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Conrad was an innovative novelist as well as one of the finest stylists of modern English literature. His novels are complex moral and psychological examinations of the ambiguous nature of good and evil. His characters are repeatedly forced to acknowledge their own failings and the weakness of their ideals against all forms of corruption; the most honorable characters are those who realize their fallibility but still struggle to uphold the dictates of conscience. To examine these dilemmas, Conrad devised narrative techniques that more completely involve the reader in the conflicts of his characters than did traditional novels.

Conrad was born in 1857 in a Russian-ruled province of Poland. He was exiled with his parents to northern Russia in 1863 following his parents' participation in the Polish independence movement. His parents' health rapidly deteriorated in Russia, and, after their deaths in 1868, Conrad lived in the homes of relatives, where he was often ill and received sporadic schooling. At sixteen, Conrad pursued a career as a seaman, sailing to Martinique and the West Indies. Although he knew very little English at the time, he joined the British merchant marines in 1878; during his ten years of service, he became a naturalized British citizen, traveled to Africa, Australia, India, and the Orient, rose to the rank of Captain in the service, and mastered the English language.

Poor health forced Conrad to retire from the merchant marines. In 1894, he began a career as a writer, basing much of his work on his experience as a seaman. Conrad wrote much of his first novel, (1895), while he was still in the service. Regarding its publication in 1895, Conrad later remarked: "the only doubt I suffered, after the publication of was whether I should write another line for print...." Conrad struggled for the rest of his life to earn a living as a writer. In addition to his financial difficulties, he found writing in English to be a slow and agonizing ordeal, and many critics have noted the effects upon his work of such lifelong conditions as neurasthenia and fear of inadequacy. While the 1913 novel was Conrad's first financial and critical success, his novels and short stories published during the first decade of the twentieth century are currently regarded as his most important and enduring works. Conrad suffered a heart attack and died in his home in Kent, England, in 1924.

Throughout his career, Conrad examined the impossibility of living by a traditional code of conduct: his novels postulate that the complexity of the human spirit allows neither absolute fidelity to any ideal nor even to one's conscience. In Conrad's work, failure is a fact of human existence, and every ideal contains the possibilities for its own corruption. This is portrayed most effectively in (1904), which deals with revolution, politics, and financial manipulation in a South American republic. All of the characters in this novel are corrupted by their ambitions, which range from greed to idealistic desires for reform, and all their ambitions lead to disaster-the nobler the ideal, the greater their self-disgust.

Most of Conrad's greatest works take place on a ship or in the backwaters of civilization. A ship or a small outpost offered an isolated environment where Conrad could develop his already complex moral problems without unnecessary entanglements that might obscure the concentration of tragedy. The two greatest examples of moral tragedy in his work are (1900), which examines the failures of a man before society and his own conscience, and (1899), a dreamlike tale of mystery and adventure set in central Africa that is also the story of a man's symbolic journey into his own inner being. In both of these novels an understanding of the role of the narrator, Marlow, is crucial to a more complete comprehension of Conrad's intentions. Marlow offers a tentative view of a complex and ambiguous world. He is the most refined example of Conrad's use of an unreliable narrator, but in all of his works he relies upon time shifts, flashbacks, and multiple perspectives to portray the unreliability of human perception. The reader is constantly forced to interpret and reinterpret the information that Conrad's characters present. In his preface to The Nigger of the "Narcissus" (1897), an essay that has been called his artistic credo, Conrad expressed his intention of forcing the reader's involvement in his work: "My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you feel-it is, before all, to make you That-and no more, and it is everything."

is widely recognized as Conrad's most ambitious novel. An account of a revolution in the fictitious South American country of Costaguana, examines the ideals, motivations, and failures of several participants in that conflict. Critics agree that represents an important development in Conrad's career. His earlier works, including provide an intense analysis of a few characters, while in the political novels, beginning with and including Conrad widened his scope to examine an entire society. Conrad himself referred to as his "largest canvas," and many critics consider the novel one of the greatest of the twentieth century.

Conrad's current reputation rests with such relatively early works as Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, in which imagery, symbolism, and shifts in time and perspective combine to create an intriguing, mystical series of fictional settings. In his later works, Conrad's examination of the ambiguity of good and evil is generally considered too stylized and heavy-handed. His most highly regarded works, however, are acknowledged as masterpieces of English literature and continue to generate significant critical commentary.

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Joseph Conrad (1857-1924) - Glenbrook Academy English ~ Mr. Allen

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Conrad was an innovative novelist as well as one of the finest stylists of modern English literature. His novels are complex moral and psychological examinations of the ambiguous nature of good and evil.

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Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad | Plot Summary

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Discussion of the novel's place and importance

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Discussion of the novel's place and importance

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How Conrad’s imperial horror story Heart of Darkness resonates with our globalised times

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In our ongoing Guide to the Classics series, we look at Heart of Darkness: the product of dark historical energies that continue to shape our contemporary world.

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Professor Tim Youngs considers how Victorian authors chronicled and questioned Britain's imperial expansion.

In English literature of the 19th century, Empire is often present. Sometimes it appears in the margins. Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (1814), for example, cursorily acknowledges that the estate of the novel's title derives some of its wealth from slavery. Sir Thomas Bertram has plantation holdings in Antigua and visits there, away from the scene of the novel, to attend to business matters. At the end of Elizabeth Gaskell's novel, Mary Barton (1848), the protagonist, her husband and their child are living in Canada. Charles Dickens's Magwitch in Great Expectations (1861) returns from New South Wales, where he had been deported as a convict. In Charlotte Brontë's (1847), Rochester's insane wife from Jamaica, Bertha Mason, is kept hidden away, locked in the attic for a decade.

Fair copy manuscript of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre

This is the fair autograph copy of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre manuscript. The novel was published in 1847 under her pen name Currer Bell.

Usage terms

This material can only be used for research and private study purposes.

In other texts, Empire features more prominently. It is apparent in its complexity and ambivalence in the works of Rudyard Kipling. Many of the adventure novels of popular authors G A Henty, H Rider Haggard and R M Ballantyne were set in imperial spaces or promoted imperial values, though it is important to recognise that expressions of jingoism and xenophobia did not go unopposed.

