Abstract
In his ‘personal remembrance’ of Conrad, Ford suggested how Conrad’s boyhood reading of Marryat’s novels about ‘the frigate warfare of Napoleonic times’ had shaped his response to his own career in the merchant navy:
In the seventies and eighties of last century Conrad by dint of experience found in that service…the tradition of Marryat’s frigates. It was fidelity to an ideal, the ideal of the British merchant service.1
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Notes
Frederick Marryat, Peter Simple (London: Saunders and Otley, 1834) 3 vols.
Vernon Young, ‘Trial by Water’, Accent (Spring 1952) pp. 80–1, suggests that ‘Wait’ also contains a symbolically significant play on ‘weight’.
See Hampson, ‘Conrad and the Idea of Empire’, L’Epoque Conradienne (Limoges, 1990) pp. 9–22, for a more detailed discussion of this issue.
It could also be argued that Marlow is driven by guilt relating to the lie he told the ‘Intended’ — indeed, that he is compelled to tell the true story of Kurtz, a narrative that breaks out of the conventions of imperialist adventure-romance, because he surrendered to that conventional pressure in the story he told the ‘Intended’. See Peter Brook, Reading for the Plot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).
Karl Marx, ‘Future Results of British Rule in India’, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works (London: Laurence & Wishart, 1950) I, p. 323.
Thus Guerard, for example, describes Marlow’s pilgrimage as ‘a journey towards and through certain facets or potentialities of self’ (Conrad the Novelist, p. 38). Frances B. Singh, however, usefully draws attention to the contradiction between the political and psychological levels of the narrative: ‘Historically Marlow would have us feel that the Africans are the innocent victims of the white man’s heart of darkness; psychologically and metaphysically… Marlow equates the primitive with the evil and the physical blackness of Africans with a spiritual darkness’ (‘The Colonialistic Bias of “Heart of Darkness”’, Conradiana, X [1978] pp. 41–54).
See also Patrick Brantlinger, Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830–1914 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988): ‘Conrad portrays the moral bankruptcy of imperialism by showing European notions and actions as no better than African fetishism and savagery…. His version of evil — the form taken by Kurtz’s Satanic behaviour — is going native. Evil in short is African’ (p. 262).
For further discussion of attitudes to work and language implicit in Marlow’s response to this document, see Jeremy Hawthorn, Joseph Conrad: Language and Fictional Self-Consciousness (London: Edward Arnold, 1979) pp. 9–10. An Inquiry into Some Points of Seamanship is set against Kurtz’s ‘report’ (with its ‘postscriptum’).
He is also, of course, the Fool to Kurtz’s Lear. See P. J. Glassman, Language and Being, p. 223; Adam Gillon, Conrad and Shakespeare (New York: Astra Books, 1976) p. 135.
Edgar Allan Poe, ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’, The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1982) pp. 127–40.
Marlow’s attitude can be seen as conventional in this genre. It is comparable to Gulliver’s response to humanity after his fourth voyage. It might also be compared with Edward Prendick’s mood at the end of Wells’s The Island of Dr Moreau (London: W. Heinemann, 1896): ‘Though I do not expect that the terror of that island will ever altogether leave me, at most times it lies far in the back of my mind, a mere distant cloud, a memory and a faint distrust; but there are times when the little cloud spreads until it obscures the whole sky. Then I look about me at my fellow-men. And I go in fear…. I feel as though the animal was surging up through them…. When I lived in London the horror was wellnigh insupportable… I would go out into the streets to fight with my delusion, and prowling women would mew after me, furtive craving men glance jealously at me’ (pp. 216–17). Wells’s exploration of the human/animal boundary is also connected to an interest in food, eating and being eaten. See Peter Kemp, H. G. Wells and the Culminating Ape (London: Macmillan, 1982) pp. 7–72. Conrad’s collocation of policemen and butchers re-appears in The Secret Agent.
Robert Secor, The Rhetoric of Shifting Perspectives in Conrad’s ‘Victory’ (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1971) p. 7.
For this view of the Brownlow-Maylie world, see Arnold Kettle, Introduction to the English Novel (London: Hutchinson, 1951) I, pp. 115–29.
See R. Hampson, ‘Chance: The Affair of the Purloined Brother’, The Conradian, 6.2 (June 1981) pp. 5–15.
Martin Green, in Dreams of Adventure: Deeds of Empire (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980), discusses Conrad in the context of adventure-romance. For an adventure-romance hero of the type Jim physically resembles, consider, for example, Jack Martin in R. M. Ballantyne’s The Coral Island: ‘Jack Martin was a tall, strapping, broad-shouldered youth of eighteen, with a handsome, good-humoured, firm face. He had had a good education, was clever and hearty and lion-like in his actions, but mild and quiet in disposition’ (p. 7).
The Coral Island was first published by T. Nelson & Sons, London, 1858. All references are to the Everyman’s Library edition (London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1907).
J. S. Bratton, in The Impact of Victorian Children’s Fiction (London: Croom Helm, 1981), refers to the mid-Victorian transformation of Arnold’s attitude to boys as exemplified by Kingsley’s Westward Ho! She writes: The new ideal is to be a lad like Amyas, who is tongue-tied and thoughtless but strong, brave, and simple in his faith in God, England and himself, and in his right to rule not only his social inferiors at home, but all the world abroad’ (pp. 133–4). The passage she quotes from Westward Ho! provides an appropriate context for the romance world of Patusan: ‘As he stands there with beating heart and kindling eye, the cool breeze whistling through his long fair curls, he is a symbol, though he knows it not, of brave young England longing to wing its way out of its island prison, to discover and to traffic, to colonise and civilise.’ Westward Ho! was dedicated to Rajah Brooke.
Gordan suggested Brooke was a source for Lord Jim, in Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist, pp. 64–73. In Conrad’s Eastern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), Norman Sherry gave qualified support to this suggestion (p. 135).
In Joseph Conrad: The Major Phase, Jacques Berthoud writes: ‘I have argued that the first part of the novel has been concerned with establishing the truth revealed by conduct. This being so, the second part is concerned with exploring, under the sponsorship of the German merchant Stein, the truth inherent in vision’ (p. 80). In Conrad in the Nineteenth Century, Watt observes ‘how deeply representative Stein is of German romantic idealism’: There is the twin enthusiasm for geographical exploration and scientific discovery…there is the fact that Stein…is also an exile from the 1848 revolution, and thus a representative of German political liberalism; and there are his poetic quotations, which make him the spokesman of German romantic literature’ (p. 323). See also Leo Lensing, ‘Goethe’s Torquato Tasso in Lord Jim: A Note on Conrad’s Use of Literary Quotation’, English Literature in Transition, 19(1976) pp. 101–4.
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© 1992 Robert Hampson
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Hampson, R. (1992). The Brotherhood of the Sea: The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, ‘Heart of Darkness’ and Lord Jim. In: Joseph Conrad: Betrayal and Identity. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22302-2_5
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