Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad (December 3, 1857 – August 3, 1924) was a Polish-born British novelist, one of the most important and respected novelists of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth centuries. Conrad's works emerge out of the confluence of three literary currents prominent in the Europe of Conrad's time: Romanticism, particularly in the works of Polish novelist Henryk Sienkiewicz; realism, which flowered in Russia in the works of Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoevsky; and modernism, which emerged as the dominant literary aesthetic of the twentieth century. Conrad's works draw on the symbolism of the Romantics and the psychological acuity of the realist and modernist schools. Despite these affinities, Conrad defies easy categorization. His indictment of Western colonialism as the failure of the "civilized world" to fulfill its responsibility, but rather exploiting its colonies, is a common thread running through much of his work.

Born and raised in Poland, Conrad spent part of his youth in France and the majority of his early life at sea; only in his mid-thirties would he settle down, in England, to start a career as a writer, writing not in Polish or French, but in English, his adopted third language. Like the Russian émigré Vladamir Nabokov, Conrad is regarded as a master prose stylist among authors in the English literary canon. His knowledge of languages and cultures, gleaned not only from his European experiences but also from his decades spent as a sailor at sea, can be seen in the haunting style of his prose and the enormity of the themes which he constantly brings to the surface. His works have inspired writers throughout the twentieth century and his works remain at the center of scholarly attention.

Biography

Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (of the Nałęcz coat-of-arms) in Berdyczów (now Berdychiv, Ukraine) into a highly patriotic landowning noble family. Conrad's father, a writer of patriotic tragedies and a translator from French and English, was arrested by the Russian authorities in Warsaw for his activities in support of the January Uprising, and was exiled to Siberia. His mother died of tuberculosis in 1865, as did his father four years later in Kraków, leaving Conrad orphaned at the age of eleven.

He was placed in the care of his maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, in Kraków—a more cautious figure than either of his parents. Bobrowski nevertheless allowed Conrad to travel to Marseille and begin a career as a seaman at the age of 17, after the failure to secure Conrad Austro-Hungarian citizenship made him liable for a 25-year conscription into the Russian army. During these early years Conrad learned English by reading the London Times and the works of Thomas Carlyle, and William Shakespeare.

In the mid-1870s Conrad joined the French merchant marines as an apprentice, and made three voyages to the West Indies. In 1878, after being wounded in what may have been a failed suicide attempt, Conrad took service in the British merchant navy, where rose through the ranks over the next 16 years. In 1886 gained both his Master Mariner's certificate and British citizenship and officially changed his name to Joseph Conrad. In the same year he took command of his own ship, the Otago.

Conrad called on ports in Australia, Borneo, Malaysia, various stations throughout the Indian Ocean, South America, and the South Pacific. In 1890 he journeyed up the Congo River in west Africa. The journey provided much material for his novel Heart of Darkness. However, the fabled East Indies particularly attracted Conrad and it became the setting of many of his stories.

During these long years at sea Conrad began to write, and many of his greatest works, including Lord Jim, Nostromo, "Typhoon," "The Nigger of the Narcissus,"and "The Secret Sharer," drew directly from his experiences. Elemental nature profoundly impressed Conrad, and his experience of loneliness at sea, of the corruption inherent in intimate human relations in the microcosm of ship life, forged a coherent, if bleak, vision of the world. Like Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor, Conrad's fiction explores the relentless progress of character flaws within the matrix of social relationships. Conrad expressed his deterministic view of the world in an 1897 letter: "What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. To be part of the animal kingdom under the conditions of this earth is very well-but soon as you know of your slavery, the pain, the anger, the strife. The tragedy begins."

Conrad left the sea at the age of 36 and settled in England, married, and devoted himself to writing. Always a keen observer of social landscapes, the writer absorbed the sights and scenes of London, from the docks to the slums to the drawing rooms of the literary elite, which included G.K. Chesterton, Ford Madox Ford, Henry James and H.G. Wells, the leading literary figures of the day. While ConradMoney was a serious problem in the Conrad household until the 1920s, when he began to secure substantial serial deals and sell in large numbers.

