Conrad's Cities

ELT 36:2 1993 certain attractive rhetorical balance in its paradoxical oppositions. We have the impression that something analytical has been said; it is only when we look again at the sentence that we discover that more questions have been raised than answered. How does narrative "increase in intensity"? Is there a single language "appropriate" both to common experience and extraordinary vision? How do we know when that language is discovered? Just how "extraordinary" is this vision, anyway? And this is to say nothing of the questions feminist criticism has raised regarding Stephen's encounter with the prostitute: but then, there is nothing in Peterson's book that could not easily have been written before the advent of feminist criticism. Peterson is scrupulous about citing most of the important books on Joyce published in the past twenty-five years, either in his text or (more often) in footnotes, but at no point does he enter into genuine dialogue with them. Structuralists, semioticians, poststructuralists, Lacanians, Marxists, and New Historicists all suffer the fate of feminists; Peterson is happy to point vaguely toward their work, but there is no evidence that any of it has affected his own reading of Joyce. Fair enough—no one requires Peterson to be a contemporary theorist. But it was Peterson himself who invoked as his rationale the changing and evolving nature of Joyce criticism. Surely it would not be necessary to smother undergraduates under loads of contemporary theory to give them some sense of the ways in which Joycean criticism has changed in the past twenty-five years. Indeed, the Twayne series might be an excellent place to do just that. R. B. Kershner ______________ University of Florida Conrad's Cities Gene M. Moore, ed. Conrad's Cities: Essays for Hans van Marie. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1992. 291 pp. $50.00 CONRAD'S CITIES is a worthy tribute not only to the exceptional scholar Hans van Marie but to Joseph Conrad himself. Its seventeen essays are uniformly clearly written, informative, and up-to-date but free of the aggressive kind of "theorizing" that threatens "to obliterate literature itself," in the words of one of the contributors, Paul Kirschner. Kirschner's piece on Under Western Eyes, containing fascinating detective work and superb maps and photographs, is perhaps the best example of the many riches awaiting the reader in this book, particularly in its biographical and historical essays. Among many other things, 258 BOOK REVIEWS Kirschner establishes "the fact that a twenty-three-year-old Russian with the unusual name of Rasoumoff, who claimed to be a student in the faculty of philosophy, had lodgings in Geneva a few hundred yards from Conrad, four months before Conrad began writing a novel he at first called after its protagonist, a philosophy student named Razumov. ... Further: just around the corner from Stephane Rasoumoff's lodgings, at 91-93 rue de Carouge, was a Bolshevik educational and propaganda centre ... and ... a few doors away was the club of Polish social-democratic émigrés, at which Lenin frequently spoke." Kirschner's primary historical work allows us to visualize the character Razumov's world more concretely, to understand the significance of his peregrinations around Geneva in detail, and to appreciate in greater depth Conrad's engagement with the physical, political and moral landscape of his day. Gene Moore deserves praise not only because he edited this excellent volume, but because his own "Conrad in Amsterdam," originally published in Conradiana, is one of the best pieces in the book. Moore uses photos and maps to illuminate the role of the city in influencing the writing of Mirror of the Sea, as well as Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands. Like Kirschner, Moore not only allows us to visualize a major city as it existed around one hundred years ago, but to feel the mental climate and preoccupations that are behind some of Conrad's writings. Warsaw is "mentioned only once and briefly" in Conrad's works, but as Zdzisaw Najder points out, it was still very important to him. Najder provides a fascinating view of the city in the 1860s, including a photo of the street and house in...