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    File: \DP\0034\00348.TXT         Wed Apr 13 15:54:21 1994
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$Pretitle{}
$Title{Works of Joseph Conrad
Introduction}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Conrad, Joseph}
$Affiliation{Department Of English Education, New York University}
$Subject{conrad
conrad's
novels
sea
language
darkness
stories
secret
world
heart}
$Date{}
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Title:       Works of Joseph Conrad
Book:        Heart of Darkness
Author:      Conrad, Joseph
Critic:      Weiss, James
Affiliation: Department Of English Education, New York University

Introduction

Beginnings:

     In 1856 Appolo Korzeniowski, aged 36, and Ewelina Bobrowska, aged 25,
married in Podolia, a Polish province under Russian rule. On December 3, 1857,
their only child Teodor Jozef Konrad Korzeniowski was born. In 1862, a little
more than five years after Joseph Conrad's birth, his father moved the family
to Warsaw and launched what was ostensibly a literary magazine called the
Fortnightly Review. Appolo Korzeniowski was an ardent Polish patriot who
resented the Russian domination of Poland, however, and he used the magazine
as a cover to promote resistance against Russian rule. The secret National
Committee, which he helped to create, met frequently in his home. Even before
the 1863 insurrection in Warsaw against Russian rule. Conrad's father was
arrested and after ten months detention in the Citadel in Warsaw was exiled to
Russia. Conrad's mother asked for permission to follow Appolo into exile. Less
than three years later, the frail and poverty-stricken Mrs. Korzeniowski
died at the age of thirty-four. After being released from Russian exile
Conrad's father died a melancholy and defeated person in Cracow, in 1869. The
death of both parents helped to intensify Conrad's own tendencies toward gloom
and introspection and forced him to seek refuge in the world of books. He was
later reared by an aristocratic uncle-guardian. Thaddeus Bobrowski, who sent
him to St. Anne High School in Cracow, where he studied Latin, German,
geography, and history. It is well to note that both sides of Conrad's family
belonged to the landed gentry and the family history is replete with men who
had important military careers. From his father's side of the family. Conrad
inherited a passionate, romantic nature tinged with revolutionary zeal; from
his mother he inherited a practical, down-to-earth personality housed in a
delicate constitution. Both contributed to his development as a writer. Had it
not been for his poor health, which prevented him from continuing his career
as a seaman, Conrad might never have settled down to the long and cruelly
laborious occupation of writing novels.

Youth:

     At the age of fifteen, Conrad announced his ambition to go to sea. His
biographer, Gerard Jean-Aubry, believes this ambition reflected Conrad's
desire to leave the stifling atmosphere of his school. Jean-Aubry's theory
is supported by Conrad's rejection of the idea that he attend a naval academy
in Pola, the academy of the Austrian Navy. Conrad preferred to begin his life
as a seaman immediately, without further schooling. Clearly, Conrad wanted to
leave his schools, his surroundings which reminded him of his dead parents,
and the oppressive atmosphere of Poland, a country under the paw of the
Russian bear.

     Other biographers attribute his desire to leave Poland to quite a
different source. It was about this time that the official Polish attitude
toward the revolution was being revised. The glorious revolution of 1863 was
now considered an inglorious mistake. Conrad's father who had sacrificed so
much to bring about the revolution had sacrificed in vain. The rigors of exile
which brought an early death to both his parents and a lonely childhood to
Conrad himself were consummated in a lamentable repudiation. It is no wonder,
according to his biographers, that Conrad found it difficult to remain in a
society which rejected the suffering and sacrifice of his family.

     Conrad's Uncle Thaddeus attempted to dissuade him from going to sea, but
Conrad remained firm. At the age of seventeen, to his guardian's horror, he
want to Marseilles, and from there sailed over the world on various
respectable and disrespectable expeditions, including gun-running trips to
Central and South America. Among his many exploits is a love affair with a
Spanish court lady, and a duel fought over her with an American adventurer.
Conrad claims that through this lady he became the master of a smuggling ship
working for the Carlist pretender.

