JOSEPH CONRAD

Joseph Conrad is now accepted as one of the modernist masters of serious narrative fictions. Historicly placed he is a major figure in the transition from Victorian fiction to the forms and values of twentieth-century literature. His twenty volumes of novels and stories vary greatly in quality and interest. Conrad displays senses of defeat and anxiously heavy ideological consrvativism. He yoked ornate narrative methodhs with sentimental tales and lush descriptive rhetoric with moral reflections.

His three linked novels placed in Malaya ( Almayer´s Folly (1895), An Outcast of the Islands (1896), and The Rescue (1920) ) expand upon some episodes and characters drawn from his maritime experiences.

The first, Almayer´s Folly, was slowly started in the 1880s when Conrad was still a merchant-marine officer. It shows an ornate descriptive style, strong in portentuos atmospheric detailing. The novel shows also the moral ambiguity of colonialism. Though Conrad´s later writing became more disciplined and polished in manner, it continued some of the oddity style, a rhetoric of considerable redundancy, providing a persisting tone of ominousness and misteryousness.

The lush rhetoric seems appropiate to the theme of Malayan fictions: The destructiveness of romantic idealism in weak colonialist characters in an alien environment.

Almayer´s Folly is the first novel finished, but it describes episodes of political manipulation and wars among the Malayans, Arab traders, jungle tribes and European colonialists. Romantic fantasies such as Almayer´s, ending in weakness, failure, and despair, are nuclear conradian fictional experiencies.

An Outcast of the Islands somewhat more clearly ordered, concerns earlier periods of this colonoial history. Willems, another vain and corrupted European weakling, betrays his patron Lingard, becomes an outcast, and finally is killed by his native mistress.

The Rescue, completed only after several decades and marked by the less energetic handling of the older Conrad, focuses on yet earlier episodes of the colonial history.

Perhaps the main interest in these early fictions, besides the exoticism, rests in the curious convinetion of the conventions of popular romance and antiromantic, pessimistic analysis of moral corruption, which was to characterize most of the Conrad´s novels.

As a writer with commercial ambitions, Conrad publicated his stories in magazines which paid better than the publication of novels. Several of the first five of his shorter fictions, later collected as Tales of Unrest (1898), were simply variations on the Far East materials of the early novels.

" The Lagoon" (1897), has a Malayan tell a European of his stealing a beloved but forbidden woman with the loyal help of his brother. But when the three are being pursued, he abandons his brother and makes his scape with the woman. His brother is killed. During the telling of this story to the European, the beloved woman is reportedly dying of an illness.

The longer " Karain: A Memory" (1897), more elaborately uses the distances narrative frame characteristic of many of Conrad´s tales. In this story he uses the story-within-a-story technique. A European trader retrospectively tells the story of a Malayan native ruler obsessed with his best friend´s sister, who has violated natives taboos and run away with a European.

" The Idiots" (1896), produced during his honeymoon in Brittany is a macabrely violent tale of a French peasant couple who have produced four idiots. The wife kills the husband during sex in order to stop producing yet more idiots. Then in a guilty frency she destroys herself.

"The Return". The characters, unusual in Conrad, consit of a contemporary upper-class husband and wife. The wife starts to run off with a literary man but quickly returns to her husband. Conrad emphasizes the insularity, rigidity and smugness. The story gets with absurd domestic dialogue,erratic shifts in point of view and Conrad´s inability to present a believable woman.

"An Outpost of Progress" (1897). Here Conrad makes his first fictional use of the brief period he spents on the Belgian Congo. Perhaps of his great anger at what he saw there, this story shows little moral ambivalence. With harsh irony, Conrad directly recounts the disintegration of two lower-middle-class European incompetents during a few months at an isoleted jungle trading post.

The Nigger of the "Narcissus", first published as the children of the sea in 1897. This is the work that launched his reputation as a noted writer about the sea. It is better written, more stylistically disciplined, than the Malayan novels. The intense descriptions of the crew´s suffering suggests a nearly hystericla vision of human misery.

The central totemic figure of the "Nigger",( un-able-bodied seaman James Wait, a west indian black man) is partly presented in a racist rhetoric: " His pathetic and brutal" face has " the tragic, the mysterious, the repulsive mask of a nigger´s soul.."

