Conrad's Vision: The Illumination of Romance

Conrad's Vision: The Illumination of Romance Leonard Woolf From the Monk's House Papers University of Sussex Library WHEN ONE HAS PLEDGED one's word lightheartedly and probably without due consideration to give a lecture upon a novelist like Mr Conrad some curious psychological phenomena follow. One rereads his works which in this case is a very pleasant occupation. Then follow doubts, hesitations, possibly regrets. The question is how is one to treat him, what is one to say. One wants of course to say what he has tried to do and how he has done it—the object I suppose of all criticism. But the objection to criticism rises up before one. There are the books, you can buy them for 7d or 4/ß at any book shop, you can borrow them from any library. Nothing that I or any one else can say will alter what is in them, and the best way for any one to find out what is in them is to read them. Several times it occurred to me that the whole of my lecture ought perhaps to be given in the sentence of the Eastern sage when he explained the results of his meditations. He had sat as Eastern sages do in a desert, meditating for twenty years and at last it became known that he had got to the foundations of everything, all life, all knowledge, all experience. The story goes that thousands of people went out into the desert and sat at his feet to hear the truth at last, the result of his meditations. They sat at his feet for three days waiting. After three days, the sage said "What is, is." Then they went away. Well I have felt a strong temptation to use the sage's words and say "What is, is and you will find it all in the books themselves." The only thing is that I fear that you would not then go away but ask the pertinent question "What is?" And so I am again forced back upon trying to answer that question a little more explicitly. 286 k. ^ fc , e,,. . .., ,.tua ^ ka 4~^. ^ ELT 36:3 1993 We start from what appears to be an acknowledged fact that Mr Conrad is a novelist. But if you will do what I have done during the last few weeks—read his books steadily through one after another·—you will during this operation I think often recur to the thought that the fact is rather astonishing. A novelist according to definition is a person who writes novels, and Mr Conrad is called a novelist because he has written novels. Almayer's Folly is a novel and so is Youth and The Heart of Darkness and the stories in Typhoon and so is Under Western Eyes. And we call Candide a novel or we used to call it and Vanity Fair and Pride and Prejudice and Kipps. The mere statement of these facts shows how difficult it is to criticise a novelist in the way in which we can criticise a dramatist for example. After all we know pretty well what the form and object of a tragedy will be before we read it or see it acted, we know even the sort of emotions which the author will be trying at any rate to evoke in us. The Oedipus, Hamlet and The Mind the Paint Girl can all be brought within the narrow limits of a definition and there are still critics who accept the statement of the critic of 2000 years ago that the object of tragedy is to purge the passions through pity and fear. But the novel appears to be so utterly without form and void that it defies definition. If Youth is merely a short novel and Vanity Fair a long one then a novel seems to be little more than a receptacle for the imagination, a sort of formless vacuum into which are poured the creations of the author's imagination. And that is I believe after all probably all that can be said by way of definition of a novel: it still remains what it started from—an imaginary story...