     All this, and much more, occurred before Conrad was twenty-one.
Undoubtedly a great deal of Conrad's "autobiography" must be taken with a
grain of salt. There is evidence, for example, that the scar with which Conrad
always demonstrated his having been wounded in the duel was suffered in a much
more prosaic way. It is safe to say that, for purposes of his own, Conrad
seems to have purposely desired that his early life at sea be permanently
shrouded in mystery. Nevertheless, it is absolutely clear what the sea meant
to the young Conrad: "After a childhood weighed down by oppression, how
excellent and moving it was to be free from social conventions and political
tyranny, alone, and face to face with the wide spaces of the sea!" Young
Powell in Chance utters these words but we may feel comfortable in saying that
Conrad himself shared this attitude toward the sea.

The British Navy:

     At the age of twenty-one Conrad became commieted to the idea of being
an English master mariner. He studied the language from newspapers and books,
and on April 24, 1878, he shipped out for Constantinople on the English
steamer, the Mavis. He had decided, as he points out in A Personal Record,
that if he was to be a seaman, he would be an English seaman and no other.
After two years in the British service he passed his examination for third
mate and in 1883 and 1886, for mate and master. Once he had made his decision,
curiously enough, he became almost more British than the British themselves.
He subscribed wholeheartedly, or at least he tried to subscribe, to the ethic
of unquestioning duty that was characteristic of the Imperial Navy. From that
time onward he stayed away from illegal adventures and was known as an
excellent sailor, if one somewhat too prone to take chances.

     From January, 1888, to March 1889, he had command of his first ship, the
Otago. The story of his first voyage can be read in The Shadow-Line,
possibly the most autobiographical of all his works. He continued in Her
Majesty's Merchant Marine for several years, mostly in the Far East. That
area, particularly the Malayan archipelago, became the location for many of
his novels and stories.

Apprenticeship-To-Life:

     It is impossible to overestimate the importance this learning period had
for Conrad. In story after story he reveals how difficult it is to bridge the
gap between youth and manhood, between wanton, adventuresome living and
commitment to a mature responsible ideal. The theme of initiation does not
refer only to adolescence facing manhood; in Conrad man is always an
apprentice to the dark imponderables within life and within himself. The
ordeal of initiation is shared by men of all ages as they progress out of
their egotism and move to a more comprehensive morality. In the young,
however, the ordeal is more clear-cut and the emergence more immediately
satisfying. In his short story, "Youth," the idea of apprenticing and
emergence is most clearly delineated in its purest, albeit elemental, form.
Later on in The Secret Sharer and Heart of Darkness we shall see the deeper
implications of emergence and non-emergence.

Literary Beginnings:

     Not until his thirties did Conrad begin writing. His first novel,
Almayer's Folly, was begun on shore leave in London, and continued for several
years on various ships. Much of it was written on the flyleaves of his copy of
Flaubert's Madame Bovary. It was published in 1895, the year after he gave up
life at sea in favor of a literary career. Though showing a number of faults
as a novel. Almayer's Folly revealed the characteristics of a serious
craftsman and stylist. His second novel, An Outcast of the Islands (1896), was
a continuation of the history of certain characters in Almayer's Folly. In
1897 he published his first really major work, The Nigger of the Narcissus.
The ten years following the publication of The Nigger of the Narcissus saw one
of the greatest creative outbursts, not only in Conrad's life but in all
modern literature. Many of his most memorable works were written during this
period, including Lord Jim (1900), Typhoon and Heart of Darkness (1902),
Nostromo (1904), and The Secret Agent (1907). The Secret Sharer was published
in 1910.

Later Success:

     Most critics feel that after this decade, or at least after Under Western
Eyes (1911), the quality of Conrad's work dropped considerably. With the
exceptions of Victory (1914) and The Shadow Line (1917), no one of his later
works is considered a major work. It is ironic that Conrad's popular success
arrived at precisely the time when his artistic powers began to decline. Prior
to 1913, when he had his first great commercial success with Chance, he had
been virtually unrecognized by the public. From that date, however, he became
one of the most sought after writers of England. His popularity steadily
increased until his death (1924), some eleven years later, at the age of sixty
- seven.

