Critical Approaches to Joseph Conrad

Agata Szczeszak-Brewer

• Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781611175301
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

Critical Approaches to Joseph Conrad is a collection of essays directed to both new and experienced readers of Conrad. The book takes into account recent developments in literary theory, including the prominence of ecocriticism, ecopostcolonial approaches, and gender studies. Editor Agata Szczeszak-Brewer offers a comprehensive and comprehensible introduction to Conrad's most popular texts, also addressing the most recent academic debates as well as the conversations about narrative and genre in Conrad's canon.

Students and scholars of Conrad, twentieth-century literature, and modernism will appreciate the clear, accessible prose by nineteen internationally recognized contributors who approach Conrad in different ways, from postcolonial and ecocritical perspectives, through explorations of gender, to psychoanalysis, narrative theory, and political analysis. Beginning with a biographical introduction by Szczeszak-Brewer, the collection offers an essay outlining the cultural and historical contexts that influenced Conrad's fiction and an essay on reception of Conrad's work.

Following that, contributors provide critical approaches to Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, Typhoon, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, The Secret Sharer, and Under Western Eyes. In these sections scholars offer insights about complex issues in Conrad's fiction, ranging from the study of specific literary tools and narrative development in his books to the political theories in Conrad's portrayal of the threat of terrorism and violent revolutions.

PART I

Conrad’s Contexts

Joseph Conrad

Historical and Cultural Contexts

BARRY MORTON

Three different geographical zones bear considerably on Conrad’s social and political outlook: first, his native Poland and its troubled history as a partitioned country. Conrad was in a sense exiled from his homeland—which did not even exist as an independent nation for most of his life—yet he thought of himself as a Pole. Second, Conrad worked as a merchant sailor and almost all of his early fiction was set in the Congo area of Central Africa and the Malaysian Archipelago in southern Asia. After some two decades of sailing, Conrad would settle in England and would remain a professional writer for the rest of his life. As an extremely well-traveled person, Conrad was also very cosmopolitan in outlook and eventually branched out greatly both in theme and geographical range. Even so, his upbringing and his pre-novelist years as a sailor are vital to understanding his oeuvre.

Poland: The Partitioned Homeland

Joseph Conrad was born to Polish parents in 1857, although the country that they aspired to belong to had been extinct for over six decades. During the so-called “Partition Period” from 1795 to 1918, the formerly independent Poles were divided up and ruled by Prussia, Russia, and Austria. Not until after World War I, when Conrad was over fifty years old, would Poland reemerge as an actual political unit—once again sandwiched precariously between its traditional enemies Germany, to its west, and Russia, to its east. So although Poland had existed as a country for some eight hundred years prior to being carved up in 1795, during the nineteenth century it existed as a mere idea. Poland was, in the words of one intellectual, “a nation that refused to die.”¹ During this “long century” a small but vocal Polish-speaking intelligentsia kept the idea of an independent Poland alive.² Nationalism was probably the major ideology circulating amongst the Poles, just as it was elsewhere in Europe. In Italy or Germany, for instance, nationalist politicians sought to merge (both by force and by persuasion) small states, principalities, and kingdoms and eventually produced the unitary states that we recognize today.

Polish nationalism, though, faced far greater obstacles than Italian nationalism, for instance. Following the demise of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1795, the Poles found themselves as small, minority populations divided between three major powers. In all three cases the Poles were subject populations who did not enjoy anything resembling modern notions of democratic civil rights. They lived instead in absolutist monarchies, and hence they lacked the freedom of speech to oppose their governments. Additionally, as newly introduced minorities to the countries they lived in, the Poles were far from centers of power and rarely had any influence or lobbying privileges. Almost all formerly influential and important Poles were, in other words, marginalized. Any incipient leaders who spoke out too forcefully in favor of Polish rights and autonomy could expect to be prosecuted, leading to either punishment or exile.