Youth (1898) is also based on Conrad´s earlier maritime experience. In this novel captain Marlow gives, with nostalgic high spirits, a generation-latter account of his first berth as a second mate while young.

In the story´s odd disproportion, the fear, pain, frustration, and exhaustion of a multiply ill-fated voyage, ending with an unsympathetic shore society, are treated as a genial initation rite. The disparity between the harsh events and Marlow´s burbling tone in recounting them produces an emphasis upon the absurd.

Heart of Darkness (1899), which has become even more famous because of adaptation in the serio-popular movie Apocalypse Now (1979). In 1890 Conrad had spent a few months under contract to captain a river steamer in what was then the brutally esploited, Belgian colony of the Congo. A narrator describes Captain Marlow´s telling the story, some years after the events, to four solid citizens on a pleasure yawl in the Thames estuary.

Lord Jim (1900). This bifurcated narrative links what so far had been Conrad´s two main sources of subject matter, his maritime and his colonial experiences. After the early chapters of omniscient narration, much of the story is told by Captain Marlow.

The first part centres on the decrepit steamship Patna which is carring eight hundered Muslim pilgrims across the Indian Ocean. When the ship is damaged, the cowardly officers abandon the ship, making no provision for the passengers. But the Patna survives and is safely towed to port by another ship. Jim is tried and convicted of patent dereliction of duty, though he loses only his mariner´s certificated and his good name. Jim ends up a trader on a far-distant colonial island, becoming the paternalistic colonialist Lord Jim.

Typhoon (1902). The bumbler captain comes out heroic, in spite of himself. Captain MacWhirr, master of a small steamship trading the China coast, is a totally dutiful criature of very little intelligence, imagination, and responsiveness. But his very lack of sympathy and insigh, his very literalism, is also his virtue. Unlike his second mate, who goes out of his mind during the typhoon and his responsive first mate whose imagination makes him ineffective in the storm.

To-Morrow (1902). A pathetic comedy about a retired and lunatic coastal captain whose fantasy of what his son will be like when returns denies the actual son when he does come back.

The End of the Tether (1902) is a sentimental short story inflated into near novel length. A once superior sailing captain, Whalley attempts in his late sixties to keep up the facade of a fastidiously proud gentleman and master, though actually impoverished and with a leeching married daughter. Although this tale has implicity powerful themes, it is poor. Forced melodrama may, of course, be attributed to the popular magazine audience for which they were written.

Falk (1903) It is an story around a mock-heroic Scandinavian tugboat captain in an Eastern port and his elaborate efforts to marry a german shipowner´s niece. Curiosly Falk´s sexual hunger is displaced into his digressive story of when he commited canibalism in order to survive on a long-disabled ship.

Nostromo(1906) is Conrad´s largest novel in size, scope, and ambition. The first half engages the reader, by a back-and-forth movement in time and focus. While the mosaic is thin and stereotyped on subjective experience, it is rich on mythic history. In the central action the town of Sulaco ( placed in South America), turns its province into a separate country, the Occidental Republic.

The novel´s entitling figure is Nostromo. An Italian exsailor become " captaz de cargadores", turns out to be a courageous man and a "prodigy of efficiency". But he is also consumed by vanity and as lust for fame and popularity. He is supposedly incorruptible but in the end is totally dominated by his obssesion with a secreted load of silver.

In Nostromo Conrad repeats an obsessive moral: " Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought, the friend of flattering illution. . . " this reversal of the traditional emphasis on the power of comtemplation takes form in Conrad´s other fictions in the glorification of work and the fidility to simple sea routines. Our manteining illusions depends on keeping idle minds away from devilish awareness of our futile condition as men. Women are except from the need for action, because they do not, and he insits should not think. Woman who , we are told in Nostromo are " barren and without importance"

" Gaspar Ruiz" ( 1906) tells of a simple strong man South American guerrilla leader repeatedly switching from the republican to the Spanish royalist sides in the endless brutal confusions of the war of independence. He dies absurdly holding up a cannon. His coldly superior wife then commits suicide, aparently revealing her romanticism.

" An Anarchist"(1906) is pathetic but less maudlin. A simple french mechanic is convicted as an anarchist. Then set off to french penal colony in South America. He scapes but ends up as practically a slave in a colonial ranch.

