Abstracts
(listed alphabetically by name)
Gönül
Bakay
Beykent University,
Istanbul
Lord Jim: A Hero or a
Coward?
One of the main problems
the book presents is the problem of Lord Jim’s death. How can the reader
interpret Jim’s death? Does he share Ian Watt’s views that he “died for his
honour”? Or does he believe in Tony Tanner’s view that Jim’s death is “an easy
way out” or an escape from life’s complication ? Does he share with Conroy the
view that he died “essentially in disgrace” because he abandoned Jewel and knew
that he was leaving Patusan for renewed political chaos? Perhaps one can
conclude that Jim has been true to the deepest impulses of his personality and
to the uneasy contradictions that constitute his nature. Perhaps his death can
explained, as J. H. Stape puts it, in terms of “a desire to evade compromise and
contingency , and thus a longing for the release that can be found only in
death.” It is not the events themselves but our reaction to events that
determines their effect on us. So it is the reader’s reaction to Jim’s death
that will determine whether he can be regarded a hero or a coward.
Susan Barras
Sussex, England
“Sly
Civility”: Mrs Almayer’s Performance of Colonial Resistance in
Almayer’s
Folly
This paper
is based on James C Scott’s ideas (derived from Erving Goffman’s theory of
frontstage and backstage performances in everyday life) about the ways in which
“subordinates” (the colonized) employ impression management to conceal their
“hidden transcript of indignation” in the presence of their colonial “masters.”
It demonstrates how Mrs Willems and Mrs Almayer create ambiguous roles for
themselves through which they can protest about their treatment by their
colonial “masters” (their husbands, Willems and Almayer) whilst at the same time
appearing to remain within the boundaries of acceptable female behaviour laid
down by Malay society. The paper argues that these women’s frontstage
performances also include the use of the Malay phenomenon called “latah” (spirit
possession) to express a coded version of their hostility and indignation whilst
simultaneously appearing to conform with the public transcript.
Katherine Isobel Baxter
The British Library,
London
The Literary
Collaboration of Romance
Despite the importance
placed on the historical, political, and ironic, modes of Conrad’s writing,
romance pervades much of it. A perfect instance of this is can be found in the
eponymous hero of Conrad’s great political/historical novel: Nostromo is a
figure straight out of romance, and in particular, out of Romance, since
he is weirdly prefigured by the charismatic bard, Manuel de Populo. Romance
provides us with the opportunity to explore the relevance of romance to Conrad’s
work; it contains numerous overt and covert allusions to the European literary
tradition of romance, including references to Byron, Don Quixote, and
echoes of Scott, in the portions normally attributed to Ford. The insistent
repetition of the term “romance” itself throughout the whole novel demands that
the reader contemplate its aesthetic qualities as a romance: we are not to read
it simply because it is a romance (its subject matter and plot are clear enough)
but as a romance engaging with a grand European tradition.
Martin
Bock
University of
Minnesota Duluth
Joseph Conrad and
Germ Theory
This paper would briefly
summarize the history of the emergence and popularization of germ theory in the
latter 19th century, trace Conrad’s preoccupation with sanitation and infection
(and how his maritime career and personal health my explain this preoccupation),
and outline his portrayal of contagious disease from Outcast through
The Shadow-Line. I will begin with a discussion of Willems (born in
Rotterdam!) as an example of malarial neurasthenia, a condition from which
Conrad may have been thought to suffer and one that suggests the close
connection between the will, physical, and psychological health. A discussion of
The Nigger of the “Narcissus” will 1) speculate on why the “diagnosis” of
tuberculosis is never explicitly stated and how social class may account for
this “omission” from the text; 2) discuss evidence and foreshadowing of
contagion in the text and who, in addition to Wait, might be infected; and 3)
trace the metaphoric resonance of disease and contagion, especially in relation
to the story’s political themes. After suggesting how disease and “pestilence”
is developed in the ideological themes of The Secret Agent, I will focus
on The Shadow-Line. In this later novel, Conrad returns to earlier
Victorian theories of disease (popular in the late 1880s) such as miasmal
infection and the relation of bodily health to the exercise of will. The paper
will close with a summary of the importance of contagion as a metaphor linked,
in Conrad’s fiction, to his political, psychological, and moral themes.
Christopher Cairney
Doğuş University,
Istanbul
“Those Dutchmen are
all alike”:
Race Relations and
Biopsychology in Conrad’s “Karain”
Despite the aesthetics
of a good story set in a country far away, many scholars seem drawn, implicitly
or explicitly, into arguments about Conrad’s relation to Imperialism, or
colonialism, because of the time and setting of many of his stories. The
simplistic view is that he is either guilty of “sin” or innocent of the charge
of racism. Achebe and Said, for instance, famously see him as a racist, more or
less, while Najder and others feel that he is not, or moreover that he is not
writing about “the Orient” at all, but about Europe. MacKenzie and Donovan have
put forward other views. But Conrad’s story “Karain” seems a good place to
problematize with the results of the usual “Heart of Darkness” arguments, since
Marlow’s sympathetic but decidedly etic perspective in the novella is replaced
in the short story by Karain’s constructed faux-emic one.
Keith
Carabine
University of Kent
“Poor Conrad”:
Conrad, Rothenstein, Newbolt, and The Royal Bounty Fund, 1905
A variety of people
(among them Jessie Conrad, Henry James, and Archibald Marshall) referred to
Conrad as “poor Conrad”; but this paper concentrates on William Rothenstein who
used the epithet because 1) he “was always in difficulty over money”; 2) “he
suffered much from gout”; 3) “he strained after an unattainable standard of
perfection”; and 4) “his nerves sometimes made him aggressive.” Rothenstein was
the instigator of an appeal led by Edmund Gosse to the Royal Bounty Fund, which
granted Conrad the maximum award of £500. My paper will concentrate on the
extraordinary consequences of this award which greatly offended Conrad, leading
to a round of letters between Rothenstein and Henry Newbolt (the beleaguered
trustees), Gosse, and Conrad.