Exploration

Many of those who travelled in the service of Empire wrote about their journeys. Explorers, missionaries, soldiers, colonial administrators, scientists and others produced accounts of their experiences, whether in the form of letters, diaries, journals, essays or full-length manuscripts. These reflected and could reinforce prejudices against 'race', though they could challenge ignorance, too. Their writings should not be seen as entirely separate from the novels or poetry of the time. Explorers and novelists read some of the same books and one another's works. Exploration and travel narratives employ plots, narrators, protagonists and symbolic episodes, just as autobiographies and novels do. Many British explorers who travelled to Africa, among them Sir Samuel White Baker, Verney Lovett Cameron and Stanley himself, each published at least one novel for children.

Three Sailor Boys: Children's adventure story

An early edition of an adventure novel, Three Sailor Boys, written by the explorer Verney Lovett Cameron. The young protagonists are at one point pursued by cannibals, this was no doubt influenced by Cameron's travels of Africa.

Historians disagree about the extent to which the British Empire was formal or informal, driven by government or independent trading and scientific interests, but it is generally accepted that the second half of the 19th century saw a shift from scientific inquiry to more overtly political and material concerns, culminating in the 'high imperialism' of the 1870s and 1880s. East and Central Africa attracted particular attention from the 1850s: driven by geographical curiosity, especially the search for the sources of the Nile, and by a quest for wealth. John Hanning Speke's Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile (1863) glows with the prospect of opening up for trade the region around Lake Victoria (as he named it after his monarch). The missionary-scientist Dr David Livingstone was explicit about the benefits of spreading the '3 Cs': civilisation, commerce and Christianity. Livingstone's goals were taken up, if distorted, by the man who famously 'found' him in Africa, the Welsh-American journalist Henry Morton Stanley, whose book How I Found Livingstone (1872), helped promote Livingstone's image. More than any other figure, Stanley was responsible for erecting the myth of the 'dark continent', evident in the titles of two of his books: Through the Dark Continent (1878) and In Darkest Africa (1890). Stanley, who was and remains a controversial figure, was also a professional journalist. His expeditions and writings exhibit a brashness and egotism that divided his companions and his readers. His complex personality mirrors many of the contradictions of the age.

Illustration from How I Found Livingstone by Henry M Stanley

This illustration, taken from Henry Stanley's book How I Found Livingstone (1872), is of the famous meeting between Stanley and Dr. Livingstone. Stanley allegedly greeted Livingstone with the statement, " Dr. Livingstone, I presume? ", stated in the caption of the image.

In Darkest Africa by explorer Henry M Stanley

Map taken from Henry Stanley's In Darkest Africa (1890). A broken red line is drawn around the Congo Free State and marks the boundary of the Free Trade Area. In the late 19th century, the area was privately controlled by Belgium's King Leopold II who brutally exploited the region's people and resources.

Questioning empire

The 19th century witnessed the expansion of the British Empire, but this process did not go unquestioned. Doubts about Empire seem to have intensified in the last quarter of a century. Several texts of the 1890s offered warnings about the consequences of Britain's actions overseas. A passage in H G Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898) compares the Martians' attack on the human race with the supposed hunting to extinction of Tasmanian Aborigines by European colonists. Dracula's invasion of England in Bram Stoker's novel has been labelled by critic Stephen D Arata an instance of 'reverse colonisation'. Dracula studied England's language, society and culture to aid his incursion. Published in 1897, the same year as and Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, Richard Marsh's told of attacks in London by a shape-shifting Egyptian worshipper of Isis seeking revenge on politician and future statesman Paul Lessingham.

Joseph Conrad's novella, Heart of Darkness, which many interpret as a critique of the excesses of imperialism, was published in serial form by Blackwood's Magazine in 1899 and in book form three years later. It culminates in a vision of the wilderness invading the 'civilised' world. Although the Congo is not named in the work, it is identifiable. Critics have put forward various candidates, including Stanley himself, as the model for Kurtz, but the scandal surrounding the conduct of two officers on Stanley's ill-fated Emin Pasha Relief Expedition (1887-89) forms part of the story's background. Major Edmund Musgrave Barttelot, whose increasing brutality and apparent mental deterioration aroused hostility among Africans and his fellow officers, was killed, allegedly shot by an African named Sanga. His fellow officer, Irish gentleman James Sligo Jameson, who also failed to survive the expedition, was implicated in what was reported to be the cannibalistic killing of a young slave girl. Whatever the truth of the matter, Jameson's own account, published by his family after his death, has him unwittingly commissioning the murder by handing over six handkerchiefs as advance payment but thinking it was part of a joke. The dreadful events of this expedition were played out in gruesome detail in British newspapers over several months in the late 1880s, provoking troubled questions about Britain's role in Africa.

James Jameson's account of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition

James Sligo Jameson's account of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition, published posthumously in 1890.

Heart of Darkness reads as a journey into moral and psychological disintegration as its protagonist 'goes native' but its setting perpetuates the idea of darkest Africa. Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe branded Conrad racist, arguing that the tale's symbolism denied black African humanity and culture. Achebe's criticism notwithstanding, much European writing on the Congo uses Heart of Darkness as a reference point.

Illustration of Victorian explorer Henry Morton Stanley

This image appeared in Funny Folks magazinein December 1899. The image is of the Emin Pasha Relief Expedition (1886 -1889); the figure at the front is Henry Stanley and the figure at the back is Emin Pasha.

These late 19th-century works of fiction reflect feelings of instability and apprehension. Their use of multiple narrators strengthens the sense of fragmentation and uncertainty. The threat to order and reason is apparent in their movement away from realism. Dracula and The Beetle turn to the supernatural and revive the Gothic. (Patrick Brantlinger labels their type of writing 'imperial Gothic'.) Wells employs science fiction, or, to use his own term scientific romance. Heart of Darkness employs images and impressions that are often indefinable, as if unmaking the detailed world of the explorers and empire. All of these texts draw on ideas of travel and exploration and take them in new directions. Their metaphors have proved powerful and enduring but are rooted in their imperial contexts.

Footnotes

[1] Arata, Stephen D. 'The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization'. Victorian Studies, 33.4 (Summer 1990), 621-45.

