Joseph conrad (1857 - 1924) - conrad and imperialism, heart of darkness

JOSEPH CONRAD

Joseph Conrad (whose real name was Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) was born in 1857 in Ukraine, at that time a Polish province under Russian rule.

In 1861, Joseph's father moved to Warsaw, where his house became a clandestine meeting place for underground Polish nationalists. In the same year was arrested and exiled to Russia with his wife and son. Joseph's mother died soon afterwards and Joseph began to reveal those signs of physical suffering and moody temperament that later will interfere with his work.

In 1869, Joseph's father too died and the little orphan was handed over to his uncle Tadeusz.

The sad solitary child read a lot and in the world of books discovered a life of adventures and excitement.

In 1874, at the age of 15 years, Joseph left Poland for Marseilles, where, became a sailor, sailing to the West Indies and to Central and South America, started living and adventurous life.

In 1878 joined an English steamer, the Mavis; so became an English mariner and began to study English (at the age of 20!). His teachers were the sailors.

On 1886, Joseph Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski changes his name to Joseph Conrad.

He sailed for 20 years on many British ships, rising from the rank of ordinary seaman to the position of Master Mariner.

In 1889, Conrad undertook a voyage into the Belgian Congo that will be the scenario of Heart of darkness.

Africa affected Conrad deeply. On his Congo expedition, he came in(to) contact with the real face of colonialism, which is greed and corruption, and the pain it caused native populations.

He found himself disgusted by the behaviour of the so-called civilized Europeans.

Finally, in 1894, he fell ill (suffered from attacks of gout) and returned to England where applied to writing.

In 1895 appeared his first novel, Almayer's Folly, an exotic tale of action and romance, dedicated to the memory of his uncle (died the previous year).

The novel "The Nigger of the Narcissus" (appeared in 1897) caused Conrad to be classified as a writer of sea tales.

Conrad is the novelist of extreme situations. In the greater part of his work, the theme is the man in conflict with himself and with his environment, the man who saves himself in loneliness.

The most important event in Conrad's literary career was probably his meeting with the novelist Ford Madox Ford in 1898 that marked the beginning of a period of rich productivity during which Conrad wrote:

Heart of darkness (1899);

Lord Jim

Typhoon (1902);

Nostromo (1904);

The secret agent (1907);

as well as many shorter works.

The break-up of his relationship with Ford played an important role in the mental illness that affected Conrad in 1910.

So, the works written in the second half of Conrad's life as a writer are surely inferior to what he had written before.

Conrad's health and spirit underwent a definite decline.

In 1924, at the age of 67 years, Conrad suddenly died of a heart attack and was buried in Canterbury.

CONRAD AND IMPERIALISM

According to some critics, Conrad had a conservative view of imperialism, while others see him as a sceptical of the whole enterprise and a supporter of anti-colonial revolts because of his personal experience that made him particularly sympathetic to other victims of imperial intrusion.

Anyway, we can say that his works, with their complexity and instability, constitute accurate studies of the imperial situation in late 19^th and early 20^th century.

In that time, European imperial rule extended to nearly two-thirds of the earth's land surface and Britain's empire represented most of it.

Conrad considered Britain as "home" and thought that the empire he served was doing a good work. But a few years later he realised that the British Empire had gone over the edge.

Conrad's initial thought that trade was an exchange that mutually benefited both parties but afterwards begun to doubt about this because actually trade was just grabbing what could be got and make a profit.

When Conrad begun to work for the Belgian company (which organized trade in the Congo), saw the actual conditions of colonized and colonizers: instead of efficient and generous bearers of civilization's torch, he saw men drunk on power, alcohol and their presumed racial superiority, and saw the brutalities and the exploitation of expansion.

Europeans generally declared that they had to rule primitive people, the black men, because of their own superiority, both technological and moral.

Indeed, the fictional chronicle of his trip to Congo reveals a more hostile attitude towards imperialistic Europe's civilizing mission.

Both Conrad and Marlow, while they went to Africa expecting to find the darkness there (and in the Africans), they had to admit that the darkness was in themselves.

Although Marlow uses the racist language of his day (for example, calls black people "niggers"), Heart of darkness denies the current attitude that justified European domination by a presumed racial superiority.

In conclusion, the anti-imperialism of Heart of darkness doesn't refer only to Belgian imperialism but can be considered international, in the sense that no imperial power is without blame.

HEART OF DARKNESS

The novel "Heart of darkness" was first published in serial form in 1899: it's a story about the selfishness of the civilizing work in Africa, a complaint of the immoral exploitation of the native populations, based on Conrad's personal experiences.

Heart of darkness is the report/chronicle of the journey from Brussels to the mouth of river Congo made by Marlow, who describes to his audience on the river Thames a distant land where every man may become a butcher and where human flesh may be man's meat.

