By Yael Levin, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Johan Adam Warodell. Conrad’s Decentered Fiction. Cambridge UP, 2022. 290 pp. $99.99 hardback or ebook.
Johan Warodell’s Conrad’s Decentered Fiction is like no other book of Conrad criticism. It is, rather, a cabinet of curiosities: a collection of details that Conradians have consistently overlooked. The reason for this is double. First, such details resist sweeping generalizations and theoretical agendas; they are always in excess of meaning. Second, peripheral and secondary, they tend to congregate in the critic’s blind spot. The two points are contradictory: either we see them and cannot answer for their multiplicity, or we do not see them at all, as they are not consequential enough to draw our attention. Like other contradictions offered in this study, the two possibilities live together happily without need for synthesis. Regardless of its underlying cause, Warodell views the critic’s failure to account for these details as evidence of a significant gap between the critic’s output and the reading experience. This is an interesting point of departure for the book, as it harbors the promise of a different Conradian experience, one that will be more attuned to the stuff of the fiction than the ideological agendas an interpreter might foist upon it. An interpretation will always have to rely on given categories, forms of understanding that are outside the text and must be artificially imposed on it in the course of the hermeneutic process. Warodell will have none of that. As he notes: “by shifting our interest to the details, and decentering our gaze, we can pay more attention to the content of books rather than, say, entertain an idea about an overarching and superseding argument” (8).
A helpful conceptual hinge for the project is offered in the term “eclectic” —a word whose history rests precisely on the difference between an ideologically-motivated selection and a random collection of objects. The materials Warodell brings together are just that: catalogues of, inter alia, Conradian animals, hats and unpublished marginalia. The monograph sets out to prioritize detail above the thematic, categorical, topical and conceptual. This is an interesting experiment, even when it fails to do what it promises and reverts back to the very critical practice it warns against. In suggesting that “Conrad’s authorship is unified by its eclecticism” (11), Warodell shows he is not immune to the critic’s urge to center, to unify, to interpret. We are asked to consider doing things differently, but the book occasionally yields the suspicion that this is very hard to do. Though it shows the urge to unify or interpret might be difficult to overcome, it does offer methodological alternatives. Definitive arguments or interpretations are often dropped for speculation and an open-ended critical probing. What is lost in the exchange are the conclusions we often look for in a book of criticism. Perhaps this is precisely the point. Whether or not we are convinced by these new methods or accept this resistance to clear-cut claims, the invitation to do things differently is valuable. The experiment raises important questions about our contemporary critical methods and their limitations.
The experiment raises important questions about our contemporary critical methods and their limitations.
The first part of the book is devoted to Conrad’s marginalia: doodles, maps, and drawings that accompany the writing process. The chapter on maps offers a panoply of cartographic possibilities: real, imaginative; stage maps and stage directions. All are read as attempts to represent the story world outside language. Warodell treats these interchangeably; he is not interested in their ontological coordinates but in their relationship to the text. The investigation is speculative, as there is an attempt to describe a connection between the author’s creative process (as represented by the maps) and the artistic output (the work itself). Such a connection might be mimetic, inspirational, or operational. And these questions lead to others — is the connection between the two too intimate to be accessed by an audience of readers or critical thinkers? The chapter offers a survey of ways of thinking the maps with the work. Many connections are drawn, none are presented as definitive.
The following chapter offers a similar probing of the drawings attached to the writing of the unfinished novel The Sisters. The reading here is more programmatic. The attempt to date extant drawings so as to ascribe them to moments in the writing process brings genetic criticism in aid of a dismantling of critical dismissals of the work. Warodell wonders whether we can use Conrad’s drawings as a method to unravel Conrad’s interest in or engagement with the theme of the aspiring artist. In doing so he undermines previous devaluations of the work, critiques that hinge on an assumption of Conrad’s ignorance of the artform. Richard Curle’s statement that Conrad had no interest in visual art is one such example. The chapter works against this early critical response and its culmination in Zdzislaw Najder’s claim that The Sisters is a lesser work because it is not rooted in personal experience. By calling on biographical detail and the sketches themselves, the chapter tries to establish Conrad’s familiarity with, and interest in, the visual arts. It is surprising, then, that the argument concludes with the comment that “Regarding The Sisters and its autobiographical ingredients, the question about whether Conrad liked, practiced and understood painting should, perhaps, not be overemphasized” (59).
