‘A different fabric’. The overt and the hidden in Joseph Conrad’s prefaces to his prose works

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In A Familiar Preface to the ‘autobiographical’ volume A Personal Record. Some Reminiscences, Joseph Conrad provides that, in this work, there is no ‘veil’ separating the reader from the author. Despite this declaration, Conrad’s ‘memories’ goes beyond autobiography and you can risk the thesis that all ‘autobiographical’ texts are rather telling – in the idiomatic way – not about a man but cultural contexts, which formed him. Conrad ’s paratexts (the famous preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, mentioned A Familiar Preface and Author’s notes written by Conrad for subsequent volumes of his works in the period 1917-1920) make an even greater problem of interpretation. They contain not only the artistic statements, but also a surprising ‘autobiographical’ reference and ‘guidance’ of interpretation – that really explains very little and seem to talk about something else. It is difficult to treat Conrad’s paratexts as autobiographical texts (though they often pretend to be); in turn proposal of seeing in them ‘author function’ in the classic form, indicated by Michel Foucault, also appears to be incomplete, because these paratexts simultaneously create author and his cultural context and literary craftsmanship. It seems, therefore, that Conrad considered his paratexts (especially Author’s notes) as a separate literary genre, in accordance with the instructions of Kierkegaard.