The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad ed. by J.H. Stape (review)

HUMANITIES 287 block-like folios reversed out oflittle blackbricks are an odd note, as are the bold and stocky caption numbers. While I am being critical, there is one false note in Stacey's text (other than his recalling seeing Hunter Bishop for the last time at the Art Gallery of Ontario's Magnetic North exhibition - by which he must mean the 1984 The Mystic North. I know the North has been magnetic for Stacey, however, and he has written extensively on this theme in other works). This is a polarity he tries to establish between MacDonald's design and that of the Bauhaus and 1930S modernism (A Word to Us All). In conSidering Macdonald and his Arts-and-Crafts ethos a 'more humane model' than the 'austere, utopian system decreed by the idealistic determinists of international Modernism,' Stacey simply reveals a personal taste issue, since the designers ofthe Bauhaus and their followers were trying to humanize mass production and introduce good design for everyday products and for all levels of society - very similar to the ideals espoused by the Arts-andCrafters a generation or two earlier. In conclusion, reading Robert Stacey is always a pleasure. Ever the archhistorian , he paints a detailed picture, seemingly effortlessly filling in cracks with facts, connections, asides, and commentary in a relaxed, conversational style. Both books are a rich read and a rich look, and are excellent and welcome contributions to the field. (LIZ WYLIE) J.H. Stape, editor. The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad Cambridge University Press. 258. us $54.95 cloth, us $17.95 paper As an account of sources and fundamental issues, such as Conrad's elaborate narratives and the recent disputes about his views on race and imperialism, this volume is consistent with the overall quality of the Cambridge series. But consistent analytical sophistication, at least in the chapters devoted to specific novels, is more covert, and when something truly striking occurs, in the essays on The Secret Agent and Nostromo for example, it is a 'fantastic invasion' of the texts, as bizarre as the antics of the pilgrims Marlow describesin 'Heart of Darkness.' With local variations the first eight sections seem to have been written by the same person, one who brings a relentlessly SUlUly disposition to bear on this dark, scabrous writer and one who, perhaps in deference to Conrad's stylistic turmoils, writes a slightlyawkward prose, an inky hint ofa repressed translator at work. This uniformity extends, inevitably one suspects. to the Works Cited, which seem interchangeable from essay to essay. Less explicable is that despite some remarks about Bakhtin, the volume is militantly non-theoretical, a bias that erodes even further the sense of critical balance such a collection should provide. 288 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 Cedric Watts attends to 'Heartof Darkness/ J.H. Stape to Lord Jim, Keith Carabine to Under Western Eyes, and Robert Hampson to 'The Late Novels.' Watts is especially thorough in mapping the Marlow/Kurtz realm, its origins and its presence in contemporary fiction and film. He properly balances the attacks by Achebe and Showalter with the more respectful positions taken on Conrad's conventionality and progressivism by Ngugi Wa Thiong'0 and Wilson Harris,butrelaxes in the inert distinctionbetween imaginative structure and political manifesto. Stape and Carabine skilfully trace the complexity of particular narrative techniques, and Hampson emphasizes the resonance of 'epistemological scepticism' in Victory and Chance. Butsolid, knowledgeable, and informative as these discussions are, they all prefer 'rivets' to the heart of the stories, to the near collapse of language into vacancy which they do not seem to hear, let alone capture. Conrad's Kurtz, Jim, and Razumov remain, then, largely shadowy doubles to the figures arranged in the essays. The most demanding ofConrad's novels, The Secret Agent and Nastromo, fare much worse from their guides. Jacques Berthoud sets out the appropriate documentary and biographical contexts for one of the language's greatest ironic narratives, but his literary judgments are at best eccentric, and The Secret Agent comes to seem a slightly loopy version of a novel by John Galsworthy. Berthoud unaccountably identifies the Professor as an American and remarks that 'the anarchists we meet' are 'not uniformly...