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By Hugh Epstein,
London
Michael John DiSanto. Under
Conrad's Eyes: The Novel as Criticism. McGill-Queen's Studies
in the History of Ideas Series, No. 47. Montréal: McGill-Queen’s
University Press, 2009. 253 pp. $63.
About Under Western Eyes, Conrad wrote
to Edward Garnett: “I am concerned with nothing but ideas,
to the exclusion of everything else” (CL4 489). Michael
DiSanto contends that “Criticism concerned with ideas and
the history of ideas does not receive much attention at the present
time,” and his study seeks to remedy this in the case of Conrad.
His repudiation of the postcolonial dominance of contemporary Conrad
studies as he sees it (he names six books and could easily have
named more) announces a strong Arnoldian inflection. Clearly (liberal)
humanist in tendency, Freud is here, but no Lacan; Foucault and
Derrida mentioned only to claim them as Nietzsche’s descendants;
we cannot separate the writer from the work. In fact, DiSanto proposes
to follow Leavis’s practice in finding that “the best
evidence of Conrad’s reading is in the language, style and
structure of his novels.”
Much of the introductory chapter takes up
an interesting debate about comparison and influence, in which DiSanto
counters Yves Hervouet’s notion of Conrad’s writing
as an act of “appropriation” with the idea of the “novel
as criticism,” always in dialogue and often in combat with
that from which it borrows. So he declares that “This study,
therefore, is and is not a study of influence,” and therein
lies the refreshment of the book for readers who welcome the insight
contrived from an encounter between various textual moments from
different writers, and the problem for readers who demand a more
scholarly and rigorous documentation of exactly what Conrad read,
when, and under what circumstances.
DiSanto’s work needs to be more fully
and carefully established in the tradition of Patricia Beer, George
Levine, and others, who have done so much to place literary texts
convincingly in a wider intellectual climate. However, Under
Conrad’s Eyes is precise and interesting in what its
six main chapters offer the reader: readings of “Heart of
Darkness,” The Secret Agent, Nostromo, Under
Western Eyes, Lord Jim, and Victory (in that
order) against works by Carlyle, Dickens, George Eliot, Dostoyevsky,
Darwin, and Nietzsche.
There is no mention of French literature,
and more mystifying, given the study’s philosophical bent,
is the relegation of Schopenhauer to a footnote. This said, one
of the strengths of the book is that the chosen thinkers and novelists
enable DiSanto to construct three strands of thought, which he artfully
entangles, that lend unity to the whole enterprise – highlighting
how sympathy and pity, knowing and not knowing, and notions of self-preservation
and self-sacrifice function in Conrad’s thought.
The study’s major contribution lies in reasserting Carlyle’s
importance to Conrad by examining Carlyle’s two prominent
prescriptions – hero-worship and work – in “Heart
of Darkness.” DiSanto is surely right in his attack upon academic
structures that divide Conrad from his nineteenth-century inheritance
by, for instance, teaching Carlyle in courses on “Victorian
Prose” and Conrad in courses on “Modernism”; however,
his book itself does seem rather to be a product of “courses”,
and one can see it fitting teaching purposes for “the novel
and nineteenth century thought” very well.
DiSanto is penetrating and enlightening on
how “Heart of Darkness” subjects Carlyle’s gospel
of work to scrutiny. Pursuing Conrad’s recognition of the
contradiction in Carlyle’s idea that work is the “most
important expression of being and the most important avoidance of
being,” DiSanto offers a telling reading of Marlow’s
famous, “No, I don’t like work. I had rather laze about
and think of all the fine things that can be done.”
DiSanto is eloquent in his contention that
Marlow’s idealization of work grows out of his need to be
saved from knowing the horrors of the grove of death, and he makes
a significant intervention in post-Achebean debates by showing how
“Carlyle is present at the scene.” His demonstration
of the way in which the grove of death operates as a criticism of
“An Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question” is a
high-point of this book.
The next two chapters are impelled by a good
idea, and a sensitivity to life as well as to literature, although
in neither does the analysis quite fulfil the claims made for interconnectedness.
To find much of the origin of The Secret Agent in Bleak
House is a familiar, but by no means an exhausted, comparative
move, and the strategy of entry – “The two authors share
the idea that not knowing is the dominant impulse or instinct ...
of a perceived sickness undermining English culture” –
promises a good discussion. But for all his manoeuvring of the characters
against each other, DiSanto’s writing lacks a dimension of
wit that is demanded to be equal to the spectacular gymnastics of
these two novels and to represent what Conrad owes to Dickens in
terms of style and thought.
“Arguably,” DiSanto claims, “George
Eliot was as influential as Carlyle, Dickens, or Dostoyevsky.”
Were he able really to show this, his next chapter would be a major
addition to Conrad studies. However, “counts for” in
practice means that the critic can find opportunities for contrast.
