He stood and fumbled in his pockets (for a knife) while he faced Kayerts, who was hanging by a leather strap from the cross. He had evidently climbed the grave, which was high and narrow, and after tying the end of the strap to the arm, had swung himself off. His toes were only a couple of inches above the ground; his arms hung stiffly down; he seemed to be standing rigidly at attention, but with one purple cheek playfully posed on the shoulder. And, irreverently, he was putting out a swollen tongue at his Managing Director.
Thus concludes Conrad's morbid An Outpost of Progress, written in 1897, just two years before his chef-d'œuvre, Heart of Darkness. Like that seminal work, this story is situated in King Leopold II's Congo Free State, and describes the gruesome realities of colonial exploitation driven not merely by commerce and a belief in progress, but by a mission civilisatrice. Having acquired the region in the Scramble for Africa as a personal possession, Leopold declared that in his new possession he intended to "pierce the darkness that envelopes the whole population," a work worthy of a century of progress. Conrad saw what that piercing looked like on the ground.
Kayerts and Carlier, the story's two protagonists, are tasked with running an ivory trading station three hundred miles from the nearest outpost. Assisted by their local interpreter Makola, their commerce swiftly expands into the selling of their own station men into slavery, as Makola turns this into an immense profit. Flush with this success, the two traders abandon their principal task and squander their days reading cheap fiction and Our Colonial Expansion, a paper celebrating the merits of their predecessors who "went about bringing light, and faith and commerce to the dark places of the earth." From the outset, Conrad describes both men as "insignificant individuals" whose existence is only made possible "through the high organisation of civilised crowds." Remove the crowd, he suggests, and watch what remains of the man.
What remained is not much. When the steamer carrying their rations is wrecked, disgust and panic ravage the friendship of the two men who once walked hand in hand, and Carlier becomes the fatal victim of a quarrel over some lumps of sugar Kayerts was unwilling to share. Having killed his friend, Kayerts hears at last the call from the river:
Progress was calling to Kayerts from the river. Progress and Civilisation and all the virtues. Society was calling to its accomplished child to come, to be taken care of, to be instructed, to be judged, to be condemned; it called him to return to that rubbish heap from which he had wandered away, so that justice could be done.
Unable to confront his Managing Director, Kayerts follows his companion's fate. Unlike Heart of Darkness, Conrad forgoes Marlow, the quasi-omniscient narrator in so many of his works. The reader is left unguided among these two traders and their adventure, which makes the verdict all the more merciless. And like everything Conrad wrote, the story drew on his own life, a life impressive enough to require three lives.
The First Two Episodes
Born in 1857, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, anglicised upon his arrival in Britain as Joseph Conrad, belonged to a Polish noble family settled in Berdychiv, in today's Ukraine. His father, Apollo, a man of letters who had translated Shakespeare and Victor Hugo into Polish, introduced his only child to French and English literature. By 1861, Apollo's revolutionary activities and fervent advocacy of Polish independence from the Russian Empire had forced the family into exile. Shortly after, Apollo and his wife both died of tuberculosis, rendering Conrad an orphan. He was sent to live with his paternal uncle, from whom he eventually departed at the tender age of 16 for France to begin his life as a sailor. The departure itself, sparked by the writings of Balzac, Hugo, and Maupassant, stemmed from a simpler desire: to escape boredom. Boarding the Vienna express, Conrad would later describe this departure as akin to “a man entering a dream– which still continues.” Intoxicated by the sea novels of J.F. Cooper and Captain Marryat’s vignettes, he followed this dream into a life of adventure.
