It’s been a great year for literary anniversaries: Auden (100) in February, Blake (250) last week, and today Joseph Conrad (150). Conrad was Polish, English was his second language, yet for the influential, if unfashionable, literary critic F.R. Leavis, Conrad was one of the top five novelists in what he called “The Great Tradition” of English literature. The other four were Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and D.H. Lawerence, but none of them combined insight with action like Conrad.
Lord Jim (1900) is a brilliant study of the timeless themes of shame, courage, and redemption. For contemporary relevance, as an anatomy of the mind of the terrorist, you can’t beat The Secret Agent (1907). But it was Heart of Darkness that blew me away as an undergraduate, making an indelible impact on my own understanding not only of the human condition but especially of the state of my own soul. Francis Ford Coppola’s celluloid remake and update Apocalypse Now pays worthy homage to the novella, but its seventy pages really is essential reading as a thick description both of the the inherent corruption and violence of colonialism, and also of the distorted desires that lie at the rotten core of the human soul. It’s an Augustinian take on sin in story form.
The Independent suggests that Conrad’s 150th “will pass largely unnoticed outside the tightly knit community which keeps the writer’s spirit alive.” There are, no doubt, several reasons for today’s non-observance and the literary relegation of Conrad largely to post-colonial studies. But I wonder: could one of them be the eclipse of sin in understanding what it is to be human?
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Larry B 12.05.07 at 12:48 am
Thanks for pointing the anniversary out. I’ve read all three of his books metnitoned above and loved them. I don’t currently have a copy of heart of darkness (have the other two), but I think I’ll put it on my get a copy list.