Conrad's Margins and Details

ENGAGING IN A CRITICAL STUDY ABOUT CONRAD’S FICTION TODAY means entering a crowded arena, jostling with established scholarship and experimental reading methods. Nevertheless, both the topic and the critical approach of Johan Adam Warodell’s book add a convincing and original perspective to Conradian studies. Warodell proposes a change of viewpoint that, in the terms of Edward Said, shifts us ‘from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics’ of Conrad’s fiction ‘to its unhoused, decentered, and exilic energies’. If we had to define Warodell’s book with a single word, that word would be ‘marginality’. By drawing on Joseph Conrad’s life as well as on his extended corpus of fiction, Warodell analyses all that is marginal, negligible, on the edge, and apparently unimportant in his novels in order to build a discourse which reverses the meaning of literary marginality as we know it today. Every dictionary will define the adjective ‘marginal’ by referring to minimal qualities and bordering positions. In this book, those qualities and positions are made central and considered as the pivot of new stimulating interpretations. Marginality detaches from the meaning it has gained in today’s literary criticism as referred to minority culture and becomes the place where ‘Conrad’s philosophy, writing and working method is made clear’ (p. 11). Conrad’s Decentered Fiction consists of three parts, each made up of three chapters. In the introduction to the volume, Warodell sets the theme and methodology of his study by defining the marginal as a ‘necessary misnomer’ filled with ‘revealing details’ (p. 11) which he unwraps throughout his analysis. Part I of the book considers the technical peculiarities of Conrad’s fiction at the stage of writing where paper, pen, and ink are involved, that is, doodles at the margins of his manuscripts, maps, charts, and drawings. Part II deals with marginality in Conrad’s published texts by engaging with method and writing technique, and focusing on delayed decoding, a crucial concept of Conradian studies. This section also