Further reading

Achebe, Chinua. 'An Image of Africa: racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness.' In Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1965-1987. Oxford: Heinemann International, 1988, pp.1-13.

Arata, Stephen D. 'The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization'. Victorian Studies 33, 4 (Summer 1990), 621-45.

Brantlinger, Patrick. Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988.

Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. London: Chatto and Windus, 1993.

Youngs, Tim. Travellers in Africa: British Travelogues, 1850-1900. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994.

Tim Youngs is Professor of English at Nottingham Trent University. He is the author or editor of several books on travel writing. His most recent publications are The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing (Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Beastly Journeys: Travel and Transformation at the fin de siècle (Liverpool University Press, 2013).

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professor tim youngs considers how victorian authors chronicled and questioned britain’s imperial expansion.

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By using this site, you agree we can set and use cookies. For more details of these cookies and how to disable them, see our cookie policy. Professor Tim Youngs considers how Victorian authors chronicled and questioned Britain's imperial expansion. In English literature of the 19th century, Empire is often present.

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Table of Contents

What was Joseph Conrad's original name?

What was Joseph Conrad's family like?

What were Joseph Conrad's jobs?

What is Joseph Conrad known for?

Read a brief summary of this topic

Joseph Conrad, original name Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, (born December 3, 1857, Berdichev, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now Berdychiv, Ukraine]-died August 3, 1924, Canterbury, Kent, England), English novelist and short-story writer of Polish descent, whose works include the novels Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), and The Secret Agent (1907) and the short story "Heart of Darkness" (1902). During his lifetime Conrad was admired for the richness of his prose and his renderings of dangerous life at sea and in exotic places. But his initial reputation as a masterful teller of colourful adventures of the sea masked his fascination with the individual when faced with nature's invariable unconcern, man's frequent malevolence, and his inner battles with good and evil. To Conrad, the sea meant above all the tragedy of loneliness. A writer of complex skill and striking insight, but above all of an intensely personal vision, he has been increasingly regarded as one of the greatest English novelists.

Early years

Conrad's father, Apollo Nalęcz Korzeniowski, a poet and an ardent Polish patriot, was one of the organizers of the committee that went on in 1863 to direct the Polish insurrection against Russian rule. He was arrested in late 1861 and was sent into exile at Vologda in northern Russia. His wife and four-year-old son followed him there, and the harsh climate hastened his wife's death from tuberculosis in 1865. In A Personal Record Conrad relates that his first introduction to the English language was at the age of eight, when his father was translating the works of Shakespeare and Victor Hugo in order to support the household. In those solitary years with his father he read the works of Sir Walter Scott, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, and William Makepeace Thackeray in Polish and French. Apollo was ill with tuberculosis and died in Kraków in 1869. Responsibility for the boy was assumed by his maternal uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, a lawyer, who provided his nephew with advice, admonition, financial help, and love. He sent Conrad to school at Kraków and then to Switzerland, but the boy was bored by school and yearned to go to sea. In 1874 Conrad left for Marseille with the intention of going to sea.

Life at sea

Bobrowski made him an allowance of 2,000 francs a year and put him in touch with a merchant named Delestang, in whose ships Conrad sailed in the French merchant service. His first voyage, on the Mont-Blanc to Martinique, was as a passenger; on its next voyage he sailed as an apprentice. In July 1876 he again sailed to the West Indies, as a steward on the Saint-Antoine. On this voyage Conrad seems to have taken part in some unlawful enterprise, probably gunrunning, and to have sailed along the coast of Venezuela, memories of which were to find a place in Nostromo. The first mate of the vessel, a Corsican named Dominic Cervoni, was the model for the hero of that novel and was to play a picturesque role in Conrad's life and work.

Conrad became heavily enmeshed in debt upon returning to Marseille and apparently unsuccessfully attempted to commit suicide. As a sailor in the French merchant navy he was liable to conscription when he came of age, so after his recovery he signed on in April 1878 as a deckhand on a British freighter bound for Constantinople with a cargo of coal. After the return journey his ship landed him at Lowestoft, England, in June 1878. It was Conrad's first English landfall, and he spoke only a few words of the language of which he was to become a recognized master. Conrad remained in England, and in the following October he shipped as an ordinary seaman aboard a wool clipper on the London-Sydney run.

Conrad was to serve 16 years in the British merchant navy. In June 1880 he passed his examination as second mate, and in April 1881 he joined the Palestine, a bark of 425 tons. This move proved to be an important event in his life; it took him to the Far East for the first time, and it was also a continuously troubled voyage, which provided him with literary material that he would use later. Beset by gales, accidentally rammed by a steamer, and deserted by a sizable portion of her crew, the Palestine nevertheless had made it as far as the East Indies when her cargo of coal caught fire and the crew had to take to the lifeboats; Conrad's initial landing in the East, on an island off Sumatra, took place only after a 13 ¹/ ₂ -hour voyage in an open boat. In 1898 Conrad published his account of his experiences on the Palestine, with only slight alterations, as the short story "Youth," a remarkable tale of a young officer's first command.

He returned to London by passenger steamer, and in September 1883 he shipped as mate on the Riversdale, leaving her at Madras to join the Narcissus at Bombay. This voyage gave him material for his novel The Nigger of the "Narcissus," the story of an egocentric black sailor's deterioration and death aboard ship. At about this time Conrad began writing his earliest known letters in the English language. In between subsequent voyages Conrad studied for his first mate's certificate, and in 1886 two notable events occurred: he became a British subject in August, and three months later he obtained his master mariner's certificate.

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In February 1887 he sailed as first mate on the Highland Forest, bound for Semarang, Java. Her captain was John McWhirr, whom he later immortalized under the same name as the heroic, unimaginative captain of the steamer Nan Shan in Typhoon. He then joined the Vidar, a locally owned steamship trading among the islands of the southeast Asian archipelago. During the five or six voyages he made in four and a half months, Conrad was discovering and exploring the world he was to re-create in his first novels, Almayer's Folly, An Outcast of the Islands, and Lord Jim, as well as several short stories.

