Noć se nad Gelu spuštala naglo, slično vranama koje iznenada slete na neko stablo. Bila je teška, nekako ljepljiva i zastrašujuća. Eshil je pamtio i drukčije noći, one vedre, obasjane mjesečinom, zalivene vinom i ozvučene pjesmom koja blagotvorno djeluje na ljudski duh. Te vedre noći u kojima se sjedilo uz vatre koje su titrale na licima sugovornika koji su, zahvaljujući volji bogova, opet bili okupljeni u taboru nakon dana koji su proveli ubijajući neprijatelje čije su vojskovođe pokušavale uništiti sustav vrijednosti koji je stoljećima izgrađivalo društvo naroda kojemu je i Eshil pripadao, kažem: te su noći pripadale njegovoj mladosti. U takvim je noćima on puštao mislima okupiti se na sijelo u njegovoj svijesti, opustiti se i zabaviti uz priče onih kojima je još do priče bilo, uz vino koje ih je činilo tromima, ali koje je ponekad i njemu razvezivalo jezik. Misli tada nisu postavljale dubokoumna pitanja (ona će doći kasnije, s godinama koje će Eshilu postupno širiti vidike); one su pripadale mladosti i težile onome čemu mladost i inače teži – jednostavnosti i mašti. Vojnik zaista ne treba puno: njemu je potrebna noć kako bi mu rekla da je proživio još jedan dan, da bi mu dala nadu da će ih doživjeti još mnogo i potrebna mu je mašta (a vojnik najradije mašta o ženskim čarima) kako bi mogao izdržati sve nevolje koje sa sobom vojnički život nosi.
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Akademik Božo Žepić, Nacija i nacionalno pitanje, Mostar, 2015.
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Uz godišnjicu smrti naše istaknute glumice Tatjane Feher
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Prošla je godina dana otkako nas je napustila Tatjana (Tanja) Feher, dugogodišnja članica ansambla Hrvatskog narodnog kazališta u Mostaru i Narodnog pozorišta Mostar. Na Akademiji dramskih umjetnosti u Zagrebu studirala je u klasi Branka Gavelle, a 1962. diplomirala kod Georgija Para.
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Doajenka našeg glumišta Tatjana Feher o svojim nagradama, uspomenima, ljubavima i životu (Maxi revija; lipanj, 2008.)
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Josip Mlakić, Svježe obojeno, Fraktura, Zaprešić 2014. Zvonimir Balog, Stoj ili pucam od zdravlja, Hrvatska kulturna zaklada, HKZ – Hrvatsko slovo, Zagreb, 2015. Sonja Škobić, Kuća okrenuta moru, Zdravo društvo, Mostar, 2014. Anto Stanić, Bili su k’o braća; Štamparija Fojnica; Kreševo, 2015. Grgo Mikulić, Priče i legende iz Hercegovine (II), Gral, Široki Brijeg, 2016. Anita Martinac, Medaljon
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Keywords: The Other; alienation; understanding; sympathy; communication; Levinas; loneliness; alterity
The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of the theme of confronting the Other in Conrad’s story “Amy Foster”. In an indifferent and at times even hostile or malevolent universe, Yanko Goorall’s fate seems to exemplify Man’s ultimate loneliness and the impossibility of reaching a full understanding of other people, as there is always an unbridgeable rift between individuals, of which linguistic and cultural barriers are but a small fraction. Limited by their narrow-mindedness or parochialism and overburdened by the bleak reality of everyday toil, Amy and the other villagers of Colebrook lack the capacity and sensibility that is needed to show understanding. They also lack the imagination to perceive Yanko’s basic needs and to acknowledge his longing for communication and natural human contact. However, the overall atmosphere of inhumanity and the general sense of estrangement appear to be slightly alleviated by – though not entirely compensated for – the empathy and yearning to find “a particle of a general truth in every mystery” exhibited in Doctor Kennedy’s account – which, characteristically, is framed by the primary narrator’s sincere interest in Yanko’s tragedy
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Keywords: Joseph Conrad; Nostromo; Under Western Eyes; The Secret Agent; Ford Madox Ford; The Inheritors; Sir Thomas More; utopia; dystopia; political novel
In this paper I discuss the three political novels of Joseph Conrad – Nostromo, Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent – along with one novel written together with Ford Madox Ford – The Inheritors. As well as analysing their literary structure, I examine the social and political visions that emerge from these novels. In my opinion, several elements in these texts show similarities to classical utopias such as Thomas More’s Utopia, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis or Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun. It would seem that the fictional reality which is presented in Conrad’s novels can be understood as being a symbolic reference to utopian worlds, together with their geography, history and principle characters. However, this is not to say that the meaning of Conrad’s novels is simply a continuation of utopian texts. To begin with, as none of these novels can be taken completely at face value – given Conrad’s irony and narratorial distance – a definitive identification of the social and political ideas which are to be found in them is no easy task. Moreover, some elements in these novels display a convergence of anti-utopian or dystopian visions, though the vogue for negative utopias only really began in the second decade of the twentieth century. To conclude, we may say that – read in this context – Conrad’s political novels can be interpreted as being both a positive and a negative vision of social development. They may also have had an influence on some later utopian or dystopian texts.
