When much younger I tried reading Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, thanks to seeing the movie. I could not finish the novel. A little later, I did read Heart of Darkness thanks to Apocalypse Now. I kept flirting with Conrad afterwards without really making any effort at consummation. Only in prison did I have luck in finally coming to grips with Conrad. Then I found him fascinating. Maybe it was an age thing, that I needed enough understanding of life to understand Conrad. I suggest everyone wanting to understand what fiction can do, what is great writing needs to make an effort to read Conrad.
About history, the following comes from A journey through Joseph Conrad’s life at sea. By Lapham’s Quarterly. The "he" is Conrad:
...“Fiction is history, human history, or it is nothing.” He has a lot of things to say about this, and they skew in slightly different directions. He was very committed to trying to represent on the page what he believed to be a kind of reality around him. I use the word reality guardedly because he’s often associated with a technique called literary impressionism. He writes in another text about how his purpose is to make you see, to make you hear, to make you feel—which is something that’s been important for me to think about as I write history. We know as historians that everything that we write is, of course, a narrative. Everything we look at is a narrative. Everything in our soundly researched, empirically supported histories is nonetheless channeled through our own interpretation and based on other people’s interpretations....
sch 8/31/22
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