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Notes on Professor Najder
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- By Cedric Watts
- Edited by Jolanta Dudek, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Andrzej Juszczyk, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Joanna Skolik, Uniwersytet Opolski
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- Book:
- Essays on Joseph Conrad in Memory of Prof. Zdzisław Najder (1930-2021)
- Published by:
- Jagiellonian University Press
- Published online:
- 01 March 2024
- Print publication:
- 25 April 2023, pp 31-32
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Summary
In 1972, Dr Najder invited me to attend a conference on Joseph Conrad to be held in Warsaw, Kraków and Gdańsk. I accepted the invitation with alacrity. I was an admirer of Conrad's Polish Background: Letters to and from Polish Friends (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), which he had edited with such scholarly skill. My edition, Joseph Conrad's Letters to R. B. Cunninghame Graham, had been published by Cambridge University Press in 1969, and this had prompted the invitation.
I was 35, and this was the first time I had been invited to a conference abroad. The Polish organisers were remarkably hospitable, paying for the journey to Poland and for all the travel, meals and accommodation within Poland. Spanning nine days, the conference, under the aegis of the Neophilological Committee of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences, was lavishly planned and executed; and I remain grateful to the Polish people whose taxed labours paid for it. Dr Najder himself greeted the British guests on our arrival in Warsaw: he was a handsome, stylish figure, with his overcoat worn loosely over his shoulders in a style I associate with Polish officers.
I was delighted to find that other guests at the conference included some famous figures: among them, Borys Conrad, the author's elder son, to whom The Shadow-Line is dedicated, Ian Watt, Thomas Moser, Gustav Morf, René Rapin and Norman Sherry. I was also introduced to Edward Said, Andrew Busza, Hans van Marle, Mario Curreli, Przemysław Mroczkowski, Róża Jabłkowska and Barbara Kocówna, among others. The conference was “gate-crashed” by some people who had attended a Conradiana conference in London and decided to invite themselves to the Polish event: these included Edward Bojarski, Eloise Knapp Hay and Juliet McLauchlan. The Polish hosts, at first understandably disconcerted, gallantly accepted these newcomers. Dr Najder I found to be urbane, keenly intelligent and observant, and genially tolerant of my unfamiliarity with the ways of conferences. As a result of that Polish conference, the Joseph Conrad Society (UK), with its journal The Conradian, was founded in 1973.
Later in his career, Dr Najder was sentenced to death in absentia by the régime of General Jaruzelski, so he worked in the West (and during that time accepted my invitation to give a guest lecture at my university, the University of Sussex).
Donkin, Wait—Themes and Idioms in Conrad's The Nigger of the “Narcissus”
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- By Cedric Watts
- Edited by Jolanta Dudek, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Andrzej Juszczyk, Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Joanna Skolik, Uniwersytet Opolski
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- Book:
- Essays on Joseph Conrad in Memory of Prof. Zdzisław Najder (1930-2021)
- Published by:
- Jagiellonian University Press
- Published online:
- 01 March 2024
- Print publication:
- 25 April 2023, pp 47-62
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- Chapter
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Summary
I
A recurrent weakness in several of Conrad's novels is that he makes the villains too caricatural, like figures from melodramas. The narrator practically invites us to boo and hiss them. Vivid but grotesque, they force their disruptive way through predominantly realistic narratives.
In Almayer's Folly, there is the slinking Cornelius. In Lord Jim, there is the “scourge of God,” Gentleman Brown. In Nostromo, it is General Sotillo, with Pedrito Montero not far behind. The Secret Agent offers a gallery of grotesques: the obese Michaelis, the venomous but impotent Karl Yundt, and Comrade Ossipon, who could serve as an illustration in a tome by his mentor, Cesare Lombroso, doyen of anthropological criminology. In Victory, the villainous trio, Gentleman Jones, Ricardo and Pedro, seem to have trespassed into a realistic novel from a lurid stage-melodrama. In Under Western Eyes, Nikita (“Necator”) is a sadistic monster. In The Arrow of Gold, the grotesque is Ortega; in The Rover, it is Scevola. In The Nigger of the “Narcissus,” in contrast, James Wait's ambiguity helps to make him the plausible centre of the ship's divisions and strife, and, eventually, the text depicts his fear of death in a sympathetically realistic way (aided by borrowings from French fiction, in particular the description of the death of Forestier in Guy de Maupassant's Bel-Ami). Wait stands predominantly on the realistic side of caricature, though with the occasional lapse. It is Donkin who is the opprobrious grotesque. Wait, whose complexion is black, is bad enough; but Donkin, who is very white in complexion (being albino, with white eyelashes), is far worse: eventually he abuses and robs the dying man. When ashore, the crew refuse to drink with him.
With The Nigger of the “Narcissus” (1897), Conrad rapidly reached maturity as a novelist: this is the start of his major phase. Though animus pushes Donkin to the caricatural, the narrative is predominantly realistic; it is also allegoric and symbolic; and it is vividly imagined: complex and rich in implication. It imprints on memory a series of starkly-lit images: Conrad has certainly learnt from what he termed the “impressionism” of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage.
In its political allegory, this story of the ship's voyage from Bombay to Victoria Docks in London is markedly right-wing.
3 - 'Heart of Darkness'
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- By Cedric Watts
- Edited by J. H. Stape
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to Joseph Conrad
- Published online:
- 28 May 2006
- Print publication:
- 27 June 1996, pp 45-62
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Summary
Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness' is a rich, vivid, layered, paradoxical, and problematic novella or long tale; a mixture of oblique autobiography, traveller's yarn, adventure story, psychological odyssey, political satire, symbolic prose-poem, black comedy, spiritual melodrama, and sceptical meditation. It has proved to be 'ahead of its times': an exceptionally proleptic text. First published in 1899 as a serial in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, it became extensively influential during subsequent decades, and reached a zenith of critical acclaim in the period 1950-75. During the final quarter of the twentieth century, however, while its influence became even more pervasive, the tale was vigorously assailed on political grounds by various feminist critics and by some left-wing and Third World commentators. In this essay, I discuss the novella's changing fortunes in 'the whirligig of time' (Feste's phrase from Twelfth Night) and argue that even now it retains some capacity to criticize its critics.
The phrase ‘ahead of its times’ first needs defence. What put it ahead of them was that it was intelligently of them: Conrad addressed issues of the day with such alert adroitness and ambiguity that he anticipated many twentieth-century preoccupations.