Conrad and Dialogue

30:1 Reviews emotional impact of the artistic experience which the play offers and which a literary analysis, even a linguistic one, should enhance. There is also in King's language a hint of feminist jargon which in the circumstances is inappropriate. In these last respects the book is filled with modem literary jargon which in fact may not be objectionable to many readers, but which I find makes the book duller to read than it might be, and certainly less aesthetically satisfying. I find repeated use of the word "interface" and of the prefix "meta," as in "metadramatic," "metalinguistic," "metatextual," and "metaesthetic," unnecessary, possibly inaccurate, and ugly— likewise phrases such as "to admit them only as unlanguaged ultimate form." Finally, all too characteristic is the foUowing sentence which opens a section: "In When the Moon Has Set a resolution of the antinomic singularity of the 'one mode' of existence (f. 19) which separates 'the dual puissance' (f. 21) of life exclusively into the virginal-matriarchal or the authoritarian paternal mode is attempted." It appears to me that the book simply contains too much language of the dissertation, actually language which I would like to see discouraged even in dissertations, but then, given the cunent tendency of literary criticism, the problem may be more the reviewer's than the author's. For me the book was rather spoiled by its style, but it is generally a book that contains enough genuine insight and sound analysis to make it useful for the student of Synge's plays. Joseph Ronsley _______________________________________McGiIl University______________ CONRAD AND DIALOGUE Aaron Fogel. Coercion to Speak: Conrad's Poetics of Dialogue. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1985. $22.50 In this challenging critical work on Joseph Conrad, Professor Fogel explores the theory and uses of dialogue, with much attention to their broad implications. A simple idea of dialogue, the notion of necessary disproportion between speakers—the picture of one speaking a great deal and one very little—can be applied expressively, Fogel claims, to diverse world views such as those of Leopardi, Valéry, and Richard Ohmann. Fogel's thesis is "that Conrad was, if anything, a dialogist conscious of these plural possibilities, and that he used the stark universal of dialogue disproportion, sometimes adding to it the more complex Oedipal dynamic of the punishment of the speechforcer , to 'fuse' categories like the psychological, the poetic, and the political" (22). Strategies of reading which have made him out as primarily a psychologist, a metaphysician, or a political thinker have tended to ignore his understanding of dialogue. He is, Fogel believes, "the novelist who most 111 30:1 Reviews consciously understands the classical action of coercion to speak as sometimes explicit and sometimes sublimated unifying motif (23). Although theories about dialogue are fairly common, the theories about the historical development and change of dialogue forms are scarce. Utilizing the developing theories of dialogue, Fogel traces Conrad's "progress" through the three periods of his writing career to find in the early works (An Outcast of the Islands, The Nigger of the "Narcissus", Lord Jim, "Heart of Darkness," and "The End of the Tether") the material to sketch the presence of Comad's own craft in using dialogue. He allots to the works of Conrad's middle period {Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes) special attention in that the forced dialogue provides the central organization of the dialogues and remains the same until the completion of the last named "in 1912" [sic]. After that date, Conrad, Fogel notes, went on to write a series of romances of "interference," in which work {Chance, Victory, and The Rescue) the stories themselves are about "unusually forced bonds, rivets, and interferences" (45), like the problem of The Rescue, where the question is rescue itself, that of Hassim and his sister Imada by Lingard. Comad's distinctive reading of the English language, which was conditioned by his particular idea of forced speech and forced writing, is revealed in Fogel's analysis of the three major novels. Nostromo, for example, reflects the critic's concept that this novel contains a "trope of coercion, the 'unfree freebooter,' whose gift for roving and 'free...