Conrad Review Essay: Illegitimacy, Pattern and the Status of Self

Conrad Review Essay: Illegitimacy, Pattern and the Status of Self By Jan Verleun and Jetty de Vries University of Groningen, Netherlands Mark Conroy's Modernism and Authority: Strategies of Legitimation in Flaubert and Conrad, Stephen K. Land's Paradox and Polarity in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, and Suresh Raval's The Art of Failure: Conrad's Fiction deal with Conrad's works from widely different angles.1 Conroy's exegesis tries to prove that the texts of Flaubert and Conrad fail to justify themselves as meaningful moral statements for the edification of a solid, morally united readership. The blame for this failure, however, is not directly assigned to the writers themselves. Rather the bourgeois atmosphere in which they published and their own ambiguous relation to it inevitably produced fatal ambivalences in their art. From Conroy's viewpoint, Flaubert and Conrad should be considered exemplars of the modem novelist's inability to preserve literature as an institution at the core of communal life. The modem novelist cannot find a moral message of general appeal because, unlike the bard and storyteller of archaic, paternal communities, he is unable to appeal to established metaphysical and ethical frames. The consequence of ,this in Flaubert and Conrad is respectively the denial of objective truth (L'Éducation Sentimentale) and the ultimate flight into style (The Secret Agent). Stephen Land's approach, on the other hand, singles out for comparison and alignment thematic and structural elements to prove that almost every one of Conrad's larger works is (at least structurally) "an advance on its predecessors ," and that there is in them a "common set of laws, circumstances, and concepts" (1). His analysis is structured by the familiar notions of dualistic conflict and of the heroes' intemal divisions as embodied in the figures of the rival, the nemesis, the heroine and anti-heroine. The conduct of the heroes, and of the later heroines, is paradoxical, Conrad's overall paradox being that "purposive action is self-defeating" (4). Action results in moral compromise, the consequence of which is the nemesis' retribution. Suresh Raval, far from believing that Conrad fled into style, maintains the position that "the power of his fiction does not derive from a skepticism verging on futility and despair but, rather, from its radical confrontation with both hope and failure" (166). Conrad may not offer a kernel of philosophical truth, but he is no nihilist, "except," says Raval, "in the view of those who believe in absolutist transcendental ideals of objectivity, truth, and meaning" (167). Conrad's vision is despairing, but it is never his intention to complicate our sense of our own helplessness. He is profoundly sensitive to 322 Verleun and de Vries: Conrad Review Essay human suffering and the human capacity to inflict it both on the self and others. In showing man's feeble grasp of external and intemal reality, he uses a "complex play of antithetical meanings" (165), denying the possibility of easy resolutions. With these views we very largely agree. Further, to our minds Conroy is rigidly theoretical, Land rather strictly adheres to his theme of paradox and polarity, and Raval's approach is eclectic, in fact warning against the theorist's tendency to apply broad general principles . Indeed as Raval observes, "responses to specific literary works are always more pertinent"; when criticism is performed "in terms of specific absolute premises, one's conclusions are entailed in the premises" (4). Our agreement with this has grown stronger, as has our appreciation of the eclectic approach. This approach to Conrad, if allied to strict thematics as in Land and Raval, does not preclude all danger of biased judgment, but it does minimize that danger, as we hope to show by a comparison of the theorist's work with that of the two "practical" critics. Conroy's Modernism and Authority Conroy finds that Flaubert's Éducation Sentimentale only ostensibly criticizes the bourgeois society within which it was produced. The novel's conclusion undermines the validity of its social criticism just as it undermines our sense of the reality of the experiences of Frédéric Moreau and Deslauriers, his friend. Flaubert's double denouement insists on the illusoriness of human experience. The...