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CHAPTER NO: 2
CHAPTER NO: 2
The Works of Joseph Conrad
The Growth of Conrad’s Art
The recent
Conrad criticism has shown two tendencies-the first of these is the inclination
to abandon the so-called "old" view of Conrad, a love of the sea, and
to stress instead of the psychological and symbolic subtleties of his fiction.
Other critics have found Christian and classical mythology, a persistent
misogyny, and even “hidden symbolic intentions.” The best way of approaching
Conrad's work is the "old" one, not because Conrad's work is simple,
but because its psychological, philosophical, and symbolic subtleties are
secondary to his central moral interest.
The second the questionable tendency of recent criticism, then, is the growing inclination to
view Conrad's career as a case of achievement and decline. Almost everyone
seems to agree that half a dozen novels and stories towards the middle of
Conrad's career is his best, and that most of his later efforts are markedly
inferior: sentimental, melodramatic, and marked by creative exhaustion.
Conrad's career
shows a progress-of-awareness that divides itself into three distinct stages:
1. beginning with the prosocial dilemmas of
private honour and individual fidelity standing at the centre of the early works;
2. expanding, with Nostromo to a consideration of
the individual in society and the moral contradictions imposed by social idealism;
and
3. extending finally, with Chance and
Victory, to the theoretical and metaphysical bases of any moral commitment.
As
this progress-of-awareness proceeds, Conrad's technical ingenuity keeps pace,
lagging at first when some genuinely new subject or theme is approached, and
then devising the techniques that will go to its centre and provide the control
it needs.
This
line of Conrad's growth-both intellectual and technical -comes to an end with
Victory and the works that follow are largely anti-climatic. In Victory Conrad
seems finally to have resolved the moral and philosophical perplexities that
had motivated his fiction from the beginning. There are two tasks before the reader of Conrad: to identify the deepest thematic centres of Conrad's work,
and to see how his most characteristic techniques- the involved narrator, the
time shift, the use of symbolic descriptions, and so on-reflect these deep
concerns.
Looking
back on his early fiction from the vantage point of 1917, Conrad recalls that
"Youth marks the first appearance in the world of the man Marlow, with
whom my relations have grown very intimate in the course of years", the characteristic remark which gently underplays the moral identity between author
and narrator: "He haunts my hours of solitude, when, in silence, we lay
our heads together in great comfort and harmony." Anyone who would understand
Conrad's early fiction must grasp at once this deep affinity between Conrad and
Marlow: there are no more important works in the canon than Lord Jim
and Heart of Darkness, and no aspect of the more important than
Marlow's role. In all the stories in which he appears, Marlow must be taken as
a choral character in the fullest sense-for all practical purposes the voice of
Conrad himself; and Marlow's meditative history-not the train of physical
events reflected in that history-must be taken as the reader's primary object
of interest.
Heart of Darkness
It
is a story of a man whose soul went mad, and is told by Marlow, the narrator of
Youth and most of Lord Jim, at evening on the Thames-which
is the scene, too, of the narration of Falk.
Marlow,
seated cross-legged, with sunken cheeks, complexion, a straight back, an ascetic
aspect, resembles an 'idol'. He was a seaman, this subtle story-teller, but he
was a wanderer too.
The
scene of Marlow's narrative is set at the outset with the monotonous grim
coast, edged with colossal and almost black jungle, visible day after day on
his voyage to the Company's station where he is to take up the command of a
river steamboat. It is also suggested by the names of the places that they
passed-"names like Gran Bassam, Little Popo, names that seemed to belong
to some sordid farce acted in front of a sinister backcloth".
He
sees a French man-of-war anchored off the coast, shelling the bush in an aimless
kind of way: the French, it appeared, had "one of their wars going on
thereabouts." She does not seem to do much harm, however-except to her
crew, who were "dying of fever at the rate of three a day." However,
after calling more places, Marlow arrives at the Company's station. There he
comes upon a "boiler wallowing in the grass," an "undersized
railway truck lying on its back," with one wheel off, and other discarded
great-a kind of disordered nursery, as it were, of some low, destructive
intelligence.
Marlow
had "seen the devil of violence, and the devil of greed and the devil of
hot desire;" but, here, apparently is a "flabby, prepending
weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly." He turns aside from
the dismal sight in the sun-glare but, coming under some shady tree, discovers
that he has "stepped into the gloomy circle of some Inferno" Marlow
"didn’t want any more loitering in the shade." Another word that was
in the air was Mr Kurtz is rumoured to be ill and his station, far up the river
in the interior, to be in jeopardy. He must be relieved. The Manager is "very,
very uneasy;" the rivets necessary for the repairing of the steamboat are
a very long time in coming.
Mr.
