Reviewed by: The Rover by Joseph Conrad Andrea White (bio) Joseph Conrad. The Rover. Edited by Alexandre Fachard and J. H. Stape. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. ISBN: 9781107149021. The Cambridge Edition of the works of Joseph Conrad is almost complete. This impressive undertaking, begun in 1990 with The Secret Agent, now draws near its conclusion with, appropriately, Conrad’s final complete novel, The Rover. As essential to a careful understanding of the writings of Joseph Conrad as the Collected Letters have been are these editions, and the case the editors make for the necessity of this work is a convincing one: “Owing to successive rounds of authorial revision, transmissional errors and deliberate editorial intervention, Conrad’s texts exist in various unsatisfactory and sometimes even confused forms” (xvii). Through careful literary sleuthing based on genetic principles, the editors arrive at the most probable copy-text, making these editions invaluable to scholars. As the editors claim, these texts “are as trustworthy as modern scholarship can make them” (xvii), which includes, as they themselves admit, some educated guesswork and informed logic. General readers benefit from these critical editions as well as from the editors’ essays that provide pertinent information about the novel’s origins and growth, the explanatory footnotes, Conrad’s biographical and textual sources, and the particular novel’s initial and more recent reception. This edition takes as one of its first tasks the challenging of some contentions, contemporary and more recent, that The Rover was “escape literature” and evaded the present moment rather than engaging it. On the contrary, this volume’s editors Alexandre Fachard and J. H. Stape argue the novel can be read most profitably in the context of its complicated times, for the postwar years of the writing, 1921–23, resembled in many ways the historical setting of the novel, the aftermath of the French revolution, the Napoleonic wars and the ensuing Treaty of Paris. Both periods, they argue, brought about a “political reconfiguration across the continent” (xxx). They provide further evidence of their view in a contemporary reviewer’s remark that the novel provided an “ ‘extremely subtle description of the after-effects of Revolution,’ with Arlette, Catherine, Scevola and Réal embodying ‘types of modern Russians recovering slowly from a surfeit of horrors’ ” (xxxvi). They also see in the cripple of the Madrague and the handicapped Michel, both compelling figures in the novel, reminders to contemporary readers of the shell-shocked, war-wounded and disoriented veterans presently “wandering the country’s streets” (xxxvii). In many ways, they argue, the novel is a response to current [End Page 106] problems especially in its “skepticism about violence as a means of political change” (xxxvi). In their Introduction, the editors go on to tell us of The Rover’s several anomalies in Conrad’s oeuvre. The first two are connected: the only manuscript of this novel is a brief introductory section, the writing of which taxed his gouty hand to such an extent that he reluctantly brought into his labors his amanuensis, Miss Lilian Hallowes, to whom he dictated the rest of the novel. He had employed Miss Hallowes on occasion since his work on Nostromo, but this was one of the few novels almost entirely dictated. A careful reading of the letters revealed to the editors his dependence on Hallowes, which sometimes amounted to an active collaboration (223). As was true of Henry James’s use of an amanuensis, the practice encouraged a prolix style, to the annoyance of some readers and reviewers. Conrad himself admitted in a letter to Garnett, included in an appendix here, that had he been “writing with pen and ink I would probably [have] come nearer to expressing myself ” (508). A third anomaly of Conrad’s final complete novel is the lack of an Author’s Note. These prefaces, unlike Henry James’s “lengthy and sometimes technical” introductions to his works, constituted “brief causeries: intimate ‘chats’ that discussed a given work’s origins and sources, and often highlighted its autobiographical connections” (xxx). The Rover was the only one of his texts, published in his lifetime, missing such an authorial Foreword, Preface, or Introduction. A...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Sep 1, 2022
Edith Mulhern 
Open Access