1 Death and the Lighthouses (1 January 2001)

with the bizarre screech: “The revolution will not be like the new
historicisms. The revolution may never happen and, if it does, will be more
like a consumerist atavism than a progressive Marxism.” (More gibberish,
though I what may be troubling Currie is those TV news scenes of
people looting shops of electrical goods at times of social unrest.)
One of the requirements of the “transitions” series is that the theory
under discussion be tested against the same two texts,
and
This requirement exposes
the paucity of Currie’s critical approach. The best he can do with
Stevenson’s novella is a deconstructionist reading which proposes that
perhaps Jekyll’s narratives are actually narrated by Hyde and that this
whacky and idiosyncratic reading is as valid as any other critical
interpretation, proving deconstruction’s point. The objection to this strategy
is that the rhetoric of Stevenson’s narrative involves persuasion and that
some versions of what this text is about are plausible on both internal
and/or external grounds, while others aren’t. Currie’s isn’t, in terms of
Stevenson’s own readings of his text, the conventions of Victorian narrative,
or the sub-texts which a twentieth-century critic can reasonably identify. It
is symptomatic and revealing that Currie never once gives Stevenson’s book
its correct title.
When it comes to Conrad he describes the interpretations of J. Hillis
Miller, Peter Brooks, Nina Pelikan Straus, Edward Said and Christopher
Miller, finding in the latter critic especially “a new kind of reading. It
represents the new narratological world in which the critic can be deeply
engaged in the projects of historicism and formalism at once.” To test this
claim to novelty, I scraped the half-inch layer of dust off my copy of C. B.
Cox’s (London, Dent, 1974) to see
what an old-fashioned untheoretical critic made of
. Cox
begins by looking at Conrad’s versions of the two female characters in
relation to Freud and Conrad’s own attitudes to sexuality, while cautioning
that “Conrad’s impressionist method gathers itself into a wealth of possible
meanings of which the Freudian constitute only a part.” Cox describes
Conrad’s own experiences in the Congo and quotes from his notebook,
contrasts this with the use of mythology in the narrative, but warns that
Conrad’s intention was not to compose an allegory. He notes the thrillerish
aspects of the narrative, the pervasive irony, the twin meanings of the title,
the contradictory uses to which the word “reality” is put in the text, and the
double-edged aspect of Marlow’s quest, which is “both a search for moral
enlightenment and an investigation into the appropriateness of aesthetic
forms”. He examines “the failure of civilised language”, the unresolved
tension between imperialism and the wilderness. He discusses the wide
variety of critical responses evoked by the novella. He offers an
interpretation of that strange figure, the harlequin.
1 (1 January 2001) 44