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242 REVIEWS 1. The Lesson of the Master: James and Conrad Elsa Nettels. James and Conrad (Athens: University of Georgia P, 1977). $12.00. The question of the influence of Henry James on Joseph Conrad has long interested critics. The uncertainty of the question is underscored by the fact that Elsa Nettels, in her careful and thorough comparison of the novels of both writers, does not rest her arguments on this ground. Conrad did not regard himself as James's disciple; his praise of James "is always in terms of general qualities of delicacy, feeling, and inexhaustible vigor" (p. 20). James for his part entertained serious reservations about Conrad's novels: his appreciation of The Nigger of the Narcissus was unqualified, but he described Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes as "impossibilities " and "wastes of desolation" (p. 13); he preferred Wharton's The Custom of the Country to the "circumvallations" of Chance (p. 1~7) ; and Conrad comes off badly in his famous essay, "The Younger Generation." Nettels likens their relationship1 to that of Hawthorne and Melville, with James fending off the\importunate junior. Ironically, the lessons of the master if indeed there were any - were learned too well: James regarded Conrad as too much the devotee of technique for its own sake. Nevertheless, it is Nettels'task to make as much as she can of the multiple similarities which she finds among their works. If her study has a fault, it is her apparent indifference to the problems implicit in comparative literary studies. Without a principle governing the disposition of similarities and differences , she admits everything to consideration, on the assumption that any and all resemblances are somehow meaningful. She writes well on James's use of satire, for example, only to demonstrate that it has little in common with Conrad's. She finds James and Conrad drawing upon a "common tradition" of the grotesque, but she discovers nothing more than fortuitous connections in her examination of the different senses in which they follow the tradition. It is often unclear what conceptual purpose the critical analysis is serving. A more important tradition is "Romance"! a comparison of Lord Jim to The Portrait of a Lady leads to the conclusion that Isabel Archer is enlightened by the stripping away of romantic expectations whereas Lord Jim is not; in James, the "romance hero's adventure is internalized . . . the journey is inward"; in Conrad, we get "more of the paraphernalia of romance"; and if James's characters achieve "inward victory," Conrad's find "failure and degeneration" (p. 13D. The point is made that James and Conrad share their ideas about fiction with Pater, Ruskin, Flaubert, and George Eliot, but there is no attempt to recreate the intellectual and literary context which these writers and others supplied for James and Conrad. In Dickens, Scott, Thackeray, or Trollope we do not find "the kind of passionate affirmation of the validity 243 of the aesthetic consciousness and its power which James and Conrad express" (p. 43). True - of course, but what are the sources of their mutual and peculiar concern? Turgenev and Maupassant were important to each, but in different ways; Conrad, we learn in passing, is closer to the symbolist tradition than James; both depart from many of the conventions of the nineteenthcentury novel, particularly in their confrontation of ambiguity and in their turning "perception" itself into the subject of their fictions. They are set apart from the European and American naturalists by their concern with consciousness as a subject. This - Nettels' large conclusion - is not new. She repeats that the basic bond is their fascination (in James's phrase) with "the inward life of the mind, the cultivated consciousness" (p. 238). This has long been understood; what is needed is a study that examines this psychological richness in an intellectual and historical as well as literary context. Such studies as this, limited to comparative explications, have more and more the look of academic exercises. It is what we learned to do in graduate school. As an interpreter of texts, Nettels does an exemplary job - but how many variations on the text of The Ambassadors or Lord Jim - or of Under Western...

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