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

{"title":"“Fine-weather books”: Representations of Readers and Reading in Chance","authors":"Helen E. Chambers","doi":"10.1163/9789004308992_008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004308992_008","url":null,"abstract":"CRITICAL INTEREST in Chance has been mainly directed to its textual variants, serialization and marketing, the complexities of its narrative structure, gender issues, its numerous literary allusions, and its representation of advertising. This essay takes yet another approach, one from the perspective of the history of reading, to demonstrate how Chance is one of the most textually charged of all Conrad's novels with depictions of readers and reflections on actual, not merely metaphorical, acts of reading.This discussion will mostly, although not entirely, circumvent Amar Acheraiou's typology of Conrad's fictional readers, whom he divides, on the one hand, into those \"nominal\" readers (\"myopic and incompetent\") and, on the other, into \"metaphorical\" readers who are \"active observers and interpreters of allegorical scripts such as other characters' faces, their body language, and their geographical, social and cultural contexts\" (2009: 94-95). Instead, the focus will be on the \"actual\" fictional readers in Chance and on their reading practices. It is important at this point, however, to note the warning sounded by Kate Flint who, writing about the representation of reading in Thackeray's 1Vanity Fair; states that:Only a naive reader would believe that the representation of reading in fiction offers straightforward, empirical evidence of contemporary reading practices. Fictional depictions of what and how women and men read involve the novel's consumer in complex acts of interpretation. When such depictions are insistent and teasing ... they directly confront the reader with the need to consider his or her own interpretative strategies while in the very act of employing them.(1996: 246)This comment is also relevant to examining the representation of reading in Chance. Through the complex narrative structure, Conrad engages us, the readers, in a relentless ironic dialogue about, among other subjects, reading, including the relationship between the acts of reading in the novel and the ways in which the novel itself might have been read. This dialogue is mediated through Marlow, who, in addressing the unnamed narrator, is thereby addressing one group of Conrad's own implied conservative readers. At the same time, Conrad writes to his new market, the weekend edition of the mass circulation New York Herald, a broad readership whose profile can be deduced from examining the news, feature articles, advertising material, and other paratextual elements in any randomly chosen issue.An example of how, early in the novel, Conrad depicts an act of reading offers a beginning. Marlow, alone in his summer cottage and enjoying the fine sunny weather, muses before being abruptly interrupted by Fyne:I love such days. They are perfection for remaining indoors. And I enjoyed it temperamentally in a chair, my feet up on the sill of the open window, a book in my hands and the murmured harmonies of wind and sun in my heart making an accompaniment to the rhythms of my auth","PeriodicalId":394409,"journal":{"name":"The Conradian : the Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society","volume":"12 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":"127917669","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 “girl-novel”: Chance and Woolf’s The Voyage Out","authors":"E. H. Wright","doi":"10.1163/9789004308992_007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004308992_007","url":null,"abstract":"CONRAD'S CHANCE (1914) and Virginia Woolfs The Voyage Out (1915) were completed within a year of each other and were both written with great difficulty (including mental breakdowns) over the course of several years.1 Although Woolfs novel was her debut work and Conrad's was written after decades of successful authorship, they were ostensibly similar in attempting to delineate the life of a young woman who, in both instances, crosses the ocean to find a suitable suitor as well as a sense of self and self-worth. Both have women as protagonists; although, significandy, neither author made the heroines eponymous, arguably signalling that the works were about the accidents of life in Chance and the passage through it in The Voyage Out2 Yet both writers approached the \"girl-novel\" (if they could be described as such) differendy. Indeed, Woolf would have railed at such a term perhaps because of Conrad's caveat that in his \"girl-novel\" there would be a \"steady run of references to women in general all along\" (CL5 208) - a somewhat reductive plan.With his novel, Conrad attempted to target a female audience, as letters to his agent, J. B. Pinker, and his interview in the New York Herald of 14 January 1912 reveal. He also aimed to explore contemporary male attitudes towards women, although he does not investigate the female psyche and gives his heroine little chance to speak her mind. Woolf, on the other hand, reluctant to be called a feminist and conscious of the criticism levelled at female writers writing about women, tried to avoid preaching or strident discussion of the differences between the sexes particularly by the narrator who, she was aware, might be conflated with the author, a fate that has, in fact, consistently befallen Conrad.As Woolf wrote to her brother-in-law Clive Bell to whom she sent drafts of the manuscript:Your objection, that my prejudice against men makes me didactic \"not to say priggish,\" has