A Conradian Odyssey

Colonial Odysseys: Empire and Epic in the Modernist Novel

by David Adams

Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. 249 pages

Despite its title, which promises a study of colonial odysseys in the modernist novel, Colonial Odysseys is primarily a book on Joseph Conrad that examines his use of the odyssey motif in the context of modern British literature and culture. Fortunately, it is a very good book on Conrad whatever the title, since in addition to offering fresh readings of a number of Conrad texts, it addresses a key philosophical question that Conrad and others addressed: how to fill (or "reoccupy," to borrow Hans Blumenberg's term) the god-shaped hole in an increasingly secular culture (10). Ultimately, Adams demonstrates that even though Conrad, like others including Evelyn Waugh and E. M. Forster, was "unable to dispense with questions about the totality of the world and history," he was "able to expose the deficiency of available answers" in his colonial odysseys--that is, in stories that relate themselves, often ironically, to Odysseus's epic journey to alien places (6).

In the opening chapter, Adams discusses Hellenism in relation to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary culture, contrasting popular Victorian adventure stories with what he identifies as modernist colonial odysseys. Whereas the former, according to Adams, "employ the odyssey myth both to escape from problems of modernity and celebrate the empire" (10), the latter use the myth to associate homecoming with "estrangement and death" (30). Although Adams's discussion of adventure stories is problematic since he relies on the Tarzan stories written by an American, Edgar Rice Burroughs, to demonstrate the prevalence of Hellenism in popular British fiction, his discussion of E. M. Forster's gradual rejection of Hellenism is informative, if abbreviated. Using primarily biographical information, Adams shows how Forster moves from seeking "a rapprochement with modernity" in his early works to accepting that such a rapprochement can never occur. The latter, he argues, can be seen most clearly in A Passage to India, a modernist colonial odyssey that "exposes the false hope that imperial power can replace divine power" (44). On the whole, Adams's discussion of Forster works well as an introduction to the theme of "reoccupation" that he takes up in much more detail in the chapters that follow. Since he tends to assert rather than demonstrate, however, particularly when addressing Forster's earlier works, the section adds little to existing Forster criticism.

In the second chapter, Adams provides a theoretical foundation for his analysis of modernism, imperialism, and secularization in relation to the modernist novel. Drawing from the work of Edward Said, Fredric Jameson, Georg Lukacs, and especially Hans Blumenberg, Adams argues that modernist colonial odysseys can be understood as efforts to "reoccupy the god-shaped vacuum" that exists in modern secular culture (74). Adams's strength is in his ability to synthesize elements from the work of distinct theorists into a cohesive whole: he shows how the modernist preoccupation with redemption, power, and death can be understood in metaphysical rather than political terms. Unfortunately, he is less convincing when he tries to connect the metaphysics of modernism to the metaphysics of the novel, in part because the only novel he discusses at any length is Joyce's Ulysses, and even then he fails to focus on issues of genre. The chapter would have benefited from further literary examples.

Chapter 3, which is divided into three subchapters, each of which could be considered a chapter in itself, focuses on Joseph Conrad's efforts to employ art as a means of "reoccupation." In his analysis of "Karain," one of Conrad's first colonial odysseys, Adams demonstrates how "[n]either Queen, empire, nor fiction has the power to perform the redemptive role once belonging to the Christian God" (117). Although his conclusions rely on the complex interpretation of the gilt coin featured in the story, he is impressive in his use of textual and historical evidence and ultimately convincing in his claim that Conrad recognizes the inadequacies of British imperialist ideology as a means of reoccupation.

In the section on Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim, Adams focuses more directly on art's redemptive potential or lack thereof. Here Adams's contributions to Conrad scholarship are valuable not only because he approaches Conrad's best-known colonial odysseys from a philosophical perspective but also because he makes a number of insightful local points about everything from Jim's leap from the Patna to Marlow's lie to the Intended. Unfortunately, Adams never reconciles Conrad's philosophical attitudes toward art, imperialism, and modernity with his personal ones. The discussion of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim would have been richer if he had taken into account both Conrad's education as a member of the Polish intelligentsia and his experiences as a colonial subject of the Russian Empire. At the very least there should be some consideration of how Conrad's Eastern European intellectual milieu differed from that of writers such as Waugh, Forster, and Woolf.