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C H A P T E R # 7
Conrad's
Style
"It
(style) must strenuously aspire to the plasticity of sculpture, to the colour
of painting, and to the magic suggestiveness of music - which is the art of
arts"
(Joseph Conrad)
The Mode of Narration:
It is as a writer, as an artificer
of splendid periods, an evoker of atmosphere, a translator of concrete
phenomena into living words, that Conrad is chiefly famed. His prose is flush, gleam,
atmospheric, eloquent and superb. Rather any other good writing, his
prose-style is no more and no less than the translation of thoughts, feelings,
perceptions, into words with the minimum loss of intensity. Conrad, a writer
of prose, had an etiquette, a style of writing-a style of extreme flexibility,
expressiveness, and interest. If a writer can give full value to his
perceptions of the most colourless and commonplace phenomena he is a good
writer. The opening paragraphs of The Secret Agent, descriptive of Mr.
Verloc's miniature emporium in Soho must have been as hard to write as any
passage descriptive of a luxuriant jungle scene, sunrise and all. Similarly,
the Patna's interrupted voyage across the Arabian Sea is the amazing
description. These celebrated passages, nevertheless, are useful because of they
highlight Conrad's temperamental approach to the subject to be rendered, which,
although it has nothing to do with the manipulation of words as such, plainly
has a direct bearing on the nature of his prose, The first thousand words of Suspense
prove that Conrad was a great writer so effectively that the whole of "Typhoon"
is a good deal more useful than Suspense for the light it throws on Conrad's
psychology.
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