Joseph Conrad in Context (review)

In her Times Literary Supplement essay on Joseph Conrad, written on the occasion of his death in 1924, Virginia Woolf observed: "there clings to the genius of Conrad something essentially … difficult of approach." This was the case both in his carefully guarded private life and in his writings. As David Miller writes of the first instance, "Conrad the novelist who captured humanity somehow still, superbly, evades us as a man." "There was," Woolf adds, "always an air of mystery about him." Conrad himself described both life and art as "obscured by mists," and other writers had anticipated Woolf in this assessment, as Allan Simmons notes: Wells had likened Conrad's early impressionism to "river mist," his books composed of "a haze of sentences"; and Forster had famously argued that "the secret casket of his genius contains a vapour rather than a jewel." In the first chapter of Joseph Conrad in Context, J. H. Stape—who as the author of The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (2007) and editor of a dozen volumes by or about Conrad, including The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad (1996), knows better than anyone—notes that "during the past half-century biographers have constructed a more nuanced picture of a man whose life has long been a focus of interest and speculation on the part of those who read his fiction." Yet that fiction points to a peculiarly complex author, "a chameleon, multiplex self confronting vicissitude."

Joseph Conrad in Context confronts this "chameleon, multiplex self" and the work that that self produced from a variety of angles. It comprises a multifaceted approach to Conrad's life and works and begins with the fundamental assumption, articulated in Simmons's preface, that "the writings that have ensured Conrad's enduring fame were not produced in a vacuum." This statement is bald in its obviousness; yet it is one well worth remembering, especially by the intended audience, not only scholars but Conrad neophytes. Simmons explains the purpose of the volume in greater detail: "Conrad's writings have long needed the comprehensive historical, social, political and intellectual placement afforded here. Addressing subjects germane to Conrad's times and writing, the individual chapters provide a comprehensive study of the context for his writings." Any effort to grapple with Conrad should remember the opening sentences from his daunting preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus," in which he describes a profoundly demanding artistic vocation:

[A]rt may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect. It is an attempt to find in its forms, in its colours, in its light, in its shadows, in the aspects of matter and in the facts of life, what of each is fundamental, what is enduring and essential—their one illuminating and convincing quality—the very truth of their existence.

It would surely be going too far to say that Joseph Conrad in Context aspires to the condition of Conradian art. That is not its purpose. But it is certainly informed by a respect for Conrad's vision; its goal is to capture its subject from as many angles as possible and to offer us something of "the very truth of [Conrad's] existence" and of the existence of his writings—while nevertheless admitting that Conrad "remains elusive" and that he "no doubt will continue to do so."

To what extent and with what degree of consistency does this collection of thirty-two brief essays (averaging seven or eight pages) by twenty-five contributors, along with a detailed chronology, twenty illustrations, and a dozen pages of up-to-date, category-specific suggestions for further reading, fulfill Simmons's aim of "comprehensive … intellectual placement"? In pursuing that goal, to what extent do the contributors, a Who's Who of established Conradians along with several emerging scholars, achieve comprehensiveness but, more interesting, an instructive and illuminating dialogue? What, if any, are the notable...