After leaving the Vidar Conrad unexpectedly obtained his first command, on the Otago, sailing from Bangkok, an experience out of which he was to make his stories "The Shadow-Line" and "Falk." He took over the Otago in unpropitious circumstances. The captain Conrad replaced had died at sea, and by the time the ship reached Singapore, a voyage of 800 miles (1,300 km) that took three weeks because of lack of wind, the whole ship's company, except Conrad and the cook, was down with fever. Conrad then discovered to his dismay that his predecessor had sold almost all the ship's supply of quinine.

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Joseph Conrad | Biography, Books, Short Stories, & Facts

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Joseph Conrad, original name Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, (born December 3, 1857, Berdichev, Ukraine, Russian Empire [now Berdychiv, Ukraine]-died August 3, 1924, Canterbury, Kent, England), English novelist and short-story writer of Polish descent, whose works include the novels Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), and The Secret Agent (1907) and the short story "Heart of Darkness" (1902).

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Was Belgium's King Leopold II a mass murderer on a par with Hitler or a greedy despot who turned a blind eye to a few excesses? A new book has ignited a furious row in a country coming to grips with its colonial legacy. Stephen Bates reports

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King Leopold II & the Congo Free State (1885-1908)

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When it says 'Orientalism' a lot of this was a study of how the West treated the East, but his work is important when considering any "Other' culture, in this instance, Central African Congo.

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Edward Said and Orientalism: A Simple Explanation

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Note that this is an online copy of the full critical work by Said, you don't need to read the whole thing!

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Central Africa - Central Africa - Exploitation of ivory: In the second half of the 19th century, the northern border of Central Africa was suddenly opened up to the impact of an intense new trade in ivory. Rapid prosperity in both Europe and North America had led to an increase in demand for ivory t…

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Chinua Achebe criticism of Heart of Darkness

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Chinua Achebe criticism of Heart of Darkness

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Another author we were going to study, Achebe, who wrote Things Fall Apart, wrote a lengthy criticism of Heart of Darkness. This is the full article. Again, you do not need to read the whole thing!

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Orientalism, Western scholarly discipline of the 18th and 19th centuries that encompassed the study of the languages, literatures, religions, philosophies, histories, art, and laws of Asian societies, especially ancient ones. Such scholarship also inspired broader intellectual and artistic circles in Europe and North America, and so Orientalism may also denote the general enthusiasm for things Asian or "Oriental." Orientalism was also a school of thought among a group of British colonial administrators and scholars who argued that India should be ruled according to its own traditions and laws, thus opposing the "Anglicanism" of those who argued that India should be ruled according to British traditions and laws. In the mid-20th century, Orientalists began to favour the term Asian studies to describe their work, in an effort to distance it from the colonial and neocolonial associations of Orientalism. More recently, mainly through the work of the Palestinian American scholar Edward Said, the term has been used disparagingly to refer to the allegedly simplistic, stereotyped, and demeaning conceptions of Arab and Asian cultures generally held by Western scholars.

As a scholarly practice, Orientalism emerged in late 18th-century European centres of learning and their colonial outposts, when the study of the languages, literatures, religions, laws, and art of East Asian societies became a major focus of scholarly attention and intellectual energy. In that era, the number of Europeans doing research on East Asia dramatically increased, and new forms of institutional support in universities and scholarly associations encouraged such studies and their dissemination. A frequent theme of that scholarship was that Asia had once been host to great civilizations that had since fallen into their current state of decay. Many Orientalists, as they came to be called, were connected to a colonial bureaucracy, but others were not, and their positions on colonialism varied. Orientalism as a scholarly field was dominated by research in the French, English, and German languages and associated centres of learning, and its subjects ranged geographically from the North African Mediterranean to East and Southeast Asia. One of the most significant discoveries of Orientalists was that Sanskrit and many European languages were related to each other, which implied that Europe and India shared historical origins. That discovery has been credited with giving rise to the comparative method in the humanities and social sciences.

In the wake of that Orientalist research, scholars and artists took up ideas about Asian societies, art, and traditions in their intellectual and creative works, and images of and ideas about Asia or specific peoples or parts of it became common tropes in popular literature and even decor. Thus, Orientalism was a significant philosophical and aesthetic movement that reached well beyond the specialized circle of Orientalist scholars, especially in the 19th century.

The terms Orientalism and Orientalist first took on a markedly political meaning when they were used to refer to those English scholars, bureaucrats, and politicians who, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, opposed changes in British colonial policy in India that had been brought by the "Anglicists," who argued that India ought to be ruled according to British laws and institutions. The Orientalists, in contrast, insisted on the primacy of local laws and traditions; some of those Orientalists conducted research on ancient or traditional Indian laws and legal structures in an effort to codify them for use by a colonial bureaucracy. Ironically, however, British efforts to understand, codify, and govern according to what they believed to be local tradition often brought about significant changes in social and political life in India.

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Orientalism, Western scholarly discipline of the 18th and 19th centuries that encompassed the study of the languages, literatures, religions, philosophies, histories, art, and laws of Asian societies, especially ancient ones. Such scholarship also inspired broader intellectual and artistic circles in Europe and North America, and so Orientalism may also denote the general enthusiasm for things Asian or "Oriental."

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Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, provides social commentary of how western society 'Orientalises' Africa because of societal anxieties that manifested as a result of Charles Darwin's Evolutionary Theory. Darwin's theory proclaims the concept of the 'survival of the fittest', which advocates those who are best adapted to the environment will survive. However, this scientific theory morphed from a biological concept into a social doctrine, Social Darwinism. Consequently, individuals and nations embraced darwinian theory perceiving themselves as being superior to others. This ideal ofsupremacy is explicitly illustrated by Conrad's portrayal of the colonisation of Africa, as Conrad's characterisation Europeans exemplifies the social Darwinian that "[t]he higher intellectual and moral- must displace the lower and more degraded races"(Wallace clxix). Social Darwin principles are also demonstrated by Said's Orientalism, which illustrates the western xenophobic discourse of 'Othering'(4-5). Said's theory states that since the inception of European Enlightenment and colonisation, western society has essentialised and othered a self-glorifying contrast between its own civilised society and primitive, unenlightened cultures (4). This is a prevalent theme in Conrad's novella,and is repetitiously demonstrated by the highly denigrating characterisation of African. This is demonstrated by Marlow's repetitious use of the word 'savage'in reference to African American's, which connotes being uncivilised and archaic. Orientalism is also exemplified when Marlow is confronted with an African who has been 'civilised' by western culture;

"I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below me... a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind legs. A few months of training had done for that really chap"(45).

