Joseph Conrad

Tim Middleton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415268523
• eBook ISBN: 9781317657033
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The popular yet complex work of Joseph Conrad has attracted much critical attention over the years, from the perspectives of postcolonial, modernist, cultural and gender studies. This guide to his compelling work presents:

• an accessible introduction to the contexts and many interpretations of Conrad's texts, from publication to the present
• an introduction to key critical texts and perspectives on Conrad's life and work, situated in a broader critical history
• cross-references between sections of the guide, in order to suggest links between texts, contexts and criticism
• suggestions for further reading.

Part of the Routledge Guides to Literature series, this volume is essential reading for all those beginning detailed study of Joseph Conrad and seeking not only a guide to his works, but also a way through the wealth of contextual and critical material that surrounds them.

1
Life and contexts

A Polish childhood

Although he was naturalised as a British citizen in 1886, Conrad’s own attempt at autobiography, A Personal Record, suggested the importance of his Polish childhood for an understanding of his fiction, describing it as ‘that inexorable past from which his work of fiction and their personalities are remotely derived’ (25). He was born on 3 December 1857 in Berdyczów, a small town in a part of Poland which had been annexed by Russia in 1793 and is today a part of the Ukraine. His parents were active in revolutionary circles working to overthrow the foreign occupation, and his full name – Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski – captures some of their political commitment:

His first name, given after his maternal grandfather, was connected with a legacy of anti-romanticism, political opportunism, and enlightened conservatism in social opinions. The second name the boy received after his paternal grandfather, ex-captain of the Polish Army and a fervent patriot. But the most heavily loaded with meaning was his third name, which had been made popular in Poland by two heroes of Adam Mickiewicz’s poems.

(Najder 1964: 4)

Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz’s Konrad Wallenrod (1827) told of a Lithuanian boy raised by Teutonic knights who schemes to overthrow his German captors whilst his Dziady (1832) presented the awakening of nationalist sensibilities in a romantic egocentric who adopts the name Konrad as a symbol of his ideological transformation. If these associations were not enough of a burden for the child to live up to, Conrad’s father, Apollo, wrote his own poem for his baby son, saturated in his dreams for a renewed nation-state:

Baby son, tell yourself
You are without land, without love,
Without country, without people,
While Poland – your Mother is in her grave.
For your only Mother is dead – and yet
She is your faith, your palm of martyrdom.
Hushaby, my baby son!

(Najder 1983b: 33)

When Conrad was only five years old, his father was arrested for his political activity and, after a period of imprisonment, the family were exiled in 1862 to Vologda, some 300 miles north-east of Moscow. The journey was difficult, and the young boy and then his mother fell ill with pneumonia. Vologda was ‘a huge quagmire’ where there were only ‘two seasons’, a white winter which ‘lasts nine and a half months’ and a green winter which persists for ‘two and a half’; during the white winter the temperature falls to minus 30 Fahrenheit (Najder 1983b: 67). During this time, Apollo wrote and anonymously published his pamphlet on ‘Poland and Muscovy’ which examined human history as a conflict between barbarity and civilisation – Poland, unsurprisingly, is on the side of the angels whilst Russia is depicted as ‘the plague of humanity’ (Najder 1983b: 77). Whilst in exile, Apollo completed translations into Polish of works by Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo and Shakespeare, works which first introduced Conrad to English literature.

In their exile, Conrad’s mother, Ewa, suffered from extended periods of illness and, despite brief respites, her health declined and she died in April 1865 when Conrad was seven. He recalled his mother as more ‘than a mere loving, wide-browed, silent, protecting presence, whose eyes had a sort of commanding sweetness’ (A Personal Record, 24). Apollo’s few remaining letters from this period catch something of the depths of his despair – he writes of spending ‘the greatest part of my days by the grave’, of his ‘torments’ and suffering (Najder 1983b: 94–5). He acknowledged that ‘the little mite is growing up as though in a cloister, the grave of our Unforgettable is our memento mori’ and noted that ‘the little one, seeing nobody, burrows too deeply into books’ (Najder 1983b: 102, 104). Apollo’s own health declined after Ewa’s death, but he continued to care for Conrad, overseeing his education and encouraging his reading of Polish Romantic poetry and of those authors he was translating. As several biographers have noted, Conrad had a lonely childhood, nursing a father gripped by despair, psychological and physical illness in an atmosphere of ‘mysticism touched with despair’ (CL2: 247).

Conrad had little formal education during the years between seven and eleven but he seems to have read widely, wrote patriotic dramas and recited Mickiewicz’s poetry (Najder 1964: 10). In 1869, they moved to Kraków where Apollo was to further his journalistic work, but his health rapidly deteriorated and he died on 23 May. His funeral became the occasion for popular protest and the young Conrad led a funeral procession that comprised several thousand people. His account of this experience, for all its after-the-event writerly hyperbole, captured the emotional challenge of this occasion:

the small boy … following a hearse; a space kept clear in which I walked alone, conscious of an enormous following, the clumsy swaying of the tall black machine, the chanting of the surpliced clergy at the head, the flames of tapers passing under the low archway of the gate, the rows of bared heads on the pavements with fixed, serious eyes. Half the population has turned out on that fine May afternoon.

