Abstract
Conrad’s political novels provide one of the best literary examples of the relationship between an ironic narrative mode and a realistic conception of historical understanding. In the Introduction, I distinguished between, on the one hand, modes of thinking which manage to be critical without claiming access to superior truths and, on the other, the ‘demystifying operations’ of the ideologist (to use the term with its ‘liberally’ fashioned pejorative connotations). Such distinctions are particularly important to an understanding of Conrad. Few other novelists have been as preoccupied with the implications of believing in individual ways of seeing as opposed to the vague historical perspectives of ideology.1 ‘To each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a given civilization present a different picture …’: both of the passages quoted above direct our attention to the extreme difficulty of understanding and interpreting historical phenomena with any confidence. They describe acts of ‘seeing’ which help to bring into focus the characteristics of whole civilizations, but proceed with a sharp awareness of how partial any individual perspective is, and how incapable of intuiting a higher-order ‘interpretative code’2 transcending the limits of individual perceptions.
No one is more conscious than the writer with what limited means and strength he has addressed himself to a task so arduous. And even if he could look with greater confidence upon his own researches, he would hardly thereby feel more assured of the approval of competent judges. To each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a given civilization present a different picture …
Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy
He had lowered at last his fascinated glance; she too was looking down, and standing thus before each other in the glaring light, between the four bare walls, they seemed brought out from the confused immensity of the Eastern borders to be exposed cruelly to the observation of my Western eyes. And I observed them. There was nothing else to do.
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes
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Notes
This preoccupation can be related to Conrad’s stylistic preference for ‘definite images’ over abstractions. He has been criticised for ‘failing’ to distinguish varieties of ideological doctrine, but this can be seen as a deliberate strategy for directing attention towards the abstractions of ideology as such rather than towards its specific forms. See E. K. Hay, The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1926; 1927) pp. 17–18 and 283. Z. Najder, ‘Conrad and Rousseau: Concepts of Man and Society’, in N. Sherry (ed.), Joseph Conrad: A Commemoration (London: Macmillan, 1976) p. 87, also discusses Conrad’s concentration on lived history and ‘the individuality of phenomena rather than their universal validity’.
J. Burckhardt, Reflections on History (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1943; 1950) p. 174.
P. Gay, Style in History (London: Jonathan Cape, 1974) pp. 176–8. One of the best summaries of Burckhardt’s contribution as a historian is to be found in Gay’s chapter ‘Burckhardt: The Poet of Truth’.
Lawrence to Edward Garnett (30 Oct [–2 Nov] 1912, in The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. J. T. Boulton, i (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) 465.
I. Howe, Politics and the Novel (New York: Horizon Press, 1957) p. 92; and see Jameson, The Political Unconscious, p. 286, on Utopian transfiguration.
A. Fleishman, Conrad’s Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967) pp. 48 and 232–7; D. R. Schwarz, Conrad: ‘Almayer’s Folly’ to ‘Under Western Eyes’ (London: Macmillan, 1980) pp. 109–10; and B. Ford, Introduction to Under Western Eyes, pp. 45–6.
This is the argument put forward in, for example, R. Siegle, The Politics of Reflexivity: Narrative and the Constitutive Poetics of Culture (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986) pp. 66–121 (‘Conrad, Early Modernism, and the Narrator’s Relation to His Material’).
J. Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860; Oxford: Phaidon, 1981) pp. 81 and 92–3; and see Gay, Style in History, pp. 158–61.
M. Oakeshott, Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays (1962; London: Methuen, 1977) p. 153; and see J. H. Plumb, The Death of the Past (London: Macmillan, 1969) p. 17.
Conrad to Garnett, 20 Jan 1900, in The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, (ed.) F. R. Karl and L. Davies, ii (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) 246. See also Hay, The Political Novels of Conrad, p. 15, on Conrad’s opposition to those who believed it possible to withdraw altogether from political commitment: ‘Man cannot retire’, being a fundamentally political animal.
Burke, A Grammar of Motives, pp. 33–4; S. Bok, Secrets: On the Ethics of Concealment and Revelation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982; 1986) p. 21; and see, for example, Meyerhoff, The Philosophy of History in our Time, p. 227, and Booth, Modern Dogma, p. xvi.
Conrad, Under Western Eyes, pp. 104 and 69 (pt 1, chs. 1–2). Several critics suggest that Razumov’s ‘famous credo’ can be ‘taken as a confession of faith on Conrad’s part’. See for example Fleishman, Conrad’s Politics, pp. 228–9, and J. Baines, Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography (1960; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) pp. 437–8. Though there are aspects of the declaration which one can assume to agree with Conrad’s views (such as the contrasting of historical continuity and tradition with violent, ideological changes), the use of capitalised abstractions suggests how dangerous any such ‘programmatic’ definitions can be.
J. Conrad, Notes on Life and Letters (London: J. M. Dent and Sons, 1924) p. 17.
White, Metahistory, pp. 262–3; and J. Burckhardt, Judgements on History and Historians, tr. H. Zohn (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1959) p. 215.
J. Conrad, Author’s Note, Within the Tides (1915; Edinburgh: John Grant, 1925) pp. vii–viii.
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© 1990 Lee Horsley
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Horsley, L. (1990). Irony as Historical Realism: Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. In: Political Fiction and the Historical Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-11055-1_4
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