MFS Modern Fiction Studies

Conrad’s Decentered Fiction takes the reader straight to the heart of the matter—how critics have relegated to the margins the “minute, independent and eclectic details” (10) of Conrad’s short stories and novels. In nine chapters—divided into three parts—the reader is privy to a focused examination of doodles, distractions, drawings, voices, maps, hats, cats, and bats (and other animals). Warodell’s task is to “write on what Conrad writes about”: a seemingly straightforward enterprise, but a contentious one too in that—in the most gracious and sometimes humorous way—Warodell challenges the traditional and accepted Conradian scholarship of the past thirty years. [End Page 381]

In the first chapter, “Doodles and The Shadow-Line,” Warodell chastises one of the editors of the Collected Letters, claiming that in his overview of Conrad’s 3500 pieces of correspondence, Frederick Karl failed to recognize the importance of the author’s doodles, relegating them to the scholarly wastebin of “minimal interest” (22). Jeremy Hawthorn, Jacques Berthoud, and Owen Knowles are similarly singled out for passing over the doodles and considering them insignificant to and separate from the text. Warodell is firm in his conviction, arguing that it is more important to “move the doodles from the margins of the manuscript to the centre of discussion” (33). Associated with “boredom, impatience and procrastination” (31), they correspond with the “sentiment aboard the stagnant ship in The Shadow-Line.”

By extension, Warodell equates doodling with map-making, providing useful illustrations of Conrad’s draftsmanship and arguing against the fashionable “critical cartography” (34) of recent scholarship in which the map becomes a vehicle for linguistics, semiotics, structuralism, Marxism, phenomenology, and more. For Warodell, instead, the map is “grounded in fantasy, memory or imagination rather than physical space” (41) but at the same time corresponds with the text. However, the caveat lies in the use of the maps. Why are they there? What, as readers, do we do with them? Leading his own reader down a linguistic alley, Warodell argues that perhaps the maps, “like a private language,” were “only accessible to Conrad” occupying a “liminal space between private imagination and public discourse” (48).

As we discover in chapter 3, Conrad’s private imagination in the form of ink sketches was hidden in locked drawers likened to the “shady wares acquired from Mr Verloc’s shop in Brett Street” (50). Two of Conrad’s most renowned biographers, John Stape and Jeffrey Meyers, failed to identify drawing as one of Conrad’s hobbies (the others being reading and chess) or that the author had a distinct interest in visual art. Where Zdzisław Najder maintains that Conrad had little knowledge of painting, Warodell produces a convincing case for the author’s talent, suggesting that The Sisters—a novel started in 1895 about a painter who couldn’t paint—was a “historical document and reflection on the modern artist—written during the advent of modernism in visual art” (51). The overriding point is that neither The Sisters nor Conrad’s cartographic impressions should be marginalised. Indeed, both feed into the artistic credo that Conrad developed in his later works.

In the most ambitious chapter of the monograph, the premise of Ian Watt’s “Delayed Decoding”—the most famous of Conradian [End Page 382] narrative techniques—is turned on its head and reinstated as “Delayed Miscoding.” Ironically placed in the center of the monograph, “Decoding and Heart of Darkness” advances the discussion into the philosophical realm underpinning Warodell’s objective: to show that “the topic of margins and details . . . is of such substance for Conrad’s writing that it manifests itself inside and outside of the text” (72). As such, the correlation between the words on the page and Marlow’s “private perception and public meaning” (qtd. in Warodell 93) are played out in the narrative. Bertrand Russell’s “logical atomism” (93) is brought into correspondence with Watt’s “delayed decoding” (73), in which literature can be broken down into “easily understandable parts.” The emphasis here is on words. As Conrad notes, “Words which are the common property of mankind are but fit for common occasions” (qtd. in Warodell 73), a statement that echoes Russell’s view that “ordinary language is convenient for ordinary occasions, but not on occasions that demand complete accuracy.” Warodell skilfully builds his case, explaining logical atomism and how it links to—but is not synonymous with—delayed decoding. Conrad’s aim in all his works is to portray reality (truth). Conventional scholarship would accept that delayed decoding articulates “a transition from ignorance to a heightened sense of knowledge: to unqualified understanding” (83), in other words, a “delayed understanding” that assumes a “shared (non-private) reality” (88). However, the most famous moment of delayed decoding—the little sticks that rain down on the steamer in Heart of Darkness (1899)—offers a restricted bivalent interpretation of the moment; what Marlow experiences must be either true or false. The nuanced approach demands epistemological relativism and an exploration of “underlexicalization” (89): Marlow describes the sticks as “these things” (qtd. in Warodell 89) because he does not have a word for them, and why should he when, as a Westerner, arrows/sticks fall outside of his frame of reference? What makes this chapter so convincing is Warodell’s historical analysis of arrows in the Congo, such as the observation that the Congolese were skilled in iron work, begging the question why they would be attacking with wooden sticks.

Warodell’s bold and imaginative book gives no cause for distraction, but that is exactly what is demanded of us in the following chapter where characters are revealed as chewing their moustaches (Nostromo [1904]), “toying with a teaspoon” (94) (Chance [1913]), and “endlessly scraping [a] nail with a penknife” (Under Western Eyes [1911]), demonstrating that throughout Conrad’s texts there are “so many moments of distraction” (104) that come together to create [End Page 383] a “unified whole.” Conrad equally distracted himself while telling stories, with activities—doodling in the margins, sketching maps, playing chess with his son John—that focused his mind on the writing process. The same applies for his reader in the sense that distractions are central to the narrative. For example, the cat that Verloc strokes in chapter 1 of The Secret Agent (1907) is mentioned only once and then seemingly forgotten. Why, then, is the outer door of the shop left “suspiciously ajar in the obscure and narrow street” (qtd. in Waro-dell 105) if not to let the cat in and out, serving a crucial narrative function? The point is that Conrad directs his reader’s gaze toward a focal point (like Martin Handford’s Where’s Wally cartoon books), but the peripheral details provide the meaning.

The final part of the monograph explores Conrad as a marginalized subject, ironically considering the voicelessness of the rather chatty characters in the N****r of the Narcissus (1897). The conclusion of the book also includes a chapter on the unconventional animal similes and metaphors that Conrad employs: bloodthirsty pigeons, sentimental bats, and sarcastic turtles, all designed to create an “unreality effect” (170) and “engage the reader’s imagination and thinking” (171). Animals may appear to be peripheral—where are all the elephants in Heart of Darkness?—but in Conrad’s works they are not mere backdrops outside the function of the narrative. Instead, the unreality effect aligns with the “confrontational aspect of modernist nature” (176) and to a certain degree, postmodernism.

This is a bold and imaginative book that pushes aside the accepted and previously unchallenged to make way for the voiceless, unnoticed, and seemingly unimportant to demonstrate how the novels and short stories all speak to each other.