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Conrad and the Being of the World: A Reading in Speculative Metaphysics Nicholas Gayle Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022 177 pp. $99.95
In Conrad and the Being of the World, Nicholas Gayle argues for the avant la lettre relevance of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO for short) to Conrad's fiction. For those unfamiliar with OOO, this is a non-anthropocentric philosophy related to speculative realism and developed by American academic Graham Harman. The speculative realists pose the question "does a real world exist independently of human access, or not?" (Harman 183). As Gayle anticipates in the introduction, many readers will ask "Of all writers, why Conrad?" (3). In response Gayle asserts that Conrad's fiction presents a "hidden reality forever out of reach"; a "veiled withdrawn world"; and a "province of the unexpected" (3, 7, 8). These terms resonate with the object-oriented notion of an unknowable universe. In support of his argument, Gayle cites a letter from Conrad to Richard Curle in 1922, where Conrad complained that everything he had "laboured to keep indefinite" in his fiction was being scrutinized for significance. Conrad's "insistence on leaving things "indefinite," Gayle suggests, "goes to the very heart of the new philosophy of realism that OOO expresses" (2).
Gayle rather over-works his theme of Conradian indeterminacy. For example, Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim are described as:
paradigmatic examples of how Conrad uses breakdown, incoherence, lapses into silence and the language of dreams to allude to what is both unsayable and unknowable-which is to say reality itself, a realm ultimately impenetrable to human thought (9).
The phrase "impenetrable to human thought" will be familiar as Marlow's response to the Congo in Heart of Darkness, and so this is ostensibly a Conradian perspective on the universe that chimes with Harman's philosophy. However, it is via Marlow's thoughts that we can begin to access the awful reality of colonial Congo, a "realm" that is accessible through subjective experience. Conradian reality is not exactly overburdened by certainty and knowability, but it is surely a long way from the inaccessible "hinterland" posited by speculative realism.
Gayle has chosen a challenging writer for his case study. Nevertheless, he tenaciously applies object-oriented metaphysics to an impressive range of works from Almayer's Folly to Suspense throughout seven well-structured chapters. These...