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ENG 3051 CRN 12142 CONRAD IN THE 21 ST CENTURY F3000 SECTION 341 BH 415 T 4:30 TH 5:15 DR. ADAM ZACHARY NEWTON “A series of outrages…executed here in this country; not only planned here—that would not do—they would not mind…. A bomb outrage to have any influence on public opinion now must go beyond the intention of vengeance or terrorism. It must be purely destructive.” Not a plan for September 11, 2001 in New York or March 11, 2004 in Madrid or July 7, 2005 in London or November 26-29, 2008 in Mumbai, or for a given day in a given city in states like Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, Iran, Israel, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, or the U.S.A. Rather, these are two sentences from Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), which is hardly unique among his fiction in describing a world in the shadow of waning empire, superseded national fidelities and cultural allegiances, and fatigued language at the turn of the 20th century—a world very much with us just after the turn of the 21st. This 3000 level course will focus on that world, and on that writer (born Josef Teodor Konrad Naecz Korzeniowski, 1857-1924), one of the most idiosyncratic, writerly, and endlessly rewarding figures in the entire literary canon—which his place inside forever disturbs and kineticizes. In this seminar we won’t try to do too much; we will:

1. Read texts by Conrad including selected letters, essays, excerpts from A Personal Record; several novels—Lord Jim, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, Victory—and short fiction—“The End of the Tether,” “The Tale,” “An Anarchist,” “Karain.”

2. Examine certain key concepts in narrative theory with reference to those texts, i.e., temporality, story/discourse, voice, focalization, dialogism.

3. Refract Conrad’s work through the category of “terror”—a word all too common in contemporary speech, but which Conrad (as he does for so many other individual terms and phrases in his adopted third language), makes productively strange and uncanny.

Texts: Various writings by Conrad

Course-reader with selections by fellow émigrées Witold Gombrowicz and V.S. Naipul, and essayists Walter Benjamin, Geoffrey Harpham, Fredric Jameson, Edward Said, Aaron Fogel, Mikahil Bakhtin, Tony Tanner, Frank Kermode, Peter Christopher Gogwilt, et alia.

• This course is a 3000 (Advanced) level “Forms” course in the English Major designed to

pose questions about literary forms, practices, and interpretive communities like, “who reads, who writes, and through which lens? As a F2000 course, it fulfills the 2nd semester of the current two-semester literature requirement for graduation from Yeshiva College, and can also be used towards the major in English.

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Schedule of Readings January 19th-21st Conrad in the 21st Century, Introduction, Forward, pp, 17-38, 283-303 CP: 1. Conrad Chronology 2. Orr, “Biography” *3. Karl, “Letters” *4. Conrad, “Selected Letters” 5. Gombrowicz, “The Statue of Man”; Diary V2 (excerpt) 6. Said, “Conrad: The Presentation of Narrative” 7. Conrad, “Henry James” 8. Naipual, “Conrad’s Darkness” 9. Harpham, “The Language of Mastery” Angel: *Michael A. Lucas, “Conrad’s Adjectival Eccentricity” *Michael Stubbs, “Conrad in the Computer” January 26th-28th

CP: 10. “Karain” (1898) 11. “Preface” to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897) 12. “Author’s Note and A Familiar Preface” to A Personal Record

13. Benjamin, “The Storyteller” 14. Hawthorn, Lothe, Phelan, “Conrad and Narrative Theory” Angel: * Adams, “"Remorse and Power"

February 2nd-4th “The End of the Tether” (1904)

CP: 15. Bruss, “Teleological Diminishing” 16. Vološinov, “Language, Speech, and Utterance” 17. Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel”

18. Fogel, “Ideas of Dialogue” and “The End of the Tether” February 9th-11th Lord Jim (1900) CP: 19. Lothe, “Conrad’s Lord Jim: Narrative and Genre” 20. Roberts, “Conrad and the Territory of Ethics”

21. Harpham, “Conrad’s Global Heartland”

February 16th-18th Lord Jim CP: 22. Ian Watt, from Conrad in the 19th Century: “Marlow’s Inquiry” 23. Gail Fincham, “The Dialogism of Lord Jim”

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22. Muriel Moutet, “Foreign Tongues” February 23rd

