All creative art is magic, is evocation of the unseen in forms persuasive, enlightening, familiar and surprising, for the edification of mankind, pinned down by the conditions of its existence to the earnest consideration of the most insignificant tides of reality.
Action in its essence, the creative art of a writer of fiction may be compared to rescue work carried out in darkness against cross gusts of wind swaying the action of a great multitude. It is rescue work, this snatching of vanishing phases of turbulence, disguised in fair words, out of the native obscurity into a light where the struggling forms may be seen, seized upon, endowed with the only possible form of permanence in this world of relative values — the permanence of memory.
But everything is relative, and the light of consciousness is only enduring, merely the most enduring of the things of this earth, imperishable only as against the short-lived work of our industrious hands.
The artist in his calling of interpreter creates the clearest form of demonstration because he must. He is so much of a voice that, for him, silence is like death; and the postulate was, that there is a group alive, clustered on his threshold to watch the last flicker of light on a black sky, to hear the last word uttered in the stilled workshop of the earth. It is safe to affirm that, if anybody, it will be the imaginative man who would be moved to speak on the eve of that day without to-morrow — whether in austere exhortation or in a phrase of sardonic comment, who can guess?
For my own part, from a short and cursory acquaintance with my kind, I am inclined to think that the last utterance will formulate, strange as it may appear, some hope now to us utterly inconceivable. For mankind is delightful in its pride, its assurance, and its indomitable tenacity.
It will sleep on the battlefield among its own dead, in the manner of an army having won a barren victory. It will not know when it is beaten. And perhaps it is right in that quality.
The victories are not, perhaps, so barren as it may appear from a purely strategical, utilitarian point of view. The earth itself has grown smaller in the course of ages. But in every sphere of human perplexities and emotions, there are more greatnesses than one — not counting here the greatness of the artist himself. Wherever he stands, at the beginning or the end of things, a man has to sacrifice his gods to his passions, or his passions to his gods.
Conrad is instead interested in setting up fictional scenarios in which an apparently obvious set of values, or accepted belief system, is thrown into question -- Conrad forces his readers to acknowledge the limitations of their own knowledge, and the historical and geographical specificity of their values and behavioural habits. In doing so, he exposes their relativity and, most importantly, their fragility.
With regard to his thematic preoccupations and literary styles Conrad can certainly be considered a Modernist writer. Why might this be? Conrad's sceptical critiques and literary interrogations of distinctly Eurocentric conceptions of morality and tradition does not come from within the metropolitan, bourgeois cityscape that was the home of so many self-fashioned, high Modernist authors think of Ezra Pound , T.
Eliot , or several members of the Bloomsbury Group. Instead, they emerge from colonial settings, underdeveloped environments, from contact zones in which colonizing and colonized cultures clash and conflict, such as in Lord Jim , Nostromo and Nigger of the Narcissus. The exploration of the ramifications of a global imperialism upon the metropolitan centre writes the marginalized space into the very heart of the Empire.
Conrad's literature is not simply colonial. What he says goes. Everything he says comes pinched between inverted commas. But his intentions became more intelligible in light of newer words and later work.
At one level, the word simply describes his dramatic method, in which the reader knows more than any single character. He swayed me. I own to it, I own up. The occasion was obscure, insignificant—what you will: a lost youngster, one in a million.
The editors of the nine-volume collection of Conrad letters—an amazing achievement, overseen by Laurence Davies—suggest that Conrad liked the essay because it praised him. But the biographical habit, once acquired, can prove hard to shake.
I think I have given you already to understand the nature of my feelings. Indeed, I spoke to you very openly expressing my fundamental objection to the character you wished to give to it. It is a strange fate that everything that I have, of set artistic purpose, laboured to leave indefinite, suggestive, in the penumbra of initial inspiration, should have that light turned on to it and its insignificance as compared with I might say without megalomania the ampleness of my conceptions exposed for any fool to comment upon.
Conrad never denied that his writing was autobiographical, but he used the word in a specific connection. But Conrad has also been the beneficiary of much tactful and sympathetic reading, especially in America.
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