Department of English

The satire that runs through Conrad’s work is characterized by its Imperialist focus and its Modernist tone. However, subject and style are conflated in these stories; Modernism has profound ideological implications for his novels just as Imperialism affects their literary character. In analyzing Imperialist London, Conrad inevitably displays some of the same anxieties expressed by high-Modernist authors such as Eliot and Joyce. In the end, he offers his readers no new vision to replace this decrepit system. Rather, we are left to sort through Conrad’s impressionistic, post-colonial canvas and salvage what hope we can from his dark vision of an empire of collapsing frontiers.

Throughout his life, Conrad was, “peculiarly sensitive to place, and associated human possibilities with various types of places.”[3] He was born in 1857 to Polish nobles who reviled the oppression of the Tsarist government under which they lived. Stimulated by the exotic travel literature of the age and wary of being drafted by the Russian Army, Conrad became a merchant sailor in 1874,[4] eventually joining the British Merchant Marine. By the time he settled in England in 1894 to dedicate his creative energies to writing, he was an experienced seaman whose adventures had taken him to the frontier of civilization in places like Singapore, Borneo, Bangkok and the Belgian Congo. Using life’s experience as source material, he became a participant in the early stages of Modernist literary innovation.

This lifestyle afforded Conrad the opportunity to witness the range of different communities within the British Empire, which was encapsulated by two extremes—the exotic peoples of its outposts on distant continents and the citizens working within its mammoth industrial and commercial capital on the Thames. In light of these experiences, “Conrad, who continued to identify himself as belonging to the dispossessed Polish gentry, was wedded to the chivalric codes of his ancestral tradition and disdainful of middle-class materialism.” Therefore, he remained, “out of sympathy with British pragmatism, alienated from institutionalized Christianity, uneasy about foreign rule over subjugated peoples, and offended by the vulgar and self-congratulatory jingoism which flourished in the age of colonial expansion.”[5]

Methodology

I would like to approach Conrad from two distinct directions. First, I want to use the recent developments in post-colonial theory to construct a cultural context for the character and tone of Conrad’s tales. Oftentimes when analyzing his attitude towards Imperialism in works such as “An Outpost of Progress” (1898) or Nostromo (1904), the lines between sardonic critique and simple affirmation become blurred. This has been the cause of many heated debates. Are his works racist, Imperialist, indifferent, liberal, humane? Second, I would like to analyze Conrad as an author at the forefront of Modernism in order to understand how his descriptions of the British Empire are a part of a greater vision for humanity. Ultimately, I hope to prove that Conrad’s novels criticize colonial practice, yet confirm society’s progression towards Imperialism on a global scale. The following questions highlight some of the key issues to be discussed in the resolution of my thesis.

1. To what extent are Europeans and natives treated differently in Conrad’s imperial communities? How prevalent are mixed racial groups in his tales? What niche do these communities carve out for themselves in both the colonies and England? How does the growth of mixed communities produce an empire with a denationalized population? Do we get the sense that these are the “imagined communities” described by Benedict Anderson or are they merely random groupings of conquerors and subjugated peoples?

2. What is the narrative structure of these works? Is the narrator meant to be critical of or sympathetic towards the British Empire? Or is the narrator meant to be ambiguous? If so, why?

3. To what extent does the rise of the middle-class contribute to the loss of human contact? Do any of Conrad’s characters manifest true friendship? Does any one character really know another? How is isolation a byproduct of life at the end of the nineteenth century?

4. To what extent do Conrad’s colonizers return to Britain physically and mentally altered from their colonial experiences? Is British cultural purity undermined? If so, how and by whom?

5. Is there a loss of exoticism in Conrad’s works? If so, do the various narrators mourn the loss of mysterious frontiers? Does this have parallels in other Modernist works such as T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland”?

6. Do we ever get the sense that we can escape from the Empire or is it a closed system? Is there the possibility for resolution in the societies Conrad creates? Do any of Conrad’s characters exhibit a high moral standard? If so, what kinds of characters stick to their principles?

7. What is it about Conrad’s writing that makes his stories innovative or radical in style? How does this affect the reader’s understanding of the represented Imperialist system?

Bibliography

Biographical Texts

F. R. Karl and Laurence Davies (eds.), The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, 3 vols., (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

Zdzislaw Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle, (News Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1983).

Norman Sherry, Conrad and His World, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972).

History and Cultural Theory
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, (London: Verso, 1991).

Philip D. Curtain, The World and the West: The European Challenge and the Overseas Response in the Age of Empire, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)

D. K. Fieldhouse, Colonialism, 1870-1945: An Introduction, (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1981).

Denis Judd, Empire: The British Imperial Experience, from 1765 to Present, (London: Fontana, 1997).

