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ZELNICK 73 STEPHEN ZELNICK CONRAD'S LORD JIM: MEDITATIONS ON THE OTHER HEMISPHERE Marxist literary criticism in the U.S. has arrived at a moment of important choices. Down one road lies European theorizing, much of it suggestive, but often more Hegelian than Marxist and developed in terminology available only to narrowly specialized academics. Another road is "rugged proletarianism", which seeks to discover proletarian works to supplant the established canon. Then, too, there is the road of dry economism, which reduces works of art to lessons in economic history. Finally, there is too often the attitude that we can travel any of these roads without regarding the tendencies of established literary criticism. It is my sense that either we find a way to talk about the leading works of the established canon without an arcane language, hostility, or presumption; or we will become voiceless in the discussion of culture. Either we demonstrate the superiority of Marxist literary criticism by encountering other approaches intelligently and undogmatically, or we will surely remain one of the store-front churches of literary criticism. Setting out to write about Lord Jim, I must anticipate the rejection of Conrad's works by some Marxists on the grounds that his politics are "incorrect ". One could range the objections to Conrad in a reverse order of sophistication: 1.Conrad was an aristocrat by birth and, hence, capable only of idealistic nostalgia. This view is not quite true in biographical fact and demonstrates a mechanical notion of historical determinacy. 2.Conrad is hostile to socialism-witness his early letter to his friend Spiridon Kliszewski: "Where's the man to stop the rush of social-democratic ideas? . . . England was the only barrier to the pressure of the infernal doctrines born in continental back-slums. Now, there is nothing! . . . Socialism must inevitably end in Caesarism" (19 December 1885);1 witness also his constant disagreements with his socialist friend R. B. Cunninghame Graham2 : and his devastating portraits of "revolutionary activity" in Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent. Nevertheless, we have to remember that other artists who were unsympathetic to socialism (the classic case is Balzac) have explored their societies with often a more critical awareness than writers with a specific Marxist program. Also, for anyone who has spent time with the far left, what Conrad depicts in his "anti-socialist" novels is only too painfully true. 74 THEMINNESOTA REVIEW 3.Conrad provides no extensive analysis of his society to show the antagonism of social classes; thus his works mistake the matrix of reality. However, this charge is true of all but a few works and assumes that literature ought to be sociology. 4.Lord Jim, in particular, is a classic instance of modernist obfuscation, where subjectivism and an experimental form generate a mist of evasions. This view overlooks the disruption of personal experience in an imperialist setting. It rejects the value of modernist works, such as Lord Jim, which burrow under the surfaces of bourgeois certitudes and disrupt the rationalized hegemony of imperialist "realism". Also blocking the way to a serious study of Conrad is the reluctance to learn anything from non-Marxist criticism. In the haste to uproot established critics, Marxists often assume a too facile superiority. It may well be that traditional scholarship is empirical and disregards historical dialectics, but the laborious gathering of even undifferentiated facts and the often clever insights of formal analysis can help us do our work if we understand their limits. In the same way, much psychological and ethical criticism, which usually registers a sharp sense of social disorder, is useful when we relate it to our understanding of the sources of disrupted communities and alienation. The power of Marxist criticism is its integrative totality that allows us to grasp a work in its essentials. Our dialectical vantage point allows us to understand the interaction of disparate phenomena. Our sensitivity to process allows us to describe the dynamics of form, especially as form portrays a world in motion. We are equipped to understand the historical tendencies of a particular work and to identify its typology as other approaches cannot. The critical work on Lord Jim represents every approach imaginable. The following views have been...

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