Kate O'Brien and the Fiction of Identity: Sex, Art and Politics in Mary Lavelle and Other Writings
The Rescue explores the uses of theatrical metaphors to signal moments of nonrecognition in the exotic and romantic setting of Lingard’s Malay Archipelago. The final chapter, on The Rover, argues that the romantic characters are left to haunt an isolated, post-romantic world; Peyrol’s death, however, ensures that romance will reappear in material and narrative form to those left behind. The title of the study derives from Conrad’s claim that The Rescue is “the swan song of romance”. The suggestion is that there is no more to be said on the subject. Baxter questions this assumption, demonstrating that romance will endure because it doubts its own death. Conrad’s fiction reveals its limitations and even its own disintegration. Fiction, like mankind, is vulnerable because it has a precarious hold on life. It is only in The Rover that narrative can be seen as a consolatory action. In the absence of the hero, heroism emerges. There is consolation in the reconstruction of a past that is lost to us. While the renewal of romantic narrative can never bring back that lost past, it demonstrates the arbitrariness of the present. Based on wide reading and an acute sense of cultural history, Joseph Conrad and the Swan Song of Romance offers many original interpretations of Conrad’s works and a new appreciation of the ways in which he continued to experiment, even in his later fiction.
What Is a Romantic Novel
From the time there was a thing you could call a "Romantic novel," it has been a source of embarrassment for its critics. Until the advent of Scott, even the reception of the best that the genre could produce was marked by squeamish ambivalence. Thus, Arthur Aikin's notice of Radcliffe's The Italian in The Monthly Review (March 1797). In order to fix Radcliffe's place in the aesthetic order, Aikin constructs a hierarchy of modern fiction, in which the "most excellent" and "difficult" species of "novel-writing consists in an accurate and interesting representation of such manners and characters as society presents." Aikin is looking back toward the male tradition of the novel, exemplified above all by Fielding and Richardson, and forward, unwittingly, to Jane Austen and George Eliot. "Next comes the modern Romance; in which, high description, extravagant characters, and extraordinary and scarcely possible occurrences combine to rivet the attention, and to excite emotions more thrilling than even the best selected and best described natural scene." So far, it seems, so good. But then Aikin proceeds: "This species of fiction is perhaps more imposing ... on the first perusal" but at second glance it reveals its "vast inferiority" to "the genuine novel" (49). Whereas the novel is based on "truth," the romance is just a narrative gimmick for exciting curiosity, which it can no longer do once we have guessed the "secret" of its plot. Aikin concedes that women may master the more difficult novel (presumably, he has Burney in mind) but implies that romance is their natural sphere. Thus, Radcliffe may be the supreme practitioner of "modern romance"-of the Romantic novel, we might now say-but this only leaves her at the head of the tribe of scribbling women and some ways behind even the laggards in the male ranks ahead of her, proper novelists staggering under the masculine burden of rigorous truth. Robert Kiely's seminal study, The Romantic Novel in England, is equally embarrassed. Kiely begins his introduction by likening the Romantic novel to a species of Frankenstein's monster, a crazy patchwork of appropriated, dismembered, unassimilated literary forms. He then explains how this calamitous experiment came into being. The Romantic novelist was drawn to the period's interest in the subjective and irrational, the oneiric and the outr6, as represented in such aesthetic fads as the sublime, graveyard imagery, and the supernatural. While such material was workable in the medium of poetry, it pulled against the qualities that had become intrinsic to the novel form: duration, a concern with community, and the objective representation of events. Kiely repeatedly essays different formulas for the hash the Romantic novelist subsequently made of things: "The English romantic novelists seem to have wanted it both ways-to authenticate the incredible, to claim originality without really departing from the familiar" (10); "they tried to introduce the unnamable [sic] into a genre which derived
The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad
'The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad.' So begins F. R. Leavis' most controversial book, the Great Tradition, an uncompromising critical-polemical survey of English fiction, first published in 1948. Leavis makes his case for moral seriousness as the necessary criterion for an author's inclusion in any list of the finest novelists. In the course of his argument he adds D. H. Lawrence to the pantheon, and singles out Hard Times as Dickens' one 'completely serious work of art'; while Lawrence Sterne, Henry Fielding, and James Joyce are among those weighed in the balance and found wanting. "[Leavis] gave one a new idea of what it meant to read...the whole business of criticism acquired a new and exhilarating quality." (Frank Kermode, London Review of Books).