Character Types from Populist Genres in Joseph Conrad's Urban Fiction
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
1 Character Types from Populist Genres in Joseph Conrad’s Urban Fiction Ph.D Thesis Andrew Glazzard Royal Holloway, University of London July 2013 2 Declaration of Authorship I, Andrew Glazzard, declare that this thesis and the work presented in it is entirely my own. Where I have consulted the work of others, this is always clearly stated. Signed: Date: 3 Table of Contents Abstract of Thesis 6 A Note on Texts 8 Introduction The All-Powerful Masses and the Limited Coterie: Conrad and Reputation, Popularity, and 9 Genre “Some – literary – reputation” 9 “Something magazine’ish” 15 “Getting his sales” 27 “A widely discussed subject” 38 Chapter 1 “Armed with the defensive mandate of a menaced society”: Detectives 49 Introduction 49 Gentlemen and Players 57 “His trained faculties of an excellent investigator” 67 Unobtrusive Shadows 78 Systems of Supervision 84 Conclusion 92 Chapter 2 “An actor in desperate earnest”: Informers and Spies 97 Introduction 97 Systematic Informers 98 Secret Agents and Secret Signs 120 Conclusion: Under Western Eyes as Espionage 141 Bildungsroman 4 Chapter 3 “The Inciter Behind”: Spymasters 148 Introduction 148 Conrad and the Rise of Espionage Fiction 149 “A Hyperborean swine” 163 “Not quite as black as he used to be painted” 177 Conclusion: Conrad, Soskice and Dostoevsky 187 Chapter 4 “The cowardly bomb-throwing brutes”: Anarchists, Terrorists and Revolutionaries 196 Introduction: Anarchism and Conrad's Circle 196 Typologies of Anarchism 203 Nihilist Heroes 206 Idealistic Heroines 213 Fashionable Revolutionaries 220 Propagandists of the Word 224 Anarchist-Terrorists 234 Promethean Technologists 239 Conclusion: “Subversive, sanguinary rot” 245 Chapter 5 “The Perpetrator of the Most Heartless Frauds”: Swindlers 250 Introduction 250 “The absurd infatuations of the investing public” 253 Romances of Modern Commerce 277 "The modern system of advertising" 284 Conclusion: “But what does a silly sailor know of 291 business?” 5 Conclusion Conrad’s Literary Experiments 301 Cooking the Books 302 Experiments and Genre 308 “I am modern” 316 Annex A Select Chronology (1885-1916) of Fictional Works 320 Mentioned in the Text Bibliography 330 6 Abstract of Thesis This thesis investigates the relationship between literary and popular/populist fiction by examining Conrad’s use of five character types common in popular fiction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the detective, the informer/spy, the spymaster, the anarchist/terrorist, and the swindler. Conrad’s fiction has previously been situated in relation to ‘exotic’ genres such as adventure fiction; what is original about my thesis is its use of a very wide range of texts from ‘urban’ genres such as detective and espionage fiction to reconstruct what Conrad’s contemporary readers would have expected from novels featuring the character types listed above. This enables a more thorough examination of Conrad’s engagement with urban genres than has previously been attempted, using popular texts not previously examined in relation to Conrad. The thesis argues that Conrad appropriated character types from populist genres for three reasons: as a commercial strategy to make his fiction marketable, as a way of responding to topical or contentious social and political issues, and as a means of creative experimentation. The thesis argues that Conrad’s fictions are simultaneously ‘literary’ and ‘popular’, and that Conrad achieved distinctive aesthetic effects by applying particular literary techniques – what he called “treatment” – to popular subjects such as crime and espionage. This rewriting of genre fiction enabled Conrad to balance the demands of the literary marketplace with artistic and ethical aspirations, and to produce a wide range of narratives that varied significantly in aesthetic effect. Finally, the thesis argues that reading Conrad’s narratives alongside examples from populist genres forces us to question critical judgments built on assumptions that popular fiction is necessarily inferior to literary 7 fiction, and that Conrad’s own assertions that his fictions belong to an aesthetic realm untainted by commercial considerations are unreliable. 