Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism 019886437X, 9780198864370

Table of contents :
Cover
Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
List of Abbreviations
Preface: Conrad in Slow-Mo
Notes
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Losing the Plot, Finding Time
“Almayer’s Watch Was Going”
Time out of Joint
Notes
2 Language and the Subject
The Permeable Subject
The Spring of Inaction
Notes
3 “To Make You See”? Marlow and the Anti-Ocular Turn
The Recorporealization of the Cognitive Subject
The Revalorization of Time over Space
The Detranscendentalization of Perspective
Notes
4 For Fear of “Drifting Unconsciously”: Marlow Goes to a Wedding
Chance
Marlow Goes to a Wedding
Notes
5 From Being to Becoming: Writing the Now
Narrative Action: The Cartesian Cogito’s Life Support
Slowing Down into the Here and Now
Notes
6 Conclusion: Slow Modernism
Modernist Erasure and Eternal Return
Note
References
Index

Citation preview

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Joseph Conrad

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Joseph Conrad Slow Modernism YA E L L EV I N

1

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Yael Levin 2020 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2020 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020933197 ISBN 978–0–19–886437–0 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

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For Conrad and his readers

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Contents List of Abbreviations Preface: Conrad in Slow-Mo Acknowledgments

ix xi xvii

Introduction1 1. Losing the Plot, Finding Time An Outcast of the Islands and The Rescue

28

2. Language and the Subject Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Victory

51

3. “To Make You See”? Marlow and the Anti-Ocular Turn Lord Jim

71

4. For Fear of “Drifting Unconsciously”: Marlow Goes to a Wedding91 Chance 5. From Being to Becoming: Writing the Now Nostromo

121

6. Conclusion: Slow Modernism152 References Index

163 171

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List of Abbreviations Conrad’s Works AF C HD LJ N NN OI PR R SL TLS UWE V

Almayer’s Folly Chance Heart of Darkness Lord Jim Nostromo The Nigger of the “Narcissus” An Outcast of the Islands A Personal Record The Rescue The Shadow-Line ’Twixt Land and Sea Under Western Eyes Victory

Edited Volumes CL LL CR

The Collected Letters Georges Jean-Aubry, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters Contemporary Reviews

All page references to Conrad’s works refer to the Dent edition (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1945–55).

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Preface: Conrad in Slow-Mo Paul Cilliers’s “On the Importance of a Certain Slowness” opens with an introduction to a new cultural phenomenon: As a result of a whole range of what one could call “pathologies” in contemporary culture, the idea of “slowing down” has of late been mooted in a number of contexts. A few can be named briefly. The “Slow Food” movement, which started in Italy but has a worldwide following, extols the virtues of decent food made from decent ingredients without compromise. The resistance shown to “junk food” is not only based on aesthetic considerations, but also on ethical (and nutritional) ones. The movement promoting “Slow Cities,” also of Italian origin, fosters an understanding of cities that is more humane. Such cities should encourage walking rather than driving, have small shops with local products rather than shopping malls, and, in general, provide opportunities for the community to interact, not to live in isolation. “Slow schooling” is a movement that questions educational processes in a world geared for instant results. It emphasizes the contextual nature of knowledge and reminds us that education is a process not a function. [. . .] We need to recognize that the journey is more important than the destination, and that takes time.  (211)

The past decades have seen the slow emerge as a counter-culture to the values of speed and efficiency that have come to dominate our lives in the digital age. Associated with the ethical treatment of the environment and the people with whom we share it, the movement is also tied to humanism, to receptivity, tolerance, and patience. It promises deeper, more meaningful experiences, a life lived better with others and greater individual fulfillment. The binary opposition to speed is rid of its symbolic connection to dullness, stupidity, delay, inefficiency, waste, and corruption. It is now the positive to the negative, an escape from the ills of modern life. Conrad’s work strains against such a realignment of the evaluative grid attaching to the fast and the slow. The first words with which Dr. Kennedy describes the eponymous character in “Amy Foster” would suggest a more traditional view of such opposition: “She is very passive. It’s enough to look

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xii  Preface: Conrad in Slow-Mo at the red hands hanging at the end of those short arms, at those slow, ­prominent brown eyes, to know the inertness of her mind—an inertness that one would think made it everlastingly safe from all the surprises of the imagination” (“Amy Foster” 107). Slow movement is conflated with a slow mind and the want of imagination. More damning, perhaps, is Dr. Kennedy’s allusion  to the safety that comes with such inertness. To be slow is to be tethered to the commonplaces and fixed ideas that make us blind to the complexities of reality. Such collocations punctuate Conrad’s fictional and metafictional universe. From the countless mentions of writer’s block in his letters to the dead calm that upsets sea travel in The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” The ShadowLine, The Rescue, and other narratives, slowing down spells the death of inspiration, an obstacle to movement, a moral test. It draws meaning through negation; it is a crisis that demands resolution. While thematic decelerations may signal a character’s limitations, stylistic decelerations in Conrad’s writing provide moments of insight. Ian Watt coined the term “delayed decoding” to denote instances where the slowing down of representation demands we see the world differently; rather than keeping us tied to what we know, such passages liberate us from the automatic processing associated with habit and preconceived ideas. Such stylization is often read against the backdrop of modernist innovation. Claire Barber-Stetson reflects on the slowing down of modernist art: The benefits of slowing down have already been recognized by authors and theorists of modernism, such as Viktor Shklovsky. As he proposes in Theory of Prose (1925), art impels its audience to see rather than merely recognize an object. Like perception, reading can become a habitual practice according to which “objects are grasped spatially, in the blink of an eye. We do not see them, we merely recognize them by their primary ­characteristics. The object passes before us, as if it were prepackaged” (5). Shklovsky and Roy thus locate a related problem with the way many p ­ eople treat literary texts and their environments, more generally. Specifically, these authors emphasize how disrupting automatic processing may enable readers to distribute their attention differently, a practice Shklovsky calls enstrangement. Authors can use specific literary techniques to “mak[e] perception long and ‘laborious’ ” so that the reader “dwells on the text” instead of consuming it thoughtlessly (6, 12). Such texts have the potential “to return sensation to our limbs” (6) and make us aware of that which formerly seemed unimportant.  (“Slow Processing” 148)

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Preface: Conrad in Slow-Mo  xiii Amy’s slowness may be understood as a reiteration of commonplaces of literary symbolism (slow movement suggests a slow mind), but the rendering of slow-motion perception in select passages of Heart of Darkness (to name but one of many examples) is regarded as part of a network of techniques that inaugurate a new literary tradition. These diverging effects notwithstanding, the book will argue that both decelerations are the product of the same binary thinking that views the slow as an impediment to understanding. Amy is faulted for not knowing better; delayed decoding capitalizes on the momentary frustration of Marlow’s and the reader’s need to understand.1 Michelle Boulous Walker associates the moral and aesthetic investment in epistemological mastery with a philosophical principle that reigns supreme in Western thought. She writes: Knowledge replaces the love of wisdom with the result that system and certainty become, over time, dominating principles. By the time we reach Descartes, we encounter a desire to know so exhaustive and forensic in its practice that only absolute certainty will prevail. Philosophy and science merge in the discovery of not only our ignorance but more importantly in the conviction that we must, at all costs, dispel this ignorance. We must know. (Slow Philosophy 3)

Boulous Walker understands the dominance of such teleological investigation as spelling the demise of its methodological antecedent, the Socratic love of wisdom, “a slow engagement with the ‘strangeness’ or otherness of the world – an engagement that transforms and moves us beyond ourselves” (4). The definition views the slow as representing a qualitative departure from philosophical methodologies that are entrenched in the desire to know. The slow no longer functions through negation as delay, crisis, and blockage, but as a key to receptivity and openness. Conrad’s modernist innovations are often seen as serving that same cultural privileging of epistemology; convoluted chronology and impressionistic techniques frustrate and grip the reader through a desire to understand. By focusing on the knowledge Conrad allows and disallows his reader, we neglect an experience of the same text that is not goal-oriented, that allows for an engagement not mitigated by reason, that does not see the narrative as a means to an end. In the spirit of trying something new, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht suggests “we conceive of aesthetic experience as an oscillation (and sometimes as an interference) between ‘presence effects’ and ‘meaning effects’ ” (2).

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xiv  Preface: Conrad in Slow-Mo This book, too, wishes to think literature differently; to consider not only what the work will or will not say, but what underlies the hermeneutic processes we apply to the text, how we think as we do and why. In order to read Conrad productively in slow motion, we must release the slow from meaning-through-negation and reimagine it as denoting an experience that is transformative, affective, receptive, and open-ended. Existing philosophical models of slowing down have recently been complemented by analogs in a range of disciplines from neuroscience to disability studies.2 Here, too, the slow is seen as denoting experience that exceeds or eschews reason and logical processing. Barber-Stetson teases out a cor­res­ pond­ence between what Deleuze and Guattari term minor literature and the cognitive processes associated with autism. She terms this commonality “slow processing.” Describing its relation to the first, she writes: The works of Franz Kafka serve as their primary example; they argue that he revitalized the language in which he wrote (German) by suspending readers’ perception of it as, first and foremost, a medium for communication. To produce this effect, a minor literature destabilizes conventional linguistic hierarchies so that “[t]here is no longer any proper sense or ­figurative sense, but only a distribution of states” (Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka 22). This broader distribution strains our ability to quickly consume a word by increasing the distance we must cover when processing. Such an approach derails readers’ automatic tendency to move toward sense – as in, meaning – by obliging them to consciously reorient their processing style. Consequently, this approach disrupts the hierarchy of senses that has developed in the word “sense” itself – with meaning valued over sensation – thus giving language “a new expressivity, a new flexibility, a new intensity.” (149)

Minor literature—a category that will readily admit Conrad’s work3— undermines the commonplaces of hermeneutic practice by problematizing interpretation, offering a performative experience rather than the communication of a message, and demanding the reader immerse in the prose rather than essentialize it by drawing out its meaning. A study of cognitive processes linked with autism is similarly illuminating, in that it offers an alternative to the commonplaces of hermeneutic processing associated with the neural patterns of “neurotypically developing individuals” (BarberStetson 149):

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Preface: Conrad in Slow-Mo  xv The cognitive style common among autists contributes to their production of images – and, I argue, texts – that exhibit weak central coherence when judged from a perspective biased toward neurotypicality. This style predisposes them to prioritize stimuli that neurotypicals consider trivial; thus, autists’ perceptions look disjointed to neurotypicals, who see gaps where the information they value would be. Framed more constructively, autists distribute salience differently, assigning importance to objects or stimuli that may not interest others; in the process, they locate innovative connections among the particulars on which they focus. Like all cognitive styles, the one common among autists enables them to focus on a specific group of stimuli; however, these individuals are also more vulnerable to sensory overload because they must exert more effort to transition between cognitive styles.  (Barber-Stetson 152)

Rather than viewing atypical cognitive processes as limited, Boulous Walker suggests that the different cognitive style and its unique distribution of attention and response might offer new insights into human ­experience. Such studies not only give voice to those authors and individuals who have been seen as marginal, they attempt to find new models of e­ xperience and expression in order to accommodate the radical changes attending human life in past centuries. Our attention, interests, affective and perceptive responses are not what they were. In line with recent studies of Conrad’s work (which will be addressed in the book), I would like to show how the writer participates in, and indeed anticipates, such questions. This book turns to thematic and stylistic decelerations in Conrad’s novels in order to demonstrate how and why we should read the slow against trad­ ition­al collocations. It also shows where existing critical interventions in commonplaces of literary pace still issue from biases ingrained in Western thought. By liberating the slow from the symbolic, moral, and philosophical metonymies with which it is associated, the following chapters reconsider our understanding of Conrad’s modernism. Those scenes, motifs, and techniques that are often associated with literary innovation will be shown to rely on the kind of closure that keeps us safe; deceleration and anticipation will be seen as key to a radical openness and receptivity. We agree that Conrad’s innovations are an invaluable contribution to literary history. This study hopes to extend the reach of his influence by grappling with the question of where he is really and radically new.

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xvi  Preface: Conrad in Slow-Mo

Notes 1. Recent interventions in Watt’s concept of delayed decoding are demonstrative of critical attempts to undermine the traditional subordination of sense experience to reason. In Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics, Jesse Matz associates this hierarchy with Conrad’s “somatophobia” and its expression in a tendency to claim “impressionist receptivity and range without making full commitment to its collapse of epistemological distinctions” (139). More recently, Johan Adam Warodell faults Watt’s term for its imposition of “a hierarchy of knowledge,” one that is brought into play “by attributing understanding simpliciter to conceptualization – rather than to more immediate, minimally interpreted sensory-experience” (9). 2. Michelle Boulous Walker’s Slow Philosophy: Reading against the Institution is highly recommended for readers who wish to look further into the philosophical articulations of the slow. 3. Deleuze and Guattari associate minor literature with problems of expression (often associated with writers using a language not their own), political struggle as refracted through individual experience, and “collective, and even revolutionary, enunciation” (Kafka 17). These three qualities mark “the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation” (18).

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Acknowledgments I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. Robert Hampson, whose ­support and encouragement have been unwavering from the very first years of our acquaintance at Royal Holloway. I would like to thank him especially for reading the manuscript and offering his invaluable feedback. I owe a debt of gratitude also to Prof. Jeremy Hawthorn who generously read the manuscript and offered his advice. The book has benefited greatly from the wisdom and generosity of both. I would like to thank Dr. Katherine Isobel Baxter for her comments on an early version of Chapter  2. My thanks also to Prof. Andrea White who was the first to draw my attention to Conrad’s appreciation for Marcel Proust. I would also like to thank Prof. John  G.  Peters and Prof. Leona Toker for their notes on the manuscript. My  sincere thanks to Eleanor Collins, Matthew Williams, Paul Mauriat Raymond, and Joanna North for their help in seeing this project through. I am forever grateful to my parents, Aryeh and Aliza, for their inspiration and example. Finally, I would like to thank my husband, Ruben Borg, a brilliant scholar, a welcome sounding board, and my best friend. Thank you for your support, your advice, and your love. A version of Chapter  2 was published in Conrad and Language (Edinburgh University Press, 2016). I would like to thank the press and the editors of the volume, Katherine Isobel Baxter and Robert Hampson, for their permission to reprint it here. The research was supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 468/17).

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Introduction This book builds on current interventions in modernist scholarship in order to rethink Joseph Conrad’s contribution to literary history. Where much recent critical work devoted to the author sets out to negotiate anew ­biographical, historical, and cultural contexts, this book utilizes emerging crit­ic­al modernisms, the work of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze, and late modernist fiction to stage an encounter between Conrad and a radically different literary tradition.1 It does so in order to uncover critical blind spots that have limited our appreciation of his poetics. The purpose of this investigation is threefold: first, to participate in recent critical attempts to correct a neglect of ontological preoccupations in Conrad’s writing and uncover the author’s exploration of a human subject beyond the Cartesian cogito.2 Second, to demonstrate the manner in which such an exploration is accompanied by the reconfiguration of the very building blocks of fiction; character, narration, focalization, language, and plot have to be rethought to accommodate a subject who is no longer con­ ceived of as autonomous and whole but is rendered permeable and inter­ depend­ent. Third, to show how this redrawing of the literary imaginary communicates with the projects of late modernist writers such as Samuel Beckett, writers whose literary endeavors have long been held separate from Conrad’s.3 In the spirit of current reexaminations of modernism and critical endeavors to think it anew outside the commonplaces that once defined it, this study returns to Conrad’s art with an eye to twentieth-century shifts in the way we process, understand, and evaluate information. Conrad’s works, our conceptualization of modernism and the slow are offered here as gauges for this meaningful transformation. On February 20, 1909, the front page of Le Figaro featured Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism.” Extolling a love of “danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness,” the manifesto asserts: “up to now literature has exalted contemplative stillness, ecstasy and sleep.” Addressing “all the living men of the earth,” it celebrates, instead, “movement and aggression, feverish insomnia, the racer’s stride, the mortal leap, the Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism. Yael Levin, Oxford University Press (2020). © Yael Levin. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198864370.001.0001

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2  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism slap and the punch” (51). The manifesto squares life and vitalist energies with the project to abolish time and space. “Velocity,” it claims, “is eternal and omnipresent” (51). In the “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature” (published three years later), Marinetti focuses on the way literature might be used to promote the movement’s radical philosophy. He calls for a syn­ tactical and figurative transformation that would “destroy the ‘I’ ” (122), undo the familiar coordinates of subjectivity as predicated on the Cartesian cogito, and conflate man with machine. Marinetti associates the project of rethinking the human with technology, urbanization, and sensory flux, all brought together under the unifying motif of vertiginous speed. Against the emphasis on a futurist-inspired modernism fueled by speed technology, the readings here demonstrate that Conrad is most radically innovative where he rethinks the human outside its Enlightenment co­ord­ in­ates of autonomy, control, and cohesion by slowing down rather than speeding up. More in tune with Henri Bergson’s concept of durée, the writer attempts to represent life and vitalist energy in moments of waiting and anticipation rather than in an ever-accelerating contraction of space-time. In turning to Conrad’s scenes of suspension, anticipation, and stasis, the study thus reconsiders an aspect of the art that has largely been excluded from discussions of his contributions to modernism. Where skepticism, the elusiveness of self-knowledge, and epistemological uncertainty are seen to signal the writer’s pioneering aesthetics, the former have often been associ­ ated with a return to tradition or the exhaustion of his creative energies. A significant critical shift in recent years recuperates such stylization and speaks to its merits. Where this book disagrees with these studies is in their tendency to view these decelerations as the belated expressions of obscurity in Conrad’s poetics. In doing so they ultimately reinforce the critical con­ vention wherein epistemological doubt is key to the author’s modernism. Challenging such commonplaces of modernist writing and rethinking Conrad’s stylistic and thematic explorations of the slow, the book sets out to uncover new interpretations of his novels, reconsider his contribution to modernist poetics, and trace the way in which the evolution of narrative form responds to shifting conceptualizations of being at the turn of the century. In Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline (1957), Thomas Moser famously sets apart Conrad’s successes and failures according to a parabola of aesthetic accomplishment. That these literary failures are anchored in themes of love and desire is less significant, here, than the stylistic me­ton­ ymies to which they are bound. Symbolically, thematically, and structurally,

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Introduction  3 Conrad’s decline is signaled by deceleration. In Moser’s account, characters young and old are tired; they lack motivation and are a hindrance to proper plot development rather than the instruments of desired change. The thesis of decline no longer holds sway. It is debunked in such landmark critical works as Robert Hampson’s Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (1992). In “The Late Novels,” Hampson demonstrated that, though condemned by Douglas Hewitt, Moser, and Albert J. Guerard, these works have since been re-read as “novels of moral affirmation” and later yet, read again with an “increased attentiveness” to their “new modes and techniques” (The Cambridge Companion 140). That the current study participates in what has already become a tradition of new critical endeavor suggests that there is no need to re-engage with evaluations that have repeatedly and diversely been under­ mined. I mention Moser’s critique in order to identify the meta­phys­ic­al bias from which it arises. Addressing like-minded critical responses, in The New Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad (2015), Michael Greaney notes that “not all of Conrad’s readers have been happy with the tarrying, linger­ ing qualities of Conradian narrative; Virginia Woolf, who greatly admired Conrad, reports with some regret that his style can be ‘a little somnolent sometimes in repose’ . . . the artful sluggishness of his prose, the lingering style that doubles back on itself when conventional narrative be keen to forge ahead. Progress, inhibited by all sorts of obstacles, can be a de­cided­ly slow business in Conradian narrative” (106). The last decades have seen important interventions in this critical bias and its lasting effect on the reception of Conrad’s works. Key to the recon­ figuration of the canon and generative of much-needed re-readings of the neglected fiction, such interventions have significantly altered our method of reading and interpreting the author’s oeuvre. What is nevertheless strik­ ing is that these studies hinge on that self-same preference of movement over stasis. Critical work still needs to explain why the slow, the static, and the immovable are indeed worthy of attention and how they are to be read as stylistic innovation rather than the exhaustion of Conrad’s creative energy. Hugh Epstein’s study of The Rover unpacks its stylistic decelerations. Impediments of “the forward motion of the narrative” are designed “to drag it back from the action promised by a story of service, of the movement of ships and small craft and of military encounter, to the wariness of full utter­ ance that prolongs the exchanges between Peyrol and Real and to the statu­ esque immobility that is the visible remnant of the trauma suffered in his native land while Peyrol was away on the seas” (110). Katherine Baxter sug­ gests that the repetitive nature of language in the novel results in “attempts

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4  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism to indicate linear stretches of time” that ultimately “fall back on themselves through repetition so that the years or days become indistinguishable and static rather than eventful and changing” (Swan Song of Romance 137). Though recuperated as a meaningful stylistic choice where the resistance to forward-moving action functions as a performative rendition of trauma, both readings show the slow to be the negative binary to development and change. It means through negation.4 The need to recuperate Conrad’s decelerations in this manner is indica­ tive of an underlying bias that not only bespeaks the survival of a modernist ethos that celebrates speed and vilifies the slow but is also indicative of the fact that the medium in question is based on movement. In Narrative Discourse Revisited, Gérard Genette presents the foundation of any form of minimal narrative: “As soon as there is an action or an event,” he writes, “even a single one, there is a story because there is a transformation, a tran­ sition from an earlier state to a later and resultant state” (18). Without change there is no narrative; it is only where there is a perceived shift that we identify a story. That is not to say that narrative does not include in-between states of immobility, those instances that linger between represented events. In attending to such moments, Roland Barthes’s proposed classification never­ theless again demonstrates that same primacy of movement over stasis. He writes: “In order to classify a function as cardinal all we need verify is that the action to which it refers opens (or maintains or closes) an alternative directly affecting the continuation of the story” (“Structural Analysis” 248). Though pertaining to the purportedly neutral terminology of structuralist discourse, Barthes’s prioritization of action over stasis and agency over pas­ sivity echoes the moralistic undercurrent of a definition of narrative that goes back to Aristotle. Chapter 1 of this study teases out the implications of this coincidence more fully in order to explain why any attempt to think narrative outside such an evaluative grid is not only aesthetically but also philosophically and morally challenging.5 The difficulty in extracting narrative form from principles that are so ingrained in Western thought is evident in a tension in Conrad’s fictional and metafictional writing between a commitment to convention, on the one hand, and a real attempt to give expression to early twentieth-century reconceptualizations of time, subjectivity, and experience, on the other. In “Author and Cinematograph,” a lecture written for the staff of his American publisher, Doubleday, Conrad returns to the age-old link between narrative and movement in a statement that reflects his commitment to traditional

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Introduction  5 narrative form: “Long before the idea occurred to scientists and means devised by technicians that sun can make pictures, at first motionless and afterwards moving, the aim of the novelist has been (at least one of his aims) to present humanity in action on the background of the changing aspects of nature and a series of acted scenes exhibiting part of life in a connected series up to some appointed conclusion” (Schwab 345). In his presentation of action as a goal in fiction, Conrad invokes a commonplace of narrative form dating back to the foregrounding of action in Aristotle’s Poetics. “A tale that would not move in any sense,” Conrad explains, “would be not much more interesting than a lump of lead” (346). But as with many of Conrad’s attested principles, these words must be taken with a grain of salt, not least because the parenthetical interruption suggests such pride of place may be provisional. In a letter to Eric Pinker in which he describes the lecture he shows his thesis to be tailored for the audience, rendering the sincerity of his convictions questionable: “Don’t imagine that I am going to be im­per­ tin­ent to the cinema; on the contrary, I shall butter them up” (342). Though it is impossible to guess how Conrad believed himself to be buttering the audience up—his prejudices about the American public and its predilection for cinematic excitement might itself be an interesting point to investigate— such a point as he makes here is not without precedent. Conrad’s many indications of his belief in an abiding connection between novelistic action and public favor include his comment to Pinker dating back to Nostromo: “I verily believe that N. has elements of success in book form. I’ve never writ­ ten anything with so much action in it” (CL 3 137). Still, his emphasis on action at the start of the speech is soon withdrawn: “Of course you will believe that while saying this I am not forgetting the existence of a novel of analysis—in fact I am not forgetting the existence of any sort of novel [. . .]. What makes their existence so vexing to me apart from my personal neces­ sity in writing them, is this—that their kinds run into each other; analysis into impressions, facts into ideas, and ideas into feelings” (346). Action here fizzles out in the introduction of analysis, feelings, impressions—the stock trades of modernist writing in the making. Conrad concludes by suggesting that the book’s true advantage over cinema and the stage is “a gift of in­tim­ ate appeal” where “nothing stands between the reader and the artist’s ­conception” (346). Two impressions converge in this short statement, ideas that are central to Conrad’s art as well as to this book. The first touches on the correlation between narrative action and commercial success, a connection Conrad intuited and remarked on repeatedly throughout his career. To “butter up

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6  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism the audience,” so to speak, is to move the narrative forward through action—to speed it up, as it were. The second, complementary concern is on the relation between a different kind of a narrative, a narrative that defies conventions of plot and event, and the newly formed preoccupations of a “modern” author. Such an artistic vision is already evident in his advice to Edward Noble in 1895. Poetic imagination, he explains, “should be used to create human souls; to disclose human hearts – and not to create events that are properly speaking accidents only” (CL 1 252). In order to appreciate the way these two insights clash in Conrad’s developing poetics we can turn back to an earlier stage of his career.6 On reading the first installment of The End of the Tether, George Blackwood (nephew of William Blackwood, editor of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine) writes that though the work is suitable for Maga, “at present one can hardly say one has got into the story yet” (CL 2 416). Conrad responds to the observed slight in a letter to William Blackwood dated May 31, 1902. His defense hinges on the pace of his prose and its relation to aesthetic and commercial success, two qualifications to one’s work that, in his estimation, are at odds with one another: I am long in my development. What of that? Is not Thackeray’s penny worth of mediocre fact drowned in an ocean of twaddle? And yet he lives. And Sir Walter, himself, was not the writer of concise anecdotes I fancy. And G. Elliot—is she as swift as the present public (incapable of fixing its attention for five consecutive minutes) requires us to be at the cost of all honesty, of all truth, and even the most elementary conception of art? But these are great names. I don’t compare myself with them. I am modern, and I would rather recall Wagner the musician and Rodin the Sculptor who both had to starve a little in their day—and Whistler the painter who made Ruskin the critic foam at the mouth with scorn and indignation. They too have arrived. They had to suffer for being ‘new’. And I too hope to find my place in the rear of my betters. But still—my place.  (CL 2 418)

Honesty, truth, and art are seen as contradictory to the demands of the mar­ ket and its attention-deficit readers. To produce art is to be true to one’s self, one’s method and intention. Such integrity comes with a price. To be mod­ ern is to be unrecognized—both literally and figuratively, to offer an art that does not conform, that does not follow, that tries to do something new— and does it at its own pace. Conrad refuses to engage his readers by utilizing the shocks of immediate revelation or by providing stock events that will

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Introduction  7 keep them titillated. To return to “Author and Cinematograph,” he will use his appeal as a novelist to reveal to the reader nothing but the truth of an artistic conception that is not mediated by the familiar. And such a truth will be slow to develop. His artistic intention hinges on a certain de­cel­er­ ation—the frustration of expectation and the protraction of meaning. No instant gratification here. Twenty years separate this letter to Blackwood and the writing of the speech to his American public in the spring of 1923. The pride of place afforded to the novel of analysis in the latter might suggest something of the insights Conrad gains in the interim into the question of artistic truth and its relation to pace. His appreciation for this particular form is expressed in his correspondence in the year leading up to his voyage across the Atlantic. In a letter written in December 1922 to Scott Moncrieff, Conrad commiser­ ates with the translator for the public’s lackluster reception of Swann’s Way (published in September 1922). He writes: “The lack of response from the public does not surprise me. And I don’t think it surprises very much Messrs. Chatto & Windus. The more honour to them in risking that shot for which no great prize can be obtained” (CL 7 623). Conrad here returns once again to the separation of commercial success and artistic merit. And merit, it seems, is squared neatly with Marcel Proust’s unique interpretation of the novel of analysis, a novel that views life as a collection of impressions, feelings, and sensations; a life not predicated on narrative action. Conrad explains: The important thing is that whereas before we had analysis allied to cre­ ative art, great in poetic conception, in observation, or in style, his is a creative art absolutely based on analysis. It is really more than that. He is a writer who has pushed analysis to the point when it became creative. All that crowd of personages in their infinite variety through all the grad­ ations of the social scale are made to stand up, to live, and are rendered visible to us by the force of analysis alone. [. . .] And yet no intelligent per­ son can doubt for a moment their plastic and coloured existence. One would think that method (and P. has no other, because his method is the expression of his temperament) may be pushed too far, but as a matter of fact it is never wearisome. There may be here and there among those thou­ sands of pages a paragraph that one might think over subtle, a bit of ana­ lysis pushed so far as to vanish into nothingness. But those are very few, and all minor, instances. The intense interest never flags because one has got the feeling that the last word is being said upon a subject much stud­ ied, much written about and of undying interest – the last word of its time.

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8  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism Those that have found beauty in Proust’s work are perfectly right. It is there. What amazes one is its inexplicable character. In that prose so full of life there is no reverie, no emotion, no marked irony, no warmth of con­ viction, not even a marked rhythm to charm our fancy. It appeals to our sense of wonder and gains our assent by its veiled greatness. I don’t think there ever has been in the whole of literature such an example of the power of analysis and feel pretty safe in saying that there will never be another. (CL 7 624)

This is a lengthy quotation—but it is well worth unpacking. At the start, Conrad describes the difference between mimetic and creative analysis.7 The first represents the world as it is, the second is closer to creation ex nihilo. Proust’s artistry does not lie in his ability to represent Parisian life or Parisian characters authentically. As Conrad writes in an earlier letter—this “has been done by others admirably enough.” He appreciates Proust not because “he has reproduced for us our own past” but because he has dis­ closed “to us a past like nobody else’s and thus [adds] something memorable to the general experience of mankind.” Analysis emerges as a creative rather than a descriptive tool. Rather than show his readers a world to which they have become blind through habituation, he will show them something entirely new. In Conrad’s words, Proust is a prose writer “qui a poussé la force de l’analyse jusqu’au point ou elle deviant créatrice” (CL 7 605). The significance of this shift—between an art that defamiliarizes and an art that creates something unknown, between action and analysis—is at the heart of a shift in Conrad’s art that I will delineate in the chapters of this book. Both defamiliarization and creation are forms of artistic endeavor that may be understood as attempts to innovate. The nuances that differen­ tiate them are the impetus for this study. The first shows us what is already there—it arrests our attention and shocks us into seeing that of which we are no longer cognizant. What is new is not what we see but how we see it. Such an artistic aim boasts a long tradition dating back to antiquity and is repeatedly reiterated by aesthetic and critical schools that follow, including, inter alia, romanticism, formalism, and modernism. Shklovsky’s “defamil­ iarization” is perfectly matched with Conrad’s delayed decoding, because the latter “makes the familiar seems strange by not naming the familiar object” (Shklovsky 13). In his description of Tolstoy’s method, Shklovsky writes that the author “describes an object as if he were seeing it for the first time, an event as if it were happening for the first time. In describing

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Introduction  9 something he avoids the accepted names of its parts and instead names cor­res­pond­ing parts of other objects” (13). Conrad’s celebrated modernist stylizations are precisely these—the arrows that are perceived as sticks, the heads that are first thought to be decorative knobs (in Heart of Darkness). We experience these objects anew because they are not named; they fail to evoke the concepts or categories that are familiar to us and demand we pro­ cess and experience them anew. Ezra Pound’s motto, “make it new” becomes definitive of a generation of writers whose work Conrad in many ways inaugurates.8 The withholding of familiar linguistic categories that is evident in delayed decoding is complemented by a process of retrograde temporal unfolding. It is a technique Conrad repeatedly uses and regards as essential to his art. As he writes in that same letter to Blackwood (May 31, 1902): “in the light of the final incident, the whole story in all its descriptive detail shall fall into its place – acquire its value and its significance” (CL 2 417). This is true not only of the unfolding of a plot towards its necessary and illuminating con­ clusion—but in the very process of comprehension tied to the defamiliariz­ ing techniques described above. The scene always concludes with naming. What this means is that the process is always teleological. Withholding must conclude with revelation—time must finally fall into a clear linear pat­ tern; the end reveals a significance missed but already present at the start. This is a fiction of always already—the new is not a product of what is pro­ duced so much as how it is revealed. The new, however, can also be understood as an attempt to create that which is not. Sir Philip Sidney takes such liberties in his sixteenth-century An Apology for Poetry when he argues that the artist is a creator bringing forth “forms such as never were in nature” (100). More in keeping with the tradition within which this study is framed, Deleuze and Guattari describe the artistic struggle as one launched against the “’clichés’ of opinion”: The painter does not paint on an empty canvas, and neither does the writer write on a blank page; but the page or canvas is already so covered with preexisting, preestablished clichés that it is first necessary to erase, to clean, to flatten, even to shred, so as to let in a breath of air from the chaos that brings us the vision. [. . .] Art is not chaos but a composition of chaos that yields the vision or sensation, so that it constitutes, as Joyce says, a chaosmos, a composed chaos—neither foreseen nor preconceived. (What is Philosophy? 204)

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10  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism A cursory reading of the passage might yield the impression that the writers are returning to the idea of defamiliarization. But Deleuze and Guattari are not describing the way in which an artist must show anew that which we already know. The true difficulty for an artist is to attempt the unforeseen and the unknown, that which is entirely new but can nevertheless be made meaningful, beautiful, and poignant. To do so is to court open-endedness; it is not the tantalizingly delayed revelation of a foreclosed outcome. This other method of representation does not provide an end for the justification or explanation of that which occurred before it. There is no end; there is no collection of static moments that might be made coherent once they are reassembled in a linear trajectory. This is a form of writing that is not trad­ ition­al­ly associated with Conrad’s work; it is associated with late modernist or postmodernist writers such as Beckett. But while we may all agree that Conrad anticipates Pound’s modernist manifesto, this study aims to tease out the ways in which the early twentieth-century writer also foreshadows an art that will find its quintessential expression only after the heyday of high modernism, in a poetics of delay and anticipation that is stripped of the principle of telos. The poetic shift traced in the transition from defamiliarization to the rep­ resentation of the unforeseen may be ascribed to a philosophical shift dat­ ing back to the early twentieth century. In The Matrix of Modernism, Sanford Schwartz channels the insights of such early twentieth-century thinkers as William James and Henri Bergson in his explanation that “The intellect is an instrumental rather than a speculative faculty, and its purpose is to replace the stream of sensations with a network of stable and useful con­ cepts” (28).9 The manner in which defamiliarization hinges on conceptual logic and causality places it squarely within the realm of a method of think­ ing that predates such insights. Defamiliarization works by withholding and then revealing the identity of an object, by withholding and then revealing the manner in which causal links are involved in its production. Our aes­ thetic experience is contingent on our use of the faculty of reason. We must figure out what we see, find similarities and bring the unknown back to the familiar. But an art that responds to the insights of the philosophers Schwartz addresses attempts to resist conceptual logic and categorical thought. It makes us see, yes—but not by appealing to reason. It demands we experience it, that we feel it and are affected by it. The aesthetic potential of such an art is not realized through categorical logic. The following chapters trace an oscillation in Conrad’s writing between these two art forms, between an art of being and an art of becoming.

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Introduction  11 A certain emphasis will be placed on the latter as the book’s aim is to draw attention to a facet of Conrad’s art that has not yet received sufficient atten­ tion. That is not to say that the book hinges on an evaluative hierarchy; one art form is not presented here as better or more significant than the other. The differences between the two are often minute and the biases that inform our critical paradigms (as outlined above) render difficult any attempt to investigate an art of becoming. The aim here is to facilitate a more clearly defined and accessible approach. To that end, philosophical jargon is used min­im­al­ly and the analyses are always grounded in Conrad’s texts. Critical anchors are provided at this stage in order to draw attention to some of the nuances that will be traced in the following chapters. The philosophical shift that gives rise to these two different artistic impulses accrues a number of signposts. These will be used to illustrate this evolution even at its most sub­ tle. Defamiliarization and its ties to conceptual logic are attended by the following telltale signs: 1. The spatialization of time. As Chapter 1 will clarify, time in narrative is traditionally produced through the artificial imposition of ­non-human factors. It is counted rather than experienced, a measure of clock time rather than human sensation. Such an experience of time lends itself to spatial figures such as a road or path. We understand time as unfolding in linear fashion towards an end point. Even if the author plays havoc with the ordering of events in the sujet (which Conrad invariably does), readers reconstruct a mimetically reassuring fabula wherein each event is tied to the next in a logical, causal sequence. 2. Conceptual logic. As evident in delayed decoding, the confusions of  sensory shock are finally made to cohere with conceptual logic through a process of identification. Difference and incoherence are canceled when similarities are found between unknown and known categories, between what appears new and the knowledge we already possess. The misplaced category of decorative knobs in Heart of Darkness is corrected when the reader reapplies the sensory stimuli to the category of heads; the confusion of sticks flying in the air is finally comprehended by attributing the phenomenon to an arrow attack. The significance of analogy here is that of recognition—it is only by finding similarity that sensory input can be associated with the categories to which they pertain. The fundamental differences that might arise between the idea and its phenomenological counterpart

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12  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism are made to disappear. The shock of the unfamiliar and unknown is worked through. 3. Telos. The spatialization of time and the prescriptions of conceptual logic hinge on a form of determinism. They are both directed towards an end product. The first through the imposition of an artificially composed end (the beginning only assumes its full meaning after the end is revealed), the second through the imposition of sameness or identity (again, coherence is the product of the cancellation of differ­ ence towards the identification of an existing category). The artistic attempt to fashion the unforeseen is attended by a different network of features. These resonate with a worldview that stretches from Nietzsche through Bergson to Deleuze and can be loosely associated with the following: 1. Duration. The experience of time is not made to bend to atemporal, fixed structures. Neither spatialized nor measured, the passage of time is registered through an unmediated experience of the present moment. This is not a perception of the passage of time that is predi­ cated on retrospective reordering.10 2. Univocity. The term (borrowed from Deleuze) offers an alternative to analogy.11 Rather than bending ex­peri­ence to the categories of under­ standing through an identification of likeness, this principle is grounded in difference. Experience is defined as the product of a process of dif­ fer­en­ti­ation. Difference serves as a generative principle, a principle of change and passage. The idea of unity suggested by the term might be confusing; but it does not connote the bending of experience to the singular. Rather than understanding being as predicated on duplication or separation (as in Platonic and Neoplatonic thought), it emerges as a single generative principle from which all life issues through a process of dif­fer­en­ti­ation. Ontologically, this is a process of becoming—a ­continual flux with no predetermined direction or goal. 3. The unforeseen. Where conceptual logic and spatialized time bring the reader necessarily back to what is known, the notion of becoming promises to bring before the reader that which is entirely new. Such representation does not rely on duality and logic but on the recording of affect, sensation, and oftentimes confusion. It is the glow that brings out a haze—a perfect example as it suggests an ongoing ­process without the clear end result of a cracked nut.

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Introduction  13 Beckett’s appreciation of Proust’s art offers a helpful illustration of the way in which the philosophical principles associated with becoming might be embodied in aesthetic expression. He defines Proust’s impressionism as a “non-logical statement of phenomena in the order and exactitude of their perception, before they have been distorted into intelligibility in order to be forced into a chain of cause and effect. . . . We are reminded of Schopenhauer’s definition of the artistic procedure as ‘the contemplation of the world inde­ pendently of the principle of reason’ ” (Proust 66).12 But Beckett’s words are already anticipated in Conrad’s own reiteration of Schopenhauer’s thought. In a comment to R.  B.  Cunninghame Graham dated January 14, 1898, Conrad writes: “Of course reason is hateful—but why? Because it demon­ strates (to those who have the courage) that we, living, are out of life— utterly out of it” (CL 2 16). Reason provides the formal and conceptual categories that lead to the cancellation of the accidental, of difference and the new. It turns the multiplicity and confusions of the ex­peri­enced moment into the familiar and the known. For art to tap into life in its complexity it must eschew such categories rather than court them. The difference between the two philosophical stances outlined above is key to an underlying ambivalence in Conrad’s art, one that will be traced throughout the book. And where certain threads will show Conrad’s art to be observing a shift from the first to the second—from being to becoming— others will follow the opposite trajectory. Rather than make claims as to Conrad’s artistic development or draw out a parabola of achievement and decline, the oscillations delineated in this study are indicative of an ongoing tension in his poetics. Chapters 1 and 5 frame the book by describing a transition from an art of being to one of becoming. The first reads An Outcast of the Islands with The Rescue, the second focuses on Nostromo. In the Malay trilogy, Conrad fol­ lows Lingard’s career in the form of chronological back-tracking. The Lingard of The Rescue, the last installment in the series, is younger than his counterpart in Almayer’s Folly. Though the chronology moves backwards, the worldview attending it, as couched in those metonymies explored above, moves forward. It proceeds from being to becoming, from analogy to uni­ vocity. The treatment of Nostromo in Chapter 5 follows a similar trajectory. The novel appears to hinge on the inevitable recurrence of a history that repeats itself—whether from within a discourse of revolution or from within a discourse of psychoanalysis and family inheritance. This determin­ istic dynamic is reminiscent of Beckett’s opening words in Murphy: “the sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new” (1). By tracing moments

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14  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism of deceleration and stasis in the novel, the chapter shows where representation strains against such foreclosure and the unfolding of history is envisioned outside a paradigm of determinism. The central chapters in this study follow an inverse trajectory, from becoming to being. In the progression from Heart of Darkness to Lord Jim and Chance Marlow’s character may reflect the chronological development of an aging seaman, but the narrator who ages in time nevertheless comes under the yoke of a philosophy that edges backwards rather than forwards in history. The transition from one worldview to the other and the respective shifts in the artistic aims that observe it are not without implications for narrative theory. Twentieth-century writing contributed much to narratological con­ ceptualizations by offering many slippery exceptions to a medium that has in large part adhered to principles outlined in Aristotle’s Poetics, over two millennia ago. We have seen that Genette claims that narrative is predicated on events, “because there is a transformation, a transition from an earlier state to a later and resultant state” (18). Though he posits such a transition may be viewed as “a whole story,” he is nevertheless quick to concede that for a writer such as Beckett, such a transition might “already be too much to narrate or put on stage” (19). That Beckett and his contemporaries are rep­ resentative of a radically new tradition of writing goes without saying—it is a commonplace of literary history. This new tradition of writing does not view paralysis and stasis as signs of aesthetic exhaustion but rather as the invigorative reshuffling of a calcified literary tradition. The transition from the early part of the twentieth century to the present moment may thus be charted along a shift in the aesthetic, moral, and cultural significations of the slow. Where the slow previously signifies a hope “to press history back into the singularity of a unified narrative,” a desire for “the end of history in order to challenge the pressures of acceleration” (Koepnick 3–4), mid- and late twentieth-century writing reconfigures the slow as multiplicity, flux, engagement, and a maximization of potential. Its jarring effect in narrative creates confusion, but this is a confusion that liberates thought from pregiven forms. Writing might now proceed not by way of adhering to generic, stylistic, and thematic conventions but by allowing for the unexpected, the unchartered, the unforeseen. We cannot appreciate Conrad’s place within this story of literary history without some necessary back-tracking. That literary periodization hinges on pace may be seen as a product of the veneration of speed and locomo­ tion evident in early twentieth-century culture. In The Speed Handbook,

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Introduction  15 Enda Duffy unravels the connection between speed and the advent of modernism: The car was modernist mobile architecture; it offered a new pleasure to the masses. With it, a major realignment of the economy of pleasure and pain, duty and desire, through which the modernist persona was imagined was bound to occur . . . Bodies came to be judged as speed machines, not only by Taylorist utilitarianism, which demanded that human bodies as motors be maximally efficient in every movement, but in the ways that people thought of their own well-being as energetic machines . . . Human wellbeing was recast more vehemently as the capacity for active movement and the management of the organism’s energy.  (6)

Duffy goes on to trace Conrad’s participation in such a morally charged obsession with speed: “The great writer about ship life as monotony was Joseph Conrad: his elegies to the life of the sailor are also all treatises on killing time. Heart of Darkness has retained its striking hold over gen­er­ ations of readers . . . because it registers on every page an almost allergic reaction to slowness and the perceived lack of liberating movement and efficient speed. Slowness, in Heart of Darkness, is the true horror” (66). “Slowness,” Duffy summarizes, “gets notated pejoratively as the temptation to linger in the haunted home or to wander in search of the heterotopic other space, the dream world that no longer exists; slowness is more and more often in these years rendered as something to be feared” (67). The dynamic Duffy describes finds multiple fictional expressions in Conrad’s writing. The Shadow-Line opens with a crisis of “spiritual drowsi­ ness” (35); the young man despairs at the thought that “there is nothing original, nothing new, startling, informing, to expect from the world” (35–6). The metafictional reverberations of the modernist ethos are telling—the original, the new, and the startling are where value and knowledge lie. Drowsiness and passivity provide a noxious opposition. In keeping with this evaluative grid, the reversal that ensues is codified in terms of pace and movement: But as soon as I had convinced myself that this stale, unprofitable world of my discontent contained such a thing as a command to be seized, I re­covered my powers of locomotion. It’s a good step from the Officers’ Home to the Harbour Office; but with the magic word “Command” in my head I found myself suddenly on the quay as if transported there in the

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16  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism twinkling of an eye, before a portal of dressed white stone above a flight of shallow white steps. All this seemed to glide toward me swiftly. The whole great roadstead to the right was just a mere flicker of blue. (44–5, my emphasis)

Action figures as a moral and aesthetic antidote to the stasis experienced at the officers’ home, where the inanity of empty chatter, “the very voice of the universal hollow conceit” (35) spells an obstacle not only to the character’s growth but also to the development of the plot. A story needs to move, and so does its protagonist, a principle that the allusion to Hamlet serves well.13 Agency and power are conflated with an invigorating velocity, one that res­ onates with technological advancement ranging from methods of transport to electricity and light. The passage illustrates a recurring conflation of motifs across Conrad’s writing, a coincidence that will guide the choice of focus in the chapters to come; the co-presence of voice and language with deceleration and stasis shows the two to be conjoined as anathema to fiction and morality alike. At the same time, this conjunction of motifs that is so often vilified also emerges as something entirely new and creative in other scenes in Conrad’s art, where they provide a key to thinking the slow out­ side this binary grid. In the former instance, Conrad’s writing conflates the slow with n ­ oxious inefficiency and outdated stillness, “an amazing blind immobility” (“The Tale” 67). Such collocations can be read against the exponential rise of speed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lutz Koepnick describes this process and the shift to which it corresponds in human experience: According to conventional understandings, industrial modernity, as it began to sweep across the European landscapes of the nineteenth century and introduced technologies such as the steam train, the telegraph, the telephone, the cinema, and the automobile, inaugurated an age of un­pre­ ce­dent­ed time-space compression. Modernity brought the thrill of speed and motion to the sluggishness of preindustrial life. It provided unknown physical sensations, perceptual pleasures, and psychic agitations and, in this way, it not only reworked the entire human sensorium, but promised a future joyfully different from the past. What, in turn, defined aesthetic modernism as modernist, following this prevailing understanding, was its relentless desire to tap into modernity’s valorization of speed. Modernism, it has been concluded, surfed the wave of modern haste and rupture. . . . In 1931 Aldous Huxley famously pronounced: “Speed, it seems to me, ­provides the one genuinely modern pleasure.”  (15–16)

