Abstract
Joseph Conrad’s second book of reminiscences, A Personal Record (1912), includes a story about the novel Nostromo (1904), a nd what happened when he was interrupted during the writing of it by a neighbour:
… I had, like the prophet of old, ‘wrestled with the Lord’ for my creation, for the headlands of the coast, for the darkness of the Placid Gulf, the light on the snows, the clouds on the sky, and for the breath of life that had to be blown into the shapes of men and women, of Latin and Saxon, of Jew and Gentile …
‘How do you do?’
… The whole world of Costaguana … , men, women, headlands, houses, mountains, town, campo (there was not a single brick, stone, or grain of sand of its soil I had not placed in position with my own hands); all the history, geography, politics, finance … all that had come down crashing about my ears. I felt I could never pick up the pieces — and in that very moment I was saying, ‘Won’t you sit down?’1
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Notes and references
J. Conrad (1975) The Mirror of the Sea [and] A Personal Record (London: Dent), pp. 98–100.
See P. B. Armstrong (1983) ‘The Hermeneutics of Literary Impressionism’, Centennial Review, XXVII, no. 4, 244–69;
J. Matz (2001) Literary Impressionism and Modernist Aesthetics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press);
T. Katz (2000) Impressionist Subjects: Gender, Interiority, and Modernist Fiction (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press);
J. G. Peters (2001) Conrad and Impressionism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press);
and A. Parkes (2011) A Sense of Shock: The Impact of Impressionism on Modern British and Irish Writing (New York: Oxford University Press).
See for example E. K. Hay (1976) ‘Impressionism Limited’, in N. Sherry (ed.) Joseph Conrad: A Commemoration (London: Macmillan), pp. 54–64.
See M. Saunders (1996) Ford Madox Ford: A Dual Life, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press), vol. 2, pp. 196–228.
F. Jameson (1983) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Methuen), p. 208,
citing J. H. Miller (1965) Poets of Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 24–9 and 46–51,
and I. Watt (1979) Conrad in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 169–200.
P. Brantlinger (1988) Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press), p. 264.
J. Conrad (1995) Heart of Darkness, ed. Robert Hampson (London: Penguin), p. 83.
J. Conrad (1974) Lord Jim (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p. 11.
F. M. Ford (1931) Return to Yesterday (London: Gollancz), p. 20.
Ford (1931), p. 379. See J. Harding (2006) ‘The Englishness of the English Review’, in D. Brown and J. Plastow (eds) Ford Madox Ford and Englishness (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi), pp. 137–45.
See M. Saunders (2011) ‘Fiction as an art: Henry James, Joseph Conrad, and Ford Madox Ford’, in P. Parrinder and A. Gasiorek (eds), The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Volume 4: The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel 1880–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 55–71.
See M. Saunders, ‘Introduction’, in F. M. Ford (2012) The Good Soldier, ed. Saunders (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. xxv–vi.
J. Conrad (1897), ‘Preface’ to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, first printed as ‘Author’s Note’, New Review, XVII, 628–31.
J. Conrad (1971) Nostromo (Harmondsworth: Penguin), p. 203.
Letter to Edward Garnett, 19 June 1896, in F. Karl and L. Davies (eds) Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 288–9.
H. James (1984) ‘Preface to The Ambassadors’, in The Art of the Novel, ed. R. P. Blackmur (Boston: Northeastern University Press), p. 320.
See M. Saunders (2010) Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction and the Forms of Modern Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
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Saunders, M. (2014). The ‘power of the written word’: Literary Impressionism, Politics and Anxiety. In: Parrinder, P., Nash, A., Wilson, N. (eds) New Directions in the History of the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137026989_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137026989_9
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