Among those authors whose lives are utterly fascinating Joseph Conrad's certain ranks high. His life falls into three distinct phases: his youth in Poland, his years on the sea, and his career as an author who became a master stylist and a leading writer of impressionist literature. He was born in 1874 into the life of the Polish landed gentry as Jozef Korzeniowski. Poland was at that time under Russian rule and his father, being on the wrong side of the political fence, was exiled into Russia. Conrad's mother died when he was 8, and he was raised by his uncle.
As a youth Conrad was an avid reader, particularly of the works, in translation, of Dickens and Shakespeare. But he was especially fascinated by the study geography and the lives of men who devoted themselves to the exploration of land and sea. One day as a child gazing at a map of Africa, he put his finger down on the Congo River and declared that one day he would go there. The wish was realized in 1890 when as a steamboat captain he navigated up the Congo, an experience that offered the inspiration for The Heart of Darkness.
He astounded his uncle when as a teenager he declared his determination to leave his land-locked Poland and go to sea. Finally securing permission, with the help of a tutor he made his way down to Marseilles, France, where in 1874 he entered the French navy, and his naval career began. As a neophyte sailor he had many adventures, including participating in smuggling goods into Spain during the Carlos uprisings.
Conrad recounts how--in 1874 or 75, he forgot which--he first heard words in the English language when a sailor shouted "Look out, there," and was enchanted by the sound. Joining the English merchant marine, he rises in its ranks to its highest by 1886. In 1890 he realized the dream of his youth by taking command of a river steamer and sailing up the Congo. But he contracted malaria, which necessitated a year of convalescence in England. Having made an attempt at writing a story--Almayer's Folly--prior to this time, and finding it well received, he soon abandoned his life on the sea, married, and quickly rose to become a master writer of English fiction.
Musing on his adopted career, he writes: "The truth of the matter is that my faculty to write in English is as natural as any other aptitude with which I might have been born. I have a strange and overpowering feeling that it had always been an inherent part of myself. English was for me neither a matter of choice nor adoption. The merest idea of choice had never entered my head. And as to adoption--well, yes, there was adoption; but it was I who was adopted by the genius of the language, which, directly I came out of the stammer stage, made me its own so completely that its very idioms, I truly believe, had a direct action on my temperament and fashioned my still plastic character." He speaks of "the sheer appeal of the language, my quickly awakened love for its prose cadences, a subtle and unforeseen accord of my emotional nature with its genius . . . You may take it from me that if I had not known English I wouldn't have written a line for print, in my life." (Cushwa, An Introduction to Conrad, 209, 210).
Conrad entered the fiction-writing profession at a time when its leading English practitioners--e.g., Henry James, Ford Maddox Ford--were experimenting with point of view, and developed what is know as literary impressionism. Quickly adopting the technique, Conrad becomes one of its masters, and The Heart of Darkness is a good example. Impressionism is motivated by the desire to explore the nature of personal reality. The Impressionists ask, "Where does reality really lie?" and answer, "Not simply out there, in the external world, but rather within the human breast." They therefore turn away from the objective points of view of an author like Dickens and position in their writings one or more characters from whose consciousness they relate their story.
Impressionist techniques have many advantages, among them an enhanced sense of immediacy on the part of the reader, together with a certain aesthetic distance, as the reader is seeing external details "second-hand," as it were. Impressionist authors carefully depict the development of awareness on the part of a viewing consciousness, thus giving them an additional tool for keeping the interest of the reader. The focus is often on confronting a mystery and exploring various interpretations of it. The convention of the unreliable narrator quickly develops, so that readers feel, were they in such a situation, they would see it differently. Thus impressionist stories often are ambiguous, inviting more than one interpretation, each quite plausible.
Therefore, as you read The Heart of Darkness, note carefully what type of person Marlow is. We see him becoming fascinated with the mystery of Kurtz and gradually learning about this strange idealist. Precisely what does Marlow learn, from his adventure up the Congo, about Africa, about Kurtz, about the human nature? Why does he draw the conclusions he does? Do you agree, or take issue? To what extent do your Christian convictions shape your own impressions? We should have much to take about in our forthcoming sessions.
Chinua Achebe, in Things Fall Apart, adopts a more traditional third-person point of view to his story. His purpose is to give a fair and objective presentation of the time-honored customs and traditions of the African tribe in which he was himself born and raised. Born in 1930 into a Christian family in the Igbo tribe of Nigeria, he was raised in what he describes as the "crossroads of cultures." "On one arm of the cross," he explains,"we sang hymns and read the Bible night and day. On the other, my father's brother and his family, blinded by heathenism, offered food to idols." He was educated in a missionary school and an African university, where he read much colonial literature. He recounts how he unconsciously identified with the white man in these stories until he read The Heart of Darkness and realized that he really belonged with the savages Marlow saw dancing on the shores of the Congo, and he condemned Conrad's work as racist. When Things Fall Apart was widely hailed as a master novel, he continued to write novels in which he explores the nature of European colonialism and its effect upon the African peoples.
Things Fall Apart does not deal with the horrendous wrong of the slave trade, but an untold quantity of native Africans were captured, herded on ships like cattle, and taken to Europe and America to be sold into slavery. In America, several Africans managed to escape and gain a measure of freedom in the North. Some fifty book-length slave narratives exist, most of them published by the Abolitionist Movement in the North. Frederick Douglas's Narrative and Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl are the most famous.
Douglas was born and raised a slave in Maryland, from which he devised his escape in 1838. A self-educated, brilliant man, he rose to become a powerful orator and ardent advocate for emancipation of his fellow Africans. During the days of Reconstruction, he was appointed to various governmental positions, finally becoming minister to Haiti in 1889. He publishes several accounts of his experiences; we will read the first of these, published in 1845 and very influential in effecting Emancipation.
As horrendous as the fate of male salves was, that of female slaves was still worse. Harriet Jacobs's graphic account of her experiences brings into sharp focus the plight of the black woman. If time affords us opportunity, we will close on a lighter note, considering how Joel Chandler Harris's Adventures of Briar Rabbit offers, in quite another vein, comments on Southern social realities.
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