Frederick Crews
THE POWER OF DARKNESS
{fApres tout rien ne remplace
les amities de notre en/ance."–
CONRAD (LETTER TO MARGUE–
RITE PORADOWSKA, OCTOBER
16,
1891)
Predictions about the future ranking of authors should be
made with the greatest tentativeness or not at all.
In
retrospect it is
easy to see that literary value in any given age has been glimpsed
through a haze of ideology (it wasn't long ago that
By
Love Possessed
was thought by many to be the Great American Novel). The acad–
emy, that home of disinterested taste, cannot be appealed to as a
referee; there a swelling GNP of discreet praise for every "major
author" is bound to
be
heard, and one author may be favored over
another simply because he lends himself to a more labored approach.
Joseph Conrad is a case in point: he was trilingual, he was influenced
and influential, he did some obscure things that need to be "research–
ed," he studded his works with symbols and he exuded a moral por–
tentousness that both invites and resists analysis. Most "Conradians"
would find it hard to separate these professional conveniences from
the question of Conrad's ultimate merit. Those of us who are in–
volved in the quaint modern industry of explaining literature are
assailed sometimes by a doubt as to whether we even know what we
like. To say what some future generation would like is quite beyond
our power; the closest we can come is to try to define for ourselves
the shape and limits of an author's imaginative world.