It would be hard to make the objective case that the Poles were an especially oppressed group. As far as subject groups in Eastern Europe went, they did not suffer from the extensive restrictions or persecutions that the Jews, for instance, faced. In fact, the tsars initially allowed the Russian Poles to retain their own vernacular school system.³ Access to education was thus straightforward, and many Polish nationalists emerged from Russia as a result. In Austria, many Polish nobles were admitted to the aristocracy and retained their former influence. While Poles in Prussia had to be educated in German, they nevertheless were free to organize countless voluntary organizations to look after their religious, cultural, farming, and business interests. In all three states the Poles were free to own land and had access to courts to defend their property. Even in Prussia, where the state eventually set aside funds to buy up Polish farmland in order to promote German migration to the east, the Polish farmers sold at high prices and ultimately rebought at lower ones so that they actually increased their holdings. The peasants, who represented the majority of the Polish population, were generally better off during Partition than before as many old impositions and restrictions placed on them were phased out. Serfdom gradually ended, and many peasants became small landowners.⁴ Increasing industrialization, trade, and urbanization also raised the standard of living of the Poles as the decades went by. The landless and poor, meanwhile, emigrated in large numbers to America and elsewhere.⁵

Notwithstanding this relatively benign picture, the evolving language of Polish nationalism remained fervent throughout the nineteenth century. At the forefront of the movement were the marginalized members of the szlachta, the former aristocracy who had enjoyed prestige and privilege in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. Now, often shorn of their wealth and position, the szlachta remained a vocal and educated class with strong international ties. With many of the defeated former Polish elite exiled in France following the Partition, the emerging nationalists were highly influenced by the rhetoric of the French Revolution. These strong ties with France were cemented as Napoleon’s armies (which included several exile battalions) took control of Poland and established a client state, the Duchy of Warsaw, in 1807. If the Poles showed greater fervor for French overrule, they nevertheless paid for that allegiance quickly. As many as 100,000 Poles served in Napoleon’s army that invaded Russia in 1812, and in the aftermath of this disastrous invasion Russia not only routed Napoleon but regained Poland in 1813. For the remainder of the nineteenth century many Polish exiles would reside in France, and many Polish nationalists wrote in French. Polish nationalists thereafter would direct their appeals at an international audience using Romantic, idealistic, and revolutionary sentiments rather than write specifically for local audiences. Using their opportunity to publish abroad without fear of retribution, many of these exiles became the leading nationalist spokesmen.

While the Russians soon repartitioned the Poles with the Prussians and Austrians, they nevertheless retained most of the Duchy of Warsaw as a separate, quasi-independent state known as the “Congress Kingdom.” This kingdom, established and controlled by the modernizing autocrat Alexander the Great, featured a constitution that allowed for a Polish national assembly and considerable autonomy. Although Alexander in practice was far less accommodating to Polish freedoms than the constitution promised, nevertheless the “Congress Kingdom” era from 1815 to 1831 was one in which Polish nationalism developed coherence.

During the Congress Kingdom period, Adam Mickiewicz (1795–1855), now revered as Poland’s greatest poet, became the leading Polish nationalist and Romantic writer. A member of the szlachta, the young Mickiewicz emerged as an intellectual while still a university student with his strident poem “Ode to Youth,” and soon became a leader in nationalist secret society circles.⁶ After being imprisoned, Mickiewicz was eventually exiled to Russia in 1824, where he moved in polite society and was able to write many of his most famous works. These included his famous Konrad Wallenrod, a nationalist epic poem describing the military exploits of Teutonic knights under the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Russian censors seemed oblivious to its thinly veiled central theme: the need for Poles to oppose their traditional Russian enemies. The book was published and almost immediately established Mickiewicz as the greatest poet and writer ever to use the Polish language.⁷ After the publication of Konrad Wallenrod, Mickiewicz was allowed to leave Russia. He thereafter lived in permanent exile, chiefly in Rome and Paris, where the rest of his works were composed, most notably Pan Tadeusz (1832), another epic poem set during the fall of the Duchy of Warsaw to the Russians.