(‘Poland Revisited’, Notes on Life and Letters, 169)

After the death of his father, Conrad was initially cared for by his father’s friend Stefan Buszczyñski and then by his devoted maternal grandmother Teofila Bobrowska, who became his official guardian in 1870. Conrad lived with her in Kraków until May 1873, but the management of his education was subject to the influence of his maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski. Bobrowski had little time for his brother-in-law’s politics, and biographers have speculated on the psychological tensions which Conrad might have experienced whilst trying to remain true to his father’s memory and accommodate the views of his influential uncle. Conrad was initially placed in a Kraków boarding school, but his lack of prior formal education meant he was behind his year group and the family appointed a personal tutor, a young medical student called Adam Marek Pulman, who also accompanied Conrad on his long summer holidays. His uncle faced many worries as Conrad continued to be not only sickly but also somewhat independently minded. On top of this Conrad was still deemed to be a Russian citizen and could be expected, in future, to be subject to a period of military service – potentially disastrous for the son of a known opponent of the State. To try and prevent this, the family sought Austrian citizenship for Conrad but this was unsuccessful.

It was in late 1872 that Conrad stunned his family by announcing that he wished to have a career at sea – a declaration that ‘stirred up a mass of remonstrance, indignation, pitying wonder, bitter irony and downright chaff’ (A Personal Record, 42). His plans were initially resisted. After a trip to Switzerland for medical treatment in May 1873 and a brief period back in Kraków with his grandmother, Bobrowski decided that Conrad would be best cared for at his cousin Syroczyñski’s boarding house and school in Lwów. He told Conrad that the move was intended to ‘help harden you, which is something that every man needs in his life’ (Najder 1983a: 35). This move to stricter environs may have been part of Bobrowski’s attempt to put a dampener of his seafaring ambitions but Conrad appears to have been an unruly pupil, fretting under the rules of the boarding house, and in September 1874 he was moved back to Kraków by his uncle, perhaps because of Syroczyñski’s disapproval of a developing flirtation between Conrad and his cousin Tekla. In October, Conrad, having finally persuaded his uncle of the merits of a sea career, travelled to Marseilles to begin life as a sailor on French ships.

The long-term influence of Polish culture on Conrad’s work remains a contested area of scholarly debate. Conrad spent most of his life away from his home country and bereft of his immediate Polish family, and this isolation brought with it a critical distance from the cultural and social concerns of his homeland. It is clear from his letters that he was touchy about suggestions that he had abandoned his country by electing to write in English, and critics have noted a Polish heritage in his syntax and fondness for adverbs (Busza 1966, Morzinski 1994). Through his father, Conrad was exposed to the Romantic nationalism of Mickiewicz and his romantic-nationalist compatriots and imbibed their heady brew of selfless fidelity and obsession with the preservation of honour at an impressionable age. In their works, personal happiness comes very much second to patriotic duty, and critics have seen evidence of these Polish concerns in Conrad’s fictions – whether it be in Jim’s self-destructive adherence to a code of conduct in Lord Jim, or Marlow’s choice of nightmares in ‘Heart of Darkness’ (see Works, pp. 44–6, 49–52). Conrad’s childhood experience of revolutionary action, filtered by Bobrowski’s disapproval, may have informed his withering account of nationalist ambitions in Nostromo and his wry study of bungling revolutionaries in The Secret Agent, and is undoubtedly central to his great study of honour and betrayal, Under Western Eyes (see Works, pp. 64–7, 70–2, 83–6). Whilst his critical view of revolutionary action owes much to the views of his uncle, his ability to capture its idealism owes a debt to the Romantic nationalism of his father. For his leading Polish critic, ‘the curse of Conrad’s inner life and bitter inspiration for his art’ seems to stem from this tension between Polish Romantic idealism and Polish pragmatism (Najder 1964: 19). Polish characters and settings do not, however, feature large in his canon, with the exception of the short story ‘Prince Roman’ (see Works, pp. 131–2). We can see little direct engagement with Polish history and culture in his work aside from some heavily inflected reflections in A Personal Record and the essays ‘Autocracy and War’, ‘The Crime of Partition’, ‘A Note on the Polish Problem’, and ‘Poland Revisited’ collected in Notes on Life and Letters. For most commentators, it is the less obvious manifestations of his Polish background that shape his themes. For his most influential Polish critic, it is Conrad’s Polish background that makes him ‘a man dis-inherited, lonely, and (for a Western writer of that time) exceptionally conscious of the sinister brutalities hidden behind the richly ornate façade of bourgeois political optimism. And these characteristics are precisely what makes Conrad our contemporary’ (Najder 1964: 31).

