Conrad’s Visual Aesthetics: Classical and Modern Connections

Abstract

In order properly to grasp Conrad’s visual aesthetics and reader theory, it is crucial to give due consideration to the multiple literary sources that informed his writing. There is ample evidence that Conrad read extensively and that he was an avid reader of both modern and ancient authors and texts. His father Apollo Korzienowski introduced him to the Polish Romantic classics, specifically Mickiewicz and Slovacki, as well as to Shakespeare¹ and Victor Hugo, which he translated into Polish.² Later, Conrad read the ancient Greek and Latin poets, the French Humanists, and modern British, French, and Russian writers, including Dickens, Marryat, Pascal, Flaubert, Maupassant, Anatole France, Stendhal, Balzac, and Turgenev. These authors affected Conrad’s writing in various ways. Conrad himself has acknowledged his debts through direct or implicit reference in his essays, letters, and fiction. For instance, the Shakespearean notion of the world as a stage is constantly reiterated in Conrad’s fiction, notably in Lord Jim, Under Western Eyes, ‘Karain: A Memory’, and Victory? He referred to Pascal in Under Western Eyes where the novel’s protagonist Razumov is associated with a ‘thinking reed’, a phrase echoing Pascal’s famous saying, ‘Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed’ (2004, 84). Dickens’s imprint can be felt in the grimy urban setting of The Secret Agent⁴ and the influence of Flaubert and Maupassant permeates Conrad’s writing.