (1990) The French Face of Joseph Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Higdon, David Leon (1987) ‘“His Helpless Prey”: Conrad and the Aggressive Text’, The Conradian 12: 108–21. Hobson, Marian (1982) The Object of Art: the Theory of Illusion in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Hodgson, Emily (2009) Authorship and the Play of Fiction: Novels and Theater, Heywood to Austen (New York: Routledge). Horace (1989) ‘The Art of Poetry’, in D.A. Russel and M. Winterbottom (eds) Classical Literary Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Hough, Graham (1960) Image and Experience: Studies in a Literary Revolution (London: Duckworth). Howes, Alan B. (ed.) (1974) Sterne: the Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Hunter, R. (2004) ‘Theocritus and Moschus’, in Irene de Jong, R. Nünlist and A. Bowie (eds) Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature: Studies

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

References

in Ancient Greek Narrative, Vol. 1 (Boston: Bibliotheca Classica Batava) 83–99. Isaac, Benjamin (2004) The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press). Iser, Wolfgang (1980) The Act of Reading: a Theory of Aesthetics (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press). Iser, Wolfgang (1989) Prospecting: From Reader Response to Literary Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). Jabłkowska, Róza (1961) Joseph Conrad (Wrocław: Zakł. nar. im. Ossolinskich). ´ Jackel, Bradley Kevin (2004) ‘Joseph Conrad and Dante’s Inferno: a Demonstration of an Approach to Conrad’s Allusive Imagery’ (Phd thesis, unpublished) (Monash University). Jameson, Fredric (1981) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (New York: Cornell University Press). Jean-Aubry, G. (1927) Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters (New York: Doubleday). Johnson, Scott Fitzgerald (2006) Greek Literature in Late Antiquity: Dynamism, Didacticism, Classicism (Aldershot: Ashgate). Jolas, Eugene (1948) ‘My Friend James Joyce’, in Seon Givens (ed.) James Joyce: Two Decades of Criticism (New York: Vanguard). Joyce, James (1964) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Viking). Karl, Frederick (1960) A Reader’s Guide to Joseph Conrad (London: Thames and Hudson). Karl, Frederick (1979) Joseph Conrad: Three Lives (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Kempf, Roger (1964) Diderot et le roman ou le démon de la présence (Paris: Seuil). Kermode, Frank (1983) ‘Secrets and Narrative Sequence’, in Essays on Fiction, 1971–1982 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul) 133–55. Keymer, Tom (2002) Sterne, the Moderns and the Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Kindt, Tom and Hans-Harald Müller (2006) The Implied Author: Concept and Controversy (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter). Kott, Jan (1945) ‘The Lay Tragic Spirit’, Creativity: 137–60. Krajka, Wiesław (1992) Isolation and Ethos: a Study of Joseph Conrad (Boulder: East European Monographs). Krajka, Wiesław (1993) ‘Conrad and Poland: Under the Eyes of My Generation’, in Keith Carabine, Owen Knowles and Wiesław Krajka (eds) Contexts for Conrad (Boulder: East European Monographs). Krajka, Wiesław, Attie De Lange and Gail Fincham (eds) (2001) Joseph Conrad at the Millennium: Modernism, Postmodernism, Postcolonialism (Boulder: Social Science Monographs). Krzyzanowski, Julian (1930) Polish Romantic Literature (London: Allen & Unwin). Kumar, Krishan (2003) The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Kumar, Shiv K. (ed.) (2002) British Victorian Literature (New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers). Kundera, Milan (1986) Jacques and his Master (London: Faber and Faber). Leavis, F.R. (1948) The Great Tradition (London: Chatto and Windus). Lewis, W.S. and Ralph Williams (1952) Horace Walpole’s Correspondence (London: Oxford University Press).

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

218 References

219

Lloyd, Geoffrey E.R. (ed.) (1978) Aristotle on Mind and the Senses (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). London, Bette (1990) The Appropriated Voice: Narrative Authority in Conrad, Forster, and Woolf (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press). Lormier, Douglas A. (1978) Colour, Class and the Victorians (Leicester: Leicester University Press). Lothe, Jakob (1989) Conrad’s Narrative Method (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Lothe, Jakob (2001) ‘Cumulative Textuality in “Heart of Darkness”: Virgil, Dante, and Goethe’s Faust’, in Gail Fincham, Attie De Lange and Wiesław Krajka (eds) Conrad at the Millennium: Modernism, Postmodernism, Postcolonialism (Boulder: Social Science Monographs) 177–95. Lucian of Samosata (1905) The Works of Lucian of Samosata: the Way to Write History, Vol. 2 (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Mace, Nancy A. (1996) Henry Fielding’s Novels and the Classical Tradition (Newark: University of Delaware Press). Mallios, Peter Lancelot (2003) ‘Introduction’, Joseph Conrad Victory (New York: Modern Library). Matz, Jesse (2007) Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Maureseth, Anne Beate (2007) L’Analogie et le probable: Pensée et écriture chez Denis Diderot (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation). McKeon, Michael (1960) The Origins of the English Novel, 1660–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press). ˆ Menil, Alain (1995) Diderot et le Drame: Théatre et Politique (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France). Meyers, Jeffrey (1991) Joseph Conrad: a Biography (London: Murray). Michel, W.J.T. (1987) Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Miller, Hillis J. (1985) ‘“Heart of Darkness” Revisited’, in Ross C. Murfin (ed.) Conrad Revisited, Essays for the Eighties (Alabama: University of Alabama Press) 31–50. Morf, Gustav (1965) The Polish Heritage of Joseph Conrad (New York: Haskell House). Morf, Gustav (1976) The Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad (New York: Astra Books). Morley, Christopher (1918) Shandygaff : a Number of Most Agreeable Inquirendoes upon Life and Letters (New York: Garden City). Morton, Henry Vollam (1984 [1927]) In Search of England (London: Methuen). Morzinski, Mary (1995) Linguistic Influence of Polish on Joseph Conrad’s Style (Boulder: East European Monographs). Mudford, William (1811) The British Novelists, Vol. 3-I (London: W. Clarke). Muir, Edwin (1924) ‘A Note on Mr. Conrad’, in Latitudes (New York: Huebsch). Najder, Zdzisław (ed.) (1964) Conrad’s Polish Background: Letters to and from Polish Friends (London: Oxford University Press). Najder, Zdzisław (1974) ‘Conrad and the Idea of Honour’, in Wendell M. Aycock and Wolodymyr T. Zyla (eds) Joseph Conrad: Theory and World Fiction. Proceedings of the Comparative Literary Symposium, Vol. 7, January 23–25 (Lubbock: Texas Tech) 103–15. Najder, Zdzisław (ed.) (1983a) Conrad under Familial Eyes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