Lord Jim CP: 24. Krishnan, “Seeing the Animal” 25. Eagleton, “Criticism as Ideology” *26. Jameson, “Romance and Reification” Conrad in the 21st Century, 223-237 Angel: *Deresiewicz, “Lord Jim and the Transformation of Community” March 2nd to 4th The Secret Agent (1907) CP: 27. Guimond, Maynard, “Kaczynski, Conrad, and Terrorism” Conrad in the 21st Century, 155-171 Angel: *Fleischman, “The Symbolic World of The Secret Agent” *Arac, “Romanticism, the Self, and the City” * Harpham, “Abroad Only by a Fiction” March 9th to 11th The Secret Agent CP: 28. “An Anarchist” (1906) Angel: *Pye, “London Soundscapes” March 16th to 18th Under Western Eyes (1911) CP: 29.Long, “The Secret Policeman’s Couch” 30. Kermode, “Secrets and Narrative Sequence” March 25th Under Western Eyes CP: 31. GoGwilt, “The Rhetorical Invention of the West” 32. Conrad, “Autocracy and War” Conrad in the 21st Century, 251-265 April 8th Victory (1915) CP: 33. Tanner, “Conrad and the Last Gentleman” April 13th-15th Topic Proposal Due Victory

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CP: 34. Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, “The Failure of Textuality” Conrad in the 21st Century, 267-279 April 22nd Victory April 27th-29th Distribute Topic Proposal A Personal Record (1912) (selections) CP: 37. Szczpien, “Composition, Intention, Design: Polonism” 38. Prescott, “Autobiography as Evasion” Angel * Davies, “Clenched Fists and Open Hands” May 4th-6th CP: 35. “The Tale” (1917) 36. “Geography and Some Explorers” (1924) CP: 39. Christopher GoGwilt, “Writing and Geography” May 24th Term Paper Due

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Course Packet Table of Contents

1. Conrad Chronology 1 2. Leonard Orr, “Biography” 6 3. Frederick Karl, “Letters” 13 4. Joseph Conrad, “Selected Letters” 21 5. Witold Gombrowicz, “The Statue of Man”; Diary V2 (excerpt) 49 6. V.S. Naipaul, “Conrad’s Darkness” 57 7. Joseph Conrad, “Henry James: An Appreciation” 65 8. Geoffrey Harpham, “The Language of Mastery” 69 9. Edward Said, “Joseph Conrad: The Presentation of Narrative” 85 10. Joseph Conrad, “Karain: A Memoir” 97 11. Joseph Conrad, “Preface” to The Nigger o f the ‘Narc issus ’ (1897 125 12. Joseph Conrad, “Author’s Note, A Familiar Preface” A Personal Record 13. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” 137 14. Hawthorn, Lothe, Phelan, “Conrad and Narrative Theory” 149 15. Paul Bruss, “Teleological Diminishing” 161 16. V. N. Vološinov, “Language, Speech, and Utterance” 171 17. M. M Bakhtin, “Discourse in the Novel” 181 18. Aaron Fogel, “Ideas of Dialogue,” “The End of the Tether” 195 19. Lothe, “Conrad’s Lord Jim: Narrative and Genre” 233 20. Andrew M. Roberts, “Conrad and the Territory of Ethics” 243 21. Geoffrey Harpham, “Conrad’s Global Heartland” 259 22. Ian Watt, from Conrad in the 19th Century: “Marlow’s Inquiry” 273 23. Gail Fincham, “The Dialogism of Lord Jim” 285 24. Muriel Moutet, “Foreign Tongues” 295 25. Sanjay Krishnan, “Seeing the Animal” 305 26. Terry Eagleton, “Criticism as Ideology” 331 27. Fredric Jameson, “Romance and Reification” 337 28. James Guimond, Katherine Maynard, “Kaczynski, Conrad, Terrorism” 371 29. Joseph Conrad, “An Anarchist” 395 30. Andrew Long, “The Secret Policeman’s Couch” 409 31. Frank Kermode, “Secrets and Narrative Sequence” 429 32. Christopher GoGwilt, “The Rhetorical Invention of the West” 449 33. Joseph Conrad, “Autocracy and War” 463 34. Tony Tanner, “Conrad and the Last Gentleman” 475 35. Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan, “The Failure of Textuality” 493 36. Joseph Conrad, “Geography and Some Explorers” 502 37. Joseph Conrad, “Aothor’s Note,” Almayer ’s Fol ly 521 38. Joseph Conrad, “The Tale” 522 39. Jean M. Szczpien, “Composition, Intention, Design: Polonism” 534 40. Lynda Prescott, “Autobiography as Evasion” 562 41. Christopher GoGwilt, “Writing and Geography” 574

