By Robert Hampson, Professor Emeritus, Royal Holloway, University of London

Debra Romanick Baldwin (ed.) The Routledge Companion to Joseph Conrad (Routledge, 2024) 386 pp. £215

It is very pleasing that this new Routledge Companion to Joseph Conrad should appear in 2024, the year that marks the centenary of Conrad’s death. It is very good to know that so much interesting and original work is being produced on Conrad one hundred years later with so many different approaches. For this edited collection, Debra Romanick Baldwin has brought together some 28 critics, ranging from early-career academics through rising stars to established names in Conrad studies. She has also drawn her team of contributors from a wide range of countries – Canada, China, France, Italy, Israel, Japan, South Africa, Taiwan, and Turkey as well as Britain, Poland and the United States – as a testimony to Conrad’s international reach and continuing importance in world literature.

The Introduction wisely begins by quoting Yael Levin’s observation that a companion is neither an introduction nor a guide: it is not a matter of basic pedagogical instruction, but rather of intimacy, an accompaniment, a ‘being with’. This, of course, raises the question of what that intimacy might entail. Debra Romanick Baldwin addresses the educational and literary context in which Conrad is currently studied and read, where less attention is now given ‘to features of Conrad’s art once taken for granted’: ‘his influential modernism, his astonishing use of language informed by multilingual contexts, his psychological depth, his exilic imagination and political complexity shaped by experience of different regimes and wide geographical travel’. Indeed, as Levin has addressed elsewhere, the idea of valuing depth, complexity, encounters with otherness (as opposed to identification with what is like yourself), and the novel as an art form, are often quite alien (if not anathema) to contemporary readers and students.

The editor has organised the essays in this volume under seven headings: ‘Conrad and Biography’, ‘Conrad and Narrative’, ‘Conrad and Philosophy’, ‘Conrad and Women’, ‘Conrad and Other Writers’, ‘Conrad and Politics’, and ‘Conrad and Other Forms of Art’. These headings are intended to be suggestive, not definitive: contributors were not assigned topics, and the boundaries are porous. As the headings suggest, however, the essays provide a wide-ranging engagement with Conrad’s work.

The First Part begins with Helen Chambers showing how she has extended the evidence-based scholarship of Hans van Marle, J.H. Stape, Alan Villiers, Allan Simmons and Alston Kennerley through the rigorous and imaginative use of digital resources (digitised archives and databases) not available to earlier researchers. She corrects earlier maps of Conrad’s voyages and indicates continuing gaps in the record: for example, his two months in Calcutta and two months in Port Elizabeth, Conrad’s forgotten, first experience of Africa. In Chapter 2, Kim Salmons addresses Conrad’s cultural Catholicism (more specifically, his links with the Carmelites) and offers a reading of ‘Amy Foster’ through the lens of Yanko Gooral’s Catholicism (and St John of the Cross). In the third chapter, Sylwia Janina Wojciechowska presents The Mirror of the Sea as an example of ‘modernist nostalgia’. She usefully differentiates simple and complex forms of nostalgia: a sentimental revisioning of the past as against an anxious nostalgia transmitted through tensions between past / present, near / far, familiar / unfamiliar. She points to the foundational binaries in The Mirror of the Sea (from the opening landfall and departure to the later East and West winds) to argue for a foregrounding of transitions, in particular the transition to the increased uncertainty and instability of Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘liquid modernity’. The final essay in this first section, Nathalie Martinière’s ‘Conrad as Character’, considers Conrad’s after-life as a character in recent fiction from Alain Joubert’s Au Bord de la Mer Violette (based on Conrad’s time in Marseilles), through two very different works about Conrad’s death (David Miller’s Today and Edouard  Berti’s Un Padre Extranjero) to the use of Conrad as a witness to the horrors of colonialism in Paul Kawczak’s Ténèbre and the graphic novels Heart of Darkness (by Catherine Anyango and David Zane Mairowitz) and Kongo (by Tom Tirabosco and Christian Perrissin). She concludes with two works that treat Conrad as the enemy: Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Dream of the Celt and Jose Altamirano’s The Secret History of Costaguana. As she concludes, these instances of fictionalization confirm Conrad’s ‘many-sided influence on contemporary authors’ (53).

