The Nigger of the Narcissus

From the very beginning you wonder what the heck Conrad is doing or saying about race.

Finally, in Chapter 4, Jimmy Wait and Donkin are there to make more or less Nietzschean political points which do not as such reflect well on Conrad's contemporary acceptability, though it might be too harsh, reading him quite that way, and the storm is there to make the metaphysical points that maybe do and maybe don't.

One hell of a story eh?

And lovely English prose.

My God, what a brilliant ending

So much better than the movie.

Lord Jim.

Chapter 32

From the outside, love is madness, possession by hormones, utterly stupid.

From the inside, it is the redemption of life.

Provided the beloved does not turn out to be unworthy.

Lord Jim.

Whatever else he was, Conrad was a romantic, to use his own word.

Odd. At least.

Stein relates he killed three men and thought so little of it he went off chasing a butterfly.

Indeed, he gloats in retrospect he had annoyed the enemy who sent them.

Make of that what you can.

Lord Jim.

All the same, Stein is wonderful.

About romantics.

And about missed opportunities.

Marlow on crime

The real significance of crime is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind, and from that point of view he was no mean traitor [.]

Marlow, about Jim, chapter 14, Lord Jim.

Their fault, not his

It is completely their fault that he jumped, and not his, says Jim.

Chapter 10.

Lord Jim.

The first engineer gets it right

Addressing Jim, '"Won't you save your own life - you infernal coward," he sobs.'

And that is exactly the difference between Jim and him, between Jim and the Captain and the others who deserted the pilgrims of the Patna.

He deserted out of uncontrollable fear.

They deserted out of unscrupulous self-love.

Conrad, Lord Jim.

Update.

Well, no, that is not quite how they differ from Jim.

Not if Marlow is right that "a turmoil of terror [that] had shattered their self control" is what drove them.

But I think perhaps he is not entirely, unqualifiedly right.

Chapter 9.

All the same, the point is repeatedly made that they call him a coward with hate and contempt.

Pot and kettle?

Or is he truly more the victim of possession by fear than they?

And yet . . . .

"They were exasperated with him for being a half hearted shirker; he focused on them his hatred of the whole thing [.]"

Or the Greeks

.  .  .  . for it is my belief no man ever understands quite his own artful dodges to escape from the grim shadow of self-knowledge.

The narrator, Marlow, in Lord Jim, 1900, Joseph Conrad.

A coward should be killed

That is what Conrad teaches in Nostromo.

And, at greater and meditative length, in Lord Jim.

Costaguano

Mrs Gould is considerably less sanguine about the political significance of "material interests" after the successful secession of the Sulaco region.

The Lighthouse, Nostromo, chapter 11.

Nostromo and the silver of the mine

Senora Teresa as much as tells him to steal it.

Doctor Monygham does the same.

He does not seem to have thought of that, already, himself.

About the middle of the book.

An idealist of capitalism

Charles Gould and his wife are far more eloquent and compelling than any creation of Ayn Rand.

But of course Conrad puts her far in the shade in every way.

Nostromo, The Silver of the Mine, chapter 6, the last few pages.

Pretty dark, really

Just what was Conrad up to in his Heart of Darkness, 1899.

Yes, yes.

He opposed the massive hypocrisy of imperialism.

But not necessarily imperialism, nor even colonialism, judging just by this book.

Though obviously he saw and loathed all the horror of the Congo.

Via this book, he and white people in general have nevertheless been angrily denounced for racism.

As to the latter, racism - specifically, the idea of the racial inferiority of blacks to whites - has historically been used as an excuse for the most unspeakable crimes and the most inhuman rapacity.

That doesn't make it false, though it may well be that.

And it is certainly possible Conrad believed in the racial inferiority of blacks without for a moment buying it as an excuse.

In any case, he was a profound pessimist, atheist, amoralist, and even nihilist.

So what was he up to?

And a very fine writer.