|
By J. H. Stape, Vancouver
Wieslaw Krajka, editor.
A
Return to the Roots: Conrad, Poland, and East-Central Europe.
Conrad Eastern and Western Perspectives, Vol. 13. Boulder/Lublin:
Distributed by Columbia University Press, 2004. viii + 308. $50.
Conrad's relationship to his cultural background
is a story of unremitting complexity. Born in the Ukraine of Polish
parents, he was from birth a figure at the margins. His parents’
life experience in what on today’s map is “Poland”
was brief, as was his, growing up as he did partly in the area near
Kiev, in Russian exile, then in the Austro-Hungarian city Lemberg
(now in Ukraine), and leaving Eastern Europe at the age of sixteen
for Marseilles and the wide world. The son of political activists,
Conrad claimed that his first memory was of visiting his father
in Warsaw’s citadel.
The relationship of Poland to Conrad has been
no less fraught: in 1898, when he was barely scraping a living from
fiction published in a couple thousand copies, a Polish novelist
attacked him for writing “popular and very lucrative novels”
for the English market instead of giving his talents to Polish literature.
More subtle or more informed views have not always prevailed since.
In the 1930s, Gustav Morf worked up a crude theory of betrayal of
the fatherland on the basis of Lord
Jim.
On the topic of Conrad and Poland, Conrad
studies continue to suffer imbalances, erasures, and blind spots.
Facts to the contrary, Conrad has been claimed for Catholicism,
and Zdzislaw Najder’s 1983 biography not accidentally refers
to Lemberg as Lvóv. Coded readings are something of a mini-industry:
fiction set in Southeast Asia and South America is “really”
about Poland and fanciful “evidence” for this presented;
“Amy Foster,” whose protagonist dies in a ditch, is,
after sufficient distortions, “about” Polish Messianism.
Conferences in Poland follow in “Conrad’s
Polish footsteps.” Those of The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
are usually held, by longstanding arrangement, at London’s
Polish Social and Cultural Centre. Polonitis, like avian flu, is
catching: the word “exile” is regularly and inappropriately
evoked for a man who took up British nationality and identity by
choice in his maturity, and Daniel R. Schwartz can write, at the
outer margins of the fantastic, of Conrad’s “life-long
desire” to return to Poland.
This selection of fourteen papers from a conference
held in Poland in 2001, usefully avoiding extremist positions, focuses
on three main topics: Conrad’s reception by several Polish
writers, the short story “Amy Foster,” and Conrad and
Russian literature. It opens with Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek’s
greeting to the conference (politics and writing are still deadly
serious business in Eastern Europe), followed by an overview of
the volume’s contents by the editor. It closes with two indices
– one to non-fictional names, the other to Conrad’s
work.
The first clutch of essays is mainly of specialist
interest. Wieslaw Krajka focuses on Kapitan Conrad, a six-part Franco-Polish
docu-drama made in 1990, presenting Conrad and his father, the poet
and dramatist Apollo Korzeniowski, as “martyrs” for
the Polish nationalist cause. Much of the essay inevitably describes
scenes in the film, with a running commentary on their ideological
biases. Krajka concludes that the writers freely lurched from fact
to fiction in pursuit of their polemical aims, bolstering (although
he does not say this) an emergent and newly challenged Polish identity
at the period when the rusty and creaking Iron Curtain was falling.
Amar Acheraïou in “The Shadow of
Poland” ranges more widely, locating a suppressed Poland in
Conrad’s fiction. He deftly assays an absence-is-presence
theme, but could have justifiably seen “Poland” less
monolithically. (There were, in effect, various Polands or constructions
of a nation that was a state of mind rather than a nation-state.)
Donald W. Rude uncovers a 1919 interview with a Polish journalist,
published in Chicago in 1924. He is wrong in claiming that this
was Conrad’s second interview (another having occurred during
his 1914 visit to Poland): a Daily
Mail journalist went down to The Pent in July 1901 for just
such a purpose (see CL 2:
340).
More skepticism as to the degree that Conrad
shaped his comments about Polish politics for his interviewer and
future audience might have been applied. Interested in the fate
of Poland at the close of the First World War, Conrad systematically
kept a discreet distance from Polish organizations in London. Not
indifferent to public affairs generally, he did write essays on
the topic and also, for instance, pronounced on women’s suffrage
and dramatic censorship.
Three essays explore the responses to Conrad
by figures prominent on the Polish literary scene of their day but
little known to the English-speaking world: that of the dramatist
and novelist “Witkacy,” the critic and drama theoretician
Jan Kott, and the journalist Antoni Golubiew. These essays focus
on the politico-ideological crosscurrents in the Polish reception
of Conrad, ranging from Witkacy’s nuanced admiration, to Jan
Kott’s rejection of a bourgeois decadent purveying despondency,
to Golubiew’s brightly tinted appreciation of Catholic values
in Conrad’s work.
Of the three essays marking the centenary
of the publication of “Amy Foster” that by Mary Harris
is the most probing. After a taut review of biographically-oriented
criticism, she goes on to argue for seeing the background of Amy
and the inhabitants of the Kentish setting as important as those
of the exotic protagonist-outsider Yanko Goorall. Despite Conrad’s
hostility to Christianity -- “I always, from the age of fourteen,
disliked the Christian religion, its doctrines, ceremonies and festivals”
(to Edward Garnett, 22 December 1902) -- Yannick Le Boulicault of
the Université catholique d’Angers, unconvincingly
acclaims Yanko a Christ figure.
Anna Brzozowska-Krajka, developing earlier
work, goes for intertextuality, adducing the influence of the Polish
Romantic tradition generally, and, more specifically, of Józef
Korzeniowski’s 1843 play Carpathian Mountaineers on the story.
The romanticization of the Carpathian highlander is found in several
texts of the period, and the case seems partly to rely on Conrad’s
awareness of a writer from a previous generation whose name he happened
to bear.
The Central Europe of the volume’s title
is hardly touched on, unless Russia, oddly, stands in for it. “Conrad
and Russia” forms a focus of interest for four critics, who
variously consider the writer’s relationship with the work
of Dostoevsky and Turgenev. Harry Sewlall focuses on Under
Western Eyes and Crime and
Punishment, drawing on a large body of criticism and on the
theoretical stances of Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva to place the two
works into fruitful juxtaposition.
Monika Majewska expands on previous work, arguing
that Dostoevsky’s Prince Myshkin and Nastasya Filippovna of
The Idiot influenced Conrad’s
Stevie and Winnie in The Secret Agent. The essays on Conrad and
Turgenev -- by Katarzyna Sokolowska on images of nature in the two
writers and Brygida Pudelko who adduces the influence of The
Sportsman’s Sketches (here called The
Sportsman’s Notebooks) on the loose structure of The
Mirror of the Sea -- necessarily make less than watertight
cases as influence studies often do, although both contain interesting
individual observations.
The conference seems to have generated surprisingly
little in the way of biographical or other “hard” scholarship,
where linguistic skills and matchless proximity to sources otherwise
difficult of access allow native Polish speakers to make particular
contributions. One assumes that despite the four decades of Zdzislaw
Najder’s meticulous and richly rewarded efforts and the patchy
survival of archives in a country plagued by strife there are still
things to turn up. Like most collections of conference papers, and
like conferences themselves, this is an occasion of mixed pleasures.
© 2005 J. H. Stape
|