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http://www.josephconradsociety.org/2018_Conference/2018_Final_Programme.pdf
How, Why, Watt: Conrad, Beckett and the Modernist Witness
Recent decades in modernism scholarship have seen the once elitist, exclusionary movement transform into an ever-expanding cultural phenomenon. The paper traces the conceptual and aesthetic tensions underlying the literary witness in an attempt to fathom why. Two novels bookending the modernist period will serve to unpack the link between a rethinking of the movement’s coordinates and the topos. Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim and Samuel Beckett’s Watt locate the metonyms of the traditional denotations of witnessing in sight, judgment and a diegetic periphery, a semiotic grid denoting a register of law and ethical responsibility. The witness may share the storyworld with the hero, but he is always at the margin, looking in, recording and judging. While the two works thus adhere to conventions of representation, they also upset readers’ expectations by gradually reconfiguring the device. The witness emerges as a mode of contagion rather than separation, proximity rather than distance, flux rather than stasis. He is no longer he who questions and testifies but he whose very existence is tied to the other in mutual becoming. Such a shift and its manner of reshaping our understanding of perspective sheds light, in turn, on the way in which modernism reaches into the present moment and affects contemporary experience. Conrad and Beckett are read here not only as an odd but significant couple of modernist writing, but also as thinkers who determine the movement’s resistance to the fixed periodizations of past scholarship.
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