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By Richard Niland, Oxford University
Andrzej Ciuk and Marcin Piechota, editors.
Conrad's Europe. Opole:
Yearbook of Conrad Studies Poland, 2005.
Elegantly produced, Conrad's
Europe successfully addresses the subject of its title in
most of its contributions. Dominating this publication are the questions
of Conrad's views of nationality and Europe, along with the presence
of the work of Edward Said, to whom this conference, held in Poland
in September 2004, became, in effect, a tribute. As with the Ugo
Mursia Memorial Lectures (2005), this volume is not wholly
free from typographical errors, with Conrad's last work, in the
volume's Table of Abbreviations, becoming Suspence,
and Najder's seminal study of Conrad's youth doubling as a study
of classical music as Conrad's Polish
Bachground.
Such minor problems aside, many of the essays collected here take
a broad view of Conrad's career and his ideas on and understanding
of Europe. As Sylvère Monod points out in his fine "Conrad and European
Politics," even to begin to examine this subject one needs not only
a lifetime of varied reading but also of re-reading. With that caveat
in mind, it is not surprising that the most accomplished and persuasive
essays here are by senior Conradians.
Andrzej Busza offers a geographical survey of nineteenth-century
literary Europe, placing Conrad between Flaubert and Dostoevsky,
convincingly presenting Conrad as a self-consciously European writer.
While a reader without any national claims to Conrad must, it seems
clear, easily accept Conrad's essentially European temperament,
an interesting feature of this volume is the attempt to align Conrad
with a number of specific national viewpoints.
Grażyna Branny's paper on Conrad's time in Kraków concurs with
yet confronts Addison Bross's view that Conrad failed to treat in
his work the central philosophical debate between the declining
Polish Romantic view of the nation after the 1863 Insurrection and
the emerging thought of the Positivist movement. Branny indicates
that the painful circumstances of Conrad's family history explain
his refusal to engage with this polarization of views of the struggle
for the Polish nation and that Bross rather callously failed to
note this. However, it would seem that both Bross and Branny are
mistaken: this conflict is evident throughout Conrad's writing in
many forms from time-worn arguments over the presence of the romantic
and the realistic in his writing to the focus in The
Nigger of the "Narcissus" on the co-existence of both the
"work" of the younger crew and the attentive presence of a romantic,
older generation, represented by Singleton, in the guiding the ship
of state.
Branny's essay is regrettably marred by a few quirky details that
ultimately make one question the objectivity of this attempt to
study aspects of Conrad's Europe. First, there are repeated references
to the author generally known as Joseph Conrad as "Konradek" and
"little Konradek," which, when coming from anyone other than a member
of Conrad's immediate family circle in the late 1850s or 1860s,
set alarm-bells ringing. Such an approach to Conrad usually indicates,
in addition to a fixation with the photograph of the young Conrad
with riding-whip, a protective ownership of this European and trans-national
writer that belies specific national(ist) intentions and preconceptions.
These tendencies are further evidenced by Branny's overtly polemical
comments: that Conrad, for instance, was "well aware of the British
aloofness towards foreigners as well as England's reluctance to
act on Poland's behalf at the expense of the propriety of their
relations with Russia, whether tsarist or Soviet, the attitude which
has unfortunately hardly become outdated over the period of 80 years
that have elapsed since Conrad's death" (38).
The essay also claims, quite outrageously,
that Józef Retinger can be considered the "founder of the modern
idea of United Europe" (41), which argument, if only considering
Stefan Buszczyński's promotion of some degree of European unification
in La Décadence de l'Europe
(1867), is unsustainable. Finally, Retinger is here held up to be
the "Paine of Europe" (44), an assertion that, if it refers to the
same Tom Paine of Rights of Man, calls for immediate administration
of a strong dose of "common sense."
While Conrad's European artistic achievement is celebrated here,
the fraught question as to which of the nations of Europe has the
greatest claim to him inevitably rears its head. Allan H. Simmons
in his "Conrad and English Politics and Culture" begins to present
a balanced examination of the complexities inherent in the idea
of Englishness at the period of Conrad's literary apprenticeship.
For Simmons, Conrad's situation and the position
represented by characters such as Marlow allows this European author
to analyze the conflicting forces, whether pro- or anti-imperialism
or preconceived notions of class, then, and still, existing within
a national identity renegotiating its position in the wider world.
