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his downfall and imprisonment, and precipitates his family into disintegration, especially his daughter Flora’s situation of a miserable adolescence. Other works dealing with capitalization ranges from the Malay trilogy, in which the colonial enterprise based on capitalist interests debilitates the mutual trust between the colonizers and the native people; “Heart of Darkness,” where the shameless and unscrupulous struggle for capitalist interests in the name of “civilizing mission” is best embodied in the Eldorado Exploring Expedition, aimed to “tear treasure out of the bowels of the land” to gain infinite capitalist interests (“Heart of Darkness” 177);
to Lord Jim, whose British Merchant Marine episode vividly depicts the capitalist logic that standardizes and rationalizes the maritime culture, as the dehumanizing and depersonalizing effects of the investigation case conducted by the maritime court testifies. Another outstanding text is Nostromo, which shifts its focus to American capitalism and imperialism that intervenes and cashes in on the commercial as well as political activities of its neighboring countries in the name of technological progress and political stability.
III. Conrad’s Modernist Dissatisfaction
Continuing the discussion from the Introduction of European high culture’s dissatisfaction with the consequences of Enlightenment, this section delves into Conrad’s reaction to Enlightenment culture and its disastrous effects on human life, which is characteristic of the modernist dissatisfaction with the contemporary status quo. As Robert Pippin puts it, there exists a culture of suspicion in the nineteenth century designated as “Nietzschean and Heideggerian, [a] dissatisfaction with the affirmative, normative claims essential to European modernization,” suspecting that the two great accomplishments of modern culture – technology and democracy – pose a threat rather than contribute to the welfare of human life itself (xi, xii). The
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so-called “masters of suspicion” from Marx and Nietzsche to Freud in the realm of high culture proposed severe critiques of the bourgeois modern culture, denouncing the value of that culture’s hallmark of “rationalization” and “productive efficiency”
which brought about “anomie, consumerism, alienation, disaffection… [and] a consummerized culture of kitsch” (Pippin 7). The culture of modernism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries best represents such an ethos of
dissatisfaction with the “sterile, exploitative, commercialized, or simply ugly forms of life” reflected in the “bourgeois forms of modernization” (Pippin 29). In reaction to the Enlightenment culture of bourgeois modernity featuring self-complacent liberty, progress, and democracy, the arts and literature of modernism employ “difficult, opaque, strange, elitist, self-defining” forms and contents to display the spirits of autonomy and integrity negated by the bourgeois culture (Pippin 31-2). As a forerunner of literary modernism, Conrad is inclined in his works to advocate this attitude of modernist dissatisfaction heralded by the “masters of suspicion” with the bourgeois Enlightenment culture. Nevertheless, we must be mindful of the subtle distinction between the Nietzschean outlook of nihilism as well as the
Schopenhauerean one of pessimism and the Conradian outlook of an amalgam of skepticism and hope, in their respective reaction to and reflection of the catastrophes of modernization.
The “destroying fathers” (or the “masters of suspicion” mentioned above) in their writings disseminated the culture of “Counter-Enlightenment” in a tone of
“pervasive skepticism, relativism, and despair” (Erdinast-Vulcan 11). As a contemporary to those nineteenth-century “destroying fathers,” Conrad naturally occupied the “landscape of ruins” as his “cultural habitat” (Erdinast-Vulcan 10).
Fertilized by the spreading of new scientific theories that refuted the existence of a divine universe, this “landscape of ruins” became the breeding ground of
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epistemological uncertainty that denies any meaning and purpose to the lives of human beings. Erdinast-Vulcan points out that among the “destroying fathers” faced with the universe of despair, Nietzsche was the first thinker “who refused all
metaphysical consolations, and pursued the implications of the death of the Absolute”
(15). Specifically on this point of the “ethical implications of the death of God,”
Conrad and Nietzsche seem to share the common ground since the former too is a
“disillusioned moralist” who wrestles with the universal despair and skepticism (Erdinast-Vulcan 18). In his survey of the analogy between Conrad and Nietzsche Edward Said points out the former’s familiarity with the latter’s ideas of “the will to power,” the “Overman,” and the “transvaluation of all values” (65-6). Said traces Conrad and Nietzsche’s intellectual inheritance to Schopenhauer and describe them as the “disaffected” followers of the great pessimistic thinker (65). Both Nietzsche and Conrad in their works disagreed with Schopenhauer’s insistence of the Will as blind and contended instead that Will inevitably leads to the “acquisition of power” (Said 65). Besides, both of them were dissatisfied with their mentor’s “cowardly retreat from life by preaching stoic withdrawal” (Said 65). My intention here is not to trace the philosophical genealogies of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Conrad, but to present a connection of Conrad’s works to the thoughts of the other two thinkers. I admit Said’s suggestion of Conrad’s rendering of the Will as the instrument for the
fulfillment of men’s desire of power is true, as demonstrated by Kurtz’s indomitable will to conquer the native land to gain more power, interest, and universal fame.
