Conrad's Reading

Space, Time, Networks

Helen Chambers

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319764863
• eBook ISBN: 9783319764870
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book aligns concepts and methods from book history with new literary research on a globally studied writer. An innovative three-part approach, combining close reading the evidence of reading, scrutiny of international book distribution circuits, and of Conrad's many fictional representations of reading, illuminates his childhood, maritime and later shore-based reading. After an overview of the empirical evidence of Conrad's reading, his sparsely documented twenty years reading at sea and in port is reconstructed. An examination the reading practices of his famous narrator Marlow then serves to link Conrad's own maritime and shore-based reading. Conrad's subsequent networked reading, shared with his closest male friends, and with literate multilingual women, is examined within the context of Edwardian reading practices. His fictional representations of reading and material texts are highlighted throughout, including genre trends, periodical reading, reading spaces and their lighting, and the use of reading as therapy. The book should appeal both to Conrad scholars and to historians of reading.

© The Author(s) 2018

Helen ChambersConrad's ReadingNew Directions in Book Historyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76487-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Helen Chambers¹

(1)

Open University, Milton Keynes, UK

Helen Chambers

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

MethodologiesBook historyHistory of readingEvidence-basedConrad’s readingInvestigative strategy

End Abstract

I

Conrad’s Reading: Space, Time, Networks is an exploration of how concepts and approaches from book history and the history of reading may be incorporated seamlessly with new research on a canonical writer, one whose works are studied wherever, in the Anglophone and non-Anglophone world, English literature is taught. Evidence-based rather than theoretical, this monograph creates a tangible linkage between the conventional literary approach towards a major author and his works, and the cross disciplinary field of book history/history of reading. It addresses for the first time the need, repeatedly demonstrated by Conrad scholars, for a dedicated study of Conrad’s reading and Conrad as a reader. Rather than continuing to cherry-pick, from his known reading, yet more putative literary sources and influences on his fiction, it examines how the unusual circumstances of Conrad’s several lives and changing geographical and social environments shaped his own reading and informed his writing.

That Joseph Conrad was a voracious, rapid, wide-ranging and lifelong reader in at least three languages is not in doubt. Soon after his death in 1924, several of his friends commented on his reading practices. The author, editor, and journalist Richard Curle , a close friend of Conrad’s later years, wrote that ‘it was part of his inbred, unselfconscious courtesy that he always seemed to take it for granted that one knew as much as he did and had read all the obscure memoirs that he had read—he was one of the widest-read men, one of the fastest and most tenacious readers, I ever met’ (Curle 1975, 8–9). In his moving eulogy ‘Inveni Portum’ Conrad’s cherished and lifelong friend, the pioneer socialist, traveler, writer and Scottish nationalist R. B. Cunninghame Graham , wrote that Conrad had ‘all the resources of a mind steeped in the modern literature of Europe, especially that of France’ (Ray 1990, 230–35). ¹ But what sort of a reader was Conrad? What did he read; where did he read; did he read with others as well as silently and alone; why did he read; under what circumstances did he read intensively (or rapidly, or casually); how and when did he record his reading; how can this reading be recovered and how reliable is the recovered evidence? ² This monograph is a comprehensive investigation into these core questions which, while linking the evidence of Conrad’s reading with the rhythms of his life and his creative output, is not intended as an intellectual biography. Nor is it simply a further contribution to the immensely valuable and still ongoing investigations into sources and influences for his fiction, but rather a re-examination of the reading (and conditions of reading) that shaped his thinking. It looks in a new way, and much more broadly, at Conrad as a reader and Conrad’s reading practices , and situates these within the wider context of late Victorian and Edwardian writing and reading cultures . It offers an innovative examination of Conrad’s barely recorded twenty years of maritime reading, using an original multidimensional investigative approach which combines three methodologies : first, close reading of the evidence of reading ; second, investigation of the international availability and distribution of texts, particularly to seamen, ship’s passengers and other travellers, in order to establish the ‘bibliographic credibility’ of a reported or putative act of reading; and third, an examination of Conrad’s many fictional depictions of readers and material texts. It is the first study to make comprehensive, systematic and critical use of the rich seams of recorded evidence of reading to be found in Conrad’s correspondence, evidence now available in the open access repository, the Reading Experience Database (UKRED). ³