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Forethoughts

Consciousness finds itself facing the necessity of having to choose a language….The word in language…becomes ‘one’s own’ only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word. Many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them. Language is not a neutral medium that passes freely and easily into the private property of the speaker’s intentions. Expropriating it, forcing it to submit to one’s own intentions and accents, is a difficult and complicated process. M. M. Bakhtin

Words come to us from a distance; they were there before we were; we are born into them. Meaning them is accepting the fact of their condition. To discover what is being said to us, as to discover what we are saying, is to discover the precise location from which it is said; to understand why it is said from just there, and at that time. The art of fiction is to teach us distance—that the sources of what is said, the character of whomever says it, is for us to discover. Stanley Cavell

A book is interrupted discourse catching up with its own breaks. But books have their fate; they belong to a world they do not include, but recognize by being printed, and by being prefaced and getting themselves preceded with forewords. They are interrupted, and call for other books and in the end are interpreted in a saying distinct from the said. Emmanuel Levinas

All three passages, from thinkers severally concerned with the problem of alterity, manifestly apply to Conrad’s writerly sense of labor-in-vocation. They should be taken, similarly, to underscore your own task in this seminar—above all (to re-voice Conrad), to make you think, speak, and write. Requirements THIS DOCUMENT: You are responsible for familiarizing yourself with the syllabus and the information it details. Make sure you have read it thoroughly, and return to from time to time during the semester. It represents your first act of close reading.

Grade percentages • Mandatory attendance/Sedulous Participation 50% • Weekly postings to the discussion forum on Angel 15% • Final essay—15 pages 35% ATTENDANCE POLICY: Your attendance is crucial to the success of our collective endeavor. You are expected to attend class regularly and punctually, and to prepare your work attentively—that is, please be both present and present . Unless

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you face the most compelling of reasons, you should not miss a single class. If you accumulate more than two unexcused absences, your grade will drop in half-increments per additional absence (A becomes A-, A- becomes B+, etc. Attendance, informally speaking, during my office hours or by appointment is more than welcome. Please seek me out; that’s why I’m here. All students should prepare for, attend, and contribute to all class sessions, and should read and contribute to exchanges in the course’s online discussion forum on Angel. Formal writing assignments will include weekly postings to that forum a final conference paper of 15 pages due on May 13. *** Due to the heavy load of reading, and because the conference-paper represents a less solitary and more community-oriented enterprise, your final writing exercise in this seminar is designed for manageability rather than the sustained inquiry of a standard seminar-paper.

Routine

• Our course meets twice each week with the exception of holidays for a total of 15 weeks and 32 class-sessions. Please be present, on time, and most of all, vocal. This is a course on the writing of Joseph Conrad, an author peculiarly alive to the drama of voice, eye, and ear; language as both garrulity and conversational exchange. It is absolutely essential that you come prepared to speak: to the text, to each other, and to me. A class in which you remain silent is one in which you are only nominally present.

• ABR. Always Be Reading . It is equally essential that you come to class

having read the texts assigned. What a short story is assigned, as in week 2, make sure you complete it before Tuesday’s class. When a novel is assigned over four or six classes, pace yourself accordingly, but try to read ahead as much as you can; they tend to be medium-length but each forms a totality and needs to be approached as such otherwise classroom discussion will be inhibited.

• All reading assignments in the coursepack must also be completed. Some

essays can be skimmed, while others need more careful attention. Since this is a 300o level course, a dialogue between text and commentary is built-in. The critical essays on Conrad are thus to be read alongside the writings of Conrad. Readigs with asterisks are recommended, not required.

In Class • Please attend to each other. “Pedagogy is a relation, a network of obligations ….To be spoken to is to be placed under an obligation, an initial respect. Nor is this ‘respect’ a matter of deference; it is the simple fact of alertness to otherness.”

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(Bill Readings, The University in Ruins). I endorse these principles wholeheartedly, and encourage you to do the same. The scene of teaching, like certain moments in Conrad, is the scene of colloquy, of call-and-response. Consider your speaking role as dialogic: addressing others but also prompting, catalyzing, opening a space for their interventions. Aside from a craft and art of its own, speech is collective and communal: every word (says one of the theorists you will study) is “half someone else’s.” Differently put, even our words have ל“ ה“ י (la’shem ha’aretz u’mloah) inscribed upon them, i.e., use this speech with the owner’s blessing. • Be smart, be vocal, be invested; but be temperate and self-aware. • Please come to class on time: your punctuality is as importance as your attendance. Similarly, I request that you not bring food or drink into the classroom, or go in and out of the classroom while we are in session unless physiologically compelled.

