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

CONRAD AFTER A CENTURY
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interests."3 We hear about them in one of the culminating scenes of Nostromo, when Dr. Monygham says: "There is no peace and no rest in the
development of material interests. They have their law, and their justice.
But it is founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude,
without the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral
principle."4 Their rule results in the calculation of the value of every human
act or person in the terms of financial worth or gain.
But Conrad's disapproval of the present was not linked to an idealized
vision of a better past or a glorious future. He did not reject the present;
he only regarded it coolly, with his deeply rooted scepticism about human
nature, which he did not consider naturally good.
However, even when criticising most severely, he was never petulant.
While castigating self-satisfaction, he was also against despair. The universe
we live within may be devoid of any inherent ethical idea; it is full of "cruel
and absurd contradictions," but it is a "spectacle for awe, love, adoration,
or hate... but... never for despair!" Our "appointed task on this earth"
is mainly a task for our conscience.5 Without illusions about human nature,
Conrad believed in man's indomitable spirit.
Art was one of its manifestations. "For in art alone of all the enterprises of men there is a meaning in endeavour disassociated from success[,]
and merit-if any merit there be-is not wholly centered in achievement
but may be faintly discerned in the aim."6
I have mentioned Joseph Conrad's artistic program, as expounded in
his Preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus.' Let us now have a closer look
at it. This program implies a renunciation of the fantastic and fanciful,
of fable-making and inventing non-existent worlds. It postulates concentration on the real, essential, and true. It defines art, in the celebrated formula,
as "a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the
visible universe, by bringing to light the truth."7 Conrad declares himself
here, in fact, as a representationalist, a writer who wants to describe what
there is. "Inspiration comes from the earth, which has a past, a history,
a future, not from the cold and immutable heaven."8 A novelist's imagination is for him essentially a re-imagination, a reconstruction. The processes
of learning about facts, of gaining knowledge about an event or a person,
of searching for the truth, are a most frequent motif in Conrad's works.
He traces, and reproduces with a highly inventive skill the sinuous and
bumpy ways of our understanding. Lord Jim can be read also as a textbook in the psychology of knowledge.
In his admirable book Conrad in the Nineteenth Century Professor
Ian Watt analyses Conrad's device of "delayed decoding." In applying
this device, Conrad first presents a sense impression but withholds "naming
it or explaining its meaning until later; as readers we witness every step
by which the gap between the individual perception and its cause is belatedly
closed within the consciousness of the protagonist."9 But that was only