“Conrad’s Margins and Details”

ENGAGING IN A CRITICAL STUDY ABOUT CONRAD’S FICTION TODAY means entering a crowded arena, jostling with established scholarship and experi- mental reading methods. Nevertheless, both the topic and the critical ap- proach of Johan Adam Warodell’s book add a convincing and original perspective to Conradian studies. Warodell proposes a change of viewpoint that, in the terms of Edward Said, shifts us ‘from the settled, established, and domesticated dynamics’ of Conrad’s fiction ‘to its unhoused, decen- tered, and exilic energies’.1 If we had to define Warodell’s book with a sin- gle word, that word would be ‘marginality’. By drawing on Joseph Conrad’s life as well as on his extended corpus of fiction, Warodell analyses all that is marginal, negligible, on the edge, and apparently unimportant in his novels in order to build a discourse which reverses the meaning of liter- ary marginality as we know it today. Every dictionary will define the adjec- tive ‘marginal’ by referring to minimal qualities and bordering positions. In this book, those qualities and positions are made central and considered as the pivot of new stimulating interpretations. Marginality detaches from the meaning it has gained in today’s literary criticism as referred to minority culture and becomes the place where ‘Conrad’s philosophy, writing and working method is made clear’ (p. 11).