Part Two, ‘Conrad and Narrative’, begins with July Gay’s suggestive essay on ‘archipelagic writing’. The essay is somewhat over-ambitious in its attempt to deal with Lord Jim, Nostromo and Victory under this heading. One problem this grouping raises is the meaning of the word ‘archipelago’: is it really useful for critical purposes to employ the same term to link the Isabels in Nostromo with Heyst’s ‘magic circle’ that includes the Malay Archipelago and parts of Melanesia? The blanket term ignores the matter of scale and also serves to elide and occlude historical and geopolitical issues. This occlusion perhaps explains a misreading of the opening paragraph of Chapter XXII of Lord Jim: Patusan is not an ‘islet’ (LJ, 172). It is compared to ‘an islet’ in relation to the ‘stream of civilisation’. The text indicates that Patusan is a region in Sumatra or North-east Borneo (‘a remote district of a native-ruled state’ (LJ, 167]). Patusan is also the name of ‘the chief settlement’ (LJ, 167), and this leads to a further confusion in the essay. Patusan the district is ‘circumscribed by lofty impassable mountains’ (LJ, 173); Patusan the settlement, which is forty miles from the sea, is surmounted by ‘the summits of two steep hills’ (LJ, 167-8). The mountains and the hills are quite distinct geological features. However, Gay’s approach to Lord Jim through Édouard Glissant’s work on archipelagic writing leads to an insightful engagement with Conrad’s practice as a writer. Gay cites Glissant’s definition of the archipelago in relation to replacing linear chronology with ‘the fortuitous encounter and joining together of “time fragments”’ (63). She productively relates this to Conrad’s assertion of the writer’s task as to hold up ‘the rescued fragment’ in order to show ‘its vibration, its colour, its form’ and ‘through its movement, its form, and its colour’ to reveal ‘the substance of its truth’ (NN, 7). As she says, the image of the archipelago is more satisfactory than the static images of the mosaic or the patchwork to characterise Conrad’s art of fiction with its fluid groupings and shifting perspectives (CL8, 131).

As this suggests, the essays in the second part, are not generally concerned with classic narratology, but draw on other theoretical framings. Chapter 6, Catherine Delesalle-Nancey’s outstanding essay on ‘Reading Conrad’, approaches Conrad’s fiction by ‘paying attention to voices in his works’ (70). She begins from Claude Maisonnat’s Lacanian concept of ‘the textual voice’ and proposes to focus on ‘the figure of the listener’ and ‘the conditions for listening’ (70). She convincingly argues that, by staging a teller and a listener in various fictions involving confession, Conrad draws attention to the art of listening and, by extension, to the art of reading. The difference between hearing and listening is crucial to her argument. She takes us through ‘Heart of Darkness’, ‘Amy Foster’, Lord Jim, Under Western Eyes and ‘The Tale’. She begins by noting the attention to the vibrating of the voice in ‘Heart of Darkness’. Her emphasis on the voice’s appeal not to reason but to ‘the senses, or rather to some obscure ineffable thing’ (72) could usefully be put in dialogue with Hugh Epstein’s work on Victorian science in Hardy, Conrad and the Senses (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). She provides similarly subtle accounts of ‘Amy Foster’ in terms of the fear of senseless speech overcoming the signifying chain; of Lord Jim in terms of the contamination of confession; of Lord Jim and Under Western Eyes in relation to the problematisation of access to truth.  She concludes with an extended engagement with the silent voice of the text and the ‘extimacy’ of reading, which involves the reader opening to the other and allowing ‘the perceived affects of the other to resonate with one’s own’ (82). She demonstrates how, in each of the texts she has discussed, ‘Conrad refuses his reader the comfort of an ideal narratee who can perfectly model for him a reading method and grant him easy access to true interpretation’ (78). Instead, ‘it is precisely the shortcomings, the ambivalences of narratees and narrators that the reader is requested to detect’ (78). In this process, as she said earlier, we come to recognise ‘a silent voice that keeps reminding us of the complexity, instability and responsibility of interpretation’ (71).