Mario Curreli
Università
di Pisa
Was Cloete
a Dutchman? Four Different Ways of Telling a Story in Within the Tides
Conrad was
well aware that the four tales collected in Within the Tides cannot
aspire to the unity of artistic purpose of the Youth volume, as they do
not constitute an organic whole. In fact, as he wrote to Galsworthy, these tales
are not so much art as a “financial operation.” Even so, these minor
productions can be of some value to the reader, since, as Conrad stated in
several letters, their diversity of setting, subject, and treatment offers an
interesting essay in craftsmanship as a deliberate attempt at four different
ways of telling a story.
Laurence Davies
Dartmouth College /
University of Glasgow
Rattling the Cage:
Conrad, Nicolas Freeling, and the Metaphysics of Crime
What better time or
place to consider the presence of Conrad in the work of Nicolas Freeling than a
conference in Amsterdam? English by birth, Irish by education, French by family
connection, Freeling was working as a chef in Amsterdam when he fell foul of the
Dutch legal system for having helped himself from the kitchen. His experiences
in jail so fascinated him that he began to write what are known to aficionados
as police procedurals. Roughly a third of his thirty or so novels are set in the
Netherlands, the rest in France. Most of these works contain some allusion to
Conrad, more frequently a Conradian motif, or even a Conrad intertext;
Valparaiso, for example, is an homage to The Rover. Conrad also
features in Freeling’s culinary books, and above all in Criminal Convictions,
his investigation of the metaphysics of criminal fiction, which takes as its
main subjects authors such as Conrad, Dickens, and Stendhal. Freeling had no
patience with either those devotees of the genre who insist on conformity to a
series of hobbling structural requirements or those who profess to defend
literary fiction by relegating such stories, whatever their artistic strengths,
to outer darkness. Literary misbehaviour, the turning upside down of formal
expectations appealed to Freeling, as it did to Conrad, the former rattling the
bars of the generic cage from within, the latter from without. Both these
writers can be seen as vital figures in the evolution of a specifically European
mode of writing about criminal activity, its ethics, its politics, its social
context, its metaphysics. To quote Freeling: “The matter... and the theme of the
crime novel are death and destruction – the ruin of the body and the distortion
of the soul. Vital: central to our existence.”
Stephen Donovan
Blekinge Institute of
Technology, Karlskrone
Conrad and the Rogue
Wave
Last year, researchers
at MaxWave, a project affiliated with the European Space Agency, announced that
they had made a startling discovery using satellite imaging of a 200 sq. km
quadrant of the South Atlantic ocean. Previously thought to be exceptional
events that occurred only once in a millenium, freak waves exceeding 25 metres
in height were found to be regular and indeed relatively common features of the
ocean. During the very three-week period of their survey, and in uncanny
confirmation of the research team’s findings, two large cruisers, the Bremen
and the Caledonian Star, were both struck by 30-metre waves in the South
Atlantic and only narrowly escaped sinking. The discovery has prompted a major
revision to the Linear Model upon which ocean wave movement has hitherto been
calculated as well as to ship and oil platform design. Moreover, and presumably
thanks in part to the thematizing of monster waves in films such as The
Perfect Storm (2000), Billabong Odyssey (2003), and The Day After
Tomorrow (2004), the phenomenon has received extensive coverage in national
media in countries ranging from South Africa to Sweden, reminding us of the
sea’s enduring power to capture the public imagination. This paper presents an
analysis of Joseph Conrad’s several treatments of rogue waves in his fiction and
prose. Presenting modern photographs of the phenomenon as well as an engraving
of the Juno foundering in very heavy seas, published in Wędrowiec,
his favourite boyhood magazine, it argues that the monster wave exercised a
life-long fascination over Conrad, who, in turn, assigned it a precise status in
his writing somewhere between maritime legend and sailors’ secret.
Linda Dryden
Napier University,
Edinburgh
H. G. Wells and
Joseph Conrad: A Literary Friendship
A reference to “The Heart of Darkness” in H. G. Wells’s When the Sleeper
Wakes: Story of Years to Come (1899) is an example of self-conscious
intertextuality on Wells’s part; when it comes to Conrad, much more subtle
Wellsian influences are seen to come into play. In his Preface to The Nigger
of the “Narcissus,” Conrad makes a direct riposte to Wells’s
criticism of the obfuscations in An Outcast of the Islands. In other
examples in “Heart of Darkness” we can detect parallels with Wells’s The
Invisible Man and The War of the Worlds. This paper traces some of
the literary allusions that imply an acknowledgement of Wells’s art and
criticism in Conrad’s work, especially in “Heart of Darkness.” Further, a sense
of the zeitgeist that surrounded the emergence of literary modernism can
be glimpsed in the debates about artistic style and vision that Conrad and Wells
engaged in. Such a discussion brings to light a more intimate understanding of
the difference in artistic vision that ultimately undermined this literary
friendship.
Jérôme
R. Ensch
University of Kent
The
Community in the Narcissus
The paper focuses on the community on board the Narcissus
and analyses the complex and subtle power relations between Wait and the crew.
The first part deals with notions of solidarity and how the crew is amalgamated.
However it equally deals with the omniscient themes of pity and compassion which
represent a threat to the integrity of the community. The second part
investigates the disturbances which threaten to unhinge the solidarity on board
the ship, and focuses in particular on Donkin, Belfast, and Wait.
Hugh Epstein
London
“The fitness of
things”: Conrad’s English Irony in “Typhoon” and The Secret Agent
The main thrust of the
paper is to find some links in Conrad’s development as an English writer in the
sort of comic irony that he first uses (in my opinion) in “Typhoon,” his most
thoroughgoing sea fiction, and develops in The Secret Agent, the most
land-locked of all his productions. I want to argue for the importance of
“Typhoon” in the development of an English ear and sensibility that has its
flowering in the later novel. So I (gently) argue against Michael Lucas’s
linguistic finding – that “Falk” represents the fault-line after which Conrad’s
prose is normalized or naturalized into literary English. The point is to see
how astonishingly Conrad ventriloquises an English sensibility through his use
of English idiom. I say ventriloquises because, rather than inhabit it as an
Edwardian novelist, this language is always the object of scrutiny even as it is
employed. It is this that really makes both works so funny.
