ABSTRACT
Coming to English as an adult, Joseph Conrad passed through a period of awkward apprenticeship, and his accent – idiosyncratic even for a Pole – remained a lifelong marker of foreignness. Conrad sometimes fixes on particular words, especially those with multiple meanings, which he explores in various contexts, the result being, on occasion, a startling disclosure of a web of odd associations in his mind. Conrad seems, then, to have intuited a connection between paternity and linguistic facility, and to have discovered a punning way to express this connection through the term “adoption”. When Conrad masters the language in the technical sense, he is able to conceive of and even to urge a relinquishing of mastery in the ideological-imperial sense. Marlow achieves and articulates a degree of detachment, or “desertion,” that might never have been voiced in these terms by a native speaker.
