Challenges and problems of the Far East (i): Conrad’s tales

Abstract

One cannot consider Conrad a British writer in the same way one would Kipling, Forster, Lawrence and Cary, though his work is an important, integral part of the tradition of British fiction. It is true that he used English as the medium for his creative work though he knew French from childhood and learnt English only when an adult. He found that fiction in English had established itself as a serious art form. His period in the British Merchant Service was to him a spiritual experience and lies behind his art. He became a British citizen and settled down in Britain to become a full-time writer. He was attached to the country of his adoption. But he achieved only a temporary working-comradeship in the Merchant Navy. He could not root himself in British society and did not find much joy among English literary men. His Continental affiliations are as important as his English ones; it is this fact that makes F. R Leavis’s attempt to place him in ‘the great tradition’, coming down from Jane Austen and George Eliot through to D. H. Lawrence, not quite convincing.¹ Even as a British merchant seaman, he was in part the Continental nobleman; he was known as an extremely stand-offish captain. His literary methods, such as his strict objectivity, his rigorously economical and highly wrought style, his tight and complex construction, have their antecedents in Flaubert and Maupassant rather than in Jane Austen and George Eliot. Still, Conrad was adrift from Poland and found no resting-place in France or Belgium. Indeed, he found no community anywhere.