"I am afraid of being tedious but don't know how to avoid it": Conrad's Rhetoric of Boredom

Abstract

"I am afraid of being tedious but don't know how to avoid it":Conrad's Rhetoric of Boredom Oliver Neto (bio) INTRODUCTION In an early letter to Marguerite Poradowska, from May 1895, Conrad presents his aunt with a type of complaint that would become a regular feature of his correspondence in his early years as a novelist: "Quand a moi je continue a écrire et cela n'en finit pas. Je crains les longueurs mais je ne sais pas leurs echapper [sic]" (CL 1: 215). In their edited collection of Conrad's letters, Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies offer a curious translation: "As for myself, I continue to write, and the writing never ends. I am afraid of being tedious but don't know how to avoid it" (CL 1:215). By interpreting Conrad's fear of tedium ("Je crains les longueurs") as a fear of becoming a source of tedium himself ("I am afraid of being tedious" rather than the more literal "I fear the periods of tedium"), the translation highlights a relationship between his temperament and his prose that has not yet been explored in critical scholarship: the awareness he exhibits that his writing often bored his readers, and the extent to which this awareness influenced both his work and his attempts to manage its reception at the beginning of his career. In this article, I want to suggest that in the decisive early phase between the writing of Almayer's Folly and the reception of An Outcast of the Islands, Conrad developed what I will call his rhetoric of boredom: a strategy, elaborated primarily in his correspondence, through which he played on his reputation as an author who was often boring to read in order to position himself a writer of boredom. From a very early stage, Conrad was conscious that he risked alienating much of his readership through the wandering digressions and inconsequential descriptions characteristic of his narrative style; the striking depiction of Marlow as "a tiresome, garrulous, philosophising bore" in a review of Lord [End Page 95] Jim by the Sketch (Sherry, Heritage 118) echoed sentiments that had been expressed by readers ever since the publication of his debut novel. In a sense, of course, his writing invited such criticism from the outset. The content of early novels like Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands, for example, was arguably inspired less by the genre of imperial romance with which it was often compared by critics than by the French tradition of bovarysme—works whose subject is typically a mediocre individual deluded by an elevated conception of him/herself into thinking that it is possible to escape the boredom of everyday life (Hervouet 19-23; Watt 51-53; Hampson 11-13). Perhaps even more striking to his contemporaries were the formal aspects of Conrad's work: while his elaborate descriptions of exotic settings usually led his early readers to expect an accessible type of swashbuckling adventure fiction, the opacity of these descriptions would often obscure or even replace the action that many of its readers hoped to find. However, while conscious that he risked alienating many readers through his style, Conrad was also aware that his compulsion to layer his narratives produced unusual aesthetic effects. After reading a draft of the first chapter of "The Rescuer," Edward Garnett compliments him: "You bring before one wonderfully the sense of boredom, the oppression of the stillness & the heat, & all the monotony of life" (Garnett, qtd. in Stape and Knowles, Portrait 22; original emphasis). Boredom was not simply a tangential result of what many felt to be the excessive verbosity of Conrad's prose. The experience was in fact a central thematic concern for an author whose letters document what he felt to be the endless, repetitive nature of writing itself—a process, as he complains to Poradowska, that "never ends"—and the dense descriptions, wandering digressions and profound ruminations typical of his narratives conveyed it with peculiar poignancy. Although Conrad would later complain that "the nature of my writing runs the risk of being obscured by the nature of my material" (CL 8: 215), it was the manner in which his writing style...