Szczeszak-Brewer Agata - Empire and Pilgrimage in Conrad and Joyce

Empire and Pilgrimage in Conrad and Joyce

The Florida James Joyce Series

UNIVERSITY PRESS OF FLORIDA

Florida A&M University, Tallahassee

Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton

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EMPIRE AND PILGRIMAGE IN CONRAD AND JOYCE

Agata Szczeszak-Brewer

Foreword by Sebastian D. G. Knowles

University Press of Florida
Gainesville Tallahassee Tampa Boca Raton
Pensacola Orlando Miami Jacksonville Ft. Myers Sarasota

Copyright 2011 by Agata Szczeszak-Brewer

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

22 21 20 19 18 17 6 5 4 3 2 1

First cloth printing, 2011

First paperback printing, 2017

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Szczeszak-Brewer, Agata.

Empire and pilgrimage in Conrad and Joyce / Agata Szczeszak-Brewer ; foreword by Sebastian D. G. Knowles.

p. cm.(The Florida James Joyce series)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8130-3539-0 (cloth: alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8130-5464-3 (pbk.)

1. Joyce, James, 18821941Criticism and interpretation. 2. Conrad, Joseph, 18571924Criticism and interpretation. 3. Imperialism in literature. 4. Pilgrims and pilgrimages in literature. I. Title.

PR6019.O9Z825 2010

823.'912dc22

2010020782

The University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida.

In memory of Izabela and Wincenty Stelmaczonek

Contents

Foreword

Conrad and Joyce: I like to think of them as Corley and Lenehan in Two Mandarins, an imaginary short story from a lost collection called Modernists (which also features D. H. Lawrence as Bob Doran, W. B. Yeats as Little Chandler, and T. S. Eliot as Gabriel Conroy). In that story, the two unlikely companions wander through the turn-of-the-century universe, maddeningly unclear in their discourse and intentions, searching for a transcendence to which they are both pathologically averse. It is Agata Szczeszak-Brewers great achievement that she can see through her authors smokescreens, can tolerate their paradoxes and hypocrisies, and can flick them into focus with a clear and dispassionate eye. Szczeszak-Brewer marches them up the hill, through a subtle and sympathetic reading of Conrads teleological and hegemonic ambitions, and marches them down again, through a freewheeling engagement with Joyces subversive attitudes to the colonialist enterprise. The resulting dyad gives us Conrad and Joyce as a combined Penelope figure, first weaving (Joseph Conrad, conquering the day) and then unweaving (James Joyce, unconquering the night). By considering the characters in Joyce and Conrads work together, we now see that Don John Conmee and Inspector Heat are cut from the same cloth, as are, from a more variegated bolt, the Harlequin and Buck Mulligan. Dedalus has a marked resemblance to Decoud; Leopold Bloom and Nostromo share, in their stealth and circularity, the habits of the flneur. We now understand how The Dead shares a swooning uncertainty with Lord Jim, and why the most important thing about the first part of Ulysses is that it ends, as Heart of Darkness begins, with a ship.

Above all, Szczeszak-Brewer has provided depth and balance for the outward odysseys of all the journeyers in Joyce and Conrad, and by extension, of all the pilgrims in modernism from Rachel Vinrace to the fisherman of What the Thunder Said: each outward journey now has its inward counterpart, a voyage in every way the equal of the journey in the world. The act of colonialization has been internalized, with deep and useful results. Conrad and Joyce, through the work of this important study, have been shown to be two things of opposite natures depending on one another, as the imagined on the real. To be able to bring such opposites together requires art as well as scholarship: Empire and Pilgrimage in Conrad and Joyce is a work of both clarity and grace.

Sebastian D. G. Knowles

Series Editor

Acknowledgments

I am deeply indebted to Thomas Jackson Rice, my mentor and friend, for invaluable insight, motivation, and an example of exceptional scholarship. Sebastian Knowles gave me useful suggestions and asked challenging questions, as did Georgia Johnston and the anonymous reviewer of the manuscript. I am also grateful to other people who have been generous readers and commented on all or some parts of the manuscript: Kevin Dettmar, Meili Steele, Kevin Lewis, Ed Madden, Jeanne Garane, Julia Levin, Sarah Allen, Warren Rosenberg, Crystal Benedicks, Robert Royalty, and David Blix. My thanks go to Wieslaw Krajka for scholarly guidance when this project was in its infancy and to my mother, Maria Szczeszak, for my first lessons in English.

I wish to thank several organizations and fellowships for their generous support of my research. The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded me a stipend to participate in the summer 2007 seminar on Ulysses at Trinity College, Dublin. I would like to thank the seminars participants for inspiration and encouragement. My thanks also go to the Wabash College Deans Office, the English Department, and the colleges Faculty Development Fund as well as its Byron K. Trippet research fund. I also received support from the Newberry Library in Chicago, the National Library of Ireland, and Trinity College Library, and travel grants from the International James Joyce Foundation and the Joseph Conrad Society of America. The Rotary Foundation Scholarship for International Ambassadorial Scholars provided very generous funding for the first two years of my research.

appeared in Teleology without a Telos? Constitutive Absence in James Joyces Pilgrimage in Displacing the Center: Pilgrimage in a Mobile World, edited by Simon Coleman and John Eade, special issue of Mobilities 2 (November 2007): 34762. I wish to thank the editors of these volumes for their kind permissions to reprint sections of my articles in this book.

Above all, I would like to thank my husband, Josh Brewer, for his unconditional love, scholarly advice, and enormous patience, and my son, Kuba, for putting all my worries about commas and square brackets into perspective.

Introduction

Cartographers and Pilgrims

Mapping the Void

Colonial conquest has always relied on territorial representationsmapmaking and charting of new itinerariesbut also on skillful interpretation of gathered data. In order to claim, appropriate, and exploit new land, European powers sent out explorers, land surveyors, and other readers of foreign landscapes who had to tame the real into the symbolic, the representational. Literary criticism employs similar tactics. Frank Budgen comments on his familiarity with James Joyces