The Conradian : the Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society最新文献

{"title":"“The shore gang”: Chance and the Ethics of Work","authors":"A. Glazzard","doi":"10.1163/9789004308992_002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004308992_002","url":null,"abstract":"THE SUB-TITLE OF CHANCE declares it to be \"A Tale in two parts.\"1 The novel is a fabula duplex in ways more subtle and complex than merely in its overtly bi-partite form: this is a novel full of dichotomies that provide deeply thematic as well as formal structures. A choice between two options even characterized its author's deliberations over the novel's direction, as he reveals in his \"Author's Note\":like a sanguine oarsman setting forth in the early morning I came very soon to a fork in the stream and found it necessary to pause and reflect seriously on the direction I would take. ... My sympathies being equally divided and the two forces being equal it is perfectly obvious that nothing but mere chance influenced my decision in the end. (vii)This essay will consider the topic of work, which features in two of the novel's dichotomies - work and leisure, and work on shore versus work at sea - in order to demonstrate that Chance is strongly concerned with the ethics of working life, and that this concern reflects Conrad's ambitious attempt to anatomize British society at the beginning of the twentieth century.Both of these dichotomies are presented at the novel's opening, in which a confrontation between Charles Powell and a waiter in a riverside inn on the Thames estuary is witnessed by the novel's frame narrator, as well as one of its many internal narrators, Marlow. Powell, a yachtsman, addresses the waiter as \"steward,\" revealing him also to be a sailor: for Powell, the sea has provided work as well as leisure. \"Presently,\" we are told, Powell \"had occasion to reprove that same waiter for the slovenly manner in which the dinner was served.\" He does so \"with considerable energy\" before addressing Marlow and the frame narrator:\"If we at sea,\" he declared, \"went about our work as people ashore high and low go about theirs we should never make a living. No one would employ us. And moreover no ship navigated and sailed in the happy-go-lucky manner people conduct their business on shore would ever arrive into port.\"(3-4)Powell expands with a sweeping condemnation of all trades and professions that do not involve the sea:No one seemed to take any proper pride in his work: from plumbers who were simply thieves to, say, newspaper men ... who never by any chance gave a correct version of the simplest affair. This universal inefficiency of what he called \"the shore gang\" he ascribed in general to the want of responsibility and to a sense of security. (4)What becomes clear as we read on is that Powell's observations are more than merely one man's rather jaded opinion. For a start, his view is supported by another jaded commentator, Marlow, whose \"patronizing comments for women readers outlining the superior ethics of seamanship as opposed to the corrupt morals of those living on land\" in the serial text were, as Susan Jones has revealed, \"severely cut in the book version\" (2009: 293).The novel's exploration of the ethics of work goes well beyond the comm","PeriodicalId":394409,"journal":{"name":"The Conradian : the Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society","volume":"282 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2014-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129987980","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Interruption of Writing: Uncanny Intertextuality in under Western Eyes","authors":"Yael Levin","doi":"10.1163/9789401207270_003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401207270_003","url":null,"abstract":"If there is a dark power, which with such enmity and treachery lays a thread within us, by which it holds us fast, and draws us along the path of peril and destruction, which we should not otherwise have trod; if, I say, there is such a power, it must form itself within us or from ourselves, indeed; become identical with ourselves, for it is only in this condition that we can believe in it, and grant it the room which it requires to accomplish its secret work.E. T. A. Hoffman, \"The Sandman\" (147)Under WESTERN Eyes is a novel of uncanny returns; spectres, words and compulsively repeated scenes all conspire to unhinge its protagonist. Not only Razumov's guilty conscience, however, inspires this hauntological matrix.1 Haldin's unforeseeable intrusion at the outset inaugurates a story of betrayal, a fictional case study of the tyrannical fate dealt out in Tsarist Russia. This essay will show that the fateful intrusion may also be read as the formative start to an altogether different plot, one that self-reflexively and obsessively tells a story of writing. Viewed in this light, the spring of action is not a moral test but a dramatization