[Vwoolf] Conrad and Woolf

[Jeremy Hawthorn]

I don't have any specific verbal echoes to reference, but passages such 
as these from /Lord Jim/ do make me think of Woolf's presentation of Jacob.

"These were things he could not explain to the court – and not even to 
me; but I would have been little fitted for the reception of his 
confidences had I not been able at times to understand the pauses 
between the words."

"'I don’t pretend I understood him. The views he let me have of himself 
were like those glimpses through the shifting rents in a thick fog – 
bits of vivid and vanishing detail, giving no connected idea of the 
general aspect of a country. They fed one's curiosity without satisfying 
it; they were no good for purposes of orientation."

"There is much truth - after all - in the common expression 'under a 
cloud.' It is impossible to see him clearly – especially as it is 
through the eyes of others that we take our last look at him."

"Now he is no more, there are days when the reality of his existence 
comes to me with an immense, with an overwhelming force; and yet upon my 
honour there are moments, too, when he passes from my eyes like a 
disembodied spirit astray amongst the passions of this earth, ready to 
surrender himself faithfully to the claim of his own world of shades."


However, the following sentence in /Jacob’s Room/: "But words have been 
used too often; touched and turned, and left exposed to the dust of the 
street" does remind me of this one from Conrad's "Typhoon": "And Captain 
MacWhirr wrote home from the coast of China twelve times every year, 
desiring quaintly to be 'remembered to the children,' and subscribing 
himself 'your loving husband,' as calmly as if the words so long used by 
so many men were, apart from their shape, worn-out things, and of a 
faded meaning."

Of course, we may well be talking here of a more general set of ideas 
about the mystery of other people that belong to a common modernist 
currency rather than just to two writers.

Jeremy H




On 18.12.2018 15:09, Christine Froula via Vwoolf wrote:
>
> ... and, of course, Woolf described the Polish Conrad as "our guest" 
> and "a better writer than the rest of us put together"... I have a few 
> pages on Woolf's reading of Conrad in relation to The Voyage Out in 
> /VW and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde/ (and some on Conrad and The Waves 
> in a forthcoming piece); the Lord Jim =} Jacob connection seems 
> intriguing; do you find close textual echoes?
>
> Christine
>
> On 12/18/2018 4:25 AM, Jeremy Hawthorn via Vwoolf wrote:
>>
>> I've often wondered to what extent a more general influence of /Lord 
>> Jim/ can be traced in /Jacob's Room/ - all the stuff about Marlow 
>> never seeing Jim clearly, that he is observed through a mist, and so 
>> on. In like manner the reader sees Jacob doing and saying all sorts 
>> of things, but ends up with a sense of his unknowability. In both 
>> cases, intimacy is denied.
>>
>> What do you think?
>>
>> Jeremy H
>>
>>
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