Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad
    Biography
Born in 1857, died in 1924.
 He uses literary techniques which were familiar earlier, but also introduces some new techniques.
He was of Polish origin, he begins this trend which will continue in the modern British literature, which is that some of the most prominent names of the British literature are not British at all. Joseph Conrad was Pole, T.S. Elliot and Ezra Pound were Americans, James Joyce, William Butler Yeats and Bernard Shaw were Irish, so there are few English men and women, and English literature is no longer something written by the English.
  He was born in Ukraine but his parents were Polish. His life from the very beginning was a series of adventures.
He travelled quite a lot, he was a seamen, belonging to the British merchant navy.
He visited France, GB, Congo in Africa, South America.
His life of adventure begins as early as his childhood. His parents were foreigners in the Russian part of Ukraine, being Polish. Conrad’s father was very well-read and educated, also a political activist who even took part in one of the rebellions of the Poles in Russia. He was something like a persona non grata for the political regime and the family was on the run all the time. He grew up in a very tense political atmosphere. At some point they settled as refugees in Russia, so very early in his life, Conrad learned what it was like to live in exile, being constantly on the run. He experienced very early on the atmosphere of uncertainty and suspicion.
He was only 12 when his mother died in 1869.
His father died in the same year in Krakow in Poland, where the family settled again. Conrad spent his boyhood in Poland, went to Gymnasium there and stayed with his mother’s family, so he was an orphan.
During his school years in Krakow he begins dreaming of travelling to distant lands and continents.
As a young man of 16 or 17 he made up his mind to travel the world on trade ships. His family disapproved, and he decided to leave home, which he does at the age of 17 in 1874, goes to France, Marseilles.
While in Marseilles he went to his first sea voyages. He also gambled and fell in love and due to disappointment he attempted to commit suicide.
 In 1878 he joins the British Merchant Navy and remained in service for the next 16 years. He actually made a career in it. He even got British citizenship, but never fully mastered English language, which was peculiar, given that he became a famous author of British literature. For that reason, construction of his sentences was always exotic so to say and he created an interesting language with a foreign touch.
In 1895, at the end of the 19th century he begins writing his first novel. He was 32 then. The first novel was not that important as a piece of good literature, but it was his first novel. The title was Almayer’s folly.
In the following year, 1896 he travelled to Congo in Africa for the first time. This trip to Congo was the source of his story Heart of Darkness. He then remained a sailor for some time, until he changed profession and decided to begin a new career as a novelist.
Generally he wrote 31 books. He married in 1896 and that was not a happy married life, they were constantly struck with poverty. Despite difficulties he kept friendships with prominent writers. Another important work of his was the story entitled The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ in 1897, and then the Heart of Darkness in 1899. In 1900 he wrote Lord Jim. All three of the mentioned works had enormous importance to his career. Many consider the novel Nostromo his masterpiece, which was created in 1904. In 1906 the Secret Agent and in 1910 Under Western Eyes. The last two were political novels in which he showed the world the elements of detective stories. His late novels were Chance in 1912 and Victory in 1914. He also wrote the short stories.
    The Heart of Darkness
 fist published in a magazine form in 1899 in Blackwoods Magazine
1902 it appeared in the book form.
-----On one level, the surface level, The Heart of Darkness can be read as the criticism of imperialism and colonialism
----On the deeper level, it is a story about symbolism, about metaphysical struggle between light and darkness, between good and evil.
character of Mr. Kurtz,  central characters apart from the narrator Marlow.
When Marlow arrives to Congo he is appalled (zgrožen ) with how the black people are treated.
Conrad returned from this trip ill physically and morally,  a trigger that made him the great writer.
Congo belonged to Belgium King Leopold the II.
Conrad came to see very soon that the point of colonisation was personal enrichment and enrichment of Europe.
The King actually said in his speech
that they wanted to pierce the darkness which enveloped the entire population, to root out illiteracy and that it was a mission of white Europeans to spread the light of knowledge, literacy and education. That was of course far from their true intentions.
Conrad was disgusted with what he saw in Congo when he visited and it was profoundly shocking experience for him. The story he describes in the Heart of Darkness matches the route Conrad took previously. The journey is ironically, or it should be, from civilisation to darkness, but what he finds it there is opposite, not because of primitive black people, but because of the brutal whites.
 Mr. Kurtz is a symbol of white colonial Europe who came to bring civilisation, but gradually sinks into the wilderness, but not the wilderness of Africa, but the wilderness and darkness of his own soul. .
Generally the book is divided into three  3 major parts.
1.    The first part covers the departure from London, sea voyage to Congo and arrival to Congo (Marlow is the narrator) and brutal depictions of slavery and colonialism, treatment of black people by the white masters. In this first part he hears the first rumours about Mr. Kurtz, who lived with the black woman. Marlow gets more and more interested in meeting him.
2.    Second part is more or less description of his journey up the river.Then there is a typical Conradian description of the jungle. There are also examples of metaphysical symbolism where jungle is no longer merely external manifestation of nature, but it becomes a symbol, a metaphor of wildness of human soul, the jungle of human mind. Nobody wrote fiction like that before. There is always a level of metaphysical symbolism where jungle becomes a symbol of human mind.
3.    Finally in the 3rd part, Marlow finds Kurtz on his deathbed. He describes him as almost a creature from hell. He is astonished and frightened by what he finds in Kurtz in this metaphysical sense of the word, how dark his soul has become.
The last words that Kurtz utters are: horror, horror. Conrad does not decipher for us what it means, but he suggests how horrible his own soul has become and how he (Kurtz) is disgusted by his own soul. That would be the main plot. Kurtz dies and Marlow later goes to London to visit Kurtz’s fiancée. She wants to know what his last words were and Marlow lies about it. He decides to tell a noble lie instead of the truth to comfort her. He says that her name was the last word he uttered before he died. That would be the story given in the Heart of Darkness.