of writer's block. The prize-winning essay that Razumov intends to write as he mounts the steps to his room before encountering Haldin is never written. The unfolding crisis of writing harbours the premise that the writerly instinct is inexorably linked to an experience of interruption, an acute and paralyzing sense of a lack of privacy. Haldin's spectral presence in the novel is thus to be read not only as a manifestation of guilt but also as an expression of writerly anxiety.The curious coincidence of writing and haunting explored in the novel makes for an interesting case study of the conceptual link between intertextuality and the uncanny. Although coined by Jentsch, \"the uncanny\" remains tied to Freud's seminal essay of 1919 in which it is used as an interpretative framework for the teasing out of GEdipal desire and the study of eerie repetition. The intertextual, in turn, offers a space of canny repetition, a convention of citation and duplication that in many ways defines what is literary. And yet, intertextuality also marks a space of difference where outside permeates inside and the familiar is uncannily inscribed into the new. Rather than define the transition between the accepted and the unaccepted, between the obsessive interruption of a return of the repressed and the poetic convention of a return to the already mitten, this essay will trace the way in which writing marks a conflation of the two, a space of permeable borders where the subject must confront the sham of its impervious cohesion.Writing, InterruptedHaldin's infiltration of Razumov's life occurs as a form of rupture or trauma that stands in the way of normality, a normality, moreover, that is perceived as the liberty to write: '\"I shall put in four hours of good work,' he [Razumov] thought. But no sooner had he closed the door than he was hor","PeriodicalId":394409,"journal":{"name":"The Conradian : the Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society","volume":"36 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129158300","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Underground Explosion: The Ethics of Betrayal in under Western Eyes and Malcolm Lowry's under the Volcano","authors":"Catherine Delesalle-Nancey","doi":"10.1163/9789401207270_006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401207270_006","url":null,"abstract":"UNDER WESTERN Eyes and Under the Volcano-, the preposition common to the tides of the two novels points to a vertical plane even though more directly so in Under the Volcano (1947). This apparent detail seems, in a way, to hint at the kind of link one may find between these two masterpieces, Malcolm Lowry's novel somehow emphasI2Ing the ultimate logic at work in Under Western Eyes. It is significant that the two novels should be at once the most political and the most personal works written by the novelists, and that both should be so successful. Delving into their authors' pasts and conflicting political and personal allegiances, they seem to confirm the statement Lowry makes in his first novel, Ultramarine-. \"What one writes, if one is to be any good, should be rooted in some sort of autochtony\" (89).Such autochtony, however, cannot but be problematic for these men who chose to leave their birthplaces and whose relationship with the mother country is stamped with ambivalence. Rooted in such shifting \"grounds\" (khton), the two novels deal with the notion of betrayal, political betrayal being inextricably tangled with personal concerns, even though Conrad and Lowry tried to set up some distance through the narrative devices they chose - the protagonists are introduced to the reader by a peripheral character: the Teacher of Languages, the homodiegetic narrator of Under Western Eyes, and Lamelle, the focalI2er of the first chapter in Under the Volcano. In both novels, a Western eye is witness to the violence and dire consequences of radical ideologies that divide other nations: the autocratic Russian regime and the revolutionists in Under Western Eyes, the Mexican Revolution followed by the rampant presence of the Fascists in the Mexico of Under the Volcano.In both novels, the protagonists strongly resent attempts to involve them in politics and wish to avoid taking sides; yet they will eventually be drawn into conflicts and raging violence, and driven to betrayal - that of Haldin by Ra2umov, and that of the dying Indian by the Consul. The intensely personal overtones this question has for Conrad, divided between his fidelity to his father's romantic revolutionary passion and his maternal uncle's practical and rational conservatism are well-known.1 Similarly, the political split between conservative ideology, on the one hand, and involvement in the Communist fight against Franco in Spain, against fascism and in favour of President Cardenas' socialist policy, on the other, are linked in Lowry's two surrogate father-figures: Conrad Aiken, whose political cynicism the Consul