Conrad was an Anglophile, who regarded Britain as a land which respected individual liberties. As a writer he accepted the verdict of a free and independent public, but associated this official figure of censorship to the atmosphere of the Far East and the "mustiness of the Middle Ages," which shouldn't be part of the twentieth-century England.

He continued to write prolifically, although he largely wrote in obscurity until late in his career, when the publication of the novel Chance finally brought him fame and success. Ironically, scholars generally agree that the novels written after Chance's publication in 1913 are lesser works than the dark novels Conrad wrote in his earlier years. Conrad continued to write and publish up until his death from a heart attack in 1924, aged 66.

Works

Conrad's first novels, Almayer's Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896), were dark sea tales that drew from Conrad's experiences. The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'a novella published in 1897, demonstrated a development of Conrad's psychological penetration, and utilized a device he would revisit in "the Secret Sharer" as well as his major novels with the introduction of an enigmatic figure that serves as a touchstone for society's values as well as a dramatic foil within the confines of ship life. was a complex story of a storm off the Cape of Good Hope and of an enigmatic black sailor. Lord Jim, narrated by Charlie Marlow, told about the fall of an young sailor and his redemption. "You have fallen terribly, my boy, fallen, perhaps, through your own self-confident dreams. Get up and try again. No skulking, no evasion! Live this thing down, humbly and hopefully, in the light of day."

Lord Jim was originally intended as a short story, but was then enlarged into a novel. It is partly based on true events: in 1880 a British captain and his crew abandoned the steamship Jeddah, carrying Muslim pilgrims, when the ship started to leak. Jeddah was brought by another steamship safely to port. Particular blame was attached to A.P. Williams, the first mate, who had organized the desertion of the vessel. The protagonist of Lord Jim is a British naval officer, who is haunted by guilt of cowardice, when he left his ship, Patna, in a storm without taking care of the passengers. During the voyage towards Mecca, the ship had hit a submerged object, and when the small crew lowers a lifeboat, Jim impulsively jumps in it. Contrary to the crew's beliefs, the ship did not sunk and Jim is left to stand in front of the Court of Inquiry. After disgrace Jim moves through a variety of jobs ashore and finds work as an agent at the remote trading post of Patusan. The misjudged Jim gains the confidence of chief Doramin and becomes a respected figure, proving that he is "inscrutable at heart." When Gentleman Brown and his fellow European adventurers appear, Jim promises Doramin that Brown and his men will leave the island without bloodshed. He is wrong, Doramin's son is killed, and Jim is finally forced to face his past-he allows himself to be shot by the grieving Doramin. "...Jim stood stiffened and with bared head in the light of torches, looking him straight in the face, he clung heavily with his left arm round the neck of a bowed youth, and lifting deliberately his right, shot his son's friend through the chest." (Other sailor/adventurers: Ulysses, Sinbad, Hugo Pratt's comic hero Corto Maltese.)

Heart of the Darkness was partly based on Conrad's four-month command of a Congo River steamboat. The book was written in 1899 and published in 1902 in YOUTH: A NARRATIVE WITH TWO OTHER STORIES. Conrad had learned about atrocities made by Congo "explorers", and created in the character of Kurtz the embodiment of European imperialism. Also the account of Commander R.H. Bacon, who travelled in Benin, described horrors: "... everywhere death, barbarity and blood, and smells that it hardly seems right for human beings to smell and yet live!" Moreover, Conrad was aware about Henry Morton Stanley's journey up the Congo river in the mid-1870s. Stanley's revelation of the commercial possibilities of the region had resulted in the setting up of a trading venture. However, in the novel the journey become analogous with a quest for inner truths-like in Henry Rider Haggard's novel She (1887). Conrad's vision has also drawn fierce criticism. In 1977 the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe described Conrad as "a bloody racist".

