Conrad and Imperialism

437 Proserpine" and then casually tells us there is no need to extend his examination further. Some of Tennyson "resembles" decadent style. Rossetti and Meredith are "precursors" of Decadent style. Yeats's "Oisin" is "thoroughly modern" if not decadent. Verlaine "was not really a Decadent poet." Wilde provides "a good approximation" of Decadent style. Some of Dowson's lyrics "approach" Decadent style. Gray's poems are dismissed as "'aesthetic' exercises in melancholy," and Vincent O'Sullivan's have "more anguish" in them, but both poets merely represent the "general manner of fin de siècle poetry." In Symons he finds "a silhouette" of Decadent style. Thus, the English poets are dismissed in pitifully few pages, and the Germans in even fewer. So much for decadent poetry. On the other hand, Baudelaire's creative effort "suits" Reed's definition of Decadent style. He tells us that Baudelaire 's poems "unravel"; then he picks up his own word, modifies its form, and thereafter refers to the "technique of 'unraveling,'" hardly a useful term for the rest of us. Decadent Style is a quaintly archaic study. Had it been written forty years ago, not one word need have been different. His biographical approach to the poets is outmoded : "Swinburne's early life fits the usual notion of decadence" or "The futility of consummation led Dowson to enshrine girlhood as his symbol of near perfection" or, "Even more than Dowson, Johnson would seem to qualify as a Decadent . He was apparently a homosexual who railed against female concupiscence and literally shut himself up in his world of art, denying the mundane world." It is virtually impossible to determine where or if Reed takes any clear critical stance. He is overly simplistic in his Conclusion. Not that the book is a total loss. Here and there, Reed's trenchant comments on the Pre-Raphae1 i tes and his discussion of individual Beardsley drawings are informative. Nicholas Salerno Arizona State University 7. CONRAD AND IMPERIALISM Benita Parry. Conrad and Imperial ism: Ideological Boundaries and V isionary Frontiers. London: Macmillan, 1983. Distributed in the U.S. by Merrimack Publishers' Circle, 1984. $28.00 In a long note to her short study, Benita Parry lumps eight books discussing the themes of colonialism and imperialism in modern literature, and briefly dismisses them with 438 the statement that her discussion "subsumes a variety of methodological approaches" (p. 134). Ms. Parry then proceeds to discuss themes often discussed before both by critics of Conrad who are interested in his treatment of colonialism and by others who, having observed conflicting values in Conrad, explore the polarities of his thought. A good rule of thumb for reading a critical study is that if it takes an inordinate amount of time to get through the rationale for the study (in Parry's case the introductory chapter), and even longer to find new and freshly developed perspectives from which to view the author's works, the reader should perhaps go to other things; perhaps return to Conrad's texts themselves for insight that the critical study occludes. Such was this reviewer's reaction to Conrad and Imperia1 ism: Ideolog ica1 Boundaries and V i sionary Frontiers. The study reaches the height of its anti-imperialistic argument of page five of the introductory chapter when Parry, who disregards the depth with which many previous critics have commented on the dualities of "light and dark" in Conrad, proceeds to discuss (redundantIy) Conrad's use of a "chiaroscuro of light and dark." This is the first of her various attempts to work with polarities. But Parry's attempts are inconsistent, and her understanding of historical and critical contexts inadequate . Consequently, more often than not Parry's potentially sensitive readings of five of Conrad's works—Heart of Darkness , The Rescue, The N igger of 'Narcissus', Lord J im, and Nostromo—become restricted by a too narrow rhetoric. A case in point is Parry's long (20 pages) chapter on Heart of Darkness, which is concerned among other things with traditional discussions of "white and light" (p. 22) and, by extension, of black and dark. This is followed inexorably by discussions of Marlow's "mythopoeic narration of a journey...