1851-1921.

Joseph Conrad

Life and works Joseph Conrad once called himself"Homo duplex", and indeed duplicity characterizes both his interesting life and the contradictions of his work. Conrad never held clear, stable positions. Evidence of this can be seen in his double nationality, the two professional careers he pursued, his mixed social identity and the extensive use of the theme of the double in his writing. Teodor Jozef Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski, as he was christened, was born in 1857, in the territory of Poland partitioned and occupied since 1795 by Russia, Prussia and Austria. Thc tyrannical rule of Russia never extinguished Polish nationalist fervour nor the insurrectionary movement in which Conrad's father, Apollo Korzeniowski, was very active. His family was forced into exile in Russia and soon both his parents died. For Conrad, then, the experience of being colonized carne early; exile and loneliness were also almost 'inborn'. Conrad was brought up by an uncle and in 1874 he left for Marseilles to go to sea. For four years he sailed on French merchant ships, training as a mariner. In 1878 he joined an English ship to the Far East and Australia. Learning
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Englishwas required for his Master

Mariner qualification, which he achieved in 1886, the same year in which he became a British subject. His career as a seaman put him in contact with men from a different social class and background from his own, but in whom he learned to appreciate the values of a simple devotion to a demanding, monotonous, dangerous job, and work is a powerful theme in his novels. In 1890 Conrad received a commission which brought him to Africa. This journey is recorded in his Congo Diary, which bears witness to his direct experience of the brutalities of colonial exploitation. Feverish sickness and near mental breakdown were the results of the horrors

of the Congo. A modest inheritance he received from his uncle encouraged him to abandon the sea and devote himself to writing. The dating of Conrad's works is not simple because some were published in book form, some were published serially and did not appear as books untillater, occasionally with considerable differences; often two or three were being written at the same time; and there were also many articles and short stories. He contributed some of the best writing of the century. From The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897),

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Youth(1898),Lord]im (1900)and Heart of

Darkness (1902), by way of Nostromo (1904), The SecretAgent (1907), The Secret Sharer (1909) and Under Western Eyes (1911), to Victory (1915), The Shadow Line (1917), The Rescue (1920) and The Rover (1923), Conrad worked on and out of a society and literary culture which called for a radical reassessment. By the time of his death, which carne suddenly from a heart attack in 1924, Conrad had certainly met that demand.

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The writer's task Conrad stated what the writer's task should be in the prefaceto TheNiggerof

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the Narcissus (1897). He did not believe the novelist should try to amuse his readers or to teach them a lesson; his task was to record the complex pattern of life as he saw it. His aim was to explore the meaning of the human situation. Exotic Iatitudes Conrad was at first labelled a writer of adventure stories because he set his novels and short stories at sea or in exotic latitudes. He wrote about the Belgian Congo or the China Seas because these were the places he knew well and because they enabled him to isolate his characters @12 Empireand the so that their problems and inner conflicts Victoriannovel stood out with particular force. Most extremely, his setting was the ship, which became a sort of microcosm in its isolation, or an African river and the jungle.
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illusion of life being lived by a number of very different people at the same time. He used various narrative techniques: first-person narration, an invisible narrator, journals and letters. Many novels and short stories are told by the same narrator, Marlow, or have more than one narrator. The several points of view result from Conrad's wish to break free from the constraints of an omniscient narrator so that the reader is left to decide for himself, and is also shown the relativism of moral values. Conrad's Ianguage Conrad's native tongue was Polish and his second language was French. However, he wrote in English because he thought that it offered him the ideaI expression for his complex vision of life. The 'fluid form' of his novels reflects the complexity of man's consciousness. The dialogue is idiomatic, characterized by question and exclamation marks, by dashes and interje.ctions. Conrad makes use of an amazing variety of adjectives and of complex structures. The individuaI consciousness In almost all his works there is the recurrence of a situation in which a man who relies on the virtues of honesty, courage, pity and fidelity to an ideaI of conduct is confronted by a sense of evil against which these virtues seem powerless. Conrad is concerned with the conflict between personal feelings and professional duties. It is the crowd, organized society that give man confidence. But this confidence fails when man is lonely and surrounded by a wild and hostile background. So Conrad points out that reality is indeed the construction of individuaI consciousness (@ t149), through individual responsibility and selfcontroI.

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gUId e d study

1. Answer the following questions about Conrad. 1. In what sense did duplicity characterise Conrad's private lifeand his work? How did his career as a seaman affect him? What caused his mental breakdown? Why isthe dating of his works sometimes diffcult? What features of his works made him different from a 19th-

2. 3. 4.

