THE CHALLENGE OF BEWILDERMENT by Paul B. Armstrong

Author:Paul B. Armstrong
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2018-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

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1Joseph Conrad, “The Return, ” in Tales of Unrest (1898; rpt. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1924), p. 130.

2Joseph Conrad, Chance (1913; rpt. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1924), p. 117.

3Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900; rpt. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1924), pp. 410, 411.

4J. Hillis Miller, Poets of Reality (1965; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1966), p. 19; Tony Tanner, “Butterflies and Beetles—Conrad’s Two Truths, ” in Lord Jim, Norton ed., ed. Thomas C. Moser (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968), p. 458.

5Ian Watt, Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), pp- 33, 335. In a rare lapse, Watt is wildly inaccurate when he claims that the question of how to get out of alienation “was not to be of any particular concern to the other great figures of modern literature” (p. 33). How to remedy humanity’s powerlessness and isolation was an issue of deep and abiding importance to writers as different as Eliot, Lawrence, Mann, and Sartre.

6Joseph Conrad, The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897; rpt. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1926), p. 25.

7Joseph Conrad, “An Outpost of Progress, ” in Tales of Unrest, p. 89.

8Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899), in Youth and Two Other Stories (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page, 1924), p. 152.

9Conrad, Lord Jim, p. 143. Subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text and will refer to the 1924 Doubleday edition.

10Joseph Conrad, “Guy de Maupassant” (1904) and “Preface” to The Secret Agent (1920), in Joseph Conrad on Fiction, ed. Walter F. Wright (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), pp. 60, 193.

11Each of Marlows incarnations is different, and my characterization of his role holds only for the Marlow of Lord Jim. The Marlow of “Youth” is less skeptical, often amused at the boyish enthusiasm he reports, and almost nostalgic for his lost innocence. The Marlow of Heart of Darkness is less ambivalent, more scathing in his cynicism about the social norm even if he ultimately upholds its deception. The Marlow of Chance is an ill-controlled mix of seemingly capricious annoyance and (particularly at the end) almost sentimental sympathy.

12Although for different reasons, J. Hillis Miller makes a similar point about Conrad and Aristotle: “Insofar as [Lord Jim] is. . . not the straightforward historical movement suggested by Aristotle’s comments on beginning, middle, and end in the Poetics, then the sort of metaphysical certainty implicit in Aristotle, the confidence that some logos or underlying cause and ground supports the events, is suspended” (Fiction and Repetition [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1982], p. 35). Later I discuss Conrads refusal of temporal coherence. As I have tried to show, a similar denial that the world is inherently logical and orderly is implicit in his defiance of probability.

13Joseph Conrad, “Anatole France” (1904), in Conrad on Fiction, p. 67.

14Conrad’s story “Amy Foster” (1901) might seem an exception to this rule inasmuch as the scapegoat Yanko Goorall is an outsider from the start. The community finds his strangeness disturbing, however, only because it senses continuities with him.

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