Joseph Conrad and the Swan Song of Romance by Katherine Isobel Baxter (review)

Katherine Baxter’s study concentrates on Conrad’s aesthetic experimentation in the use of romance in his novels. Except for some brief connections to the use of romance in the works of Conrad’s literary predecessors, for instance, Scott’s Redguantlet and Chaucer’s The Franklin’s Tale, Baxter does not explore questions regarding Conrad’s critical engagement with particular authors of romance adventures such as Stevenson or Kipling but instead with the genre in general terms. She is not formulating an anxiety of influence argument. Instead, Baxter focuses on Conrad’s ambivalence in his experimentation with romance conventions throughout his career to demonstrate the central importance of his preoccupation with the genre.

Following a brief introduction, the book is structured in three parts. Each part is summarized by a two or three page prologue that initiates readers into the central concerns that follow in the individual chapters. Part one has chapters on “Heart of Darkness” and Lord Jim, part two has chapters on Romance, Nostromo, and Chance, and part three has chapters on Victory, The Rescue, and The Rover.

In the introduction, after questioning Thomas Moser’s achievement and decline reading of Conrad’s writing career, Baxter contextualizes her study in relation to ideas of romance articulated by Northrop Frye, Gillian Beer, and Margaret Bruzelius and then explains the distinctions between philosophical romance and anti-philosophical romance articulated by Robert Miles. Though Baxter states that she will not “provide paradigm-driven readings of Conrad’s oeuvre” (14), Miles’ categories are central to the study. Philosophical romance may be understood as a novel that self-consciously rewrites and exposes the ideologies of cultural and historical norms in narrative, structure, language, etc. Anti-philosophical romance may be understood as a novel that “confirms the social norms which it reflects and fails in the end to expose the ideologies which underpin such norms” (15). Baxter suggests that “Conrad’s phrase ‘the swan song of romance’ is a description of a method” in which “he turns the scepticism of philosophical romance upon the form itself” and makes his fiction show “its own limitations, incapacities, even its own disintegration” (15).

The examination of “Heart of Darkness” considers Conrad’s use of a quest narrative to “expose the ways in which history, geography, race and sanity are ideologically conceptualized in the late nineteenth century” (17). Baxter emphasizes the relativity and indeterminacy of Conrad’s narrative in arguing that Marlow is in pursuit of knowledge that is beyond knowledge. Though the chapter is somewhat conventional in its assumptions and choice of themes, readers may understand that writing an original and inspired reading of “Heart of Darkness” is becoming increasingly difficult given the enormous amount of commentary on the story. The chapter on Lord Jim focuses on Jim as a character in search of a plot and the various attempts in the novel to construct a story for and about him, raising questions about the very process and production of narrative. A key element is Jim’s failure as a reader, which results from his fascination with light holiday literature, in recognizing the reality of his situation in Patusan.

Conrad’s collaboration with Ford Madox Ford, Romance, is offered as an example of anti-philosophical romance. Because of the authors’ attempt to achieve financial success by following the model of Stevenson’s material, the novel fails to explode the ideology of its characters and the conventional romance narrative structure. On the other hand, Nostromo is seen as an attempt to controvert readers’ expectations about narrative, and especially narrative endings. Conrad’s use of character doublings and inter- and intratextuality contributes to the destabilization of the narrative and the frustration of readers. The discussion of Chance, with its focus on power, gender, and laughter, is one of the more interesting chapters in the book. The discussion of laughter in relation to schadenfreude is thought-provoking, especially because of Baxter’s observations about the...