Conrad's Decentered Fiction

One of the greatest novelists and stylists of the English language, Joseph Conrad—born in 1857 as Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski—has become a fixture of postcolonial debates and theoretical literary analyses. Johan Adam Warodell has written a joyful book with a very different approach, one that brings together various sorts of marginal aspects of Conrad's art, from literal marginalia to personal sketches to the eclectic details of the narratives themselves. As such, the book is of interest to all those who might appreciate the achievements of Conrad's literary art, but who are also interested in him as a craftsman, a logistical writer, a doodler, a traveler, and an amateur sketch artist.Warodell proceeds by suggesting and fostering the concept of “distracted reading,” whereby one remains open to precisely those elements that might seem unimportant in order to discover that “the trivial is significant” (p. 185). Perhaps the most valuable part of the study is its meditation on the marginalia of the manuscripts, including maps that Conrad drew as part of his creative process, including newly digitized maps found on the manuscripts of Nostromo and Victory. Warodell is careful and nuanced in his approach to these drawings, which he notes sometimes conflict with the corresponding geographies of the narratives. Helpfully likening the writer to an architect, he helps us see some of the complexity of what it means to be a “builder of space.”Warodell also presents two of Conrad's own sketches, both drawings of women, which Warodell dates to the period in which Conrad was writing about a visual artist in his unfinished novel, The Sisters. These drawings are both striking and well-done, attesting to Conrad's facility with visual design and his faculty of eye-hand coordination reinforcing his aesthetic conviction doing justice to the surfaces of the visible world. Warodell dates the works’ composition persuasively and analyzes The Sisters thoughtfully. I found myself wondering, however, at a certain disjunction between what Warodell identifies as the modernism of Conrad's conception of art and the sheer conventionality of the sketches themselves, which look very much like the illustrations that accompany stories in nineteenth-century magazines. Unlike Conrad's complex narratives, these designs are not ambiguous in their form or disorienting in their effect—there is no question that they are women and not a vase, as it were. And while Warodell offers lines from the narratives that might correspond to each image (a flower-seller and a lady with a parasol), a valuable effect of reproducing these images is contrastive: fidelity to such surfaces is but the beginning of Conrad's art.Then the book ventures into the philosophic realm, where Warodell challenges—or rather complicates—Ian Watt's coined term of “delayed decoding,” suggesting that “delayed miscoding” is perhaps more accurate because “Marlow's narrative does not progress on the truth axis, but questions the very existence of such an axis” (p. 92). Warodell revisits Watt's famous example of the flying “sticks” and makes the case that such sticks could not have been “arrows,” whatever they were (p. 90), suggesting that Marlow tells the story in a way that undermines our certainty about the truth of the episode. While Warodell is surely right to argue for the destabilizing effect of Conrad's narrative—not to mention the importance of getting one's history right if one is to use it—nevertheless, one might still acknowledge the practical value of Watt's phrase when analyzing Conrad's narrative strategy. Whatever indeterminacy about the objects that kill the helmsman of the Roi de Belges does not change the fact of his death in the story, nor the disjunctions, both temporal and otherwise, between facts and their interpretation. Of course, Warodell is right to remind us that overemphasizing the “decoding” aspect of “delayed decoding” (and students love the idea—once introduced to it, they can't let it go) risks missing the deeper and all-pervasive mystery of Conrad's world.Warodell's study then moves to cataloging the multiplicity of animals that appear throughout the narratives—over 150 different types. Often these animals appear as metaphors or similes, which accounts for why readers might pass over them, attending instead to that to which they describe. Warodell contends that the fanciful way in which Conrad anthropomorphizes animals, from “outraged cockatoo” to “passionate fish” to “sentimental bats,” disrupts our expectations and promotes wonder and reflection, not only about the non-human beings, but the human ones as well.The phrase of the title—“Conrad's decentered fiction”—might be accompanied by the phrase “decentered reading.” Is it the fiction or the reader's attention that is decentered? Just because the smallest details in the works might make sense in a multiplicity of ways does not mean that individual stories might not offer central dilemmas to ponder or crucial actions with consequences. Warodell justly celebrates Podmore's conjuring of the coffee on the Narcissus as “heroic” and even miraculous in the wake of the storm—indeed, “As long as she swims, I will cook!” was an affectionate tagline between Conrad and his wife—but the heroism that the sailors (and readers) might grant him in that moment arguably fosters his ensuing pride and the sadistic zeal with which he later torments Jimmy.Warodell exhorts us to pay attention to the smallest details—and thus to notice the integrity of Conrad's craft. This does not mean that what is peripheral is simply equivalent to what is central—which only inverts the dichotomy without escaping the binary thinking—but rather that the details on the periphery often contain their own submerged and suggestive backstories and mysteries, that the vision is always more complex and fuller than we thought. Nor in his concept of “distracted reading” does Warodell advocate free-for-all interpretation ripping everything out of context. Rather, he is exhorting us to delight in what we might otherwise ignore, to look at the page and then to look at it again. In a writer as great as Conrad, that activity always garners worthwhile new discoveries—as Warodell has beautifully shown.