Photo: Joseph Conrad.
Under the cover of darkness: Jonathan Wooding takes a look at Joseph Conrad
‘I’ve developed an inkling that he was not the God-denier that many assume him to be.’
Should Friends ever find themselves in need of a ready-made set of scriptures – reflective, shall we say, of our iconoclastic spirituality – may I suggest the unsettling writings of Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)?
It is often assumed that Conrad’s works are irreligious and atheistic, perhaps because he writes persistently of a cosmic ‘immensity that receives no impress, preserves no memories and keeps no reckoning of lives’ (The Shadow-Line, 1917). You won’t find this, for instance: ‘the Lord is at work in this thick night of Darkness’, which was George Fox’s cheerful message to Friends during a time of persecution (1663). More significantly, you will find Conrad doing what Fox specifically advises against: ‘And never heed the tempests nor the storms, floods nor rains.’ These are exactly the tribulations and terrors to which Conrad assiduously attends in his alarmingly-documentary fiction. Conrad, very aware of that existentially-threatening ‘ocean of darkness and death’, is not an obvious bedfellow of Fox, with his ‘infinite ocean of light and love, which flowed over the ocean of darkness’. But I’ve developed an inkling that Conrad was not the God-denier, or God-avoider, that many assume him to be.
One of Conrad’s most famous works, Heart of Darkness (1899), inspired the equally famous film Apocalypse Now (1979). Young existentialists quoted from the book to advertise their atheism and supposed superior metaphysical insights. The memorable line ‘The horror! The horror!’ is uttered by the charismatic, demonic protagonist, Kurtz, an ivory-trader in nineteenth-century Belgian Congo, who despairs at the human potential for savagery.
It doesn’t stop there. The Shadow-Line was described by Martin Amis as ‘one of the most aggressively godless testaments in the English language’. What is there here that could be of interest to Quakers? Who was Joseph Conrad, and what are his metaphysics?
Well, John Gray, in Seven Types of Atheism (2018), says this: ‘Born in 1857 into an aristocratic Polish family in Tsarist-ruled Ukraine, he spent his childhood in the Russian provinces after his father had been exiled for anti-Russian activities.’ This picture of exile, a young and tragic fool of fickle fortune, comes from a thrilling chapter entitled ‘Joseph Conrad and the godless sea’. According to Walter Allen, in The English Novel: A short critical history, Conrad left Cracow at seventeen to become a sailor in the French merchant service, and remained at sea until 1894. Some say he was fleeing conscription into the Russian Army. Conrad seems, after all this flight and precarity, to have suffered from post-traumatic stress, certainly after experiences on a trip up the Congo River. In a biography of the man, John Batchelor writes: ‘The experiences in the Congo were so shattering, physically and emotionally, that Conrad’s health never fully recovered. At the end of February (1891) he was hospitalized suffering from gout, neuralgic pains in his right arm and recurrent attacks of malaria, and from psychological prostration’ (The Life of Joseph Conrad: A critical biography). Despite any assumptions about where all this strife might leave a man, FR Leavis, apostle for great literature, held that Conrad was not a nihilist after all: ‘We are made aware of hostile natural forces threatening his seamen with extinction, but not of metaphysical gulfs opening under life and consciousness’ (The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad). The distinction may be helpful.
Conrad reflected on his post-oceangoing artistic endeavours in the preface to an early novel. His aim was ‘to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect’. That truth-seeking is sufficient for this Quaker to think of Conrad alongside the great scriptural writers (Job, say, or Ecclesiastes). Martin Amis again perhaps captured it best: ‘Conrad was the kind of writer who kept his eyes open when most of us would prefer to keep them shut.’
‘We might say that, to someone of religious sensibility, God, silence, darkness and suffering are inexplicably entwined.’
In that same preface, Conrad writes – in terms that Friends will appreciate – that ‘the artist descends within himself’ and there ‘finds the terms of his appeal’. His determination to focus on ‘unrestful’ episodes ‘in the obscure lives of a few individuals out of all the disregarded multitude of the bewildered, the simple and the voiceless’ certainly convinces me of his courage, his humanity, and his radicalism. It reminds me, too, serendipitously, of the mysterious illogic of the gospel beatitudes: ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.’ Out of the silence, a disruptive voice.
Blaise Pascal, writing at about the same time as the birth of Quakerism, looked at the universe and was terrified of the ‘eternal silence of these infinite spaces’; he found an apparently godless universe. For me, where I might once have taken the same line as Conrad’s existentialist fans, I now find what one might call a non-indifference among the universe’s interstellar silences and spaces. I feel a chilly but reciprocating sense of attention. John Gray asserts that Conrad ‘stated his rejection of religion in categorical terms’, but I’m not so sure. Where Martin Amis insists that Conrad ‘formidably and thunderously excoriated religious belief’, we should point out that Conrad’s anti-clericalism was also popular among non-conformists and reformists. We should also, however, fully acknowledge Conrad’s antipathy. In a letter to Edward Garnett, for instance, he objected to Tolstoy’s Christianity: the ‘absurd oriental fable from which it starts irritates me. Great, improving, softening, compassionate it may be but it has lent itself with amazing facility to cruel distortion’.
Cruel distortion may well be what Conrad is exploring in the anti-pilgrimage of Heart of Darkness. Conrad probably suffered from his own form of shellshock, which may explain his refusal to accept the ready consolations and blandishments of established religion. As Maya Jasanoff expresses in her extraordinary The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a global world, Conrad ‘saw in Congo a European regime of appalling greed, violence, and hypocrisy, and left Africa in a state of psychological and moral despair… he channelled his experience into a novel called Heart of Darkness.’
We might say that, to someone of religious sensibility, God, silence, darkness and suffering are inexplicably entwined. The sacramental vision is after all a tragic one. Conrad’s post-traumatic creative non-fiction has become, for me at least, as scriptural as the post-traumatic witness of failure and injustice that we call the Gospel of Mark.