References

Najder, Zdzisław (1983b) Joseph Conrad: a Chronicle (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press). Najder, Zdzisław (1997) ‘Joseph Conrad: a European Writer’, in Zdzisław Najder, Conrad in Perspective: Essays on Art and Fidelity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 165–75. Najder, Zdzisław and J.H. Stape (eds) (2008) ‘Introduction’, A Personal Record (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), xxi–xlix. Nicole, Pierre (1667) Les Imaginaires, ou lettres sur l’hérésie imaginaire (Liège: Adolphe Beyers). Nowak, J. (2005) ‘Wincenty Lutoslawski’s National Idea: Derivative or an Advancement of a Romantic Commonwealth of Nations’, Issues of Nationality, n.s. 26: 115–33. Nünlist, R. (2004) ‘The Homeric Hymns’, in Irene de Jong, R. Nünlist and A. Bowie (eds) Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature: Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative, Vol. 1 (Boston: Bibliotheca Classica Batava) 35–42. Olds Bissell, Frederick (1969 [1933]) Fielding’s Theory of the Novel (New York: Cooper Square). Pakenham, Thomas (1979) The Boer War (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson). Parfect, Ralph (2006) ‘Romance of Nationhood: Ford and the Adventure Story Tradition’, in Denis Brown and Jenny Plastow (eds) Ford Madox Ford and Englishness (Amsterdam: Rodopi) 37–46. Pascal, Blaise (2004) Pensées (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger). Perkins, David (1976) A History of Modern Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Peters, John (2001) Conrad and Impressionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Peters, John (2006) A Cambridge Companion to Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Pierce, David and Peter Jan de Voogd (1996) Laurence Sterne in Modernism and Postmodernism (Amsterdam: Rodopi). Plutarch (1936) Moralia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Pope, Alexander (2006) ‘Peri Bathous or the Art of Sinking in Poetry’, in The Major Works, including The Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics) 195–238. Quennell, Peter (1943) ‘Laurence Sterne’, Horizon, VIII: 337–49; 419–33. Quintilian (1921) Institutio Oratoria, 4 vols (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Quintilian (1987) The Teaching of Speaking and Writing (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press). Ray, Martin (1993) Joseph Conrad (London: E. Arnold). Ress, Jane (2002) Tender Consciousness: Sentimental Sensibility in the Emerging Artist – Sterne, Yeats, Joyce, and Proust (New York: Peter Lang). Riede, Austin (2006) ‘The Decline of English Discourse and the American Invasion in The Good Soldier and Parade’s End’, in Denis Brown and Jenny Plastow (eds) Ford Madox Ford and Englishness (Amsterdam: Rodopi) 211–24. Romanick Baldwin, Debra (2008) ‘“Simple Ideas” in Conrad’s World? The Case of “Prince Roman”’ (unpublished paper; Joseph Conrad Annual Conference, UK). Rosenblatt, Marie Louise (1978) The Reader, the Text, the Poem: Transactional Theory of the Literary Work (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press).

