Conradiana最新文献

• Contributors

G. W. STEPHEN BRODSKY, Royal Roads Military College (Retired), is author of Joseph Conrad’s Polish Soul (2016). His articles and reviews on Conrad have appeared in Conradiana, The Conradian, Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives, Zwischen Ost und West: Joseph Conrad im europäischen Gespräch, the Jagiellonian University Conrad Year Book, Modern Fiction Studies, and Conrad Without Borders: Transcultural and Transtextual Perspectives. His earlier reviews of the Cambridge University Press editions—Last Essays and An Outcast of the Islands—have appeared in Joseph Conrad Today. His articles and books in Renaissance Drama criticism, military memoirs, and military literary culture include Gentlemen of the Blade: A Social and Literary History of the British Army Since 1660 (1988).

LINDA DRYDEN is Professor (Emeritus) of English Literature at Edinburgh Napier University. She is the author of Joseph Conrad and the Imperial Romance (1999), The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells (2003), and Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells: The Fin de Siècle Literary Scene (2016). Dryden has written numerous articles on Conrad, Wells, and Robert Louis Stevenson, and is on the Executive Committee of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK).

JANA M. GILES is Professor of English at the University of Louisiana at Monroe and has served as the Managing Editor of Conradiana since 2016. She has published articles on Conrad, as well as on Samuel Beckett, James Joyce, J.M. Coetzee, and Jean Rhys, among others. Giles’s current theoretical interest is in the politics and ethics of aesthetics, and she is at work on a monograph, Decolonizing the Sublime. She was elected to Second Vice President of the Joseph Conrad Society of America in 2023.

FIONA HOUSTON has a PhD in First World War propaganda from the University of Aberdeen, with a focus on the government-sponsored material written by John Buchan and Ford Madox Ford. Her research attempts to revise current concepts of Great War propaganda and those who wrote it, and she has published work tracking the term “propaganda” throughout the publication history of the Oxford English Dictionary. She currently works as a Production Editor for The Open University.

ALAN PROCTER is an independent scholar. Following a degree in English language and literature in 1958 from the University of Toronto, he engaged for thirty-some years with teenagers and literature in Toronto suburban-school classrooms, and now continues to enjoy the worth of others’ writing.

RICHARD RUPPEL’s primary research interest is the work of Joseph Conrad—he is a past president of the Joseph Conrad So

• “Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality”: A Possible Source for Under Western Eyes
• Alan Procter (bio)

The third sentence of Under Western Eyes, in the words of Conrad’s Russian-literate narrator, reads, “Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.” In the four parts of the novel that follow, this startling claim gets manifest support in significant ways, just one of which is the lies uttered by various characters in their pursuits of various troubling, self-justified, delusional versions of unreality. But the subordinate tag to his claim, “as is well known,” in those four following parts lapses, the fame uncorroborated, as if its source in the mind of the narrator, like his very acquisition of words themselves, lay too deep to be resurrected.

In quite another book, a recent study of the poetry of the Russian Arsenii Tarkovsky, Kitty Hunter Blair, in commenting on a line of Tarkovsky’s poetry, makes reference to an echoed line in a poem of a century earlier, a “much-quoted line” (23). The poem is the brief “Silentium,” its author Feodor Tiuchev (1803–73; also spelled Fyodor Tyutchev). Blair renders the relevant lines from “Silentium” as “a thought once spoken is a lie” (23). Similarly, Charles Tomlinson translates the lines: “Utter your thoughts / They flow in lies” (lns. 9–10). If among literate Russians the line has been much quoted, then the narrator’s claim to its fame is justified, just as his recollection of the line itself is faithful.

