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By Richard
Niland, Richmond American International University, London
Joseph
Conrad: Voice, Sequence, History, Genre, edited by Jakob
Lothe, Jeremy Hawthorn, & James Phelan. Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 2008. 285pp.
Introducing his influential essays On the
Aesthetic Education of Man (1795), Friedrich Schiller insisted
he would rather his critical ideas “collapse from their own
feebleness than maintain themselves by means of authority and borrowed
strength.” While acknowledging the “Kantian principles
upon which the propositions that follow will for the most part be
based,” Schiller conceded that his thoughts only needed to
be freed “from their technical formulation, and they will
emerge as the time-honoured utterances of common reason.”
Schiller had reservations about the proximity
of impenetrably presented but otherwise straightforward (apart from
its accompanying jargon) theorizing to the sacred realm of Art,
something that, while it helped illuminate the understanding, tainted
the purity of aesthetic mystery:
But it is just this technical formulation,
which reveals the truth to our understanding, that conceals it
once again from our feeling; for unfortunately the understanding
must first destroy the objects of the inner sense before it can
appropriate them. Like the chemist, the philosopher finds combination
only through dissolution, and the work of spontaneous Nature only
through the torture of Art. In order to seize the fleeting appearance
he must bind it in the fetters of rule, dissect its fair body
into abstract notions, and preserve its living spirit in the sorry
skeleton of words.
Approaching a collection of essays on narrative
theory and the work of Joseph Conrad, one might expect to find the
editors asking, like Schiller, for “some measure of forbearance
if the following enquiries should remove their object from the sphere
of sense in attempting to approximate it to the understanding."
The twelve essays contained in this handsomely
produced volume, from the front of which stares Conrad’s profound
and distant gaze, do not on the whole strive to say anything new
about the author, but largely constitute exercises in style, where
the focus of enquiry becomes, like that in Lord Jim, “not
the fundamental why, but the superficial how” (56) of Conrad’s
understanding and representation of narrative and history.
There is ultimately, as anyone who has embarked
on such a critical venture will recognize, a certain frustrating
predictability to investigations of time, narrative, and history
in Conrad’s work, as it is almost guaranteed from the outset
that the only achievable critical conclusion is one that informs
us yet again (and in what becomes an increasingly conventional “insight”)
how it is that we can never attain epistemological certainty and
that we are doomed to wander in a sceptical void that, if not embraced
as a refuge from self-delusional certainties, leads ineluctably
to nihilistic despair or, worse, to a false belief in conquered
knowledge. Conrad, we are reminded, followed a literary aesthetic
challengingly devoid of narratological and historical absolutes.
Emerging from the hospitable proceedings of
a colloquium held in Oslo in the autumn of 2005 in which knives
were drawn and brandished on such controversial questions as to
what exactly constitutes metalepsis, the papers presented here range
from the impressive to those that wade deeply into the world of
narrative theory, dragging, one would suspect, a reluctant Conrad
along with them, an author whose works offer a rich field of speculation
for such conjectures.
The Introduction explains how the field of
narrative theory has allowed us to have a deeper understanding of
the complex machinations of Conrad’s work. The editors tell
us that “Had narrative theory existed as a well-known body
of criticism at the turn of the twentieth century, many reviewers
of Conrad’s fictions might have been a little less frustrated
and dismissive” (3). However, as emerging archival research
demonstrates, not as many of Conrad’s contemporaries were
as baffled or dismissive of his work as the current consensus would
have us believe. Numerous contemporary popular reviewers of Conrad’s
work had a thorough understanding and appreciation of his methods
and venerated his literary style.
Divided into four subsections containing essays
on each of the title’s sub-headings of Voice, Sequence, History,
and Genre, the first on Voice is perhaps the most disappointing
in the volume, containing rather perfunctory essays, and relatively
few insights, on some well-worn aspects of Conrad’s work.
