Conrad's Text Research Articles

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Reviewed by: Heart of Darknessby Joseph Conrad Yael Levin Heart of Darkness. By Joseph Conrad. Fifth Norton Critical Edition. Edited by Paul B. Armstrong. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2017. The history of the critical reception of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darknesshas transformed the text in a way that recalls one of its oft-quoted passages. For the young Marlow, the map of Africa is "a blank space of delightful mystery—a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over." Exploration and conquest spell the loss of this symbolic innocence and that blank space becomes "a place of darkness" (8). The proliferation of analysis and commentary on the novella since its original 1899 publication offers a reenactment of this process. Chinua Achebe's famous 1975 denunciation of its author contributed much to the fact that any reading is always a rereading of Conrad's text through the prism of its racial attitudes. Heart of Darknessis always already framed. The Norton Critical Edition has the paradoxical function of both reinforcing and challenging this determinism. A large part of the materials accompanying the text is devoted to the Congo's colonial past, a history of violence that quickly overshadows the story. At the same time, new critical approaches ranging from terrorism to ecocriticism demand we think Conrad's text anew. The choice of a new version of the novella, an editorial decision grounded in recent genetic research on the history of its publication, is also indicative of a real attempt to rethink the work in light of recent critical developments. Excerpts from David Van Reybrouck's recently published Congo: The epic history of a peopleprovide a welcome new supplement to the previous edition's selection in "Backgrounds and Contexts." The passages chosen present an interesting accompaniment to the fiction and shed light on some of its more elusive themes. The European practice of concubinage is one such example in that it offers a broader context for our reading of the character of Kurtz's African paramour. More pertinent, perhaps, is the description of the economic and political backdrop to the novella's action. Reybrouck opens with the 1884 Berlin conference of the major European powers to apportion territories for colonization in Africa. King Leopold II of Belgium is here authorized to oversee the "International Association of the Congo" in return for his pledge to eradicate slave trade and promote freedom of commerce. Free trade quickly translates into financial ruin for the monarch. To remedy a state of no return on his investment, Leopold nationalizes 99 percent of the land and exploits its emerging rubber industry for personal profit. The proliferation of violence that ensues brings about the devastation of the country's economy and culture. Reybrouck's narrative may end in Leopold's surrender of his power to the Belgian parliament in 1908, but the editorial choice to succeed the historical account with Leopold's "The Civilizing Mission" quickly recalls the reader to the horror of a colonial discourse that argues that "strong authority must be imposed to bring the natives… to conform to the usages of civilization" (124). One of the significant contributions this section offers the uninitiated reader is an elucidation of Conrad's part in the effort to expose the truth behind Leopold's benevolent rhetoric. Conrad's reflections on his experiences in Africa as well as his writing on behalf of the Congo Reform Association leave little doubt as to his position. Allan Simmons furthers our education on this point by untangling the history of Conrad's encounter with Roger Casement, the British consul to the Congo who authored the 1904 report that played a central role in curbing Leopold's unchecked rule. For readers eager to play judge and executioner to Conrad's place in colonial history, this is an important find. The critical corpus that cemented the novella's reputation as a canonical work of early modernism is well represented in the section on criticism. Albert Guerard's seminal study of the night journey into the unconscious provides a helpful reference to the subjective turn evident in modernist writing, a turn that finds its stylistic elaboration in Ian Watt...

