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Method and Form in the Novels of Joseph Conrad. Harold Edmund Davis Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College

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Method and Form in the Novels of Joseph Conrad. Harold Edmund Davis Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1956 Method and Form in the Novels of Joseph Conrad. Harold Edmund Davis Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Davis, Harold Edmund, "Method and Form in the Novels of Joseph Conrad." (1956). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 140. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/140 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. METHOD AND FORM IN THE NOVELS OF JOSEPH CONRAD A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English ...o by ^ Harold E.d7 Davis B. A., The University of Denver, 1949 M. A., The University of Denver, 1950 June, 1956 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The author would like to express his thanks to Professors Nathaniel M. Caffee and John H. Wildman, who advised this study, and to Professors Thomas A. Kirby, Donald E. Stanford, and Ralph L. Wlcklser, who read It and made suggestions about Its contents. He is also grateful to those members of the Hill Memorial Library who were helpful In securing materials. Finally, he expresses gratitude to his wife, who is responsible for much of the most difficult work. TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT........................................... iv INTRODUCTION ....................................... viii CHAPTER I Backgrounds............................................1 The revolt....................................... 1 The Impressionist8 ................................. 13 Impressionism.......................................40 CHAPTER II S t y l e ...............................................55 CHAPTER III Symbolism..................................... 90 CHAPTER IV Structure............................................126 Point of view...................................... 130 T i m e ................... 168 Nostromo..........................................186 CHAPTER V Influences .................................... 215 BIBLIOGRAPHY.......................................... 233 VITA .................................................. 238 ABSTRACT In the considerable body of criticism written about almost every aspect of the novels of Joseph Conrad, there is a noticeable lack of comment about his technical methods, even though it has been a commonplace of literary history that his techniques were experimental to a greater degree than those of most of his contemporaries. Past criticism has also failed to place his whole approach to method into a clear relationship to any traditions of the English novel, or to find any influences which may have led to his technical experimentation. His work has been grouped loosely with "travel" literature popular at the close of the century, with sea and "Romantic" novelists, or the problem of classification has been avoided by considering him an unexplainable phe­ nomenon, a foreigner writing in a language not his own and with roots in a tradition not native to English. However, if Conrad's reputation as a highly skilled novelist is to be thoroughly understood and his position to be fixed in the history of the novel, it is necessary to face directly the problems of technique and method. The purpose of this study, then, is twofold: first, to look more closely at Conrad's contemporaries, those writers with whom he associated himself, and dlsoover some evidenoe about their methods, their self-styled literary impressionism; iv V second, to analyze Conrad's twelve novels In terms of their style, symbolism, and structure, and arrive at some conclusions about his technique and Its place In relation to the stream of the English novel. Literary impressionism, as it was defined and practiced by Ford Madox Ford, Henry James, Stephen Crane, W. H. Hudson, and Joseph Conrad, was not a deliberately organized literary movement. Rather it was a loosely connected group of views which saw the novel not as a series of external events, but as an attempt to present the reaction of those events upon the actors in them; it placed great importance upon the rendering of experience with the dramatic immediacy with which it strikes the mind; and, perhaps of greatest historical importance, it saw the novel as a conscious art form with unity and coherence organic in its nature. In style, Conrad varied considerably from the goals of eoonomy and simplicity held by his Impressionist contemporaries. Possibly because of his unusual language background, his prose style is essentially a calculated, "rhetorical" style, a deliberate use of language for its inherent effects, although there is, in his work, a development towards a more functional prose, best illustrated in The Rover (1923). The same calculated quality is evident in the rich symbolism in hie novels, particularly in the early Almayer'a Folly (1895), and An Outcast of The Islands (1896), although the use of color and atmosphere symbolically in all of his novels is soundly based in impressionism. It is in his structures that Conrad shows clearly his Vi debt8 to impressionism and his influence upon a tradition which underlies the modern novel* Through his experiments with point of view, time shifts, and dramatic projection, he throws the emphasis upon the effect of action rather than upon action Itself. Instead of the conventional chronological progression, Conrad employs Juxtaposition of scene for irony, association by idea and character instead of time, and meaning through arrangement and focus instead of direct comment— all of which are outgrowths of the Impressionists' view of fictional structure. It is through this general approach to the form of the novel that Conrad's techniques have had their most far-reaching effect, for much of the technical experimentation of the modern novel is an indirect or direct result of this basically new vision of the richness of meaning possible through form. INTRODUCTION The technical approach to the arts has never been a popular one. By asking the auction How? we can sometimes miss the very essence of art, but then It Is to be wondered If criticism can or should ever really capture this, for there is in all art a secret core which can never be appre­ hended by mechanical analysis. Such an approach may also slight content, meaning, theme, historical significance, biographical reference, all of which have in the past fallen into the area of critical investigation. But technique is a neglected approach, particularly in the novel, and it is possible that a more vital view of an artist's achievements can come from an attempt to discover his method, Mark Schorer has stated that "modern criticism has shown us that to speak of content as such is not to speak of art at all, but of experience; and that it is only when we speak of achieved content, the form, the work of art as a work of art, that we speak as criticB, The difference between content, or experience, and achieved content, or art, is technique."1 It follows then that if any writer is to be fully understood, historically and esthetically, especially one who is so thoroughly grounded in technical experiment, we must have some knowlege of the way in which he achieved his content. 1 "Technique as Discovery," Forms of Modern Fiction, ed. William Van O'Connor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1948), p. 9. vii viii The reputation of Joseph Conrad among the great novelists of English literature is firmly fixed, although a thorough attempt has not yet been made to evaluate his full significance as an artist; that is, as the artist whom Joseph Warren Beach has called "the most restless and ingenious experimenter of hi8 time, the one who brought the greatest variety of techni­ cal procedures to bear upon the problem of the novelist."2 There is a multitude of comment on Conrad's biography, his personal psychology, the relevance of his national origins, the autobiographical elements in his novels, his philosophical positions, and almost every other aspect of his art but the highly important one of his methods. Two very important books have come close in filling tnis need, both of which have been freely utilized in tnis study: Ford Madox Ford's Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance, and Edward Crankshaw's Joseph Conrad: Some Aspects of the Art of The Novel. But while these books are valuable, neither makes a full attempt to analyze Conrad's methods formally, or to fix them into a historical perspective. Ford's book is not properly a study of Conrad's techniques at all, as he makes ouite clear in the work; it is rather a record of a close personal association with some interesting and valuable asides on the views held toward the form of the novel by Ford and Conrad. Crankshaw has written what should be recognized as one of the most fundamental studies of technique in the novel generally as well as of Conrad specifically, but many of his 2The Twentieth Century Novel (New York: D. Appleton- Century Co., 1932), p. 337. lx findings need further elaboration, qualification, and formalized specific illustration; also he is not concerned with a broad view of Conrad1s impact upon and origins in a tradition. There are, of course, many minor allusions to Conrad's methods in all of the standard Btudies of his work, but these too are not expanded into any complete, schematic, and formal study of the ways in which he constructed his art. Because the study of technique in the novel has not been widely explored, there is a lack of groundwork for a special­ ized study of an Individual novelist; an absence of termi­ nology, procedures, formal disciplines, and models. It is an area in which the critic must build his own foundations as he proceeds and assume that they have a valid relationship to his study.
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