Nevertheless, I cannot fully agree with the judgment that Conrad echoed Nietzsche’s point of departure from Schopenhauer’s idea of “stoic withdrawal.” By contrast, I believe Conrad in his works also portrays his heroes/heroines as the lonely exiles not in a gesture of hopeless surrender but in pursuit of individual chastisement and redemption of life’s meanings. I will give an in-depth study of the themes of exile
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and redemption below in Chapter Four, which forms the core of my thesis argument and the main thrust of this dissertation.
Both Schopenhauer and Conrad viewed the universe as dominated by a dark force that unrelentingly drives the destiny of human beings, which is termed “the will” by the former and “the darkness” by the latter (Panagopoulos 19). This “blind, amoral force” disheartens modern man and thwarts his will to subsist in this cruel world (Panagopoulos 19). In this regards, both in Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Conrad’s fiction world, man has become a solitary existence that attempts to escape from this world of dark forces overriding moral principles and human reason.
Nevertheless, as Nic Panagopoulos points out, the theme of exile bears different meanings for the two writers. For Schopenhauer, the exilic pursuit is derived from a wearied pessimistic worldview and “a desire for annihilation;” while for Conrad, the gesture of self-exile is a heroic action to “redeem and re-affirm existence” however futile it might be proved at last (Panagopoulos 19). In light of the two writers’
nuanced variation toward human being’s reaction to his own undesired situation, Panagopoulos argues that Conrad’s perception of the world is more akin to that of Nietzsche for both of them express a sense of “affirmation” of human will to
surmount its difficulties rather than that of the Schopenhauerean pessimism to escape from this world in total withdrawal (21). However, we should also be cautious of the points where Nietzsche and Conrad might diverge. In other words, my attempt here is to show the nuanced difference between Conrad’s and Nietzsche’s reactions to modernity and the “modern temper.” Unlike Nietzsche, Conrad is not only a nihilistic witness to the modern temper; Conrad’s works also represent a “revolt”
against the modern temper based on his solid moral and ethical grounds
(Erdinast-Vulcan 18-9). Erdinast-Vulcan points out the fact of Conrad’s Polish romantic heritage that sets him apart from the Nietzschean nihilism (20). I will
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discuss the religious face of Conrad in his relation to the Nietzschean conception of the “death of God” below.
Nietzsche’s influence on the generation of the fin-de-siècle and the First World War is far-reaching. His disbelief of all established institutions – from Christianity, nineteenth-century “idées reçues,” to the traditional morality – and his quest instead of “aristocratic radicalism” are echoed in the contemporary philosophy of
Existentialism (McFarlane 79). Indeed, the urgency of Nietzsche’s prophecy of the arrival of nihilism caused by an “anomic, directionless ‘herd society’” eclipsed the importance of Christian religion in men’s confrontation with a modern world
dominated by mechanic and indifferent science (Pippin 83). Nietzsche’s famous but almost clichéd “death of God” bespeaks the failure of any traditional moral or
philosophical values attached to “allegiance and commitment,” and calls instead for an attitude of “transvaluation of values” to think “beyond good and evil” (Pippin 146, 83). Viewed in a big picture, Nietzsche’s thought is interpreted by Heidegger as a form of nihilism that sees no “hope for some divine, eternal, or even subjectively necessary warrant” (Pippin 146). A first glimpse of Conrad’s works seems to confirm the skepticism of religion welcomed in the contemporary thoughts of Nietzsche and Schopenhauer – the “predicament of the Conradian character” can be easily interpreted to “reflect the uncertainties of humanity in a new faithless age”
(Lester 234). Nevertheless, Conrad’s attitude toward religion in general and
Christianity specifically is far more complex and ambivalent than one imagines. On the one hand, from the perspective of psycho-biography, Conrad’s sense of religious uncertainty came from his mother’s untimely death and his father’s consequent disappointment in the Roman Catholic Church (Lester 230-1). On the other hand, according to John Lester, Conrad’s object of criticism is confined to the institution of Christian religion. Despite his distaste for the worldly trappings and ornamental
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ceremonies of Christianity that were “stifling spirituality,” he remains a believer of God (Lester 231, 235). His religious faith can be explained as his inheritance of the
“passionate religious nationalism” of Polish Romanticism, in which Catholicism was
“integral to nationalistic identity” (Lester 229). Conrad’s sense of Catholic identity will be further discussed in Chapter Three in which Polish Romanticism and
Messianism play important parts. Besides Conrad’s heritage from a literary tradition that gives equal weight to scripture like the English literature, he is also influenced by the modernist trend of immersion in the language of the Scripture (Purdy 8, 5).
