Conrad-

The Centenary of the Death of Joseph Conrad and the “Heart of Darkness”

Conrad in the drawing of Dionisio di Francescantonio

Joseph Conrad
(Berdyčev, 3 December 1857 – Bishopsbourne, 3 August 1924)

https://www.barbadillo.it/115456-il-centenario-della-morte-di-joseph-conrad-e-del-cuore-di-tenebra/

What a strange thing life is—this mysterious contrivance of implacable logic toward so futile a goal. The most one can hope for from it is a certain self-knowledge—which comes too late—and a harvest of unquenchable regrets.

The sea, the theatre of Conrad's formative experience and of his major novels, has in him a dual soul: in his stories a multifaceted humanity appears, known during navigation or in exotic and distant places, portrayed with the rough palette of realism, but the sea is also a metaphysical place, a secluded space, of fullness and solitude, where spiritual conflicts easily reach extreme positions and where men find themselves dramatically grappling with the absolute. Conrad's greatness and originality consist in knowing how to give the ghosts of the spirit the plastic features of reality and in knowing how to raise careful veristic writing to the rarefied depths of metaphysics. He knows how to reveal the occult essences of human action, laying bare the cruel core of instinct in the fragile torment of the soul. But in this inclination of his one senses a compromise materialized by skepticism and characterized by a sense of melancholic estrangement. He is in fact, by choice, an English-language writer, but in reality he is a cosmopolitan author, a homeless person, an uprooted person who finds, precisely in the sense of uprooting of his existence as a man and as a narrator, the way to find himself confronted with his own double or with the other from himself. His narration enters into the secret and dark part of the human soul, plumbing the vortex of life's irrationality and revealing the causes of unfulfilled actions, of eluded or denied vocations, of the voids of the soul that debase every passion. His gaze is marked by an ambivalent irony, directed more at himself than at others since his existence suffers the remorse of abandoning Poland, his homeland, and the betrayal of the patriotic ideals of his father who, for those ideals, met an early death, to become a pilgrim of the sea and the world, an observer of the secret impulses that lead man to betray that code of honor that remains firm only in our intentions and that we so often abandon, since the disintegration of the value of codes, which he intuited early thanks to his condition as a "foreigner" wherever he found himself, nullifies any idea of ​​history understood as optimistic progress, that is, of that path of advancement in the light of civilization in which Europe, in his time, deluded itself into marching triumphantly, and which instead led to a retreat into the darkness nested in the ambiguity of our deepest being. More than anyone else, Conrad felt that ours was a journey into the “heart of darkness” that comes from the encounter with our double, with that other than us that comes into contact with our conscience and pollutes it with its diversity. He, therefore, uses the adventure novel of travel to elsewhere, taking it out of the Eurocentric and positivist optimism within whose horizon it was born, to deliver it to the slippery and painful spirit of Western modernity,who, precisely in comparison with the other, ended up losing himself, together with his certainties and the pride of his civilised achievements.