The narrator, again Marlow, who perhaps is not so reliable, depicts to his friends a trip into Africa, where he becomes curious about a man called Kurtz. Marlow works for a company that is only interested in ivory and he witnesses the suffering of the native workers. He travels up the Congo River to reach Kurtz, an agent whom Marlow expects by his reputation to be a "universal genius," an "emissary of pity, and science, and progress, and devil knows what else." As they near the inner station of the company, they are attacked, and Marlow's helmsman is killed. At the station they meet a Russian who idolizes Kurtz, a man who has made himself the natives' god and who has decorated the posts of his hut with human skulls. Marlow tries to get the seriously ill Kurtz away down the river, but Kurtz dies, his last words being, "The horror! The Horror!" Back in Europe Marlow lies to Kurtz's fiancée, that "the last word he pronounced was-your name."

Heart of the Darkness has inspired several film version, starting from Orson Welles but his project for RKO never materialized. Kurtz fascinated Welles; a genius destroyed by inner conflicts, greatness gone wrong. During his career as a director and actor, Welles would play this kind of Faustian figure repeatedly, most notably as Citizen Kane, who also dies with a mysterious phrase on his lips. In a television performance from 1958 Boris Karloff was seen as Kurtz and Roddy McDowall as Marlow. Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) was based on the novella, Michael Herr's Dispatches, and John Milius' 1969 script. Nicolas Roeg's adaptation from 1993 followed Conrad's work closely. "In Apocalypse Now, the "horror" is symbolically repressed (killed), while in Heart of Darkness it is brought into the light, as horrible as it might be to do so. The film, then, accepts as a premise our capacity for evil, and goes ahead to show how the colonialist psychosis of Kurtz, and by extension Western culture, translates into a social nightmare." (from Novels into Film by John C. Tibbets and James M. Welsh, 1999)

In Youth (1902) the title story recorded Conrad's experiences on the sailing-ship Palestine. NOSTROMO (1904) was an imaginative novel which again explored man's vulnerability and corruptibility. It includes one of Conrad's most suggestive symbols, the silver mine. In the story the Italian Nostromo ("our man") is destroyed for his heroism like Lord Jim. With his death the secret of the silver is lost forever. The English director David Lean planned to film the book, and he started to work with the screenplay with Christopher Hampton in 1986. Steven Spielberg agreed to produce the movie for Warner Bros. "I thought Conrad was a very good match for David's temperament," Hampton later said, "because he was very positive about individuals, but very pessimistic about the human race in general." Lean died in 1991 and the project was not realized.

   "All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind." (from A Personal Record, 1912) - "All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising." (Conrad writing about Henry James)

THE SECRET AGENT (1907) took a bleak view of prophets of destruction and utopians, but Conrad also once confessed, that "there had been moments during the writing of the book when I was an extreme revolutionist". Conrad dedicated the novel to H.G. Wells.

The period between The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' and UNDER WESTERN EYES (1911) is considered artistically Conrad's most productive. H.G. Wells encouraged Conrad and gave him good reviews and his work was also recognized by John Galsworthy. With Ford Madox Ford he wrote three books: THE INHERITORS (1901), ROMANCE (1903), and THE NATURE OF CRIME (1924). Although Conrad was prolific, his financial situation wasn't secure until 1913 with the publication of CHANCE. Interestingly, Conrad despised Dostoevsky, another Slavic writer often cited as marking the transition between realist and modern fiction. Conrad despised Russian writers as a rule, due to his parents' deaths at the hands of the Russian authorities, making an exception only for Ivan Turgenev.

In addition to Heart of Darkness, which has been seen as a scathing indictment of colonialism and which gazes unflinchingly into the depths of despair, Conrad's "golden period" of novels begins with Lord Jim (1901) and includes Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes, all of which deal in one way or another with the extremely problematic history of imperialism and colonialism in the nineteenth century. These novels are all notable as the highest exemplars of Conrad's nebulous, psychological style where the minds and voices of characters intermingle freely with the loose prose of the narrative.

Heart of Darkness

Heart of Darkness, published in 1902, is considered by most to be Conrad's greatest achievement. It was originally serialized in three parts in Blackwood's Magazine (1899). The highly symbolic story is actually a story within a story. The narrator is man whose name we never learn, whose is traveling up the Thames in the middle of the night with a group of passengers, among them a mysterious traveler named Marlow. Without almost no prompting, recalling Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Ancient Mariner, Marlow recounts a mesmerizing story of his adventures to the other passengers. Marlow tells the tale of how he was hired by a Belgian trading company to travel up what presumably is the Congo River (although the name of the country Marlow is visiting is never specified in the text) to investigate the work of Kurtz, a Belgian trader in ivory who apparently has gone insane.