Marlow's mission is to bring back Kurtz because is very sick. Kurtz is a European who had entered the African wilderness and had achieved a semi-divine power over the natives, sinking into the state of corruption that he originally wanted to remove.

In a short story written in 1898, Youth, Conrad invented for the first time the character of Marlow using it again as a narrator in Heart of darkness and Lord Jim.

The value of the figure of Marlow goes beyond the role of point of view of the story, but is a character involved in the action and transformed by it.

The novel plays on the imagery of darkness to represent this process: the heart of darkness of the title is at once the (dark) heart of Africa, the heart of evil and the heart of man.

In Conrad's world, the evil lies within every man.

As often occurs in Conrad, the ship represents a microcosm of the real society and the journey is a moral inquiry.

Conrad's popularity is the result of the general scepticism [skeptisism] concerning the morality of imperial politics and "progress", the bringing the light into de dark places of the earth by Europeans.

Heart of darkness is a novella or long tale of travel, of adventurous exploration, story of a journey into the darkest Africa that belongs to the late 19^th century (1899), the age of the peak of Victorian imperialism, a period of intense national rivalry for colonial possessions.

It's a story told by a British gentleman to other British gentlemen according to the convention of "the tale within the tale".

Moreover, the tale is full of paradoxes, and the decade of the 1890s was a decade in which paradoxes abounded in literature (for example, in Oscar Wilde's works).

Previously, Baudelaire had declared that nature provided a "forest of symbols" and Conrad expressed his paradoxes not only explicitly, but also through ambiguous images and many-faceted symbols.

In Heart of darkness there are various elements presented as paradoxical: civilization, society, imperialism.

Conrad also includes paradoxical images associating black and white, light and dark.

The title of the tale, Heart of darkness, refers not only to the heart of darkest Africa, but also to Kurtz's corruption, to London and other kinds of physical and moral darkness.

The character of Kurtz, charismatic and brilliant but also depraved and corrupted descends from Milton, so that Kurtz is a modern Faust who has sold his soul for power and gratification.

In addition, Marlow's journey is linked to Dante's imaginary journey in The Inferno and to The Aeneid, particularly when Aeneas travels through the underworld.

Of course, Heart of darkness is based also on a Conrad's personal experience and his scepticism about the imperial mission can be related to the fact that he was born in Poland and that his parents were patriots exiled for their political struggle against Russian oppression.

Both of them died when Conrad was still a boy.

Heart of darkness was inspired by a Conrad's journey into Congo made in 1890, during which he could saw atrocities, exploitation, inefficiency and hypocrisy, fully convincing himself of the disparity between imperialism's rhetoric (that is, bringing the light of civilization to savage people) end reality.

We can notice that Marlow has various features in common with Conrad: indeed, Conrad (like Marlow) went to Brussels to gain employment with the Belgian company that organized trade in the Congo; Marlow gains the interview with the company thanks to an aunt (though in Conrad's case was the wife of a distant cousin).

Therefore, the tale can be clearly related to Conrad's own experience but also to various concerns of the 1890s (for example, the theory of evolution by Charles Darwin produced worries about human nature) and to various literary traditions (Faust, Dante's Inferno, The Aeneid).

But Heart of darkness is considered to be a tale "ahead of its times" because it seems anticipating some historical events of the 20^th century, as the First World War, Hitlerism and Holocaust, and the corruption and decadence of the 20^th century.

Conrad seems to have anticipated these experiences in his description of the ways in which men in Africa served, and died for, a cruel organisation.

He describes men crippled (schiacciate) by the system that dominates them.

Hitlerism and Holocaust seem to have been anticipated in the depiction of Kurtz's charismatic depravity and corruption.

However, Marlow's use of the term "nigger" clearly reveals that the tale is surely Victorian.

Therefore, while Conrad is certainly ambivalent on racial matters, Heart of darkness is progressive in its satiric description of colonialism because criticizes imperialist activities in Africa (and, implicitly, of imperialist activities generally) contributing to the international protest campaign that tried to stop Belgian injustices in the Congo.

All this, despite the fact that most British people considered imperialism to be a good enterprise.

This novella offers alternative viewpoints, without offering a final resolution.

The title Heart of darkness (originally, The heart of darkness) evokes not only the inner of darkest Africa, but it also means the corruption of Kurtz and the city of London, the centre of an empire "on which the sun never sets" and that can be itself a heart of darkness.

In addition, Conrad provides the reader some contrasts between the far and the near, the savage and the civilized, the tropical and the urban.

Britain too has been one of the dark places of the earth and have seemed as savage to Roman colonizers as Africa seems to Europeans.

Conrad employs a technique called "delayed decoding" that is making effect precede causes, for example, presenting first the impact of an event, and only after explaining it.

This technique provides great vividness and realism to narration, but it also marks an ironic difference between the real events and their conventional interpretation.