Marseille, from which he first sailed in 1874, gave him exactly that by the sea. Starting in the Mediterranean, his journeys carried him across the world, from South America to the Malay Archipelago and, like Kayerts and Carlier, to Africa. Conrad felt "a sacred fire burning in him" and relished the sea's language as "an instrument wrought into perfection by ages of experience," which he set out to master. Yet for Conrad the sea remained impenetrable and stingy to its suitors: unlike the earth, it cannot be subjugated. The ship, man's invention for venturing onto the waters, must therefore be respected, and serves in his fiction as a moral anchor of human courage and toil; given the choice, Conrad took the sail over the steamship of the ushering Industrial Age. Two decades of being shipwrecked, crushed by a falling spar, duelling, and falling in love made him a master mariner; by the autumn of 1893 he was ashore in London for good, still wandering, renting with his wife and two sons a series of houses from Kent to London. The second episode of his life as a sailor became the backdrop of the third.
That third episode would be cast in his third language. To another born Briton of Polish roots who did not speak Polish, Conrad once declared: I am more British than you, as you can do nothing about your Britishness. Raised a Francophone, introduced to English through his father's translations of Shakespeare, he grew through the merchant ranks on English course material on seamanship, and his preference for the Anglo world was that of a practical man: it was the largest, the most cosmopolitan, and far less bureaucratic than the French. He became a British citizen in 1886, between duties at sea; the Britain of his era was imperial, and that fact gave him security, employment, and a sense of belonging. In his own accounting, his life fell into three episodes: Poland, the sea, and authorship.
The Third Episode
This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man’s hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.
Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.
The Hollow Men III - T.S. Eliot
Conrad began writing his first novel, Almayer's Folly, in 1889, a tale set in the Malay Archipelago about a poor trader who dreams of discovering a gold mine and escaping with his daughter to Amsterdam, a story in which, as so often in Conrad, the European is outsmarted. Free to write in Polish, French, or English, he settled on the latter for what he called its plasticity, against the crystallised perfection of French—though the shadow of Gustave Flaubert lies visibly across the book, whose Madame Bovary and L’Éducation Sentimentale Conrad vigorously reread. The manuscript of Almayer's Folly accompanied Conrad on his final journey as a seafarer into the Congo Free State, where he nearly lost it and concocted the mise-en-scène of An Outpost of Progress and Heart of Darkness. The paternal uncle who had financed his embarkment from Marseille and subsidised his lavish spending habits died in 1894, leaving him a year's salary. The inheritance arrived just as the manuscript found its reader.
Submitted to Unwin, Almayer's Folly reached Edward Garnett, a failed novelist turned critic, whose wife Constance is remembered today for her translations of canonical Russian novels. Garnett became a lifelong friend to Conrad, and the key to English literary society; through this door came the celebrated Ford Madox Ford, and with him literary impressionism: the attempt to capture the transitory experience of our lives, embracing human experience as a succession of fragments, on the conviction that no perfect perception is possible. To a friend, Conrad described a work of art as "very seldom limited to one exclusive meaning and not necessarily tending to a definite conclusion." Like Saint-Exupéry after him, Conrad made his profession the template of his fiction—though where the Frenchman was a humanist, Conrad remained a Victorian pessimist. The pessimism found its form in Lord Jim.
Lord Jim (1900) was innovative above all for its shift of voices: the omniscient narrator yields to Marlow, who proves far more modest in his understanding. Set again in the Malay Archipelago, it narrates the story of the Patna, a ship bound for Mecca and abandoned at night by its crew (among them Jim) in fear of sinking. The Patna does not sink, however; the crew is prosecuted for negligence; and Jim, vilified and pursued by shame through the publicity of the case, refuses the return to society that Marlow offers him, until Marlow at last settles him as a trade representative on a remote island. The book is Conrad at his highest pitch: the riveting prose, the narrative architecture, the construction of Jim's complex and contradictory character, the questions of free will and responsibility and its principal character's tragic role. It was no bestseller, but London's literary elite recognised what had arrived.
Conrad's career straddles the seam between two ages. The Victorian world made him: its ethic of duty, seamanship, and restraint is the very standard against which Jim is measured. His greatest novels are nonetheless Edwardian products, written into a decade of imperial anxiety, anarchist bombs, and mounting doubt about the civilisational project, their irony knowing, urban, disenchanted. He judged the new century with instruments forged on sailing ships the steam age had made obsolete, which is why his characters so often fail: the code survives, but the world that sustained it has gone.
