THE ART OF JOSEPH CONRAD Item Type text; Dissertation-Reproduction (electronic) Authors Boebel, Charles Edward, 1938- Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 09/10/2021 17:03:17 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/287622 71i-12,729 BOEBEL, Jr., Charles Edward, 1938- THE ART OF JOSEPH CONRAD. University of Arizona, Ph.D., 1971 Language and Literature, modern University Microfilms, A XEROX Company, Ann Arbor, Michigan , M COPYRIGHTED BY CHARLES EDWARD BOEBEL, Jr. 1971 iii f THIS DISSERATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED THE ART OF JOSEffl CONR/1D by, , c° Charles E.\ Boebel, Jr. A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOFHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 19 7 1 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE I hereby recommend that this dissertation prepared under my direction by Charles E. Boebel, Jr. entitled THE ART OF JOSEPH CONRAD be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy $/7 & Dissertation Director Date After inspection of the final copy of the dissertation, the following members of the Final Examination Committee concur in its approval and recommend its acceptance:"" f'/) / Y/Z3/7* ((fCtku/t "This approval arya acceptance is contingent on the candidate's adequate performance and defense of this dissertation at the final oral examination. The inclusion of this sheet bound into the library copy of the dissertation is evidence of satisfactory performance at the final examination. STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to bor­ rowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder. PREFACE Conrad's collected works are published by William Heinemann, 1921-1927; J. M. Dent, 1923-1928; and Doubleday, Page, 192E>. Volume and page numbers in the text refer to the Doubleday, Page Kent Edition of 1925. Last Essays and Tales of Hearsay (abbreviated in the text as Last Essays) was published by J. M. Dent in 1928. Conrad's published letters are contained in the eight volumes listed below. Frequently cited volumes are followed by the abbrevi­ ation used in the text. Conrad to a Friend: 1^0 Selected Letters from Joseph Conrad to Richard Curie. -ed. Richard Curie. New York, 1928. Conrad's Polish Background: Letters to and from Polish Friends. ed. Zozistaw Najder and trans. Halina Carroll. London, 19&U. Joseph Conrad: Lettres Francaises. ed. G. Jean-Aubry. Paris, 1929. Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters. 2 vols. ed. G. Jean-Aubry. Garden City, N. Y., 1927~. (Aubry) Letters from Joseph Conrad: 1895>-192U. ed. Edward Garnett. Indianapolis, 1925^ (Garnett) Letters of Joseph Conrad to Marguerite Poradowska: 1890-1920. ed.~John A. Gee and Paul J. Sturm. New Haven, Conn., 19U0. (G & S) Letters to William Blackwood and David S. Meldrum. ed. William Blackburn. Durham, N. C., 195$! ("Blackburn) Randall, Dale B. J. Joseph Conrad and Warrington Dawson. Durham, N. C., 1968. So much good commentary has been written on Conrad that it is a pleasure to acknowledge my general debt to several generations iv T of scholars and critics. Specific instances of indebtedness are recorded in numerous footnotes. I am especially grateful to The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc. for permission to quote from Letters from Joseph Conrad, edited by Edward Garnett, copyright 1928, by The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., (c) 1956 by David Garnett; to Duke University Press for permission to quote from Conrad's Letters to William Blackwood and David S. Meldrum, edited by William Blackburn; to Doubleday and Company, Inc., for permission to quote from the Kent Edition of Conrad's works and from Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters, edited by G. Jean-Aubry; and to Princeton University Press for permission to quote from Bernard Meyer's Joseph Conrad: A Psychoanalytic Biography. The selected bibliography includes those works which have been cited in the text and a number of others that proved generally helpful. A Conrad checklist appears occasionally in Modern Fiction Studies, and the year's publications on Conrad are annually listed in the MLA International Bibliography. An essential bibliographical work is Kenneth A. Lohf and Eugene P. Sheehy, Joseph Conrad at Mid- Century: Editions and Studies, 1895-1955, (Minneapolis, 1957). TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT vii 1. INTRODUCTION 1 2. REBELLIOUS SHADES: ALMAYER'S FOLLY AND AN OUTCAST OF THE ISLANDS 12 3. THE CRISIS OF THE RESCUE U3 U. THE RITUAL NOVEL: THE NIGGER OF THE NARCISSUS AND "HEART OF DARKNESS" 6? 