Conrad and Language ed. by Katherine Isobel Baxter and Robert Hampson

Reviewed by: Conrad and Languageed. by Katherine Isobel Baxter and Robert Hampson Jennifer Janechek (bio) Katherine Isobel Baxter and Robert Hampson, eds. Conrad and Language. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016. 219 pp. ISBN: 9781474403764 (hardback); 9781474403788 (e-book). Katherine Isobel Baxter and Robert Hampson's Conrad and Languageis a wide-ranging and comprehensive treatment of a central topic in Conrad studies—that of Conrad's understanding of, and wrestling with, language, both as a symbolic system and as a national or regional tongue. With eleven chapters, an introduction, and an afterword, it approaches this subject from divergent and yet complementary methodologies—from affect studies (Josiane Paccaud-Huguet) to disability studies (Baxter) to critical terrorism studies (Andrew Glazzard). The collection might rightly be divided into two sections, with the first six chapters addressing Conrad's exploration of the relationship between word and thing—of the ability (or inability) of language to accurately represent experience—and the next five chapters focusing on Conrad's multilingualism. Thus, although the editors claim in their introduction that the chapters in this volume follow in the tradition of Jeremy Hawthorn and Martin Ray by "approach[ing] the topic of 'Conrad and Language' not from the perspective of comparative linguistics or stylistics, but rather in terms of that 'more than commonly developed consciousness of language', which produced 'an awakened philosophical curiosity about language,'" only the first six chapters really do so (6). The final five chapters follow more closely the trajectory established by the pioneering work of René Rapin, Irmina Pulc, and other scholars who mapped Conrad's negotiation between the various languages he spoke or had in his consciousness. To be sure, these chapters extend beyond the domain of pure linguistic analysis, as they establish telling connections between Conrad's "macaronic" tendencies (his habit of oscillating between languages while writing) and larger concerns of cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, [End Page 189]and colonialism, and they are quite valuable in the new angles they adopt in examining "Conrad's existence within and between multiple languages" (Baxter and Hampson 8). Taken together, the chapters in this volume offer a well-rounded and innovative study of Conrad's personal and artistic preoccupation with language. In his afterword, Laurence Davies identifies two common threads that run throughout the essays: first, he notes an attention to ethics—either the ethics of speech and writing or the ethics of interpretation; second, he detects an awareness "not so much of absence as of incompleteness, loss and imperfection" with regard to language (206, 208). To these I would like to add the following three themes: double voicings in Conrad's texts, Conrad's self-consciousness about his readers, and Conrad's struggle between desiring rigorous linguistic precision and his mistrust of language. These topics are certainly not new to Conrad studies, but they are approached with innovative methodologies that render the content and form of analysis very unique indeed. Many of the authors correctly discern a linguistic doubleness in Conrad's works. In his examination of Conrad's use of nautical language, Hampson argues that by using mild swear words, substitutes, blanks, and inventive language to represent less palatable swear words, Conrad "offers a double-voiced text: an irreproachable text for the delicate or juvenile reader and a readily translatable text for those with stronger nerves" (19). For his part, John Attridge locates a dualism within Conrad's stylistic imagination between a desire to represent concrete sensory experiences and an interest in more abstract concerns, a dualism that creates a slippage between material and metaphysical worlds (53, 61). Yael Levin also notices a doubling at the narrative level with a dichotomy consistently drawn between the character who acts and the character who remembers and narrates (68). According to Levin, this doubling—and concomitant collapsing of the distance between subject and object—demonstrates Conrad's refashioning of subjectivity along modernist lines, where the subject is no longer cohesive and impregnable but instead is perpetually open to invasion by the language of the other (70). One of the most original pieces is Christopher GoGwilt's chapter on how Conrad probes the transcription, transliteration, and translation of Malay into the Romanized print form of English, which exposes...

Envisioning dystopia: Eben Venter’s Art of Darkness

Since the publication of Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, published in serial form in 1899, there were several texts that purported to ‘rewrite’ the Conrad text. Often the relationship with the master text was remote, if not tenuous. Another rewriting of Conrad’s text came with the publication of Eben Venter’s Trencherman, first published under the Afrikaans title Horrelpoot. This text studiously mimicked the master text not only by using excerpts from it as epigraphs to each chapter, but overtly and covertly wove images and words from the Urtext into its narrative. The questions confronting a reader like myself, who is not conversant with Afrikaans, were whether this was an act of plagiarism or an exercise in intertextuality; or whether this was an act of sensationalism designed to promote sales. These questions formed the basis of an intertextual exploration of both texts. What followed was a close reading of Conrad’s text, side-by-side with Trencherman to identify their intertextual links. The theoretical basis was provided by Kristeva and Barthes. The investigation confirmed that Trencherman was indeed an exercise in intertextuality, not simply qua intertextuality but rather as a dialogical engagement with the Conradian master text. The conclusion arrived at was that Trencherman validated itself as an intertextual response to deconstruct the Conrad text and to transpose its scenario to a dystopian, post-democratic South Africa.

Rewriting Conrad: Conradian Crosscurrents in Conceptual Writing

In this essay, I begin with the contemporary British novelist, Iain Sinclair, and the contemporary London-based visual artist, Sarah Jacobs, responding to and rewriting Conrad's works. The main focus of the essay, however, is recent works by three poets who, in different ways, address the task of rewriting Con-rad. Appropriation in relation to literary production has a long history. More recently, with Conceptual Writing (in the work of Kenneth Goldsmith, Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place) appropriation has become an integral (but also controversial) poetic practice. This essay focuses on Rod Mengham's video poems based on Heart of Darkness and "Amy Foster"; Yedda Morrison's treated text version of Heart of Darkness, creating a new work by the process of erasure; and Peter Jaeger's The Shadow Line with its reframing and reconfiguring of Conrad's text. The essay concludes with a brief account of a recent collection of poems by various hands, all of which treat, revise, and respond to works by Conrad. Conrad's insistence on le mot juste, his attention to concrete detail, and his fine ear for the cadences of English prose have created texts that have proved attractive to (and productive resources for) contemporary poets.