" The Informer" (1906) also uses distant narration to tell of a London revolutionary group with an upper-class patroness. She is desilusioned when her anarchist lover turns out to be a police informer. He commits suicide, she withdraws for live.

Other stories of the period include: " The Brute" ( 1906), " The Duel"(1908), and "Il Conde"(1908).

The Secret Agent (1907) has a more disciplined and direct style, with a vivid description and sardonic reflectiveness. Subtitled A Simple Tale, the novel is both infernally complicated in its savage plotting and yet devastatingly simple in the fixed ( obsessional) ideas of all the characters. It is an absurd tale of a bumbling agent provocateur, grotesque marginal terrorist, conniving police officials, and the yelow journalism fears of the time.

Conrad´s denigration of political-moral ideas and his often astutely cynical ironies against all make this ostensibly political novel quite antipolitical. Against as with Nostromo, the real terrorism is solitary thinking, though here the desert island is modern urban life.

Undern Western Eyes(1911), other Conrad´s longer novel employing the materials of political revolutionism, seems a considerably lesser work than The Secret Agent in style,and subjective intensity. Part of the difficulty is the use of a rather Jamesian narrator, an obtusely lofty-mannered teacher of languages and English literature. While the figure may have been psychologically desirable to Conrad for distancing himself from the painful revolutionism, the narrative creaks badly and sometimes breaks down, as with the sentimental old Englishman who defensively provides the entitled perspective. This excuses Conrad from understanding and sympathetically presenting the revolutionaries.

Most of the story is set in Geneva, which allows further denigration of the whole russian madness when contrasted to the bland Swiss order.Given such distanced scene and narration, the exiled revolutionaries come out mostly as pathetic grotesques.

Conrad´s stories of this period include:" The Secret Sharer" and the novella A Smile of Fortune (1911) collected in Twixt Land and Sea (1912), also concerns a young merchant marine captain, but the scene this time is set mostly in port. The central action turns about a sly ship chandler who wishes to peddle both potatoes for market and his illegitime daughter. Sexually excited by the resentful mannered girl the captain hangs around and finally kisses her in an aroused manner( something quite unusual in Conrad). Guiltily, he buys potatoes he does not want; inexplicably, he also turns cold toward the girl. By chance, the burdensome potatoes acquired because of the expensive kiss are sold at his next port for a substantial profit. But, without reason, the captain cannot bear to go back to the first port ( where the girl awaits him) as his shipowners insist and he is forced to resign his command, which he considers a large misfortune. But the real misfortune was the captain´s overwhelming sexual and social fear.

" Freya of the Seven Isles" ( 1912) turns about suitors competing for a bumbling farmer´s young daughter—a romantic English trading captain and a gross Dutch naval officer. The rejected naval officer manages to wreck the beloved captain´s fine bark. Since his beautiful ship gave him his romantic power over the woman, the young captain despairs and quickly degenerates into sickly madness. The abandoned heroine, who oddly makes no effort to see her lover again, dies of pneumonia and love.

Chance (1913). Now the refracting narrator, Marlow, becomes a tiresome mannerism, with involuted strategies by which somebody tells somebody who tells Marlow, who tells the unidentified narrator.

Much of the moralizing seems to be done in response to a contemporary issue, the woman´s movement of the time. The aged sentimentalist bachelor Marlow offers numerous smug denigrations, often contradictory, of female idealism and lack of idealism, toughness and weakness. Perhaps his clearest point is that femenism turns women " into unscrupulous sexless nuisances", while true feminity is always and necessary " passive".

A pathological passivity, male as well as female, informs the plot.Sixteen –year-old Flora is cruelly dumped by her governess when her father goes bankrupt. Traumatized and unloved, Flora grows up self-denigrating. Captain Anthony, a merchant marine master in his mid thirties, meets her. He marries Flora out of pity, but out of idealism he does not consummate the marriage. The ex-convict father, apparently gone mad, poisons captain´s brandy. The decent young second mate, rushes to save his master. That takes Flora a little out of her passivity, and she leans against him. Apparently the marriage is then consummated. But sometime later the ship sinks and, after saving his wife and second mate, the captain goes down with it.

