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The Inescapability of Tragic Human Fate in Joseph Conrad's Amy Foster

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The Inescapability of Tragic Human Fate in Joseph Conrad's Amy Foster Źródła Humanistyki Europejskiej t. 8, 2015, s. 1–16 doi:10.4467/24496758ZHE.15.001.4265 www.ejournals.eu/ZHE/ AGATA KOWOL* Instytut Filologii Angielskiej UJ The Inescapability of Tragic Human Fate in Joseph Conrad’s Amy Foster Nieuchronny tragizm ludzkiego losu: Amy Foster Josepha Conrada motywów Abstrakt i Celem niniejszego artykułu jest ukazanie, w jaki sposób Joseph Conrad w opowiadaniu Amy Foster czerpie z tradycji antycznej tragedii greckiej, oraz zaprezentowanie motywów kla- praktyk sycznych, które pojawiają się w tym tekście. Jednym z najważniejszych tematów porusza- nych przez Conrada jest nieuchronność ludzkiego losu, często bardzo tragicznego. Mocno osadzony w realiach swoich czasów i kulturze zachodnioeuropejskiej Conrad odziedziczył po wieku dziewiętnastym przeświadczenie, że świat nie jest już pod opieką dobrego Boga. Na tym tragicznym tle przedstawia autor losy Janka, młodego karpackiego górala, który cu- I. Ciągłość dem ocalawszy z katastrofy morskiej, doznaje okrutnego odrzucenia i obojętności ze strony mieszkańców angielskiej wioski, aby potem im zaufać i poślubić tytułową Amy. Szczęście jednak nie trwa długo, gdyż dziewczynie nie udaje się Janka w pełni zrozumieć. Opuszcza męża w chorobie, a on umiera w samotności. Inność młodego mężczyzny oraz wartości, którym pozostaje wierny, wydają się jego jedyną winą (hamartia). Jego życiem zdaje się kierować niewyjaśniona i okrutna siła, co można porównać do władzy kapryśnych bogów nad bohaterami greckich tragedii czy eposów Homera. Janko umiera bez rozpoznania czy zrozumienia własnej sytuacji, co sprawia, że jego koniec wydaje się jeszcze tragiczniejszy. W ten sposób bolesne odczucie pustki metafizycznej zostaje spotęgowane próżnią epistemo- logiczną. Odrobinę nadziei tej ciemnej wizji dodaje jednak pełen empatii komentarz dwu narratorów zewnętrznych w szkatułkowej kompozycji tekstu, którzy umieszczając historię Janka w perspektywie uniwersalnej, odgrywają rolę chóru z tragedii antycznej. Paradoksal- nie, snując opowieść o nieczułości i beznadziejnej przepaści między ludźmi, sami dają oni * E-mail: [email protected]. I would like to thank the reviewer of this article, prof. dr hab. Krystyna Stamirowska-Sokołowska, for her invaluable comments and help. 2 Agata Kowol świadectwo współczucia, zrozumienia i udanej komunikacji, co świadczyć może również o efekcie swoistej katharsis, do której prowadzić może sama literatura. Słowa kluczowe: Conrad, los, fatum, tragedia, starożytność, Amy Foster Key words: Conrad, fate, tragedy, Antiquity, Amy Foster Introduction Written in 1901, Amy Foster is a short story by Joseph Conrad first published in the Illustrated London News and included in the Typhoon and Other Sto- ries volume of 1903. As has been argued by numerous critics1, the first-person frame narrative enclosing Doctor Kennedy’s yarn about Yanko Goorall, a ship- wrecked emigrant from the Carpathian Mountains who finds his miserable end in an English village, the novella may well reflect some of Conrad’s own fears, anxieties and the sense of personal estrangement as a Polish exile in an adopt- ed country. In wider terms, the novella has often been interpreted as a parable of potential meanness to a fellow human being.2 Moreover, many have seen in Yanko an Everyman (Guerard 1970: 50): he longs for happiness, friendship and love, but is tossed by the cruel sea on a bleak shore, where his hopes are thwarted by suspicion and misunderstanding. A vivacious young highlander from the Carpathians, Yanko is tricked by dis- honest swindlers offering a job in America, and having narrowly survived a ship- wreck off the English shore, is treated cruelly and uncomprehendingly by the parochial villagers he encounters. Gradually he manages to acquire the English language, acclimatize and eventually marry the eponymous Amy Foster, a dull girl whose humane impulses were the first acts of kindness he experienced on the foreign soil. Grant him charity as she does, Yanko’s refuge and happiness in marriage are short-lived since Amy, terrified by his feverish and incomprehensi- ble