Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism by Yael Levin (review)

The best literary criticism rubs away the veneer of familiarity that can mummify even the freshest and most original works of imagination. Yael Levin accomplishes this and more in Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism. Yes, after reading Slow Modernism I understand An Outcast of the Islands, Lord Jim, Nostromo, Chance, and even Beckett's plays a little differently, with a keener appreciation both for their richness and strangeness. But Levin's aim is more ambitious than this. She wants us to see narrative itself differently, to stop turning pages to find how this action will lead to that effect and to start experiencing particular moments in Conrad's work outside of time, as examinations of essential being. She succeeds admirably.

One critical explanation for Conrad's well-known problems with audience suggests that his novels and stories seldom conform to the requirements of their genres. So Heart of Darkness troubles the colonial adventure tale; The Secret Agent refuses to fit comfortably with other dynamite fiction; and Nostromo is a perverse founding epic. Levin's alternative explanation for Conrad's lack of popular success (before his 1913 novel Chance) is that Conrad's fiction presents "experience that exceeds or eschews reason and logical processing" (xiv). In this way, she writes, Conrad anticipates Beckett, another writer who leads us to question the reassuring Enlightenment binaries—subjective/objective, inside/outside— and to reconsider our natural tendency to impose order on experience, to channel our perceptions into pre-formulated conclusions. Levin puts it this way:

Honesty, truth, and art are seen as contradictory to the demands of the market and its attention-deficit readers. To produce art is to be true to one's self, one's method and intention. Such integrity comes with a price. To be modern is to be unrecognized—both literally and figuratively, to offer an art that does not conform, that does not follow, that tries to do something new— and does it at its own pace. Conrad refuses to engage his readers by utilizing the shocks of immediate revelation or by providing stock events that will keep them titillated. . . . His artistic intention hinges on a certain deceleration—the frustration of expectation and the protraction of meaning.

(6–7)

One other purpose for Slow Modernism is to contest Thomas Moser's Achievement and Decline thesis, which proposes that Conrad's fiction declines after Under Western Eyes (1911). Levin argues that Conrad neither declines nor advances over his career; instead, she traces a tension between what she calls defamiliarization and the creation of something new, something that reveals the stark uniqueness of every moment of experience. The earlier fiction often employs defamiliarization, described by Ian Watt as delayed decoding,¹ a term which suggests that Conrad's fiction is an ongoing, sometimes demanding study in epistemology. Levin describes it this way: "Defamiliarization works by withholding and then revealing the identity of an object, by withholding and then revealing the manner in which causal links are involved in its production. Our aesthetic experience is contingent on our use of the faculty of reason. We must figure out what we see, find similarities and bring the unknown back to the familiar." Instead, Levin asks us to attend not to the process of knowing in Con-rad's work but to his representation of being. This feature of his fiction "makes us see, yes—but not by appealing to reason. It demands we experience it, that we feel it and are affected by it. The aesthetic potential of such an art is not realized through categorical logic" (10). She believes that "[t]he significance of this shift—between an art that defamiliarizes and an art that creates something unknown, between action and analysis—is at the heart of a shift in Conrad's art" (8). Levin describes this movement as an "oscillation" between "an art of being and an art of becoming." (10)

Levin usefully compares Conrad's depiction of being-out-of-time with Beckett's. Conrad's characters, she shows us, anticipate Beckett's...