This chapter considers how the powerfully controversial modernist novelist Joseph Conrad acquired his reputation as the first truly ‘global’ writer. A trilingual Polish expatriate, Conrad’s transnational identity was shaped by – and in turn helped shape our understandings of – a new sense of global interconnectedness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In texts such as Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim and Nostromo, his engagement with what we would now call globalization is bedevilled by paradox and ambivalence. His writing scorns European globetrotters even as it beholds the world via a privileged Western gaze. His innocent fascination with maps is haunted by a guilty awareness of their political and ideological functions. Under no illusions about the vicious impact of European imperialism on non-European cultures, he often represents those cultures as voiceless, one-dimensional and exotically unknowable. Finally, his idealization of the sea as a bracingly pure alternative to the sordid political world of terra firma is steadily undercut by his sense that maritime space has long since been colonized by capitalist modernity.

If the reports of recent critics are anything to go by, Under Western Eyes should carry a health warning: a novel about the duplicity of language, it is itself adroitly duplicitous; an ‘aggressive text’, it ‘hates its readers’ and ‘routs the liberal subject’. This is evidently not a novel for the faint-hearted, yet rumours of its aggressive designs on the unsuspecting reader have, if anything, served only to enhance its reputation. In the wake of a series of scholarly reassessments, many of which lay powerful emphasis of the linguistic self-consciousness of the novel, the critical standing of Under Western Eyes has never been higher.

Espionage and political violence are as central to Under Western Eyes as they were to The Secret Agent; the novels also share a decidedly edgy relationship with the ‘general reader’. But in terms of its representation of language and human subjectivity, Under Western Eyes might be read as a brutally unsentimental rewriting of Lord Jim. Kirylo Sidorovitch Razumov, the novel's studiously innocuous hero, commits a grievous betrayal of trust and is pursued from St Petersburg to Geneva by compromising rumours and echoes of his guilt. The St Petersburg/Geneva dichotomy superficially resembles the Patna/Patusan split in Lord Jim; but for Razumov there is no Patusan, no compensatory linguistic utopia, no Jim-like martyrdom – only a final deafness that functions both as a sadistic ‘remedy’ for his fear of words and as a violent caricature of the general reader's own ‘deafness’ to the finer nuances of Conrad's prose.

Chance is Conrad's problem novel. Published in 1914, it occupies an ambiguous position between his most celebrated creative phase, which culminated with Under Western Eyes (1911), and the comparatively neglected work of his ‘decline’. It is the most ‘feminine’, or female-oriented, of Conrad's novels, but its engagement with issues of gender is tainted by the arch misogyny of Marlow, whose clumsy and unsympathetic line in anti-feminist repartee is never convincingly challenged or dialogized in the text. Also problematic is the novel's unwieldy narrative structure, which, with its convoluted time-scheme and strange ensemble of variously limited or unreliable narrating voices, presses the techniques of ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Lord Jim dangerously close to self-parody. Any serious reading of Chance must begin by confronting these problems, not in a bid to explain them away, but in order to move to a fuller understanding of the vexing relationship between the novel's curious structure and provocative substance.

The notion of Conrad as an irredeemably homocentric, even ‘macho’ writer has been challenged so forcibly in recent years that it is worth reminding ourselves of the kind of material that gave rise to it in the first place. The following remarks, by the narrator of ‘Because of the Dollars’, suggest that the view of Conrad's world as an exclusively masculine environment is not without foundation in the texts themselves: ‘Ours, as you remember, was a bachelor crowd; in spirit anyhow, if not absolutely in fact. There might have been a few wives in existence, but if so they were invisible, distant, never alluded to.’

