Conrad and War, and Its Aftermath

In Chap. 4 we see Conrad’s impress on literature through two World Wars and the capitalist neocolonialism filling the void left by the collapse of empires. In his introduction to Donald Hankey’s A Student in Arms, J. St. Loe Strachey gives us a sustaining trench-eye view of reading Conrad by soldier Donald Hankey, who made the supreme sacrifice in 1916; in an essay on Arthur Koestler cultural changes are rung in with George Orwell’s sighting of Conrad following his contemporary H. G. Well’s Mr Britling Sees it Through bravely in the home front in the so-called Great War. Although Conrad didn’t live to see the second of the World Wars, his presence has remained in sight. Ian MacEwan’s Atonement, gives us a straightforward Dunkirk episode, preceded by events inevitably evoking intimations of the fog of war in Conrad’s “The Tale”; Christopher Othen’s The King of Nazi Paris, a depressing account World War II’s underbelly, the traitorous profiteering by Paris underworld thief and collaborator Henri Chamberlin and his actress lover Dita Parlo, draws in several World War II iterations of Heart of Darkness, in film and radio. As vicious and amoral as Chamberlin’s thievery was the economic and commercial neocolonialism precipitated by the collapse of Europe’s empires following World War II. it is exemplified in John Le Carré’s The Constant Gardener, a fiction based on a distressingly actual case of a pharmaceutical corporation’s heartless exploitation of desperately ill Nigerians as guinea pigs for an unapproved drug.