Conrad's Last Novel

189 CONRAD'S LAST NOVEL By AVrom Fleishman (The Johns Hopkins University) In seeking to evaluate The Rover, a critic of whatever persuasion cannot get past the first page without noting matters that demand explanation, if they do not call for apology. The last sentence of the paragraph reads: But as to that, old Peyrol had made up his mind from the first to blow up his valuable charge - unemotionally, for such was his character, formed under the sun of the Indian Seas in lawless contests with his kind for a little loot that vanished as soon as grasped, but mainly for bare life almost as precarious to hold through Its ups and downs, and which now had lasted for fifty-eight years.* Not only are we appalled by the reversion to learner's English and the clumsy stringing out of cllche"s, but we may suffer an uneasy sensation that perhaps this is what Conrad has offered all through his career - magniloquent reflections on the human condition which are hard to distinguish from bombast. We assuage these doubts by recalling not only that Conrad was fully capable of writing wellbalanced and grammatical sentences, but that the whole tenor of much of his earlier work conspires to validate what would otherwise be windy rhetoric on man's destiny. It becomes Instructive, then, to determine how far The Rover. Conrad's last completed novel, succeeds in Integrating Its language and its themes, and this is best done by comparing it with earlier novels that are generally accepted as Integral works of art. In making this comparison, It is of course desirable to have in hand two works whose subject-matter Is similar, in order to see the difference in treatment the more clearly. Surprisingly, the novel which most closely resembles The Rover is The Secret Agent surprising because they are so remote In time and place of action and in tone. Yet the two are Immediately set apart from most other Conrad novels by their length: they are neither extended studies that claim attention as magna opera nor pungent novellas marked by Intense concentration, but tightly-constructed novels of roughly 300 pages. Further, their political-historical subjects lead them both into the realm of revolutionary terrorism, the Toulon massacres of the French Revolutionary period becoming as vivid in the later work as the threat and occasional manifestation of modern radical violence in the earlier. Both novels are, moreover, concerned not so much with the forefront of political action as with the responses of more-orless Innocent bystanders on the historical scene - with the unwilling and partly-aware Involvement of people who ordinarily succeed In maintaining their unlnvolved mediocrity. *A11 references are to the Dent and Doubleday editions of Conrad's collected novels, and are henceforth Incorporated in the text. 190 The cast of characters Includes, in each novel, a quixotic and upright but rather stiff younger man who never clearly emerges from the shadows as a hero (Lieutenant Ré*al and the Assistant Commissioner); a neurotic, long-suffering woman whose mental Imbalance becomes a matter of concern for her protectors and exploiters (Ariette and Winnie Verloc); a revolutionary opportunist who, despite his capacity for destructlveness, remains a puny and faintly comic figure (Scevola and Verloc); and a half-witted, pathetic hanger-on of the main figures, who loses his life without even realizing that he has risked it (Michel and Stevle). Despite the obvious differences between the plots of these novels, they both hinge on the typically Conradlan theme of man's hopeful effort to take himself off the scene of political effort and moral relationship , and the ironic loop which the world makes in gathering the alienated man back Into its folds - whether as hero or as villain, in the case of Peyrol and Verloc respectively. Finally, It is for these two figures that the novels are named. It cannot be seriously believed that Conrad was merely sifting his past products to find reusable materials for late, uninspired efforts, Far more likely, we have to do here with a reversion to the elementary forms that structure an artistic imagination - a confrontation with the spectres and animas of the Junglan unconscious...