"A am not a sausage machine"Conrad's anxiety and resistance in "The partner"

Resumo

Along with two other stories (“A Smile of Fortune” and “Prince Roman”), “The Partner” marks the beginning of Conrad’s recovery from a state of physical and mental collapse after finishing Under Western Eyes and quarrelling with his agent, J. B. Pinker. Except for the serial publication of Chance, “The Partner” is the only work by Conrad in which the frame-narrator is a professional “writer of stories” with no connection with the sea or with any other profession whatsoever. My main goal in this paper is to expand on what I left in sketch in a previous article on the history of the composition and publication of “The Partner”: namely, to examine how Conrad gives voice to his anxieties and resistances as an author by creating a frame-narrator whose safe position of observer is upset by an inquisitive stevedore. The latter tells him a story that the writer-narrator reproduces in a raw state, thus refusing to transform his sources into a more artistic and/or saleable product. The reader finds inscribed in the text of “The Partner” Conrad’s resistance not only to commercial formulae, but also to the style that we may call Conradian, which by late 1910 he felt had —like the market— become a determinant.