Conrad and the Problematics of Rescue

The writer for Conrad, in a less familiar passage in the Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus, is a “snatcher” who saves lost fragments from disappearing beneath the waves of time by “holding them up.” Dedicated to an involuntary salvation resembling other imaginable conversion experiences, Conrad’s redeemer “plucks” the fragmentary to a new life, revisualized in a new light. Response to the call to rescue can be self-serving or redemptive, but inevitably creates an irrevocable fictional bond that threatens the self-determination of rescuer and rescued. “I was lost, but now I am found” becomes an entrée to a reluctant political life rather than a life obedient to “looking on without making a sound,” advised by Heyst’s father in Victory. Who is saved and for what purpose? Saviour and rescued have a dialectical relationship, each on occasion becoming the other in an endless quest for mutual recognition. If colonialism purported to salvage the savage from primitivity, so de-colonialism held out the hope of rescuing the subaltern from the oppressive master. Rescuer and rescued are “bonded” as they re-write each other’s lives in a perpetually redefined attachment. Carlos Gould’s reclaimed, previously abandoned San Tome silver concession of Nostromo, converts a sleepy colonial backwater in an only descriptively rich Golfo Placido to an object of speculative economic and ideological investment. The translation (conversion) of Razumov’s abandoned, diary/manuscript/manifesto-in-situ – a fragment translated/ “held up” to light by a “mere” expatriate English teacher – does the same in Under Western Eyes. As with other conversion experiences, then, existence comes to have a “before” and an “after,” denoting change, rather than Lukacs’ frozen, artificial time of the bourgeois novel. All conversions arouse suspicion, as Marlow’s unreliable narratives suggest. Adoptions, adaptations and formal “conversions” of Conrad’s works by contemporary novelists (Anthony Burgess’ The Malayan Trilogy being an early example); filmmakers; manga artists; and post-colonial poets and performing artists are similarly unique “rescues” of Conrad. Like literary criticism, new “takes” illuminate (re)-cognition and renewal of a canon for a less literary age. The need for periodic rescue, in reality or fantasy (Lord Jim), is an informing trope of Conrad’s achievement. The rescue of silver ingots (Nostromo); of a maiden and her mentally-challenged dependent by a Secret Agent; of a suicidal Flora de Barral by Captain Anthony in Chance; of an ivory merchant gone rogue in Heart of Darkness; of a Leggat rescued by a nameless Secret Sharer; or of a Lena rescued from the demi-monde of Schomberg’s bar in Victory – all testify to the demands of rescue as a perpetual “calling” for the drifting seafarer. Captain and crew were to be attentively “on watch.” Critical and creative conversion is the change that assumes that it knows what it is doing, that always- already knows its own value and virtue, but really speculatively opens an extended life for character, canon, criticism. Ironically, Conrad rescued Rescue in 1920 (late in his career), initially an earlier volume in the Malay Trilogy, but abandoned shortly after marriage. This author, only an incidental Conrad scholar, had an abandoned, because critically rejected, essay on Conrad (with the words “drop this one” affixed), plucked from the waste file by two members of the Polish Conrad Society who threw it an editorial life vest: a new life. Rescue is a trope of generic renewal for speculative investment by authors and readers during inclement literary weather.