To follow the dream and again to follow the dream" : Don Quixote, Almayer and Conrad as multiple reflections of the dreamer , W: Secret sharers : Melville, Conrad and narratives of the real

Abstract

"Gustave Kahn, the French symbolist poet and critic, called Conrad a “powerful visionary”—“un puissant visionnaire” (Kahn 1). This appreciation did not pass unnoticed by the addressee; he cherished the comment and reiterated it to others several times. First, he mentioned it to his literary agent, J. B. Pinker (Karl and Davies, III, 1988: 413). Then he shared the comment with the general public (and thus immortalized it) in his apparently autobiographical work A Personal Record (111).1 Yet Conrad, deliberately or not, modified the phrase when he referred to it. In a letter to Pinker, he used the expression “a powerful seer of visions.” Then, in his 1914 memoirs, he misquoted the French critic again in citing the original French phrase “un puissant reveur”—“a powerful dreamer” (Personal Record 111). That seems to be the first prism through which Conrad would prefer to be perceived.2 Moreover, Conrad wished for his books to be placed in line with such captivating literary dreams as Cervantes’s Don Quixote de la Mancha or Dickens’s moving stories. He yearned to be perceived as part and parcel of the European literary tradition—not as a revolutionary of literary conventions, as, for example, Jean Jacques Rousseau." (fragm.)