Abstract
Although Conrad investigates space throughout his works, Under Western Eyes provides the most extended investigation into this phenomenon, and the most prominent example of space is also its most prominent spatial entity: Russia itself. Just as the Greenwich Meridian Observatory symbolically overshadows the events in The Secret Agent and Mt. Higuerota overshadows the events in Nostromo, so also does Russia symbolically (and literally) overshadow the events in Under Western Eyes. By the novel’s conclusion, Conrad finds not a single Russia but infinite Russias, each determined by the circumstances surrounding it. Furthermore, Conrad employs these infinite Russias to posit epistemological uncertainty and a concurrent skepticism toward the politics in Under Western Eyes and toward the West, whose eyes perceive but can never comprehend the Russia they observe.
His existence was a great cold blank, something like the enormous plain of the whole of Russia levelled with snow and fading gradually on all sides into shadows and mists.1
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Notes
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), 303.
Joseph Conrad, Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether, ed. Owen Knowles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 77.
Conrad himself had a similar experience while in the Congo in 1890. He is reputed to have told Edward Garnett: “Before the Congo I was just a mere animal.” See G. Jean-Aubry, Joseph Conrad: Life and Letters, 2 vols. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1927), 1: 141.
Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim, ed. J. H. Stape and Ernest W. Sullivan II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 253.
Joseph Conrad, Tales of Unrest, ed. Allan H. Simmons and J. H. Stape (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 40–41.
Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), 33. Hereafter, all quotations from Under Western Eyes will be taken from this edition and will be followed by their page number(s) in parentheses.
Amar Acheraïou, “Joseph Conrad’s Poetics: Space and Time,” L’Epoque Conradienne 27 (2001): 34.
Ian Watt, “Pink Toads and Yellow Curs: An Impressionist Narrative Device in Lord Jim,” in R. Jabłkowska ed., Joseph Conrad Colloquy in Poland, 5–12 September 1972 (Warsaw: Polish Academy of Sciences, 1975), 12. See also Watt’s Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (174–180, 270–286). Ian Watt sees this phenomenon as one where a character first experiences a mistaken perception and then corrects it. However, I tend to agree with Bruce Johnson, who sees these initial perceptions as unmediated rather than incorrect. See “Conrad’s Impressionism and Watt’s ‘Delayed Decoding,’” in Ross C. Murfin, ed., Conrad Revisited: Essays for the Eighties (University: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 53.
Daniel R. Schwarz, “Conrad’s Quarrel with Politics in Nostromo,” College English 59.5 (September, 1997): 552; emphasis in the original.
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© 2014 Robert T. Tally Jr.
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Peters, J.G. (2014). The Space of Russia in Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes. In: Tally, R.T. (eds) Literary Cartographies. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137449375_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137449375_7
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