«Sailing towards Poland» with Joseph Conrad: (42 American University Studies)

Joseph Conrad ingeniously buried images from Polish literature and culture into his works. Once recognized, these references alter the accepted meanings of the texts. In an interview that was published in Kuryer Polski (in the then Polish city of Ostrawa, now in the Czech Republic) on 26 August 1915, Conrad himself declared about the nineteenth-century Polish poets: “Krasiński, Mickiewicz and Słowacki. Their words are everything for me. I was raised and formed by them.” Yet, the Polish sources deeply rooted in Conrad’s works have been scantily acknowledged and hardly explored, although notable intertextual theorists have argued that the ultimate understanding of the text comes from the intertext(s). The first part of this book analyzes Conrad’s first novel, Almayer’s Folly, and four of his greatest works: Lord Jim, Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. Unearthing the cache of Polish references in these works enhances our intellectual and aesthetic appreciation of Conrad as an artist par excellence. The signs recall literary and artistic works as well as aspects of social behavior, as Kristeva and Riffaterre explain. Bloom provides additional insight regarding the writer’s struggle to supersede his predecessors. The second part of the book looks at two autobiographical works: A Personal Record and “A Familiar Preface.” With poetic eloquence, Conrad proclaims his victory over his tragic past in A Personal Record. A tone of gaiety rises stubbornly in the midst of complete awareness of sorrow. The tone of “A Familiar Preface” is also unmistakably triumphant. More than joyous, the merriment in these self-portraits celebrates many worldly achievements, but ultimately one great triumph. In his writings the English author has transcended bitter adversities by transfiguring dreadful facts into the perfection and permanence of art.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations – Acknowledgments – List of Abbreviations – Introduction – Echoes from Konrad Wallenrod in Almayer’s Folly and A Personal Record – Polish Butterflies in Lord Jim and Echoes from The Iliad – Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard – The New Religion in Zygmunt Krasiński’s The Undivine Comedy and The Secret Agent – The Memoirs of Tadeusz Bobrowski and A Personal Record – Under Western Eyes – A Personal Record – The Manuscript of "A Familiar Preface" An Encoded Proclamation of Triumph – Appendix: Kurtz’s Cathedral: An Image from The Undivine Comedy in Heart of Darkness – Works Cited – Permissions – Index.

About the Author :
Jean M. Szczypien (Ph.D., University of Massachusetts in Amherst) was Professor of English for thirty years at SUNY/FIT in Manhattan and continues to teach there on a part-time basis. She was President of The Joseph Conrad Society of America from December 2000 to 2002. Her essays have been published in a variety of journals and anthologies. Szczypien has also lectured on Joseph Conrad at international conferences in Canada, Denmark, England, France, Italy, Poland, and the United States.

Review :
“In a captivating new book, Jean M. Szczypien’s important work deftly reinstates Conrad’s enduring attachment to, as well as complex relationship with his native Poland. In its range and depth the book goes much further than to suggest the presence of Conrad’s Polish ‘background’ in his fiction. Szczypien’s deep and extensive research reveals the subtle character of Conrad’s relationship to Poland and Polish literature. Each chapter delivers a welcome addition to Conrad studies and an expert assessment of the intertexts and traces of the Polish literary and linguistic contexts of Conrad’s work. Szczypien shows the way in which the language and content of Polish texts, philosophical ideas, and political skepticism, especially of the Romantic period, resonate throughout Conrad’s fiction and letters.” Susan Jones, Fellow and Tutor in English, St Hilda’s College, University of Oxford “This book is a striking—and strikingly necessary—contribution to the rich and enormously consequential tradition of considering Conrad in light of the literature, culture, history, and politics of his native Poland. Expanding our sense of Conrad’s echoes and interactions with Polish literary history to degrees hitherto unappreciated, Jean M. Szczypien advances a suggestive case for an entire symbolic register through which Conrad’s fiction is in consistent dialogue with Polish literary precedent, and in the process challenges our understandings of a significant number of Conrad’s texts. Readers interested in Conrad’s Polish moorings will find themselves irresistibly engaged by this text—and readers not yet interested in such ‘Polish’ questions will find themselves challenged and compelled to change their minds by the significance of the subject and the gravity, eloquence, and provocative elasticity of its treatment here. Definitely an important contribution to current global and internationalist interests in Conrad generally.” Peter Lancelot Mallios, University of Maryland “Jean M. Szczypien has delved deeply into Conrad’s Polish background, an area in which almost all of us Anglo-American Conradians are woefully ignorant.” Thomas C. Moser, Emeritus Professor of English, Stanford University