Introduction

Introduction Christopher Gogwilt (bio), Ellen Burton Harrington (bio), and Nidesh Lawtoo1 (bio) New York, June 2017: Conradian Crosscurrents. The essays collected in this special issue of Conradiana were all originally delivered in one form or another at a conference organized for the Joseph Conrad Society of America at locations a few blocks north, west, south, and east of Trump Tower: Fordham University at Lincoln Center, the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland, the Kościuszko Foundation. The constellation of essays presented here represent only a portion of the wide array of different perspectives on display at the conference. In selecting these essays, the editors have sought to capture the spirit of the event, while foregrounding certain shared resonances across the variety of different approaches to reading Conrad. In doing so, it is our hope that readers might find in these essays a sampling not only of a vibrant conference, but also of the wider landscape and soundscape within which Conrad's fiction currently circulates. Readers will hear a range of crosscurrents that shape the way Con-rad has been and continues to be read. Readers are invited also to hear crosscurrents—and undercurrents—that give critical urgency to the way Conrad is read today. And readers may also hear the resonant promise of future readings of Conrad. The subtitle of the conference, with its double focus on "creativity" and "critique," signaled an intention to bring together two kinds of response to Conrad—the creative and the critical—that are often cordoned off from each other. There has been a veritable explosion in creative responses to Conrad at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Conrad also remains central to arguments across a range of theoretical debates. "Theory" and "creative writing" as labels barely do justice to these two different sides of an ongoing engagement with Conrad. Theory, perhaps especially as embodied by its most iconic practitioners, has rarely been content to remain within the sterile quarters to which its detractors have repeatedly tried to consign it, emerging instead as dynamic [End Page 111] and creative in its own right. Even the most classical of theoretical paradigms—mimesis—turns out not to be quite what "theory" had in mind, according to the insights Nidesh Lawtoo brings to considering its protean form, both in his own essay and in his editorial interventions in reading others' essays. Creative responses, moreover, come not only in the now-classical form of rewritings of Conrad—and in Margaret Cezair-Thompson's keynote we catch a glimpse of an exciting future instance of this to come in her forthcoming novel inspired by Heart of Darkness. Such responses also appear across a range of different media and extending all the way to what Robert Hampson explores under the classification of "uncreative" writing. The genre of the critical essay, of course, usually coordinates this contrast between the creative and the critical. Many of the essays here offer examples of this in reading Conrad's texts through the lens of other writers' rewritings of those texts, including Wiesław Krajka's intertextual reading based on Conrad's "To-morrow" and its adaptations, and Catherine Delesalle's treatment of Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River in relation to Heart of Darkness, as well as Brian Richardson's rereading of Conrad's Victory among other more contemporary versions of The Tempest. The topic of this special issue engages contributors on both the creative and critical side to adopt comparative, transnational, and interdisciplinary readings that open up Conrad studies to the "outside." These include linguistic comparisons with fellow modernist travelers such as Beckett (William Atkinson), postcolonial accounts of Conrad's and Phillips's mirroring images of Europe and Africa (Delesalle), as well as intertextual analyses of Conrad's narratives that cross over to theater and musical drama (Krajka), contemporary poetry (Hampson), cinema (Christopher GoGwilt and Holt Meyer), and extend to maps charting Conrad's (actual and imagined) journeys (Anne Luyat). This also means that many of the essays collected here challenge the critique/creativity divide as well. Some rely on narrative strategies to give dramatic form to critical reflections, a creative move at play in GoGwilt's and Meyer's dialogic...

John Stape (1948–2016)

John Stape (1948–2016) Andrew Busza I shall begin with a sad cliché. In the normal course of things, John should be giving this eulogy for me, since it is more common for the teacher to predecease his student. John was anything but ordinary or commonplace. With ironhard independence and resolve, he often went against the grain. He appears to have identified his goals relatively early and pursued them with extraordinary diligence and increasing single-mindedness. Born in Ohio, he obtained a BA Honors in English under the tutelage of Bruce Harkness, Conrad scholar and Dean of Arts. He came to the University of British Columbia with a graduate scholarship to work on his MA, also in English literature. I met John when he enrolled in my first graduate seminar on "Conrad, Flaubert, and Dostoevsky" in the fall of 1971. It soon became evident that he was one of the most promising students of an unusually gifted group, several of whom went on to pursue academic careers. Since John had already started on the Conrad trajectory, he proceeded to write under my supervision a first-class Master's thesis on Conrad. He then took what may have seemed at the time a tangential move. He went to the University of Toronto to write a PhD dissertation under Professor S.P. Rosenbaum on E.M. Forster's fascinating novel Howard's End. Significantly, John's study involved biographical, critical, and textual analysis, and from then on, these three approaches would dominate his work on Conrad. John's publications are very numerous and listing them all would fill several pages of this journal. John taught, lectured, and gave papers in North America, Europe, and the Far East. He organized various scholarly events, in particular, the extremely successful Vancouver Conrad Conference in August 2002. He was co-general editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad, consulting editor of The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad, and general editor of Joseph Conrad in Penguin's Classics. Dozens of his articles appeared in The Conradian and at least half a dozen in Conradiana. One could go on and on. In 2007, he published a biography of Conrad titled The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, which was subsequently translated into four languages. Given the extraordinary prolificness of his scholarly production, one is tempted to suspect that John, too, [End Page v] must have had several lives, especially as he found time to cultivate his love of music (opera in particular), literature, and other arts. Moreover, he always found time for friends. Were I to highlight one quality of John the man as opposed to John the scholar, it would be his capacity and talent for friendship. He knew how to make friends and how to retain them. His friendships were as varied as his personality. In friendship, John was generous and undemanding. He was a wonderful companion. His conversation was witty, full of humor, as well as of delightful acerbic irony. He always had something interesting or entertaining to say. Visiting him in the cancer clinic while he was receiving chemotherapy treatment was paradoxically an enjoyable occasion. We talked about current affairs, discussed and argued about Conradian issues, reminisced, and laughed a lot. The other lethargic and sullen patients must have thought that we were a pair of lunatics. Needless to say, John confronted approaching death with incredible courage and stoicism like one of Conrad's heroes—say, Jim, who walks with measured steps towards old Doramin, clutching at the flintlock pistols on his knees. As the end approached, with the meticulousness with which he edited Conrad's texts, John prepared everything. He organized his legacy, choosing younger successors to continue the Cambridge Edition project. He even selected the speakers and the music to be played at his memorial. For several years I was, in some measure, his mentor and teacher, but as time went by I came to learn more and more from John, and in the end he also taught me how to die. His final gesture was to raise his right hand as if in triumph. However, I shall give the last words to Conrad, to whose writing John dedicated...