Katie
Featherstone
University College
London
Conrad’s Novels of
the East Indies and Multatuli’s Max Havelaar
This paper will discuss
the work of the Dutch-born Indonesian scholar G. J. Resink (1911-1997), in
particular his examination of the influence of Multatuli’s famous Dutch
anti-colonial novel Max Havelaar (1860) in shaping Conrad’s perception of
the Malay Archipelago in his novels. The real importance of Resink’s arguments
for the Conradian lies in his detailed knowledge of the geographical areas of
the archipelago mentioned in Conrad’s novels. The aim of this paper will be to
address the importance of Resink’s claims, focusing in particular on the
geographical aspect, narrative structure, and character similarities that were
identified in both writer’s oeuvres.
Frank
Förster
Universität Leipzig
Conrad’s German
Reception
The paper gives a brief
survey of the German editions of Conrad’s works and his German literary
reception deduced from over one thousand reviews and articles from newspapers
and magazines from 1902 until today. The first German translations were already
released in 1900, but Conrad was not well known in Germany until the first
complete edition of his works was published (1926-39). In the Third Reich his
works were not prohibited but undesirable. A second and newly translated
complete edition (1962-84) was warmly welcomed. In the German Democratic
Republic only half of Conrad’s works were published.
Oliver
Garrett
University of Exeter
On the Borders of
Self and Ethics
My paper explores
concepts of subjectivity and ethics in terms of the “border” as an organizing
principle. Attending primarily to the writings of Joseph Conrad, I examine a
selection of texts to postulate a theoretical model of the author’s “politics of
narration.” Moving to consider the interface between various forms of border and
concepts of the self and ethics, the paper engages with several influential
approaches to the role of literature within culture, including those of Fredric
Jameson, Homi K. Bhabha, and Edward Said. Whilst arguing for the influence of
the border in Conrad’s formulations and understandings of subjectivity, the
paper also seeks to assess his treatment of the border as a politicized zone of
cultural mediation. In this respect, the paper offers an exposition of examples
of Conrad’s aesthetic innovation informed by boundaries between categories and
their re-presentation as loaded sites of ethical contest. The thesis focuses on
Conrad’s short stories “An Outpost of Progress,” “The Lagoon,” and “The Secret
Sharer” to assess the changing ideological tensions between ethically motivated
literature and the historical and political contexts in which it is produced and
received. As a general principle then, the paper proposes the ways in which
Joseph Conrad’s writings inhabit complex historical, cultural, and political
border positions. Moreover, the paper’s analysis of the author’s formal and
thematic fictional techniques reads them as part of a “negotiating” process,
staged around a border conceit, between artistic practice and political praxis.
Wacław Grzybowski
University of Opole
Conrad’s Vision of Human Freedom in the Light of Karol Wojtyła’s Anthropology
It
may seem that Conrad’s skepticism creates insurmountable distance, enhanced by
history, between him and Karol Wojtyła (John Paul II). However, both are
inheritors of the heroic Polish tradition, of literary and patriotic character,
which found the element of free will crucial for both individual existence of
man and social fate of nation. Wojtyła’s search for the secret of human free
will, nourished by his reading of Polish literature and contemplative
Chrislotology, found its expression in his poetry and philosophy. His “Person
and Deed” can shed unique light upon the silhouettes and secrets of the heroes
of Conrad’s novels (Lord Jim, The Rescue, Under Western Eyes).
Jacek
Gutorow
University of Opole
Thresholds of
Audibility: Conrad’s Soundings
This is a tentative
analysis of various phenomena related to what might be called a philosophy of
voice” in Conrad. My point of departure is a letter to Edward Garnett in which
Conrad points to “all states of consciousness” understood as varied vibrations
of sound waves (letter of 29 Sept. 1898). Thus, sound and voice turn out to be
metaphors, or rather metonymies, of presence and identity, and all the acoustic
“events” (e.g. articulation/ inarticulation, links between writing and speech,
narrative modes and frequencies) can be explained as existential and cognitive
issues. One notorious accusation directed against Conrad has had to do with his
apparent overuse of adjectives related to moments of incomprehensibility and
obscurity. This is a serious accusation as it strikes into the heart of Conrad’s
project – the latter is not an expression of ignorance and the resulting
artistic failure.
Robert
Hampson
Royal Holloway,
University of London
Conrad’s
Malay Fiction and European Women Travelers in the Archipelago
European
women in the Malay archipelago have not been given the attention they deserve.
The paper will consider two groups of these women: those traveling for
professional reasons and those traveling for leisure. It will focus on
Victory and The Rescue. It begins with Victory and women’s
orchestras in the archipelago. Norman Sherry and others have suggested models
for the Ladies Orchestra. The paper will consider the representation of Lena and
the Ladies Orchestra in relation to real-life women’s orchestras. The paper then
moves on to The Rescue and leisure travel. It will begin with Isabella
Bird as a professional traveler and travel-writer. It will then consider
travelers such as Annie Brassey, who traveled with her husband in the
archipelago. The paper will end by suggesting a new source for Mrs Travers and a
consideration of Mrs Travers in relation to this new context.
Richard J. Hand
University of
Glamorgan, Wales
A “Grim and Weird”
Play: Basil Macdonald Hastings’ Adaptation of Victory
Basil Macdonald
Hastings’s dramatization of Conrad’s Victory (produced 1919) proved to be
a highly successful production enjoying a run of over eighty performances at the
Globe Theatre in London with actor-producer Marie Löhr as Lena. Despite the
popular success of the play, the reviews of the production were fascinatingly
mixed ranging from the laudatory to the systematically destructive. In the
adaptation, Conrad’s 1915 complex and ambiguous novel is shifted towards the
certainties of melodrama: the play presents a rigidly black and white universe
with good and evil characters. Such melodramatization is unsurprising in the
context of post-Great War popular theatre. Despite the formulaic aspect to the
work, the play remains a fine example of the genre of late melodrama and is
especially interesting in its characterization, in particular the depiction of
“foreign” characters in a post-war context and the stage construction of the
“woman-hating” Mr Jones. The implied homosexuality of Jones is not in the least
diminished on the stage and yet was overlooked by the notoriously stringent
British board of stage censorship – the Lord Chamberlain’s office – which
despite being concerned that the play was “lurid” and “dreadful” in its
violence, delighted in the populistic thrills and intrinsic “literariness” of
the Victory adaptation and granted permission for the play to be
performed without a single cut being made. This paper will look at the
Victory play with special attention to the reception in the form of
theatrical reviews in newspapers and the stage censor’s confidential report.
