The Guardian essay on Joseph Conrad
Dec 4th, 2007 by John
The Guardian recently ran an essay on the works of Joseph Conrad to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth. The author, Giles Foden, embraces Conrad as one of the first and greatest modernists of the English language. Though that point is indisputable, Foden’s obsession with Conrad’s “moral relativism” as central to his enduring legacy seems overstressed, particularly since the observation strikes me as a weak one. Consider this excerpt:
“The idea of suicide is important in the novels, several of which defend it as a legitimate act in the face of an absurd world. They do so rather in the terms of French existentialism - there are links between Conrad and Camus - as a form of conviction when all other forms seem worthless.”
This seems strange to me. Decoud’s suicide in Nostromo, for example, is shown to be the final act of a man whose only defining characteristic is a lack of conviction, not the final act of a man expressing a “form of conviction.” I also have trouble reconciling the Foden’s claim that Conrad had an aversion to abstract moral principles—a suspicion, certainly, and perhaps a fascination, but not a downright aversion. What about Nostromo’s refusal to fetch a priest to hear the confession of his dying, surrogate mother? Nostromo, like Conrad, had no faith (at the time) in the efficacy of religious ritual—but N’s refusal haunts him as an act of moral cowardice. And what is an abstract moral principle if not the principle that a dying woman should have access to the last rites? (A similar conundrum also turns up in Romance, the book Conrad co-authored with Ford Madox Ford, where a group of criminals are hung and denied confession. This fact appalls the hero/narrator).
Foden, who takes care to ignore Conrad’s deathbed conversion to Roman Catholicism, also harps on the importance of “context” to establishing character value. I don’t see how in Lord Jim the “context” impacts Jim’s decision to abandon a ship full of Muslim pilgrims, for example. His act, which shadows the rest of his life, could only be characterized in terms of abstract moral principles: heroism and cowardice. “I had jumped, it seemed.”
Though I disagree with some of the author’s points, it’s a thoughtful meditation on a writer whose “influence on subsequent authors has been so pervasive that Graham Greene, for one, wrote of having to stop reading Conrad for fear of becoming completely enslaved to his style.”
