Illusion of a room Catabasis and colonisation in Joseph Conrad's The Return

Conrad's novels equate colonial travel to a fall from civilisation and history, back to humanity's zeropoint. Returning thus opens into a presocial depth, the catabasis becomes the leading chronotope of Conrad's odysseys. As early a tale as The Return (1897) shows Conrad fashioning narrative perspective and space to accommodate these serial descents to hell: with the narrative disintegrating melodramatic scenes grounded in stable affective discourse, Conrad develops the "epic" procedures which will allow him to form his "shifting landscapes". The collapse of "illusions of a room" generates an uncertainty of perspective, while the intruding infernal landscapes produce bodies and objects that will resist integration into romantic subjectivity. Domestic London, seemingly a conventional topos of literary realism, thus maps out the very secular yet incommensurable uncanny of Conrad's elusive colonial landscapes. Homecoming in this context means recognising the alien in the familiar, means unveiling an abyss always lurking beneath the "illusion of a room" - in this sense homecoming will turn into a fall as much as it will be the starting point for an interminable epic catabasis. Moreover, close-reading can reveal how much of Conrad's narrative procedures of disintegrating subjective space is owed to his readings of Flaubert.