Just as Mickiewicz was achieving such influence as a nationalist writer, the Poles unsuccessfully tried to overthrow their Russian shackles during the “November Uprising” of 1830. During the 1820s the Polish parliament, the Sejm, had rarely been allowed to assemble, and many outspoken intellectuals and nationalists such as Mickiewicz had been exiled or imprisoned. Meanwhile, several official policies also led to a dramatic increase in the population of landless peasants. Hence, by 1830 a large coalition of disaffected Poles ended up joining an ambitious revolt led by lower-ranking Polish officers in the Russian army. Once the poorly planned revolt broke out, the Sejm endorsed it “as an act of the nation”⁸ and before long could muster a sizable army consisting primarily of defecting Russian army troops led by a former Napoleonic general from the Duchy of Warsaw era. Despite valiant efforts, the Polish government failed to win international support, and its overmatched forces eventually succumbed to a Russian invasion in mid-1831.

In the face of the inevitable Russian advance and brutal crackdown, most of the Polish leadership and intelligentsia went into exile in France. Famous Poles such as Mickiewicz and the composer Frederic Chopin were well known in Paris. These two were at the center of a burgeoning Romantic movement amongst the Poles. Mickiewicz’s famous declaration, “And finally Poland said: Whosoever will come to me shall be free and equal, for I am freedom,” indicated the idealistic, revolutionary, and international outlook of this group. Another young exile, the prolific dramatist and poet Juliusz Słowacki (1809–1849), was less influential in Paris than Mickiewicz but developed a large following in several parts of Polish Russia that would only grow larger in the late nineteenth century. A third Romantic nationalist writer to emerge in Paris was Count Zygmunt Krasiński (1812–1859). Another dramatist and poet, the nobleman would eventually be heralded with Słowacki and Mickiewicz as one of the “Three Bards” seen as the unofficial Polish national poets—men who could lay bare “the national feeling.”⁹ Although all three died young in exile, their reputations among Poles only grew as the partition continued.

The Three Bards were by no means the only Polish writers of their time, and they competed with many others for critical attention. By the 1880s large compendia of Polish verse were being translated into English and featured more than fifty other poets beside the acclaimed Three Bards.¹⁰ One such minor writer was Apollo Korzeniowski (1820–1869), the father of Joseph Conrad. The elder Korzeniowski, although never in Paris, followed a fairly standard trajectory for Polish intellectuals of his time. A highly educated member of the traditional szlachta living in Russian Poland, Korzeniowski was involved both in nationalist secret societies and in radical publishing (including his dramas and translations). His engagement in plotting various failed uprisings and in organizing secret societies ultimately led him to be imprisoned, tried, and exiled in 1861.¹¹ Ultimately, he spent his last years in Austrian Poland engaged in similar political and literary work. Conrad himself did not set much of his fiction in Russia, although his novel Under Western Eyes (1911) is an exception.

During the later nineteenth century Polish nationalism increased in intensity across its partitioned regions. Failed insurrections in Russia came and went. In Austria and Germany, Poles preferred to join voluntary associations to promote their cultural and business interests. Writers and intellectuals were always at the forefront of these groups, although in the early twentieth century Romantic and idealistic values were shed in favor of a more ruthless, ethnically driven movement—“a strongly organized, disciplined army” that made anti-Semitism a key feature of its ideology.¹² By this time, though, Joseph Conrad was no longer a Pole—but during his youth he had read and been influenced by many of the Romantic nationalists, most notably Mickiewicz and Słowacki.¹³ During and after World War I, Conrad actively propagandized on behalf of an independent Poland in such texts as The Polish Question (1919). In doing so he used Woodrow Wilson’s concept of “self-determination” as a rationale for Poland to be finally freed from German, Austrian, and Russian overrule. After the Versailles Conference, Poland was indeed reborn.

The Malaysian Archipelago

After Conrad’s iconoclastic act (for a member of the szlachta) of opting to become a seaman in the late 1870s, many of his early voyages took him to the East Indies—where many of his early stories and books were to be set. This area was an ancient and lucrative destination for sailors, with the Straits of Malacca being a particularly im...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chronological List of Works by Joseph Conrad
• Introduction
• Part I Conrad’s Contexts
• Part II Critical Approaches to Heart of Darkness
• Part III Critical Approaches to Other Major Texts
• Appendix: Sources for Further Reading
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Contributors
• Index