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century writer? 6. Why did he choose to write in Englishalthough it was not his native language? 7. What were the main themes of his works? I

Conrad's oblique styIe Conrad experimented continually, his style is not straightforward but 'oblique'. His stories deal with extreme situations and often with violence and mystery. Differently from the 19th-century novelists, who showed the insignificance of their main characters in relation to the hugeness of the universe or the life of a nation or modern city, Conrad's heroes are all solitary figures, rooted in no past, committed to an uncertain future. In generaI they are viewed externally, through the mind of others or through their actions. Various narrative techniques Conrad found chronological sequence inadequate, so he broke the normal time-sequence and used time shifts to create the

1902

Heart of Darkness

Plot fiance and, instead of telling her the truth about what had happened, he told The novel, which consists of three parts, is her that Kurtz had uttered her name set at the end of the 19th century at an unspecified date. The narrator is Marlow, a while dying. sailor who, together with the passengers of the Nellie, is waiting for the tide which will The historical context to the novel The historical context to the novel is the let the ship sail from London. He talks about his first commission for a Belgian specific form of colonial imperialism King Leopold II of Belgium practised in his company involved in the ivory trade in the Congo. His task was to carry raw ivory Congo Free State which he regarded as a from the heart of the continent to the personal territorial possession. Moreover, coast where it could be loaded on ships Leopold pursued his Congo interests in the bound for Europe. Once in Africa, while he name of philanthropy and anti-slavery. He stated that the agents of the State had to was proceeding down the coast, he encountered a French gun-boat firing accomplish the noble mission to continue the development of civilization in Africa into the jungle though, apparently, there gradually reducing the primitive barbarism was no enemy. He then got to the Company Station near the coast, where and fighting sanguinary customs. They he was disappointed by the inefficiency also had to accustom the population to generallaws, of which the most needful and neglect of the organization and by and salutary was that of work. He set up the cruelty of the colonial exploitation (@ t149). It was there that he heard concession companies controlled by his Kurtz's name for the first time. Kurtz was personal representatives to exploit the wealth of the Congo State fulIy. a company agent who managed to supply more ivory than the other agents and had become a sort of idol for the natives. An The indictment of imperialism Conrad was writing at a time of growing expedition was arranged to reach Kurtz and bring him back to civilization, since he doubt about imperialist politics, so his book is about imperialism conceived as a was seriously ill. During the voyage Marlow met several people who referred to system of political and economic dominance. His indictment of the brutal Kurtz as "a very remarkable person': "an exercise of law on the natives (@ t149), of emissary of pity, and science, and the missionary zeal, the administrative progress". Marlow found out that Kurtz efficiency and search for profit is had even been required by the generalised to alI forms of imperialism International Societyfor the Suppressionof Savage Customsto write a report wherehe when he calls the company Marlow works put down the noble ideals that had initially for" Continental Trading Company" or brought him to Africa, but which he ended when he gives Kurtz a German name, a with the postscript: "Exterminate alI the half-French father and a half-English mother. brutes!': Marlow finally met Kurtz and succeeded in taking him on board. A complex structure However, before he could interrogate him The novel presents a series of stories, one about the "unspeakable rites" he had embedded within the other. First there is taken part in, Kurtz died whispering the the frame provided by an anonymous ambiguous words: "The horror! The narrator who, on board the Nellie on the horror!" (@ t1S0). When Marlow Thames, introduces Marlow - an observerreturned to Belgium, he called on Kurtz's

A Poster of Apocalypse Now (1979), directed by Francis Ford Coppola. The film,which drew inspiration from Conrad's novel, belongs to the genre of the "Nammovies" that dealt with the experience of the Vietnam War.

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narrator and formally closes the narrative. Everything else is contained within this I frame; minor characters also tell their own stories, and state their views of Kurtz. The complex structure of the noveI is sustained by the continuous shifts backwards and forwards in Marlow's narrative, by the way he creates suspense and interest by delaying the details of his meeting with Kurtz. Psychological reaIism is reinforced by the language which is characterized by idiomatic speech, by irony, and often by Marlow's difficulty to explain his experiences, conveyed through vague and disturbing adjectives: "unspeakable", "unimaginable': "inscrutable", "nameIess".
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between the river Thames and the Congo,

between Marlow and Kurtz

as well as in

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Symbolism

The novel is rich in imagery and

symbolism, in parallels - such as those

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~ Joseph Conrad on board a ship.

oppositions - black and white, light and dark (@ t149).lt is interesting to point out that the traditional meaning of light and dark, given by the frame-narrator, is gradually subverted as Marlow's retrospective narrative unfolds. For the frame-narrator light is associated with calm, peace, beauty and good. Darkness or gloom, on the other hand, is seen as an insidious menace to light, and, ultimately, as evi!. As Marlow penetrates into the darkness of Africa, black acquires positive connotations: it is the colour of the jungle, of a primitive, noble environment and of its people. White, instead, is associated with the negative aspects of colonialism: violence, exploitation, hypocrisy, indifference.

A quest for the self

guided ,stud~ 1. Answer these

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questions about Heart or Darkness. 1. How did Leopold Iljustify the kind of colonialism he set up in the BelgianCongo? 2. What was Conrad's attitude towards

imperialism? 3. What isthe structure of the novel? What sustains it? 4. In what sense did Conrad reverse western traditional symbols? 5. How can the novel be interpreted? 6. How does Marlow differ from Kurtz?

Heart oJDarkness can be read as Marlow's mythicaI jOU1;ney in search of the self, in order to bring back a new truth. Kurtz was a progressive and a liberai, a painter, a writer, a musician who was received by the black natives as if he were a godoHowever, it was perhaps because he went into the jungle without knowing himself, that his wrong conduct took him beyond the limits of his heart; so he paid the price in madness and death (@ t1S0). On the contrary, Marlow did not transgress his limits and carne back without fully understanding his experience, and aIthough the heart of darkness tried to exercise its influence on him, too, he was able to restrain
himself

he recognized its fascination

and its abomination, but resisted his desire to join in those unspeakable rites. Marlow was saved because his aim was self-knowledge, the mystery of existence, which demands a great humility.