The Dawn Watch – Maya Jasanoff
Where to start with Joseph Conrad? He is one of my favourite novelists and I have great admiration for the vigour of his writing style, something even more remarkable when you consider that English was his third language, learned when he was in his twenties. His writing career began when he responded to a competition in Tit-bits magazine.
Born in 1857 Conrad, or to give him his birth name Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, had a hell of a life. His parents and close family were involved in the Polish struggles for independence, his father was under surveillance and in Joseph’s formative years the family were sent east into exile. When he was orphaned as a teenager, he was assisted by his uncle to head west and realise his dream of going to sea. Settling in England – the British merchant navy was pre-eminent at the time – Conrad eventually became a captain but often had to settle for lower positions. His experiences included long passages on clipper ships to Australia, poodling around Singapore and its environs on a tramp steamer and enduring for a time a mind-bogglingly awful trip up the Congo at a time when the Belgians were raping and pillaging the country.
These experiences provided Conrad with enough source material to furnish his literary career. These days Conrad is under a bit of a cloud, thanks in part to a brutal critique of Conrad by Chinua Achebe in 1975 who called him a bloody racist and the Heart of Darkness the most despicable book. For those who seek it out Conrad is also guilty of reflecting the anti-semitic views of the time and with very few exceptions his books are about white males. Does this for the modern reader put him beyond the pale?
Jasanoff, in her magnificent melange of biography, literary criticism, history and travel writing, seeks to re-establish Conrad’s prominence in the literary world, by positioning him as a remarkably prescient author, grappling with the many of the issues that trouble us today – immigration, terrorism, amoral capitalism, imperial decline and rapid and disorientating technological change. Taking four of Conrad’s masterpieces to illustrate her central thesis, she points out how we have Russians interfering in the democratic processes of a state (The Secret Agent),an individual yearning for the gentler days of sail now superseded by steam (Lord Jim), the transience of empire through the realisation that the British Empire is soon to be replaced by American financial might (Nostromo) and that capitalism in its raw state can be more brutal than what it has supposed to have civilised (the Heart of Darkness).
She is surely right in viewing Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as an attack on the hypocrisy of the so-called civilising mission of capitalism, boiling it down to merely taking the earth and its resources “from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves”, a theme picked up in the characterisation of the grasping American capitalist, Mr Holroyd, in Nostromo. To see Conrad’s depiction of the horror of the Congo as purely racist entirely misses the point of where Conrad was coming from. And I have immense sympathy for the reading of The Secret Agent as much about human relationships with Winnie Verloc as the glue that binds the book together as a discussion of terrorism.
There is much to digest in a book which is written in an engaging style.
Let us hope that Jasanoff succeeds in rehabilitating Conrad’s reputation. He was very much admired by contemporary writers and very influential, particularly amongst writers who were experimenting with narrative techniques. His return to public favour is long overdue.
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