Chapter 10 On Joseph Conrad

Suddenly, our guest left us, before we had time to prepare our minds or consider the words of farewell; and his informality, his departure without saying goodbye, was in harmony with his mysterious settlement in this country many years ago.For there was always a certain air of mystery surrounding him.This air of mystery stems partly from his Polish ancestry, partly from his memorable looks, and partly from his strange choice: he would rather live in the backcountry, free from gossip and invitations, and therefore, The news about him can only be obtained by relying on the evidence provided by the simple villagers who are used to calling at the door bell. According to their reports, the strange host is well-mannered, bright-eyed, and speaks English with a strong sense of humor. foreign accent.

To be sure, death tends to hasten and concentrate our memories, but Conrad's genius has an element of inaccessibility that is fundamental rather than accidental.His reputation in recent years, apparently extraordinary, is undoubtedly the highest in England; yet he is not a writer for the masses.Some read his work with enthusiastic joy, others found him cold and lacklustre.Among his readers are people of very different ages and hobbies.Schoolboys of fourteen rush through Mallett, Scott, Hunty, Dickens, and swallow him whole with other writers; sophisticated and fastidious readers, penetrating into the heart of literature, There, a few precious crumbs were turned over and over again, and Conrad was carefully selected for their banquet.Of course, where one always finds awkwardness and incongruity, a source of incongruity can be found in his sense of beauty.Readers who read Conrad's novels must feel the same way Helen did when she looked in the mirror. When she looked at her figure in the mirror, she would understand that no matter what she did, she could not be regarded as an ordinary woman under any circumstances. .Conrad was so gifted, so trained himself, and so indebted to a peculiar language whose special charm lay in its Latin rather than in its Saxon quality, that he It seems impossible that there could be any clumsy or meaningless failure in the writing.His lovers—his style—are sometimes a little sleepy at rest.But let us go and talk to her, and she will loom towards us with grace, with what color, triumph, and majesty!However, this is debatable: if he had not been so constantly concerned with the appearance of the works he had to write while composing them, Conrad might have achieved both high reputation and popular popularity.They stall, hamper, distract artistic effect, said his critics, pointing to the famous passages; and to extract them from their context and exhibit them with other broken flowers of English prose has become a habit.They complain: he is self-conscious, dead, polished, to whom his own voice is more dear than the cry of a human being in pain.This criticism is familiar to us all, and it is as hard to refute as the comment of the deaf when the orchestra played "Figaro".They saw the symphony orchestra; they heard a bleak, vague grinding sound in the distance; their own comments were interrupted, and they naturally concluded that if the fifty fiddlers went Rather than rubbing Mozart pieces here, they could better serve the purpose of life.Beauty teaches, beauty is a teacher, and since her teaching and her voice are inseparable, how can we convince those who cannot hear her voice?Go and read Conrad, not in bits but in bulk, though apparently Conrad's concern was only to show us the beauty of the sea at night, and whoever is in that rather dull and low music If he doesn't hear its meaning, its pride, its vast and unalterable wholeness, doesn't feel that good is better than evil, and that loyalty, integrity, and courage are the signs of good, then he must really have lost his grasp. The meaning of Conrad's text.Capturing such information from the composition of these works, however, is tricky business.Drained in our little saucers, without the mystery and magic of language, they lose their power to excite and stimulate, the terrific force that is an enduring quality of Conrad's prose.