Locating the Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is a story of an expedition by European voyagers into the hub of the African continent at a time when such explorations into unknown lands were commonplace. As a colonial narrative, Conrad's text has provoked intense criticism and heated debate, much of which points to the novella's racist overtones. This is largely owing to Joseph Conrad's foregrounding and representations of nativism, primitivism and degeneracy, which are writ large in the novella. Using Homi Bhabha's idea of ambivalence and Mieke Ba's concept of focalisation, in tandem, this paper exonerates Conrad's text from the charges of racism, arguing that the novella draws attention to the underlying ambivalence which is located at the very heart of colonial narrative and discourse.

Reconceptualizing Conrad as a Transnational Novelist: a Research Programme

Approaching Conrad as a transnational writer, this essay argues, poses a challenge to the Anglo-Modernist contextualizing hypothesis that has shaped his reception in the twentieth century. In responding to a condition of linguistic and cultural marginality, Conrad anticipated the artistic projects of writers such as Luigi Pirandello, Italo Svevo, James Joyce, and Franz Kafka, who have contributed to creating a polyphonic literary space within twentieth-century European literature. This transnational space is the proper context for Conrad's texts. This alternative hypothesis will require a research programme involving not only Conradians but scholars of other European literatures, comparativists, narratologists, students of British intellectual history, and all those interested in theories of the novel, particularly those developed by Mikhail Bakhtin.

Anticipations of the Accident: Modernist Fiction and Systemic Risk

In the summer and early autumn of 2008, as the global ‘credit crunch’ intensified, resulting in the collapse, part-nationalization, or forced merger of numerous venerable financial institutions, a ...

Introduction: Untimely Nostromo

Introduction:Untimely Nostromo Peter Lancelot Mallios (bio) In this foretaste of eternal peace they floated vivid and light, like unearthly clear dreams of earthly things that may haunt the souls freed by death from the misty atmosphere of regrets and hopes [. . . . ] [Martin Decoud] had the strangest sensation of his soul having returned into his body from the circumambient darkness in which land, sea, sky, the mountains, and the rocks were as if they had not been. —Nostromo (1904) We are discussing a problem of abstraction whereby, among many other things, a supreme abstract form slowly appears which is called that of Time itself, and which then holds out the mirage of some pure and immediate experience of itself [. . . . ] [But Nostromo] is rather the situation which suddenly allows the veil to be ripped away from this intolerable ontological bedrock, and it imposes it on consciousness as the ultimate lucidity. —Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (1982) It is a normal if unconscious ambition of the reader to live vicariously through an imagined experience; to live through scenes. But [in Nostromo] every promised scene is here broken off, at most after a few pages. The reader is never allowed to settle down and enjoy. And so too, if only to combat that vertigo, the reader incorrigibly longs to locate himself in time and space, and incorrigibly wants to apprehend experience in its order and degree of importance. But this longing is frustrated from beginning to end [. . . . ] The common reader's notorious general aim—to enter into the book and become one of its characters—is carefully and austerely baffled. The novelist (shifting scene, time, focus, post of observation) maliciously chops at his hands. —Albert Guerard, Conrad the Novelist (1958) [End Page 213] This special issue of essays on Nostromo has its origins in two centennial events of 2004: one, a panel at the Modern Language Association convention in Philadelphia entitled "Nostromo at 100"; the other, the day-long conference "One Hundred Years of Nostromo" hosted by the Kosciuszko Foundation in New York City. "Contemporaneity"—Conrad's timelines—was an important note at both events, as it has been in many recent "twenty-first century" discussions of Conrad's work. But the fact that the essays gathered here appear in the displaced and belated year 2008 , each heavily revised from its original format, each also significantly dislocated from its original scenes of discussion and discussants, all now appearing in a year of no totemic significance or mystic numerical symmetry with respect to either Conrad or Nostromo—all these raise the question of Conrad's untimeliness: i.e., how we might read him, and how we might need to read him, as not a figure of "our man," "our text," "our time," "one of us," but rather as a textual locus irreducibly out of phase with and disruptive of any attempt among its various audiences to construct themselves as "contemporary." Nostromo is the exemplary Conrad text to raise this kind of question because, its ample claims to contemporary "resonance" notwithstanding, there is no other Conrad work, and on so many different levels of composition, construction, and reception, that flaunts problems of temporal displacement and deferral, and challenges assimilation to any specific moment "in" time, the way this one does. "Untimely" from the very beginning, Nostromo was originally inspired by a "story" Conrad heard while in "the Gulf of Mexico" during a shipping run in "1875 or '6"—(Conrad's only visit to Latin America and one in which his "contacts with land were short, few, and fleeting," if any)—which could not be told in that moment (Nosotromo xl-xli). Rather, it had to wait until "twenty-six or seven years afterwards," when Conrad encountered a different (printed) version of the story, in a different location (England), amid a very different spatio-temporal field of available1 European historiography on Latin America and informing political events like the secession of Panama from Columbia in 1903 (Nostromo xl-xli). Actually composed between (roughly) October 1902 and August 1904, Nostromo very nearly was not indigenous to this "moment" either. Though by no means Conrad's most deferred or prolonged text in the making, it may...

