CONRAD IN PERSPECTIVE

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33941, 6 September 1975, Page 10

CONRAD IN PERSPECTIVE

Conrad; A Reassessment. By Douglas Hewitt. Bowes and Bowes. 142 pp. Notes, bibliography and index. N.Z. price $5.65. Many admirers of Conrad will be familiar with Douglas Hewitt’s fine pioneer study, which remains the best single account of Conrad’s principal novels and stories. Hewitt’s early value was in his distinction, between the good and the bad in Conrad; in his insistence that Conrad’s exotic settings were a means and not an end; and in his clear analysis of Conrad's most constant themes. This reissue of the 1952 book has a new preface and conclusion, and includes the long preface to the book’s 1968 second edition, which serves as a most interesting account of the means by which the literary critical process has attempted to abstract Conrad from recognition into obscuritv again. Mr Hewitt, for example, saw fit in 1952 to point out that the telegraph wire in

“Nostromo” signified something more than its literal self, as a means of contact between an isolated community and the outer world of commerce and change. Now he rightly protests at the critical tendency which can see the said wire “only as • a symbolic umbilical cord linking the womb-like mine with the town which has metaphorically issued from it but which, nevertheless, by the strange logic of archetypes, rests by the amniotic waters of mother sea.” Mr Hewitt’s study is refreshingly common-sense, and makes its judgments from demonstrably close readings of the texts, and of Conrad’s own scattered and contradictory observations on his art. Mr Hewitt’s claim for Conrad of a “body of work which makes all but a handful of other English novelists look superficial” is commonplace now. The virtue of this study lies in the fact that Mr Hewitt had, in 1952, to demonstrate it, and did so,