Conrad's Language:

     What has made Conrad one of the most difficult of writers in English is
not the complexity of his thought, which indeed appears difficult enough, but
his rhetoric or language style. Both his language and the construction of his
books create great problems for the reader. A certain part of our difficulty
with his language may be due to the fact that he did not learn English until
the age of twenty. French was his second tongue and many of his expressions
strike us as highly gallicized. Some of his passages even look as if they had
been translated from the French. He loved to use balanced phrases and parallel
structure in his sentences. Often he interrupted his narrative to give long,
poetic descriptions of natural scenes. While his purpose in such passages is
to help create the proper tone and atmosphere for the story, some critics
complain that his verbosity diminishes the accumulation of tension and
prevents the reader from becoming unalterably involved with the events.

     Conrad's prose is always heightened. His word choice, the rhythm of his
phrasing, the length of his sentences, the paragraph climaxes, all conspire to
lift his prose to the level of eloquence, to a premeditatedly heightened level
which produces a kind of intoxication. When successful, this state of raptness
works on the reader to make him receptive to the meanings embedded in the
overall pattern of the story. The language is loaded and impressive especially
when the concrete presentation of incident and natural setting provide a
context for the language to illuminate. However, as Leavis points out in his
controversial set of essays, The Great Tradition, Conrad's language becomes an
excrescence when it is imposed on the reader without the validation of
objective experience. It is as if Conrad were trying to convince the reader
solely through his language that something important was taking place. When
Conrad is trying to invoke in the reader a feeling for the vague and
unrealizable, he intensifies his language and insists on the existence of
something powerful and mysterious because he can't really produce that
intensity through the event. One should be on his guard when Conrad uses the
terms "indefinable," "exotic," "inconceivable," "enigmatic," "inscrutable"; he
is probably trying too hard to invest the experience with significance. Leavis
compares this tendency towards "thrilled insistency" with the melodramatic
intensities of Edgar Allen Poe. When Conrad is writing badly, as he often does
in his later works, his language becomes murky and pretentious. Often it is
hard to know whether it is the obscurity of the language or the density of the
reader that is causing the difficulty. R. P. Blackmur identifies this misuse
of language as the fallacy of expressive form: the belief that if a thing is
felt deeply enough its expression in language will automatically give it
satisfactory form. The error implied in this fallacy is that the writer
abdicates his formal obligation to the raw material of his subject matter.
Overstatement can be one of Conrad's effective literary devices; it can also
betray a specious reality.

Symbolism:

     In all his works, Conrad's main objective is the presentation of a
psychological and moral reality, rather than an external naturalism. In
attempting to describe the various mental states of his characters, Conrad
resorts to the use of symbolism. His books are invariably built around a
symbolic skeleton, which reveals the psychological attributes of his
characters better than anything "realistic" could do. In fact, his choice and
repetitious use of various natural elements in some of his stories lends a
sort of super-reality to the narrative. When the conclusion of Victory draws
near, for example, there is a violent thunderstorm. This indicates to the
reader that the judgment of heaven is about to descend.

     Conrad also employs objects, both natural and man-made, with great
success as symbols. The ever thickening jungle in the Heart of Darkness, the
white hat in The Secret Sharer, the silver mine in Nostromo are all examples.
All of them are symbolic stand-ins for the thoughts and emotions of the
characters as well as for supervening embodiments of the thematic message.
Consider the title of the Heart of Darkness. On a strictly literal level these
words could be interpreted to represent the outline of the continent of Africa
which does indeed resemble a crude sketch of a human heart. The skin tone of
Africans fulfills the total symbolism inherent in the Heart of Darkness. But
"heart" can also be taken to mean the place of central importance, of most
vital significance. And when the center is a repository of "darkness," the
symbolism suggests a form of hellishness producing dark thoughts and actions.
Another possible interpretation of "darkness" is that of ambiguity, things not
clearly seen. So the title may prefigure a story of mystery and veiled truths.
The permutations are endless.

