Although his fascination with 'the novel' as a form of art has been well documented by Ford Madox Ford and others, Conrad seldom used the term to refer to his own longer works. In their subtitles, he described six of his novels as 'tales' and one as a 'story', thus emphasizing the older and larger category of narrative fiction. In his letters also, he preferred not to distinguish between short fiction and novels, referring to both forms as 'stories'. This blurring of generic boundaries reflects the organic evolution of many of his works. For example, Nostromo, which he was still calling a 'story' after writing 560 manuscript pages, actually began as a short story before it became a 'long short story', and then a 'long story' or 'novel'. Indeed, any overview of Conrad's creative process would reveal an essentially Darwinian approach to writing fiction in that his art forms are continually being modified by the pressures of their 'environment'. Perhaps for this reason, he often exploited comparisons with elemental or natural forces to describe his working methods: ‘I am letting myself go with the Nigger. He grows and grows’, ‘The Typhoon is still blowing’, ‘Verloc’ – a little earlier called ‘this beast’ – ‘is extending’, ‘Razumov will grow into a short book before I am done with him’, and so on (Letters, I, p. 312; II, p. 307; III, p. 318; IV, p. 76). Of all Conrad‘s stories and novels, only ‘The Lagoon’, an early work of some 6,000 words, conforms to guidelines on length set in advance of composition.

Conradian narrative is not only exceptionally sophisticated and varied but also remarkably productive thematically. In common with all major writers, Conrad's fictional content is inextricable from narrative presentation. To make this point is not to regard the concept of content as unimportant. It is to stress that the rhetorical persuasiveness, ideological tension, dramatic intensity, and continuing interest and relevance of Conrad's fictional vision depend upon and are indeed generated and shaped by diverse and original narrative techniques. It follows that a discussion of Conradian narrative is a substantial critical venture. This treatment will focus on a selection of particularly important constituent aspects of Conrad's narrative strategies. Progressing chronologically, it ranges over most of Conrad's major works and concludes with a consideration of the thematic significance of Conradian narrative.

Even though the dramatic intensity and thematic suggestiveness of Conradian narrative can vary considerably from work to work, there is no direct or obvious correlation between narrative success and date of composition in Conrad‘s fiction. Although the artistic quality of the fiction subsequent to Under Western Eyes generally deteriorates, texts such as Victory, ‘The Tale’, and The Shadow-Line are notable exceptions. More importantly, Conradian narrative matured very rapidly. In Almayer‘s Folly, Conrad‘s first novel, the narrative presents not just the main action revealing Almayer‘s inglorious situation and futile dreams, but also a covert plot centred on Abdullah‘s schemes to eliminate Almayer as a trading rival. While supporting the main plot‘s characterization of Almayer, this covert plot also, as we are more likely to discover on a second rather than a first reading, precipitates its outcome (Watts, A Preface to Conrad, p. 119).

Conrad's earliest sense of himself, as a six-year-old child in 1863, was typically multiple, as 'Pole, Catholic, Gentleman' (Baines, Joseph Conrad: A Critical Biography, p. 14). In 1874, he was an adolescent thought by some to be 'betraying' his country in his desire to escape Poland for a freer life as a seaman in France. By 1878 he had joined the British Merchant Service, though still officially a Russian subject and unable to speak English. Nicknamed 'Polish Joe' by other crew members, he was about to discover sustaining social and corporate ideals under the Red Ensign. By 1904, nine years after publishing his first novel, he produced the most radically experimental English novel of the early Modernist period, the monumental Nostromo. At his death in Canterbury in August 1924 he was already a legend in his own lifetime.

Surprised though the Polish-born ‘Joseph Conrad’ may have been to become a published English author in 1895 at the age of thirty-seven, it should come as no surprise, given the extraordinarily varied and cosmopolitan influences at work on him, that he should turn out to be the novelist of paradox and riddle. The logic connecting the various diverse phases of his life often appeared so mysterious to Conrad himself that he would repeatedly speak and write about it in terms of a dream-like ‘affair’.

