Abstract
Said, discussing the interplay between writing, speaking and seeing in Conrad’s fiction, has suggested that, characteristically, Conrad’s narratives ‘orginate in the hearing and telling presence of people’ (95).1 But these narratives also often assume (as Chapter 6 has demonstrated) the currency of rival versions and, indeed, are often positioned among competing narratives. Although these spoken narratives evoke a cornrnunity, their existence as writing implicitly sets that evoked community against the actual isolation of the scene of writing and the scene of reading. Where gossip anticipates a community, writing produces the reader as solitary individual. Conrad’s narratives circulate gossip within a community, but also, as in ‘Karain’ or Lord Jim, repeatedly return to the solitary scenes of writing and of reading.
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Notes
Edward Said, ‘Conrad: the Presentation of Narrative’, in The World, The Text and The Critic (1984; London: Vintage, 1991), 90–110; 95; hereafter cited as WTC.
As Robert Eaglestone puts it, ‘the text’s very existence is based on absence’: ‘representation comes into existence in order to represent what is absent’ (Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas [Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997], 46).
See J. B. Hartley, ‘Maps, knowledge, and power’, in D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels (eds), The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the symbolic representation, design and use of past environments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 277–312.
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, On the margins of discourse: the Relation of Literature to Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 85.
Roland Barthes, Image Music Text (London: Fontana, 1977), 141–8, hereafter cited as IMT.
J. Derrida, Dissemination (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981), 146
Jerry Brotton, ‘“This Tunis, sir, was Carthage”: Contesting colonialism in The Tempest ‘in Ania Loomba and Martin Orkin (eds), Postcolonial Shakespeares (Routledge, 1998), 23–42; hereafter cited in the text as TT.
See Leslie Heywood, ‘The Unreadable Text: Conrad and “The Enigma of Woman” in Victory’, Conradiana, 26.1 (Spring 1994), 3–19, for an interpretation of this motif that contests the idea of absolute difference.
Paul Brown, ‘“This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”’: The Tempest and the discourse of colonialism’, in Jonathan Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (eds), Political Shakespeare: New essays in cultural materialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 48–71.
Peter Hulme Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean 1492–1797 (1986; Routledge, 1992), 88–134. Brotton notes how The Tempest ‘carries resonances of different geographical trajectories’ (TT31). Where (post)colo-nial criticism of the play has emphasised the ‘New World’ encounter, Brotton attends to the Mediterranean and ‘Old World’ aspects of the play, the neglected ‘eastern frontier’ of maritime expansion, to situate the play precisely at the ‘geopolitical bifurcation between the Old World and the New’.
Indeed, Peter Bagnall has convincingly connected Ricardo with the Ripper murders. See Peter Bagnall, ‘Joseph Conrad and Jack the Ripper’, Unpublished D.Phil. Thesis, University of Oxford, 1998.
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© 2000 Robert Hampson
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Hampson, R. (2000). Absence and Presence in Victory . In: Cross-Cultural Encounters in Joseph Conrad’s Malay Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598003_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598003_8
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