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By Jakob Lothe
Joseph
Conrad and the Performing Arts, edited by Katherine
Isobel Baxter and Richard J. Hand. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. 165 pp.
£55.
For readers of Conrad who tend to think of his fiction
without linking it to the performing arts, this book is a useful
correction in two ways. First, it demonstrates that Conrad not only
took a strong interest in the theatre but also contributed to the
genre of drama himself, for instance by adapting his short story
“To-morrow” into a one-act play entitled One Day
More and by dramatizing the novel The Secret Agent.
Second, it shows that Conrad made wide-ranging and innovative use
of stage and screen techniques and conventions in his fiction.
The book is much more than a correction, however.
Its eight chapters provide a wealth of information about, and spirited
discussion of, significant aspects of Conrad’s work seen in
the light of “performance.” Sensibly, the editors define
the notion of performance inclusively, linking it both to the two
aspects already mentioned and to the reader’s understanding
of cultural specificity. For instance, Conrad’s Malay fictions
express, as Linda Dryden puts it, “cultural difference through
the way his characters ‘act out’ cultural codes of behaviour”
(13). Dryden’s essay, appropriately entitled “Performing
Malaya” and preceded by an informative introduction by the
editors, Katherine Isobel Baxter and Richard J. Hand, opens the
collection. As Baxter and Hand point out, the eight essays cannot
possibly provide a complete account of Conrad and the performing
arts. However, collectively they offer an engaging forum for a nascent
area of Conrad studies – an area likely to grow in importance
in the years to come.
Dryden’s interesting discussion is followed
by Susan Barras’s essay on Mrs Almayer’s and Mrs Willems’s
performances of colonial resistance in Almayer’s Folly
and An Outcast of the Islands. In common with Dryden, Barras
takes a strong interest in the Malay fiction, and she manages to
show that, in both novels, it is not only Babalatchi, with his covert
schemes to undermine the Europeans, who provides examples of performance.
Mrs Almayer and Mrs Willems also engage in performances of colonial
resistance in order to protest at the way they are treated by their
“white masters,” that is their husbands, Almayer and
Willems. Also examining the nature of Aïssa’s performance
in An Outcast of the Islands, Barras ends by suggesting
that Aïssa’s own performace is less successful in obtaining
mastery than that of the two other female characters. Barras concludes,
I think convincingly, that both Mrs Almayer and Mrs Willems achieve
what Homi Bhabha has described as “the refusal to return and
restore the image of authority to the eye of power,” thus
hinting, in and through their performances, at an “implacable
aggression” that their European husbands can neither fully
suppress nor satisfactorily contain.
Critically rewarding is also Richard J. Hand’s
discussion, which argues that Conrad’s fiction includes a
number of significant references to, as well as uses of, popular
performance, not least melodrama and commedia dell’arte. Considering
melodrama as an artistic feature which is not necessarily “negative,”
Hand implicitly links parts of his argument to Peter Brooks’s
understanding of melodrama in The Melodramatic Imagination
(1976). Usefully reminding us that Conrad is a very dramatic writer,
Hand, taking his cue from Conrad’s comment that “Though
I detest the stage I have a theatrical imagination” (17 April
1909; CL4 218), identifies and discusses various aspects
of melodrama in “Freya of the Seven Isles: A Story of Shallow
Waters” and “The Return.” Hand does not claim
that these stories are masterpieces of short fiction to be placed
on the same high level as, for example, “An Outpost of Progress”
or “The Secret Sharer.” But he shows that, not least
by dismissing a story such as “Freya of the Seven Isles”
as simple melodrama, critics have tended to overlook significant
aspects of the narrative.
Conrad’s “theatrical imagination”
is also at the centre of Robert Hampson’s significant contribution.
Hampson’s critical focus is not on Conrad’s adaptations
of his fiction for the stage or screen. Rather, he discusses how
Conrad uses stage and screen conventions in his fiction. While Hampson
identifies a number of stage conventions in “The Return”
and Victory, he points out various screen conventions in
The Secret Agent and Chance. For example, he shows
that in “The Return,” a short story intertextually linked
to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879), Hervey’s
performances as a character draw on the codes and conventions and
of popular theatre; thus Conrad signals the inauthenticity of Hervey’s
attitude.
