Conrad the Victorian

CONRAD THE VICTORIAN1 Charles Burkhart (Temple University) It Is customary today for Conrad to be considered a modern novelist, a major figure of twentieth-century literature, a contemporary whose works appear side by side, in critical or scholarly reference, with those of Lawrence, Joyce, and Virginia Woolf. Whether or not Conrad quite merits inclusion in the great tradition of the English novel, it seems clear that his place among the moderns has been assigned rather too simply on the basis of chronology, and not on the actual intent and execution of his work. Chronology is often misleading; VictorIan novelists, like C. P. Snow, still exist. It is,perhaps, more logical to group Conrad with the Victorians, with Dickens, Thackeray, and Charlotte Bronte, than with those brilliant and diverse talents which, around the time of the first World War, shattered the old forms and re-oriented the purpose and the scope of fiction. One might suggest several biographical reasons why Conrad belongs more with the Victorians than with the moderns. For one thing, he was the product of a culture which, though civilized, was backward and provincial, the Polish land-owning gentry. In no country under foreign domination, as Poland was under Russia's, are the arts ever progressive; and the atmosphere that oppression generates was the heritage of Korzeniowski during his early formative years. Not only by background , but also by temperament (if the two are separable--), Conrad was a conservative, for example, in his views of politics, class, and women's rights, and in his hatred of revolution, a hatred which makes mordant the ironies of THE SECRET AGENT and UNDER WESTERN EYES. A third consideration is that Conrad came to writing relatively late; his first novel, ALMAYER1S FOLLY, was published In I895, when Conrad was thirty-seven. Conrad's notion of England, as it appears in his writing, is curiously atavistic, somewhat in the way Dickens and Collins nostalgically preferred the coach to the railroad. But conservative thinkers are by definition a little, or a lot, behind the times. Whatever the study of Conrad's life can educe in tentative explanations for the Victorianism of his writing, the perils of biographical criticism are too celebrated , and too real, for it to tempt us very far. More interesting and more profitable is an attempt to place him in the Victorian tradition by specific aspects of his work. To do so is to assume definitions of what the Victorian novel was and the modern novel is. We are only bold enough to generalize on the subject of the Victorian novel to the extent that Conrad's treatment of character and Conrad's moral outlook will, it is hoped, be shown to be Victorian, while an examination of his technical innovations will try to show that they do not place him in the company of those modern novelists with whom he is usually classified. Characterization, morality, technique: are they "inscrutable," to use one of Conrad's favorite words? It is surprising how much of the vast amount of literary criticism of Conrad prefers to deal with his themes, rather than with the specifics of his craftsmanship. Certain minor parallels in Conrad's works with the works we think of as eminently Victorian will be mentioned only, for they may be no more than coincidental. The irony that Conrad shares with Thackeray and Hardy is to be found In many a modern novel ist—Forster, for example, if we can call him modern. The excessive use of coincidence, which we associate particularly with Dickens among the Victorians, and which appears everywhere in Conrad, most stridently in the novel whose title, CHANCE, enthrones it, is a somewhat more pointed parai IeIisrn with the Victorians; but there is so much coincidence everywhere, in real and fictional life, that it is not useful as a delimiting agent. In style Conrad is so often rhetorical, stilted, borabasticaliy adjectival—contrast with the colloquialism of Lawrence, the naturalism of Joyce, the poetry of Virginia Woolf"-that his style cannot be said to place hsm anywhere Mn particular, and we remember that he never came to find English as natural and as capable a means of literary expression as...