A Lost Joseph Conrad story…. wrestling with the past.

Posted on | January 9, 2010 |

Today I thought I’d post a few comments on a rather abstruse subject - Joseph Conrad’s story ‘The Sisters’. I choose it because it’s fairly clear that Conrad was using his story to explore some rather murky personal territory.

So murky was it that, in the end, he abandoned the tale. It was published as a fragment two years after his death.

It’s not much more than a fragment, really, but the edition that is prefaced by F. M. Ford is valuable because Ford was present when Conrad was first writing it, and has many important things to say about this posthumous Conrad volume.

The theme that might most interest Conrad fans is one that echoes through ‘Nostromo’ and ‘The Arrow of Gold’ - two sisters, and one man’s attraction to the second sister when feeling something very different towards the first. Ford refers to this as ‘incest’ although it stretches further than this. This is what we see in Nostromo’s struggle when he is engaged to the virtuous Linda but lusts after the less soulful Giselle. It is the same tension we see when Kurtz has his pure ‘Intended’ back in Brussels, and his native mistress in the Congo. To some extent Razumov feels an attraction for Natalie Haldin that is very similar, since it depends upon a betrayal of her brother - and he winds up with another woman anyway.

The theme of being attracted to one woman and finding oneself actually attached to another, very different, woman is one that echoes through Conrad’s work. ‘Victory’ sees Heyst attracted to Lena but unable to believe in her, in a tragic echo of this prevailing idea.

When seen in this way ‘The Sisters’, for all its incomplete nature, works as an attempt by Conrad to explore his conflicted feelings about lust and idealism. For this reason one could say that it is central to our understanding of who Conrad was.

From my point of view it tells us several things about writing. The first is that it can be used to work out our complicated feelings. The second is this: if we abandon the attempt to work those feelings through they don’t go away. They stick around and haunt us. The artist’s challenge is to turn those ghosts into something that can bring understanding and peace. Even if that’s not entirely possible the attempt is a worthy one.

Writing about one’s life is always an attempt to wrestle with ghosts.

Comments