mark monday's Reviews > Youth, a Narrative

"O youth! The strength of it, the faith of it, the imagination of it! To me she was not an old rattletrap carting about the world a lot of coal for a freight - to me she was the endeavour, the test, the trial of life. I think of her with pleasure, with affection, with regret - as you would think of someone dead you have loved. I shall never forget her... Pass the bottle."

"Youth" is a great gateway drug into the heady world of Joseph Conrad. this compact little story about a young man (Marlow from Conrad's Heart of Darkness) and his commission on an ill-fated ship named the Judea made me eager to read more by this intriguing, controversial author. his descriptive prowess is highly impressive: the story is filled with so many little details, enough to put the reader right on that ship, but not so much that the story felt weighed down. this story is richly textured with all of those details, and brief and surprising moments of philosophizing, and the ongoing, rather yearning depiction of how it feels to be a young man on an adventure - and confident of many more adventures to come. all told as a story coming from an older, wiser, altogether more cynical and salty version of that young man... but an old man who still loves that part of his life - and even more, respects it, naivete and all. this could have been a tragic tale if it had been told in a certain way. but at the end of the story, I felt refreshed and invigorated.

"One was a man, and the other was either more - or less. However, they are both dead and Mrs. Beard is dead, and youth, strength, genius, thoughts, achievements, simple hearts - all dies... No matter."

there was one part that genuinely disturbed me, occurring after yet another disaster on the ship, and after the crew has rallied successfully:

"No; it was something in them, something inborn and subtle and everlasting. I don't say positively that the crew of a French or German merchantman wouldn't have done it, but I doubt whether it would have been done in the same way. There was a completeness in it, something solid like a principle, and masterful like an instinct - a disclosure of something secret - of that hidden something, that gift of good or evil that makes racial difference, that shapes the fate of nations.

I didn't know what to make of that so I decided to consult the experts.

Harold Bloom from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness:
"The sailors' very Englishness, a force beyond their understanding or control, makes them act nobly in an emergency. Yet here Marlow's belief in the existence of a 'hidden something' does not amount to any sort of racial theory of history. The uneven distribution of character appears to him as an inexplicable secret, and it just so happens that the English have more of it than other people. Marlow's pride in his Englishness does not lead him to pronounce race a 'key to history'; even he feels threatened by the biological definition of national character..."

Frances Singh from Postcolonial Whiteness:
"At the same time, he hints at an idea which transcends this narrow racist point of view. Conrad also writes that it is service at sea that brings out the 'right stuff' in men. In the final analysis, then, Conrad seems to be suggesting that the highest race one can belong to is not the English race but the transnational, miscegenated Sailor Race, which men belong to after a period of perilous training and collaborative service. It is a race whose highest moral principle is that all must pull together for the common good."

Michael North from The Dialect of Modernism:
"But Conrad wants his crews to manifest that phatic communion that exists far below the level of discourse, that comes from national and racial commonality, and so he makes them all... more English than they were."

Peter Edgerly Firchow from Envisioning Africa:
"At the same time it must be remembered to his [Conrad's] credit that he consistently mocked notions of white superiority in his fiction, in both its Pacific and its African settings. Where Conrad was demonstrably racist (in the older, more inclusive sense of the word race) is in his belief in the superiority or inferiority of the European "races" or nations in relation to each other -" (boldface is mine)

personally, I'm most inclined to agree with Peter Firchow's interpretation. particularly because, on the one hand, the European captain of another ship is portrayed as absurd and offensive - specifically to Englishmen. and on the other hand, I did not notice a whiff of racism or condescension in Conrad's descriptions of the Malay reacting to the foundering Judea or the Javanese reacting to the crew that has finally reached their shores, bereft of ship.



10 of 16 in Sixteen Short Novels