5. THE RITUAL NOVEL: LORD JIM 107 6. THE MORAL FABLE: NOSTROMO AND THE SECRET AGENT 131 7. "THE SECRET SHARER" 180 8. TRANSITION: UNDER WESTERN EYES AND CHANCE 193 9. THE TRIUMffl OF THE SELF: THE SHADOW-LINE, VICTORY, AND THE ROVER 2U7 10. CONCLUSION 307 SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY 311 vi ABSTRACT Conrad often said that, for him, writing was a kind of action. Although we cannot be absolutely sure of his meaning, it seems likely that he referred to the expressive function of his art and, in effect, to the form assumed by some of his most important novels. The form is basically ritualistic, its definitive criterion being an ability to give opposite feelings simultaneous expression. The content of ritual cannot be precisely defined. In primitive societies what is essentially the same form of expression is put to any number of uses, and the content—the kinds of feelings reconciled—changes with this change of function. Conrad developed a ritual form principally because of his need to express conflicting feelings towards the self and society. On the one hand, Conrad held that the self, as the sole center of human consciousness, was also the only source of moral value, and he felt that self-abnegation meant exchanging intelligence, sensi­ tivity, and sympathy for impersonal organization. But, on the other hand, he knew that unchecked egoism was morally and psycho­ logically destructive. Both attitudes were for Conrad equally important, and the major task of his writing life was to discover a literary form which could incorporate both points of view. Conrad did not discover this literary form until several years after he had begun his writing career. Almayer's Folly, vii viii An Outcast of the Islands, and "The Return" are damaged by Conrad's ambivalent attitude towards his protagonists, and it was his divided view of Tom Lingard and Edith Travers that prevented him from finishing The Rescue until more than twenty years after the novel was begun. In the first three works, Conrad attempted to attack egoism, and in The Rescue he attempted to give almost unreserved sympathy to a romantic egoist. But in each instance his divided attitude caused structural fragmentation. With The Nigger of the Narcissus Conrad discovered the ritual form which proved an adequate vehicle for his conflicting feelings, and he carried this form throughout Lord Jim, "Heart of Darkness," and Under Western Eyes. The ritual form was created only after Conrad exchanged third-person omniscient point of view for a first- person point of view—a shift that indicates a new acceptance of his divided mind. With the adoption of first-person point of view and perhaps as a result of this change, Conrad also learned to use patterns of imagery as correlatives of conflicting feeling. The dark and light images of The Nigger of the Narcissus and "Heart of Darkness," and the earth-air, dark-light images of Lord Jim are, in a precise sense, paradoxical. The delicate balance of opposites established in the ritual novel was not easy to maintain, and in the novels that follow Lord Jim, Conrad exhibits a strong desire to give his experience a more rational order. At this point, however, he could not choose between the self and society, and so in The Secret Agent and, to a large extent, in Nostromo, he rejects both. Moral value can be found neither in egoism nor in self-abnegation. After The Secret Agent, Conrad's double attitude towards the self and society began to break down, apparently without his being fully aware of the process. In Chance,for instance, he maintains the trappings of the ritual novel, but he has already decided that in the modern world, moral value stems from the private affections of isolated groups of individuals and that large-scale social organization is corrupt. World War I only intensified this conviction. Although I have not attempted a revaluation of Conrad's late works, it is safe to say that they are simpler and more rationally ordered than the ritual novels; allegory has been sub­ stituted for paradoxical symbolism. The late novels do not reveal intellectual decline, but a contraction of sensibility. CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Conrad sometimes said that novel writing is a form of action. We shall never know exactly what he meant, but he probably had at least two different meanings in mind. On the one hand, he was claiming that, in spite of appearances, his life did possess an inner coherence. He may have been both novelist and sailor, but he wished to assert that at the core of his being he was the same man.