Conrad, Joseph

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CONRAD, JOSEPH

CONRAD, JOSEPH (1857–1924), Polish-born English writer.

Joseph Conrad was born as J?zef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski on 3 December 1857 at Berdichev, which was then part of Ruthenia but later became part of Ukraine. His family was part of the Polish gentry but at the time of his birth Poland was partitioned between Prussia, Russia, and Austria. It did not exist as a geographical entity but survived as a culture, a language, a literature, and a fervent patriotic force. Conrad's father, Apollo Korzeniowski, and his mother, Ewa Bobrowska, were leaders of the Polish patriotic resistance in 1863, and for this they were imprisoned by the Russians and died as a result of illtreatment. Their only child led his father's funeral procession through the streets of Krakow as part of a major public expression of patriotic Polish feeling.

By the age of eleven, the orphaned Joseph Conrad was the ward of his uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski. The contrast between Conrad's father, who was romantic, impulsive, and altruistic, and his uncle, who was prudent, self-interested, cautious, and circumspect, profoundly influenced the models of masculinity that occur in the mature Conrad's novels; typically, his male heroes are suffering, divided, and self-doubting.

Between 1876 and 1893, Conrad was a sailor, serving first in the French and then in the British merchant marine. Although known as a great English novelist, Conrad wrote in his third language, Polish and French being his first and second. To the end of his life, he spoke English with a heavy Polish accent, and in his early texts he habitually used French and Polish constructions (some of which were corrected by his English wife, Jessie, who typed his manuscripts).

Conrad would not have become an English novelist at all had the French and the Russians not signed a treaty in which France recognized Russia's right to hold its male citizens liable for twenty-five years of military service. It was to avoid service that Conrad joined the British merchant marine in 1878 as an ordinary seaman on the Skimmer of the Sea, a ship that carried coal between Newcastle upon Tyne and Lowestoft. His introduction to English was through the often difficult to understand dialect called Geordie, spoken in northeast England.

During his years at sea, Conrad read Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, Russians such as Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Ivan Turgenev, the classic English authors (Conrad's father had translated Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare into Polish), and his great contemporary Henry James. By 1890 he had written his first novel and he carried the manuscript with him when he took a job in the Belgian Congo, an experience that transformed his art and by extension the whole of English literature, since it led to the writing of Heart of Darkness (published in serial form between 1899 and 1900). In 1894, after some twenty years at sea, he married and settled in the southeast of England. His first novel, Almayer's Folly, was published in 1895 and was followed in quick succession by An Outcast of the Islands (1896) and The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897). With the publication of Lord Jim in 1900, Conrad had in effect invented the modern novel.

Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim take narrative themes familiar to the late Victorians—exploration in Africa and the Far East—and use radical narrative to transform the traditional material of the action story into an exhaustive moral and psychological exploration of the human condition. He also used a Polish narrative tradition, the gaweda, or told-tale: both Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim use a frame narrator, who presents an inner narrator, Marlow, who tells the story of an elusive, enigmatic (and now dead) figure, Kurtz and Jim respectively. The narrative device forces the reader into a collaborative rather than a passive relationship with the text, attending at every point to the way the tale is being told.

These novels of personal crisis and moral tragedy lead into the next group of narratives, the political novels Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), and Under Western Eyes (1911), set in South America, London, and Russia, respectively. In these, inquiry into individual predicaments coexists with the investigation of whole societies. Conrad's complex relationship with political power, already visible in Heart of Darkness's treatment of European imperialism, recurs in his South American and Russian novels; in the latter, his personal loathing of Russia takes center stage. His London novel treats the institutions and attitudes of his adopted country with withering and corrosive irony. In the same period, Conrad wrote short stories of rich psychological complexity, the most powerful of which, "The Secret Sharer," can serve as a supplement to the study of tensions within the self that was extensively explored in the Dostoyevskian figure of Razumov in Under Western Eyes.

After his major phase, which closes with Under Western Eyes, novels such as Chance (1914), Victory (1915), and The Rover (1923) were less innovative, although The Shadow-Line (1917) is a late masterpiece that fully recovers his earlier subtlety and complexity. On his death in 1924, he was the acknowledged master of the English novel.