HIS BOOKS IN RELATION TO HIS LIFE
In Heart of Darkness he carried the situation only a little beyond his own experience of a journey to the Congo in order, as he said, to add to it "a sinister resonance". We are to note that Conrad leaves unexplained the remorse which weighs upon the dying Kurtz and, further, that there is a symbolic darkness in Kurtz's own heart. Conrad admitted the presence of overtones of symbolism in many of his books.(5)
The facts of a writer's personal life are sometimes an unimportant element in the understanding of his work. With Conrad it is otherwise. His life and his books are so closely integrated, that what passes for a story, as instance by Youth, is sometimes autobiography, while who shall say that passages in A Personal Record lack the flavour of fiction? He was capable of creation in the large sense, but he drew upon and returned again and again to the store of direct experience he had acquired in his dealings with fellow men of almost every race and creed. (6)
The autobiographical basis of this is in maturer experience, a voyage up the Congo, undertaken in 1890, which appears to have had a profound effect upon his imagination and indeed his personality. Before it, he told Edward Garnett, he had been "just a mere animal". And in the story he was concerned, he recorded, with "experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case... That sombre theme had given a sinister resonance, a tonality of its own, a continued vibration that, I hoped, would hang in the air and dwell on the ear after the last note had been struck". To this end he marshals all his developed resources of atmospheric writing, and achieves a masterpiece which is at once overpowering and enigmatical.
It has been maintained that Conrad as he came to maturity acknowledged or half-acknowledged something shameful in having left Poland, and that much of his writing is generated in the haunting persuasion that he had betrayed his manhood even before he grew into it. There is only a limited critical interest in the thesis that all his work is an allegory of desertion and expiation. Yet he is undoubtedly an artist in whose creations the echo of some deep inner conflict is constantly heard. (7)
(5) ã A Literary History of England. The 19th Century and after (1789-1939)
Samuel C.Chew. Bryn Maur College
Richard D. Altick. The Ohio State University
Edited by Albert C.Baugh- Second Edition
London, Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd.
1967- Meredith Publishing Company.
Page. 1553
(6) ã Joseph Conrad by Oliver Warner
Published for THE BRITISH COUNCIL and the NATIONAL BOOK LEAGUE
By Longmans, Green and Co., London, New York, Toronto.
First published in 1950.
Page:8
(7) ã Eight Modern Writers. J.I.M.Steward
Oxford History of English Literature
Edited by F.P.Wilson and Banamy Dobrée
Oxford at the Clarendon Press
Oxford University Press.- 1963
Pages: 193 and 185.
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