Literary Imagination Advance Access published online on April 8, 2008
Literary Imagination, doi:10.1093/litimag/imn013
© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Association of Literary Scholars and Critics. All rights reserved. For permissions please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
A Train of Thought is Never False: Fictions of Nation and History in Conrad
*E-mail: mwood@princeton.edu. The members of last year's Summer Institute at the National Humanities Center will recognize how thoroughly they are the real begetters of this essay - my thanks to them again.
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Michael Gorra, in the introduction to his Portable Conrad, says Conrad, "relies on the fixities of nineteenth century nationalism to define his characters even as he charts a world in which they are all out of joint."1 This is very well put; a suggestion full of interpretative possibilities. Gorra is thinking chiefly of "Typhoon" and Nostromo. I want to develop a similar line of thought, or a train of thought, in relation to Under Western Eyes. "Nineteenth century nationalism," in this novel, means essentially two national stories, English and Russian, although each stands for other stories too, and each national story is also the story of a political system.
The novel, Conrad says in his Author's Note, is "an attempt to render not so much the political state as the psychology of Russia itself." The goal is "truth," since "truth alone is the justification of any fiction