Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Note on the text
- Introduction
- Part I Conrad's French literary and cultural background
- Part II Conrad's debt to French authors
- Part III Conrad's philosophical and aesthetic inheritance
- Part IV Conclusion
- Appendix Conrad's knowledge of French writers
- Notes
- Bibliography
- General name index
- Index of Conrad's links with other writers
Appendix - Conrad's knowledge of French writers
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 January 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Note on the text
- Introduction
- Part I Conrad's French literary and cultural background
- Part II Conrad's debt to French authors
- Part III Conrad's philosophical and aesthetic inheritance
- Part IV Conclusion
- Appendix Conrad's knowledge of French writers
- Notes
- Bibliography
- General name index
- Index of Conrad's links with other writers
Summary
Novelists having a significant impact on Conrad's fiction
Benjamin Constant (1767–1830)
See above, pp. 122-35 for Conrad's debt to Constant in the creation of Victory.
Stendhal (1783–1842)
In ‘Books’ (1905) Conrad, castigating the ‘high priests who have proclaimed Stendhal for a prophet of Naturalism’, gave this warm appreciation:
But Stendhal himself would have accepted no limitation of his freedom. Stendhal's mind was of the first order. His spirit above must be raging with a peculiarly Stendhalesque scorn and indignation. For the truth is that more than one kind of intellectual cowardice hides behind the literary formulas. And Stendhal was pre-eminently courageous. He wrote his two great novels, which so few people have read, in a spirit of fearless liberty.
(NLL,p.8)Although Retinger asserted that Conrad found the Forsyte Saga ‘too grey’ because it ‘conformed too much […] to Stendhal's definition of a novel: un miroir qui se promène sur la grande route’, Conrad does not seem to have been indifferent to Stendhal's technique. Ford recollected hearing Conrad ‘read with enthusiasm, commenting as he went on the technique there employed, at least half of Le Rouge et le Noir’, and claimed that Stendhal ‘did very much inspire Joseph Conrad, at any rate during the earlier periods of his writing career’. (See above, pp. 107-8 for the impact of Le Rouge et le noir (1830) on Under Western Eyes.)
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- Information
- The French Face of Joseph Conrad , pp. 233 - 256Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1990