Where Delesalle-Nancey reads Lord Jim as ‘an orchestration of voices’ (74), in Chapter 7, Susan Jones approaches Conrad’s texts as a ‘wordless taxonomy of gesture’ (86). She notes that Conrad was contemplating two short stories, ‘Jim’ and ‘Dynamite’, in 1898 – the same year as he confessed his suicidal impulse to Garnett (CL2, 83). Having established this linked genesis, her focus then is on Lord Jim and Chance as novels concerned with self-identity in which the performance of gesture by characters is ‘a marker of an unstable, depressed or suicidal frame of mind’ (85) associated with the failure of language to communicate trauma. Jim is haunted by his ‘jump’ from the Patna, and Flora is haunted by various traumas in her childhood. Jones shows how gestures made by characters can point to ‘an excess of potential meaning’ (89), where the body expresses ‘what cannot be remembered nor conveyed in words’ (93).  Jones convincingly traces Conrad’s ‘identification with female trauma’ (93) through Under Western Eyes into Chance, and also offers a more complex (and surprisingly resonant) reading of de Barral through his ‘aggressive gestural vocabulary’ (96). She notes how he is first encountered in the novel sitting in the dock during his trail for fraud, ‘raising a hard-clenched fist above his head’ (C, 87), and how a series of gestures in the closed cab that collects him from prison both express ‘his suppressed fury’ and encapsulate  ‘the narrative of his life, his past success, his conviction and imprisonment for fraud, his frustration at a further prospective “incarceration”’ (96).

Maria Luigia Di Nisio’s on ‘Il Conde’, the final chapter in Part Two, comes closest to classic narratology. It uses Barthes’s S/Z (and comparison with Balzac’s ‘Sarrassine’) to argue (against the dominant homosexual reading of ‘Il Conde) for the story as a ‘pensive text’ – ‘replete with meaning’ (107) - whose interest ultimately lies in its elusiveness).

The opening essays in Part Three, ‘Conrad and Philosophy’, reflect the recent critical interest in Conrad and nature. In her exploration of ethics in ‘Falk’, Jana Giles addresses Falk’s cannibalism, the role of Hermann’s niece, and the human / animal binary through Conrad’s interest in Schopenhauer. She begins with the story’s narrator, for whom Falk represents Schopenhauerian Will-to Life, but she argues that this is a misreading (repeated by some critics). Instead, she suggests, Falk’s thoughtful and compassionate nature reflects Schopenhauer’s belief in compassion as the basis of voluntary justice. As she shows, the naïve young narrator also learns from his encounter with Falk and, through compassion, ‘performs an act of voluntary justice’ (123). In the following chapter, Alexis Hannis draws on her reading of Aristotle to explore Conrad’s ‘deep sense’ of the mystery of the ‘world of the living’ (SL, 5), a position of wonder set in opposition to a desire for ‘total knowledge’. She links ‘Conrad’s critique of instrumentalism’ and ‘Aristotle’s distinction between philosophical wonder and utility’ (132).  Aristotelian ‘wonder’, she argues, is a reminder of ‘the limits of human understanding’ and a check on ‘hubristic tendencies’ to control (127). (This chimes with Giles’s contrast of the compassionate ethics of Falk with the bourgeois values of Hermann.)  From this Hannis turns to Victory and its use of natural images that invite us to wonder at the complex inner worlds of its characters. She presents this as reflecting both a ‘deeply human need’ for sub-ordination to ‘non-human nature’ (135) and (less convincingly) ‘an inexplicable affinity between nature and human nature’ (138).