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Introduction  17 Speed is tied to the reconfiguration of human experience, a fact that is repeatedly demonstrated in modernist writing and the impressions recorded by its authors. In “Roads into London” (1905) Ford Madox Ford describes the manner in which speed technology—from the automobile to the electric tram—changes the way travelers coming into London view the city.14 This is a striking illustration of the way in which perception is linked to new and diverse forms of transport; it is also unique in attending to the way in which this development contributes to the cementing of class strati­ fication. To arrive by motor car, a luxury afforded to men of privilege, “is to fly too fast for any easy recognition of the gradual changes from country to town” (37). The effect, however, is not merely the result of pace but also place: “the motorist is too low down as a rule, the air presses against the eyes and half closes them; he has a tendency to look forward along the road, to see more of vehicles and of pedestrians than of the actual country or the regiments of buildings. He grows a little aloof, a little out of sympathy; he becomes more intent about keeping a whole skin on himself and on his car than about the outer world” (38–9). Perception may become foreshortened for the motorist, but the poor (in Ford’s words) sit high up in an electric tram, where the “range of sight is much longer” (39). These distinctive ex­peri­ences nevertheless share a single, overriding effect. Approaching the scenery and the actors that inhabit it from a moving vehicle, what inevitably occurs is that “the outlines grew tremulous, it all vanished with a touch of that pathos like a hunger that attaches to all things of which we see the beginning or the middle courses without knowing the ends” (40). For a writer, the associations are immediately metafictional. Speed undermines the very principles of teleology and coherence attending the conventions of narrative form: “the constant succession of much smaller happenings that one sees, and that one never sees completed, gives to looking out of train windows a touch of pathos and of dissatisfaction. It is akin to the sentiment ingrained in humanity of liking a story to have an end” (61). Modernist writers respond to this new experience of the world by rethinking narrative structure and methods of representation. Where speed rises in estimation, the slow observes a radical decline. As Koepnick writes: In the wake of modernism’s joyful adoration of rapid motion, slowness became largely denigrated as both antiprogressive and antiaesthetic. . . . Slowness [was] typecast as a sad remnant of preindustrial longings and sentiments—as something that combats the peculiarly modern sense of temporal contingency, flux, and indeterminacy; that blocks the progress of

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18  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism artistic and social affairs; and that quells the seeds of individual change and liberation. . . . privileging static over dynamic interrelations, binary oppositions over dialectical energies, mindless contemplation over critical engagement, escapist flight over nonsentimental commitments, nostalgia over activism.  (17)

In light of this historical bias and the conventions of narrative form both, it is clear that any attempt to signal out deceleration as the site for a renewed investigation into Conrad’s poetics may appear counterintuitive. That we do not note or appreciate the reconfiguration of the aesthetic and philosophical significance of the slow in Conrad’s art, however, may be as much a product of the biases I described as they are a measure of Conrad’s perceived merits. Critical and cultural attitudes to the slow are now shifting, and our reading of Conrad is shifting with them. Greaney’s recent chapter on Conrad’s style offers further evidence of this transformation. Giving support to my own association of the writer with Beckett, Greaney states that Conrad was master not of suspense but of suspendedness, captivated by the ­spectacle of what happens when things fail to happen and fascinated by how people conduct themselves in the limbo of detail and deferral. Uncoiling with languorous indirectness, Conradian narrative often involves its heroes in the quintessentially modern, Beckettian predicament of wait­ ing for nothing – for meaning that never fully reveals itself or relief that will never arrive. . . . Somnolence, repose and delay are stylistic traits that all contribute to what can seem like a peculiar unforthcomingness in Conrad’s style, an unwillingness – or inability – to comply with the naïve appetite for answers and revelations that all readers, however sophisti­ cated, cannot but help bring to narrative.  (107–8)

In the spirit of Epstein’s and Baxter’s readings, Greaney considers Conrad’s decelerations as part and parcel of his stylistic repertoire rather than the deviation that spells the exhaustion of his creative ability. Linda Dryden does the same in her recent Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells. Where Wells is “brisk” (63), Conrad is ponderous and nostalgic” (62). I would argue that the way in which all the critics here mentioned associate these decelerations with modernist technique says as much about the evolution of the slow in the cultural imaginary as it does about the changing nature of Conrad criti­ cism. Where Conrad scholarship is still lacking is in a consideration of the

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Introduction  19 slow outside a binary grid. We need to consider how to think deceleration outside the metonymies of frustration and delay. In attempting to distinguish slow going from going slow, Steven Connor writes: This is the aspect of slowness that interests me most of all in Beckett; the slowness of things happening, as it is put repeatedly in The Lost Ones, ‘by insensible degrees’. No other writer has joined his rhythm so unflinchingly to the rhythm and duration of insensible elapse, to the ordinary mystery of what Beckett in his notes on Winnie’s forgetfulness calls the ‘incompre­ hensible transport’ from one moment to another, the inability either to coincide with the passing of time, or to be able to arrest it.  (153)

Connor approaches the slow not as a mode of cessation or frustration, but as one of movement that eludes representation. We cannot measure move­ ment; it is not quantifiable because moments are not distinct—they run into one another by “insensible degrees,” much like those generic forms that Conrad mentions in “Author and Cinematograph.” The experience Connor describes is one of becoming—an ongoing process without a foreseeable goal or direction. His suggestion is that we think of it as “the present discon­ tinuous”: “the ordinary, fundamental, terrifying topple of time’s slow foot into the next moment, the disfazione (unfolding, unworking, working out, falling out, dissolution, decomposition) of sheer elapse that never resolves into anything as dramatic and determinate as collapse or relapse, the pitiless passing away, in soft and imperceptible torrent, that passes understanding” (158). For a writer, such a rethinking of time engages with it as an entity both new and elusive; it is not the fictional back-tracking towards a pre­ meditated conclusion that we have in traditional narrative form. Koepnick offers coordinates by which we might rethink the slow, in keep­ ing with the transition related above: To experience the present aesthetically and in the mode of slowness is to approach this present as a site charged with multiple durations, pasts, and possible futures; it is by no means hostile toward memory and anticipa­ tion. But to go slow also means to open up to the opulence and manifold­ ness of the present; to unfetter this present from the burdens of mindless visions of automatic progress and nostalgic recollections of the past and to produce presence beyond existing templates of meaning. Far from

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20  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism bonding us to different times and places, then, slowness negotiates today’s desires for both memory and presentness by allowing us to reflect on the now in all its complexity.  (4)

This definition is significant in demanding we understand these moments of retardation outside the confining limits of conceptual logic. This is not a retardation that will allow for the unfamiliar to be brought back to the known, the other to the same. This is no longer the site where the cohesive, autonomous Cartesian cogito can make of reality what the categories of thought will allow. The slow described here is a site of openness and the new; it does not exclude environmental stimuli in celebrating coherence and unity; nor does it cancel out difference in service of uniformity. It does not understand or comprehend the present moment through a harking back to the past or a vision of the future (as in Almayer’s vision of a return to Europe or Jim’s dreams of heroic accomplishment). To understand the present in this latter fashion is to spatialize time, to turn experience into measurement, and sensation into logic. It is to bend the new and unknown to the familiar and the emplotted. The aim of this study, then, is to demonstrate the manner in which Conrad himself might be seen to participate in this gradual transition. It traces expressions of an oscillation in Conrad’s writing between the first conception of the slow—the slow that is seen as a binary to movement, nar­ rative development, moral mettle and aesthetic merit—and a slow that is liberated from this binary and allows for the emergence of the phenomena of openness and flux as defined above. In the following chapters, Conrad’s work is read in dialogue with twentieth-century writing (fiction, philoso­ phy, and theory) in order to illustrate how we might view the innovations underlying his various decelerations as contributing to the evolution of fic­ tion late into the twentieth century. The first chapter focuses on ontologies of time in order to challenge some of the critical commonplaces that determine the way we understand and evaluate Conrad’s plot designs. Readers who fault and those who commend the late works meet in the need to address the pervasiveness of deceleration. The first identify it as key to the works’ failure, the second undertake the challenge of redeeming it through interpretation. Such critical approaches stem from an association of thematic and stylistic expressions of narrative inaction with failure, resistance, and crisis. A cursory history of the philoso­ phy of time allows for an identification of the source of this critical bias and an intervention in its enduring influence. Rather than rehearse either side of

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Introduction  21 the self-same bias, the discussion provides an alternative definition of time that is not contingent on movement. The object of this shift is to release the slow from the value-judgments arising from traditional definitions of time, value-judgments that are foundational to the narratological and aesthetic criteria that inform our method of reading to this day. To rethink plot out­ side these coordinates is truly an innovative project—one that Conrad attempts in The Rescue. In order to tease out the new as evident in this late work, the chapter begins with a reading of An Outcast of the Islands, a novel that, though written many years before its prequel, shares its fictional and historical story world. The analysis shows how the novels diverge in their presentation of two distinct ontologies of time that are articulated in two diverging methods of emplotting. The second chapter focuses on Conrad’s scenes of suspension as sites for an investigation of language and its role in the creation of subjectivity. Where Conrad’s contribution to modernist thinking is often seen as his ability to illustrate the instability of language and its tentative relation to the objects which it attempts to represent, the approach offered here is different. The investigation does not focus on how language fails to represent a true or stable object—but on how language determines subjectivity. Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Victory are addressed in order to uncover in­nov­ ations in language, subjectivity, plot, and character formation that have so far eluded critical investigation. The return to these works is framed by Samuel Beckett’s poetics, a juxtaposition that will shed light on the emer­ gence of a new subject and the manner in which its ontological permuta­ tions determine the rethinking of plot and event in Conrad’s fiction. The analysis of the three canonical novels hinges on the overturning of three mainstays of Conrad criticism. First, Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness are read not as evolving around a series of revisitations of Jim’s seminal jump off the Patna or the search for Kurtz but as the serial restaging of an unsolicited encounter with the language of the other. The novels’ many returns to this model of unwarranted interruption contribute to an exploration of a par­ ticularly passive and fragmented subjectivity that relinquishes the agency and cohesion afforded to the Cartesian cogito. Though commonly read as Marlow’s attempt to trace the psychological makeup and development of the younger man in Lord Jim and the horrors of the colonialist enterprise and their articulations in the character of Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, both works are presented as the implied author’s philosophical refashioning of subjectivity in response to the historical and ideational shifts at the turn of the century. Second, the insistence on the oral tradition evident in the

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22  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism Marlovian narratives and other works is not understood as an attempt to resurrect speech within an essentially silent medium. Instead, the quota­ tions within quotations in Conrad’s texts are read as a dramatization of the role of language in the evolution of the modernist subject and the narrative that houses him. Finally, the experimental narrative techniques often asso­ ciated with Conrad’s commitment to an inherently epistemological philo­ sophical inquiry are attributed rather to the author’s effort to chart the ontological coordinates of character and narration. Chapter 3 addresses sight as a gauge for the philosophical shifts described in this study. The cultural expressions of the anti-ocular turn observed in the nineteenth century provide the framework for a testing of Conrad’s use of the witness-narrator in Lord Jim, a novel that dramatizes the oscillations between an aesthetics of being and one of becoming. Bergson’s Creative Evolution and Time and Free Will inform the philosophical backdrop to the discussion, the anti-ocular turn of modernism its cultural complement, and narratology’s concept of the witness-narrator, the fictional measure against which these discourses strain. The three coalesce in an attempt to think the relation between sight, experience, and comprehension, between the demise of visual perception and its figurative, scientific, and philosophical expres­ sions in the failure of categorical thinking and instrumental logic. Chapter 4 turns to Chance in testing the relation between its titular theme, its handling of time and event, and its commercial appeal. Critical responses to the novel are suggestive of diametrically opposed views on the meaning of its title. Opinions diverge on whether the title is representative of the novel’s purported message or whether it should be read as its ironic subversion. The chapter shows that the novel supports both interpretations. The emphasis on chance serves Conrad’s attempt to performatively resist the pervasiveness of determinism in nineteenth-century thought. At the same time, a set of motifs that serve as counter-indications to contingency offer coherence and the familiar. The ambivalent treatment of chance is read as an indication of Conrad’s oscillation between two different artistic com­ mitments and the different philosophical paradigms that generate them. What is at stake is not only the nature of the audience he chooses to address and the authorial responsibilities that such a choice dictates, but the very question of his artistic legacy. The method with which chance is to be treated in the novel will determine if Conrad is a “modern” writer or a panderer to public opinion; whether he chooses an art of becoming or an art of being.

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Introduction  23 Chapter 5 turns to Nostromo. The novel is anchored in the determinism of a historical force that undermines the notion of human agency: the first through the forces of capitalism and revolution, the second through the inevitability of family inheritance and psychodynamic repetition. It is action heavy; the twists and turns of the plot performatively mirror the historical or libidinal forces that draw the heroes into a scripted future. Moments of deceleration and hesitation that punctuate the narrative nevertheless inter­ rupt the rush of history with the suggestion of accident, the unforeseen, and the new. The chapter turns to stylistic and thematic articulations of suspen­ sion in order to think the possibility of recurrence with difference, of an escape from an inevitability that is not only historically but also generically determined. The book concludes by discussing how we might think the tensions observed throughout this study in light of the evolution of human ex­peri­ ence. Conrad’s art, and the modernism with which it is associated, have long been read as centering on questions of knowledge and truth, conceal­ ment and revelation, doubt and the desire to know. A more ontologicallydriven thinking of modernism shows that the oscillations between being and becoming are meaningful not only as competing forces in critical prac­ tice and philosophical discourse, but as a gauge for significant changes in the way we engage with the world. The discussion will return to points made throughout in order to illustrate how we ourselves are undergoing something of a transition from a paradigm of being to becoming, and that the way we read, interpret, and identify meaning is demonstrative of this change.

Note 1. See, for example, John G. Peters’s A Historical Guide to Joseph Conrad (2010), Allan Simmons’s Joseph Conrad (2006), Michael John DiSanto’s Under Conrad’s Eyes: The Novel as Criticism (2009), Robert Hampson’s Conrad Secrets (2012), and Gail Fincham, Jeremy Hawthorn, and Jakob Lothe’s Outposts of Progress: Joseph Conrad, Modernism and Post-Colonialism (2015). For new approaches to modernism see, inter alia, Douglas Mao and Rebecca  L.  Walkowitz’s Bad Modernisms (2006), Peter Nicholls’s Modernisms (2009), and Kristin Bluemel’s Intermodernism (2009). That the term is noted in the plural or defamiliarized through the notation of a prefix is indicative of the way in which current critical studies are fueled by an impulse to expand the period’s once rigid definitions. Such exclusionary categories as highbrow, difficult, gendered, and Western

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24  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism are now exploded to include styles and voices that were previously seen as ­contradictory with or alien to the modernist ethos. The concluding chapter addresses the way this spirit of expansion finds expression in Conrad scholarship. 2. Many valuable studies of Conrad’s works address ontological questions; these will be consulted throughout. My point is not that such studies do not exist but rather that they tend to view ontological questions as serving the broader epis­ temological nature of the author’s contributions to modernist aesthetics. This tendency may well be the product of an emphasis on epistemology in modern­ ist studies (as opposed to the ontological emphasis in postmodernism). More recent critical treatments of the ontological implications of Conrad’s work no longer exhibit such a bias and my book will consider why this is the case. Nidesh Lawtoo’s Conrad’s Shadow: Catastrophe, Mimesis, Theory (2016) and Kaoru Yamamoto’s Rethinking Joseph Conrad’s Concepts of Community: Strange Fraternity (2017) are both important contributions to a rereading of Conrad’s work with contemporary theory. The paradigms that frame their investigation are different to those offered here. Both present a reading of Conrad with Jean-Luc Nancy. Lawtoo also offers an introduction to a wide range of ­twentieth- and twenty-first century thinkers including René Girard, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and many others; Yamomoto’s study similarly engages with a host of critical thinkers including, inter alia, Jacques Derrida, Hannah Arendt, Cathy Caruth, and Nicholas Royle. 3. A case in point, a recent peer-review of one of my papers suggested that reading Conrad with Beckett in order to rethink modernism is “methodologically flawed.” At present, comparative analyses of the two authors usually bring them together in order to highlight difference. To offer a familiar example, in Postmodernist Fiction (1987) Brian McHale argues that the two authors are separated by the epistemological/ontological dominants that determine the respective foci of modernist and postmodernist literature. McHale’s distinction may appear dated, but recent critical work often relies on the same terms of comparison. In Modernism and the Machinery of Madness (2017), for example, Andrew Gaedtke suggests that “what [Lewis’s, Loy’s, Kavan’s, Waugh’s, Beckett’s] novels and antinovels share is a radical uncertainty over ontological differences between the human and the machine, the living and the dead, and self and world. These are symptoms not of the low-level status anxiety that Trotter detects in the work of Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, and T. E. Hulme; rather, such symptoms manifest in subjects who struggle to determine not only what kind of person they are but also what is meant by ‘person’ ” (10). This book will argue that, in so far as Conrad anticipates this effort to redraw the human sub­ ject and his experience of being in the world, the uncovering of commonalities between these literary projects may be more productive in light of current crit­ ic­al debates than the cementing of traditionally accepted differences. A notable exception to the critical tendency I identify here is Ted Billy’s “ ‘Nothing to be

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Introduction  25 Done’: Conrad, Beckett, and the Poetics of Immobility.” The article focuses on similar themes to those addressed here in relation to Conrad’s Victory. His interpretative stance is contradictory to mine, however, in that he views immo­ bility as negation, a site of “cosmic entropy” (70); it is on the basis of this prin­ ciple that he reads the two authors together. Where Billy concludes by suggesting Conrad “grounds his artistry on the impotence of reason in navigat­ ing the enigma of human existence” (71), this book shows how moments of suspension are employed by Conrad to explore creative alternatives to the faculty of reason. 4. Understood as negation, the slow lends itself to a variety of critical readings of opposition in Conrad’s poetics—particularly in relation to race, culture, and gender. Providing a powerful example of the way such binaries are conflated with questions of pace, Richard Ruppel writes: “Words like ‘Inert,’ ‘static,’ and ‘unchanging’ nearly always adhere to late nineteenth-century descriptions of Eastern and African nations and cultures. While the West moves along with the great sweep of history, Africa and the East remain apart from that movement, unable even to look forward, much less advance on their own. Only contact with the West will allow them to progress socially, economically, politically, or, the missionaries would say, spiritually” (43). The following study does not issue from an investigation of binary opposition but rather attempts to think of two modes of philosophical discourse and the artistic practices they generate. 5. The moral implications of what I will shortly describe as the transition from a philosophy of being to a philosophy of becoming are only peripheral to the aims of this book. But the unpacking of this philosophical shift will allow my readers to appreciate the ways in which it necessitates a host of complementary conceptual reconfigurations that touch not only on aesthetic, epistemic, onto­ logical, and narratological categories, but also on morality. The following chap­ ters will demonstrate that Conrad’s moral vision is grounded in the humanist values that issue from a philosophy of being. It is because of this that his aes­ thetic exploration of a philosophy of becoming is haunted by the fear of nihil­ ism and moral disintegration. The tension between the impulse to explore new modes of writing and the fear of moral failure will be unpacked further in Chapter 4. I would like to emphasize at the outset, however, that the transition from a philosophy of being to a philosophy of becoming does not spell nihil­ ism; models of immanent ethics suggest that morality does not necessarily rely on the Categorical Imperative or on rational thought. Tamsin Lorraine’s Deleuze and Guattari’s Immanent Ethics (2011) provides a good introduction to an ­ethics that might accompany a philosophy of becoming. 6. The question of modernism and the market has gained much critical attention. Though Chapter 4 offers a metonymically related investigation of the same in connection to Chance, readers interested in exploring this further might wish to consult Joyce Piell Wexler’s Who Paid for Modernism?: Art, Money, and

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26  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism Fiction of Conrad, Joyce and Lawrence (1997). The discussions here touch on this subject in so far as they relate to the difference between being and ­becoming, the new and the familiar, a diametrical opposition that informs shifting emphases in hermeneutic practices and critical investigation. 7. Conrad’s tribute to the writer published in Scott Moncrieff ’s collection is titled Proust as Creator (126). Marcel Proust: An English Tribute. Ed. C.  K.  Scott Moncrieff. London: Chatto & Windus, 1923. 8. In his essay “Vorticism,” Pound similarly points to the distinction between ­creative and imitative art. Robert Hampson’s “ ‘Experiments in Modernity’: Ford and Pound” offers a nuanced reading of Pound’s response to the poetics of Ford (and, by extension, Conrad). Of particular interest here is Pound’s note that “The categorization of forms is a much more energetic and creative action than the copying or imitating of light on a haystack” (quoted in Hampson, “Experiments in Modernity” 108). 9. Henri Bergson’s Time and Free Will and Creative Evolution are referenced throughout this book. Mary Ann Gillies has argued that “Conrad’s central debt to Bergson is not linked to his ideas about time” or “the self,” as the author “stops short of direct representations of self and never really eliminates the bar­ rier between subject and object that Bergsonian ideas about representation of the self would require” (166). She argues instead that “Conrad’s greatest debt to Bergson lies in the ideas of comedy developed in Laughter” (169–70). I strongly disagree with this view—both in its suggestion of the specificity of Bergson’s influence and Conrad’s treatment of subjectivity. No historical records prove Conrad’s having read or studied Bergson though he was certainly familiar with the philosopher and named him in his letters. Frederick  R.  Karl notes that “Although Conrad did not respond directly to Henri Bergson’s work, he would surely have had some sense of its impact, which by 1910 was quite intense” (453). He suggests also that Chance is an expression of Conrad’s attempt to “grapple with Bergson’s warnings [. . .] that the logical mind created continuity where none really existed” (fn, 743). Unlike his knowledge of Bergson, Conrad’s familiarity with the philosopher’s disciple, William James, is documented. In his “Reminiscences of Conrad,” John Galsworthy writes: “Of philosophy [Conrad] had read a good deal, but on the whole spoke little. Schopenhauer used to give him satisfaction twenty years and more ago, and he liked both the personality and the writings of William James” (91). I would like to thank Helen Chambers for drawing my attention to this citation. For a detailed dis­ cussion of James’s influence on Conrad, see Chambers’s Conrad’s Reading: Space, Time, Networks 31 and 124–5. The question of direct philosophical influ­ ence on Conrad is not the subject of this study. Following Karl’s observation, my assumption is that the ideas circulating at the time can be shown to have percolated into Conrad’s art.

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Introduction  27 10. There are many metonymically related expressions of the difference between these two stances and their attitude towards time and experience. One helpful example might be the linguistic difference between the equivalences drawn by the verb to be, and the elimination of such equivalences in a syntax of co­ord­in­ ation. As Deleuze explains: “AND doesn’t just upset all relations, it upsets being, the verb . . . and so on. AND, ‘and . . . and . . . and . . .’ is precisely a creative stam­ mering, a foreign use of language, as opposed to a conformist and dominant use based on the verb ‘to be’ ” (Negotiations 44). The latter arrests understand­ ing and experience in a moment of conceptual organization, the former allows it to unfold. 11. I do not wish to burden my argument with a discussion of the philosophical nuances of the term. Deleuze presents his understanding of the term and its history in the first chapter of Difference and Repetition. 12. It is not only Beckett’s appreciation for Proust but also his debt to Schopenhauer that makes Proust a rewarding companion to Conrad studies. 13. The allusion is to Act 1, scene 2, where Hamlet bemoans the “weary, stale, flat and unprofitable” uses of the world (1.2 133). The play’s themes are apposite; it will be discussed further in the following chapter in relation to The Rescue. 14. A comparable effect in the rise of speed technology at sea would have been acutely felt by Conrad many years earlier in the transition from sail to steam­ ships. This study will not pursue a biographical-inspired discussion of possible correlations between Conrad’s experiences and the aesthetic decelerations noted in his writing. In The Dawn Watch, Maya Jasanoff offers such an in­ter­ pret­ation in her suggestion that Lord Jim’s “meandering narrative” “owed much to Conrad’s maritime perspective. When you’re on a ship at sea, you’re cut off from almost everything that gives incident to a day in a life on shore [. . .]. This gives a sailor at sea a particular relationship to time. Quotidian time passes in a pattern of two- and four-hour blocks, cycling without regard for night and day [. . .]. With nothing new to talk about in the present, the past and the future become extraordinarily rich imaginative domains. Sailors often speak of how they’ll spend their futures: what they’ll do onshore, what awaits them at home, what they’ll do when they stop sailing altogether. And sailors, famously, spin yarns about adventures and encounters from the past, which—like the lines they coil and mend—come at length, and with twists and turns” (147–8).

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1

Losing the Plot, Finding Time An Outcast of the Islands and The Rescue

This chapter focuses on ontologies of time in order to challenge some of the critical commonplaces that determine the way we understand and evaluate Conrad’s plot designs. As noted in the introduction, readers who fault and those who commend the late works meet in the need to address the perva­ siveness of deceleration. The first identify it as key to the works’ failure, the second undertake the challenge of redeeming it through interpretation. Such critical approaches stem from an association of thematic and stylistic expressions of narrative inaction with failure, resistance, and crisis. A curs­ ory history of the philosophy of time will allow for an identification of the source of this critical bias and an intervention in its enduring influence. Rather than rehearse either side of the self-same bias, the discussion will offer an alternative definition of time that is not contingent on movement. The object of this shift is to release the slow from the value-judgments aris­ ing from traditional definitions of time, value-judgments that are founda­ tional to the narratological and aesthetic criteria that inform our method of reading to this day. To rethink plot outside these coordinates is a truly ambitious literary undertaking. Still, The Rescue has not accrued critical acclaim as an innova­ tive work. Canonical works such as Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim are seen as early articulations of the impressionistic turn in Joyce and Woolf, an attempt to represent the “atoms as they fall upon the mind” (Woolf 107). Conrad does not abandon the call to rethink narrative form in The Rescue but it anticipates a different mode in modernist writing. The 1920 novel performs a radical break with literary conventions by releasing narrative form from action, the very principle upon which it is founded. Andrew Renton suggests that in his three Still texts Beckett writes a “narrative of non-events and tendencies towards actions, rather than the actions them­ selves” (171). The analysis that follows will attempt to show how Conrad’s novel may be seen to participate in the formation of such an aesthetic, Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism. Yael Levin, Oxford University Press (2020). © Yael Levin. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198864370.001.0001

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Losing the Plot, Finding Time  29 a  harbinger of the slow that emerges in the experimental writing of the ­mid-twentieth century. An Outcast of the Islands and The Rescue share a fictional and historical story world. A fundamental difference emerges against the backdrop of this resemblance. The disparity will be identified here as a product of Conrad’s long cogitated literary and philosophical deliberations on the nature of time. Grounded in a conceptualization of time that originates in antiquity, the first novel is obsessed with measurement and account­ ing. Time is always regarded as secondary to movement. The Rescue is more neatly squared with modern philosophy and its attempt to conceive a time that preexists numerical evaluation.1 The two ontologies of time find their narrative expression in two distinct plot designs. The first hinges on action, the second, inaction. Deviating from the conventions of emplotting we find in earlier works, the late novel presents a time of suspension and waiting, a time out of joint. The comparative analysis of the two novels will demonstrate that, if in the transition from An Outcast of the Islands to The Rescue Conrad appears to lose the plot, it is because he finds time. For philosophy and narratology both, such a transition marks an attempt to think outside determinism and court the indeterminate—to think the new.

“Almayer’s Watch Was Going” “Don’t lose any time . . . Don’t lose time”

(OI 319)

An Outcast of the Islands is obsessed. Its preoccupation with time calls attention to itself in a motif of measuring, accounting, and plot formation, all signaling a commitment to chronological time. Here is a representative passage: [Almayer] pulled out his watch. It was going. Whenever Lingard was in Sambir Almayer’s watch was going. He would set it by the cabin clock, telling himself every time that he must really keep that watch going for the future. And every time, when Lingard went away, he would let it run down and would measure his weariness by sunrises and sunsets in an apathetic indifference to mere hours.  (308)

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30  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism The passage casts Almayer and Lingard in the role of a dialectic pair; one joins an array of characters that fall into the semiotics of cessation, the other signals the motif of perpetuum mobile. In Lingard’s absence the watch stops. The neat binary opposition is somewhat undermined, however, by Almayer’s sustained commitment to Lingard’s ethos. The watch having stopped, he continues to measure time’s passage with the help of the sun. Such a method of reckoning is equally associated with Willems, the nov­ el’s anti-hero. Describing his imposed exile upriver from Sambir, the narra­ tor reflects: “The days passed. They passed unnoticed, unseen, in the rapid blaze of glaring sunrises, in the short glow of tender sunsets, in the crushing oppression of high noons without a cloud” (327). Unlike Lingard and Almayer, Willems is oblivious to the passage of time; he lives in perpetual darkness.2 The tally nevertheless continues. It is as if the narrator is remedy­ ing the protagonist’s refusal to conform to the novel’s investment in these calculations. He continues to mark off time on Willems’s behalf. The collocation of time and numerical measure evidenced above may be traced back to Plato’s mythical account of the creation of the former in the Timaeus. The etiology introduces time as a method to impose order on a chaotic, undifferentiated universe. Its significance in this story of creation is readily applicable to Conrad’s novel. Tallying produces coordinates by which to trace the progression of the characters’ lives or, as the case may be, the implied author’s narrative. The one character that does not measure the passage of time is relegated to a chaos stripped of the assurances of such signposts. Without them, he does not move towards any perceptible goal. He is, as it were, frozen in time. What emerges from this distinction between those who count and those who do not (pun intended) is that when it is not measured, time grinds to a halt. Henry Somers-Hall’s gloss on Plato’s fable helpfully unpacks the subordination of time to its measure: Before the universe is organised according to time, it is still in motion, although this motion is ‘disorderly’. Thus, motion is not dependent on time, as motion is prior to the imposition of time. Time is not that which allows movement to take place, but that which allows movement to become rational. In fact, Timaeus believes that time is grounded in the elements which are most perfect in the universe. That is, the celestial bod­ ies. The celestial bodies thus occupy something like a mediating position, as on the one hand, they are similar to the eternal, whereas on the other, they are the ground for time. The planets move in an orderly manner, which is what allows time to be related to measure.  (58)

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Losing the Plot, Finding Time  31 Our reading of An Outcast might be served by an extrapolation of some of the insights that are offered in the Timaeus. Willems’s abyss might be ­likened to the pre-temporal state of Plato’s account. The flux he experiences can only be ordered by imposing regulated movement against which to measure time’s passage. It is this regulated movement—the revolutions of the planets in orbit—that serves as a method to gauge temporal passage. Somers-Hall concludes his explication of the fable by emphasizing two related insights: On the Platonic model, therefore, we cannot have something like an understanding of the pure form of time, as time is the way in which some­ thing else (in this case, the number, or measure of motion) presents itself. Time is simply an imperfect way in which the eternal patterns of the world present themselves. It is always an ancillary time premised on a logically prior movement.  (58)

If time is secondary to movement and emerges from it, the absence of movement spells the interruption of time. An Outcast exhibits a need to account for time’s passage through movement (whether the ticking of the clock or the revolution of the stars). The collapsing of time and space (the first is always the product of a movement registered in the second) suggests that the two are inseparable; without movement time stands still. Both of the examples described above—Almayer’s perfunctory if reluctant tally and the narrator’s proxy accounting—are suggestive of an underlying threat of cessation; narrative can only be sustained as long as the counting continues. This premise develops into a dialectic that sustains the narrative by oscillat­ ing between the threat of cessation and the promise of continuation. Evidence of this principle is available throughout Conrad’s novel. Where Willems is not blind to movement, a keen perception of changes occurring around him serves as a painful reminder of his own immobility: Round him everything stirred, moved, swept by in a rush; the earth under his feet around him strove, struggled, fought, worked—if only to prolong a miserable existence; but they lived, they lived! And it was only himself that seemed to be left outside the scheme of creation in a hopeless immobility filled with tormenting anger and with ever-stinging regret.  (65)

Change and movement here complement numerical value in establishing the passage of time, and, by extension, in depicting life. Willems’s sense of

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32  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism his own arrest is associated with a form of death in life. Stasis is an existence outside time. A similar anxiety appears to infect scholarship on narrative. The slippage from philosophical accounts of time to narratological definitions of its representation in narrative owes much to Aristotle’s definition of tragedy in The Poetics. The treatise cements the lasting influence of this ancient philo­soph­ic­al conceptualization of time on the way we read, write, and evaluate narrative: But most important of all is the structure of the incidents. For Tragedy is an imitation, not of men, but of an action and of life, and life consists in action, and its end is a mode of action, not a quality. Now character deter­ mines men’s qualities, but it is by their actions that they are happy or the reverse. Dramatic action, therefore, is not with a view to the representa­ tion of character: character comes in as subsidiary to the actions. Hence the incidents and the plot are the end of a tragedy; and the end is the chief thing of all.  (25–7)

What we find in this famous definition is the same prioritization of move­ ment to time in its application to narrative. The passage of time is predi­ cated on action, a form of movement we know as the building blocks of any well-conceived plot. Narratologists adopt this premise in their definition of narrative as “the representation of an event or a series of events. ‘Event’ [being] the key word here, though some people prefer the word ‘action’ ” (Porter Abbott 13). Mieke Bal defines the event as “the transition from one state to another state” (6). Narrative time is the representation of an action, an event or, more sparingly, a transition. The definition shows passage to be a product of the spatialization of time. It is predicated on movement, on numbers, on the quantification of experience. Aristotle’s prioritization of action in narrative gives rise to an array of attending value-judgments. If action is the very essence of drama, every­ thing outside its scope is insignificant or secondary. Barthes’s narratological taxonomy appears to eschew the values attached to such hierarchy, as it relies on the premise that all classes of units in narrative are significant: “Art does not acknowledge the existence of noise (in the informational sense of the word). It is a pure system: there are no wasted units, and there can never be any, however long, loose, or tenuous the threads which link them to one of the levels of the story” (“Structural Analysis” 245). In the spirit of the structuralist project, Barthes goes on to distinguish between two classes of,

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Losing the Plot, Finding Time  33 as it were, equally valuable units in narrative: functions and indices.3 The  first relate to action. The second contribute to the story by providing information that does not directly relate to action but fleshes out the char­ acters, establishes atmosphere, and so on. The purported leveling of the Aristotelian hierarchy is nevertheless undermined by a distinction Barthes makes between these two classes of units: “in order to understand what purpose an index [indice] or indicator serves, one must pass on to a higher level (actions of the character or narration), for only there can the ‘index’ be clarified” (247). Functions mean in relation to one another; indices produce meaning only in relation to a higher level of narrative units—the level that pertains to action. The implication of this distinction is that meaning is always sub­or­din­ated to the action. It is evident, then, that Barthes not only re-establishes the hierarchy presented in The Poetics but proceeds to extend it to the her­men­eut­ic value of each of these units. The action of the narrative is key to our interpretation. Following on the spatialization of time, mean­ ing, too, hinges on movement. The codification of value-judgments in narratological taxonomies is often obscured by the pseudo-scientific nature of the discourse and its ostensible neutrality. The implicit values attached to Barthes’s terms are never­the­less made explicit in much critical analysis. A clear evaluative cri­ ter­ion emerges in the distinction between movement and cessation, passage and pause. In Plot, Story, and the Novel, Robert L. Caserio states that “the novelist-storytellers have been committed to plot because they have found it the complement of what they most value. And what they value most is a life more active than contemplative: a commitment to engendering continuities and inescapable, definite meanings; a passionate purpose that rescues life from sterile theorizing as well as from frustration and blankness” (xxi). Caserio’s introduction pays homage to Aristotle’s abiding authority at the same time that it implicitly repeats Barthes’s lesson on the production of meaning in narrative. The determination of narrative value according to purpose and movement gives rise to an evaluative yardstick that is difficult to shake. Movement becomes coterminous with purpose, continuity, and life. Its antonyms include frustration and, implicitly, death. The binaries are couched not only in moral but also in aesthetic terms. Movement is associ­ ated with definite meaning, cessation with blankness. The implications are not only fundamental to the representation of the passage of time and the production of meaning but to the very enterprise of art. Caserio believes action is “as an innovating, differentiating creativity or creative force or will whereby purposive motion is made actual or realized” (8). Movement

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34  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism signals creativity and actualization; cessation spells sterility. The aesthetic criteria that are presented here are clearly lodged in what poststructuralists have long since identified as the biases of Western metaphysics. Creativity is the product of presence and causality; immobility is conflated with failure and virtuality. On the blank, frustrating, and sterile side of this binary arrangement there is only absence. Although the project of this book is precisely to undermine such evalu­ ative collocations, we must begin by acknowledging the extent to which this binary grid is perfectly matched with An Outcast, its underlying semiotics and its unrelenting investigation into plot design. The story hinges on action much as narrative repeats the philosophical imperative wherein time is predicated on movement. We now return to Conrad for a more tangible demonstration of the manner in which time’s measure and the unfolding of the plot become interchangeable in the novel’s taxonomy and its implied moral determinations. Aïssa’s interrogation of Willems on his dealings with Syed Abdullah pro­ duces in him a fleeting realization of his culpability; an alliance with her cements his betrayal of Lingard. He “became aware of the passing minutes every one of which was like a reproach; of those minutes that falling, slow, reluctant, irresistible into the past, marked his footsteps on the way to perdition” (142). The numerical measure here doubles both as an indication of the passing of time and as the signposting of the plot’s unraveling towards a morally determined resolution. This short passage brings together the measure of time’s passage, the metaphor of the path and the framework of a higher law of destiny. All three are contingent on movement, and all three provide a figurative articulation of the passage of time. We cannot experience or sense the passage of time qua time; time is always encoded in movement, moral law, or numerical measure. The conceptual conflation encountered here is already announced at the outset. An Outcast famously begins with the following, rather elaborate comment on plots in fiction: When he stepped off the straight and narrow path of his peculiar honesty, it was with an inward assertion of unflinching resolve to fall back again into the monotonous but safe stride of virtue as soon as his little excursion into the wayside quagmires had produced the desired effect. It was going to be a short episode—a sentence in brackets, so to speak—in the flowing tale of his life: a thing of no moment, to be done unwillingly, yet neatly, and to be quickly forgotten.  (3)

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Losing the Plot, Finding Time  35 The passage admits a double irony. Willems casts himself as a victim of ­circumstances, his crime—an inevitability. Much as he dismisses his respon­ sibility, he dismisses the consequences. His conceit is so great he believes he has the power to hide his peccadilloes from an avenging fate. No less signifi­ cant is the irony that signals the delusion upon which this sophistry lies. As the image pans out and the narrator shares something of Willems’s history we learn that the peculiarity of his honesty conceals the narcissistic pride of a man who has earned his position by the good graces of others and the color of his skin. Willems’s reflections on his life’s journey serve as a commentary on plot design. Time finds its expression in action. The measure of an episode will determine its part in the passage of Willems’s life. Two plot designs emerge here. The first is associated with straightforward linear progression, the sec­ ond with a deviation from such a scheme. In the first the grounding of the plot in action is expressed in the metaphor of a “stride,” in the second, an “excursion.” Both are predicated upon movement. Willems’s fate will be meted out through the twists and turns of the action. Without action, there is no plot. In these first lines of the novel we already have an indication of the semi­ otics of a freezing of time. The “wayside quagmires,” the first mention of the image of mud that will serve as a leitmotif for the novel’s protagonist, repre­ sent a “thing of no moment.” Not only does the deviation have no numerical value (no moment), it is also perceived by Willems as lying in some way outside his life’s action. It is excluded from the unfolding of the trajectory of his plot, that “straight and narrow path” as he imagines it. Without meas­ urement, without moral significance, the interruption of action emerges as a moment outside time. The distinction is marked by two literary topoi of moral figuration—the straight and the circuitous. At the outset of Dante’s Divine Comedy a state of sin is introduced by the narrator’s phrase that he has “lost the straight way” (I). Similarly, when Milton’s Satan leads Eve to the tree of knowledge in Paradise Lost, he does so by “making intricate seem straight” (IX 632). The trajectories taken by the sinner and the fallen angel are equally damning. For a character to be righteous s/he must follow “the straight and narrow path” (OI 3) of virtue. The symbolically signposted binary is repeatedly ref­ erenced in the parallel drawn in the novel between Willems’s character and the various metaphors associated with his life’s path. The deliberation on plot trajectories demonstrates the conflation of moral law with action, a morally-codified distinction between straightforward

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36  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism movement and the circuitous path that leads to immobility and death. The association of Willems’s character with those quagmires at the very start of the novel lends itself to a network of similar short-circuits. Willems repeat­ edly wanders into deviations that lead nowhere, a leitmotif that sym­bol­ic­ al­ly marks his lack of virtue. Rather than choose the straight path that is illuminated by sunlight, Willems seeks short cuts: It was such a faint and ill-defined track that it took him some time to find out how far he had strayed amongst the brambles of the dangerous wilder­ ness he had been skirting for so many years, without any other guide than his own convenience and that doctrine of success which he had found for himself in the book of life—in those interesting chapters that the Devil has been permitted to write in it, to test the sharpness of men’s eyesight and the steadfastness of their hearts. For one short, dark and solitary moment he was dismayed, but he had that courage that will not scale heights, yet will wade bravely through the mud—if there be no other road.  (21)

The deviation and its morally damning implications are signposted by a dis­ course of temptation and the returning metaphor of mud. Although time appears to continue rather than stop, the suggestion that the road is “faint and ill-defined” intimates an end of sorts. Despite the predilection of his character to seek out these non-paths, to court the cessation that is spelt by being caught in a paralyzing bog, the narrative appears to police Willems back onto a real path lit by sunlight: Here and there he could see the beginnings of chopped-out pathways, and, with the fixed idea of getting out of sight of the busy river, he would land and follow the narrow and winding path, only to find that it led nowhere, ending abruptly in the discouragement of thorny thickets. He would go back slowly, with a bitter sense of unreasonable disappointment and sadness; oppressed by the hot smell of earth, dampness, and decay in that forest which seemed to push him mercilessly back into the glittering sunshine of the river. And he would recommence paddling with tired arms to seek another opening, to find another deception.  (67)

Both passages are suggestive of a slowing down of time, a growing weari­ ness that spells the end. Willems, however, will not be allowed to find the end of his life’s path and is repeatedly drawn back into the light, back onto the “safe stride” of being in time.

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Losing the Plot, Finding Time  37 Willems is as an agent of deceleration, a villain of sorts who necessitates the interventions of a narrator charged with accounting for time and an implied author who provides the thorny thickets that force the protagonist back onto the sunlit path. A much-needed antidote to the unwieldy de­cel­er­ ations of his villainous double, Lingard is fleshed out as the novel’s an­tith­ esis, a man of action associated with the progression and purpose on which a narrative relies. Lingard participates in bringing the plot forward and securing its proper end. A man who “had removed an enemy once or twice before, out of his path” (235), Lingard once again cements the significance of a clear path and forward movement. It is in his role as such that Lingard is confronted with the task of bring­ ing the narrative to its end: “the thing was as well as done” (234). And yet there is something about Willems’s character that appears to infect him, rendering him “unable to make up his mind and unwilling to act” (235). Rather than exact vengeance and facilitate the narrative’s conclusion by bringing about Willems’s death, Lingard abandons the villain to his own devices. The moment is marked by the return of the symbolism separating the two. “The rapid motion of the craft” carries Lingard away from the pris­ oner (281); Willems is left on the shore and a sudden torrential downpour submerges him in the mud with which he was associated throughout: “From under his feet a great vapour of broken water floated up, he felt the ground become soft—melt under him” (283). Lingard’s refusal to exact revenge results in a moment of crisis that announces the novel’s last act. The crisis that ensues is decidedly chrono­ logical. Almayer’s dissatisfaction with Lingard’s decision hinges on time: What an extraordinary idea to keep him there for ever. For ever! What did that mean—for ever? Perhaps a year, perhaps ten years. Preposterous! Keep him there ten years—or may be twenty! The fellow was capable of living more than twenty years. And for all that time he would have to be watched, fed, looked after. There was nobody but Lingard to have such notions. (293)

Lingard’s decision to let Willems be results in a sudden excess of time—a stretch of time that cannot be measured, one that is interminable or indeter­ minate. The crisis doubles here as Almayer’s anxiety about his own pros­ pects and a more meta-narrative anxiety on the question of the novel’s ending. It is fitting, then, that Almayer is tasked with the job of concluding the narrative, a task he achieves through the orchestration of Willems’s

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38  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism reunion with his wife. Almayer hopes their escape will absolve him of his uncertainty; by extension, such a turn of events will serve to rid the readers of their own. An Outcast’s obsessive measuring and accounting in its deliberation of the passage of time and the progression of the plot repeatedly gesture to a conceptualization of time traced back to antiquity. In keeping with the prin­ ciples of narrative and the hermeneutic tradition, the novel is partial to movement and action; it views their various antonyms—fatigue, de­cel­er­ ation, and cessation and their figurative expression in mud, the quagmire, shade, and darkness—as morally damning, the noxious impediments to a forward-moving plot. These semiotics are completely overturned in The Rescue. Before turning to the later novel I would like to underline the seeds of a counter-argument that is already present in An Outcast, where a suspicion of the conceptual conflation of time, aesthetics, morality, and plot design is already in evidence. Midway through the novel we find the following ­self-reflexive comment on “the man of purpose”: Consciously or unconsciously, men are proud of their firmness, steadfastness of purpose, directness of aim. They go straight towards their desire, to the accomplishment of virtue—sometimes of crime—in an uplifting persua­ sion of their firmness. . . . If they do stop, it is to look for a moment over the hedges that make them safe, to look at the misty valleys, at the distant peaks at cliffs and morasses, at the dark forests and the hazy plains where other human beings grope their days painfully away, stumbling over the bones of the wise, over the unburied remains of their predecessors who died alone, in gloom or in sunshine, halfway from anywhere. The man of purpose does not understand, and goes on, full of contempt. He never loses his way. He knows where he is going and what he wants. Travelling on, he achieves great length without any breadth, and battered, besmirched, and weary, he touches the goal at last; he grasps the reward of his perse­ verance, of his virtue, of his healthy optimism: an untruthful tombstone over a dark and soon forgotten grave.  (197)

In some ways the description may be seen to anticipate the evaluative cri­ teria seen in Caserio’s study of plot and story. The emphasis is on purpose, movement, and human will as a method to achieve a desired end. Unlike related passages addressed above, however, here the collocation of moral value and progression is shown to be a hoax. The criminal and the possessor

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Losing the Plot, Finding Time  39 of virtue are both men of purpose. And both are equally rewarded for their efforts in pursuing their desire by death. There is no moral law; neither reward nor punishment is meted out according to a man’s moral fiber. The passage is veritably Nietzschean in its implicit denunciation of the human agent who believes he possesses the power to control his destiny through virtuous action. But what is perhaps most striking is the suggestion that the man of action fails to fully grasp or experience the world around him. The choice of action is a resistance to the manifold experience of the world. And it is such blindness that ultimately brings the two characters together under the scrutiny of the narrator. The novel repeatedly demonstrates the qualitative difference between Willems and Lingard. The first courts deceleration and blockage, the second the quickness of assured action. Such an essential distinction notwithstand­ ing, from the very outset the two are shown to be equally self-deluded. Willems’s self-deception is a product of his overinflated sense of self. When he is confronted by his failures he responds not with understanding but with surprise and dismay: “What a fatal aberration of an acute mind! He did not recognize himself there. He must have been mad” (23). Lingard errs because of his trusting and generous nature. He has an exaggerated faith not in himself but in others. The first is associated with illusion, the second with naivety. Both pay for their inability to recognize the truth and in both cases this inability to see is the product of the insistence on action. What is lost is a form of knowledge that comes with an openness to experience that extends beyond the confines of prescribed or predetermined action. Barthes’s prioritization of functions to indices tellingly offers a related comment on the trivialization of experience we find here. In that distinction between the narrative classes addressed above he concludes that “Functions imply metonymic relata, indices metaphoric relata; the former are func­ tional in terms of action, the latter in terms of being” (“Structural Analysis” 247). The distinction drawn here may be seen as a parallel testament to the prioritization of movement over stasis. Action relies not on receptivity but on constant progression. An investigation into the truth and fundamental laws of being can only be achieved vertically—outside a spatialized con­fig­ ur­ation of time that is predicated on movement. The pro­tag­on­ist of Beckett’s “The Expelled” provides compelling testimony to the give and take involved in the binary opposition between action and thought. Commenting on his unusual gait, he writes: “A man must walk without paying attention to what he’s doing, as he sighs, and when I walked without paying attention to what I was doing I walked in the way I have just described, and when I began to

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40  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism pay attention I managed a few steps of creditable execution and then fell” (14). It is a form of habit or automata that ensures forward movement. Awareness, consciousness, and receptivity are confusing; they are literally arresting. Though Conrad’s narrative and Barthes’s narratology prioritize action in corresponding terms, what emerges from these fleeting moments of selfawareness in An Outcast is the makings of an altogether different semiotic grid, wherein passivity is not a state of ignorance, a stepping out of time, but rather the site of a different experience of time, a time of indeterminacy, openness, and receptivity.