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Keywords: moral conventions; social exclusion; love; sacrifice; alienation; atavistic rage; crime
Joseph Conrad’s novel entitled The Secret Agent has three main thematic threads: those of social convention, psychology and politics. Against this background, we follow the story of Winnie Verloc’s humdrum existence, which is conditioned by the low social status of her family, the sense of alienation and distance that exists between herself and her husband, her own inborn psychological traits and her position as a woman, who – like other women at that time – had no say in important matters and was excluded from many areas of public life. Shocked by the tragic death of her beloved brother – which, to make matters worse, has been caused by her own husband – she kills the latter and – after suffering a nervous breakdown – takes her own life. Winnie Verloc’s story has been variously interpreted by literary critics, who differ particularly in their assessment of her motives for murdering her husband (B. Harrington, B. Soane), linking it with a critique of the hypocrisy of the bourgeois world and also of the big city, which is seen as a source of moral degradation. Her story is also sometimes interpreted in a ‘domestic’ colonial context (B. Soane) and through the optic of the status of Woman as the Other, who is deprived of her rights and dignity. Her life is also interpreted in terms of betrayal (W. Heimer) and the futility of her devotion to her brother, her fate being the epitome of lone sacrifice. Worthy of note is an attempt to look at Winnie from the point of view of her husband, together with a negative assessment of the fact that she married Verloc purely in order to safeguard her brother’s future (P. Dolan). W. Tillyard for his part wonders whether Winnie is a tragic figure. In conclusion, we may say that on a social plane, Winnie’s fate appears to be a consequence of the disintegration of the bourgeois world, while on a psychological plane it can be seen as a consequence of personal traits of character or inborn predispositions. On a political plane, Winnie’s story can be viewed through the optic of movements for the emancipation of women, as well as her unwitting involvement in a complicated political game.
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Keywords: atmospherics; climatology; redundancy; information theory; media theory; The Secret Agent
This paper examines the saturation of redundant particulates (such as fog, soot, dust and mist) and redundant sign systems in the atmospherics of The Secret Agent, while taking into account late Victorian responses to London’s air pollution. Through applying the information theory concepts of redundancy and information carrying capacity, it extends J. Hillis Miller’s analysis of repetition in Conrad’s work and thereby examines how the text’s minimal redundancy of specific words serves to encode higher levels of significance. The paper demonstrates that The Secret Agent represents the particulate atmosphere of London as a media system, in that its patterned use of minimal redundancy serves to trace the stabilization of collective conditions of immersion in air and sign systems.
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Keywords: Joseph Conrad; Yann Martel; parallel; Life of Pi; refractions of Conrad’s seafaring philosophy; nomadic biography
Yann Martel, the author of the Booker-winning novel Life of Pi, says in an interview that if asked to invite an author or book character to coffee, he would opt for Joseph Conrad (but only if the latter was in the mood for conversation). He would be glad to learn more about Conrad’s manner of writing. We can only make guesses at what form this imaginary conversation might take as it will remain unreported. Conrad is one of a number of authors who, along with Dante Alighieri, John Updike and John Steinbeck, live on in the Canadian writer’s creative work and populate the equally successful film version based on it. Many are convinced that – in today’s world of visual culture – it was the film which triggered mass interest in the book. The present article searches for refractions of Conrad’s seafaring philosophy and poetics in both the textual and cinematic mirrors of Life of Pi. It undertakes a close reading of some specific features of this particular case of film-making that reveal the cinematic potential of Conrad’s works and its realisation in the film interpretations.
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Keywords: Stanisław Lem; Joseph Conrad; Jan Józef Szczepański; “bring the visible world to justice”; “mete out justice to the visible world”; the ontology of a seaman; the ontology of an astronaut; axiological
Stanisław Lem betrayed his fascination with Joseph Conrad’s writing relatively early. The first references to Lord Jim can be found in his first novel, entitled Szpital Przemienienia (Hospital of the Transfiguration). However, the nature and the extent of this Conradian inspiration was based on Lem’s reading of Jan Józef Szczepański’s well known study entitled W służbie Wielkiego Armatora (In the Service of the Great Shipowner) and his much less well known List do Juliana Stryjkowskiego (A Letter to Julian Stryjkowski), in which he presents his understanding of the Conradian principle of “meting out (not ‘doing’) justice to the visible world”. Indeed, it would seem that Lem follows Szczepański in adopting the Conradian principle of axiological absolutism. Unlike Szczepański, however, Lem sees this principle not as the result of a broadly understood rational procedure, but instead detracts from its rationality by bringing within its scope the problem of the so-called randomness of supra-universal and supra-global cosmic reason. For Szczepański, the most important phase of his own approach to reading Conrad was undoubtedly Lord Jim. Although Lem betrays a partiality for Conrad’s short (and longer short) stories, he does not single out one particular story. In the present article, I venture to suggest that given Lem’s belief in “radical solitude in the cosmos”, the story whose import would best correspond to this conviction is The Shadow Line.