Broadly, the chapter compares Dorothea with Emila, Ladislaw with
Decoud, and Lydgate and Monygham, and DiSanto persuades us that
Conrad brings a more acute and seasoned set of feelings to the key
issue of sympathy than Eliot, who consistently comes off worse (“There
is a danger in a form of sympathy that perceives the object of sympathy
as not intelligent enough to participate on an equal footing with
the researcher”), while Conrad “understands this problem
and presents it in Decoud.”
DiSanto feelingly conveys Conrad’s portrayal
of Mrs Gould’s desolating loneliness, comparing Middlemarch
(ch. 31 and ch. 83) with Nostromo (I, 6 and II, 5) to demonstrate
that “Conrad reworks some fundamental elements of Eliot’s
art.” This is not quite the same as identifying a specific
debt. For instance, DiSanto quotes Eliot’s narrator on the
marriage of Rosamond and Lydgate: “It was as if they were
both adrift on one piece of wreck and looked away from each other.”
This proves too much to resist as he jumps to Nostromo and Decoud
on the lighter “as if (Conrad) were writing a profound meditation
on the meaning of that very suggestive sentence from Eliot’s
book.”
Conrad’s favourite “as if”
is the weak point of the criticism here: perhaps comparison is never
more than cherry-picking, but the critic should either set full
passages against each other for whatever arises from the collision
or establish influence in a more scholarly way. DiSanto writes interestingly
about isolation, sympathy, and the want of it, in the lighter and
elsewhere in Nostromo, but the linkage to Middlemarch is
occasionally strained.
The Carlylean thread to DiSanto’s book
is evident in his view that Under Western Eyes is “about
heroes, real and sham, and what actions or sacrifices compel admiration
and worship.” Central to the chapter is the Dostoyevskyan
genre of “the confession”, and again, Dostoyevsky comes
off the worse for the comparison. DiSanto judges that Conrad sees
as a disfigurement Dostoyevsky’s self-sacrificial women of
the confessional: “Conrad’s criticism is that Dostoyevsky
violates, if not destroys, the individuality of his female characters
in forcing them to become mouthpieces of his own ideals.”
The uncontroversial, but strongly felt, conclusion is that Tekla
earns the reader’s sympathy and emerges as the extraordinary
person in her unidealizing service of others.
The chapter devoted to Lord Jim as
a novel rewriting Darwin’s and Nietzsche’s “arguments
about the instincts for self-preservation and self-destruction”
is the study’s most interesting and closely argued. Using
ideas from Girard, DiSanto says that Conrad makes it difficult for
the reader to differentiate between sacrifice, suicide, and victimhood.
The Bob Stanton and Brierly episodes attract an attentive reading
that asks us to think carefully about self-sacrifice and self-regard.
Prepared to take the risk of being “suggestive rather than
conclusive in making (his) case,” as he puts it elsewhere,
DiSanto in this chapter creates distinctive readings from the ideas
he applies to Lord Jim, whether Conrad is shown conclusively to
have found these ideas in Darwin or Nietzsche or not.
The final ambitious chapter, about Conrad’s
criticisms of Nietzsche’s thought, proves to be the most difficult
to read and enjoy. (That Conrad is “difficult to read”
is an often-repeated linguistic tic here, where “read”
seems to mean to arrive at a single interpretation). Clearly, however,
the discussion of Nietzsche’s rejection of pity reaches back
to the chapter on sympathy and provides further evidence of the
intellectual thread running throughout this study. Finding Nietzsche
represented in the elder Heyst as philosopher, Jim as a Christ-like
“idiot,” and Stevie as the victim who becomes the self-destructive
exploder, DiSanto’s aim is to explore how Conrad exposes that
Nietzsche’s contempt as “a form of not knowing his own
pity or capacity for pity.”
In its attention to the relations between Conrad’s
fiction and the work of major nineteenth-century precursors, this
is a welcome book. DiSanto is uneven in the success with which he
manages to persuade us of Conrad’s debt, connection, or affinity
with the style of others, a palpable hit with Carlyle not being
matched elsewhere. Of course, this is a study primarily about ideas,
and every page reveals DiSanto’s lively engagement with his
reading in nineteenth-century intellectual history, and an enthusiasm
and advocacy that is winning.
It is rather surprising then, when the whole
enterprise seems to be to stress the value of Conrad as a thinker
and a critic, there is no mention of the writer’s essays and
literary criticism. But some reservations aside – and DiSanto
deliberately positions his work outside a circle of scholarly research
– Under Conrad’s Eyes is a valuable addition
to the line of commentary that seeks to associate Conrad’s
fiction with prior intellectual traditions, particularly in its
refocusing of attention upon English writers.
© 2010 Hugh Epstein
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