Although the modernist writers are inclined to use scripture in a “displaced or disguised” manner, Conrad in his works is more straightforward in his use of the scriptural metaphors (Purdy 6). Conrad’s familiarity with the English Bible may shed a clearer light to the positive side of his ambivalent relation to the Christian religion.
In Nietzsche’s search for a “transvaluation of values” mentioned earlier that promotes thinking “beyond good and evil,” he is aspiring to a kind of “noble”
independence, an “active nihilism” based on “modern, secular goal of autonomy”
(Pippin 93). In other words, Nietzsche is opposed to the “slave revolution” waged by the weak, the powerless, for an moral ideal based on “resentment, fear, envy, and even self-hatred” as their “will to power” (Pippin 94). On the contrary, Nietzsche advocates the “noble,” the “high-minded,” masters to “create values” and “coin names for values” to distinguish themselves from the “low-minded” and the “plebian”
(Pippin 108). Indeed, Nietzsche’s role as a proponent of the strong and the powerful is very different from Conrad’s position as an ally to the oppressed and the silenced victims. As Panagopoulos points out, Nietzsche’s “man-artist,” or “Übermensch,”
never ceases his will to power to dominate nature and other people, which is opposed to Conrad’s vision of “humanity” and “solidarity” that will curb the growth of
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rampant egoism (19). Conrad’s perception of human nature is in common with the Schopenhauerean “compassionate man” who offers civilization a glimmer of
redemption as opposed to the Nietzschean “superman” whose will to power only leads to “self-destruction” (Panagopoulos 20). A good example of these two types of human behavior and interpretation of human nature is “Heart of Darkness,” where Marlow and Kurtz assume the models of “compassionate man” and “superman”
respectively. Kurtz has become a demigod in the jungle and is corrupted by his will and desire that goes beyond the “ethical notions of right and wrong;” while Marlow can identify with Kurtz’s predicament and attempt to rescue him from his
degeneration that makes the former “restrained and compassionate toward others”
(Panagopoulos 99, 104). Fred Madden also confirms Conrad’s attempt to search for
“ethical mechanism” in the novella corresponds to Schopenhauer’s inquiry of the internal basis of morality in “The Foundation of Ethics.” Madden picks up the fact of Marlow’s “lie” to the Intended to demonstrate man’s capacity of “sympathy” that restrains himself from imposing suffering and pain to others. This again testifies to Conrad’s conviction in “compassion” and “altruism” as the noble and indispensable human dispositions to combat the dark will of the universe and the “rampant egoism”
it engenders (Madden 58). His sympathy for the colonial natives and his resentment on behalf of them expressed in “Heart of Darkness,” and his concern of women’s plight in The Secret Agent and Chance all testify to Conrad’s ethical vision of justice to help and support the needed. In his Preface to “The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’”
which is often regarded as his aesthetic manifesto, Conrad also proclaims his aim to give voice to the “disregarded multitude of the bewildered, the simple, and the voiceless” (146). The similarity between Conrad and Existentialism lies in their attempt to address the individual agonies over the dilemma of life; both the Conradian heroes and the existentialist hero are involved with the themes of “death, suicide,
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isolation, despair, courage and choosing to be” (Watt 14). However, we also have to bear in mind their difference in Conrad’s deviation from a willed, violent, and proud existentialist hero espoused by Nietzsche and the former’s pursuit of human solidarity and affirmation of individual fidelity to his fellow human beings driven by his inner consciousness of “restraint and honor” (Watt 14).
