Conrad’s Influence in Postmodern Literature and Abroad, and in the Performing Arts

Chapter 5 ’s Sightings reflect Conrad’s presences at least at the beginning of the Postmodern era and the broadening of the canon to embrace other literatures in translation. We find him present explicitly or implicitly in a wide range of popular literary fiction by authors recently deceased or living and still writing. In Rabih Alameddine’s “Comforting Myths” Heart of Darkness is portrayed as a prop for European culture; Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North shifts the dark heart of primitive Africa to savagely civilized London; Sándor Márai’s Embers (A version of this section was published in Joseph Conrad Today vol. 43, Issue 2, 2018, p. 4), describing infidelity and a heart of darkness in the ashes of an ended era as a darkness of the heart, enters the newly globalized canon translated from Hungarian; yet in John Banville’s The Book of Evidence Irish author John Banville carries on a British tradition of thematic doubleness, mentioning Conrad among others in so-called “English” literature which has long embraced James Joyce. Albert Camus’s La Peste, unofficially inducted into the English canon as early as the 1950s in translation as The Plague, has tantalizing glimpses of Conrad; Reading Lolita in Tehran chronicles its author Azar Nafisi’s efforts to dispel the darkness of cultural nescience in ayatollah-ridden Iran by reading for her students passages from Conrad’s most famous prefatory Ars Poetica. French Screenwriter Anne-Louis Trividic and director-producer Patrice Chéreau’s film Gabrielle is an adaptation of Conrad’s “The Return” reimagined in bourgeois Paris. French screenwriter Anne-Louis Trividic and director-producer Patrice Chéreau’s film Gabrielle is an adaptation of Conrad’s “The Return” reimagined in bourgeois Paris; and the film Ladies in Lavender evokes Conrad’s “Amy Foster” and his Carpathian mountain man Yanko Gooral. The film series Exterminate All the Brutes, bearing the same title as Sven Lindquist’s book, adds other sources and ranges further. The film Ladies in Lavender evokes Conrad’s Carpathian mountain man Yanko Gooral in “Amy Foster”; and an opera based on, and titled, The Secret Agent presents a version of Conrad’s book and play for the first time in a musical medium.