The Grotesque in Conrad's Fiction

Abstract

C ONRAD has yet to be named a master of the grotesque. In recent books on the in literature by Wolfgang Kayser, Arthur Clayborough, and Philip Thomson, Conrad is not even mentioned.' Critics have analyzed the in the works of Dickens, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Golding, and Sherwood Anderson, among others, but no one has made an extended study of the in Conrad's fiction.2 This is surprising in view of the importance in Conrad's fiction of characters and situations to which the novelist himself applied the term grotesque and which exemplify qualities by which twentieth-century scholars have identified the in literature. The distortion of persons and objects, the yoking of incompatibles, the fusion of the fearsome and the ludicrous, inducing in the reader a sense of dislocation and insecurity-those elements stressed by Kayser and Clayborough and others in their definitions of the grotesque-are pervasive in Conrad's fiction from Almayer's Folly to Victory and The Arrow of Gold. The is of essential importance in Conrad's treatment