Kurtz turns out to be an exceptional man indeed. The soul of this man is
beautiful, Kurtz is a physical as well as a spiritual wreck. He returns to die on
board the steamboat in the hands of Marlow.
The
story is a masterpiece - Marlow is a detective of the human soul. Kurtz ascends
to the position of man-god in the story. The poignant concern of the natives
about the possible death or departure of Kurtz is one of the most striking
things in the story.
A.
E. Housman said that man was alone and afraid in a world he had not made, Both,
Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim deal with it. Marlow's journey up the Congo into
the depth of the jungle aims to suggest the horrifying possibilities of that
great part of the men’s minds "where doubt itself is lost in an unexplored
universe of is certitudes" Conrad shows how some situations will force men
back to uncivilized states where centuries of social and cultural achievement
are lost in a great blackness of the mind. From the moment Marlow sets foot in
Africa, he finds all decencies threatened. Kurtz, the Company's most successful
agent, had at first hoped to bring the light of civilization into the great
darkness of Africa. He even wrote an inspiring memorandum on the problems, having
been entrusted by the International Society for the Suppression of Savage
Customs with making a report for its future guidance. It is all used leas. Ultimately,
he comes to realise what has happened to himself and at the end of his report
scrawls in an unsteady hand the addition: "Exterminate all the
brutes." His last words are a whisper "The Horror! The Horror!"
Conrad
is determined to make his reader understand that the fate of Kurtz is that of
any man placed in the same position. Back in Europe Marlow is angered by the ordinary life of the city, whose people cannot possibly know the things he now
knows.
The
Nigger of the Narcissus
"Mr.
Barker, the chief mate of the ship Narcissus, stepped in one stride out of his
lighted cabin into the darkness of the quarterdeck." This opening sentence
suggests, by analogy, that conflict between the small lighted area of human
order, of "mind and will and conscience," and darkness that surrounds
it, darkness both of the elemental forces of nature and also of the darker forces
within man himself.
The
menace to human order which Conrad presents in The Nigger of the Narcissus
assaults both from outside and from inside. The external menace is the storm;
the internal menace is the stems; primarily from Donkin and from the dying negro,
James Wait. The issues of this tale all meet in James Wait. From the moment he
attracts attention by being almost late for the roll call, the life of the
whole ship revolves around him. It is the baleful presence that starts Belfast thieving,
that exaggerates the cook's near-religious mania, and that allows the
despicable Donkin to achieve a position at the mouthpiece of the crew. Without
the nigger, Mr Baker, the mate, would have had no difficulty in dealing with
Donkin. With Wait, however, Baker is powerless. Whether the Nigger is actually
dying or merely malingering, the crew cannot decide. Old Singleton is the one
man untouched by Wait's presence.
The
men are ultimately saved by a great storm-they dull together in their efforts
to defeat their common enemy, the sea. At the height of the tempest, Mr Baker
asks the cook to make a hot drink. The cook is at first too busy talking about
the life to come. Mr Baker says he will attempt the job himself. At this
stage, the cook, by using his breadboard for a raft, achieves the apparently
impossible and puts fresh heart into the weary men. And the men, after burying
James Wait at sea, reach home in a Narcissus which runs quickly on as if
relieved of an unfair burden.
The
story thus is a well-told yarn. The Nigger is more than a yarn of the sea.
Conrad leaves us in no doubt that his ship is the greater world in miniature.
Conrad's concern is with the mental and physical health of the whole crew in
the face of forces which threaten to poison their combined action.
Typhoon
Captain
Mac Whirr of Typhoon is stoic whose unyielding resistance to all misfortune is
the direct result of his unthinking nature, He has "just enough
imagination to carry him through each successive day and no more," and
this makes him "tranquilly sure" of himself. His strength is derived
from the unruffled ordinariness of which his unrolled but elegant umbrella is a
symbol. He cannot understand the mate's suggestion that it might be well to head
the ship off her course for a time in an effort to evade the storm. Captain Mac
Whirr is not the man to evade anything which lies in what he regards as the
plain path of duty. Then the China- men he is carrying start fighting and
become seething, the uncontrollable mass of arms and legs. The mate tersely informed,
"can't have fighting board ship," and is sent to set matters right,
It is his sense of the fitness of things that leads him, once the storm is over
and the Chinese are restored to order, to work out a plan for dealing with the
money which had caused all the trouble by rolling out of the chests at the
height of the storm. The mate wants to pass the responsibility on to someone
else when the ship reaches port, and even brings rifles for fear of further
disorder. But the Captain insists on sharing the money out equally, and the
three dollars left over he gives to the three most damaged coolies.
Typhoon is a minor masterpiece. It is a vivid
account of life onboard a ship during a storm. One of the great strengths of Typhoon
is its solidity. Against the isolating and disintegrating force of the storm,
Mac Whirr and Jukes clasped together, which asserts the value of human
solidarity and endurance. Mac Whirr, through his actions, shows the force of
the undefeated human will resisting the destructive violence of the elements.
