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By Hugh Epstein, London
Michael Lucas, Aspects
of Conrad’s Literary Language. Conrad: Eastern and
Western Perspectives, Vol. 9. New York: Columbia University Press,
2000. 236 pp.
As a teacher of English language and linguistics,
Michael Lucas’s concern in this book is to examine “the
nuts and bolts – the syntax and pragmatics – of the
language of (Conrad’s) fiction” and to offer information
rather than judgements about Conrad’s style, particularly
his heavy use of extended noun phrases. In a scientific study, Lucas
re-examines some of the claims made by impressionistic critics by
taking selected passages from six stages of Conrad’s writing
career in order to isolate the markers that characterise his idiosyncratic
style.
To do so, he focuses on five linguistic elements:
nominal modifiers, verb phrase and clause modifiers, parataxis,
semblance and resemblance, and speech frames. Each of these is explained
for the reader having only a slim grounding in grammar and linguistics;
and the book is consciously addressed to such a reader – though
one prepared to become conversant with about twenty terms of modern
descriptive grammar. The book is a product of long acquaintance
with the whole corpus of Conrad’s works and of a fascination
with Conrad as a non-native-English-speaking writer of highly distinguished
and distinctive English.
In the five linguistic aspects listed above,
Lucas compares Conrad with a control group of eight native-English-speaking
writers (Dickens, Eliot, Stevenson, Haggard, James, Hardy, Bennett,
and Lawrence) and finds that Conrad’s writing displays marked
eccentricities: “The immediate purpose of this study,”
he says, “is to expose these eccentricities of syntax in a
systematic way.” The study’s central section does exactly
this, quantifying variations from the practice of the other writers
to show particularly that Conrad is denser in his use of modifiers
to the head noun, leading typically to complex sentences that extend
themselves through prepositional phrases and past participial structures,
extensive use of coordination and apposition, and, most notably,
through his use of adjectives, a feature of his writing that has
long attracted comment.
Lucas is especially interesting when showing
how the characteristic ambiguity that makes Conrad’s texts
so beguiling often arises from a reader’s temporary uncertainty
as to whether an adjectival or participial phrase functions simply
to identify a noun or to comment on it. For instance, he takes the
passage from Almayer’s Folly,
“she listened to Dain’s words giving up to her the whole
treasure of love and passion his nature was capable of” to
explore how a reader responds to Conrad’s slight eccentricity
in the modifying phrase “giving up to her.”
In the acuteness of many such small, local
readings as these, Lucas’s study offers the reader a convincing
linguistic grounding for some of his impressionistic reactions to
Conrad’s writing. It will, however, take a reader of fairly
secure grammatical competence and confidence to go on and apply
Lucas’s techniques to new areas of text that is the service
that his book offers to other Conradians.
For the less technically-minded reader the
most engaging aspect of this book is the substantial Chapter 5:
“Conrad’s Development,” in which Lucas plots his
“Indices of Eccentricity” through twenty-four texts
representing six stages of Conrad’s writing career, from Almayer’s
Folly through to The Rover.
Lucas makes some very interesting observations and claims about
each stage, and turns up some surprising eccentricity counts. For
instance, while most will not be surprised to find the adjectivally-laden
prose of "The Lagoon" and An
Outcast of the Islands taking first and second place as Conrad’s
most “eccentric” texts, it comes as a surprise to find
Nostromo in third place, equal
with the first part of The Rescue.
“Heart of Darkness,” on the other hand, comes in at
number twenty, equal with The Shadow-Line.
Lucas offers a broad picture of Conrad’s
writing as being high in syntactic eccentricity in the early part
of his career, at its least eccentric in the period after Nostromo,
and then slipping back into old habits of composition in his final
years. He is particularly good on the early years, comparing
Almayer’s Folly with An
Outcast of the Islands, and showing that Conrad did not immediately
respond to Wells’s criticism of his style in the latter. In
fact, he sees Conrad as initially resisting the pressure to “normalise”
his style, using the famous “Preface” to The
Nigger of the “Narcissus” as a defence of his
presentation of his fiction in answer to charges of the slow-moving
mistiness of his “haze of sentences” (Wells).
Lucas’s most arresting point is that
it is Falk which “reveals
a more or less wholesale change in Conrad’s style,”
and he goes on to examine the stylistic modifications of 1901-02,
the “peaks of achievement” (which he dates as lying
between 1904 and 1910), and the “slackening off” of
1910-15. In this latter section, Lucas is acute in his depiction
of how “The Planter of Malata,” although not a heavily
“eccentric” story, begins the reversion to an earlier
style of writing that he usefully sees as a characteristic of Conrad’s
final works.
Chapters on stylistic variations in some of
the early works and on the representation of oral narration, both
containing some enlightening individual and comparative observations
(for instance, about the different sorts of importance to the development
of Conrad’s style of Edward Sanderson, Ford Madox Hueffer,
and Pierre Loti), leave me wanting equivalent chapters on the later
works and the presentation of written narrative.
There is a sense here of a gathering together
of different papers written over the years rather than a comprehensive,
fully planned study. However, the final chapter very effectively
collects the major points Lucas wishes to make about the characteristics
of Conrad’s nominal style and answers the charge of prolixity
by demonstrating instead his lexical density. A style “characterized
by the noun phrase carrying such a heavy semantic load” and
in which “information is presented in a condensed manner in
large units of information” is one that challenges the reader
to cope with its “semantic compression,” one that perhaps
tries “to tell us too much in too short a space – trying
to give us too much detailed information all at once in order to
ensure that he conveys as clear, accurate and instantaneous impression
as he possibly can.”
And after so much detail, we can readily appreciate
what Lucas means when he compares Conrad’s front-loading of
clauses to a typically English “end-weighted” clause
pattern, leading to the major claim of his book: “Conrad is,
in a very real sense, not an English but a European novelist, and
some of his critics have not fully come to terms with this fact.”
The aim of this book is modest: to test some
impressions about Conrad’s style against a factual analytic
framework drawn from (largely Hallidayan) linguistics. Its strength
lies in the convincing precision with which Lucas has carried this
out. Some might question his concept of “an index of eccentricity,”
but Lucas’s data certainly give rise to some provocative insights
and an enlightening account of Conrad’s development.
This study’s limitation is that what
is the linguist’s completed piece will leave the literary
critic still demanding a stronger application of these factual perceptions
within an aesthetic or theoretical approach to the novels. The enterprise
thus seems incomplete. For instance, on his penultimate page Lucas
begins a fascinating discussion of the relative infrequency of finite
verbs of action in these novels, yet he does not engage with Conrad’s
philosophy of action, a major topic that seems to demand attention
after the initial linguistic perception. Equally, Lucas takes Baines
and Leavis to task for their failure to appreciate Polish and French
components in Conrad’s style, but does not estimate the contribution
of modern, more linguistically acute, critics such as Ian Watt,
Jeremy Hawthorn, and Aaron Fogel.
Despite these shortcomings, we should be grateful
to Michael Lucas for doing some “real work” in a Conradian
spirit in this book and adding to our knowledge of Conrad’s
use of language in a manner similar to Mary Morzinski’s study
of the influence of Polish on Conrad’s writing, published
in this series a few years ago. Lucas has cleared a space for some
of us to do more work in this area and provided tools that may very
well prove useful and durable in broader narratological approaches
in the future.
© 2005 Hugh Epstein
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