Marlow's belittling description illustrates that the African is both literally and figuratively below him. This reflects the social darwin principle of racial hierarchy and Said's theory of Westerners viewing themselves as enlightening 'lesser' cultures. This is also demonstrated by thefiremen being lead to believe that, "should the water... disappear, the evil spirit inside the boiler would get angry through the greatness of his thirst, and take terrible vengeance"(45). Once again, this demonstrates the condescending nature of Marlow treating the African as a child. Thus, the Western discourse of Orientalisation and social Darwinism are fundamental to this novella, as is illustrates the colonial perception of dominance and Otherness over the Africans.

Bibliography

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. New York: Penguin Books, 2011.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. London: Routledge, 1978.

Wallace, Alfred W. "The Origin of Human Races and Antiquity of Man Deduced from the Theory of "Natural Selection", Journal of Anthropological Society of London, Vol. 2: 1864, pp. clviii-clxxxvii. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3025211. Date accessed 2 June 2015.

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Heart of Darkness, Othering and Orientalism. T Gilmour

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Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness, provides social commentary of how western society 'Orientalises' Africa because of societal anxieties that manifested as a result of Charles Darwin's Evolutionary Theory. Darwin's theory proclaims the concept of the 'survival of the fittest', which advocates those who are best adapted to the environment will survive.

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Summary and Analysis Part 1

When Marlow visits Brussels to get his appointment, he describes the city as a "whited sepulcher" - a Biblical phrase referring to a hypocrite or person who employs a façade of goodness to mask his or her true malignancy. The Company, like its headquarters, is a similar "whited sepulcher," proclaiming its duty to bring "civilization" and "light" to Africa in the name of Christian charity, but really raping the land and its people in the name of profit and the lust for power. Marlow's aunt, who talks to him about "weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways" serves as an example of how deeply the Company's propaganda has been ingrained into the minds of Europeans. Uncomfortable with his aunt's ideas, Marlow suggests that the Company is simply "run for profit"; before he sees how these profits are acquired, he is blissfully unaware of the Company's depravity. Marlow dwells in the realm of wishful thinking, wanting to believe that the Company has no imperialistic impulses and is simply an economic enterprise, much like the ones to which he is accustomed as a European.

The first glimpse Marlow and the reader have of the Company's headquarters hints at the organization's sinister, evil, and conspiratorial atmosphere. First, Marlow "slipped through one of the cracks" to enter the building, implying that the Company is figuratively "closed" in terms of what it allows the public to learn about its operations.

Second, the two women knitting black wool suggest the Fates of Greek mythology; like these goddesses, the Company is "knitting" the destiny of the Africans, represented by the black wool. The Company, therefore, plays God with the lives of the Africans, deciding who in the Congo will live or die.

Third, Marlow is led into a dimly lit office - the lighting reflects the "shady" and ambiguous morals of the Company. He only speaks with the Company's President for forty-five seconds, suggesting that the Company views Marlow - and people like him - as expendable.

Fourth, Marlow is asked to sign "some document" that ostensibly contracts him to not reveal "any trade secrets," but figuratively suggests the selling of his soul to the Devil. (As the Manager of the Central Station will later remark about Africa, "Men who come out here should have no entrails.") As the Devil seeks human souls to overthrow God in Heaven eventually, the Company is metaphorically seeking to acquire the souls of as many Europeans as possible to make greater profits.

Fifth, when Marlow is examined by the Company's Doctor, he learns that many Europeans who venture to Africa become mad: When the Doctor begins measuring Marlow's skull, the reader infers Conrad's point that European "science" and "technology" (even with a science as ludicrous as phrenology) are no match for the power of the jungle. When "civilized" Europeans go to Africa, the restraints placed upon them by European society begin to vanish, resulting in the kind of behavior previously seen in Fresleven. Later in the novel, when his anger begins to grow after finding all of his gear damaged by the porters, Marlow ironically remarks, "I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting."

Also worth noting is the abundance of white and dark images in these opening pages of Marlow's narrative. The Congo is described as a " white patch" on a map, Fresleven was killed in a scuffle over two black hens, Brussels is a " whited sepulcher," the two women knit black wool and the old one wears a "starched white affair," the President's secretary has white hair, and the Doctor has black ink-stains on his sleeves. Many critics have commented (sometimes inconclusively) on Conrad's use of white and black imagery; generally, one should note how the combination of white and black images suggests several of the novel's ideas:

The Company claims to be a means by which (as Marlow's aunt calls them), "emissaries of light" can bring civilization to the "darkness" of Africa, which is done by denoting Brussels as white and the Congo as white.

The White men in the novel (particularly Marlow and Kurtz) will be greatly influenced by their experiences with the Africans.

Although the Company professes to be a force of "White" moral righteousness, it is actually "spotted" with "black" spots of sin and inhumanity, and the corpses of the black natives that are found throughout the Congo.
Continued on next page...

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When Marlow visits Brussels to get his appointment, he describes the city as a "whited sepulcher" - a Biblical phrase referring to a hypocrite or person who employs a façade of goodness to mask his or her true malignancy.

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Character Analysis Marlow

Marlow is a thirty-two-year-old sailor who has always lived at sea. The novel's narrator presents Marlow as "a meditating Buddha" because his experiences in the Congo have made him introspective and to a certain degree philosophic and wise. As a young man, Marlow wished to explore the "blank places" on the map because he longed for adventure; his journey up the Congo, however, proves to be much more than a thrilling episode. Instead, his experiences there teach Marlow about the "heart of darkness" found in all men: Many (like himself) suppress these evil urges, while others (like Kurtz) succumb to them.

Marlow's chief qualities are his curiosity and skepticism. Never easily satisfied with others' seemingly innocent remarks such as those made by the Manager and Brickmaker, Marlow constantly attempts to sift through the obscurities of what others tell him (such as when his aunt speaks to him of "weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways"). However, Marlow is no crusader for Truth. He lies to Kurtz's Intended to save her from a broken heart and ultimately returns to Europe and his home, despite his having been convinced by the Company and Kurtz that civilization is, ultimately, a lie and an institution humans have created to channel their desires for power.