Jeremy Hawthorn
English
Institute, NTNU, Trondheim
Reading
and Writhing: The Exotic and the Erotic in Joseph Conrad
This paper
will use the quotations from four of Conrad’s fictional works as a
starting-point to explore a particular “family of associations” in his fiction.
It will argue that this family of associations enables Conrad to explore
sexuality in a partly displaced manner through descriptions of “exotic”
vegetation, and through a concern with the response of European observers to
this vegetation. Here and elsewhere we are presented not with straightforward or
“objective” descriptions of nature but with descriptions that present a
displaced image of “exotic” fecundity and that also appeal to suppressed or
repressed elements in the male European observer that can be released if he
becomes an “outcast.” In these passages, moreover, nature is mediated not just
through cultural difference but through cultural history. Whenever Conrad
describes “exotic” vegetation the Garden of Eden is not so very far away, with
its ability to yoke together ideas of purity and innocence with those of
corruption, sensuality, and sexuality.
While making some
general comments on the way in which Conrad depicts sexuality in terms of its
displacement into exotic vegetation, this paper will focus in particular on
An Outcast of the Islands as a key text in the understanding of Conrad’s
portrayal of erotic and sexual topics.
Jenaeth Higgins
IES, Chicago
The Problem of
Perspective?
Narration and Moral
Subjectivity in Heart of Darkness
The widespread
recognition of the merits of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness has been
tempered by critical challenges to both its vague descriptive language and moral
inconclusiveness. Stylistic questions have frequently arisen as to the value of
disguising the text’s meaning in inscrutable statements and imagery. Thematic
queries have often led back to the tale’s central predicament: how does one
reconcile Marlow’s irrational commitment to hope with his damning knowledge of
mankind’s innate depravity? Ultimately, I believe that these issues of form and
content are interconnected. I wish to explore the manner in which narration, for
Marlow, constitutes an act of self-determination that allows him to transcend
the need to choose between two seemingly mutually exclusive values, hope and
truth. Conrad’s use of non-specific imagery and multiple narrators calls
attention to the inherently problematic nature of the narrative process.
Conrad’s imprecise style and his reliance upon multiple narrators can be
explained and justified as instruments of his attempt to affirm the subjectivity
of the ideas of hope and truth, and hence, the irrelevance of any moral struggle
to determine the primacy of one or the other.
Douglas Kerr
Hong Kong University
“Typhoon”: Chinese
Boxes
Rather than reading
“Typhoon” as an enquiry into kinds and theories of language and representation,
this paper examines it as a story about a ship carrying a cargo – or are they
“passengers”? – of Chinese coolies through a storm. Each coolie has a box, and
there is a fight over their contents. The ship itself is a Chinese box, a
container of Chinese. And the tale is a Chinese box, with at least one secret
inside it. There are two stories about the Chinese in “Typhoon.” One story gives
an epitome of the history of China, with the Chinese cast back through
misfortune and natural disaster into something like a state of nature (from
Hobbes, via Herbert Spencer), dehumanized, and scrabbling in the dark. Inside
this is another story which shows the Chinese reduced to penury by the very
global traffic that claims to save them. Bound to indentured labour, they have
been doing the real “dirty work of empire” around the world in a parodic
inversion of the White Man’s Burden, under a system of local exploitation (the
Bun Hin Company) which itself defers to the real mastery of the global hegemon
upon whom it depends. Both these stories are to be read in the context of the
history of the coolie trade, and the immediate aftermath of the Boxer Rebellion
(and its reporting in the West).
Joanna
Kurowska
The University of
Chicago
“European-ness” and
Interpersonal Relations in Conrad’s Malay Fiction
This paper will explore
the concept of “European-ness” as considered by Conrad’s various characters and
investigate its significance in shaping interpersonal relations among the
Europeans as well as between the Europeans and non-Europeans in Conrad’s Malay
fiction. The aim will be first to distinguish “European-ness” as identity (as
Conrad understood it) from “European-ness” as an ideological construct. My paper
will show that notwithstanding their essential “sameness,” the Europeans who
share the sense of European-ness as a “construct” remain in discord with their
surroundings and among themselves.
Ann
Lane
Japan Women’s
University, Tokyo
Silk Plants in Malata
What exactly is the
Planter growing on the Malata Concession? What are the five-year-old “silk
plants” which induce Professor Moorsom, “the fashionable philosopher of the
age”, to take an interest in the plantation that is lucrative rather than
scientific? In this story we see Conrad’s political acuteness operating in an
unfamiliar area, that of “economic botany.” Conrad’s 1913 story connects with
the contemporary great race to discover an industrially viable artificial silk
(which was to be useful in celluloid film, parachutes, and aircraft wings). But
the story is even more interesting for prefiguring a stock-market scam of the
early 1920s, involving a kind of “silk plant” being grown on a concession on the
Perak River, and Henry Wickham, the same man who had earlier smuggled out rubber
seedlings from Amazonia to give to Sir Joseph Hooker at Kew Gardens, with the
eventual result of breaking the monopoly on wild rubber. Conrad’s story links
the topics of science and colonial expansion.
Yannick Le Boulicaut
Université Catholique
de l’Ouest, Angers
Going
Overboard: Ruffians First!