It is possible, then, to conjecture that Conrad’s own Russian experience included this poem, thereafter perhaps lying deep within him until it resulted here in his narrator’s instinctive unreflective, unelaborated, unidentified recall of it. If so, then a paradox ensues, for Tiuchev’s poem reckons on words to proclaim the primacy of that wordlessness, of inexpression that he so cherished, the “reality” of the narrator’s third sentence of Under Western Eyes. Such cherished reality for Conrad’s characters seems to exist outside the boundaries of their word-filled lives within which they place themselves, or find themselves. Foremost among them, the protagonist and Tekla brave the costs of seeking release from the great foes of reality. In writing his novel, unique as it was in the severity of costs to his own well-being, Conrad may have been seeking for himself a similar release, his silentium. [End Page 179]

ALAN PROCTER is an independent scholar. Following a degree in English language and literature in 1958 from the University of Toronto, he engaged for thirty-some years with teenagers and literature in Toronto suburban-school classrooms, and now continues to enjoy the worth of others’ writing.

WORKS CITED

Reviewed by:

• Migration, Modernity and Transnationalism in the Work of Joseph Conrad ed. by Kim Salmons and Tania Zulli
• Richard Ruppel (bio)

To help celebrate the 2022 New Year, Yael Levin hosted a virtual meeting of Conrad scholars from Japan, Israel, the UK, and the United States to discuss two questions: Why should we teach the work of Joseph Conrad, and how should we teach it? Participants shared their earliest, bewildered encounters with Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, and The Secret Agent, their vague understanding that these stories were disturbing and strange, difficult but imaginatively stimulating: worth, we ultimately agreed, spending a significant portion of our professional lives figuring out.

Teaching Conrad, on the other hand, has become problematic for several reasons, reflecting a general crisis in the humanities. Briefly, the group concluded, it is increasingly difficult to teach Conrad because he may be considered just another privileged white male and, though he opposed colonialism and, to a degree, racism, in Heart of Darkness and other works his treatment of race is sometimes offensive. Though some academics may scoff at our students’ sensitivities and mock those who feel “triggered,” we agreed that student distress may be justified: African American students might well have had experiences that make reading “The Nigger of the Narcissus” painful, or enraging, or both.

Kim Salmons and Tania Zulli’s twelve-essay collection, Migration, Modernity and Transnationalism in the Work of Joseph Conrad, provides several different answers to these questions about why we should continue to teach Conrad and how, as writers and teachers, we can accommodate our evolving understanding of and sensitivity to ethnicity, nationality, and race in Conrad’s work.

In their Introduction, Salmons and Zulli point out that while transnationalism is currently a popular term associated with the flow of capital, goods, cultural and political beliefs and behaviors, and people across national borders, [End Page 181] “in its literary declination and in its intellectual and narrative forms, as an expression of global relations articulating the interaction of cultures and ideas through scholarly thought and fictional representations, transnationalism is a much earlier concept. Joseph Conrad described the world as ‘in a state of transition’ (Conrad 1926, 130), a perception that was not confined to geographical movement, but instead encompassed the philosophical, psychological and political changes that

This essay closely reads the “telling situations” of the Marlow trilogy. These meta-narratives represent a specific type of the storytelling “occasion” (James Phelan’s “narrative as rhetoric”) that is self-conscious. I argue Conrad was ultimately more interested in how we impose the form of a narrative onto a narration of another person’s life-events in an attempt to account for the other’s thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires than in the life-events themselves, hence my focus on meta-narrative and narration. In these meta-narratives, Marlow points to the ways in which his anticipation of his audience’s expectations for his stories (namely that a tale will set them to rest) have shaped their narrative structure. The shift in Marlow’s role as narrator from “Youth” to the subsequent tales is revolutionary: in “Youth,” Marlow’s tale is flawlessly transmitted and received, setting everyone involved at rest; in Heart of Darkness, Marlow refuses to satisfy his audience’s expectations, narrativizing Kurtz, through an unreliable interpretation of his last words, as a tragic hero in order, instead, to set himself at rest; and in Lord Jim, Marlow has transformed into someone who is wary of his own and others’ need to redeem Jim in the form of narrative. Marlow’s function as character-narrator is to make readers constantly aware that when someone—whether implied author, narrator, character, or implied reader—writes the stories of others’ lives, she does so as the result of some underlying motivation and under the pressures of her own and audiences’ expectations and narrative form.

