CONRAD, Joseph
Polish/British novelist (1857-1924)
Born in Poland, Conrad ran away to sea at 17 and ended up a captain in the merchant navy and a naturalised British subject. He retired from the sea at 37 and spent the rest of his life as a writer. There was at the time (1890s--1910s) a strong tradition of sea-stories, using the dangers and tensions of long voyages and the wonders of the worlds sailors visited as metaphors for human life. Most of this writing was straightforward adventure, with little subtlety; Conrad used its conventions for deeper literary ends. He was interested in driven' individuals, people whose psychology or circumstances force them to extreme behaviour, and the sea-story form exactly suited this idea. His books often begin as yarns', set in exotic locations and among the mixed (and mixed-up) human types who crew ocean-going ships. But before long psychology takes over, and the plot loses its straightforwardness and becomes an exploration of compulsion, obsession and neurosis.
HEART OF DARKNESS (1902) This 120-page story begins as a yarn': Marlow, a sea-captain, tells of a journey he once made up the Congo river to bring down a stranded steamer. He became fascinated by stories of an ivory-merchant, a white man called Kurtz who lived deep in the jungle and was said to have supernatural powers. Marlow set out to find Kurtz, and the journey took him deeper and deeper into the heart not only of the Dark Continent', but into the darkness of the human soul. (Francis Ford Coppola's 1970s film Apocalypse Now updated this story to the Vietnam War, making points about US colonialism as savage as Conrad's denunciation of the ivory-trade).
Conrad's major novels are Lord Jim, The Nigger of the Narcissus, Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. His short-story collections (an excellent introduction to his work) are Tales of Unrest, Youth, Typhoon, A Set of Six, Twixt Land and Sea, Within the Tides and Tales of Hearsay.
READ ON
Typhoon (which deals with corruption and exploitation of a different kind, this time using as its metaphor a passenger steamer caught in a typhoon in the China Sea);
The Secret Agent (about the conflict between innocence and corruption among a group of terrorists in 1900s London)
J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World is an sf novel of Conradian intensity. Lionel Davidson, Making Good Again Robert Edric, The Book of the Heathen a modern novelist examines Conradian themes in the Conradian setting of 1890s Belgian Congo). Graham Greene, The Comedians John Kruse, The Hour of the Lily Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Foretopman Paul Theroux, The Mosquito Coast B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
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