What “A Smile of Fortune” Has To Hide: An Intertextual And Comparative Reconsideration of the Texture and Theme of Conrad’s Tale (original) (raw)
Related papers
JOSEPH CONRAD: A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION
Joseph Conrad has been an eminent author of the modern times and his colonial writings do present a critique of the hypocritical nature of European imperialism. Many of his works are highly impressionistic in nature because of their graphic, physical representations of not only the physical landscapes of the colonized world but also the cultural ethos of the different people of those lands. But at the same time, it must not be forgotten that Conrad does probe into the inmost recesses of the characters of his works and make a thorough investigation into the abounding complexities of the human mind. In other words, Conrad‘s works are also psychological treatises where one can trace his insightful probe into the various complex processes that underlie the intricate workings of the human mind.
Secret Sharers: Melville, Conrad and Narratives of the Real
Secret Sharers: Melville, Conrad and Narratives of the Real, 2011
The present book explores a variety of fundamental questions that all of us secretly share. Its twenty-one chapters, written by some of the world’s leading Melville and Conrad scholars, indicate possible directions of comparativist insight into the continuity and transformations of western existentialist thought between the 19th and 20th centuries. The existential philosophy of participation—so mistrustful of analytical categories—is epitomized by the lives and oeuvres of Melville and Conrad. Born in the immediacy of experience, this philosophy finds its expression in uncertain tropes and faith-based actions; rather than muffle the horror vacui with words, it plunges head first into liminality, where logos dissolves into a “positive nothing.” Unlike analytical philosophers, both Melville and Conrad refrain from talking about reality: they expose those who would listen to a first-hand experience of participation in an interpretive act. Employing literary tropes to denude the essence of the human condition, they allow their readers to transgress the limitations of language. Mistrustful of language, they accept the necessity of discourse which, to make sense, must be actively reshaped, endlessly questioned, and constantly revised. And if uncertainty is the only certainty available to us, our lowly human condition also necessitates compassion: an existential cure against the liquid, capricious reality we are afforded.
Yearbook of Conrad Studies
The eponymous question of the present address as well as its main premise concern the issue of reading Conrad as opposed to the issue of Conrad's readings. Although the writer insisted on the priority of artistic expression in his oeuvres over their thematic content, he tends to be analyzed with a view to precedence of content over form. Moreover, his application in his less known short fiction of the then novel modernist device of denegation usually ascribed to Faulkner, is hardly given its due in criticism. What distorts Conrad is, likewise, ideological mediatization of his fiction and biography. And, last but not least, comes insufficient appreciation among Western Conradians of the significance for his writings of his Polish background, and especially his borderland szlachta heritage, where also Polish criticism has been at fault. As emphasized, in comparison with Conrad's Englishness, which comes down to the added value of his home, family, friends, and career in England as well as the adopted language, his Polishness is about l'âme: the patriotic spirit of Conrad's ancestry, traumatic childhood experience, Polish upbringing and education, sensibilities and deeply felt loyalties deriving from his formative years in Poland. Therefore, one of the premises put forward in the present address is that perhaps Conrad should be referred to as an English writer with his Polish identity constantly inscribed and reinscribed into the content and form of his oeuvres, rather than simply an English writer of Polish descent as he is now. The three eponymous aspects are thus hardly to be ignored in Conrad studies, even if a significant part of Conrad criticism to date has done precisely that. 1
”Twixt Land and Sea” in Conrad's Youth: a Narrative and Two Other stories
Yearbook of Conrad Studies, 2017
The article aims at discussing the interdependence of the marine and the land spaces in Conrad's works. Although they serve the same purpose-they constitute the background, and set the scene for Conrad's tales, the marine space works quite frequently as a catalyst for human actions. The Youth: A Narrative and Two Other Stories volume is analysed in order to present the image of land and sea as created by the writer. Moreover, the voyage, the element joining the tales, will be considered from the perspective suggested by Juliet McLauchlan in her inspiring article Conrad's 'Three Ages of Man': The 'Youth' Volume.
The Ghost in the Account Book: Conrad, Faulkner, and Gothic Incalculability
Novel, 2019
“The Ghost in the Account Book” claims that the imperial fiction of Joseph Conrad and William Faulkner rejects accounting as a totalizing logic and, by extension, questions the English novel's complicity in propagating faith in that false logic. Accounting, which had remained unobtrusively immanent to realist novels of empire such as Mansfield Park and Great Expectations, surfaces to the diegetic level and becomes available for critical scrutiny in high modernist novels such as Heart of Darkness or Absalom, Absalom! Drawing from writings by Max Weber (on guarantees of calculability) and Mary Poovey (on the accuracy effect), this essay attends to the dandy accountant of Heart of Darkness, the accretive narrative structure of Nostromo, and Shreve's recasting of Sutpen's life as a debtor's farce in Absalom, Absalom! If Conrad bluntly equates accounting with lying, Faulkner reveals secrets elided in rows of debit and credit one by one as sensational truths; to those ends, both writers invoke Gothic conventions. By dispatching the totalizing technique that had been invented by early modern merchants and finessed by realist novelists to generate faith in a stable fiduciary community, Conrad and Faulkner impel the invention of newer forms and figures with which to express the new imperial (and later, postcolonial) world order.
Uncanny Conrad: Home, Exile, Memory, and Communion with the Dead
Leviathan, 2009
A lthough this paper speaks of dealing justly with the dead, it will do less justice to Melville and to Poland than to Conrad. Nevertheless, I hope that charting the uncanny contiguities of exile, home, memory, judgment, and ancestral presences in Conrad may throw-as Marlow would say-"a kind of light" on Melville. Here we are at the limit of deep-water navigation on the Odra (Oder) River, in a polyglot city shaped by exile, devastation, and involuntary resettlement as well as by the wealth, cultural and financial, brought by the Baltic shipping trade. 1 Neither Conrad nor Melville ever saw the Baltic, but Szczecin is a likely place to feel the poignancy of exile, the impermanence of home, and the heft of national identity (or, for Conrad, identities) in the work of two conspicuously international authors. Their affinities are not confined to experience fore or aft. It goes almost without saying that the author of Billy Budd and "The Encantadas" is a polyphonist and a mixer of modes, writing in a multitude of voices, switching from poetry to prose, to drama, from fiction to statistical account, but so, more quietly, is the author of Heart of Darkness and An Outcast of the Islands as he glides without warning from the grandly operatic to the savagely ironic, from the orotund to the colloquial. 2 These are protean writers, hard to confine in any ideological cage, not least when they treat of the uncanny, the supernatural, the metaphysical.