ABSTRACT
The dedication of this book to the memory of Edward Said is, for me, particularly appropriate, for Said’s relation to Conrad was not confined to academic interest; it was, rather, an obsessive relationship that lasted from youth-when he read “Youth”—to the very end of his life. As his career unfolded, taking him in so many directions, he remained imaginatively bewitched by a few Conradian images and permitted these to penetrate his sensibility, to organize his thinking on any number of subjects, including himself. His career, like his character, was, of course, singular; but in one respect I believe that he spoke for many of Conrad’s most passionate readers when he described, in the remarkable interview with Peter Mallios that concludes this book, his relationship to Conrad as “totally individual.” Said learned about youth from “Youth”; and, in later years, he learned about the “sense of being invaded by outside forces,” the necessity of a “relentlessly open-ended, aggressively critical inquiry into the mechanisms and . . . abuses of imperialism,” and the attraction to “lost causes” from other books. I find myself hoping that he discovered, at the end, a sense of ultimate victory through his engagement with Victory. But my real point is that Conrad, the most exotic and singular of authors, was somehow able to solicit a direct and personal identification not only from the equally exotic and singular Said, but from a wide range of readers who have felt themselves not merely entertained or enlightened by his work, but in a sense represented in it.
