The Wild Colonial...

I was a bit disturbed to see that many influential literary analysts are now looking askance at Joseph Conrad, as news of Conrad's racism
is being taken as gospel in many literary circles.

Mark Twain is also being tidied up and made palatable for readers
who do not like the words he used. Having already lived through how Enid Blython was scrubbed to within an inch of her limited
output, with characters being denounced as either violent or racist, I expect this trend will continue for some time.

In the past sexual matters were taboo.
This has been replaced by race and a sort of ongoing witch hunt for evidence of
colonial sympathies in writers from the past.

We are all people of our time. If one writes about murderers, does it mean one is a murderer or that one agrees with one's characters' actions?
Any reader who cannot separate the writer from the narrative voices within any text is going to be easily led astray.

Joseph Conrad gives a very cogent analysis of the colonial world in which he worked for years before
becoming a writer. George Orwell in "Shooting an Elephant" explores the realisation that fell upon his mind
during a stint in India where he had to face the implications of how the coloniser fails to make any impact
on the local scene.

This is not to underestimate the problem.


Achebe is right to have looked more closely at "Heart of Darkness" and
recognise how it represents the large un-named mass of humanity that peopled the Congo as lacking in individuality,
caught in tribal ritual. But Conrad was re-living an experience that had brought on a major nervous breakdown in
his own life and was bringing the reader, gingerly, inching every inch of the way, up the river of darkness towards
consciousness of the fearsome task the invaders had brought upon themselves when they decided to use the
richness of the place for their own ends.

The French are everywhere in Conrads' universe.
The French Frigate, a metaphor of impotence,
is "firing into a Continent".

Was Conrad anti-French? Or was he merely stating the obvious? That all efforts to control nature are futile.


A question that brings me to the Polish identity that Conrad seems to express consistently in all his work.
What struck me most when I first read him was the ponderous, mitteleuropean lack of any sense of humour, as I know it.
Bucolic laughter is never found, but a subtle, incisive sense of irony that allows
for a smile, often bitter, of recognition. Conrad's characters are, invariably, and given the obsessive nature of their passions, tragically,
on a quest.
"The Truth" looms large. Marlow hangs on every story told about
"Lord Jim" with a tenacity of purpose that is only equalled by Jim's insistance on redeeming his own fortunes
and reclaiming the honour of his name.


Chekhov put his finger on the problem..

"Life is terrible and marvelous, and so, however terrible a story you tell in Russia, however you embroider it with nests of robbers, long knives and such marvels, it always finds an echo of reality in the soul of the listener, and only a man who has been a good deal affected by education looks askance distrustfully..."


What is the true nature of the case?

In "Lord Jim" we could be reading a Freudian analytical paper.

Perhaps what we have to come to accept, as readers, is that, as with all the real, mysterious people we meet every day,
we shall never truly know?

(A comment has been sent to "Detectives Beyond Borders". The question about
how wealthy groups protect their own interests and members is central to all
crime fiction.



"The remarkable thing about Jim is that so many people within the ex-pat community wanted to help him, but he kept moving on.

Truly a romantic figure, as Stein (the butterfly collector) says.")

To be discussed...