The Conradian Review
By Robert Hampson, Royal Holloway, University of London
Yoko Okuda. Emotions and Contingencies in Conrad’s Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2024). Hardcover £109.99, eBook £89.99.
Professor Okuda is a familiar figure in Conrad Studies through her contributions to conferences in Britain, France and Poland and through her publications across the range of international Conrad journals. She is also currently the president of the Joseph Conrad Society of Japan. Her monograph, Emotions and Contingencies in Conrad’s Fiction, is the product of more than a dozen years of research on this project.
Okuda begins with Conrad’s advice to Edward Noble in his letter of October 1895: ‘you must treat events only as illustrative of human sensation’ because only ‘inward feelings’ are truly interesting while events are ‘properly speaking accidents only’ (CL1 252). As she points out, ‘sensation’ here is a tricky word (with possible interference from the French, as in Conrad’s celebration of Henry James as the ‘historian of fine consciences’).1 Hugh Epstein has explored this area extensively in his recent Hardy, Conrad and the Senses (Edinburgh University Press, 2020). However, ‘inward feelings’ has no such ambiguity, and Okuda’s interest is in Conrad’s depiction of the emotions of his characters. She notes the neglect of the depiction of the emotions of characters and the appeal to the emotions of the reader in Western literary criticism (until the arrival of Affect Studies) and offers ‘the first book-length study of emotions’ in Conrad’s works (3). Her focus, as she makes clear, is not the philosophical approach to affect, but rather the ‘experience-based’ psychological approach which accords with the views stated in the letter to Noble. By combining this focus with close textual reading, as she notes, she follows in the tradition of her early mentor, Paul Kirschner.2
As Okuda suggests at the outset, Conrad’s ‘unique insights into human emotions’ (3) involve an engagement with ethical values and a planetary consciousness to which his earliest reviewers responded (which twenty-first century criticism has belatedly rediscovered).3 A key element of Conrad’s fictional universe, as the letter to Noble suggested, is the event, the accident, contingency. As Okuda observes, the sense of impermanence that is part of this vision is ‘at the core of Eastern religions’ (12), and she suggests similarities between Conrad’s world-view and the ‘Three Signs of Being’ in Buddhism: Change, No-Self and Suffering / Emotions (13). However, she doesn’t pursue Conrad’s possible connections to Buddhism in the body of her text. Her concern here, rather, is to characterise herself as a reader and acknowledge her own situatedness: she doesn’t use Buddhism as her approach to the subject of the book, but, instead, keeps largely to western academic concepts of affect. (She draws particularly – and productively – on the work of Patrick Hogan.4)
The monograph examines seven works written by Conrad between 1898 and 1911 – from Lord Jim to Under Western Eyes – with Lord Jim ‘laying the ground for subsequent works’ (17). In her Introduction, Okuda discusses her key concepts – emotion, contingency and identity – in relation to Conrad’s letters. (Palgrave Macmillan now irritatingly insists that Introductions be entitled Chapter 1, clearly not understanding the different function of an Introduction.) The opening chapter, Chapter 2, then examines Marlow’s world-view in Lord Jim through the key concept of ‘the unexpected’ as a manifestation of impermanence. Okuda notes how Marlow’s expectation from the Patna inquiry was ‘some essential disclosure’ about ‘human emotions’ (LJ, 57), and what he encounters is Jim’s struggle with the emotions released by the disruption of his world-view through his encounter with ‘the unexpected’.5 She points out how Marlow’s relationship with Jim is itself marked at the start by a series of unexpected events, and how this is the context for Jim’s dream of a secure world in which everything can be ‘prepared for in advance’ (25). Ironically, as she points out, Marlow’s decision to take responsibility for Jim is itself an emotionally driven decision that contradicts his own view of the unexpected.
In the second half of the novel, Patusan is introduced as a place where ‘utter insecurity for life and property was the normal condition’ (LJ, 228). After his sudden realisation of his danger in Tunku Allang’s courtyard, Jim’s life in Patusan is obliged to proceed with a sense of impermanence and insecurity (as evidenced in his drinking of the raja’s coffee which might be poisoned). However, when Marlow visits him in Patusan, Jim’s extraordinary success has encouraged a confidence in ‘the security of tomorrow’ (34) which obviously forebodes disaster. As Conrad observes in The Mirror of the Sea: ‘a sense of security … precedes the swift fall of disaster’ (MS, 30). Okuda’s line of argument leads inevitably and insightfully to a reformulation of the ambiguity of the ending: is Jim’s surrender to Doramin a recognition of the insecurity of the unexpected that he had ignored or an attempt to confront that world of impermanence with his own preparedness?