The Sjuzhet as a Conradian Mode of Thinking

The Sjuzhet as a Conradian Mode of Thinking H. M. Daleski There are countless ways in which novelists may make narratives think for them. One obvious and direct way is through the use of narratorial commentary. George Eliot in Middlemarch, for instance, after a sustained and powerfully dramatic representation of her heroine in a narrative of nearly 900 pages, cannot refrain finally from telling us, through her narrator, what she thinks about the life depicted, and, moreover, from generalizing the thought: Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of a young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. (896) Charles Dickens, though he too is much inclined to narratorial commentary, uses a complex structural strategy to make his narrative think for him in Bleak House. He employs an alternating, contrasted, double narrative, one with an external, third-person narrator and the other with an internal, first-person narrator, the former using the historic present and the latter the retrospective past. The divided narrative as a whole evokes pronouncedly separate social worlds. But the two narratives move slowly closer and closer together until they finally become one, and thus what the narrative emphatically thinks is the inescapable oneness of the various groups presented, a oneness that is Dickens's large implicit theme. Joseph Conrad's mode of thinking in the two texts I propose to discuss, Lord Jim and Nostromo, is through his manipulation of the sjuzhet.1 The [End Page 151] sjuzhet is by now an old-fashioned term, and it may be as well to recall that it is defined in contradistinction to the chronological order of all that occurs in a narrative when this is reconstituted after the completion of a reading of it (i.e., the fabula), the sjuzhet being the actual order we encounter in the text as it is. I choose to use this Russian Formalist distinction in preference to Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's adoption of Gérard Genette's terminology relating to temporal order in narrative (40) because of the particular intricacy of the selected Conrad texts. Rimmon-Kenan says, with admirable clarity, "An analepsis is a narration of a story-event at a point in the text after later events have been told. . . . Conversely, a prolepsis is a narration of a story-event at a point before earlier events have been mentioned" (46). The problem about applying this distinction to Conrad's two texts is the notion of the "story-event," as the following instance in Lord Jim suggests. Marlow says that the devil has let him in for "the inquiry thing, the yellow-dog thing—you wouldn't think a rnangy, native tyke would be allowed to trip up people in the verandah of a magistrate's court, would you?" (34). This is nominally a prolepsis since we do not meet the yellow dog for some 35 pages, but if so it is highly problematic. When we encounter "the yellow-dog thing" in apposition to "the inquiry thing," we take it to be a rather far-fetched and certainly obscure figure for the Court of Inquiry that is trying Jim. Then, when we come to the actual yellow dog, we discover that the mangy tyke's "tripping people up in the verandah" of the court is merely Marlow's metaphor for what transpires. When they leave the courtroom, Marlow's companion, noticing the yellow dog, loudly comments: "Look at that wretched cur," whereupon Jim, walking ahead of them, spins round and aggressively says to Marlow, "Did you speak to me?" (70). It is Jim, of course, who is metaphorically "tripped up" by his sense of shame and embarrassingly gives himself away. The yellow dog, therefore, is real enough, but its initial tripping up of people in the verandah of the court is a non-event, unless we wish to call Marlow's use of the metaphor a "story...

Ama Ata Aidoo'sHeart of Darkness

This essay reads Aidoo's novel Our Sister Killjoy as a postcolonial revision of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. While both novels have been accused of being racist texts, this essay argues that the implied existence of Conrad's text is crucial for our understanding of Aidoo's racist representational strategies. The drama of Aidoo's novel lies in approaching and refraining from the horror of the racism of Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Bound in Blackwood’s: The Imperialism of “The Heart of Darkness” in Its Immediate Context

Research Article| December 01 2004 Bound in Blackwood’s: The Imperialism of “The Heart of Darkness” in Its Immediate Context William Atkinson William Atkinson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2004) 50 (4): 368–393. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2004-1001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation William Atkinson; Bound in Blackwood’s: The Imperialism of “The Heart of Darkness” in Its Immediate Context. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 December 2004; 50 (4): 368–393. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2004-1001 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2004 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Essays You do not currently have access to this content.

