Ruppel - A Political Genealogy of Joseph Conrad

A Political Genealogy of Joseph Conrad

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham Boulder New York London

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Ruppel, Richard J. (Richard Jeffrey), 1954

A political genealogy of Joseph Conrad / Richard Ruppel

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-7391-7824-9 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN 978-0-7391-7825-6 (electronic)

1. Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924Political and social views. 2. Conrad, Joseph, 1857-1924Criticism and interpretation. 3. Politics and literatureGreat BritainHistory20th century. 4. Political fiction, Englis-History and criticism. 5. Politics in literature. I. Title.

PR6005.O4Z7914 2014

823'.912dc23

2014033111

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Parts of chapter 2, on Lord Jim, first appeared in Studies in the Novel in 1998, and parts of chapters 3 and 5 first appeared in Conradiana, in 1989 and 2009. Thanks to the Johns Hopkins University Press and Texas Tech Press for allowing me to reprint modified versions of these essays here.

Many friends and colleagues in the Conrad community heard and commented on early versions of some of these ideas when I presented them at conferences. I am grateful for their responses, especially their disagreements, which helped me refine my positions. I am also grateful to my good friend and colleague, the Dean of Wilkinson College at Chapman University, Patrick Fuery, who provided funding for my attendance at those conferences as well as release time to work on the book.

Finally, thanks to Kathy, Sarah, Liz, Benjamin, Jason, Tiago, and Sebastian. This is for themwith love.

Conrads Radically Contingent Politics

Jzef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, who gradually transformed himself into the English writer, Joseph Conrad, was a mercurial personality. He left Poland for the sea, though he had no experience with salt water and no family history in sailing. He left the Polish language for French, and then for English. He attempted suicide at the age of twenty. He invested in various schemes and lost his inheritance. He married an English typist nearly sixteen years younger than himself with whom he had nothing in common. He worked as a writer though he made no money through all the years of his most important work and though he experienced psychological breakdowns of varying intensity after completing each novel. He was warm with his friends, ingratiating with influential strangers, but also intensely irritable and easily offended.

His work is as varied and changeable as his personality, from his first two, emotionally intense Malay novels, to the stolid and confident Nigger of the Narcissus and Typhoon; from the coldly ironic Outpost of Progress to the nightmarishly subjective Heart of Darkness; from the leisurely, panoramic visions of Nostromo to the tautly nervous, claustrophobic ironies in The Secret Agent.

Despite the fact that Conrad was changeable and subject to extreme mood swings, and despite the extraordinary thematic and tonal range of his work, critics have attempted to impose a stable political perspective on his fictionmost often an Edmund Burkean, organic conservatism, influenced by his Polish background. This is understandable; until recently, a literary critics primary role has been to impose order on an authors creative work or to identify groups of authors as part of well-defined movements. So, in his Politics and the Novel (first published in 1957), Irving Howe persuasively established a conservative base from which to view and understand Conrads politics, identifying him, essentially, as a little Englander:

Conrads conservatism, which is at least as much a psychological reflex as a formulated opinion, reached its full bloom in England. It is not an aggressive conservatism, Conrad being, for one thing, anti-imperialist in an age of imperialism; his rather querulous political mood came closest to Little Englanders, those who wished to freeze history at the point where England had been a prosperous mercantile nation but not yet a world power, and where the English gentleman and his country house had seemed indestructible monuments to an eternal order of virtue. This is a politics of defense: a desire to remain untouched by the fearful effects of industrialism, to be let alone by history, to retain privileges and values that are slipping away. (79)

Conrads conservatism, Howe adds, his hatred of the anarchists, his suppressed residue of nationalism must now seem more equivocal than at first sight. The anarchism he attacks is... a projection of an unrevealed self, of the desolation a modern ego fears to find beneath its domesticated surface (82). In other words, Conrad fears anarchism for psychological reasons. He fears his own disorder.

Howe claims that Conrad was profoundly conservative, even reactionary, in his politics. Thus, he hated revolutionaries, and this damaged the way he presented them in his work. His hatred was a consequence of his traumatic childhood. His fathers revolutionary activity, Howe argues, left him an orphan and a life in permanent exile, and Conrads political positions can all be traced back to this. According to Howe, when Conrad expresses any sympathy for revolutionary thought and behavior it is because he despairs that any system will alleviate every thinking persons profound alienation and loneliness. The only answer is annihilation, the remedy suggested (and essentially left unchallenged) in The Secret Agent.

This has proven to be a persuasive analysis, but Howe is rather nave in the way he deals with Conrads psychology; we are asked to imagine that Conrads personality, politics, and art derived almost entirely from childhood trauma. This leads Howe to undervalue and, essentially, to misread Conrads most finished novel, The Secret Agent. In their preoccupation with Conrads psychology, later critics followed Howes lead in their efforts to impose a consistent political perspective on Conrads work.

In the first full-length analysis devoted to Conrads politics, The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad (1963), Eloise Knapp Hay refers to the claim that Conrad wrote out of his sense of guilt for having left Poland, a position Hay herself supports in her discussion of Lord Jim. Hay notes Conrads preference for death to surrender and his defense of fanaticism as arising from his Polish heritage. Hay claims that Conrads attraction to lost causes was not because he supported archaic monarchies but because they