The stories, collected in Within the Tides (1915), include " The Planter of Malta" (1914), and " The Partner" (1910)

In " The Planter of Malta" the entitling figure is another of Conrad´s solitaries, visiting in a Far Eastern port, searching for her missing girlfriend whom she had wronged, he develops an obssesive passion for her. Under false pretenses—her missing lover was his assistant, dead for some time—he lures her and her family to his island plantation. Eventually he reveals the death of the unworthy drug-addict lover and his own passion. Rejected by the woman who is unable to love, the solitary planter commits suicide in the sea.

The figures are stereotyped: The manipulative and hypocritical philosopher-father, the pretentiously vain and empty woman, the irredeemably snnobish aunt, the superior protagonist suffering from vague despair. . .

The shorter " The Partner" is better. In this simple story, a conniving businessman gets his partner to plant a crooked first mate on his brother´s ship in order to help sink it for the insurance money. Chance complicates matters when the criminal mate robs and kills the captain who, in the necessary cover-up, must be treated as a suicide.The partners do not get sufficient insurance money to carry out their scheme, and all end in failure.

Victory ( 1915) Its protagonist, Axel Heyst, is yet another isoleted intellectual. His double appears as an allegorical Mr. Jones—diabolical gentleman, homosexual, gambler, and killer—with whom Heyst forms an implicit Faustian pact. Heyst´s deficiences are related to his father, a " romantic" philosopher who indoctrinated his son with a pessimistic skepticism.

The two times Heyts ventures out of his romantic withdrawal, he gets into disproportionate trouble. The firat time his " sceptical mind was dominated by the fulness of his heart", pity leads him to lend money to a desperate captain to save his brig. His charity results in the captain´s invitation to take part in an abortive coaling scheme, the captain´s death on a business trip, and Heyst´s guilty remorse. His second fall into common humanity occurs when, out of pity, he recues Lena, a poor orphan girl, and takes her back to his island refuge. But the guilty pity produces impotence, and Heyst cannot love. Lena accidentally recieves a bullet in her breast and dies " with a divine radiance on her lips". We are told her meaning: " The great exaltaion of love and self-sacrifice which is woman´s sublime faculty".

Conrad´s remaining short fictions were collected posthumously as Tales of Hearsay (1925). Included was "The Black Mate", apparently his first story, rewritten many years later, about an aging white-haired mate who finds employment difficult and so dyes his hair and beard deep black to get a job on a sailing ship captained by a mean spiritualist. In a tricky plot, the mate, after an accident, claims to have been attacked by an apparition in order to explain his hair turning white.

The Shadow-Line (1917). Introduced with an elaborately redundant jocularity, the story becomes another exercise in endurance in which the young captain must deal with a becalmed ship, and, this time, a sick crew as well. The tale is dialectically as well as stylistically flat. The tale shows ( as in Typhoon ) the vivid description of the malignant weather.

" The Tale" (1917). A British naval captain recounts his boarding an anchored neutral merchant vessel on the suspicion that it had been supplying German submarines. In spite of careful examination, he can find no confirmation of neutrality violations by its Scandinavian master, who claims simply to be lost in the fog. The British officer orders him to leave on a certain course; if he fails to do so, it means he knows where he is. He follows the british order, and the ship goes down with all hands. The British officer concludes that he will "never know" whether he had done "stern contribution or murder".

" Prince Roman" (1917) seems to be the only time Conrad directly used Polish material in his fictions. The entitling figure is an exalted Polish nobleman, who joins as a common soldier a Polish military rebellion against the Russians. He is sent to Siberia and serves a twenty-five-year sentence. The tale is a simpleminded paean to continuing Polish aristocracy and patriotism, (Conrad´s origins) and of no larger interest.

" The Warrior´s Soul" (1917), another tale of the Napoleonic period, is recounted years later by an old Russian officer. He had once been done a great favour in Paris by a French officer, and had fervently promised any return favour any time. During the Napoleonic army´s retreat from Moscow, the same French officer, ill and hopeless, makes himself the prisioner of the young Russian. The prisioner demands that the youth carry out his warrior´s pledge of honor and kill him. The young Russian carries out the promise and shoots the French officer.

The Rover (1923) about the Napoleonic era. Peyrol an ex-pirate sacrifices himself in a fantastic plot for the great English navy and an old man´s quaint " honor".

At his death Conrad was working on yet another Napoleonic period romance, the incomplete work published posthumously as Suspense (1925). No serious commentator has spent much time on these fictions, which would no longer be read at all if they were not by the author of Heart of Darkness and The Secret Agent.