Philip Hensher
Nothing Is Explained
Joseph Conrad: A Biography
By Jeffrey Meyers
John Murray 428pp £20
Conrad is in the fortunate position of having, for all purposes, no private existence. The great shaping influences on his life are public events and historical movements. The childhood in the vacuum of Poland, the youthful smuggling of arms for the Carlists, disillusionment in the Belgian Congo are happenings not just for a biographer but for a historian. They have an air of importance in themselves, which leaves Conrad's character and life trailing behind in the glamour stakes.
We know a lot about what happened to Conrad. But, in a way, we don't know anything about him. His marriage, for instance, baffled even his contemporaries. The man who claimed he valued beauty in a woman above all other qualities married a woman whom H G Wells called 'a
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Paul Gauguin kept house with a teenage ‘wife’ in French Polynesia, islands whose culture he is often accused of ransacking for his art.
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We are saddened to hear of the death of Fredric Jameson.
Here, from 1983, is Terry Eagleton’s review of The Political Unconscious.
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Terry Eagleton: Supermarket of the Mind - The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act by Fredric Jameson
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