Online • https://yu.elearning.yu.edu/ is the url that brings you to the Angel Course

management system mentioned above. If you are registered for the course, there will be a link there to the course site once you log in, but it also follows below: https://yu.elearning.yu.edu/section/default.asp?id=201001%5F12142. On the Course Tab page, click on Lessons, click on the Weekly Discussion Forums Folder, and click on the relevant weekly forum.

• The forum will serve as both an opportunity to think through aloud what you

are reading (and thus, a kind of journal), and a dry-run for classroom discussion. It also counts for 15% of your grade. By Friday of each week, I will post to our Angel course website some directional remarks (both prospective and retrospective) for your reading and for our collective dialogic labors in class. Additionally, each week, by Sunday evening, one student will be expected to post a short 300-450 word commentary on primary and/or secondary readings (ideally though not necessarily a combination of the two); we will proceed alphabetically through the roster. The remaining class members will “piggyback” on this lead posting with excurses of their own that build on or resituate the original posting. All such interventions should cut across the breadth of the readings, capturing their scope while articulating a synthetic approach to a problem they either define or aggravate.

• You may post for either Tuesday’s orThursday’s class, but please review all

postings before you attend (you should photocopy your own posting as well as any others that strike you). NB: Your comment should be heuristic not evaluative, just as the forum is designed for analysis not opinion. Please avoid

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comments about texts and/or their authors like the following: “I couldn’t make any sense of X.” “I totally disagree with Y.” “Z leaves me cold.”

• In a course with this much reading, what we gain in intensity and concentration

we lose in processing time and, it must be admitted, a space for decompression. The aim of the online is to move as much as possible of the exploratory “first-contact” of the course online so that students can review such material easily and at length, with classroom discussion focused on working through the critical questions thereby raised.

Writing

• Keep your postings to the discussion forum both limber and lucid. Think of

yourselves as both student and teacher: have your peers in mind as your concrete and immediate addressees.

• One of my own former literature instructors wrote, “Beauty often comes to us

through no work of our own, then leaves us prepared to undergo a giant labor.” The degree to which you exert yourself as readers is also the degree to which you receive—and give back—pleasure. Without of course presuming to legislate, I solicit you to want to express yourself and care about the words you choose and the sentences you shape. Literary criticism and theory—which includes your own contributions—is an essential part of literary experience.

• By April 13, please submit a preliminary topic-proposal for your term paper.

By April 27, share a revised and extended version of that prospectus with the rest of the class.

COMMUNICATION AND ACCESSIBILITY. My office hours for Spring are are Wednesdays, 2PM to 4PM. This is time reserved for you. Please feel free to meet and talk with me about anything related to the course: its material, any concerns you may have, its meaningfulness and utility. I will always respond to your emails, though not necessarily within twenty-four hours. As a general rule of thumb, an exchange over email is a precursor to fuller and more transparent face-to-face communication. Please keep in mind, though, that it is a tricky medium to get right in the absence of social cues, and is regularly deployed as a short cut to self-expression. A surviving member of the Donner Party after her rescue in 1847 wrote, “Never take no cutoffs.” Take her advice to heart. ACADEMIC INTEGRITY. Plagiarism and cheating are violations of YU’s policy on academic integrity. By registering in this course, you are promising to abide by all the requirements stated in this policy. Students in breach of it are liable to penalty, including disciplinary action beyond automatic course failure. Ignorance of what

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plagiarism involves will not be accepted as an excuse. It is your responsibility to recognize the difference between statements that do require documentation and those that do not. If you have any questions about documenting outside research and secondary resources and/or you are unsure of when to document secondary resources, consult the following link: http://www.yu.edu/catalog/undergrad/catalog9899/yeshiva.htm. The only acceptable writing help is from the Writing Center. Less obvious forms of plagiarism include

• Recycling your own work: “Submitting your own work as all or part of an assignment for two different courses [without] the permission of both professors” (xvii).

• Too much help from others: “…getting help from a fellow student, a friend, a relative, or some other person…. [who] exercise[s] skills on your behalf” (xx).