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

220 References

221

Safran, Gabriela (2000) Rewriting the Jews: Assimilation Narratives in the Russian Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). Sanders, Julie (2006) Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge). Schultheiss, Thomas (1966) ‘Lord Hamlet and Lord Jim’, The Polish Review 11(4): 111–33. Schwab, Arnold T. (1965) Conrad’s American Speeches and his Reading from Victory (Chicago: Chicago University Press). Scott, Walter (1834) Essays on Chivalry, Romance, and the Drama (Edinburgh: Cadell). Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1887) ‘In Defence of Poetry’, in Essays and Letters (London: W. Scott) 1–40. Sherman, Carol (1976) Diderot and the Art of Dialogue (Geneva: Librairie Droz). Sherman, Nancy (1999) Aristotle’s Ethics: Critical Essays (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield). Sherry, Norman (ed.) (1973) Conrad: the Critical Heritage (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul). Sichel, Walter (1910) Sterne: a Study (London: Williams and Norgate). Silver, Brenda (1979) ‘“Anon” and “The Reader”: Virginia Woolf’s Last Essays’, Twentieth Century Literature 25: 365–441. Simmons, Allan (2004) ‘“The Art of Englishness”: Identity and Representation in Conrad’s Early Fiction’, The Conradian 29(1): 1–26. Simmons, Allan (2006) Joseph Conrad (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan). Stape, John (2007) The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (London: Heinemann). Stape, John and Owen Knowles (1996) Correspondence to and about Conrad (Atlanta, GA: Rodopi). Stedmond, John (1967) The Comic Art of Laurence Sterne: Convention and Innovation in Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Stendhal (1986) Journal Littéraire, Vol. 3 (Geneva: Slatkine). Stendhal (2007) L’histoire de la peinture en Italie (Paris: Champion). Symons, Arthur (1925) Notes on Joseph Conrad (London: Meyers and Co.) Tadié, Alexis (2003) Sterne’s Whimsical Theatres of Language: Orality, Gesture, Literacy (Aldershot: Ashgate). Tillyard, E.M.W. (1958) The Epic Strain in the English Novel (London: Chatto and Windus). Walder, D. (1995) The Realist Novel (London: Routledge). Walpole, Hugh (1929) Joseph Conrad (London: Nisbet). Watt, Ian (1957) The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding (Berkeley: University of California Press). Watt, Ian (1979) Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: California University Press). Watts, Cedric (1977) Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’: a Critical and Contextual Discussion (Milan: Mursia). Watts, Cedric (1988) ‘Introduction’, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (Harmondsworth: Penguin). Watts, Cedric (2009) ‘Under Western Eyes: the Haunted Haunts’, The Conradian 34(2) (Autumn). Wettlaufer, Alexandra K. (2003) In the Mind’s Eye: the Visual Impulse in Diderot, Ruskin and Baudelaire (Amsterdam: Rodopi).

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

References

Whibley, Charles (1995) ‘Thomas Hardy’, in R.G. Cox (ed.) Thomas Hardy: the Critical Heritage (London: Routledge) 419–28. Wollaeger, Mark A. (1990) Joseph Conrad and Fictions of Skepticism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). Woolf, Virginia (1924) ‘Joseph Conrad’, Times Literary Supplement, 14 August, 493–4. Yelton, Donald C. (1967) Mimesis and Metaphor: an Inquiry into the Genesis and Scope of Conrad’s Symbolic Imagery (The Hague: Mouton). Zabierowski, Stefan (1971) Conrad w Polsce (Gdansk: ´ Wyd. morskie). Zaborowski, W. (2004) ‘Wincenty Lutosławski – His life and Work’, Kwartalnik Historii Nauki Techniki (Quarterly Journal of the History of Science and Technology) 49(1): 65–81. Zwerdling, Alex (1977) ‘Between the Acts and the Coming of War’, Novel 10: 220–36.

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

222 References

Conrad, Joseph see under individual book titles Cooper, James Fenimore 96, 206n Corneille 147 The Country House 60 Courtney, W.L. 53 Crime and Punishment 172 Curle, Richard 62, 195n, 198n, 200n, 202n, 204n, 207n, 211n Cuypers, M.P. 75

Achebe, Chinua 63 Addison, Joseph 85, 148, 154, 209n Almayer’s Folly 42, 52, 53, 54, 57, 58, 62, 70, 200n, 207n, 212n ‘Amy Foster’ 63–5 Apollonius of Rhodes 75, 204n Aristotle 5, 11, 81, 84, 87, 145, 151, 152, 191, 193n, 204n, 209n, 210n Arnold, Matthew 71, 204n The Arrow of Gold 71, 80 The Art of Rhetoric 87 Austin, Alfred 58

Dabrowski, Marian 37 Daleski, Hillel Matthew 118 Dante Alighieri 70, 172 Davie, Donald 133 de Quincey, Thomas 182 de Vinne, Christine 40 Delacroix, Eugène 88 Dickens, Charles 69, 78, 198n, 203n Diderot, Denis 7, 16, 85, 143–8, 150, 153, 158, 160, 161, 162, 163, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175, 179, 190, 191, 204n, 208n, 209n, 211n, 212n Don Quixote 42, 162 Donovan, Stephen 76, 83, 129 Dostoevsky, Fyodor Mikhaylovich 172, 212n Dumas, Alexandre 96

Bakhtin, Mikhail 15, 125, 194n Balzac, Honoré de 69, 96, 123 Barbaud, Anna Laetitia 77 Barthes, Roland 1, 2, 13–21, 141, 187, 193n, 194n Batteux, Charles 148, 209n Bender, Todd 80 Bennett, Arnold 58–9, 62 Blackwood, William 79, 86 Booth, Wayne 2, 141, 195n Brissenden, R.F. 77 Brodsky, Stephen 46–7 Brontë, Charlotte 87 Brooke, Rupert 58–9 Burke, Edmund 182 Burke, Seán 194n Busza, Andrej 28, 43

Encyclopédie 147 The Epic Strain in the English Novel

Camus, Albert 71 Carlyle, Thomas 62, 78 Cervantes 41, 70, 143, 144, 171, 172, 209n Chance 41, 52–3, 54, 111, 114–16, 120, 126, 128, 189, 198n, 199n, 200n, 206n, 207n, 212n Cicero 5, 84–6, 90, 191 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 182 Colls, Robert 55, 202n Conrad, Jessie 62

72

Fielding, Henry 7, 11, 12, 75, 85, 123, 133, 143–5, 147, 148, 150–5, 158–9, 160, 161–2, 163, 167, 171, 187, 190, 204n, 209n, 210n, 211n Flaubert, Gustave 1, 6, 7, 16–18, 41, 43, 50, 69, 78, 84, 87, 129, 131, 172, 185, 191, 193n, 195n, 197n, 205n, 207n Fogel, Aaron 71–2, 213n Ford, Ford Madox 30, 57, 58, 62, 75, 167, 196n, 201n, 202n, 204n 223

