Watt on Conrad

ELT 45 : 1 2002 are we learning something bracing about literary history that alters our perception of well-loved and oft-turned pages? While Sumner's A Route to Modernism provides many insightful close readings which indeed lure us back to the original works themselves, tincturing our reading with fresh appreciation, her work is at the same time curiously dated; it provides no social, historical, or cultural context for the works or concepts discussed, thus avoiding larger questions about modernism itself. Ultimately Sumner's "study of'the adventure to the unknown,' the unconscious, the enigmatic in the fiction of Hardy, Lawrence and Woolf leaves us longing to survey the entire railway system rather than this specific route. Kabi Hartman ______________ Temple University Watt on Conrad Ian Watt. Essays on Conrad. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. xi + 214 pp. Cloth $52.95 Paper $18.95 WITH THE PUBLICATION in 1979 oÃ- Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, Ian Watt emerged as one of the foremost, if not the foremost, Conrad scholars of his generation. This study focused primarily on the early works—Almayer's Folly, The Nigger of the "Narcissus," Heart of Darkness, and Lord Jim. Watt demonstrated the insightfulness and originality, critical balance and comprehensiveness of scope scholars recognized in The Rise of the Novel (1957), which remains to this day a major text in its field. Although he continued to write on Conrad until his death in 1999, publishing a slim volume on Nostromo in 1988, Watt never completed the much anticipated second study, "Conrad in the Twentieth Century." We are therefore lucky at least to have Essays on Conrad, a collection, as Frank Kermode notes in his Foreword, which forms the nucleus of Watt's never-completed second Conrad book. Although each of this book's twelve chapters already has been published, it is nevertheless useful to have the essays collected in one volume, and not only for purposes of convenience: the essays together add up to more than the sum of their (already considerable) parts. Watt's approach in Essays on Conrad, as in Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, might be called "critical-biographical." That is to say, Watt never loses sight of the ways in which Conrad's own life and times inform the genesis—and also should inform our critical reception—of the works. In "Joseph Conrad: Alienation and Commitment," the book's first 104 BOOK REVIEWS chapter, for example, Watt uses his vast knowledge of Conrad's life, letters , and fiction to set the seaman/author apart from other modern writers who acknowledge the force of individual alienation yet who do not attempt a further "movement from alienation towards commitment." According to Watt, many of these other modern writers tend to equate the achievement of individuality with the process of alienation; the poetry of Eliot and Pound, for example, typically leads us away in revulsion from contemporary actuality; while the novels of Joyce and Lawrence tend to focus on the breaking of ties with family, class and country: both poets and the novelists leave us, not with a realization of man's crucial though problematic dependence on others, but with a sharpened awareness of individual separateness . Conrad, by contrast, "also gives us a sense of a much wider commmitment " (defined by Watt as "dedication" to "a course of action which transcends any purely personal advantage") to "the main ethical, social and literary attitudes, both of the world at large and of the general reader, than do any... of his great contemporaries." According to Watt, Conrad's writings, while acknowledging individual isolation, nevertheless also betray their author's social commitments—"to his career, to his fellowseaman , to his adopted country"—rather than merely proclaiming "their author's radical separateness from the rest of mankind." This essay is followed by a number of others that treat individual Conrad works: a comprehensive introduction to Almayer's Folly; a study of the critical reception oÃ- The Nigger of the "Narcissus"; an essay that answers Chinua Achebe's now famous condemnation of Heart of Darkness ; a study of comedy and humor in Typhoon ("One simple way of putting it would be to say that Typhoon is about the corrections...