Daniel R. Schwarz - Conrad (Almayer's Folly to Under Western Eyes). 1980.

- London and Basinstoke. Macmillan

- Introduction

xiii) He brought a new psychological and moral intensity to the English novel and its traditions of manners and morals. He recognised the role in human conduct of repressed desires, unconscious motives, and unacknowledged impulses.

xiv) The narrative voice within his novels is often searching for values and self-definition. This search reflects Conrad's sense of himself as a perpetual outsider; his ambivalence both about leaving Poland and abandoning his maritime career; and, above all, his continuing struggle with self-doubt and anxiety.

[뿌리 뽑힌 존재로서의 콘래드. 이방인이라는 느낌. ]

-) His novels are intimately related to his life and often reflect his psychic turmoil.

-) It is certain my conviction gains infinitely.

the moment another soul will believe in it.

(Novalis) Lord Jim 제사. A Personal Record에도 나옴.

-) The desperate reaching out to an alter ego who might sympathetically respond to his frustrations--[가닛, 커닝엄에게 보낸 편지에서 찾아볼 수 있는 패턴]--defines a central structural and thematic component of his work. A lonely soul--be it Marlow, Jim, the Captain in 'The Secret Sharer', Razumov, Heyst, or Captain Anthony [Chance]--reaches out for an other who he hopes will recognise, understand, and authenticate him.

xv) The pervasive gloom that haunts Conrad's novels reflects his personal travail. He was beset by self-doubt, physical illness, and debt. Despair, anguish, and a sense of failure were his constant companions during his writng career.

xvi) Conrad's pessimism and nihilism have been over-emphasised, while his humanism has been neglected. [하디 - 콘래드]

xvii) Perhaps because he was an orphan and an emigre, the importance of restoring personal and family ties is a major theme throughout his career, a central value of the political novels, and the cornerstone of his humanism.

xviii) Conrad's humanism conflicted with his scepticism. In his works he showed how the urge to self-fulfilment often interfered with a person's moral responsibilities to his fellows.

Part one Quest for Identity

1. Acts of initiation: Almayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands

I.

3) In what become a characteristic of Conrad's early works, he uses fictional material from his own adventures as his source material.

-) Sambir, the setting for Alamayer's Folly and An Out, is the first of Conrad's distorted and intensified settings. Like the Congo in HD and Patusan in Lord Jim, Sambir becomes a metaphor for actions that occur there.

-) Like Hardy's Egdon Heath, Sambir is an inchoate form that can be controlled neither by man's endeavours nor by his imagination. The demonic energy that seethes within the forests is a catalyst for the perverse sexuality of the white people and their subsquent moral deterioration.

[이런 언급은 주목할 필요가 있다. demonic energy that seethes within the forests라는 것이 어떤 의미인가? 자연에 선악의 이미지를 부여하는 것은 어떻게 정당화될 수 있는가? 오히려 개인적인 선입견이나 편견의 투사가 아닌가? 이 시점에서 Wallace의 책을 읽을 필요성이 부각된다.]

4) Sambir's primordial jungle comments on the illusion shared by Dain and Nina, as well as Willems and Aissa, that passionate love can transform the world.

- Sambir's tropical setting seems to be dominated by the processes of death and destruction, and the jungle's uncontrollable fecundity expresses itself in devolution rather than evolution.

- The dominance of the Pantai and the forest implies that Conrad's cosmos is as indifferent to man's aspirations as the cosmos of his contemporary Hardy whose Jude the Obscure was published in 1895.

[자연주의적인 세계관이 강하게 작용]

- In Sambir, the (relatively) strong prey on the weak, the young upon the old, and the rich upon the poor. Illness, ageing, and death dominate life in Sambir.

[콘래드의 초기 작품의 기본적인 세계관은 적자생존의 다윈적이고, 비관주의와 기계론적 우주관이 두드러지는 자연주의적 입장이다.]

- 거대한 자연 속에서의 인간의 왜소함. 이런 부분에 대한 지적. (Dain is depicted as a dimimutive and anonymous figure)]

- Throughout Conrad's early work, the search for someone to legitimise one's activities by an empathetic response to one's motives and feelings is dramatised.

