Content area
Full text
Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment, by Jeremy Hawthorn; pp. xv + 271. London, New York, Melbourne, Auckland: Edward Arnold, 1990 (raised edition, 1992), $17.95 paper.
Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition: Constructing and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject, by Andrea White; pp. xi + 233. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995, L35.00, $49.95.
Although the politics of Joseph Conrad's fiction has long been the focus of critical study, these two books are directly concerned with the relation between literary aesthetics and ideology, and with the implications of that relationship for Conrad and his readers. While narrative theory is central to Jeremy Hawthorn's project, Andrea White is primarily interested in literary genres and how they reflect and construct social reality. Both studies are valuable not only for what they tell us about Conrad but also for their ideas about the interrelations of aesthetics, ethics, and politics.
Jeremy Hawthorn investigates questions about literary value. In Conrad's most successful fiction, he maintains, there is either an unwavering sense of ideological commitment or a firm, conscious control of ambivalent political views and the narrative methods that convey them. Hawthorn is fascinated by the paradox that the narrative that tends to be most technically agile is often also the most grounded in moral or political commitment. "Indeed, the flexibility owes much to this commitment, for it is this which tells the narrative where to go, what to look for, and how to judge what is found" (xiii). Conrad's artistic failures or works that are "impressive but flawed" often betray what Hawthorn considers weaknesses, contradictions, or incoherence in both technique and political understanding (69). His study develops this thesis to explain in detail why the three texts that constitute Conrad's critique of imperialism--"An Outpost of Progress" (1896), Heart of Darkness (1899), and Nostromo (1904)--are superior to The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (1897), The Rescue (1920), and Chance (1914), all fictions marred by "moral and intellectual hesitations and doubts that are disfiguring" (xii). In addition to the two sections of the book concerned with these clusters of novels, Hawthorn devotes the final third of the study to imaginative and interpretative procedures as depicted within Conrad's fiction.
In a long preliminary chapter, Hawthorn traces Conrad's use of represented speech and...