Imperialism and Literature
Ian Baucon, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

Patrick Bratlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830- 1914, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988).

David Trotter, The English Novel in History, 1895-1920 (London: Routledge, 1993).

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, (London: Vintage, 1994).

Modernism and Literature
Michael H. Levenson, Modernism and the Fate of Individuality: Character and Novelistic Form from Conrad to Woolf, (Cambridge University Press, 1991).

Ian Roy Wilson, Warwick Gould and Warren L. Chernaik, Modernist Writers and the Market Place, (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996).

Specific Works of Criticism
Chinua Achebe, ‘An Image of Africa’, Massachusetts Review 17:4 (1977), pp. 782-94.

Patrick Bratlinger, ‘Heart of Darkness: Anti-Imperialism, Racism, or Impressionism’, Criticism 27:4 (1985), pp. 363-85.

Jacques Darras, Joseph Conrad and the West: Signs of Empire, (London: Macmillan Press LTD, 1982).

Gail Fraser, Interweaving Patterns in the Works of Joseph Conrad (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Research Press, 1988).

Christopher Lloyd GoGwilt, The Invention of the West: Joseph Conrad and the Double Mapping of Europe and Empire, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).

Leo Gurko, Joseph Conrad: Giant in Exile, (New York: Macmillian Publishing CO., 1962)

John A. McClure, Kipling and Conrad: the Colonial Fiction, (London: Harvard University Press, 1981).

Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers, (London: Macmillan Press LTD, 1983).

Ian Watt (ed.), Conrad: The Secret Agent: A Casebook, (London: Macmillan Press LTD, 1973).

Cedric Watts, ‘ “A Bloody Racist”: About Achebe’s View of Conrad’, Yearbook of English Studies 13 (1983), pp. 196-209.

Select Annotated Bibliography

Chinua Achebe: At the center of the Imperialist debate on Conrad lies a racial subtext. In fact, Conrad’s works have often been described as racist. In order to discern the aim of Conrad’s racial descriptions in “Heart of Darkness” and other stories, it is necessary to grapple with Achebe’s viewpoint that Conrad was a vicious racist. While Conrad’s works are largely critical of Imperialism they seem to uphold the status quo through a condescending attitude towards characters of non-European origin. Though Conrad might have personally believed the treatment of natives to be abhorrent, he was not capable of thinking outside the British imperial system. To criticize Imperialist facets cannot be equated with condemning Imperialism altogether. (It is important to note that Achebe does not speak for all native African authors; Kenyan poet, Mathew Buyu, has openly defended “Heart of Darkness”.)[6]

Benedict Anderson: Imagined Communities constitutes the first major attempt to define nationalism using socio-cultural terms. Though this manner of cultural analysis has become quite commonplace in present day academic circles, I believe it finds its best expression in Anderson. I am most interested by his theory that nationalism is, in part, predicated upon the assemblage of a national literature. My thesis seeks to prove that Conrad skirts around Anderson’s theory. His novels seem to occupy a space between cultures. On the one hand, they are extremely critical of Imperialism. At the same time their tone is always self-referential, as if Conrad cannot escape the Imperialist system. If we choose to react against masses we end up like the Professor in the final lines of The Secret Agent who, “passed on unsuspected and deadly, like a pest in the street full of men.”[7]

Patrick Bratlinger: I feel as though Bratlinger’s article takes a more sensible middle road through the highly controversial issue of racism in Conrad. Ultimately, he makes the point that Conrad exhibits an impressionistic style, which muddies the judgments made upon race in his stories.

Philip D. Curtain, D. K. Fieldhouse and Denis Judd: In addition to familiarizing myself with Conrad’s life, I believe it would be beneficial to brush up on my colonial history. Much of what Conrad’s stories react against are institutions that were well known among readers at the turn of the twentieth century, but which have eluded later generations.

Jacques Darras: I must confess that an alarm went off in my brain when I read one of the opening lines in Darras’ criticism: “In “Heart of Darkness”, the sun was beginning to set on the Empire. In The Secret Agent, its final hour has come.”[8] However, Darras only touches upon this point briefly in analysis that moves on to consider hierarchical symbols as well as monetary signs. I could not help but feel as if he was avoiding a literary gold mine. My thinking on the subject began with Darras, but it has moved on to include questions of race, middle-class attitudes and what I feel are the general symptoms of the Modernist condition which point to the ultimate contraction of space in Conrad’s stories at the turn of the twentieth century.

