Joseph Conrad: Modernism, England & Empire

This new study by Allan H. Simmons is one of three recently published to cover similar ground. It will, as such, inevitably invite comparison with the other two: Tim Middleton's own Joseph Conrad (published by Routledge) and John G. Peters's Cambridge Introduction to Joseph Conrad (from Cambridge University Press). As introductions, however, these necessarily take a general approach. While Simmons's book in part serves a similar, preliminary function, it pays much closer attention to text and context by concentrating on specific issues—namely Conrad's relationships to modernism, England, and Empire. These leading themes animate the study's excavations of familiar Conradian tropes such as race, the sea, and nationalism.

The chapters "broadly follow the chronology of Conrad's career, identifying its various phases and grouping the fiction according to shared concerns." This grows out from an opening section on "Life and Letters," sketching key political, social and biographical contexts, from Conrad's Polish heritage, through his life at sea, to his arrival on the English literary scene. In just one instance of the book's range of insight, Conrad's recollection in A Personal Record (1912), of reaching out to touch the same sort of "English ship" in which he would serve for the next fifteen years, is given due significance. Whilst marking a foundational moment of national identification, there is also "a satisfying symmetry in Conrad's choice of the ship as 'home,'" commensurate with "his rootless early life and symbolic of his state of exile."

Conrad's oft-explored link with the sea is also recast in terms of a broader imperial connection: "In the British Merchant Service, Conrad was a cog in the greatest imperial machine the world had ever seen at a time when Britain dominated the oceans." Interestingly, Conrad's entry into the Merchant Service in the first place was thanks to the strains placed on Britain in the maintenance and slow erosion of this dominance in the period up to 1900. Faced with increasing competition from Germany and America, "the sheer scope of the Empire strained Britain's ability to meet her demand for sailors, and foreign sailors"—like Conrad—"were common in the 'British' Merchant Service." This feeds into an in-depth discussion of The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (1897) and "Typhoon" (1903).

Similarly, Conrad's literary career, for which he gave up this maritime one, is firmly situated in the scientific and technological upheavals of the age. Conrad's first novel, Almayer's Folly (1895), for instance, was published the same year as "the invention of the telephone and the discovery of X-rays"; "it was also the year in which Freud published his first work on psychoanalysis and Marconi sent his first message over a mile by wireless." In much the same way as Conrad's experience of the sea leaves its impress on his writing (and on his early critical reception, as a writer of "sea-stories"), this techno-scientific context has an equally shaping effect. Most obviously, science—"the sacro-sanct fetish of to-day"—is the target of the bomb outrage in The Secret Agent (1907). One of his U.K. publishers, J. M. Dent, described Conrad's importance thus: "we are witnessing the birth throes of a new world, and you of all men, it seems to me, should be the prophet of its psychology." Indeed, Joseph Conrad is on the whole geared in support of this appraisal.

One chapter, dealing with "Youth" (1898), "Heart of Darkness" (1899) and Lord Jim (1900), clusters like these stories around the figure of Marlow. (Their grouping as "The Marlow Trilogy" is apt: before Lord Jim outgrew its original concept as a short story the three were to be collected as one volume.) Simmons gives Marlow, often taken for Conrad's surrogate, a more nuanced assessment by reexamining his relation to those within, as well as the real author without, the fiction. He argues that, although linked to his represented audiences in these three texts by shared values...