Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture (review)

A "little-known photograph" of Conrad reproduced on the dust jacket of Joseph Conrad and Popular Culture provides a stylish and revealing illustration for Stephen Donovan's rewarding new study. Asking us to consider his study as the "literary-critical corollary" to the photograph, Donovan suggests that both present the "new face" (9) of a Conrad absorbed by the distractions of popular culture. Oddly, Donovan says nothing at all about the fact that the photographer, Alvin Langdon Coburn, was associated with the work of high literary modernism, most notably for his photogravure illustrations for Henry James's New York Edition, and his experimental "Vortographs" inspired by Ezra Pound's Vorticism. Does the photograph (available at www.geh.org) illustrate Conrad's relation to modernism or to popular culture?

The new face of Conrad that emerges from Donovan's study is that of a modernist artist attempting to manage and contain the new popular and mass forms of cultural entertainment emerging over the period in which he wrote. Citing Fredric Jameson's argument (from The Political Unconscious [1981]) that Conrad's work represents the simultaneous emergence of contemporary modernism with "what will variously be called popular or mass culture" (qtd. in Donovan 11), Donovan outlines his own "shamelessly pragmatic" (12) use of the term "popular culture." Jameson's is the first in an eclectic set of cultural studies on which Donovan will draw in his use of "popular culture" as a blanket term to cover the full range of different social phenomena variously called popular or mass culture.

Donovan focuses on four areas of popular culture: visual entertainment, tourism, advertising, and magazine fiction. Each chapter offers intriguing, often surprising, historical anecdotes situating the biographical Conrad within the particular field of popular culture in question. The chapter on tourism, for example, includes an entertaining excursus on Conrad's dangerous passion for driving cars at high speeds. As with the cover illustration, such anecdotes tend to open up more questions than answers, but this is one of the book's strengths: it invites further study. Tourism introduces a number of rewarding areas for investigation, from the relevance of Cook's tours for Lord Jim (1900) to the culture of "pedestrianism" that informs Chance (1913). That Conrad's passion for cars belongs to a mere "excursus" suggests that "tourism" doesn't quite define the constellation of industries (tourist, automobile, shipping) that underwrites Conrad's imaginative investments. Nonetheless, Donovan successfully demonstrates how thoroughly Conrad's fiction is permeated by the material traces of popular culture.

In the chapter on advertising, Donovan's interest in the product-placement of Conrad's own image—a topic on which this book is full of suggestive hints—tends to be outweighed by a plethora of references to the "material artefacts" of advertising in Conrad's fiction: the "empty Huntley and Palmer biscuit-tin" of "Heart of Darkness" (1902), Captain Mitchell's endorsement of Tres de Mayo coffee in Nostromo (1904), and, above all, the veiled allusion to Bovril in the beef extract "B. O. S." that plays so prominent a role in "An Anarchist" (1906).

This wealth of detail raises questions about the coherence of each of the chosen fields of popular culture. The chapter on visual entertainment begins by reconstructing Conrad's discomfort on finding himself caught in Vienna at the onset of World War I, taking his son to an early form of video arcade, whose entertainment involved firing at images of Scottish soldiers projected onto a cinema screen. This anecdote introduces perhaps the most successful chapter of the entire book, establishing the relevance of "visual entertainment" for Conrad's career—from "the cinematic event of 1897, the Diamond Jubilee parade of 22 June" (44) to discussion of Conrad's notes for a lecture entitled "Author and Cinematograph" delivered in New York in 1923. Donovan makes a convincing argument for reading a cinematographic logic informing Conrad's oft-cited artistic aim—"above all to make you see " (qtd. in Donovan 20). Yet...