Time out of Joint In Difference and Repetition, Deleuze famously distinguishes between two separate ontologies of time: The joint, cardo, is what ensures the subordination of time to those ­properly cardinal points through which pass the periodic movements which it measures (time, number of the movement, for the soul as much as for the world). By contrast, time out of joint means demented time or time outside the curve which gave it a god, liberated from its overly simple circular figure, freed from the events which made up its content, its rela­ tion to movement overturned; in short, time presenting itself as an empty and pure form.  (111)

We have seen that the first conceptualization of time subordinates it to movement. The reading of The Rescue that follows will demonstrate how we might think of time outside movement, outside moral law, and outside numerical measure. This is a time of waiting and hesitation. Narratology defines such moments as descriptive pauses, a suspension of story time. Rather than adhere to such determinations these scenes are read here as a representation of the experience of time itself. The Rescue might not be the most celebrated of Conrad’s novels, but it certainly has pride of place amongst his many literary procrastinations. At the start of his Author’s Note to the novel Conrad writes that, “of the three long novels of mine which suffered an interruption, ‘The Rescue’ was the one that had to wait the longest for the good pleasure of the Fates” (ix). The writer here casts his literary career in a plot predicated upon the unfolding

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Losing the Plot, Finding Time  41 of an otherworldly design. Each entry in his list of publications measures out the passing of time in his life’s journey. But if Conrad still commits to a view of time as contingent on the kernel events of his creative process, the novel to which he addresses these comments is suggestive of an altogether different conceptualization of time, one that is ontologically prior to any given measure, a time out of joint. The twenty-year abandonment of the project performatively places the author in the role of Willems, one of the more unappealing representatives of the story world it would take Conrad so long to revisit. We recall that An Outcast begins with the character’s stepping “off the straight and narrow path of his peculiar honesty” (3). Like his anti-hero in the early novel, Conrad abandons the monotonous and safe stride associated with conven­ tional plot design and explores, instead, a plot that hinges on the juxta­pos­ ition of moments of anticipation and waiting—those very quagmires and bogs with which Willems is associated. The first indication of this deviation, of the casting of the author in the role of his maligned protagonist, is in The Rescue’s spring of action.4 Yannick Le Boulicaut notes the peculiarity of this novel’s opening: the Travers’ yacht “runs onto the mud-flat at the wrong place, at the wrong time. Thanks to this unexpected situation, the narration can start. It is immobility which brings momentum to the story” (“Shores” 237). Le Boulicaut picks up on the irony of a spring of action reimagined as inaction, obstacle, and helpless fixity. But he sees it in the framework of conventional emplotting—it is this underlying problem that generates the action necessary for the plot to begin. Such a reading is in keeping with Carter’s appeal to Lingard at the start: “Our gentry are tired of being stuck in the mud and wish for as­sist­ ance” (31). Lingard’s role is to rescue their yacht from immobility and help them resume their onward journey. As the novel progresses it is clear that this initial image of fixity is one that is not resolved but repeated. The novel proceeds not through action but through a continual slippage between states of fixity or capture. Initially, the Travers are stuck on board a yacht “hard and fast on middling soft mud” (30); Mr Travers and Mr d’Alcacer are then held captive by Daman on shore, then placed in the protective custody of Lingard in “The Cage” aboard The Emma, and then once again cast in the role of captives, this time in Belarab’s camp. Such fixity, moreover, characterizes not only the hapless victims who stumble upon Lingard’s island intrigues but the very agents participating in or enlisted to the cause. Immada and Hassim, Belarab, Jörgenson, Carter, Jaffir, and the others repeatedly fall into states of immobility. The novel is

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42  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism not stunted but rather proceeds through scenes of waiting, anticipation, and suspended action.5 One of the striking illustrations of this challenging of the traditional emphases on (or preference for) movement is in the overturning of the symbolic import of the novel’s ships. Conventional figurations are sug­gest­ ive of speed, movement, power, and energy. At the outset, Lingard is “proud of his brig, of the speed of his craft, which was reckoned the swiftest country vessel in those seas” (10). Such an introduction to the protagonist’s vessel soon emerges as an incredibly deceptive premise. Lingard’s The Lightning is the first ship to be stripped of its traditional symbolism. Contrary to its fame, the reputed vessel is encountered in the image of “a hopeless captive of the calm, a helpless prisoner of the shallow sea” (5). The Travers’ yacht, The Hermit, then assumes the self-same image of immobility and even ex­acer­bates the sense of fixity by becoming bogged down in a mud-flat. The Wilde Rose mirrors its owner Jörgenson in its association with death, and The Emma is bought at great cost only to be “towed up the creek” and run aground. Neither The Wilde Rose nor The Emma serves as a vehicle of transportation. The first shrinks to a single mahogany case left over from the original ship, the second becomes Lingard’s (immobile) arsenal in The Land of Refuge. The image of the beached ship is not in itself an oddity of the late novel; stranded vessels often feature in Conrad’s story world. We have already seen one such instance in An Outcast, where Almayer deliberately stays the Whale Ship on which he and Lingard’s men pursue Mrs. Willems. This par­ ticular image of immobility nevertheless assumes a significantly different function in the previous work. In contradistinction to its function in The Rescue, the stranded vessel in An Outcast facilitates action. As Almayer later reports, “I am sure I did it all for the best in trying to facilitate the fellow’s escape” (OI 361). The ship’s fixity serves to suspend one action in order to allow another to take place. It is a momentary delay that serves to bring about the desired end to the narrative. The beached ships in The Rescue do not function as a momentary suspension of chronological time in order to allow for action to take place. Instead, they serve as the back­ drop for a representation of a time of waiting and anticipation by which the plot proceeds. It is the context in which a captain might come to a startling realization: Lingard “did not know where he was going. That adventurer had only a confused notion of being on the threshold of a big adventure. There was something to be done, and he felt he would have to do it. It was expected of him” (R 87).

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Losing the Plot, Finding Time  43 The motif of the beached vessels signals an attempt to liberate narrative from the conventions of emplotting: a series of events that conform to and reflect a choice of genre. Lingard senses that an adherence to this series of events is expected of him. The metafictional implications of his impression clearly align such expectations with the writer tasked with the design of his character’s fictional journey. The stranding of the ships symbolically insinu­ ates an attempt to think narrative progression outside the conventions of action, to create plot not by pursuing a shift from one event to the next but through a juxtaposition of almost identical images of immobility. A motif of broken watches complements this attempt to rethink narrative progression by reconfiguring time outside its spatial articulations. It does so by symbolically canceling chronological time. The novel is littered with watches that are stripped of their purported function and no longer tell time. Mr. Travers tells d’Alcacer that his watch broke when they were attacked on the sandbank. He explains: “I had just then pulled out my watch. Of course it flew out of my hand but it hung by the chain. Somebody trampled on it. The hands are broken off short. It keeps on ticking but I can’t tell the time. It’s absurd” (337–8). Similarly, when Jörgensen asks Edith for Lingard’s watch, he reassures her that the fact that the watch has stopped “doesn’t matter. I don’t want to know the time” (363). An additional expression of this substantive shift in the conceptualiza­ tion of time in narrative is evident in Conrad’s unusual employment of the verb to linger. The reworked usage of the word in many ways parallels the transformed characterization of the hero whose name it resembles. In An Outcast Lingard’s name assumes a certain irony as his character is associ­ ated with forward movement and progression. We have already noted this association in the passage cited above where the narrator notes that “when­ ever Lingard was in Sambir Almayer’s watch was going” (OI 308). The nov­ el’s denouement admits to a moment of hesitation on Lingard’s part but one that may be identified as an exception to the rule: “Nobody had ever seen him in the mood he was in now. Nobody had seen Lingard doubtful and giving way to doubt, unable to make up his mind and unwilling to act; Lingard timid and hesitating one minute, angry yet inactive the next; Lingard puzzled in a word, because confronted with a situation that dis­ composed him of its unprovoked malevolence, by its ghastly injustice” (235–6). In The Rescue the exception becomes the rule, and Lingard’s name is stripped of its irony. Much like the life that surrounds him, he is often depicted in a state of immobility: “For hours he would stand elbow on rail, his head in his hand and listen—and listen in dreamy stillness to the

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44  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism cajoling and promising whisper of the sea” (R 10). For Bergson, it is p ­ recisely in such a moment of hesitation that freedom is experienced. The seed that is planted in this caesura in An Outcast is developed in the later novel, where we can see it as an exploration of freedom. Bergson writes: “the living being essentially has duration; it has duration precisely because it is continuously elaborating what is new and because there is no elaboration without search­ ing, no searching without groping. Time is this very hesitation or it is nothing (The Creative Mind 75). A comparison of the way in which the word “linger” is employed in the two novels yields a telling discursive divide between them. The word appears eleven times in An Outcast, and fourteen times in The Rescue.6 In An Outcast, the word is most commonly used as an adjective, and comes to be associated with memories of the past or the depiction of the scenery (lin­ gering clouds). As an action attributed to an agent, however, the verb is used only in relation to Willems and Almayer, the novel’s primary agents of deceleration. The Rescue offers a different connotation for the word. Here, it functions mainly as a verb associated with human agents. Jaffir, Jörgensen, Shaw, Carter, Mrs. Travers, and Belarab all linger at different moments in the text. The use of synecdoche further contributes to the association of the verb with human agents. Hassim’s eyes are said to linger over the objects ornamenting Lingard’s cabin; Lingard receives the same metonymical attri­ bution through his ship: “[Lingard] hesitated, and the brig, answering in her movements to the state of the man’s mind, lingered on the road, seemed to hesitate also, swinging this way and that on the days of calm” (92). The passage announces the metonymy, drawing attention not only to the perfect correspondence between the captain and his ship, but also their similarity in hesitation and inaction. The distinct use of the word conforms to the more general difference between a novel obsessed with measured time and movement, and one that repeatedly represents deceleration and inaction. The manner in which the word is connected to the past in An Outcast and to the present in The Rescue is in keeping with the difference between a deceleration associated with a rejection of the present, and one that is associated with an experience of pure time, a description of being in the present moment. The first functions as an obstacle to the action, a momentary cessation that either furthers the plot (as in Almayer’s ruse at the end) or adds to the atmosphere and charac­ terization. The second dramatizes a being in the present that is not contrary to the unfolding of plot events but rather allows for a rethinking of the ­fundamental building blocks of fiction. Where Almayer’s and Willems’s

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Losing the Plot, Finding Time  45 moments of reflection are to be seen as a stepping outside time, the freezing of time and an obstacle to the action, Lingard’s reported confusion courts a fictional representation of the now as a tangible moment of indeterminacy. No longer a caesura in the unfolding of a predetermined design of novelistic action, such lingering emerges as a site for multiple virtual possibilities that co-exist without being actualized. Henri Bergson’s conceptualization of the difference between the past and the present proves helpful in unpacking the significances of this shift. Bergson views pure memory as a repository of virtual images, a compen­ dium of moments that communicate with the present through various l­ evels of protraction and expansion. The further these images are from the needs of the immediate present, the more dilated and detailed they can be. Pure memory takes the subject away from the present in a process of reflection. We might view Almayer’s and Willems’s obliviousness to the present moment as such—as a turning away from action and a reverting to the vir­ tual. The hesitations that we encounter in The Rescue, however, are part and parcel of the living moment. Rather than perform a retraction into a past that recedes from the present moment, the images encountered in the novel confront us with the experience of the present as such. The difference between these two connotations of hesitation emerges as a choice between an exploration of determination and freedom, the known and the new. Lingard’s confusion is the product of the heightened awareness that emerges in the absence of a generically-prescribed action. When tasked with the fate of his uninvited guests he muses that “if the unconscious part of him was perfectly certain of its action, he, himself, did not know what to do with those bruised and battered beings a playful fate had delivered sud­ denly into his hands” (88). Traditional plots develop around kernel events, events that necessitate a choice between possibilities. This representation undermines such conventions by turning to duration, the heightened con­ sciousness of one’s self in time. Rather than view this as paralysis, a negation of the will and the inability to move in time, we might view this as a stylized exploration of a form of liberation. Suzan Guerlac explains that for Bergson, to act freely is not to choose between two alternative actions . . . [Such a view] gives a retrospective analysis of a situation after it has already hap­ pened, after we already know what action has been taken. This kind of explanation only works when we read backwards and construct a kind of narrative that moves inexorably toward one action as opposed to another, and then reconstructs motives for this choice. The problem is that the

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46  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism choice never really happens, because the alternatives are never really given as such in advance. They are fictions, invented after the fact, in order to tell a story that has a beginning, a middle, and an end. What really happens occurs in a time of becoming where there are no clear alternatives, only a “multitude of different and successive states” and “a self that lives and develops through the effect of . . . hesitations” (EDI 132 [175–6]). Bergson locates freedom, then, in hesitation, not in choice.  (83–4)

To experience duration is to live in the present moment, to experience the new and the unforeseen. Elizabeth Grosz considers the radical possibilities that are generated at such moments: “Life protracts the temporal delay latent in physical processes into a productive freedom, an indeterminacy, into the creation of the new, into invention itself ” (246). Bergson thus allows us to consider a narrative pause not as a contraction of story time (time in the story stops ticking, as it were) but as a description of time unfolding in human experience. And it is here that narrative turns from a mode of being to becoming—from defamiliarizing the known to contem­ plating the unforeseen—from predetermination to freedom. The focalizer for the literary exploration of such experience is the newly imagined character of Lingard himself. Not yet commanding the reputation of a man of action (as explored in An Outcast, a novel set chronologically after The Rescue), Lingard is cast in the prequel in the role of Hamlet; he becomes a repository for multiple images of capture and arrest but without the attending motif of time coming to a halt. Jörgenson’s comment, “Here’s Tom coming in his nutshell” (197) insinuates this correspondence with the Shakespearean play, an allusion that works well to complement the novel’s insistence on hesitation, reluctance, and the motifs of dreaming and acting. Deleuze’s analysis of the tragedy helps frame the significance of this juxta­ pos­ition: “ ‘Hamlet is the first hero who truly needed time in order to act, whereas earlier heroes were subject to time as the consequence of an ori­ gin­al movement (Aeschylus) or aberrant action (Sophocles)” (ECC 28). Hamlet provides a doubly important intertext for The Rescue. First, it offers a helpful demonstration of the representation of a subject experiencing time as duration, outside the cosmological or spatialized mode described earlier. Second, it prefigures the discussion of the distinction between the real and the fake, between authentic and constructed experience that is picked up in The Rescue in the motif of the stage. The discussion of the real and the fake in the novel thus finds a parallel in its handling of time as it shuttles between the lived experience of duration and the stylized and inauthentic represen­ tation of clock time.

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Losing the Plot, Finding Time  47 The marked symbolic and discursive transition traced in these three instances (the ships, the clocks, and the use of linger) contributes to the dis­ tinctive differences between the two novels in their handling and conceptu­ alization of time. Such a shift necessarily comes with a corresponding change in narrative form. In order to unpack the significances of this shift and the manner in which it relates to the broader themes explored in the novel we can turn back to Mr. Travers’s ratiocination of his insistence on winding a watch that no longer tells time. Mr. Travers provides a useful summary of the benefits of chronological time, here explored through the register of habit. Habit offers the reassur­ ance of thoughtless predictability. As such, it corresponds to what Bergson and Nietzsche, each within the framework of their different philosophical projects, see as a denial of life and its productive forces of change and renewal. In attempting to explain to d’Alcacer why he continues to wind a broken watch, Mr. Travers describes the central role habit plays in the unfolding of time as he experiences it: It isn’t so much blind habit as you may think. My habits are the outcome of strict method. I had to order my life methodically. You know very well, my dear d’Alcacer, that without strict method I would not have been able to get through my work and would have had no time at all for social duties, which, of course, are of very great importance. I may say that, materially, method has been the foundation of my success in public life. There were never any empty moments in my day.  (336)

The ordering of Mr. Travers’s life—much like the ordering of a conven­ tional plot, follows a regimented and fixed trajectory that assures success— here measured in public recognition. The empty moments to which he alludes connote a time that is unchartered and unregimented, one that is open to contingency. The “cage” in which the novel places Mr. Travers may be understood as a metaphor for his incarceration in the security of habit. For Bergson, it is only in what Mr. Travers understands as “empty” time that one can be free. Travers does not understand such freedoms. He cannot relate to his wife’s alienation, her sense that she is living an in­authen­tic life played out for an audience. It is precisely in situations of uncertainty, where clocks no longer work and habits are broken, that, in stark contradiction to her husband, she finally feels liberated: “In a few hours of life she had been torn away from all her certitudes, flung into a world of improbabilities. This thought instead of augmenting her distress seemed to soothe her” (244).

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48  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism The closing pages of the novel pit the two conceptualizations of time against each other. Lingard is “seduced away by the tense feeling of exist­ ence far superior to the mere consciousness of life, and which in its im­mens­ ity of contradictions, delight, dread, exultation and despair could not be faced and yet was not to be evaded” (431). Left to guard the ship, Carter continues to measure time. His need to re-establish movement is in keeping with this chronological vigilance. “I fancy,” he says, “I have acted as a sea­ man and as a seaman I intend to go on acting. Now I have made the ships safe I shall set about without loss of time trying to get the yacht off the mud” (329). Carter’s words recall Almayer’s when he urges Mrs. Willems not to lose time in following her husband at the end of An Outcast. Almayer and Carter are both tasked with a restoration of clock time as a method to re­instate an action punctuated by events that will ensure the narrative draws to a close. Though the novel concludes in the restoration of movement over stasis, The Rescue offers its readers a glimpse of a work of fiction that is conceived otherwise, an attempt to bring to the fore indeterminacy, flux, and chance as manifest in a dynamic of hesitation and anticipation. The retardation of the action allows for a new focus on sensation, confusion, and passivity, together evoking an experience of time akin to Bergson’s duration. This chapter has traced the literary expressions of two separate onto­ logic­al conceptualizations of time. The first is predicated on movement and is offset by plots that are teleological and deterministic. The second is a pure time freed of the conceptual constructs of action or moral law; it signals moments in Conrad’s artistic life where plot proceeds not by conforming to the rules of emplotting but as a form of dynamic genesis. The confusions, decelerations, and hesitations encountered in The Rescue do not spell the freezing of time but rather an expansion of consciousness through the unmediated experience of time’s passage.

Notes 1. There is a rich array of critical work on Conrad’s handling of time. To name just two, John  G.  Peters’s “Joseph Conrad’s ‘Sudden Holes’ in Time: The Epistemology of Temporality” offers a comprehensive account of the articula­ tions of time in Conrad’s work by attending to the differences between mechan­ ical and human time and the significance of context to the experience of the

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Losing the Plot, Finding Time  49 latter. My investigation is framed by ontological rather than epistemological considerations of time. Though the distinction between spatialized time and duration in some ways overlaps with Peters’s distinction between mechanical and human time, the philosophical framing of these differences is here brought to bear on the way in which the two correspond to two different methods of emplotting. Adam Barrows’s “ ‘The Shortcomings of Timetables’: Greenwich, Modernism, and the Limits of Modernity” is one of many productive essays devoted to a study of The Secret Agent. This is also a helpful essay in its his­tor­ ic­al contextualization of the treatment of time in the novel. 2. My reading significantly departs from J.  M.  Kertzer’s. Kertzer suggests that physical space and time “are mere facts devoid of meaning” and, echoing Ortega y Gasset, he explains that “ ‘we give them life, we make them serve vital purposes’ when we order them and in­corp­or­ate them in our experience” (303). This chapter shows that order and meaning may be synonymous in her­men­ eut­ic practice, but that such methods of meaning-making betray human experi­ ence by bending it to the artificial impositions that rid us of the confusions of duration in the service of conceptual logic. 3. Barthes’s taxonomy suffices for this demonstration but the understanding is that his terms may be exchanged with corresponding systems proposed by other narratologists. 4. A more elaborate discussion of The Rescue’s unusual text­ual dynamics can be found in “Make Love not War: Covert Modernisms in Joseph Conrad’s The Rescue.” My argument there is framed by the question of metaphor and meton­ ymy and their respective functions in narrative. 5. The themes of paralysis and immobility in the novel now command a range of excellent critical interpretations employing a diverse range of theoretical para­ digms. Most recently, Andrew Francis approaches these motifs through the novel’s racial dynamics and its political context. He writes: “In the stillness of the apparently deserted Malay coast in The Rescue, as if at some anticipatory defining moment of history, Malay and European cultures are ranged against each other, suspended, like the stranded yacht, in time and space. The under­ lying equality of the two races, and the helplessness of Europeans when not supported by the products of their culture, are suggested by the hands of Travers’ watch, which he says are ‘broken off short. It keeps on ticking but I can’t tell the time’ (p. 337), whereas Malays, as if having overcome time, are ‘people to whom time is nothing and whose life and activities are not ruled by the clock’ (p. 415). Any suggestion of the superiority of European culture is additionally undermined by the party’s being tourists, for whom, in contrast to the earnest activities of the Malays, mobility has become movement lacking serious purpose; Travers’ lack of courtesy contrasts with ‘the well-bred air of discreet courtesy’ (p. 74) of the Malays. The European presence represents two

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50  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism different forms of cultural intervention in the Archipelago, as conveyed by the ships’ names: Lingard’s Lightning suggesting rapidity and intermittence, and the tourists’ Hermit, isolation, plainly visible in Travers’ unwillingness to engage with Malay culture and people” (71). 6. The count is based on the non-authoritative versions available online. The two versions are taken from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/638/638-h/638-h.htm and http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1712/1712.txt.

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2

Language and the Subject Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Victory

Words and language are not wrappings in which things are packed for the commerce of those who write and speak. It is in words and language that things first come into being and are. (Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics 13) In A Personal Record Conrad famously writes: “English was for me neither a matter of choice or adoption. The mere idea of choice had never entered my head. And as to adoption – well, yes, there was adoption; but it was I who was adopted by the genius of the language” (vii). That the English language contributed to the transformation of Josef Korzeniowski to Joseph Conrad is a well-known fact of Conrad studies. And yet when we speak of language in Conrad’s work we often talk not of its power to create the subject, but of the tenuousness of its hold on objects in the world. “Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality” (UWE 3), the narrator of Under Western Eyes famously aphorizes; in doing so he expresses a principle of Conrad’s poetics that scholars have long-since noted: language is no longer a transparent medium for representation. It is deceptive and misleading; it leads to error, doubt, frustration, and confusion. Ella Ophir follows this widely accepted scholarly insight in claiming that: One of the most distinctive characteristics of Joseph Conrad’s work is its pervasive linguistic skepticism, a “disturbing recognition of the insubstantiality of words” (Billy 278) that is also a feature of his modernism. Conrad’s skepticism toward language has at least two aspects. First, a deep distrust arising from the ease with which words, particularly when used with facility, can generate illusions and cast ennobling veils over base motives; the exemplary instance of this is the spellbinding rhetoric of Kurtz. Second, a sense that even when one sincerely attempts to make

Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism. Yael Levin, Oxford University Press (2020). © Yael Levin. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198864370.001.0001

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52  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism language cleave to experience, to sensation and perception, its resources are ultimately insufficient.  (23)

Where this chapter wishes to intervene in existing scholarship is in leaving this well-documented phenomenon aside and turning to a study of language that is more in keeping with the dynamic described in Conrad’s comment. Conrad speaks of a certain passivity in the encounter with language. Language is not just the misleading or frustrating tool with which the subject must grapple in order to communicate. It is also a force that preexists and generates the subject in a way that is automatic, predetermined, and admits no agency. The subject is created in language, thinking bends to its idioms, its figures, to the very limits of word choice available. The question that will guide this chapter, then, is no longer how language represents the world, how it manipulates or distorts what we see, but how it creates us. Attention to the working of language will frame an ontological rather than an epistemological study of Conrad’s poetics.1 The chapter engages with some commonplaces of Conrad scholarship in order to initiate a new line of inquiry into the writer’s exploration of language and subjectivity. Particular attention will be drawn to the emergence of a new subject and the manner in which its ontological permutations determine the rethinking of plot and event in Conrad’s fiction. Such a reframing of three of the canonical works will demand we read against three mainstays of Conrad criticism. First, Lord Jim will be read not as evolving around a series of revisitations of Jim’s seminal jump off the Patna but as a serial restaging of an altogether different moment of inception in the novel. Marlow describes his initial meeting with Jim as an un­soli­ cit­ed encounter with the language of the other. The novel’s many returns to this model of unwarranted interruption contribute to an exploration of a particularly passive and fragmented subjectivity that relinquishes the agency and cohesion that are definitive of the Cartesian cogito. To view the novel as evolving from this spring of action is to redefine its thematic focus. Though commonly read as Marlow’s attempt to trace the psychological makeup and development of the younger man, the novel will be presented here as the implied author’s philosophical grappling with the refashioning of subjectivity consequent upon historical and ideational shifts at the turn of the century. Second, the insistence on the oral tradition evident in the Marlovian narratives and other works will not be regarded as an attempt to resurrect

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Language and the Subject  53 speech in an essentially silent medium. Instead of viewing these conjured voices as an antidote to the sense of alienation Walter Benjamin famously associates with the novel, the quotations within quotations in Conrad’s texts will be read as a dramatization of the role of language in the evolution of the modernist subject and the narrative that houses him.2 Finally, the experimental narrative techniques often associated with Conrad’s commitment to an inherently epistemological philosophical inquiry will be attributed rather to the author’s effort to chart the onto­logic­al coordinates of character and narration. The stylistic and thematic commonalities of these three paradigms may appear scant. The chapter will demonstrate that they meet in the redrawing in Conrad’s fiction of language as event. Such a language will be viewed as neither oral nor written, but as a writerly spring of action from which plot and subject are brought into being. The eponymous narrator in Beckett’s The Unnamable muses on the onto­ logic­al confusion generated by an inability to distinguish object from subject, expression from experience: “I seem to speak, it is not I, about me, it is not about me” (Three Novels 285). His difficulty is cast in linguistic terms. As the choice of pronouns depends on a clear-cut demarcation of subject and object positions, the tentativeness of the same leads to a grammatical chaos. Admitting as much, the Unnamable finally maintains that “Any old pronoun will do, provided one sees through it” (336). The incongruence underlying the writer’s task as noted by Beckett is thus signaled in his work in this pronominal tension. Lene Pedersen suggests that “If it is the status and function of pronouns which establish subjectivity in language, experiments with pronouns in a literary text may lead to new conceptions of the subject which overcome the ‘linguistic skepticism’ of these novels” (232). A similar grammatical oddity is evident in one of Conrad’s earlier novels. The Nigger of the “Narcissus” begins with a heterodiegetic third-person narrator which is abruptly forfeited when a homodiegetic first-person plural narration takes its place. The narration then shuttles between the two until it concludes in the voice of a single first-person homodiegetic narrator. Bruce Henricksen argues that: The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ deconstructs the identity of the subject by juxta­pos­ing a third-person narrative voice that refers to the crew as ‘they’ with a first-person voice that says ‘we.’ These two pronouns alternate in an apparently random way that has suggested to many readers simple au­thor­ ial carelessness.  (785)

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54  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism Drawing a clear parallel to the examples seen in Beckett, such a “violation of the rules concerning point of view exposes the dialogic nature of discourse and consciousness.” Henricksen concludes that: The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ reveals the paradoxes of the storytelling self, who must on the one hand maintain the fiction of a disengagement that offers a perspective from which to ‘see’ or ‘hear’ society’s speech diversity while on the other hand being always already inhabited and constituted by that diversity.  (792)

If we choose to view these transgressive pronoun shifts as an indication of the writer’s attempt to work through the reconfigurations of subject and object and their respective articulations within the grammar available to a writer, we may view this novel as the first of many technical efforts to address this difficulty. That the writer need choose between the first- and third-person voice in order to tell the story is no longer simply a matter of narrative convention, between the sympathy generated by the first-person narrator and the distance and reliability associated with the third-person. In making such a choice the writer must make an ontological commitment; he must conceive what a subject might be and how to cast his relation to the  world. Whether this is the outcome of a deeply cogitated philosophical impasse or the mistakes of an inexperienced writer, the shifting pronouns in The Nigger of the “Narcissus” are an exception in the Conrad canon.3 In the ­novels that follow, Conrad does not revisit these unmotivated pronoun shifts but relies instead (for comparable effect) on multiple narrators. In choosing the latter technique, Conrad appears to commit not to the ontological confusion signaled by Beckett’s linguistic anarchy but to the epis­ temo­logic­al doubt raised by competing narratives. The distinction between the two authors might thus be delineated in accord with these disparate philosophical questions. Beckett’s works not only return to the linguistic confusion demonstrated above but also dramatize it further by undermining the narrative convention of cohesive and separate characters. Characters are not only confused about how to separate themselves from others, they are also named and renamed during the course of the narrative so that there is a real sense of the fluidity of identity. Such is not the case in Conrad’s universe. Here, the split between self and other is repeatedly underlined. Compare the following passages from Lord Jim and The Unnamable respectively:

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Language and the Subject  55 And that’s the end. He passes away under a cloud, inscrutable at heart, forgotten, unforgiven, and excessively romantic.  (LJ 416) Malone is there. Of his mortal liveliness little trace remains. He passes before me at doubtless regular intervals, unless it is I who pass before him. (Three Novels 286)

Though these two excerpts are hauntingly similar, the impressions recorded by Marlow and the Unnamable diverge significantly. When Marlow brings his narrative to a close and parts with the young man he does not signal any of the ontological confusion suggested by the Unnamable’s addendum. The difference between the two passages might be relegated to the thematic divide that Brian McHale introduces as a method to distinguish modernism from postmodernism. Delineating the two epochs’ diverging foci, McHale suggests that “postmodernist fiction differs from modernist fiction just as a poetics dominated by ontological issues differs from one dominated by epistemological issues” (xii). Such a position is supported by Marlow’s emphasis on Jim’s inscrutability, a comment no doubt issuing from his stated project in Lord Jim. From the outset, Marlow explains that his is a quest for knowledge: Was it for my own sake that I wished to find some shadow of an excuse for that young fellow whom I had never seen before, but whose appearance alone added a touch of personal concern to the thoughts suggested by the knowledge of his weakness—made it a thing of mystery and terror—like a hint of a destructive fate ready for us all whose youth—in its day—had resembled his youth? I fear that such was the secret motive of my prying. (LJ 51)

Indeed, whether it is the “fundamental why” or the “superficial how” (LJ 56), it is knowledge and its various coordinates to which the novel and its narrator repeatedly return. That the question of self-knowledge is not without ontological implications is noted in Marlow’s comments above; one comes to know oneself by looking to the other. McHale’s categorical separation does not undermine such a mixing of thematic concerns; his thesis is not predicated on a mutually exclusive divide, modernism and postmodernism provide diverging emphases in subject matter, a distinction to which traditional treatments of the two authors adhere.4 The differences in emphasis are nevertheless significant. If Conrad’s treatment of the relation between self and other is seen primarily

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56  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism as part of an epistemological inquiry, that is so because we believe such an inquiry to be held within a world of solid ontological foundations. It is the absence of the same that initiates the alternative focus in the work of the later writer. Prevalent in the work of both writers, the motif of doubling offers a useful illustration of these diverging emphases. Though the motif serves to highlight similarity between characters, in Conrad, such similarity never approaches that sameness explored in Beckett where characters often entertain the suspicion that they might be easily confused with the doubles that populate their narratives. The Unnamable wonders: “And is it still they who say that when I surprise them all and am Worm at last, then at last I’ll be Mahood, Worm proving to be Mahood the moment one is he?” (Three Novels 341). In contrast, such evidence of doubling in Heart of Darkness repeatedly underscores the divisions and boundaries between characters. Summing up his last days in the Congo, Marlow remarks: And it is not my own extremity I remember best—a vision of grayness without form filled with physical pain, and a careless contempt for the evanescence of all things—even of this pain itself. No! It is his extremity that I seem to have lived through. True, he had made that last stride, he had stepped over the edge, while I had been permitted to draw back my hesitating foot. And perhaps in this is the whole difference; perhaps all the wisdom, and all truth, and all sincerity, are just compressed into that in­appre­ciable moment of time in which we step over the threshold of the invisible. (HD 151)

The passage here illustrates a telling contradiction. At the same time that it testifies to Marlow’s ability to vicariously “live through” Kurtz, it repeatedly calls on the existence of a limit between the two. That “invisible” threshold is not only the difference between experience and expression, between moving forward and drawing back. It is also the difference between self and other, between the subject and object of contemplation. Expression is the sum product of not having stepped over the edge, not having evacuated one’s sense of self by stepping over the threshold into the unknown. Though such a line of inquiry is helpful in tracing the differences between two literary traditions and the varying preoccupations attending their respective cultural backdrops, I would suggest that in ignoring significant similarities between them we lose sight of important continuities observed in twentieth-century poetics. In order to appreciate how we might read

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Language and the Subject  57 Conrad with rather than against Beckett, we need to consider how language determines not only what we know but also what we are. Heidegger’s conceptualization of Dasein in Being and Time provides a key to fleshing out the difference between these diverging approaches to language. Magda King helpfully sums up the distinction: It is because Da-sein factually exists in a world with others that the articulated understandability of his hereness comes to word and concretely voices itself (utters itself) in language. The existentiell-ontic phenomenon of language is therefore not a man-made tool consisting of words into which mutually agreed meanings have been infused, but is the signifying voicing of the already disclosed and articulated meaning of man’s hereness. Where language is a communicating talk, what is communicated, shared, is not the inner experience of an isolated subject with another isolated subject but the mutually understandable hereness in a mutually shared world. (253)

King’s exposition recalls Conrad’s words at the start of this chapter by tra­ cing a slippage from individual choice or even communal convention to the very fact of being. The first views language as the product of human choice and human interaction; it understands language as a product of individual and communal agency or will. Language is what we do, what we create— how we communicate with one another through the intentional exercising of the faculty of reason. The second sees language as preexisting the subject. Rather than being a product of our minds, our minds are produced by it. We are born into language; we are made to speak it; we are fashioned in the model it provides. To think of language as determining the subject rather than being determined by him—is to relinquish the illusion of agency we have when we use language to express ourselves. It is in this sense that King notes that any act of communication is not merely a passing of information between two or more individuals but the dramatization of man’s thrownness. Every time we speak, we call attention to this passivity that is ingrained in our very being. The following section will apply this insight to a reassessment of the role of language in Lord Jim and how a careful tracing of its function in the novel might allow us to intervene in some of the crit­ic­al commonplaces about the stability of the ontological foundations in Conrad’s work. By tracing a shift from a subject who actively uses language to one who is passively overtaken by language I will show that Conrad’s characters are not quite as ontologically stable as we might think.

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58  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism

The Permeable Subject Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan suggests that the removal of Jim to Patusan in the second part of Lord Jim is an “active, if desperate, attempt to defeat [the modern temper] by a regression to a mythical mode of discourse” (Modern Temper 35). The distinction made is between a communal and integrated epic-mythic universe and an individualized, fragmented, and modern one. The coordinates drawn in these respective universes may be seen as definitive also of the differences between the modernist and the pre-modernist subject. The mythic hero is the product of an ideational and perhaps philo­ soph­ic­al fantasy that lends itself to the figurative geographical borders of an isolated and clearly demarcated space of an island or remote territory. In keeping with this method, Jim’s secluded life in Patusan takes on the figurative force of a door shutting behind him. Marlow emphasizes the younger man’s isolation and remarks: “I could make him a solemn promise that [the door] would be shut behind him with a vengeance. His fate, whatever it was, would be ignored, because the country, for all its rotten state, was not judged ripe for interference” (LJ 232). In Victory, the protagonist Axel Heyst is similarly brought into isolation where he is refashioned as a romantic hero. On the island of Samburan, we are told, Heyst is “out of everybody’s way, as if he were perched on the highest peak of the Himalayas, and in a sense as conspicuous. Everyone in that part of the world knew of him, dwelling on his little island” (3–4). Douglas Kerr notes the similarity between the two characters and their respective settings: “In both cases of retreat from the business of men and the western traffic around the globe, to an enclosed, apparently timeless, unworldly and enchanted space, the orientalism of the figure of the circle is manifest enough” (356). Where Kerr highlights the postcolonial significances of such characterization, the distinction to which I wish to draw attention lies in the subject’s relation to language. The peculiarity of this relation might be demonstrated by exploring its antithesis. In opposition to such a pre-modernist vision of insulation, the modernist subject is constantly open to invasion. Marlow’s description of his encounter with Jim at the outset of his narration in Lord Jim testifies to his own remarkable openness and vulnerability: I know I have him—the devil, I mean. . . . He is there right enough, and, being malicious, he lets me in for that kind of thing . . . the kind of thing that by devious, unexpected, truly diabolical ways causes me to run up against men with soft spots, with hard spots, with hidden plague spots, by

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Language and the Subject  59 Jove! and loosens their tongues at the sight of me for their infernal ­confidences; as though, forsooth, I had no confidences to make to myself, as though—God help me!—I didn’t have enough confidential information about myself to harrow my own soul till the end of my appointed time. And what I have done to be thus favoured I want to know. I declare I am as full of my own concerns as the next man, and I have as much memory as the average pilgrim in this valley, so you see I am not particularly fit to be a receptacle of confessions.  (LJ 34)

The particular weakness attested to here is that of an irremediable openness to the other—more specifically, the language of the other. Marlow resists such an invasion on the grounds that, though an empty vessel might be suitable to contain that which another man wishes to share, he is rather “full.” Marlow’s comment dramatizes the death-throes of the pre-modernist subject who does not wish to devolve, as it were, into a modernist one. The first, as we have seen, is cohesive, full, and impregnable—precisely how Marlow sees himself. The encounter with Jim, however, leads to a dramatic change in the manner in which Marlow’s subjectivity is presented. Once Marlow’s consciousness becomes riddled with the language of the other, once he begins to reiterate another’s words rather than his own, his sense of self and the cohesion and fullness that define it, are undermined. He is reborn as a modernist subject who is forced to circulate the words of the other. Such a destabilizing effect figuratively fleshes out that poststructuralist vision of a language that is likened to a “mosaic” or a “tissue of quotations,” where words are always “anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read: they are quotations without inverted commas” (respectively, Kristeva, Desire in Language 66 and Barthes, Image 160). The significance of this shift is precisely the loss of agency and cohesion that are attributed to the Cartesian cogito. Marlow believes himself and his reality to be the product of his rational mind and the choices that he exercises. As a storyteller he produces a world, he creates a reality. However, what he learns in his exchange with Jim is that, in fact, he is as much the product of others’ language as he is that of his own rational mind. His identity is not exclusively of his own making. To realize the potential of this significant insight is to reread the novel as issuing not from Jim’s initial jump off the Patna but from Marlow’s encounter with Jim’s story. Marlow’s attempt to understand Jim is thus shadowed by the story of the implied author’s attempts to negotiate the radical refashioning of subjectivity. What is at stake is not the question of Jim’s ego ideal and the suffering generated by its encounter with reality but the very

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60  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism foundations of an ego understood as that agency that commands an abiding and coherent self. The novel’s core division has been seen as a symbolic rendering of two distinct types of subjectivity: the pre-modernist (whether mythical, epic, or romantic) and the modernist subject. The first is autonomous and whole. We see such subjects in the symbolic isolation of Jim and Heyst. The second is invaded, fragmentary, passive, co-dependent, and in flux. We see the emergence of such a subject in Marlow’s character. A careful reading of Lord Jim and Victory might be instructive, however, in undermining such a dichotomy. Though the difference in the formation of the subjectivity of Marlow, Jim, and Heyst appears definitive, the significance of an isolating geography only underlines the fact that there is no ontological distinction between them. That Jim and Heyst must be removed to a remote island in order to fleetingly fulfill their vision of self suggests that such an endeavor cannot be imagined without such material seclusion. It is precisely because Jim and Heyst are as much a modernist subject as is Marlow that they require such remoteness from the world to survive. They, too, are open to the invading other and his poisonous language.5 This is made evident in the first part of Lord Jim where the young man’s many escapes are effected by the voices circulating the Patna story. Similarly, the first part of Victory shows that the spring of action in Heyst’s narrative is his chance meeting with Morrison. Morrison excuses himself for being so talkative: “Upon my word, I don’t know why I have been telling you all this. I suppose seeing a thoroughly white man made it impossible to keep my trouble to myself. Words can’t do it justice; but since I’ve told you so much I may as well tell you more. Listen” (Victory 14). The effect of the encounter with Morrison, then, is much like the effect of Marlow’s and Jim’s encounters with the language of the other. Morrison infects Heyst with his language, his story, his trouble. In doing so he shatters the illusion of autonomy and insulation that is so integral to Heyst’s sense of self. The encounter with Morrison, much like Marlow’s encounter with Jim, reveals the true nature of the subject. And like Lord Jim, Victory, too, can be read as a series of encounters with another’s language. Morrison, Lena, Schomberg, Mr. Jones, and the very memory of Heyst’s father all contribute to the realization that Heyst’s belief in the wisdom of non-participation is based on a false premise. We are always already the composite of a language not our own. As modernist subjects, Heyst and Jim share Marlow’s paralyzing passivity in the encounter with another’s language. It is this fact, perhaps, that renders them as much a pawn of language as it does those to whom they tell

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Language and the Subject  61 their tales. Jim is finally undone by Gentleman Brown’s language, as is Heyst by Schomberg’s. And, at the same time that Marlow laments Jim’s vul­ner­ abil­ity and wishes he could shield the younger man from the aversive ­echoes that haunt his existence, he is himself the very model for such openness. Language happens to the unwitting Marlow; he is a passive receptacle to the words that invade him. Conrad’s famous storyteller thus prefigures the late-modernist association of being and language as explored in the work of Beckett. Taken to the extreme, this condition of a language that always already comprehends the speaker drives the emerging subject into a state of inauthenticity, where any attempt at agency is rendered hollow, the sham repetition of another’s words. The Unnamable explains the difficulty in communicating one’s sense of self: It’s of me now I must speak, even if I have to do it with their language, it will be a start, a step towards silence and the end of madness, the madness of having to speak and not being able to, except of things that don’t concern me, that don’t count, that I don’t believe, that they have crammed me full of to prevent me from saying who I am, where I am, and from doing what I have to do in the only way that can put an end to it. (Three Novels 318)

By removing Jim and Heyst from a place of language to one of isolation, the narrative appears to resuscitate the ideal of the Cartesian cogito. In their capacity as romantically impenetrable heroes who are created in action, Jim and Heyst once again embody the antithesis of the modernist subject. They are made safe from the threat of polyphony. In contradistinction to Marlow who is bound to cite and repeat, in Patusan, Jim enjoys the momentary ownership of the words that fashion him and his world. Such power is particularly striking as it tellingly contrasts with Jim’s previous life where he was trapped in the language of others; light literature and courthouse discourse being two cases in point. Marlow testifies that in Patusan, Jim’s “word was the one truth of every passing day. It shared something of the nature of that silence through which it accompanied you into unexplored depths, heard continuously by your side, penetrating, far-reaching—tinged with wonder and mystery on the lips of whispering men” (LJ 272). Jim’s language is not only impregnable, it is penetrating—precisely the kind of language that contaminates others and is fated to be repeated. The irony underlying Lord Jim, however, is that such a model of communication has become obsolete, as much a romantic fantasy as is the ego ideal

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62  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism Jim struggles to realize. The novel’s epigraph is touched by the same irony. Though it may be true “my conviction gains infinitely the moment another will believe it,” the encounter with the other is often passive rather than active; it results in the unsolicited invasion of the other’s language rather than the psychologically affirmative sharing of one’s own. The prototypical subject of communication in the novel is thus not the addressor but the addressee—not he who speaks, but he who listens. It is Marlow listening to Jim’s narrative, Big Brierly listening at court, and Jim silently listening to the voices haunting him from the sailors on the Patna to Gentleman Brown in Patusan. Language happens to the subject. Without agency, without words of his own, the subject is forced to accept passively the voice of the other.6 The communicative model traced here would suggest that the modernist subject experiences being in the world as a passive attendance on language, a dynamic that is fundamental to Beckett’s poetics. Unfolding a similar, if radicalized view of such a state of being in the world, the Unnamable notes: “you have only to wait, without doing anything, it’s no good doing anything, and without understanding, there’s no help in understanding, and all comes right, nothing comes right, nothing, nothing, this will never end, this voice will never stop . . .” (Three Novels 374). Though stripped of the sense of urgency and despair articulated by the Unnamable, a similar set of ontological coordinates is dramatized at the outset of each of the four Marlovian narratives. Heart of Darkness famously begins with a scene of waiting. The anonymous first-person narrator reports: We looked on, waiting patiently—there was nothing else to do till the end of the flood; but it was only after a long silence, when he said, in a hesitating voice, ‘I suppose you fellows remember I did once turn fresh-water sailor for a bit,’ that we knew we were fated, before the ebb began to run, to hear about one of Marlow’s inconclusive experiences.  (HD 51)

The experience of language described here is one of passive acceptance, an almost noxious inevitability. Waiting for the tide—that experience of waiting without agency—may be seen as the symbolic rendering of the condition of being in the world and falling into language. That stories, experiences, alliances are forced onto the listener thus dramatizes the inevitability of language and its place in the making of subjectivity. Like the spinner of yarns in Lord Jim, the anonymous narrator here presents himself as a victim of language. He is “fated” to encounter Marlow’s words much as Marlow in

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Language and the Subject  63 Lord Jim is fated to hear Jim’s story. The emphasis on the heard voice or oral communication in the Marlovian narratives offers a powerful demonstration of this. And yet it is not only the speaking voice that determines language as event. A similar dynamic is at work toward the end of Lord Jim. The anonymous narrator intervenes here to relate the fact that “there was only one man [. . .] who was ever to hear the last word of the story. It came to him at home, more than two years later, and it came contained in a thick packet addressed in Marlow’s upright and angular handwriting” (LJ 337, my emphasis). Though it is now written language, the letter is an extremely evocative example of the interruption of language and the way it intrudes on one’s life. The addressee is as much a victim of language as are the listeners on board the Nellie and the audience reposing on the veranda after a meal. Language comes uninvited to the privileged man and must be taken in.

