Both in his fiction and autobiographical writing Conrad was trying to do something that his experience as a writer every where revealed to be impossible. (Said, The World 90)

Introduction

As a romantic idealist Conrad shares the overarching concern of the great Romantic, Novalis, for example, that the artist’s task is to invest “the commonplace with a lofty significance, the ordinary with a mysterious aspect, the familiar with the prestige of the unfamiliar, the finite with the semblance of infinity” (Novalis,Collected Works, III, 38).  Yet in doing this, Conrad proceeds from the perspective of organicist idealism, hence his metaphysical critique of 19^th century rationalist and instrumental logic. Indeed Conrad’s novels may be said to illustrate Conrad’s negotiation of the contradictions inherent in his Romantic commitment to personal-intuitive vision and his social organicist beliefs (political-collectivist idealism). The paper offers a panoptic view of Conrad’s textual practice through a wide-ranging discussion of his major novels¹ (with greater emphasis here and there on one than the other). Yet the paper also draws on Conrad’s non-fictional writings, such as letters and critical essays in order to retrace the key contours of Conrad’s “rhetoric of presence”, that is, his desire for pure being, ontological fullness, and an originary, self-evident Plenitude, what Said calls the “writer’s intention of wishing to say something very clearly” (The World 95) via the structures of literary art, namely organic Form. Said describes this process very well when he writes of Conrad:

[Conrad’s] narrative no longer assumes merely listeners. It dramatizes them as well, so that frequently even the author himself appears to be participating in the tale as an audience or, more precisely… as the dramatized recipient of impressions… his language is usually in the mode of reported speech. (Said 101)