• Patchwriting: Creating “a pastiche of phrases and ideas so that your documentation is unacceptable even if you include a footnote or parenthetical reference” (xxiii).

STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES. Students with disabilities who are enrolled in this course and who will be requesting documented disability-related accommodations are encouraged to make an appointment with the Office of Disability Services, (646) 685-0118, during the first week of class. After approval for accommodations is granted, please contact me as soon as possible to ensure the successful implementation of those accommodations. Please keep in mind that you must obtain a new accommodation letter for each semester that you request accommodations. WRITING CENTER. The Wilf Campus Writing Center, in Furst 202, offers individualized tutoring that can support your writing for this course. All writers need feedback, even strong ones. Make an appointment and find out about drop-in hours at http://www.yu.edu/writingcenter. DEPARTMENT WEBSITE. Please visit it and learn about English at YC. http://www.yu.edu/yeshivacollege/departments/english/

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CONRADESE

I On men reprieved by its disdainful mercy, the immortal sea confers in its justice the full privilege of desired unrest. Through the perfect wisdom of its grace they are not permitted to meditate at ease upon the complicated and acrid savour of existence, lest they should remember and, perchance, regret the reward of a cup of inspiring bitterness, tasted so often, and so often withdrawn from before their stiffening but reluctant lips. They must without pause justify their life to the eternal pity that commands toil to be hard and unceasing, from sunrise to sunset, from sunset to sunrise: till the weary succession of nights and days tainted by the obstinate clamour of sages, demanding bliss and an empty heaven, is redeemed at last by the vast silence of pain and labour, by the dumb fear and the dumb courage of men obscure, forgetful, and enduring. [NN, Chap 4]

II In the middle of a shadowless square of moonlight, shining on a smooth and level expanse of young rice-shoots, a little shelter-hut perched on high posts, the pile of brushwood near by and the glowing embers of a fire with a man stretched before it, seemed very small and as if lost in the pale green iridescence reflected from the ground. On three sides of the clearing, appearing very far away in the deceptive light, the big trees of the forest, lashed together with manifold bonds by a mass of tangled creepers, looked down at the growing young life at their feet with the sombre resignation of giants that had lost faith in their strength. And in the midst of them the merciless creepers clung to the big trunks in cable-like coils, leaped from tree to tree, hung in thorny festoons from the lower boughs, and, sending slender tendrils on high to seek out the smallest branches, carried death to their victims in an exulting riot of silent destruction. [AF, Chap 11]

III “Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest. The air was warm, thick, heavy, sluggish. There was no joy in the brilliance of sunshine. The long stretches of the waterway ran on, deserted, into the gloom of over-shadowed distances. On silvery sandbanks hippos and alligators sunned themselves side by side. The broadening waters flowed through a mob of wooded islands; you lost your way on that river as you would in a desert, and butted all day long against shoals, trying to find the channel, till you thought yourself bewitched and cut off for ever from everything you had known once -somewhere -far away -in another existence perhaps. There were moments when one's past came back to one, as it will sometimes when you have not a moment to spare to yourself; but it came in the shape of an unrestful and noisy dream, remembered with wonder amongst the overwhelming realities of this strange world of plants, and water, and silence. And this stillness of life did not in the least resemble a peace. It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention…. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us -who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign -and no memories. “The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there -there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were -No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it -this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity -like yours -the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.” [HD, Chap 2]

IV

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All at once, in a revolt of misery and despair, he formed the crazy resolution to get out of that. And he began to thresh about with his arms and legs. But as soon as he commenced his wretched struggles he discovered that he had become somehow mixed up with a face, an oilskin coat, somebody's boots. He clawed ferociously all these things in turn, lost them, found them again, lost them once more, and finally was himself caught in the firm clasp of a pair of stout arms. He returned the embrace closely round a thick solid body. He had found his captain. [T, Chap 3]

V “Of course. Blown to small bits: limbs, gravel, clothing, bones, splinters--all mixed up together. I tell you they had to fetch a shovel to gather him up with.” [SA, Chap 9]

