Introduction

Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, who gradually transformed himself into the English writer, Joseph Conrad,^[1] was a mercurial personality. He left Poland for the sea, though he had no experience with salt water and no family history in sailing. He left the Polish language for French, and then for English. He attempted suicide at the age of twenty. He invested in various schemes and lost his inheritance. He married an English typist nearly sixteen years younger than himself with whom he had nothing in common. He worked as a writer though he made no money through all the years of his most important work and though he experienced psychological breakdowns of varying intensity after completing each novel. He was warm with his friends, ingratiating with influential strangers, but also intensely irritable and easily offended.

His work is as varied and changeable as his personality, from his first two, emotionally intense Malay novels, to the stolid and confident Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and “Typhoon”; from the coldly ironic “Outpost of Progress” to the nightmarishly subjective Heart of Darkness; from the leisurely, panoramic visions of Nostromo to the tautly nervous, claustrophobic ironies in The Secret Agent.

Despite the fact that Conrad was changeable and subject to extreme mood swings, and despite the extraordinary thematic and tonal range of his work, critics have attempted to impose a stable political perspective on his fiction—most often an Edmund Burkean, organic conservatism, influenced by his Polish background. This is understandable; until recently, a literary critic’s primary role has been to impose order on an author’s creative work or to identify groups of authors as part of well-defined movements. So, in his Politics and the Novel (first published in 1957), Irving Howe persuasively established a conservative base from which to view and understand Conrad’s politics, identifying him, essentially, as a “little Englander”:

“Conrad’s conservatism,” Howe adds, “his hatred of the anarchists, his suppressed residue of nationalism must now seem more equivocal than at first sight. The anarchism he attacks is . . . a projection of an unrevealed self, of the desolation a modern ego fears to find beneath its domesticated surface” (82). In other words, Conrad fears anarchism for psychological reasons. He fears his own disorder.

Howe claims that Conrad was profoundly conservative, even reactionary, in his politics. Thus, he hated revolutionaries, and this damaged the way he presented them in his work. His hatred was a consequence of his traumatic childhood. His father’s revolutionary activity, Howe argues, left him an orphan and a life in permanent exile, and Conrad’s political positions can all be traced back to this. According to Howe, when Conrad expresses any sympathy for revolutionary thought and behavior it is because he despairs that any system will alleviate every thinking person’s profound alienation and loneliness. The only answer is annihilation, the remedy suggested (and essentially left unchallenged) in The Secret Agent.

This has proven to be a persuasive analysis, but Howe is rather naïve in the way he deals with Conrad’s psychology; we are asked to imagine that Conrad’s personality, politics, and art derived almost entirely from childhood trauma. This leads Howe to undervalue and, essentially, to misread Conrad’s most finished novel, The Secret Agent. In their preoccupation with Conrad’s psychology, later critics followed Howe’s lead in their efforts to impose a consistent political perspective on Conrad’s work.

In the first full-length analysis devoted to Conrad’s politics, The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad (1963), Eloise Knapp Hay refers to the claim that Conrad wrote out of his sense of guilt for having left Poland, a position Hay herself supports in her discussion of Lord Jim. Hay notes Conrad’s preference for death to surrender and his defense of fanaticism as arising from his Polish heritage. Hay claims that Conrad’s attraction to lost causes was not because he supported archaic monarchies but because they were lost, just as the cause of Polish independence was lost. She writes, “The abolished constitution of the old Polish Republic remained for him . . . both vague and correct, a marvelous paradox of freedom and control mirrored in ‘the Polish temperament’” (11–12). Again, this argument about Conrad’s politics is essentially psychological. Because of his attachment to his Polish past, an attachment rendered both poignant and painful by the traumas he suffered as a boy, Conrad became an author who supported but, paradoxically, disdained all noble causes, who was drawn to noble political ends but was convinced they would never succeed.

Hay’s observations are always interesting, and her book continues to be essential for anyone exploring Conrad’s politics, but, like Howe, her representation of Conrad’s psychology—especially as the foundation for Conrad’s politics—is naïve and unsatisfying.

Avrom Fleishman’s Conrad’s Politics: Community and Anarchy in the Fiction of Joseph Conrad, published four years later in 1967, remains equally significant, important, and unsatisfying. Fleishman claims that Conrad was essentially a Polish Positivist. “Its chief antagonist was the naïve mystical nationalism which had undermined the revolution. In place of the grand illusions, the Positivists preached realism: realism in life—evolutionary rather than revolutionary, social change through hard work—and realism in art, in place of the afflatus of Polish Romanticism.” “The record of Conrad’s political opinions,” Fleishman adds, “is a record of growth.”

