Joseph Conrad: Victory. Ed. J. H. Stape and Alexandre Fachard. With the Assistance of Aaron Sacks. Introduction by Richard Niland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

• Peter Lancelot Mallios

There is, as every reader knows in this textual age, a very close generative relation between editing and literary interpretation. It is the reason, I believe, why some people are attracted to the alchemy of scholarly and critical editions. Both of these activities, the editorial and the interpretive, represent value; but the former, even under current digital conditions, requires much less portable forms of property. There is, from that point of view, a deplorable lack of concentration in serious editing. Now, if all of the original editions and textual antecedents of a given work could be put into a single volume – but it turns out, they can! At the same time, there is a fascination in contradiction, in incommensurate texts and plural textual meaning, still the supreme commodities of a profession in which we are camped, like bewildered travellers in a garish, unrestful habitus. And I suppose these two considerations, the aspirational and the irresolvable, underlie the immense provocation of the new Cambridge Scholarly Edition of Joseph Conrad’s Victory.