Literature Network » Joseph Conrad

The power of suggestion: Conrad, Professor Grasset, and French medical occultism.(Joseph Conrad, Joseph Grasset)(Critical essay)

Content courtesy of

From: Conradiana
Date: 20070622
Author:Bock, Martin

Any investigation of Joseph Conrad and the occult should probably begin with healthy skepticism. One can't imagine Conrad, who had "an instinctive horror of losing [his] sense of full self-possession," behaving like the theosophist W. B. Yeats, who fell into a composing trance on a London public bus (Personal 112; Chapman 204). Moreover, Conrad seems to express contempt for spiritualists, most notably in Under Western Eyes and less prominently in a short essay "The Life Beyond," in which he ridicules several spiritualists, including Cesare Lombroso's famous medium, Eusapia ...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.

Other Articles on Joseph Conrad

About Our Articles: We've partnered with Highbeam Research to provide these article excerpts for your research needs. However, due to copyright laws, we cannot publish the whole article. To view these articles in full length you'll need to use the link above to access the free trial at Highbeam.