CONRAD AMONG THE CRITICS: THE EARLY REVIEWS

Abstract

As a discipline, literary interpretation has increasingly allied itself with context. The reception of Joseph Conrad’s works refl ects this tendency to historicise and sociologise texts. There is nothing new in such pattern-making: one thinks of how certain critics stretched the theme of betrayal in Lord Jim to fi nd echoes of Patria and Polska in Patna. Fuelled by Conrad’s trans-national allegiances, this reading borrows further from a nineteenth century concept of nation to discover that here, as in the rootlessness of his seafaring life, Conrad had stumbled upon the hallmarks of the modern age. Nor do we need to stray into allegory; historical context is everywhere, functioning as a self-consciously mimetic property of the Conradian text. Almayer’s Folly’s reference to the British Borneo Company or the clamour for “rights” in The Nigger of the “Narcissus” – not to mention the “scramble for loot” (Last Essays 17) charted in “Heart of Darkness” – ensure that the reader cannot receive these texts without some awareness of the historical moment of their conception. The Athenaeum review of Almayer’s Folly hints at Conrad’s writing if not in response to then certainly on the wave of current events: “Why should he not give his readers, if he can, a sketch of the Straits Settlements, whose petition for fairer treatment, in respect of their military contribution, at the hands of the Government at home, has brought them into contemporary prominence?”1 In our attempts to recapture the taste of the moment rather than impose the judgement of posterity, it is with no less verisimilitude that we respond to the mood and