The Spring of Inaction My reading has so far teased out the benefits of rereading Conrad’s ex­plor­ ation of subjectivity in light of poststructural theories of language. I would argue further that the shifts consequent upon the ideational breaks at the turn of the century are noted not only in Conrad’s characters but also in his reconfiguration of events in narrative. The beginnings of the Marlovian narratives in “Youth,” Heart of Darkness, Chance and the delayed exposition in Lord Jim show that the model of communication employed in fashioning the modernist subject becomes the very event that launches Conrad’s plots. While Jim’s plot is measured in battles, narrow escapes, or a test at sea, the modernist subject’s plot begins with the passivity of waiting interrupted only by the unwarranted language of the other. That is to say that, unlike the traditional plot that sets forth from what is referred to as ‘the spring of action,’ such emplotting is initiated not by an event in language (the representation of a battle or an unexpected arrival) but by an event of language (language happens, as, for example, when someone begins to talk). The difference is significant if we regard language as fulfilling a particularly onto­ logic­al function. In order to fully appreciate this shift in focus I would suggest we briefly turn from the conception of language as issuing forth from an utterer or origin to the idea of an untethered and disembodied discourse that appears to circulate freely between the characters. The opening of Beckett’s Company hauntingly encapsulates this sensation: “A voice comes to one in the dark.

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64  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism Imagine” (3). Marlow’s disappearance in the darkness of the night on board the Nellie gestures towards such a view of language. The frame narrator relates that: For a long time already [Marlow], sitting apart, had been no more to us than a voice. There was not a word from anybody. The others might have been asleep, but I was awake. I listened, I listened on the watch for the sentence, for the word, that would give me the clue to the faint uneasiness inspired by this narrative that seemed to shape itself without human lips in the heavy night-air of the river.  (HD 83)

I would not claim that Marlow is here canceled out as an individual with a unique idiom and an unusual storytelling style. And yet Marlow’s illusory disappearance here allows us to view that discourse floating in the night as the very fact of language, a language that speaks and in speaking comprehends and predetermines the human subjects that are within its purview. The difference between these two methods of initiating plot (a plot event and the witnessing of a speech act) is thus not merely a matter of what occurs—whether it is an event in language or an event of language. It also necessitates a rethinking of the philosophical significance of the fashioning of choice. The traditional spring of action would necessarily be of the order of Roland Barthes’s cardinal event, which he defines as follows: In order to classify a function as cardinal, all we need verify is that the action to which it refers opens (or maintains or closes) an alternative directly affecting the continuation of the story, in other words, that it either initiates or resolves an uncertainty. If in a fragment of narrative the telephone rings, it is equally possible to answer or not to answer the call, procedures that are bound to carry the story along different paths. (“Structural Analysis” 248)

Barthes’s definition of a cardinal function relies on agency, an attribute of that pre-modernist subject that the novels discussed above repeatedly undermine. Such a reconfiguration of plot events or plot beginnings as Conrad initiates renders the matter of choice obsolete. Though Barthes’s example of answering the phone is merely illustrative, the point is precisely that it is no longer possible to choose whether or not to answer the phone; as Jim’s, Heyst’s, and Marlow’s experiences repeatedly show, one is always

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Language and the Subject  65 already made to listen. Noting the absence of cardinal events in Beckett’s Trilogy, Ruben Borg argues that: Throughout his career (and with increasing frequency) Beckett tests the possibility of thinking about time without assuming subjective agency as a primary value. A passive consciousness comes to replace the functions of voice and character as the ground of narrative action. In lieu of kernel events, in which characters advance the plot by exerting some sort of free will, Beckett imagines a world in which waiting is the paradigmatic activity.  (“Ethics of the Event” 195)

Conrad’s reconfiguration of subjectivity and the manner in which it affects the very functions of plot are suggestive of the burgeoning of this philosophy well in advance of late modernism. The transition from the omniscient narrator of the first four chapters in Lord Jim to Marlow’s narration provides a further case in point.7 The description here is uncannily similar to the one in the novella: Perhaps it would be after dinner, on a verandah draped in motionless foliage and crowned with flowers, in the deep dusk speckled by fiery cigarends. The elongated bulk of each cane-chair harboured a silent listener. Now and then a small red glow would move abruptly, and expanding light up the fingers of a languid hand, part of a face in profound repose, or flash a crimson gleam into a pair of pensive eyes overshadowed by a fragment of an unruffled forehead; and with the very first word uttered Marlow’s body, extended at rest in the seat, would become very still, as though his spirit had winged its way back into the lapse of time and were speaking through his lips from the past.  (LJ 33, my emphasis)

The abiding sentiment, then, is “Hang exertion. Let that Marlow talk.” This passage further confirms the paradigm traced above. Language unfolds in Conrad’s tales as an initiation into an inevitable passivity. It occurs at rest, at anchor, in the stillness or in-betweenness of a wary anticipation. It is that which is offered in lieu of action, in lieu of movement. In the staying of action there is an insistence on words, words circulating, unmoored, always belonging to another. A reimagining of plot beginnings in this event of language is the stylistic extension or symbolic representation of the modernist subject and his relation to the world. To start a plot in this manner

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66  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism functions as a dramatization of the tension between experience and ­expression, between self and other; it is to suggest that the primary event of fiction is the subject’s encounter with language, an encounter that harbors the real­iza­tion that he is always already within language and as such can never independently author himself. The event of language is both effected by this loss of agency—occurring, as it does, in that space of involuntary waiting—and further contributes to it by cementing the subject’s paralysis. When Marlow’s narrative comes to a close in the novella, the frame narrator notes that “nobody moved for a time” (LJ 162). While agency is annulled, made obsolete by the encounter with one’s thrownness, Lord Jim shows that it nevertheless survives as an illusion. And it is in the survival of this illusion of agency that Conrad’s poetics cannot be aligned with Beckett’s where, we recall, one always “sees  through” (Three Novels 336) the tricks of the trade. As opposed to the ­disillusioned characters populating Beckett’s narratives, Conrad’s stories contain a score of “finished artist[s].” Marlow reflects on Jim’s power of imagination: Nothing in the world moved before his eyes, and he could depict to himself without hindrance the sudden swing upwards of the dark sky-line, the sudden tilt up of the vast plain of the sea, the swift still rise, the brutal fling, the grasp of the abyss, the struggle without hope, the starlight closing over his head for ever like the vault of a tomb—the revolt of his young life—the black end. He could! By Jove! who couldn’t? And you must remember he was a finished artist in that peculiar way, he was a gifted poor devil with the faculty of swift and forestalling vision.  (LJ 96)

In this association of art and deception Marlow tellingly echoes an earlier comment, where he stated that “no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge” (LJ 80). Whether it serves in fleshing out doom or glory, Jim’s imagination is continually in the service of his ego ideal. It is through the power of this art that Jim can counter the alienating effects of language as discussed above and effectively author himself.8 And though Marlow is very aware of the deceptive nature of this enterprise and always ready to diffuse its power with his deliberate asides, he too might be seen to dabble in its seductive power. This is particularly evident at the moment where he gives free rein to his writing:

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Language and the Subject  67 At this point I took up a fresh sheet and began to write resolutely. There was nothing but myself between him and the dark ocean. I had a sense of responsibility. If I spoke, would that motionless and suffering youth leap into the obscurity—clutch at the straw? I found out how difficult it may be sometimes to make a sound. There is a weird power in a spoken word. And why the devil not? I was asking myself persistently while I drove on with my writing. All at once, on the blank page, under the very point of the pen, the two figures of Chester and his antique partner, very distinct and complete, would dodge into view with stride and gestures, as if reproduced in the field of some optical toy. I would watch them for a while. No! They were too phantasmal and extravagant to enter into any one’s fate. And a word carries far—very far—deals destruction through time as the bullets go flying through space.  (LJ 174)

Marlow is at his desk, a paralytic with nothing but words as the tools of his trade. And yet what emerges in this scene is no less than the power of cre­ ation. Much like a demi-god staring into the abyss, it is through words that Marlow fashions the world in which the romantic hero will survive or perish, be great or fail. His power to author another, however, might be seen as the very extension of that self-deception he had diagnosed in Jim. Marlow’s power to author Jim is as much an illusion as is Jim’s power to author himself. In being a subject one is always already predetermined in language. And it is precisely this fact of being that the event of language repeatedly demonstrates. Though Conrad’s poetics are traditionally associated with other early modernist writers, it is in the work of late modernists such as Beckett that a corresponding vision of the subject in language emerges. In her discussion of The Unnamable, Naomi Greene notes that the protagonist’s predicament in this mid-twentieth-century novel is that “Silence is unattainable” explaining that the Unnamable “is subject to the onslaught of language which needs to express itself through someone and has chosen him as its unwilling victim” (267). The juxtaposition of the two writers’ works demonstrates that Conrad’s treatment of the modernist subject heralds the seismic shift associated with a much later aesthetic preoccupation with subjectivity. Greene goes on to unpack the ontological implications of this motif: “if [the Unnamable] is nothing but the site language has chosen through which to express itself, then without this very same language he would have no existence. His being depends upon the language he abhors for, in effect, he is

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68  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism made of words” (267–8). Marlow articulates a comparable ontological ­anx­iety when he comments on the transience of the subject of his story. “Jim,” he tells his listeners, “existed for me, and after all it is only through me that he exists for you” (LJ 224). A subject is not only represented but also created in language; his existence relies on it. This chapter addressed a particular and telling relationship between language and subjectivity in Conrad’s works. Calling attention to the manner in which this network of themes illuminates the author’s treatment of the fin de siècle crisis of subjectivity, I demonstrated that passivity serves as one of the abiding symbols of this ontological exploration. Conrad’s reimagining of language as an event in narrative in lieu of the action that promotes the traditional fictional or dramatic plot dovetails with the fragmentation of the modernist subject and his modernist stories. The modernist subject is defined by openness; he must circulate the language of others while possessing the paralyzing self-awareness that the words he produces are never exclusively his own.

Notes 1. This chapter shows passivity to be an indelible trait of the modernist subject. If the suggestion proves morally, aesthetically, or crit­ic­al­ly difficult, it is so because of our investments in binaries born of Enlightenment thinking, wherein consciousness (or mind) and matter are distinguished by the agentic properties of the first and the inertia or passivity of the second. Our freedom is understood as an ability to act or to control objects, to predict their trajectories and manipulate them according to our desires. The emphasis on passivity here is in keeping with the semiotic and linguistic studies of poststructuralist thinkers ranging from Jacques Lacan to Michel Foucault. But it also serves as necessary groundwork for a charting of a new ontology wherein passivity might be rethought outside its positioning as the antipode to a more morally affirmative agency. The following chapters trace instances of passivity in Conrad in order to participate in what Jacques Derrida describes as an attempt to think “this inconceivable and unknowable thing, a freedom that would no longer be the power of a subject, a freedom without autonomy, a heteronomy without servitude, in short, something like a passive decision” (152). 2. Benjamin writes that “what differentiates the novel from all other forms of prose literature . . . is that it neither comes from oral trad­ition nor goes into it. [. . .] The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual” (Illuminations 87).

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Language and the Subject  69 3. I would like to thank Jeremy Hawthorn for drawing my attention to two further instances in the fiction that deserve mention in this context. The omniscient narrators of Nostromo and The Secret Agent both employ the first-person in passing: the first, in a description of the effect of the working mine on Sulaco: “The outward appearances had not changed then as they have changed since, as I am told” (N 95, my emphasis). In the latter, we find a similar infraction of the third-person where the narrator describes Verloc: “what I want to affirm is that Mr Verloc’s expression was by no means diabolic” (SA 13, my emphasis). Jakob Lothe discusses these instances at length in Conrad’s Narrative Method (1998, pp. 187 and 230). I would argue that the pronoun shifts in The Nigger of the “Narcissus” are never­the­less exceptional in that they occur within the action rather than as commentary on the action. Much like the moralizing turn to the second-person plural in “An Outpost of Progress” where the narrator remarks that “we talk with indignation or enthusiasm” (106, my emphasis), the narrative instances relating to Nostromo and The Secret Agent may be seen as ex­amples of a covert or non-dramatized omniscient narrator emerging briefly as an overt, dramatized narrator. 4. Critics often associate Conrad’s modernist style with his representations of epistemological uncertainty. In “Conrad and Modernism,” Kenneth Graham suggests that the innovation of Heart of Darkness is its “epistemological ambiguity” which, “Borne out as it was to be by almost all of Conrad’s other major writings, . . . [is] enough in itself to constitute an early manifesto of a Modernism that came to define itself in opposition to the positivistic, mechanical view of the universe that saw meaning as ob­ject­ive and single” (213). 5. White other, that is. As Kerr and others have argued, there is a sense that the porousness of the modernist subject is immune to the voice, or silence for that matter, of the native. 6. Hans Jonas’s philosophical history of the senses provides an interesting intertext to my argument, in so far as he claims that where sight offers some agency, “sound, itself a dynamic fact, intrudes upon a passive subject.” As he explains, “for the sensation of hearing to come about the percipient is entirely outside his control, and in hearing he is exposed to its happening. All he can contribute to the situation is a state of attentive readiness for sounds to occur (except where he produces them himself). He cannot let his ears wander, as his eyes do, over a field of possible percepts, already present as a material for his attention, and focus them on the object chosen, but he has simply to wait for a sound to strike them: he has no choice in the matter” (139). 7. In keeping with the critical tendency to privilege epis­temo­logic­al over ontological concerns, this transition is often associated with the novel’s stylistic and thematic preoccupation with hermeneutics. Indeed, the use of Marlow as a narrator ­­furnishes the text with a subjective prism of interpretation who continuously

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70  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism offers self-reflexive commentary on the partial nature of his narrative e­ nterprise, a technique that results in an inability to clearly see and know the subject of his investigation. My project here is not to question this interpretation but to ­illuminate an add­ition­al method of reading the novel that has not received due attention. 8. It would be incorrect to suppose that such a view of art is reflective of the author’s as it is repeatedly deflated by ironic modifiers that strip it of aesthetic value: Jim is a finished artist; his escapes are artful. Marlow’s conflation of art and deception should not be seen as a comprehensive aesthetic treatise.

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3

“To Make You See”? Marlow and the Anti-Ocular Turn Lord Jim

The artist is a much more subtle and complicated machine than a camera, and with a much wider range, if in the visual effects less precise. (LL 2, 302) My eyes are useless, for they render back only the image of the known. (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 171) This chapter utilizes early twentieth-century conceptualizations of time and the subject, as elaborated so far, in order to tease out the ontological and epistemological tensions underlying the figure of the witness-narrator to whom Conrad repeatedly returns. Language and time are the focal points in previous chapters; here sight serves as the philosophical, scientific, and cultural gauge for the recording of a transition from a philosophy of being to that of becoming. Bergson’s Creative Evolution and Time and Free Will inform the philosophical backdrop to the discussion, the anti-ocular turn of modernism its cultural complement, and narratology’s concept of the witness-narrator, the fictional measure against which these discourses strain. The three coalesce in an attempt to think the relation between sight, experience, and comprehension, between the demise of visual perception and its  figurative, scientific, and philosophical expressions in the failure of categorical thinking and instrumental logic. The epigraph from A Thousand Plateaus from which this chapter draws inspiration shows the Enlightenment conflation of visual perception with reason to be an obstacle to an attempt to think the new. To see is to understand, but, as Jean-Michel Rabaté writes in The Pathos of Distance, “understanding is not all” (188). The wider range

Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism. Yael Levin, Oxford University Press (2020). © Yael Levin. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198864370.001.0001

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72  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism to which Conrad gestures in the first of the two epigraphs may thus provide an alternative method to approach the new. In Creative Evolution, Henri Bergson writes: Instead of attaching ourselves to the inner becoming of things, we place ourselves outside them in order to recompose their becoming artificially. We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic of this becoming itself. Perception, intellection, language so proceed in general. (306)

In 1955 Norman Friedman coined the term witness-narrator, a narrative device whose function is synonymous with perception, intellection, and language, the very categories Bergson singles out. Also in keeping with the illusions Bergson identifies, such a device comes into being in the diegetic margin. Rather than issuing forth from “the inner becoming of things,” the witness-narrator is firmly situated outside. Readers of the fiction must make do with the spatio-temporal separations that are definitive of such a viewpoint. “The reader,” Friedman explains, “has available to him only the thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of the witness-narrator; he therefore views the story from what may be called the wandering periphery” (1174). The witness-narrator is thus defined by the practices Bergson associates with artificiality. Guardian of a narrative form that was, he is put in place in order to police the narrative back into intelligibility, to resurrect telos, and artificially recompose what he witnesses. His role is sanctioned, as an ap­par­ atus of knowledge should be, by the conventions of a figurative court. As Friedman explains, the witness tells “the reader only what he as observer may legitimately discover” (1174, my emphasis). The illusion of objectivity with which such a viewpoint is here associated makes the twentieth-century witness-narrator a notable site of inquiry. It marks the narrator as an instrument of logic at the same time that it renders him the figurative expression of its failure. The period’s anti-ocular turn shows the scopic bias underlying Friedman’s definition to be suspect; exponent of a Cartesian perspectivalism in demise, the witness-narrator no longer sees very well. He misunderstands, mishears, projects where he should record, distorts where he should be precise. He not only bears witness to being, he is also tethered to the object of his observation in mutual becoming.

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“ To Make You See ” ? Marlow and the Anti-Ocular Turn  73 The narrator’s various biases and manipulations are seen as a necessary component of early twentieth-century attempts to shake the authorial agency of an omniscient narrator and the illusory transparency with which it is associated. Marlow dramatizes the witness’s inability to be objective. While critical readings of Lord Jim often focus on the ways in which Marlow fleshes out the growing literary and philosophical investment in the distortions of a subjective observer, the chapter will consider where Marlow never­the­less emerges as a throwback to a more reassuringly stable and reliable point of view. This chapter will suggest that though we may see Marlow as the quintessential subjective prism of interpretation, he nevertheless serves his author in resisting the confusions and open-endedness of a ­philosophy of becoming. In Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought, Martin Jay provides the signposts to three complementary processes that signal a philosophy of becoming and the new worldview that attends it: “The first concerns what can be termed the detranscendentalization of perspective; the second, the recorporealization of the cognitive subject; and the third, the revalorization of time over space” (187). The chapter is divided into three sections in order to test, one by one, the fictional ar­ticu­la­tions of these processes against the tasks demanded of a fictional witness-narrator.

The Recorporealization of the Cognitive Subject Marlow’s difficulty in doing justice to Jim’s story often finds expression in visual figures; the inability to tell Jim’s story is the product of the impossibility of seeing him very well. Jim is glimpsed “through the shifting rents in a thick fog—bits of vivid and vanishing detail, giving no connected idea of the general aspect of a country” (LJ 76). “I am fated never to see him clearly,” Marlow tells his audience (241). The significance of sight, of capturing an image or, in Bergson’s words, a snapshot, is emphasized throughout—always in relation to a desire for certainty. Sight is repeatedly invoked in Jim’s and Marlow’s attempts to unlock the meaning of the night of his fateful jump off the Patna: “It seemed to me that I must jump out of that accursed boat and swim back to see—half a mile—more—any distance—to the very spot . . . ”? Why this impulse? Do you see the significance? Why back to the very spot?

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74  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism Why not drown alongside—if he meant drowning? Why back to the very spot, to see—as if his imagination had to be soothed by the assurance that all was over before death could bring relief? I defy any one of you to offer another explanation. It was one of those bizarre and exciting glimpses through the fog. It was an extraordinary disclosure.  (114)

Sight and its various metonymies proliferate in this short passage. They pertain not only to Jim’s experience on the boat, but also to Marlow’s commentary on Jim’s story and the pointed asides he offers his own audience. Jim seeks assurance that the Patna has drowned, that the ordeal is over—but such certainties can only be provided through visual perception. Seeing is believing. The self-same verbs serve Marlow in his own attempt to seek certainty, to understand Jim’s narrative and tease out its ironies. Here visual perception is picked up as a figure for understanding. The mental gaze stands in for the visual perception of lived experience. Whether it is inner or external, bereft of the soothing power of sight, Jim, Marlow, and his listeners must all grapple with a very uncomfortable state of incertitude. The inability of the eye to accurately capture the object of its gaze can be read with the late nineteenth-century challenging of ocularcentrism, a ­cultural phenomenon that is likewise reflected in Conrad’s words in the ­epigraph to this chapter. Jay cites some of its more vehement exponents. Amongst them is Jean-Louis Comolli, a French filmmaker, theoretician, and one of the editors of the Cahiers du Cinéma. He writes: “at the very same time that it is . . . fascinated and gratified by the multiplicity of scopic instruments which lay a thousand views beneath its gaze, the human eye loses its immemorial privilege; the mechanical eye of the photographic machine now sees in its place, and in certain aspects with more sureness. The photograph stands as at once the triumph and the grave of the eye” (Downcast Eyes 149). Jay unpacks the seismic philosophical shift that accompanies this cultural phenomenon: It was only during the waning years of the nineteenth century that a concerted challenge to the hegemony of the visual was successfully launched. As in the case of painting and literature, its animus was first directed against the domination of the ancient scopic régime we have called Cartesian perspectivalism, and then it was broadened to include all variants of ocularcentrism. In France more explicitly than elsewhere, the interaction of all these assaults seems to have produced that widely shared

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“ To Make You See ” ? Marlow and the Anti-Ocular Turn  75 suspicion of sight, at least amongst intellectuals, which might be called, with apologies to Comolli, a frenzy of the anti-visual.  (187)

The stakes of such a shift in the cultural currency of sight are much greater than the recording of a casualty of developing science and technology. It is not only how we see that warrants reconsideration, but also how we think and, by extension, how we conceptualize the human subject. The loss of the accuracy associated with eyesight may be seen as the material expression of the obsolescence of Cartesian perspectivalism and the epistemological certainties it once fashioned: Descartes assumed that the clear and distinct ideas available to anyone’s mental gaze would be exactly the same because of the divinely insured congruence between such ideas and the world of extended matter. Individual perspectives did not, therefore, matter, as the deictic specificity of the subject could be bracketed out in any cognitive endeavor . . . .  Perspective in this sense was atemporal, decorporealized, and transcendental. (Downcast Eyes 187–8)

The Cartesian cogito from which such a perspective issues is grounded in an assumption of autonomy and freedom; the observer assumes the privilege of complete separation from the stimuli he records—he neither con­tam­in­ ates nor is contaminated by the data he analyses. By the late nineteenth century, however, such a subject position can be seen as nothing but illusory: [This subject position] gives the observer the illusion he could see without being involved, that he could see, without being seen, without changing the observed through observing and without himself being changed by the act of observing: The subject that sees by means of linear perspective installs itself behind the window of the “peep show” [. . .] in the position of a secret, for himself and others invisible voyeur. Consequently, he is an empirical subject only in a very limited sense. While he is in the world in the emphatic sense that the things of the world organize themselves according to his perspective [. . .], he is at the same time distanced from the world by this very act. Like the Cartesian cogito the observer is bereft of his body. (Lüdemann 1999, 66. The original is in German—this translation is from Huck 2009, 203)

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76  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism The insertion of an embodied center of consciousness into Lord Jim strips the novel of the illusory transparency of the omniscient account that precedes it. That the narration that takes its place is, in its visual effects, no longer very precise, suggests that the information rendered will be partial, mutable, and subject to error. But the loss of scientific rigor is not without its compensations. The partial images that an eye can record are ac­com­pan­ ied by multi-sensory input, affect, and apperception. All are registered in an experience of time that is fleeting, unfolding, and irreversible. This is the product of embodied experience—the representation of what Jay refers to as the recorporealization of the cognitive subject, where the product of cognition is transformed to accommodate a new subjectivity, one in flux, in time, changing, dependent, flawed in accuracy but entirely authentic. What it registers is not scientific in nature but entirely human. Jim notes, when he looks out at the audience in the courtroom, that there is one man who looks at him “as though he could see somebody or something past” his shoulder. Jim interprets the odd gaze as an indication of an awareness “of his hopeless difficulty” (33). Marlow’s glance demonstrates the way in which the eye might be refashioned in the wake of ocularcentrism. No longer suggestive of fixed empirical observation, it now signals a being-with, a sensing of the other, an expression of sympathy and identification. It looks beyond the surface to register that which would elude a scientific device. The shift ne­ces­sar­ily undoes the principle on which ocularcentrism is premised: the hierarchical and perhaps even ontological separation of subject and object. The turn from omniscient narrator to homodiegetic narrator serves as the narrative correlative of this shift. The remoteness of the scientific gaze is rendered obsolete, and the subject and object of the gaze find themselves together in a shared story world. That Jim returns the glance and then turns away, “as after a final parting” (33), further demonstrates that the eye no longer serves the tyranny of discernment. Such a method of contact and communication is particularly meaningful to a character who repeatedly fails to express himself in language. The representation of a shift in the philosophical conceptualization of experience that is here neatly encapsulated in the transition from an omniscient narrator to a witness-narrator is handled more subtly in “The Secret Sharer.” The short story cannot rely on narrative form to represent a shifting worldview as it is delivered in its entirety in the voice of a first-person narrator. The story nevertheless provides a helpful intertext as it dramatizes a similar transition to the one we see in the novel; it does so by playing on the semiotics of the gaze.

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“ To Make You See ” ? Marlow and the Anti-Ocular Turn  77 In the short story, the eye is associated at the outset with knowledge and mastery. The Captain surveys the horizon to delimit the field of his vision, his knowledge, and his control. By extension, that which is submerged or fades into the horizon can neither be known, nor mastered. Again supporting the semiotic connection of sight and mind, the chief mate’s eyes are described as “round,” an indication of the curiosity that will be attributed to his characterization as a problem solver. Throughout the story he is characterized by his predilection for “trying to evolve a theory” (SS 94). The last indication of the collocation of sight and knowledge is recorded just before the Captain meets Leggatt. Faced with an inexplicable image in the water, he reports: “I leaned over the rail as far as I could, to bring my eyes nearer to that mystery floating alongside” (98). The ensuing encounter upsets the integrity of this traditional figuration. The symbolism of the eye is refashioned in a resistance to reason; the gaze now serves to establish a connection between Leggatt and the Captain that is instinctive, unexplained, and uncanny. “I felt,” the narrator comments in response to Leggatt’s story, “this was no mere formula of desperate speech” (99, my emphasis); “It was pure intuition on my part. A mysterious communication was established already between us two” (99). From an instrument of judgment, the eyes are transformed into a means of telepathic communication: “We could only talk with our eyes when I first went down” (123); the Captain keeps his “eyes on him” (115). This uncanny connection to Leggatt is guarded to the exclusion of all others. The Captain repeatedly shirks the gaze of the other men on board the ship. He “looked down at  once” (93) when he accidentally meets the gaze of his second mate; when the steward gives him “a keen look,” the Captain dare “not meet his eyes” (112). The dynamic of exchanged glances in the story dramatizes a relation that is not couched in language or reason. It is instinctive, affective, and dynamic. The story thus offers an incredibly cogent example of the method whereby sight is refigured in the literary imaginary outside its association with the Cartesian cogito, in a way that effectively upsets its traditional collocation with autonomy, reason, and independence. In doing so the motif offers an apt complement to a story that thematizes a conceptualization of identity that is porous, co-dependent and in flux, where we encounter the represented inability to distinguish self and other. Indeed, those eyes that the Captain repeatedly avoids are often couched in the metonymies we find in Lord Jim where eyes signify judgment and understanding. “It would take very little to make me a suspect person in the eyes of the ship’s company” (110).

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78  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism By choosing the gaze as symbol of affect and intuition rather than cogitation and conceptual logic, the Captain’s choices reflect his maker’s attempt to couch the story in the illogical, dynamic, and contaminating ­figures that resist the artificial, arresting impositions of logic and understanding. Still, the story concludes with the restoration of the traditional semiotic. The eye is once again associated with understanding and mastery in a transition aptly signaled by a return to the familiar. The Captain recognizes his own hat in the water. The hat becomes “the saving mark for [his] eyes” (142); he notes: “it was saving the ship, by serving me for a mark to help out the ­ignorance of my strangeness” (142). Lord Jim already anticipates this symbolic retraction. In a scene that closely resembles the dynamic explored in the story, we receive a demonstration of the stakes involved when sight and understanding are both sacrificed for an altogether different relation between characters: A seaman, even if a mere passenger, takes an interest in a ship, and looks at the sea-life around him with the critical enjoyment of a painter, for instance, looking at another man’s work. In every sense of the expression he is “on deck”; but my Jim, for the most part, skulked down below as though he had been a stowaway. He infected me so that I avoided speaking on professional matters, such as would suggest themselves naturally to two sailors during a passage. For whole days we did not exchange a word; I felt extremely unwilling to give orders to my officers in his presence. Often, when alone with him on deck or in the cabin, we didn’t know what to do with our eyes. (LJ 201)

The scene reads as a veritable draft for the short story. However, what proves positive in the later tale is dramatized in the novel as a moment of undoing rather than a rite of passage. The difference can be attributed to the fact that where Leggatt infects the insecure Captain with his confidence and experience, Jim threatens to infect Marlow—much as he had infected Brierly before—with his failure. It is this fear of contamination, perhaps, that results in the mirroring of Brierly’s downward gaze at court and Marlow’s unwillingness to reciprocate Jim’s gaze here. What Marlow describes is the complete failure to communicate, a sense of radical alienation that is cast in linguistic and ocular terms both. Instead of reflecting on Jim, Marlow is infected by him, an effect that falls outside rational cogitation, outside judgment and language. And it unmans Marlow. He loses his ability to command his officers.

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“ To Make You See ” ? Marlow and the Anti-Ocular Turn  79 In the aftermath of Brierly’s suicide, Marlow’s exchange with the former’s chief mate concludes in a statement to the effect that they are secure from that which haunted the great man because of their relative mediocrity: “You may depend on it, Captain Jones,” said I, “it wasn’t anything that would have disturbed much either of us two,” I said; and then, as if a light had been flashed into the muddle of his brain, poor old Jones found a last word of amazing profundity. He blew his nose, nodding at me dolefully: “Ay, ay! neither you nor I, sir, had ever thought so much of ourselves.” (65)

With the reconceptualization of subjectivity that attends the anti-ocular turn, however, such a comment is rendered false. No man is immune to influence. With the obsolescence of ocularcentrism comes a relation that is co-dependent, affected, and porous. Such a relation is no longer the sole purchase of the narcissist. Everyone is in some way “disturbed” by those they encounter. Rather than send its narrator overboard, the novel withdraws from its commitment to the anti-ocular turn as orchestrated in the transition from chapter four to chapter five. Marlow’s repeated absences from the story world and the conjurations of figures who reintroduce a clear division between the object of observation and the subject who studies it may be viewed as the symptoms of a nostalgia for Cartesian perspectivalism. Such returns may be colored by the irony of an awareness of its illusory nature, but it is nevertheless suggestive of a desire for the reassurances of the kind of transcendental knowledge that only an autonomous and cohesive subject is allowed. What is rehearsed in this recurring image of the judgmental, scientific, and remote gaze, then, is that self-same nostalgia for coherence and independence discussed in relation to the performance of language in the previous chapter. The modernist subject is repeatedly plagued by the language that contaminates him; he seeks recourse to the escapes that would allow him to enjoy a freedom from these influences. Similarly, the loss of the ability to separate oneself from the object of one’s gaze means not only that one loses the hermeneutic certainties and assurances of conceptual logic, but also that there is no escaping the affective contaminants of the experience of being-with. The first part of the novel adheres to conventions of modernist writing and its commitment to a modernist subject. Marlow’s account begins with repeated references to the distorted lens of perception and symbolic

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80  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism expressions of the collapsing of the firm division between object and ­subject. Here, even Big Brierly, whose separation from Jim is both professionally and personally sanctioned (the first by his role in the maritime court, the second by his impenetrable confidence), is ultimately and fatefully touched by the encounter. No such privileged positions as associated with Enlightenment thinking appear possible; Marlow, Brierly, Jim’s various employers, indeed, all who encounter Jim are affected by him. The exception to the rule might be the French Lieutenant whose experience of the Patna and thoughts on Jim repeatedly return to figures for the kind of detachment and epistemological certainty we might associate with Cartesian perspectivalism. Failing to obtain an “intelligible reply” from the deck of the derelict ship, he ascertains “through his binoculars” that it is safe to send a boat over to assess the situation. The motif of visual perception here emphasized is repeatedly coupled with the suggestion of remoteness or disinterested scrutiny—a “curious mixture of unconcern and thoughtfulness” (138). He glances “with one eye into the tumbler” in which he is offered his drink; he remains on the Patna for thirty hours straight because it is deemed necessary that one of the officers “should remain to keep an eye open” (141). In his diagnosis of Jim’s conduct, “the mouthpiece of abstract wisdom” (147) with heightened “effect of detachment” offers a “sharp glance,” and gives “a notion of extreme efficiency” (148). Though his assessment finally concludes by turning to “the eye of others” (147), invoking communal judgment rather than empirical scrutiny, the use of the ocular motif in relation to the Lieutenant nevertheless spells universal validity rather than idiosyncratic distortion. And this is also where his approach differs from Marlow’s. Marlow attempts to relate to Jim in a way that exceeds the law and logic that a remote and disinterested gaze evokes. Where the first part of the narrative rehearses—with this one exception— the partial and distorting gaze, the second part conjures up a host of disinterested onlookers who strengthen the impression of the novel’s nostalgia for epistemological and ontological certainty. Often associated with a generic shift, the novel’s central divide also functions as a method of sep­ar­at­ing Marlow and Jim. The two are made to inhabit two geographically and culturally distinct worlds, a division that may be seen as a corollary of the diegetic levels that customarily distinguish narrator and character. The div­ ision thus symbolically (if not stylistically) serves to reinstate the paradigm of omniscience with which the novel begins. Marlow’s homodiegetic narration is abandoned, as it were, and he is refashioned as a pseudo-heterodiegetic narrator, in a gesture that will be rehearsed again in the shifting story worlds

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“ To Make You See ” ? Marlow and the Anti-Ocular Turn  81 of Under Western Eyes. The plot twist reinstates the separation between observer and object, detached onlooker and the agent of experience. Stein and the privileged reader both shadow Marlow in contributing to the proliferation of remote onlookers who are tasked with a diagnostic summing up. Both are introduced at a remove from the action, certainly at a remove from its hero, and both are asked to judge the protagonist. The turn from one mode of engagement to the other is marked by Marlow’s decision “to go and consult Stein in the evening” (202). The discourse here shifts from sympathy and exasperation—affective indications of involvement—to the detached consideration that is sanctioned by physical distance. If proximity breeds confusion, distance allows for understanding. Such a sentiment reverberates in Marlow’s description of Stein as he attempts to explain why he seeks to consult him on Jim’s case: The gentle light of a simple, unwearied, as it were, and intelligent goodnature illumined his long hairless face. It had deep downwards folds, and was pale as of a man who had always led a sedentary life—which was indeed very far from being the case. His hair was thin, and brushed back from a massive and lofty forehead. One fancied that at twenty he must have looked very much like what he was now at threescore. It was a student’s face; only the eyebrows nearly all white, thick and bushy, together with the resolute searching glance that came from under them, were not in accord with his, I may say, learned appearance.  (202)

The shades of color and light bespeak enlightenment. Though boasting a life of adventure (as briefly intimated in the passage), Stein is consulted because of his capacity for discernment, his experience as a collector, a pseudoscientist. Marlow turns to him because he wishes to describe a “specimen” (205) and Stein is quick to offer his learned opinion. Marlow explains: “he had diagnosed the case for me, and at first I was quite startled to find how simple it was; and indeed our conference resembled so much a medical consultation—Stein, of learned aspect, sitting in an arm-chair before his desk” (212). The ironies issuing from Marlow’s abiding skepticism may be present, for he notes: “it was a charming and deceptive light, throwing the im­palp­able poesy of its dimness over pitfalls—over graves” (215). Though deceptive, such light is nevertheless reassuring; the longing for the illusion of objectivity is real. The discursive shift that I have described may be subtle—but it is significant. It is signaled not only by the reinstatement of the motif of the detached

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82  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism onlooker, but also by Marlow’s transformed role in the story. The novel opens by placing Marlow squarely in the position of an eye-witness. “What did you mean by staring at me all the morning” (71), Jim asks him when they first meet. But Jim does not command Marlow’s gaze for long. Marlow’s letter to the privileged reader at the end acknowledges this transition. He writes: “I put it down here for you as though I had been an eyewitness” (343, my emphasis). The visual sense is exchanged for its figurative, hermeneutic counterpart. As Marlow remarks: “I strained my mental eyesight” (197). His task is not to observe so much as it is to forage for the bits and pieces that might be fitted together in making “an intelligible picture” (343). The sight of personal experience is thus exchanged for the Cartesian symbols of understanding and deciphering—as in the putting together of a jigsaw puzzle, a method of bending experience to artificial constructs akin to the one Bergson criticizes. Lived experience is replaced by the distorting logic of visual snapshots. The futility of such an enterprise is unmasked when Marlow ends the public version of his account with the recollection of his last view of Jim in Patusan: “The last image of that incomplete story, its incompleteness itself, and the very tone of the speaker, had made discussion in vain and comment impossible” (337). In a return to the idiom of the anti-ocular turn, sight and knowledge are substituted for a form of performative contamination. Jim’s silences infect the audience, rendering their experience as open and mystifying as his own. The witness-narrator is once again positioned in the role of conduit (or, as he terms it at the start, “receptacle”); his affective response to Jim is passed on to the audience. This return, however, is short-lived. The following chapter opens by policing Jim back to the familiar through the figurative gaze of a new commanding witness. The privileged reader is now admitted into the circle of onlookers who participate in the bending of lived experience to the conclusions of a remote and disinterested observer. The symbolism attached to the last episode of the novel is in keeping with the privileged reader’s role in the narrative: “His rooms were in the highest flat of a lofty building, and his glance could travel afar beyond the clear panes of glass, as though he were looking out of the lantern of a lighthouse” (337). The imagery here once again demonstrates a longing for the assurances of Cartesian perspectivalism— the illusion of objectivity that comes from a linking of clear sight and objective distance. “The onlookers see most of the game” (224), Marlow tells his audience. Like Stein, like the privileged reader, like Marlow himself in the second part of the novel, these are the onlookers whose remoteness from

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“ To Make You See ” ? Marlow and the Anti-Ocular Turn  83 the protagonist is consistent not with multi-sensory experience, but with the piecing together of bits of fragmentary information into an in­tel­li­gible whole. Such reconstructions, however, are always distorted by their teleological nature. Deleuze and Guattari’s comment provides a gloss on Bergson’s point: “My eyes are useless, for they render back only the image of the known” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 171).

The Revalorization of Time over Space In the Author’s Note to the novel, Conrad describes it as “a free and wandering tale” (LJ viii) suggesting a form of narrative development that does not bend to the rules of conventional emplotting, a fitting fictional representation of the shift from a philosophy of being to that of becoming. Such ­conviction as to the novel’s unruly structure is echoed in his response to the idea of adapting the novel for the stage: “I don’t think that it is possible. The story is in itself nothing, it is composed of detached episodes, and such value as it may have depends purely on its literary quality which of course can not be transferred to the boards of theatre” (CL 7 459). Lord Jim, the author believes, does not conform to the rigid structure of moral action. Such an impression is in keeping with Aristotle’s Poetics where it is noted that an episodic plot is detrimental to good dramatic structure. As the phil­ oso­pher memorably explains: “I call a plot ‘epeisodic’ in which the episodes or acts succeed one another without probable or necessary sequence” (38). Lending support to the longevity of this principle and its significance beyond the stage, an early reviewer of the novel complains that the novel “spins itself away, out of nothing, with side tracks leading, apparently, nowhere, and cross tracks that start back and begin anew and end once more—sometimes on the verge of nowhere, and sometimes in the centre of the plot itself;–and all with an air of irresponsible intentness and a businesslike run at the end that sets the structure trembling on gossamer threads” (J.B.P The Critic, May 1901 437-8, CR 1 345). The frustrations underlying the condemnation recur but are reframed in a positive light in the reviews extolling the novel as a triumph of modernist innovation. An unsigned review published in Speaker on November 24, 1900 suggests that the “apparent artlessness” of “the arrangement of the book” “[arises] from the determination that the reader shall not be led away by the interest of the mere external events of the tale. Events are almost contemptuously forestalled, in order that the how and the why of them alone shall get the best attention of

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84  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism the reader.” The writer concludes that “the arrangement of the book is ­ori­gin­al and effective; it seems to have solved one of the great difficulties of the philosophical romance” (L.R.F.O CR 1 302). More recently, Allan Simmons describes the “misleading” nature of the novel as a method of development through “frustrated anticipatory gestures that predict the tale and are then confounded” (“Misleading” 32). Josiane Paccaud-Huguet sees the novel as following the design of a broken kaleidoscope, “an elusive visual/vocal spot that makes every image uncertain and problematic” (“Heroes of the Real” 125). Opinions diverge on the novel’s worth—but not on its openness. That the novel is digressive and unwieldy is not in question. Where I wish to intervene in this corpus of critical reception is in showing that, in fact, Marlow “draws back his hesitating foot” (HD 101) from the confusions attending narrative innovation and instead brings the familiarity of telos and directionality back to bear on his account. The first part of this chapter traced the way in which the haunting returns of the detached gaze are suggestive of the survival of a philosophy of being and the symbols that attend it. Here, the spatialization of time will provide a gauge for a similar-minded inquiry into the insistence on the familiar at the expense of the new. “On all the round earth, which to some seems so big and that others affect to consider as rather smaller than a mustard-seed, [Jim] had no place where he could—what shall I say?—where he could withdraw. That’s it! Withdraw—be alone with his loneliness” (LJ 171). In jumping off the Patna Jim betrays the fellowship of the craft, he betrays his duty and his responsibility towards the pilgrims on board the ship. He fails to uphold the seaman’s code of honor. The hope of withdrawing into the safety of a little world serves as a spatialized fantasy of escaping “the grim shadow of self-knowledge” (80). The irony of such evasions—the mind being its own place—is not lost on Marlow. Though happy to assist Jim in escaping the reach of his infamy, he frames the young man’s various attempts with a deterministic comment that anticipates their failure. “A clean slate, did [Jim] say? As if the initial word of each our destiny were not graven in imperishable characters upon the face of a rock” (186). Jim’s betrayal cannot be expunged. Marlow’s comment testifies to his divided loyalties. He promises to withhold judgment at the same time that he foreshadows its execution. Rather than trace the meanderings of a guilt-ridden protagonist, the recording of, in Henry Somers-Hall’s words, “an entity that develops in time,” Marlow’s narrative will unfold as the “manifestations of an underlying law, or an underlying judgement: the fate of the character” (67). The difference

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“ To Make You See ” ? Marlow and the Anti-Ocular Turn  85 between the two narrative trajectories is not only thematic but temporal.1 As Jay explains, “the freeing of time from its spatialization is also the ­impossibility of predicting effects – the negation of a hermeneutics of causal sequence” (196). That Marlow turns to the idea of destiny, an idea that bends an uncharted experience of time to the determinism of cause and effect, thus serves as an indication of Marlow’s betrayal of a philosophy of becoming. Jay grounds the spatial turn in the logic of causality; such a turn is equally signaled by a philosophical commonplace described in Chapter 1. Recalling Plato’s treatment of time in the Timaeus, Marlow proposes to chart the development of Jim’s character by relating his actions not to a temporal but an atemporal structure. The characters upon the face of a rock—unchanging and eternal as they are—serve as a measure for the unfolding of human time in lieu of the lived, finite, and ever-shifting reality of human experience. What is lost in the shift from the first to the second is the possibility of contingency. Destiny serves to bend the free and wandering tale to determinism. The setting up of such a framing device thus runs counter to the novel’s design as asserted in the Author’s Note. Marlow here frames the story as a retrospective reconstruction towards a known conclusion. That this latter method of storytelling is still in evidence is all the more striking as Lord Jim opens with a series of gestures to the effect of withdrawing from such summary judgment. Present at the court inquiry after the Patna incident, Marlow notes the futility of the court proceedings: The examination of the only man able and willing to face [the court inquiry] was beating futilely round the well-known fact, and the play of questions upon it was as instructive as the tapping with a hammer on an iron box, were the object to find out what’s inside. However, an official inquiry could not be any other thing. Its object was not the fundamental why, but the superficial how, of this affair.  (56)

In the transition from the superficial how to the fundamental why, Marlow promises his audience a real attempt to navigate the hidden recesses of Jim’s psyche. But his investigation ultimately appears to be as foreclosed and predetermined as the court proceedings. It, too, will enforce a telos upon the object under investigation. In his role as witness-narrator, Marlow emerges both as the vehicle for modernism’s liberation from the yoke of legal determinism and as one that resuscitates the moral categories that underlie them. The terms of the inquiry are different—one judicious, the other

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86  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism psy­cho­logic­al. But in so far as moral and legal law both provide an atemporal structure that functions as a measure for the representation of time, both serve the novel in ensuring that action does not slow down into the directionless experience of pure time. Jim’s testimony provides a powerful illustration of such deceleration: Fortunately he remembered everything. He wanted to go on talking for truth’s sake, perhaps for his own sake also; and while his utterance was deliberate, his mind positively flew round and round the serried circle of facts that had surged up all about him to cut him off from the rest of his kind: it was like a creature that, finding itself imprisoned within an en­clos­ ure of high stakes, dashes round and round, distracted in the night, trying to find a weak spot, a crevice, a place to scale, some opening through which it may squeeze itself and escape. This awful activity of mind made him hesitate at times in his speech . . .  (31)

The episode depicts a painful exhibition of the shame attached to the dereliction of duty. But if we reframe Jim’s testimony in terms of its relation to time, we see that the scene is cast as a narrative crisis that issues forth from a dilation of the present moment, one that in narrative terms reads as a frustrating inability to move forward. This is an experience that cannot bend to the rules of rational thought or linear development. Language emerges here as a hollow imposition of codified expression, a betrayal of lived experience. The short excerpt thus offers a glimpse of duration; it is slow, labored, a form of white noise that upsets our epistemological and aesthetic predilection for order.2 For Jim, the experience of time is not linear; it proceeds in fits and starts in a method that upsets the familiar classifications of chronological development. This is a time out of joint that collapses the past and the present in a continuous now. Readers of Conrad’s novel encounter its symptoms again later, when Jim narrates his story to Marlow. The account often reads more like a reliving of the event than its retelling. As Marlow notes, “He remembered so well that, gasping in the chair, he seemed to sweat and choke before my eyes” (30). Lending support to this in­ter­pret­ ation, Jim later remarks: “I ought to have a merry life of it, by God! For I shall see that funny sight a good many times yet before I die.’ His eyes fell again. ‘See and hear . . . See and hear,’ he repeated twice, at long intervals, filled by vacant staring” (106). The long intervals of silence and vacant staring that recur here are again a spanner in the works of a forward-moving plot.

