Our Conrad: Constituting American Modernity (review)

Joseph Conrad languished in poverty, ill health, and relative obscurity during the period when he was writing his greatest novels, finding a mass audience only when his arguably weaker later novels were embraced by publishers and readers in a country where Conrad himself had never set foot, a place that scarcely figured at all in the otherwise vast geographical scope of his fiction. Why did Americans of the late nineteen-teens and twenties embrace Conrad wholeheartedly as one of their own when on the surface his style, settings, and subject matter seem so distant from what we typically identify with American writing? Why lionize a man who seemed, based on his fiction at least, to have a disdainful European contempt for American materialism and greed? Why on earth would American readers make the plodding and now largely unread late Conrad novel The Arrow of Gold the second bestselling book in America when novels like Lord Jim or The Secret Agent had previously failed to find anywhere near that kind of enthusiastic reception? In his brilliant and compellingly readable book, Our Conrad, Peter Lancelot Mallios provides an answer to these questions and in the process makes an impassioned and thoroughly informed case for a transnational comparatist approach to Conrad, American studies, and modernism alike, opening up productive possibilities for dialogue between Americanists and Conradians that has been, as Mallios writes, "more foreclosed than one might think" (ix).

America's construction of Conrad as a "master" literary figure, Mallios argues, was crucially determined by the Great War, when under the Woodrow Wilson presidency America emerged as "both an international power and a modern nation entwined in a global crisis" (33). At a time when America's relationship to the British Allied war cause and to Anglo-Saxon cultural hegemony more generally were issues of paramount public concern, the Polish-born Conrad, who was at once both productively assimilated to and insuperably alienated from his adoptive country of England seemed to be rehearsing America's own crises and opportunities, or as Mallios more lucidly phrases it: "Conrad's writings directly evoke and uncannily summon wide fields of U.S. concern and territory, consequently disrupting, dialogizing, and placing into controversy vast domains of U.S. knowledge hitherto administered by a grounding tabula of isolationist and exceptionalist logic" (33). Conrad's exceptional malleability within and adaptability to this uniquely American cultural and political nexus of problems is in large part due to his notoriously ambiguous and ironic narrative positioning, which enabled him to be co-opted by some American readers as aggressively anti-War and by others as the greatest militant jingoist since Kipling. Doubleday, Page, and Company, clearly seeing the commercial opportunities for selling their latest star client according to the latter interpretation, carefully and quite deliberately in Mallios's view packaged their uniform editions of Conrad's works in direct replication of the aggressive marketing campaign that had worked so well for Kipling. If The New Republic could use Conrad as a model for Anglophilism and the allied war effort "precisely because his sense of British appreciation and sympathy originally came from somewhere else" (116), other readers, like H.L. Mencken, could read in Conrad's work a staggering condemnation of the entire Anglo-Saxon enterprise and by extension the war effort that was being mustered to prop it up.

While Conrad himself carefully and calculatedly seems to have refused to clarify his position on the war, thus enabling his reception by a broader section of Americans, Mallios attributes Conrad's ambivalence and ambiguity far more worshipfully to the great writer's ability to produce literary "heterotopias" such as his Malay trilogy wherein "hierarchies of imperialism, and the conceptual segregations endemic to them, are folded into a single social space in which cultures and races are multiple, power is plurally distributed, and all methods, boundaries, alliances, and attachments are provisional, subject to no naturalizing or exceptionalizing claims" (31). While a theoretical reliance on the overused and insufficiently challenged Foucauldian concept of "heterotopias" perhaps unfairly absolves...