The main
protagonists in Joseph Conrad’s works are usually marginal characters
experiencing liminal situations: Jim, Nostromo, Lingard, Marlow, and Heyst are
left unexpectedly stranded on the shores of life, they hesitate to stride over
the “shadow line,” and when they do, they stop being “one of us,” being
overwhelmed by guilt, suffering from the painful consequences of moral
transgression. Minor characters such as Schomberg, Heemskirk, Jörgenson, or Mr.
Jones on the contrary, are allowed by the novelist to travel freely back and
forth from one world to another. The paper will focus on the theme of
transgression and try to show that such so-called minor characters help the
narration find a better balance since they offer an unusual perspective to the
same dramatic situations. Their eccentricity or wickedness creates a second
narrative frame to narratives which, otherwise, would have been lost in the
mists of impressionism.
Man-Sik Lee
Kyungwon College, Kyunggido, South Korea
The
Implicit Narrator in Heart of Darkness
Heart
of Darkness may be
read as a self-conscious meta-fiction intended to parody the logic of
conventional ideology. The implicit narrator who presents Marlow’s account of
Kurtz plays a central role in this project. The offense of Marlow’s lie to the
Intended may provide the cornerstone of a “new” humanism for Europeans as well
as Africans if it is understood in terms of the role of the implied narrator.
Yael Levin
Hebrew University of
Jerusalem
The Moral Ambiguity
of Conrad’s Poetics:
Transgressive Secret
Sharing in Lord Jim and Under Western Eyes
This paper sets forth
several influential theories on the nature of storytelling and the relation of
the narrator-witness to the experiencing subject. Drawing from the insights of
Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, the paper re-opens the discussion of the
ethical pitfalls involved in the telling of another’s story as demonstrated in
the characterization of Conrad’s intradiegetic narrators. A close reading of the
characters of Marlow and the English teacher in Lord Jim and Under
Western Eyes respectively, and the parallels between them, will help to shed
light on the practice of a transgressive secret-sharing in Conrad’s novels.
Laying their ethical scruples aside, the two narrators repeat and re-enact the
crimes of the novel’s protagonists, spying and betraying their confidants as
they go about procuring hidden details of the affairs they witness so as to make
them public for their listening or reading audiences.
Claes
Lindskog
Lund University,
Sweden
Larger than Life:
The Malthusian Tragedy in Conrad’s
Fiction
The nineteenth century
abounded in simple schemes for making sense of history: witness Hegelian
dialectics, Darwinist evolution, the general romanticist obsession with circles,
belief in progress, and the Bildungsroman. One such scheme was the triad
surplus – fit – deficit. This triad was present as one of the many tragic ghosts
underlying the Victorian conception of the world, as instanced by the Malthusian
economics of population on which Darwin’s view of the history of speciation was
founded. Malthus’s basic insight was that more individuals are born than can
possibly survive. This idea was applied to the present of modern societies, to
the origin of species, and to the interrelations of the peoples of the world.
The same paradigm could be applied to individual lives in Conrad’s fiction. They
all follow the formula “more hopes and expectations are born in consciousness
than can possibly survive into fact.” This insight is a fairly modern phenomenon
and one dependent on the absence of religion to gain its full tragic impact, as
it does in Conrad’s work. It changed Conrad’s version of both tragedy and
Bildungsroman, and is part of the reason why his work is so necessary for
our age. My paper traces this new conception of tragedy in Conrad’s work, with
special reference to the imagery of surplus, fit and deficit.
Michael Lucas
University of
Bio-Bio, Chile
“Gaspar Ruiz”:
Conrad’s Chilean Tale
This year is the
centenary of Conrad’s writing of “Gaspar Ruiz,” set in Chile, a country of which
Conrad never came within two thousand miles. In my essay on “The Brute” (Conradian,
28, 2 [2004]), I call “Gaspar Ruiz” “a potboiler if ever there was one.” This
paper is an attempt to justify that harsh evaluation through an analysis of
Conrad’s sources, his mixing of historical fact and fiction, and the structure
and narrative strategy in the story.
Anne
Luyat
Université d’Avignon
Almayer’s Folly
and An Outcast of the Islands : Preparing Victory
Mikhaïl Bakhtin believed
that the inherent quality of the novel was its unfinished nature. The
transmutation and regeneration of its forms resembled human existence in a
universe that was forever unfinished. The novels Almayer’s Folly and
An Outcast of the Islands shed invaluable light on Victory, which was
a triumph of the grotesque imagination.
Anita
Mathew
Goa
The Conradian World
View and India
Conrad is read with
interest in India today mainly because of the “spiritual” elements in his
writings. Conrad’s quest for truth bears comparison with Indian philosophical
thought as enumerated in the Vedas and Buddhism rather than the Christian way of
defining good and evil in the world. Conrad’s perceptive and mystical manner
appeals greatly to the Indian psyche. For him all life was connected and must be
respected. Any imbalance of power structures, inflated egos, prejudice, anarchy,
alienation, or divisions created by man within himself and without leads to
atrophied identities and annihilation of the individual. But the mind of a human
being can transform the meaning of Reality. This paper will focus on The
Nigger of the “Narcissus,” Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim as
examples of the relevance of this Conradian worldview, which offers
possibilities based on the meaning of being culturally civilized which could
help to promote unity through harmony and peace in India and throughout the
postcolonial world.
David
Miller
London
Amanuensis: A
Biographical Sketch of Lilian M. Hallowes
The purpose of my paper
is to colour the sketches of Lilian Hallowes we have from the Oxford Reader’s
Companion and The Conradian’s commentary on the “Hallowes Notebook,”
so augmenting our knowledge of her through a review of Conrad’s correspondence
and my original research. The paper is primarily biographical – not attempting
textual assessment of her rôle as “unsung co-creator of the original drafts of
[Conrad’s] late works” – covering what we know about her life before, with, and
after Conrad. Finally, I shall make suggestions with regard to Under Western
Eyes and hope to put flesh on her bones.
Sylvère Monod
Université de Paris
III: Sorbonne Nouvelle
Heemskirk, the Dutch
Lieutenant
In “Freya of the Seven Isles,” while not a single character deserves unalloyed
esteem, it is Heemskirk who receives the most systematically hostile treatment.