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“ To Make You See ” ? Marlow and the Anti-Ocular Turn  87

The Detranscendentalization of Perspective Destiny, a motif that eschews any possibility of freedom or contingency, becomes the refrain around which the story is organized. But it serves an additional literary aim to that of resuscitating the plot. In his letter to the privileged reader at the end, Marlow writes: “You must admit that it is romantic beyond the wildest dreams of his boyhood and yet there is to my mind a sort of profound and terrifying logic in it, as if it were our im­agin­ ation alone that could set loose upon us the might of an overwhelming destiny. The imprudence of our thoughts recoils upon our heads; who toys with the sword shall perish by the sword. This astounding adventure, of which the most astounding part is that it is true, comes on as an unavoidable consequence” (342–3, my emphases). In his attempts to attribute meaning to what he witnesses Marlow repeatedly calls on the universal validity of cat­ egor­ic­al logic. The meaning he tries to discover is in many ways personal— as he asks, “was it for my own sake that I wished to find some shadow of an excuse for that young fellow?” (51). The pronouns in this passage show, however, that his aim is not personal so much as universal. It is not how he but how we might understand the story. The imposition of logic on a tale that is repeatedly shown to elude it, then, is key to the third method whereby Marlow is made to serve as a buffer against the confusions of a philosophy of becoming. Again, critics often suggest that Marlow’s unusual method of imparting his story cancels out the possibility of meaning; Marlow confuses rather than enlightens his audience. Such an impression would be in keeping with the anonymous narrator’s description of the same in Heart of Darkness. For Marlow, “the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos, that sometimes, are made visibly by the spectral illumination of moonshine” (HD 48). Michael Sayeau comments on the critical implications of this opaque figure: Conventional novelistic discourse oscillates between reportage and reflection, the description of actions and meditation about what the actions mean. But in this case, because of the fissuring of Marlow’s language, his editorializing is too disjunctive and disproportional to imbue the described actions with meaning. Things are happening, lots of things, but sundered from the continuity of a plot-line they take the shape of anti-events. They

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88  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism are actions, but they quite clearly do not participate in a causal chain and thus do not yield cumulative meaning.  (170)

Sayeau suggests that Marlow’s weakness as commentator, or the implied author’s refusal to align events with the commentary that is traditionally used to unpack them, contributes to the obscurity of the text. I would argue that, in Lord Jim, the artificial imposition of categorical logic—as in the case of destiny and its attribution of causality—serves to make the story in­tel­li­ gible nonetheless. In noting this against the grain of critical reception I am merely repeating a lesson Conrad himself shares with his publisher, William Blackwood. Responding to an implicit slight made by the publisher’s brother George, wherein the author’s prose is criticized as slow to develop (in The End of the Tether), Conrad writes: “in the light of the final incident, the whole story in all its descriptive detail shall fall into place—acquire its value and its significance” (CL 2 417). The value of his art, then, is in its ability to cohere with conceptual logic, with a vision of art that is whole, that is unified, and that is teleological. When all the elements of the work are co-present, the disparate and incoherent parts fall together to make an intelligible picture. A story, in this sense, is always the product of back-tracking—a retrospective ordering that hinges on the spatialization of time and a logic of causality. This is also the principle that guides Marlow’s attempts to fit together the fragments of Conrad’s free and wandering tale. The foreseeable outcome ensures that the manifold encounters, ­symbols, and characters that make up this web of narration are all meaningful and necessary. All contribute to the story’s unfolding towards its rightful conclusion. My point is not that the novel does not confuse its readers, but rather that the tension between these confusions and the novel’s more covert efforts to right them is demonstrative of the way in which the narrative nevertheless anchors itself in a philosophy of being against the incoherence of a philosophy of becoming. This is evidenced in a process both philosophical and aesthetic wherein, as noted by Bergson at the start, we artificially impose categorical logic on experience in order to make it intelligible. What makes Lord Jim so remarkable is the way in which it oscillates between the two—between the modernist attempt to capture vertiginous experience and the impositions of narrative form against which such innovation strains. Marlow himself provides a forceful phrasing of a like tension in his reaction to Jewel’s story: “It had the power to drive me out of my conception of existence, out of that shelter each of us makes for himself to creep under in moments of danger, as a tortoise withdraws into its shell” (LJ 314).

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“ To Make You See ” ? Marlow and the Anti-Ocular Turn  89 The encounter of the modernist witness with the protagonist whose life he narrates brings into relief the tension between silence and speech, an organized, foreseeable trajectory and contingency. The tension between the discourses and temperaments of Jim and Marlow may thus be read as the figurative expression of the tensions between modernist representation and  the conventions of narrative—between a confusing flood of affect and perception and the codified categories of event, sequence, causality, and tele­ology. To align Marlow’s role in the novel with the strategies accruing to the latter goes against decades of critical work on the novel. It is a claim that will seem counterintuitive in light of the digressive and diffuse structure of the novel. And yet, Marlow’s role is very much like that of his maker. He is  enlisted to seek “fit words” for Jim’s “meaning” (“Author’s Note” LJ ix). “My information,” he recounts, “was fragmentary, but I’ve fitted the pieces together, and there is enough of them to make an intelligible picture” (LJ 343). In keeping with Jay’s definition of the modernist worldview, Marlow performs the detranscendentalization of perspective, the recorporealization of the cognitive subject, and the revalorization of time over space. But Marlow also undoes all three by imposing causality on the story he narrates, by bending it to the transcendental paradigm of moral action, and by repeatedly absenting himself from the action, thereby reinstating a Cartesian perspective. The following chapter traces further the implications of this tension between philosophical attitudes in Chance, the last Marlovian tale. What has been teased out as an ambivalence in Lord Jim appears to be resolved in the later novel in a return to a form of Cartesian perspectivalism that had been cast off in Heart of Darkness. The next chapter thus provides the concluding analysis to a trajectory of reversal, where Marlow serves Conrad in establishing himself not as a modern writer composing for a select few, but as a writer who wishes to appeal to the many. One of the telltale signs of this shift is the restoration of a clear separation between the story worlds of he who narrates and he who experiences. If “Youth” and Heart of Darkness are primarily recounted as Marlow’s experiences, in Lord Jim and Chance we find that the narrator is more and more at the margin. The transition, I would argue, is suggestive of a desire for that self-same power of objective observation and certitude that is lost in the anti-ocular turn.

Notes 1. The question of judgment and law has generated many productive readings of the novel. Like much of the novel’s critical reception, these emphasize the

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90  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism ambiguous quality of the narration rather than its determinism. Dorothy Van Ghent writes that “The tale Conrad prepared to narrate was a tale in the manner of the older classical dramatists, wherein law—whether divine, as with Aeschylus, or natural, as with Sophocles—is justified to the self, whatever its agonies of discovery. But he managed to do a tale that put both the law and the self to question, and left them there” (The English Novel 243). In “Tragic Adventures: Conrad’s and Marlow’s Conflicting Narrative in Lord Jim,” Richard Ambrosini notes the tension between new, imperial laws and old traditional, tribal laws as a modern-day re-enactment of comparable tensions in Greek drama. 2. An important clarification is needed at this juncture. The argument does not dovetail with the idea that trauma is resistant to language. Rather than focus on the ontological or epistemological validity of language, this chapter deals with the representation of time and the part language plays in the bending of time to space. It might also be helpful to point out that trauma studies are contradictory to Bergson’s theory in so far as they hinge on the assumption that normalcy (the absence of trauma) is suggestive of a stable correspondence between language and experience. Like Bergson, Conrad vehemently and repeatedly resists such a view. Words in his poetic universe are memorably “the great foes of reality” (UWE 3). Marlow reiterates the self-same view in many of his asides, which often turn on the impression that the story is “so difficult to render in colourless words” (LJ 94). Katherine Baxter offers a helpful gloss in her suggestion that “trauma is not rendered unspeakable because representation of it is impossible, as is presumed in Caruth’s model, but rather that trauma can be caused by the failure and/or frustration of speech itself ” (“Senseless Speech,” 2). Such an overturning of the question of the relationship between subject and language squares more neatly with poststructuralist theorists such as Lacan and Foucault who show language to be definitive of subjectivity. This latter idea is explored in detail in Chapter 2 of this book.

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4

For Fear of “Drifting Unconsciously”: Marlow Goes to a Wedding Chance

I have argued that Marlow’s attempt to rein in the multiple viewpoints and interpretations that make up the narrative of Lord Jim is anchored in the coherence of destiny. Countering the confusing and often digressive accounts that have caused readers to falter in their attempt to follow the narrative trajectory, destiny unfolds with a deterministic power that offers an anchor for the twists and turns of the action, the multiple voices that report it, and the narrator’s ongoing efforts to provide a cogent in­ter­pret­ ation for the sum of its parts. The protagonist and the readers may be ­confused—but the chaos is nevertheless governed by a rule of law that sur­ vives the unsatisfactory sentence of its maritime counterpart. Whether his is a moral or social crime, the betrayal of a code of honor or his ego ideal, Jim will pay for his transgression. The theme of destiny and the narrative coherence it promises are os­ten­ sibly abandoned in the last of the Marlovian tales. John G. Peters associates this stylistic turn with “a crucial moment in Conrad’s career” (“Narrative Problem” 144). He argues that “the ‘uncongenial subject’ of romance has less to do with the difference between Conrad’s middle and later works than does the pervasive emphasis on a world controlled by chance” (144–5). Peters’s call to rethink the novel’s place in Conrad’s developing aesthetic also implicitly demands that we rethink the very meaning of the title. Where Peters views the title as representative of the novel’s purported message, other critics see this relation in terms of opposition. Richard Ruppel’s recent assertion that “Chance’s plot works systematically through a series of ‘chance’ occurrences to predictable conclusions” (136) is in accord with Bruce Harkness’s 1954 claim that “the basis of the novel, far from being a representation of accidental occurrences, is the reverse of chance” (210).1 Ruppel and Harkness may disagree on the significance of this insight—but they certainly agree on the misleading nature of the novel’s title. Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism. Yael Levin, Oxford University Press (2020). © Yael Levin. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198864370.001.0001

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92  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism This chapter calls attention to an ambivalence in the novel that invites these diametrically opposed views on its treatment of chance. The emphasis on chance appears to serve Conrad’s attempt to resist the pervasiveness of determinism in nineteenth-century thought; it emerges in the novel as an alternative model of historical progression.2 At the same time, the narrative again turns to destiny and fate in a motif that runs counter to contingency. The following discussion traces the stylistic and thematic expressions of the two warring artistic impulses by testing them against the models of time, narrative, and subjectivity that were presented in earlier chapters. It con­ cludes by suggesting that the ambivalent treatment of chance may be read with Conrad’s oscillation between two different artistic commitments and the different philosophical paradigms that generate them. What is at stake is not only the nature of the audience he chooses to address and the authorial responsibilities that such a choice dictates, but the very question of his artis­ tic legacy. The method with which chance is to be treated in the novel will determine if Conrad is a “modern” writer or a panderer to public opinion; whether he chooses an art of becoming or being.

Chance The Author’s Note opens with the question of how to do things differently: how to avoid the kind of determinism that is so ingrained in the conven­ tions of fiction. Conrad writes: “CHANCE” is one of my novels that shortly after having been begun were laid aside for a few months. Starting impetuously 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 upon the direction I would take. Either presented to me equal fascinations, at least on the surface, and for that very reason my hesitation extended over many days. I floated in the calm water of pleasant speculation, between the diverging currents of conflicting impulses, with an agreeable but perfectly irrational conviction that neither of those currents would take me to destruction. 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)

The sentiment may be read with the philosophical shift described above; the nineteenth century brought into circulation an array of paradigms to

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For Fear of “Drifting Unconsciously”  93 challenge the conventions of reason and agency that had been celebrated in the Enlightenment. Choice and the exertion of effort were no longer seen as key to human evolution. History was now perceived as the product of con­ tingency or the determinations of a range of non-human forces—cellular mutation, the market, history, and technology. Illustrating the range of dis­ ciplines participating in this new way of thinking, Elizabeth Grosz writes: “Like Darwin, Bergson is interested in the processes of development, pro­ cesses that induce change, that demonstrate time’s forward direction, and in a future that is based on the resources of the past while it inevitably sur­ passes them, that involve innovation, emergence, and the creation of the new and the unforeseen” (157–8). Such a cultural shift is marked here by the attempt to shake authorial control and allow the novel to develop freely, without the determinism of generic conventions. And in this we might see, following Peters’s suggestion, a real attempt to explore a narrative method that is distinct from that utilized in previous works where even the most experimental plot designs follow Aristotle’s principle of moral action. Lord Jim and Under Western Eyes delineate their protagonists’ progress towards a conclusion dictated by poetic justice. Jim pays for his transgression; Razumov seeks redemption for his own. Instead of subordinating the action to the determinations of moral law, Chance reports the lives of its characters as they develop—the author will not bend the course of the narrative to serve any extraneous intention.3 Conrad’s note brings to mind the challenges facing a different generation of writers. A well-known example of a comparable gesture is evident in chapter thirteen of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, a novel written over fifty years after Chance. Following his protagonist onto a train carriage, the narrator likewise muses on how to avoid the tyranny associated with the selection of one of two possible paths for his hero: So I continue to stare at Charles and see no reason this time for fixing the fight upon which he is about to engage. That leaves me with two alterna­ tives. I let the fight proceed and take no more than a recording part in it; or I take both sides in it. I stare at that vaguely effete but not completely futile face. And as we near London, I think I see a solution; that is, I see the dilemma is false. The only way I can take no part in the fight is to show two versions of it.  (97)

John Fowles’s solution is unlike Conrad’s. Setting two possibilities of plot development side by side is perhaps a better show of the relinquishment of

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94  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism authorial control than Conrad’s purported lack of design. Fowles’s strategy plays on the postmodernist challenging of norms of writing that are upset in this metaleptic conflation of diegetic levels wherein narrator and character are thrown together in a single ontological realm. Noting Roland Barthes’s famous essay on “The Death of the Author” (1967), the narrator reflects on the ethics of writing in an age when an author’s omnipotence is questioned, when the need to decide on a course of action might be seen as an infringement on characters’ freedoms. The philosophical concerns underlying these two ges­ tures may be different—but both arise from the perceived need to free narra­ tive from generic closure and allow for openness against the determinations of plot. Conrad chooses to play dice with the events linking his narrative together; Fowles brings several narrative contingencies into play. Both pre­ sent their strategies as a method to achieve certain narrative freedoms. Neither of the two authors, Bergson would argue, accomplishes the task. In Time and Free Will, the philosopher explains the faulty logic under­ lying existing accounts of free will. His discussion provides an important gloss on the authorial calculations described above. He writes: “To be conscious of free will,” says Stuart Mill, “must mean to be con­ scious, before I have decided, that I am able to decide either way.” This is really the way in which the defenders of free will understand it; and they assert that when we perform an action freely, some other action would have been “equally possible.” . . . Inversely, determinism claims that, given certain antecedents, only one resultant action was possible.  (173–4)

Bergson argues that both free will and determinism hinge on an under­ standing of temporality that is spatialized—imagined as a sequence of ­discrete (as in separate or isolated) events that, linked together, constitute movement in time. Static moments are strung together to create passage in a kind of “mechanical oscillation between the two points X and Y” (179), like “the march of an army on a map” (180). Bergson illustrates his point by turning to the figure of an army marching across a map. This may be confusing—but turn back to the two examples described above. Conrad im­agines his narrative as a stream that branches out in different directions. Fowles, though opting for the figure of a boxing match, tellingly places him­ self and his character in a train carriage. The spatial metaphors demonstrate why thinkers fail to grasp time on its own terms. The question of how time unfolds repeatedly turns to where time unfolds. Time transforms into space in the attempt to conceptualize or represent continuity.

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For Fear of “Drifting Unconsciously”  95 Such an understanding of temporal development necessarily falls short as time is never static. There are no X and Y on a map; experience is always in flux. X suggests a static moment, one that can be recaptured or linked into a series of static moments to imagine or artificially create movement. But, in fact, there is no X—a moment is never static. Once it has passed it is no longer what it was—it is constantly moving and evolving. Time is not a map—and we cannot envision ourselves (or our characters) moving through it as if it were. To visualize time with the aid of such a spatial figure, is to [represent] a thing and not a progress; [a thing that] corresponds, in its inertness, to a kind of stereotyped memory of the whole process of delib­ eration and the final decision arrived at [. . .] If I glance over a road marked on the map and follow it up to a certain point, there is nothing to prevent my turning back and trying to find out whether it branches off anywhere. But time is not a line along which one can pass again. Certainly, once it has elapsed, we are justified in picturing the successive moments as exter­ nal to one another and in thus thinking of a line traversing space; but it must then be understood that this line does not symbolize the time which is passing but the time which has passed.  (Time and Free Will 181–2)

To extrapolate from Bergson’s lesson, Conrad’s and Fowles’s authorial ges­ tures fail to rid their fiction of determinism because they do not account for temporal flux. Marlow may poke fun at Mrs. Fyne by stating that she is “as guileless of consequences as any determinist philosopher ever was” (Chance 63), but in championing free will his creator might be found guilty of a like offense. Once an author maps out his story, he has already fallen into the trap of determinism; he has betrayed the contingencies of duration. One of the ironies underlying Chance is that the self-same argument finds its fictional correlate in the story. Here, Marlow is cast in the role of Bergson and Mr. Fyne in that of the author whose spatial logic rids ex­peri­ ence of contingency. The illogicality of his method is neatly encapsulated in the oxymoronic title of his book, The Tramp’s Itinerary. The odd conjunction offers a useful illustration of the manner in which the freedoms of wander­ ing are lost in the codifications of spatial trajectories. Where Fyne “pound[s] along the road” (54), Marlow “drift[s]” (61). The temperamental mismatch between Marlow and Fyne repeatedly assumes metafictional significances. For Marlow, who does not know where they are going, the road extends into the unknown: “By a strange illusion

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96  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism the road appeared to run up against a lot of low stars at no very great ­distance, but as we advanced new stretches of whitey-brown ribbon seemed to come up from under the black ground” (55). In keeping with Conrad’s stated aim at the start, the journey seems to continue without design—and the implications are a form of abandonment of plot on the part of the writer himself. The only constant is the blank ribbon that, like that of a typewriter, continues to stretch on. Every twist in the road—or the story—is unforeseen. The passage, however, contains not one writer but two. Where Marlow’s feelings are in a state of “confusion,” Fyne can determine whether they are “engaged in a farce or in a tragedy” (54). His mapping of the journey means he knows which twists and turns will follow and where they will lead. Marlow’s predilection for a more relaxed drifting over a codified tele­ ology is seen as one of his abiding character traits from the start. His young interlocutor notes that his questions are put before the storyteller in order to keep “the ball rolling” (7). This is needed, in his estimation, because Marlow delights in delay and digression. Powell tells the young man, in turn, that Marlow is “the sort that’s always chasing some notion or other round and round his head just for the fun of the thing” (33). Again, the image is one of circularity rather than teleology, drifting rather than driving towards a conclusion. This certainly recalls Marlow’s introduction in Heart of Darkness where his famed storytelling is likened to a glow that  brings out a haze. In Chance a similar method of telling stories is brought to bear on the titular theme. Accident, Marlow explains, should not be regarded as a mishap but as “that which happens blindly and with­ out intelligent design” (36). Marlow’s method of thinking, processing, and presenting the events does not follow prescribed form. Where the Marlow of Lord Jim ac­know­ledges the power of destiny at the very outset, his counterpart in this later novel will not bend events to the tune of moral action. The young narrator registers this tendency in a telling figure he attaches to the older man. He remarks that Marlow “has the habit, or, say, the fault, of defective mantelpiece clocks, of suddenly stopping in the very fullness of the tick. If you have ever lived with a clock afflicted with that perversity, you know how vexing it is—such a stoppage” (283). The annoying habit serves as yet another indication of the fact that temporal unfolding has a freedom to it that does not bend to artificial teleologies or clock time. The narrative, much like the path, does not lead the pedestrian towards a goal. Path, pedestrian, and narrative all proceed without a pre­ determined destination.

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For Fear of “Drifting Unconsciously”  97 Marlow is not alone in fleshing out for the reader an experience of time that is durational rather than chronological. Powell offers a poignant illus­ tration of the same in the course of a short exchange with de Barral on the deck of the Ferndale: Mr. Powell was surprised not only by being engaged in conversation, but also by its character. It might have been the suggestion of the word uttered by this old man, but it was distinctly at that moment that he became aware of something unusual not only in this encounter but generally around him, about everybody, in the atmosphere. The very sea, with short flashes of foam bursting out here and there in the gloomy distances, the unchangeable, safe sea sheltering a man from all passions, except its own anger, seemed queer to the quick glance he threw to windward where the already effaced horizon traced no reassuring limit to the eye. In the expir­ ing, diffused twilight, and before the clouded night dropped its mysterious veil, it was the immensity of space made visible—almost palpable. Young Powell felt it. He felt it in the sudden sense of his isolation; the trust­worthy, powerful ship of his first acquaintance reduced to a speck, to something almost undistinguishable, the mere support for the soles of his two feet before that unexpected old man becoming so suddenly articulate in a darkening universe. [. . .] The occasion, or rather the want of occasion, for this conversation, had sharpened the perceptions of the unsophisticated second officer of the Ferndale. He was alive to the slightest shade of tone [. . .]. The strange words, the cautious tone, the whole person left a strong uneasiness in the mind of Mr. Powell. He started walking the poop in great mental confusion. He felt all adrift.  (292–4, my emphasis)

The repetition of the word “drift” at the end of the passage is telling. It serves as a refrain to tie together the author and his two narrators in their attempt to represent an experience of time that is not quantitative but qualitative. The effects recorded here offer a neat summary of the strength of such ex­peri­ence. Powell registers the present moment in the form of an overload of sensory input and affect. In a kind of slowing down or freezing of the moment, his being in the world is suddenly attended by heightened percep­ tive abilities and greater powers of intuition. Though the exchange with de Barral generates confusion, we sense that it is brought on by being more rather than less in tune with the human and natural world around him. Such heightened awareness does not fall neatly into the category of know­ ledge or insight. It exceeds logic. It is receptive and open-ended. It does not

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98  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism demand ready-made conclusions or preconceptions but rather leaves him with a sense of more to come. For Powell such an experience may be nothing more than a momentary awakening. In Marlow, however, such decelerations provide the founda­ tion for an abiding character trait which perfectly matches the author’s attitude towards chance in the Author’s Note. We recall that in the process of composition Conrad “[floats] in the calm water of pleasant speculation” (iv), thereby allowing contingency to determine the twists and turns of the plot. Conrad and Marlow are well-matched in their adherence to such a model of passage. A second network of motifs attached to the figure of drifting nevertheless suggests that they are just as well-matched in the ultimate betrayal of their commitment to contingency. For Conrad and Marlow both, the attempt to commit to chance in their method of string­ ing the narrative together repeatedly falters. We have seen that from a philosophical perspective, the failure to represent contingency may be relegated to the narrative convention of spatializing time. This philosophical insight finds a literary complement in a thematic rival for chance in the novel. Certain passages perfectly uphold the model to which Conrad commits at the start. Here, for example, Marlow explains why Flora should suffer as she does: Yes, that very young girl, almost no more than a child—this was what was going to happen to her. And if you ask me, how, wherefore, for what reason? I will answer you: Why, by chance! By the merest chance, as things do happen, lucky and unlucky, terrible or tender, important or unimportant; and even things which are neither, things so completely neutral in character that you would wonder why they do happen at all if you didn’t know that they, too, carry in their insignificance the seeds of further incalculable chances.  (100)

This account shows that happenstance cancels out any possibility of inten­ tional design. This is a haphazard chain of occurrences that are connected only in so far as each generates further permutations, further possibilities for realization. The unfolding of time delineated here is suggestive of a world in flux where each contingency creates further multiple possibilities, so that causal links are deemed illusory and determinism is made im­pos­sible. In the very same chapter, however, Fyne’s predicament reads as a re­asser­tion of the principle of cause and effect:

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For Fear of “Drifting Unconsciously”  99 [Fyne] feared future complications—naturally; a man of limited means, in a public position, his time not his own. Yes. He owned to me in the par­ lour of my farmhouse that he had been very much concerned then at the possible consequences. But as he was making this artless confession I said to myself that, whatever consequences and complications he might have imagined, the complication from which he was suffering now could never, never have presented itself to his mind. Slow but sure (for I conceive that the Book of Destiny has been written up from the beginning to the last page) it had been coming for something like six years—and now it had come. (128, my emphasis)

Fyne is burdened because he believes that choices have consequences; any decision he makes will set off a chain of events that will determine what is to come. In order to optimize his prospects—and Flora’s—he must weigh all the possibilities available to him and consider how they will play out before he can intervene. That Fyne becomes the exponent of causal connections is only natural in light of his systematic mapping of any possible path going forward, as evident in The Tramp’s Itinerary. Marlow’s aside compounds such rational calculations with the idea of moral action; a character’s devel­ opment is traced in accordance with the unfolding of a transcendental law or judgment. The book of destiny is long finished and passage in time does not develop so much as it unfolds towards a predetermined end. Such an experience of passage does not allow for contingency. Much like the letters carved on the face of the rock in Lord Jim, the development of Fyne’s char­ acter in time is measured against this atemporal, extraneous structure—not the haphazard subjective experience of duration. It is fitting then, that Fyne’s time is “not his own.” In context, the comment alludes to his professional and private life in the public eye. Symbolically, the turn of phrase may be understood to suggest that his life is simply the meting out of an artificial temporal construct. Time is the realization of a given fact. That Marlow expounds on the inevitability of an outcome already written in the book of destiny shows that he shares in Fyne’s determinism. And still, Marlow wavers between two models of historical progression. He wonders, “was [Flora] born to be a victim [. . .] or too luckless?” (309). Is her life a testa­ ment to the working of fate or luck? The question remains unanswered. The two models of passage differ not only in narrative design, but also in their moral implications. Where Fyne’s deliberation of the consequences of his choices necessarily calls for human responsibility and accountability, a world in flux that eschews the logic of punishment and reward renders the

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100  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism same obsolete. A world without clear causal links may lead to nihilistic abandonment, despair, and isolation. The Author’s Note demonstrates that the author is well aware of the stakes involved in promoting such a world­ view. Commenting on the novel’s popularity, he writes: This [success] gave me a considerable amount of pleasure, because what I  always feared most was drifting unconsciously into the position of a writer for a limited coterie; a position which would have been odious to me as throwing a doubt on the soundness of my belief in the solidarity of all mankind in simple ideas and in sincere emotions. (viii–ix, my emphasis)

The slippage observed here between contingency (as signaled by uncon­ scious drifting) and a loss of values (throwing doubt on simple ideas and sincere emotions) is telling.4 And it is apparent not only in the suggestive associative shift but also in the transition from the lexical choice of floating (to which he alluded earlier) to drifting. The words may be synonymous in so far as they describe movement without agency—but where the first is morally neutral, the second often functions in Conrad’s work as a symbol for the loss of a moral compass or the foreshadowing of misadventure. “Falk” provides a powerful example of the morally damning implications of such a form of movement: They had drifted south out of men’s knowledge. They failed to attract the attention of a lonely whaler, and very soon the edge of the polar ice-cap rose from the sea and closed the southern horizon like a wall. One morn­ ing they were alarmed by finding themselves floating amongst detached pieces of ice. But the fear of sinking passed away like their v­ igour, like their hopes; the shocks of the floes knocking against the ship’s side could not rouse them from their apathy: and the Borgmester Dahl drifted out again unharmed into open water. They hardly noticed the change. (229, my emphasis)

The breakdown of the steamer means they can no longer steer the ship. Drifting spells apathy, despair, the neglect of duty, and the exhaustion of the will. This is a story of degeneration, the backdrop for the transgression of the strictest of taboos. The Shadow-Line similarly testifies to the connection between drift and disaster. Here, the verb signals the tortuous spell encoun­ tered when the ship is finally at sea:

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For Fear of “Drifting Unconsciously”  101 Not that the evil spell held us always motionless. Mysterious currents drifted us here and there, with a stealthy power made manifest only by the changing vistas of the islands fringing the east shore of the Gulf. And there were winds, too, fitful and deceitful. They raised hopes only to dash them into the bitterest disappointment, promises of advance ending in lost ground, expiring in sighs, dying into dumb stillness in which the currents had it all their own way—their own inimical way.  (SL 83–4)

For a seaman, drifting is both professionally and morally nightmarish. It makes no sense. “What’s the good of letting go our hold of the ground only to drift, Mr. Burns?” (SL 75), the newly appointed captain asks his chief mate. These passages provide a moral gloss on Conrad’s Author’s Note to Chance. The turn from floating to drifting linguistically recasts contingency in a condemnatory light; chance spells the loss of values intimated by a weak or crippled com­ mand that here doubles as an author’s failure to fulfill his duty to his readers. The odd slippage from the theme of contingency to the question of values can thus be read as a retraction of the gesture with which Conrad opens the Note. The introduction of the theme of chance as the novel’s overarching principle gives way to an uneasy repudiation. The Author’s Note unfolds as a rather ambivalent manifesto on chance; it begins by promoting the theme as a new model for stringing together events in narrative, and concludes by reflecting on the moral risks attending such artistic innovation. The method to which Conrad commits at the outset is questioned and the passive or leisurely atti­ tude with which Marlow is associated throughout is implicitly faulted. Two conflated variables are at work in this retraction. The first follows the choice of an audience and the way in which different artistic visions appeal to different readers; the second traces a continuum between aesthetic form and moral responsibility. In both cases, the author’s choice (of audi­ ence, of aesthetic or moral commitment) has serious implications for the value of his message. The odd conjunction of these two contradictory statements on chance in the Author’s Note recalls a tension traced in the introduction to this study, between a wish to be ‘modern’ and the wish to be familiar, between commit­ ting to an aesthetic that might be appreciated by a small circle of cultural innovators and the courting of widespread recognition. That the debate resur­ faces here with renewed force is not surprising—the novel marks Conrad’s first great commercial success. The pleasure such public recognition affords to an author who previously insisted that he does not write for the masses, requires some nuanced psychological readjustment.

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102  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism At an early point in his writing life (the letter is addressed to Baroness Janina de Brunnow and dates back to October 1897), Conrad memorably makes the following statement: I am not a popular author and probably I never shall be. That does not sadden me at all, for I have never had the ambition to write for the allpowerful masses. I haven’t the taste for democracy – and democracy hasn’t the taste for me. I have gained the appreciation of a few select spirits and I do not doubt I shall be able to create a public for myself, limited it is true, but one which will permit me to earn my bread. I do not dream of fortune; besides, one does not find it in an inkwell. But I confess to you I dream of peace, a little reputation, and the rest of my life devoted to the service of Art and free from material worries.  (CL 1 390)

Conrad’s comment is in keeping with a literary stance often attributed to the moderns. As Joyce Piell Wexler writes, “modernists were contemptuous of writers—and anyone else—who courted a wide audience for profit” (1).5 Though Conrad is happy to reiterate the sentiment at other points in his career, there are also other moments—much as that described above— wherein such aesthetic snobbery is undermined by a desire for recognition. The unusual slippage between contingency and artistic responsibility as noted in the Author’s Note suggests that Conrad’s indecision on his target audience finds its metonymical expression in a certain ambivalence in the treatment of chance in the novel. To court chance in the stylistic handling of the narrative is to appeal to a “limited coterie”; it is to be “modern.” To pro­ vide the moral anchors that promote the simple ideals on which humanity thrives is to write to a wider readership.6 The tension between a choice of contingency and a commitment to val­ ues is finally resolved by way of a conceptual slippage. The idea of drifting is made to serve rationally sanctified categories in order to make the novel’s message accessible and morally palatable. Conrad does not finally choose between a “modern” theme where chance is suggestive of an open-ended restructuring of narrative or a foreclosed, traditional form of writing that hinges on familiar generic conventions. Instead, he glosses over the op­pos­ ition by keeping the theme and abandoning its radical potential. He domes­ ticates contingency but keeps it as a label to denote the progressiveness of his artistic aim. In order to demonstrate how Conrad subtly orchestrates this refashioning of the concept we return, once again, to the temperamen­ tal battle waged between Marlow and Fyne.

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For Fear of “Drifting Unconsciously”  103 The motif of pace recurs as a marker of opposition between the two c­haracters. At the start, the distinction appears to embody that division described above between Fyne’s determinism and Marlow’s openness, between the fast and the slow. “What really jarred upon me,” Marlow says, “was the rate of his walking” (54). “Under the provocation of having to keep up with his pace,” Marlow adds, “I began to dislike him actively” (55). Marlow’s aversion to Fyne’s speed comes from his investment in its polar opposite. As he explains: “To drift is the only reposeful sort of motion (ask any ship if it isn’t)” (61). Such a form of deceleration coheres with the sign­ posts associated with a philosophy of becoming, as outlined at the start of this study. The policing of the difference described above—between chance as a symbol of openness and closure, between receptiveness and logic—is ­particularly striking in a passage where Marlow discusses the difference between information and knowledge: “You must not think,” went on Marlow after a pause, “that on that morn­ ing with Fyne I went consciously in my mind over all this, let us call it information; no, better say, this fund of knowledge which I had, or rather which existed, in me in regard to de Barral. Information is something one goes out to seek and puts away when found as you might do a piece of lead: ponderous, useful, unvibrating, dull. Whereas knowledge comes to one, this sort of knowledge, a chance acquisition preserving in its repose a fine resonant quality.  (88)

The excerpt is significant in the way that it brings the terms of the op­pos­ ition described in the Author’s Note to bear on the question of knowledge. Marlow distinguishes between knowledge and information by tracing a distinction between passivity and willed action, between sensory stimuli and the utility of reason, between an embracing of lived experience and its deadened counterpart. Information is that which is willingly sought and used with a clear end in mind. The outcome is likened to a piece of lead, a Conradian commonplace for the insipid.7 In contrast, knowledge is the product of contingency, the receptivity of a fully lived life. Unlike its “unvi­ brating” other, it is resonant, vibrating, and slow. The passage begins by reiterating the significance of chance, passivity, and deceleration, suggesting the knowledge Marlow describes is one with a philosophy of becoming and hinges not on reason but on sensory input. It signals an openness to experience, to chance and the unforeseen. To read

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104  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism on, however, is to encounter a slippage from becoming to being. The same metonymies—deceleration and receptivity—are gradually yoked to a phil­oso­phy of being. Unlike a deceleration that dramatizes a staying of judgment and openness to flux, it emerges as an invitation to conceptual logic. Marlow does not wish to record the multiplicity of his impressions so much as make them cohere with the known categories of thought. Reflection allows for the transformation of a myriad of impressions into a lucid message. One of the telling signs of this transition is the way in which Marlow removes himself from the world of experience. It transpires that the chance acquisition to which he alludes is not the product of experience, but of isolated cogitation. Marlow reverts to the sanctuary of his parlor, thereby re­instat­ing the separation between subject and object as a measure for clearsighted and objective observation. The figurative insistence on light com­ plements this transition. Against the symbolic darkness and its metonymical derivatives in fog, clouds, mist, and blindness that attend moments of sus­ pended action in earlier Marlovian tales, Chance slows down into light: But [English weather’s] fine days are the best for stopping at home, to read, to think, to muse—even to dream; in fact to live fully, intensely and quietly, in the brightness of comprehension, in that receptive glow of the mind, the gift of the clear, luminous and serene weather.  (88)

The receptive glow described here attaches not to the elusive and confusing haze associated with Marlow in Heart of Darkness, but to the clear luminos­ ity of moral and epistemological certitude—“the brightness of comprehen­ sion.” Marlow wishes to master experience, much perhaps, as Fyne wishes to conquer the road. Such slowing down marks a return to models of sub­ jectivity associated with the Enlightenment, where cogitation and being are synonymous. The mind is autonomous, whole and self-determining. It is a safety net of conscious ratiocination that offers an antidote to the fear of drifting unconsciously. The allusion to Hamlet in those phrasal cadences at the start of the pas­ sage is indicative of the way in which the idea of drifting no longer func­ tions as a signpost for open-endedness and the eschewing of transcendental logic. As noted earlier, the play holds action and cogitation apart. The first is associated with progress, the second with passivity and inertia. The strong will of those who act is measured against the burden of understanding of those who do not. In order to know one must be separated from the action;

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For Fear of “Drifting Unconsciously”  105 it is only a remote gaze that allows for insight. This division between willed action and passive reflection may be brought to bear on the distinction between Fyne and Marlow. For Marlow, Fyne’s pedestrianism is indicative of single-minded blindness. Stephen Donovan notes that “Marlow twice remarks that Fyne’s brand of pedestrianism, far from stimulating his per­ ceptual faculties, appears to have impaired his ability to deal with new ­people and situations” (105). Alternatively, Marlow’s “nostalgia for an older, Romantic view of walking” is “an exercise of the imagination as much as of the body” (105); it is a “peripatetic philosophy” that is “moderate as well as impressionable” (106). Though Donovan sees Marlow’s comment as a Romantic throwback, it can also be read in relation to a more contemporary philosophical model.8 A life experienced fully and intensely may be associated with the senti­ ments professed in early twentieth-century writing. However, the need to master such experience through categorical logic is to betray the ideology of such life philosophers as Henri Bergson and William James, who believe “there is no essential form behind the stream of sensory appearances; there are as many ‘essences’ as there are points of view through which to order ex­peri­ence.” Such thinkers hold that “what our rational constructs reveal about the world is relative to the nature of our involvement with it” (Schwartz 18). Marlow’s idea that “the onlookers see most of the game” (LJ 224)—an idea reiterated in Chance in the phrase: “an unexpected insight into motives, as of disinterested lookers-on at a game” (33)—returns thinking to a mech­ an­is­tic, scientific discourse that relies on the autonomy of the perceiving subject and his separation from the objects in his field of vision. Such a view has little currency at the time of the novel’s composition. Collapsing diverse models of thinking under a single, shared idea, Schwartz writes: Bergson’s “real duration,” James’s “stream of consciousness,” Bradley’s “immediate experience,” and Nietzsche’s “chaos of sensations”—all of these expressions designate the original presentation of reality beneath the instrumental conventions we use to order it. Philosophers varied consid­ erably in their description of the sensory flux, but they agreed on the essential points. All of them employed the stream of sensations as a coun­ terpoise to the abstract systems that organize reality, and they regarded it as a kind of repository for aspects of experience that we habitually ignore. The opposition between abstraction and sensation is one of the most prominent features of turn-of-the-century thought.  (19–20)

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106  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism The terms offered at the end give expression to the tension we have already identified in the treatment of chance, between a notion of drifting that sig­ nals an openness to experience and one that transforms the confusions of sensation and affect into known logical categories. The first is encapsulated in sensation; it is an unmediated experience of the present. The subject is in time; he experiences passage as it happens. The second is announced by the term abstraction. This occurs at a remove from the action; it marks a freez­ ing of time. In an essay on “Slow Going” in the work of Beckett, Steven Connor re­iter­ates the distinctions we have traced so far. One mode of experience (noted above as abstraction) is associated with agency and cognitive con­ trol; the other (sensation) is not codified in logic, cognitive processing, or conscious thought. Though Conrad believes the latter is associated with a falling out of favor with a wide readership, for Connor, it is precisely this method that makes Beckett’s writing great. Unpacking the significances of this new, unconventional form of slowing down—what we have associated with a process of becoming—Connor shows how it must be antithetical to the recognizable traits of its more conventional counterpart: In the condition I am going to keep on calling slow going, [. . .] there can be no convergence of the one who undergoes and the one who perceives the time of elapsing. There can be no deliberation. We cannot live at the rate at which we nevertheless must live; we cannot live in the time that it will over and over again turn out that we were all along living out. Life, and the pivotal moments of a life, the moments after which nothing was ever the same again, will all in the end be, in the concluding words of Beckett’s play that Time, ‘come and gone in no time’ (CDW, p. 395). ‘No time’ here seems to mean not only ‘in the blink of an eye’ but also some­ thing like my slow going; the immeasurable, unexperienceable drift of accretion and degradation, the insensible process that one cannot live slowly enough to live knowingly, because then one would be getting ahead of oneself, living more quickly than the process which lives itself out in the our living. Going slowly is something we attempt to do to time; slow going is what time does to us, through us.  (154, my emphasis)

Connor’s use of the term “drift” helps us apply the insight offered on Beckett to Conrad’s poetics. It also inadvertently provides a gloss on Conrad’s fear of “drifting unconsciously.” For Connor, drifting is associated with living life fully, with a receptivity to multi-sensory experience and the insights

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For Fear of “Drifting Unconsciously”  107 afforded by intuition.9 Though such experience is not what we might term “unconscious,” it is nevertheless incommensurate with the notion of living knowingly, in so far as formal knowledge is concerned. This in­com­men­sur­ abil­ity is the product of a divide in the human subject between the experi­ encing and the knowing self, a split that recalls the division between doing and thinking, as observed in Hamlet. Deleuze describes the moment in the history of philosophy when this split emerges in the form of a crisis: When Kant puts rational theology into question, in the same stroke he introduces a kind of disequilibrium, a fissure or crack in the pure Self of the “I think”, an alienation in principle, insurmountable in principle: the subject can henceforth represent its own spontaneity only as that of an Other [. . .]. A Cogito for a dissolved Self: the Self of ‘I think’ includes in its essence a receptivity of intuition in relation to which I is already an other. It matters little that synthetic identity – and, following that, the morality of practical reason – restore the integrity of the self, of the world and of God, thereby preparing the way for post-Kantian syntheses: for a brief moment we enter into the schizophrenia in principle which characterises the high­ est power of thought, and opens Being directly on to difference, despite all the mediations, all the reconciliations, of the concept.  (Difference 58)

Deleuze highlights the gap between experiencing and knowing—a fissure in the idea of the unified self. Conrad himself repeatedly notes this in­com­ men­sur­abil­ity and works it into the fiction; it emerges even here, in his sug­ gestion of drifting as that which occurs unconsciously. The drifting subject appears split—shorn of the passive self whose logical computations process the experiences of his phenomenological other. It is also registered in Marlow’s comment in the novel where he notes that “our experience never gets into our blood and bones. It always remains outside of us” (Chance 282). Though Marlow sees this division as occurring outside rather than inside the subject, the descriptions are similar in so far as they connote the same mismatch between experience and understanding. The syntheses to which Deleuze alludes in the passage are suggestive of an artificial mending of this split.10 The reflective subject comprehends experience in thought thereby transforming what are essentially two pro­ cesses (experience and its cognitive reshaping) into a coherent unity. But the twentieth century unmasks such a unity as a hoax. Beckett articulates this well in his comment on the difficulty of writing: “The material of

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108  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism ex­peri­ence is not the material of expression and I think the distress you feel, as a writer, comes from a tendency on your part to assimilate the two” (Gunn 13). The radical nature of what Connor proposes is an attempt to bypass this artificial uniformity and consider experience as passive synthe­ sis. It is a method to rethink the human outside the coordinates of agency, control, and rational thought. Conrad’s reluctance to give in to the passivity of drifting reads less as an existential than an aesthetic comment. The artistic method with which he associates drifting is conflated in his mind with “throwing a doubt on the soundness of my belief in the solidarity of all mankind in simple ideas and in sincere emotions” (Chance ix). We might suppose, then, that Chance (or chance) is fashioned in light of a more traditional philosophy because the author wants to communicate something meaningful to the audience. The commitment of “modern” writing to the representation of flux, sensory and affective overload might not be as conducive to a communication of the simple ideas that are both appealing and necessary for the readers as a more traditional delivery might be. Conrad wants to offer his readers something tangible against the suspicion that the ambiguity of his prose has left his readers confused and frustrated. What emerges, then, is a tension between his wish to appeal to two different audiences—a literary milieu and the general public. The first expects narrative innovation, an attempt to repre­ sent a life that is not determined by generic conventions and the rigid struc­ ture of plot. The second is partial to a clear plot and a clear message. The wish to celebrate that which, according to Marlow, occurs without design, is accompanied by the fear that such a paradigm renders the novel’s moral and cultural lessons obsolete. This is not to say that Conrad here decides to betray the artistic tradition to which he is indebted. Echoing the principles of a tradition of art going back to Edgar Allan Poe’s “Heresy of the Didactic,” Conrad writes in this same Author’s Note that “no one had ever done me the injury . . . of char­ging a single one of my pages with didactic purpose.” Conrad eschews the idea of art as a form of schooling; his fiction is not “practical, improving, enlighten­ ing or even revealing” (CL 7 560). A commitment to form, however, is not a commitment to artistic solipsism. The comment in the Note is concluded with a no less telling statement: “every subject in the region of intellect and emotion must have a morality of its own if it is treated at all sincerely and even the most artful of writers will give himself (and his morality) away in about every third sentence” (viii–ix). In writing Chance Conrad does, in fact, give himself away. But perhaps only in so far as he mirrors the

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For Fear of “Drifting Unconsciously”  109 sentiment pronounced by his suffering protagonist in Under Western Eyes: “to be understood appeared extremely fascinating” (UWE 297). Such considerations might help elucidate the concerted efforts to eradi­ cate the potential hazards associated with the model of contingency that inspires the novel’s title. The idea of drifting as associated with the loss of that shadowing, knowing, processing self must be retracted or in some way corrected. We find precisely such a correction in Marlow’s comment that “To drift is the only reposeful sort of motion (ask any ship if it isn’t) and therefore consistent with thoughtfulness” (61, my italics). We are allowed the experience of drifting, then—an experience that might be seen to cohere with contingency still—however, what we no longer have is that “modern” expression of a passive drifting towards the unknown. Drift is made to cohere with more traditional conceptualizations of being when it is attached to a reflective, policing, disinterested agency, a subject who is privileged with an external or hermetically separate vantage point. The significance of this reformulation is brought to bear on the responsibility of the author. The following exchange between Marlow and young Powell offers a neat expres­ sion of this retraction and the reasons behind it. Marlow begins: “Luckily, people, whether mature or not mature (and who really is ever mature?) are for the most part quite incapable of understanding what is happening to them: a merciful provision of nature to preserve an average amount of sanity for working purposes in this world . . . ” “But we, my dear Marlow, have the inestimable advantage of understanding what is happening to others,” I struck in. “Or at least some of us seem to. Is that too a provision of nature? And what is it for? Is it that we may amuse ourselves gossiping about each other’s affairs? You for instance seem—” “I don’t know what I seem,” Marlow silenced me, “and surely life must be amused somehow. It would be still a very respectable provision if it were only for that end. But from that same provision of understanding, there springs in us compassion, charity, indignation, the sense of solidarity; and in minds of any largeness an inclination to that indulgence which is next door to affection.  (117, my emphases)

Marlow here reiterates that split between a subject who knows and one who experiences. Rather than offer an artificial reconstruction of a unified self— a construct that, as argued in Chapter  2, is no longer viable—the split is assuaged through an emphasis on the responsibility of the observer. The narrator, the storyteller, and, by extension, the author, must fulfill the role of

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110  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism the missing, cogitating self. Slowing down is brought into the service of a knowing observer, one who will provide answers and glosses on those ex­peri­ences that inevitably elude us. This responsibility is impressed upon the reader through the provision of a whole network of linked professions—writers, reporters, financiers—all committed to the extraction of profit or the preaching of misguided ideolo­ gies rather than the espousing of the humanist ideals on which a healthy community thrives. Marlow sees himself as a singular voice in the din, a man conscious of the necessity to offer more well-meaning gestures. Flora, Captain Anthony, Young Powell, and the Fynes receive the benefit of his help. And though the implied author occasionally reminds the reader that Marlow’s help is not quite what he himself believes it to be (Flora’s comment that it is the dog and not his own intervention that prevents her from jump­ ing is a case in point), we do sense that behind the ironies attached to Marlow’s efforts to assist and comfort the people he encounters there is real underlying authorial sentiment.

