Abstract
Chapters 4 and 5 focus on the effects of asymmetrical history in the literary texts and reception of Joseph Conrad, a storyteller of imperialism and a naturalized British citizen of Polish descent. The work of Conrad presents a case in which certain poetic strategies can be seen to unintentionally produce reading positions for various unimplied situated readers. In Chapter 4 Kaakinen first demonstrates how Conrad’s texts divide their readers according to a developmental frame of civilization and imply a conversation with a British audience. Highlighting the figure of overhearing in Conrad’s texts, she then shows how “unimplied” postimperial readers have amplified the traces in Conrad of an “unspecified outside” beyond the imperial center and filled it with significance according to their own projects of historical orientation.
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Notes
- 1.
The most relevant essays in this context are “The Crime of Partition” (1919) and “Autocracy and War” (1901).
- 2.
The focus on Conrad’s impressionism has tended to privilege the visual dimension of Conrad’s writing. Ian Watt, one of the prominent British Conrad critics who have used the term, draws an analogy between literary impressionism and impressionist painting, in which “visual sensations of a particular individual at a particular time and place” became the central artistic concern (Watt 2006, 351).
- 3.
“She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash or barbarous ornaments […] She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificent; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress. […] She came abreast of the steamer, stood still and faced us. […] Her face had a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow and of dumb pain mingled with the fear of some struggling, half-shaped resolve. She stood looking at us without a stir and like the wilderness itself, with an air of brooding over an inscrutable purpose. A whole minute passed and then she made a step forward. There was a low jingle, a glint of yellow metal, a sway of fringed draperies, and she stopped as if her heart had failed her […] She looked at us all as if her life had depended upon the unswerving steadiness of her glance. Suddenly she opened her bared arms and threw them up rigid above her head, as though in an uncontrollable desire to touch the sky […] She turned away slowly, walked on following the bank and passed into the bushes to the left. Once only her eyes gleamed back at us in the dusk of the thickets before she disappeared.” (HoD 61.)
- 4.
“These tableaux powerfully impress themselves upon the reader’s consciousness, so that although it is the narrator who speaks of what he imagines a character seeing, that section of text is equally focalized by the reader” (Fincham 2008, 65). Fincham argues that Conrad’s narrative technique of separating narration and focalization is designed to make readers sympathize with the protagonist Razumov, which she sees as a prerequisite for telling Razumov’s story to Western readers (ibid. 78). She sees the novel’s narrative form as an act of bridging the “chasm” that separates the West and the East and as Conrad’s attempt to bring about a union of Enlightenment rationality, acts of sympathetic imagination as well as vision working as a catalyst of this unifying process (hence the obsession of the narrative with visual motifs).
- 5.
The complexity of the narrator figure has not always been noticed by readers, which testifies to the importance of ”attuned ears” for detecting comparative resonances. For instance Gustav Morf claims that events are seen through the narrator’s “English, i.e. his emotionally detached and rather unimaginative eyes,” which “gives the narrative an apparent objectivity it would have lacked if Conrad had given free rein to his indignation” (Morf 1976, 184).
- 6.
Christopher GoGwilt proposes that this kind of linkages in Conrad ultimately reveal how Conrad’s texts, which dealt with both Empire and Revolution, the two important political topics of the imperial era, operated at the intersection of discourses about European divisions and discourses about Empire (GoGwilt 1995, 3).
- 7.
“Conrad ‘repeats’ the scene of dialogue abstractly, not merely in the story of the characters but from level to level of the story’s production, until we finally see Conrad, or the author, in a dialogical relation to us that resembles, in its desire for conquest, all the others. What Conrad called ‘secondary’ plot of Heart of Darkness, in this reading, is this gradual identification of all dialogue relations as disproportionate and imperial” (Fogel 1985, 21).
- 8.
Jameson lists in The Political Unconscious (1981) nine influential critical approaches to Conrad (which are tied to Jameson’s time and do not yet include postcolonial readings): Conrad as a “writer of adventure tales, sea narratives and ‘popular yarns’,” Conrad as an impressionist, a myth-critical reading, Freudian reading, ethical reading interested in heroism and honor, ego-psychological reading interested in questions of identity, existential, Nietzschean, and finally the structuralist-textual reading focusing on self-reflexivity of the text and problematization of linear narrative. On a more general level, Jameson’s reading foregrounds a basic opposition in Conrad between “reified tendencies to romance” and modernist “will to style,” which is something that makes him both a late Victorian writer and a modernist – or even a proto-postmodernist, whose texts not only experiment with point of view but also with textual self-generation.
- 9.
Interestingly, Jameson does not seem to consider locations outside Europe as relevant to the political unconscious of Conrad’s works, but he still occasionally makes references to Conrad’s Polish background. He sees it as a “nonsynchronous overlap in Conrad’s own values and experience (feudal Poland, capitalist England)” (Jameson 1981, 217). A more surprising departure that Jameson makes from the Western European context is an unelaborated reference to the Ukrainian painter Kuindzhi, whom Jameson mentions as possibly even more relevant comparison to Conrad’s impressionism than Western European painters (Jameson 1981, 231).
- 10.
The most striking aspect of Fogel’s reading is his argument that Conrad’s way of overhearing culminated in “chimes,” or prose rhymes, that are like ideas generated from aural qualities of words. For instance, the plot of Under Western Eyes begins with a detonation: an explosion as the activist Haldin throws a bomb at “Mr de P-, the President of the notorious Repressive Commission” (UWE 6), and it ends with a “de-tonation,” as Fogel puts it, when the student Razumov, who has become an unwilling overhearer of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary intrigue, loses his hearing as the activist Nikita breaks his eardrums with a violent blow. Even Conrad’s way of employing “impressionism” in the meaning of “to impress” would function according to this logic of adjusting or generating new meaning by hearing English words differently (Fogel 1985, 184–214).
- 11.
Rebecca Walkowitz seems to read Conrad somewhat like this, although she does not articulate Conrad’s modernism in terms of “deterritorialization” (see Walkowitz 2006).
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Kaakinen, K. (2017). Imperial Comparison and Postcolonial Reading. In: Comparative Literature and the Historical Imaginary. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51820-6_4
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