As Marlow travels upriver, he witnesses more and more savagery, becoming utterly disgusted with the imperialist Belgians who have employed him. These fictionalized accounts almost certainly draw on Conrad's own experiences. Eight years before he had served as a captain aboard a Congo steamer; on a single trip up the river, he witnessed so many atrocities that he quit on the spot. The Belgian Congo of that time, under the rule of the tyrannical King Leopold, was notorious even among imperial colonies for its brutality and oppression. Marlow's travel up the river follows a similar descent, and by the time Marlow reaches Kurtz—who has indeed gone insane and installed himself as a tyrannical god-king among the natives—he is no longer sure whether fulfilling his mission of bringing Kurtz to the authorities would do any justice at all in such a lawless place. Kurtz's moment of illumination comes just before his death. His emotive words, "the horror!' came to symbolize the corrupting influence of the racist imperialist enterprise and, further, the modernist sense of alienation and meaninglessness at the heart of "civilization."

Themes

"Heart of Darkness" suggests the main theme of the novel. "Darkness" alludes superficially to the unknown and the barbarous, contrasted with the "light of civilization." But that which ought to be on the side of "light" is often in fact mired in darkness. The contrast of barbarity and civilization cuts both ways. Perhaps the most apt (and vexing) image for this muddling of light and darkness can be found in the painting of the traditional figure of the blindfolded goddess of Justice that Marlow discovers along his journey; instead of holding a scale, she carries a torch, and is painted on a background of tremendous darkness. Marlow, holding a candle, moves closer to the painting, to try to make sense of it; but at the moment the candle goes out. The painting, as it turns out, was painted by none other than Kurtz a year before he departed for the Congo. The irony and peculiarity of the scene—with an image of blind justice bringing light to darkness, and Marlow bringing a light to the image, only to have it go out at the moment he thinks he can discern the meaning of the picture—reflect on the manifold levels of lightness and darkness as they ripple throughout the text. More tellingly, the novella explores Europe's, and civilization's, "heart of darkness"; Marlow's journey up the river leads deeper and deeper into the dark recesses of imperialist Europe until at journey's end he is confronted by the depraved Kurtz.

Elsewhere, early in the novella, the narrator recounts how London—the largest, most populous and wealthiest city in the world, where Conrad wrote and where a large part of his audience lived—was itself in Roman times a dark part of the world much like the Congo is now.

Style

As an artist, Conrad famously aspired, in his preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897), "by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel... before all, to make you see. That—and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand—and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask."

Writing in what was the age of symbolism in poetry and impressionism in the visual arts, Conrad showed himself in many of his works a prose poet of the highest order: thus, for instance, in the evocative Patna and courtroom scenes of Lord Jim; in the "melancholy-mad elephant" and gunboat scenes of Heart of Darkness; in the doubled protagonists of The Secret Sharer; Conrad created a style that was at the same time deliberate and measured while at the same time nebulous. Hence, one might suggest that Conrad was perhaps a sort of prose impressionist, in that, like the painters of France with whom he was familiar, he strived to create works that duplicated the sense of impressionisme—that sense, as he articulates above, of seeing, ever so briefly, a glimpse of the sudden, ephemeral truth.

"In Conrad's writing generally," says English novelist Giles Foden, "the grandiloquent Edwardian temper shades into something hesitantly modern, as the forthrightness of imperialist subject matter is undercut by the obliquities of narrative form. All this leaves his works unclassifiable, spilling 'out of high literature into light reading and romance,' as the critic Frederic Jameson has put it, 'floating uncertainly between Proust and Robert Louis Stevenson.' "

Criticism

Chinua Achebe has argued that Conrad's language and imagery is inescapably racist, probably in large part on account of his first few novels, which show little insight into the natives he describes. Conrad associated the wild with despair, death, and savage, inhuman acts; nevertheless, in his depiction of London and industrial man he paints a similarly gloomy picture. He uses this symbolism in many of his novels, but most powerfully in Heart of Darkness, where he shows, as many readers will agree, that the racist imperialism of the British made them into far worse savages than any of those they ever colonized.