Sea life

Having left his homeland at the age of sixteen, Conrad did not return to it until 1890 when he was thirty-two, and during those sixteen years of travel, sea life and associated personal growth, he added crucial elements to his experience that would shape his fiction just as profoundly as his Polish childhood. It is important to stress that whilst Conrad spent many years working as a merchant mariner, to claim him as a writer of sea stories would be a mistake. To be sure, there are some key works in which the ‘wrestle with wind and weather’ (CL2: 354) are integral such as ‘Youth’, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, ‘Typhoon’ or The Shadow Line (see Works, pp. 48–9, 32–5, 57–8, 114–16), and others in which events afloat are a key part of the text – one thinks of Jim’s voyage on the Patna in Lord Jim or Decoud and Nostromo’s night voyage in the lighter in Nostromo, for example (see Works, pp. 44–6, 64–7). In these texts, the sea voyage is figured as part of a rite of passage, a testing ground for a character’s beliefs and values. In his reflections on things maritime, Conrad suggested that whilst ‘from sixteen to thirty-six cannot be called an age, … it is a pretty long stretch of that sort of experience which teaches a man slowly to see and feel’ (The Mirror of the Sea, xi), and in writing about men and the sea Conrad found a fluid and formidable mirror in which to refract the tensions and predilections of his epoch. ‘Twixt land and sea he found not only a title for a collection of short fiction but also a terrain that a marginal outsider in English letters could make his own.

Conrad’s first study of men and the sea was The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ – a key text in the history of his writing since it marked his turn from the ‘exotic’ settings of his early fiction and focused on English ships and the passions of those who worked on them. His seafarers in that novel were, by and large, simple men from the age of sail and in this great paean to the English merchant marine he decisively broke away from settings that had begun to pigeonhole him as the Kipling of the Malay Archipelago and firmly aligned himself with his new country’s traditions, addressing issues of class conflict and national character in ways designed to chime with the politics of the period. As Jonathan Raban has remarked, in his sea fiction Conrad is

building a counterworld; a mirror-world of shimmering lucidity, unlighted by the horrors of nineteenth century industrial democratic life. His love for the one is sustained by his hatred of the other, and it is poignantly sharpened by … [his] knowledge that he is writing about a dying age in the life of the sea

(1992: 20)

Whilst writing of men and the sea in the age of sail might be seen as part of a reactionary politics – given that the modern diesel engines had been invented some five years earlier and screw-driven steam ships such as Brunel’s SS Great Britain had been in service since the 1840s – the novel’s narrative method was startlingly contemporary (see Works, pp. 32–5).

Conrad’s ship-based fictions provided him with settings that offered a social microcosm within which societal and cultural mores could be carefully put into play in ways that challenged and at times debunked his era’s dominant ideologies. Although in many of these sea fictions it is the physical challenge of the sea-based world for humanity that his work explores – in ‘Typhoon’, the examination of the ‘disintegrating power of a great wind’ (40), the disease-haunted, delay punctuated voyage in The Shadow Line or the limping progress of the Judea in Youth (see Works, pp. 57–8, 114–16, 48–9) – to read these as sea fictions in the tradition of Frederick Marryat’s Mr Midshipman Easy (1836), Fenimore Cooper’s The Pilot (1839), or R. H. Dana’s Two Years Before the Mast (1840) is to overemphasise their settings’ significance when compared to their thematic concerns. The great tradition of American writing about the sea is one that celebrates humanity’s exploration of the natural world, whilst in Britain the legacy of a Romantic awe when faced by the power of the natural world fed the industrial epoch’s sense of the separation of nature from mankind and meant that writers were less concerned to classify and explain the seaborne world than they were interested in evoking its alien, sublime strangeness. In his fictional works about the sea and sailors, Conrad is a writer first and merchant sailor second. This isn’t to say that he doesn’t pay attention to seamanship but rather to suggest that knowledge of it is not a prerequisite for enjoying his novels. Tests of character and resolve are central themes in Conrad’s sea stories, and it is the value of solidarity and collaborative endeavour that is being celebrated in works such as The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, which showed an ethnically disparate crew wedded together by the fellowship of the craft and the rules of merchant sea life despite the provocations of the agitator Donkin and the sentimentalising allure of the dying James Wait (see Works, pp. 32–5). We might take a cue from this novel for a view of the relative importance of things nautical in Conrad’s sea fiction for, with one or two exceptions (the vicious killer ship of The Brute springs to mind (see Works, p. 76)), Old Singleton’s assertion that ‘ships are all right. It’s the men in them’ (The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, 24) can be taken as a crude summary of the focus of his novelistic attention.

Detailed biographical and archival research, begun with the pioneering studies of Norman Sherry in Conrad’s Eastern World (1966) and Conrad’s Western World (1971), has traced the ways in which Conrad drew upon his sea experiences as a source for stories and incidents and as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations, frequently cited works and cross-referencing
• Introduction
• 1: Life and contexts
• 2: Works
• 3: Criticism
• 4: Chronology
• Bibliography
• Index