Essays on Conrad

by Ian Watt

Ian Watt (1917-1999) has long been acknowledged as one of the finest of postwar literary critics, and among the most learned of those writing about the work of Joseph Conrad. Essays on Conrad is a collection of Watt's most characteristic essays on Conrad's work. Watt's own philosophy, as well as his insight into Conrad's work, was shaped by his experiences as a prisoner of war on the River Kwai. His moving account of these experiences completes this essential collection of Watt essays.

228 pages, Paperback

First published July 26, 1996

About the author

Ian Watt was an English literary critic, literary historian and professor of English at Stanford University. His The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding is an important work in the history of the genre.

Reviews

[Eva · Rating 4 out of 5]

Insightful and meticulous.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1979, Ian Watt, author of "The Rise of the English Novel" and a professor at Stanford University, wrote an important critical study of Joseph Conrad's early works, "Conrad in the Nineteenth Century." Watt planned to write a second work on Conrad’s 20th Century output, but this never came to fruition. Instead, shortly after his death in 1999, Cambridge University Press published his "Essays on Conrad." In this collection you can see Watt building the base for the larger work, always with meticulous research and a deep-seated knowledge of his subject.

In the first essay, Watt elaborates on Conrad’s core themes of alienation and commitment. Suspicious of “Progress” and “Civilization,” and all too aware of the animal within man, Conrad set his best stories in hostile environments and scrutinized his characters’ actions under duress. The ones that do right, the ones that survive, are rarely the progressive or the dreamer or the sophisticated or the bookish.

In "Typhoon," for example, which Watt considers a comic masterpiece, Captain McWhirr’s ponderous approach to duty brings his ship safely through the storm. And in Conrad’s breakthrough novel "The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’," the old sailor Singleton, by staying at the helm at the moment of crisis, steadies a mutinous crew.

In these unimaginative, unlearned men, whose first duty is to their ships’ passengers and crew, Watt sees two Conradian moral imperatives: tenacity and solidarity in the face of coercive circumstance.

Conrad has ridden several waves of criticism since his death in 1924. His reputation crested after the Second World War, when his modernism and influence on next-generation writers, his psychological insights and existential themes were highlighted and hailed.

The trough may have occurred during the surge of multiculturalism in the late seventies, when the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe branded Conrad “a bloody racist,” citing his stereotyping and lack of compassion for the Congolese victims in "Heart of Darkness." Watt argues otherwise, although he does not entirely succeed in dismissing Achebe’s criticism.

Conrad was certainly not a racist in any active, conscious sense. But he was a staunch patriot of his adopted country, and he upheld some of the prevailing biases that bolstered the British Empire. (It’s telling that Conrad refused to write an affidavit in support of his old acquaintance from the Congo, the anti-imperialist Irish nationalist Roger Casement, when he was accused of treason.)

But Conrad also understood that an individual’s tenacity and sense of solidarity must embrace all of humanity—all of us in the boat, so to speak—or those two qualities become their flip-side negatives: selfishness and exclusion. That’s the hard lesson Jim learns in "Lord Jim," when, for his own survival, he jumps from the listing “Patna,” leaving the passengers—Mecca-bound pilgrims—to fend for themselves.

Several critics have argued that Conrad’s fiction declined in his later years. Watt is not one of them. He finds masterpieces in all phases of Conrad’s output, and moments of stylistic brilliance in even the weakest works. Virginia Woolf famously wrote of Conrad: “He could not write badly, one feels, to save his life.”

I would argue Conrad’s success depended on his subject matter. He certainly could not write about women to save his life. His female characters, with the possible exception of Winnie Verloc in "The Secret Agent," are helpless, two-dimensional creatures of romantic stereotype. Whenever Conrad ventured away from the heart of darkness and into the heart of romance, as he did more frequently in his later years, the result—no matter how well written—was diminished.

Conrad wanted popular and financial success, and he believed that by following the course set by Henry James he might achieve it. But Conrad was a skeptical realist, not a dramatist of social mores and subtle gender wars; he was a former sea captain with little affinity for the feminine mind. Far more than some dubious racism (a word which, as Watt points out, did not exist in his day), this was his greatest weakness as a writer.

As a coda to this collection, the publisher has included an essay that is only tangential to Conrad. Watt had the dubious distinction of being one of the British soldiers imprisoned by the Japanese during the Second World War who worked on the bridges over the River Kwai (there were actually two of them). In “‘The Bridge over the River Kwai’ as Myth,” Watt uses all of his brilliant critical acumen to compare the real experience (including the Conradian moral imperatives which the real British colonel exemplified) to the themes of the book by Pierre Boulle and the subsequent movie by David Lean. It is a brilliant essay that alone is worth the price of this fine book.

[Dana]

Critic on Conrad + Critic on Critic on Conrad. Very useful and insightful.