Though Fleishman suggests Conrad’s political positions—represented in his fiction—are unsystematic, Fleishman himself imposes a system on what he calls Conrad’s “steadily growing imaginative comprehension.” Fleishman’s argument is strained repeatedly as he tries to impose his vision of Conrad’s developing political consciousness, which Fleishman sees, essentially, as an organicism most often associated with Edmund Burke.

In Joseph Conrad: Narrative Technique and Ideological Commitment, published in 1990, Jeremy Hawthorn resists the natural effort of earlier critics to impose a consistent political philosophy on Conrad’s work. Hawthorn usefully employs Keats’s term “negative capability” to refer to Conrad’s capacity to accept often contradictory positions and points of view and then work those positions and viewpoints into his art. Hawthorn focuses on Conrad’s narrative technique, especially his use of free indirect discourse, and this helps him produce a number of subtly nuanced, politically wide-ranging interpretations of what Hawthorn identifies as Conrad’s successful fiction. But Hawthorn’s over-arching project is to distinguish between Conrad’s artistic successes and failures. He suggests that Conrad’s fiction is great only when his technique is informed by his “intellectually active moral consciousness,” that his art fails when he fictionalizes his own (conservative) political positions (xii).

Once again, this suggests that Conrad maintained more-or-less stable and conservative political ideas throughout his working life, but any survey of his Collected Letters proves that Conrad’s political positions varied with his circumstances and with his audience. In the Letters, Conrad’s politics range from those expressed in his anti-democratic rant (“Where’s the man to stop the rush of social-democratic ideas?”) to Spiridion Kliszczewski (December, 1885, discussed with The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ below), to his equally famous letter fifteen years later, to Cunningham Graham, which expresses qualified agreement with his socialist friend. The world would indeed be better if Graham’s positions were adopted, he claims. Conrad’s only disagreement with Graham is that he believes the world cannot be changed, and he expresses this through his well-known comparison of the universe to a knitting machine; human nature and human society cannot be altered: “You can’t interfere with it. The last drop of bitterness is in the suspicion that you can’t even smash it” (CL, 1, 425). As I suggest in Chapter 5, Conrad reveals a sympathetic understanding of those who want to “smash it” in his anarchist stories and The Secret Agent. He mocks the aggressive activities of suffragettes in a 1913 letter to Michael Holland, wondering whether Holland’s wife laments having missed joining this “latest fashionable amusement for ladies” (CL, 5, 227), though he had signed a petition favoring women’s right to vote three years before.^[2] Overall, the Letters reveal an active interest in politics, local, national, and international, but they do not provide a stable base from which to view his fiction. Any effort to hold the politics in his fiction against the politics he expresses in his letters and non-fiction is complicated by the internal contradictions within both.

Paul Armstrong takes Hawthorn’s position on Conrad’s negative capability a bit further in his Play and the Politics of Reading (2005), where he argues that Conrad created texts that not only interrogate and, often, criticize particular cultural conventions, assumptions, and prejudices, but that also challenge the reader to find areas in the texts themselves that might be interrogated and criticized. And he directly addresses the issue of Conrad’s shifting politics:

With this, Armstrong frees us from the critical compulsion to seek a consistent lens through which to read Conrad’s political fiction, a move that Conrad himself would have applauded. He would have been especially pleased with Armstrong’s insistence that Conrad expected a great deal from his audience, including an ability to turn the skepticism expressed by the narrative in the works against not only the direct objects of his satire, such as imperialism, radical groups, and sentimentalists, but also against the implicit, variable positions and values he himself seems to have promoted and expressed in his fiction.

Indeed, there is no doubt that Conrad wrote for an ideal audience that was wide-awake, open to a wide variety of points of view, and capable of self-criticism, an audience that he despaired of finding in his lifetime. In Conrad’s only half-joking letter to H. G. Wells in September, 1908, about his short story, “An Anarchist,” he suggested that he will “get several additional centuries of Purgatory for that tale—that is if the Recording Angel of man’s deeds knows what he is about, and it would be impious to doubt that” (CL 4, 128). Only an angel in heaven, Conrad’s ideal reader, can fully understand his fiction. And, at least in Conrad’s fiction, neither angels nor heaven exist.