Europeans and Africans are portrayed as being at different stages in their cultural development, which does not necessarily mean that Conrad felt Africans to be inferior. Anyone aware of Conrad's other work will know how critical he is of modern civilization. Indeed, Kurtz's savage African truths are presented as almost attractive and superior to modern European civilization. Conrad seems to imply that what Imperial Rome once did to northern Europe, imperial Europe was doing to the whole world; whether this was a good or a bad thing, remains ambiguous in Conrad's assessment of history.

Legacy

Primarily seen in his own time as a writer of adventure stories, Conrad is now recognized as a master of narrative technique and English diction (astonishing given that English was his third language),whose work displays a deep moral consciousness. Conrad's penetrating insight, influenced by Henry James, combine vivid descriptions of life in situations of duress, the testing of human character under conditions of extreme danger and difficulty. Writing at the apex of European colonialism, Conrad examined the inner psychology of both colonial overseers and subjects.

Conrad's literary work bridges the gap between the realist literary tradition of writers such as Charles Dickens and Honore de Balzac and the emergent modernist schools of writing. His prose is not nearly as abstruse as pure modernists such as James Joyce or Marcel Proust. Although Conrad deploys some of the modernist techniques (most notably, the interior monologue) he still retains all the trappings of a standard, realistic narrative. Nevertheless, his works, like those of Henry James, effuse a certain ethereal quality, suggesting a symbolic resonance of layers of meaning that go beyond the level of the plot. Heart of Darkness is perhaps Conrad's most masterful display of this strange aspect of his fiction: on the one hand, at the level of the narrative it is a rather straight-forward story of a man traveling up the river of the Congo to apprehend a lunatic; but in the symbolic register, there are layers of uncanny detail: the way the tale of going up the Congo River is being related by a narrator going up another dark river of his own; the way the novel itself is a story within a story, with the real narrator never being named nor ever identified, and the veracity of all the story's narrators left open to murky doubt.

Heart of Darkness famously served as the basis for Francis Ford Coppola's film about the American experience in Vietnam, Apocalypse Now. The film portrays an officer, (played by Martin Sheen), sent up the Mekong River to kill a rogue Colonel Kurtz, (played by Marlon Brando) who had lost his soul in his effort to beat the Viet Cong at their own style of war, which included terror and torture.

Novels and novellas

1895	Almayer's Folly
1896	An Outcast of the Islands
1897	The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'
1899	Heart of Darkness
1900	Lord Jim
1901	The Inheritors (with Ford Madox Ford)
1902	Typhoon (begun 1899)
1903	Romance (with Ford Madox Ford)
1904	Nostromo
1907	The Secret Agent
1911	Under Western Eyes
1913	Chance
1915	Victory
1917	The Shadow Line
1919	The Arrow of Gold
1920	The Rescue
1923	The Nature of a Crime (with Ford Madox Ford)
	The Rover
1925	Suspense (unfinished, published posthumously)

