Rereading Conrad, and: Oxford Reader's Companion to Conrad, and: Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad's Malay Fiction (review)

Ever since the 38-year-old Polish émigré first captured the attention of English readers with the publication of Almayer's Folly in 1895, critics have sought to explain both the difficulty and the appeal of reading Joseph Conrad. All three of the books under review respond to this challenge, revealing the persistence with which Conrad's writing continues to demand the attention of an English readership. Each book illustrates (albeit in different ways) the truism of Daniel Schwarz's title: reading Conrad means rereading Conrad.

Rereading Conrad is a series of incidental essays originally published between 1985 and 1997 and reflecting the critic's attempt to adjust a formalist approach to poststructuralist, new historicist, and postcolonial imperatives redefining literary criticism since the publication of Schwarz's first book on Conrad in 1980. The "interrogative mode" Schwarz frequently adopts—asking questions of the works he discusses—invites an open-minded, attentive, and collaborative interrogation of Conrad's works and the way others have read them. Its strengths are exemplified in his 1997 edition of "The Secret Sharer" (1910) in Bedford's series of case studies in contemporary criticism, from which Schwarz has rearranged his own contributions for the present volume. Arguing that "the history of Conrad criticism is a miniature of the history of Anglo-American criticism in the postwar period" (8), Schwarz outlines some of the shared assumptions of postwar American criticism: an emphasis on form; biographical and historical context; mimetic function; interpreting the central meaning; interpreting characters; and evaluating the work's unity. While in the Bedford edition this recapitulates an older history of Conrad criticism to preface the set of newer critical essays to come, in Rereading Conrad the same survey is enlisted to argue for the continuing relevance of those postwar critical assumptions Schwarz espouses as "formalist humanism." The insistence with which Schwarz presses his case (elaborated in two earlier books—The Humanistic Heritage [1986] and The Case for a Humanistic Poetics [1991]) has the unfortunate effect of distracting attention from the specifics of his more interesting contributions to Conrad studies—his call for a closer look at the later work, for example; or his interest in the influence of Paul Gaugin on Heart of Darkness (1901).

A more convincing case for Schwarz's ideal "pluralistic approach that allows for multiple perspectives and a dialogic approach among those perspectives" (8) might be found in the resource-rich Oxford Reader's Companion to Conrad edited by Owen Knowles and Gene Moore. A happy combination of scholarship and canny marketing, the Oxford Reader's Companion has the feel of a compact Victorian encyclopedia tailored to the postmodern, professionalized, simultaneously specialist and nonspecialist world of the early twenty-first century. Necessarily pluralist and dialogic in its alphabetical arrangement of an eclectic and inclusive range of entries, the sheer heterogeneity of its implied readership makes Schwarz's "formalist humanism" sound quaintly anachronistic (although one might concede that Schwarz's "humanistic" assumptions do seem to govern the template of entries focusing on biography, individual works, fictional characters, and surveys of critical approaches). Like other such companions published recently, it is the product of a sort of compromised truce amongst contending critical perspectives. Unlike other such companions, though, it emphasizes facts above interpretations. Its wealth of biographical and archival data, especially concerning the range of Conrad texts available either in print or in libraries, is especially impressive and welcome...