A Conradian Odyssey

Review Article| December 01 2004 A Conradian Odyssey Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel, by Adams, David, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. 249 pages. Thomas Henthorne Thomas Henthorne Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Twentieth-Century Literature (2004) 50 (4): 433–435. https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2004-1005 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Thomas Henthorne; A Conradian Odyssey. Twentieth-Century Literature 1 December 2004; 50 (4): 433–435. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/0041462X-2004-1005 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsTwentieth-Century Literature Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © Hofstra University2004 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Conrad Scholarship Under New-Millennium Western Eyes

Andrew Michael Roberts.Conrad and Masculinity. St. Martin's Press, Inc., 2000. xi + 250 pp. $55.00. Peter Edgerly Firchowd.Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness. University Press of Kentucky, 2000. xvi + 258 pp. $34.95. John G. Peters.Conrad and Impressionism. Cambridge University Press, 2001. xiii + 206 pp. $60.00. Con Coroneos,Space, Conrad, and Modernity. Oxford University Press, 2002. 199 pp. $65.00. If radical developments in Marxism, poststructuralism, feminism, and postcolonialism have posed serious challenges to traditional approaches to literary studies, then Conrad and Conrad scholars have proven to be more instead of less relevant with each new intellectual development. The recent studies on Conrad, which so deftly incorporate contemporary theory into their interpretations, are perfect cases in point. These studies, rather than being narrow and trendy, bring together a variety of theories in an attempt to honor the complexity and integrity of Conrad's texts. Perhaps the least compelling of the recent studies is Space, Conrad, and Modernity, which could have easily been titled Laughter, Foucault, and Postmodernity or Frontiers, Language, and Mysticism. This is a book that wanders from one thought to the next, making brief reference to a myriad of modernists and postmodernists, poets and philosophers, mystics and anarchists, but is ultimately less successful than it could have been. The primary problem with this book is its method of analysis, which usually consists of dense forays into theory and then brief reference to a Conrad text. Unfortunately, neither the theoretical approach nor the textual analyses are sufficiently developed. This weakness occasions much disappointment, for the content of this book promises to yield much insight into Conrad and modernism. [End Page 143] Coroneos's main argument: in contrast to the time-oriented approaches to modernism, Coroneos focuses on the "space of things." One of the primary problems that modernists had to confront was the emergence of "closed space," which is defined as "a world in which all earthly space is charted, claimed, interconnected, creating a 'closed political system'_" (15). In addition to the emergence of closed space is the complication arising from the linguistic turn in the western intellectual tradition, which has effectively blurred the distinction between sign and referent. Given all these developments, Coroneos sets his book "on the shadow-line between the space of things and the space of words" (16). This focus on space is fascinating and insightful, certainly a topic that could shed considerable light on both Conrad and modernism. But there is a lack of focus in this short book. There are intelligent discussions of the "real scandal of Galileo" (31), "the real scandal of Foucault's own work" (37), and the "scientific scandal" of "the desiring heart" (44). I found myself especially enthralled by a compelling interpretation of Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber (39-41), an enlightening discussion of anarchist geography (49-57), and an insightful analysis of philosophy's inability to grasp laughter (150-54). Given the overwhelming complexity of these extremely diverse ideas, it is little wonder that Coroneos had some difficulties bringing all of the material into a single constellation of thought. Despite the overall lack of focus in this book, there are some excellent observations throughout. By reading The Secret Agent in light of developments in anarchist geography, Coroneos intelligently argues that "Conrad's most urban novel reveals a peculiar secret: the existence of an 'open' space embedded within a 'closed' one" (57), and by reading Under Western Eyes in light of "a beguiling opposition between Russian mysticism and Western reason" (102), Coroneos does a compelling analysis of the psychology of 'Russianness' in Conrad's novel, a psychology that illuminates Conrad's politics. However, these interpretations, while insightful, are only suggestive, and as a consequence, I suspect that many Conrad scholars will be neither convinced nor satisfied. Of course, it is possible that Coroneos merely intended to initiate a dialogue that would take many years...

BOOK REVIEW: Peter Edgerly Firchow.ENVISIONING AFRICA: RACISM AND IMPERIALISM IN CONRAD'SHEART OF DARKNESS, Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 2000.

More than 25 years have passed since Chinua Achebe called Joseph Conrad a "bloody racist," and the scholarly world has yet to recover. Scarcely a year goes by without another earnest attempt to soften or rebut Achebe's charges, generally by the judicious invocation of historical context. Achebe himself has stood by the offending comment, even as an entire industry of postcolonial studies has grown up to reiterate the claim in more theoretically polite terms. Achebe's essay, "An Image of Africa," has by now attained a canonical status of its own, being regularly anthologized and invoked whenever discussion turns to Conrad's 1899 novella. Whatever one's ultimate judgment of "Heart of Darkness" itself, Achebe's remark had the decided merit of restoring what Edward Said calls the "worldliness" of the text--its powerful, messy, disturbed and even harrowing implication in the shameful violence of European imperialism. Expelled from the hushed precincts of the modernist pantheon, Conrad's text--despite, or perhaps thanks to, Achebe's intervention--retains an actuality that other masterpieces from the turn of the last century can only envy.

Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness (review)

More than 25 years have passed since Chinua Achebe called Joseph Conrad a "bloody racist," and the scholarly world has yet to recover. Scarcely a year goes by without another earnest attempt to soften or rebut Achebe's charges, generally by the judicious invocation of historical context. Achebe himself has stood by the offending comment, even as an entire industry of postcolonial studies has grown up to reiterate the claim in more theoretically polite terms. Achebe's essay, "An Image of Africa," has by now attained a canonical status of its own, being regularly anthologized and invoked whenever discussion turns to Conrad's 1899 novella. Whatever one's ultimate judgment of "Heart of Darkness" itself, Achebe's remark had the decided merit of restoring what Edward Said calls the "worldliness" of the text--its powerful, messy, disturbed and even harrowing implication in the shameful violence of European imperialism. Expelled from the hushed precincts of the modernist pantheon, Conrad's text--despite, or perhaps thanks to, Achebe's intervention--retains an actuality that other masterpieces from the turn of the last century can only envy.

Conrad's Gout

Conrad’s Gout John Marx (bio) Scholars of modernism employ the notion of rupture in two different ways. Critics interested in establishing a difference between high and low cultural productions introduce it emphatically and deliberately, while many other commentators on English literature use the idea less self-consciously and more chronologically to partition the Victorians from the twentieth century. This difference tends to collapse in the field of the English novel, where scholars do not consider fiction high art until modernism takes it up. Literary criticism finds a place for most novels and most novelists to one side or the other of this simultaneously aesthetic and historical divide. Not so for Joseph Conrad, who usually ends up in the middle. Michael Levenson, for example, locates Conrad at English modernism’s moment of emergence. 1 For Levenson, as for many, Conrad divides the pre-literary from the literary; his work announces that the modernist break has occurred. According to Fredric Jameson, Conrad’s writing thematizes “the emergence not merely of what will be contemporary modernism . . . but, also, still tangibly juxtaposed with it, of what will variously be called popular culture or mass culture.” 2 Conrad convinces us that the Victorian era is over, in other words, by accurately forecasting the shape of the culture to come next. Because he so effectively represents this “strategic fault line,” Conrad’s place in the literary field is singularly “unstable,” Jameson argues, “his work unclassifiable . . . floating uncertainly somewhere in between [that of] Proust and Robert Louis Stevenson.” 3 This characterization of Conrad’s position has a long history. We discover it as early as F. R. Leavis’s Great Tradition, where [End Page 91] Leavis describes Conrad’s writing as combining literariness with the extra-literary authenticity based on his experience as a sailor. Thus the best Conrad texts maintain a relationship with “ordinariness” even as they mine the aesthetic depths of a profoundly modernist “heroic sublimity.” 4 Ian Watt testifies to the classificatory difficulties posed by such an admixture of high and low when he depicts Conrad as “both more contemporary and more old-fashioned than his modern peers.” Watt’s fin de siècle Conrad both leans back toward the “solidarities of human experience . . . much commoner among the Romantics and the Victorians” and lurches forward to a modernist interest in “alienation and exile.” 5 Such unstable allegiances structure Conrad’s biography as well. In Frederick Karl’s authoritative version, Conrad’s life story breaks into distinct thirds—Pole, sailor, and novelist—that persistently bleed into one another and, ultimately, violate their own terms. 6 By canonizing Conrad for the transgressive, ironic quality of his life and work, modernist criticism has granted Conrad’s precarious position a curious kind of stability. Such stability in instability is, I argue, precisely the dynamic imagined in Conrad’s letters and his aesthetic writings. Conrad portrayed himself as an author who transformed popular material into art, who crossed over from high to low and back again in a never-ending search for raw material. He defined his work as a salvage operation, as an act of textual rescue. 7 Scholars who fix on the mix of high and low in his novels are therefore reiteratating Conrad’s own representation of his writing. In his letters, especially, Conrad made rewriting the specialized focus of his mode of literary production. By thus portraying his labor as revising, recrafting, and retooling preexisting narratives, I will demonstrate, Conrad defined it as a professional task, locating his writing in a service sector that, at the end of the nineteenth century, was well on its way to supplanting commodity production and consumption as the engine of the English economy. In doing so, moreover, he characterized himself as a manager of literary economics and as conservator of the value of literature itself. This may seem an odd claim to make, especially given that Conrad’s aesthetic instability was complemented by his equally well documented poverty. Add to this the fact that Conrad was never very healthy, and he becomes a distinctly unlikely candidate for managerial employment. While Conrad’s letters do indeed provide ample evidence, as Frederick Karl and others have shown, that his was...

Conrad's Fiction as Critical Discourse , and: Conrad's Existentialism , and: Joseph Conrad (review)