A number of critics suggest a reading of Conrad’s works from the perspective of skepticism and moral nihilism. Suresh Raval emphasizes the “moral paralysis”
experienced by Conrad’s characters and calls for a deconstructive reading to analyze the “epistemological impasse” inherent in Conrad’s fictional world (3, 6). Perhaps the most well-known cynical reader of Conrad is the deconstructive critic J. Hillis Miller. Miller grounds his own philosophy on the conceptions that “the human world is a lie” and refutes the viability of all human ideals, which endows him with a skeptical vision of the Conradian world (Poets of Reality 17). Miller contends that Conrad’s fiction is aimed to make his readers disillusioned of this world through an unveiling of the dark truth behind the illusions in an attempt of “demystification”
(Poets of Reality 18-9). The Conradian universe is depicted as a berth of darkness that relentlessly devours the individuals who inhabit it (Poets of Reality 28). Miller poses the question regarding the Conradian dilemma – “Is there no way to remain in touch with the darkness without being engulfed by it, no way to be actively engaged in life without becoming part of an empty masquerade?” – and then abruptly negates the possibility of any way out (Poets of Reality 34). In his deconstructive
masterpiece “Heart of Darkness Revisited” Miller maintains Marlow’s narrative is given in a consistent “ironical” tone, aimed to reveal truth and defend against truth at the same time in a status of undecidability characteristic of the human world in general (219). In the skeptical readings of Conrad by the poststructuralist critics, it seems there is no hope to transcend the dilemma of moral complexities in this
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enlightened world of despair and disaster, since every possibility is always already negated and questioned. Although I admit that the representation of moral complexities and moral ambiguities renders it difficult to treat Conrad’s works in a simplistic and optimistic manner, the Conradian world is not necessarily reduced to one of total nihilism and defeatism. We need more efforts to distinguish the subtle difference between the existentialist vacuity of nothingness and the Conradian complexity of opposite forces in struggle. In his study of Conrad’s obscurity in terms of lexicon and register, Allon White affirms the writer’s simplicity and clarity in his “moral purpose” based on the simple ideas of “Fidelity, Duty, Courage, Honest Work” in spite of the equivocal and multiplied meanings derived from his difficult wordings (108). Adam Gillon points out the idealistic perspective of the Conradian world in its protagonists’ dauntless confrontation with failure and futility, and
highlights the fact that “defeat may sometimes be an affirmation of the ideal value of things” (58). Furthermore, Gillon forcefully singles out the differences between the Conradian moral dilemma and Sartrean moral despair. Conrad’s central themes of
“freedom” and “negation” distinguish his worldview from Sartre’s philosophy in that for the former “metaphysical emptiness” is fatal and destructive rather than normal and self-evident, and it is through certain “ethical code of behavior” that the
Conradian hero may achieve freedom and moral redemption that are totally lacking in the existentialist hero (Gillon 168). Even though Conrad’s characters may suffer as much as Sartre’s in their solitude and anguish, for the former the moments of
“extreme state of isolation or defeat” can be an “affirmation of human fidelity and compassion” (Gillon 172). For example, in spite of the torturing and defeats during the long process, Jim’s and Razumov’s life of isolation and exile will lead to their deep repentance and ultimate salvation. To sum up the diverse critical points of view cited above regarding the philosophy of Conrad’s fictional world, moral nihilism
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is only one facet of its moral complexity which has the nuanced difference from the Existentialist philosophy of void and despair. To grasp the essential point of
Conrad’s writings, the readers have to pay equal attention to its cynical and idealistic sides, which is a prerequisite for my thesis argument to read out the possibility of redemption and salvation under the surface of Conrad’s modernist dissatisfaction.
In regard to Conrad’s modernist dissatisfaction with the Victorian culture of enlightenment and progress cultivated by the advances in science and technology, and his subtle difference from the Nietzschean reaction to modern civilization, Ian Watt’s elaboration of the Conradian conflicted vision of alienation and commitment is highly relevant here. On the one hand, in his affirmative moments of heroic and romantic representation, there are hints of moral ambiguities; on the other hand, the negative tones of alienation and despair in his representative works are diluted by the
persevering quest for human solidarity or commitment (Watt 11-2). The conflicted attitude was defined by E. M. Forster as Conrad’s vacillation between his “further vision” and “nearer vision” (Watt 2). His further vision is reflected in the late-Victorian worldview of despair cultivated by the sense of insecurity and purposelessness of human destiny in a world dominated by scientific progress and industrialism (Watt 3). By contrast, the sense of alienation is counteracted by his nearer vision of social and personal commitments developed during his years at sea to devote “to his career, to his fellow-seamen, to his adopted country” (Watt 7). Ian Watt highlights the importance of the theme of solidarity in Conrad’s works, in which the “isolated and alienated” characters are engaged in an unremitting attempt to reach other human beings in their moral and ethical quest, however torturing or harrowing the process may be (12). Watt adroitly puts the question of the legitimacy of
persevering quest for human solidarity or commitment (Watt 11-2). The conflicted attitude was defined by E. M. Forster as Conrad’s vacillation between his “further vision” and “nearer vision” (Watt 2). His further vision is reflected in the late-Victorian worldview of despair cultivated by the sense of insecurity and purposelessness of human destiny in a world dominated by scientific progress and industrialism (Watt 3). By contrast, the sense of alienation is counteracted by his nearer vision of social and personal commitments developed during his years at sea to devote “to his career, to his fellow-seamen, to his adopted country” (Watt 7). Ian Watt highlights the importance of the theme of solidarity in Conrad’s works, in which the “isolated and alienated” characters are engaged in an unremitting attempt to reach other human beings in their moral and ethical quest, however torturing or harrowing the process may be (12). Watt adroitly puts the question of the legitimacy of