Nostromo (1904), arguably Conrad's finest long work, was poorly received, which wounded him immensely, as Conrad remained highly sensitive to how his work was received. Set in Costaguana, a fictitious Latin American republic ravaged by constant violence and political unrest, it braids heroism, politics, ethics, and the cycles of history, describing with rare precision the relationship between the colonial elite and capitalism, and the weight of the United States upon Latin America, a pointed critique of American imperial adventurism, written at the century's dawn. And it is Nostromo, more than any other book, that explains why Conrad's most demanding modern reader kept returning to him.
That reader was Edward Said, who counted two great intellectual presences in his life, Bach and Conrad—a cantus firmus against which everything else was counterpoint and who saw in Conrad the predecessor of Naipaul and Rushdie, the first great narrator of exile. For Said, Nostromo was a relentlessly open-ended, aggressively critical inquiry into the mechanisms, presuppositions, and abuses of imperialism; his complaint was Conrad's lack of political action: the tacit acceptance that colonialism was inevitable, the inability to imagine a non-European world on its own terms. Chinua Achebe, in his 1975 Chancellor's Lecture at Amherst, went further: Heart of Darkness, far from being the anti-imperialist masterpiece the Western canon takes it to be, reduces Africa to "a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognisable humanity", "the other world," a darkness against which European interiority can be lit. He anticipated the standard defence: the layered narration, with a frame narrator enclosing Marlow, creates ironic distance and rejects it; the device grants Marlow only "limited liability." Achebe's critics reply that using Africa as a mirror for European self-delusion is the book's purpose, not its failure; the honest verdict is perhaps that Conrad was at once anti-imperialist and imperialist, clear-eyed enough to condemn empire's rapacity yet unable to grant the colonised a narrative future; critiquing the practice of empire from within without ever escaping it. That the debate still burns—that Coppola could transplant the novella whole into Vietnam as Apocalypse Now—is itself the measure of the work; the blank spaces on Marlow's map still stand for our unsolved mysteries.
Conrad's clairvoyance did not stop at empire. He saw terrorism coming, too. The Secret Agent (1907) turns to placid imperial London: Adolf Verloc, a seedy Soho shopkeeper, at once nominal anarchist and paid embassy informer, is ordered to stage a senseless bombing of the Greenwich Observatory, an attack meant to overthrow not merely government but faith in science itself. He enlists his wife's disabled brother Stevie, who is blown to pieces. Verloc sees himself as a respectable man; the narrator, in famous deadpan irony, does not, treating radical and reactionary politics alike as mirror images of vanity and self-deception; humanity is tainted by corruption at every station. Under Western Eyes (1911) carries the theme to St. Petersburg: Razumov, a solitary student who wants only a quiet career under the autocracy, finds the revolutionary Haldin hiding in his rooms after assassinating a minister, and betrays him to the police. The novel is written against Dostoevsky, with Crime and Punishment as its target. Conrad inverts the narrative: Raskolnikov murders from a theory and is redeemed through suffering and faith; Razumov betrays from conformity and ends in deafness and ruin, with no grace offered.
Port After Stormie Seas
On Conrad's grave in Canterbury stand two lines of Spenser:
Sleepe after toyle, port after stormie seas, Ease after warre, death after life does greatly please.
Why, then, read Conrad? Because no writer earned his material more dearly; the savoir-faire of the master mariner and the couleur locale of four continents were not researched but lived, three lives folded into one Odyssean journey from Berdychiv to Canterbury. Because he uniquely enlarged both the techniques of the novel: the shifting voices, the impressionist fragments, the refusal of one exclusive meaning and the fates of its characters, who are tested, like Jim and Kayerts and Razumov, at the exact point where the high organisation of civilised crowds falls away. Because he saw, before the century did, what empire, terrorism, and revolution would make of it, and described them in an adopted language with a precision most native writers never reach. That is why we still ship out with him.
Words: Burak Ömer is a financial markets professional based in Belgium. He previously studied applied mathematics & philosophy.