By Hugh Epstein, London

Xiaoling Yao. Conrad, Autobiographical Remembering, and the Making of Narrative Identity (New York: Routledge, 2024), 190 pp. £116.00.

Xiaoling Yao teaches in the English Department of East China Normal University, Shanghai, and this is her first book with a western press, taking its place in the Routledge Auto/Biography Studies series. After a substantial Introduction, ‘Conrad as a Poetic Rememberer’, there are four chapters in which Yao addresses in considerable detail Almayer’s Folly, ‘An Outpost of Progress’ and ‘Heart of Darkness’, Lord Jim, and The Shadow-Line. Her subject, how Conrad remakes memories into narratives and the implications of so doing, is both clear and clearly developed throughout, each chapter enquiring slightly differently into the relations between autobiography and fiction, the relationship between the unrest of a remembered past and the continuing difficulties of the creating present. Yao is concerned with ‘a writer’s role as an artistic interpreter of human life, rather than a mere objective recorder of factual events.’ She goes on to say, ‘Viewed in this way, Conrad never attempted to faithfully represent his experiences’, and she consistently values and focuses upon the resulting artifact rather than conducting extensive biographical research. This is literary criticism, investigating Conrad’s ‘narrative strategies to capture and depict the intricacies of memory’, and, as such, is indebted to Jens Brockmeier (particularly), Jerome Bruner, and Max Saunders among others. Brockmeier’s 2018 title, ‘From Memory as Archive to Remembering as Conversation’ captures perfectly the activity that Yao explores in Conrad’s (auto)biographical writing, some of it fitting the ‘autobiografiction’ championed by Saunders in Self Impression (2010). At times a reliance on secondary commentary contributes a little too much to the fabric of her discussion, but the range of her secondary reading is wide, including such fine Conrad scholars as Geoffrey Galt Harpham and Werner Senn. Having said this, Yao definitely has a first-hand feel for Conrad: doubt, scepticism and uncertainty, both about experience and perception, are her keynotes, expressed straightforwardly and directly. ‘Identity is not a static and given idea, but constructed in and through narrative’: this is the thoroughly convincing position taken up by each chapter of this thoughtful and interesting book.

Yao’s concern in Almayer’s Folly is primarily with the ‘impact of the past on the present … the inability to rid oneself of the past’, and she deftly takes us through the techniques of writing by which Conrad reveals that Almayer’s determination to ‘Forget!’, and the actions he undertakes to do so, only serve to render an Almayer “lost in the alarming possibilities of memory”, haunted by an idealised phantom of Nina. Over several pages Yao examines Conrad’s use of both the expressionless face of Almayer and the headless corpse assumed to be that of Dain as images of a ‘trace erasure’ that proves to be illusionary. And as part of an overall movement towards what she calls a ‘future-oriented remembering’ that the novel proposes in opposition to Almayer’s impossible attempts at forgetting, Yao productively introduces the ‘turning point’, as she sees it, of 1894: ‘the subtle connection between the death of Bobrowski, the ending of (Conrad’s) seafaring life, and the death of his first protagonist, Almayer.’ She suggests that ‘Conrad’s repeated return to the text [in A Personal Record and in letters to Poradowska] serves as a way for him to re-enact and commemorate his real-life losses vicariously. … the symbolical rewriting of the writer’s loss into Almayer’s Folly not only registers and articulates the author’s pain of loss, but also functions as a locale where Conrad imagines what might happen if one is abandoned and cut adrift from the past.’ Yao’s implication is that the writer’s art, in constructing the author ‘Joseph Conrad’ by fashioning the turbulence of largely unhappy memory into the narrative of his first novel, protects Conrad from being sentimentally overcome by the past and creates an identity with which to live into the future.

