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  • Under Conrad's Eyes: The Novel as Criticism
  • Mark Wollaeger (bio)
Under Conrad's Eyes: The Novel as Criticism, by Michael John DiSanto; pp. xv + 253. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2009, $95.00, £59.00.

Michael John DiSanto sets out to redress a significant limitation in Conrad studies that affects Victorian studies more generally: "we are far from a full understanding of Conrad's relationships with his predecessors" (19). While Joseph Conrad has seen new life in recent criticism, owing to postcolonial and transnational studies, DiSanto returns to some relatively familiar terrain in order to explore Conrad's "dialogues" with Thomas Carlyle, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Foydor Dostoevsky, Charles Darwin, and Friedrich Nietzsche (13). DiSanto emphasizes the notion of conversation or dialogue as opposed to influence because he understands Conrad as a self-consciously philosophical thinker whose novels engage in complex critiques of ideas posited in nineteenth-century literature and in philosophical and scientific texts. Preceding DiSanto in this effort is Ian Watt's magisterial Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (1979), which sets a high bar for those focusing on the history of ideas. Attempting to make some room for himself, DiSanto asserts that his book is less narrowly focused on the later nineteenth century but understands his project modestly, nevertheless, as "an addendum to Watt's work" (30). He also describes his project as more attuned to textual [End Page 359] (as opposed to biographical) evidence of interauthor dialogues found in Conrad's novels. This approach raises a good question: "When does evidence, in the form of specific language and thought from the novels, cease to be circumstantial and become accepted?" (12). No reader today doubts the influence of Crime and Punishment (1866) on Under Western Eyes (1911), even though Conrad's letters harshly disavow Dostoevsky. Under Conrad's Eyes aims to make us feel the same way about Carlyle, Eliot, and other eminent Victorians.

In this DiSanto succeeds reasonably well. If few critics in recent years doubt Conrad's engagement with Nietzsche, Darwin, Carlyle, and Dickens, DiSanto elaborates a variety of thematic affinities and analogies worthy of some new attention. More potentially groundbreaking are his arguments about Middlemarch (1871–72) and Nostromo (1904), and the more general claim that Conrad's engagement with his predecessors is profoundly and sometimes intricately critical: "Conrad is a major thinker and makes an impressive claim to being one of the best critics of several major nineteenth-century thinkers" (231). In my judgment, DiSanto's particular claims about Eliot—see, for instance, his discussion of parallel passages about sympathy in Middlemarch and Nostromo—are more persuasive than his broader claims.

Let me lay my cards on the table: I consider Conrad a major novelist, but not, at least in DiSanto's sense, a major thinker. E. M. Forster was the first to suspect that "the secret casket of his genius contains a vapour rather than a jewel" (Abinger Harvest [Harcourt, Brace & World, 1936], 137). Forster suspected that despite Conrad's philosophical portentousness, he had little to say. As a philosophical novelist who did not write novels of ideas, Conrad is philosophical in a different way; his thought participated in a longstanding tradition of skepticism in which thoughts continually undermine their own validity by turning rationality against itself. A skeptical idealist, Conrad practiced a form of deconstruction avant la lettre without really wanting to.

DiSanto, in contrast, sees Conrad as intentionally dismantling forms of binary thinking. Where Sigmund Freud, for example, insisted in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920) on a dualism between the life and death drives, Conrad in Lord Jim (1900) confesses what Freud cannot: "they are not easily distinguished" (168). Freud has been read otherwise, but more important here is DiSanto's insistence on Conrad's superior self-consciousness. Of Conrad's much-discussed relationship with Dostoevsky, DiSanto makes a characteristic claim: "The problem with previous discussions is that critics show little or no awareness of Conrad's consciousness of the problem" (134). This may seem irrelevant given DiSanto's emphasis on textual evidence: the nature of Conrad's critique of, say, Dostoevsky's idealization of women need not depend on the full awareness of the...

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