Marlow Goes to a Wedding Chance diverges from previous works not only by offering a moral rati­ocin­ ation to the reassertion of the split between knowledge and experience, but also by committing to a different thematic focus than that explored in Lord Jim. The earlier novel is narcissistic through and through. The narrative not only proceeds from an investigation of how to survive an inflated sense of self but is also driven by an impulse that, at least initially, is self-serving. As Marlow wonders at the outset: “Was it for my own sake that I wished to find some shadow of an excuse for that young fellow whom I had never before, but whose appearance alone added a touch of personal concern to the thoughts suggested by the knowledge of his weakness?” (LJ 51). The exploration of the tyranny of the narcissistic ego is abandoned in the later novel. Here, as Marlow tells Powell, the narrator’s responsibility is to promote “compassion, charity, indignation, the sense of solidarity; and in minds of any largeness an inclination to that indulgence which is next door to affection” (Chance 117). The novel is no longer an exploration of the dark recesses of the self; it is about living well with others. The shift coincides with the procuring of a heroine to take the place of the hero who precedes her. Any attempt to attribute meaning to the co-presence

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For Fear of “Drifting Unconsciously”  111 of these two changes hinges on authorial intent. It would be a futile exercise to decipher whether the new theme is a necessary adjustment to fit the domestic context or whether it signals Conrad’s wish to take a different direction in his art wherein he might celebrate the simple ideas extolled in the Author’s Note.11 Rather than speculate on causes and motivations for the transition, we can look to its effects. The coincidence of these two shifts is suggestive of a retraction similar to that traced above in Conrad’s treatment of chance. To reiterate—Conrad does not finally choose between a “modern” theme where chance is suggestive of an open-ended restructur­ ing of narrative or a foreclosed, traditional form of writing that hinges on familiar generic conventions. Instead, he glosses over the opposition by keeping the theme and abandoning its radical potential. He domesticates contingency but keeps it as a label to denote the progressiveness of his artistic aim. A similar dynamic is at work, I would argue, in the coincidence of the shift in gender and theme. The encasing of this particular moral message in a feminized setting detracts from its impact. Instead of arguing for the uni­ versal significance of the values extolled in the novel, Conrad promotes them in a setting where they are rendered virtually meaningless. Such val­ ues as caring, charity, and affection are worked into the feminine setting as clichés—so familiar as to become unnoticeable.12 It may well be that Chance offers a correction of Stein’s diagnosis in Lord Jim, where, if Jim is to survive the demands of his ego ideal he must “in the destructive element immerse” (LJ 214). The later novel does not allow for such sympathies. It dictates the need to think of others before one’s self; it clearly extols the lesson that the community and its needs are more important than one’s ego ideal. Needless to say, such a lesson is already insinuated in Jim’s story. We sense the indig­ nation of employers abandoned without notice; we note the suffering of the Patusan community who are led astray by their cherished leader and we feel for Jewel’s loss. Jim’s narcissism is his undoing. Still, the novel does not offer such a clear condemnation of egoism as we find in Chance. Here, specula­ tion on and investigation into the romantic ideal are replaced by a clearly worded message as to its evils. And yet rather than materialize as the author’s clarification of the previous novel’s message, the reverberations of key scenes in the later novel read as a rewriting that is sanctioned by the dictates of feminine norms of conduct. Chance thus explores contingency without committing to its confusions; it offers a new message without com­ mitting to its universal significance.

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112  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism Flora’s character recalls Jim’s in a number of ways, not least of which is her difficulty of expression: The very effort she had to make in conveying the impression to Mrs. Fyne, in remembering the details, in finding adequate words—or any words at all—was in itself a terribly enlightening, an ageing process. She had talked a long time, uninterrupted by Mrs. Fyne, childlike enough in her wonder and pain, pausing now and then to interject the pitiful query: “It was cruel of her. Wasn’t it cruel, Mrs. Fyne?” [. . .] The girl was like a creature struggling under a net. [. . .] She sat up in bed with a sudden wild motion as if to jump out and flee away from the sound of the words which had just passed her own lips.  (138–40)

Her efforts to free herself from a linguistic net recall Jim’s trouble in the courthouse, where he is likened to a creature “finding itself imprisoned within an enclosure of high stakes” and later in Marlow’s room, where he “fought and gasped, struggling for his breath” before rushing “out on the verandah as if to fling himself over” (LJ 177). The motif of escape—here rendered in the figure of jumping out—simi­ larly connects the two novels. But where Jim’s and Brierly’s leaps are fueled by egotistic instincts, Flora’s consideration for others finally sways her from committing such an act. Recounting her experience on the cliff, she tells Marlow: “I was so miserable that I could think only of myself. This was mean. It was cruel too” (213). Her words serve as a striking condemnation of such a self-centered impulse. The egotistic considerations to which so much psychological interest is devoted in the earlier novel are dismissed as monstrous in Chance. Mrs. Fyne voices what might perhaps be the novel’s most transgressive idea when she asks Marlow: “Why should a girl be more considerate than anyone else? More than any man, for instance?” (58). She further proposes that a woman even has “the right to go out of existence without considering anyone’s feelings or convenience” (59). Marlow has nothing but contempt for such suggestions: “Mrs. Fyne’s individualist woman-doctrine, naïvely unscrupu­ lous, flitted through my mind. The salad of unprincipled notions she put into these girl-friends’ heads!” (62-63). The complexity with which Marlow observes self-interested motivations in Jim’s character is replaced here with the simplicity of moral repugnance. The difference between Jim’s behavior and the dictates of Mrs. Fyne’s policy are essentialized in a single word— woman. Where Marlow sympathized with the young man’s difficulty in the

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For Fear of “Drifting Unconsciously”  113 earlier novel, here he speaks on behalf of those values that Jim’s choices repeatedly undermine. In his will to serve his own ego ideal Jim sacrifices the feelings of his employers, his friends, and his partner. His narcissistic vulnerability to Gentleman Brown’s rhetoric results in the death of Dain Waris and the betrayal of Doramin and his people. Rather than contemplate the ironies attending the destructive potential of narcissism, rather than allow his heroine to immerse in the destructive element, Marlow preaches the necessity for compassion, self-sacrifice, and charity. Critical attention to the refashioning of the narrator in Chance might attribute the difference to a loss of the complexity and depth that was formerly characteristic of his narrative style. Robert Hampson proposes that the “Marlow of Chance lacks the subtlety, sensitivity and intensity of the Marlow of Lord Jim. Indeed, as a number of critics have observed, this Marlow can be trivial, long-winded, and even obtuse” (Betrayal 201). For Ruppel, “this last version of Marlow in Chance has almost nothing in com­ mon with earlier Marlows, whose tolerance, generosity, humanity, and humility concerning their own limitations contrast so sharply with this Marlow’s conceited pride in his superior point of view” (137 fn 9). Martin Bock sees him as “indiscreet, overbearing, intrusive, even voyeuristic,” and concludes that he is “completely unlikeable” (171). We might attribute Marlow’s changed attitude to the object of his study to his gender politics. Ellen Burton Harrington is exemplary in arguing that Marlow is “im­prisoned by his own illusions and ideologies about gender” (73). Though such a line of interpretation might help explain the differences between the two novels, it is limited in so far as the changes observed in Chance cannot be relegated to Marlow’s narration alone. The new value scheme promoted in the later novel exceeds the musings of a potentially misogynist narrator and may well serve the broader cultural context in which the novel is written. By locating such qualities as care and self-sacrifice in a heroine, Conrad avoids what might have been read, in the day, as the effeminization of a male hero. Flora is Jim in many ways. But she is also a correction of Jim’s flaws. Where Jim is a model for a modern-day anti-hero, Flora is a model that can—and perhaps should—be emulated. Much as the theme of chance is domesticated in the familiar forms of generic convention and is thereby stripped of its potential to restructure narrative anew, the shift described in the novel’s value scheme is rendered familiar by being placed in a gendered setting. Susan Jones has suggested that the rewriting of the work for publication in novel form is indicative of “Conrad’s sense of freedom to critique the serial’s demands for conventional

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114  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism explication and its fulfillment of readerly assumptions” (“Conrad’s Critique” 295). Such revisions notwithstanding, the values promoted in the novel are already so codified in gendered norms of behavior that they do little more than fulfill readers’ expectations; the complexity of moral questioning seen in previous novels is reduced here through the known, and the significance of the simple ideas and sincere feelings announced in the Author’s Note is lost in clichés. We hardly view the novel as calling for the formation of a new hero who would champion charity, sacrifice, and virtue. Thomas Mann suggests that “one of the features that had always distinguished literature from popular fiction was that it ‘may seriously challenge one’s attitudes and values’ ” (Wexler 2). If this is the case, Chance appears to fall neatly into the latter category. Where the novel does demand some adjustment on the part of the reader is in its domestication of the narrator. Marlow is reimagined in Chance not on the deck of a yacht or against a teeming jungle, not in a dusty far-eastern port, or a ship at sea, but in a parlor. It is here that he listens to Fyne’s “artless confession” (128), a striking contrast to the public setting of the hotel and its globe-trotting guests where he hears Jim’s “artful dodges” in accounting for his experiences on the Patna. Marlow’s attitudes to questions of gender appear to be affected by the changed context. His self-professed “composite temperament” is checked, in a rather obscure and perhaps sug­ gestive way, by his being, “by definition” and “conviction, a man” (146). The odd comment has generated a number of critical glosses. Hampson sees Marlow’s character as indicative of “an uneasiness of a conflict in relation to the heterosexuality and the masculinity that he asserts” (Conrad’s Secrets 110). Bock argues that, “like the new woman of his own day,” Marlow “is liberated from the confines of his earlier gender roles”; “modulating from a conserva­ tive, masculinist anti-feminist to a progressive, feminine anti-masculinist” (172–3). He concludes that: Chance thus becomes a tale of male liberation that retains an essential­ ist position on matters pertaining to sexuality but that rejects the ­culturally constructed gender roles. Such roles, Conrad suggests, unduly restrain men by inhibiting the development of feminine sensibilities and imprison women by limiting their options in life. The Marlow of Chance thus recants the Nordaudian sentiments uttered by the narrator of The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” who warned against the dangers of “becoming highly humanized, tender, complex, excessively decadent, . . . over-civilised” (NN 139).  (174)

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For Fear of “Drifting Unconsciously”  115 The same critics that criticize Marlow’s character as it presents itself in the first parts of the novel thus readily admit that in its denouement, Chance offers its narrator (and perhaps its author) a redemption of sorts. Following Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan’s suggestion that Marlow undergoes an education through his encounters in the novel (“Textuality” 59), Hampson shows how “Marlow’s behavior towards Flora displays a sense of responsibility quite lacking in his earlier utterances” and that “the aestheticizing distance he has maintained earlier also gives way before his compassion” (Conrad’s Secrets 111). I would take such narratives of recovery or education further in arguing that, in its concluding pages, Chance not only provides its luckless heroine with a happy conclusion but that it does the same for its luckless hero. Marlow suffers for Conrad. He is a naysayer, a wanderer cast in the role of Coleridge’s ancient mariner. He is an outcast destined to spread his gos­ pel wherever he can in an attempt to work through his experiences. And much like the mariner’s, the repetitive nature of his enterprise would sug­ gest he fails to do so. In Chance Conrad brings his garrulous narrator back from the cold. Coleridge’s mariner, Marlow’s intertextual double, concludes his role by denying the hapless wedding guest the ability to resume his place among the revelers. In the last Marlovian tale Conrad’s narrator is liberated from the mariner’s shadow. Marlow’s retirement comes with a sanctioned entry into the chapel. He will neither stay the wedding nor prevent the wed­ ding guests from attending. Indeed, Marlow serves as a catalyst for the sec­ ond wedding and promises to take part in the celebration. The narrator’s transformation also includes the correction of the hint of the exotic with which he is labeled in Heart of Darkness. The anonymous narrator likens him in the novella to “an idol” (HD 46) and “a meditating Buddha” (50). In Chance Marlow jocosely remarks that he is “not exactly a pagan” (Chance 447); he may still be “lanky, loose, quietly composed in var­ ied shades of brown robbed of every vestige of gloss,” but such markers are attributed to “a predisposition to congestion of the liver” (32). And much as Marlow is thus domesticated in the novel so is his influence.13 In the previ­ ous works his exotic otherness appears to touch his listeners in an effect akin to contamination. In keeping with the haunting effect of Coleridge’s mariner, the omniscient narrator of Lord Jim describes Marlow’s audience dispersing with a sense of isolating enervation, “as if the last image of that incomplete story, its incompleteness itself, and the very tone of the speaker, had made discussion in vain and comment impossible. Each of them seemed to carry away his own impression, to carry it away with him like a secret” (LJ 338). In Chance, Marlow’s story has no such influence. What his story

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116  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism produces in his interlocutor is neither confusion, nor regret, nor ex­ist­en­tial angst, but a grin. Marlow’s last words are directed at young Powell: “What are you grinning at in this sarcastic manner? I am not afraid of going to church with a friend” (Chance 447). In a final departure from the other Marlovian tales, the work does not conclude by framing Marlow. His are the last words in the novel. The thematic and stylistic reconfigurations of his character ensure that Marlow concludes his service for the author no longer as he who tears men asunder, but as a man who brings the community together and takes part in its celebrations. The abiding image with which the novel concludes is that of community, companionship, and mutual care. Being-with is no longer conflated with the dangers associated with the per­ meability of the modernist subject as seen in Chapter 2; it is here a marker of moral and human triumph, a viable alternative to the temptations and dangers of narcissistic isolation. History suggests that the novel spells something of the same fate for its author. In the course of his search for the shipping office before securing his post on the Ferndale, Powell happens upon a clerk in a dusty dungeon-like room. The clerk leaves an indelible impression on the younger man: “I won­ der sometimes whether he has succeeded in writing himself into liberty and a pension at last, or had to go out of his gas-lighted grave straight into that other dark one where nobody would want to intrude” (11). In writing Chance, Conrad may have done just this. He writes himself out of the self-imposed seclusion and poverty of a writer whose work targets a “limited coterie.” That he is alike liberated from the writing desk is in question; but perhaps he succeeds in conveying to a wider audience his “belief in the solidarity of all mankind in simple ideas and in sincere emotions” (ix). The generic and stylistic turns taken in Chance may have contributed to its public success, but the tension with which its pages are filled testifies to a deep-seated ambivalence on the purpose of art. Conrad was committed to the idea that literalness and explicitness “are fatal to the glamour of all artis­ tic work, robbing it of all suggestiveness, destroying all illusion”; as he would add, “nothing is more clear than the utter insignificance of explicit state­ ment and also its power to call attention away from things that matter in the region of art” (CL 7 457). Susan Jones has suggested we may view the novel as fulfilling such artistic purpose: “The story is constantly punctuated by elusive gaps and hiatuses, and the representation of the female protagonist evades its narrators’ assumptions about her identity.” Chance, she concludes, “lends itself more closely to modernist writing” (“Modernism” 108). Though this is certainly a productive way of reading the novel and redeeming its

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For Fear of “Drifting Unconsciously”  117 message, this chapter finds such open-ended questions to be repeatedly glossed over, overshadowed throughout by an emphasis on “the brightness of comprehension” (Chance 88). In a veritable contradiction of Conrad’s statements about the power of suggestion, Chance repeatedly shows itself to conform to the dictates of a different conception of art, one that is in accord with Marlow’s conception of human capability: “The purely human reality is capable of lyricism but not of abstraction. Nothing will serve for its under­ standing but the evidence of rational linking up of characters and facts” (Chance 310). I have demonstrated that such a view cannot be seen as the ironic projections of a single voice in the novel—Conrad’s own ambivalence as evident in the Author’s Note and the incongruity between the novel’s title and its epigraph show these sentiments spill over into the paratext. Fyne, Flora, and the young narrator also contribute to the promotion of a different view of art. “Simplicity,” the latter notes, “is a good counsellor” (33). While a narrative tailored to becoming demands the detranscendentaliza­ tion of perspective, the recorporealization of the cognitive subject, and the revalorization of time over space, Chance once again separates the subject and object of observation, spatializes time, and falls back upon the universal ideas owing to conceptual logic. Much as the novel domesticates contin­ gency and morality, it domesticates Marlow, too. The novels that follow Chance do not support the suggestion that such a choice of artistic direction will be a lasting commitment. But it certainly has an impact on the artistic legacy of the author and the narrator with which he is so often associated. Conrad admonishes his friend Richard Curle for promoting his reputation as “a gloomy, depressing author” (CL 7 462) and objects to “being called a ‘tragedian,’ ” an appellation he finds “shocking” (458). Chance is his redemption. With the publication of this novel Conrad is rid—if only fleetingly—of such a reputation; and Marlow follows suit. No longer a wanderer challenging the simple truths that allow a community to prosper, the famed narrator retires in the guise of a man who would support the abiding power of those same truths to hold a community together.

Notes 1. Harkness grounds his argument in the mismatch between the novel’s title and its epigraph. He writes: “the epigraph contradicts the title. Chance (accident) does not govern life. If the believers in chance had seen deeply enough into the apparently uncaused events, they would have perceived that life is not a matter

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118  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism of chance. Conrad is saying, hence, that even in this tale, with its great amount of pure chance and accident, there is a determinative causality at work” (211). 2. Helen Chambers supports this idea in her suggestion that Conrad was reading William James as he was writing Chance. She writes: “Conrad may have been referring to William James, whose latest work Memories and Studies (1911), John Quinn sent to Conrad in late November 1911, during the composition of Chance (CL 4, 514). In his letter Conrad implies that he was familiar with the earlier works of William James, so he may well have had in mind James’s popu­ lar and influential The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1896), in which James writes, in ‘The Dilemma of Determinism’, that ‘the stronghold of the deterministic sentiment is the antipathy to the idea of chance’ (153). As this work by James contains at least a hundred references to ‘chance’, and given Conrad’s choice of title and the recurring trope of ‘chance’ in the novel (the word is used 64 times), this is a credible connection. Marlow’s remark thus implies a reasonably literate fictional listener and, by extension, that at least some of Conrad’s own readers were familiar with arguments about determinism” (124–5). 3. A different interpretation of the ambivalence underlying the Author’s Note might be that, whether consciously or unconsciously, Conrad felt that writing a popular novel betrayed his artistic credo. In following a prescribed generic design he necessarily dropped his commitment to being a “modern.” This, then, might be an attempt to couch the narrative method in a façade of innovation. The tension between the two in­ter­pret­ations and how it reflects on questions of art, philosophy, and commercial success are addressed below. 4. It is also demonstrative of Conrad’s investment in a humanist ethics that does not survive the transition into a philosophy of becoming. The transition from a philosophy of consciousness (mind) to a philosophy of life does not spell the renunciation of ethics (as is suggested here, in keeping with Conrad’s world­ view) but rather comes with new m ­ odels of ethical thought. Tamsin Lorraine’s Deleuze and Guattari’s Immanent Ethics: Theory, Subjectivity and Duration is a good introduction to the notion of an immanent ethics, one that is attuned to a philosophy of life. She writes: “Deleuze and Guattari’s conception of an imma­ nent ethics calls on us to attend to the situations of our lives in all their textured specificity and to open ourselves up to responses that go beyond a repertoire of comfortably familiar, automatic reactions and instead access creative solutions to what are always unique problems” (1). She notes further that “their lifeaffirming approach attends to what Susan McManus [. . .] terms the ‘affective register of subjectivity’ in ways that prompt resolution of ‘nihilistic blockages in agency’ ” (2). 5. Wexler does not in fact see Conrad as a representative of the aesthetic snobbery she associates with other moderns. Arguing against a commonplace of Conrad studies (promoted by Frederick R. Karl in Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives) she

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For Fear of “Drifting Unconsciously”  119 writes: “Conrad was surprised to discover that his desire for the income of popular authors conflicted with his artistic aims. When he decided to become a writer, he assumed that art and sales were compatible goals; with experience, he recognized the need to choose between them, or to appear to choose between them. Conrad himself felt his purpose was both aesthetic and rhetorical, but critics assumed that his less popular books were written with more integrity than his bestsellers. The high sales of Chance in 1913 proved an embarrassment to his early ad­mirers; since it was popular, critics reasoned, he must have compromised his art” (xv–xvi). She cites Conrad’s literary agent, J. B. Pinker as commending his client on his “desire to meet the public taste, and to win popularity” (21). Though Wexler questions the binary opposition between art and popularity, the Author’s Note to Chance appears to lend support to such a dichotomy. 6. Noting this dichotomy (though not in relation to Chance), Eloise Knapp Hay writes: “among intellectuals the great objection to Conrad is not his difficulty (which discourages the unintellectual reader) but his moralizing, the one thing that would have recommended him most highly to unintellectual readers, if he had not made his novels so difficult for them” (214–15). 7. As Conrad writes in “Author and Cinematograph,” “a tale that would not move in any sense would be not much more interesting than a lump of lead” (Schwab 346). 8. The figure of the flâneur provides a test-case against which to test the modernist potential of Marlow’s character. Walter Benjamin writes that “the flâneur still stands on the threshold—of the metropolis as of the middle class. Neither has him in its power yet. In neither is he at home. He seeks refuge in the crowd” (Arcades Project 10). He is “a spy for the capitalists, on assignment in the realm of consumers” (427); a revolutionary, he disappears in the crowd; he feels history through the soles of his feet. He is not the “philosopher promenader” (418). Benjamin’s ex­pos­ition supports the impression that Marlow’s figure does not align with the liminal and transgressive modernist experience associated with the flâneur. 9. The instantiations of the term “drift” brought in this chapter show it to be a recurring metaphor in challenging traditional philosophical conceptualizations of man and his place in the world. Though it is beyond the scope of this chapter to study further examples of theoretical and fictional uses of the term, it might be helpful to offer an illustration of the way in which the figure inspires others. In Driftworks, Jean-François Lyotard utilizes the term as a prompt for thinking beyond negation and critique. Drift is associated with “an aimless voyage, a col­ lection of fragments impossible to unify [. . .] in accordance with the diversity of the times and sceneries wafted through.” It is “the Odyssey displaced – not at all Ulysses’ polymorphy collected and gathered, totalized in a return home, to the self, which will be the model of Hegelian dialectics and of bourgeois socialist

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120  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism

10.

11.

12. 13.

thought and praxis in their entirety. Rather the intense stationary drift wherein the fragments clash in Joyce’s Ulysses” (10). Lyotard also brings the term to bear on the act of criticism itself. “Critique,” he writes, “must be drifted out of. Better still: Drifting is in itself the end of all critique” (13). Lyotard’s use of the figure illustrates an attempt to avoid the unity of conceptualization. It works not only thematically but also performatively, by allowing the figure itself to drift with the writer’s thoughts. Jean-Jacques Lecercle provides a gloss on the concept of synthesis and its sig­ nificance for Kant and Deleuze both: “Its origin is to be found in Kant, where it plays an essential role, as it names the operations through which we make sense of the chaotic multiplicity of phenomena. There are three syntheses: of appre­ hension in intuition, of reproduction in imagination, of recognition in the con­ cept. Kant is working his way from sense to intellect or understanding, and in each case the object of the exercise is to grasp together a multiplicity under a form of unity, be it an object of the senses, an image or a concept. In Deleuze, where the phenomena are given in the form of series (in The Logic of Sense – series of things, of words, of thoughts, etc.) or flows of energy (in Anti-Oedipus), the function of synthesis is to capture and regulate the connection or intersec­ tion of such series or flows: to segment, to connect, to fuse, so that again the world of phenomena should acquire form. There are three syntheses in Deleuze as in Kant: of connection, of conjunction, of disjunction” (16–17). Susan Jones addresses the significant changes made to the manuscript between Conrad’s offering it to the English Review in March 1912 and its appearance in the women’s section of the “Sunday Magazine” with its orientation towards a female readership. Among these changes were the addition of the governess and the feminist (Jones, Conrad and Women 144–5). These changes notwith­ standing, the plot itself already traces the shifts discussed above. This chapter does not offer a feminist reading of the novel. Much excellent critical work on the subject is available; Susan Jones’s seminal work on this is cited below. Anne Enderwitz’s “Speech, Affect, and Intervention in Chance” is particularly relevant here. She argues that the novel “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” (36).

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5

From Being to Becoming: Writing the Now Nostromo

The philosopher must go further than the scientist. Making a clean sweep of everything that is only an imaginative symbol, he will see the material world melt back into a simple flux, a continuity of flowing, a becoming. And he will thus be prepared to discover real duration there where it is still more useful to find it, in the realm of life and of consciousness. (Bergson Creative Evolution 369) After three days of waiting for the sight of some human face, Decoud caught himself entertaining a doubt of his own indi­ viduality. It had merged into the world of cloud and water, of natural forces and forms of nature. In our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion of an independent existence as against the whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless part. Decoud lost all belief in the reality of his action past and to come. (Nostromo 497) As noted in the epigraph, Nostromo offers the reader the insight that it is in “our activity alone” that “we find the sustaining illusion of an independent existence as against the whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless part” (N 497). The sentence violently yokes together two incommensurate conceptualizations of subjectivity. The first—under pressure here—is that of the autonomous and cohesive subject whose being in the world is the prod­ uct of rational cogitation and choice. The second underscores the artificial­ ity of such a conceptualization by pointing to our interconnectedness and passivity. Action emerges as a method to illusorily restore the first in a way that recalls the familiar opposition between knowing and doing. Men who act do not suffer existential angst. As the narrator in An Outcast of the Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism. Yael Levin, Oxford University Press (2020). © Yael Levin. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198864370.001.0001

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122  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism Islands comments, “The man of purpose does not understand, and goes on, full of contempt. He never loses his way. He knows where he is going and what he wants” (197). The separation of action and cogitation is one of the recurring and abid­ ing signposts of a philosophy of being in Conrad’s works. It is this sep­ar­ ation that generates the division of a narrator who watches and an actor who experiences, that systematically separates object and subject, ensuring the reliability of a detached and objective gaze. It is a philosophical and ­literary topos that repeatedly resuscitates the autonomous and cohesive Enlightenment subject even as it gasps its last breaths. Chance returns to this binary; we see evidence of this in the way that deceleration allows Marlow to make sense of the confusing and often contradictory informa­ tion he collects by withdrawing to the safety of his parlor. The sanctuary creates a spatial and temporal remove that recalls the unique privilege of an omniscient narrator. It is here that he can make order of the lives he wit­ nesses according to the logical constructs of cause and effect and temporal sequencing. Nostromo dramatizes the radical undoing of this distance and the action/cogitation binary on which it relies. As in The Rescue, the novel shows that a deceleration into inaction does not signal a narrative pause necessary for the synthesis of ideas and the sharing of insight. Stasis and suspension are no longer limited to the temporal and spatial remove neces­ sary for establishing the Cartesian subject’s privileged perspective. Rather than institute a shelter from phenomena, they facilitate an experience of a multiplicity of sensory stimuli without the filters of the pregiven categories of conceptual logic. The stakes underlying such a radical transition are both philosophical and artistic. Werner Senn quotes Edward Bullough who stated in 1912 that Conrad proves “artistically most effective in the formulation of an intensely personal experience, but he can formulate it artistically only on condition of a detachment from the experience qua personal” (7). Senn relates this com­ ment to the view that “aesthetic distance is essential to art” (7), a principle he deems fundamental to an informed and sustained engagement with Conrad’s unique style. The ontological and artistic principles of distance coalesce in the conceptualization of the liberal-humanist subject. Such a  conceptualization privileges the sense of sight and the mediations with which it is associated. Proximity blurs vision. Senn suggests that Conrad’s art relies on a dialectical play between distance and proximity, Conrad’s need, “as an artist, to keep his subject matter at a distance, and his equally insistent endeavour to manipulate the reader into both proximity and

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From Being to Becoming: Writing the Now  123 distance” (8). The art I wish to describe here is not the product of a dialectic balancing act. It is a rendering of a complete immersion in the tactile, confusing, and immediate present. The product of such an experiment is shocking; it demonstrates how the rethinking of the subject demands a respective transformation in the artistic medium and the evaluative criteria by which it might be judged. Once the subject is no longer separate, the binaries of distance/proximity, inside/outside are rendered obsolete. It is not with the shock of immersion that the novel opens. At the outset, the narrative appears to be foreclosed to change. Action funnels a fluid and complex reality into predictable patterns of cause and effect; events are exe­ cuted by a predetermined set of agents whose role is already scripted. Such scripts keep the encounter with an unmediated present at bay, and with it, deny the unexpected, the unknown, and the new. Whether it is the repeti­ tion of the clashes between institutionalized power and revolution, or the psychodynamic returns of trauma and memory, what effectively disappears in such codified trajectories is the unmediated present.1 Experience is the product of reiteration and the now is replaced by figures connoting a spatial and temporal remove. The present is always viewed from a distance. Habit eclipses the singular moment. The chapter will trace the gradual violence done to such narrative fore­ closure by tracing the novel’s method of bringing the shocks of the immediate present to the page. The novel approaches presence by gradually shedding the symbolic removes in which it is initially entrenched: Sulaco and its major actors are seen at a distance; its geographical remoteness is comple­ mented by an array of stylistic and thematic metonymies that serve to with­ hold presence in its immediacy. Linguistic form (the iterative), epithets and stories personal, historical, or political all shield the characters, the land, and the readers from the truth of becoming. The novel’s power lies not in changing the outcome of history but in exploring the ways in which a narra­ tive might be punctuated by glimpses of the confusing and unexpected now that the will to narrativize forever keeps at bay. The insistence on the idea of a spatial remove effectively collapses the question of being with a truism of narratology. How might we understand Being and being as occupying a single ontological plane? How might narra­ tive be reconfigured to accommodate a narrator who is no longer held sep­ ar­ate from his narration? Nostromo interrupts habit and repetition in an attempt to answer these questions. It does so by dramatizing the failure to narrativize and, more broadly, the exhaustion of metonymic form. Against existing readings of the novel that view it as a dramatization of the tension

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124  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism between free will and determinism or a comparison of the distortions of fictional and historical accounts of the past, the analysis will show that the novel is most philosophically and aesthetically radical when it interrupts habit, exhausts the will to narrativize, and discards its spatial and temporal removes for the here and now. This chapter teases out Conrad’s attempt to flesh out the radically new by writing the now.

Narrative Action: The Cartesian Cogito’s Life Support Conrad was excited by the prospect of Nostromo’s potential success. In a letter to his agent, J. B. Pinker, he writes: “I verily believe that N. has elem­ ents of success in book form. I’ve never written anything with so much action in it” (CL 3 137). We have already attended to Conrad’s intuition that narrative action and commercial success are indelibly linked. The author believes his readers are fascinated by the power of movement. A passage in Nostromo where the newly arrived Pedro Montero addresses his new sub­ jects, provides a powerful, if ironic illustration of the power of action to command a spectator’s attention: The greater part of the citizens remained fascinated by the orator’s action alone, his tip-toeing, the arms flung above his head with the fists clenched, a hand laid flat upon the heart, the silver gleam of rolling eyes, the sweep­ ing, pointing, embracing gestures, a hand laid familiarly on Gamacho’s shoulder; a hand waved formally towards the little black-coated person of Señor Fuentes, advocate and politician and a true friend of the people. (N 389–90)

The example can be read as a self-reflexive comment on how the instinctive drawing of the eye to perceived movement finds a stylistic parallel in a reader’s fascination with narrative action. It is also an indication of the obtuseness with which we respond to that which occurs in the present moment. The passage speaks to the author’s deep-seated belief that rational processing never occurs in the moment. We encounter the present blindly; we lack the tools to comprehend what we see. Understanding is a form of recollection. Marlow unpacks this phenomenon in Chance, where he notes: The surprise, it is easy to understand, would arise from the inability to interpret aright the signs which experience (a thing mysterious in itself)

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From Being to Becoming: Writing the Now  125 makes to our understanding and emotions. For it is never more than that. Our experience never gets into our blood and bones.  It always remains outside of us. That’s why we look with wonder at the past. And this persists even when from practice and through growing callousness of fibre we come to the point when nothing that we meet in that rapid blinking stum­ ble across a flick of sunshine—which our life is—nothing, I say, which we run against surprises us any more. Not at the time, I mean. If, later on, we recover the faculty with some such exclamation: ‘Well! Well! I’ll be hanged if I ever, . . . ’ it is probably because this very thing that there should be a past to look back upon, other people’s, is very astounding in itself when one has the time, a fleeting and immense instant to think of it . . .  (C 282–3)

Sunshine here functions as a symbol for life experienced in the moment. It is important to emphasize the temporal quality of the figure because this works against the weight of a literary and philosophical tradition wherein sun and light are figures for a truth that is often linked to an experience of transport, a truth that takes us outside time altogether. Plato’s parable of the cave is a well-known example of the manner in which sunlight is linked to the realm of ideas, a place ontologically separate from the temporally cir­ cumscribed world of phenomena. The passage from Chance is not Platonic, in so far as it places truth in the phenomenal world. More in tune with Nietzsche, it presents man as blind not to the idea, but to phenomena. Reason always denies the present; it maintains a temporal delay that is a product of our thinking backwards. We comprehend by means of a com­ parative analysis; interpretation and judgment are predicated on distance. The passage suggests such distance is not only temporal but also spatial. Meaning is most readily available when applied to another’s experience— that which occurs, so to speak, elsewhere. To understand is to observe a remove both temporal and spatial. Such a view on hermeneutics might be used to extol the power of representation. In the act of bringing the past back to consciousness, of rehearsing and replaying it, we allow for a workingthrough of experience that is never possible as it happens. It is a movement from fully-embodied presence to mediation; from a multi-sensory experi­ ence to the mind’s processing of visual and aural impressions. Seen as such, Nostromo can be read as a parable on representation.2 Its machinery works from the very first to withhold the immediate present from the characters and the readers both; the novel’s action is always described at a remove. The reader first encounters this strict stylistic

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126  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism po­licing at the very outset. The exposition repeatedly returns to Sulaco’s geographical remoteness: “Sulaco had found an inviolable sanctuary from the temptations of a trading world in the solemn hush of the deep Golfo Placido” (N 3). Nature conspires to keep technology and empire at bay, and in so far as both serve as figures for the present moment, Sulaco is intro­ duced as a place that is perpetually behind. The conjoining of sanctuary and temptation renders this a paradisiacal place. Whether it is the biblical para­ dise or the utopias that promise a sense of endless summer, such places are immune to the shocks of change: Neither the war nor its consequences could ever affect the ancient Occidental State secluded beyond its high barrier of the Cordillera. All the fighting took place on the other side of that mighty wall of serrated peaks lorded over by the white dome of Higuerota and as yet unbreached by the railway, of which only the first part, the easy Campo part from Sulaco to the Ivie Valley at the foot of the pass, had been laid. Neither did the tele­ graph line cross the mountains yet; its poles, like slender beacons on the plain, penetrated into the forest fringe of the foot-hills cut by the deep avenue of the track.  (135)

Battles and historical dramas occur elsewhere. Mrs. Gould assures the ­visiting chairman of the railway that “nothing ever happened in Sulaco,” that “even the revolutions, of which there had been two in her time, had respected the repose of the place” (36). Sulaco is not Eden—it is neither atemporal, nor does it exist on a separate ontological realm. But in so far as it partakes in the movement of history, it is always with a delay, through the belated arrival of news and, later still, the advent of the representatives of new regimes. News reaches Sulaco “by the usual roundabout postal way through Cayta, and up the coast by steamer” (141); as Mrs. Gould concludes, “here in Sulaco they heard only the echoes of [the] great ques­ tions” (36), questions posed by those orchestrating the battles and those that see them out. The identity of the key actors that populate the narrative is itself contin­ gent on the machinery of distance and belatedness that is definitive of the geographical setting. Don José Avellanos “could be most useful at a distance, in Sulaco. His name, his connections, his former position, his experience commanded the respect of his class” (140–1, my italics). The geographical distance doubles as a philosophical or psychological stance of detachment. Captain Mitchell and Martin Decoud both shadow Don José’s documentary

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From Being to Becoming: Writing the Now  127 enterprise, each in his own fashion. And each brings to the novel an ­add­ition­al articulation of a detached perspective. The first is described in the Casa Gould as sitting a little apart, near one of the long windows, with an air of old-fashioned neat old bachelorhood about him, slightly pompous, in a white waistcoat, a little disregarded and unconscious of it; utterly in the dark, and imagin­ ing himself to be in the thick of things. The good man, having spent a clear thirty years of his life on the high seas before getting what he called a “shore billet,” was astonished at the importance of transactions (other than relating to shipping) which take place on dry land.  (112)

The description does more than draw out the ironic gap between his being “in the dark” and his conviction to the contrary. Culturally and profession­ ally separate from the life he encounters in Sulaco, Captain Mitchell shows that, in Nostromo, detachment is not just a self-imposed stance. Even those characters who believe themselves to be actively participating in the life of the town are misled by a tendency to substitute the reality of lived experience with an illusory construct. Though the implied author’s attitudes towards Captain Mitchell and Martin Decoud are very different, they are both in the dark: “Martin Decoud was seldom exposed to the Costaguana sun under which he was born” (151). The sentence gestures to Decoud’s spatial remove, but it also reinvokes the figurative power of the sun to sug­ gest Decoud is sheltered from an experience of the present in its lived immediacy. His outlook on life is one of detached isolation. Such detach­ ment is emphasized further through an elaboration of an extended conceit. Decoud looks on life as though it were theater, a substitute for the real, a representation: This life, whose dreary superficiality is covered by the glitter of universal blague, like the stupid clowning of a harlequin by the spangles of a ­motley costume, induced in him a Frenchified—but most un-French— cosmopolitanism, in reality a mere barren indifferentism posing as intellectual superiority. Of his own country he used to say to his French associates: “Imagine an atmosphere of opera-bouffe in which all the comic business of stage statesmen, brigands, etc., etc., all their farcical stealing, intriguing, and stabbing is done in dead earnest. It is screamingly funny, the blood flows all the time, and the actors believe themselves to be influ­ encing the fate of the universe.”  (152)

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128  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism To follow the paradigm established in Lord Jim and carried through to Chance, Captain Mitchell and Decoud are “disinterested lookers-on at a game” (Chance 33). Though the first is an unwitting onlooker and the sec­ ond assumes the role by design, both look on at the action from the wings. But where Captain Mitchell invests what he documents with that self-same importance with which he views himself—everything he views marks an “epoch” of history—Decoud labels what he records as fake, theatrical. That the perspectives of both are so in tune with their characterization suggests that such inferences are universally self-reflexive. This insistence on the same bolsters the idea of a cohesive identity by extolling the enduring power of individual consciousness and its method of narcissistically branding in its own image everything that is under its observation. It is only if there is an abiding, unique, and autonomous self that the object can be colored by the person who perceives it. The detached and all-encompassing stance observed here is suggestive of a subjectivity that is once again founded on and, in turn, reinforces, the Cartesian cogito. Nostromo will eventually undermine such a conceptualization of subjectivity, but it will do so only after first promoting it. One of the telltale signs of this is in its policing of the separation of subject and object. Decoud’s rationalization of his detached stance offers one of many examples of this motif. “No man of or­din­ary intelligence,” he explains, “can take part in the intrigues of une farce macabre” (N 152). The farce to which he alludes is the cycles of revolu­ tion suffered in his home country, a judgment he later generalizes to include “government everywhere,” which is always “a thing of exquisite comicality to a discerning mind” (152). Reason, judgment, the faculties he himself associates with a superior mind, keep the observer squarely out of the life he witnesses.3 That the three characters participating in the memorializing of history all exhibit or are associated with a writer’s detachment may be part and parcel of a literary commonplace. It also offers a fictional fleshing out of a convention of narratology, wherein “narration is always at a higher narra­ tive level than the story it narrates” (Rimmon-Kenan 94–5). The principle not only places the narrator at a spatial and temporal remove, but on an altogether separate ontological level. The justification for such displace­ ments may be self-evident in the case of characters associated with writing or storytelling. The same motifs of detachment and separation are more dif­ ficult to negotiate when they are brought into connection with characters such as Nostromo, who actively contribute to the histories these writers will later document.