Of Conrad’s nine-month duration in Africa, Yao says that he ‘attempted to make sense of this journey through different mediums, such as diaries, letters, and autobiographical fiction’, and she asks, in a question that parallels but that is not the same as that asked of Almayer’s Folly, ‘why did Conrad repeatedly return to this Congo journey, delving deeper and deeper into this particular episode of his life?’ Quoting from ‘An Outpost of Progress’ (“every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd”), she concludes that ‘the profound lesson he himself had learned from his trip to the Congo … [is that] self is not an autonomous concept but a relational one that is an ongoing process of negotiation with the public and external “surroundings”.’ This ‘relational self’ and its construction through narrative becomes in large measure the focus of the chapter: as Yao says in relation to the construction and unfolding of ‘Heart of Darkness’, ‘Conrad transcends the confines of rememberer to include audience in the process of shaping memory into narrative, which suggests that memory is not only narrative, interpretative, but also relational.’ Consequently, she conducts a twelve-page investigation of the narrative breaks in Marlow’s storytelling, exemplifying much that is best in this book – a sustained worrying at the text led by an independent line of thought. It is perhaps a bit disappointing that she takes the over-relied-upon flying sticks episode for examination, but she makes the discussion more interesting by picking up on Johan Warodell’s adjustments to Ian Watt, which she then adjusts again by attending to William James on attention. Yao’s view of what Marlow is really attending to brings some individuality to her account, as does her courage, in a later discussion of Marlow’s lie to the Intended, in dissenting to some degree from Nina Pelikan Straus, Johanna Smith and Elaine Showalter about withholding the truth from women, and acknowledging the futility of telling any discomposing truth to the Intended or to the society which enfolds her.

‘Marlow’s encounter with the Congo re-educates his sensorium’, says Yao, and she is certainly alert to the importance of sensation in Conrad’s writing. But I would disagree that Marlow ‘surrenders himself to the unknown yet intimidating force by busying himself with “the mere incidents of the surface”.’ Surely, this is exactly his means to defend himself against the unknown by countering it with the trade and skills that he knows. Likewise, I am not persuaded that his ‘monkey tricks’ and the tightrope performance Marlow goes on to challenge his listeners with can be extended to ‘a symbolic expression for Kurtz’s deeds in the Congo’; however, her wider discussion of Marlow’s critique of the rapacious trading practices that they are all involved in, and the way he seeks as part of his memory-investigation to bring this home to his listeners, is well worth attending to as an exploration of the theme of the chapter: ‘Autobiographical memory is not a static archive of raw materials from the past. Rather, it is a meaning-making process which depends upon the dynamics of storytelling and interpretative acts.’ And Yao’s description of those dynamics as ‘Marlow’s continuous and inconclusive interpretation of his initial experiences’ is convincingly true to Conrad’s art of narrative: ‘each remembered past is merely provisional and temporary’.

Yao’s treatment of Lord Jim moves towards the idea of ‘shared memory that can be “retrieved”’ as opposed to individual memories. Reflecting upon Marlow’s “[Jim] existed for me, and after all it is only through me that he exists for you”, she comes to her more general statement about memory, telling, and the novel: ‘To tell is to exist, and to tell is to tell something to somebody. The narratees are an important part of this communal act of storytelling.’ Of those narratees Marlow is the most substantial, and Yao states well an obvious but important truth about what makes Lord Jim the novel it is: ‘Marlow’s remembering process serves as a site for us to witness how Jim’s life becomes told stories.’ Taken as a whole, this means that the emphasis throughout Yao’s book is upon ‘narrative landscape(s)’ that arise from communal structures and interests rather than upon the isolation, singularity and loneliness of individual lives, which would have been a different, equally valid, way of approaching Conrad’s fictional output. This leads her, in Lord Jim, to acknowledge ‘the stark contrast between the Patna and Patusan sections’ of the novel, and, in particular, to reflect upon the difference between the competing spoken accounts of the first half, and the reading of a letter, alone ‘atop a hill’, by the privileged reader of the second, in which ‘remembering is transformed into an individualistic pursuit.’ Yao’s whole discussion is interesting and worthwhile, but not (as many readers would claim about this transition in the novel itself) without its problems. She approvingly quotes Daniel Schwarz, who maintains that ‘the written word is a kind of deferral of the immediacy of spoken language and an indication that [Marlow] is giving up his inquiry into himself’, yet she also affirms that her reading of the novel ‘argues that the Patna and Patusan sections are not discontinuous from each other’. Her most telling comments and illustrations rather point in the other direction. However, Yao is ever-alert to ‘the inner unrest and psychological anxiety, which permeate the narrative of Lord Jim’, as well as Conrad’s attempts, through writing, ‘to appease his inner unrest … at that time.’ Her repeated use of the unsettling word that Conrad himself used so repeatedly is a marker of Yao’s intuitive appreciation of both the work and the artist.
    
