Suspended

A decade ago, scholarly indifference toward Conrad’s final novel, Suspense: A Napoleonic Novel (1925), was noteworthy. Indeed, “neglect of this novel has been virtually absolute” (Moore, “In Defense” 99), and, in spite of some recent bibliographic work and inquiries into the accuracy of Conrad’s real-world references (see Mursia), it largely persists. To be sure, “much of the difficulty of appreciating Suspense lies precisely in the nature of the demands it makes on the historical imagination of the reader.” Such demands require “a detailed familiarity [with] events leading up to the Hundred Days,” including “Italian politics in the time of Napoleon” (van Marle and Moore 147). But it remains to be understood that often these demands quite transcend textbooks of history. For of all Conrad’s works, none more effectively demonstrates his lifelong ambivalent fascination with the ideas of rhetoric that erupt into Western European culture at the inception of the Romantic era, precisely the interval wherein Suspense’s three-day plot is set. Suspense, moreover, provides an invaluable occasion to reconsider the idea and aesthetics of suspense as they have informed Conrad’s grapplings with politics and history throughout his fiction.