Conrad & the Adventure Tradition

ELT 38:3 1995 Land of Heart's Desire," and The Secret Rose," early works all, but he did make use of comparisons from the variorum editions of poems and plays. From letters and reviews, Mercier also furnished examples of Yeats's almost "rectory humor," understated, ironic and self-parodic. Mercier convinces us that Yeats had a sense of humor and had no trouble recognizing the alternation of tragicomedy and como-tragedy in poems and plays. WhUe Mercier does not suggest this, I suspect that Yeats's final "tragic joy" resulted from a recognition of what he had been doing. According to Mercier, Synge's preoccupation with tramps and beggars was his version of the pastoral (really "mock pastoral") and influenced Beckett's choice of characters, too. Synge, like the later Beckett (and Mercier), was a Trinity graduate, but educated himself largely through reading, the study of languages, and travel. Better educated than Yeats, he read extensively in Greek classics, as weU as in poets such as Francois Vülon, Robert Bums, and Robert Herrick. In one way or another, all of these affected the plays and poems. WMe he proclaimed himself an agnostic, he retained the morality of his evangeUcal relatives, to the point of creating a prudish Dierdre. In Mercier's view, Synge also had a strong influence on Yeats's plays, for in them he used at least eleven mock pastoral figures. Mercier's chapter on Joyce focuses upon another of his favorite works, Ulysses and its creation. For the neophyte, this is stiU another useful chapter, though perhaps less informative than some of the other chapters . Still, Mercier's interpretation of the "Nausicaa" episode as "the person telling herself a story about herself is a new way of looking at that chapter. Mercier also argues convincingly that the Blooms did not abstain from sex since the death of the son but used "coitus interruptus." WhUe one can see that Mercier's focus, examples and conclusions are both personal and eccentric, they are also thoughtful and thought-provoking . Whüe it might have been even more substantive had he Uved to see it through the press himself, and one regrets the loss of its companion volume, Modern Irish Literature: Sources and Founders is a fitting conclusion to the life work of a significant Irish critic. Jack W. Weaver _____________ Winthrop University Conrad & the Adventure Tradition Andrea White. Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition: Constructing and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993. xii + 233 pp. $49.95 426 BOOK REVIEWS ALMOST FROM THE FIRST, Conrad criticism has expended much time, energy, and not a little ingenuity in tracing and identifying the books Conrad read and used in his short stories, novellas, and novels; however, since Michel Foucault introduced the concepts of "archaeology of knowledge" and "discourse," the boundaries and the intentions of this type of study have changed drastically. Andrea White's Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition was conceived and written with these two projects in mind. The subtitle of the book, "Constructing and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject," indicates the narrative line and argumentative thrusts of her study, as she traces the evolution of travel writing, the co-option of adventure fiction by the "imperial discourse ," and the eventual subverting of this discourse by Conrad, especiaUy in the works of the first third of his career. The study is definitely not a f adle contrasting of Conrad with Haggard or Hope or Stevenson. AU in all, White's study is clearly written, modestly argued, and genuinely helpful in giving substance to generalizations often made about Conrad's fiction. Indeed, at the moment, Conrad criticism in general appears bent on reading each of his works as the subversion of one type of discourse or another. White approaches her task chronologicaUy, exploring how travel writing stimulated and nourished adventure writing, how adventure novels then became a primary voice in the imperial discourse, and how Conrad, along with H. Rider Haggard and Robert Louis Stevenson, began to interrogate, problematize, and subvert this discourse. In particular , she asks two central questions: how did adventure fiction establish itself so quickly and so powerfuUy in the century, and what is...