Romance and Reification
" Plot Construction and Ideological Closure in Joseph Conrad"
from Fredric Jameson's The Political Unconscious("Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act")
Excerpt
"Nothing is more alien to the windless closure of high naturalism than the works of Joseph Conrad. Perhaps for that very reason, even after eighty years, his place is still unstable, undecidable, and his work unclassifiable, spilling out of high literature into light reading and romance, reclaiming great areas of diversion and distraction by the most demanding practise of style and écriture alike, floating uncertainly somewhere in between Proust and Robert Louis Stevenson. Conrad marks, indeed, a strategic fault line in the emergence of contemporary narrative, a place from which the structure of twentieth-century literary and cultural institutions becomes visible as it could not be in the heterogeneity of Balzacian registers [...] In Conrad we can sense the emergence not merely of what will be contemporary modernism (itself now become a literary institution), but also, still tangibly juxtaposed with it, of what will variously be called popular culture or mass culture, the commercialized cultural discourse of what, in late capitalism, is often described as a media society. This emergence is most dramatically registered by what most readers have felt as a tangible "break" in the narrative of Lord Jim, a qualitative shift and diminution of narrative intensity as we pass from the story of the Patna and the intricate and prototextual search for the "truth" of the scandal of the abandoned ship, to that more linear account of Jim's later career in Patusan, which, a virtual paradignm of romance as such, comes before us as the protoype of the various "degraded" sub-genres into which mass culture will be articulated [...] But this institutional heterogeneity - not merely a shift beween two narrative paradigms, nor even a disparity between two types of narration or narrative organization, but a shift between two distinct cultural spaces, that of "high" culture and that of mass culture - is not the only gap or discontinuity that Lord Jim symtomatically betrays. Indeed, we will have occasion to isolate the stylistic practice of this work as a virtually autonomous "instance" in its own right, standing in tension or contradiction with the book's various narrative instances or levels - just as we will insist on the repressed space of a world of work and history and of protopolitical conflict which may in this respect be seen as the terrace and the remnant of the content of older realism, now displaced and effectively marginalized by the emergent modernist discourse."