Joseph Conrad's Fiction

Joseph Conrad has been critically nominated as the most complex of England's novelists (Moser 1). Granting this claim, a critical appreciation of Conrad's complexity only intensifies when the imperialistic, bureaucratic, and colonial intentions encoded in his fiction are factored into the equation. Born in Poland, learning French as his second language, English was actually his third language acquired. Scholars have suggested that these triplicate translations contributed to the development of his particularly dense style. Conrad's sense of detachment, his exacting observation skills, refined cynicism, and an acute sense of alienation serve as substantial underpinnings within all of his writing. As a novelist Conrad could represent the irony and contradictions inherent in the modern world's deteriorating imperialistic system of government, the contra-speak dispensed by its bureaucratic demands even as he sketched its oddly dispassionate turn toward self-destruction, an annihilation issued apparently from a compulsive and collective Nietzschean will to power, an inexorable need to dominate. Yet ironically Conrad's stylistic insistence upon detachment steers him away from the shortcomings of a more austerely directed didactic intent. Like his great inspirational model, the French stylist, Gustave Flaubert, Conrad recognized and avoided the danger in advancing the political above art (Seymo

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f signifying the bureaucrat's distance from actual events surrounding him. Writing his daily column is his task. Understanding the people about whom he writes appears to have become impossible. He has already reduced these people to a formulaic understanding as evidenced by his speech: There is a curse of futility upon our character. Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, chivalry and materialism, high sounding sentiments and a supine morality, violent efforts for an idea and a sullen acquiescence in every form of corruption. We convulsed a continent for our independence only to become the passive prey of a democratic parody (Conrad, Nostromo, 166). In attempting to decipher the politics of wealth in an undeveloped country, Conrad seems to arrive at the gloomy conclusion that both material interests and revolutions doom societies to a nearly preordained failure. Aspirations to greater political equity are cruelly, albeit subtly undercut as when Don José Avellanos' unpublished revolutionary manuscript, "Thirty Years of Misrule" is used during the revolt for canon stuffing in order to ensure its stability when firing. Yet Decoud represents the newspaperman as ineffectual bureaucrat whose inability to be actually engaged wit
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Approximate Word count = 5000
Approximate Pages = 20 (250 words per page)

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