VI The twelve years that have elapsed since the publication of the book have not changed my attitude. I do not regret having written It. Lately, circumstances, which have nothing to do with the general tenor of this Preface, have compelled me to strip this tale of the literary robe of indignant scorn it has cost me so much to fit on it decently, years ago. I have been forced, so to speak, to look upon its bare bones. I confess that it makes a grisly skeleton. But still I will submit that telling Winnie Verloc's story to its anarchistic end of utter desolation, madness, and despair, and telling it as I have told it here, I have not intended to commit a gratuitous outrage on the feelings of mankind. [SA, Author’s Note]

VII

He went back heavily to a garden seat, dropped into it. This was the place for making a beginning of that writing which had to be done. The materials he had on him. “I shall always come here,” he said to himself, and afterwards sat for quite a long time motionless, without thought and sight and hearing, almost without life. He sat long enough for the declining sun to dip behind the roofs of the town at his back, and throw the shadow of the houses on the lake front over the islet, before he pulled out of his pocket a fountain pen, opened a small notebook on his knee, and began to write quickly, raising his eyes now and then at the connecting arm of the bridge. There glances were needless; the people crossing over in the distance seemed unwilling even to look at the islet where the exiled effigy of the author of the Social Contract sat enthroned above the bowed head of Razumov in the sombre immobility of bronze. After finishing his scribling, Razumov, with a sort of feverish haste, put away the pen, then rammed the notebook into his pocket, first tearing out the written pages with an almost convulsive brusqueness. But the folding of the flimsy batch on his knee was executed with thoughtful nicety. That done, he leaned back in his seat and remained motionless, the papers holding in his left hand. The twilight had deepened. He got up and began to pace to and fro slowly under the trees. “There can be no doubt that now I am safe,” he thought. His fine ear could detect the faintly accentuated murmurs of the current breaking against the point of the island, and he forgot himself in listening to them with interest. But even to his acute sense of hearing the sound was too elusive. “Extraordinary occupation I am giving myself up to,” he murmured. And it occurred to him that this was about the only sound he could listen to innocently, and for his own pleasure, as it were. Yes, the sound of water, the voice of the wind—completely foreign to human passions. All the other sounds of this earth brought contamination to the solitude of a soul. This was Mr. Razumov’s feeling, the soul, of course, being his own, and the word being used not in the theological sense, but standing, as far as I can understand, for that part of Mr. Razumov which was not his body, and more specially in danger from the fires of this earth. And it must be admitted that in Mr. Razumov’s case the bitterness of solitude from which he suffered was not an altogether morbid phenomenon. [UWE, Part 3]

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I A specimen of the Conradian “oxymoronic”—adjective and noun, subject and predicate dialectically linked across and absent principle of mediation. Phrases are conflicted, set against themselves. Language of equivocation II Conrad’s personal sense of displacement—informs a “style” (linked to theme, point of view, etc) which is a persistent sense of elsewhereness. What’s being described here? Things? The impression of things? Everything is alive with a sentience that issus from some unspecified source elsewhere. The most inert item is “a man.” Harpham, borrowing from Levinas calls this kind of style a “foreign interference” in English literature in which language seems to distance itself from agency and consciousness.

III The empty center at the heart of Conrad’s style; a privation of and in language where language and its referents fail to hook up. The passage is intensely specific about the effect of the experience but scrupulously vague about the concrete particulars that evoke that effect. The language loses its way, becomes uncoupled from its objects. Also, a fog or steam of words, part of the structure of imperialism, of overwhelming the other.

IV, V The syntax of what Charles Darwin calls a tangled bank, but emptied of grandeur—the admixture of elements, components of identity. Another Conradian filter, sorter: “It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.”

VI Conradian metaphor. From clothing to skeleton bypassing the midway stage of flesh—omission of the human from the process of inquiry. Conrad not as flesher out of political life but a skeleton’s tailor. The novel takes bare events and historical actions and clothes them in literary garb. Readers see through the robe of scorn to perceive not a body, character, living past, but a skeleton which is lade bare. The political novelist doesn’t recreate life, restore the flesh of the past. Not a dramatic recreation but an analytic interrogation of the tragic sequence of events. The author

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as something other than “creator,” the reader as something other than “reanimator.” Something that contradicts sympathetic naturalism; something closer to coercive inquiry. Art participates and does not transcend the murderousness of other historical relations, a nontranscendent process of inquiry caught up within other inquiries.

