Authorial Attitude in Joseph Conrad’s Third-Person Fiction Yusuke Takahata Royal Holloway, University of London PhD 1 Declaration of Authorship I, Yusuke Takahata, hereby 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 stated clearly. 2 Abstract Mainly examining Joseph Conrad’s third-person novels written in his early to middle career, this thesis argues that when the novelist adopts third-person narration, the works tend to exhibit problems of one kind or another that affect their fictional adequacy to varying degrees, and that these problems are deeply related to the handling of authorial attitude towards the characters, events, and fictional worlds he presents. Chapter 1 discusses three third-person short fictions written in Conrad’s early to middle career to explore the variety of authorial attitudes Conrad’s third-person works exhibit. Chapter 2 analyses ‘The Rescuer’ and argues that the split in the narrative voice between the romantic and the realistic modes, which culminates in the last part of the manuscript where the exploration of Lingard’s Kurtzian idealism comes to focus, largely explains the impasse of the novel. Chapter 3 examines how the introduction of Marlow’s first-person narration in Lord Jim allows Conrad to sidestep the difficulty―as was observed in ‘The Rescuer’―involved in the treatment of romantic protagonists and fictional worlds. Chapter 4 scrutinises how Nostromo, by means of eliminating Decoud and scapegoating Nostromo, avoids the potential trivialisation of its socio-historical panorama which a rigorous anatomisation of the political condition of its fictional world and the resultant nihilistic vision could bring about. In Chapter 5 I compare the authorial attitude in The Secret Agent with that in 3 Nostromo and suggest, in the Conclusion, that there is a certain trade-off between the relative technical flawlessness of The Secret Agent and the emotional effect of Nostromo. The thesis concludes that an extra-heterodiegetic narrator exercising degrees of omniscience was essentially not a congenial device for Conrad, and that this was due to his tendency to be acutely conscious of certain limitations which his own fictional worlds have to carry. 4 Acknowledgements First and foremost, I thank Professor Robert Hampson for his patient supervision as well as for the specific advices he gave me during my writing. He listened extremely tolerantly to my poor presentation of the embryonic idea of this thesis and let me pursue my project freely despite its somewhat idiosyncratic theoretical basis. Without this― and without the innumerable suggestions he gave me as to my interpretations of Conrad’s individual works―it would have been quite impossible for me to complete this thesis. I also deeply appreciate the advices and the encouragement which my adviser, Professor Andrew Gibson, gave to me. I owe much of my skill as a literary researcher to the professors in University of Tokyo, where I was educated up to the Master’s level. Attending the classes of Professor Kazuhisa Takahashi, my former supervisor, greatly improved my critical practice. Though not my direct supervisor, Professor Takaki Hiraishi’s influence on my idea of what literary studies is about has been so immense that if I had not acquainted myself with his ideas―both through his books and his classes―I would have been utterly unable to continue my career as a literary researcher. My life as a postgraduate student, which lasted for eight years, was mentally and financially tough enough to sap my enthusiasm occasionally, and this was especially so while I was working on this 5 thesis. More than anybody else, it was my beloved wife, Mayumi, who supported me throughout this demanding period. Knowing that it was solely out of her affection that she endured the enormous inconvenience of living in a foreign country for a couple of years as a wife of a postgraduate student, I cannot be too grateful for her kind support and encouragement. My parents’ assistance was also immense, both mentally and financially. Without it, I would not have dared to pursue my career as a literary researcher, let alone study in the U.K. I also thank my parents-in-law for their consistently understanding and encouraging attitude. Finally, I wish to express gratitude to my examiners, Professor Allan Simmons and Dr. Michael Greaney, for their serious engagement with my thesis and helpful advices. Although they pointed out some problematic aspects of my thesis, they greatly encouraged me by generously praising its merits. This made me more confident that I could perform capably in my forthcoming career as a literary academic. What I most earnestly hope now is that this thesis is worth the immense goodwill and expectations given to me by those people named here. 6 Table of Contents Abstract. .3 Acknowledgements. .5 Introduction . .9 1. The Theoretical Basis of the Thesis . 9 1.1 Relation to Contemporary Literary Theories . 