Joseph Conrad: Adventurer, Writer, Post-Colonial Lightning Rod
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 03.13.08 | 12:10 PM ET
Like Hemingway and Melville, Joseph Conrad transformed a life of adventure into gripping novels. As Adam Kirsch notes, he was “a ship’s captain, visiting ports from Malaysia to Venezuela. He attempted suicide in Marseilles, had a ship blown up under him in Sumatra, almost died of dysentery in the Belgian Congo, and fell in love with a mademoiselle in Mauritius.” A biography, The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, by John Stape, explores the many facets of Conrad’s character. In recent weeks, it’s been receiving mixed reviews.
in The New York Sun, Kirsch takes Stape to task for his failure to address Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe’s criticisms of Conrad, among other things.
As we noted a couple of weeks ago, Achebe’s novel “Things Fall Apart,” which turns 50 years old this year, was a response to Conrad’s classic novel, “Heart of Darkness.”
Achebe viewed the book as racist and delivered a landmark lecture in 1975 in which he called it “an offensive and totally deplorable book.”
Writes Kirsch:
One need not agree with this charged judgment to acknowledge that race and racism play a more central role in Conrad than in any other novelist of his stature. Even if Conrad is not a white supremacist, as Mr. Achebe charges, it is clear that his worldview depends on racial categories and what might be called a racist metaphysics—the belief that race is an essence, which renders racial divides profoundly unbridgeable. In this, he reflects some of the most “advanced” thinking of his era, which witnessed the most aggressive phase of European imperialism.
Stape talks up Conrad’s life over photos of the author on YouTube:
Related on World Hum:
* ‘Things Fall Apart’: 50 Years Later
* World Hum’s 10 Greatest Fictional Travelers
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Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
