Conrad's Almayer's Folly: Structure, Theme, and Critics

Abstract

THOUGH IN 1894 Edward Garnett, as a reader for Fisher Unwin, thought Almayer's Folly a remarkable first novel, that conviction is not generally shared by important Conrad critics today. The change of attitude over this elapse of time, and toward a minor work at that, is not surprising. It would not, normally, cause more than a comment on shifting tastes. But the case with Almayer's Folly, while it concerns our accurate understanding of this single volume, also involves somewhat more. Certain current indictments against the book have been made the cornerstone of evidence to support sweeping judgments about much that Conrad wrote, and about the essential limits of Conrad's imagination and artistic control. A careful reading of this novel, and an estimate of the criticism to which it has been subject, is therefore of some general, as well as particular, point. The most extensive objections to Almayer's Folly appear in Thomas Moser's prominent work of re-evaluation: Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline (Harvard, 1957), pp. 50-54. Moser's principal dissatisfaction begins with Conrad's shaping of the subplot. The romance between Almayer's daughter, Nina, and the Malay prince, Dain, is taken as a preposterous melodrama lacking in moral and psychological interest. The sub-plot is judged to serve no valid aesthetic or philosophic function. The relationship of the lovers is viewed as logically inconsistent and inappropriately represented in the novel's imagery. Still a second love story in the book (Almayer's unrequited, incestuous love for Nina), it is charged, serves only to obscure the meaning of the novel. Con-