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Index of Names and Titles

Forster, E.M. 57, 71, 201n, 204n Foucault, Michel 17 France, Anatole 69, 129, 207n Galsworthy, John 52, 58, 60, 129 Gasiorowska, Maria 33 George, Jessie 61 Gide, André 168 Gillon, Adam 28, 43, 79, 203n Gomulicki, Viktor 26, 32, 35, 197n Gordan, John Dosier 53, 200n Greaney, Michael 17, 18, 115, 183, 199n, 213n Hand, Richard 76 Hardy, Thomas 58, 60–1, 198n, 202n ‘Heart of Darkness’ 5, 7, 42, 53, 57, 58, 62–3, 70, 71, 74, 80, 86, 94, 99, 101–3, 106, 108, 110, 111–14, 115, 117, 120, 124, 125, 126, 133, 137–8, 158, 159, 168, 188, 189, 190, 206n Hervouet, Yves 43, 69, 78, 84, 195n, 197n, 207n Higdon, David Leon 183 Histories 74 Homer 5, 71, 72–5, 131–2, 136, 191, 204n, 205n, 207n Horace 85, 148–9, 173 Hough, Graham 115 Hugo, Victor 69, 203n Iliad 72, 73, 74, 132 Iser, Wolfgang 2, 13, 21, 141, 193n, 194n Jabłkowska, Róza 41 Jacques the Fatalist 7, 145–6, 147, 148, 150, 153, 161, 162, 173, 179, 208n, 211n, 212n James, Henry 16, 54, 168, 200n Jameson, Fredric 2, 193n Joseph Andrews 75, 144, 145, 150, 151 Joyce, James 17–18, 78, 144, 149, 168, 210n

‘Karain: A Memory’ 42, 43, 57, 69, 70, 76, 80, 99–101, 120–2, 163, 189, 201n, 206n Kermode, Frank 183, 212n Kipling, Rudyard 55, 62, 203n Kocóvna, Barbara 42 Korzeniowski, Apollo 31, 41 Kott, Jan 41 Krajka, Wiesław 28, 36, 196n La Bruyère, Jean de 70 Lesage, Alain-René 144, 209n Lord Jim 5, 7, 21, 28, 33–4, 35, 38–40, 41, 42, 44, 53, 57, 58, 69, 70, 73, 74, 76, 80, 86–7, 88–9, 94, 97–9, 106–9, 110, 113–14, 115, 116, 117–20, 121, 122, 124–8, 129, 130, 131, 132–42, 158–9, 163–4, 168, 178, 187, 188, 189, 190, 193n, 197n, 200n, 202n, 203n, 208n, 211n, 212n Lucian 79, 204n, 209n Lutosławski, Wincentry 26-8, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 197n Lynd, Robert 50–2, 57, 65 Madame Bovary 17, 197n Mallarmé, Stéphane 14, 194n Mann, Thomas 168 Marivaux, Pierre de 144 Marryat, Frederick 69 Maupassant, Guy de 16, 43, 50, 69, 84, 129, 197n Michel, W.J.T. 76-7 Mickiewicz, Adam 26, 28, 29, 37, 41, 42–3, 69, 195n, 196n Miller, Hillis 82 The Mirror of the Sea 71, 174, 197n Montaigne, Michel de 70 Montesquieu, Charles Louis 133 Moralia 77 Morf, Gustav 6, 26–7, 28, 33, 35, 38–41, 42, 43, 47, 65, 197n, 203n Mudford, William 182 Muir, Edwin 80 Najder, Zdzisław 28, 35, 38, 41, 42, 43–7, 71, 137, 172, 197n, 198n, 203n, 212n

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

224 Index of Names and Titles

Nepos 151, 209n Newbolt, Henry 58, 62 The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ 5, 53, 80–2, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 142, 191, 200n, 202n, 203n, 205n Nostromo 5, 41, 71–3, 80, 94, 97, 99, 110, 114, 120, 129, 132, 133–5, 188, 189, 190 O’Connor, T.P. 53, 54 Odyssey 71, 73, 131–2, 204n The Old Wives’ Tale 58–9 Orzeszkowa, Eliza 26, 28–31, 32, 34, 197n An Outcast of the Islands 33, 52, 53, 54, 62, 70, 124, 199n, 200n, 207n ‘An Outpost of Progress’ 62, 80, 94, 95–7 Pan Tadeusz 37, 41 Pascal, Blaise 69 A Personal Record 18, 20, 26, 40, 50, 51–2, 53, 54, 185, 186, 196n, 197n, 200n, 212n Peters, John G. 80 Phidias 79 Plato 11, 81, 84, 170 Plutarch 77, 84, 151, 191, 204n, 208n, 209n Pope, Alexander 167, 212n A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 17 Praxiteles 79 ‘Prince Roman’ 36, 196n, 197n Proust, Marcel 168 Quennell, Peter 183 Quintilian 5, 84, 86, 191 Rabelais, François 70, 79, 143, 171, 209n Richardson, Samuel 144, 153, 163, 209n Rodin, Auguste 78, 79 Romance 57 Rosenblatt, Marie-Louise 2, 13, 141, 193n Ruskin, John 79, 88