'It must not be supposed that Mr. Conrad makes attack upon colonisation, expansion, even upon Imperialism', The Manchester Guardian's reviewer assured contemporary readers of 'Heart of Darkness' (Sherry, ed., Conrad: The Critical Heritage, p. 135). In December 1902, in Academy and Literature, Edward Garnett noted the novella's subversiveness, as 'a page torn from the life of the Dark Continent - a page which has been hitherto carefully blurred and kept away from European eyes' (Ibid., p. 133). Conrad's fiction continues to excite such antithetical responses. Within the past thirty years in particular, the political aspects of his work have been a central focus of Conrad studies, and while Garnett's views have generally prevailed, these two early opinions frame an on-going discussion that continues to be shaped by multiple points of view.

The arguments range widely, in fact, from those who view Conrad as committed to a conservative, ‘English view’ of imperialism to those who see him as sceptical of the whole enterprise and a champion of anti-colonial revolts (Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, p. 135, and Hawkins, ‘The sychology of colonialism’, p. 86). The Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe‘s accusation that Conrad was ‘a bloody racist’ is countered by the contention of Ezekiel Mphahlele, a South African writer, that Conrad was one of the few ‘outstanding white novelists who portray competently characters belonging to cultural groups outside their own’ (The African Image, p. 125).

Any reading of Lord Jim that aspires to be comprehensive must come to terms with the novel's title-character. To borrow Emerson's words, he incarnates the 'plain old Adam, the simple genuine self against the whole world', a notoriously unequal struggle with a foreordained outcome. Conrad's earlier Malay novels, the 'Lingard Trilogy' of Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and the unfinished 'The Rescuer', similarly focus on individuals living in exile from their culture and blindly in pursuit of an unhappy fate. But while the early novels describe the failure of unsympathetic protagonists (and Lingard, too, in his naivete and braggadocio is distanced from the reader), Lord Jim is famously ambiguous. A technical tour de force, it painstakingly dissects and then reassembles the activities and consciousness of a young man, who in his failings and virtues appears to be 'one of us'. Because of a multiplicity of virtuoso narrative techniques that sometimes alienate the reader, Jim, however, is both at the novel's centre and on its periphery. He is thus always present either as a massively constructed figure in the foreground, in the manner of the memorable characters of Dickens or George Eliot, or as a hovering evoked presence in the background.

In 1907, Conrad wrote to his literary agent, J. B. Pinker, that 'the public mind runs on questions of war and peace and labour'. He adds that he plans 'to treat those subjects ... from a modern point of view' (Letters, III, pp. 439- 40). These matters had become his subject already, however, when he wrote Nostromo four years earlier, and they continued to preoccupy him for the rest of his life. Labour relations had figured largely in his fiction even earlier, since 1897 when The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' and other sea stories presented sea-captains like Allistoun, and Marlow in Africa, managing their sometimes mutinous subaltern officers and crews. Nostromo is the first to introduce the other, equally 'modern', topic of 'war and peace', which for Conrad turns out to mean revolution and its consequences in a post-colonial world.

Readers for generations have related Nostromo to Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace (1869). The Russian novel may not have been a deliberate model, yet similarities abound: the vast compass of history the two novels re-enact, the celebration of a nation's repulse of an invading army, and the multiple plots and family histories that centre on the making of marriages and the reasons for their success or failure.

Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' is a rich, vivid, layered, paradoxical, and problematic novella or long tale; a mixture of oblique autobiography, traveller's yarn, adventure story, psychological odyssey, political satire, symbolic prose-poem, black comedy, spiritual melodrama, and sceptical meditation. It has proved to be 'ahead of its times': an exceptionally proleptic text. First published in 1899 as a serial in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, it became extensively influential during subsequent decades, and reached a zenith of critical acclaim in the period 1950-75. During the final quarter of the twentieth century, however, while its influence became even more pervasive, the tale was vigorously assailed on political grounds by various feminist critics and by some left-wing and Third World commentators. In this essay, I discuss the novella's changing fortunes in 'the whirligig of time' (Feste's phrase from Twelfth Night) and argue that even now it retains some capacity to criticize its critics.