If
the anarchic violence of the typhoon is a threat to human order, so too is the
anarchic violence of the rioting coolies.
Nostromo the action centres around the silver
of the San Tome mine, the continued safety of which is imperilled by a South
American revolution. This mine is in several ways the meeting point of the
lives of a whole coastal area, and for the first time, Conrad's art moves easily
through various political, social, religious, military and purely personal
levels. On a thematic level, Nostromo is a statement of the difficulties and
dangers which beset men who pursue political and economic ends. However worthy
the ends may seem, Martin Decoud is for a time the explicit spokesman for this
point of view. Born in Costaguana, though long since sophisticated by living in
Paris, he is drawn back to his native land by the love of Antonia. He is openly
scornful of the obsessions of both political parties. He points out several
times that all such worldly interests as represented by the silver of the mine
must of necessity coarsen people. Yet he, too, is drawn into playing his part,
and the plan to save the silver of the mine is his.
More
important, however, than Decoud's utterances are the lives of those involved in
running the mine. Without exception, they find their integrity threatened.
There is the Goulds who owns the mine. They are both good people. Charles has
devoted his life to its service in the belief that it can bring order to
Costaguana. His wife, on the other hand, sees the cost plainly: she knows that
the mine has destroyed their married life. In one way, both Goulds have been
destroyed by the mine; they have paid far too high a price in terms of
individual integrity and of married understanding to make the sacrifice worthwhile.
Then
there is Nostromo himself, the man of the people, the "incorruptible
Capataz" who is to save the threatened mine by taking away in a lighter,
by night, the silver, which the revolutionist will, otherwise, capture. The
mainspring of his actions is understood by Decoud "the only thing he
seems to care for is to be well spoken of." Nostromo is not especially
intelligent. In truth, he is romantically naive, and when he is brought into
closer contact with the mine, he is betrayed by it. Until the scene on the
gulf, he remains incorruptible. But Decoud's scepticism and the blackness of
the night undermine his hitherto unwavering confidence. "Deprived of
certain simple realities such as the admiration of women, the adulation of men,
and the admired publicity of his life", he steals the silver. As he
shrewdly grows rich little by little, "he feels the burden of sacrilegious
guilt descends upon his shoulders."
Critics
agree that the second half of the novel is a falling off. After Decoud's death,
Nostromo realises that he alone knows where the treasure in hidden; everyone
else imagines it at the bottom of the gulf. He, therefore, makes occasional
journeys to its hiding place. A lighthouse
is built on the same island, however, and kept falling off by Giorgio Viola and
his two daughters. Nostromo goes to steal yet more silver, is mistaken by Viola
for a suitor and is shot.
Conrad
described Nostromo as a story of "events flowing from the passions of men
short-sighted in good and evil." There is in Nostromo an acute awareness
of the contradictions in human nature, Conrad knew that men often pretend to be
what they are not, or deceive themselves about their real motives, or use for
their own advantage the gullibility of others. Conrad often treated these with great
scorn.
The Secret Agent
In
the Secret Agent Conrad continues his depiction of men in society. This time we
are in a world of spying and counter-spying, of government departments and police
action. There is the Secret Agent himself, Mr Verloc. It is his boast that he
has had his fingers on every "murdering plot for the last eleven
years." Chief Inspector Heat of the English police admits that Verloc's
information very likely saved "ugly trouble" on the day of an
Imperial visit to London. He is, in fact, a double agent working for both
sides. Now, with the coming of a new First Secretary in the Foreign Embassy
which employs him, Mr Verloc finds himself ordered to blow up Greenwich
Observatory. His life as a rather well-known hanger-on and emissary of the
Revolutionary Red Committee" is not to be so easy in the future.
Mr.
Verloc knows all about the other revolutionists. The Professor is the only
revolutionary we can admire. What we admire in the Professor is his single-mindedness,
his freedom from the selfish cant of the other revolutionaries.
The
novel is organized as a succession of scenes, each of which throws a light on
revolutionary activity. When, for example, the Professor leaves Ossipon, he
accidentally meets Chief Inspector Heat. It is a splendidly handled incident.
The novel adopts throughout the method of inviting the reader to turn normal
judgements upside down. It is a drama conditioned by, and throwing light on,
"the game" played by society, the death of Verloc is really the
penalty exacted by "the game" for his too-trusting spirit. The story
of this novel has sufficient scope to a Marxist interpretation also.
Under the Western Eyes
Razumov,
the illegitimate family. His ambition is a high academic success, the gaining of
a silver medal and perhaps of a professorship. With dramatic effect and irony,
Conrad shows Razumov climbing the stairs to his own room as he day-dreams of an
announcement in the papers that he is the son of an aristocrat, is without this
year's silver medalist. This is but a shadow when he enters his room a moment
later, it is to find the murderer, Haldin, asking for his help. Razumov has
found involvement thrust upon him.
