High-sounding sentiments and a supine morality: Conrads Quixote/Panza dichotomy

Conrad reports in A Personal Record his tutor Adam Pulman calling his younger self an
incorrigible, hopeless Don Quixote. Far from outgrowing Quixotism, however, it stayed with
him, becoming emblematic not only of his early desire to go to sea, but also of the
intersection of commitment, illusion, and imagination that animates so much of his fiction.
The figure of Quixote is important enough to Conrad that Cedric Watts could observe a
Hamlet/Quixote dichotomy has an obvious application both to Conrads janiform
personality and to the loom of characteristation in his works.

Tony Tanner also suggests that Don Quixote had a special significance for Conrad, who
wrote, in A Personal Record, he rides forth, his head encircled by a halothe patron saint of
all lives spoiled or saved by the irresistible grace of imagination. But he was not a good
citizen. Tanner goes on to label R. B. Cunninghame Graham Conrads Quixote. The
identification of Quixote with Graham, alongside Conrads own connection between Quixote
and citizenship (even if through failure to live up to the ideal) signals a connection between
the legendary hidalgo and politics that deserves further investigation.

My paper will coordinate between issues of characterization, high/low form and

elite/democratic political affiliation to asks whether grounds exist for further reading of
Conrads oeuvre in relation to the ingenious hidalgo of La Mancha.