JOSEPH CONRAD: A Chronicle

by Zdzislaw Najder ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 15, 1983

Najder (Conrad's Polish Background, 1964) is critical of biographies which have used Conrad's literary work to interpret his life-history; he also objects to the psychoanalytic approach of Bernard Meyer (1967)--and, implicitly, that of Frederick R. Karl's rich, massive, excessively interpretive study. (Unlike all the other major Conrad-bios, it goes virtually unmentioned here.) In his own long, hard-working chronicle, then, Najder takes a more scholarly, documentary tack--rigorously separating fact from myth, emphasizing Conrad's background and polities, but also struggling with the same quasi-psychological themes (the Outsider, the Divided Self, etc.) which have made previous Conrad studies challenging. . . and often opaque. For Najder, the young orphan Konrad is ""egocentric and neurasthenic""; his suicide attempt may have been ""ostentatious simulation""; and neither his fiction, nor his memoir (A Personal Record), can be trusted as a source of information on his years at sea--which he idealized. In contrast to Karl, Nadjer sees the Congo trauma in largely political terms, while treating the subsequent breakdown as a probable ease of his lifelong ""pathological depression""--with heavy emphasis on the personality-clash between Conrad and his uncle. And, not really differing from most commentators, Najder presents Conrad's writing as ""an act of compensation, of correcting, perfecting, or at least complementing his own pre- and extraliterary life"": the alien looking for identity (e.g., in the Marlow persona), the skeptic straining to affirm faith in mankind's ""moral heritage."" Throughout, Najder refrains from extensive literary criticism, bringing in fictional content only as it relates to Conrad's painful creative wrestlings. (Under Western Eyes brought him ""face to face with a black wall of hopelessness raised by the real world."") Distortions in his own self-portraits--and in those of wife Jessie and others--are painstakingly pointed out. Sexually-oriented psychoanalysis is firmly eschewed. (""Eros did not play an important part in Conrad's spiritual life""--though he was probably not a strictly faithful husband.) And each of the many literary colleagueships is carefully, thoughtfully documented. With extensive letter-excerpts and much day-by-day detailing, this is not the most readable of Conrad biographies. Najder's halfheartedly psychological approach is also a problem, with some murky, abstract passages as a result. But if neither fully satisfying nor fully convincing (the political emphasis seems a bit exaggerated), this is a worthy addition to the problematic Conrad shelf--especially in its special attention to the writer's Polish-gentry background.

Pub Date: Nov. 15, 1983

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Rutgers Univ. Press

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1983

Categories: NONFICTION