not quite the same force with me; I dont [sic remember what I said that suggests the remark; I daresay it came out without my knowledge, but I will bear it in mind. I never meant to preach, and agree that like God, one shouldn't. (1975: 383)General comments about the sexes are largely voiced by the characters who speak or think their own minds about gender issues in the natural course of conversation or in their own reflections. In Woolfs work there is no calculated attempt by the narrator to reference women \"in general all along\" as is the case with Marlow's crass observations, which remain chauvanistic, no matter how much he tempers his essentialist judgements with moments of more liberal reflection or excuses that he only believes what he says \"on certain days of the year\" (94). His comments about women are laced with general scorn, grumbling dislike, and patronizing sarcasm; and his sensible declaration that women are neither \"doll or an angel to me\" (53) is undermined when he replaces these types with equally reductive categories.The rea","PeriodicalId":394409,"journal":{"name":"The Conradian : the Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society","volume":"117 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":"132543821","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":"“Let that Marlow talk”: Chance and the Narrative Problem of Marlow","authors":"J. G. Peters","doi":"10.1163/9789004308992_010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004308992_010","url":null,"abstract":"EARLY COMMENTATORS quickly noted the significance of Conrad's creation of Marlow. Virginia Woolf drew a distinction between how Conrad presents his characters before and after him, suggesting that his early characters were \"seafarers, used to solitude and silence. They were in conflict with nature, but at peace with man,\" but she adds that \"it is clear that to admire and celebrate such men and such deeds, romantically, wholeheartedly and with the fervour of a lover, one must be possessed of the double vision; one must be at once inside and out\" (1924: 493). For Woolf, Marlow provided Conrad with this ability: \"Conrad alone was able to live that double life, for Conrad was a compound of two men; together with the sea captain dwelt that subtle, refined, and fastidious analyst whom he called Marlow.\"Other critics considered Marlow's purpose to be different but no less important. Joseph Warren Beach pointed to his role in creating multiple points of view: \"Conrad's problem was to secure the advantage of the many points of view without losing that of coherence. It was to make a real composite of these many pictures taken from so many diverse angles, to make a ynthesis of material so disparate. And he solved that problem most successfully through the help of Captain Marlow\" (1931: 353). Frances Wentworth Cutler viewed Marlow in yet another way, arguing that he places the reader in the position of groping rather than grasping for meaning:But Marlow's method not only defies the text-books: it insistently questions some basal assumptions of the critics of fiction. ... The older novel, the simplification of life, gave us the creative process achieved, the decision handed down. ... But with Conrad we actually enter the creative process: we grope with him through blinding mists, we catch at fleeting glimpses and thrill with sudden illuminations. (1918:37)Edward Crankshaw went so far as to argue that Marlow was crucial to Conrad's literary progress, remarking that \"he seems to me to provide a key, the key, to all the problems surrounding Conrad the novelist as distinct from the man\" (1936: 67). For Crankshaw, Conrad created Marlow in order to comment \"without ruining his illusion\" of reality and to maintain his \"aloofness and impersonality\" (73); by employing Marlow, Conrad can reveal subjectivity while maintaining authorial objectivity: \"Marlow we find indeed a creature of necessity. For it was he among other aids who enabled Conrad to illuminate with subjective comment state of mind which he could never have rendered objectively because he could not invent, because he could not visualI2e what he had never seen\" (119).Marlow has been the subject of much subsequent commentary, most of which focuses on his role in \"Heart of Darkness\" and Lord Jim, and to a lesser degree \"Youth,\" with litde criticism directed towards the Marlow of Chance. Similarly, throughout commentary on Chance, periodic oblique references appear regarding Marlow as the novel's narrator and ","PeriodicalId":394409,"journal":{"name":"The Conradian : the Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society","volume":"21 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":"124999838","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":"Ships in the Night: Intimacy, Narration, and the Endless Near Misses of Chance","authors":"Mark Deggan","doi":"10.1163/9789004308992_012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004308992_012","url":null,"abstract":"HANCE INSCRIBES A SEARCH for a narrator capable of setting out i its scenario, a quest made more complex by the fact that for V > much of the novel a middle-aged man is called in to unveil the consciousness of an all but fallen young woman. Indeed, by the end of the novel the struggle of Conrad's primary narrator, Marlow, to place Chance's elusive female protagonist into perspective becomes a theme in its own right. In negotiating the story's voyeuristic aspects, including Marlow's own affective complexities concerning Flora de Barrai, Conrad comes to frame an interrogation of his narrator's perspectiva! practices, including the text's