5) 1894년 보브로우스키의 죽음 이후 가닛과 그래엄을 Putative fathers. (Conrad's personal quest for identity)

-) The protagonists of his first novels--ineffectual, self-deluding indolent men who are the victims of their own imagination--objectify the self-consciousness about his ability and worth that he projects in his early letters.

-) 외삼촌: endurance and steadfastness of decision의 부족 질책.

-) Almayer and Willems lack a father and seek to compensate for the absence of someone in whom to confide.

(Omar - Babalachi - Lakamba: 상징적 부자관계)

6) Pathetically, Willems and Almayer believe in Lingard's omnipotence, for Lingard is the man both men would like to be.

-) 빌렘즈 - 링가드에게

(In the whole world there was only one man that had ever cared for me. only one white man. You!)

상징적인 부자 관계. 올메이어 역시도. [그럼에도 불구하고 빌렘즈는 링가드를 배반]

7) Lingard equates himself with Law and Justice. The ageing Lingard represents a kind of independent, self-sufficient man who benefits from the East's geographical and moral spaces. He is the embodiment of the childhood fantasy that desires may determine one's morality, a fantasy which takes more pernicious forms in Kurtz and Jim.

-) Lingard may respond amorally and egocentrically, but he knows who he is and had the kind of stature that enables him to transform a situation by his very presence.

-) In a sense he[Lingard] is both the artist Conrad wishes to be and the idealised man of action who regretfully must be left behind.

-) Lingard anticipates Kurtz in the Congo, Jim on Patusan, and Gould in Costaguana as men who are finally unable to conquer themselves by means of conquering their environment.

[커츠나 짐처럼 링가드도 신적인 존재. plays God in Sambir.

to be in two places at once' or to 'make himself invisible'

-) From the outset of his career, the early Conrad explores heterosexual love as a possible alternative to isolation and self-doubt.

(올메이어 - 데인과 니나. 추방자 - 빌렘즈와 아이샤?. 로드 짐 - 짐과 Jewel?

-) Victorian sexual taboos; miscegenation(interracial marriage), incest, adultery

[Sambir becomes Almayer's and Willem's personal nemesis once they violate sexual taboos.]

8) Conrad depicts Willem's love for Aissa as a turning towards decay and moral darkness. Significantly, Willems perceives her as 'the very spirit of that land of mysterious forests'. once Willems has sexual intercourse with Aissa, he had 'a depraved sense of pleasure at the after-taste of slime in the water.' Like Sambir her facade is appealing, while containing the threat of the forbidden and destructive.

-) 콘래드의 핵심적인 주제 : man necessarilly lives in a world of his own illusions.

- Each of the major characters creates narratives of the future in which he or she believes.

- Almayer is 'absorbed' in his dream; Willems 'imagined' and 'fancied' that his life will continue as it has.

9) once he is disgraced, Willems responds to his repressed libidinous needs by creating a fantasy in which sexual love becomes synonymous with life.

- 올메이어도 니나에 대해 허구를 창조함.

(링가드가 올메이어의 부인에게 피그맬리언이 되려고 한 것처럼 올메이어도 니나에게 그렇게 함. 근친상간적인 측면.)

10) As the ironic narrator makes clear, Willems is the man who has no principles and who takes economic success as a synecdoche for moral and emotional well-being.

- Willems : It was not death that frightened him: it was the horror of bewildered life where he could understand nothing and nobody round him; where he could guide, control, comprehen nothing and no one--not even himself.'

- Willems becomes a totem to warn man and to remind man of what happens when he gives into his repressed impulses.

11) 올메이어는 자신의 결혼이 파탄이 나자, 딸을 아내로 변형시키기 시작.

- 원시적인 인간과 문화인 사이에 중요한 차이점은 없음. (이 부분 필요하면 다시 볼 것.) 이해가 잘 안 됨.

12) 독자는 니나도 자신의 변덕에 따라 다른 인간을 형성하려는 올메이어의 어리석음을 반복할 지 모른다는 것을 이해.

