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• W279400744 abstract "The Strange Short Fiction of Joseph Conrad: Writing, Culture, and Subjectivity. By Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 1999. x + 191 pp. 40 [pounds sterling]. Envisioning Africa: Racism and Imperialism in Conrad's `Heart of Darkness'. By Peter Edgerly Firchow. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. 2000. xvi + 258 pp. $34.95. Joseph Conrad and the Imperial Romance. By Linda Dryden. Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St Martin's Press. 2000. xii + 228 pp. 42.50 [pounds sterling]. Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan's latest book confirms that she is among the finest modern commentators on Conrad's work, combining a fine intelligence with a remarkable ability to explain, negotiate, and use a range of theoretical approaches. The Strange Short Fiction is divided into two parts and seven chapters, each beginning with a lucid, courteous survey of the huge theoretical and critical material on the particular issue she has located in the particular story or stories. Inevitably, perhaps, the chief problem in this kind of study is that the move from the framework of ideas to the individual story can seem contrived or conversely the story is wrested to meet the theoretical agenda. This is the case perhaps with Erdinast-Vulcan's reading of `The Idiots' and, especially, `Falk' where her solemn conclusion that `the narrator's story' is one `of initiation into Lacanian symbolic order and the symbolic castration it entails' (p. 128), seems at odds with the narrator's relaxed, self-mocking, humorous tone and constant guying of Herman's (and the bourgeois reader's?) squeamishness over the taboo of cannibalism. Usually, however, the theoretical positions initiate illuminating and provocative interpretations of the stories. Two examples must suffice. Part ii, Chapter 4, `The Romantic Paradox', opens with a brilliant discussion of modern views of Romanticism's ambivalent stance towards the self, subjectivity, and the imagination: and Erdinast-Vulcan's subsequent readings of `A Smile of Fortune' and `Freya of the Seven Isles' fully justify her claim `that the ambiguity and complexity of Conrad's attitude to the Romantic tradition is symptomatic of the unresolvable ideological tension and the ambivalence which lies at the core of Romanticism itself ` (p. 134). Similarly, her reading of `The Tale' accepts the familiar claim that it dramatizes `a state of epistemological uncertainty'. But calling upon Foucault and French feminist theory, Erdinast-Vulcan persuasively argues, through a close attention to the story's language, complex structure, and the Officer's peculiar formulations (such as `Somewhere where there was no choice but between truth and death'), that `The Tale' `is, in fact, a subversion of the most fundamental Platonic paradigm, the cultural episteme which conflates light, visibility, knowledge, and the truth; which equates knowledge with mastery; which is so central to Modernity itself' (p. 174). Peter Firchow's magisterial study should be required reading for everybody embroiled in the post-Achebe and heated postcolonial critical debate of the last two decades which accuses Conrad and often finds him guilty of endorsing racism and `of really supporting imperialism while seeming to subvert it' (p. 3). I do not have space to do justice to the subtlety and power of his argument, but I would recommend all readers to study his introduction which begins with a careful survey and definition of terms that Achebe and subsequent interpreters have far too easily taken for granted. At the time Conrad was writing, `the word racism did not exist' (though, of course, the phenomenon certainly did!). Moreover, as Firchow demonstrates, the word race in the modern primary sense of `one of the great divisions of mankind, having certain physical peculiarities in common' ranked only fourth at the turn of the century to definitions that are no longer current: `(a) A limited group of persons descended from a common ancestor; a house, family, kindred; (b) A tribe, nation, or people, regarded as of common stock; and (c) A group of several tribes or peoples, forming a distinct ethnical stock, e. …" @default.
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