ABSTRACT
Jim Reilly's book interprets the novels of Thomas Hardy, George Gissing and Conrad as stages in a process by which history came to seem increasingly impossible to represent in the modern world. His theoretical approach is Marxist insofar as he attributes this alienation from history to the development of capitalism, and draws on thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault. But Reilly's sense of history as a problematic category is based on a deconstructive account of meaning and representation, exemplified in his claim (made earlier in the book) that 'a sign simultaneously evokes the presence of the signified* it posits and acts as the evidence of its absence' (Reilly, p. 10). The word 'history', Reilly notes, presents this paradox in intense form, because it seems to unite event and representation: 'history' means both what happened (the events), and the narratives we construct about what happened (representations of events): it tries to present the past to us (to make it seem 'present' to our understanding) even while identifying it as the past (and therefore absent). In the work of the philosopher Hegel, a century and a half before deconstruction, Reilly finds the radical suggestion that event and discourse (or representation) are produced simultaneously (Reilly, p. 9). These ideas inform Reilly's account of Nostromo, which he sees as offering a critique of capitalism from inside. For Reilly the limitation of Conrad's novel lies in its fear of imagining political alternatives, while its strength lies in its honest self-awareness of its own implication in the values it critiques. This self-awareness prompts the recognition that global capitalism tends to erode any possibility of an external or 'disinterested' standpoint. Reilly's account elucidates Conrad's combination of explicitly conservative values with what seems a radical understanding of economic oppression. Reilly relates the sense of deadlock and stasis in Nostromo to Georg Lukacs's view
that reifying description in nineteenth-century realism is indicative of subservience to an ideology. However, Reilly goes on to use Walter Benjamin's account of epic theatre to suggest that Nostromo conveys, not the stasis of reification, but the strain of unresolved contrary forces, in society, in history, and in its author.