225

Sanderson, E.L. 88, 176 Scarron, Paul 144 Schopenhauer, Arthur 83, 205 Scott, Walter 77, 144, 182, 209n The Secret Agent 33, 59-60, 69, 80, 94, 188, 212n The Secret Sharer 94, 188 Shakespeare, William 59, 69, 87, 147, 161, 172, 178, 203n, 205n, 208n, 209n Shelley, Percy Bysshe 11, 12, 83 Sherman, Carol 133, 147, 209n Słovacki, Juliusz 29, 31–2, 69 Steele, Richard 154 Stendhal 6, 7, 69, 131, 190, 191, 193n Sterne, Laurence 7, 8, 11, 12, 13, 16, 75, 77, 78, 85, 123, 133, 141, 143, 144, 145, 146–50, 152, 153, 155–9, 160, 161, 162, 163, 167, 169, 171, 172, 173, 175, 178, 179, 182, 183, 187, 190, 191, 204n, 208n, 209n, 210n, 211n Swift, Jonathan 79, 143, 148, 166, 209n Symons, Arthur 41-2, 78, 79, 80, 206n Szczepanski, ´ Jan Józef 38 Tales of Unrest 53, 202n Tarnawski, Wit 38–9, 197n Telemachus 75, 204n Thackeray, William Makepeace 62, 78 Theocritus 75 Thucydides 71, 72, 77, 191, 205n Tillyard, E.M.W. 72 Tom Jones 7, 75, 123, 144–5, 150–2, 153–5, 161–2, 167, 210n, 211n Tristram Shandy 7, 12, 75, 77, 123, 141, 145, 146–50, 152–3, 155–8, 161, 162, 167, 169–73, 175, 178, 179, 182, 183, 208n, 210n, 211n, 212n Turgenev, Ivan Sergeyevich 69 Turgot, Anne-Robert Jacques 148, 209n ‘Typhoon’ 5, 41, 89–93, 133, 134, 188, 192

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Index of Names and Titles

Under Western Eyes 7, 8, 21, 57–8, 69, 86–7, 88, 94, 104, 108, 131, 137–8, 141, 150, 158–9, 160–1, 163, 164–6, 167–9, 172–8, 180–2, 183, 187, 190, 198n, 203n, 208n, 212n, 213n Valéry, Paul 71 Victory 5, 69, 70, 74, 94, 97, 99, 103–6, 108, 110, 114, 116–17, 120, 121, 124, 126, 128, 130, 131, 132, 163, 188, 189, 190, 203n Wagner, Richard 79, 205n Waliszewski, Kazimierz 25, 34

Walpole, Horace 182, 209 Watts, Cedric 80, 82–3, 111, 205n, 207n, 213n Wells, H.G. 53, 62, 65, 199n Weslawska, Emilia 28, 33–4, 40, 41 Wettlaufer, Alexandra 85, 163 Whistler, James 79 Woolf, Virginia 62, 65, 71, 78, 83, 144, 149, 204n, 206n, 210n ‘Youth’

53, 111–12, 114, 124, 200n

Zabierowski, Stefan 41 Zagorska, Aniela 33, 197n Zola, Emile 123

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

226 Index of Names and Titles

proxy of 121, 140 relevance of 18, 186 resilient persona 26 as secret sharer 21, 141, 187 surrogate 137, 142 as total absence 3, 19 authorial determination 19 authorial dissemination 1, 13, 15, 17–20, 185–7 authorial presence 16, 17, 18, 20, 110, 141, 185 authorial redundancy 186 authorship 1–3, 8, 16–21, 170–3, 175, 180, 183, 185–7, 195n, 206–7n, 210n

acculturation 30 aesthetics of indirectness 37 multi-faceted 30, 46–8, 49, 66, 81, 83–4, 113, 118, 197n of readership 4–5, 6, 131, 150 visual 4–5, 69–93, 185, 191 alter ego 7, 95, 136–8, 190, 207n alterity 140 ambivalence 6–7, 34, 122, 127, 131, 170–1 appropriation 34, 47–8, 66, 102, 121–2, 143, 149–50, 197n aristocratic leaning 6–7, 123–42, 189–90 artifice 8, 146–7, 168–9, 173, 175 artistic aim 81, 115–16, 140, 165–6, 205n artistic creation 5, 12, 30, 81–2, 88, 91, 178, 181–2 artistic freedom 147 audience 2, 5, 7, 11, 12, 20, 32, 36, 49, 59, 60, 75, 83, 85–7, 99–100, 107, 108, 110–14, 123–8, 130–6, 140–2, 153–60, 163, 166, 167, 168–71, 173–4, 180, 183, 185, 188, 189, 190, 206n, 207n, 208n addressee 125, 127, 132, 133, 134, 171, 189 construction of 6, 26, 123–42 elect 132, 135, 138, 142 elite 54, 190 fictional 5, 95, 123, 124, 168, 189 ideal 26, 101, 123 privileged 6, 40, 128, 130, 132, 135–6, 138 sympathetic 101, 132, 135, 190 author demise of 1, 8, 13, 15–16, 18–20, 186, 187 implied 7, 8, 123, 142, 183 nomadic aura of 19 as past conjecture 14

barbarism 56, 58, 63, 70, 71 betrayal 28–9, 34–5, 37, 39 body language 94, 124, 166, 177, 207n borrowing 42, 48, 69, 70–1, 76, 143–4, 149–50, 172, 178–9, 185, 190, 198n, 208n, 209n bovarysm 17, 42, 193n, 197n Burlesque 144, 204n centrifugal consciousness 112–13 centrifugal truth 6, 122 centripetal agency 6, 122 centripetal perspective 19, 112–13 chauvinism 26, 43 chiaroscuro see authorship chronotope 132 cinematic device 76, 83, 172, 191, 204n see also the pictorial; visuality classical poetics 2, 4–5, 11, 42, 69, 71–3, 78, 84–7, 124, 143, 145, 148, 149–51, 170–1, 173, 185, 191–2, 204n, 206n, 208–9n, 210n collectivity 4, 28, 30–1, 52, 63 idealized ‘imagined community’ 40, 55, 58 227