8 A Note on Texts Unless stated otherwise, all references to Conrad’s works are to volumes in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad where available, or to Dent’s Collected Edition (22 volumes, 1946-55) where not. One exception is Conrad and F.M. Hueffer’s The Inheritors, for which I have used the Liverpool University Press edition (1999). References to Conrad’s letters are to The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad (see bibliography for details). The following abbreviations for Conrad’s works have been used in citations: C Chance CL The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad I The Inheritors LE Last Essays LJ Lord Jim NLL Notes on Life and Letters PR A Personal Record SA The Secret Agent SS A Set of Six UWE Under Western Eyes 9 Introduction The All-Powerful Masses and the Limited Coterie: Conrad and Reputation, Popularity, and Genre I have some – literary – reputation but the future is anything but certain, for I am not a popular author and probably I never shall be. That does not sadden me at all, for I have never had the ambition to write for the all-powerful masses. I haven’t the taste for democracy – and democracy hasn’t the taste for me.1 …what I always feared most was drifting unconsciously into the position of a writer for a limited coterie: a position which would have been odious to me as throwing a doubt on the soundness of my belief in the solidarity of all mankind in simple ideas and in sincere emotions.2 “Some – literary – reputation” In his affectionate memoir of his father, Joseph Conrad: Times Remembered, John Conrad recalled that, at Christmas, “I was always given a bound volume of the previous twelve issues” of the Boy’s Own Paper. For the young John, the appeal of the magazine was its “adventure stories, well written and exciting, with instalments spread over several months’ issues”. The volume seemed to attract the interested attention of another member of the Conrad household: “I am pretty sure that J.C. read it after I had gone to bed because I found little spills of cigarette ash between the pages” (J. Conrad 1981: 31-32). This anecdote is revealing about Joseph Conrad the reader and, by extension, the writer. That there is a relationship between Conrad’s fiction and various kinds of popular literature, particularly adventure fiction, has long been recognized, but the 1 Conrad to the Baroness Janina de Brunnow, 2 October 1897 (CL1 390) 2 Conrad, ‘Author’s Note’ (1920), in Chance (1913), xxxii-xxxiii. 10 significance of the relationship remains a matter of debate. Some critics and influential readers have seen Conrad as a writer of romances or adventure narratives in the tradition of Frederick Marryat, whose “greatness” Conrad praised in his 1898 article ‘Tales of the Sea’ (NLL 46-49), and who was one of the few writers whom he recommended to his son John (167). John Masefield, for example, criticized his fiction for failing to live up to its generic promise (White 1993: 172), while even a critic as perceptive as George Orwell emphasized Conrad’s “romanticism”, which he attributed to an out-dated belief in the existence of the “English gentleman”: “As a result he was constantly creating characters in whom a capacity for having adventures, and a capacity for appreciating them, were combined in a way that is impossible in real life” (Orwell 1968: 387-89). For this reason, Orwell went on to dismiss Lord Jim (1900) – now one of Conrad’s most admired novels for its proto-modernist techniques and themes – as “an absurdity as a whole”. The enrolment of Conrad into the “Great Tradition” by F.R. Leavis (1948) and the subsequent reappraisal of his novels as modernist or proto-modernist by critics such as Thomas C. Moser (1957) and Albert J. Guerard (1958) ensured that his fiction became valued later in the twentieth century precisely for those features that distinguished it from popular forms, such as innovative narrative techniques, literary impressionism, and its philosophical climate of uncertainty and scepticism. More recently, Conrad’s exploitation of popular genres has come under renewed attention, with influential work by Andrea White (1993) and Linda Dryden (1999) identifying adventure stories as the cultural products of an imperialist ideology that shaped Conrad’s fiction, and which he simultaneously assimilated and subverted. Their approach reconciles the previously contradictory views of Conrad the ‘romancer’ and Conrad the ‘modernist’, reminding us that Conrad’s reading of “light holiday literature” (LJ 6), no less than Lord Jim’s, cannot 11 have failed to leave an impression, while preserving Conrad’s position as a ‘serious’ writer worthy of continued attention and scholarship. The impression left of Conrad the reader by his son’s memoir points to a contradiction in Conrad’s writing that the following chapters will explore. Conrad was sufficiently attracted by “well-written and exciting” yarns to appropriate his son’s Christmas present, yet he felt obliged to do so covertly, even amongst his own family. Elsewhere, John Conrad commented that, while his father was not immune from the material appeal of books, he was much more interested in the quality of the text – but what he valued as a reader was traditional narrative: He liked books to be well bound but it was their contents that mattered and he never kept a book of which he did not approve – there was no room for ‘bosh’ in his bookcases. He was a fast reader, not a skimmer reading bits here and there, but a perspicacious reader who obtained the greatest satisfaction from a good story well written. (100) What Conrad would have viewed as “bosh” John does not record, although Conrad’s letters are peppered with scathing references to some of the successes of late Victorian and Edwardian popular literature.