Conrad's Gout

Abstract

Conrad’s Gout John Marx (bio) Scholars of modernism employ the notion of rupture in two different ways. Critics interested in establishing a difference between high and low cultural productions introduce it emphatically and deliberately, while many other commentators on English literature use the idea less self-consciously and more chronologically to partition the Victorians from the twentieth century. This difference tends to collapse in the field of the English novel, where scholars do not consider fiction high art until modernism takes it up. Literary criticism finds a place for most novels and most novelists to one side or the other of this simultaneously aesthetic and historical divide. Not so for Joseph Conrad, who usually ends up in the middle. Michael Levenson, for example, locates Conrad at English modernism’s moment of emergence. 1 For Levenson, as for many, Conrad divides the pre-literary from the literary; his work announces that the modernist break has occurred. According to Fredric Jameson, Conrad’s writing thematizes “the emergence not merely of what will be contemporary modernism . . . but, also, still tangibly juxtaposed with it, of what will variously be called popular culture or mass culture.” 2 Conrad convinces us that the Victorian era is over, in other words, by accurately forecasting the shape of the culture to come next. Because he so effectively represents this “strategic fault line,” Conrad’s place in the literary field is singularly “unstable,” Jameson argues, “his work unclassifiable . . . floating uncertainly somewhere in between [that of] Proust and Robert Louis Stevenson.” 3 This characterization of Conrad’s position has a long history. We discover it as early as F. R. Leavis’s Great Tradition, where [End Page 91] Leavis describes Conrad’s writing as combining literariness with the extra-literary authenticity based on his experience as a sailor. Thus the best Conrad texts maintain a relationship with “ordinariness” even as they mine the aesthetic depths of a profoundly modernist “heroic sublimity.” 4 Ian Watt testifies to the classificatory difficulties posed by such an admixture of high and low when he depicts Conrad as “both more contemporary and more old-fashioned than his modern peers.” Watt’s fin de siècle Conrad both leans back toward the “solidarities of human experience . . . much commoner among the Romantics and the Victorians” and lurches forward to a modernist interest in “alienation and exile.” 5 Such unstable allegiances structure Conrad’s biography as well. In Frederick Karl’s authoritative version, Conrad’s life story breaks into distinct thirds—Pole, sailor, and novelist—that persistently bleed into one another and, ultimately, violate their own terms. 6 By canonizing Conrad for the transgressive, ironic quality of his life and work, modernist criticism has granted Conrad’s precarious position a curious kind of stability. Such stability in instability is, I argue, precisely the dynamic imagined in Conrad’s letters and his aesthetic writings. Conrad portrayed himself as an author who transformed popular material into art, who crossed over from high to low and back again in a never-ending search for raw material. He defined his work as a salvage operation, as an act of textual rescue. 7 Scholars who fix on the mix of high and low in his novels are therefore reiteratating Conrad’s own representation of his writing. In his letters, especially, Conrad made rewriting the specialized focus of his mode of literary production. By thus portraying his labor as revising, recrafting, and retooling preexisting narratives, I will demonstrate, Conrad defined it as a professional task, locating his writing in a service sector that, at the end of the nineteenth century, was well on its way to supplanting commodity production and consumption as the engine of the English economy. In doing so, moreover, he characterized himself as a manager of literary economics and as conservator of the value of literature itself. This may seem an odd claim to make, especially given that Conrad’s aesthetic instability was complemented by his equally well documented poverty. Add to this the fact that Conrad was never very healthy, and he becomes a distinctly unlikely candidate for managerial employment. While Conrad’s letters do indeed provide ample evidence, as Frederick Karl and others have shown, that his was...