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Index of Concepts

228 Index of Concepts

deconstruction theory 1–2, 3, 13–14, 17–21, 47, 149, 186–7, 194n theoretical absolutism 14 democratic vision 6, 120, 129–31, 132 derivation 30, 48, 76, 84, 192 see also aesthetics detachment 17, 25, 28–9, 57, 71, 113, 114–15, 148, 159, 174 deterritorialization 30 dialogism 65, 83–4, 110, 125, 132, 133, 140–1, 171, 181–2, 187, 194n dictatorship 16, 154, 187, 194n didacticism 7, 12, 46, 75, 141, 193n aesthetic 153–61 heuristic teacher 99–100, 152–3 moral instruction 150–3 difference see otherness diffidence 170, 171 diffusion 1, 15, 19, 185–6 digression 75, 147, 154, 156–8, 159, 160, 167, 171, 173, 182–3, 212n discourse 6, 19, 34, 58, 118, 120, 185–6, 194n, 208n, 212n discursive layers 19, 210n monolithic 2, 15, 17, 25–6, 118, 140, 194n, 202n see also rhetoric dissemination 1, 13, 18–20, 27, 119, 185–7 dramatic display 99 dramatic form 143, 161

dramatic impulse 161–6 dramatic intensity 92, 162, 164 dual loyalty 4, 25 egotistic leaning 31–2 elastic conception of art 31 elastic meaning 119 elastic readership 4, 26, 119, 140 elitism 6–7, 95, 129–32, 189–90, 198n, 200n see also audience elusiveness 19–20, 34, 37–8, 118, 185, 197n, 202n enargeia 5, 85–7, 191–2 encyclopaedic competence 125–6 Englishness 50, 55–65, 201n, 202n, Enlightenment 70 enunciation 14, 20, 73–4, 110, 113, 120–1, 130, 134 epistemic deadlock 103 epistemological deficiency 74, 102, 106 essentialism 4, 47, 51, 59, 197n ethics 46–7, 64, 66, 158–9 of authorship 16 of collectivity 4, 31, of denegation 7, 8, 181, 190 of mobility 135 of negativity 15, 177–8, 183–4 of readership 4, 6, 16, 76, 84, 182 exile 17–19, 28–9, 31, 39, 42, 43, 45–6, 59, 62, 186, 201n, 203n existential precariousness 39, 64–5, 92, 119, 202n exoticism 101, 111 experimentation 75, 84, 105, 110, 148, 153, 175, 181 artistic 70–1 innovation 69–70, 76, 84, 85, 147, 149, 156 random writing 179 fiction-as-confession 39–40 focalization 80, 109–10, 118 fallible perspective 119, 125, 134 floating 109 limited knowing subject 73–4, 119 migrating 118

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

colonialism 49, 57, 70, 72, 80, 96, 99, 101, 112, 121 anti-colonial rhetoric 30 decolonization 46 postcolonialism 22 communion 40, 52, 64, 107–8, 126, 140, 141–2 conclusiveness 40, 54, 119, 126 confessional novel 39–40 cosmopolitanism 45, 50–1, 57, 59, 190 country-house fiction 59 cultural mistranslation 103

multiple 110, 118 roving presence 17–18, 19, 21 fragmentation 66, 90, 93, 112–13, 118, 119, 141 gesture 5, 64, 82, 101, 162–3, 164, 177, 206n, 211n heroism 36, 38–9, 41, 73, 89, 98, 201n mock-heroism 73 heteroglossia 49, 194n holistic theory 2, 6, 14, 22, 40, 66, 122, 191 horizontality 5, 108–9, 122, 139, 188, 191 Humanism 69, 70 hybridity 26, 64 see also otherness; dual loyalty identity 35, 49, 52, 118 cultural insider 51–2 homo-duplex 25–6, 61 moral 119, 212n narrative 173, 175, 177, 180 rhizomic 50 multifarious 2, 4, 25, 65–6 see also hybridity illusion see verisimilitude image see cinematic device; the pictorial; visuality imperialism 17, 28, 30, 56, 58, 62, 70, 71–2 impressionism 78, 80, 90, 118, 205n indeterminacy 3, 13, 74, 93, 119–20, 142, 160, 186–8, 194n provisional meaning 119, 134 see also narrative; representation insularity 27, 50, 63, 66, 201n irony 7, 8, 72, 73, 98, 183, 190 jingoism 47, 57, 201n see also nationalism language 5, 14, 28, 34, 44, 50–2, 54, 56, 57, 85, 87–90, 92–3, 140, 148, 161, 176–7, 180, 191, 192, 194n, 196n, 198n

