MICHAEL JOHN DISANTO. Under Conrad's Eyes: The Novel as Criticism.

Abstract

Opening by quoting Ford’s remark that Conrad’s life ‘was a perpetual reading’ (p. 5), DiSanto discusses Conrad’s engagement with issues, ideas and forms in his nineteenth-century predecessors Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Charles Darwin and Friedrich Nietzsche. While we have little evidence of Conrad’s reading other than scattered references in the letters, autobiographical works and essays, such biographical allusions are of little importance, for ‘the best evidence of Conrad’s reading is in the language, style and structure of his novels’ (p. 29). Basing his explorations of intertextuality with his interlocutors on Conrad’s own texts—‘Heart of Darkness’, The Secret Agent, Nostromo, Under Western Eyes, Lord Jim and Victory—DiSanto shows how Conrad reconfigures and problematises such issues as the will to know and the avoidance of knowledge, the potential harmfulness of sympathy, and the competing instincts for self-preservation and self-destruction in the thinking of his interlocutors. That Conrad’s fiction indeed exhibits a ‘responsive insight, one capable of answering to the fullness of existence found in the language and thought of other writers’ (p. 15) has been argued by many critics who support Conrad’s claim to Garnett (made in relation to Under Western Eyes) that ‘I am concerned with nothing but ideas, to the exclusion of anything else’ (p. 132). But this recognition suggests limitations in DiSanto’s approach. Remarking that ‘postcolonial readings of Conrad’s works have all but monopolized the critical discussion in recent years’ (pp. 15–16), DiSanto chides readers: ‘Rather than read Conrad from an early twenty-first century perspective, we should explore Conrad’s early twentieth-century view of his major predecessors’ (p. 16). Why ‘rather than’? Why not ‘in addition to’? Finding myself, and my colleague Attie de Lange, among a list of critics accused of (implicitly ahistorical) postcolonialising, I feel the need to justify my own publications about Conrad’s intertextuality as historical (Plato, Rousseau) as well as postcolonial (Stockenström, Mda.) By way of antidote to diSanto’s strictures, I offer the wisdom of that eminent Conradian and literary scholar, J.Hillis Miller: Works of literature do not simply reflect or are not simply caused by their contexts. They have a productive effect in history. This can and should also be studied. To put this another way, the only thing that sometimes worries me about the turn to history now as an explanatory method is the implication that I can fully explain every text by its pre-existing historical context. But the publication of these works was itself a political or historical event that in some way or another changed history. I think that if you don’t allow for this, then literature is not much worth bothering with. (Hawthorne and History [1991], pp. 152–3.)