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  • “Sailing towards Poland” with Joseph Conrad by Jean M. Szczypien
  • Mark D. Larabee (bio)
Jean M. Szczypien. “Sailing towards Poland” with Joseph Conrad.
New York: Peter Lang, 2017. xx + 269 pp.
ISBN: 9781433127526.

Jean Szczypien’s “Sailing towards Poland” with Joseph Conrad begins by pointing to a puzzling contradiction. On one hand, as Conrad declared in 1915, Polish literature was “everything” for him (1), the foundation of his upbringing. On the other hand, curiously, references in A Personal Record to what he had read in his youth omit the Polish authors who supposedly had meant so much to him. Readers of Conrad not already familiar with Polish literary history (or scholarship in Polish) may well miss this contradiction, whose key this book so artfully discloses: how subtly but thoroughly Conrad wove Polish sources into his writing and his life. “Sailing towards Poland” charts a course of hidden links between Conrad and Poland that winds through history, biography, texts, and intertexts. As a result, Szczypien shows how recognizing Conrad’s Polish literary references opens new insights into his authorial practices and literary themes, as well as his sense of identity and Polish nationhood.

Szczypien takes the title of her book from a letter that Conrad wrote to his father’s friend Stefan Buszczyński in 1883, in which he recalls Buszczyński telling the young Conrad on his leaving Cracow, “wherever you may sail you are sailing towards Poland!” Conrad in return declares in his letter (writing in Polish), “That I have never forgotten, and never will forget!” (3). Szczypien’s extensive research unearths those memories not just by establishing lines of influence or cataloging allusions per se, but instead by capitalizing on theories of intertextuality articulated by Michael Riffaterre and Julia Kristeva. For example, it was as early as 1960 that scholars first noted “reverberations” or “verbal echoes” of Adam Mickiewicz’s patriotic narrative poem Konrad Wallenrod in Almayer’s Folly (33). However, Szczypien broadens our view by situating Conrad’s first novel alongside Mickiewicz’s poem, A Personal Record, and Virgil’s Aeneid. In so doing, she indicates something larger than thematic parallelism at stake: what Riffaterre, in Fictional Truth (1990) calls “the truth of the text” (Szczypien 41). In general, this truth in Conrad’s writing emerges through mechanisms of symbolism activated by those seemingly unobtrusive references to subtexts. For Szczypien, consequently, in the case of Conrad’s echoes of Konrad Wallenrod he signals “resolutely, if indirectly, that he, too, is serving his fatherland” through a “mission” as “divine” as Aeneas’s (38). In such a reading of “hidden treasure” (42) concealed in Conrad’s work—representative of this volume as a whole—Szczypien fills in gaps in earlier [End Page 198] studies and suggests answers to questions previously left unresolved (such as why, for Ian Watt, Conrad treats Almayer unsympathetically).

Just as the Aeneid reverberates in Almayer’s Folly, as Szczypien goes on to show, the Iliad resounds in Lord Jim via Alexander Fredro’s play Zemsta (Revenge), which Conrad may have seen performed in 1871. To elaborate these connections, Szczypien’s analysis ranges across such an array of materials as previous criticism of Lord Jim, Apollo Korzeniowski’s poetry, and characters in Revenge; images of Conrad’s manuscript; an 1807 allegorical portrayal of the partition of Poland; and Andrzej Wajda’s 2002 film version of Fredro’s play. The result not only revises our understanding of Stein—“not as cultured and erudite but as a talkative, ridiculous figure whose decisions produce catastrophic results” (51)—but also furthers other revelations: of Conrad’s critique of Romanticism, his praise of the “grand dignity of his father and Romantic patriots like him” (Szczypien 68), and his disapproving attitudes towards Tadeusz Bobrowski. In a characteristic move that “[makes] possible an otherwise unacceptable metaphor” (Riffaterre 147), it is only through the workings of intertextuality that Conrad could critique Bobrowski by way of Stein (Szczypien 68).

The consequences of Szczypien’s study of Almayer’s Folly grow from her close examination of the single phrase “It has set at last.” Throughout this book, Szczypien works outward from such potentially inconspicuous but crucial pieces of evidence. “Sailing towards Poland” is thus...

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