The last two essays in this part are by An Ning and Debra Romanick Baldwin. Ning uses Umberto Eco’s idea of the open text to authorise a reading of Lord Jim through the I Ching.  In this reading, Jim becomes Conrad’s ‘image of the ideal being’ (141). Ning’s thesis is that ‘Jim outgrows his youthful folly and obtains great moral strength and practical wisdom’ (145). In this account, Jewel is given an important role in the education of Jim, and Ning convincingly demonstrates how Jim’s love for Jewel (too often disregarded in critical readings of the novel) ‘opens his eyes to the existence of people other than himself’ (147) and develops his sympathetic imagination. Baldwin’s focus is ‘the ancient quarrel between philosophy and poetry’ (151). In this exemplary essay, Baldwin takes us back to Plato and to Conrad’s education in ‘classical books’ before proceeding to an extended, attentive reading of ‘Typhoon’. Her close readings show how Conrad ‘invites the reader to consider the act of knowing’ (163). She considers how the presentation of Mr Jukes, for example, displays ‘the mind’s capacity to generate its own thoughts and ideas’ and detach itself from the particularity of lived experience (154). In contrast, she argues that Captain MacWhirr ‘stays in touch with the material particularities before him’ (155): ‘Facing it – always facing it – that’s the way to get through’ (T, 88-9). In this revaluation of the two characters, Baldwin brilliantly brings in a real ‘storm strategy manual’ and shows how it offers generalities rather than particularities (‘every typhoon is taken to be the same size’[156]). This provides the platform for a brief but illuminating account of Heyst and Razumov as other characters whose patterns of thinking detach them from the world. Her final discussion of Conrad’s theory of the novel with its close attention to Conrad’s art at the level of the sentence provides (indeed, embodies) one of the best answers to the question why we should read Conrad.

Conrad has sometimes been seen as a ‘man’s writer’ with his stories set in ‘a man’s world’ of ships and colonial outposts. The contributors to Part Four, ‘Conrad and Women’, challenge the former label and qualify the latter description. In Chapter 13, Carola Kaplan addresses the figure of ‘the martyred mother’ in Conrad’s fiction. She approaches Jewel’s mother in Lord Jim, Winnie’s mother in The Secret Agent and Mrs Haldin in Under Western Eyes as figures, superfluous to the narrative, who constitute ‘a physical and emotional surplus that exceeds the social institutions – marriage, family, and community’ (167). Using Bhabha’s version of the unheimlich, she argues that each of these women becomes ‘an instrument of social criticism’: Jewel’s mother points up the abuses of colonialism; Winnie’s mother exposes the inadequacy of marriage to protect women; Mrs Haldin shows the ‘toll on human lives’ exacted by an autocratic state and revolution (169). Each bears witness to ‘the trauma of history about which the text cannot speak directly’ (169). Kaplan also considers the important roles played by women in these fictions. It is Mrs Haldin, she argues, who is ‘the catalyst for Razumov’s belated assumption of responsibility for Haldin’s death’ (175). Chiming with Ning’s analysis, she shows how Jim’s tending of Jewel’s mother’s grave is a sign of his ‘conscience’, and how Marlow repeatedly instances Jewel’s ‘bravery, independent spirit and initiative’ (171). Indeed, she concludes, it is not ‘Jim who rescues Jewel but rather she who protects and aids him’ (171).

