Lecture 14

The Twentieth Century (Prose)

Plan:

The Twentieth century (Prose)

1. Joseph Conrad

2. Virginia Woolf

3. James Joyce

4. Katherine Mansfield

5. D.H.Lawrence

6. Frank O’Connor

^{Joseph Conrad}

1857-1924

Two facts have long obscured the full meaning of Conrad's work: first, that he did not learn to speak and write English until he was twenty-one; and second, that his early work centered on the sea and exotic regions of the Far East. While these aspects of his life are important, the attempts of Conrad's early critics to use one or both of them to define his achievement were misleading. That the young Polish man learned English is less interesting than his use of that language to achieve a new kind of fiction; that he excelled at describing the sights, sounds, and smells of Malaysia, or the absorbing craft of the sea and the lonely trials of command, is less important than his discovery of our common humanity in these unfamiliar settings.

In one of his prefaces Conrad describes the writ­er's calling in this way: "He [the writer] speaks to our capacity for delight and wonder, to the sense of mystery surrounding our lives; to our sense of pity, and beauty, and pain; to the latent feeling of fel­lowship with all creation. ..." Conrad insists on a community based on aspiration, illusion, and dream. A number of important writers at the end of the nineteenth century tried to find some basis outside the state and outside organized religion for defining our common humanity and for creating a bond that might hold people together. For Conrad the ideal of the nation-state lay in the past. He found a kind of bond, a partial order, in the code of the sea, which bound officers and men in a net­work of defined responsibilities to each other, to their passengers, and to the vessel.

Conrad did more than discover a usable code of conduct, a bond between people. In his novels he measured this code against the pressures of West­ern civilization in his time. In some of his works he may, in fact, to a superficial reader, seem more concerned with the pressures of civilization than with the code. In Heart of Darkness, he deals with the merciless exploitation of Africans in the Belgian Congo. In Nostromo, he exposes the weak­ness of commercial interests. But underlying these works as well as. such masterpieces as Victory, The Secret Agent, and Lord Jim, there is always Conrad's greatest theme: the way in which our dreams of ourselves work either to join us with, or to cut us off from, the rest of humanity. In the process of exploring this theme, he is to an extent one of the finest modern psychological novelists. He penetrates the obscure places of the human heart and shows how our lives are wrecked or sus­tained by our dreams and illusions. In Conrad, however, the psychological as well as the social is subordinated to a basic concern with "the truth, manifold and one" about us and the world we in­habit and shape. Conrad has no very happy view of this adventure of dream and reality. Almost always he remains the stern shipmaster of souls: act on your dream you must, he says, but take good care that it reaches out to include your fellows, other­wise you will lose your humanity. Josef Teodor Conrad Nalecz Korzeniowski was works as well as. such masterpieces as Victory, The Secret Agent, and Lord Jim, there is always Conrad's greatest theme: the way in which our dreams of ourselves work either to join us with, or to cut us off from, the rest of humanity. In the process of exploring this theme, he is to an extent one of the finest modern psychological novelists. He penetrates the obscure places of the human heart and shows how our lives are wrecked or sus­tained by our dreams and illusions. In Conrad, however, the psychological as well as the social is subordinated to a basic concern with "the truth, manifold and one" about us and the world we in­habit and shape. Conrad has no very happy view of this adventure of dream and reality. Almost always he remains the stern shipmaster of souls: act on your dream you must, he says, but take good care that it reaches out to include your fellows, other­wise you will lose your humanity. Josef Teodor Conrad Nalecz Korzeniowski was knows) having had an unhappy love affair, he shot himself in the chest. (He later made up a tale about a duel to account for this episode.) Under the care of his attentive uncle Tadeusz, he recovered, and that same year shipped out on a British vessel for the first time. In 1886 he became a British subject, as well as a licensed ship's captain, and until 1894 he was to serve as seaman and officer on British ships, sailing to Asia, South America, and South Africa, with only occasional intervals ashore.

From 1889 until the publication of Almayefs Folly in 1895, Conrad spent all his leisure mo­ments working on the manuscript of this first novel. In the year following its publication, he married an Englishwoman and became a house­holder and the head of a family. But even with mar­riage he did not achieve tranquillity. He was a ner­vous, irritable, passionate man, who labored long, agonized hours at his desk, was in constant need of money, and never received full public recognition during the years when he did his best work. When recognition finally came in the form of an offer of knighthood, Conrad refused it.