Nelson, Jasper Allen, and Freya herself are shown as rather absurd persons, and
the narrator is grievously lacking in clear-sightedness. But Heemskirk is
depicted as much worse than the others; he is an evil creature, dull-minded,
ugly, conceited, and murderously vindictive. He is lieutenant of a gunboat, but
in Lord Jim, Conrad had shown that he had nothing against lieutenants of
gunboats. The trouble with Heemskirk is that he is the Dutch lieutenant of a
Dutch gunboat. Nothing redeems him in the story, though on reflection it appears
that responsibility for the final catastrophe is shared by Jasper and especially
by Freya; by buffeting Heemskirk’s cheek, she thoughtlessly performs an act
which, in its consequences, amounts to murder and suicide. There is much
“amusement” going on around Freya, but it is of a sinister kind, because it
stupidly ignores the harsh realities of sexual desire. Freya is one of the few
women represented by Conrad as physically desirable (unlike, for instance, Edith
Travers). That is enough, not of course to provide an excuse for Heemskirk¹s
cruelty, but to explain it as the outcome of vigorous, irresistible impulses. Is
Heemskirk to be regarded as a or even the typical Dutchman? Up to a
point, yes, but in the main what he embodies is Joseph Conrad’s hostility to the
Dutch, an attitude that was born in him when he became an officer in the English
merchant navy, trading in Dutch-governed areas of the Far East.
Josiane Paccaud-Huguet
Université
Lumière
- Lyon 2
The Conradian Moment
of Vision
Virginia Woolf praised Conrad”s
early works for their presentation of a “flash of insight” when the protective
screen of semblance tears up for a character who suddenly glimpses a truth, most
of the time unpleasant,. This moment of vision (elsewhere called epiphany or
moment of being) revives the romantic tradition of the “spot of time,”
accompanied by two affects: fear or ecstasy. With the modernists, however, it
crystallizes a traumatic encounter with the force of the real which shatters the
symbolic co-ordinates of an individual or a group.This paper will explore the
impact of such moments in Conrad’s early works, in particular the “Marlow
trilogy” (“Youth”, Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim).
Marcin
Piechota
University of Opole
Conrad and Polish
“Theoretical Racism”
I would like to propose
a soothing voice in the worldwide discussion on Conrad’s racism, beginning with
examples from Conrad’s early readings in Polish, which would nowadays be
considered racist but was understood quite differently in the 19th
century. The second part of my paper will consider translations of Conrad’s
works since the early 20th century. Especially early translations are
filled with overtly racist language, which was criticized by Conrad himself, but
certainly the translators’ intentions were nothing of the sort. My point is that
the Polish language is, linguistically, inherently racist in a way
incomprehensible for non-Polish speakers, without being ideologically racist at
all. Things are beginning to change now, but until very recently Poland was cut
off from the rest of the world: hardly any Polish citizens were able to leave
the country and even fewer would leave the continent, and the country was rarely
visited by other nationals and hardly ever by non-Europeans. Therefore, there
was no perceived need to discuss the appropriateness of the language used in
journals and books; no criticism was available and hence no restraints imposed.
On the other hand, there was no possibility of being a racist ideologically
owing to the lack of contacts with representatives of other races. So, we might
claim that Polish racism was purely theoretical, and in my paper I would like to
suggest how Conrad’s writing might have been influenced by this Polish
particularity.
David
Prickett
Scotland
The Ethics of
Self-governance in Conrad and the Late Work of Michel Foucault
In many of his novels
Conrad represents highly restricted or coercive situations, whilst nonetheless
demonstrating how ethical action is still possible, namely through the ability
of some characters to gain greater control over their subjective experience, and
hence relationships with others. Similarly, whilst the thought of Michel
Foucault is often taken as portraying the impotence of individuals within
structures of power, in his later work Foucault became increasingly interested
in methods of self-governance. Following a discussion of Conrad’s treatment of
ethical action (drawing on Lord Jim, The Secret Agent,
and Under Western Eyes), and an overview of Foucault’s late work, I
will consider some possible relationships between their work.
Whilst acknowledging their differences, I will argue that their shared suspicion
of generalized ideas of liberation, and their insistence upon the need for
specific ethical relationships, means that a reading of Conrad offers a way of
taking forward the themes of self-governance opened up by Foucault.
Brygida Pudełko
University of Opole
Leo
Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Conrad’s “The Warrior’s Soul”
Conrad’s
story “The Warrior’s Soul” is unusual in its sympathetic treatment of the
Russian military characters who dominate the narrative. Set against the
background of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in 1812, “The Warrior’s Soul”
displays interesting similarities with Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Conrad,
who accepted only partly Tolstoy’s art and did not agree with
Tolstoy-the-moralist and his notion of Christianity, created an entirely
sympathetic, even idealized Russian character in the person of the morally
tortured, but heroic Tomassov. Most of the space in “The Warrior’s Soul,” which
is devoted to moving descriptions of the wretched and bloody retreat of the
remnants of the French army is analogous to Tolstoy’s presentation of the French
army in War and Peace. Both Tolstoy and Conrad reflect a friendly
attitude to the French. The representation of courage and honour, although not
presented in a quite the same way, is one of the building blocks from which both
War and Peace and “The Warrior’s Soul” are constructed.
Richard Ruppel
Viterbo University
More Love between the
Lines: Intimacy in Conrad’s Letters
Conrad’s stories and
novels are structured upon one or more central relationship. The Secret
Agent presents the clearest example. Winnie and Verloc’s relationship –
founded and maintained by silence, lies, misunderstanding, sacrifice, and
economic injustice – stands synechdochically for every relationship in the book.
Other works are built on multiple relationships. Lord Jim’s first
central intimacy is between Marlow and Jim, but, in the second half, this is
complicated by the introduction of Jewel, Jim’s paramour. Intimacy is therefore
at the heart of Conrad’s fiction. In this paper, I will explore the quality of
the intimacy Conrad articulated in his letters. This should give us some
additional insight into how we might interpret intimate relations in his
fiction: among the crew of the Narcissus; among Kurtz, his Intended, his African
consort, the Harlequin, and Marlow; among Jim and Marlow and Jewel; among the
language teacher, Razumov, and Natalia in Under Western Eyes, among
Heyst, Morrison, and Lena in Victory, etc.
