The Fairy Tale and Fiction: Enchantment in Early Conrad

Abstract

SOMEWHAT anticipated by Goldsmith and Scott, the major Victorian novelists Dickens, the Brontes, Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James saturate their works with references and allusions to fairy tales, achieving two main kinds of effects. On the one hand these references and allusions suggest to us that it is not by chance that the novels' characters, settings, plots, and incidents often are similar to those of fairy tales. The novels themselves become like fairy tales: though they are predominantly realistic they are also made partially unreal, strange, romantic. On the other hand and somewhat paradoxically, charming fairy tales and ones in which good people achieve happiness are also often called up for the purpose of contrast, to emphasize the pedestrian, harsh, unhappy conditions of life in the real world which the authors are portraying. Both kinds of effects are achieved by all of these writers, but as the Victorian period advanced the second of them became more and more dominant. Thus though James produced such fairy-tale novels as The American, The Bostonians, and The Princess Casamassima, these books are less like fairy tales and are now more emphatically realistic than Oliver Twist and Jane Eyre, or even Great Expectations and Silas Marner.' But in Joseph Conrad, whose use of fairy tales is unusual first of all because he mainly refers to the single motif of enchantment, we find a special case. Expectedly, there are fewer references to fairy tales in Conrad's works than in those of early and mid-Victorian novelists, and a number of these references are meant to provide images that are in contrast to reality; yet a large number of references and allusions in his works also endow many of them with the most powerful evocation since Dickens of the sense that the real world at times indeed resembles the world of fairy tales. The multiple implications that 'enchantment' had for Conrad were already revealed in some of his early works, and a study of this aspect of them offers insight not only into his sense of the nature of reality, but also into his implied belief that man can act freely only sometimes, and that he often pays a price for choosing to act wrongly. One way that Conrad talks about enchantment is as a quality perceived in the universe, usually beautiful, exotic, and superior to what is common, but also an illusion: not an aspect of reality that is different from the everyday one but a distorted perception of the true reality. It is what Almayer sees in his 'enchanting vision' of the future which he thinks he and his daughter will enjoy when they become wealthy, which they of course never will.2 Almayer learns at last that the reality of his life is different from what he had long imagined it would be, and the opening lines of Conrad's first novel stand as a microcosm not only of it but also of the action of many of his works: ' Kaspar! Makan! The well-known shrill voice startled Almayer from his dream of splendid future into the