II

While Conrad scholars, over the past seventy years, have regularly alluded to his reading as being ‘so prodigious as to demand a sizeable volume to itself,’ Conrad the reader, that is to say his reading tastes, the pattern and rhythms of his reading, his spaces and places of reading, and his reading community, have not yet been systematically addressed, although Owen Knowles and Gene Moore had signalled, almost twenty years ago, the need for such a comprehensive study (2000, 339–45). As is to be expected, literary scholars, when referring to the importance of Conrad’s reading, have tended to examine this in a piecemeal fashion, to support an argument about composition, or about literary heritage and influences, in other words, centred on Conrad’s own works , not on Conrad the reader. This traditional text-based approach tends to start with a close examination of a piece of his fictional writing and then, through intertextual comparisons, propose a source or an influence derived from Conrad’s reading. These critical studies were (and still are) of two overlapping types: They may be ‘genetic-genealogical’, that is, tracking backwards from the text to search for influential literary ancestors and/or allusions, or they are ‘geological-archaeological’, drilling down ever deeper into the almost bottomless depths of the text, either to uncover new sources from books, newspaper articles, or official reports, or else excavating laterally to reveal new seams of intertextuality. This leads the critic to then propose, or teleologically impose, a contingent act of reading. The argument could be generically framed as: ‘I see evidence/suggestions/hints, of the influence of/intertextuality with/allusions to, such-and-such a text/author (X), therefore it is highly likely that Conrad had read text/author (X)’. This essentially hermeneutic approach, which looks at Conrad’s reading only in order to explain or interpret his literary production, has yielded much valuable material and is seemingly not yet exhausted. Seminal works began to appear over sixty years ago, when John D. Gordan (1941) set the tone by discussing the sources of Conrad’s fiction, classifying them as ‘observation, personal experience, hearsay, and reading’ (57). Norman Sherry (1966) was the first to show in any detail how Conrad’s targeted reading for research purposes directly informed his fictional output. Around the same time Andrzej Busza (1966) wrote extensively on the influence of Polish romantic literature on Conrad’s work, significantly bringing to English criticism sources previously accessible only to Polish scholars. Yves Hervouet (1990) in his path-breaking work, convincingly and repeatedly demonstrated the influence of, and wide borrowings from, (predominantly nineteenth-century) French fiction. Numerous other exemplary studies have dealt with the influence of specific genres , books or writers on Conrad’s output. ⁴ All these major studies, written before the history of reading became an established discipline did not, understandably, focus on Conrad’s reading as such.

Other approaches to investigating Conrad’s reading have been descriptive and bibliographical. David Tutein’s slender work (1990) consists essentially of a lightly annotated and incomplete alphabetical listing of books Conrad mentioned, or may have read, or which were listed in some of the sales catalogues of his library after his death. Hans van Marle (1991) pointed out the inadequacies of this work and usefully added nearly 200 extra items. Around the same time, Owen Knowles (1990) produced a much more satisfactory, accurate and indexed listing of Conrad’s reading and has recently updated this from the Collected Letters project and other sources, in what is an immensely useful chronological aide-memoire/calendar of Conrad’s life, including his reading. ⁵ Three of Conrad’s modern biographers have shown some interest in his reading. The seventy indexed entries under ‘reading’ in Frederick Karl’s massive biography (1979) are mostly to footnotes, apart from his description of some of Conrad’s formative reading (105–8). While Zdzisław Najder (2007) is clearly interested in Conrad’s reading and uses letters as primary sources of evidence, his wide-ranging subject index has no entry for ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. ‘Books Are an Integral Part of One’s Life’: Evaluating the Evidence of Conrad’s Reading
• 3. ‘Read by Chance on the Indian Ocean’: Reconstructing Conrad’s Maritime Reading
• 4. ‘A Book, Not Bemused by the Cleverness of the Day’: Marlow as a Reader
• 5. ‘A Conrad Archipelago Replete with Islands’: Edwardian Reading Communities
• 6. ‘Gifted with Tenderness and Intelligence’: Conrad’s Reading Women
• 7. Conclusion
• Back Matter