The phrase ‘ahead of its times’ first needs defence. What put it ahead of them was that it was intelligently of them: Conrad addressed issues of the day with such alert adroitness and ambiguity that he anticipated many twentieth-century preoccupations.

Francis Bacon's natural philosophy may be viewed as a single philosophy with two aspects or as two philosophies each with its own peculiar character. Either way it is useful to acknowledge that there is a doubleness to his philosophical enterprise: on the one hand, Bacon's philosophy offers itself to us as a program for constructing a body of scientific knowledge that was supposed to yield immense practical benefits and so release the human race from material privation. On the other hand, it manifests itself as a rather strange corpus of speculative science. In its first guise Bacon's philosophy shows itself as a set of methodological recommendations together with a bold analysis of their implications for existing attitudes to knowledge and the institutions of knowledge.

Posterity has been remarkably generous to Bacon. Yet this generosity has taken the form of a protracted debate and has been largely disguised under the cloak of a culturally tacit certitude. We are faced with that debate from the very moment we are intent to gauge Bacon's technical influence on the ensuing philosophical reflection and in particular in that field in which Bacon is most commonly remembered, namely the epistemological discussion which fills so large a period of Western speculation in the modern age. It is not for nothing that Bacon hails his own Novum organum as a new logic and saw himself as a legislator and discoverer of sorts. But, as will be shown, the exact tenor and merit of Bacon's purported discoveries is open to much dispute. Unshakably certain, on the other hand, is that the ethos he infused into modern science as something inherently related to social development remains by and large a substantial part of our categorial framework.

It is a historical fact that Bacon's philosophy is contemporaneous with the birth of modem thought. But it is also a fact that modem thought has developed in a way which does not accord with the idea that Bacon gave of the new science. Of course, we can praise the Chancellor's sense of reformation, his critique of false sciences, his comments on academic institutions and the politics of science; we can even say, as the French Encyclopedists did, that he was the herald of experimental philosophy. But the fact remains that the Baconian concept of science, as an inductive science, has nothing to do with and even contradicts today's form of science. As far as the method of science is concerned (and by method we mean the rules and formal processes of knowledge, and not only a general sense of experience), Bacon's instauratio went to a dead end, as early as the first progress of science in the seventeenth century.

THE SEPARATION OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION

A longstanding commonplace in Bacon scholarship has been the notion that the Baconian advancement of learning depends upon a strict separation of divinity and natural philosophy. In a number of memorable passages Bacon indeed warns his readers of the dire consequences of confusing divinity with natural science: to combine them, he says, is to confound them. This is supposedly what Plato and the scholastics did, and what Bacon explicitly designs the new learning to overcome. Even the acceptable hybrid “divine philosophy,” when it is “commixed together” with natural philosophy, leads to “an heretical religion, and an imaginary and fabulous philosophy” (111, 350). According to this emphatic strand of Baconian doctrine, religion that joins with the study of nature is in danger of becoming atheistic, or an enthusiastic rival of the true church. Natural philosophy that traffics unwisely with divinity collapses into idolatry or fakery.

HERALD

When we pronounce the word science many things come to our minds: the theories and the experiments, the laboratories and places of research, the scientific communities and congresses, the journals and the manuals, the academies and scientific societies, the institutions and the languages of science.

Sometimes, when we speak of science in reference to Bacon or Mersenne or Galilei we are drawn to forget that that which we call science (in the form in which we know it) did not exist in the first half of the seventeenth century. The two great historic processes which gave life to our science, and which the sociologists have called institutionalization and professionalization of science, took place between the middle of the seventeenth and the middle of the nineteenth centuries. The question that the historians of philosophical and scientific thought ask themselves (must ask themselves) is the following: what idea or what image of science made those processes possible? On what terrain were they born?

Francis Bacon was a politician and a statesman for most of his life. He received an education designed to train him for an active life and he sat in the House of Commons for the first time at the tender age of 20. He considered himself first a “bonus civis” - which amounted to being “a good and true servant to the Queen ” -and only after a “bonus vir, that is an honest man” (M, 132, 190-1). Up to the time of his unexpected fall in 1621, Bacon was actively involved in high politics at the court of James, and he never abandoned hope of a political comeback. A month after his impeachment he was already planning to offer instruction in politics (XIV, 285), and his History of Henry VII, written in 1621 and published in March 1622, was partly intended to show his abilities as a counselor. At the same time he planned to ask the king to employ him again “publicly upon the stage” and, in 1624, he declared himself ready to travel to the Continent to negotiate a league with France (XIV, 349, 443-4).

