Contextualizing and comprehending Joseph Conrad's "The Return."

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1996 by the Kid Billy

(2) References to Conrad's works (Dent, 1946) are abbreviated as follows throughout this essay: The Arrow of Gold (AG), Heart of Darkness (HD), Lord Jim (LJ), Nostromo (N), The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (NN), An Outcast of the Islands (OI), The Rescue (R), The Secret Agent (SA), Tales of Hearsay (TH), Twixt Land and Sea (TLS), Tales of Unrest (TU).

(3) For alternate discussions, see Bonney, Thorns and Arabesques (9096, 102) and "Politics, Perception, and Gender" (112-17). The "failed embrace" is the subversive counterpart of one of the most prominent of nineteenth-century situational motifs, that of agonized suspense as Andromeda, offered to Cetus, is rescued by Perseus: see Munich for an inclusive discussion.

(4) The phrase belongs to Keats (Letters 1: 185). See also Milton, Paradise Lost 8.460-90. References to Keats's poetry arc not capricious. Conrad was profoundly influenced by nineteenth-century European literature, and particularly by the works of Keats, whom he called "My favorite poet" (Tutein 56).

(5) Vergil apparently regards such a moment as bearing much figurative weight, for these details and vocabulary arc repeated in boon 6, in which Aeneas once again tries to grasp a wraith, in this case the ghost of his father:

Three times [Aeneas]

Tried to fling his arms round that dear neck, three times

The spirit melted from his hands

That clutched in vain, like the

. . . swift dissolution of a dream. (140)

(6) Although neglected at the present time by Western readers, the works of the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz were widely circulated in Europe throughout the nineteenth century, and much valued by Conrad, who could quote from them by heart even as a child (see Gurio 11, 57). Indeed, the name "Conrad" carries much patriotic significance within the context of Polish culture and is derived from Mickiewicz's Konrad Wallenrod.

(7) The following citations are only suggestive, by no means exhaustive: Goethe, Werther (60, 64, 69, 106, 119), Faust, pt. 2 (1.6560-63, 3.9804-10, 9939 11); Keats, "Lamia," "La Belle Dame Sans Merci"; Shelley, "Alastor" (lines 18091); Byron, Manfred (1.1.188-92); Mickiewicz, "Romanticism" (lines 5-13), Forefathers' Eve 3 (2.109-12), Konrad Wallenrod (lines 319, 1783, 1896). Perhaps the definitive twentieth-century example of this figurative event occurs in To the Lighthouse when the philosopher Mr. Ramsey gropes in the dark for his dead wife: "he stretched his arms out. They remained empty" (200). Completed embraces appear in Conrad's fiction typically only as rhetorical devices laced with annihilatory implications: see, e.g., Marlow's speculation that the wilderness "had taken [Kurtz], loved him, embraced him . . . consumed his flesh," a trope that he anxiously extends unwittingly when he describes Kurtz's native mistress, who, as "she opened her bare arms," generates "shadows [that] darted out . . . gathering the steamer in a shadowy embrace" (HD115, 136). (8) By 1898 the arabesque had functioned for over a century-since Goethe's essay "Von Arabesken" (1789)--as a figure bearing inclusive aesthetic and existential significance in European Romantic discourse. For instance, Schlegel alone uses the word 98 times in his extant writings between 1797 and 1801. It suggests to him the "original chaos of human nature" that should be rendered in the design of prose fiction--the "most important thing in the novel is chaotic form" which is exemplified by the "arabesque." To Schlegel, the figure was embodied by the French Revolution, a "grim chaos," a "gigantic tragicomedy of humanity" (Brown 91-93). As usual, Conrad invokes the profundities attached to a word by his culture even as he uses it within a context that derides the very assumption that anything can be penetratingly profound (Latin pro: "before," "at" fundus: "the bottom").