Conrad's Text Research Articles

Seven years ago, when Second International Conference of Conrad Scholars met in Canterbury, England (Conrad's burial place), a reviewer for Listener scathingly referred to the Conrad industry. Now five recent books' give us our chance to decide if industry is providing good service to readers or if it is merely creating a self-flattering mise en abyme for book makers. Reading these new books, I felt that service is a real one as long as there teachers willing to digest mass of material in such a way that students will not be put off by enterprise. We as far as ever from having a basic book on Conrad, but same must be said for every major author, and such a notion may be a dangerous fantasy anyway. five new books disagree among themselves as much as older books on Conrad do, and of course only teachers will have time and incentive to correlate their findings. Courage for task comes from two opposed approaches to reading, both of which true and necessary. first is illustrated by Socrates' remark in Plato's Phaedrus, inciting reviewer (and teacher) to be on guard against all interpretations: [Written words] seem to talk to you as though they were intelligent, but if you ask them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you just same thing for ever. By this rule Conrad's collected works will never tell us anything other than what they said at time of publication, and we risk contaminating them each time we add our own commentaries. opposite approach to reading was well presented by T. S. Eliot when he said that no one ever reads same book twice, for (as he wrote in The Dry Salvages), we are not those who saw harbour [here Conrad text] / Receding, or those who will disembark. That is, we now neither people we were when we first read Conrad nor people we shall be when we read him next. In interlude between readings, we (if not text) may be changed by a helpful interpreter. New books like ones under review offer us a chance to change for better. Certainly five enriched my own readings, prompting me in some cases to point to intransigence of Conrad's words, but in many cases showing me points where I must change in relation to them. contexts of criticism have altered dramatically in last five years; however, these books at least steer clear of difficulties posed by deconstructionists, and in fact they suggest a demand for returning to context of Conrad's own time as a necessary condition for understanding him. Freudian psycholo-

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