Reviewed by:

• The Inheritors and The Nature of a Crime by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford
• Linda Dryden (bio)

The Cambridge Edition of The Inheritors (1901) and The Nature of a Crime (1909), edited by Jeremy Hawthorn, is the nineteenth volume of Conrad’s works published in this series. As is already evident from the previous volumes, this series of expertly edited and annotated works establishes the definitive texts with a wealth of additional material for context and interpretation. The Editorial Board is comprised of an international team of leading academics in the field of Conrad studies. Prior to the advent of the Cambridge Editions, the major textual resource for Conrad scholars was the less reliable, unannotated, Dent Collected editions. Researchers are now in the fortunate position of having recourse to authoritative texts for all the major Conrad works, and to the wealth of additional material gathered by the individual editors.

The current volume is a further welcome addition to the catalogue of studies dedicated to the works of Joseph Conrad. Both The Inheritors and The Nature of a Crime are often overlooked in surveys of Conrad’s literary output, and thus a whole volume dedicated to charting their genesis, interpreting and contextualizing their content, providing extensive textual notes, and offering an account of their critical reception will receive a warm reception from Conrad scholars. Although not the most accomplished works in the Conrad canon, these texts are nevertheless significant for a number of reasons, not least for the fact that, alongside Romance: A Novel (1904), they represent Conrad’s experimental literary collaboration with Ford Madox Ford. As Hawthorn says:

Omitted from Dent’s Collected Edition and accordingly often passed over by Conrad readers and scholars in the latter half of the twentieth century, these important fruits of the collaboration between two of the great modernist novelists in English are thus made available to the sort of serious consideration accorded to other works by these authors.

(252–53)

In this respect the stories are important in that they offer us examples of how these two authors influenced each other, and of how they worked together.

In Jeremy Hawthorn, the General Editor of the Cambridge Editions has engaged a renowned and highly respected Conrad scholar, whose extensive knowledge of the writer and exceptional editing skills afford this volume an [End Page 209] extremely satisfying authority. This authority is amply dem

Except for his revisitings of printed text in his own hand, few emendations can be known for sure to have been with Conrad’s approval or even knowledge. The trouble is compounded by there being two Conrads: the Conrad who came from the sea and became a published author in 1895 in his late thirties, and the seasoned author at almost twice that age in his early sixties, full of honors, who wrote most of his prefaces for collected editions of his previously published books in about 1919 to 1921. Additionally, the many variants among editions of Conrad’s texts owe their existence to house-style interventions, typing errors, typesetters’ lapses, and unwarranted interference with syntax, lexicon, and semantics by publishers’ editors. Moreover, differences between a publisher’s copy editor and a bibliographic editor lead to diverse editions. While the former aims to correct a text, improve its style, make a better book, even, of the raw preprint matter or a previously published edition, the latter aims not for a better book, but an authoritative one, as close as possible to the author’s intention; the task is not aesthetic or grammatical but forensic. The purpose of this paper is to challenge the very notion of the possibility of an authoritatively definitive text.

Reviewed by:

• Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford: A Study in Collaboration by John Hope Morey
• Fiona Houston (bio)

While the relationship and collaboration between Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford is well known and well acknowledged, the nature of the relationship, however, is perhaps no longer, or rarely, analyzed, or challenged. This is not to say that scholars necessarily agree on the nature of the collaboration: did Ford exaggerate the extent of the help he provided for Conrad? Did Conrad underplay the importance of Ford’s services? John Hope Morey’s doctoral dissertation—edited and reproduced “to make it more readily available to a wider readership” (ix) by Gene M. Moore—is by no means recent scholarship (the very opposite is true); yet its tracking and testing of what Morey refers to as [End Page 188] the “Conrad controversy” (x) is vital reading for a new generation of scholars, as well as those who have been immersed in Ford or Conrad studies for years. Many works discuss the collaborative work of these two men, yet few track and test it so thoroughly as Morey, and the publication of this work decades after its original production highlights the importance of questioning accepted assumptions which may perhaps have been repeated without enquiry for many years.

