Review: The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World by Maya Jasanoff (2017)
The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World by Maya Jasanoff (2017)
Maya Jasanoff's biography of Joseph Conrad, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, is a highly readable account of Conrad's life and times. Her biography sketches a detailed portrait of the changing times and places in which Conrad found himself—flitting from his childhood among Polish nationalists in present-day Ukraine to his life as a sailor at the transition between the Age of Sail and the advent of steam to his life as a father and professional writer.
Jasanoff carefully depicts the changing environs that Conrad encounters in a rapidly globalizing world. While her text provides biographical insight into Conrad's life, Jasanoff clearly relishes providing historical context that informs the events that Conrad experienced firsthand. This historical context is enjoyable to read and essential to Jasanoff's thesis that Conrad was both a product and an important observer of global transformations in the waning days of the nineteenth century.
By contrast, Jasanoff's critical approach to Conrad's fiction is restrained. Her analysis of Conrad's fiction is mostly confined to synopses of his major works and a discussion of their fictional contents in relation to events in his life. These analyses are most successful when the work under discussion is clearly informed by Conrad's direct experience, particularly Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness. Jasanoff's extended discussion of the brutal regime in the Congo Free State, Conrad's brief foray into Congo as a steamship captain, and his writing of Heart of Darkness is the highlight of the book.
Jasanoff does not probe Conrad's politics. As she points out, Conrad seemed wary of partisan politics and often demurred from taking explicit political positions. This was the case even when Conrad was provided the opportunity to comment on conditions in Congo by his acquaintance, Roger Casement, whose 1905 report widely publicized the atrocities of the Congo Free State.
In lieu of obvious political sentiment, Conrad uses irony to situate his characters within political frameworks. This ironic sensibility is most apparent in his two novels that are most deeply concerned with politics—The Secret Agent and Nostromo. Both concern individuals trapped within the political machinations of others—among anarchists in London in The Secret Agent and nascent capitalists in South America in Nostromo.
In The Secret Agent, Adolf Verloc sends his mentally disabled brother-in-law Stevie to his death. Verloc, acting at the behest of a foreign spy who exploits his left-wing politics, uses Stevie to transport a bomb to the Greenwich Observatory. The bomb explodes, and Stevie dies before he reaches the observatory. After Verloc's wife learns that Verloc has killed her brother, she stabs him to death.
In Nostromo, the titular character is a longshoreman who acts as a gopher and mercenary for the European colonists who are exploiting the mineral wealth of Costaguana, a fictitious South American country. In the midst of a revolution, Nostromo conceals a vast load of silver on an uninhabited coastal island. After the revolution is successfully quelled, Nostromo becomes listless and paranoid, slowly siphoning off the silver from the island under cover of darkness. One evening, as he is removing the silver, he is killed by the very lighthouse keeper that he installed on the island, who mistakes him for a trespasser.
In both novels, the characters' actions, made in pursuit of a confused mix of self-interest and moral yearning, yield frustration, incapacity, and death. Conrad is deeply skeptical of the purity of ideology; everyone has mixed motives. Conrad uses irony to capture this ambivalent political vision.
While Jasanoff connects Conrad's conservative temperament to his childhood as the son of failed Polish nationalists, she does not dig much deeper into his political formation. No doubt, Conrad himself and his personal writings offer little insight. As such, Jasanoff's focus on Conrad's journey as a sailor and writer in a world of rapid technological and societal change makes sense. Jasanoff has written a historically-centered and approachable account of Conrad's life and work.