From Sight through to In-Sight: Time, Narrative and Subjectivity in Conrad and Ford by Omar Sabbagh (review)

Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford collaborated on novels, short stories, and magazine editing for an immensely productive decade, and their mutual influence remained strong even after their friendship cooled in 1909. It is all the more surprising, then, that we do not have many parallel or comparative studies of these two major figures. We should therefore welcome Omar Sabbagh’s monograph, which sets out to examine how a selection of Conrad’s and Ford’s narratives narrate and thematize time, how they represent the self, and how they bring these two concerns together by examining time as subjective experience. These would seem to be valuable questions to examine: while the techniques of impressionism have been productively investigated by critics such as John G. Peters (on Conrad) and Max Saunders (on Ford), this study seems to be approaching new territory — the temporal dimension of early twentieth-century literary impressionism.

However, several problems with the approach soon become apparent. A 35-page prologue offers an anticipation of some of the material to come in “a personal register.” One of three epigraphs to this prologue is a quotation from Forster’s Howards End (1910): “Only connect.” Aside from assigning this as a rogue epigraph to Forster’s novel — one of the many typographical slips and minor errors that suggest insufficient attention at the proof-reading and copy-editing stages — this instruction is one that we might wish Sabbagh had followed himself. The prologue’s meditations range from St. Paul to G. K. Chesterton via J. S. Mill, George Eliot, and Rosa Luxemburg; the relevance of this material to the questions under examination is hard to discern. And Shandyesque discursiveness is a persistent feature of the book’s style, causing difficulties of comprehension not just with respect to its arguments but even at sentence level. Parenthetical insertions of only tangential relevance are so frequent that the reader not only struggles to follow, but also quickly begins to wonder how much the author is in control of his material.

This problem of parenthetical complication is part of a more fundamental problem of clarity. Even when it does not wander, Sabbagh’s prose is often obscure to the point of impenetrability. At times this is no doubt because he is seeking to communicate subtle and complex ideas. For example, writing conceptually about time — a focus particularly of his examination of Ford’s Parade’s End tetralogy (1924–1928) — is never likely to be straightforward, but it is possible to be clearer than this: “just as the analeptical presentations of the past present the past, and vividly so, so the qualitatively different moments from the latest point in time, the latest present, make of the latter, continuously, a past, from the perspective of the cusp of the future, or future anteriority that is evinced or suggested by this continuous shifting back and forth” (195).

Another problem becomes visible when a page-long quotation from Heart of Darkness (1899), in which Marlow expresses his realization that the dying Kurtz is suffering from a kind of moral insanity, appears in the prologue (again, barely linked to what comes before or after). Sabbagh mentions his intention to “look at the constellation of moments of climax and disintegration in detail” in this passage — and yet he moves on with barely a comment. Later in the study he promises us close readings, and those that we get are, on the whole, perceptive and rewarding, but they are few and far between. Analysis too often remains cursory.

What, then, is this study actually saying? Because of these (in my view rather fundamental) flaws, this is not an easy question to answer. What Sabbagh says he will address is “why and how Ford and Conrad chose to shape and form their narratives the way they did.” This seems clearly enough to be signalling a narratological approach, but Sabbagh then adds an extra issue: he will examine “how...