Chapter 3 explores the development of Marlow’s emotional understanding through what he witnesses on his journey in Heart of Darkness. In her account of the novella, Okuda focusses on subjectivity and the emotions. She begins with the perception that, whether in relation to the Roman legions in Britain or Europeans in Africa, what the invader perceives as a threatening environment seems to be perceived differently by the indigenous peoples. However, given that Marlow’s narrative is mediated by another narrator, Okuda is on difficult ground when she tries to distinguish between subjective and objective realities in Marlow’s narration, although there are clearly certain things that count as what Marlow calls ‘straightforward facts’ (HoD, 61). (Here, for instance, if it were presented to us rather than deduced by us, the reality of the Africans is as subjective as that of the Europeans; on the other hand, the treatment of the Africans by the Europeans or the details of the navigation of the river take us into the realm of facts.) Nevertheless, she is right to emphasise how Marlow’s fable about the Roman legions is focussed on ‘feelings’ (HoD, 49).
Okuda is once more on awkward ground when she tries to argue that Marlow’s early reference to ‘devotion to efficiency’ (HoD, 50) is presented as a positive work ethic. That attempt to justify British colonialism in terms of efficiency falls apart as soon as he then goes on to define the task (‘the conquest of the earth’) as ‘aggravated murder on a great scale’ (HoD, 50). The criticism of ‘devotion to efficiency’ is embodied in his encounter with the accountant at the Outer Station, who objects to the groans of a dying man because they interfere with his book-keeping. Marlow’s preamble to his act of story-telling is a more tentative (and, ultimately, thwarted) attempt to justify ‘the conquest of the earth’: it prompts not the search for a redeeming ‘idea’, as first-time readers might think, but rather the story of a man who sets himself up as a god to be worshipped.
The rest of the chapter attends to Marlow’s interest in the emotional responses of others, ‘gradually developing a sensitivity to the emotional expression of others’ (55). Okuda rightly picks out his emotional responses to those he meets and his attention to the feelings of others in the course of his narrative. She contrasts, for example, his negative representation of the Europeans with the more positive representation of various African peoples: there are the rowers who provide him with ‘a momentary contact with reality’ (HoD, 61), not to mention the restraint and ‘inborn strength’ (HoD, 65) ascribed to the hungry crewmen on the steamer. However, Marlow’s expressed ‘curiosity’ about their ‘impulses, motives, capacities, weaknesses’ (HoD, 105) reminds us again that we are always dealing with Marlow’s subjective impressions rather than a veridic discourse (and there are more problematic aspects of his descriptions which Okuda does not address). This line of analysis culminates in Marlow’s encounters with Kurtz and with the Intended, where, as Okuda points out, he experiences not only ‘dull anger’ at the falsehood created by her responses, but also ‘a feeling of infinite pity’ (HoD, 161) at her expression of the pain of not being with Kurtz when he died. Okuda usefully suggests that, with the decision to tell his lie to the Intended about Kurtz’s last words, Marlow shakes off Kurtz’s influence and ‘regains emotional independence’ (56): ‘I pulled myself together and spoke slowly’ (HoD, 161). As he had stated earlier, Marlow ‘laid the ghost of his gifts with a lie’ (HoD, 115), and the voice stops.
In Chapter 4, Okuda approaches Nostromo in terms of the emotions, identity and nature. As she observes, Garnett, in his review of Nostromo, had mentioned both Conrad’s ‘psychological analysis of character’ and his attention to ‘the delicate relation of his characters to the whole environment’.6 As Epstein put it more recently: this represents a world-view in which ‘we are merely minute participants, caught up in the impersonal unfolding of a cosmic event’ (237). This is evidenced in the opening chapter of the novel with its description of the Golfo Placido, which prepares us for the crucial scene in which Nostromo and Decoud drift in the thick darkness of the Golfo in the lighter carrying its cargo of silver ingots.
Okuda’s focus in this chapter is on the emotional reactions and practical actions of the principal characters: Mr and Mrs Gould, Dr Monygham, Martin Decoud and Nostromo. For her discussion of identity, she begins by highlighting two key terms in the novel: ‘conviction’ and ‘personal advantage’. Conviction is an important concern in Conrad’s fiction, but ‘personal advantage’ proves a less productive lens in this chapter. Okuda addresses the force of an idea (and illusions) in relation to Gould; ‘unselfishness and sympathy’ (N, 67) in relation to Emilia Gould; Dr Monygham’s sense of human insignificance acquired during his time living ‘in the great forests of the far interior’ (N, 311); Decoud’s ‘paralysing sense of human littleness’, when he is left alone on the Great Isabel; and (less convincingly) Nostromo’s betrayal by a natural world with which he has lost contact.
In Chapter 5, Okuda returns to the impact of the unforeseen as she engages with ‘the emotional and mental lives’ of the major characters in The Secret Agent (83). She begins with Verloc’s indolence, the ‘surprise’ of Vladimir’s unexpected demand, and the anger Verloc feels at this disruption to his way of life. She then discusses the Professor’s ‘exalted conviction of his merits’ (SA, 75), his ‘self-confident’ belief that he is a ‘moral agent’, and the deep-seated fear this is designed to suppress. She proceeds to describe the self-interest that underlies the actions of Chief Inspector Heat and the Assistant Commissioner, and the security that Heat finds in his professional life (and the surprise and anger he feels when the Assistant Commissioner confronts him); Stevie’s ‘morbid fear of pain’ (98), his ‘immoderate compassion’ (169) for the suffering of other sentient beings and his anger directed at the perpetrators of violence (which Verloc presumably exploits); and Winnie’s quasi-maternal love for her brother, her ‘uninquiring acceptance of facts’ (153), and her murderous anger at the news of his death. In many of these instances, Okuda traces a common pattern of surprise leading to anger.
