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JOSEPH CONRAD
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) once called himself “Homo duplex”, and indeed duplicity characterizes both his life and his work. Conrad never held clear, stable positions. Teodor Jozef Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski (his real name) was born in 1857, in Poland partitioned and occupied since 1795 by Russia, Prussia and Austria. The 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. Conrad experienced the colonization came early. 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 English was required for his Master Mariner qualification. 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 the colonial exploitation. Feverish sickness and near mental breakdown were the results of the horrors of Congo. A modest inheritance he received from his uncle encouraged him to abandon the sea and devote himself to writing. He contributed some of the major writing of the century. From The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897), Youth (1898), Heart of Darkness (1902) and Lord Jim (1900), by way of Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (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.
The writer’s task
Conrad stated what the writer’s task should be in the preface to The Nigger of 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 latitudes
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 exotic land (like Belgian Congo or the China sea) because these were the places he knew well and because they enabled him to isolate his characters so that their problems and inner conflicts 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.
Conrad’s oblique style
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 general, 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 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 language
He wrote in English because he thought that it offered him the ideal 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 interjections. Conrad makes use of an amazing variety of adjectives and of complex structures.
The individual 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 ideal 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 individual consciousness, through individual responsibility and self-control.
Heart of darkness
Plot
The novel, which consists of three parts, is set at the end of the 19th century at an unspecified date. The narrator is Marlow, a sailor who is waiting for the tide which will let the ship sail from London. He talks about his first commission for a Belgian company involved in the ivory trade in the Congo. His task was to carry raw ivory from the heart of the continent to the coast where it could be loaded on ships bound for Europe. Once in Africa he encountered a French gun-boat firing into the jungle though, apparently, there was no enemy. He then got to the Company Station near the coast, where he was disappointed by the inefficiency and neglect of the organization and by the cruelty of the colonial exploitation. It was there that he heard Kurtz’s name for the first time. Kurtz was a company agent who managed to supply more ivory than the other agents and had become a sort of idol for the natives. An expedition was arranged to reach Kurtz and bring him back to civilization, since he was seriously ill. During the voyage Marlow met several people who referred to Kurtz as “a very remarkable person”, “an emissary of pity, and science, and progress”. Marlow found out that Kurtz had even been required to write a report where he put down the noble ideals that had initially brought him to Africa, but which he ended with the postscript: “Exterminate all the brutes!”. Marlow finally met Kurtz and succeeded in taking him on board. However, before he could interrogate him about the “unspeakable rites” he had taken part in, Kurtz died whispering the ambiguous words: “The horror! The horror!”. When Marlow returned to Belgium, he called on Kurtz’s fiancée and, instead of telling her the truth about what had happened, he told her that Kurtz had uttered her name while dying.
The historical context to the novel
The historical context to the novel is the specific form of colonial imperialism of Belgium practised in Congo Free State regarded as a personal territorial possession. Moreover, Leopold pursued his Congo interests in the name of philanthropy and anti-slavery. He stated that the agents of the State had to accomplish the noble mission to continue the development of civilization in Africa gradually reducing the primitive barbarism and fighting sanguinary customs. They also had to accustom the population to general laws, of which the most needful and salutary was that of work. He set up concession companies controlled by his personal representatives to exploit the wealth of the Congo State fully.
A complex structure
The novel presents a series of stories, one embedded within the other. First there is the frame provided by an anonymous narrator who, on board the Nellie on the Thames, introduces Marlow – an observer-texts narrator and formally closes the narrative. Everything else is contained within this frame; minor characters also tell their own stories and state their views of Kurtz. The complex structure of the novel 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 realism 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.
Symbolism
The novel is rich in imagery and symbolism, in parallels – such as those between the river Thames and the Congo, between Marlow and Kurtz – as well as in oppositions – black and white, light and dark. It 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 evil. 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
Heart of Darkness can be read as Marlow’s mythical journey in search of the self, in order to bring back a new truth. Kurtz was a progressive and a liberal, a painter, a writer, a musician who was received by the black natives as if he were a god. However, 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. On the contrary, Marlow did not
Beckett of keeping a dialogue running for so long is overcome by making his characters forget everything. Estragon cannot remember anything about his past; Vladimir, although possessing a better memory, distrusts what he remembers. Estragon needs his friend to tell him his history; it is as if Vladimir establishes Estragon’s identity by remembering for him. Estragon also serves as a reminder for Vladimir of all the things they have done together. Thus both men serve to remind the other one of his very existence. Pozzo and Lucky are physically linked to each other by a rope as well as by a tyrannical relationship of master and servant; Lucky is slavish and stands for the power of the mind, while Pozzo is the oppressor and represents the power of the body. The name of the character Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for is Godot, which is probably the result of adding the French suffix ‘ot’, meaning ‘little’, to the English ‘God’. This may justify a religious interpretation of the play.
The meaninglessness of time
Time is meaningless as a direct result of chance which is at the basis of human existence. This is why there is a cyclical pattern to events in Waiting for Godot. Vladimir and Estragon return to the same place each day to wait for Godot and experience the same general events with variations each time. It is not known for how long in the past they have been doing this, or for how long they will continue to do it: time essentially is a chaos. Human life is treated arbitrarily and is characterised by suffering but Beckett does not want to offer any solution because when you try to systemise, you simplify and stop understanding the truth. The fundamental question is: “Is there a God?”. The evidence seems to be that there is no God but Beckett leaves the question open because it is impossible to know.
The comic and the tragic
A grotesque humour pervades the daily routine of the two tramps, whereas tragic and desperate tones express Beckett’s assumption: man’s increased knowledge has only made him aware of the uselessness of his learning, since the forces that regulate the universe cannot be understood. Beckett’s pessimism is intensified by his perception of the dreariness and meaningless of human life and by his notion of time as a series of meaningless events.
The language
The language of the play is informal, but it does not serve the purpose of communication: dialogue is only sketched and each character, who usually follows his own thoughts, appears to be perfectly aware that the words he produces are just a way to fill his endless waiting. Another device used to show the lack of communication of characters is the use of para-verbal language, such as pauses, silences and gags, and clichés which highlight the fact that in real life most verbal exchanges are equally devoid of real communication. Repeated phrases, lines, and words and the fact that the second act repeats the first one are used to signify the senseless repetition and relentless flow of time inherent to human existence.