Zdzislaw Najder, whose work is always immediately of interest to
the Conradian, usefully discusses “The Personal Voice in Conrad’s
Fiction;” James Phelan speculates on “Lord Jim
and the Textual Uses of Recalcitrance,” blandly informing
us again that “Conrad’s audience cannot trust Marlow’s
interpretation” (50) of Jim’s story; and Gail Fincham
runs through some well-worn narrative conundrums in Under Western
Eyes.
Things pick up in the section on Sequence,
which contains some perceptive accounts of Conrad’s uses of
narrative and its relationship with physical and temporal movement
throughout his writing. Jeremy Hawthorn unveils Conrad himself as
an “implicit narrative theorist” (98), whose writing
displays complex ideas on narrative as a complement to Conrad’s
own interpretation of his journey through life. Hawthorn compares
“the syntactical generation of a sentence to a succession
of life choices” (88), and manages to convey a slow motion
like effect of the endless possibilities and fates awaiting Conrad’s
characters as the writer shaped their destinies mid-sentence.
This focus on movement continues as Susan
Jones analyzes how “Conrad harnessed the rhythmic and gestural
properties of human action to his narrative strategy” (101),
exploring the representation of narrative and bodily movement in
“Heart of Darkness” and fin-de-siècle
European culture, while Josiane Paccaud-Huguet investigates the
culminating and short-lived “Conradian Flash of Insight”
in an epistemological analysis of certain Conrad texts.
The section on History opens with an interesting
reading of “The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’:
History, Narrative, and Nationalism” by Allan H. Simmons,
exploring how the text offers a “maritime myth of national
identity” (141). The essay treats expansively the political
and cultural context of the composition of Conrad’s seminal
early story alongside the competing but balanced worlds, language,
and identities inherent in the voyage from Bombay to London.
J. Hillis Miller’s discussion of Nostromo
as a “Critique of Global Capitalism” engages the reader
owing to the writer’s position in literary criticism over
the last forty years, but the essay evokes the tone and brevity
of a fireside chat, albeit an enjoyable one. Still, for the purposes
of this volume it is a slight presentation of how the events and
characters in Nostromo, especially Holroyd, remind one that the
United States has played an interfering role in Latin American politics
ever since the Monroe Doctrine (1823), the Spanish-American War
(1898) and the Roosevelt Corollary (1904), and on into the twentieth
and twenty-first centuries.
Daphna Erdinast Vulcan treats historiography
and the urge to historical narrative in Nostromo alongside a discussion
of the sense of community, or lack thereof, in “Nostromo
and the Writing of History,” while Christophe Robin’s
“Time, Narrative, and History in Nostromo”
constitutes a mystery of sorts in that it is comprised of extended
quotations from Derrida, Foucault, and, most notably Paul Ricoeur,
who eventually wrests control of the authorship of this essay from
Robin. Robin’s speculations of the absent-presence in Conrad’s
work and contemporary philosophy usurp the critic’s writing
to such an extent that he himself must be found “elsewhere,”
and certainly not in the work bearing his name, with Robin the real
absent-presence in this critical jigsaw.
The book closes with two good essays: the
first by J. H. Stape on “Narrating Identity in A Personal
Record,” a counterpart to the Introduction to the recently
published Cambridge edition of A Personal Record, and finally
“Conrad’s Lord Jim: Narrative and Genre”
by Jakob Lothe, which discusses how Lord Jim “appropriates
and cumulatively combines aspects of other sub-genres of fiction,
including the sketch, the tale, the fragment, the episode, the legend,
the letter, the romance, and the parable” (236). Like Lothe’s
important major work Conrad’s Narrative Method (1989),
this essay gives the reader a renewed determination to lose oneself
again in Conrad’s inexhaustible literary and philosophical
landscapes.
If, on a quest for meaning, one were stopped
for the night at the Spouter-Inn admiring the artwork, then a few
of the essays published here might assist in the journey towards
deeper Socratic understanding. Others, however, would be an unnecessary
distraction from the occupation of detecting glimpses of the white
whale in the brushes and strokes of finer artists.
© 2008 Richard Niland
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