229

see also linguistic bankruptcy; linguistic frenzy; linguistic insider; linguistic regeneration letter writing 93, 94, 132–6, 139, 188, 190 liminality 134–5, 188 linearity 54, 80, 93, 99, 108, 110, 118, 139, 140, 173 linguistic bankruptcy 66, 88–9, 124, 177, 192 see also language linguistic frenzy 92 see also language linguistic insider 51–2 see also language linguistic regeneration 5, 89, 91, 177 see also language literalism 86, 93, 95, 97, 116, 139, 189 literary compromise 52 literary impulsiveness 179 literary novelty 147–8, 210n literary randomness 179 literature and education 11, 146, 151–3, 158, 160–1, 175 loyalty see dual loyalty matrix 47, 59 meaning see signification mega-poetics 5, 82 Messianism 26, 28–30, 31, 40, 46, 195–6n, 197n meta-narrative 6, 95, 124, 128, 134–5, 188 mimesis 81, 84 modernism 2–3, 12, 16, 17, 19–20, 66, 75, 78, 83, 124, 129, 148, 150, 158, 182, 206n, 210n multiplicity 15, 115, 120, 179 mystification 17, 47, 121 myths of origins 47, 55 narrative act of denial 101 authority 121, 125, 127 competency 112, 124, 125, 135 competition 110–23 credibility 116, 152, 167, 174, 212n

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Index of Concepts

230 Index of Concepts

objectivity 16, 36, 48, 113, 117, 174–5, 180, 194n, 195n,

Occidentalist discourse 45, 48, 121, 183 odyssey of telling 131–2, 190 open-endedness see indeterminacy Orientalism 62, 71, 99–100, 121 otherness 49, 62, 63, 101, 206n radical other 46, 56, 165 participation (active) 8, 125, 166 patriotism 4, 26, 28, 29–31, 34–6, 42, 50–1, 55, 56, 61, 153, 174, 196n see also nationalism perspectivism see focalization pessimism 54, 55, 60, 88, 97, 200–1n philosophical outlook 41, 49–50, 54, 60, 70 Picarro 42 the pictorial 5, 12, 76–82, 85, 87, 163, 172, 191, 204n see also cinematic device; visuality plasticity 26, 51, 81–2 plausibility 36, 144, 145, 167, 209n Polishness 4, 29, 35–7, 48, 201–2n Polonism 50, 196n, 198n polyphony 3, 15, 111, 120, 121, 132, 134, 191, 194n postmodernism 2–3, 16, 19, 20, 47, 119, 140, 149, 152, 179, 182, 185, 186, 187, 193n, 212n, primitivism 100 proliferation 3, 110, 186 see also dissemination quintessence

59

race politics 4, 63–5, 203n ramifications 2–3, 5, 82, 143, 192 reader as active collaborator 7, 8, 12, 21, 141, 160, 211n actual 6, 22, 99, 128, 134, 188–9 as author’s secret sharer 21, 141, 187 average 54, 60, 95, 126–9, 131, 132, 136, 189, 200n, 207n as co-author 7, 12 competent 8, 109, 140, 183, 189

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

narrative – continued despised informants 114–16 dual-voice 111–12 erratic 146, 158 hegemonic 6, 116, 187 hierarchy 5–6, 74, 109, 114, 120, 124, 126, 130, 189 indeterminacy 3, 13, 74, 119, 120, 187–8, 194n layers 3, 19, 43, 46, 49, 114–15, 118, 121, 139, 186, 191, 210n multi-focal 54 pact 113, 169 reader-oriented 5, 123 rite of passage 110 self-consciousness 7, 75–6, 143–9, 161, 165–9, 172, 184, 190, 210n solidarity 5–6, 122, 130, 191 supremacy 120–1, 127–8 variation 134, 161, 188, 207n see also enunciation; experimentation; narrator; voice narrator authorial 80, 90, 95, 97, 110, 111, 112, 113, 120, 124, 128, 132 elect 110–11 eye-witness 128, 134, 205n hegemonic status 116, 121 homodiegetic 111, 164 primary 73–4, 112, 120, 122, 123–4 privileged informer 117 secondary 73–4, 113–14, 115, 116–20, 124, 130, 189, 204n source of enunciation 20, 121, 134 valorized informants 114, 116 see also enunciation; narrative nationalism 17, 26–30, 34, 40, 43–4, 52, 55–6, 58–60, 65, 195n, 197n see also patriotism; transnationalism negativity 15, 60, 167–84, 186 see also ethics of negativity neutrality 14, 15, 26, 36, 47, 174, 175, 180–1 New Criticism 12, 47, 193 nostalgia 37, 47, 59, 111

as creative agency 7, 13–14, 21–2, 141, 160 deified 1, 2, 21, 187 discerning 7, 108, 141–2, 181, 188 as entity-in-the-making 8 fictional 5, 6, 94–109, 135, 188 hegemonic 16, 21, 187 highbrow 65, 128–9, 132, 190 ideal 7, 101, 123, 141–2, implied 7, 75, 90, 123, 134, 183, intra-textual 188 iterative 160 literalistic 97, 189 lowbrow 65, 190 metaphoric 5, 94, 99, 103, 109, 119, 122, 123, 132, 188, 190 myopic 5, 95, 99, 108, 189 naive 97–8 nominal 5, 94–5, 97, 99, 122–3, 188, 189 overarching 16 para-fictional 135, 188 privileged 21, 132, 134–9, 141, 190 rhetorical 94, 99, 106, 108–9, 136, 188–9 shallow 97, 131, 189 subliminal 135–6, 140, 190–1 surrogate 134–5 as surrogate writer 142 see also reading reader-centric theory 14, 20–2, 186–7, 193n reader-oriented narratives 5, 123 reader’s pact 8, 52, 154, 169 reader theory 2, 4, 7–8, 13, 69, 76, 93, 130–1, 137, 149, 180, 181, 183, 187–91, 197n readership aesthetics of 4–5, 6, 131, 150 elastic 4, 26, 119, 140 ethics of 4, 6, 16, 76, 84, 182 reading act of 136, 162–3, 184 coherence 90, 157–8, 175 figurative 101, 189 finite 118, 140 hierarchy 5, 94–109, 124–5 linear 99, 110, 118

