Solitude Versus Solidarity in the Novels of Joseph Conrad: Political and Epistemological Implications of Narrative Innovation by Ursula Lord (review)

434 letters in canada 1999 of those dramatists who touched theatre history through the staging of their own œuvre, such as Wagner, Yeats, and Beckett. One reason why Shaw is generally considered to be out of fashion has to do with the fact that he is quite unapologetically what we used to call an engaged or political writer. This term means relatively little for the present current of academic writing that takes everything to be political that has something to do B no matter how B with race, class, and gender. Since there are few things on this earth that do not, the political then enters the work through the eye of the sufficiently conditioned reader who already knows that a given text will inevitably get entangled in these and related issues and who is ready to report back to the applauding academic community. Such reading strategies are not always wrong but they do not fully capture a writer who considered the political to be even more a question of writing and speaking than of reading. Shaw did not shrink from calling his plays propaganda, because his plays are already overtly politicized, but in a late nineteenth-century sense of the word. Those essays puzzling over Shaw's commitment to feminism and his position on colonialism illuminate, but do not solve, this problem, perhaps because they do not measure the difference between our notion of politics and his, for Shaw was a supporter of suffrage and not a late twentieth-century feminist, a denunciator of expansionist capitalism and not a writer in the tradition of postcolonialism. The two best essays of this collection, one on Shaw and Wilde by David J. Gordon and one on Shaw's discussion plays by Christopher Innes, directly address this alliance between Shaw's dedication to reform and his ambition as a dramatist, and they refuse to treat the intimacy between those two enterprises as a source for embarrassment or as a problem that has to be explained away. All these larger questions emerge vividly when reading this collection back to back. And this reader's desire to bring the writers to a round table in order to ponder these questions once more is perhaps the best tribute to this volume B one of the best Cambridge Companions around. (H. MARTIN PUCHNER) Ursula Lord. Solitude Versus Solidarity in the Novels of Joseph Conrad: Political and Epistemological Implications of Narrative Innovation McGill-Queen's University Press 1998. x, 362. $55.00 It is a supreme achievement for a critic not only to explore, but to reflect B in language, voice, or outlook B qualities we feel are at the core of a writer. In ways that are impressive, revelatory, and eerily limiting, Ursula Lord is very much attuned to her subject, making one suspect once again that genuine Conrad scholars are or become a special breed. When she plays Marlow to Conrad's itinerant narrator, she is at her analytical and stylistic humanities 435 best, drawing together threads (in her case thick philosophical ones), veering off to pursue other lines of association, and above all sketching the profound intimacy in Kurtz, Jim, Stein, Decoud, and Nostromo of narration and epistemology. But the reciprocity between critic and author becomes unsettling when the derived texture is disjunctive. Like her subject, Lord is ambitious and hesitant, elated and appalled, articulate and evasive in the face of the moral complexity presented by Kurtz and the surface of the Golfo Placido. Conrad's adjectival compulsions are her philosophical ones. He reveres but despairs of language; she is learned, yet oblivious to some of the most remarkable perspectives on Conrad in print. She brings Darwin, Marx, Mannheim, Durkheim, Weber, Jameson, and Taylor to bear B often to considerable if extended effect B on the issues of isolation, community, work, and nominalism in `Heart of Darkness,' Lord Jim, and Nostromo, but creates her own version of Conradian solipsism by refusing to leave her chosen territory and visit, even when they seem to shout from the borders, The Secret Agent or Under Western Eyes or Victory or Chance. Unlike her subject, though, she does not seem entirely aware of how vast and largely uncharted...