mostly voices; and Nordhal Grieg, a Norwegian writer Lowry much admired, who died in a RAF bomber over Berlin in the Second World War, and whose ideas mostly find their way into the novel through the Consul's half-brother, Hugh.For Lowry as well as for Conrad, then, the political and personal are intricately entwined. Keith Carabine writes: \"Under Western Eyes, the first fiction s","PeriodicalId":394409,"journal":{"name":"The Conradian : the Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122999694","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Under Western Eyes and \"The Theatre of the Real\"","authors":"A. Busza","doi":"10.1163/9789401207270_010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401207270_010","url":null,"abstract":"Under Western Eyes and \"The Theatre of the Real\"GRAHAM Greene DIVIDES his fiction into \"Serious Novels\" and \"Entertainments.\" This essay in Greene's terms will be \"an entertainment.\" Rather than, say, offer a detailed contextual reading of Conrad's Under Western Eyes (something already done by a number scholars) or develop an analysis of the text filtered through a specific interpretive framework (something increasingly being attempted by critics), this essay will present a relatively free-wheeling set of variations on the theme of espionage in the novel in relation to what I call \"the theatre of the real,\" a phrase borrowed from John Le Carre (1983: 204). While Greene and Le Carre entertain us with their skilfully constructed narratives, they also engage to some degree our moral, ideological, and political sense. In an analogous way, as I spin my tales of espionage, I intend to illustrate Conrad's uncanny understanding of the world and psychology of informers, collaborators, double agents, and spies, even though, unlike Greene and Le Carre, he was never professionally involved in intelligence work.Let me begin with an anecdote. In the late seventies, when the Polish dissident movement (which eventually grew into \"Solidarity\") was gathering strength, a young student defector from Poland contacted my friend and fellow poet, the late Bogdan Czaykowski, and offered to act as an intermediary between us and the London-based magazine Index on Censorship. The magazine wanted to publish in translation texts by young Polish poets with a dissident slant. Czaykowski and I had done a fair amount of translating together and, naturally, we agreed. In due course, our translations of poems by Zbigniew Herbert, Stanislaw Baranczak, and Jacek Bierezin appeared in the magazine. But the story of the student defector is more to the point here. The young man, a gregarious and malleable individual, had been marginally involved in the student demonstrations of March 1968. During one demonstration he was arrested and imprisoned by the security forces. In prison, where he was kept some six weeks, he was alternately mistreated and given cordial treatment. The interrogators had quickly hit upon his weak spot: he abhorred being disliked. And so to oblige them he agreed to collaborate and became an informer. He was sent abroad to spy on Polish emigre circles in the guise of a defector and made his rounds of all the major emigre institutions. I am sure he must have visited the Bibliotheque Polonaise in Paris; I know that he found his way to the Institut Litteraire at Maisons-Laffitte (a much more serious and influential Cold War analogue of Château Borel, although also hosting its complement of colourful figures); he must have hung around the bar at POSK; and I would be surprised if he didn't pay at least one visit to the cafeteria of Radio Free Europe in Munich.His status as a defector appears to have been somewhat ambiguous. He undoubtedly sent reports to his controllers in ","PeriodicalId":394409,"journal":{"name":"The Conradian : the Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society","volume":"57 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131627554","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Generic Transformations in under Western Eyes and \"The Secret Sharer\": Echoes of E. T. A. Hoffmann's \"The Sandman\" and Dostoevsky's \"The Double\"","authors":"J. Hawthorn","doi":"10.1163/9789401207270_004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401207270_004","url":null,"abstract":"KARL MARX FAMOUSLY opens his 1852 essay \"The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte\" with an ironic riposte to a comment of Hegel's. Hegel, he notes, \"remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice.