Conrad's Lives Revisited

ELT 42 : 1 1999 aged giant and "[l]ook for a young Shaw." Still, this is only a quibble about an otherwise fascinating and thoroughly satisfying book. Julie Sparks ________________ San José State University Conrad's Lives Revisited Geoffrey Gait Harpham. One of Us: The Mastery of Joseph Conrad. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1997. xiv + 211pp. Cloth $35.00 Paper $14.95 THIS BOLD revisionist study offers a reinterpretation of Conrad 's "lives" as a Pole, seaman, and English writer, focusing on Conrad's mastery of his chosen professions and native and adoptive languages. Basing his approach partly on Frederick R. Karl's massive, even ungainly , biography of 1979, Harpham sets out to recover the unconscious forces at work on Conrad, an aim that includes analyzing the operation and effects of the larger "discursive, ideological, and material systems" shaping his experience. Harpham offers readings of selected fictions to support his points, but concentrates primarily on illuminating the political , intellectual, and economic crosscurrents in Conrad's native and adoptive cultures and at exploring how these both nurtured and hindered as well as shaped and deformed the Polish seaman who became the émigré writer "Joseph Conrad." Harpham's first section, "To Be a Pole," summarizes theories of nationhood and nationality as a prologue to demonstrating how Conrad's childhood and family background collided with Polishness itself as a condition of loss, alienation, and permanent identity crisis, consequent upon the late eighteenth-century partitions that disembodied Poland and made it a nation without a state. From this position, he extrapolates how Conrad's personal experience of his native country, itself an imagined or fictive community during most of his lifetime, led him to "polonize " the novel, meaning that his plots are constructed around central negations and absences, articulated by temporal discontinuity, structural fragmentation, and narrative instability. The nearly complete absence of Poland from Conrad's fiction, Harpham maintains, thus more vividly expresses its (un)reality than would its actual use as a setting. (The short story "Prince Roman," the most overtly Polish of Conrad's fictions , oddly goes unmentioned.) These observations sacrifice some nuance to obtain an overarching view. Class particularities and allegiances resulted, in fact, not even in a unitary imagined "Poland" but in several "Polands." As Zdzislaw Najder has urged in his authoritative Joseph 90 BOOK REVIEWS Conrad: A Chronicle (1983), and more recently in Conrad in Perspective: Essays on Art and Fidelity (1998), the gentry construction, by no means the only one available, determined Conrad's views on Polish history and politics. Contrary to most critics and analysts of Conrad's second life, Harpham constructs Conrad's experience as a seaman not as a wholly anomalous and inexplicable leap away from things Polish but as maintaining continuity with them. Long-held traditions, a profound sense of community, and moral purpose, the fundamental constituents of Polishness , oppose the sea's essential anarchy, incoherence, and arbitrariness, which, in this original and at times challenging account, is an analogue for Poland's situation vis-à -vis her Russian master. The political aspects of Conrad's presentation of the sea, present particularly in The Nigger of the "Narcissus", are more outlined than developed; but, by way of compensation for not retreading familiar ground, the almost universally neglected The Rescue is closely scrutinized as the crucial "breakthrough text" that allowed Conrad to discover his true métier as a writer. Precisely because he misconceived his real subject, the sea and not Tom Lingard , he laid aside The Rescue to write The Nigger of the "Narcissus". In this work, here re-evaluated as one of Conrad's major achievements, he broached, with some openness, the topics of homosociality and homoeroticism , issues that, Harpham implies, lie beneath the strained sexuality of The Rescue, including Lingard's fetishization of his brig. Taking issue with Tony Tanner's contention that sea fiction is inherently limited in emotional range and hostile to the treatment of sexuality because of its monosexual environment, Harpham argues, on the contrary, that homoeroticism is variously coded, disguised, and displaced in sea fiction generally. He offers by way of witness a brief survey of its appearances in various Conrad texts, including "Heart of Darkness ," The Nigger...