increasingly fruitful collusion between the marine aspects of its scenario and the interiorities of its cast. This essay explores the means by which Marlow's symbolic usages not only move productively between scenes set at sea and the narrative presentation of the story's dramas of morality and intimacy, but also incorporate the several near misses of Conrad's published scenario.1A further observation can be made concerning Marlow's narrative stance. While playing down the \"mere visual impressions\" he sees sustaining a journalistic or \"picturesque point of view,\" Marlow comes dose to mocking those moments in which one acquires merely \"ponderous, useful, unvibrating\" information as opposed to the awarenesses by which true \"knowledge\" is composed (68). As will be seen, this paper is most concerned with those points where, despite Marlow's acknowledgement of the \"fine resonant quality\" proper to full understanding, he resists pursuing such resonances where they \"touch upon the transcendental\" (68) - that is to say, where they are most full of the sorts of reflections and associations by which \"resonant\" qualities might be translated into deeper meaning. Whilst these phrases are occasioned with reference to Flora's father, Marlow is elsewhere more inclined to engage \"transcendental\" categories in rounding out the narration of profound insight. I would raise a similar point with regard to Chance's feminine aspects - for while an important reader of Conrad's work like Ian Watt may recognize how \"nowhere, I imagine, can subject matter have called more strongly for externality and indirection of presentation\" (1968: 316), even Watt stops short of wondering whether such indirection has resonance or whether it might prove the central means by which Conrad addresses the dodgier substance of his scenario: eloping former heiresses, a sea captain's long delayed marital consummations, or the romande inclinations of an attractive young widow.Conrad does more than use an indirect route as a way of narrativizing the occasionally awkward intimacies the story sets in motion. For instance, where the innermost subjective processes of his cast tend towards the amatory, it is the synaesthetic poetics of consciousness with which he animates the conflicted affects and emotions of his leading characters, rather than the presumed and perhaps ","PeriodicalId":394409,"journal":{"name":"The Conradian : the Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society","volume":"29 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":"133192826","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 Conradian Subject-in-Process: The Question of Ethics in under Western Eyes","authors":"D. Erdinast-Vulcan","doi":"10.1163/9789401207270_007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401207270_007","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":394409,"journal":{"name":"The Conradian : the Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society","volume":"09 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":"114537445","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":"'\"Unfit for Action . . . Unable to Rest\": Goethe, Lermontov and Under Western Eyes","authors":"R. Niland","doi":"10.1163/9789401207270_005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789401207270_005","url":null,"abstract":"IN 1913, referring to Goethe, Conrad stated that he had \"never read a line of the Great Man\" (CL5 174). Nevertheless, Under Western Eyes engages with Faust, especially in light of the strong presence of Goethe's masterpiece in the nineteenth-century Russian literature that Conrad most directly evokes in Under Western Eyes. While some critics have drawn parallels between Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus (1947) and Under Western Eyes (Kaye 1957) references to \"Mephistophelian laughter\" (60), \"Mephistophelian eyebrows\" (245), the Devil, and ghouls abound in the novel with sufficient frequency for our gaze to be directed more fruitfully back to earlier Faustian parallels. Indeed, the narrator makes the Faustian symbolism explicit in alluding to one of the central myths of post-mediaeval European society: \"To the morality of a Western reader an account of these meetings would wear perhaps the sinister character of old legendary tales where the Enemy of Mankind is represented holding subtly mendacious dialogues with some tempted soul\" (304-05).Conrad's initial engagement with Goethe can be traced to Lord Jim. Gting the novel's references to Goethe's play Torquato Tasso, Paul Kirschner observes that \"the lines from Tasso suggest that Goethe was one of the great writers who helped to shape Conrad's imagination,\" arguing that Stein is \"a figure cast in the Goethean mould\" (1979: 79).1 Essential to this connection is Stein's philosophizing on the Faustian polarities of Jim's character. For Jim, like Faust, in \"his frenzied, crazed unrest,\" \"all the near and far that he desireth / Fails to subdue the tumult of his breast\" (Goethe 1969: 33). Faust's self-diagnosis offers an eloquent expression of the divided self that holds a singularly influential position in nineteenth-century European literature:Two souls, alas! reside within my breast,And each withdraws from, and repels, its brother;One with tenacious organs holds in lustAnd clinging love the world in its embraces;The other strongly soars above this dustInto the high ancestral spaces(Goethe 1969: 58)Faust's salvation in Goethe's version of the legend as a result of his incessant striving \"has puzzled scholars and laymen alike\" (Hagen and Mahlendorf 1963: 473), and the poem's insistence that \"Restless