\" Marx comments dryly: \"He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce\" (1962: 247). There is something satisfyingly appropriate in the way in which Marx illustrates a repetition that paradoxically produces something utterly different by reference to generic transformation. Writers often recycle material, consciously and unconsciously using elements from other writers in their own work. But in the case of great writers such borrowings are typically transformations. If over half a century ago the influence of F. R. Leavis's The Great Tradition (1948) encouraged us to believe that the greatest works of literature (amongst which Leavis numbered Under Western Eyes but not \"The Secret Sharer\") were influenced only by other great works and writers, a later generation of critics has generally accepted that Claude Levi-Strauss's concept of bricolage (1972: 17) probably provides a more accurate picture of composition. Writers are bricoleurs, odd-job men and women who find the materials that they need in the clutter of their culture and who adapt these materials to their purposes without necessarily having any respect for their original functions.Conrad was a notorious borrower, and he had the clutter of more than one culture to rummage through. His borrowings from French, Polish, and Russian culture have been extensively documented, and his reading of other literatures was far from negligible. But his borrowings were also transformations, and in his writing a phrase, a passage, a motif borrowed from another writer is often as different as Napoleon Bonaparte was from his farcical successor Louis Bonaparte. Furthermore the use to which Conrad put borrowings from a single source varies from work to work, and this variation is often linked to generic transformation.Thus one may abstract sentences or short passages from works by Conrad and be struck by how close a resemblance they bear to one another, or how close a resemblance they bear to elements from the work of another writer, only to realize that in their textual contexts the resemblance is far less striking. Take, for example, the following sentence: \"I felt with displeasure that a mysterious contact was being established between our two mental personalities\" (cited in Higdon and Sheard 1987: 174). These words bring \"The Secret Sharer\" to mind, and perhaps the sentence from \"The Secret Sharer\" that they most direcdy evoke is: \"A mysterious communication was established already between us two - in the face of that silent, darkened tropical sea\" (87).The first quoted sentence is not, however, from \"The Secret Sharer\" but is part of a cancelled sequence in the typescript of Under Western Eyes that describes a lengthy discussion that","PeriodicalId":394409,"journal":{"name":"The Conradian : the Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society","volume":"88 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131919580","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Conrad's Fatherless Sons: Betrayal by Paternity and Failure of Fraternity in under Western Eyes","authors":"C. Kaplan","doi":"10.1163/9789401207270_008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401207270_008","url":null,"abstract":"THE TRAUMATIC ABSENCE or betrayal of the father is a key theme in Conrad's works, from Almayer's Polly (1895) onwards. Eord Jim, for example, presents an array of unsatisfactory fathers - Jim's naive, hypocritical parson father; Stein, whose romantic injunctions prove unequal to salvaging Jim; and Doramin, who relinquishes to Jim his own son's right to succession. But in no work does Conrad explore this theme more fully than in Under Western Eyes, in which all fathers - biological, social, and political - fail or betray their sons. Razumov's father, who refuses to acknowledge his natural son, is cowardly and unable to protect him. Haldin's father is dead - and his death has undone his family. Further, father figures in Russia, including General T- and Mikulin, are either cruel or untrustworthy; and father figures in the West, whether the actual Teacher of Languages or the spectrally present Jean-Jacques Rousseau, are either ineffectual or misguided. Finally, the State as father is either cruelly autocratic, as is Russia; or complacently materialistic, as is Switzerland.Given the failure of patriarchy and patriarchal institutions, the novel considers the possibility of an alternative order, a society of brothers, as first proposed by Haldin to Razumov. But the novel, as it unfolds, demonstrates that such an alternative structure is doomed to fail. In the absence of the father, there can be no brotherhood: the sons - Razumov, Peter Ivanovitch, Yakovlitch - do not share power but rather bicker, batde, and flounder. And the sisters - Natalia, Tekla, and Sophia Antonovna - lacking any place in society, create their own, but at the expense of procreation and social continuity. The collapse of generations results in the loss of generativity: paralyzed men and disaffected women do not marry nor have children. That Conrad, in the course of writing the novel, came to the above awareness is demonstrated by his rejection of the original marriage plot.In a 1908 letter to John Galsworthy, Conrad explains his first conception of the novel: \"The Student Razumov meeting abroad the mother and sister of Haldin falls in love with that last, marries her and after a time confesses