Joseph Conrad and the Reader: Questioning Modern Theories of Narrative and Readership by Amar Acheraïou (review)

Joseph Conrad was a man whose deep ambivalences and many complications confound neat generalization and tidy classification. Though for a long time after leaving his homeland at age sixteen he distanced himself from Poland and its political fortunes, he always recognized that he was shaped by its culture and history, particularly by the values of honor and duty to which he was deeply committed. After he gave up the sea, he became a British citizen in 1886 and assumed the habits of an Englishman, but was never quite accepted as one: Virginia Woolf described him after his death in 1924 as “our guest.” Aristocratic by birth, he declined a British knighthood shortly before his death. He was a political conservative, who created a literary world distinctly his own. In his writing, he wanted readers to arrive at their own meaning and, simultaneously, he had a strong didactic impulse to direct their understanding that made him a moralist of the first order. He was friendly with many other writers and close to few, yet his influence on the English novel and later writers had been profound.

Now, Amar Acheraïou has written a book that deepens our understanding of the ambiguous and contradictory impulses in Conrad’s works. He lucidly describes Conrad’s notion of and relation to the reader, starting with conceptions of audience from the classical period to the Modern before turning to rehearse Conrad’s reception in Poland and Great Britain and then showing that Conrad’s idea of the reader and of reading are rooted in ancient Greece and eighteenth-century fiction. Along the way Acheraïou shows how far Conrad overflows many contemporary literary theories, accepting neither Barthes’ death-of-the-author nor Deconstructionism’s always already absent author. Acheraïou demonstrates that for Conrad the reader is part of a triadic relation of text, reader, and author, all influenced by the culture, ideology, and politics in which they are situated.

Acheraïou takes issue with Barthes’s eviction of the author from meaning-making and privileging of the reader in that production. “Unlike Barthes, who considers the writer dead or exiled from his fictional universe, Conrad argues rather that the author only melts away and disseminates” (18). In this, Conrad is much closer to Flaubert. For both writers the author’s share in the making of meaning is not annulled, only disguised or diffused in the texts. Thus, Acheraïou takes Conrad to be in a middle position between many previous literary theories that centered on the author and modern ones that concentrated on the texts or readers, for he throws over earlier ideas of the writer as the sole and clear decider of meaning and resists later conceptions of the reader as paramount.

The diffused presence of the author increases the difficulty of deciphering Conrad’s works, and it highlights the essentially triadic nature of meaning. For Conrad:

an accomplished, ideal aesthetics is a dynamic construction in which text, writer, and reader converge and collaborate to shape meaning. It is in the spirit of this close collaboration that Conrad invites the reader to become a writer and write the other half of the book. This creative effort that Conrad demands of his readers makes reading a privileged act of solidarity. It requires the collaboration of the reader’s faculties of cognition and perception—seeing, hearing, and thinking—as well as the cooperation of the writing and reading agencies.

(142)

Conrad may anticipate Deconstructionism’s emphasis on textual indeterminacy and multiple meanings, but he retains the author as central to the aesthetic enterprise.

Among early Polish critics, many of whom were highly sensitized to Poland’s exigencies after its partition between Austria and Russia, there was a tendency to read Conrad’s work, perhaps even Conrad himself, as not quite true or faithful to his homeland. Among the first Polish critics...