As Heart of Darkness progresses, Marlow becomes increasingly sensitive to his surroundings and the "darkness" that they may embody or hide. When he visits the Company's headquarters, for example, he is slightly alarmed by the doctor's comments and puzzled by the two women knitting black wool. When he arrives at the Outer Station, however, he is shocked at the amount of waste and disregard for life he sees there. By the end of the novel, Marlow is almost unable to reintegrate himself into European society, having become convinced of the lies and "surface-truths" that sustain it. He tells his story to the men aboard the Nellie to share with them what he has learned about the darkness of the human heart - and the things of which that darkness is capable.

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Marlow is a thirty-two-year-old sailor who has always lived at sea. The novel's narrator presents Marlow as "a meditating Buddha" because his experiences in the Congo have made him introspective and to a certain degree philosophic and wise.

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Joseph Conrad had a long career as a merchant mariner before he ever ventured to write fiction. Born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857 to Polish parents in Ukraine, his journeys to the far corners of the earth gave him a firsthand view of late 19th-century European interaction with many foreign cultures in the colonized world. His treatment of this relationship in his fiction is keenly incisive, yet contains flawed and insensitive portrayals of indigenous peoples. Indeed, perhaps his most well-known and widely read work, the classic novella Heart of Darkness, is problematic, to say the least, because of how he depicts the Africans in the story.

Against this backdrop, and during a time of renewed focus on social and racial justice in America, Heart of Darkness could be rejected as not worth reading or as unhelpful to military leaders today. It should not be. The novella is relevant to those who lead or may lead military operations overseas and to those senior policymakers who send them there. In the story, Conrad wrestles with the moral and ethical implications of Western involvement in foreign lands - a subject with which many U.S. military leaders will come face-to-face in the course of their careers. Heart of Darkness also bears directly on the challenge U.S. military leaders confront in ensuring the lawful, ethical, and moral conduct of war. Just as with the story's mysterious ivory trader, Mr. Kurtz, military personnel have breaking points. Are they at times placed for too long in environments where it is unreasonable to assume none of them will reach theirs? And of these breakdowns, is the environment itself the primary cause or are we indulging a naïve understanding of human nature?

Heart of Darkness is told in retrospect from the cruising yawl Nellie anchored on the Thames. The narrator is Conrad's alter ego, the merchant seaman Charles Marlow, first introduced four years earlier in Conrad's story Youth. Marlow recalls to shipmates what he experienced in the Belgian Congo, where, at the behest of a Belgian trading company, he was sent to replace a river steamer captain, a Dane called Fresleven, who was killed by a local chief over "a misunderstanding about some hens." As Marlow travels up the Congo River, he learns of Kurtz, with whom the company had lost contact and whom the company suspected had gone far into the jungle and found trouble. In my memory of reading the novella in high school in the early 1980s, it was taught as a story about the corrupting influence of the entire European colonial project. No mention was made of the controversy surrounding Conrad's depiction of the Africans in the story.

Yet, it was just a few years prior that the award-winning Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe ignited this very controversy in leveling a scathing attack on Heart of Darkness, to the point that he labeled Conrad a "thoroughgoing racist" and refused to count it as a great work of literature. For Achebe, only clever, postcolonial literary criticism can look past this serious flaw while claiming the book contains universal lessons - a sort of literary rearguard action meant to protect Conrad's reputation as a great writer. Conrad may have achieved an artistic, clear-eyed skepticism of man's true nature, but in Achebe's telling, that does not absolve him for the offense of perpetuating a racist image of Africa.

Achebe was not the first prominent scholar or person of letters to criticize Conrad's "colonial" writings. The debate on whether Conrad supported or opposed colonialism had been raging for some time. For example, as Hunt Hawkins noted in his 1979 article "Conrad's Critique of Imperialism in Heart of Darkness," Robert F. Lee, in his 1969 book Conrad's Colonialism, wrote that "one of the major directions of Conrad's colonial fiction is a recognition of and accord with the conception of Anglo-Saxon superiority." Other Conrad scholars, such as Eloise Knapp Hay (The Political Novels of Joseph Conrad, 1963) and Wilfred Stone, believed Conrad was adamantly opposed to the European imperial project and attempts to prove otherwise were, in Stone's words, " a misreading of Conrad so gross as to be, at times, simply ludicrous."

As a visiting professor at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst, in February 1975 Achebe delivered the lecture "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" (the lecture was later updated and published in The Massachusetts Review in 1977). While the novella may portray Africans sympathetically as people suffering from colonial cruelty and deserving compassion, they were still "savages" from a dark and inhospitable place, and their plight paled in importance to the real problem - the diseased state of the European mind. Marlow recalls the journey on a French steamer to the mouth of the Congo River as traveling "all along the formless coast bordered by dangerous surf, as if Nature herself had tried to ward off intruders. ... It was like a weary pilgrimage amongst hints for nightmares." Africa is a nightmarish place a European enters at his own risk. When Marlow switches to a smaller steamer to take him the first 30 miles upriver, the Swedish captain hints of trouble for those who venture too far into the jungle and wonders why they do it "for a few francs a month. I wonder what becomes of that kind when it goes up country?" When Marlow says he aims to find out, the captain replies that the last man he took up the river wound up hanging himself.

When Marlow arrives at his company's first station where a railway is being built, he describes a "scene of inhabited devastation. A lot of people, mostly black and naked, moved about like ants." As he wanders through the camp, he sees at almost every turn evidence of the sheer brutality with which the natives are treated in the service of the trading company's commercial bottom line:

Black shapes crouched, lay, sat between the trees leaning against the trunks, clinging to the earth, half coming out, half effaced within the dim light, in all the attitudes of pain, abandonment, and despair. ... They were dying slowly - it was very clear. They were ... nothing but black shadows of disease and starvation, lying confusedly in the greenish gloom.

