Joseph Conrad Simulacrum

The Life

Joseph Conrad was born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857, in the Russian-ruled Ukrainian territory of the former Polish Commonwealth. His father, a Polish patriot and translator, was exiled to northern Russia for conspiracy against tsarist rule; both his parents died of tuberculosis by the time Conrad was eleven. He was raised by an uncle in Lviv and Krakow, went to sea in 1874 as a teenage apprentice in the French merchant marine, and from 1878 to 1894 served in the British merchant marine, rising to master's ticket and command. He wrote in English, a third language acquired after Polish and French, and published his first novel at the age of thirty-seven. He died in 1924.

The Thought

Conrad's sea-stories — *The Nigger of the Narcissus* (1897), *Lord Jim* (1900), *Typhoon* (1902), *Youth* (1902), *The Shadow-Line* (1917), among others — extended the seriousness of the sea-novel beyond what Melville had left. Where Melville had made the whale-ship a figure for metaphysical inquiry, Conrad made the sea voyage a figure for moral and political examination. His characters — captains, mates, and sailors — are defined by the unforgiving conditions under which they make decisions and by the inadequacy of the codes of conduct they have inherited to the situations they actually face. *Lord Jim* examines a single moment of cowardice and its lifelong consequences; *Heart of Darkness* examines the moral collapse of European imperialism along an African river; *Nostromo* examines revolution, capital, and failure on a South American coast.

The Conradian prose — dense, qualified, shadowed with narrators who are themselves unreliable — made the moral ambiguity of his material explicit. He did not allow the reader the consolations that earlier maritime fiction had offered: the decisive captain, the clear enemy, the eventual return. His sea is a place where moral categories are tested to destruction.

The Legacy

Conrad is, alongside Melville, the other great novelist of the sea in English. His influence on subsequent English-language fiction — on Ford Madox Ford, Graham Greene, V. S. Naipaul, and through them on the broader modernist tradition — has been immense. *Heart of Darkness* has become one of the most-taught short works in English-language literature and one of the most-contested; the argument over whether Conrad's critique of imperialism is adequate to its subject, opened by Chinua Achebe in 1975, has not been settled. For the Académie Maritime, Conrad stands for the sea as the setting in which moral questions are posed at their sharpest.