F. R. Karl and Laurence Davies: Conrad’s letters are an excellent source for information concerning Conrad’s own attitudes towards Imperialism. For example, Conrad took a certain amount of interest in the atrocities perpetrated by the Belgians in the Congo. In time, he became friends with E. D. Morel, the head of the Congo Reform Association. In fact, Conrad sent several letters to Roger Casement, Morel’s partner in the organization, who subsequently published a parliamentary report on Belgian disregard for the people of the Congo.[9] Along more literary lines, there are numerous letters, which show Conrad reflecting on the plot and characters of his novels. In short, I hope to use these as a way of understanding the development of Conrad’s stories before they went to the printing press.

Zdzislaw Najder: Before Joseph Conrad became an author, he lived two previous lives—one as an exiled Pole and the other as a British merchant seaman. For the purpose of this thesis it will be necessary to become familiar with Conrad’s background because the exploration of Imperialism as a cultural phenomenon in his novels was fueled by his adventurous past. Najder’s work is one of the most critically recognized biographies of Conrad, owing to the depth of its research. Najder chooses not to speculate in this narrative approach and therefore is able to discredit much of the myth that surrounds Conrad.

Benita Parry: While I have quoted Parry already in this proposal, I find her arguments particularly jumbled and difficult to read. Nonetheless, I feel as though she does an excellent job of considering aspects of Conrad’s personal life in conjunction with his literature. She fills the void between straight biographical works like Najder and Sherry and the literary criticism of Darras.

Edward W. Said: Though Said devotes precious few words to Conrad, I believe Culture and Imperialism gives the best assessment of late-Victorian authors and their attempts to come to grips with the world around them. Said explains that, “it is no paradox that Conrad was both anti-imperialist and Imperialist.”[10] He goes on to suggest that, “when European culture finally began to take due account of imperial ‘delusions and discoveries’…it did so not oppositionally but ironically, and with a desperate attempt at inclusiveness.”[11] He also manages to draw some interesting parallels between Conrad and Kipling who arrived at a profoundly different view of the British Empire.

Norman Sherry: Admittedly, this is a much smaller work in size and scope than Najder’s tomb, however, it provides some interesting assessments of Conrad’s early life as the son of Polish patriots who lived under Russian authority and the young sailor who navigated the remote, exotic colonies under British control. My thesis will consider these aspects of Conrad’s life as a backdrop to his art.

David Trotter: Trotter’s point that, “for the colonizer, colonial experience did not so much confirm an old identity as create a new one”[12] adds strength to my suspicions about the loss of cultural purity. Part of Conrad’s prophecy is that the cultures within the British Empire have become entirely inauthentic. In The Secret Agent, he describes the Italian restaurant is an entirely British invention.[13] Furthermore, the mixing of nationalities in the cuisine is reflected by the patrons who have descended into a kind of ethnic anonymity. The conclusion that Conrad comes to is that of a cultural wasteland where everything is meant to imitate something else, something exotic, and in so doing fails to distinguish itself from the bustling urban sprawl.

Cedric Watts: Watts’ article is a counter-response to Achebe’s, which suggests that Heart of Darkness is meant to question the very assumptions which racism is predicated upon. While Watts’ argument is intelligent and a good response, I believe it gives Conrad too much credit. As Edward Said explains, “whether we like it or not the author [in this case Conrad] is writing not just from the dominating viewpoint of a white man in a colonial possession but from the perspective of a massive colonial system whose economy, functioning, and history had acquired the status of a virtual fact of nature.”[14]

[1] Jacques Darras, Joseph Conrad and the West: Signs of Empire, (London: Macmillan Press LTD, 1982), p. 99.

[2] Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, (London: Vintage, 1994), p. 160.

[3] Leo Gurko, Joseph Conrad: Giant in Exile, (New York: Macmillian Publishing CO., 1962), p. 169.

[4] Norman Sherry, Conrad and His World, (London: Thames and Hudson, 1972), p. 16.

[5] Benita Parry, Conrad and Imperialism: Ideological Boundaries and Visionary Frontiers, (London: Macmillan Press LTD., 1983), p. 13.

[6] Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and Other Tales, Cedric Watts (ed.), (Oxford: Oxford University Press), p. xviii.

[7] Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale, Martin Seymour-Smith (ed.), (London: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 269.

[8] Jacques Darras, Joseph Conrad and the West, p. 99.

[9] Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, p. xx.

[10] Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xviii.

[11] Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 189.

[12] David Trotter, The English Novel in History, 1895-1920 (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 143-144.

[13] Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent, p. 152.