The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World by
The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World By Maya Jasanoff William Collins £25 Oldie price £21.75 inc p&p
Every so often, a book arrives that is so awake to the state we’re in that reading it is like emerging from a coma. This is such a book.
Maya Jasanoff teaches history at Harvard and, in The Dawn Watch, she applies her interest in empires, exiles and globalisation to the life and work of Joseph Conrad. In doing so, she catapults Conrad to the top rank of prophetic novelists.
‘I set out,’ writes Jasanoff, ‘to explore Conrad’s world with the compass of a historian, the chart of a biographer, and the navigational sextant of a fiction reader.’ She also sets out with the heart of a traveller, as she traces the journey down the Congolese river described by Conrad in Heart of Darkness.
Jasanoff’s argument is this: the Polish exile, British seaman and great English novelist, whose tales are set on the decks of sinking ships, moored barques and crack clippers, anticipated the world we inhabit today. Conrad’s pen, says Jasanoff, ‘was like a magic wand, conjuring the spirits of the future’. Those who find phrases like this a tad purple should remember that Conrad himself described sailing ships as gliding ‘mysteriously into a sort of unearthly existence, bordering upon the magic of invisible sources’.
Conrad was a romantic conservative and Jasanoff’s own work is driven by the belief that his novels ‘are ethical injunctions’. Focusing on The Secret Agent, Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim, and Nostromo, she places each in its context, showing how Conrad was acutely in tune with historical currents.
Konrad Korzeniowski, the son of Nationalist Polish aristocrats, knew first-hand about the abuse of power. Born in 1857, he belonged to a country that didn’t formally exist. Poland’s ‘history had been hijacked’, its ‘language suppressed’, its ‘religion marginalised’ and its ‘mode of life scorned’. In 1862, his father was arrested and the family was exiled to the Ukraine. Konrad lost his mother at the age of seven, his father at eleven, and ran away to sea at sixteen. There he discovered that the fellowship of sailors, based on values of loyalty, order, courage and commitment, was the ideal society. He also learned that the replacement of sail by steam marked the disappearance of moral tone. He watched as a noble and monastic way of life was erased by floating gin palaces.
Sailing, like writing, was an art, but anyone could wash the decks of a steamer. The destruction of the shipping industry, says Jasanoff, is the subject of Lord Jim. Its effects were immediately apparent in the tragedy of the Titanic (and, more recently, in the bathos of the
Costa Concordia) but the heirs of Conrad’s redundant sailors are also to be found in ‘industries disrupted by digitisation’. The Secret Agent, which centres on a bomb plot in London, captures the inanity of internet chatrooms and modern-day terrorist cells, while Nostromo is about multinational capitalism.
Jasanoff finds in Conrad metaphors for history. Of Heart of Darkness, which begins on the Thames estuary and ends on an Africa river, she writes that Conrad ‘wasn’t simply saying: look, Africa is more primitive than England. He was saying that history is like a river. You can go up or you can go down. You can ride the current and get ahead, but the same force can push you back.’ Of The Secret Agent, she says, ‘Every detective novel is a historical novel: it uses clues in the present to figure out how something happened in the past.’
It is good to be reminded that novels know something. Henry James also pointed this out. He wrote to Conrad, ‘No one has known – for intellectual use – the things you know, and you have, as the artist of the whole matter, an authority that no one has approached.’
Barack Obama concurs. Once challenged as to why he was reading Heart of Darkness, a book considered by some to be racist, Obama explained that Conrad ‘teaches me things… About white people, I mean. See, the book’s not really about Africa. Or black people. It’s about the man who wrote it. The European. The American. A particular way of looking at the world.’ Was there ever a better time to turn to Conrad?