Abstract
Thomas Moser, writing in the mid 1950s, referred to ‘a new and serious interest in the novels of Joseph Conrad’ since the end of the Second World War, that had grown out of the rediscovery of Conrad in the 1940s by M. C. Bradbrook, Morton Zabel and F. R. Leavis.1 In Conrad’s own life-time there were already two book-length studies of his work, and in the decade after his death there was a succession of memoirs and collections of letters.2 In the 1930s, critical attention to Conrad’s work was already under way with studies by Gustav Morf, R. L. Mégroz and Edward Crankshaw; but J. D. Gordan’s Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist (1940) marks the start of serious, scholarly study of Conrad.3 Certain critical works of the 1950s, notably Douglas Hewitt’s Conrad: A Re-assessment, Moser’s own work, Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline, and A. J. Guerard’s Conrad the Novelist, were to become very influential: indeed, they created the paradigm within which most subsequent Conrad criticism has been written.4
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Notes
Thomas Moser, Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957) p. 10
M. C. Bradbrook, Joseph Conrad: Poland’s English Genius (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1941)
Morton Zabel, The Portable Conrad (New York: Viking, 1947)
F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (London: Chatto & Windus, 1948).
A. J. Guerard’s monograph Joseph Conrad (New York: New Directions, 1947) should be added to this list.
(a) Richard Curie, Joseph Conrad: A Study (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1914); Wilson Follett, Joseph Conrad: A Short Study.
(b) Ford Madox Ford, Joseph Conrad: A Personal Remembrance (London: Duckworth, 1924)
Richard Curie, The Last Twelve Years of Joseph Conrad (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1928)
Jessie Conrad, Joseph Conrad as I Knew Him (London: Heinemann, 1926)
Jessie Conrad, Joseph Conrad and his Circle (London: Jarrolds, 1935). (c) Five Letters by Joseph Conrad to Edtoard Noble in 1895 (privately printed, 1925); Joseph Conrad’s Letters to his Wife (privately printed, 1927)
Conrad to a Friend: 150 Selected Letters from Joseph Conrad to Richard Curie, ed. R. Curie (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1928)
Letters from Joseph Conrad, 1895 to 1924, ed. Edward Garnett (London: Nonesuch Press, 1928)
Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters, ed. G. Jean-Aubry (London: Heinemann, 1927) — hereafter referred to as L.L.
Gustav Morf, The Polish Heritage of Joseph Conrad (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1930)
R. L. Mégroz, Joseph Conrad’s Mind and Method (London: Faber & Faber, 1931)
Edward Crankshaw, Joseph Conrad: Some Aspects of the Art of the Novel (London: The Bodley Head, 1936)
J. D. Gordan, Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940).
Douglas Hewitt, Conrad: A Re-assessment (Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes, 1952)
Thomas Moser, Joseph Conrad: Achievement and Decline (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957)
A. J. Guerard, Conrad the Novelist (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1958). Moser was a member of Guerard’s 1950 and 1953 Harvard/Radcliffe graduate seminars in the modern novel; he acknowledges a debt to Guerard for ‘nearly a decade’ of discussions on Conrad (p. vii); and he aligns himself with Guerard and Hewitt (p. 3). In particular, the account of Conrad’s ‘anticlimax’ in Guerard’s earlier work, Joseph Conrad (pp. 27–30) is credited as influencing Moser’s view of Conrad’s ‘decline’ after The Shadow Line (p. 2).
For recent work that pays some attention to the early fiction, see William W. Bonney, Thorns & Arabesques (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980)
Cedric Watts, The Deceptive Text (Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1984)
Stephen K. Land, Conrad and the Paradox of Plot (London: Macmillan, 1984). More representative, however, are Aaron Fogel, Coercion to Speak (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985)
Suresh Raval, The Art of Failure (London: Allen & Unwin, 1986)
Jakob Lothe, Conrad’s Narrative Method (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989) — all of which concentrate on the canon of texts established by the ‘achievement and decline’ paradigm.
John A. Palmer, Joseph Conrad’s Fiction: A Study in Literary Growth (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968) p. 10. Palmer’s account of the development of the paradigm (‘Achievement and Decline: A Bibliographical Note’, pp. 260–86) can be read as complementary to my own. Thomas Kuhn’s concept, the ‘paradigm’, has an obvious applicability to changes and developments in literary critical traditions. For Kuhn, paradigms are ‘universally recognised scientific achievements that for the time provide model problems and solutions to a community of practitioners’ (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962] p. X).
After describing the ‘rediscovery’ of Conrad as ‘a profound psychologist’, ‘a politicaľpropheť and an ‘audacious craftsman’, Moser asserts that ‘over these three’ and ‘including them all, stands Conrad the moralist’ (pp. 10–11). For a similar privileging of ‘Conrad the moralist’, see Paul L. Wiley, Conrad’s Measure of Man (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1954)
C. Cooper, Conrad and the Human Dilemma (London: Chatto & Windus, 1970)
J. E. Saveson, Conrad: The Later Moralist (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1972)
R. A. Gekoski, Conrad: The Moral World of the Novelist (London: Paul Elek, 1978).
Guerard, p. 146. Compare: ‘Fictional characters are representations of life and, as such, can only be understood if we assume they are real. And this assumption allows us to find unconscious motivation by the same procedure that the traditional critic uses to assign conscious ones’ (M. A. Kaplan and R. Kloss, The Unspoken Motive [New York, 1973] p. 4).
Bernard C. Meyer, Joseph Conrad: A Psychoanalytic Biography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1967).
