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By Véronique Pauly, Université
de Versailles
Allan H. Simmons, Joseph
Conrad. Palgrave Critical Issues Series. London: Palgrave, 2006.
256 pp. £52.50 paper £17.50
Allan H. Simmons’s book makes good on the
promise on its dust-jacket: to “provide first-time readers
with in-depth contexts for appreciating a writer whose work is often
challenging, while readers already familiar with Conrad’s
fiction will find new perspectives with which to view it.”
Simmons certainly does both in this monograph, which
is not so much a how-to-study-Conrad guide as an invitation to plunge
into Conradian complexities. Conrad’s fiction is never simplified
for the sake of the first-time reader, but is relocated in its biographical,
historical, and cultural contexts. It is thus presented in a way
that enables him or her to form a balanced view of Conrad’s
complex negotiations of the concerns of his age and of his own subject-position
as insider and outsider.
The first chapter, “Introduction: Life and
Letters”, provides biographical and cultural background but
does more than just this, for in his presentations of historical
landmarks, Simmons usefully espouses Conrad’s “penchant
for opening dual perspectives” (3). Britain’s imperialism
is thus presented as based on an economic necessity as much as on
ideology, and the “Conservative imperialism [that] dominates
British politics at this period” is counterbalanced by “portents
of imperial disintegration” and “strains of old hierarchies
of authority and power and an incipient democracy” (14).
To mention but one instance of Simmons’s
method, Conrad’s exile is related to “the 3.6 million
people who emigrated permanently from Poland in the half century
before 1914” (5), which establishes “unrest” as
the central experience of the modern condition and introduces the
emphasis on “alienation, exile, homelessness and homesickness”
that characterizes Modernist literature.
The subsequent chapters are studies of Conrad’s
works “broadly follow[ing] the chronology of Conrad’s
career, identifying its various phases and grouping the fiction
according to shared concerns” (viii). The second chapter is
devoted to Almayer’s Folly and An Outcast of
the Islands, with references to their-companion piece, The
Rescue, which is dealt with at greater length in the final
chapter (“Late Novels and the Growth of a Reputation”).
Viewed as “consecutive stages of the same narrative of European
exploitation of the Archipelago,” the three novels that form
this “Malay trilogy-in-reverse” (210) gain historical
depth and find their rightful place in the Conrad canon as instances
of Conrad’s “sustained focus on the dissolution of the
European self in the face of cross-cultural encounters” (29).
Without engaging in a theoretical discussion of
exoticism and Orientalism, Simmons offers stimulating perspectives,
reminding the reader, for instance, that at the turn of century,
the “appropriation of foreign settings … extend[ed]
to the other arts” (38), with Gauguin leaving Europe for Polynesia
in 1895. His suggestion that “the Malay islanders become,
simultaneously, symbols of Conrad’s own strangeness and the
means by which he can smuggle in his own view of Western Europeans”
(38) is one of the constant reminders in the book that in Conrad
narrative instability and perspectival reversals – now shorthand
for literary Modernism and the modern experience of fragmentation
– always introduce frictions and tensions whereby positions
of supremacy and claims of superiority are challenged.
In Chapter 3, “Conrad and the Sea: The
Nigger of the "Narcissus" and Typhoon”,
Simmons’s readings of these two texts are remarkably detailed
and comprehensive given the few pages allotted to them. Combining
scholarship and pedagogical clarity, they delineate Conrad’s
“irreconcilable antagonisms”: “the clash between
the creed of individualism that typifies nineteenth-century liberalism
and the pressures for social organization and regulation deemed
necessary for communal as well as individual survival (60).
This chapter, in particular, offers a stylistic
analysis of a section of the storm sequence in Typhoon
in which, with “impressionist vividness” (69), “the
havoc wreaked by the storm extends to the grammar used to describe
it” (70). The texture of Conrad’s prose is thus made
palpable, enabling the reader to hear, to feel, and to see.
In Chapter 4, “The Marlow Trilogy: "Youth,"
"Heart of Darkness," and Lord Jim,” the
emphasis is laid on the fact that Conrad’s engagement with
Britishness, through Marlow, is co-extensive with an awareness that
“for every Western narrative of colonial adventure a parallel
narrative exists in which it is the Westerner who is perceived as
“Other” (85). Thus, “Youth” is presented
as simultaneously a tribute to the British Merchant Service and
a paradoxical story of initiation in which the young Marlow’s
experience of the East can never amount to any true “knowledge”
of it.
The discussion of “Heart of Darkness”
usefully places the text “within its own historical moment”
(91), and does not give undue credence to Achebe’s critique
of Conrad’s alleged racism (only mentioned in the final chapter
devoted to the critical reception of Conrad’s works). Racist
clichés and paternalistic turns of phrase are duly identified
and contextualized, with reference to Roslyn Poignant’s Professional
Savages: Captive Lives and Western Spectacle (Yale University
Press, 2004), and textual analyses enable the readers to understand
the use to which they are put in “Heart of Darkness.”
A balanced study of the question must then conclude,
as Simmons does, that while the text presents a European view of
the jungle, it is one that is “both threatened and reformulated
by contact with Africa” (91) and one in which the Europeans
do not come out favourably. Similar emphasis is laid in the pages
on Lord Jim in which the novel’s juxtaposition of
Modernism born fully grown and “stereotypical and formulaic
representation of exotic space in colonial fiction” (110)
is viewed less as a flaw than as the means whereby the very logic
of colonial fiction is undermined.
