Narrative Self-Consciousness and the Act of Reading: Examining Under Western Eyes through the Lens of the Poetics of Fielding, Sterne, and Diderot

Abstract

Conrad’s implicit encouragement of the reader to’ see’ with him, evoked in the previous chapter, testifies to his conception of reading and writing as acts of solidarity. This intersubjective inclination reflects Conrad’s promotion of a participative poetics that tends to a shared vision and reciprocal understanding with his audience.1 Conrad’s participative poetics is the focus of the present chapter. It is examined within a broad literary and cultural context that should allow us to grasp its complexity and ramifications. The approach is comparative and consists in studying Conrad’s technical experimentation, reader-response theory, sense of the dramatic, and narrative self-consciousness through the lens of the works of three major eighteenth-century writers: Fielding, Sterne, and Diderot. My contention is that these authors’ literary and reader theories widely influenced Conrad’s poetics, although Conrad nowhere acknowledged a debt to them. And since writing is essentially an act of appropriation and adaptation,2 Conrad’s eighteenth-century influences were, unsurprisingly, themselves indebted to earlier literary traditions. They drew on ancient Greek and Roman poets as well as on Rabelais, Cervantes, and Swift. They assimilated the epic and dramatic forms they borrowed and ushered their narrative forms in new directions.3