Reviewed by: Conrad's Fiction as Critical Discourse, and: Conrad's Existentialism, and: Joseph Conrad David Leon Higdon Richard Ambrosini . Conrad's Fiction as Critical Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991. 253 pp. $49.50. Otto Bohlmann . Conrad's Existentialism. New York: St. Martin's, 1991. 234 pp. No price given. Ruth L. Nadelhaft . Joseph Conrad. Atlantic Highlands: Humanities P, 1991. 147 pp. $39.95 cloth; pb. $12.50. Neither Richard Ambrosini, Otto Bohlmann, nor Ruth Nadelhaft has contributed what could be called a breakthrough study to Conrad criticism, but in their various ways their books have provocatively, sometimes authoritatively, filled particular gaps in and asked necessary questions of existing criticism: the agreement between critical expression and narrative practice, the exact nature and expression of Conrad's existential beliefs, and the roles of feminism and the female in Conrad's fiction. Ambrosini's Conrad's Fiction as Critical Discourse is perhaps less useful when it hews closely to its announced thesis than when it inquires into the exacting practice of narration. Conrad critics have generally ignored Conrad's reviews, essays, notes, and prefaces (except for the "Preface" to The Nigger of the "Narsissus"). Holding that Conrad's failure to use "a readily identifiable theoretical language" accounts for this dismissal, Ambrosini argues that "Conrad did in fact attempt to articulate such a language" and that he constantly "strove after a synthesis of abstract principles and life experiences." To recover this language, Ambrosini first identifies five controlling tropes—work, idealism, fidelity, effect, precision—which suture experience and principles together with the words on the page. These tropes enabled Conrad "to synthesize the aesthetic and moral implications of his artistic intention" and stood him well even in his later years. Approaching Conrad's texts in this way, Ambrosini fully justifies Conrad's challenge that a work should manifest "its justification in every line." Ambrosini ignores the first two Conrad novels and focuses his attention on Tales of Unrest, especially "Karain," to show how Conrad "sets to work an internal consciousness which originates the multilevel structure of many characteristics of the Marlow tales." I remain puzzled as to why Ambrosini starts, so to speak, in médias res, ignoring Almayer's Folly, its 1894 preface, and An Outcast of the Islands. Since Conrad's search for new forms is central to Ambrosini's discussion, his argument sometimes seems headless, not having the discarded forms of the early 1890s before the reader. For this reason, the second half of the study seems more satisfactory, more stimulating, than the first. Ambrosini's thorough consideration of the "mirror effect" relationship between story and tale in Heart of Darkness ingeniously traces the interplay between the unidentified narrator, the several states of Marlow's personality, and Kurtz in which "the telling, rather than the event itself, generates meaning." This approach enables Ambrosini to pull together observations on image and sensory patterns, ironic juxtapositions, the proleptic nature of temporality, and the reader's role. The reading develops with considerable subtlety and insight, exacting attention to the text, and constant dialogue with the existing critical statements. (One must not ignore the book's extensive notes, because the argument may otherwise seem hermetically isolated from historical, cultural, and critical statements.) The two chapters on Lord Jim convincingly refute the "break" readings which see the Patna and Patusan sections as standing apart from one another. Ambrosini [End Page 509] returns attention to the tripatrite division based on the different narrative techniques and holds that "at the end of each segment the themes embodied in Jim's figure are synthesized with the author's discourse in theoretical problem. . . . He reinstates Stein as an authority and finds Marlow's interview with him "Conrad's most sustained and explicit use of the critical discourse in his fiction." Lord Jim is, for Ambrosini, the perfected embodiment of fused principle, event, and narrative choice. After it, he writes, come "a funambulatory control of space, time and point of view, as well as a heavy-toned irony practiced at the expense of his narrators." Ambrosini fully documents the nature of Conrad's aesthetic thought, but is Conrad indeed an existentialist writer and thinker? This question has been asked many times...

The Exclusion of the Intended from Secret Sharing in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness"

In a stirring but sketchy essay entitled Finding Feminist Readings: DanteYeats, Gayatri Spivak writes that alternative readings might well question normative rigor of specialist scholarship through a dramatization of autobiographical vulnerability of their provenance. Such autobiographical dramatization, Spivak points out, has already begun in work of Jacques Derrida and other male critics, but the privilege of autobiography to counter rigor of theoretical sanctions is accessible to very few of world's (47). The feminist reader's access to a text like Conrad's Heart of Darkness is especially problematic in terms Spivak considers. Not only is tale concerned with a kind of male experience associated with traditional Western high art (penetration into a female wilderness, confrontation with monstrosity, male rites of passage, life at edge), but those who write about it may be tempted to ally themselves with heroic consciousness that Conrad presents. The feminist reader, in contrast, is apt to be more skeptical about and alienated from this masculinist tradition, and her access to Conrad's text may be so inhibited that her commentary is thrown off its most responsive and useful center. Her pleasure-in-the-text in Roland Barthes' sense may be rendered uneasy. Her understanding of Marlow or Kurtz may produce not psychic plenitude but psychic penury. The question of readerparticipator's sense of self in imagined contexts obtrudes, and in reading Heart of Darkness she becomes aware of a particular kind of ambiguity. Even if sexism of Marlow and Kurtz is part of horror that Conrad intends to disclose, feminist reader cannot but consider that text is structured so that this horror-though obviously revealed to male and female reader alike-is deliberately hidden from Kurtz's Intended. If Heart of Darkness is one of Ur texts of modernist high art by which our reading (and teaching) habits are tested, it is a text which makes us tend to distinguish between women inside texts and women outside texts, between women as fictive characters and women as living readers. Conrad's tale thus opens several difficult questions: must woman reader neutralize awareness of her gender so that her reading becomes objective (non-autobiographical) in way that male readings supposedly are? Is this neutralization in any way a complicity with sexism of mainstream commentary? Might not disclosure of her own autobiographical vulnerability throw light on Heart of Darkness as an example of how high art functions, or on question of why, in Spivak's words, the traditions and conventions of art are so brutally sexist (60)?