9 1.2 Theoretical Outlook . .21 2. The Position of the Present Thesis within Conrad Criticism .37 Chapter 1 Three Varieties of Authorial Attitudes in Conrad’s Third-Person Short Fictions . .47 ‘The Return’ . .49 ‘The End of the Tether’ . .71 ‘Typhoon’ . .87 Chapter 2 The Impasse of ‘The Rescuer’ and Incoherence in Authorial Attitude . 112 1. The Exploration of Lingard’s Idealistic Dream in the Last Eighty-Seven Pages of ‘The Rescuer’ . .. 114 2. The Last Eighty-Seven Pages and Conrad’ Failure to Finish the Novel. 125 3. The Split in the Narrative Voice between the Romantic and the Realistic. 135 4. The Rescue as a Simplified Romance . 154 Chapter 3 Marlow’s Two Perspectives and Focal Transition in Lord Jim 7 . .171 1. The Behaviour of the Third-Person Narrator . 173 2. Marlow’s Oral Narrative. 184 3. Marlow’s Letters to the ‘Privileged Man’ . 204 4. The Transition of Narrative Focus. .. 214 Chapter 4 Decoud Eliminated, Nostromo Scapegoated, and Politics Defocused: The Treatment of Nihilism in Nostromo . .222 1. International Capitalism and the Centre of Nostromo . 223 2. Decoud, Authorial Voice, and the Trivialising Nihilism . 235 3. Myth, the Scapegoating of Nostromo, and the Circumvention of Politics. .258 Chapter 5 The Mask of Inhumanity and Positional Indeterminacy in The Secret Agent . .278 1. The Primary Subject of The Secret Agent . .278 2. A Sceptical Authorial Attitude towards Social Issues . .289 3. The Narrator’s Playfulness and Inhumanity. 302 Conclusion. 324 Bibliography. 335 8 Introduction 1. The Theoretical Basis of the Thesis 1-1. Relation to Contemporary Literary Theories Whereas Conrad criticism before the 1970s explored moral, philosophical, psychological, political, technical, and biographical issues in Conrad’s literature mainly from what have been called liberal-humanist standpoints,1 many of the subsequent studies exhibit influence from the development of literary and critical theories especially since the 1980s. Those theories have now flourished enough to become part of the institution of literary studies including Conrad criticism. The present thesis, though extensively benefiting from the fruits of those theories, does not belong to any specific school of existing theoretical approaches. Its ultimate interest lies in contributing to shed new light on the particularities of Conrad as a novelist mainly in 1 According to Peter Barry, the term liberal humanism ‘became current in the 1970s, as a shorthand (and mainly hostile) way of referring to the kind of criticism which held sway before theory. The word “liberal” in this formulation roughly means not politically radical, and hence generally evasive and non-committal on political issues. “Humanism” implies something similar; it suggests a range of negative attributes, such as “non-Marxist” and “non-feminist”, and “non-theoretical”. There is also the implication that liberal humanists believe in “human nature” as something fixed and constant which great literature expresses’. See Barry, Beginning Theory: An Introduction to Literary and Cultural Theory (2002), p. 3. 9 terms of form and technique. We might say that the earliest liberal humanist critics such as F. R. Leavis, Douglas Hewitt, and Thomas Moser offered their readings to address the same issue and explicate what makes Conrad a unique novelist. The present thesis differs from those early studies first and foremost in that it is informed by the theoretical development of literary studies in the last few decades of the twentieth century, as I will demonstrate shortly. Another important difference―and this is also the difference between the present thesis and the majority of studies since the advent of theory―is that its focus is placed on the formal aspects of Conrad’s novels rather than on their subject matter. Although Conrad’s narrative technique has always been an object of critics’ interest and discussion since the time of Henry James,2 the idiosyncrasies of Conrad’s subject matter in comparison with that of other English writers―which derive largely from his Polish background and his world-wide experience as a seaman ― have attracted even greater attention. Indeed, as their titles illustrate, many of the important studies up to the 1970s are characterised by their exploration of characteristic Conradian themes.3 The general privileging of theme over form in Conrad criticism 2 In his influential essay on Chance written in 1914, James analysed the novel’s complex narrative structure. See James, ‘The New Novel’, Notes on Novelists: With Some Other Notes (London: Dent, 1914), pp. 249-87. 3 See, for instances, Adam Gillon, The Eternal Solitary: A Study of Joseph Conrad (1960); Leo Gurko, Joseph Conrad: Giant in Exile (1962); R. A. Gekoski, Conrad: The Moral World of the Novelist (1978). 10 has continued since the advent of theory as well because of the bias of most contemporary literary theories towards extrinsic criticism.