Capturing Conrad's Excellence

...James Thurber's comment, at the conclusion of My Life and Hard Times, is insightful: "There was, of course, even for Conrad's Lord Jim, no running away...

...Yet exotic novelists like Conrad provide dangerous temptations for certain kinds of critics...

...Stewart's study is stubbornly old-fashioned (the dust jacket calls it an appreciation...

...Yet this closing section is better than the concluding section of Nostromo because it does at least provide the reader with more "evidence" for understanding the enigma of Jim...

...Archetypal patterns can be found everywhere—in good novels and bad, in tv serials and comic strips...

...There is little overview...

...J. I. M. Stewart is skeptical of such methods because, as he implies, they often avoid the matter of literary judgment...

...Although D. H. Lawrence said that "we shed our sicknesses in books," Stewart knows that "The Rover, in fact, is the successful sickness-shedding book," and The Rover is not very good Conrad...

...We must return to the political novels, particularly to Nostromo, where the complex interrelationships describe a whole society, to appreciate Conrad's excellence...

...Conrad may be an exotic, but he is not too successful at describing exotic places, and the latter part of Lord Jim is far from impressive...

...Curiously, while he likes Nostromo very much, his comments are overly cautious, mostly concerning its elaborate structure...

...I am not sure, however, that we really care about what finally happened on Patusan...

...There is progress in Costaguana, but the progress corrupts all who are involved with the silver mine...

...Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, Nostromo, and Under Western Eyes get the closest treatment...

...There are no loose ends...

...The Secret Agent, Stewart notes, is "remorselessly ironic," but here the irony is applied evenly and, as a result, the book is Conrad's most completely realized novel...

...Despite its operatic ending, Nostromo, as most critics agree, is Conrad's best work, and Stewart devotes two chapters to it...

...Bertrand Russell in his Autobiography speaks of his intense respect for Conrad but adds that "Conrad, I suppose, is in process of being forgotten...

...There must be at least 10 paperback editions of Lord Jim, and the major critical studies have been by Americans...

...Or he may attempt to reconstruct the man behind the work, looking for the writer's neuroses in his obsessive patterns and images...

...Conrad's rhetoric—the dense language that surrounds and sometimes smothers his "tales"—may seem strange to those accustomed to the prose of Fielding, Austen, Thackeray, Trollope, or Eliot, but will sound familiar to readers of Melville, James or Faulkner...

...Reviewed by STEPHEN MILLER Department of English Rutgers University Conrad, as V. S. Pritchett once wrote, "is a harsh exotic who can never quite be assimilated to our modes...

...His bibliography is not exhaustive and he has the unacademic nerve to summarize the plots of the novels he analyzes...

...Conrad's two other major novels, Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent, exploring the dangers of another ideal, revolution, seem weaker than Nostromo...

...He also has an intelligent opening chapter on Conrad's life and literary career...

...Like most Conrad critics, he believes the later novels to be merely melodramatic re-enactments of earlier themes...

...The author is remote from his characters, and the reader knows at all times what his attitude toward them should be...

...The technique becomes one of evasion, and the mystery only a muddle...

...Or he may pass his time searching for archetypal patterns that bloom in the thick jungle of the writer's prose...

...In Lord Jim, Marlow's repeated attempts to "explain" Jim's actions are not unlike the narrator's efforts in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom...

...The psychoanalytical approach is equally narrow...

...Martin Decoud's letters, Captain Mitchell's conversations, and the narrator's voice itself —entering into the minds of Dr...

...As Stein says in the novel, Jim is a "romantic," though he does not know how to immerse himself in the destructive element and therefore drowns...

...The case against Conrad is easy to assemble: His novels are poor in invention, his characters are often attitudes rather than people, and at his worst he peddles words like "mystery" and "unspeakable" at bargain prices...

...Stewart's analysis of Lord Jim is very good, especially on the function of Marlow: "The constant halting of the temporal sequence as Mar-low's mind is beckoned to this or that builds up a kind of inner tension echoing that outer tension which makes us ask: 'What really happened on the Patna?' or 'What finally happened in Patusan?' " What, we also wonder, is Jim really like...

...Or Hawthorne: Young Goodman Brown's walk into the forest is not unlike Kurtz's journey up the river...

...Nostromo, therefore, is not a simple-minded expose of imperialism...

...Here is a book, then, for the "common reader" rather than for the Conrad specialist...

...By "our" I assume he meant English rather than American, for Conrad fits very well into American surroundings...

...Conrad's work is closer than we like to think to the stories and tales of Kipling...

...Gould, Nostromo, and others—provide complementary views of this central action...

...Indeed, these approaches have been adopted recently by three American critics in their studies of Conrad...

...Stewart is so reticent about what he knows that he fails to convey the novel's unique quality...

...Not so in Lord Jim, where the mystery?arising out of the actions of the protagonist, and the ways in which these actions are constantly re-interpreted by the various people who have met him—is well earned...

...The book lacks a firm point of view...

...Stewart examines the novels of Conrad's so-called "major phase" in detail, paying close attention to their structure...

...One of the weaknesses of Conrad's characters is that the narrator frequently asserts their "mystery" without letting us see it...

...In contrast, American readers and critics have taken to Conrad...

...The cloud of his special discomfiture followed him like a pup, no matter what ships he took or what wildernesses he entered...

...The writing deteriorates when Conrad describes Patusan and Jim's relationships on that island...

...True, F. R. Leavis places Conrad in his "great tradition," but E. M. Forster's remark that "the secret casket of [Conrad's] genius contains a vapour rather than a jewel" may be the more typical English response...

...Nostromo is a great novel because the characters and setting are tied to one basic and clearly defined action: Charles Gould's efforts to make the "material interests" of the San Tome mine bring progress and reform to Costaguana...

...The London setting gives the novel a "solidity" no other Conrad novel can claim...

...The critic may become preoccupied with style, analyzing the novel as if it were a long poem...

...Monygham, Mrs...

...Gould's ideal is taken seriously, but Conrad goes on to show how it would be degraded outside England...

...Stewart's book, in its spare and sensible language, helps us gain this appreciation...

...V. S. Pritchett's doubts notwithstanding, Nostromo places Conrad squarely in the English tradition, for Charles Gould's ideal is the imperial ideal...

...Melville is the most obvious comparison: the sea as a setting for an examination of the "endless jar" of right and wrong...

...and, like a novel by Flaubert or a story by de Maupassant, both of whom Conrad admired immensely, the detail is well-chosen and carefully worked out...

...to "explain" the Sutpen family...

...Stewart perceptively says about Under Western Eyes: "That Conrad saw revolution and incitement to revolution exclusively as so much sanguinary futility limits both the reach of his imagination and the play of his sympathy...

...Conrad, too, believed in the superior value of European civilization, and he is never very sympathetic to the exotic characters in his books...

...The author is never sure whether he wants to treat his characters with irony or compassion...