my conrad reference

The Conrad text I alluded to yesterday in relation to Mallarmé's image of workers taking a break is his preface to his (unfortunately titled) 1897 novella'The Nigger of the Narcissus'. In this preface Conrad, like Mallarmé, draws a parallel between the artist and the manual labourer, calling the former 'a worker in prose'. But then, again like Mallarmé, he links art not to a work's successful completion, but rather to its interruption or suspension: ‘To arrest, for the space of a breath, the hands busy about the work of the earth, and compel men entranced by the sight of distant goals to glance for a moment at the surrounding vision of form and colour, of sunshine and shadows; to make them pause for a look, for a sigh, for a smile—such is the aim, difficult and evanescent, and reserved only for a very few to achieve.’