Conrad and History by Richard Niland (review)

Scholars often try to drag Joseph Conrad into the present. Though he was born in the middle of the 19th century and might be seen as a life-long supporter of the great Victorian virtues of duty, work, and loyalty, F.R. Leavis famously declared him a modernist in The Great Tradition, linking him with Lawrence, Joyce, and Woolf. A generation later, with his attack on Conrad as “a bloody racist,” Chinua Achebe provoked Conradians to defend him as a proto-post colonialist. And some of us have recently demonstrated how Conrad can be read as a very contemporary-seeming, subterranean champion of same-sex desire.

There’s no doubt that Conrad continues to appeal to readers in part because, thematically and stylistically, his work anticipated so much of the 20th and 21st centuries. The torture and murder of the Jewish Hirsch in Nostromo foreshadowed the Holocaust. The Unabomber and the attack on the World Trade Center reminded many commentators of The Secret Agent. And Conrad’s stylistic experiments in unreliable narration, epistemology, and the mixing of genres are evidence that we can legitimately read him as both modernist and post-modernist.

But other critics, led by Conrad’s great biographer, Zdzisław Najder, continue to remind us of Conrad’s vital intellectual and emotional roots in nineteenth-century England, France, and, especially, Poland; Richard Niland’s Conrad and History is an erudite and often insightful contribution to that work, though one can make two central criticisms. First, Niland sometimes fails to make a sufficient or persuasive connection between Conrad’s work and what Niland claims are his sources. Second, Niland occasionally bogs down in tangential matters only vaguely related to Conrad and history. (Indeed, one of those matters, nationalism, is treated so often and so independently of “history” I believe the title of the book should be Conrad, Nationalism, and History.) But Niland introduces an impressive array of hitherto neglected sources, especially for Nostromo, and, despite its omissions and occasional obscurities, Conrad and History should engage every Conradian.

In the “Introduction,” Niland emphasizes the centrality of Polish history to Conrad’s world outlook; it affected his politics, his sense of history, his values, and his psychology. “Conrad’s nostalgic yearning is rooted in the Polish national experience with its refusal to accept the present as the fulfillment of history, looking to a lost past while revealing an uncertain faith in the future” (4). Niland claims, more specifically, that Conrad’s view of history is essentially Hegelian, modified by 19^th century Polish philosophers, especially August Cieszkowski. He claims that Conrad did not necessarily encounter Cieszkowski directly but that he would have absorbed Cieszkowski’s philosophy and historiography “through the Romantic writings of [Polish poet Adam] Mickiewicz, [Polish poet Juliusz] Słowacki, and [Polish poet and dramatist Zygmunt] Krasiński, and the more immediate influence of his family” (5). However, he adds, “while Conrad’s elegiac view of the past emerges from the Polish tradition, it also borrows from the lyrical English Romanticism of William Hazlitt’s essays, with their focus on the subjective power of memory, and follows the historical treatments of Carlyle” (7).

Proving that an author has been influenced by a particular philosopher can be difficult, and it can be equally difficult to demonstrate the value of tracking down that influence. How, in other words, should our awareness of that possible influence affect our understanding of the work? This problem emerges several times in Chapter 1, “Conrad and the Philosophy of History: Youth, Poland, and the Romantic Past,” where Niland (almost) claims that Almayer in Almayer’s Folly (1895) personifies Poland: “If Almayer’s intolerable present between a lost past and an uncertain future should not be read as a direct allegory of the condition of Poland, then the language with which it is presented is certainly characteristic of Polish concerns with statehood and history in the nineteenth century” (15). Despite Niland’s qualifications for this claim, it seems strained, and, more importantly, the equation...