In Chapter 14, Joyce Wexler picks up on Heyst’s words to Lena ‘Command me’ to consider agency and desire in Conrad’s women. She proposes that ‘command me’ is ‘the motif that initiates the love story’ (182), and that, with these words, Heyst cedes control and recognises Lena’s agency. She notes how these words are oddly echoed at the end of Chapter VI, when Lena signed with her hand ‘for him to leave her alone … a command which Heyst did not obey’ (V, 185). She rather glosses over this act of what might euphemistically be called ‘non-consensual sex’  with the observation that Lena has been denied agency and ‘feels the force of his desire rather than her own’ (182). Nevertheless, in her reading of the novel, she agrees with Ellen Burton Harrington that Conrad demonstrates a sensitivity to his female characters’ ‘struggle for self-determination in situations that limit their autonomy’. In the second part of the essay, she discusses Winnie’s marriage to Verloc, her ‘new sense of agency’ when she resists Verloc’s  amorous ‘Come here’, and her subsequent complete surrender of autonomy to Ossipon. From these analyses, Wexler concludes that Conrad paid attention to the autonomy and desire of his female characters and that, unlike Freud, ‘he knew what women want’ (186).

Pei-Wen Cleo Kao returns to the question of agency in Chapter 15. Her chosen texts are Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands and Lord Jim. She begins with Schneider-Rebozo’s edited collection, Conrad and Nature (Routledge, 2019), as a watershed volume, and proposes to augment these essays with an eco-feminist and postcolonial perspective. She adds ‘environmental justice’ (189) to Kaplan’s concern with ‘social injustice’ (167).  However, she somewhat problematically aligns ‘the vibrant and sprawling Malay jungle’ with ‘the bodily beauty and physical voluptuousness of the native woman’ (190). This alignment of the female body with nature used to be regarded as one of a number of hierarchical binaries (male / female, culture / nature) that, as she notes, an earlier generation of feminist critics challenged. She might alternately have considered how Conrad’s first two novels, in their alignment of the female body with the Malay jungle, also characterise that jungle with the processes of life and death. She quotes a passage from An Outcast which begins by registering ‘the intensity of that tropical life’ but ends by calling this ‘the blossoming of the dead, whose mystery holds the promise of joy and beauty, yet contains nothing but poison and decay’ (OI, 61-2). In Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity (Macmillan, 1992), I linked such passages with Conrad’s reading of Schopenhauer (27) and the linkage of tropical nature and the female body with the erotophobic element of Victorian patriarchy (28).

In the final essay of this section, Yael Levin addresses ‘the dynamics of dissemination’ in Conrad’s works by focussing on ‘The Tale’ and ‘conventionally gendered epistemologies’ (200). She reads the initial dialogue between the unnamed man and the unnamed woman in terms of a tension between the former ‘gesturing outward, to the world’ and the latter, ‘gesturing inward, to a place of escape and fantasy’ (201). Levin then presents the story he tells as his demand that she should ‘know the world better’ (and him, too). Levin usefully relates this to Peter Brooks’s account of the transferral dynamics at play in ‘Heart of Darkness’, which aim ‘to implicate one’s listeners in a taint one can’t live with alone’. If the Commanding Officer sought to do this, his attempt fails. Levin explains this failure in terms of gender conventions, the encouragement of women ‘to cultivate the ability not to see and not to know’ (206), and home-front propaganda to support the war.

Part Five, ‘Conrad and Other Writers’, begins with Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan’s insightful essay on ‘the dynamics of hetero-biography’ (213), a process of transference in which ‘intertextuality and intersubjectivity are hard to tell apart’ (214). She begins by noting Conrad’s intertextually generative literary corpus and by suggesting that ‘Heart of Darkness’ might be seen as ‘the Ur-text of the twentieth century’ (213) before turning her attention to the particular case of Graham Greene. The essay focusses on Greene’s 1959 diary, which he published as In Search of a Character.  The ambiguity of that final word is the key to Erdinast-Vulcan’s reading. By publishing the diary of his time in the Congo leper colony alongside the novel that came out of that experience, A Burnt-Out Case, Greene blurred ‘the borderlines between the biographical and the fictional narratives’ (215).  Greene spent much of his time in the leper colony reading Conrad’s works, and Erdinast-Vulcan notes how the diary is full of references to (and echoes of) ‘Heart of Darkness’, while also recording Greene’s ‘resistance to Conrad’s potential influence’ (216). Erdinast-Vulcan ends her comparison of Conrad and Greene with a recognition of Conrad’s greater political militancy and an appreciation of the courage Conrad required to write his critique of imperial and colonial practices in 1900.