Conrad’s and Ford’s reputations have differed greatly from each other over the years, perhaps perpetuated by the loyalties of Ford scholars and Conrad scholars alike in defense of each man, a fact Morey acknowledges. He highlights the extent to which Conrad was “revered,” arguing that his “enormous popularity almost completely obscured the fact that he and Ford had ever collaborated” (2–4). He recognizes that those with “predilections in favour of Conrad [. . . .] scoff at [. . . .] the claims of Ford, while Ford adherents are often guilty of uncritically accepting what Ford said about his relationship with Conrad” (67). It is this contradiction of loyalties that makes this thesis such an important piece of work: written without bias towards either man, but rather laying out the facts and the history of this literary collaboration to try and ascertain the truth. After all, the fact that a close relationship did exist cannot be contested, and “for a period of ten years they talked about fiction, wrestled with English idiom, discussed plots and—most important of all—wrote fiction together” (151). What Morey undertakes is a close study of the nature of that relationship.

Throughout the work, Morey dissects numerous claims about the authors’ partnership, testing them against evidence and comparing published works w

Reviewed by:

• A Set of Six by Joseph Conrad
• G. W. Stephen Brodsky (bio)

THE BOOK

This newly authoritative volume of A Set of Six, the seventeenth of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad, has been published in association with the project’s founding institution, the Centre for Conrad Studies at the Institute for Bibliography and Editing, Kent State University, Ohio, and the Center for Joseph Conrad Studies, St. Mary’s University, Twickenham, London. Like the earlier volumes of the Cambridge Edition, it is a masterly tour de force of bibliographic editing.

A Set of Six was the third of Conrad’s short story collections. With its Author’s Note (and another to the first American Edition), this volume brings together the serialized tales “Gaspar Ruiz” (Pall Mall Magazine, 1906), “The Informer” (Harper’s Magazine, 1906), “The Brute” (Daily Chronicle, 1906; and McClure’s Magazine, 1907), “An Anarchist” (Harper’s, 1906), “The Duel” (Pall Mall Magazine, 1908), and “Il Conde” (first appearing in A Set of Six, then serialized in Cassell’s, 1908). Published originally on August 6, 1908, by Methuen, in its diversity and sheer quantity the volume was Conrad’s most ambitious of his collections.¹ Only his first collection, Tales of Unrest (1898)² with five stories set variously in Malaya, France, the Congo, and London, approaches that record.

The task for a collection’s editors is greater than merely the sum of its parts. Especially for a collection as diverse as A Set of Six, the challenge is exponential. Conrad’s experiences, inspirations, and sources to be traced for each tale are like a paraphrase of Polonius—geographical-topographical, historical-political, and personal-social—to be riffled for gold. The sum total of these and the ur-texts, manuscripts, typescripts, first-published, and subsequent editions, is much greater than simply a multiple of six.

Sources for the stories individually have been many and varied, sending the editors on a cross-country paperchase, and demanding their judicious choices in a maze of preprint materials. Sources have been painstakingly mined in locales as various as Yale’s Beinecke Library (Author’s Note), Philadelphia’s Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia (“The Informer” and “The Duel”), the Dartmouth College Library (“The Brute”), Huntington Library (“An Anarchist”), and Princeton University’s Firestone Library (“Il Conde”). [End Page 191]

The

Reviewed by:

• Modernism and the Idea of the Crowd by Judith Paltin
• Jana M. Giles (bio)

Crowds are in the news again in our time, as mass protests surge around the world and intellectuals debate their effectiveness at moving recalcitrant power structures to change their ways for the greater good.¹ At the end of her wide-ranging reconsideration of the crowd in modernist studies, Judith Paltin reminds us that the alienated individual has dominated modernist studies, a limitation she attributes to the tendency of literary analysis to focus on individual actors, as well as its origins in theological hermeneutics. Paltin’s book aims to find an exit from this blind alley, which prevents literary studies from extending theories of the “structure/agency problem” (167) and allows group dynamics to be overlooked.

