Joseph Conrad after a Century [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 217-228]

CONRAD AFTER A CENTURY
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Still, when we now approach the beginnings of the 21st century,
Conrad's reputation as one of the greatest modem novelists looks securely
established.
What did he write about? What did he notice in the world, long gone
now, and how did he see it?
He saw it, to begin with, as a world in the state of a multifaceted
crisis; of change which did not translate into progress, as many of his contemporaries tended to believe; of overt and violent clashes between forces
and tendencies none of which deserved full support; of a less tangible but
ubiquitous struggle between what he called "les valeurs ideales," idealistic
values, and the prevailing materialism.
The world of Conrad's experience encompassed almost the entire
earth as known to man a century ago: from London, the commercial capital
of the globe, to the jungles of the Congo; from what is today Indonesia to
Latin America; from northern Russia to southern Italy; from Australian bush
to the streets of Geneva. He did not know, nor wrote about, Northern America-but did not leave it unnoticed either, as shows his great novel Nostromo
with its criticism of the role played by US capital in Latin America.
He also knew and sailed many seas-and all the oceans. In his rendering of the life of seamen he concentrated not on adventure, but on moral
and philosophical questions, posed by their existence and their work. He
returned, insistently, obsessively, to the problem of the relation between
man's work and its rewards, between man's worth and his social and economic status. The glaring discrepancy between the hard toil of seamen
who risked their lives almost daily-and their meagre pay, was for him a
model of the human condition in general, with its contrast between leading
a moral life and being successful. Behind the question of social and economic injustice, which he neither glossed over nor waxed sentimental about,
he saw a more essential issue: the need for a hierarchy of values founded
on something else than financial gain and social position.
In the far-away, exotic lands of Africa and Asia, at that time mostly
European colonies, Conrad saw progressing destruction of indigenous cultures, sometimes barbaric but usually much more sophisticated than the
colonists wanted to admit. Destruction undertaken in the name of Western
civilization, which was a slogan frequently covering nothing else than greed,
corruption, and wanton disregard for humanity. But in his "Heart of Darkness" he showed something else: the ideology of a superior race put to the
service of a dark, savage urge for power and domination. He gave, in the
figure of the talented, idealistic and murderous Kurtz, a portrait of a protoNazi, of a totalitarian fanatic.
When we read Conrad's description of forced labour at the Company's
station and the grove of death there, we cannot but feel that he discerned
in the depths of the Belgian Congo a prototype of the 20th-century Soviet