Conrad: Words and Reality
Conrad: Words and Reality

Author(s): Hugh Epstein
Subject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Literary Texts
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego
Summary/Abstract: Conrad’s Teacher of Languages states “Words, as is well known, are the great foesof reality”; but Conrad also writes of “technical language … created by simple menwith keen eyes for the real aspect of the things they see in their trade.” Charles Gouldlaments his Blanco fellow-travellers’ “trusting in words of some sort”—and so on.There have been many fine studies of Conrad’s language and Conrad and language(Fenandez; Senn; Ray; Galt Harpham; Greaney; Peters among others), and most recentlya volume of essays, Conrad and Language (Baxter and Hampson, eds.) devotedto “a questioning of the relation of words and things and a recognition of language’sapproximate representation of reality.” The particular focus of my own contributionto this discussion of the bifold nature of Conrad’s conceptions of language will be onwords themselves: “words, groups of words standing alone” (CL, 2:200), their weightand force, their fraudulence and truth as they sound in Conrad’s fiction. A range ofinstances and allusions to “words” drawn from his novels, as well as his letters andessays, finds out the contest between romance and scepticism that is such a productiveforce for Conrad’s strenuous fictional writing. The essay concludes by identifying thefive most important words for Conrad as a novelist, showing how they embodythe distinctiveness of his unillusioned search to tie words to reality.

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