William Deresiewicz has an excellent review of a new biography of Joseph Conrad in the June 11 issue of TNR . One thread of the review has to do with Conrad’s phantasmagorical vision of European imperialism and his related concern for the moral dangers of isolation from well-known social habits and standards.
Conrad’s exposure to empire came from his experience as a seaman.
Like Marlowe, he voyaged “sometimes as much as thirty miles upriver, to far-flung trading posts set down amid a bewildering complexity of local cultures and dwarfed by their backdrop of jungle and fog. There Conrad stumbled upon the sea wrack of colonial civilization: idlers and adventurers, scoundrels and cranks, lost, lonely men who dreamed of Europe and wealth and consoled themselves with native women and the bottle.”
No Conrad, no Greene, perhaps.
As a result, “The worlds of Conrad’s fiction are shaped by imperialism, but they are no, by and large, imperial spaces. Forster, by contrast, gives us in A Passage to India the more typical colonial situation: two communities, European and native, living in precisely defined relations of subjugation and power, the lines of allegiance and conduct carefully laid down. Conrad’s attention was drawn instead to the spaces between empires, between nations, the kinds of spaces in which he passed his nautical career - intercultural spaces, permeated by the force fields of empire but not bound within a single imperial orbit.”
Conrad’s fictional space is different also from that of Dickens, in whose sentimental novels “isolation and incomprehension finally give way to recognition and communion. In Conrad’s world of expatriates and isolatoes, mutual estrangement is intractable, cultural fragmentation is irreparable, and neither authorial prestidigitation nor English good fellowship can relieve them. His characters cling instead to shards of broken meaning - a name, an idea, a dream. Each is left alone with his impulses and terrors and illusions, armed only with a fragile sense of right and wrong.”
No Conrad, no Eliot either. And Eliot seemed to know it: “Mistuh Kurtz, he dead.”
Heart of Darkness , too, is the first of a series of semi-inverted quest stories, stories where the quest is an infernal quest into the self. Like Eliot and Joyce, the novel “compresses a whole set of myths into a single narrative substance. The voyage of exploration, the heroic quest, the epic descent, the journey into the self: all are implicit in Marlow’s odyssey.” It is a first in travel literature: “in Conrad’s consciousness, imperial expansion reached the limit of its own self-revulsion.”
No Conrad, no James Dickey, no Deliverance .
Conrad is at the edge of two literary worlds, between “the great social chronicles of the nineteenth century and the great psycholog9ical explorations of high modernism. He achieves the depth of the one without sacrificing the breadth of the other.”