Ellen Burton Harrington’s ‘Cannibals in the City’ productively reads The Secret Agent in relation to urban Gothic and its ‘nightmare vision of the city’ (224). She begins with a short, sharp account of ‘Heart of Darkness’ in relation to imperial Gothic, and then proceeds from Kurtz’s voracity through the damage caused by a bomb blast (in Ossipon’s horrified imagination and in the ‘cannibal feast’ of Stevie’s remains) to the perception that violence permeates ‘the whole system founded upon class-strife, self-interest, and ruthless exploitation’ (229). By contrast, in the following chapter, Simla Doğangün reads Under Western Eyes and Orhan Pamuk’s Snow through the lens of the flâneur. Doğangün usefully contextualises Snow’s explicit link to Conrad’s work by reference to the implications of the term ‘western’. The essay that follows attends to mobility and urban spatial practices in the two texts, but the foregrounding of flânerie seems a mistake. It is tempting to quote Razumov’s account of how ‘a man goes out for a walk’ in this context, but Razumov’s walks in St Petersburg are generally purposive and very far from the flâneur’s ‘openness to experience’ (239). As she says, the flâneur ‘loses himself in the masses’ and constitutes himself as ‘an observer of the spectacle of city life’ (237). This is not exactly Razumov’s experience in the streets of St Petersburg, where his predecessor is, rather, Raskolnikov. Kerim Alakuşoğlu’s walks through Kars in Snow are a much better fit with flânerie, but spatial practices would probably have been a more useful approach to both novels.

The last essay in this section is Susan E. Cook’s discussion of ‘optics in Conrad and Woolf’. Her subject is the lighthouse in Nostromo and the lighthouse in To the Lighthouse. She begins with an extended account of changes in the theory of light (from particle to wave to wave-particle), but it is not clear how this relates to her subsequent reading of Nostromo (which attends to metaphors of darkness and light rather than perception).  She suggests that: ‘In this novel, Conrad articulates a growing scientific and more broadly cultural dissatisfaction with waves as the only answer to the problem of light, as well as an unease with nascent quantum theory as a solution’ (246). I have to admit that this aspect of the novel has passed me by, and the essay doesn’t reveal it. This emphasis on science also sits uneasily with Cook’s subsequent account of reader expectations: ‘the reader anticipates a romance plot that never appears’ (247). I wonder what reader of Conrad’s earlier fiction would have had such an expectation from the opening chapters of Nostromo. Together, her attention to metaphor and her generic expectation lead to the conclusion that ‘Conrad shows us a world in which romance, represented by the lighthouse beam, no longer works as expected’ (247).

The final sections deal with ‘Conrad and Politics’ and Conrad’s afterlife in other forms of art. It is a shame, in the first essay in ‘Conrad and Politics’, that Zoe Henry repeats Achebe’s charge about Conrad’s representation of Africa (‘a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognisable humanity’) without registering the challenge to that statement provided by Conrad’s first African story, ‘An Outpost of Progress’. The essay that follows interestingly brings together W. E. B. Du Bois’s landmark work, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), and Nostromo (1904). Henry takes up Du Bois’s key concept, the experience of ‘double consciousness’, which occurs ‘when a diasporic subject sees themselves through the perspective of the dominant social group’ (258), and notes Conrad’s own double consciousness as a Polish expatriate in England (266).  She uses Du Bois to read Nostromo in relation to what she calls ‘the politics of modernist individualism’ (258). In Nostromo, she argues, ‘Conrad weaves together a series of clashing historical narratives, consisting of as many problematic individuals, as a way of holding the contradictions of his moment together’, and, if the individuals represent ‘counter-examples of simplistic politics’, the novel itself ‘models the alternative it seeks’ (262).

