Dr. Suddhaseel Sen, from Presidency University, Kolkata, will be delivering a seminar titled "Narrative Technique and the ‘Russian Character’ in Joseph Conrad’s Under Western Eyes". 

Abstract:

The concept of “national character,” based on the deterministic notion that the personality traits of an individual are shared by others belonging to the same “nation,” has informed European literature and thought for centuries. The framing narrator of Conrad’s novel Under Western Eyes (1911), the English Teacher of Languages, evokes this concept when he states that he has “no comprehension of the Russian character”; yet, several times in the course of the novel, he goes on to make an essentialist distinction between a purportedly Eastern, autocratic, and barbaric Russia, on the one hand, and the democratic, civilized world of Western Europe, on the other. Such a sharp distinction led Conrad’s one-time friend, Edward Garnett, to accuse the author, whose Polish parents devoted their lives to the cause of Polish independence from Russia, of letting his well-known personal bias against Russia affect his representation of Russians in his novel, a charge that led to the rupture of their friendship. While many subsequent critics have accepted this distinction (Bruce R. Johnson, for example), others (like Avrom Fleischman) have found Conrad as being more sympathetic to Russians than has usually been admitted, or critical of Western Europe (Tony Tanner), or employing an unreliable narrator whose pronouncements need to be treated with caution (Frank Kermode).

In my talk, I shall offer a reading of Under Western Eyes that takes at its starting point Edward Said’s observation that, with Conrad, “the chasm between words saying and words meaning was widened, not lessened, by his talent for words written.” I shall demonstrate that this discrepancy between utterance and meaning is the key to our reading of the novel’s narrative technique: recognizing this discrepancy shall enable us to not only deconstruct the narrator’s essentialist observations regarding the differences between Self and Other, West and East, or Europe and Russia, but also to observe how in one crucial passage at the beginning of the novel, Conrad’s narrator himself implies an awareness of this gap and its subversive implications regarding the concept of the centuries-old “national character” itself. Such a reading also enables us to situate Under Western Eyes, the last of Conrad’s great political novels, in the context of Conrad’s oeuvre as a whole, especially his first major – and in some ways most controversial – work, the novella Heart of Darkness (1899), in which Conrad’s attempt to examine the darker side of imperialism and racism came to be strongly criticized by postcolonial critics, most notably by Chinua Achebe. 

About the Speaker:

Dr. Suddhaseel Sen obtained his Ph.D. in English (Collaborative Program in English and South Asian Studies) from the University of Toronto (2010). He has been an Assistant Professor of English at Presidency University (Kolkata) since July 2013. In addition to Shakespeare and Adaptation Studies, his academic interests include musicology, nineteenth- and twentieth-century European and South Asian literature, cross-cultural encounters (especially between Europe and South Asia), comparative literature, and the interrelations between literature, music and film. As a Post-doctoral Teaching Fellow at the University of British Columbia, he designed and taught courses on Literature and Adaptation, Introduction to Literature, and Shakespeare and Politics. At Stanford, he lectured on opera and music theory, and has also taught, both privately and at the Calcutta School of Music, courses in music history, harmony, and orchestration. His publications include articles and book chapters on interrelations between music and literature (Richard Wagner’s influence on T. S. Eliot, song settings of Rabindranath Tagore by Western composers), films of Satyajit Ray, European and Indian adaptations of Shakespeare (Ambroise Thomas’ opera Hamlet and Vishal Bhardwaj’s film Maqbool) and on Wagner and German Orientalism. He is currently finishing a book project on nineteenth-century adaptations of Shakespeare in Europe and India.