An even more surprising conclusion awaits the reader in the second part of the book where Warodell researches the flying sticks in Heart of Darkness. “Published Texts: Working Method and Philosophy,” may well be the most rewarding section of the study. It opens with a reading of Bertrand Russel’s logical atomism as a philosophic “justification” for Conrad’s work. Such framing of the chapter might be grating to literary critics who feel this is an unnecessary resurrection of the ancient quarrel between philosophy and literature. A more helpful critical reasoning behind the juxtaposition is soon provided. The challenge is not disciplinary but theoretical; Warodell’s turn to Russell is an invitation to look at Conrad’s art not through the prism of artistic impressionism but through the findings of analytic philosophy. This is not an obvious theoretical turn in a work devoted to Conrad’s details. Impressionism is an artistic style that is attuned to the very stuff of experience. In an early association of Conrad’s work with impressionism, Harold Davis discusses the revisions to The Secret Agent and their investment in detail. The “enlargement and clarification of the mood and background” is achieved “by rendering the details exactly instead of reporting them, the basic tenet of literary impressionism as Ford, James, and Crane defined it” (245). Warodell does not dispute these readings and their culmination in John G. Peters’s Conrad and Impressionism (2001). Rather, he presents Russell’s logical atomism as a method to complement the discussion: “by discussing the analytic philosophy of Bertrand Russell, the picture of Conrad’s writing and his impressionism is more explicitly tied to sensory detail than in Conrad and Impressionism, where expansive discussion of literary impressionism included ‘the gamut of objects of consciousness: physical objects, human subjects, events, ideas, space, and time’” (72).
This section of the book is particularly rewarding where it challenges Ian Watt’s long-accepted principle of delayed decoding. For Warodell, Watt’s concept is too teleologically oriented to be squared with a novella that values multiple meanings and openness. Instead of Watt’s suggestion of the either/or of the process of perception (we perceive the stimuli correctly as arrows or misperceive them as sticks) Warodell suggests a “tripartite transition” that can fit into “an endless chain of nonhierarchical observations” (80). This is an interesting alternative to a term all Conrad scholars have come to see as foundational for the author’s art. It provides a welcome rereading of a familiar Conradian strategy. If I do not wholeheartedly accept this tripartite transition, it is because it does not quite work with the text. Warodell is right to draw out the ambiguity and multivalence of Heart of Darkness. However, it is precisely in those moments of delayed decoding that ambiguity is dropped. There is a right and a wrong way of understanding the originally confusing sensory data — whether these are sticks flying through the air or carved ivory balls on sticks. Marlow’s realization that the company is under arrow attack, his epiphany on the nature of the ornamentations around Kurtz’s hut — these moments of comprehension are necessary and unambiguous. They are moments that the novella offers as anchors of orientation in a wealth of confusing and figurative detail that is otherwise opaque. It is because of this, one would imagine, that the critics Warodell mentions (for example, Andrew Michael Roberts) support Watt’s reading. One critic who is not mentioned here but offers an important gloss on the limitation of Watt’s term is Hugh Epstein. In Hardy, Conrad and the Senses (2020), Epstein suggests that delayed decoding “implies a destination for experience in the mind which, once reached, does away with the original phenomena of the experience by intellectual dematerialization into mental terms” (34). This is perhaps a more immediate way of pinpointing how the principle of decoding does away with the truth of sensory experience.
