THE STYLE
One way in which Conrad tried to push "beyond the actual facts of the case" was by augmenting the details of his own journey up and sown the Congo with other narratives of exploration.
The adventure narrative is disrupted and overwritten with a range of discourse types and a variety of literary and mythical patterns. Marlow´s physical journey from London to the Congo becomes a moral journey in which he confronts the workings of colonialism and a psychological journey undertaken by Marlow, his audience and the reader, while his story-telling draws upon the resources of a literary culture; in his attempt to represent and comprehend the non-Eruopean experience. "All Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz' and "all Europe" contributes to Marlow's narrative. His narrative can be read as a quest; a Katabasis; an inverted pilgrim's progress; while Kurtz's experience suggests a version of the Faustian pact. (13)
His equipment was remarkable. He was a good linguist, exceptionally well read in French and English literature. Knowing Poland and Russia from within, by temperament and heredity he was, as he told Mr.Megroz, "Western European, descending from the Roman Empire and the ancient western world".
What he achieved (and indeed it enriches every book he wrote) was a background devoid of insularity. Hi was proud of his adopted country, few prouder, but from the very circumstances of his life, he saw her from without. No one has dwelt upon her with more affection He would have been the first to appreciate pleasing irony that the two writers who have written most perceptively about her seamen generally, and in particular of Nelson, should have been himself a Pole, and Alfred Mahan an American.
Mr.Megroz has described his manner as "a curious mixture of warm-hearted courtesy and a child-like irritability". The impression is general. He was well aware of his own genius and, despite his warm heart, had no great tolerance for fools.
"Fascination", says Galsworthy, "was Conrad's greatest characteristic- the fascination of vivid expressiveness and zest, of his deeply affectionate heart, and his far-ranging subtle mind".
To one who knew nothing of his origin, the thought would surely never occur that English was not his native tongue. Indeed his most persistent grammatical fault, the use of the word "shall" where he intends "will", is a peculiarity common enough even in those to whom English is an inheritance.
How he first learnt the language in which he wrote has been related. "After hearing it spoken". He learnt much from Mill's Political Economy, and from reading newspapers. Keats was his favourite English poet. Fennimore Cooper was known to his childhood from translations. (14)
The unique position of Joseph Conrad in English literary history is due not only to the fact that he wrote in a language not native to him but to his isolation from the main movement of the novel. In some respects his work resembles that of Henry James and in other more superficial respects the work of Kipling and Stevenson. But he made no contribution either to the novel of manners or to sociological fiction, and even in the few stories having a European setting the subjects are remote from typical western experience.
As a Pole his cultural connections were with the West. From childhood he knew French and to the end of his life would resort to it when at a moment's loss for an English word. But his father was a student of English literature, and in translation the boy read Shakespeare and Dickens. In his veins ran the blood of martyrs for freedom, and it is not too fanciful to suppose that the sense of man's conflict with terrific powers, which was afterwards heightened by Conrad's experiences at sea, derived ultimately from the Polish dread and hatred of Russia. In this scion of a land-locked race rose strangely the desire to follow a sailor0s life. In overingenious detail the theory has been developed that throughout Conrad's books there is evidence of an obsession, a "guilt-complex," originating in his abandonment of Poland. Certainly the cases are very numerous of disloyalty, infidelity, sullied honor, and hidden shame, as also of retribution or the restoration of self-respect through self-immolation.
Not without opposition from his family was the lad able to fulfill his desire. In 1874 he made his way to Marseilles, where he was involved in gun-running adventures for the Spanish Carlists and in the conspiratorial and emotional experiences afterwards recalled in The Arrow of Gold. He learned English (though he always spoke it with an accent), and so strong a hold did the idiom, the cadences, and the rich vocabulary of the language have upon him that, as he afterwards said, when he began to write he did not adopt English but it adopted him. To beguile the hours of calm weather all sailors spin yarns; and it was in part from "tales of hearsay" in fo'c'sle and master's cabin that Conrad shaped his technique as a novelist. (15)
(13) ã Heart Of Darkness with the Congo Diary
Introduction and Notes ã Robert Hampson, 1995
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmonksworth, Middlesex, England.
Pages: 24 and 25.
(15) ã A Literary History of England. The 19th Century and after (1789-1939)
Samuel C.Chew. Bryn Maur College
Richard D. Altick. The Ohio State University
Edited by Albert C.Baugh- Second Edition
London, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.
1967-Meredith Publishing Company
Pages: 1551 and 1552.
(14) ã Joseph Conrad by Oliver Warner
Published for THE BRITISH COUNCIL and the NATIONAL BOOK LEAGUE
By Longmans, Green and Co., London, New York, Toronto.
First published in 1950
Pages: 12, 13, 15 and 16.