For it was by virtue of a certain fiery air about him, of a leader and captain, that Conrad had captured the hearts of teenagers.Until he wrote Nostromo, young readers were quick to perceive that his characters were fundamentally simple and heroic, however subtle their ideas and however devious their creators were.They are seafarers accustomed to solitude, who clash with nature but live in harmony with people.Nature is their adversary; it is she who inspires the masculine qualities of honour, boldness, and fidelity;In the first place, it was nature that made such surly, weather-beaten characters as Captain Wheeley and old Singleton, who were ambiguous, but shone brightly in their ambiguity, and to Conrad, They are the top of our race, and he never tires of singing his praises:

They were strong once, as strong as those who know neither doubt nor hope.They had been impatient and patient, violent and loving, brutal and loyal.Well-intentioned people have tried to portray these people as wailing with every morsel of food, running and toiling in fear for their lives.In reality, they only knew toil, poverty, violence, and debauchery—but no fear, and no desire to harbor a grudge in their hearts.They are unruly but encouraging; they are silent--yet they are manly enough to despise in their hearts the sentimental voices that lament their hard fate.It was a unique fate, their own; and it seemed to them the prerogative of the chosen and the best to endure it!They were a generation that lived in silence and duty, never knowing the sweetness of love and the protection of family - and not being threatened at the end by a narrow grave.They are eternal children of the mysterious sea.

Such were the characters of his early works, Lord Jim, The Typhoon, The Black Sailor on the Narcissus, and ; and these books, whatever the changing fashions, are unshakable in our canon. .But the qualities on which they depend for their height are not found in simple adventure stories such as Mallett's or Cooper's.For this is clear: to admire and celebrate such a person and such a deed romantically, wholeheartedly, with the ardor of a lover, you must have a double eye; you must see both the inside and the outside.To celebrate their silence, you need a voice.To appreciate their resilience, you have to be sensitive to fatigue.You had to be able to live under the same conditions as Wheelley and Singleton, and hide from their suspicious eyes the qualities that made you understand them.Only Conrad could live this double life, for Conrad was made of two persons: alongside the oceangoing captain was the delicate, refined, fastidious analyst he called Marlowe.He described Marlowe as "a most deliberate and most understanding man."

Marlowe is one of those natural observers who is happiest in retirement.Marlowe liked best to sit on the deck, in the dark bay of the Thames, smoking and reminiscing; behind his smoke ring spewed circles of beautiful words, until the summer night was full of smoke and became A little foggy.At the same time, Marlowe has a deep respect for those who have sailed with him, but he also sees their humor.He can sniff out and paint brilliantly the animated characters who successfully prey on the dopey old sailor.He has an eye for human flaws; his humor is ironic.Nor did Marlowe live entirely behind the smoke rings of his own cigars.He had a habit of opening his eyes suddenly and looking—a pile of rubbish, a port, a corner of a store—and describing in full the light of burning smoke rings that shone in front of the mysterious background. things.Both introspective and analytical, Marlowe was aware of something special.He said that the ability would come to him suddenly, for example, when he would overhear a French senior seaman muttering: "My God! How time flies!" He commented:

Nothing [he remarked] is more mundane than this sentence; but for me it is in tune with a certain visual impression.It is amazing how we walk through life with half-closed eyes, deaf ears, and dormant minds. …Nevertheless, there are hardly any of us who have not experienced this rare moment of awakening: we see, hear, understand, many things—everything—before we slip back into a pleasant trance flashed by.When he spoke, I looked up and I saw him like I had never seen him before. Thus, on that dark background, he painted picture after picture; first of all, pictures of ships: ships at anchor; ships galloping before a storm; The setting sun and the morning light; he painted the night; he painted the sea in all its forms; he painted the bright splendor of the eastern harbors, men and women, their houses, and their gestures.He was a precise, unflinching observer, accustomed to "an absolute fidelity to his feelings and perceptions," which, Conrad writes, "is a writer's most exuberant creation." What the moment must hold on to." Sometimes Marlowe slips out a few lines of epitaph, unusually quiet and sympathetic, that remind us, through all the beauty and splendor that shines before us, of the background dim.

