Word: guerard
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...Guerard's book is not quite so sweeping as the title would indicate, which is just as well. There is very little biographical detail, and he is willing to deal with his favorite novels at great length, while others are dismissed with a few pages, or none. Partisans of Victory and Chance may complain that they are worth more than a half-dozen pages apiece, but Guerard's rejection of them is persuasive...
...which is a commendable notion, and well carried out. Even when Guerard's interpretations are arguable--as any interpretation of Nigger, at least, must be--he is thorough and persuasive. He is at his best in the discussions of technique...
...chapter on the short novels is not as impressive as the treatment of Lord Jim and Nigger, mostly because it is more one-sided. Guerard sees each of the three short novels as a dramatization of the "night journey," a descent into the unconscious to meet one's dark and criminal double--one's Kurtz or Leggat. Obviously, Conrad did not know enough Jung and Fraser to understand the "dramatization," and the core of the interpretation--and of much of the book--is the assumption that Conrad wrote more than he knew. Guerard explains in a footnote...
...think Guerard justifies the whole of his interpretation here. For one thing, he is inconsistent; he speaks at one point of the "dreaming of Lord Jim"--when someone else might say "composing" and then goes on to detail the elaborate pains Conrad took over each phrase to insure total control of the material and of the reader. Guerard's combination of reverie and manipulation is difficult to accept; to be sure, Marlowe sometimes mentions--and conveys--the dreamlike quality of his tales, but we must attribute the dream to him, not to Conrad, for Guerard himself has taught...
...second to last section of Conrad the Novelist deals with the three political novels: Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes. It is not, I think, an impressive as the first two hundred pages; there are excellent passages, particularly in the Nostromo chapter, but Guerard does not always reach the high level he maintains in treating the other novels...