For Whom The Bell Tolls

Widely acknowledged as one of the greatest forerunners of Modernism, Joseph Conrad, the Polish expatriate turned French dandy then experienced sailor and at last prestigious English writer, has always been a mystery to the reader. His multi-cultural identity fostered by Polish, French and English background, and the ambivalent ideology shaped by his complicated experiences of dealing with revolution and counter-revolution, nationalism and imperialism, fashion in Conrad a paradoxical consciousness to keep various competing allegiances to different ideological groups at the same time, thus making him always suspended between revolutionary and conservative, chivalric and egalitarian, romantic and pragmatic traditions.Therefore, it is not an easy job to classify Conrad's work. Romanticism, Realism and Modernism - none of them can serve well to qualify it, which, in Frederic Jameson's words, "spilling out of high literature into light reading and romance", and "floating uncertainly somewhere in between Proust and R. L. Stevenson," seems to at once transcend and lie latent in them all. The basic point of this thesis is to argue that Conrad demystifies the genre of Imperial Romance, while unconsciously rewriting it at the same time. He means to lay bare all the wickedness and hypocrisy of imperialism concealed in the grand narrative of its discourse, but because of his still lingering-on illusion of imperial idealism, he adopts a style, or an "aestheticizing strategy", to borrow Jameson's terms, that tends to defer and derealize, reveal and veil what he means to expose, only to result in a romantic irony of Imperial Romance and of its discourse.The main body of the thesis is divided into five chapters:The first chapter is devoted to an examination of the English tradition of Imperial Romance writing and Conrad's relation with it. Well nourished within that tradition but intended to topple it, he is ironically both romantic and anti-romantic. Consequently, his work shares much of the same ideological assumptions with thattradition, while intended for its subversion.In the following three chapters, close readings of Conrad's three most representative works, namely, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Nostromo are successively carried out to justify the basic hypothesis. In these three novels, Conrad severely attacks the stark anti-humanitarian exploitation of imperialism over the colonies, denouncing its fine words of heroism, idealism, and humanism. In every novel, however, he cannot bear throwing away his last piece of illusion of imperialism, thus romanticizing what he is satirizing while unawarely distancing himself away from what he is criticizing.Chapter Five is engaged in a Marxist analysis of Conrad (though the Marxist approach is fundamental in this whole thesis). It will be proved here that Conrad's "stylistic modernism" - chiefly impressionism - results from his unwillingness to tell the dark story directly and honestly for the sake of leaving a small room to sustain that dream. "For in order to say something, there is other things which must not be said"(P. Macherey). L. Althusser believes that art "makes us see", in a distanced way, "the ideology from which it is born, in which it bathes, from which it detaches itself as art, and to which it alludes." Conrad's art, however, while helping to "make you see" -the highest artistic achievement for him - gives convenience to its derealization. It is argued that Conrad's paradox lies in his unrealizable intention to find a way of solution on the aesthetic or imaginary level, to the crisis of imperialism in the actual life at the late-Victoria period. Skeptical of any forces available in reality then, for example, the proletariat revolution, and national revolutions in colonies, he could only seek constant resort to the Romantic humanistic heritage, which proves to be but an irony of his romantic irony of imperialism.To sum up, Conrad fails to carry out a drastic demise of imperial myth encoded in the writings of Imperial Romance. His wish to expose the awkward truth while safeguarding the beautiful illusion simultaneously is absurd. But nevertheless, despite his apparent limitations, his effort still deserves our respect. Taking into consideration of his times when even some socialists would have regarded imperialism as an admirable thing, he was indeed progressive in his criticism of imperialist activities.