As far as screen conventions are concerned, Hampson
helpfully reminds us that Conrad’s career as a novelist coincided
with the early development of cinema – Almayer’s
Folly was published just a couple of weeks after the Lumière
brothers presented their invention to the Sorbonne. As Stephen Donovan
shows in Conrad and the Popular Imagination (2005), Conrad
took a keen interest in visual technologies, especially film. Inspired
by Donovan’s important study, Hampson discusses various filmic
aspects of The Secret Agent, a novel in which he sees Conrad
responding to a new awareness of time (and the presentation of time
in fiction) resulting from elements of early film such as hand-cranked
cameras and projectors and non-standardised speeds.
The last four essays of the volume are also illuminating.
Suzanne Speidel, whose critical concerns are similar to those of
Hampson, notes a characteristic ambivalence in Conrad’s attitude
to the new medium. After having commented on important aspects of
narrative cinema, Speidel gives an interesting analysis of Victory,
comparing its narrative strategy to cinematic narration. For instance,
she finds that aspects of this novel are similar to Griffith’s
technique of parallel editing in The Birth of a Nation
(1915).
Emphasizing the intense depictions of light and
dark in Conrad’s fiction, Stephen Donovan concentrates on
the author’s use of shadowgraphy – the art of using
and manipulating shadows. As Donovan persuasively argues, the shadows
of Conrad’s novels and short stories are more than just visual
traces of material objects, since they frequently add another layer
of meaning (or complication of meaning) to the narrative, and since
they tend to be animated by a symbolic force of their own.
In the following chapter, Katherine Isobel Baxter
turns to Conrad and Shakespeare – a combination of names that,
with a view to the heading “Conrad and the performing arts,”
has received more attention than most. The issue of influence looms
large here, and dealing with influence is always difficult, since
it is exceptionally difficult to identify and critically evaluate.
Baxter’s discussion, however, is informative and balanced.
She starts by commenting on the Shakespearean elements already noted
by Conrad critics such as Adam Gillon and John Batchelor. These
are mainly drawn from the tragedies (especially Hamlet),
with the important exception of The Tempest. Proceeding
from this helpful survey, Baxter, in the more original part of her
essay, considers the ways in which Conrad’s reception and
interpretation of Shakespeare was mediated through his father’s,
Apollo Korzeniowski’s, works, and how – this is an important
concluding point – that mediation invites an interpretative
shift from Shakespeare’s tragedies to his comedies.
Rounding off the collection, Laurence Davies writes
with enthusiasm and insight about Conrad and one significant variant
on performance: the operatic mode. Few critics know more about Conrad’s
biography and correspondence than Davies, and relevant biographical
knowledge is put to good use in the essay, which, however, is also
distinguished by a number of perceptive observations on several
of Conrad’s most important fictional works. Davies shows that
Conrad, in addition to his engagement with the operatic avant-garde,
was also well versed in longer-standing traditions. Davies’s
survey of these, often politically radical, traditions includes
a very interesting passage on the two principal houses – in
Warsaw and Lemberg (Lwów) – of Polish opera in the
nineteenth century.
Conrad activated elements of these traditions in
his writing, not least by writing in dual modes. One important such
pairing was the operatic and the ironic, the one playing off the
other. Like many great artists, including Shakespeare and Goethe,
Conrad often reworked the conventions and ideas of popular forms.
Referring to Slavoj iek’s observation in Opera’s
Second Death (2002) that “a truly creative act not only
restructures the field of future possibilities but also restructures
the past, resignifying the previous contingent traces as pointing
toward the present,” Davies concludes that Conrad not only
constructs a force-field between the ironic and the operatic, but
that “he ironises opera without throwing it away; he treats
it irreverently with the confidence of a believer” (141).
As should already be clear, Joseph Conrad and
the Performing Arts is a significant contribution to Conrad
studies. The editors’ and contributors’ combination
of a contextual and historical approach proves thought-provoking
and critically productive, thus not just confirming but considerably
extending the structural, thematic, intertextual, and intermedial
range of the author’s fictional performance.
© 2009 Jakob Lothe
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