In 1907, when he already had some of the greatest novels in English to his name, Joseph Conrad confessed to Marguerite Poradowska that ‘l'Anglais m'est toujours une langue etrangère’. Like so many of the major modernist authors whose work has been assimilated into the canon of English literature, Conrad was an ‘outsider’, a foreigner on whom posterity has conferred the status of honorary Englishman, but who probably belongs with that later group of twentieth-century writers described by George Steiner as ‘extraterritorials’. Born in the Czarist-ruled Polish Ukraine in 1857, Conrad joined the French navy in 1874 before obtaining a berth on a British vessel in 1878. Seventeen years later he published his first novel, Almayer's Folly, the beginning of a career that produced some of the most venturesome fiction in the literature of what was his third language. The transformation of Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski into Joseph Conrad was a prodigious feat of literary self-fashioning; but Conrad took profound exception to being paraded in the literary journalism of his day as ‘a sort of freak, an amazing bloody foreigner writing in English’. It is very easy – and rather misleading – to assume that the English language was an obstacle between Conrad and creative expression; one could argue with equal justification that Conrad's sense of estrangement from his adoptive tongue was the very enabling condition of his fiction. We would do well to consider the possibility that Conrad wrote his masterpieces because rather than in spite of the English language.

This chapter will examine the speech communities of Conrad's nautical writings and early Malay fiction, and consider the emergence in his short stories of a model of storytelling that would find its most sophisticated expression in the Marlow narratives. I want to suggest that, whatever affiliations Conrad has to premodern linguistic communities, his engagement with the powerful tensions between speech and writing, telling and listening, leads him not backwards into traditional storytelling but forwards into a precocious modernism.

Conrad's memoir, The Mirror of the Sea, can be read as an introduction for the lay reader to the lexicon of the sea, full of praise for the exemplary clarity of ‘sea-talk’ and disdain for ‘lubberly book-jargon’. Sloppy imitations of ‘sea-talk’ in the popular press incur Conrad's special displeasure: the bogus romanticization of second-hand versions of nautical life is doubly obnoxious to this sailor-turned-writer. There is a certain territorial pride in Conrad's scornful critique of those ignorant landlubbers who toy carelessly with the sailor's linguistic tools. Conrad sees nautical language as a precision instrument earmarked for a specific purpose and not to be tampered with by amateurs. He lingers on particular words and phrases with affection – and perhaps a touch of envy towards sailors, who, unlike professional writers, experience no trouble in finding le mot juste:

The Arrow of Gold (1919) belongs with The Rover (1923) and the unfinished Suspense (1925) as part of the ‘trilogy’ of Mediterranean adventure stories written during the final years of Conrad's literary career. None of these novels enjoys a sparkling critical reputation, but The Arrow of Gold has been singled out by no less an authority than Zdzislaw Najder as ‘Conrad's weakest novel’. As Conrad's best biographer, Najder is better qualified than anyone to assess whether the supposedly autobiographical elements of this novel – the Carlist gun-running, the passionate love affair, the duel – have any real basis in the facts of Józef Korzeniowski's life; but his verdict on the artistic qualities of The Arrow of Gold is too peremptory. Recent critics, including Robert Hampson, Susan Jones, and Andrew Michael Roberts, have rediscovered The Arrow of Gold as fiction rather than spurious autobiography; they have focused usefully on its subversive treatment of generic conventions, its exploration of gendered identities, and its representations of visuality and the male gaze. The novel has emerged in recent years as a strange hybrid of the romantic adventure tale and the modernist Künstlerroman, an aesthetically self-conscious text whose rough-and-ready seafaring hero rubs shoulders with Marseilles bohemia in a landscape crowded with sculptures, painting, curios, and all the paraphernalia of fine art.

Though Conrad's readers have begun to take this novel seriously as a modernist text, relatively little has been said of its linguistic self-consciousness.

In his book on gossip in nineteenth-century fiction, Jan B. Gordon discerns, on the margins of a society where value is vested in the written word (marriage contracts in Jane Austen, legal documents in Bleak House, the erudite tomes under composition in Middlemarch), an ‘oral community’ whose discursive share in informational transfer is consistently negated by authority as mere ‘idle talk’. Orality in these fictions, as in Conrad, can simultaneously be grasped both as ‘metaphysical Origin’ (the Voice as temporally and ontologically prior to writing) and as a subversive interruption of written master-narratives. I have already argued that Conrad's fiction subscribes to the former conception of the Voice, that the pseudo-orality of much of his fiction betrays an allegiance to the ‘phonocentric’ tradition of western thought. But in ‘Falk’ and Victory, texts that anathematize the subversive babble of gossip, Conrad might appear to have repudiated the naïve myth that meaning is immanent in the spoken word. On closer examination, however, gossip in Conrad bears many of the defects traditionally ascribed to writing: it is a dangerous supplement to authentic language, a groundless, parasitic discourse, propagating itself freely in the absence of an originating Voice. In its use of ‘rootless’ gossip as a foil for its own claims to linguistic authenticity, Conrad's fiction closely echoes Martin Heidegger's philosophical denunciation of ‘idle talk’:

