Teaching Joseph Conrad and Henry James

Abstract

Teaching Joseph Conrad and Henry James Richard A. Hocks How I wish my title, “Teaching Joseph Conrad and Henry James,” referred to a long successful career of teaching these two authors at the University of Missouri. The truth is, I offered my course on Conrad and James for the first and only time during Winter semester, 1995, and I did so primarily because of the upcoming Canterbury conference in July of that year. I have taught Henry James for many years, but in my specialized department, Conrad is considered to be outside my field, American Literature, and therefore is taught by my colleagues with appointments in early modern British Literature. On the other hand, I began to notice in recent years that, as certain colleagues in the Conradian slot have retired or moved on, Conrad has been offered less frequently than in the past (incidentally, I suspect the same may happen with James when I retire in not too many years). In any event, I finally proposed a James/Conrad graduate class with some hesitation, and having completed it, must now report that I never did feel as though my presentation of Conrad was nearly as satisfactory as was my instruction of James. Moreover, I never felt as though what I myself learned along with the students, with our various assignments and reports, left me sufficiently informed of the mystery and the magnitude of Conrad. I felt instead, and still do, that it would probably take me the same number of years to become as truly knowledgeable about Conrad as it has with James, which only increases my admiration for colleagues like Elsa Nettels and Paul Armstrong, whose work on the two I shall cite throughout the course of this essay. So there came to be a sort of subtle imbalance to my class, not an imbalance of assignments or of attention, but of deeper understanding and cumulative wisdom. Since this was one of my principal discoveries after the fact, that same imbalance, alas, may govern these remarks—much as a key signature governs even the simplest piece of music—despite my efforts to compensate. [End Page 264] The seminar pre-enrolled ten beginning graduate students and all except one quickly admitted to invincible ignorance of both Conrad and James, the one exception being a British student on exchange from the University of Manchester. Since they were starting from scratch and had no preferred titles except “Daisy Miller,” Heart of Darkness and The Turn of the Screw—about the only texts they professed to know—I configured the readings without consulting their wishes further. Representing the two writers equally would mean examining about five major fictions apiece together with appropriate scholarship. My first decision, therefore, was to eliminate the early James corpus on the grounds it would be better to read works by both authors composed approximately during the same time period, while occasionally allowing some flexibility in order to combine works by each that invited comparison on other grounds. We began with The Princess Casamassima (1886) and followed it with The Secret Agent (1907) despite some disparity in chronology, because the two novels invited comparison thematically. With the help of earlier critics like Lionel Trilling and more recent ones like Mark Seltzer, John Carlos Rowe, and Deborah Esch, the students developed a certain appreciation for The Princess after initial puzzlement. F. R. Leavis and Armstrong primarily guided us through The Secret Agent, along with Nettels’ helpful comments about its grotesque elements. These students seemed confused, however, about a novel that at times appeared to veer from cynicism to lugubriousness (although no one in class ever used that particular word). They began to nod with agreement, however, when they encountered Eileen Sypher’s Althusserian essay on “Anarchism and Gender in The Princess Casamassima and The Secret Agent,” where she asserts that both male authors domesticate political acts in an attempt to deal with the frightening “new Woman” and gender relations. Interestingly, I found that The Secret Agent held up magnificently just because of the issues they found confusing, especially the irony, which, as Armstrong points out, presupposes a relation of mutuality with the reader, even a shared ironic awareness of...