231

multiple 134, 140 multitude 95, 131 participative poetics 143, 182, 187 solidarity 142, 143, 182, 188 superficial 96, 99 surface 95 trajectory 134, 154, 159 vertical 108–9, 139, 191 see also reader realism 60, 93, 145, 146–7, 151, 173–4, 175, 178, 194n, 198n, 205n, 209n see also verisimilitude reception theory 2, 3, 21 referentiality (crisis of) 89 rehabilitation 39, 40, 45, 52, 89, relativity 70, 118, 120, 187, 207n Renaissance literatures and thought 70 representation 2, 4–7, 13, 15, 38, 63, 66, 72–7, 80–4, 87, 91, 100–1, 115, 118–19, 140, 142, 151, 192 fictional 6, 63, 161–2 impressionistic 78–80, 90, 118, 205n indeterminate 188 modes of 6, 7, 38, 76, 109, 171, 181 pluralistic 6, 13, 15 shock tactics 167–8, 178, 184 theory of 2, 4–5, 72, 192 rhetoric 15, 18, 30, 32, 79, 86, 136, 179 of denegation 8, 171, 180, 181, 211n of inflation 91, 156 of justification 122, 152, 190 see also discourse; rhetorical devices rhetorical devices 6, 8, 14, 57, 74, 85, 86, 87, 93, 120, 122, 123, 125, 152, 158, 176, 179, 181, 183, 210n see also rhetoric Romance 46, 53, 97, 115, 144–5, 146, 147, 151, 209n Romanticism 11, 26, 28, 31, 33, 34, 37, 41–4, 46, 69, 97–9, 106, 111, 118, 182, 188, 195n, 198n, 205n, 209n rootlessness 52, 57

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

Index of Concepts

sacrifice 29, 31, 38–9, 42, 195n, 196n sameness 64–5 semiotic 13, 103, 105, 193n showing 6, 66, 81, 82, 84, 122, 164 see also telling sight 5, 80, 82, 85–7, 90, 104, 106, 124, 135, 163, 177, 191 see also the pictorial; visuality signification literalism 7, 86, 93, 95, 118, 139, 140 multi-layered 3, 117–18, 119 provisional meaning 134 signifying enterprise 1, 13, 16, 21, 141–2, 187 signifying totality 141 social realism 41 solidarity 31, 42, 64–5, 109, 137, 142, 158 act of 130, 142, 143, 182, 188 narrative 5–6, 117, 122, 130, 143, 191 reading 142, 143, 182, 188 scriptural 8 solipsism 27, 140 structuralism 1, 12–13 symbiosis 30, 76, 82, 121, 142, 188, 206n synergy 5, 66, 70, 82, 191 see also mega-poetics; plasticity szlachta 28, 45–6 telling 6, 66, 81, 82, 112, 113, 120, 122, 125, 131, 190 territoriality 28, 57 see also deterritorialization textuality 2–3, 20–1, 22, 40, 134–5, 136, 139–42, 149, 160–1, 163, 188, 197n allegorical scripts 94, 103 construction of textual meanings 1, 7, 12, 13, 21, 139, 141–2, 187, 193n intertextuality 172, 188 metaphoric script 101–2, 118, 136, 188–9 polarized textual transaction 1, 21

subtext 103, 140, 188, 210n textual truth 7, 141 theory of 14 transtextuality 190 see also tripartite textual transaction theatricality 7, 69, 99, 101 text as stage 161–6 see also dramatic display; dramatic form; dramatic impulse; dramatic intensity tragedy 11, 148, 193n transculturalism 63, 70, 103 transnationalism 65-6 tripartite textual transaction 1, 21–2, 141–2, 187 truth 3, 5, 7, 11, 14, 39, 81–2, 88, 98, 101, 104, 110–22, 126, 128, 129, 140, 141, 143–50, 151–3, 160, 173, 177, 185, 209n, 210n, 211n, 212n centrifugal 6, 122 competing 119 decentred 6, 122 ethical 46 manifold 81, 113 relative 119, 140, 152 single 47 textual 7, 141 unidentified origination

185

verisimilitude 36, 133, 143–50, 173, 175, 210n verticality 108–9, 122, 139–40, 161, 188, 191 visuality 1, 4, 5, 69–93, 105–7, 135–6, 162–4, 166, 185, 191–2 imagistic style 80, 92 making the reader ‘see’ 5, 82, 84, 86, 90, 160, 191–2 ocular penetration 101, 105 optical jouissance 104 visual activity 98, 104 visual communion 107 visual orientation 90 visual perception 72, 78, 83, 85

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

232 Index of Concepts

Index of Concepts

narrative voice 73, 90, 110–14, 120–1, 122, 126, 132, 134, 138, 163, 180, 207n see also enunciation; narrator; sight writing back

40

xenophobia 61–2, 64, 201n

10.1057/9780230250833 - Joseph Conrad and the Reader, Amar Acheraiou

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-01

vividness 79, 86, 192 voyeurism 87, 205n see also enargeia; the pictorial; sight voice 5, 6, 14, 15, 17–19, 66, 73, 82, 90, 92, 104, 107–8, 110–14, 117, 119, 120–2, 129, 130, 135, 160, 194n, 204n, 206n dual-voice narrative 73, 110–12

233