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From Being to Becoming: Writing the Now  129 Amar Acheraïou proposes a related distinction between the novel’s c­ haracters. He views Captain Mitchell and Dr. Monygham as assuming a passive and peripheral role, against Holroyd and Gould, whom he sees as actively pursuing their parts in Sulaco’s history. Acheraïou explains: “Holroyd and Gould, on the one hand, and Decoud and Monygham, on the other, are sharply contrasted antagonists subscribing to radically opposed philo­soph­ic­al stances” because “the first two characters’ relation to the world is mainly that of conquest and appropriation, while their counterparts adopt an escapist attitude made of ironic detachment and skepticism” (55). Against this qualitative differentiation, I would argue that even those char­ acters associated with aggressive participation are described at a remove from the immediate present. Holroyd not only enjoys the aloofness that comes with geographical remoteness, he views Costaguana and the silver mine as existing on an ontological realm separate from his own: “We can sit and watch. [. . .] Time itself has got to wait on the greatest country in the whole of God’s Universe” (N 77). Holroyd positions himself outside time, as it were, but this ontological separation is not one of action but of passivity, of waiting. It comes with a sense of destiny in which he, as representative of the United States and its Imperial force of “industry, trade, law, journalism, art, politics, and religion, from Cape Horn clear over to Smith’s Sound” has no choice but to play a part. “The world can’t help it—and neither can we, I guess” (77), he concludes. Such detachment is likewise observed in Gould himself. Though he is one of the key players in the making of the new Sulaco, it is only as late in the narrative as the discovery of Decoud’s death that he feels he must finally relinquish his stance of aloofness. Gould responds to the news by regretting that he must give up his “silent reserve,” “that air of impenetrability behind which he had been safeguarding his dignity.” He regards Decoud’s death as robbing him of “his inaccessible position of a force in the background. It committed him openly unless he wished to throw up the game—and that was impossible. The material interests required from him the sacrifice of his aloofness—perhaps his own safety too” (378). Gould’s sense of separation from Sulaco life requires some readjusting of our conceptualization of action. Gould’s grief after the death of his father elicits “a mournful and angry desire for action” (66). The narrator provides a gloss on this point for the benefit of the readers. He explains: “Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions. Only in the conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over the Fates” (66). The gloss works to unpack Gould’s impulse, but it can equally be

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130  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism applied to other characters’ mode of existence. Action unfolds in the novel not as a response to the demands of the present moment but as a method to keep it at bay. It anticipates and denies the new by bending life to multiple scripts. Such scripts function as paradigms of thought, a way of making time canny, of controlling its passage by emplotting it. The scripts provide a start and a finish; they break time into meaningful events that are linked in a causal and therefore knowable relationship. We have so far associated the novel’s narrative patterns with the para­ digms of destiny and inheritance. Other paradigms similarly contribute to the staging of the characters’ lives and affairs. To offer just one or two more examples to complement those which have been addressed, we might turn to Mr. Gould’s proposition that once material interests “get a firm footing” “they are bound to impose the conditions on which alone they can continue to exist” (84). Gould’s faith in the autopoietic power of material interests might be read against Father Roman’s belief in an endless cycle of govern­ mental upheavals. The latter’s belief in the inevitability of this historical dialectic shapes his tragic outlook on the fate of his flock: He had no illusions as to their fate, not from penetration, but from long experience of political atrocities, which seemed to him fatal and unavoid­ able in the life of a State. The working of the usual public institutions pre­ sented itself to him most distinctly as a series of calamities overtaking private individuals and flowing logically from each other through hate, revenge, folly, and rapacity, as though they had been part of a divine dispensation. (398–9)

The script that Father Roman follows provides scaffolding for accepted interpretations of the novel wherein it illustrates the cruelty and inevitabil­ ity of the repetition of war and revolution and the suffering to which they give rise, readings that often focus on the tension between determinism and free will.4 To follow a different line of interpretation, however, is to see the foreclosure of each of the characters’ outlook as commentary on our way of being in the world. Scripts are followed because they render the world meaningful. Characters cling to patterned and predictable cruelties rather than open themselves up to confusion, because there is nothing more hein­ous than the possibility that the future is entirely unpredictable, or, alternatively, that our histories do not follow a logical sequence. The idea is that, good or bad, at least time flows “logically” (399). Logical, knowable patterns of cause and effect are consoling because they facilitate, to follow

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From Being to Becoming: Writing the Now  131 Gould’s thinking, a “sense of mastery over the Fates” (66). Read thus, we might find the narrator’s comment on Captain Mitchell’s method of historymaking as a gesture that travesties the completely arbitrary method with which the entire cast of characters insists on taming or disappearing the present by channeling it into the sanctioned categories of historical change: Almost every event out of the usual daily course “marked an epoch” for him or else was “history”; unless with his pomposity struggling with a dis­ comfited droop of his rubicund, rather handsome face, set off by snowwhite close hair and short whiskers, he would mutter—“Ah, that! That, sir, was a mistake.”  (112–13)

The passage does well to communicate the implied author’s attitude towards Captain Mitchell, but it is also instructive in highlighting what his method of narrativizing shares with all narrative. Traditionally, narrative—and in this we might conflate history and fiction both—is an artificial selection and ordering of events that are put together to serve a logical trajectory towards a preconceived end. It works by back-tracking—it is only through retro­ spective analysis that we might decide whether an event is meaningful or mere accident. Further emphasizing this semblance of a mastery of one’s fate, the various scripts that the novel’s characters follow (destiny, memory, trauma and historical recurrence) are encased within the mnemonic devices of epic conventions. These mnemonic aids allow the reciter and audience to keep their place in the story world by rendering it familiar. We have the “cyclo­ pean” blockhouse, the names of the O.S.N ships that are imported from myth­ology, the use of epithets for the characters. In keeping with the epic tradition, characters’ names are repeatedly sub­ stituted by epithets. This is significant here in so far as such labels tie a char­ acter to a scripted role in a manner that again demonstrates the constructed nature of identity. Nostromo is often introduced not as one but as a string of individuals. The camp master is “the lordly Capataz de Cargadores, the indispensable man, the tried and trusty Nostromo, the Mediterranean sailor come ashore casually to try his luck in Costaguana” (130). Such excess dramatizes the erasure of the reality of an individual’s singular experience; it shows identity to be constructed, socially given, a part to be played. That the refrain and anchor for his identity is “Nostromo” is a greater irony still, as the name is an accident, Mitchell’s mispronunciation, not of the man’s given name, Gian Battista, but of his profession (the Italian for “bosun”). This, in

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132  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism turn, becomes an appellation—our man. The irony of the shift is double: it shows history to be a product of a “mistake” (113) (against Mitchell’s strict counter position). It also denies the character’s unique individuality by sub­ stituting his name with a socially constructed label. The guilt attaching to the taking of the silver serves to flesh out Nostromo’s character; it unfolds as a secret to which only the readers of the novel are privy. It allows us a glimpse of a mindset that is perhaps unique to the character and not the product of the company he keeps or the scripts he enacts. And, still, Nostromo’s character continues to disappear under the weight of those markers of identity from which he cannot be separated. Conrad’s “Author’s Note” offers an instructive gloss on this process: Years afterwards, grown older as the famous Captain Fidanza, with a stake in the country, going about his many affairs followed by respectful glances in the modernized streets of Sulaco, calling on the widow of the cargador, attending the Lodge, listening in unmoved silence to anarchist speeches at the meeting, the enigmatical patron of the new revolutionary agitation, the trusted, the wealthy comrade Fidanza with the knowledge of his moral ruin locked up in his breast, he remains essentially a Man of the People. (xiii)

The irony attending his reinvoked name (Fidanza—trust) notwithstanding, the passage demonstrates how the epithet enforces sameness against the backdrop of change. Time has passed—Nostromo is older, the streets are modernized. He is now wealthier and heavier for the burden of his guilt, but the epithet disallows change. Nostromo is still the man of the people, an essentialization that is completely empty, false, a mere label, much, perhaps, as it was before. And the novel suggests that Nostromo is complicit in the textual machinery that repeatedly reduces him to such labels. As Decoud writes to his sister: “it is curious to have met a man for whom the value of life seems to consist in personal prestige” (248). If Nostromo’s many designations indicate that identity is but a construct or a social contract, his is just an extreme case in a novel that relies on such labels in forming the identities of all its characters. Captain Mitchell not only names but is named in turn: “ ‘Our excellent Señor Mitchell’ for the business and official world of Sulaco; ‘Fussy Joe’ for the commanders of the Company’s ships, Captain Joseph Mitchell prided himself on his profound knowledge of men and things in the country” (10–11). Charles Gould is also the King of Sulaco and “El Rey de Sulaco.” A similar metonymical

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From Being to Becoming: Writing the Now  133 slippage is evident in the introduction of “Antonia, the beautiful Antonia, as Miss Avellanos was called in Sulaco” (149), showing once again how identity is a slippery social appellation; it negates any sense of unity or autonomy. Names of places similarly follow this model, as suggested by Captain Mitchell’s account of “The Intendencia, now President’s Palace—Cabildo, where the Lower Chamber of Parliament sits” (476). The recurring use of epithets doubles as a gesture to epic form and as an exploration of yet another mode of repetition and excess. It, too, is an illustration of the way in which labels (like scripts) serve to perpetuate an artificial construct of iden­ tity through the repetition of a stylized convention. In his review of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot famously suggested that the intertextual relation to the Homeric epic serves as “a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” (483). Eliot’s point works well to support further my argument on the way Nostromo’s action is overdetermined by the scripts that fashion its twists and turns, but the emphasis I would draw is on the way epic conventions conflate mnemonic device with mediation; allusions and labels contribute to the cancellation of the singular by offering well-rehearsed conventions in its place. The unique moment is itself rendered diffuse through repetition. The story of the extraction of Señor Ribiera from the “revolutionary rabble” (12) that threatens to tear him to pieces is a case in point. The event is narrated ad nauseam—always in hindsight, a useful illustration of the way the text perpetuates the displacement of the present by its belated reiterations. The event is mentioned early on in Captain Mitchell’s account: “Poor Señor Ribiera (such was the dictator’s name) had come pelting eighty miles over mountain tracks after the lost battle of Socorro, in the hope of outdistancing the fatal news—which, of course, he could not manage to do on a lame mule” (11); the name and the emphases may vary, but the incident repeatedly punctuates his narrative: “His Excellency Don Vincente Ribiera [. . .] whom I and that fellow of mine, Nostromo, had the honour, sir, and the pleasure of saving from a cruel death” (323). The narrator pokes fun at Captain Mitchell’s repetitive style, but then contributes to the novel’s excesses by adding to them when he himself explains that “Next time when the ‘Hope of honest men’ was to come that way, a year and a half later, it was unoffi­ cially, over the mountain tracks, fleeing after a defeat on a lame mule, to be only just saved by Nostromo from an ignominious death at the hands of a mob” (130); and again later: “Thus the Capataz, instead of riding towards the Los Hatos woods as bearer of Hernandez’s nomination, had remained in

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134  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism town to save the life of the President Dictator, to assist in repressing the outbreak of the mob, and at last to sail out with the silver of the mine” (352). Emphasizing its complete redundancy, the narrator again mentions the incident in a parenthetical remark: “The political Gefe of Sulaco (the same dignitary whom Captain Mitchell saved from the mob afterwards)” (195). This obsessively recalled history is then reiterated again in Decoud’s record to his sister. Here reinforcing the belated quality of the narrative, Decoud begins by noting that he “didn’t learn till later in the afternoon whom it was that Nostromo, with his Cargardores and some Italian workmen as well, had managed to save from those drunken rascals” (226). The presentation of Ribiera’s extraction thus demonstrates further how the history of Sulaco can be read as an exercise in variation rather than a presentation of the shocks and confusions owing to singular events. Jeremy Hawthorn’s “Repetitions and Revolutions: Conrad’s Use of the Pseudo-Iterative in Nostromo” describes the working of the iterative and pseudo-iterative forms in the novel. The analysis provides further evidence for the manner in which the novel keeps the reader from an encounter with an unmediated present. The iterative, Hawthorn explains, “involves generalization, a generalization which militates against narrative involve­ ment and has, rather a distancing effect” (126). The turn from the iterative (corresponding to repetitive action or habit) to the pseudo-iterative, wherein the unusual or singular is appropriated into an iterative discursive forma­ tion, can be understood as yet another method by which the novel packages the new in the familiar.

Slowing Down into the Here and Now Nostromo begins to unravel the detachments, separations, and temporal and spatial removes so well-policed at the outset by undoing the security of its well-established geographical seclusion and temporal retardation. Part Third of the novel begins with a thought expressed by the chief engineer, one that may be read with the machinery of evasion presented above: “With Sotillo expected from one side, and Pedro Montero from the other, the engineer-in-chief ’s only anxiety now was to avoid a collision with either” (308). Testifying to a like-minded apprehension, the first chapter ends with Dr. Monygham’s question “I wonder if Sotillo really means to turn up here?” (322), a question then reiterated in connection with Captain Mitchell as he paces the wharf at the start of the next chapter. These reflections foreshadow

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From Being to Becoming: Writing the Now  135 a change in the novel. The thing itself—the present in its immediacy— begins to encroach upon Sulaco. This is a temporal and spatial assault that undermines the town’s isolation and, by extension, threatens to shatter the illusions of detachment in which its central agents take refuge. The gloom that overtakes the town might be seen as an indication of a shift in the novel’s method. A cliché if read as a pathetic fallacy for the characters’ confusion, this darkness is nevertheless significant in its intro­ duction of a motif that has so far been canceled out by the novel’s machin­ ery of repetition. The future can no longer be foreseen. For the first time, the novel engages in a serious and sustained manner with the possibility that history is not always already scripted (whether by an extraneous power or the fixed ideas owing to a character’s psychological makeup). What little light remains is that of a “half-consumed” candle “burning dimly with a long wick” (310), a fitting emblem for the cognitive limitations imposed on or by the characters in accordance with the dictates of the scripts that sur­ vive the blackout. The transition from the scripted to the unknown, from an evasion of the present to its emergence, follows a series of shocks that interrupt the action and slow down the narrative. These moments of suspension are focalized through Decoud and are conveyed in the form of interior monologues, each accompanied by an epiphany. Together they trace a movement from a Cartesian to a posthuman subjectivity, from the separation of mind and body, subject and object, to the collapsing of such boundaries, from an emphasis on reason to the representation of affect and the sensory, from detachment to total immersion. The first occurs after Decoud completes the pocketbook entry written for his sister; the last precipitates his suicide. The report to his sister begins with a figurative extension of a conceit I unpacked at the start of this chapter: “the sun shines late upon Sulaco, for it has first to climb above the mountains” (225). Rehearsing the novel’s ex­pos­ition, Decoud’s record draws attention to Sulaco’s temporal and ­spatial remoteness. The candlelight by which he writes further emphasizes the detached quality of Decoud’s own hold on life: It occurred to him that no one could understand him so well as his sister. In the most sceptical heart there lurks at such moments, when the chances of existence are involved, a desire to leave a correct impression of the feel­ ings, like a light by which the action may be seen when personality is gone, gone where no light of investigation can ever reach the truth which every death takes out of the world. Therefore, instead of looking for something

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136  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism to eat, or trying to snatch an hour or so of sleep, Decoud was filling the pages of a large pocket-book with a letter to his sister.  (230)

The emphasis on leaving a correct impression of the feelings—displaces the life lived onto the record kept. The odd slippage of the “light by which the action may be seen” offers displacement upon displacement. It is not the action but the way in which that action is judged, evaluated, and understood that keeps Decoud from attending to his immediate physical needs. If sunlight is a symbol for the shock of the immediate present, candlelight is figuratively suggestive of the manner in which such experience might be brought under the yoke of a certain paradigm of thought. This is the light of investigation, the light by which one sees an action. That Decoud’s desire to record the moment is greater than his desire to eat or rest may be read as the triumph of mind over matter. But it is also the choice of the past over the present, an impulse to be elsewhere, as it were, that is soon conflated with a telling ontological revelation: With the writing of the last line there came upon Decoud a moment of sudden and complete oblivion. He swayed over the table as if struck by a bullet. The next moment he sat up, confused, with the idea that he had heard his pencil roll on the floor.  (249)

Herein lies the first epiphany. Decoud experiences the completion of his record as death. That the loss of the pencil is conflated with the end of life is suggestive of a deep-seated anxiety—or perhaps belief—that there is no life outside representation. In that sense, the will to narrativize, to keep writing instead of eating or sleeping—is not the triumph of mind over matter so much as a method of survival, Decoud’s attempt to extend his life against the encroaching darkness. The cessation of writing not only foreshadows his suicide but rehearses it before the fact. In giving up his role as writer, journalist, historian, Decoud has already, as it were, killed himself. The scene casts Decoud in the role of Descartes, a champion of the mind–body divide. Writing, as an extension of his mind, is the only materiality he recognizes to be true or real. It takes precedence over his own physical being. Nostromo’s and Decoud’s escape on the lighter provides the backdrop for a second epiphanic shock, another foreshadowing of death. In the gloom Decoud imagines “the lighter sinking to the bottom with an extraordinary shudder of delight” (266). The recurring imagery of death, here attended by

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From Being to Becoming: Writing the Now  137 a sense of relief, may be seen as an attempt to put in motion a scripted end to counter the disappearance of the scripts that have pervaded the novel up to this point. The psychological torture Decoud experiences is described precisely as the canceling out of action—the assault of silence, darkness, and the deceleration of time into suspension, waiting, and anticipation. We might view this as “pure duration,” what Bergson defines as “a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and permeate one another, without precise outlines, without any tendency to externalize themselves in relation to one another, without any affiliation with number” (Time 104). The nox­ ious quality of such experience is that it cannot be processed through retro­ spective analysis; it cannot be put into a sequence of events leading to a foreseen end. It is precisely the shock of this realization that is so disorient­ ing for Decoud: The change from the agitation, the passions and the dangers, from the sights and sounds of the shore, was so complete that it would have resem­ bled death had it not been for the survival of his thoughts. In this foretaste of eternal peace they floated vivid and light, like unearthly clear dreams of earthly things that may haunt the souls freed by death from the misty atmosphere of regrets and hopes. Decoud shook himself, shuddered a bit, though the air that drifted past him was warm. He had the strangest sensa­ tion of his soul having just returned into his body from the circumambi­ ent darkness in which land, sea, sky, the mountains, and the rocks were as if they had not been.  (262)

That being thus left alone with his thoughts is experienced as a dream state rather than the foundation of certainty (I think therefore I am) sug­ gests that the subject is untethered rather than moored in the isolation of the mind. Without the sensory stimuli of shore life—its agitations and dan­ gers notwithstanding—such isolation in darkness and silence is experienced as a form of death in life. This is understandable if we consider Decoud’s dependence on social phenomena, the fact that his identity is grounded in his role as witness to and commentator on political and civic life. Without an object of study he has no hold on reality. What is further evident in this passage is the gradual breaking-down of the mind–body division. It is his body—the shuddering and shaking, the sensation of the warm air against his skin—that allows for the reintegration of his fragmented self. Darkness means he can no longer rely on sight for orientation and his tactile sense is sharpened.

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138  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism The recalibration of the working of the senses—where sight is no longer privileged—can be read as a further indication of the shift from mediation to immediacy. In De Anima, Aristotle distinguishes between touch and the other senses according to their relation to mediation. The senses “produce perception by perceiving through something else and through media, whereas touch involves touching things” (Anima 65). Carla Mazzio unpacks this statement: “of the five senses, touch was the most ‘immediate,’ at once resisting temporal stasis and having no spatial ‘medium’ between the body and the touchable world (be it in the form of objects, bodies, textures or temperatures)” (91). That Decoud now relies on his sense of touch sym­bol­ic­ al­ly gestures to his immersion in the present. The shift is doubly significant. At the same time that it follows a transformative process in the character, it generates a metamorphosis in the very conceptualization of the human by staging a departure from a moral and philosophical ranking of the senses that underlies a conceptualization of the liberal-humanist subject. In “Remembering the Senses,” Susan Stewart explains the way in which the ranking of the senses contributes to, and indeed sustains a particular under­ standing of subjectivity: In Medieval, Renaissance, and Enlightenment topoi, the domain of smell, taste, and touch is properly a domain of beasts. From the Jewish Hellenistic philosopher Philo’s contention that, in exercising his will, man can act in opposition to the forces of his own nature (see Philo 1929, VI: 74–85) to Kant’s arguments for the suspension of appetite in aesthetic judgments; this rhetoric of the animal and servile senses, aside from its obvious le­git­ im­iz­ing force for philosophy, established a subjectivity separated from nature, protected by mediation, and propelled by a desire born out of the very estranged relation thus created. Of all the monuments of the cities on the plain, only the citadel of sight was left standing.  (62)

The supremacy of sight and its association with mediation and separation is key to a conceptualization of the human that can be traced back to an­tiquity. It speaks to the resistance of our baser (material) instincts and the senses that allow us to take pleasure in them.5 The battle enacted by Decoud’s char­ acter thus presents a wider theme than the psychological resistances of a character who stakes his identity on the working of a detached intellect. It speaks to a more urgent ontological questioning of the way we might think the subject outside the rigid moral and cultural coordinates of the past mil­ lennia of human life. Any attempt to intervene in the weight of tradition

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From Being to Becoming: Writing the Now  139 necessarily creates resistance, as evident in Decoud’s own private battle. The relief he experiences is short-lived. The sensation that he is brought back to himself and the comfort it provides is immediately lost when Nostromo extinguishes the candle by which they had been steering: The Capataz, extending his hand, put out the candle suddenly. It was to Decoud as if his companion had destroyed, by a single touch, the world of affairs, of loves, of revolution, where his complacent superiority analyzed fearlessly all motives and all passions, including his own. He gasped a little. Decoud was affected by the novelty of his position. Intellectually self-confident, he suffered from being deprived of the only weapon he could use with effect. No intelligence could penetrate the darkness of the Placid Gulf. There remained only one thing he was certain of, and that was the overweening vanity of his companion. It was direct, uncomplicated, naive, and effectual. Decoud, who had been making use of him, had tried to understand his man thoroughly. (N 275, my emphasis)

The conceit of the candlelight is extended further here in the way that it facilitates the charting of the route towards the Isabels. In darkness, they cannot predict where they will land and are in danger of drifting out to sea. Nostromo’s act thus further contributes to the transition described above— from spatialized time to time experienced as duration, from directionality to drifting, from the known to the unforeseen. The shock described here is thus an echo to that related at the inn. The extinguished candle, like the loss of the pencil earlier, symbolically suggests the loss of the ability to exercise reason through retrospective analysis and the ordering of events in a logical sequence. Decoud’s “complacent superiority”—ensured and enacted by these methods—breaks down in their absence. He is disarmed—launched into the world without such protective mediations. If the Cartesian observer in him survives it is because he still has a foundation for certainty. In the darkness of the gulf, “there remained only one thing he was certain of, and that was the overweening vanity of his companion” (275). Though the labels attaching to Nostromo may in the end be exposed as false, the sentiment Decoud recognizes is sound. “A good name,” Nostromo tells Teresa (reiterating her husband’s words to him) “is a treasure” (257). The irony of the motto is biting. From the first the reader learns that there is nothing more deadly than treasure; the exposition’s anecdote about the “impious adventurers” (5) establishes this at the

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140  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism outset. This is also a truth Charles Gould inherits from his father and will pass on to his wife. Both the good name and the treasure, we might suggest, are but empty labels. But the quality of the object (its signified) may be less important than the commanding power of the signifier. Nostromo is other; as an object of study he suffices to allow Decoud to maintain his stance as observer, a subject to an object. Nostromo’s presence will allow Decoud to erect bound­ar­ies between himself and the world, to separate himself from a chaos wherein all separations have been canceled out into an undifferentiated void where “Even his hand held before his face did not exist for his eyes” (262). When he is finally left alone on the island, Decoud finds that the one object to survive his isolation, where all outlines and divisions are replaced by a flux of sensation, is the treasure: “the fascination of all that silver, with its potential power, survived alone outside of himself” (499, my emphasis). The silver notwithstanding, Nostromo’s departure from the Great Isabel precipitates the final crisis and the epiphany that accompanies it. With the loss of the acolyte who had served to invoke Decoud’s power of analysis and thereby ensure the separations that bolster his sense of self (the silver occupies this role only after Decoud puts into action his decision to kill himself), Decoud’s disinterest, his method of viewing the world through a lens, becomes untenable. The narrator explains that, in such a condition of solitude, “the affectations of irony and scepticism have no place” (497). Both irony and skepticism are described as an affectation, an adopted stance sug­ gestive of the performance of difference and separation. No such mediation can be effected here. Decoud is now one of the “jabbering and obscene spectres” (498) of the people of Sulaco. He is immersed in his environment. An object with other objects, he no longer enjoys the privilege of a detached observer. The days on the island unfold as a conflation of elements, the canceling out of the conceptual divisions on which his sense of reality was staked: “he beheld the universe as a succession of incomprehensible images” (498). This is a metafictional allegory—and at the same time realization—of a sujet without a fabula. It is text without context, order, cause and effect, begin­ ning and end. Indeed, it resonates with early critics’ commentaries on the difficulty of the novel. One of the novel’s first reviewers, C.  D.  O.  Barrie notes that “the plot is confused; the tale does not run smoothly from inci­ dent to incident; it is often difficult to say when or where we are” (British Weekly, November 10, 1904, CR 2 200). But where such readers as Barrie are

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From Being to Becoming: Writing the Now  141 frustrated because of their sense that they are unable to correctly order the events according to a cogent fabula, Decoud is faced with the more dis­ orien­tat­ing possibility that no such fabula exists: After three days of waiting for the sight of some human face, Decoud caught himself entertaining a doubt of his own individuality. It had merged into the world of cloud and water, of natural forces and forms of nature. In our activity alone do we find the sustaining illusion of an inde­ pendent existence as against the whole scheme of things of which we form a helpless part. Decoud lost all belief in the reality of his action past and to come. (N 497)

The passage effectively dramatizes the transition I have been tracing throughout this book from the liberal-humanist subject to a posthuman subject, from spatialized time to duration. A notion of individuality or identity that is founded on the idea of a cohesive and autonomous subject breaks down. The hermetically-sealed figure for the subject gives way to allow for the possibility that identity is fluid, interdependent, and in flux.6 It is not separated from the environment so much as contiguous with it. The notion of life as unfolding in a sequence of events that are causally linked also breaks down, in so far as the experience of time is no longer thus punctuated. Decoud can no longer be a cohesive, autonomous sub­ ject whose actions are traced according to a series of causally-linked events with foreseeable outcomes. He is now one with the world around him where experience is no longer teleological but open-ended. The change is so radical that it disintegrates past and future in an abiding and all-encompassing present. The dramatic force of this scene speaks to Conrad’s participation in twentieth-century explorations of a subjectivity beyond the Cartesian cogito. In Decoud’s realization that he is part of a buzzing, dynamic, and multiple set of forces or particles, there is a glimpse of an individuality that does not precede the phenomenological world but issues from and is contiguous with it. The scene can be read not only with the work of theorists with which Conrad was familiar (as for example Bergson or William James) but more radically, with theorists who would consider the same questions half a cen­ tury later. Among them is Gilbert Simondon (1924–89), known to English scholars primarily through his influence on Gilles Deleuze. Elizabeth Grosz writes that “Simondon may have succeeded in going a step further than Bergson in thinking the implications of movement as the internal

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142  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism condition of individuation or being itself ” (285 fn 5). In “The Genesis of the Individual” (1963), Simondon writes: The conception of being that I put forward, then, is the following: a being does not possess a unity in its identity, which is that of the stable state within which no transformation is possible; rather, a being has a transductive unity, that is, it can pass out of phase with itself, it can – in any area – break its own bounds in relation to its center. What one assumes to be a relation or a duality of principles is in fact the unfolding of the being, which is more than a unity and more than an identity; becoming is a dimension of the being, not something that happens to it following a succession of events that affect a being already and originally given and substantial. (311)

Simondon proposes that we view individuation as an ongoing rather than a finished process. This allows us to understand time differently—not as that which the individual suffers, as it were, but that in which the individual continues to become. This is precisely the difference between conceiving of a character as acting out a script (for Marlow this would be the letters carved on the face of the rock or that which is written in the book of des­ tiny) and as evolving into an unknowable future. Simondon’s suggestion that “the living being conserves in itself an activity of permanent individuation” (305) renders our being in time significant: “time itself is considered to be the expression of the dimensionality of the being as it is becoming ­individualized” (314). The transformation comes with a ritual death. Decoud’s suicide can be read as the death of the liberal-humanist subject. It is yet unclear what is birthed in its stead, but attempts to represent such a being in late modernist literature certainly resonate with this passage.7 Beckett’s The Unnamable depicts the similarly disorienting experience of the collapsing of the bound­ ar­ies of outside/inside. As the eponymous character narrates: “I’ll have said it inside me, then in the same breath outside me, perhaps that’s what I feel, an outside and an inside and me in the middle, perhaps that’s what I am, the thing that divides the world in two, [. . .] I’m the partition, I’ve two surfaces and no thickness, perhaps that’s what I feel, myself vibrating, I’m the tympa­ num, on the one hand the mind, on the other the world, I don’t belong to either” (100). Much as it is in Nostromo, the intermixing of outside/inside is experienced in the form of a sensory confusion, a kind of synesthesia wherein silence is heard and images are tangible. For Decoud “the silence,

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From Being to Becoming: Writing the Now  143 remaining unbroken in the shape of a cord to which he hung with both hands, vibrated with senseless phrases” (N 499). The silence is heard, seen, touched—but not understood.8 The repetition of “senseless” and the “utterly incomprehensible” (499) recalls the author’s fear of moral failure as described in the previous chap­ ter’s analysis of Chance. In the novel to come, Marlow (and his author) collapse chance with the dangers of nihilism, a conflation that can be seen to be anticipated in Decoud’s inability to survive this transformation. The dynamic described in Nostromo is nevertheless very different and should not, I would argue, be read with the moralistic attitude promoted in Chance. Where the later novel treats suicide with moral repugnance, Nostromo defa­ miliarizes the same impulse by creating a synesthetic expansion that leaves moralizing aside.9 The rehearsed anticipations of suicide and the act itself both restore to the text the consolations of action. From the first it is likened to a “rite” (499), a set act that is played out or enacted for the purpose of ridding Decoud—and the novel—of the island’s suspended silence and its noxious open-endedness: “The cord of silence could never snap on the island” (499). Literary allusions form the scaffolding that bolsters the action by calling on tradition; these tame the unknown by offering the familiar as a source for meaning. The funerary dirge from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline IV.2 promises the solace of fearing “no more the heat o’ the sun”; the dead is transported out of being in time, a fitting consolation for Decoud who pulls away from the island cliff, “warm with sunshine, as if with the heat of life” (500).10 The rite ends with three words: “ ‘It is done,’ [Decoud] stammered out, in a sud­ den flow of blood” (501). The scene concludes by citing the last words of Jesus on the cross, in a gesture that not only infuses this private moment with the weight of tradition, but also floods the text with religious and spir­ itual meaning. The passage may also be read with Canto thirteen of Dante’s Inferno where the poet encounters the souls of suicides. The description of Decoud speaking through his own blood recalls the way in which Dante’s suicides are allowed speech. The poet must tear off a branch of their trans­ formed flesh in order to allow them to communicate: As a green branch with one end all aflame Will hiss and sputter sap out of the other As the air escapes—so from the trunk there came Words and blood together, gout by gout. (106, lines 40–3)

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144  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism The suicides speak through blood in a kind of poetic articulation of their sin—they are able to express themselves only through self-harm. Sin and its punishment both point to the sinner’s volition, the exercising of agency in the act of taking one’s life. Where we might see these allusions as a method to restore agency, the passage also admits a different interpretation. More in keeping with the confusions enacted on the island, Decoud’s suicide seems to be collabora­ tive; he is as much a victim as he is an instigator of the act: His eyes looked at [the silence] while, without haste, he shifted his seat from the thwart to the gunwale. They looked at it fixedly, while his hand, feeling about his waist, unbuttoned the flap of the leather case, drew the revolver, cocked it, brought it forward pointing at his breast, pulled the trigger, and, with convulsive force, sent the still-smoking weapon hurtling through the air. His eyes looked at it while he fell forward and hung with his breast on the gunwale and the fingers of his right hand hooked under the thwart. They looked—— “It is done,” he stammered out, in a sudden flow of blood. (N 500–1)

Agency as described in the passage is diffuse. Decoud’s hands, limited as they are to tactile comprehension, appear to be key agents in carrying out the act. His eyes are mere witnesses. The only active verb attributed to Decoud himself is the shifting in the boat. The citations and allusions to the literary topos of suicide brings the familiar into this uncanny scene; they provide the fragmented subject with the end-of-life script he needs in order to reinstate the illusion of mastery with which action is associated. At the same time, the challenging of agency as noted in the fragmentation of the body renders even the most scripted of rituals unfamiliar. The defamiliarization of the act of suicide contributes further to the attempt to think subjectivity anew by considering the idea of agency and how it might be understood in the moment of death. Is suicide an assertion of man’s will or an expression of its limit? In an attempt to answer this ques­ tion, Martin Crowley reads Heidegger, Levinas, and Blanchot together. Two propositions follow: the first shows death to be “the limit and guarantee of my existential authenticity, in relation to which I can come to be defined as an ontological and existential subject.” The second views it as “the very instance of that which exceeds this relation of anticipation, which happens

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From Being to Becoming: Writing the Now  145 to me without my being able to grasp it, or ever to establish any sort of ­relation whatsoever” (191). Arguing for the latter proposition, Maurice Blanchot traces the inherent contradiction in suicide, where the deliberate­ ness of the act may ultimately gesture to an ineradicable passivity. He writes: The deliberateness in suicide, its free and imposing side, whereby we strive to remain ourselves, serves essentially to protect us from what is at stake in this event. It would seem that through our effort to remain ourselves, we elude the essential; it would seem that we interpose ourselves il­legit­im­ ate­ly between something unbearable and ourselves, still seeking, in this familiar death that comes from us, not to meet anyone but ourselves, our own resolution and our own certitude. [. . .] Thus in voluntary death it is still extreme passivity that we perceive—the fact that action here is only the mask of a fascinated dispossession.  (The Space of Literature 102)

Blanchot’s description of the paradoxes inherent in suicide is instructive not in so far as it returns us to a binary of action and passivity, but in its conceptualization of action as a ploy that maintains the dialectic interplay between the two, a dialectic that may no longer be helpful in our attempt to think beyond this philosophical and discursive limit. Action roots us in that self-same binary thinking, wherein we realize one of two possible modes of existence—we act or are acted upon. However, to consider the human as contiguous with his environment rather than as an object or subject that is separate and cohesive, is necessarily to think of passivity and action as con­ curring rather than oppositional. The unusual treatment of Decoud’s sui­ cide creates the impression that action and passivity are co-present in the act; we must think life and death outside binary opposition and outside the dialectic that such opposition generates. The suggestion haunts the novel to the end. One of the expressions of this lingering question is the narrator’s inability to let the silence of Decoud’s death be; he is as troubled by it as Decoud was troubled by the silence on the island. Where Conrad elsewhere allows his readers to falter and guess, here the narrator follows up Nostromo’s stupe­ faction at the unexplained disappearance of his co-conspirator by fleshing out the mystery: “He will never come back to explain.” And he lowered his head again. “Impossible!” he muttered, gloomily. [. . .]

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146  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism “But, then, I cannot know,” he pronounced, distinctly, and remained silent and staring for hours. He could not know. Nobody was to know. As might have been supposed, the end of Don Martin Decoud never became a subject of speculation for any one except Nostromo. Had the truth of the facts been known, there would always have remained the question. Why? Whereas the version of his death at the sinking of the lighter had no uncertainty of motive. The young apostle of Separation had died striving for his idea by an everlamented accident. But the truth was that he died from solitude, the enemy known but to few on this earth, and whom only the simplest of us are fit to withstand. The brilliant Costaguanero of the boulevards had died from solitude and want of faith in himself and others.  (N 495–6)

The necessity to fill in the gap as evidenced here is both telling and ironic in its evocation of similar discursive choices the narrator earlier travesties in his commentary on Captain Mitchell’s method of history making. We recall that the latter constructs history by putting together “memorable” occasions and leaving out “mistakes,” events he views as eschewing the logic of cause and effect. Such an event as the disappearance of the lighter pre­ sents Captain Mitchell with an interpretative obstacle, as it does not cohere with either category. In order to bend the event to a recognizable historical trajectory, he labels the event “a fatality” (488). The word is suggestive of the determinism of fate and a feeling of deep sorrow. Captain Mitchell’s method of history making shows that the unexplained must always be glossed. Narrative challenges such as the unexpected can at the very least be codified with the help of the stage directions intimating accepted emotional response to an inevitable tragedy. The narrator approaches the same event with a similar anxiety, as it were, one that is exacerbated by his having shared its more troubling truth (the fact of Decoud’s suicide) with the readers. The so-called “fatality” according to Mitchell is a misattribution; there was no tragic accident. The reader is left with a suicide that is stripped of the familiar markers of emotional distress. The motivation seems almost spurious; it issues from the disintegration of subjectivity as a cohesive and autonomous entity. Decoud becomes mul­tiple; his sense of self is collapsed with a vibrating world of phenomena. The narrator cannot let such an unexplained ­suicide be—he must narrativize the act, ascribe an explanation. Motivation is consequently provided. The “fatality” is relegated to a sudden onslaught of nihilism, a want of faith.

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From Being to Becoming: Writing the Now  147 The narrator’s provision of motivation is helpful, but it fails to rid the novel of the implications of the transformation described in the movement from Viola’s inn to the Great Isabel. The shift from the scripted to the unknown continues to haunt the novel through a series of mirroring sus­ pensions that take us back to the suicide even when the silver has made Decoud’s body disappear in the water. The motif of suspension is linked in Nostromo to the actualization of the present moment, that which occurs without design and cannot be foreseen— the accidental. The word—accident—is repeatedly attributed to Hirsch. His is perhaps the most elusive character in that he punctuates the narrative with a series of accidents and suspensions that resist the application of motivation. His presence repeatedly upsets one of the fundamental principles of narrative: the coupling of cause and effect. Hirsch ends up on the lighter by accident: “By the merest accident, as it happened, he took the direction of the O.S.N. Company’s offices” (272). By stumbling, crouching, crawling, and dashing he finally makes his way to the lighter. Nostromo is troubled by what he sees as a lack of design on Hirsch’s part. Hirsch’s appearance on the lighter interrupts the narrative of heroic escape which he and Decoud are playing out. In attempting to explain to Decoud why he could not take decisive action in determining Hirsch’s fate, Nostromo says: “ ‘What! To silence him for ever? I thought it good to hear first how he came to be here. It was too strange. Who could imagine that it was all an accident?’ ” (284, my emphasis). The implication of Nostromo’s inaction is precisely that silence is unbearable if it carries the weight of the unknown— of a mystery that does not offer a solution and thereby resists narrativization. Faced with the inexplicable, action becomes null—impossible. There is no script to follow. Hirsch makes his way into the drama without an ascribed role and as such disrupts the familiar scripts with which his fate might be determined. Sotillo’s encounter with Hirsch is as frustrating for him as it was for Nostromo. And in much the same way: Hirsch was either mad or playing a part—pretending fear and distraction on the spur of the moment to cover the truth. Sotillo’s rapacity, excited to the highest pitch by the prospect of an immense booty, could believe in nothing adverse. This Jew might have been very much frightened by the accident, but he knew where the silver was concealed, and had invented this story, with his Jewish cunning, to put him entirely off the track as to what had been done.  (N 329–30)

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148  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism That Hirsch might be experiencing fear and distraction in the moment is a possibility that Sotillo refuses to entertain, demonstrating again the charac­ ters’ blindness to the present. Providing a further instance of the novel’s economy of waste wherein that which does not make sense must be made coherent through the application of a meaningful, teleological narrative, Sotillo believes Hirsch’s nonsensical raving is a cover-up for a recoverable truth. In this case, the man’s religion is all the evidence Sotillo needs to determine what that truth might be. Hirsch knows where to find the sil­ ver but as he desires it for himself he uses his “Jewish cunning” to mislead his interrogator. Hirsch’s resistance to narrativization, his being in the moment, a realiza­ tion of the accidental and unforeseen, infuses the narrative with a series of suspensions that repeatedly turn to a version of history stripped of a fore­ seeable end. On the lighter, when Nostromo is unable to act because of Hirsch’s lack of motivation, the man’s fate remains “suspended in the dark­ ness of the gulf at the mercy of events which could not be foreseen” (275). Hirsch thus functions literally as the suspended present that intrudes into the repetitive actions and scripts that otherwise provide meaning and direc­ tion. Such a suspension survives the character himself. When Nostromo encounters him a second time, Hirsch is already dead, strung up by Sotillo in the Custom House. But to Nostromo, he is a “shadow of a man” who is “doing apparently nothing.” This cancellation of action causes Nostromo to “check himself,” step “aside,” efface “himself upright in a dark corner” and wait “with his eyes fixed on the door,” step “back” and finally retreat (423–4). Action is interrupted again by Hirsch’s literal and symbolic suspension. The image of the “murdered man suspended in his awful immobility” (436) bleeds into and is in turn contiguous with other suspensions described in the pages leading up to this scene. It reverberates with the suspension described earlier, “in the darkness of the gulf at the mercy of events which could not be foreseen” (275), as it does with the picture of the three Isabels which, “overshadowed and clear cut in a great smoothness confounding the sea and sky, appeared suspended, purple-black, in the air” (411). Most strik­ ing is the manner in which the image of the hanging man recalls Decoud’s suicide. On the island, Decoud’s despair finds visual expression in the form of a “thin cord to which he [hangs] suspended by both hands.” His life is “suspended to it like a weight” (498–9). Hirsch and Decoud are emblems of these suspensions and the onto­ logic­al and aesthetic shift they generate. It is perhaps because of this that both become the necessary casualties of a narrative machinery that hinges

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From Being to Becoming: Writing the Now  149 on the promise of epistemological mastery. Hirsch’s murder and Decoud’s suicide are both framed by the narrator’s attribution of motivation and Mitchell’s narrative. These retellings serve to ensure the survival of a more consoling idea of narrative action and the cohesive subjectivity that it promotes. Narrative action is predicated on cause and effect; a cohesive subjectivity relies on the survival of the knowable limits between inside/ outside, subject/object, agent/pawn, and free will/determinism. To illusorily master fate and foretell the future is to commit to scripted action, to reason and sight, the mind over the body, distance over immersion. Nostromo repeatedly shows how, to refer back to one of many self-reflexive moments of insight offered by Gould, “vast eventualities dwarf almost to nothingness the actual matter in hand” (77). By extension, we may see this as a commentary on the blinders we don in relating to Conrad’s art. The grand narratives of modernist scholarship have resulted in our marginaliza­ tion of suspension and duration, the accidental and the new. Chronological inversions, delayed decoding, ellipses and other forms of temporal play confuse and titillate; they suggest epistemological doubt or frustration and dramatize how difficult it is to know; they call attention to the deceptions of a language whose natural relationship to the world has become suspect. Such techniques play on our need to know, to comprehend and epistemo­ logically master the sujet by transforming it into an acceptable and inher­ ently knowable fabula. We learn that the Patna has not sunk, that Razumov is a spy, that the smoke on the Judea is what follows the explosion of its coal. What we have neglected are the moments of radical innovation found in Conrad’s disruption of this process of reshuffling by slowing down the narrative to a point where it will not yield a meaningful sequence. Such decelerations are not moments of synthesis; they demand we forfeit the separations of logical categories and experience a confusion of affect and sensory stimuli. Conrad’s departures from the scripts described above do precisely this—they surprise us by suspending time and offering up the moment in its shocking immediacy; they cancel out temporal sequence to work against commonplaces and inevitabilities, generic expectation and the familiar. We cannot seek refuge in the habits of a calcified hermeneutic trad­ition; we can no longer make do with the solving of mysteries, spatial ordering, and the ascribing of cause and effect. Nostromo addresses ques­ tions that would concern a generation of philosophers and writers to come: it imagines the human outside the coordinates of the liberal-humanist subject and shows how narrative form might work against its own mediations in rendering an experience of becoming. Without the mesmerizing force of a

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150  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism wildly gesticulating tyrant, we can do nothing but immerse in the wonderful and confusing now.

Notes 1. Eloise Knapp Hay suggests that Nostromo “argues a theory of history almost at the cost of its felt life and characterization” (175). Though her point appears to overlap with mine I would suggest we think beyond the history/fiction divide in order to appreciate the novel’s comment on fiction’s complicity in the mar­ ginalization of the lived present. 2. Paul Armstrong’s chapter on Nostromo in The Challenge of Bewilderment opens by positing the opposite premise to that offered here. He suggests that the turn to impressionistic technique involves the abandonment of traditional political writing in so far as it rejects a form of representation that relies on the distance between subject and object. According to Armstrong, in the Realist tradition, representation is itself political because “the act of describing social norms temporarily suspends our practical involvement with them so that their defi­ ciencies can be exposed and criticized” (149). He concludes that Conrad’s new literary technique does not undermine the novel’s political message. This chap­ ter will challenge the suggestion that impressionism necessarily undermines the distance practiced in the Realist tradition. 3. Heyst’s inherited philosophy of detachment is a case in point. For a more detailed exploration of disinterest and its stylistic and thematic significances in Victory see my article “Masters of Disinterest: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Conrad’s Victory but Were Afraid to Ask James.” 4. Ludwig Schnauder’s “Free Will and Determinism in Nostromo” provides an excellent introduction to the terminology associated with these two principles, as well as an accessible analysis of their ap­plic­abil­ity to the novel. Opting for a middle ground between the two, Schnauder concludes that “Huxley’s combination of determinism and indeterminism corresponds, to a large degree, to the representation of history and the implied attitude towards the freedom-of-thewill-problem in Nostromo.” Monygham, Nostromo, Decoud, and Hirsch, he argues, “in a rather haphazard, unplanned manner, are responsible for large-scale historical incidents” (67). The reading comes closest to my own in citing Cedric Watts’s introduction to the novel. Schnauder writes: “Half way through the novel we are able to piece together the conventional cause-and-effect sequence of its central events, but the initial sense of confusion firmly establishes ‘that the world, truly perceived, may be recalcitrant to man’s decoding endeavours’ (Watts 1990: 83)” (73). To put the question of free will and determinism aside is to view both as products of a logical fallacy predicated on the spatialization of time. I unpack this idea in the previous chapter.

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From Being to Becoming: Writing the Now  151 5. Such a classification is also attended by a set of moral judgments that allow for social and gender rankings that effectively associate the baser senses (touch, smell, taste) with women, other races, the poor, the lower classes, and the abnormal. David Howes’s Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader (2005) offers a useful presentation of the cultural history of the senses and its radical questioning in contemporary scholarship. 6. In this the scene is very different from what Lee M. Whitehead describes as the tragic social process wherein self-discovery “under the eyes of others” is “the discovery of one’s distance and otherness from those who have given meaning and form to one’s life” (465). The pain Decoud suffers comes from a realization that these separations (both from the people of Sulaco and the environment) are undone. 7. The question what comes next has created much debate. Edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor, and Jean-Luc Nancy, Who Comes after the Subject (1991) is an important entry in this ongoing debate. My use of the term “posthuman” is not to be seen as signaling the particularity of a single discourse. Today it allows theorists to think subjectivity outside the parameters of cohesiveness, autonomy, reason, and will in discourses as diverse as disability studies, postco­ lonialism, feminism, and eco-criticism. 8. This is a significant departure from such formulations as we find throughout Conrad’s fiction. Haldin’s response to Razumov at the start of Under Western Eyes, “I understand your silence” (65), is a good example of the way in which Conrad diagnoses and challenges the human tendency to bring every social and natural phenomenon under the yoke of reason, even when such a practice is so inherently flawed. 9. Again, gender may well be a contributing factor in Conrad’s attitude to suicide in the passage in Nostromo. The motif appears to allow the author more free­ dom in sidestepping clichés when he is describing a male rather than a female subject. The unusual treatment of the act here, however, cannot be reduced to questions of gender. 10. Ulrika Maude’s “ ‘Temporarily Sane’: Beckett, Modernism, and the Ethics of Suicide,” provides an illuminating analysis of modernist interventions in the literary representation of suicide. Her comparative analysis of Joyce, Woolf, and Beckett shows the latter’s treatment of the motif to be most resonant with the unique depiction offered in Nostromo. She writes: “For while Woolf ’s writing represents suicide with empathy and understanding, suicide in her work has the status of an event, as we have seen in the representation of Septimus Smith’s suicide and its effect on Clarissa Dalloway. Joyce, too, as I have argued, treats the act non-judgementally, and with compassion, but the level of pathos with which Bloom, in particular, responds to it marks it as a significant event. In Beckett’s work, by contrast, suicide is not presented as an event, and certainly not one that is heavy with affect. Instead, it is radically normalized in its utter unexceptionality” (235).

