A Study of Author Joseph Conrad



Kaushal Desai

kaushaldesai123@gmail.com

A Study of Author Joseph Conrad





Introduction:
Joseph Conrad (Jozef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Konreniowski) was a Polish novelist who wrote in English, after settling in England. He determines various aspects in his writing and conveyed it with greater impact on world hierarchy. His foremost novel works shows his greatness in writing; Conrad's first two works were based on his experiences of Malaya. Alrnayer's Folly and An Outcast of the Islands (1896) if not among his best(grve a foretaste of his later work'in their use of a vivid tropical background and in their study of a white man whose moral stamina was sapped by the insidious influence of the tropics, linen came one of his best novels, The Nigger of the ''Narcissus" (1897), a moving story of life on board ship, remarkable for its powerful atmosphere, its sea description, and its character study) Donkin is one of the best of his many vividly drawn villains. (After the five stories collected as Tales of Unrest (1898). appeared Lord Jim: a Tale (1900), the greatest of his early works. Youth-A Narrative;. and two other Stories (1902) and Typhoon, and other Stories (1903"). "Heart of Darkness" in the former collection is remarkable for an overwhelming sense of evil and corruption for its excellent tropical backgrounds and irony of mankind.

Four major contributions to England and to world literature:
  1. His unique style
  2. The additions of new settings and genre to the world of literature
  3. Creation of the psychological story
  4. Creation of political fiction-spy novel, espionage

Features of his Novels:
His Subjects; Conrad, the greatest modern romantic, sought his subjects wherever he could expect to find adventure in an unusual or exotic setting. His own experience of the sea find, in particular, of Malayan waters, was of immense value to him as a writer, and most of his best work is in one or both of these settings) While he is an excellent story-teller who gives deep thought to his technique of presentation's prime interest is in character, in the tracing of the life of a man in such a way as to illuminate the inmost recesses of his soul This preoccupation with character grew as time went on.

Joseph Conrad’s portraying of Character:
He uses the character as signifying the real meaning and what Conrad is want to say to the readers. His characters, both men and women, are drawn from a wide range. They are rarely commonplace, and some of his best are dyed-in-the wool villains like Kurtz in The Heart of Darkness and Donkin in The Nigger of the " Narcissus.''

Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness” perspectives:

According to V.S. Naipaul (Goonetilleke, 1991), Conrad is himself a contradiction comprised of both the real and the imagined: “to understand Conrad, it is necessary to lose one's preconceptions of what the novel should do…. When art copies life, and life in its turn mimics art, a writer's originality can often be obscured."

Heart of Darkness was written in the years prior to World War I and represents a transition between Victorian literature and the Modern British literature of the post-war era. Popular Victorian adventure writers included Rudyard Kipling and H.R. Haggard, who took readers into exotic locales usually associated with the far-flung locations of the British Empire. In novels such as Heart of Darkness, events are filtered through the perceptions and minds of characters that are changed by what they see and experience.

Heart of Darkness is preoccupied with general questions about the nature of good and evil, or civilization and savagery.

•         Moral ambiguity is a central concept in the novel, and is expressed throughout the narrative in the tension between opposing forces.
•         Irony is also deeply embedded in the novel.
–        At one level, it shows the hypocrisy of the Europeans’ “moral” purpose of invading Africa, when their motive is really only commercial.
–        At another level, it shows how these European emissaries, instead of 'suppressing savage customs,' actually become savages themselves.


Journey from the Heart of Darkness to the Heart of Sadness: Fiction v/s Reality:

“Heart of Darkness” whose continental experience and familiarity with the imperial milieu in the east and Africa leave him capable of bringing much greater knowledge of real politic into literary work more than anyone else. In Heart of Darkness there is a suggestion that the exploited will someday, sooner or later, rise in revolt against the exploitation of the foreign rule. He uses African condemned and using it for the right purpose to show the reality in a fictional way that one can clearly observe in “Heart of Darkness”. The cruelness of the colonizer is the main fact of it to show that there are the inner dimensions that can say about man vs. nature target and that leads to emotions.

Racism and the Heart of Darkness:

Chinua Achebe reflection of Joseph Conrad for his representation of Africa, any serious critical study of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness must first take a posture on Conrad’s alleged racism. In his famous speech, Achebe challenged two aspects of Heart of Darkness: its representation of Africa and Africans and the canonicity of the work itself. Achebe’s main point seems to be about the noxious impact of Heart of Darkness as a pedagogical tool about Africa, which is compounded by the canonical acceptance of the text itself. Unfortunately, however, Achebe’s timely intervention has actually enhanced the very canonicity of Heart of Darkness that he challenged, for the debate after his intervention has mostly been focused on Heart of Darkness.  

Ngugi Wa Thiong'o accepted some of Achebe's criticisms but felt he had overlooked the positive aspect, namely, Conrad's attack on colonialism. The skulls stuck on poles outside Kurtz’s house, Wa Thiong’o said, were the most powerful indictment of colonialism. No African writer, he continued, had created so ironic, apt, and powerful an image: ironic when one considers that Kurtz and many others like him had come to "civilize" the non-European world; apt when one recalls what they really did. But Ngugi Wa Thiong'o also observed that though Conrad (having experienced the evils of Czarist imperialism) castigates Belgian atrocities, he is much milder in his criticisms of British imperialism.


Edward Said writes about analysis was published in 1993 and is in many ways a response to Chinua Achebe's “An Image of Africa”. Said begins his critique “Two Visions in Heart of Darkness” by stating that we must not blame the Europeans for the misfortunes of the present. We should instead look at the events of imperialism “as a network of interdependent histories that would be inaccurate and senseless to repress, useful and interesting to understand.”. We live in a global environment and racial hatred can lead to destruction.

Reference Links:

http://desaikaushal1315.blogspot.in/2015/03/comparative-study-of-things-fall-apart.html
https://janeaustensummer.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/culture_and_imperialism.pdf
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4900.Heart_of_Darkness

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