An important aspect of Bacon's “total reconstruction of sciences, arts, and all human knowledge” (IV, 8) was the organizational and institutional restructuring of natural philosophy. His rhetoric of a revolution in learning was similar to that employed by a number of his near contemporaries, but his vision of how it would be achieved differed. Unlike Descartes, for example, who retained the traditional philosophical emphasis upon the power of individual reasoning, Bacon sought to institute a new method for the investigation of nature, based upon the cooperative efforts of a large workforce.' Bacon's advocacy of cooperative research was in part responsible for his sharp criticism of traditional learning.

Francis Bacon has always had a central but controversial place in historical accounts of early modern philosophy. For some, he was the first spokesman of modern science in general and the father of its inductive method in particular. For others, he was an immoral charlatan who had nothing original to say. In the seventeenth and especially in the eighteenth century, when Bacon's reputation was at its peak, he was widely seen as the originator of modern science and philosophy. In the middle of the nineteenth century William Whewell could still bestow fulsome praise on Bacon - “the supreme Legislator of the modern Republic of Science.” The tide, however, was turning apace, and it soon became a commonplace to ridicule Bacon's philosophy and criticize his moral outlook.

Both of these negative assessments have proven surprisingly tenacious. While moral denunciation continues, the main contemporary criticism of Bacon concerns the shortcomings of his grand philosophical schemes and methodological views. But there has been little consensus as to where precisely Bacon's philosophical failure lay. For some present-day epistemologists, Bacon was a spokesman for a hopelessly naive induction by enumeration, and had thus nothing to do with the development of modern science. In striking contrast, the Frankfurt School criticized Bacon for being the very epitome of the modern scientific domination of nature and humankind However, although these censures are still occasionally repeated, tremendous strides have been made in Bacon scholarship. New and important material has been turned up and anachronistic criteria for assessing Bacon's philosophy have been abandoned. Several ghosts of nineteenth-century interpretation have been exorcised and a new detailed account of Bacon's philosophy has started to emerge. There has been, in fact, something of a transformation in Bacon studies during the last few decades.

INTRODUCTION

Francis Bacon set forth his idea for reforming the entire realm of knowledge in The Proficience and Advancement of Learning Divine and Human (first published in 1605), which he offered as a “fixed memorial” and “immortal monument” to the magnificence of James I (111, 261-4). It was divided into two books, the first dealing with the merit of augmenting learning, and the second with mapping out parts of knowledge, indicating which parts were extant, absent, or in need of revision in order to facilitate the advancement of learning explained in the first book. It is in the second book that we find Bacon's classification of knowledge. He revised parts of it in 1612 (Description of the Intellectual Globe V, 503-44)) and further in 1623, when he translated The Advancement of Learning into Latin as the De dignitate et augmentis scientiarum (The Dignity and Advancement of Learning). Bacon now reviewed the entire scope of learning in eight books.

Given the important place occupied by rhetoric in Bacon's career, one might imagine that by this late date an abundance of serviceable studies would exist. But, perhaps as another proof of his observation that “the opinion of plenty is amongst the causes of want” (111, 327-8)) such is not the case. There are three book-length studies frequently cited: Karl R. Wallace's pioneering study, Francis Bacon on Communication and Rhetoric, Lisa Jardine's revised Cambridge dissertation, Francis Bacon: Discovery and the Art of Discourse, and the overall history by W. S. Howell, Jr., Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700. There are also some shorter essays, of varying value.' But it is not being unkind to say that none of these offers a satisfactory account of either Bacon's theory or practice of rhetoric. In some cases major emphases in Bacon's theory have simply not been registered, or were misunderstood. In others, the writers' evaluation of Bacon was adversely affected by their general conception of rhetoric, and the place it held in European intellectual life.