Much like the presentation of these sticks and ornaments in the novella, Warodell’s chapter ends with its own surprise revelation. Conrad’s arrows are not quite like the arrows of Victorian literature; they do not make the sounds “traditionally” expected. His conclusion is that “on the basis of decoding that covers textual analysis and historical context (to illustrate how arrows were perceived), it is difficult to see how the sticks could be arrows” (92). Marlow, it transpires, may have well gotten it wrong.
The following chapter rereads the major novels as books of distraction. Not distracted narrative, but narratives about distraction. Moments of or indications of distraction are brought out in readings of The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. Such rereadings are particularly welcome, as they offer a defamiliarizing return to well-known novels and the well-established critical tradition that accompanies them.
“Patterns and Preoccupations: Marginal Voices and Characters” closes the study with a collection of odds and ends — the voices of social outcasts in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus,’ hats in Nostromo, “The Secret Sharer” and The Secret Agent, and a catalogue of Conradian animals as they appear throughout the fiction. These irreconcilable details are entirely Warodell’s own; they have become a trademark of his critical work. And not without merit. This part of the book perhaps speaks for the project in its entirety: it is a book of details and facts and the lists that collect them. It is a book of speculation on those details and their relation to the author and his creative life. Here too we see that, even as he warns against overinterpretation and biographical interpretation, Warodell occasionally falls into these very traps. The call to avoid abstractions and deeper meanings is not easily realized. On hats, for example, Warodell states: “Conrad leaves us with the idea that while we may think that we wear hats, hats are clothed in meaning and may even wear us; there is no clear boundary between object and person; an everyday material object can be a key to understanding a complex individual and vice versa” (16).
In Conrad’s Decentered Fiction Warodell brings the leftovers, trivia, objects, animals, and marginalia into a meaningful if neglected center of meaning and coherence. This is not an obvious argument to make in a book devoted to decentering — but the urge to unify here is still present and real. Warodell’s comment about Conrad’s doodles in The Shadow Line may well be true of much of the critical work offered throughout the study: “what exists at the margin may be highly telling about the central message” (24). The dissonance arising from the pairing of the title and this ultimate message notwithstanding, there is value in bringing the disparate parts of the Conradverse together. The book draws our attention to the imaginative and creative work invested in the novels beyond the words on the page, those details that escape our notice and fail to attract our interest. The compelling takeaway is that writing is more than the sum of the words we read, and often more than the sum of the words that are finally published or are ever encountered.
Warodell suggests we rethink Conrad through his eclecticism, that we introduce into Conrad scholarship terms that could be coined only by reading his fiction differently; delayed miscoding, unreality effect, unprofessional narrator, distracted reading, and in medias distractionis — these are some of the newly minted terms one will find in the course of the reading. The book issues from the understanding that it is only by reading the details that we do justice to Conrad’s ideology and poetics. As Warodell concludes, “Conrad was fiercely and philosophically opposed to overreliance on generalizations and theoretical abstractions, and this outlook affected his writing” (185).
Works Cited
Davis, Harold E. “Conrad’s Revisions of The Secret Agent: A Study in Literary Impressionism.” Modern Language Quarterly, vol. 19, 1958, pp. 244–54.
Epstein, Hugh. Hardy, Conrad and the Senses. Edinburgh UP, 2020.
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Yael Levin is an associate professor of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, president of the Joseph Conrad Society of America and associate provost of the Rothberg International School. She is currently working on “The Evolution of Attention in Modern and Contemporary Culture” at the Mandel Scholion Research Center. Her monographs include Joseph Conrad: Tracing the Aesthetic Principle in Conrad's Novels (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and Joseph Conrad: Slow Modernism (Oxford UP, 2020). Her work on modernism, postmodernism, narratology, the subject, and disability has appeared in journals and volumes including: The Conradian, Conradiana, Partial Answers, Twentieth-Century Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, and Journal of Beckett Studies.