Short stories

• "The Idiots" (Conrad's first short story; written during his honeymoon, published in Savo 1896 and collected in Tales of Unrest, 1898).
• "The Black Mate" (written, according to Conrad, in 1886; published 1908; posthumously collected in Tales of Hearsay, 1925).
• "The Lagoon" (composed 1896; published in Cornhill Magazine 1897; collected in Tales of Unrest, 1898).
• "An Outpost of Progress" (written 1896 and named in 1906 by Conrad himself, long after the publication of Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, as his 'best story'; published in Cosmopolis 1897 and collected in Tales of Unrest 1898; often compared to Heart of Darkness, with which it has numerous thematic affinities).
• "The Return" (written circa early 1897; never published in magazine form; collected in Tales of Unrest, 1898; Conrad, presaging the sentiments of most readers, once remarked, "I hate it").
• "Karain: A Memory" (written February–April 1897; published Nov. 1897 in Blackwood's and collected in Tales of Unrest, 1898).
• "Youth" (written in 1898; collected in Youth, a Narrative and Two Other Stories, 1902)
• "Falk" (novella/story, written in early 1901; collected only in Typhoon and Other Stories, 1903).
• "Amy Foster" (composed in 1901; published the Illustrated London News, Dec. 1901 and collected in Typhoon and Other Stories, 1903).
• "To-morrow" (written early 1902; serialized in Pall Mall Magazine, 1902 and collected in Typhoon and Other Stories, 1903).
• "The End of the Tether" (written in 1902; collected in Youth, a Narrative and Two Other Stories, 1902)
• "Gaspar Ruiz" (written after "Nostromo" in 1904–1905|05; published in Strand Magazine in 1906 and collected in A Set of Six, 1908 UK/1915 US. This story was the only piece of Conrad's fiction ever adapted by the author for cinema, as Gaspar the Strong Man, 1920).
• "An Anarchist" (written in late 1905; serialized in Harper's in 1906; collected in A Set of Six, 1908 UK/1915 US.)
• "The Informer" (written before January 1906; published in December 1906 in Harper's and collected in A Set of Six, 1908 UK/1915 US.)
• "The Brute" (written in early 1906; published in The Daily Chronicle in December 1906; collected in A Set of Six, 1908 UK/1915 US.)
• "The Duel" (aka "The Point of Honor": serialized in the UK in Pall Mall Magazine in early 1908 and in the US periodical Forum later that year; collected in A Set of Six in 1908 and published by Garden City Publishing in 1924. Joseph Fouché makes a cameo appearance)
• "Il Conde" (i.e., 'Conte' [count]: appeared in Cassell's [UK] 1908 and Hampton's [US] in 1909; collected in A Set of Six, 1908 UK/1915 US.)
• "The Secret Sharer" (written December 1909; published in Harper's and collected in Twixt Land and Sea 1912)
• "Prince Roman" (written 1910, published in 1911 in the Oxford and Cambridge Review; based upon the story of Prince Roman Sanguszko of Poland 1800–1881)
• "A Smile of Fortune" (a long story, almost a novella, written in mid-1910; published in London Magazine in Feb. 1911; collected in Twixt Land and Sea 1912)
• "Freya of the Seven Isles" (another near-novella, written late 1910–early 1911; published in Metropolitan Magazine and London Magazine in early 1912 and July 1912, respectively; collected in Twixt Land and Sea 1912)
• "The Partner" (written in 1911; published in Within the Tides, 1915)
• "The Inn of the Two Witches" (written in 1913; published in Within the Tides, 1915)
• "Because of the Dollars" (written in 1914; published in Within the Tides, 1915)
• "The Planter of Malata" (written in 1914; published in Within the Tides, 1915)
• "The Warrior's Soul" (written late 1915–early 1916; published in Land and Water, in March 1917; collected in Tales of Hearsay, 1925)
• "The Tale" (Conrad's only story about WWI; written 1916 and first published 1917 in Strand Magazine)

Memoirs and Essays

• The Mirror of the Sea (collection of autobiographical essays first published in various magazines 1904-1906), 1906
• A Personal Record (also published as Some Reminiscences), 1912
• Notes on Life and Letters, 1921
• Last Essays, 1926

External links

All links retrieved June 14, 2007.

• The Joseph Conrad Society (UK)
• Conrad First: a digital archive of every newspaper and magazine in which the work of Joseph Conrad appeared between 1896 and 1935
• The Complete works are available from eBooks@Adelaide
• Works by Joseph Conrad. Project Gutenberg
• Free audiobook of The Secret Agent from LibriVox
• Penn State's Electronic Classics Series has 26 Works of Joseph Conrad available for free Joseph Conrad at Penn State's Electronic Classics
• Joseph Conrad at kirjasto.sci.fi
• Heart of Darkness text at American Literature
• Chinua Achebe: The Lecture Heard Around The World
• Conrad's page at Literary Journal.com – A number of research articles on Conrad's work

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