activity proves the man\" (Goethe 1969: 78) has led to conflicting moral and political readings of Goethe's work. Marshall Berman, asserting that Goethe's work is \"one of the primary sources of international romanticism\" (1993: 43), investigates the poem's exploration of the redemptive aspects of individual dynamism, while others have understood Faust as a \"symbol of modern man's aberrations, crimes, and failures\" (Hagen and Mahlendorf 1963: 473). For the Goethean Stein in Lord Jim, Jim's failure to submit to the \"destructive element\" (214) that allows man to embrace his inheritance of both the real and the ideal provokes a Faustian restlessness, thereby explaining why man makes \"a great noise about himself' (208","PeriodicalId":394409,"journal":{"name":"The Conradian : the Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society","volume":"37 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":"121790189","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":"Speech, Affect, and Intervention in Chance","authors":"Anne Enderwitz","doi":"10.1163/9789004308992_004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004308992_004","url":null,"abstract":"CHANCE, THE LAST OF Conrad'S Marlow narratives, resembles \"Heart of Darkness\" in its concern with language, storytelling, and interpretation. Never one for \"neat endings\" (ErdinastVulcan 1989: 52) and clear messages, Marlow produces in Chance an intricate web of diverse narrative voices, piecing together \"bits of disconnected statements\" (222). Nonetheless, the way in which Chance approaches language differs from Conrad's earlier explorations of the threatening failure of representation and communication in \"Heart of Darkness.\" \"Heart of Darkness\" exhibits the struggle involved in communicating experience with Marlow mourning the lack of unmediated access to lived experience and \"the truth of things\" (54). Chance, on the contrary, scrutinizes the power of language to affect and intervene without lamenting the loss of certitudes. Its primary focus is not on the absence of an original referent beneath language and narrative but on how language affects us and what possibilities it offers. The scene of Flora's trauma plays a key role in demonstrating the potency of language to affect people. In the end, however, the emphasis is not on the word's ability to wound. As the novel progresses it emerges that the potency of words to move people to action offers possibilities for intervention that can empower the subject. Not accidentally, Chance even offers a fairly \"neat ending.\"From Representation to the Power of SpeechFamously, Marlow calls the elopement of Flora and Captain Anthony the \"affair of the purloined brother\" (148), speaking from the standpoint of Captain Anthony's sister, Mrs Fyne. This allusion to Poe's detective story \"The Purloined Letter\" (1844) is suggestive. Captain Anthony has not only disappeared, quite as the letter M. Dupin is asked to find in the original Poe story, but, just as the letter's contents remain unknown, the original Captain Anthony is, in a sense, a blank, being the one character with whom Marlow never speaks. Instead, he is entirely pieced together from the comments of others, an extreme case of a general phenomenon in the Marlow stories. In \"Youth,\" \"Heart of Darkness,\" Lord Jim, and Chance events are first transmitted by an anonymous first-person narrator and then by Marlow. Furthermore, in the latter three narratives, important parts of the stories are told by other characters. In Chance, as in \"Heart of Darkness\" and Lord Jim, Marlow relies heavily on other people's accounts for the creation of his own, and the reader is confronted with multiple narrative perspectives.Conrad's allusion to Poe's detective story also operates on a more literal level, for a letter lies at the heart of Flora's and Anthony's love complications. As in Poe, this one is \"one of the blank spots, one of the absences in the narrative\" (Hampson 1980: 11), with Mrs Fyne alone familiar with its contents. In \"The Purloined Letter,\" the author of the letter, a member of the royal household, is in the power of Minister D., who has stolen the compr","PeriodicalId":394409,"journal":{"name":"The Conradian : the Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society","volume":"24 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":"128987880","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 and Its Intertextualities","authors":"Ewa Kujawska-Lis","doi":"10.1163/9789004308992_006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004308992_006","url":null,"abstract":"THE ACCUMULATION OF ALLUSIONS and explicit references to literature turns Chance into a novel about writing a novel and a manifest game with literary conventions, rather than a mere sailor's yarn. The most obvious generic convention interwoven in Chance is the romance with the topos of \"damsel in distress.