See, for example, Freud’s Studies in Hysteria (The Pelican Freud Library, III) pp. 389–92, or Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (The Pelican Freud Library, I) pp. 482–500 (e.g.: ‘what turns the scale in his struggle is not his intellectual insight…but simply and solely his relation to the doctor’ (p. 497]). See also Jacques Lacan’s ‘Intervention on Transference’ (1951): ‘What happens in an analysis is that the subject is, strictly speaking, constituted through a discourse…psychoanalysis is a dialectical experience’ (In Dora’s Case, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane (London: Virago Press, 19851 p. 93).
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, trans. Robert Huxley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977)
Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Methuen, 1981) p. 99. See also Freud, Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis: ‘there is no justification for carrying this shift of interest so far that, in looking at the matter theoretically, one replaces the dream entirely by the latent dream-thoughts’ (p. 217).
Richard Brown, ‘James Joyce: The Sexual Pretext’, Ph.D. thesis, University of London (1981); revised version published as James Joyce and Sexuality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
Frank J. Sulloway, Freud: Biologist of the Mind (London: Fontana, 1980).
Wiley, p. 14. See also Ralph Tymms, Doubles in Literary Psychology (Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1949) pp. 93–4.
J. Galsworthy, ‘Reminiscences of Conrad’, Castles in Spain (London: Heinemann, 1927) p. 91. (In a 1908 letter to Galsworthy, Conrad commented on the character of Hilary Dailison in Galsworthy’s Fraternity: ‘Morbid psychology, be it always understood, is a perfectly legitimate subject for an artist’s genius’ [L.L., II, p. 781.)
S. Freud, Selected Papers on Hysteria & other Psychoneuroses (Nervous & Mental Disease Monograph Series No. 4; New York, 1912).
C. G. Jung, Psychology of the Unconscious, trans. Beatrice M. Hinkle (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1916). Hinkle prefaces her translation with an introductory essay on psychoanalysis. (Conrad’s copy was included in Hodgson’s catalogue for their 1925 sale of books from his library.)
Jeffrey Berman, Joseph Conrad: Writing as Rescue (New York: Astra Books, 1977) pp. 149–50. Berman, however, does not make much of this observation: after suggesting that ‘genuine loneliness, feelings of abandonment, and submerged hostility towards her imprisoned father…prompt Flora to repudiate her life’, he goes on to say only that Flora ‘still does not have the intellectual or psychological complexity that Conrad’s solitary males possess’ (p. 154).
Richard Brown, p. 26. J. D. Patterson has attempted to do this for the earlier novels in ‘The Representation of Love in the Novels of Joseph Conrad: 1895–1915’, D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University (1984).
Paul Kirschner, Conrad: The Psychologist as Artist (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1968)
Zdzislaw Najder, Conrad’s Polish Background (London: Oxford University Press, 1964)
Avrom Fleishman, Conrad’s Politics (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967)
Eloise Knapp Hay, The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963).
Two other works were also influential in the early stages of my research: Edward Said, Joseph Conrad and the Fiction of Autobiography (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965)
Robert R. Hodges, The Dual Heritage of Joseph Conrad (The Hague: Mouton, 1967).
More recently, I have been indebted to Cedric Watts, Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’: A Critical and Contextual Discussion (Milan: Mursia International, 1977)
Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (London: Chatto & Windus, 1980).
‘Against the distant background of British, Dutch and Arab struggle for domination of the islands, the local Arabs and Malays compete for trade and political power’ (Conrad the Novelist, p. 71). Eloise Knapp Hay used the word ‘psychopolitica’ in her account of Nostromo (The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad, p. 189). More recently, Cedric Watts has argued, in The Deceptive Text: An Introduction to Covert Plots (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1984), that the political struggle is not just an over-elaborated background, but constitutes a covert plot that prompts and contains the overt plot.
Eloise Knapp Hay, p. 10. This idea is taken further by Robert Hodges in The Dual Heritage of Joseph Conrad and by Zdzisław Najder in Conrad’s Polish Background and in Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Bruce Johnson, Conrad’s Models of Mind (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971) p. 15. Johnson’s approach is philosophical and ethical rather than psychological.
Ibid., p. 26. G. B. Ursell, in ‘Conrad’s Early Writing with Particular Reference to “The Rescue” (“The Rescuer”)’, Ph.D. thesis, University of London (1973), argued the importance of a consideration of The Rescueť for an understanding of Conrad’s early work. Roussel also argued for the need to discuss The Rescue as ‘a product of Conrad’s early years’ (p. 55): he sees it as ‘an investigation of the most obvious alternative to Willem’s last vision’ (p. 56).
By ‘existential psychology’, I refer to the early work of R. D. Laing and the associated work of David Cooper and Aaron Esterson. For a critical account of Laing’s early development, see Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1975) pp. 227–92.
See also Robert Boyers and Robert Orrill (eds), Laing and Anti-Psychiatry (Harmondsworth: Pelican Books, 1972).
R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965) p. 33 (hereafter referred to as D.S.).
Ibid., p. 26. Laing is referring specifically to Ludwig Binswangeťs term ‘being-in-the-world’. See Ludwig Binswanger, Being in the World, trans. Jacob Needleman (London: Souvenir Press, 1975).
Aaron Esterson, The Leaves of Spring (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972) pp. 38–9. Juliet Mitchell suggests a serious limitation to Laing’s approach: ‘Laing’s account makes the mistake of supposing an already-constituted discrete subject…. Freud’s child does not have the separate, pre-existent essential self…his discrete self is set up in the moment of this recognition of absence which is the recognition of difference’ (p. 384). On the child’s compulsive-repetition game in front of the mirror (to which Mitchell refers)
see Freud, ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’ (1920)
Jacques Lacan, ‘The Mirror-phase as Formative of the Function of the I’, New Left Review, 51 (Sept./Oct. 1968) pp. 72–3.
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Hampson, R. (1992). Introduction. In: Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22302-2_1
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