13) Nina's future life that do not conform to her fictions.

- 올메이어의 우행/ 니나

(No two human beings understand each other. They can understand but their own voices. You wanted me to dream your dreams, to see your own visions. . . . But while you spoke I listened to the voice of my own self.

14) Conrad understood that man can only pursue, and never capture, one's dream.

- The emphasis upon man's diminutive stature in relation to nature, the stress on man's temporality, the indifference of nature to man's aspirations, and perhaps even the meanness of the human spirit as illustrated by white man and natives show the impossibility of love's creating a new existence.  

II.

14) he feels isolated in a meaningless universe; he is cynical about man's motives and purposes on this earth; he senses that he is an artistic failure; he doubts his ability to communicate, even while expressing his desperate need to be understood.

- a universe: amoral, indifferent, and at times hostile

- Marlow의 발견

Conrad subsequently learns to capitalise on his reluctance to be dogmatic; he dramatises Marlow's process of moral discovery, and shows how Marlow continually formulates, discards and redefines his beliefs through experience.

15) The unresolved tension between . . . Conrad's own personal concerns and . . . his attempt to objectify moral issues is revealed in conflicts between the values expressed by the narrator and the implications of his plot and setting.

[여기서 지적하는 갈등은 화자의 서술과, 등장인물의 초점화의 불일치의 문제. 클로손이 이야기하는 부분과 연결시켜 생각해 볼 수 있다.]

- At times, one of the narrator's comments may very well be in some conflict with another. Or one of his comments may be more an outburst of intellectual energy than a reasoned through discussion of the novel's action.

[이 부분의 언급이 올메이어와 추방자를 염두에 둔 것이지만 [진보]에도 적용할 수 있을 듯.]

- When he launched his writing career, Conrad was not only a complex personality almost paralysed by self-doubt, but an expatriate with an ambiguous attitude toward the English intellectual and moral milieu of the 1980s.

16) The tradition of English manners, with its emphasis on polite behaviour and fastidious moral distinctions, plays a prominent role in the early novels where Conrad's usually sceptical and gloomy narrator often adopts the stance of an enlightened Victorian.

- Conrad did not accept the late Victorian notion shared by the Fabians, Shaw, Cunninghame and Butler, that mankind was evolving into a higher creature or that Western civilisation was of superior quality to the more primitive kinds of human life.

- Conrad implies that the distinction between civilised white man and savage natives, a distinction which is taken as the essential premise of life by his Western European characters living in undeveloped areas, is fundamentally apocryphal.

- I am content to sympathize with common mortals, no matter where they live; in houses or in tents, in the streets under a fog, or in the forests behind the dark line of dismal mangroves that fringe the vast solitude of the sea. For, their land—like ours—lies under the inscrutable eyes of the Most High. Their hearts—like ours—must endure the load of the gifts from Heaven: the curse of facts and the blessing of illusions, the bitterness of our wisdom and the deceptive consolation of our folly. (Author's Note)

   

- 올메이어와 빌렘즈 : 인종적인 지위를 이용해 경제적 이익을 추구

(Kayerts, Carlier, Company men in HD. the officerr of the Patna와 맥락을 같이함.)

17) vlaues and ideals를 제안하고 있지만. 강조하는 것은 - mankind's powerlessness, his ineffectuality, his pettiness, his selfishness, the ephemral nature of the life he leads.

18) 열정이 억압되고 왜곡됨. 동반하는 사회적 발전이 없이 문명에 의해.

- 올메이어의 문제 중 일부는 털어놓을 사람이 없다는 것. (고독과 고립의 문제)

- 인간이 통제할 수 없는 사건의 연쇄에 갇힌 듯이 보이는 폐쇄된 우주 (기계적 우주관)

19) 올메이어, 빌렘즈 -  all men share a kinship with the worst of men.

- Willems and Aissa : To me they are typical of mankind, where every individual wishes to assert his power, woman by sentiment, man by achievement of some sort - mostly base.

20) Almayer and Willems are fictional projections of self-doubt, weariness, and anxiety that Conrad desperately wishes to leave behind.