I was first introduced to Conrad in high school–and what an introduction! We read Heart of Darkness in our British Literature class, focussing on the themes of darkness, madness, and the terrible effects of imperialism. Conrad’s pictures certainly stick with you, and to this day I can remember the harrowing images of Congolese natives sneaking away into the forest to die, and I can hear the final whisper of the dying Kurtz: “The horror! The horror!” To read it again two years later at university only added new dimensions to the man’s genius: we studied Conrad’s innovative ‘frame narrative’ by which he uses Marlow to tell a story within a story, and we learned how Marlow’s journey into the heart of Africa reflects his psychoanalytic journey into the darkness of the heart of man.
I fully recognise, of course, that Conrad isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Just ask certain members of my family, who have never forgiven me for recommending it and have most likely harboured fear for my emotional wellbeing ever since. Nonetheless, he is one of my favourite authors, so when I browsed my bookshelf for something small to bring to Brighton for the day, it was Typhoon and Other Tales which found its way into my bag.
Admittedly, I chose ‘Amy Foster’ because it was the shortest in the collection and I was busy exploring the Royal Pavilion, etc; but even within 40 pages, Conrad manages to capture your imagination. In fact, imagination is the main theme of the narrative, a story about a young girl falling in love with a Polish refugee who survives a tragic shipwreck and comes to live in her village. “There is no kindness of heart without a certain amount of imagination,” writes Conrad, and Amy Foster “had even more than is necessary to understand suffering and to be moved by pity…for you need imagination to form a notion of beauty at all, and still more to discover your ideal in an unfamiliar shape.”
Conrad certainly loves the theme of the ‘unfamiliar shape’, and he explores the idea of ‘foreigness’ throughout his fiction. Having spent twenty years as a sailor, Conrad would certainly have identified with the difficulties of crossing cultural boundaries, which we see not only in Yanko’s character but in the fact that most of his narrators (Marlow being the most famous) are sailors, and nearly all of them are social outcasts. As a Pole himself, Conrad provides a rare glimpse of his own feelings of isolation in this story through Yanko’s character by never truly allowing him full acceptance in the Kent community.
Isolation and imagination are the pervading themes of Conrad’s work, and these are always masterfully combined in his marvelous descriptions of the sea. His tone often reflects the changing of the tide, ranging from the dark and sombre pessimism of an approaching storm to the radiant and ironic comedy that distinguishes a weathered sailor. It was fitting, then, that I should come to read ‘Amy Foster’ on the pebbled beach of Brighton, where like the narrator, I had the chance to look out “at the frigid splendour of the sea, immense in the haze, as if enclosing all the earth with all the hearts lost among the passions of love and fear.”
If you’re not quite ready for Heart of Darkness, I recommend easing into Conrad’s bleak, but beautiful exploration of human doubt and longing in this extraordinarily moving short story, ‘Amy Foster’. (Don’t watch the film version, though: Swept from the Sea looks like another lame Hollywood makeover).
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