Joseph Conrad

Conrad provides a first, and distinctly gothic, encounter with the themes that recur throughout modernist grotesquery: the loss of self-control, crowd mentality, the commodifying power of capitalism, and the strange ‘progress’ of science and society that produces the very savagery it supposedly overcomes. In The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes, and Heart of Darkness, Conrad uses the body as a site for exploring the impossibility, and necessity, of social reform and revolution. Through his grotesque references to the bodies of E.T.A. Hoffmann, Mary Shelley and Heinrich von Kleist. Conrad’s bodies escape their owner’s control, and our ability to define them. His living puppets and resurrected corpses unseat human reason as the driving force behind human behaviour, replacing it with alien, external, societal and mechanical forces. His close relationship with authors like Henry James and H.G. Wells disputes Conrad’s critical status as a purely psychological novelist. His satirical, disturbing portrayal of both African and European bodies forces a reassessment of the grotesque: it is not a primitive, regressive or timeless phenomenon, but an inherently modern one. Through simultaneous comedy and horror, his works destabilise easy responses to temporal narratives of progress.