With its clear autobiographical foundation, The Shadow-Line is fittingly brought in to conclude Yao’s series of detailed studies, but also, as she says in her Conclusion, to ‘extend our understanding of memory beyond its traditional cognitive framework, highlighting the significance of bodily experiences, emotions, and feelings’, (an aim in accord with a recently-published monograph on Conrad by Yoko Okuda). To this end, her claim that, from the third-person narration of Almayer’s Folly, through the accounts of the more direct oral storyteller Marlow, to the confessional first-person narration of The Shadow-Line, ‘the distance between Conrad and his readers is gradually reduced’ is interesting and convincing. Here she is concerned to show that Conrad’s concurrent depressive mental state while writing the novella finds its reflection in the details and contours of the memories as they are rendered into story, such that ‘the stagnant sea in The Shadow-Line acts out what it is like to be gripped by anxiety and desperation’. Yao’s drift here follows that of Knowles, Simmons and Stape in the Cambridge Edition, and she rightly quotes them; but when she goes beyond this general approach to offer closer textual correlations the result is less certain. Despite giving wider evidence from Conrad’s practice to show that ‘it is reasonable to liken the act of writing on the page to the advancing of the ship on the sea’, the close reading surely doesn’t work: of the captain’s first order, “Let her head come up to south”, Yao writes ‘Symbolically, this voices out the writer’s longing as well: to get his pen down to the direction of the south – the bottom of the paper – and consequently blacken the page.’ I question her use of Sartre as she seeks to examine how ‘the transformational power of emotions in a magical way’ contributes to reframing the so-called ‘supernatural’ elements in the narration, and the characterisation both of the captain and of Burns (‘an obsessed monster’). Yao’s ‘By exaggerating Mr Burns’s obsessiveness and diseased state, Conrad sought to exorcise his own fears, anxieties, and uncertainties during the writing process’ certainly demands thought, but the effect of seeing The Shadow-Line as about the writing of The Shadow-Line, though productive in some respects, is ultimately rather reductive of the novella’s scope. In fact, I am sympathetic to Yao’s desire to increase the scope of how we view Conrad’s autobiographical writing as a whole when, in her Conclusion, she proposes ‘the medium itself – the sea’ as a ‘New Metaphor for Memory’. The fluid, ever-changing, incalculable, the often-perilous: yes, I would agree that these are the conditions that Conrad’s writing continually faces; yet I wonder if it would not be more accurate to define Conrad’s practice in terms of navigating the sea, just as the title of Yao’s book would more accurately describe what she shows us were it to be The Making of Narrated Identity rather than that of Narrative Identity.
     
Throughout her book, Yao’s writing is clear, largely uncluttered by abstractions, and at times strikingly felicitous, as I hope some of my quotations have shown; yet there are some visible shortcomings. She has not been well-served by Routledge: there are many occasions where a copy-editor should have corrected the minor slips of a second-language writer, though these rarely impede communication of Yao’s meaning. But then, more significantly, we are treated to some carelessness with reference to names (‘Roy Roussel’, ‘Debra Romanick’ on one page and ‘Debra Baldwin’ on the next, ‘Simons’ for ‘Simmons’), and, worryingly, ‘Polish Revisited’. Burns is twice characterised as ‘demonised’ when Yao surely means its opposite, ‘demonic’. Though I am pleased to see it examined in relation to Conrad, her account of nineteenth-century physiological psychology is rather ‘potted’ and dependent upon a received history, so she reproduces the common error that William James ‘coined’ the phrase ‘stream of consciousness’ (G. H. Lewes was using it thirty years beforehand). Yet while in some respects Xiaoling Yao is still in the process of finding her own full critical voice on Conrad, this book is far from a PhD rushed into print, too often the fate of promising insights that need a wider, longer and slower literary acquaintance to mature them. This is sustained enquiry by a serious-minded and attentive scholar, from whom it will be good to hear more. I look forward to reading what she makes of Under Western Eyes.

© 2025 Hugh Epstein