Conrad reinforced a stereotype of a primitive people devoid of their own rich traditions of language, art, and culture. They and the continent of Africa are background props in the story. The black characters barely utter more than a word or two in the whole text. They are nothing but "black shapes" and "black shadows." They are from the "earliest beginnings of the world," which for Conrad was not some blissful Garden of Eden where innocence had yet to be corrupted, as Rousseau imagines in Emile, but a time of darkness where man's base instincts ruled. Achebe writes, "Heart of Darkness projects the image of Africa as 'the other world,' the antithesis of Europe and therefore of civilization, a place where man's vaunted intelligence and refinement are finally mocked by triumphant bestiality."

Achebe credits Conrad for trying to work out, through Kurtz's mysterious mental breakdown, what colonization was doing to the European mind and soul, but he rejects the dehumanization of an entire portion of the human race to do it. This powerful rebuke hit like a thunderbolt, sending Conrad admirers and scholars into a defensive crouch. Achebe's essay, not to mention his debut 1958 novel Things Fall Apart about a fictional southeastern Nigerian tribe that can be read as a response to a European impression of Africa still prevalent in the mid-20th century, makes reading Heart of Darkness today quite uncomfortable, particularly in light of the recent racial justice protests. One cannot ignore some of Conrad's grimace-inducing descriptions of the African characters and thus could be forgiven for not finishing the novella.

Twenty years after Achebe's lecture, film and literary critic David Denby revisited the controversy with the essay " The Trouble with 'Heart of Darkness.'" Denby had just retaken Columbia University's core literature humanities course (some three decades after he took it as an undergraduate) and later published a book about the experience. In addition to providing an update on the aforementioned controversy, including noting that the Columbia scholar Edward W. Said had joined the roster of critics questioning Heart of Darkness's place in the canon, Denby pivots to discussing the abiding allure of the classic. He recounts the joy and exhilaration of rereading a text that "has lost none of its power to amaze and appall: it remains, in many places, an essential starting point for discussions of modernism, imperialism, the hypocrisies and glories of the West, and the ambiguities of 'civilization.'" Denby makes a strong case for rereading Heart of Darkness later in life, perhaps closer to impending experiences for which this particular work may have more direct relevance.

Yet, despite this ongoing literary storm, Conrad's reputation as an important and unique voice in 20th-century literature seems no worse for the wear. I count myself among those able to reconcile Achebe's criticism with Conrad's reputation as a great writer and Heart of Darkness as great literature. Conrad was not Rudyard Kipling, who was perhaps European colonialism's most eloquent champion, but he still was a product of his day. His blind spots must be weighed in the context of his times, as with any artist. In her widely acclaimed 2017 book The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, Harvard history professor Maya Jasanoff goes even further, recalling,

When I read [ Heart of Darkness] and Achebe's essay with my own students at Harvard, I came to value Conrad's perspective ... not just despite its blind spots but because of them. Conrad captured something about the way power operated across continents and races, something that seems as important to engage with today as it had when he started to write.

In 2003, the British writer Caryl Phillips, who is black and originally from St. Kitts, ventured to Achebe's home in upstate New York (by then Achebe was teaching at Bard College) to interview him on his long-standing opposition to Conrad as a great artist. Phillips, a self-described admirer of both Conrad and Achebe, found Achebe thoughtful but unyielding on the subject. In an essay in The Guardian recounting this experience, Phillips writes,

The problem is I disagree with Achebe's response to the novel, and have never viewed Conrad - as Achebe states in his lecture - as simply 'a thoroughgoing racist.' Yet, at the same time, I hold Achebe in the highest possible esteem. ... Conrad's brutal depiction of African humanity, so that he might provide a 'savage' mirror into which the European might gaze and measure his own tenuous grip on civilization, is now regarded by some, including Achebe, as deeply problematic. But is it not ridiculous to demand of Conrad that he imagine an African humanity that is totally out of line with both the times in which he was living and the larger purpose of his novel?

Given the ongoing struggles over race in America, including inside the military itself, reading Achebe's essay carefully and then reading or rereading Heart of Darkness confers a special benefit to military leaders beyond the reasons for which it is usually taught. Achebe's critique is a perception of the book that I was never taught in school and that I did not appreciate.

That does not diminish the value to military leaders and civilian national security professionals of reading Heart of Darkness in search of Conrad's larger purpose. But what exactly is it? Military leaders will find Heart of Darkness a helpful and enjoyable aid in navigating the complex ethical and moral terrain of warfare in two important ways.

First, there is the question of America's role in the world and how that underpins the ostensible reasons for overseas military operations, both in peace and war. Conrad was a severe critic of European colonialism at a time when very few of his contemporaries seemed bothered by it at all. Heart of Darkness was first serialized in Blackwood's Magazine in 1899, the same year Kipling published the poem The White Man's Burden: The United States and the Philippine Islands, a draft of which Kipling shared with his friend Theodore Roosevelt, who would, just two years later, become the 26th president of the United States. The poem is Kipling's call to America to do her duty in civilizing the uncivilized world, which included the Philippine Islands just "liberated" from Spain in the Spanish-American War. For Kipling, colonialism had a noble, even biblical, purpose.

The poem is offensive today, but the belief that the United States has a moral obligation to vanquish tyranny and advance democracy abroad is hardly a thing of the past. Both successful foreign ventures and tragic misadventures have sprung from this well of idealism. The democracy promotion agenda has been derided by many on the left as neocolonialism and on the right as naïve adventurism - different in nature from the rapacious European 19th-century version but still either fundamentally corrupt or just plain stupid and wasteful.

I find both positions extreme and simplistic. Nevertheless, neither should be thoughtlessly rejected any more than one should uncritically hold faith in American exceptionalism. The success of military operations abroad, especially those that last for years, rests in no small way on troop morale, and troop morale rests in no small way on belief in the purpose of the mission. When the troop members stop believing in it, they stop trusting the leaders that sent them into harm's way, and - as happened in Vietnam - the mission suffers, and there are long-lasting political and societal consequences. Heart of Darkness speaks directly to how misplaced or disingenuous foreign adventurism entrains these consequences. In the case of colonialism in Africa, European populations were fed and largely believed a story about the need to Christianize and civilize native peoples, when the primary objective was exploiting the vast natural resources.

