Conrad's Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad (review)

220 Avrom Fleishman, Conrad's Politics: Community and Anarchy In the Fiction of Joseph Conrad. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, TWF. $7.50. Of three recent books on Joseph Conrad's political works, only Professor Fleishman's includes a study both of Conrad's politics and of practically all his writings. Like the other two books, it contains a detailed analysis of Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes, but Fleishman's close examination of Conrad 's political ideas adds an original and essential dimension to the perceptive insights of Mrs. Hay and Miss Rosenfield. Professor Fleishman accurately maintains that Conrad's novels "must be read as dramatic expressions of a complex political imagination , and are therefore not reducible to political ideology . . . ," that "Conrad was open to the prevailing political ideas of his time. ..." and that "the fiction which derived from his speculations was more complicated than received opinion would have it - indeed,was much the better art because of its rich intellectual tradition" (p. ix); and then he develops these basic concepts with full and convincing detail. He accordingly places Conrad's thought and fiction in their contemporary setting by examining his "Polishness," which he finds dominated by the democratic-revolutionary Bobrowski side of his heritage instead of the conventionally accepted conservative side represented by his father. Although a definitive account of Conrad's Polish origins cannot be written without much more knowledge of Polish sources and Polish history than is now available, Fleishman, realizing this fact, bases his conclusions on hitherto largely neglected sources such as the "standard history" of Poland (p. 5). Zdzislaw Najder's recent collection of letters to and from Conrad and Polish friends, and Conrad's own essays on political subjects. Then he establishes Conrad's philosophical position in the tradition of organicism, with emphasis upon "the primacy of the community, which gives individual life its possibility and its value" (p. 56), and recognizes the role of the artist to be that of binding men together "in a universal community based on their awareness of a common fate"(p. 70). The ethics of organicism gives to Conrad's fiction a more significant relevance than do the usual interpretations: the typical Conrad hero, an alienated man like Jim and Kurtz or Peyrol and Heyst, is "either redeemed or not only insofar as he is able to identify his personal career with the life of a community" (p.71). The self can act and operate for the well-being of others in what Fleishman calls the "work ethic" (p. 72), which consists of subordination to authority, devotion to the task at hand, fidelity to comrades, identification with a tradition of service, acceptance of life's natural difficulties, and the display of effort and courage. These values express, in their deepest sense, a classically tragic sense of life. Conrad is fundamentally a humanist in that he consistently applies to social questions the 221 norm of human community as an assurance of individual self-realization ; and this signification of the polls as the ultimate human reality and the basic requirement of being a man places Conrad, with the organiclsts, in a tradition deriving directly from Aristotle and the Greek tragedians. In his writings, Conrad distinguishes the colonist from the conqueror by the former's "commitment to the role, to the place, and to the men among whom he lives" (p. 98); and the example of Sir James Brooke, the White Rajah of Sarawak, becomes a myth for Conrad to develop, a pattern containing an individual hero or antihero like Jim, Kurtz, Heyst, or Lingard, and a primitive society into which the intervening hero may bring order, as with Jim, but he is more likely to cause the power structure to degenerate, as with Willems, to intensify the ruin of the natives, as with Lingard , or to bring about the destruction of the self, as with Kurtz. This distinction supplies a basis for excellent analyses of Conrad 's works, especially of Lord Jim; but Conrad's devotion, after the turn of the century, to questions that were emerging as the main problems for the twentieth century furnishes grounds for new assessments of The Nigger of the "Narcissus"..and...