•«*#w* ""^^ "•"•sity ot Conrad's Fiction as Critical Discourse by Richard Ambrosini Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Doctorate Department of English University of Ottawa '^\ Richard Ambrosini, Ottawa, Canada, 1989. UMI Number: DC53558 INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. UMI® UMI Microform DC53558 Copyright 2011 by ProQuest LLC All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction p. 1 Chapter One: Critical Discourse: The Five Tropes p. 26 Part I: The Preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus" . p. 27 Part II: WORK p. 4 6 Part III: IDEALISM .... p. 61 Part IV: EFFECT p. 68 Part V: FIDELITY .... p. 80 Part VI: PRECISION . p. 8 9 Chapter Two: Working on Language and Structure: Alternative Strategies in Conrad's Choice of Authorship . p. 104 Chapter Three: The Mirror-Effect in "Heart of Darkness" p. 133 Chapter Four: Lord Jim (I): The Narrator as Interpreter . p. 180 Chapter Five: Lord Jim (II): The Narrator as Reader p. 240 Conclusion p. 2 90 Notes p. 300 Works Cited p. 356 i ABSTRACT The study which resulted in Conrad's Fiction as Critical Discourse was launched by the realization that Conrad uses Marlow's comments in "Heart of Darkness" and Lord Jim to direct the readers' attention toward the theoretical issues he is testing in his writing. This intellectual drama built into the fictional language led me to postulate that Con­ rad discovered and tested his own literary theories in the act of writ­ ing. His statements about his art are largely glosses on these dis­ coveries. The first implication of this postulate is that the distinc­ tion often made between the value of Conrad's tales and the sig­ nificance of the ideas at work in them is based on notions of theory and writing which do not take into account Conrad's own approach. The second is that, by setting the author's comments in the context of the transformation of his narrative forms, it is possible to reach a defini­ tion of his own view of fiction. The dismissal of the theoretical relevance of Conrad's comments about his work has frustrated the kind of discussion by which other moder­ nist writers have gained considerably. Henry James and James Joyce in­ troduced critical terms which have shaped the very notion of the modern novel. But when, as in Conrad's case, the author's personal voice does not attract much interest, and the ideas he suggests for interpreting his novels are "honor" and "fidelity," his statements of literary in­ tention are not valued as contributing to a critical discussion of the modern novel. As a matter of fact, Conrad does not use a readily identifiable critical language in his writings. When it came to set­ ting down his most deeply-felt convictions, he strove after the same ii kind of synthesis of abstract principles and life experience which he achieved in fiction. Chapter One of the present study outlines in Conrad's non- fiction­ al writings the metaphorical mode of expression which allowed him to express both the moral and aesthetic implications of his writing. This reading focuses on the five major tropes which synthesize his central concerns: WORK, IDEALISM, EFFECT, FIDELITY ancl PRECISION. Conrad uses the clusters of themes and words which form these tropes to cast his convictions in a figurative language. Conrad's use of these rhetori­ cal patterns throughout his letters and essays provides a frame of reference for seeing the continuity of his convictions. His repeated vindications of this continuity have been seen as a sign of his unreliability as a commentator on his own art. In fact, in his later years he was still reacting imaginatively to his earlier convic­ tions, still elaborating on the tropes running through his critical discourse. The most striking instance of this continuity is a piece he wrote a few months before his death, the preface to The Shorter Tales of Joseph Conrad (1924) . While editing his early stories, Con­ rad recalls, he saw "more clearly than ever before, that indeed those [early stories] were but paper boats freighted with a grown-up child's dreams" (Last Essays, 143). The present study argues that the "dream" which freights these tales with formal experimentations, authorial self-questioning, and figurative language, is that through fiction he could communicate a world view defeated by history and foreign to the language he was employing. He first enunciated his dream's aesthetic and moral implications in the 1897 Preface to The Nigger of the "Nar­ cissus. " And he carried out, tested and eventually re-defined it in "Heart of Darkness" and Lord Jim, his "paper boats." iii By uncovering the tropes and rhetorical patterns of Conrad's criti­ cal discourse, the present study has been able to interpret his metaphorical discussion of his "dream" in Marlow's narrative voice. The readings of The Nigger of the "Narcissus," "Karain" and "Youth," in Chapter Two, have set Marlow' s function in the context of Conrad's expectations as to how a critical language is to act on readers. Viewed in the light of the writing/sailing metaphor in particular, the im­ aginative sea captain aware of the dangers lurking below the surface of the sea seems less an idealized figure than a technical device. In trying to remain faithful to his memory, Marlow's moral concerns be­ come a questioning of the possibility itself of communicating his past experiences. Conrad can thus make explicit, through his internal narrator's addresses to his audience, the theoretical dimension of his own struggle to transform his own memories into visual impressions. The interpretation of "Heart of Darkness" in Chapter Three focuses on how Marlow's commentary draws a line between the sayable and the unsayable, thus enabling Conrad to distinguish the story of the events from the tale of the effect those events had on the narrator. In Chap­ ter Four, an analysis of Marlow's inquiry in the first part of Lord Jim will reveal that Conrad uses his narrator to force on readers a sense of Jim's "existence" - that is, of the reality of his predica­ ment. Marlow's commentary is, first and foremost, an interpretation of the young man's figurative language. Such an interpretation translates the expression of a subjective experience into a statement of this experience's universality. Chapter Five argues that, by presenting Patusan as the result of Marlow's interpretation of Jim's case, Con­ rad makes clear that only a fictional world can create that "suspen­ sion of disbelief" which makes a fictional character exist. iv In making his commitment to authorship in 1897, Conrad's convictions became as many motivations for writing in a form different from the novel he inherited from the Victorians. The story of this passionate conflict traces a recalcitrant capitulation to the conventions at work in the notion of fictionality which binds a community of readers. In the act of writing, Conrad realized that the chimera of a suggestive­ ly impressionistic language could not overcome the limits dividing reality from fiction. "Typhoon" marks the end of his "grown-up child's dreams." The works which follow comply with the genre conventions he had reacted against when he made his commitment to authorship. 1 INTRODUCTION The re-evaluation of Joseph Conrad's work in the second half of this century has uncovered in his texts complex narrational forms and star­ tling perceptions of the darkness in Western consciousness. That scholarly enterprise has discarded, apparently for good, several simplistic labels that earlier, less-refined approaches had attached to his fiction. Conrad's admission to the modernist pantheon, however, has not substantially redefined the earlier casting of the writer as a mature sailor who had spent his formative years in a world foreign to literary circles. The very assumptions which have made possible Conrad's re-evaluation are largely grounded on the notion that the valuable parts of his texts have to be rescued from their author's tampering with the product of his creative imagination. As a result, the com­ ments he makes about his own art in his fiction, letters, and essays are dismissed as perfunctory self-defenses. According to Douglas Hewitt, for example, Conrad seems to be "unaware of what qualities make him a great novelist." Reasoning along these lines, critics have felt that in assessing Conrad's greatness they were formulating for the first time the theoretical implications of his artistic choices. In the long run, however, the assumptions which have guided Conrad's reassessment have actually impeded understanding of the complexity of his work. The dismissal of the theoretical relevance of Conrad's com­ ments about his work has frustrated the kind of discussion by which other modernist writers have gained considerably. Henry James, Vir­ ginia Woolf and James Joyce all introduced critical terms which have 2 shaped the very notion of the modern novel. Their reflections on their craft have provided ever new contexts for the re-reading of their novels because their speculations tally with the theoretical assump­ tions they themselves helped to establish.