to her the part he played in the arrest and death of her brother\" (CL4 9). In rethinking the thematic elements, Conrad moved away from the earlier version, in which Razumov and Natalia marry, to the final version in which Razumov's confession leads to Natalia's rejection and his destruction.Yet, on closer examination, Under Western Eyes is not about the failures of patriarchy and patriarchal institutions. For indeed in the Russia Conrad depicts there is no patriarchy. Patriarchy implies law and social order. But, as Conrad points out in his 1905 essay \"Autocracy and War,\" \"there never has been any legality in Russia\" (Notes on Life and Letters 84): \"From the very first ghasdy dawn of her existence as a state she had to breathe the atmosphere of despotism, she found nothing but the arbitrary ","PeriodicalId":394409,"journal":{"name":"The Conradian : the Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131879497","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Conrad's Working Methods in under Western Eyes: The Editorial Challenge","authors":"P. Eggert","doi":"10.1163/9789401207270_002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401207270_002","url":null,"abstract":"The Editorial Tradition for Modem Works of FictionIN 1989, the renowned bibliographer and editorial commentator G. Thomas Tanselle characterized the editorial pursuit in the following terms: \"We have reason to persist in the effort to define the flowerings of previous human thought, which in their inhuman tranquillity have overcome the torture of their birth.\" His formulation is almost a definition of the category of literary works and of the aesthetic realm in which they exist. Tanselle is rarely as poetic as this. He does not quite say that works are objects but only that they have a special form of existence that puts them in a privileged realm, over and apart from other wridngs and over and apart from us.Tanselle is the principal inheritor, adapter, and articulator of the heritage of editorial thinking that comes down to us through Sir Walter Greg in his famous essay, \"The Rationale of Copy-Text,\" in 1950 and through the legendary Fredson Bowers in his extensions of Greg's insight, after the 1950s, to cover the textual situations encountered in editing a great range of mainly nineteenth- and twentieth-century American and, later, British authors. This line of thinking affects the Cambridge Conrad edition fundamentally, although for the most part silently. The reason is a simple one.After Greg and Bowers, texts of final authorial intention could be arrived at with greater subtlety than before. It was no longer the older method of ascertaining which was the latest version that the author authorized for publication - the so-called \"death-bed\" edition. The problem with this approach - let us call it, in our case, the Heinemann Collected or the Doubleday \"Sun-Dial\" Conrad - is that, even if the author did make changes, choosing the last authorized edition as the basis of the reading text necessarily built in all the other changes made as an ordinary part of their job by typists, typesetters, and editors of the editions that intervened between the manuscript and it.Following Greg and Bowers, it became a matter of choosing as copytext the version that the author was most fully engaged in. This would typically be the manuscript; but, depending upon the author's compositional habits, it could well be a later document. The editor would then ascertain critically which of the changed readings in subsequent documents or editions could be attributed confidently to the author. Such readings would be deemed to be revisions. Being of later date than the chosen copy-text, they would be incorporated into it, thus creating in the one synchronic axis a single textual assembly from multiple diachronic sources. This could include readings from documents earlier than the copy-text if it were suspected that the person who had prepared it - a typist, say - had made errors that the author had not noticed but had passively authorized. These could be overturned.Once the copy-text is chosen, the method operates locally, at the site of the individual revision, rather than ","PeriodicalId":394409,"journal":{"name":"The Conradian : the Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2011-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125186192","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"\"The Warrior's Soul\" and the Question of Community","authors":"Kaoru Yamamoto","doi":"10.5040/9781474250054.ch-007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5040/9781474250054.ch-007","url":null,"abstract":"AT FIRST READING \"The Warrior's Soul\" seems to be a characteristically Conradian tale dramatizing the moral ordeal of a young hero who must choose between two nightmares. The old Russian narrator, who for the most part speaks for Tomassov, the story's \"warrior,\" provides no satisfactory clues to his hero's conduct, however, and thereby incurs Lawrence Graver's criticism of his \"inadequate powers of explanation\" (1969: 196). This essay argues that the narrator is less preoccupied with the individual characterization, suggested in the original tide, \"The Humane Tomassov,\" than with the plurality of existence and collectivity. This change of tide from \"The Humane Tomassov\" to the more general \"The Warrior's Soul\" itself implies this shift in emphasis, one also indicated by the narrator's use of the \"we.