Abstract
In the 1901–2 period Conrad wrote five stories, including two of his great tales, ‘Typhoon’ and ‘The End of the Tether’. While the former was published with ‘Falk: A Reminiscence’, ‘Amy Foster’, and ‘Tomorrow’ in Typhoon (1903), the latter appeared with ‘Youth’ and ‘Heart of Darkness’ in Youth (1902). ‘Falk: A Reminiscence’ and ‘Amy Foster’ reflect Conrad’s continuing interest in the epistemological quest of a dramatised first person narrator. But the other tales are significant departures in their exploration of the possibilities of the omniscient voice. When Conrad discovered that he did not want to dramatise exclusively subjective states of mind, he turned again to the omniscient narrator. Although Conrad had used a primitive version of that voice in his first two novels and in a few of his early stories, he now learned in these stories how to control the readers’ responses by means of subtle modulations of tone, changing perspectives, deft withholding of crucial information, and manipulation of chronology. Conrad originally experimented with these techniques when writing his Marlow tales. But he still had to adopt them to the omniscient voice that he preferred when he was examining a panoramic situation or when he knew exactly what he thought about the central dramatic situation of a work. As we shall see, much of the art of the next two novels, Nostromo and The Secret Agent, depends upon the subtlety and control of the omniscient voice.
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Notes
In his Conrad: A Reassessment (Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1952), Douglas Hewitt suggests that the title figure’s effect on the narrator is an extremely important part of ‘Falk: A Reminiscence’ (pp. 40–5). Despite his penetrating comments, the disregard of the narrator’s role has led to the misunderstanding and relative neglect of this excellent tale. See also Bruce Johnson, ‘Conrad’s “Falk”: Manuscript and Meaning’, Modern Language Quarterly, vol. xxvi (June 1965). In his important article Johnson underestimates the importance of the narrator’s relationship with Falk and thus writes that ‘the story is ill-suited for the intellectual and emotional burden it simultaneously carries and avoids’ (p. 276).
John A. Lester, jun., Journey Through Despair 1890–1914: Transformations in British Literary Culture ( Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968 ), p. 41.
In a splendid article, Robert Andreach, ‘The Two Narrators of “Amy Foster”’, Studies in Short Fiction, vol. ii (1965), pp. 262–9, argues that Dr Kennedy diminishes his own guilt. Karl discusses the biographical implications of Amy Foster’, particularly the ‘exogamous marriage, a continuing aspect of Conrad’s work’. See Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives pp. 513–15.
John Howard Wills, ‘Conrad’s ‘Typhoon’: A Triumph in Organic Art’, North Dakota Quarterly, vol. xxx (1962), pp. 62–70.
For views of women and sexuality in the period, see Hynes, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968) chaps. 5,6, 8.
See William Moynihan, ‘Conard’s “The End of the Tether”: A New Reading’, Modern Fiction Studies, vol. iv (Summer 1958), pp. 173–7;
reprinted in Robert W. Stallman, The Art of Joseph Conrad: A Critical Symposium (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1960), pp. 186–91; See pp. 187–8.
William Blackburn (ed.), Joseph Conrad: Letters to William Blackwood and David S. Meldrum (Durham: Duke University Press, 1958), Autumn, 1902, pp. 169–70.
Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953 ), p. 13.
Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage, 1957 ), P. 71.
Lawrence Graver, Conrad’s Short Fiction (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969) argues that Whalley’s end is not heroic, for ‘Whalley, like Kurtz, sees the horror of his life and his memory perpetuated by an enormous lie’ (p.118; see pp. 113–19).
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© 1980 Daniel R. Schwarz
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Schwarz, D.R. (1980). Conrad’s shorter fiction: 1901–1902. In: Conrad: Almayer’s Folly to Under Western Eyes. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-05189-2_6
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