Conard & Joyce

ELT 41 : 4 1998 stories, published in several journals, including L'Epoque Conradienne, the journal of the French Conrad Society, go similarly unnoticed. Although the readings of the individual short stories are in the main serviceable, they not only fail to reach the level of distinction of the essays mentioned above but on occasion become merely chatty. The discussion of "Youth," for example, lamely closes with the observation that "Conrad implies that we may grow older but we never grow up" (63). The section on Heart ofDarkness, that Mount Everest in the Conrad canon, dealt with in eight pages, ends with the remark that "Conrad paradoxically uses words to demonstrate the inability of language to encompass the unfathomability of human existence" (77). This sort of teacherly musing has, perhaps, its place and purpose; but as analytical criticism, it is tired stuff that has been served up before—at least one critical generation ago. In sum, this is a disappointing book, and is all the more so because its topic is an absorbing and important one that would richly repay sustained and purposeful investigation. J. H. Stape _______________ Jakarta, Indonesia Conard & Joyce Zdzislaw Najder. Conrad in Perspective: Essays on Art and Fidelity. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997. χ + 240 pp. $59.95 Peter Hartshorn. James Joyce and Trieste. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1997. xvi + 181 pp. $55.00 ZDZISLAW NAJDER'S Conrad in Perspective: Essays on Art and Fidelity and Peter Hartshorn's James Joyce and Trieste approach thenrespective subjects from common vantage points: the biographical, cultural , and historical matrices out of which their author's fictions emerge. Both studies are worthy contributions to their fields of inquiry and both seek to enhance our understanding of their works by enhancing our understanding of their lives and times. Conrad in Perspective collects fifteen articles written between 1963 and 1996. These essays, some of which are translated from the Polish for the first time, are significant both in their own right and as elaborations on Najder's evolving portrait of Conrad's Polish background, as documented in Conrad's Polish Background (1964), Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle (1983), and Conrad Under Familial Eyes (1983). Despite their varying topics, scopes, and years of composition, the essays collected here all share certain "assumptions": that "Conrad wrote his books 484 BOOK REVIEWS about the world as he saw and knew it, not about other books," and that he "used other texts as a means of communicating not about himself, or about those texts—but about other men and the world they live in." For Najder, Conrad was an "anachronistic" writer: "While steeped in tradition , he was not bound by fashions and conventions of his time. On the contrary, he ran straight against some of them, mistrustful of the sovereignty of art for its own sake, suspicious of individualism, unmoved by psychologism. Perhaps this is one reason why so many of his works have aged so well and why he has been and still is so widely read by nonspecialists ." Following an introductory chapter that defines his critical approach, Najder devotes three authoritative chapters to Conrad's Polish background , including illuminating studies of Conrad's parents, Apollo Korzeniowski and Ewa Bobrowska, and of Conrad's maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, who becomes Conrad's guardian following the death of his parents. The next five chapters center on one work each by Conrad: The Sisters, Lord Jim, The Mirror of the Sea, A Personal Record, and The Secret Agent. In the last and most interesting of these chapters, Najder argues that Conrad, in The Secret Agent, deploys melodramatic subject-matter and melodramatic heroes in an unusual way: to create irony. This is unusual because, after all, irony is the "polar opposite" of melodrama: "Look here, [Conrad] seems to be saying, if this is our [melodramatic ] situation, if such people, such grotesque people as Mr Vladimir or Mr Verloc or Comrade Ossipon or the Professor can influence our life or cause our death, if we are defended by such men as Heat and governed by such as Sir Ethelred—then irony is indeed the only attitude worthy of a serious person." The seven final chapters concern not Conrad 's PoUsh background or his...