According to Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Secret Agent is ‘the first, and really the only, written text in Conrad's entire oeuvre’. One might object that all Conrad's tales are, willy-nilly, ‘written’; but, prior to The Secret Agent, Conrad's fiction is dominated by the ‘writing of the voice’. Even Nostromo, with its string of references to the folk legends of Azuera and its lengthy quotations from Captain Mitchell's anecdotes, betrays a lingering formal affiliation to oral tradition. Uniquely, however, The Secret Agent has no recourse to the utopian myths of transparent communal discourse that sustained the earlier fictions. The tone of impersonal irony that prevails in The Secret Agent is a far cry from the cosy atmosphere of ‘Youth’ or Lord Jim, where the reader automatically qualifies as an honorary listener, invited to pull up a chair with Marlow's friends and enjoy a good after-dinner yarn. The utopian dimension in Conrad's fiction previously extended into his conception of the relationship between text and reader, a relationship to which Conrad hoped to restore some of the direct intimacy of that between storyteller and listener. As Conrad's fiction became more sophisticated, however, it became less hospitable. Growing in creative power and ambition, he felt less need of the enabling fiction of a storytelling situation; the novels he composed at the height of his powers – Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes – make the fewest concessions to the general reader.

‘Conrad must have asked himself again and again: Is this novel to be a spoken or a written narrative, a story or a history?’ These, according to Albert J. Guerard, are the disarmingly simple either/or questions that vexed Conrad as he worked on his most ambitious novel, Nostromo (1904). Not that you would have suspected any such authorial indecision from the novel's magisterial opening pages, where academic history appears to have displaced oral story as the model of Conrad's fictional narrative. The narrator who introduces us to the volatile Latin American republic of Costaguana is well-versed in the region's colonial and commercial history, knows all there is to know about its remarkable landscape and peculiar weather-systems, and doesn't need to borrow the eyes and ears of his characters to witness its tempestuous political affairs. Nor does he choose to draft in a specialist raconteur, a Marlow-figure, to bring those events to life as ‘spoken’ narrative. Folklore and popular legends of the region are occasionally sampled, but the narrator's interest in oral culture seems broadly ‘anthropological’ rather than structural, and the novel's marginal storytellers never seem likely to challenge his control of the novel's language.

Conrad's decision to pension off Marlow at this stage of his literary career doubtless has a great deal to do with his growing mastery of the language and fiction of his adopted homeland – with ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Lord Jim to his name, he no longer needed to shelter behind an ‘English’ alter ego.

My decision to use Under Western Eyes as the final case-study of this book has a twofold origin: first, in my sense that this singularly comfortless meditation on the dangers and limitations of language is the most ‘typical’ novel in Conrad's oeuvre – in much the same way that Tristram Shandy was, for Victor Shklovsky, ‘the most typical novel in world literature’. Under Western Eyes crystallizes the fear and distrust of language that is more definitively ‘Conradian’ than any of the more familiar trappings of his fiction: the world of ships and sailors and the sea, or the grafting of psychological drama onto exotic travelogue. In its obsession with its own textual ontology, Under Western Eyes directly confronts the issues of language, voice, and textuality that Conrad, elsewhere in his work, sought ever more resourcefully to evade; it is the novel he was trying not to write throughout his career. Victory and Lord Jim in particular might be seen as abortive drafts of Under Western Eyes, the former retreating into antiseptic omniscience, and the latter relocating to Patusan, in order to evade the deconstructive logic the text has set in motion.

My second reason for privileging Under Western Eyes is that it offers an excellent vantage-point from which to reflect on Conrad's problematic modernism. I have argued in this study that the generative paradox of Conrad's fiction is that it can be grasped both as an extremely belated rearguard action against print culture and as a precocious adumbration of high-modernist textuality.