Second, the story bears directly on the challenge of ensuring U.S. military operations are conducted as lawfully and ethically as possible. Perhaps the most enduring puzzle of Heart of Darkness is whether the writer viewed the colonial experience as a causal factor in European man's corruption and almost inconceivable capacity for brutality or as a consequence of a corrupt and dark nature that simply manifests most vividly in the colonial environment. When U.S. military personnel in war zones lose their way, as happened at My Lai, Haditha, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram, for example, military leaders search for answers, wondering who could be capable of such atrocities and why the system failed to identify them sooner.

But perhaps the better question is, who is not capable of committing a war crime under any conceivable context? Are these instances really the result of "a few bad apples?" The less one believes so, the greater the burden on senior leaders to avoid putting military personnel in morally treacherous environments. What if we are all really savages at heart and the refinements of civilization are tenuous at best at containing the savagery? What if the journey to becoming Mr. Kurtz is far shorter than we care to believe? As Denby notes, his Columbia professor strongly suggested such an interpretation: "'Savagery' is inherent in all of us, including the most 'civilized,' for we live, according to Conrad, in a brief interlude between innumerable centuries of darkness and darkness yet to come." Hunt Hawkins too favors this interpretation: "We might suppose that Conrad approved the civilizing mission and objected only when it was subverted by material lust. Conrad makes clear, however, that Kurtz's immorality is not a contradiction of his morality but an extension of it."

Conrad's own experience on the Congo River in 1890 lasted less than six months. He had signed on with a Brussels-based company for three years as a steamboat captain but quit after one round trip between Kinshasa and Kisangani, so traumatizing was the experience.

In his 1998 book King Leopold's Ghost, Adam Hochschild vividly chronicles the merciless brutality with which the Belgians were administering the Congo Free State by the time of Conrad's employment there. The Belgian Congo was neither free nor a state, but a vast region for exploitation and murder on a scale shocking even for European imperialism apologists. Leopold's government largely ran the Congo with criminals and degenerates who enjoyed employing without fear of sanction the most sadistic methods to ensure they met their rubber, copal, and ivory quotas. That Conrad was shocked by this is not in doubt. Heart of Darkness can be read on one level as "one of the most scathing indictments of imperialism in all literature."

However, Conrad's critique of colonialism does not adequately explain such an enigmatic text. Conrad, by 1890, had for many years seen "the dirty work of Empire at close quarters," to quote George Orwell from his 1936 essay on British imperialism, Shooting an Elephant. Yet Conrad did not seem too troubled by British imperialism, as, for example, Hawkins shows by analyzing Conrad's somewhat conflicted letters on the Boer War in South Africa. He held financial interests in its vast enterprise (by the late 1890s he held an investment stake in a gold mine in South Africa) and was an enthusiastic apostle for his adopted land, an anglophile who believed that " liberty ... can only be found under the English flag all over the world."

Kurtz was not a criminal or a degenerate when he arrived in the Congo. He was an idealist who believed European civilization was a force for good in the world. He studied the native people and wrote a 17-page report for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. Kurtz was raised in high society and went to the best schools. It was not until he was long in the jungle and an unwitting tool of a most unholy engine of avarice that his "savagery" gained the upper hand. What happened to Kurtz? Marlow comes to learn that Kurtz had, at some point, scribbled "exterminate all the brutes!" at the end of his report to the Society. As the story unfolds, Marlow and the reader (us) become fellow travelers, increasingly bewildered over the nature/nurture question. We hope that when Kurtz is finally found, he will shed some clarity on this puzzle.

Alas, he does not. Was it just a case of a man cracking under the pressure of living in an inhospitable environment and going insane? Indeed, in describing his 1979 film adaption of the novella on the Vietnam War, Apocalypse Now director Francis Ford Coppola explained that the United States went into Vietnam and went insane (ironically, by many accounts Coppola and some of the cast practically went insane making the film). The implication was clear: Do not go into the jungle. Better to just stay away.

Or was Kurtz complicit in his own descent? Did he yield to a temptation to go where most civilized Europeans dare not go - face-to-face with their own natural amoral savagery, a place where one can make oneself into a god to others and indulge in any desire? Going there and realizing one's true nature is the ultimate horror - hence Kurtz's final words, "the horror, the horror," before dying in the hold of Marlow's steamer. In Ken Burns' 2017 documentary on the Vietnam War, novelist and war veteran Karl Marlantes (Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War) seemed to hold this view of human nature: "People talk a lot about how well the military turns kids into killing machines, and I'll always argue that it's just finishing school. What we do with civilization is that we learn to inhibit and rope in these aggressive tendencies, and we have to recognize them." Conrad's story is a journey into the savage wilderness of our own nature, where Marlow, while searching for Kurtz, discovers the lie "civilized" man indulges to justify the entire colonial project - a lie Mark Twain described as " the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages."

There's a case to be made that the U.S. military in recent decades has by many estimates prosecuted war ( jus in bello) more justly than at any time in history. Smart weapons may minimize collateral damage, and military personnel observe fairly restrictive rules of engagement. Young military professionals today should not despair but be confident that - if put to the test in the most demanding combat environments - they will serve with dignity, honor, and moral courage. But neither should they nor the leaders that will send them to war take that prospect entirely for granted. When I served in East Africa in 2006, we had to initiate a command investigation of a servicemember in charge of a remote camp accused of selling medical supplies to villagers on the local black market and of illegally hunting rare, protected game. He abused the power he had been given to exploit the local population. While he wasn't cutting off heads, left alone and relatively unsupervised for months, did he yield in a lesser way to a temptation to make himself into a god like Kurtz had? I think so.

Marlow's journey up the Congo and Kurtz's journey into madness retain a metaphorical reach into modern warfare. In reading Heart of Darkness, military and national security professionals should always be mindful that Kurtz is not just a fictional character - he is a warning sign.

Bill Bray is a retired U.S. Navy captain and the deputy editor-in-chief of the U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings magazine.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

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The Abiding Relevance of 'Heart of Darkness' for Those Who Wage War - War on the Rocks

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Joseph Conrad had a long career as a merchant mariner before he ever ventured to write fiction. Born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857 to Polish parents in Ukraine, his journeys to the far corners of the earth gave him a firsthand view of late 19th-century European interaction with many foreign cultures in the colonized world.