Simmons's work can ultimately be seen to direct attention to a relatively
neglected but important part of Conrad's immediate historical context:
What exactly is this Englishness that appears to be taken for granted?
Conrad wrote his most philosophical letters – in French –
to a then-latent Scottish nationalist at a time when the Irish national
independence movement (with its own claims to orthodoxy being challenged
by Ulster unionism) was preparing for another of its abortive climaxes.
His fictional crews are not only filled with
Europeans of every description but also with carefully and consciously
delineated characters of every shade from the British Isles. He
lived at a period into which were born a new generation of writers,
such as David Jones, who would later articulate the fundamentally
fractured nature of Britishness. It seems that as much as Conrad
should not be definitively and exclusively claimed for any one version
of the Polish idea, nor should he be so for England or particular
interpretations of Englishness, as he had a clear idea that this
England was only part of a multifarious yet possibly chimerical
Britain that incorporated varied and actively differentiating voices.
Simmons's essay is all the more important in its questioning of
this understanding of nationality as it is a concept rather blindly
accepted as a fixed idea in many of the volume's essays. Keith Carabine's
otherwise detailed, convincing, and comprehensive look at the circumstances
surrounding the publication of the essay written for the Trafalgar
celebrations of 1905 (later "The Heroic Age") posits that Conrad
was "foregrounding his English credentials: and writing on the most
national of all Great Britain's celebrations may well have appeared
to him as an ideal opportunity to emphasise his English lineage"
(78).
Such confusion over the terms of debate and
what actually is meant by the nation, nationality, and nationalism,
English, British, or otherwise, requires Conradian criticism to
pause and engage with theoretical work, even if early influential
studies such as those by Carlton Hayes, Ernest Gellner, and Eric
Hobsbawm, or later works by Benedict Anderson and Linda Colley,
particularly her Britons: Forging
the Nation 1707-1837, which itself struggles with the complexity
of this debate on the actual question of such an elusive national
identity.
This lack of clarity in the terms of the argument
also taints Fiona Tomkinson's "Spectral Nationalism in Conrad's
Last Novels." What is meant by "nationalism" here? "Autocracy and
War" is obviously the central text in this rich field of discussion,
as Conrad is overtly aware of the existence of conflicting versions
of what he calls the "doctrine of nationalities" in Europe (Notes
on Life and Letters, 86), from benign (if such a thing is
in fact possible) to aggressively expansionist. "Autocracy and War"
also sees Conrad at his most contemporarily "English," if one must
use this term, and it is a point where his inherited Polish attitude
to Germany coincides with the then-current climate of his adopted
nation.
In its quite frantic condemnation of Germany
– especially considering the views that appeared in the later
months of 1905 in The Fortnightly
Review, such as those by J. A. Spender, condemning the rash,
vitriolic anti-Germanism of the type represented in "Autocracy and
War" – Conrad's essay can be placed firmly in the tradition
of "nationalistic" pieces that contributed to the excitable atmosphere
of suspicion concerning the arms race with Germany in the years
before the Great War.
Elsewhere in this volume, Tanya Gokulsing perceptively
speculates on the extent of Conrad's possibly conscious use of both
Polish and French linguistic constructions in the development of
his literary style, while Christopher Cairney's essay on Byronic
influences in Conrad's writing interestingly explores the European
literary heritage on Conrad's work – if, perhaps, tending
overmuch to locate Byronic motifs almost everywhere.
Jakob Lothe's fine essay on narrative technique
in "Heart of Darkness" and Lord Jim
nicely aligns Conrad's work with that of W. G. Sebald, particularly
the compelling Austerlitz. The volume closes with tributes to Edward
Said, including extracts from his final interview with Peter Lancelot
Mallios, in which Said's final, but always intriguing, views on
Conrad are laid out.
One drawback of this volume is, like The
Ugo Mursia Memorial Lectures, it cannot convey the sometimes
sparkling performative aspects of the speakers. Sylvère Monod's
wide-ranging survey of Conrad's views on European politics reads
magnificently, but if one has had the pleasure of observing his
inimitably entertaining delivery, one must longingly, even dejectedly,
await the day when such volumes are accompanied by a recording of
conference highlights. Until then, and with stoicism, it must be
accepted that life is not all beer and skittles.
© 2006 Richard Niland
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