JOSEPH CONRAD AND THE SWAN SONG OF ROMANCE (Ashgate, Joseph Conrad s novel The Rescue had an unusually long gestation period.

Transcription

1 1 KATHERINE ISOBEL BAXTER JOSEPH CONRAD AND THE SWAN SONG OF ROMANCE (Ashgate, 2010) vii pp. Joseph Conrad s novel The Rescue had an unusually long gestation period. Begun in the 1890s, it was abandoned by the author for around 25 years before finally being published in 1920 as the third of a retrospective trilogy featuring Captain Lingard. Since Conrad called it the swan song of romance, Katherine Baxter takes this phrase for the title of her monograph on Conrad s relationship with the romance genre. She thus signals alternative perspectives on his use and subversion of romance tropes and conventions. Recent critics have construed Conrad s tales of imperial failure as evidence that he was writing against the traditional imperial romance. In this book, however, Baxter shows how Conrad grappled with the entire romance genre throughout most of his writing career, ranging from Heart of Darkness (1899) to The Rover (1923). Using Robert Miles s notion of the philosophical romance in What is a Romantic Novel?, Baxter argues that Conrad used the romance form to question its narrative conventions and ideology. While acknowledging the conservative side to Conrad s writing, Baxter also reveals that he suspects and distrusts the authority of language and narrative. The result

2 2 is a wide-ranging discussion of Conrad s oeuvre that is highly cognizant of cultural history and literary antecedents. Following a contextual Introduction that lays out the literary, theoretical and historical underpinnings of Baxter s argument, Part One considers two of Conrad s most famous tales of imperial misadventure: Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. These two tales, Baxter argues, use motifs, techniques, and forms of romance to create the kind of philosophical romance that Miles identifies in the fiction of a century earlier (18). Recognising the moral and psychological impact of Marlow s experience in the Congo, Baxter sees Heart of Darkness as a specifically quest narrative (24). Insightfully generalizing about the novella, Baxter argues that in it the political intent of philosophical romance is both reduced and expanded to encompass the individual and the universe (32). As Marlow, in other words, comes to recognize the absence of meaning in his experience in the Congo, this void comes to represent a more general indeterminacy of meaning. In Lord Jim, Baxter explains, Conrad develops some of the approaches to romance that he expressed in Heart of Darkness: the need to narrate the tale allied with the impossibility of giving that narration a purposeful form (34). Jim, she argues is a character in search of a plot (34), a character who ultimately fails to distinguish between romance and reality, and even more crucially, to understand that romantic action has its source in reality (46).

3 3 Part Two treats Romance, Nostromo, and Chance. In these novels, which range from piracy, to New World politics, to suburban and domestic drama, Conrad is said to explore the ironic possibilities of philosophical romance in areas beyond the colonial narratives of the individual which dominated his early fiction (51). According to Baxter, the persistent intertextuality of Romance--with its historical allusions and its references to Byron, Don Quixote and El Cid--all destabilize the narrative and thus anticipate the more radical disruption of narrative in Nostromo. Perhaps more than any other novel in the Conrad canon, Baxter argues, Nostromo represents his avant-garde credentials and reveals his anxieties about his own creative powers. But he translates these anxieties into a mode of telling that aggressively subverts the reader s expectations of narrative trajectory and form, resulting in his most aesthetically successful novel (81). Revealing Baxter at her most acute, this analysis of Nostromo furnishes some truly original insights and perspectives on the novel, its characters, and its political action. In Chance Baxter finds tragi-comedy. Here, she explains, comedy becomes a restorative agency that helps Flora resolve her own situation through domesticity. In the first part of the novel, Baxter argues, the failure of others to understand and narrate Flora s predicament appears comic. But as Flora begins to take control of her fate, the ironic and sarcastic tendencies of comedy give way to her domestic equilibrium. At this point Baxter aligns

4 4 Conrad with Walter Scott. Like Scott, she contends, Conrad uses the tropes of romance to reinscribe rather than destabilize the dominant social order, creating what Miles calls anti-philosophical romance (Miles 197, qtd. Baxter 84). In Part Three, Baxter examines at gratifying length three later novels often neglected by critics: Victory, The Rescue, and The Rover Here she aptly explains how Conrad himself reveals the limitations of the philosophical romance: Conrad draws attention to the novel s fictionality not only through its literary echoes, but also through its metamorphic and metaphoric style. In doing so he indicates the parallels between the novel s style and the romantic rhetoric used by its protagonists to mediate between ideals and reality. (105) Baxter s analysis of Victory ultimately revolves around notions of performativity, theatricality, and transformation; many of its characters, we learn, live limbo-like existences in insubstantial and unstable identities. Building on these notions, Chapter 7 ( Theatre and Incomprehension in The Rescue ) offers an erudite close-reading of its chosen subject. After usefully

5 5 comparing The Rescue to Chaucer s The Franklin s Tale, Baxter studies it in light of spectacle, theatricality, and misunderstandings. Implicitly, Baxter argues, Lingard s conflict of loyalty involves larger issues of narration, nostalgia, and their relationship to fiction and reality (120). Ending up with The Rover, Baxter argues that Conrad here explores the possibilities of romance as something already lost and felt as lost (135). Though she repeatedly finds the characters paralyzed and petrified, she also finds within this petrifaction the tentative possibilities of meaningful narrative (146). She thus fittingly ends her book by re-affirming the positive power of narrative: The productive potential of what we might call sceptical nostalgia, she writes, such as we find at the end of The Rover, indicates the persistence of our need for narrative, its consolation in the reconstruction of a past that is inevitably lost to us (148). In statements such as this, Baxter displays an acute awareness of Conrad s commitment to as well as struggles with narrative form and function, and his complex relationship with the romance genre. Her book is all the more important because it manages to make sense of the contradictions and challenges that we find in Conrad s use of the romance. Linda Dryden is Professor of English Literature at Edinburgh Napier University. She is the author of Joseph Conrad and the Imperial Romance and

6 6 The Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles: Stevenson, Wilde and Wells, and the co-editor of Stevenson and Conrad: Writers of Transition and of the Journal of Stevenson Studies.