\" A beauty in a dire predicament, Flora is placed in the modern context of financial ruin and the limitations imposed by her femininity and rescued by the Captain, a modern knight errant, lacking family bonds and with his loyal crew for retinue. As Allan H. Simmons indicates: \"The very structure of the novel, Damsel / Knight, might be said to promise a romantic resolution, which the concept of knight, with its connotations of service and duty rather than love, resists\" (1999: 261-62).Another genre alluded to is the fairy-tale. Marlow presents Flora, whose childhood is tainted by evil stepmother figures (Eliza and Mrs Fyne), as the princess waking from a poisoned dream and Anthony as the prince who falls in love with her. In connection with the fairy-tale convention in \"Heart of Darkness,\" Martine Hennard Dutheil de la Rochere notices that: \"Juxtaposing his sailor's yarns with folktales invites comparisons as well as contrasts, and Conrad arguably viewed his literary production as continuous with the story-telling tradition represented by Grimm while parodying the conventional plots, motifs, and structures associated with the genre\" (2008: 3). This is also true with Chance, where the reader faces the question as to who the real Knight / Prince is: Anthony, who creates a new life for Flora, limited by the microcosm of the ship, in effect a prison; or Powell, who rescues her from the prison of solitude? Affiliations with the fairy-tale are not as all-encompassing as in \"Heart of Darkness,\" where \"the conventions of the genre as defined in the nineteenth century are subverted while traditional gender roles are reversed\" (3), but like in the novella, they make the reader aware of the social criticism expressed in fairy-tales - \"a dimension often ignored by those who see in them only escapist stories disconnected from reality\" (15).Yet another view on generic appropriations has been expressed by J. W. Johnson, according to whom: \"Chance is a comedy of manners which deliberately parodies one kind of Victorian novel,\" while \"Conrad's themadc interests are both original and significant, being chiefly the deficiencies of Victorian culture and the failure of chivalric idealism as the guide of life\" (1968: 91). Thus Chance incorporates elements of various genres to provide a critical vision of society.Conrad also plays with the convention of detective fiction by naming Marlow \"investigator - a man of deductions\" (326). While in The Secret Agent Chief Inspector Heat is a more typical detective-hero in an urban setting, a device that was already established by Conrad's times, following the example of Inspector Bucket from Dickens's Weak House (Walton 1969: 45","PeriodicalId":394409,"journal":{"name":"The Conradian : the Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society","volume":"5 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":"133268255","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":"Marlow, Socrates, and an Ancient Quarrel in Chance","authors":"D. Baldwin","doi":"10.1163/9789004308992_005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004308992_005","url":null,"abstract":"ONE OF THE PECULIARITIES of Chance - in addition to its narrative complexity, which so many critical essays on the novel use as their starting point - is its striking reference to the figure of Socrates. He is mentioned in the first chapter not once, but twice, first as a physical likeness to a shipping master, and then again as a temperamental contrast to the man's straightforward rhetorical manner. The shipping master then abruptly disappears from the tale, and the Classical allusion is easily forgotten or dismissed as a stray detail from an awkward chapter written long before the rest of the novel. As Conrad himself said of the chapter, in a letter to Pinker: \"it did not belong to that novel - but to some other novel which will never be written now I guess\" (CL5 229). Yet we should not be too quick to ignore the chapter's references to Socrates, icon of the Western philosophical tradition. For Socrates' \"exasperating\" manner of conversation continues to reverberate through the arguably exasperating narrative that follows, and his echo turns out to be found less in the fleeting shipping master, than in the voice that introduced the allusion, the fellow with \"the habit of pursuing general ideas in a peculiar manner, between jest and earnest\" (23) - that is, in Marlow himself.This essay will suggest that Conrad sets up Marlow in Chance as a Socrates figure, fostering dialectical difficulty, curiosity and puzzlement in his manner of storytelling. But it will also emphasize a deeper complexity: Conrad importantly modifies his Marlovian Socrates from the familiar philosophical model in order to recast the search for truth on his own artistic terms. For Socrates famously rejected the poets or imaginative writers - their attachment to particularity, their fostering of passion, their defence of the human - but these turn out to be central features of Marlow's narrative activity. Indeed, Conrad's inversion of what is valued in the search for truth, conveyed in the playful guise of the Classical allusion, calls up the ancient quarrel between the philosophers and the poets, a quarrel implicit in Conrad's artistic credo as early as the Preface to The Nigger of the 'Narcissus\" (1897) where hebegins by opposing his artistic approach to truth to that of the \"thinker\" or the \"scientist.\" In Chance, he again takes up this gauntlet. Thus, while the allusions to Socrates signal a search for truth and dialectical activity to that end, the truths offered are found not in abstract ideas, but in the experience of individuals and in the affective sympathies and solidarities between them.Treating Conrad's fiction as dialectical, and in the service of humanistic ends, is not new. Analyses of narrative method by Jeremy Hawthorn and Jakob Lothe reveal the intricacy and deliberateness of Conrad's art, and Richard Ambrosini's bold and poignant study, Conrad's Fiction as Critical Discourse, show how Conrad's narrative explorations were informed by a consistent integrity of v","PeriodicalId":394409,"journal":{"name":"The Conradian : the Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society","volume":"63 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":"130122069","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}