Nature Of Spectacle Research Articles

Conrad: Satire and Fiction

In the sixth chapter of The Shape of Utopia Robert Elliott discussed the conflict between utopian fiction and the novel. 'The novelist's art is to metamorphose ideas into the idiosyncratic experience of complex human beings', but the utopian writer, interested as he is in the ideas for their own sakes, is content to create characters that are stylized, mechanical, flat. 'The expectations we bring to the Satyricon, Gargantua and Pantagruel, Candide, Barth's Giles Goat-Boy are very different from those we bring to Emma or Sons and Lovers: it is pointless to require of Brave New World that it try to be what they are.'1 My concern is with the way that satire and the novel may combine or conflict, and, while I shall start with a few instances from Dickens, my subject is really the uneasy mixture of satire and fiction in Joseph Conrad.2 In his discussion of the 'great misanthropes', under the rubric 'the satirist satirized', Elliott had occasion to cite Conrad's remarks in Nostromo about Charles Gould: 'A man haunted by a fixed idea is insane. He is dangerous even if that idea is an idea ofjustice: for may he not bring the heavens down pitilessly upon a loved head?'3 Conrad is, as I have tried to show elsewhere, essentially concerned with the 'idea' and the way in which it possesses men, turning them, as in the case of Gould, into both victims and tyrants.4 Conrad tries to show how much our lives are governed by ideas or, as he often chooses to call them, illusions. Because the idea always outruns the actual, it is threatened by calm reflection. Such reflection will make us recognize the very unrealizability of ideas. The universe is inhospitable to man's ideas; no human meanings are accommodated in the grand spectacle of nature. Man must choose among roles: he may assert and live by idea in the face of inevitable defeat; he may adapt himself to the world as it is and ignore the