Conrad Letters IV

BOOK REVIEWS which "character . . . often seems ruthlessly subjected to the author's will." The discussion of Nostromo concentrates on Découd, "one of the few characters in fiction ever to die of skepticism" and on Nostromo tending his reputation. Wollaeger explains the difference in the ironic quality of these novels when contrasted with the earlier works thus: "the hardening of Conrad's moral skepticism into a form of imprisonment from which Découd, unlike Jim, cannot escape suggests that without the mediation of a fully dramatized narrator, Conrad tends toward heavy irony ... or philosophical monologue" and concludes that part of the power of these two novels comes directly from "Conrad's denial of readerly freedom, for its authoritative discourse forces the reader to experience the Swiftian dilemma of the impossible choice." There are several problems with Wollaeger's study. The first, almost an endemic flaw in many recent studies of Conrad, involves selectivity. One wishes Wollaeger had included the early and the late novels in his discussion, especially since his conclusions virtually demand some demonstration in terms of these novels' alleged shortcomings. To what extent do Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' determine the direction and the shape of skepticism leading up to the major novels? To what extent do The Arrow of Gold, The Rescue, and The Rover represent a flight from, even a "victory" over, skepticism? Wollaeger draws a number of conclusions significant to the problematic nature of the earlier and the later novels, but his wholehearted subscription to Guerard's and Moser's decline theory leads him to slight them. At one point, though, he notes that "as skepticism emerges as a dominant influence on Conrad's narrative method and the status of character , the speculations of both Hume and Descartes model a 'technique of trouble' that nearly vanished in Conrad's later works, where various 'sheltering conceptions,' particularly romance, come to suppress skepticism and permit the construction of fictional worlds in which resolution can be found and continuities affirmed"—a valuable insight deserving more attention and demonstration than the work allots it. This is almost painfully obvious in another flaw, the study's rushed, unsatisfactory two-page concluding statement. David ^ Higd