After
agonizing uncertainty, Razumov betrays Haldin to the Tsarist authorities. He is
sent to Geneva by the revolutionaries, though in truth he is an agent of the
police, In Geneva, he meets Haldin's mother and sister. There then facts about Haldin's
death are brought to light. A coachman, Ziemianitch, is blamed for, this
murder. He falls in love with Haldin's sister. Ultimately his treachery is
revealed and he remains uncomforted to the end.
The Secret Sharer
The
Secret Sharer is the perfected version, cooler, terser, yet with far more of
pity and terror, Leggatt, who swims alongside the narrator's first command in
the dead of night is kept secretly in the captain's cabin for a whole voyage
and dropped overboard amongst the islands of the Gulf of Siam. But the strong
though the frustrating relationship between the Secret Sharer and the captain knits
the story together more powerfully. This ship's crew see only a reckless manoeuvre
of their mad captain: the captain sees only a dreadful risk to his first command:
but the reader feels the threat of all the material world armed against poor
Leggatt, poor humanity, Conrad explicitly rejects the supernatural. What he
feared was the risk of personal collapse before a hostile world.
The Shadow Line
The
story is told autobiographically. The central theme of the hero's first
ill-started command" is introduced by an account of a scheme to prevent
him from obtaining it. The tale is neatly framed within a chronologically. The
hero throws up an excellent job; survives an intrigue; reaches his ship and the first mate (who had himself hoped to become captain); finds his ship becalmed,
apparently indefinitely; learns gradually the full extent of the late captain's
wickedness and madness: sees almost all his crew fall ill: but at last, in a
rush brings his ship safely to port.
All
is done with a fine hold on reality which owes a great deal to the descriptions
of the routine tasks of shipboard. The tale, therefore, contains within the
bounds of complete credibility. The sentences are short, matching the economy
of incidents, and the conversation briskly sensible. The story has a natural
rhythm, opening very slowly, picking up as the new captain goes to take charge
of his ship, slowing down to the fixity of a bad dream during the long becalming
and then, after the sudden drama of "the darkness turning into blows.
moving with energy as the breeze bellows.
Chance
Of
all Conrad's novels, Chance (1914) is the most indirect. Part I offers a good field for analysis and for commenting on some of the advantages and
disadvantages of Conrad's narrative method.
Its
basic story is quite simple. The heroine, Flora de Barral in the daughter of a
very wealthy financier, a widower, who is jailed after his bankruptcy when she
is still not more than a child, the servants employed to look after her, desert
her, and she stays with a number of people, including the Fynes, acquaintances
of Marlow. She is so miserable that she twice attempts suicide. The first time
she meets Marlow, the second time Mrs Fyne's brother, Captain Anthony. The two
elope. In this story, the reader stands along. side Marlow and sees the scene
through his consciousness, Looking at Flora, he wonders what led her to elope
with the Captain and reflects on the oddity of the situation in which she can
talk of "the most intimate and final of subjects," death, to a
relative stranger, Conrad is trying a new technique in this novel. The
experiment is praise-worthy.
The book was Conrad's greatest material success and made his reputation as a was
due to the romantic love story and the full and pulsating style, Conrad's style
was certainly flowing more readily.
Victory
Victory
(1915), if not the greatest, is the most firmly modelled and the most boldly
wrought. The characters are drastically simplified, and take on something of
the quality of figures in a morality play; each represents a facet; a facet of
experience, or a type of mind.
The
tale is simply told; there is no narrator's perspective, there is neither
irony, humour nor comments in the telling: the irony, the humour and the
comments such as they are, belong to Heyst. Yet the book is the completest
vindication of the values represented by Lena; the vitality, trust and energy
springing from the very depths of degradation. Together, Heyst and Lena symbolize
all that Conrad approved of-the power of rectitude and the power of love.
They
stand for humanity at large, betrayed to evil, but uncorrupted, and in pathos
and dignity their fate cannot be matched in all of Conrad's work.
Conrad's
work is relevant today because it was produced in the simpler Europe which
existed before 1914: it was written in the presence of general standards of
public sanity to which we never returned in the post-war years. Yet by the peculiar history of his country, his family and himself, Conrad knew horrors
almost equal with those of today, and in this particularly commanding position
he was fitted to be an example of a good European-a type which belongs not to
the past but to the future. In himself, he knew and loved Poland, France and
England: he loved England most proudly, France most warmly, Poland most deeply.
His reconciliation of their conflicting claims, and his sympathy with the best
of what was common to the three, is his final triumph of reducing the complex
to the simple, and the one which deserves the gratitude of all.