Deliberate Ambiguity:

     Conrad's use of language and symbol are joined in a single key image that
occurs abundantly in the two stories we shall examine; this image is the
shadow. Often the shadow is accompanied by such images as mist, fog, cloud,
darkness, and blackness; it is opposed by various images of light:
candlelight, moonlight, sunlight, and lightning flashes. Through this central
image, the shadow, Conrad comments on the world around him and on the people
in it. If the world of light, daytime, and consciousness exists on the surface
of Conrad's thinking, then the world of darkness, ambiguity, and shadow exists
beneath the surface, beneath the conscious level of things-exists in the
subconscious itself.

     Another device that Conrad habitually uses to blur the straight
reportorial picture of reality is the use of multiple narrators. Narrative
viewpoints change abruptly, often several times in a chapter. The traditional
straightforward chronological sequence is destroyed by constantly skipping
back and forth through time. Often we seem to be floating in time, not quite
certain of when the events being described are taking place. This technique at
first promises utter befuddlement. One craves a single reliable commentator
talking in a comprehensible time sequence about what really is going on. Later
on, however, as we total up the impressions received from disparate
personalities and untangle the convoluted sequences of narrative we find
ourselves in possession of a deeper, more comprehensive reality. We conclude
by understanding the story far better than we would have had Conrad limited
himself to a conventional narrative style.

Theory Of Doubles: The Doppelganger:

     Of all Conrad's methods of portraying the inner life of his characters,
one stands out as the most original and the most successful: the double. In
his works, a double is a person who stands for a characteristic or emotion in
another person. Sometimes the identification may be complete; sometimes it is
only partial. It may be an older man seeing himself in a younger one, or it
may be two people very close in age. The clearest example of such a figure is
found in The Secret Sharer. In that story the hero actually hides another man,
who is an embodiment of his own fears and guilt, on board his ship. They
struggle throughout the symbolic voyage, until the hero learns to recognize
the ugly, violent qualities his double represents and is able at the end to
accept his baser nature and free the double. In the Heart of Darkness, Kurtz
may be regarded as representing the evil suppressed within Marlowe. The
confrontation between them in the jungle is then seen as an intra-psychic
struggle taking place within Marlowe rather than a contest between two
distinctly separate personalities. In The Nigger of the Narcissus, the Negro,
James Wait, serves as a collective double for all the ordinary seamen. He,
too, represents the worst part of their personalities. We should note, though,
that such a device would always fail if it were not for the masterful way in
which Conrad makes his doubles real as well as symbolic. James Wait exists as
an unpleasant, shirking, whining Jamaican, before he function as a symbol. It
is only because he is so real that we can accept him as having more than
natural significance.

Three Kinds Of Novels:

     Conrad's novels can be conveniently divided into three categories,
although all three overlap quite often. These are the jungle novels, the sea
stories, and the novels of politics. Such novels as Lord Jim and Heart of
Darkness fall in the first category. The second includes the famous group of
short novels about the sea such as The Secret Sharer and The Shadow Line. The
third category, novels of politics, is headed by Nostromo, and includes such
works as The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes.

The Jungle Novels:

     These novels generally focus on a single individual, usually a white man,
who, for one reason or another, has chosen to isolate himself from white
society and live in a primitive fashion. In Victory, Heyst isolates himself
from the civilization he has known in England because he is disillusioned with
its corruption and complexity. Jim, in Lord Jim, feels that he has committed
an unforgivable moral crime by deserting his ship and he cannot face the world
again because of his act of cowardice. In every case, the individual is unable
to escape the real world, which intrudes into his hideaway often in the form
of renegades seeking plunder. Conrad is primarily interested in the moral and
psychological problems that arise from the invasion of the hero's private
world. His heroes have forsworn any intercourse with the world, but Conrad
forces them to face it. They must pass through extreme emotional crises before
they can be redeemed and become morally whole human beings again. Many of
Conrad's characters pay for the redemption with their lives, making their
stories essentially tragic quests.

