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Surveying Conrad Criticism

It might have been better had Pavel ended his book at this satisfying point, but he soldiers on into a final chapter treating some works of particular interest to ELT readers. In terms of form, these novels are of course hard-to-schematize, particularly complex narratives. So it is not surprising that Pavel struggles to hold on to his thesis about the generative dialogic tension between the subgenres of hero and pícaro. In Ford Madox Ford’s Some Do Not ..., for instance, Pavel finds that the “magnanimity and self-restraint” of Christopher Tietjens (the protagonist) provide an “uplifting” model in an otherwise “disorienting narrative” about “deeply corrupt” Edwardian high society. Whatever the merits of this reading, Pavel comes close to surrendering his thesis when he admits that modernist authors wanted to move beyond the subgenre conflict between hero and pícaro. But maybe, Pavel very briefly and hopefully speculates, in an unwitting way these writers “were reviving the earlier model.” How? Instead of featuring specific conflicts of representative types or struggling moral hearts, modernists portrayed the greatest of conflicts: the individual psyche’s loss of connection to any illusion of social stability. Influenced by Schopenhauer’s pessimism, they depicted disoriented loners unable to fathom their own motives, much less a world defined by “a pervasive atmosphere of emptiness and sorrow.” In Pavel’s view, finally, this modernist emphasis completes a “slow, diversified, halting movement from souls to hearts to psyches” as the centers of our attention. During that sequential development the genre has gone through many changes, but (Pavel controversially contends) “the lives of the novel have one thing in common: the bid to make the ideal visible within a world of transitory, fragile, imperfect human interactions.”