By Allan H. Simmons, St Mary's College, Strawberry Hill

Wieslaw Krajka, editor. Beyond the Roots: The Evolution of Conrad’s Ideology and Art. Conrad Eastern and Western Perspectives, Vol. 14. Boulder/Lublin: Distributed by Columbia University Press, 2005. viii + 430. $50.

THE FOURTEENTH VOLUME in the "Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives" series, under the general editorship of Wieslaw Krajka, is a companion volume to A Return to the Roots: Conrad, Poland, and East-Central Europe (2004), presenting a further nineteen papers first presented at the “Conrad’s Polish Footprints” conference in 2001.

As the eclectic nature of this collection proves, essays gathered in this fashion are necessarily grouped under a flag of convenience when it comes to publication. But the diversity of approaches also attests to the vigorous health of Conrad studies, with contributions addressing almost the whole of the Conradian oeuvre from Almayer’s Folly (1895) to The Rescue (1920) and providing both a conspectus of the terrain and the varied angles from which it can be viewed. In order to highlight “the evolution of Conrad’s ideology and art,” the essays, by an international cast of writers, are arranged chronologically, according to the work principally dealt with.

The diversity of approaches within the collection reflects the real vitality of Conrad studies, but hard scholarship – biography and textual interests – go unrepresented, with the volume instead offering an omnium gatherum of conference papers of varying quality.

Following the editor’s introduction, Conrad’s early writings are discussed by Elio Di Piazza (The Nigger of the “Narcissus”), Agnieszka Adamowicz-Pospiech (Lord Jim), and Marilena Saracino (“Youth”). The first of these, on polyphony, is marred by lax editing that allows misspellings (such as “riformist” and “Lingard’s frigade”) and factual inaccuracies (“Henty’s New Review”) to stand. This, however, is a minor blemish, as the volume as a whole is well proofed. The second offers a generic survey of Lord Jim and, consisting of a compendium of current ideas in the area, a tacit invitation to scholars to develop these. In the third, Saracino’s theorized approach playfully envisions writing as “rite of passage” in “Youth.”

Arguing that work provides “a source of existential security and ethical value,” Michael Greaney’s elegant and convincing essay, the first of seven in the volume to address “Heart of Darkness,” finds in the novella a reformulation and relocation of the Victorian/Carlylean work ethic. Correspondingly, Rajyashree Khushu-Lahiri detects in the work a self-destructive impulse in the European colonization of Africa, whereby the “civilized” colonizer is hoist with his own savage petard, and which is adumbrated in Almayer’s Folly.

Drawing on a quarter of a century of critical interest in the subject, Todd K. Bender interrogates the use of the term “race” in “Heart of Darkness” and Lord Jim, attempting a Conradian “dictionary entry for ‘race’” drawing upon the continuum that stretches from Achebe (1977) to Peter Firchow (2000). If I disagree with his attribution to the privileged man, rather than Marlow, the claim that “of all mankind Jim had no dealings but with himself,” this is a quibble about a lucid and, at times, ludic essay.

Bringing alterity theory to bear upon “Heart of Darkness,” and arguing that the Other resists and refuses categorization – Levinas’s “nonsubsumptive relationship” – J. Robert Baker claims that the novella’s racism “is a phenomenon that reflects a deeper diagram of human relatedness to the Other that includes Europeans and women.” Complementing this is Nupur Sen’s clear and forthright essay on the presentation of Kurtz’s African mistress that conflates colonialism and “gender issues.”

There follow a series of comparative and contextualizing essays. J. Gill Holland traces the influence of the final scene in “Heart of Darkness” on the conclusion of Bennett’s Clayhanger, and Lawrence P. Ware speculates on the influence of Conrad on T. E. Lawrence. Inspired by the references to Garibaldi in Nostromo, Arnold Schmidt fruitfully compares the Italian revolution of 1860 with Poland’s January Insurrection of 1863 to argue that the broader European movement towards self-determination in the nineteenth century influences Conrad’s portrait of Costaguana.