Crowds were historically considered both a threat and a potential source of energy for the power elite, as elaborated by many of the theorists Paltin engages. What she calls the “servile crowd” is grounded in the rationalist/idealist traditions; against this, she introduces the performative, self-generative “agile crowd.” What hardens the first into subservience is adherence to a particular ideology, whereas the fluidity of the second coalesces around motile pragmatism and affective connection, bridging historical notions of liberal subjectivity and contemporary views of the heterogenous, intersectional multitude. Drawing upon an extensive group of theorists, including Gustave Le Bon, Wilfred Bion, Ernesto Laclau, Paolo Virno, Jacques Rancière, and Theresa Brennan, she argues that modernist representations of crowds anticipate the post-Fordist political multitude. Modernism and the Idea of the Crowd is organized [End Page 200] conceptually, rather than by author or chronology, in four chapters and a conclusion. Joseph Conrad and James Joyce are the central literary authors, with minor appearances from Virginia Woolf, Flann O’Brien, Sinclair Lewis, Sean O’Casey, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, and others, as well as examples drawn from historical crowd events.

The argument is structured around sets of binaries that elucidate the same fundamental opposition. I will discuss some of these terms below, here noting they can be categorized as follows:

Chapter 1, “Composition of the Crowds in Modernism,” offers evidence for the new thinking about crowds in the early twentieth century. Conrad’s Nostromo, illustrating how crowds may move towards either servility or democracy, tracks close

• J. Hillis Miller
• Jakob Lothe (bio)

J. Hillis Miller made very important contributions to critical trends as different as phenomenology, deconstruction, and narrative ethics. He also made a significant contribution to Conrad studies. Over the course of a career that lasted from the mid-1950s until 2020, Miller turned, and returned, to Conrad’s fiction, reading, rereading, and discussing key texts in the light of theoretical developments to which he had himself contributed.

If Miller’s strong and lasting interest in Conrad says something about the range of his critical interests, it also tells us something about the narrative sophistication and thematic richness of Conrad’s fiction. When John G. Peters and I co-edited Miller’s Reading Conrad (The Ohio State University Press, 2017), we were forcibly struck by Miller’s demonstration of the ways in which Conrad’s fiction responds to varying critical approaches. While Miller draws on aspects of phenomenology in his discussion of The Secret Agent in Poets of Reality: Six Twentieth-Century Writers (1965), an essay entitled “The Interpretation of Lord Jim” (1970) signals his critical move from phenomenology towards deconstruction. There is a link between this essay and his chapter on Lord Jim in Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels (1982). There is also a connection between both these discussions and narrative hermeneutics as represented by the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer. In Truth and Method, first published in German as Wahrheit und Methode in 1960, Gadamer argues that not only do we as readers interpret the same text differently, but the text itself contains interpretative elements that influence the reader’s interpretation. Lord Jim is an excellent example of such a text since the novel’s characters and narrators give varying, in part conflicting, interpretations of the main character Jim. Miller’s interpretation of these interpretations is thoughtful and thought-provoking.

While Miller’s literary criticism is consistently textual in its orientation, his studies of Conrad reveal a growing interest in, and focus on, elements of context and history. To put this another way, he becomes increasingly interested in the way in which the fiction is framed. Thus, while in an essay on Heart of Darkness from 1985 he writes of the narrative of Heart of Darkness as a general or unspecified process of unveiling, his interpretation of the same literary text [End Page 219] in an essay published in 2002 makes him consider Heart of Darkness as a critique of imperialism. Similarly, the essay “ ‘Material Interests’: Nostromo as a Critique of Global Capitalism” (2008) pays more attention to th