Conrad's Later Fiction

165 CONRAD'S LATER FICTION By George H. Thomson In Joseph Conrad as I Knew HIm (1926) we read: "But If he was evolving a new manner, then the volume called 'Typhoon,' standing as It does between the Blackwood phase and the beginning of a phase marked by 'Nostromo,' may be regarded as a transition book" (p. 50). Jessie Conrad Is here being deferential to the critics and to their view that Conrad's work changed after Lord JIm. but she does not, I think, quite believe them. She argues on their terms, yet she feels the dividing line falls after The Secret Agent : "That book in Its present form marks for me literally the end of our early days" (p. 56). On the face of It this Is not a literary Judgment, for the next sentence concerns the move to a new house. Neither Is It a practical Judgment, for the account of their year-to-year existence offers no clear evidence In support of her distinct feeling that there was a dividing line. Yet Conrad's books were so personal to him that a change In them would signify a change in himself. And the latter we may trust Jessie Conrad to have perceived. We may note, too, that Conrad In letters to John Galsworthy of 6 June and 17 June I907 speaks of this period with gloomy finality, and that on 20 September he writes to Henry James: "We have abandoned the Pent to Its green solitude; - to Its rats. There's a chapter closed." What that chapter was, stretching from Almayer's Folly of I895 to The Secret Agent of I907, I cannot describe here. I can only point to a tragedy of passive suffering expressed through the shifting forces and Insights of a fiction of sustained and unresolved tension. After I907 a change makes Itself felt. Beginning with Under Western Eyes the fiction moves towards a resolution of tension. At the same time It brings Into prominence a new subject: the role of woman as the source of reality and salvation. This new subject Is directly responsible for the new aesthetic effect of resolution. How Important the role of woman was to become for Conrad Is first hinted at In the concluding episode of Heart of Darkness In which Marlow confronts Kurtz's Intended. Conrad feTt obscurely but powerfully that all the elements of his story were locked together In the dark spell of this Interview with a pale and mysterious girl. Twenty years later he created the remarkable Donna Rita, the woman of all the world. Because he had long meditated on the experience which took shape at last as The Arrow of Gold, he was able In the person of Donna Rita to work out some part of the unconscious value and significance which the figure of the woman held for his deep-considering minds. But what must strike us more forcibly Is the similarity between the Intended and Donna Rita. Each Is framed In a remarkable setting, like a tomb, like a museua, And each possesses an awesome, transcendent, half ethereal ambience. Where does this woman come from and what does she portend for Conrad's fiction? It Is natural to look to the Malay novels though the answer they give Is Indirect. 166 Conrad summed It up In his last completed work when he said of old Peyrol that In his earlier days he had known a spell of crazy love for a yellow girl (p. 25). The number of such Incidents In Conrad's fiction attests to their Importance. Their meaning Is plain enough. The masculine need to view woman as a sexual object and as having a supremely sexual nature Is expressed by Conrad In the colored or half-caste girl. In this way feminine sexuality Is displaced. Isolated, confined to a realm outside the norms of civilized Europe. The native woman whose outstretched arms reach after Karlow and Kurtz Is superbly sexual; she makes possible the ethereal purity of the Intended. What then are the Implications of these two feminine roles? A glance forward to Typhoon may help, for that story In Its simplicity shows forth things that...