My approach in the subsequent chapters follows the familiar modern and post-modern distrust of what Jean-François Lyotard has called “the grand narrative.” In “Lessons in Paganism” Lyotard wrote of his distrust of theories and narratives in a way that echoes Conrad’s own disdain for “ideas” and narratives, narratives that include both constructions of individual personalities and national histories:

Lyotard acknowledges our compulsive drive to produce narratives at every level: from the largest ontological theories to the stories we tell ourselves about our own behaviors and motivations. Lyotard’s critique of the grand narrative can therefore be applied both at the micro and macro level: to individuals and to entities as large as nations. Individuals compulsively seek the over-arching narrative form of their individual lives and the lives of others, and nations celebrate grand, founding narratives to promote their unique identities and to encourage patriotism and social cohesion. At the micro level, Lyotard’s critique echoes Marlow’s attack on ideas in his often-cited praise of common, dependable, “unintellectual” people in Lord Jim, a type Jim proves not to be:

Jim believed his personality was founded, in Lyotard’s words, on “an unshakeable system,” that it was “coherent and immutable,” that he was indeed “one of us,” a dependable gentleman, and he dies trying to prove it. In the novel, Marlow, in his role as Jim’s surrogate father, contributes to this narrative myth-making and attempts to place Jim into a situation where he can impose just the right narrative on his life, where Jim can become the protagonist in his own adventure story. The novel is centrally concerned with the failure of that life narrative.^[4] Razumov has a more extreme version of the same problem in Under Western Eyes; Razumov cannot create a satisfactory, coherent narrative to follow, so his personality remains hopelessly and painfully incoherent until the end of the novel, when he is deafened and then smashed by a bus: a reality far more tangible than the ideas he thinks he believes, or those he tries to believe, or those he pretends to believe. The reality of his life continually defies the narratives he attempts to impose and the narratives that others attempt to impose on him. Heyst’s problem in Victory is, in part, his inability to see himself clearly, the discontinuity between what he thinks he knows of himself and the self we can see, often indirectly and indistinctly, through the story. The central irony in Victory is that Heyst, following his father’s example, himself evinces no faith in the grand narratives of his time, yet he is pulled into the two that destroy him: the narrative of colonial exploitation and the narrative of heterosexual romance.

As Heyst’s problems confirm, Conrad’s work not only undermines the concept of the unified personality—the character who strives to make a coherent story of his or her life always fails—it directly addresses the limitations of the largest, grandest narratives. Heart of Darkness has been justly celebrated for mocking the European, imperial “bringers-of-progress-and-enlightenment” narrative, a narrative imposed by King Leopold on the Congo. In Nostromo, nearly every character imposes a different narrative—historical, economic, and social, all proven false—on the various governmental units and institutions of Costaguana. The phony radicals in The Secret Agent have an unshakeable faith in each of their “coherent and immutable” systems. The novel analyzes the genesis of revolutionary movements in a way that anticipates both Lyotard and Michel Foucault; the movements do not grow out of any historical necessity but out of the incomplete and inadequate development of individuals, individuals shaped by large, naturalistic forces.

In “What is Enlightenment?” (“Was ist Aufklärung”?), first published in 1978, Foucault laid out his method for uncovering the ways large human constructions, such as the sciences, medicine, law, and other disciplines, operate. He suggested “that criticism is no longer going to be practiced in the search for formal structures with universal value, but rather as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying” (46). Conrad’s work also undermines “formal structures with universal value,” and his characters live in a world of competing, conflicting words and conceptions. They are naturalistic subjects and, often, victims of what the society is “doing, thinking, saying.” My approach follows Foucault in that I hope to reveal and, as far as possible, account for the discontinuities, the ruptures, in Conrad’s political thought as it is expressed, for the most part, in his novels and stories. That is why I call this book a political genealogy, a word that suggests contingency rather than order and permanence, abrupt change rather than steady development. I hope to provide a sense of Conrad’s chiaroscuro approaches to politics through the major portion of his writing career, to reveal some of the rich eccentricities and inconsistencies in Conrad’s work, and to prove that the politics in his fiction are radically contingent, depending, of course, on his own life experiences and contemporary events, but more importantly on his audience and genre.^[5]

Defining Political Fiction

It was easier to distinguish between “political fiction” and non-political fiction in the 1960’s, when Eloise Knapp Hay and Avrom Fleishman wrote the first books entirely devoted to Conrad’s politics, than it is today. The “political” novels for Hay include The Rescue, Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes. Fleishman covers the same novels, adding a number of Conrad’s short stories and including brief mentions of other works. Neither felt the need to fully define a “political” story or novel, though we can infer a definition based on the works they discuss. Political fiction, for them, included fiction dealing with characters interacting with or against systems of government. So Hay and Fleischman overlook Winnie’s problems in The Secret Agent because her situation, the situation of any lower-class woman in late Victorian England, failed to register with them as political; they neglect the early and late Malay novels, Almayer’s Folly (1895), An Outcast of the Islands (1896), and Victory (1915), though the first two, especially, focus on the problems created by colonialism; and they overlook Chance, Conrad’s peculiar meditation on feminism and criminal capitalism. Since the 1960’s, however, the application of the word “political” has expanded. In the 1970’s, when feminists agreed that “The Personal is Political,”^[6] the distinction between political and non-political fiction began to disappear. Today nearly every feature of life and fiction might be labeled “political,” because nearly every facet of life might have at least a potential political implication.