So, by a rough distinction, we would conclude that it was Marlowe who commented and Conrad who composed.This leads us to realize that our account of that change is poorly grounded; Conrad tells us that it happened while he was writing the last story in his book The Typhoon—the relationship between these two old friends. A certain alternation of , produced "a subtle change of an inspired quality". "...for some reason, it seems that there is nothing left to write about in this world." Let us assume that it was Conrad, and it was Conrad the writer who looked back with melancholy satisfaction on the stories he had told. Having said the above; he probably felt that he could never write a better storm scene than he did in "The Black Sailor on the Narcissus," or that he could never write a better storm scene than he did in "Lord Jim." A faithful tribute to the fine qualities of British seamen.It was then that the commentator Marlowe reminded him that, in the course of nature, man must grow old, sit on deck and smoke, and give up sailing.He reminded him, however, that those hard times were stored in their memory, and he would even suggest that while there was nothing more to be said about Captain Wheeley and his relationship with nature, there was nothing left to say on shore. There are a multitude of men and women whose relationship, though a more personal one, is perhaps worth examining.If we further assume that there was a Henry James novel on board and that Marlowe gave it to his friend to read in bed, we can find support for our supposition from the following facts—on a In 905 Conrad wrote a good essay on the master.

The dominant partner for many years, then, was none other than Marlowe. "Nostromo", "Fate" and "Golden Arrow" are the masterpieces of the Ma-Kang alliance in that period. Some people continue to believe that this is the most full and fulfilling period.They will say: the human mind is more intricate than the forest; it has its storms; it has its nocturnal creatures; His adversary is man, not nature; his ordeal is in society, not in solitude.For them there was always a special fascination in those books, those bright eyes that fell not only on the sea but on bewildered minds as well.But it must be admitted that if Marlowe so advised Conrad to change his point of view, it was brave advice.For a novelist's eye is both complex and idiosyncratic: it is complex because behind and beyond his characters he must establish something stable to which he can relate them up; it is peculiar because, since he is a solitary individual with a certain feeling, the facets of life of which he can be sure are strictly limited.Such a delicate balance can easily be upset.After the mid-terms, Conrad could no longer maintain a perfect relationship between his characters and their backgrounds.He no longer trusts the more worldly characters of his later works as he trusts the sailors of his earlier works.When he has to point out their relation to the novelist's world--the world of values ​​and judgments--he is far less sure of what those values ​​really are.Thus, the phrase "he steered the helm carefully" appears again and again at the end of a storm, with a complete moralizing in it.However, in this more crowded and complex world, such simple and clear words are becoming less and less appropriate.Complex men and women, with many interests and relations, would never bear such a simple judgment; had they accepted it, many important elements in them would be missed by it.It was necessary, however, for Conrad's genius, with its florid and romantic charms, to find some laws to which its creations could try to follow.Basically—and this is still his belief—the world of civilized, self-aware people is based on "a few very simple concepts of thought"; Where in the world do we find them?There are no masts in the parlor; no typhoon comes to test the existence of politicians and businessmen.Searching everywhere without finding such a pillar, the world in Conrad's later work has an involuntary haze, an uncertainty, almost a sense of disillusionment that bewilders and fatigues.In the darkness we catch only the noble and loud notes of yesteryear: fidelity, passion, honor, devotion--always beautiful, but now a little tired of repeating them, as if times had changed.Maybe it was Marlowe's fault.His habits of thought were somewhat fixed and rigid.He sits too long on deck; his soliloquy is exquisite, but he is poor at conversation; and those "momentary visions" flickering and flickering are not a steady lamp to illuminate life. Ripples and its long and gradual years of development.First, perhaps he did not consider what kind of beliefs Conrad should have if he were to create, which is the first basic question.

So while we'll explore some of his later work and bring back some rare mementos, there are many trails that most of us won't tread.It is the early works—Lord Jim, The Typhoon, The Black Sailor on the Narcissus—that we read in their entirety.What work by Conrad will live on forever?Where shall we place him in the ranks of novelists?When other people ask these questions, we are reminded of these early works, and they have the air of telling us something very old and quite true, and what was hidden in the past is now revealed; These works, such questions and comparisons seem a bit trivial.Whole and demure, quite austere and wonderfully beautiful, they emerge in our memory as first one star slowly and majestically appearing in the sky, and then another, on this hot summer night.