\"Undermining a concept of self - of an autonomous, morally responsible individual human being, whose inner life is fully known through introspection, the old Russian narrator repeatedly associates the word \"soul\" with something relational, and yet avoids a nostalgic evocation of a lost community of warriors.1 Rather the narrative opens up the possibility of \"being-together,\" to use Jean-Luc Nancy's term.2 Nancy's concept of \"community,\" following the example of the deconstruction of the metaphysics of subjectivity, affords valuable insight into this late short story. Although ostensibly concerned with the moral agony of an individual subject, the old Russian narrator is, in feet, warning against the conventional \"novelistic\" portrayal of his protagonist even as early as his first introduction of him. The narrator takes over the narrative from the seemingly omniscient, impersonal narrator of the opening few lines to report on the terrible sight of war. In his vision, the image of Tomassov sitting erect in the saddle emerges from \"a crawling, stumbling, starved, half-demented mob\" of French stragglers on the frozen battlefield. The young narrator sees \"That multitude of resurrected bodies with glassy eyes\" seething round Tomassov's horse (4-5) and then goes on to emphasize his youth, drawing \"near enough to have a good look into his [Tomassov's] eyes\": \"Those same eyes were blue, something like the blue of autumn skies, dreamy and gay, too - innocent, believing eyes. A topknot of fair hair decorated his brow like a gold diadem in what one would call normal times\" (5).The narrator's poetic diction here alerts the reader to his rhetoric. An external description of a character is usually followed by an exploration of psychological depths. Here, Tomasso^s inertia, in sharp contrast with his troopers \"pointing and slashing\" the enemy, requires the narrator's explanation. However, instead of letting us look into TomassoV^s inner feelings, the narrator's self-referential comment, Subsequently, suspending the image of a paralysed Tomassov on the battlefield, the narrator introduces an episode of passionate love and friendship in France three months before the w","PeriodicalId":394409,"journal":{"name":"The Conradian : the Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2010-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122905125","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"From Incapable \"Angel in the House\" to Invincible \"New Woman\" in Marlovian Narratives: Representing Womanhood in \"Heart of Darkness\" and Chance","authors":"Pei-Wen Clio Kao","doi":"10.1163/9789004308992_009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004308992_009","url":null,"abstract":"WHEN ADDRESSING ISSUES of the Modernist arts and literature in the face of the \"machismo aesthetics\" of the male modernists, feminist critics choose to turn their attention to things \"associated with the feminine\" that have long been excluded or ignored by male critics (Felski 1995: 24). According to Rita Felski, modernity as a concept denotes the public sphere dominated by malecentered institutions, and enacts a rigid hierarchical distinction between the public sphere (masculinity) and private sphere (femininity), which distinguishes the male mastery of a \"experimental, self-conscious, and ironic aesthetic\" from the female indulgence in the \"seductive lures of emotion, desire, and the body\" (24). To dismande the phallogocentric fixity of gender hierarchy, Felski encourages a \"revisionist readings of the male modernist canon\" on the part of feminist critics to cast new light on the importance of female experiences as well as women's modernity (24). Inspired by my predecessors' efforts to illuminate images of the feminine and to release the voices of female characters repressed by traditional scholarship concerning modernist literary text, this paper will re-read Joseph Conrad's \"Heart of Darkness\" (1899) and Chance (1914), focussing on the different representations of womanhood filtered through the eyes of the serial male narrator Charlie Marlow. Motivated by the feminist objective to restore the importance of the trivial, the everyday, and the mundane in the experiences of women (Felski 1995: 28), I shall present a critical perspective in which the representation of women and the feminine are fully explored and addressed, through the lens of female sensibility and sensitivity as well. As Nadelhaft has put