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6

Conclusion Slow Modernism

In a review dating back to the 1930s, Elizabeth Bowen explains why Conrad’s work is in “abeyance.” Her commentary is brought in evidence of what Owen Knowles diagnoses as a “state of disaffection” for the author. Bowen’s review hinges on the problem of Conrad’s preoccupation with the individual. She writes: “Most vital of all, perhaps, he seems to be over-concerned with the individual: with conscience, with inner drama, with isolated endeavor. Romantic individualism is at a discount now” (Knowles 69). It is perhaps ironic that when Conrad finally emerges as a significant voice in modernist poetics, he is celebrated for the very theme Bowen relegates to a Romantic consciousness. As Knowles explains, “Seen as part-originator of a more dangerously radical modern tradition, Conrad thus forcefully emerged as ‘our’ contemporary, his preoccupation with extreme moral isolation, the ‘trapped sensibility’ and lonely recognition making him akin to Franz Kafka, Thomas Mann, André Gide and the French existentialists” (72). The individual in isolation thus reads as key to a critical reception that both makes and unmakes Conrad as a “modern.” This study reconsiders this celebrated feature of his writing; it suggests that the author’s exploration of subjectivity anticipates the late modernist realization that identity is fluid and interdependent. The theme of isolation may be central to Conrad’s poetic vision, but it is revisited as a nostalgic or haunting conceit that dates back to Enlightenment thinking, a conceit that strains under nineteenthand twentieth-century theories that show subjectivity to be a product of multiple internal and external factors ranging from ideology, language, and convention to biological, affective, and sensory input. Much current critical thinking is devoted to the attempt to relocate the human “within a natural environment whose material forces themselves manifest certain agentic capacities and in which the domain of unintended or unanticipated effects is considerably broadened” (Coole and Frost, New Materialisms 10). A conception of the human as symbiotic, mutable, and passive may be Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism. Yael Levin, Oxford University Press (2020). © Yael Levin. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198864370.001.0001

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Conclusion: Slow Modernism  153 regarded as a philosophical response to the radical shifts in scientific theory observed over the last century. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost describe some of the scientific innovations that motivate such reconceptualizations: While particle physics has radically changed our sense of the composition of matter, other currents within physics, notably chaos and complexity theory, are also transforming our sense of the patterns or characteristics of matter’s movements. They, too, are undermining the idea of stable and predictable material substance, hastening a realization that our natural environment is far more complex, unstable, fragile, and interactive than earlier models allowed. [. . .] While for chaos theory apparently random effects have an extremely complex, nonlinear provenance, for complexity theory the emphasis is on unpredictable events that can catapult systems into novel configurations. For both, the physical world is a mercurial stabilization of dynamic processes.  (10)

Similarly in tune with these shifting conceptualizations of matter, current critical interventions in modernist poetics demand we no longer chart its limits by utilizing the traditional paradigms that once defined it. With a view to expansion rather than exclusion, critical reappraisals of the period and its works offer new frameworks by which we might test ossified classifications. Conrad needs rereading. Themes that have been conventionally aligned with modernist aesthetics—epistemological doubt, impressionistic technique, the subjective turn, defamiliarization, and speed—cohere all too readily with an ontological stance that is derived from Enlightenment thinking: Many of our ideas about materiality in fact remain indebted to Descartes, who defined matter in the seventeenth century as corporeal substance constituted of length, breadth, and thickness; as extended, uniform, and inert. This provided the basis for modern ideas of nature as quantifiable and measurable and hence for Euclidian geometry and Newtonian physics. According to this model, material objects are identifiably discrete; they move only upon an encounter with an external force or agent, and they do so according to a linear logic of cause and effect. (Coole and Frost, New Materialisms 7)

What results is a set of morally-coded binaries that occupy two mutually exclusive categories: human and non-human, agency and passivity, direction

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154  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism and drift, meaning and meaningless. In keeping with the radical scientific and philosophical shifts described above, Conrad’s writing upends these binaries and depicts a world where causality and linearity are rendered suspect. His fiction unmoors time from its chronological measure, frees the subject of the reassuring, if confining limits of the Cartesian cogito, and abandons telos in the charting of narrative form. Where conceptual logic cancels out difference in an attempt to create a coherent, recognizable picture, Conrad’s work repeatedly returns us to the life force of difference. This study proceeds from the premise that a transition from an emphasis on similarity to an emphasis on difference doubles as a just response to Conrad’s fiction and an organic offshoot of the evolution of our thinking. The last fifty years have seen a change in the way we process information. Such a shift follows the one described in the opening chapter between two art forms—one that is associated with the rigidity of categories of thought and another that is associated with the flux of becoming. The same can be said of a transformation (in some places radical, in others subtle) of our method of reading, interpreting, and evaluating literature. Critical responses to Chance provide a case in point. Much of the critical work written in the mid-twentieth century expounds on the theme of chance in light of its relation to unity. Thus, Bruce Harkness may view the title of the novel as ironic, but despite the inevitable ambiguity such irony generates he goes on to suggest that “the title, properly understood, provides the key to the unity of the novel” (209). Harkness then takes this further, suggesting such unity is evident not only in the novel, but in Conrad’s works in their entirety: “The theme of ‘ironic chance’ thus pointed out has the three distinct advantages of explaining the use of the narrators, and of applying to the main incidents of the book, and of being more in keeping with Conrad’s previous works” (222, my emphasis). We recognize such critical aims as the signposts of new critical thinking—but such a school of thought arises from a focus on closure and sameness that extends beyond this particular school’s reach. Conrad’s use of time has also been seen as a measure of unity rather than openness. In 1966, Robert N. Hudspeth argues that Conrad’s use of seven different time levels in Chance serves “to convert the ambiguities of the past into the understanding of the present” (286). He explains that it is “only by carefully collecting and sifting the past events of [Flora’s] life” that “Marlow and the reader gain the necessary moral understanding which is so important to Conrad. Life is mysterious and ambiguous in its immediate experiences, but with the passing of time these mysteries and ambiguities may possibly

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Conclusion: Slow Modernism  155 be dissipated, given enough chance meetings and acquisitions” (285). Such unity relies on precisely those signposts introduced at the start that distinguish between an aesthetics of the known and an aesthetics of the new. Hudspeth here clarifies the significance of time in serving the novel’s overarching unity and meaning: The completion of our understanding comes from the presence of the narrator who effectively removes Marlow from our direct contact with his narration. Because the narrator provides a temporal removal from Marlow, the reader more perfectly gains a knowledge of Marlow as a sensitive, humane person. If we keep in mind the original assertion that the immediate experiences of life cannot be understood fully, we can see the necessity of being able to see Marlow with some clarity. If he were the direct narrator, we would have a much less thorough understanding of his qualifications as an observer who is capable of understanding.  (289)

The techniques Hudspeth associates with understanding and cohesion are suggestive of a method of hermeneutic processing that relies on analogy and conceptual logic. We see Marlow better because he is held at a remove from us. Such a remove endows the reader with the objectivity of the remote gaze. Harkness reads Chance as a moral lesson: “Chance (accident) does not govern life. If the believers in chance had seen deeply enough into the apparently uncaused events, they would have perceived that life is not a matter of chance. Conrad is saying, hence, that even in this tale, with its great amount of pure chance and accident, there is a determinative causality at work” (211). Determinism, causality, and the spatialization of time (the rearranging of incidents according to a linear unfolding of events) are integral to meaning and coherence. But they are also integral to the way critics analyze and interpret Conrad’s work. Against these mid-century critical observations, contemporary work on Conrad repeatedly shows how understanding is no longer a provision of the identification of the same. In order to find meaning, we look for nuance, difference, and the new. I have already cited Peters’s suggestion that Chance marks a new direction in Conrad’s aesthetic vision. Where Hudspeth emphasizes the coherence of Conrad’s art, Peters underlines difference in order to propose that the novel might be a meaningful site of critical inquiry. Perhaps a more sweeping illustration of this hermeneutic shift is evident in Richard Ruppel’s introductory remarks in A Political Genealogy of Joseph Conrad (2015). He writes: “That is why I call this book a

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156  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism political genealogy, a word that suggests contingency rather than order and per­ man­ ence, abrupt change rather than steady development.” The methodological choice is made, Ruppel explains, in order “to reveal some of the rich eccentricities and inconsistencies in Conrad’s work” (8). I argued that Conrad’s writing anticipates late modernist poetics. I would further suggest that the recent refocusing of our critical lens allows us to better appreciate why and how. I have attempted to show that the way we distinguish openness and clos­ ure, the “modern” and the antiquated may follow certain misattributions owing to critical commonplaces. Modernist stylization in fiction has long been associated with the handling of information—gaps, delays, frustration, and deception. We respond to such long-standing conventions by locating modernist innovation in Conrad’s delayed decoding, convoluted chron­ ology, and the gaps and mysteries around which his plots so often revolve. Razumov’s conscription as spy, the Patna’s safe return to port—these are but two examples of the ways in which Conrad’s texts evolve around a meaningful gap. Such texts are made coherent through the promise of a fabula: a linear, sequentially logical and teleological truth that is hidden beneath the confusions of the sujet. This underlying, abstract construct speaks to a tradition that owes itself to millennia of narrative writing. The spatializing of time that allows for an author to play with the ordering or concealing of events always relies on a truth of historical progression that may be withheld—but is always finally revealed to provide meaning. This is how narrative means, and this, as we have seen, is an important aspect of Conrad’s artistic vision. He may be “slow to develop,” but all the parts eventually fall into place so that we may return to the familiarity of a known linear trajectory whose end was always determined. In the course of this book I have addressed a different articulation of the slow in Conrad’s poetics, one that has not received due critical attention. Viewed outside a traditionally damning binary grid, the slow can be understood as a “way to intensify what it might mean to be contemporaneous to one’s present” (Koepnick, 12). The attempt, in fiction, to realize this insight, marks a radical departure. The modernist poetics attributed to the writer in the past works through back-tracking; it is a method of reading forward that is always haunted by a reading back. In reading Conrad otherwise, I proposed to channel the modernist spirit in its most ardent attempt to break free of the past; to bring to fiction, as Ruben Borg writes, “the most temptingly ahistorical of concepts, a concept we might fall back on when

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Conclusion: Slow Modernism  157 attempting to characterize forces that unfold beyond ideological critique, beyond moral or aesthetic appropriation: life” (Fantasies 73).

Modernist Erasure and Eternal Return You understand that nothing is more disturbing than the upsetting of a preconceived idea. Each of us arranges the world according to his own notion of the fitness of things. (C 289) We receive sudden jolts that beat like arteries. We constantly lose our ideas. That is why we want to hang on to fixed opinions so much. We ask only that our ideas are linked together according to a minimum of constant rules. All that the association of ideas has ever meant is providing us with these protective rules—resemblance, contiguity, causality—which enable us to put some order into ideas, preventing our “fantasy” (delirium, madness) from crossing the universe in an instant, producing winged horses and dragons breathing fire. (Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy? 201) The tension traced throughout this study, between a writing grounded in analogy, sameness, and conceptual logic and one that courts an open-ended, multi-sensory, and affective movement of becoming signals a shift in how we understand the human and its relation to the world. Such a shift is heralded by the radical thinkers of the nineteenth century—Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Heidegger; it finds material urgency in the scientific, technological, and digital developments of the past decades. Posited facts cannot be taken at face value; they are the product of accident and contingency at best, forceful manipulation at worst. To engage more fully, more responsibly, and more productively with the world we need to avoid the automatic processes that substitute significant nuance with reductive or erroneous attributions of ready-made truths. The political climate offers constant reminders that the binary oppositions on which truths moral, social, and judicial are grounded have become outdated and suspect. They serve as blinders to the complexities of reality. Despite the consolations of logical thinking and conceptual categories, the present age suggests that openness and tolerance to change may better serve us going forward.

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158  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism Conrad’s works warn his readers against the violence of automatic, biased, or dismissive interpretations. Where this study adds to this accepted understanding of Conrad’s artistic vision is in addressing a tension that arises between a slowing down into pure duration—a mode of sensory receptivity and affective response that eschews judgment and rational processing—and the human desire to know. Such a tension poses a particular problem for a fiction writer, as a story develops by generating gaps that must be filled; narrative moves forward in an oscillation between crisis and resolution, concealment and revelation. It hinges on the abiding desire for certainty. Conrad’s works revolve around ambiguities and unanswered questions; they constantly test our assumptions. Still, critical focus on knowledge given and withheld leads to the neglect of a much-needed study of the way we think and the questions we ask, questions that determine the answers we fashion. To consider how we think is to engage with the pressing question of who we are. The book presents two different answers to this question—two modes of being that, though represented in opposition, often coincide and intermix in Conrad’s works. Their interrelation is observed in the tracing of a tension between two artistic impulses and the ontologies that underlie them. The first is associated with the liberal-humanist subject, an entity that employs analogy and similarity to make sense of reality and maintain its autonomy and cohesion. The second is an entity in a state of becoming; it follows a material, physical, affective, and sensory multiplicity and hinges on difference. In his appreciation of Proust (addressed in the introduction), Conrad associates the first with a mimetic aim and the second with a generative artistic impulse.1 What is at stake in the choice between the two is whether the artist engages in a return or a departure, whether he looks to the past or lives in the present. In the previous chapter I argued that Nostromo uses the motif of ­suspension to show how narrative and historical trajectories dissolve, hide, or marginalize the present moment. In “Literary History and Literary Modernity,” Paul de Man argues that such is the very aim of the modernist movement: “modernity exists in the form of a desire to wipe out whatever came earlier in the hope of reaching at last a point that could be called a true present, a point of origin that marks a new departure” (388–9). The necessity to break with the past, however, quickly falls into an inevitable paradox. Unpacking Nietzsche’s “On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life” de Man explains: “If history is not to become sheer regression or paralysis, it depends on modernity for its duration and renewal; but modernity cannot assert itself without being at once swallowed up and

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Conclusion: Slow Modernism  159 re­inte­grated into a regressive historical process” (391). The new can only be approached by breaking with the past, by turning against the impulse to historicize. The force of this revolution, however, cannot be made to signify if it is not placed within the context of an evolving history of ideas. A quick survey of the philosophers, writers, and characters sampled throughout this book is suggestive of the universality of this paradox. Bergson promotes intuition against intellection, duration against the spatialization of time. However, as Elizabeth Grosz explains, “The Bergsonian present does not succumb to a philosophy of presence: his present is never self-identical, never able to be definitely separated from the past that contextualizes it and the immediate future that it functions to anticipate” (281 fn 26). In so far as the past is a condition of the present, a virtual repository from which the present repeatedly draws, Bergson does not advocate forgetting or breaking with the past. A similar lesson is offered by Emilia Gould in Nostromo. Towards the end of the novel, she realizes that “for life to be large and full, it must contain the care of the past and of the future in every passing moment of the present. Our daily work must be done to the glory of the dead, and for the good of those who come after” (N 520–1). The primacy of memory and understanding comes to inflect this moral comment; the present cannot be stripped of its obligations to the past and its promise for the future. The insight, however, is not without irony. The thought comes to her in one of the rare depictions of a pause in the action; the abiding insistence on linearity and telos is abandoned and Emilia is encountered in an isolated moment in time. She is “alone in the garden of the Casa, with her husband at the mine and the house closed to the street like an empty dwelling” (520). Her face “became set and rigid for a second, as if to receive, without flinching, a great wave of loneliness that swept over her head” (521). Though her insight calls for an appreciation of the past and future and their manner of complementing the present moment, the affective power of the passage lies in the experience of the present. The scene is reminiscent of Decoud’s experience on the island. Emilia and Decoud are both alone, and both are caught in a moment in time—the unadulterated present that is so rarely glimpsed in the course of the novel. Where Decoud disintegrates, Emilia survives the affective overload by anchoring herself in a contemplation of the past and her duty to others. Much like Conrad’s “Author’s Note” to Chance, the choice traced here is between spatialized time (a chronological measure of past, present, and future) and duration, between a moral responsibility to others and an exploration of the affective force of the moment.

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160  Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism To conclude this brief survey of the antitheses of life and history, the present of affect and sensory input and the past imagined as a virtual repository of images, we turn to Beckett and Conrad and their respective comments on the tensions between the two. Beckett’s comment on the working of habit and repetition in Proust’s In Search of Lost Time testifies to the way in which familiar patterns of behavior deny us the experience of the new. It is only when an object or event is decontextualized, de-automatized, as it were, that we might become aware of change and be cognizant of the new: When the object is perceived as particular and unique and not merely the member of a family, when it appears independent of any general notion and detached from the sanity of a cause, isolated and inexplicable in the light of ignorance, then and then only may it be a source of enchantment. Unfortunately Habit has laid its veto on this form of perception, its action being precisely to hide the essence.  (Proust 11)

Marlow makes the opposite observation in Chance, where he notes the way in which comprehension, understanding, and an engagement with the world rely on the power of reason—on a comparative analysis that will always relate new experience back to the familiar. Commenting on Mr. Powell’s astonishment at the eccentric behavior of Mr. de Barral (known to him here as Smith), Marlow notes: Yes, I knew their joint stories which Mr. Powell did not know. The chapter in it he was opening to me, the sea-chapter, with such new personages as the sentimental and apoplectic chief-mate and the morose steward, however astounding to [Mr. Powell] in its detached condition was much more so to me as a member of a series, following the chapter outside the Eastern Hotel in which I myself had played my part.  (C 309, my emphasis)

Marlow underlines the significance of knowledge, familiarity, and reason as paths to deep comprehension. Powell may be astounded by the revelation, but Marlow is more so because he recognizes what he sees. Surprise is itself reconfigured here so that it is conceptually grounded in the known rather than the new. These competing impulses, ventriloquized as they are by different voices and falling into different, if metonymically related concepts, are not finally resolved in Conrad’s work. In keeping with the Nietzschean texts that inform de Man’s essay and inspire Conrad’s and Deleuze’s work, the dynamic

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Conclusion: Slow Modernism  161 interplay between the two does not conclude with a Hegelian synthesis but might be understood, instead, with the eternal return and its centrifugal drive into the future. In “The Eternal Return and the Phantom of Difference,” Catherine Malabou turns to the writing of Deleuze and Derrida in an attempt to grasp the instantiation of the new against the backdrop of the eternal return. Framed by the thought of the two philosophers, the eternal return is seen as Nietzsche’s attempt to provide an alternative to the Hegelian dialectic and its mechanism of negation. Difference, much as we understand Derrida’s différance, “is not opposition”; it does not seek resolution. Nietzsche, she suggests, “replaces the dialectical process of the resolution of opposites, which reduces difference and subordinates it to the work of the negative, with a principle of spectralizing selection” (22). Framed thus, the eternal return provides a cogent principle for an intervention in critical in­ter­pret­ ations of Conrad’s works, in so far as it embodies a process similar to the one I have attempted to delineate here. The slow must no longer be exclusively understood according to its traditional denotation as the negative binary to speed, an obstacle to action. Inaugurating a new avenue for artistic exploration, Conrad’s slow modernism spells openness, flux, and change; its decelerations unfold in the fiction as life itself.

Note 1. This is not to propose that the two are in a relationship of binary opposition. Mimesis is necessarily generative in so far as it functions through response and imitation. Nidesh Lawtoo’s Conrad’s Shadow: Catastrophe, Mimesis, Theory extends the concept’s reach further by demonstrating its use in poststructuralist thought and the effort to think outside conceptual logic. In his reading of “The Duel” Lawtoo argues that the mimetic principle is at work when “an external, psychophysiological manifestation of an affect (or pathos) in the other generates an automatic, mirror­ing reflex in the self, triggered by the all-too-human tendency to involuntarily mirror people (or mimetic unconscious). This unconscious reflex, in turn, generates an affective flow of nonverbal communication that blurs the boundaries that divide self and other (or individuation)” (21–2). The difference I draw here is in following Conrad’s distinction between the artistic return to existing models of literary form and an attempt to give expression to the new. Practically, the difference may well rest on emphasis rather than a qualitative divide, but the distinction is nevertheless significant.

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References  165 Crowley, Martin. “Possible Suicide: Blanchot and the Ownership of Death.” Paragraph 23. 2 (2000), 191–206. Curle, Richard. Ed. Letters of Joseph Conrad to Richard Curle. New York: Crosby Gaige, 1928. Davies, Laurence and Karl, Frederick R. Eds. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Volumes 1–4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Davies, Laurence and Stape, John. Eds. The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad. Volume 7. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983–2002. Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition. Trans. Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel  W.  Smith and Michael A. Greco. London: Verso, 1998. Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations, 1972–1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Delueze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature. 1975. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Delueze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. London: Continuum, 2004. Delueze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. What is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. De Man, Paul. “Literary History and Literary Modernity.” Daedalus 99.2 (1970), 384–404. Demory, Pamela, H. “Nostromo: Making History.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 35.3 (1993), 316–46. DiSanto, Michael John. Under Conrad’s Eyes: The Novel as Criticism. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2009. Derrida, Jacques. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Donovan, Stephen. Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Dryden, Linda. Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Duffy, Enda. The Speed Handbook: Velocity, Pleasure, Modernism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Eliot, T. S. “Ulysses, Order and Myth.” The Dial 75.5 (1923), 480–3. Enderwitz, Anne. “Speech, Affect, and Intervention in Chance.” In Centennial Essays on Joseph Conrad’s Chance. Ed. Allan H. Simmons and Susan Jones. Amsterdam: Brill, 2016, 36–52. Epstein, Hugh. “The Rover: A Post-Skeptical Novel?” Conradiana 37.1/2 (2005), 101–18. Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna. Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna.“Textuality and Surrogacy in Conrad’s Chance.” L’Époque Conradienne 16 (1989), 51–66. Fincham, Gail, Hawthorn, Jeremy, and Lothe, Jakob. Eds. Outposts of Progress: Joseph Conrad, Modernism and Post-Colonialism. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2015.

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166 References Ford, Ford Madox. The Soul of London: A Survey of a Modern City. London: A Rivers, 1905. Fowles, Jonathan. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. London: Vintage, 1996. Francis, Andrew. Culture and Commerce in Conrad’s Asian Fiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Friedman, Norman. “Point of View in Fiction: The Development of a Critical Concept.” PMLA 70 (1955), 1160–84. Gaedtke, Andrew. Modernism and the Machinery of Madness: Psychosis, Technology, and Narrative Worlds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Galsworthy, John. “Reminiscences of Conrad.” In Castles in Spain & Other Screeds. London: Heinemann, 1927, 74–95. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse Revisited. Trans. Jane  E.  Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988. Gillies, Mary Ann. Henri Bergson and British Modernism. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1996. Graham, Kenneth. “Conrad and Modernism.” In Conrad and Modernism. Ed. J. H Stape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 203–22. Greaney, Michael. “Conrad’s Style.” In The New Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Ed. J. H. Stape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015, 102–15. Greene, Naomi. “Creation and the Self: Artaud, Beckett, Michaux.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 13.3 (1971), 265–78. Grosz, Elizabeth. The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Guerlac, Suzanne. Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Gunn, Dan. “ ‘Until the Gag is Chewed’: Samuel Beckett’s Letters: Eloquence and ‘Near Speechlessness.’ ” Times Literary Supplement 5377 (2006), 13–15. Hampson, Robert. Conrad’s Secrets. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Hampson, Robert. “ ‘Experiments in Modernity’: Ford and Pound.” In Pound in Multiple Perspective: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Andrew Gibson. London: Macmillan, 1993, 93–125. Hampson, Robert. Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity. London: St. Martin’s Press, 1992. Hampson, Robert. “The Late Novels.” In The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad. Ed. J. H. Stape. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996, 140–59. Harkness, Bruce. “The Epigraph of Conrad’s ‘Chance.’ ” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 9.3 (1954), 209–22. Harrington, Ellen Burton. Conrad’s Sensational Heroines: Gender and Representation in the Late Fiction of Joseph Conrad. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Hawthorn, Jeremy. “Repetitions and Revolutions: Conrad’s Use of the PseudoIterative in Nostromo.” In La revue des lettres modernes: Histoire des Idées et des littératures. Paris: Éditions Minard, 1988, 125–49. Heidegger, Martin. An Introduction to Metaphysics. Trans. Ralph Manheim. New York: Doubleday, 1961.

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References  167 Henricksen, Bruce. “The Construction of the Narrator in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus.’ ” PMLA 103.5 (1988), 783–95. Howes, David. Ed. Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. London: Bloomsbury, 2005. Huck, Christian. “Coming to Our Senses: Narratology and the Visual.” In Point of View, Perspective, and Focalization: Modeling Mediation in Narrative. Ed. Peter Hühn, Wolf Schmid, and Jörg Schönert. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009, 201–18. Hudspeth, Robert N. “Conrad’s Use of Time in Chance.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 21.3 (1966), 283–9. Jasanoff, Maya. The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World. London: HarperCollins, 2017. Jay, Martin. Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Jean-Aubry, Georges. Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters. 2 vols. London: Heinemann, 1927. Jonas, Hans. The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology. New York: Harper & Row, 1956. Jones, Susan. Conrad and Women. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999. Jones, Susan. “Conrad’s Critique of the Serial Romance: Chance and The Rover.” Conradiana 51 (2009), 288–309. Jones, Susan. “Modernism and the Marketplace: The Case of Conrad’s Chance.” College Literature 34.3 (2007), 101–19. Karl, Frederick R. Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1979. Kerr, Douglas. “Conrad’s Magic Circles.” Essays in Criticism 53.4 (2003), 345–65. Kertzer, J.  M. “Joseph Conrad and the Metaphysics of Time.” Studies in the Novel 11.3 (1979), 302–17. King, Magda. A Guide to Heidegger’s Being and Time. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Knapp Hay, Eloise. The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963. Knowles, Owen. “Critical Responses: 1925–1950.” In Joseph Conrad in Context. Ed. Allan H. Simmons. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009, 67–74. Koepnick, Lutz. On Slowness: Towards an Aesthetic of the Contemporary. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. Trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon  S.  Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. Lawtoo, Nidesh. Conrad’s Shadow: Catastrophe, Mimesis, Theory. East Lansing: Michigan University Press, 2016. Le Boulicaut, Yannick. “Shores in Joseph Conrad’s Works.” Conradiana 37.3 (2005), 233–44. Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. Badiou and Deleuze Read Literature. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. Levin, Yael. “Make Love not War: Covert Modernisms in Joseph Conrad’s The Rescue.” In Each Other’s Yarns: Essays on Narrative and Critical Method for Jeremy

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168 References Hawthorn. Ed. Paul Goring, Jakob Lothe, and Domnhall Mitchell. Oslo: Novus, 2012, 233–48. Levin, Yael. “Masters of Disinterest: Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Conrad’s Victory but Were Afraid to Ask James.” Conradiana 45.3 (2013), 1–19. Lorraine, Tamsin. Deleuze and Guattari’s Immanent Ethics: Theory, Subjectivity, and Duration. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2011. Lothe, Jakob. Conrad’s Narrative Method. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. Lyotard, Jean-François. Driftworks. Trans. Roger McKeon. New York: Semiotext(e), 1984. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. London: Routledge, 1987. Malabou, Catherine. “The Eternal Return and the Phantom of Difference.” Trans. Arne De Boever. Parrhesia 10 (2010), 21–9. Mao, Douglas and Walkowitz, Rebecca L. Eds. Bad Modernisms. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism.” Trans. Lawrence Rainey. In Futurism: An Anthology. Ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009, 49–54. Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso. “Technical Manifesto of Futurist Literature.” Trans. Lawrence Rainey. In Futurism: An Anthology. Ed. Lawrence Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009, 119–24. Matz, Jesse. Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Maude, Ulrika. “ ‘Temporarily Sane’: Beckett, Modernism, and the Ethics of Suicide.” In Beckett and Modernism. Ed. Olga Beloborodova, Dirk Van Hulle, and Pim Verhulst. Cham: Palgrave, 2018, 223–37. Mazzio, Carla. “The Senses Divided: Organs, Objects, and Media in Early Modern England.” In Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Ed. David Howes. London: Bloomsbury, 2005, 85–105. Moncrieff, C.  K.  Scott. Ed. Marcel Proust: An English Tribute. London: Chatto & Windus, 1923. Moser, Thomas. Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957. Nicholls, Peter. Modernisms: A Literary Guide. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Ophir, Ella. “ ‘All Our Stammerings’: Two Kinds of Inarticulateness in Conrad.” ANQ 27.1 (2014), 23–7. Paccaud-Huguet, Josiane. “Heroes of the Real: Conrad’s Heroes without a Cause.” In Outposts of Progress: Joseph Conrad, Modernism and Post-Colonialism. Ed. Gail Fincham, Jeremy Hawthorn, and Jakob Lothe. Cape Town: University of Cape Town Press, 2015, 125–38. Pedersen, Lene Yding. “A Subject After All: Rethinking the ‘Personalized Narrator’ of the Self-Reflexive First-Person Novels of O’Brien, Beckett and Banville.” Orbis Litterarum 58.3 (2003), 219–38. Peters, John  G. Ed. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad: Contemporary Reviews. Vol. 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.

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References  169 Peters, John G.Ed. A Historical Guide to Joseph Conrad. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Peters, John  G. “Joseph Conrad’s ‘Sudden Holes’ in Time: The Epistemology of Temporality.” Studies in the Novel 32.4 (2000), 420–41. Peters, John  G.“ ‘Let that Marlow Talk’: Chance and the Narrative Problem of Marlow.” In Centennial Essays on Joseph Conrad’s Chance. Ed. Allan H. Simmons and Susan Jones. Amsterdam: Brill, 2016, 130–46. Porter Abbott, H. Ed. The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Rabaté, Jean-Michel. The Pathos of Distance: Affects of the Moderns. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. Renton, Andrew. “Disabled Figures: From the Residua to Stirrings Still.” In The Cambridge Companion to Beckett. Ed. John Pilling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 167–83. Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith. Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002. Ruppel, Richard. A Political Genealogy of Joseph Conrad. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015. Sayeau, Michael. Against the Event: The Everyday and Evolution of Modernist Narrative. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Schnauder, Ludwig. “Free Will and Determinism in Nostromo.”  The Conradian: Journal of the Joseph Conrad Society 29.2 (2004), 59–74. Schwab, Arnold T. “Conrad’s American Speeches and His Reading from ‘Victory.’ ” Modern Philology 62.4 (1965), 342–7. Schwartz, Sanford. The Matrix of Modernism: Pound, Eliot, and Early TwentiethCentury Thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Senn, Werner. Conrad’s Narrative Voice: Stylistic Aspects of His Fiction. Leiden: Rodopi, 2017. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet. Ed. Burton Raffel. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Shklovsky, Victor. “Art as Technique.” In Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Trans. and ed. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965, 3–24. Sidney, Philip. An Apology for Poetry. Ed. Geoffrey Shepherd. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973. Simmons, Allan H. “ ‘He Was Misleading’: Frustrated Gestures in Lord Jim.” In Lord Jim: Centennial Essays. Ed. Allan Simmons and John Henry Stape. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998, 31–47. Simmons, Allan  H. Ed. The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad: Contemporary Reviews. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Simmons, Allan H. Joseph Conrad. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Simondon, Gilbert. “The Genesis of the Individual.” 1963. Trans. Mark Cohen and Sanford Kwinter. In Incorporations. Ed. Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter. New York: Zone, 1992, 297–319. Somers-Hall, Henry. “Time Out of Joint: Hamlet and the Pure Form of Time.” Deleuze Studies 5 (2011), 56–76.

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170 References Stewart, Susan. “Remembering the Senses.” In Empire of the Senses: The Sensual Culture Reader. Ed. David Howes. London: Bloomsbury, 2005, 59–69. Van Ghent, Dorothy. The English Novel: Form and Function. New York: Harper, 1961. Walker, Michelle Boulous. Slow Philosophy: Reading against the Institution. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Warodell, Johan Adam. “ ‘Arrows by Jove!’: Delayed Miscoding in ‘Heart of Darkness.’ ” The Conradian 40.1 (2015), 7–22. Wexler, Joyce Piell. Who Paid for Modernism? Art, Money, and Fiction of Conrad, Joyce and Lawrence. Fayatteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997. Whitehead, Lee M. “Nostromo: The Tragic ‘Idea.’ ” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 23.4 (1969), 463–75. Woolf, Virginia. Collected Essays. Vol. 2. London: Hogarth Press, 1966. Yamamoto, Kaoru. Rethinking Joseph Conrad’s Concepts of Community: Strange Fraternity. London: Bloomsbury, 2017.

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Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. Abstraction  72, 105–6, 116–17, 156 Acheraïou, Amar  129 Achievement and Decline  2–3, 13 Action  4–6, 8–9, 16, 28–9, 32–41, 44–6, 48, 52–3, 63–6, 83, 85–6, 99, 103–5, 121–2, 124–6, 129–30, 135–7, 143–5, 147–9, 159, 161 Aesthetics  2, 8–10, 28–9, 38, 67–8, 86–9, 101, 108, 122–4, 148–9, 153–6 Affect  12, 76–9, 89, 91, 97–8, 106, 108, 135, 149–50, 152–3, 157, 159–60 Agency  16, 23, 52, 57, 59–63, 65–6, 73, 92–3, 100, 106–8, 144–5, 153–4 Alighieri, Dante  35, 143 Analysis (Novels of)  4–5, 7–9 Anti-Ocular Turn  22, 71–2, 79, 82, 89 Aristotle  4–5, 14, 32–4, 83, 92–3, 138 Art  10–11, 32–4, 66, 88, 92, 102, 108–11, 116–17, 122–3, 149–50, 154, 156–8 Bal, Mieke  32 Barber-Stetson, Claire  xii, xiv–xv Barthes, Roland  4, 32–4, 39–40, 59, 64–5, 93–4 Baxter, Katherine Isobel  3–4, 18–19 Beckett, Samuel  1, 10, 13–14, 18–19, 21–2, 28–9, 39–40, 53–4, 56, 60–8, 106–8, 142–3, 160 Becoming  10–14, 19, 22, 46, 71–3, 83–5, 87–8, 92, 103–4, 106, 116–17, 123, 149–50, 154, 157–8 Being  2, 10–14, 22, 39–40, 46, 51, 56–7, 60–3, 71–2, 83–4, 88, 92, 103–4, 107, 109, 122–4, 158 Benjamin, Walter  52–3 Bergson, Henri  10, 22, 26n. 9, 43–8, 71–3, 81–3, 88, 92–5, 105, 121, 136–7, 141–2, 159

Binary Opposition  xiii, 30, 33–5, 122, 145, 153–4, 156–7, 161 Blackwood, George and William  6–7, 9, 88 Blanchot, Maurice  144–5 Bock, Martin  113 Borg, Ruben  64–5, 156–7 Bowen, Elizabeth  152 Caserio, Robert L.  33–4, 38–9 Causality  11, 33–4, 84–5, 88–9, 98–9, 122–3, 129–30, 140–1, 146–50, 153–5 Cessation  33–4, 36, 38, 136 Chronology  13–14, 29, 37, 47–8, 86, 97, 149–50, 153–4, 156, 159 Cilliers, Paul  xi Circularity  35, 96 Clock  11, 29–31, 43–4, 46–8, 96 Cogito  1, 20–2, 52, 59, 61, 75, 77–8, 107, 122, 128, 141–2, 153–4 Coleridge, Samuel  115–16 Comolli, Jean-Louis  74 Commercial success  5–7, 101–2, 116–17, 124 Contemporary Reviews 140–1 Connor, Steven  19, 106–8 Conrad, Joseph Characters: Almayer  20, 29–31, 37–8, 42, 44–5, 48 Decoud  126–9, 132–48, 159 Flora  98–9, 110, 112–13, 115–17, 154–5 Fyne, Mr.  95–6, 98–100, 102–5, 114, 116–17 Gould, Emilia  126, 159 Gould, Charles  129–33, 139–40, 149–50 Heyst  58, 60–1, 64–5 Hirsch 147–9 Jim  20, 51–61, 64–8, 73–4, 78–80, 82–6, 89, 92–3, 111–14 Lingard  13–14, 29–30, 34, 37–9, 41–6

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172 Index Conrad, Joseph Characters (cont.) Marlow  xiii, 14, 21–2, 52, 55–6, 58–68, 73–4, 78–88, 95–9, 101–5, 107–10, 112–17, 122, 124, 142–3, 154–5, 160 Mitchell, Captain  126–35, 146, 148–9 Nostromo  128, 131–4, 136–40, 145, 147–8 Powell  96–8, 109–10, 115–16, 160 Travers, Mr.  41–2, 47 Willems  30–2, 34–9, 41, 44–5 Works: “Author and Cinematograph,”  4–7, 19 Almayer’s Folly  13–14 “Amy Foster,”  xi–xiii “Author’s Notes,”  40–1, 83, 85, 92, 98–103, 108–11, 113–14, 116–17, 132, 159 Chance  14, 22, 63, 89, 91–117, 122, 124–5, 128, 143, 154–7, 159–60 Collected Letters  4–9, 13, 83, 88, 102, 116–17, 124 “End of the Tether, The,”  6, 88 “Falk,” 100 Heart of Darkness  xiii, 11–12, 14–15, 21–2, 28–9, 56, 62–3, 83–4, 87, 89, 96, 104, 115–16 Lord Jim  14, 21–2, 28–9, 52, 54–5, 57–63, 65–6, 73, 76–89, 91–3, 96, 99, 105, 110–11, 115–16, 128, 149–50, 156 Nigger of the “Narcissus,”  xii, 53–4 Nostromo  4–5, 13–14, 23, 121–50, 158–9 Outcast of the Islands, An  13–14, 20–1, 29–32, 34–41, 43–5, 48, 121–2 Personal Record, A 51 Rescue, The  xii, 13–14, 20–1, 28–9, 38, 40–8, 122 Rover, The 3–4 “Secret Sharer, The,”  76–8 Shadow-Line, The xii, 15–16, 76–8, 100–1 “Tale, The,”  16 Under Western Eyes  51, 80–1, 92–3, 108–9, 149–50, 156 Victory  21–2, 58, 60 “Youth,”  63, 89, 149–50 Consciousness  39–40, 45, 54, 59, 125 Contingency (chance, accident)  13, 22, 47–8, 85, 87, 89, 91–6, 98–104, 110–11, 131, 143, 147, 149–50, 154–7 Coole, Diana  152–3 Creation  8, 33–4, 67, 158 Critical reception  3–4, 83–4, 88, 152–3

Curle, Richard  117 Death  33–4, 37–9, 42, 129–30, 135–7, 142–5 Defamiliarization  xii, 8–11, 46, 144, 153 Delayed decoding  xii–xiii, 8–9, 71–2, 149–50, 156 Deleuze, Gilles  xiv, 9–10, 12, 27n. 10, 40, 46, 82–3, 107–8, 141–2, 157, 160–1 De Man, Paul  158–61 Descartes (see also cogito and also perspectivalism)  74–5, 81–2, 136–7 Destiny  84–5, 87–8, 91–2, 96, 98–9, 130, 142 Detachment, distance  54, 75, 80–3, 115, 122–3, 125–9, 134–5, 138–40, 148–9, 155 Determinism  12–14, 22–3, 84–6, 92–4, 98–9, 103, 123–4, 130–1, 146–9, 155 Dialectics  30–1, 122–3, 130, 145, 161 Disability xiv Donovan, Stephen  104–5 Drift  96–8, 100–9, 139, 153–4 Dryden, Linda  18–19 Duffy, Enda  14–15 Duration, durée  2, 12, 45–6, 48, 86, 95, 97–9, 105, 136–7, 139, 141, 149–50, 158–9 Ego ideal  59–62, 66, 111–13 Eliot, T.S.  133 Enlightenment  71–2, 79–81, 92–3, 104, 122, 152–3 Environment  xi, 97–8, 140–1, 145, 152–3 Epic 131–3 Epiphany  135–7, 140 Epistemology  2, 21–2, 52–6, 71–2, 75, 80–1, 86, 104, 148–50, 153 Epithets  123, 131–3 Epstein, Hugh  3–4, 18–19 Erdinast-Vulcan, Daphna  58, 115 Eternal Return  160–1 Event  28–9, 32, 52–3, 62–6, 87–9, 94, 133–4 Experience  32, 38–40, 45–6, 48, 53, 56, 65–6, 71–2, 74, 76, 81–6, 88, 97–8, 104, 106–10, 122–5, 127, 131–2, 141 Fabula  11, 140–1, 149–50, 156 Fate  40–1, 58, 62–3, 73, 84–5, 92, 129–31, 148 Feminism 112–13 Fowles, John  93–5 Free will  94–5, 123–4, 130–1, 148–9 Freedom  43–6, 75, 87, 96 French Lieutenant's Woman, The 93–4

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Index  173 Friedman, Norman  72 Futurism 1–2 Gaze  73–84, 104–5, 122, 155 Gender  110–11, 113–14 Genette, Gerard  4, 14 Greaney, Michael  2–3, 18–19 Greene Naomi  67–8 Grosz, Elizabeth  46, 92–3, 141–2, 159 Guattari, Félix  xiv, 9–10, 71–2, 82–3, 157 Guerlac, Suzan  45–6 Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich  xiii–xiv Habit  xii, 39–40, 47, 123–4, 160 Hamlet  15–16, 46, 104–7 Hampson, Robert  2–3, 113–15 Harkness, Bruce  91, 154–5 Harrington, Ellen Burton  113 Hawthorn, Jeremy  134 Heidegger, Martin  51, 56–7, 144, 157 Henricksen, Bruce  53–4 Hermeneutics  xiv, 32–3, 38, 79, 81–2, 84–5, 125, 149–50, 155–6 Hesitation  23, 40, 43–6, 48 History  13–14, 23, 92–3, 99–100, 123–4, 126, 128, 130–1, 133–5, 146, 148, 156, 158–60 Hudspeth, Robert N.  154–6 Human  xv, 1–2, 11, 15, 23, 46, 57, 74–5, 84–5, 92–3, 97–8, 107–8, 116–17, 138–9, 145, 149–50, 152–4, 157 Humanism  xi, 110 Impressionism  xiii–xiv, xvin. 1, 13, 28–9, 153 Indeterminacy  40, 44–6, 48 Information  82–3, 89, 103, 154, 156 Intuition  77–8, 97–8, 106–7, 159 James, William  10, 105 Jay, Martin  73–4, 76, 84–5, 89 Jones, Susan  113–14, 116–17 Kant, Immanuel  107, 138 Kerr, Douglas  58 King, Magda  56–7 Knowledge  xiii, 39, 77, 79, 82, 103, 106–7, 158 Knowles, Owen  152 Koepnick, Lutz  14, 16–20, 156–7 Kristeva, Julia  59

Language  21–2, 51–4, 56–68, 71–3, 76–9, 86, 149–50, 152–3 Le Boulicaut, Yannick  41 Logic  10–12, 20, 22, 71–2, 77–9, 87–8, 103–6, 116–17, 122, 130–1, 149–50, 153–5, 157 Madox Ford, Ford  17 Malabou, Catherine  161 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso  1–2 Matz, Jesse  xvin. 1 Mazzio, Carla  138 McHale, Brian  55–6 Mediation  125, 133, 138–9, 149–50 Memory  45, 95, 124, 159 Mill, John Stuart  94 Milton, John  35 Minor literature  xiv Modernism  xii, xv, 1–2, 4, 8–10, 14–15, 17–19, 28–9, 51–3, 55, 58–9, 65, 67–8, 79–80, 83–6, 88–9, 116–17, 149–50, 152–3, 156–9, 161 Modern  6–7, 22, 92, 101–2, 108–11, 152–3, 156 Moncrieff, C.K. Scott  7 Morality  16, 23, 25n. 5, 35–6, 38, 38–9, 83, 85–6, 89, 99–102, 118n. 4, 108, 111–14, 116–17, 138–9, 143, 153–5, 157, 159 Moser, Thomas  2–3 Mud  35–8, 41–2, 48 Myth  30, 58, 131 Narcissism  79, 110–13, 115–16, 128 Narrative  4–6, 11, 14, 17, 19, 28–34, 38–40, 46–8, 52–5, 65, 71–2, 76, 80–1, 84–5, 88–9, 92–4, 96, 98, 101–2, 110–11, 123, 131, 135, 147, 149–50, 153–4, 156, 158 Narration  21–2, 37, 41, 53–4, 65, 72–3, 76, 80–1, 93–4, 122–4, 128, 133–4, 146, 148 Negation  xii, 84–5, 161 New, the  xv, 8–9, 12, 15, 29, 45, 71–2, 83–4, 92–3, 123–4, 129–30, 134, 149–50, 154–6, 158–60 New Materialism  152–3 Nietzsche, Friedrich  38–9, 47, 105, 125, 157–61 Obscurity  2, 87–8, 108, 154–5, 158 Ocularcentrism  22, 73–6, 79

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174 Index Ontology  1, 12, 20–1, 28–9, 40, 52–7, 60, 62–3, 67–8, 71–3, 76, 80–1, 93–4, 122–5, 129, 136, 138–9, 144–5, 148–9, 153, 158 Ophir, Ella  51–2 Oral tradition  52–3, 62–3 Paccaud-Huguet, Josiane  83–4 Passivity  xi–xii, 15, 28–9, 48, 52, 57, 60–3, 65–6, 101, 103–5, 107–8, 121–2, 129, 144–5, 153–4 Pederson, Lene  53 Perception  xii, 22, 71–2, 74, 80, 89, 97–8 Perspectivalism  72, 74–5, 79–80, 82–3, 89, 122, 139–40 Peters, John G.  91–3, 155–6 Philosophy  10–11, 13, 22, 28–31, 40, 47, 52, 54, 64, 73–6, 83–5, 92–4, 98, 105, 107–8, 122–4, 126–7, 129, 138, 144–5, 149–50, 153–4 Pinker, J.B. and Eric  4–5, 124 Plato  30–1, 84–5, 125 Plot  20–1, 28–9, 32–41, 45, 47, 52–3, 63–6, 83–4, 86–8, 92–6, 98, 108, 129–30, 140–1 Poe, Edgar Allan  108–9 Poetics  5–6, 51, 56–7, 66–8, 106–7, 152 Porter Abbott, H.  32 Posthuman  135, 141 Postmodernism  10, 55–6, 93–4 Pre-modernism  58–60, 64–5 Present, the  12, 19–20, 44–6, 86, 97–8, 106, 122–7, 129–31, 133–6, 138, 141, 147–50, 154–60 Proust, Marcel  7–8, 13, 158, 160 Renton, Andrew  28–9 Representation  19, 21–2, 32, 40, 51, 83, 85–6, 89, 125–7, 136 Rime of the Ancient Mariner, The 115–16 Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith  128 Romance, romantic  58, 67, 87, 104–5, 111, 152 Ruppel, Richard  91, 113, 155–6 Sayeau, Michael  87–8 Schopenhauer, Arthur  13 Schwartz, Sanford  10, 105 Script  23, 123, 129–32, 135–7, 144, 147–50

Self  39, 55–6, 59–61, 106–7, 109–10, 128, 137, 140, 142, 146–7 Senn, Werner  122–3 Sense, sensory  11–12, 76, 82–3, 97–8, 103–8, 122, 125, 135, 137–40, 142–3, 149–50, 152–3, 157–8, 160 Shakespeare, William  15–16, 46, 104–5, 143 Ships  41–4, 48, 77–8, 80, 100, 103 Shklovsky, Viktor  xii, 8–9 Sidney, Philip  9 Sight  71–83, 86, 122–3, 137–9 Simmons, Allan H.  83–4 Simondon, Gilbert  141–2 Skepticism  2, 51–2, 81, 129, 135–6, 140 Somers-Hall, Henry  30–1, 84–5 Spatialization of Time  11–12, 28–9, 32, 39–40, 83–5, 88, 94–5, 98, 116–17, 122, 125, 131, 139, 141, 149–50, 155–6, 159 Speed  1–2, 4, 14–15, 17, 42, 103, 153 Stewart, Susan  138 Subject, the  1, 21–2, 46, 51–4, 57–68, 71–2, 75–6, 79–80, 89, 92, 104–10, 116–17, 121–3, 128, 135, 138–9, 141–4, 146, 148–50, 152–3, 158 Suicide  135–6, 143–6, 148 Sujet  11, 140–1, 149–50, 156 Sulaco  123, 125–7, 129, 132–5, 140 Sun, sunlight  35–7, 104, 125, 127, 135–6, 143 Suspension  2, 21–3, 40–5, 48, 122, 136–7, 143, 147–50, 158–9 Synthesis  107–8, 160–1 Teleology, telos  9–10, 12, 17, 19, 32–6, 72, 82–6, 88–9, 96, 139, 141, 148, 153–4, 156 Temptation  36, 125–6 Time  11–12, 19–21, 28–48, 71–2, 76, 84–6, 92, 94, 97–9, 106, 116–17, 125, 129–30, 141–2, 149–50, 154–5, 159 Truth  6–8, 39–40, 125, 148, 156 Univocity 12–14 Walker, Michelle Boulous  xiii–xiv Warodell, Johan Adam  xvin. 1 Watt, Ian  xii Wexler, Joyce Piell  102 Witness-narrator  22, 71–2, 76, 82, 85–6 Woolf, Virginia  2–3, 28–9