Spatial Art In The Fiction Of Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad is acknowledged as "among the very greatest novelists in the language — or any language." Standing at the juncture of the late Victorian and the early modernist cultural phases, Conrad is the most restless and ingenious experimenter of his time. This thesis is devoted to the investigation into the spatial art in three of Conrad's novels: Lord Jim, Nostromo, and The Secret Agent, which represent the central achievements of Conrad in his experiment with spatial techniques. It attempts to identify and evaluate the spatial form in these texts, probing into the productive interaction between the flexibility and mobility of Conrad's narrative and his moral and thematic ideology, and on this basis providing a new way to interpret these novels.In his "Spatial Form in Modern Literature", Joseph Frank presents for the first time his general conception of the spatial form. According to Frank, spatial form is a form in which the events are arranged, not in linear and causal sequence, but in a succession of moments which are imagined to be synchronic. It includes not only objective features of narrative structure but also subjective processes of aesthetic perception. The reader of fiction with a spatial structure is no longer chained to the temporal succession of the events but rather is confronted with an open-ended array of thematically interrelated factors. He must weld these factors into a picture, a space in his imagination. In accordance with this, the spatiality of fiction is determined both by linguistic sequence and by the reader's involvement.This thesis falls into five Chapters. The first chapter examines the implication of spatial form in modem literature and its applicability to Joseph Conrad's fiction. It points out that modern literature is moving inthe direction of spatial form; Conrad's novels, reacting against the linear narrative, have the tendency towards a new system of time and space.Chapter Two considers how time is used to spatialize the novel. Conrad adopts the technique of time-freezing to create the spatiality of his novels. To freeze time is to draw the reader's attention to the detailed description where time seems to have a pause instead of a progression. It is to focus the reader's perception in a fixed moment of time. In this way, the reader cannot experience the passage of time, and slip unconsciously into the fictional space.Chapter Three analyzes the technique of juxtaposition as a specific way to construct the spatial form in Conrad's fiction. Juxtaposition is a technique of "setting one thing beside the other without connective." It isolates narrative formulas of connections between one situation and another. Facing a series of juxtaposed scenes or events, the reader has to construct a synchronic reading in order to dig out the author's moral and philosophic judgments.In the fourth chapter, the technique of impressionism is explored. As a literary device, impressionism is a manner of writing whereby the author does not try to represent reality objectively but to capture the impressions derived from it. Conrad believes that the way human beings acquire knowledge does not follow the linear and sequential way but rather a spatialized method. Impressionism reproduces the way human beings obtain knowledge. It integrates the past, present, and future, and relies on simultaneous and subjective construct of meaning. This simultaneity and subjectivity defies successive time and suggests a strong sense of spatiality.The last chapter is devoted to the analysis of the aesthetic values and ideology of the spatial art in Conrad's fiction. It maintains that spatial techniques enable Conrad to draw his novels out of the chronological sequence and present an architectural world to the reader;...