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NY Times Sunday Book Review, Nov. 26 2017
The Contradictions of Joseph Conrad
By NGUGI wa THIONG’O
THE DAWN WATCH
Joseph Conrad in a Global World
By Maya Jasanoff
Illustrated. 375 pp. Penguin Press. $30.
I turned my back on reading Joseph Conrad in 1967. This was also the
year that I published “A Grain of Wheat,” my third novel, which I wrote
soon after reading Conrad’s “Under Western Eyes.” I could not put words
to what repelled me, because, despite the unease, his influence on my
work was unmistakable, and long lasting. “A Grain of Wheat” marked a
dramatic shift for me away from the linear plots and single points of
view of my first two novels to the multiple narrative voices and diverse
temporal and geographic spaces of my later works. The difference in
style was a result of my encounter with Conrad.
The majesty and musicality of his well-structured sentences had so
thrilled me as a young writer that I could cure a bout of writer’s block
simply by listening to the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony or
reading the opening pages of Conrad’s “Nostromo.” It instantly brought
my mojo back.
I am not alone in being so impacted. In Gabriel García Márquez’s
“Hundred Years of Solitude,” the sweep of history and dictatorships that
litter the social landscape of the novel reminded me strongly of
“Nostromo,” Conrad’s complex epic about an imaginary South American
republic. García Márquez’s title even seems to nod at the fictional
historical tome contained within Conrad’s novel: “Fifty Years of Misrule.”
In her fascinating book, “The Dawn Watch,” the Harvard professor Maya
Jasanoff offers detailed background on the evolution of Conrad’s books,
describing how each was a sort of reckoning with Western conquest and
advancing globalization. We learn, for example, that “Nostromo” was
written as Conrad delved into the oral and written sources about the
“liberation” of Latin America that often ended in Western-backed
dictatorship. As he was writing, he was taking in news of the crisis
over the Panama Canal, an episode of political and military manipulation
in which America emerged as a new, wily imperial power. In other words,
Conrad and García Márquez were drawing from the same well of
post-colonial Latin American history.
In the same way, Conrad and Chinua Achebe are also connected. And yet,
Achebe led the charge against Conrad. In 1975 the Nigerian novelist
delivered a lecture, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Joseph Conrad’s
Heart of Darkness,” which was then published as an essay. He built on
the insights of the groundbreaking literary critic Es’kia Mphahlele, who
accused Europeans like Conrad of depicting Africans as acted on by
history instead of making it. Achebe went ever further, calling Conrad a
“bloody racist.” This critical perspective has become an inevitable
companion to any discussion of the writer’s work. Jasanoff herself uses
it to frame her quest for a more complex vision of Conrad.
Achebe’s essay helped explain what I had found repellent in Conrad’s
work and why I’d stopped reading him. In the novels set in the outer
reaches of European empire the native characters always seemed to merge
with their environment, reminiscent of the Hegelian image of Africa as a
land of childhood still enveloped in the dark mantle of the night. I
accepted everything Achebe said about Conrad’s biases.
And yet, I could not wholly embrace Achebe’s overwhelmingly negative
view of “Heart of Darkness” or Conrad in general. Somehow, the essay
failed to explain what had once attracted me: Conrad’s ability to
capture the hypocrisy of the “civilizing mission” and the material
interests that drove capitalist empires, crushing the human spirit.
Jasanoff does not forgive Conrad his blindness, but she does try to
present his perspective on the changing, troubled world he traveled, a
perspective that still has strong resonance today.
In “Heart of Darkness,” Conrad’s literary stand-in Charles Marlow talks
of imperialism as a form of robbery accompanied by violence and
aggravated murder on a grand scale. Colonial ventures are mostly about
taking the earth away “from those who have a different complexion or
slightly flatter noses than ourselves.” This captures, in one sentence,
capitalism’s racist roots in slavery and conquest. Conrad also
anticipated a capitalist system’s capacity to dismantle societies, a
point he illustrated through his depiction of Mr. Holroyd, the cynical
American silver and steel tycoon in “Nostromo.” Jasanoff does an
excellent job pulling on all these threads.
I suspect Achebe missed this side of Conrad because he didn’t stop to
consider the diabolical character of Kurtz, the brilliant station agent
gone rogue whom it is Marlow’s task to retrieve. In “Heart of Darkness,”
the final image of Kurtz, the man of light and reason, is one of him
hedged by human heads, capturing the horror of imperialism and the
hollowness of the enlightenment philosophy with which colonialism
wrapped itself. It is a scene reminiscent of Marx’s comparison of
bourgeois progress to the pagan idol who drank nectar but only from the
skulls of the slain. Congo was littered with 10 million skulls, the work
of civilized hunters for rubber and ivory to meet the greed of King
Leopold of Belgium.
The Conrad who was able to imagine Kurtz in this way is often obscured
by Marlow, Conrad’s literary alter ego. In “The Dawn Watch,” Jasanoff
goes behind the mask and, like Stanley in search of Livingstone, or
Marlow in search of Kurtz, sets out to find the elusive Conrad by
tracing the physical, historical, biographical and literary footsteps of
the writer. Born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857, in a Poland
then under the thumb of czarist Russia and to parents engrossed in the
struggle for independence, he later becomes a homeless traveler of the
oceans, and eventually ended up as Joseph Conrad, an English-speaking
citizen of the most global of the European capitalist empires of the
time. Jasanoff returns Conrad to all of these contexts, understanding
what impact they had on his novels.
In the process, she becomes a detective piecing together the incidents
big and small that formed classics like “Lord Jim,” “Heart of Darkness,”
“Under Western Eyes” and “Nostromo.” She helps us make sense of the
seeming contradictory decision on Conrad’s part to write about the
effect of empire but never set his novels in any of the colonial
possessions of his adopted homeland, Britain, letting their actions
unfold in mostly Dutch, Belgian and Spanish colonies.
And yet he remains one of us, a literary brother to Achebe. As Jasanoff
reminds us, Conrad and his family were victims of the Russian Empire.
Achebe and his people were victims of a Western empire. Both writers
embraced English; Achebe talks of it as a gift which he intended to use.
Jasanoff describes an incident in which Conrad, after delivering the
manuscript of “Under Western Eyes,” broke down, becoming delirious and
mumbling to himself in Polish for weeks. It wasn’t the manuscript that
triggered this collapse but rather a heated exchange with his agent in
which, as Conrad later reminded him, ”You told me that ‘I did not speak
English’ to you.”
This Conrad may have looked at imperialism through the eyes of both a
deracinated Polish nationalist and of a grateful member of the British
Empire. His art, which he defined as the capacity to make readers hear,
feel and see, was able to capture the contradictions within empires and
the resistance to them.
This is the Conrad who comes alive in Jasanoff’s masterful study. “The
Dawn Watch” will become a creative companion to all students of his
work. It has made me want to re-establish connections with the Conrad
whose written sentences once inspired in me the same joy as a musical
phrase.
Ngugi wa Thiong’o is a professor of English and comparative literature
at the University of California, Irvine, and the author, most recently,
of “Birth of a Dream Weaver.”
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