Mark Daniel Chilton follows Morse Peckham’s description of Romanticism as “cultural vandalism” to trace correspondences between Blake’s prophetic writings, primarily The Four Zoas, and Milton’s Paradise Lost and The Secret Agent. Through a finely traced network of allusive and parodic parallels the novel’s characters are ingeniously recast in various guises – for instance, the Miltonic references are seen to identify Stevie, Winnie, Verloc, and Vladimir as, respectively, Eve, Adam, God, and Satan.

Focusing on the evolution of the Victorian flâneur into a Modernist sensibility, a “filter” through which “the incessant flow of urban impressions is catalysed and described,” Agate Izabela Szczeszak examines the presentation of the modern city in the writings of Conrad and Joyce. Concentrating upon The Secret Agent, “The Return,” Dubliners, and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the essay charts the way in which “the private influences and distorts the representation of the public.” Returning to an intertextual approach, Michel Aroumi attends to the presentation of father-figures in Under Western Eyes to find in the novel – “the summum of the author’s reflection upon the problem” – transpositions and evocations of the Biblical Apocalypse of St. John whereby the Father-Son and Lord-Beast relationships are ironically reconfigured.

Finding the text pervaded by a “homosexual tinge,” Wojciech Kozak offers a “resistant” reading of “The Secret Sharer,” interpreting its “aesthetics of silence” through a lens of “sex and gender” criticism. While this story has attracted such criticism before and while such theoretical approaches tend to find what they’re looking for, the essay’s close reading approach is rewarding. Katherine Isobel Baxter reads the same text in conjunction with The Shadow-Line.

Taking the work of Andrew Michael Roberts as her starting point and with repeated recourse to Marlow’s claim in “Heart of Darkness” that “we live as we dream – alone,” she concentrates upon the “ambiguity that resists interpretation” in Conrad’s writings and, despite the slipperiness of the subject, cogently agues that the critical “impasse of solipsism” in “The Secret Sharer” is surmounted in The Shadow-Line through recognizing “the beneficial possibilities of interpretive flux.”

Nursel Içöz focuses on Victory, a novel that is enjoying a resurgence of interest in Conrad studies, to show how it is “both a repudiation of nihilism and Conrad’s most nihilistic work.” Casting a broad net, that included Sandra Dodson’s work on the sublime and Nic Panagopolous’s on Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, the essay argues for the psychological impossibility of complete philosophical attachment because Heyst’s physicality “is constantly reasserting itself.”

Richard J. Hand constructs a spirited defence of Conrad’s �modest body of ambitious plays” by placing them within the context of evolving theatrical traditions, including melodrama, Expressionism, Grand-Guignol, and naturalism, to argue that, despite his protestations to the contrary, Conrad’s awareness of contemporary theatre was more advanced than has hitherto been recognized.

Bringing the volume to a close, Mary Morzinski challenges the “achievement and decline” claims made by Moser et al. to provide a strident defence of Conrad’s stylistic development as one of continual growth, using the manuscript of The Rescue as evidence. A linguistic approach to Conrad, this essay’s context is Second Language Acquisition, whereby the speaker develops an “interlanguage.” Analysis of such characteristics as verb tense and word order (of adverbial modifiers and adjectives) leads into a discussion of asyndeton and synecdoche to argue that the hallmarks of Conrad’s style are simultaneously aspects of his artistic techniques, and that these continue to evolve across Conrad’s career.

The "Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives" series is proving to be a useful contribution to on-going Conradian scholarship and critical debate. Apart from occasional designated monographs, including Morzinski’s own Linguistic Influence of Polish on Conrad’s Style (Vol. 3: 1994), the series are largely composed of edited collections of essays that, if heterogeneous, are ultimately satisfyingly wide-ranging in their range and scope.

© 2006 Allan H. Simmons