Simmons’s approach is refreshingly no-nonsense
at times, which, in the pages on Nostromo (Chapter 5: “The
Political Novels”) leads him, for instance, to offer a less
flattering reading of Mrs Gould than customary, stressing that,
having “benefited nicely from the exploitation of Costaguana
… she can afford not to be as materialistic as her husband”
(129). Like Marlow, whose “sympathy with Africans coexists
with his racism that marks him out as a product of the ‘Scramble
for Africa,’ Mrs Gould appreciates the picturesque culture
that her husband is changing forever” (129).
Equally useful is the literary perspective from
which The Secret Agent is viewed, which extends from Dickens,
of course, through Henry James’s Princess Casamassima
(1886) in which London was already linked with anarchism, to Thomas
Mann and his description of The Secret Agent as an illustration
of the recourse to tragic-comedy, and its resultant grotesque style,
which characterizes modern art.
The overall impression that emerges from the pages
on Under Western Eyes is that the novel raises more questions
than it answers, as a consequence of Conrad’s systematic hollowing
out of everything that could have provided stability. As Simmons
demonstrates, the Teacher of Languages is no Marlow, and his presence
does not provide the “us” community from which value-judgements
can be passed.
His confrontation with the issue of language offers
no valid counterpoint to the novel’s pitting of the language
of faith that paradoxically characterizes the revolutionaries against
Razumov’s language of reason which itself leads the character
to the “unsustainable” “designation of his pre-Haldin
life as ‘truth’” (154). One may also see some
irony in the unfortunate misprint that transforms the Hôtel-Pension
de la Roseraie into the Hôtel-Pension de la Roserie. Likewise
Michael Ignatieff’s The Needs of Strangers becomes
The Language of Strangers, which confirms that undoubtedly,
as in Under Western Eyes, language is of the essence.
It is an index of this book’s comprehensiveness
that it includes Conrad’s shorter fiction (dealt with in Chapter
6, which isolates five of the most frequently anthologized pieces:
“Karain: A Memory,” “Amy Foster,” “Falk:
A Reminiscence,” “Il Conde,” and “The Secret
Sharer”) as well as Conrad’s reputedly worst novel,
The Arrow of Gold (glossed in the final chapter “Late
Novels and the Growth of a Reputation”) about which Simmons
stresses the construction of Rita as both an art-object and a woman
constituted by male discourse. The rigid prose and stilted modes
of representation only confirm Conrad’s uneasiness with the
“woman question” with which he had experimented in Chance.
That Conrad should have got with Chance
(Chapter 7: “Conrad at the Crossroads: Chance, Victory,
and The Shadow-Line”) the much-desired popularity
that his earlier fiction failed to achieve will always remain a
matter of wonder. For if, as Simmons demonstrates, Conrad’s
intention was ‘to expose outmoded patriarchal attitudes”
(178), it does so with such ambiguity that one would see it as more
likely to baffle or even irritate the female/feminist reading public
that it consciously targeted. And while, in true Conradian fashion,
that novel “rejects any easy distinction between male oppression
and feministic salvation” (179), Mrs Fyne’s dubious
and rather unpalatable embodiment of feminism and Marlow’s
misogynistic remarks require a reader competent enough to perceive
the irony in Conrad’s method and fine distinctions.
Often harshly judged, Victory presents
a fresh crop of interpretive problems addressed in this chapter.
Simmons subscribes to Conrad’s construction of Lena’s
self-sacrifice as “victory” (which should attract the
wrath of feminists) and proves his point convincingly by suggesting,
that while Lena’s sacrifice destroys Heyst’s scepticism,
the belatedness of Heyst’s conversion to life-giving forces
aligns him with other Conradian sceptics, Decoud and Razumov, who
cannot “understand anything outside (themselves) except through
the experience of separation” (118). The chapter closes with
a discussion of The Shadow-Line in which the interplay
between the sub-title, “A Confession,” and the epigraph,
“worthy of my undying regard,” defines the text as a
fictionalized autobiography as well as a tribute to both maritime
tradition and the soldiers of the First World War.
The final chapter is devoted to both the late novels
and the critical reception of Conrad’s works, which, considering
the decline in Conrad’s artistic achievement is sensible.
While the pages on The Rescue take up the argument developed
about its two companion-pieces, highlighting again that Conrad’s
return to the settings of his earlier works marks the beginning
of the colonial story the triptych relates, those devoted to The
Rover stress “the development in Conrad’s portrayal
of the outlaw who, like Leggatt, now exists in large part to assist
the law-abiding” (216) and the victims of a transgressive
society. Simmons’s summary presentation of the critical literature,
which includes all the major figures of Conradian scholarship, will
guide the reader through successive shifts of emphasis, past and
present.
The stress placed on cross-cultural encounters at
times downplays other issues, in particular, the place of the visible
universe in Conrad’s fiction, his fascination for the mists
and fogs that led him to the suspicion that the aim of the universe
might be purely spectacular. Throughout the book, numerous references
are made to Conrad’s essays and letters, which enables the
reader to form an adequate notion of Conrad’s psychological,
philosophical, and political outlook. Allan H. Simmons’s book
will undoubtedly prove a valuable reference-book.
© 2007 Véronique Pauly
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