Judith Paltin’s essay on ‘the exilic imagination’ begins with Edward Said’s account of the exilic consciousness as ‘foundational for creativity’, which she adapts in order to foreground imagination rather than simply consciousness. However, her approach to The Secret Sharer and (more problematically) Lord Jim is through the Biblical figure of Cain rather than through ‘exilic imagination’. She tries to bring the idea of ‘critical imagination’ to focus in a reading of ‘Amy Foster’, suggesting, for example, that Yanko’s imagination has been ‘enlarged by travel’ – though there is little evidence in the story that his original innocence has been turned into a critical awareness. Most interestingly, she offers a reading of ‘The Unlighted Coast’ in terms of ‘a collective sense of seamen away from home’ (275), but once again the critical imagination dimension is missing. In Chapter 23, Yumiko Iwashimizu offers a reading of ‘The Idiots’ and The Secret Agent in relation to disability. The essay is at its best when it draws on the contemporary context to note that, although there was asylum provision in Victorian England, ‘working-class families could not afford the cost of asylum care’, and Stevie’s mother is right to fear that what faced her son was ‘a workhouse infirmary (SA, 35); or when Iwashimizu shows, through repeated animal images, how the relationship between Verloc and Stevie is like that of a man with a pet (284); or when she notes how the Professor advocates a proto-fascist ‘extermination of the weakest’ (285). Otherwise, the essay is largely descriptive. Although this would not fit with modern disability studies, it might be more revealing to read both works through the scientific ideas of the time (including Lombroso). This approach would not conform to modern values, but it would cast light on both Susan’s temporary insanity before the murder of her husband (which Lombroso would relate to what we might consider her genetic inheritance), and it would show a connection between with Winnie’s murder of her husband. Within the medical ideas of the time, there is a reason why Ossipon does not regard Winnie as ‘vulnerable’ (286) – though we would not approve of those ideas and would want to frame Winnie’s (and Susan’s) experiences differently.

In the final essay in this section, Joanna Skolik addresses ‘The Resonance of Conrad in Contemporary Europe’. She begins by mentioning how Siegfried Sassoon recorded seeing soldiers, sheltering in a dug-out on the Western Front in World War I, reading the works of Conrad, and how Lord Jim was ‘a source of moral inspiration’ for the Home Front generation in Poland in World War II (288). Her real concern, however, is how works by Conrad, written over a century ago, ‘resonate with the contemporary’ (288). Her focus, understandably, is on the Conrad of ‘Autocracy and War’, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. In these works, as she clearly and eloquently shows, Conrad speaks to ‘the solidarity of Europeanism’ (NLL, 55), the threat of Russia (including its interference, as in Vladimir’s plan, with others’ domestic politics), the destabilising effect of terrorism and the threat to justice and civil rights posed by counter-terrorist practices.

It is interesting that the essays in this section do not take on directly the issues of race and gender – perhaps it was felt that these areas have already been sufficiently discussed. (Debra Romanick Baldwin provided a fine essay on ‘Gender’ for The New Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad [Cambridge University Press, 2015].) It is also striking, though understandable, that no-one attempts to engage with Conrad’s own politics – in relation to Polish independence; in relation to the English political context; or the broader issues of conservatism, liberalism, and anarchism. This raises the question, however, of whether we try to read Conrad’s work in relation to the ideas and culture of his time or aim to measure and judge him by the values of our own.

Towards the end of her essay, Skolik extends her consideration of resonance by noting what she terms ‘artistic resonance’ when ‘the reader of Conrad discovers meanings, re-reads the works, and then creates his or her own creative work in dialogue’ (298). The final section of the book is dedicated to just such dialogues. In the first essay of this section, however, Anna Marta Szczepan-Wojnarska discusses Conrad’s ‘operatic narratives’, covering the familiar territory of the operatic elements in the Lingard trilogy, an area which has been more rigorously explored by Laurence Davies and others, before proposing a reading of An Outcast of the Islands with Willems as Don Giovanni. Not only is the dishonest young clerk a long way from Mozart’s aristocratic serial seducer, but Szczepan-Wojnarska acknowledges a major problem: there is ‘no direct evidence that Conrad had seen Mozart’s opera’ (310). There is, in fact, a glancing reference to the opera in ‘The Partner’ (the famed nod of the Commander’ [WT, 82]), but this is not cited.