VII Meaning of “coercive.” Utterance, expression, conversation as force and disproportion. Being made to speak. Forced dialogue. Yarn, interrogation and interview, remaining abnormally silent. Conversation as a social contract answerable to a politics about the production of speech. Who gets to talk, and for how long. Who gets to silence the other, through either speech or silence. Dialogue as disproportionate form between speakers, as ritual, as unfree speech, even when monologic. Nonsentimental view of communication and discourse. Making you see. 1.) Razumov convincing himself to become and informer, a forced communicator. Not a soliloquy but permeated with demands of others. Not giving up—but giving up to. Coerced inner monologue. The scene itself—no grandeur: Jesus, Flaubert, Dostoevsky. Purely secular, a social contract. No grand dialectic between world and unworldly—just the world which includes a plurality of forced dialogues. 2) Also portrait of forced writing—like that confronting Conrad himself as author. Writing in exile as coercion, as forced spying. Razumov under arrest, immobilized—like the statue itself. Rousseau not an effigy of freedom but of the confusion between compulsion and freedom Conrad the writer in England, Razumov the writer in Geneva: writing as an oblique form of slavery. 3) The italicization of “Social Contract” –Conrad’s oblique signature in the text. He signs himself “Social Contract.” Pen-name as contracted form of real name and as social contract. Even personal naming under the sign of compulsion or force. A poetics of layering in the off-rhymes: personal name and political ideology made to chime with each other. Like “Kurtz” A name is less than a choice: a forced social contract. Author-and reader—as two more contractual subjects.

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Mr. Blunt kept quiet for a moment, then: “You see,” he addressed me in a most refined tone, “a mere man may suddenly find himself being kicked down the stairs.” I don’t know why I should have felt shocked by that statement. It could not be because it was untrue. The other did not give me time to offer any remark. He inquired with extreme politeness what did I know of South American republics? I confessed that I knew very little of them. Wandering about the Gulf of Mexico I had a look-in here and there; and amongst others I had a few days in Haiti which was of course unique, being a negro republic. On this Captain Blunt began to talk of negroes at large. He talked of them with knowledge, intelligence, and a sort of contemptuous affection. He generalized, he particularized about the blacks; he told anecdotes. I was interested, a little incredulous, and considerably surprised. What could this man with such a boulevardier exterior that he looked positively like, an exile in a provincial town, and with his drawing-room manner — what could he know of negroes? The Arrow of Gold, Chapter 1, 1919 “My contact with the faithful Pedro was much shorter and my observation of him was less complete but incomparably more anxious. It ended in a sudden inspiration to get out of his way. It was in a hovel of sticks and mats by the side of a path. As I went in there only to ask for a bottle of lemonade I have not to this day the slightest idea what in my appearance or actions could have roused his terrible ire. It became manifest to me less than two minutes after I had set eyes on him for the first time, and though immensely surprised of course I didn’t stop to think it out I took the nearest short cut—through the wall. This bestial apparition and a certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti only a couple of months afterwards, have fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal, to the end of my days. Of the nigger I used to dream for years afterwards. Of Pedro never. The impression was less vivid. I got away from him too quickly.” Victory, “Author’s Note”

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From "Gaspar Ruiz," A Set of Six, 1908 "Before another word could be spoken in that room I was amazed by hearing the sound of distant thunder. "I had carried in with me into the house a vivid impression of a beautiful clear moonlight night, without a speck of cloud in the sky. I could not believe my ears. Sent early abroad for my education, I was not familiar with the most dreaded natural phenomenon of my native land. I saw, with inexpressible astonishment, a look of terror in my chief`s eyes. Suddenly I felt giddy. The General staggered against me heavily; the girl seemed to reel in the middle of the room, the taper fell out of her hand and the light went out; a shrill cry of `Misericordia!` from the old woman pierced my ears. In the pitchy darkness I heard the plaster off the walls falling on the floor. It is a mercy there was no ceiling. Holding on to the latch of the door, I heard the grinding of the roof-tiles cease above my head. The shock was over. "`Out of the house! The door! Fly, Santierra, fly!` howled the General. You know, senores, in our country the bravest are not ashamed of the fear an earthquake strikes into all the senses of man. One never gets used to it. Repeated experience only augments the mastery of that nameless terror. "It was my first earthquake, and I was the calmest of them all. I understood that the crash outside was caused by the porch, with its wooden pillars and tiled roof projection, falling down. The next shock would destroy the house, maybe. That rumble as of thunder was approaching again. The General was rushing round the room, to find the door perhaps. He made a noise as though he were trying to climb the walls, and I heard him distinctly invoke the names of several saints. `Out, out, Santierra!` he yelled. "The girl`s voice was the only one I did not hear. "`General,` I cried, I cannot move the door. We must be locked in.` "I did not recognize his voice in the shout of malediction and despair he let out. Senores, I know many men in my country, especially in the provinces most subject to earthquakes, who will neither eat, sleep, pray, nor even sit down to cards with closed doors. The danger is not in the loss of time, but in this -that the movement of the walls may prevent a door being opened at all. This was what had happened to us. We were trapped, and we had no help to expect from anybody. There is no man in my country who will go into a house when the earth trembles. There never was -except one: Gaspar Ruiz. "He had come out of whatever hole he had been hiding in outside, and had clambered over the timbers of the destroyed porch. Above the awful subterranean groan of coming destruction I heard a mighty voice shouting the word `Erminia!` with the lungs of a giant. An earthquake is a great leveller of distinctions. I collected all my resolution against the terror of the scene. `She is here,` I shouted back. A roar as of a furious wild beast answered me -while my head swam, my heart sank, and the sweat of anguish streamed like rain off my brow. "He had the strength to pick up one of the heavy posts of the porch. Holding it under his armpit like a lance, but with both hands, he charged madly the rocking house

