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What “A Smile of Fortune” Has To Hide: An Intertextual And Comparative Reconsideration of the Texture and Theme of Conrad’s Tale

100%

Branny G. M. T.

Yearbook of Conrad Studies

2019

vol. 14

7-33

The present article is part of a larger project on Conrad’s less known short fiction, the area of his writing which is largely undervalued, and even deprecated at times. The paper’s aim is to enhance the appreciation of “A Smile of Fortune,” by drawing attention to its “inner texture” as representative of Conrad’s “art of expression,” especially in view of the writer’s own belief in the supremacy of form over content as well as “suggestiveness” over “explicitness” in his fiction. To achieve this aim a New Critical (“close reading”), intertextual and comparative approaches to Conrad’s story have been adopted, involving nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literary texts, i.e., both those preceding and those following the publication of Conrad’s ’Twixt Land and Sea (1912) volume featuring the tale in question. The intertextual reading of “A Smile of Fortune” against Bernard Malamud’s short story “The Magic Barrel,” Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, with Light in August as a point of reference, reveals the workings in Conrad’s story of the modernist device of denegation, which, alongside antithesis and oxymoron, seems to be largely responsible for the tale’s contradictions and ambiguities, which should thus be perceived as the story’s asset rather than flaw. The textual evidence of Conrad’s tale, as well as its comparison with three short stories: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and Peter Taylor’s “Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time,” seem to confirm the presence of the implications of the theme of incest in Conrad’s text, heretofore unrecognized in criticism. Overall, the foregoing analysis of “A Smile of Fortune” hopes to account for, if not disentangle, the story’s complex narratological meanderings and seemingly insoluble ambiguities, particularly as regards character and motive, naming Conrad rather than Faulkner the precursor of denegation.

Denegation, Textuality and Intertextuality in ”The Idiots”: Epistemological Transformation of Conrad’s Tale

84%

Branny G. M. T.

Perspektywy Kultury

2024

vol. 45

issue 2

259-272

„Idioci”, opowieść, która ukazała się w pierwszym zbiorze opowiadań Josepha Conrada pt. Tales of Unrest (1898), jest chyba jego najbardziej minimalistycznym krótkim tekstem, który zyskał przez to u jednego z jego krytyków miano „bezsensownego”. Ze względu na swą lakoniczność opowiadanie było dotąd głównie poddawane analizie kontekstualnej, wskutek czego czysto literackie podejścia do tekstu prawie nie istnieją. Niniejszy artykuł stanowi próbę epistemologicznego przewartościowania tego niedocenianego i krytykowanego opowiadania Conrada poprzez poddanie go wnikliwej estetycznej analizie. Zastosowane w tym celu eklektyczne, bo tekstualne i intertekstualne, podejście do tekstu ujawnia obecność w nim modernistycznej metody narracyjnej zwanej denegacją (potwierdzeniem obecności poprzez nieobecność i odwrotnie), zwykle przypisywanej Williamowi Faulknerowi, co pozwala na rozwikłanie zagadki niejednoznacznego zakończenia opowiadania poprzez jego zdefiniowanie jako przypadkowe utonięcie bohaterki opowiadania, nie zaś jej samobójstwo, jak chcą krytycy. Ponadto, denegacja pełni w tekście także inną transformacyjną funkcję, nadając wreszcie opowiadaniu sens poprzez wskazanie na jego denegatywnie skonstruowaną tematykę tabu dotyczącą incestu. Intertekstualna (bachtinowska) interpretacja „Idiotów” w pojęciu Kristevej, a zatem poprzez odniesienie do pisarza późniejszego, tu Williama Faulknera, nie tylko potwierdza obecność tematyki kazirodztwa w opowiadaniu Conrada, ale także ujawnia literacki dług Faulknera wobec Conrada, i to nie tylko w kwestii denegacji, którą dotąd przypisywano temu pierwszemu, ale także w stosunku do tematyki oraz szeregu motywów najbardziej eksperymentalnej powieści Faulknera Wściekłość i wrzask (1929).

“The Idiots,” published as part of Conrad’s first collection of short stories Tales of Unrest (1898), is, by far, the most minimalist of all his tales, therefore dubbed “pointless” by one of his critics. As such, it has mostly occasioned contextual readings to date, purely literary approaches to the story being few and far between. The present article offers a transformative reappraisal of this deprecated Conrad tale, in considering its artistic texture. A combined textual and intertextual approach proposed here reveals the presence, also in this Conrad story, of the modernist device of denegation (assertion of presence by absence, and vice versa) usually ascribed to William Faulkner, which helps resolve the issue of the tale’s ambiguous ending by defining it as the main heroine’s accidental drowning rather than suicide as it is usually seen in Conrad criticism. In its epistemologically transformative role, denegation likewise removes the odium of senselessness from “The Idiots” by identifying its covert, because denegatively construed, taboo theme of incest. The intertextual (Bakhtinian) reading of the story in Kristeva’s understanding of the term, and therefore through recourse to a later writer, i.e., Faulkner, does not only confirm the presence of the theme of incest in “The Idiots” but also reveals the American modernist’s unacknowledged indebtedness to this Conrad tale for some of the key motifs, if not its overall theme, of his most famous novel The Sound and the Fury (1929).

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1 Perspektywy Kultury

1 Yearbook of Conrad Studies

2 Branny G. M. T.

1 2024

1 2019

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What “A Smile of Fortune” Has To Hide: An Intertextual And Comparative Reconsideration of the Texture and Theme of Conrad’s Tale

Denegation, Textuality and Intertextuality in ”The Idiots”: Epistemological Transformation of Conrad’s Tale