Modernism and the Fate of Individuality

The first rude act in this frequently wilful study is its opening act, the decision to place Heart of Darkness and The Ambassadors side by side and to introduce a problem in modern English narrative by passing from one to the other. Admittedly, it is an almost absurdly comic picture to imagine Strether among the alligators of the Congo or to envision Captain Marlow in a tête-à-tête with Marie de Vionnet. And yet the incidents of these narratives, like the works themselves, belong to the same historical moment, and it is instructive to imagine that just as Marlow was pressing deep into the jungle, Strether was crossing the Tuileries, and that while Strether was lounging on a Parisian balcony, Marlow dodged arrows on an African river. The incongruity of these pictures gives us some feeling for the incongruities of the nineties, when the middle classes had perfected both the habits of leisure and the methods of colonialism. To enjoy the delicacies of a long cultural tradition and to overstep the boundaries of that tradition, to witness civilization at its most finely wrought and to confront its rude origins, to contemplate the refinements of social convention and to watch such conventions dissolve – these are concurrent historical possibilities that will allow us to locate modernist character within the expansive context that it demands.