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with the force of a battering-ram, bursting open the door and rushing in, headlong, over our prostrate bodies. I and the General picking ourselves up, bolted out together, without looking round once till we got across the road. Then, clinging to each other, we beheld the house change suddenly into a heap of formless rubbish behind the back of a man, who staggered towards us bearing the form of a woman clasped in his arms. Her long black hair hung nearly to his feet. He laid her down reverently on the heaving earth, and the moonlight shone on her closed eyes. "Senores, we mounted with difficulty. Our horses getting up plunged madly, held by the soldiers who had come running from all sides. Nobody thought of catching Gaspar Ruiz then. The eyes of men and animals shone with wild fear. My general approached Gaspar Ruiz, who stood motionless as a statue above the girl. He let himself be shaken by the shoulder without detaching his eyes from her face. "`Que guape!` shouted the General in his ear. `You are the bravest man living. You have saved my life. I am General Robles. Come to my quarters to-morrow if God gives us the grace to see another day.` "He never stirred -as if deaf, without feeling, insensible. "We rode away for the town, full of our relations, of our friends, of whose fate we hardly dared to think. The soldiers ran by the side of our horses. Everything was forgotten in the immensity of the catastrophe overtaking a whole country." . . . . . . . Gaspar Ruiz saw the girl open her eyes. The raising of her eyelids seemed to recall him from a trance. They were alone; the cries of terror and distress from homeless people filled the plains of the coast remote and immense, coming like a whisper into their loneliness. She rose swiftly to her feet, darting fearful glances on all sides. "What is it?" she cried out low, and peering into his face. "Where am I?" He bowed his head sadly, without a word. ". . . Who are you?" He knelt down slowly before her, and touched the hem of her coarse black baize skirt. "Your slave," he said. She caught sight then of the heap of rubbish that had been the house, all misty in the cloud of dust. "Ah!" she cried, pressing her hand to her forehead. "I carried you out from there," he whispered at her feet. "And they?" she asked in a great sob. He rose, and taking her by the arms, led her gently towards the shapeless ruin half overwhelmed by a landslide. "Come and listen," he said.

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The serene moon saw them clambering over that heap of stones, joists and tiles, which was a grave. They pressed their ears to the interstices, listening for the sound of a groan, for a sigh of pain. At last he said, "They died swiftly. You are alone." She sat down on a piece of broken timber and put one arm across her face. He waited -then approaching his lips to her ear: "Let us go," he whispered. "Never -never from here," she cried out, flinging her arms above her head. He stooped over her, and her raised arms fell upon his shoulders. He lifted her up, steadied himself and began to walk, looking straight before him. "What are you doing?" she asked, feebly. "I am escaping from my enemies," he said, never once glancing at his light burden. "With me?" she sighed, helplessly. "Never without you," he said. "You are my strength." He pressed her close to him. His face was grave and his footsteps steady. The conflagrations bursting out in the ruins of destroyed villages dotted the plain with red fires; and the sounds of distant lamentations, the cries of Misericordia! Misericordia! made a desolate murmur in his ears. He walked on, solemn and collected, as if carrying something holy, fragile, and precious. The earth rocked at times under his feet.