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By Rolf Charlston, Philadelphia
Pamela King, “Like
painting, like music...”: Joseph Conrad and the Modernist
Sensibility. Nathan, Queensland: Coop Bookshop, 1996.. xii+116
pp.
The intention of this slim work is to recognize
Conrad’s Modernist sensibility in the context of the arts.
Conrad asserts in the “Preface” to The
Nigger of the “Narcissus” that fiction is “like
painting, like music,” and King’s thesis is that Conrad
was aware of emerging artistic currents; that correspondences exist
between these artistic issues and his biography; and that these
correspondences define him as a writer. Her intention is worthy,
but the substance is largely derivative.
With 87 references in the endnotes for the
sixteen pages of the first chapter, King establishes in typical
graduate-student fashion the derivative nature of her work with
a survey of the critical literature about Conrad and the Modernist
sensibility.
This reads like a Master’s thesis –
which it is – or, as the author acknowledges, her thesis at
Griffith University in Australia became the “catalyst”
for this volume. The review covers biography, culture, art, music,
film, the aesthetic movement of art for art’s sake, and some
of Conrad’s writing like A
Personal Record and the “Preface” to The
Nigger.
While references from Rodin to Zdzislaw Najder
abound in Chapter 2, “Conrad’s Early Cultural Formation,”
some fresh ideas do emerge in King’s reading of The
Arrow of Gold (1919). Oddly, she extensively (for her) discusses
this late work in this chapter. But she does so perceptively, showing
how Conrad fuses classical, romantic, and realistic impulses with
references to the visual arts in his continuing attempt to discover
a “New Form” of the novel. Allégre’s evocation
of the Byzantine Empress Theodosia, Cabanel’s organic painting
of Venus, and the representation of Rita as “a padded sculptural
realistic dummy” contribute to the complex characterization
of Rita.
The heart of “Like painting, like music...”
is the analysis of three major works: “Heart of Darkness,”
Nostromo, and The
Secret Agent, with a chapter devoted to each. After two chapters
of biographical, historical, and critical background, one expects
finally to plunge into a close reading of the art in a Conrad text,
especially in the chapter entitled “Heart of Darkness.”
But like the “delayed decoding”
Ian Watt writes of and to which King refers, the discussion of this
novella is again delayed. She begins, instead, by returning to her
background topic in Chapter 1, namely, Conrad’s affinity with
the Modernist movements of Impression and symbolism.
It is almost as if this chapter on “Heart
of Darkness” had previously been a discrete paper. King repeats
fundamental observations on “Heart of Darkness” –
observations regularly made in undergraduate classes – but
does so under the rubrics of art: light and dark imagery; a sculptural
Buddha; painterly and sculptural references to ivory, bones, and
skulls; images of African works of art; the two contrasting paintings
like icons of women, the one apparently by Kurtz, the other of Queen
Victoria. King’s achievement is to organize these observations
into artistic categories.
In dealing with Nostromo,
King introduces aspects of the Modernist sensibility appropriate
to the writing of the novel, particularly the concept of time and
the emergence of cinema. Acknowledging other critics, she states
that Conrad frequently appears to reflect awareness of many Bergsonian
ideas, like “homogeneous time” (54), durée,
and a Fourth Dimension.
Drawing on the distinction between “blurred”
and “hard” reality in Conrad’s narrative experiments,
as related by Frederick R. Karl, King explicates Conrad’s
“literary impressionism” (58). An application in Nostromo
is that solidly defined visual art objects, like architectural
and sculptural elements and lithographs and watercolours, contrast
with the movement in time, both backwards and forwards, of the characters’
words. The blurred movement is like an Impressionist painting.
When she goes beyond Karl and other critics,
she is at her forte, focusing upon “impressionist traits”
in order to trace “correspondences between modernist art and
Conrad’s literary modernism” (58). She looks at the
art objects in Nostromo –
the statue of Charles IV, statues of the Madonna, Emilia’s
watercolours, Parochetti’s sculpture, and the cathedral altarpiece
– and recognizes the “active patterning” in the
sequence of these images, “a dynamic impression of movement”
(53) and the “cinematic orchestration of its central images”
(56). These images in the context of reality’s Fourth Dimension,
King concludes, seem “quintessentially modernist” (67).
Prompted by other critics, King considers music
in The Secret Agent, especially
the two pianos, and Bergson’s Fourth Dimension of time. When
she views the art and writing of Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944),
however, she establishes some striking resemblances with Conrad
and does so independently. She suggests no direct influence between
the artist and the novelist, as Kandinsky’s texts are Concerning
the Spiritual in Art (1911-12) and
Point and Line to Plane (1926).
King does assert that Bergson, Conrad, and
Kandinsky “overlap” in their emphasis on simultaneity
and Fourth-Dimensional space (74). “In Summer” (1904)
and “Composition IV” (1911) illustrate the aesthetic
resonances between Kandinsky’s art and The
Secret Agent. Portrayed realistically in In
Summer, a woman and little girl with a hoop divide the picture
plane diagonally and vertically and suggest to King a walking movement
frozen in time. In the abstract “Composition IV,” linear
motifs combine with geometric areas of colour and form and suggest
life and energy captured in perpetuity.
King’s drawings throughout the book,
that reproduce the art of others, are, at best, charming. Here,
however, she superimposes lines upon her interpretations of these
two Kandinsky works. The geometrical lines on In
Summer indicate the implied abstract forces of energy and
movement; the lines on “Composition IV” emphasize Kandinsky's
abstractions. In these cases the drawings contribute to King’s
position.
While Kandinsky’s art becomes wholly
abstract, in The Secret Agent
Conrad combines the literal and the abstract. While Conrad contrasts
circular and triangular motifs, the first associated with Stevie
and the second with Verloc, King points out that Kandinsky identifies
these forms as “the primary pair of planes,” and she
suggests that the two artists shared the same basic, visual logic.
She maintains that the geometrical and musical images or motifs
in The Secret Agent and in
Kandinsky’s mature, abstract paintings “typify the highly
analytical interdisciplinary … impulse informing the modernist
sensibility” (81).
King concludes with a two-page chronological
table of events in Conrad’s life and times including, for
example, the publication in 1867 of Das
Kapital and the outbreak of the First World War. This table
returns the volume to a basic level.
The provocative discussion of Conrad and Kandinsky,
on the one hand, and the simple chronological table, on the other,
demonstrates this work's inconsistency. Much of the volume is derivative
or obvious. Attempting to cover too much in a limited space, King
becomes a skimmer of a sea of material. Her strength, however, is
her analysis of Nostromo and,
especially, The Secret Agent where
she reveals her experience as an art critic for ten years and writes
with independent self-confidence.
© 2005 Rolf Charlston
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