Conrad and Lawrence: Exile or Emancipation?

Giles, Jana Maria; Giles, Jana Maria

This collaborative session of the Lawrence Society of North America and the Conrad Society of America treats the themes of exile and emancipation in the works of two writers who, whilst coded modernist, are often seen as mutually adversarial. As much as these authors’ literary trajectories demand scholarly reappraisal, we should recall that both grappled with new modes of representing the processes of consciousness and identity; both contended with the implications of industrialism and imperialism; both were motivated by the effects of isolation upon men’s relations with nature and one’s fellows; and, despite strong cultural formations, each wrestled with the challenges of self-imposed exile. More specifically, in seeking spaces of freedom and movement in expatriate settings, both saw their hopes for personal liberty counterpoised by the spectres of nostalgia and regret – a process wherein the search for selfhood in an otherwise alien surroundings revealed the degree to which such freedoms were, from the start, defined by the cultural valuations they sought to evade. Moreover, in depicting non-Western peoples and settings, both writers were drawn to depict the pitfalls of charismatic leadership at the fringes of imperium – where, in a still-colonial era, human excesses appeared less constrained.

One advantage of bringing together formative modernist writers is to see how the instabilities and stalled emancipations of our times are prefigured in their works, thus the continuing applicability of their elaborations of competitive homosocial environments, of the pulls of nature within individuals, of the confrontation with (and projection of) one’s own realms of otherness. It is precisely because the disintegrative challenges of imperial modernity continue today that Conrad and Lawrence remain relevant, not least where their critiques of alienation might be expressed through the unstable or illusory reintegration of the individual with nature or spirit. Indeed, both authors prefigure the contestations of emancipatory individuality between the romantic raising of expanded consciousness – and the thereby liberated imagination – with a quasi-existential awareness that cultural isolation or alienation fail to provide, in social or natural orders, a solution to the moral profligacies of imperial modernity.

Presided over by the president of the Lawrence Society of North America, Benjamin Hagen, the panel’s first speaker, Adam Meehan, begins by repositioning Conrad’s and Lawrence’s supposedly modernist subjectivities in relation to the so-called dispersions of postmodernity. His paper, “Exile as Structure: Conrad, Lawrence, and the Ideology of Emancipation,” addresses the theoretical status of the exilic human subject. Beginning with Said’s notion of exile as “unhealable rift,” Lawrence’s expatriate existence – as exemplified by The Plumed Serpent – is read as a psychological and geographical attempt to seek renewal or liberation through the same imperial and racialized assumptions he had sought to evade. Conrad’s exilic outlooks, as dramatized in Heart of Darkness and Nostromo, are then set out as counter-discourses to Lawrence’s primitivism, unearthing the former’s dismissals of the West’s colonial framework as incomplete emancipations.

In the second presentation, “Imperial Nature and the Theatre of Self-Contestation: The Performance of Exile in An Outcast of the Islands and Kangaroo,” Mark Deggan, focuses upon the poetic strategies whereby wilderness spaces of exile are dynamized in Conrad’s An Outcast of the Islands and Lawrence’s Kangaroo. However much both works can be read as narratives of exilic liberation challenged through enthrallment to a more powerful personality, Deggan shows how each simultaneously dramatizes an individual’s confrontation with exotic spaces less as scenes of emancipatory agency than prisons of consciousness wherein the self is unhappily subsumed within nature.

Lastly, emeritus professor and Lawrence specialist, Feroza Jussawalla, places the writers’ early literary projects into relation with the discourses of colonial projection. Seeing Conrad’s Marlow narratives and Lawrence’s non-European texts as caught between “unbelonging” and a Bildungsroman-inflected desire to resolve what she calls the double vision of “exilic consciousness,” her paper investigates the formative literary apprenticeships and travels of both writers. As she argues, their supposedly restorative explorations of projected competency and emancipation remain exercises in exilic narration wherein each author stays invested, like Benjamin’s “angel of history” (or the excesses of our own era) with a backward-looking engagement with unforeseen futures. In sum, the panel triangulates the aesthetics, theory, and relationalities of two alienated authors fated to draw back from the perils of emancipatory individuation in their works and lives.

372 Conrad and Lawrence: Exile or Emancipation?: Calls for Papers