In Chapter 6 and 7, by contrast, she turns her attention to emotional maturation: D’Hubert’s emotional maturation in ‘The Duel’ in Chapter 6, and the captain’s emotional maturation in ‘The Secret Sharer’ in Chapter 7. Chapter 6 tracks D’Hubert’s shifting emotions in the face of the series of irrational challenges from his opponent Feraud. Okuda registers the unimaginative D’Hubert’s initial failure to understand Feraud’s otherness and Feraud’s emotionally driven obsession. She then relates the emotional maturation of D’Hubert to his response to the news of his sister’s engagement, which renders him more reflective, and, subsequently, to his passionate love for his fiancée. The result of this process is, as she notes, that, on the eve of his final duel, D’Hubert ‘made the full pilgrimage of emotions … tasting every emotion that life has to give’ (247) and, next day, displayed ‘true courage’ by ‘going out to meet an odious danger’ from which ‘body, soul, and heart recoil together’ (248).
There is a long critical tradition of psychological readings of ‘the Secret Sharer’. By contrast, Okuda’s focus, in Chapter 7, is on the body: she argues that Leggatt’s presence awakens in the captain a sense of his physicality that is essential to his effective command of the ship. She productively draws on Jeremy Hawthorn’s attention to ‘bodily communication’ in Under Western Eyes to attend to references to ‘posture, gesture, movement, touch, expression’ in the novella.7 She begins with the new captain, at the start of the narrative, resting his hand on the rail of the ship, as if he were putting his hand ‘on the shoulder of a trusted friend’ (SS, 92). In support of her account of the captain’s ‘bodily learning’, Okuda has recourse to Zen meditation, in which learning through the body is fundamental. After noting how the captain first tries to come to terms with his feeling of estrangement through mental processes, Okuda emphasises the various forms of non-verbal communication through which the captain forms his bond with Leggatt and then proposes a reading in terms of the captain’s need ‘to learn to see with the bodily eyes without the interference of the mind’s eyes’ (133).
In her final chapter, Chapter 8, Okuda’s attention to the body culminates in her reading of Under Western Eyes, where she also attempts to bring together the issues of emotions and identity that she introduced earlier by drawing on Antonio Damasio.8 For Damasio, emotions are ‘played out in the theatre of the body’ (8), and this provides Okuda with the title and focus of her chapter. Initially, however, she takes off from Hawthorn and distinguishes between concrete and abstract images in Razumov’s consciousness, where abstract images are produced by fear and imposed on the concrete image. Okuda compares these to Damasio’s ‘core consciousness’ and ‘extended consciousness’ (147-8). She provides a sensitive account of Razumov’s failure to respond to the body of Haldin and of the teacher of language’s attentive reading of Razumov’s body in their first encounter on the Bastions. She is particularly good in her reading of Razumov’s responses during this encounter (and subsequently), and she makes a suggestive linkage between Haldin’ s embodied claim on Razumov (‘here I am’ [UWE, 8]) and Razumov’s similar claim made on the teacher of languages (‘You see me here’ [UWE, 191]). Okuda provides similarly detailed readings of Razumov’s meeting with Sophia Antonovna (tracking Sophia Antonovna’s shift from prioritising impressions to prioritising words) and his relations with Natalia Haldin (tracing the development of a new aspect of himself, and a new sensitivity to the body, which is evidenced, for example, in his sympathetic response to Tekla).
In these final chapters, Okuda is at her best – culminating in her reading of Razumov’s final response to Natalia (‘that marvellous harmony of feature, of lines, of glances, of voice, which made of the girl before him a being so rare’ [UWE, 343]) as a recognition of the living body that releases him from the haunting by the image of Haldin, and of Natalia’s reluctance, in this final meeting, to give up her brother’s words for the physical evidence of the body in front of her. Overall, Okuda’s monograph provides an informed and attentive engagement with a range of Conrad’s texts, offering insightful readings and demonstrating the value of paying critical attention to Conrad’s depiction of the emotions.
1 Joseph Conrad, ‘Henry James: An Appreciation’, Notes on Life & Letters (London: J. M. Dent, 1924) 11-19, 17.
2 Paul Kirschner, Joseph Conrad: The Psychologist as Artist (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1968).
3 See The Conradian, 46.2 (Autumn 2021), a special issue on ‘Conrad and the Planetary’, guest-edited by Mark Deggan.
4 See Patrick Colin Hogan, What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), Literature and Emotion (London: Routledge, 2018) and Literature and Moral Feeling: A Cognitive Poetics of Ethics, Narrative and Empathy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022).
5 All Okuda’s references are to the Dent Collected Edition, which has the same pagination as the earlier Dent Uniform Edition.
6 Edward Garnett, CR 1, 204.
7 Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad; Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment (London: Edward Arnold, 1990), 236.
8 Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotions in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt, 1999).
© 2025 Robert Hampson