Ludwig
Schnauder
Universität Wien
How
Free
is Marlow in Heart of Darkness?
Because of
the many suggestions of Marlow’s loss of control, it is surprising that he does
not come across as a kind of automaton, a helpless cipher or passive non-entity.
On the contrary, generations of readers have regarded Marlow as one of Conrad’s
most convincing fictional creations endowed with a unique personality and
narrative voice. An explanation for this apparent paradox is that Marlow accepts
his actions – regardless of whether they have been freely chosen or not – as
his own and as definitions of his identity. Most importantly, he recognizes
moral responsibility for his deeds and their consequences. It is my contention
that in this act Marlow’s freedom becomes manifest in a paradoxical manner:
although genuine free will and moral responsibility might be chimeras, we have
to hold on to these “positive illusions” because they are essential safeguards
of our humanity.
Yasuko Shidara
University of Tokyo
The
Malay Archipelago: Continuity and Discontinuity from Wallace to Conrad
When
Conrad was labelled as “the Kipling of the Malay Archipelago” in a review of his
first novel in 1895, the geographical term meant for British readers the Straits
Settlements (with its focal point in Singapore), British Malaya on the Malay
Peninsula, and British Borneo (Brooke’s Sarawak), with the vaguely imaged, vast
Dutch seas spreading west of these British colonies. If a reader had a clearer
idea about the Malay Archipelago, the person must have been a reader of Alfred
R. Wallace’s The Malay Archipelago, published in 1869 and kept reprinted
throughout the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. In fact, Wallace’s book was
one of the most significant precursory texts before Conrad’s staged in the Dutch
seas. Conrad’s borrowings from Wallace have been presented in previous studies.
Based on these findings and with an understanding that the term “Malay
Archipelago” was coined by Wallace in the mid-19th century, my paper explores
what Conrad inherited and did not inherit from Wallace’s book, focusing on such
aspects as the savage/civilized dichotomy, an attitude toward Portuguese
residents as an isolated ethnic group, and how Dutch colonial rule in the region
was featured.
Joanna
Skolik
University of Opole
Chivalry in a
Distorting Mirror,
or, Honour, Knights,
and Damsels in Distress in Chance, “The Duel,” and “Falk”
My paper aims to examine
the portraits of the main protagonists of Conrad’s works (Chance, “The
Duel” and “Falk”) in order to present what happens when chivalry becomes its own
parody. In all the works Conrad plays with the notion of chivalry; the writer
proves that without “a few very simple ideas” both chivalry and humanity cannot
exist.
George Smith
Independent Scholar,
USA
Realism and Romance: Conrad’s Representation
of Feudal Discourse and the End of Modern Fiction
Much has been said in recent years about Conrad’s contrary modes of narrative
representation. Discussion usually comes down to Conrad’s habit of playing high
modernist absolute form against popular forms, especially romance. In the famous
essay that first brings to light these tensions, Fredric Jameson describes
Conrad’s romance as emergent, and indeed prescient, mass media literary
discourse. Such criticism has revealed the stylistic strategies through which
Conrad generates dialectical friction between contrary formal elements. However,
little has been said about Conrad’s representation of the other romance, the
feudal romance. All the various discourses of aristocratic taste, the purity of
form and elitism of attitude that one associates with modernist alienation,
depersonalization, disinterestedness, and the like, can be traced to the feudal
romance. Carried in with the rising tide of popular fiction that Jameson so
wisely but so myopically attributes to Conrad’s production of emergent mass
media culture, these feudal polyphonies have gone unnoticed or ignored in
Conrad. Thus we have yet to ask whether in fact Conrad’s novel achieves its
modernist status precisely insofar as it represents an elitist text through
feudal aristocratic discourse. The simple answer is no. The issue is not so much
a question of how Conrad plays modernist form against popular form; it is a
question of how he plays popular romance against feudal romance.
Övgü
Tüzün
Beykent Universitesi,
Istanbul
Journeys into the
Outer Edge of Darkness:
The Representation
of the Malay Archipelago in the Works of Joseph Conrad and V. S. Naipaul
The aim of this paper
will be to offer a comparative reading of Joseph Conrad and V. S. Naipaul’s
depiction of the Malay Archipelago in the light of the writers’ views on
“half-made societies” and related civilizational issues. In his first book on
converted Muslim societies, Amongst the Believers (1981), Naipaul states
that “the stories of Joseph Conrad give an impression of remoter places of the
Malay Archipelago a hundred years ago.” Earlier, in Conrad’s Darkness
(1974), Naipaul had written about two of those stories, “The Lagoon” (the first
Conrad story that was read to him when he was just 10) and “Karain” as well as
novels like Lord Jim and Victory. Naipaul’s reading here
specifically focuses on the examination of the literary style and major themes
of a modernist master who had proved to be a significant literary influence on
his own writing. Like Conrad, Naipaul endlessly strives to be “faithful to the
truth of his own sensations”; an effort which is emphasized but also challenged
particularly in his travel writing. Equally, if not more, important for Naipaul
are the themes that preoccupy Conrad which, in this context, are “the collusion
and juxtaposition of two worlds” and “half-made societies that are doomed to
remain half-made.” Thus, Naipaul’s two travelogues, Amongst the Believers
(1981) and Beyond Belief (1998), highlight not only a geographical but
also a canonical journey while providing, at the same time, important insights
on the way different civilizations “interact” in the contemporary world.
Eduardo Valls Oyarzun
Universidad
Complutense de Madrid
Social Rhetorics in
Conrad’s The Secret Agent
In The Great
Tradition, F. R. Leavis explains the novel as a medium to cope with the
different ways in which society interacts with individuals. On these grounds, my
paper focuses on the relationship between Society and the Individual and how
this relationship is portrayed in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907).
