Abstract:

Joseph Conrad’s ‘Amy Foster’ presents a series of frustrations: the misleading focus of its title, Yanko’s failed absorption in his new home, the encounter with an inhospitable culture. This paper will read the story against the backdrop of the fiction of immigration to the new world in order to tease out a generically determined frustration that merits consideration. My claim is that in bringing his protagonist back to the familiar and reassuring spaces of agricultural life, the author deliberately rejects the conventions of the fiction of immigration that were definitive of the age. The story offers a glimpse of these conventions in the abrupt and fast-paced shifts that accompany Yanko’s journey through the modern and industrial West. The sinking of Yanko’s ship, however, spells the abandonment of this plot trajectory. In place of the sensory confusion associated with the experience of a late nineteenth-century port and the metropolis that it feeds, Yanko and the narrative are led to a small rural town in Kent. This jarring turn confronts the reader with an economic and cultural xenophobia that cannot be marginalized by the alienations of the dizzying and distracting experience of modern life. Conrad’s story undercuts the assimilations to which Ford Madox Heuffer alludes in The Soul of London and returns to a more traditional exploration of cultural encounter. The omission of the modern-city tropes may be read as Conrad’s deliberate decision to eschew what Ford describes as the anesthetizing effects of technology, its razing of cultural and national nuances. ‘Amy Foster’ (1901) Franz Kafka’s Amerika (1927) and Henryk Sienkiewicz’s After Bread (1880) are read here side by side in order to show how modernist writing anticipates recent debates on the role of technology in the creation of blind-spots to cultural difference. The representation of attention, pace and memory will be used to demonstrate where modernism is complicit in the marginalization of cultural difference and where it demands, stages or resists the reconfiguration of immigrant subjectivity. Such an investigation will serve not only to test tensions within modernist thought, but as a counterpoint to similar tensions in recent critical debates on migrant subjectivity, between universalizing gestures and the emphasis on difference, between the position that all subjects are created in movement and the critique of...