LORD
JIM (1900)
Lord Jim
was begun as a short story entitled "Tuan Jim –
A Sketch" in early summer 1898. The novel ran for fourteen
installments in Blackwood's Magazine
from October 1899 to November 1900, with Conrad completing
the text of the serial version in July 1900. To his friend and early
mentor Edward Garnett, however, he was pessimistic about the novel's
chances of success: "What is fundamentally wrong with the book
… is want of power. … I mean the want of illuminating
imagination. I wanted to obtain a sort of lurid light out the very
events … alas! I haven’t been strong enough to breathe
the right sort of life into it" (CL2
302).
Lord Jim:
A Tale was published by Blackwood's on 9 October 1900 and
published in the United States by Doubleday, McClure, on 31 October
as Lord Jim: A Romance.
The Critical Response
Readers coming to the novel for the first time
might want to start their engagement with secondary sources with
those gathered by Thomas C. Moser for his second Norton Critical
Edition of Lord Jim (1996),
as this work offers a full account of the historical background
to the text along with a selection from the key criticism, including
substantial extracts from seminal works by Albert J. Guerard, Ian
Watt, Frederic Jameson, and Edward Said.
Whilst there are number of studies of the novel
written before the late 1950s readers new to the study of the novel
might want to restrict themselves to Albert J. Gerard’s still
compelling evaluation in Conrad:
the Novelist (1958) where he examined the work’s innovative
use of impressionistic techniques. Ian Watt’s chapter on the
novel in Conrad in the Nineteenth
Century (1979) also offers an assessment of Conrad’s
narrative strategies, along with a helpful discussion of Marlow’s
relationship with Jim and reflection on the handling of the novel’s
ending. Jakob Lothe’s Conrad’s
Narrative Method (1992) provides a careful study of the "thematic
authority" of Marlow’s role in his narrative’s
framing of Jim’s experiences (174).
Background Materials
The real-life event on which Conrad based the
Patna incident are well known, and the subject of discussion in
Norman Sherry's Conrad's Eastern
World (1966). Gene M. Moore's useful supplement of this material
can be accessed here: Accounts
of the Jeddah Affair.
Further Reading
- Daphna Erdinast Vulcan, Joseph
Conrad and the Modern Temper (1991)
- Bruce Henricksen, Nomadic Voices:
Conrad and the Subject of Narrative (1992)
- Robert G. Hampson, Cross Cultural
Encounters in Conrad’s Malay Fiction (2000).
- Allan H. Simmons and J. H. Stape, eds., Lord
Jim: Centennial Essays (2000)
Some Web Links
for Lord Jim
THE SECRET AGENT (1907)
The novel is one of Conrad’s great city
novels (the other being Under
Western Eyes), and it offers an unrelentingly ironic treatment
of anarchist activity in London of the 1890s. The novel has been
celebrated for its portrayal of the double agent Verloc, his wife
Winnie, and her simple-minded brother Stevie. Its presentation of
the city and police owed a debt to Charles Dickens, especially his
novel Bleak House –
in A Personal Record (1912)
Conrad declared this novel to be "a work of the master for
which I have such an admiration, or rather such an intense and unreasoning
affection, dating from the days of my childhood, that its very weaknesses
are more precious to me than the strengths of other men’s
works" (124).
Early in February 1906, after a year of false
starts on what was to become Chance
and ongoing but fruitless tinkering with The
Rescue, Conrad began what he thought of as a short story
entitled "Verloc." He had already written two short stories
dealing with anarchists – "An Anarchist" and "The
Informer" – and there are many connections to be made
between these tales and the novel. In March, Conrad noted that "Verloc
is extending," but he took until November to complete the story
for its serial publication in the American journal Ridgways:
A Militant Weekly for God & Country.
In May 1907, Conrad began revising the text
for book publication, adding chapter 10 and substantially re-working
the ending to develop Winnie’s story. As book publication
approached, Conrad disingenuously declared that his revised sub-title
– "A Simple Tale" – was expressly chosen to
avoid the story being ‘misunderstood’ as having ‘any
sort of social or polemical intention (CL3
446). The novel was published in September by Methuen in England
and by Harpers in the United States.
The Critical Response
Modern appreciation for the novel stems from
F. R. Leavis’s account of it in The
Great Tradition (1948) where he argued that the work was
perfect in its structure (243) and citing the final scene between
Winnie and her husband as ‘one of the most astonishing triumphs
of genius in fiction’ (245). Ian Watt’s Conrad:
The Secret Agent: A Casebook (1973) covered the early critical
response, with longer studies from the late 1940s through to the
late 1960s, including important work from Leavis, Irving Howe, Albert
J. Guerard, and Avrom Fleishman. A study missing from Watt’s
collection was Eloise Knapp Hay’s The
Political Novels of Joseph Conrad (1963).
Further Reading
- Jacques Berthoud, Joseph
Conrad: The Major Phase (1978)
- Con Coroneos, Space, Conrad,
and Modernity (2003)
- Robert Hampson, Joseph Conrad:
Betrayal and Identity (1992)
- Barbara Melchiori, Terrorism
in the Late Victorian Novel (1985)
- Gene M. Moore, ed., Conrad’s
Cities (1992)
- Claire Rosenfield, Paradise
of Snakes (1967)
- Lissa Schneider, Conrad’s
Narratives of Difference (2003)
- Daniel Schwarz, Conrad: Almayer’s
Folly to Under Western Eyes (1980)
- J. H. Stape, ed., The Cambridge
Companion to Joseph Conrad (1996)
Some Web Links
for The Secret Agent
“THE SECRET SHARER” (1910)
"The Secret Sharer" was written during
the composition of Under Western
Eyes and, with its theme of the doppelganger,
many critics have seen connections between the two works. The story
was begun in December 1909, shortly after Conrad’s birthday,
and was written for money at the prompting of the literary editor
of the Daily Mail. Conrad
claimed "it is a very characteristic Conrad" (CL4
297, 298) in its psychological take on the pressures of first command.
On completing the tale Conrad wrote to Edward Garnett, gloating
that "the Secret Sharer is it. Eh? No damned tricks with girls
there. Eh? Every word fits and there is not a single uncertain note.
Luck my boy. Pure luck" (CL5
128).
The story was first published in the United
States in the August and September 1910 issues of
Harper’s Magazine. The "Author’s Note"
to 'Twixt Land and Sea in
which the story was collected in book form by Conrad, informs the
reader that the germ of the tale came from a real incident which
occurred on board the Cutty Sark
in which a black sailor was killed by the chief mate. Concise coverage
of this incident is given in Cedric Watts’ "Introduction"
to his edition of Typhoon and
Other Tales (2002). For more extensive coverage of the story's
real-life sources, see Norman Sherry Conrad’s
Eastern World (1971).
The Critical Response
There is a useful general survey of early critical
responses in Bruce Harkness, ed., Conrad’s
Secret Sharer and The Critics (1962). The story has been
a productive quarry for psychoanalytic studies through its use of
the motif of the double. Barbara Johnson and Marjorie Garber’s
"Secret Sharing: Reading Conrad Psychoanalytically," College
English, 49 (1987): 628-40, provided an overview of major
psychoanalytic readings.
Further Reading
- Lawrence Graver, Conrad's
Short Fiction (1969)
- Norman Sherry, Conrad’s
Eastern World (1971)
- Daniel Schwarz, Conrad: The
Later Fiction (1982)
- Ted Billy, Closure and Disclosure
in Conrad’s Short Fiction (1997)
- The Secret Sharer: A Case
Study in Contemporary Criticism (St Martin's Press, 1997)
Some Web Links
for"The Secret Sharer"
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