The social institutions Conrad depicts in the novel develop a series of
mechanisms created to sublimate, deactivate and assimilate those cultural
and psychological manifestations which resemble potentially dangerous to both
the social group and, most remarkably, its institutions. Conrad portrays this
process much in the same way Freud explained years later in his Das Unbehagen
in der Kultur. To prove my point, I give a detailed account of the role of
Anarchism within the novel as well as of the rhetorical sublimation of
particular cultural phenomena – such as sex and art – Conrad
carries out in the novel. This rhetorical sublimation, ultimately, posits
a new pattern of power relationships which not only deviates from
Victorian web-like social models – such as those of George Eliot or Thomas Hardy
– but most notably announces certain postmodernist literary and
ideological programmes. To show this, I trace the Conradian rhetorical pattern
of power relationships in different texts of 20th century poetics:
from T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and Individual Talent,” (1922) to Kenneth Burke’s
A Rhetoric of Motives (1964) and Terry Eagleton’s Sweet Violence
(2002). Thus, the social rhetorics Conrad achieves in The Secret Agent
proves to be a useful tool to update certain critical discourses and to make
the novel fit properly in the present day critical corpus.
Ludmilla Voitkovska
University of
Saskatchewan
Conrad and Ukraine:
Mutual Erasure
Joseph Conrad has been
erased from the canon of English literature in the country of his birth,
Ukraine. The choice of works to be translated into Ukrainian and released by the
state controlled publishing houses apparently reduces the image of Conrad to
that of a writer of romantic sea adventures. The body of Ukrainian criticism of
Conrad is extraordinarily small. The first article of a Ukrainian scholar on
Conrad appeared in 1925. Until 1990, only 20 critical works on Conrad appeared
in Ukraine. Nor has Conrad’s relationship with Ukraine received much attention
in Western criticism. In fact, a number of questions arise from Conrad
biographies as their authors make references to the country of Conrad’s birth.
Neill R. Joy of Colgate University writes in the Dictionary of National
Biography: “It is extraordinarily odd that one of the most important
novelists of twentieth century writing in English should have been born in
Berdyczyw in the Polish Ukraine and raised speaking Polish and French.” What map
of Europe are Conrad biographers looking at when they refer to “Polish Ukraine,”
and, consequently, what political narrative of a state history are they
promoting? Why has the Ukrainian reader been denied an opportunity to read
Conrad’s works which have become permanent fixtures in English literature
courses in Western universities? Answers to these questions lie in the complex
political history of the region, which also involves the history of ethnic
relationships between Russia, Poland, and Ukraine.
Paul
Wake
Manchester
Metropolitan University
The Time of Death:
“Passing Away” in The Secret Agent
This
paper will consider the notion of the instant of death as it appears in Conrad’s
The Secret Agent. Focusing on Inspector Heat’s examination of Stevie’s
body, in particular his remark that “The man [...] had died instantaneously,” I
will examine the ways in which Conrad’s novel attempts to narrate the instant.
The novel contains three distinct attacks on time. The most obvious is the
attempted attack on the Greenwich Royal Observatory, which fails spectacularly.
The second can be located in the novel’s complex narrative structure which, by
exploiting the discrepancy between narrative time and story time, illustrates
the potential of the narratological nature of human time. The final and, I will
suggest, the most successful attack in The Secret Agent is on the notion
of the instant and the impossibility of the instant appearing in narrative. This
impossibility is derived from the nature of a narrative time that functions in
terms of relation between past, present and future. My paper will concentrate on
this final attack, offering a close textual analysis that draws on aspects of
Aristotle’s Poetics, Augustine’s Confessions, and Paul Ricoeur’s
Time and Narrative. In this way I hope to indicate the ways in which the
temporal form of the novel reflects and supports the more readily apparent
attack on time in the attempted destruction of the Greenwich Royal Observatory.
Andrea
White
California State
University at Dominguez Hills
Allegories of the
Self and of Empire: Stevenson’s Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Conrad’s “A Smile of Fortune”
It is tempting to read
Conrad’s “A Smile of Fortune” as another island tale in the tradition of The
Tempest, Robinson Crusoe, or The Coral Island, especially in
the story’s initial paragraphs which narrate our approach to “a fertile and
beautiful island of the tropics,” the “Pearl of the Ocean.” But our horizon of
expectation soon suffers a shock, for this story goes on to tell of belatedness
and darkness, of self-deception and self-destruction. Its complex doublings and
withheld mysteries are illuminated less by an island story such as Robert Louis
Stevenson’s Treasure Island than by that same writer’s Strange Case of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Not only does the Victorian story famously concern
the decentering of the sovereign self in a way that anticipates “A Smile of
Fortune,” but it also depicts the London of the 1880s as a decidedly dark place,
an image replicated and intensified in Conrad’s story. London, as “home” to both
of these fictions’ protagonists, is represented as indeed one of the dark places
of the earth, a metropolitan center with fissures and repressions of its own
that interestingly repeats the figure of the decentered self common to both
Stevenson’s and Conrad’s texts.
Agnes Yeow
University of Malaya
Contesting Histories, Contesting Empires: A Glimpse of Conrad’s Netherlands East
Indies
Conrad’s sojourn in the Malay Archipelago
coincided with major events taking place in the region in the last quarter of
the nineteenth century including the enforcement of Indirect Rule, the
consolidation of the colonial state, the carving out of new political units, as
well as the strategic and diplomatic tussle between European imperial powers.
From the Lingard trilogy to “Freya,” Conrad’s Eastern tales mirror the political
realities of Anglo-Dutch rivalry. This paper attempts to map Conrad’s fictional
Dutch East Indies against the backdrop constituted by the “facts” of history to
illuminate the absent meanings within both narratives. A contrapuntal reading
reveals an intense dialogue between art and history and the ironic implications
which arise from this conversation. This paper examines Conrad’s depiction of
the political intrigues and the cultural and socio-economic repercussions
precipitated by the clash of empires: a portrayal which arguably supports the
authorial claim (in Notes on Life and Letters) that “fiction is history,
human history, or it is nothing.”