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Keywords: intertextuality; transposition; popular culture; popular fiction; science fiction
Joseph Conrad’s artistic legacy is of vital importance not only to those involved in the creation of ‘high’ literature and culture, but also to the creators of pop culture, including writers of popular fiction. In this paper, I discuss the influence of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and its impact on films, theatre, music, video games and – above all else – literature. In particular, I examine different realizations of the so-called transtextual relations that exist between Heart of Darkness on the one hand and science fiction and fantasy novels such as Heart of Darkness by Paul Lawrence or Headhunter by Timothy Findley on the other. The main section of the paper is devoted to a discussion of Robert Silverberg’s Downward to the Earth, which would seem to be the best example of such a transposition. In each case, the connections between both literary works are complex, especially as far as the titles, characters and the represented world are concerned. In my conclusion, I show how Robert Silverberg’s transposition of Joseph Conrad’s novella has changed both texts and why Conrad is so important for popular fiction.
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Keywords: Conrad; critical reception; Poland
The aim of this paper is to present the Polish critical reception of Conrad’s biography and work in the years 1897-2014, with particular emphasis being laid on the political, social, cultural and aesthetic factors that have conditioned this process. The reception began when Poland was still partitioned between Prussia, Russia and Austria. During this ‘Young Poland’ period, Conrad’s work was admired by a small artistic and intellectual elite which included Maria Komornicka, Stanisław Brzozowski and Wincenty Lutosławski. Things changed considerably when Poland regained her independence after World War I. Translations of Conrad’s collected works were published (with the active encouragement of the novelist Stefan Żeromski). The “Skamander” group of poets and the intellectuals grouped around the “Wiadomości Literackie” magazine became fascinated by Conrad, whose work was appreciated by the entire Polish political spectrum, with the sole exception of the communists. Towards the end of the interwar period, Conrad was seen as a kind of intellectual and moral ideal by leading critics of the younger generation. It was then that Conrad’s image in Poland was codified by Józef Ujejski’s monumental study entitled O Konradzie Korzeniowskim (On Conrad Korzeniowski – 1937). During the Second World War, Conrad became a moral landmark for those Poles – especially members of the Home Army – who were actively engaged in the struggle against Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. After the war, Conrad was strongly attacked by Marxists (and by Jan Kott in particular). During the period of relative liberalization which followed the political ‘thaw’ of 1956, Conrad’s books were widely read in independent intellectual circles and also began to be the subject of scholarly research. The period of the 1970s was particularly favourable for Conrad in Poland, as it was then that Zdzisław Najder played a leading role in the process of publishing, interpreting and popularizing his works. The restoration of democracy in 1989 removed all the remaining political obstacles to the popularization and study of Conrad’s work in Poland and a new generation of young and able scholars began to offer new approaches to the interpretation of his work. Unfortunately, however, in recent years Poland has not seen any significant growth in interest in Conrad on the part of the general reading public. We may note that in the past this interest would seem to have been occasioned in large measure by discussions on key issues of Polish culture, as Conrad – on account of his Polish heritage and his own considerable influence on Polish culture – was always considered to have been “one of us”.
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Keywords: Jospeh Conrad; censorship; communist rule; Home Army; Conradian values; literary criticism
This article discusses the attitude of Polish Conrad scholars towards Conrad and his works from the very beginning of his literary career to the present day, discussing the way they have perceived Conrad’s national identity and his cultural belonging. Although I aim to present a review of Polish criticism over the years, I pay particular attention to modern criticism, i.e. that of the period since the end of the Second World War, which includes the years of de facto communist rule (1945-1989). I try to determine whether Conrad is still “one of us”, whether he can be perceived as a moralist in the twenty-first century and whether there is a need for such a moralist in present-day Poland.
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Keywords: allegory; correspondence; clue; detection; irony; process
Written by an armchair detective/semiotician, this truncated version of a longer reading guide demonstrates Terence Hawkes’ Structuralism and Semiotics dictum that any semiotic “way of thinking about the world which is predominantly concerned with the perception and description of structures” is not static (6). Such dynamism, Hawkes points out, owes its momentum to the early twentieth-century revised understanding of the nature of perception. This understanding contains an inherent bias which affects what is perceived: “[t]he true nature of things [lies] not in things themselves, but in the relationship which we construct, and then perceive, between them” (7). In constructing one reading of Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent: a Simple Tale this guide relies on Michel Foucault’s elaboration in Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things) of the relationship between signifiers such as “correspondence”, “lie”, “mirror” as well as other encoded, cryptic, allegorical, verb / nouns and things. By example more than by explanation or interpretation, the guide foregrounds Conrad’s amusement at the “droll connections between incongruous ideas” (16) which the mind makes. The guide’s strategy of employing examples of mental semiotic processes borrows Conrad’s strategy of employing a pseudo detective story as a structuring method. As a detective text, The Secret Agent draws attention to its own self-reflexive modus operandi: it drops clues to Charles Sanders Peirce’s secret agent: semiotics. The guide invites its readers to likewise discern word’s hidden “matter.”
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