In Chapter 26, Agnieszka Adamowicz-Pośpiech displays her extensive knowledge of Conrad’s ‘global graphic afterlives’ before settling down to a subtle and detailed close-reading of Au cour des ténèbres by Stéphane Miquel and Loic Godart drawing on the methodology of adaptation studies combined with comic studies. In Chapter 27, Tania Zulli uses multimodal discourse analysis as a critical tool to show how ‘themes and topics contained in Conrad’s written texts can be expressed in a visual form’ (339) through a comparison of ‘Amy Foster’ with recent photographs of shipwrecked migrant boats and drowned migrants. Where Adamowicz-Pośpiech demonstrates how ‘Heart of Darkness’ ‘opens itself to universal readings of power misuse’ (319), Zulli shows how Conrad’s work resonates to inform current debates, extending ‘beyond its own historical moment’ to other migratory movements and ‘current practices of marginalization and exclusion’ (341). Kate Burling brings this rich volume to a fitting close with her essay on ‘the interplay of sound and affect in Conrad’s work’ (351). Burling approaches the acoustic turn in Conrad studies with the interpretative approaches of rhetorical narrative theory, which (in the words of James Phelan) understands narrative as an event, ‘a multi-dimensional purposive communication from a teller to an audience’. Burling accordingly reads The Secret Agent through Conrad’s ‘co-opting songs and lyrics as operational textual resources’ as part of his ‘authorial design’ (353), drawing particular attention to the resonance of ‘The Blue Bells of Scotland’ within the text and relating the final chapter of the novel to the structure of folk song. She concludes her essay with a fine reading of ‘The Tale’ that neatly complements Levin’s and Delesalle-Nancey’s earlier readings. Burling connects its form with Conrad’s ‘heightened dramatic consciousness’ (357) at the end of 1916 through his engagement with the stage adaptation of Victory and his resulting transmedial interest in ‘the interactive connections’ between author, audience and the effects of the work’ (358). She then reads the story, through attention to the dialogue between the narrator and his female listener and the dramatics of his performance, in terms of ‘the systematic assertion of one individual’s power over another’ (358). Instead of an ‘ethics of reception’ based on trust and attention, we are given the ‘totalising acoustics’ of the Commanding Officer, a narrative performance that drowns out ‘feedback, questions, community’, but also, finally, informs against him (359).

Overall, this volume makes a significant contribution to Conrad studies. Through the diverse approaches of the contributors, we are granted intimacy with a multitude of Conrads (as well as insight into a variety of possible approaches to his works). A couple of the essays suggest a rather limited reading in Conrad criticism. There are also a few small errors, inattentive readings or imprecise expressions in accounts of Conrad’s works: Nathalie Haldin becomes ‘a revolutionary, following her late brother’s footsteps’ (235); Nostromo is described as Conrad’s ‘sea epic’ (257); the crew of the Patna ‘fled in shame’ (272); and Almayer ‘expressed ‘his love by letting Nina escape with Dain’ (309). And is it right that the Verlocs’ money ‘will provide the funding for future bombs’ (231)? In the final chapter, Ossipon seems too traumatised to go back to his old ways. These are minor problems. The volume as a whole is a fitting response to Conrad’s ‘art of nuance and irony’, doing justice to ‘complexities and mysteries’ rather than offering ‘simple answers or boastful certainties’ (2). It also constitutes a tacit rejoinder to those critics who have tried to present Conrad studies as a redoubt for masculinist and imperialist values.

© 2024 Robert Hampson