it, \"a feminist reading of Joseph Conrad is designed in large part to reclaim Conrad for women readers for whom he has been almost a clandestine pleasure, in the face of the male critical hierarchy and feminist disapproval\" (1991: 1) so that the pleasures for women readers of Conrad's works can be best enjoyed and savored from the new critical perspective of feminism.Many critics of Chance have commented on the complex discussions of gender at work in the novel.1 By comparing the representation of the female protagonist in this novel with Conrad's earlier evocation of the \"Intended\" in \"Heart of Darkness,\" this essay explores the development of Conrad's response to contemporary literary tropes from that of the \"Angel in the House\" to the \"New Woman.\" I shall argue that while the \"Intended\" belongs to the category implied by Coventry Patmore's famous poem, Flora de Barrai in part sheds the patriarchal assumptions of the Victorian \"Angel\" and emerges with an identity more closely conforming to the ideals of the \"New Woman.\" Nevertheless, a comparison of the two female images proves that their construction goes beyond the simplistic polar division of patriarchal passivity/feminist independence, which in turn demonstrates Conrad's insight into the ","PeriodicalId":394409,"journal":{"name":"The Conradian : the Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society","volume":"502 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127328631","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Chance: Conrad's A Portrait of a Feminist","authors":"Yumiko Iwashimizu","doi":"10.1163/9789004308992_011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004308992_011","url":null,"abstract":"CONRAD'S PORTRAYAL OF WOMEN has widely been regarded as unsuccessful, and his female characters have been the target of criticism for more than half a century. In particular, Thomas Moser, who sees Conrad's fear or hostility towards women in his female characters, maintains that he loses control while describing them (1957: 162). He also points out the misogyny in the later Conrad and remarks that the characterization of Mrs Fyne seems to evolve from the author's unacknowledged misogynistic feelings (160). Several commentators have dismanded Moser's enduring critique of Conrad's writing about women. Yet one of his most intriguing characters, the topical feminist Zoe Fyne of his novel Chance, has to receive full attention.In Chance, Conrad presents Mrs Fyne's interest in women's issues in distinctively different ways throughout the novel. She invites her female friends over every week to visit, friends whom Marlow calls her \"girlfriends,\" who come \"for Mrs Fyne and treated her with admiring deference\" (42). She apparendy answers to some of her young disciples' emotional needs, and she also publishes a tract on women's education (65), which suggests a strong desire to guide young women. Since the death of Flora's mother, Mrs Fyne has been anxious about her. However, while initially sympathetic towards Flora, once Mrs Fyne learns about her elopement with Anthony, she violendy opposes the marriage and interferes in it. Mrs Fyne, although her own marriage was a mnway love match, uses her husband to play a role in preventing the couple from marrying. Her motive for stopping the marriage is not made fully clear, but Marlow conjectures that Mrs Fyne must have been thinking about how the affair might influence her daughters, because Flora is the daughter of a convict (161).1 Marlow also notes Mrs Fyne's jealous attitude: \"her sense of proprietorship was very strong within her; and though she had not much use for her brother, yet she did not like to see him annexed by another woman\" (190). Like many contemporary matches, Flora's marriage to Anthony in part stemmed from economic exigency: it was a way of protect her father and herself when her father's bankruptcy left her in an impecunious state. Mrs Fyne's unsympathetic response to Flora's elopement and condition contradicts her feminist principles, because she thinks that women, who are the victims of men's selfishness, do not have to consider other people's convenience (58).Marlow also occasionally finds fault with her feminist views. For example, in his exchanges with Mrs Fyne, Marlow says that in his first meeting with Flora she looked like \"the most wrong-headed inconsiderate girl\" (58) on a cliff, to which Mrs Fyne replies, \"Why should a girl be more considerate than anyone else?\" Marlow mockingly responds: \"Just like that. I confess that I went down flat. And while in that collapsed state I learned the true nature of Mrs Fyne's feminist doctrine. It was not political, it was not social. It was a kno","PeriodicalId":394409,"journal":{"name":"The Conradian : the Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society","volume":"75 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116623585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}