For the purposes of this study, I will therefore use the word “political” broadly; I will use it to refer to any feature in Conrad’s fiction that has wide social and cultural implications, including the roles of men and women, class, finance and financial systems, and colonialism. Conrad wrote three major novels that deal explicitly and centrally with political systems: Nostromo, The Secret Agent, and Under Western Eyes. And “An Anarchist” and “The Informer” are centrally concerned with radical political movements. In addition, however, any novel set in the colonial world is political in that sense, so the Malay novels (Almayer’s Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and Lord Jim) and the African stories, “An Outpost of Progress” and Heart of Darkness are political. The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ takes place entirely aboard ship. But Conrad makes a number of references to contemporary political issues—to the relationship between labor and management, between a more-or-less egalitarian crew and its more-or-less autocratic ships’ officers. And the ship is often presented as a microcosm representing society as a whole, one that holds off the inevitable encroachments of democracy and socialism. Chance is not only a critique of capitalism but of the “new woman.” All of these novels and stories are therefore political in our twenty-first century conception of the word.

Representations of the political in Conrad’s fiction vary widely, but the one constant of Conrad’s vision is its darkness, a darkness perfectly embodied by Conrad’s doomed young men. Kurtz, a talented young man driven by economic necessity to advance Belgium’s imperial ambitions, dies miserably in the heart of Africa. Jim is shot in the chest, Stevie blown to bits, Nostromo and Decoud also shot, Charles Gould rendered isolated, corrupted, and impotent, and Razumov deafened and crippled. The suffering does not end with the deaths—all leave grieving women: the so-called “African mistress” and Intended (Heart of Darkness), Jewel (Lord Jim), Winnie (The Secret Agent), Linda, Antonia, and Emilia (Nostromo), and Natalia (Under Western Eyes). The political is always the personal, and, in the (altered) words of Stephen Dedalus, politics is a nightmare Conrad’s protagonists can never escape.^[7]

Notes

Conrad first officially shifted from his given name to Joseph Conrad early in 1894, when he signed off as second mate of the Adowa, his last position at sea. See Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, 186.

Simmons, “Conrad and Politics,” p. 114.

For a fine discussion of the way Conrad moves beyond particular political positions to explore ontological questions of power, community, and change—focusing on Nostromo—see Armstrong’s “Conrad’s Contradictory Politics: The Ontology of Society in Nostromo.” Armstrong’s assertion in the essay that, “Like the rest of his works, Conrad’s political novels are a sustained meditation on the meaning and significance of contingency” (1) might serve as the epigraph for this book.

Daphna Vulcan Erdinast first suggested this in Joseph Conrad and the Modern Temper, where she shows how Jim leads a “fictional life,” one dictated to him by the adventure fiction he reads, and that by entering Patusan Jim is seeking to enter a complete, coherent narrative (39–47).

I will allude frequently to genre throughout this study, often making the connection between the work’s politics and the politics one might associate with any work in that genre. When I suggest that a situation, scene, or character is generic, however, I do not mean to diminish the novel or story. The word generic, in other words, is not meant to be a term of abuse. As David Duff writes in the introduction to Modern Genre Theory, contemporary, serious interest in popular culture has made generic a neutral term: “Indeed, the word genre now seems to have lost most of its negative charge, and to be operating instead as a valorizing term, signaling not prescription and exclusion but opportunity and common purpose: genre as the enabling device, the vehicle for the acquisition of competence” (2).

“The Personal is Political” is the title of an essay by Carol Hanisch, published in Notes from the Second Year: Women’s Liberation. Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt, eds. New York: Radical Feminism, 1970.

Allan Simmons puts this another way in his fine introductory essay, “Conrad and Politics”: “Conrad’s fiction demonstrates his ongoing fascination with the political process, in particular, the manner in which it entraps the individual. Indeed, the entrapment of the individual within the nexus of political regulation and determination remains one of the most persistent themes in his major fiction” (123).

Introduction

Defining Political Fiction

Notes