The Sea Stories:

     The great sea stories, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Typhoon, Youth, The
Shadow-Line, and The Secret Sharer are all short novels. They all deal with
the sea as a character in itself. The backgrounds become vitally important in
these novels. The sea is almost a moral force, against which the men in the
stories are eventually judged. The stories customarily concern a voyage, which
is not only a real voyage, but a voyage of the soul as well. The two trips are
intimately connected. The storms and calms which beset the sailors are
reflections of the storms and calms in their souls. While he is waiting for a
favorable wind, the new captain in The Secret Sharer is beset with real doubt
about his voyage as well as spiritual uncertainty about the assumption of his
first command. He, as well as the ship, is becalmed.

     Conrad's sea tales are masterpieces on the level of adventure stories as
well. No other writer in English has been able to capture the feeling of the
sea and ships as has Conrad. Every line of the tales shows that they have been
written by a man with a complete and sensitive awareness of nautical life. In
fact, toward the end of his life, Conrad became known to the public
exclusively as a writer of sea stories. He once said that he almost wished he
had never written them, so that people would take his work as seriously as it
deserved to be taken.

The Political Novels:

     The political novels are somewhat less concerned with the moral problems
of people confined within themselves and unable to flee from a spiritual day
of reckoning. Rather, they deal, especially in Nostromo, with the facts of the
entire society and with people who are in the deepest sense cut off yet remain
vitally connected with societal imperatives. In Nostromo, Conrad invents an
entire country and creates a particular, unique social, geographical, and
historical structure. In this mythical society Conrad brings into play all the
variegated forces that are shaping the modern world and which in turn shape
the destinies of the individual characters in the novel. The country itself is
the real subject, not in its physical or geographical context, but in its
human constitution. The lust for silver is the "pivot of the moral and
material events, affecting the lives of everybody in the tale." Silver is in
the land, but the lust for it is in the people. It is the general picture of
the citizens and their various lives-the interaction among them and the
contest against the background environment-which is of primary importance in
this novel. Again, one can interpret Conrad's political novels as adventure
stories excitingly reported, but if one were to limit these novels to the
level of reportage one would miss Conrad's attempt to display the deeper
forces structuring all of Western society.

Conrad's Artistic Manifesto:

     In the Preface to his novel The Nigger of the Narcissus Conrad wrote of
his aesthetic goals in writing fiction. He stated that the conscience of the
artist is more important than the formulas dictated by certain acceptable
styles. In order to be truly convincing, the writer must convey his impression
through the senses - "the secret spring of responsive emotions." Each line of
prose has the responsibility of carrying the conviction of truth. The artist
must reveal the dynamics of the whole within the core of each particular
moment. By perfectly blending form and substance, the writer can make the
audience perceive a throbbing, living reality. "My task which I am trying to
achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you
feel - it is, before all, to make you see. That - and no more, and it is
everything."

Conrad's Influence:

     During his lifetime Conrad was acclaimed for his achievement as a master
storyteller. However, not many critics at the time had the prescience to
understand how deeply his method and meaning would influence writers in the
future. Although accused of being a Victorian in disguise, Conrad preempts
some of the major themes which have obsessed writers of fiction throughout
this century. Hemingway's articulation of the failure of any kind of
abstraction, no matter how ideal, to serve the well-being of humanity is an
echo of Kurtz's failure of idealism in the Congo. In a kindred fashion
Fitzgerald's famous failure, Gatsby, is a perverted relative in misguided
idealism. Woolf and Joyce, accompanied by a host of others, have advanced
Conrad's technique of multiple narration moving back and forth through time.
What was ambiguous in Conrad has been refined into techniques of deliberate
mystification and obscurity.

     Conrad's major contribution is probably his quest for inner certitude in
a world bent on external acquisition. Progress is an empty "happening" if it
is not founded on a moral base. His desperate, intense search for ethical
conduct in the face of exploding materialism provides an enduring frame for
most of twentieth-century fiction.