ravings in a foreign language, abandons him in his illness and leaves him to die of what is later certified as “heart failure” (175).3 The story appears to display an array of typically Conradian themes of misunderstanding between people, the struggle between the contradictory claims of human impulses (Graver 1969: 106) as well as man’s hopeless loneliness and his helplessness in a universe which does not appear to be governed by a beneficent God. The miserable plight of Yanko is indeed very pitiful, as Doctor Kennedy declares at the outset of his yarn: 1 See: Guerard 1970: 49–51; Graver 1969: 104–108; Herndon 1960: 549–566; Russell 1967: 208–209. 2 See: Guerard 1970: 49–51; Graver 1969: 104–108. 3 Quotations from Joseph Conrad’s Amy Foster will be cited with page numbers only. The Inescapability of Tragic Human Fate in Joseph Conrad’s Amy Foster 3 It is indeed hard upon a man to find himself a lost stranger, helpless, incomprehensible, and of a mysterious origin, in some obscure corner of the earth. Yet amongst all the adven- turers shipwrecked in all the wild parts of the world, there is not one, it seems to me, that ever had to suffer a fate so simply tragic as the man I am speaking of, the most innocent of adventurers cast out by the sea in the bight of this bay, almost within the sight from this very window. (155) (my italics) Torn away from his familiar surroundings, unfortunate in his sea voyage, treated inhumanely, continually misunderstood and alienated due to his innate vitality and foreign habits, and finally betrayed by his own wife, his sole bene- factress among hostile people, Yanko, “the most innocent of adventurers”, seems to be fated because of who he is. His struggle with the powers governing his lot is doomed to failure. It could be argued that due to its tragic dimension, but also, to other themes and motifs, the novella seems to bear resemblance to the patterns of ancient Greek tragedy outlined in Aristotle’s Poetics and exhibited in such works as, for example, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King. Fate in a Universe without God At the turn of the twentieth century, Conrad offers a particularly heart-rending vision of the world where, due to the decline of religious faith, the Christian God, who – unlike the Greek gods – did use to provide a meaningful framework for man’s fate – is no longer seen as the source of meaning. As Sewall notes, Historically, literary tragedy has always appeared at the mature period of a culture, not at its beginning [...] It puts to the test of action all the formulations of philosophy and religion [...] [and] comes after a long period of relative stability, when a dominant myth or religious orthodoxy or philosophic view has provided a coherent and sustaining way of life. Sud- denly the original terror looms close and the old formulations cannot dispel it. The con- flict between man and his destiny assumes once more the ultimate magnitude. (1959: 7) Deeply steeped in the intellectual atmosphere of the nineteenth century, Con- rad reflected a bleak vision of man’s lot. Among the factors shaping the outlook of the times was the decline of religious belief, the rising prestige of science4 and the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, all of which contributed to a general sense of loss and disinheritance. Man was no longer perceived as a wonderful creature made in the image of God and guided by His meaningful plan, but, rather, either a machine endowed with conscience, which even in a crowd re- 4 Here it is necessary to mention the dramatic impact of Lord Kelvin’s law of entropy, which created a chilly vision of death of man due to the cooling of the sun, and, crucially, Dar- winism. 4 Agata Kowol mained forever lonely, or a predetermined animal driven by instincts, whose evolution was not devised by a divine Providence but by sheer accident, thought- less atavistic competition for survival or a mechanistic force which is far from benevolent. In a famous letter to R.B. Cunninghame Graham, Conrad wrote: There is – let us say – a machine. It evolved itself [...] out of a chaos of scraps of iron and behold! – it knits. I am horrified at the horrible work and stand appalled. I feel it ought to embroider – but it goes on knitting. You come and say: “this is all right; it’s only a ques- tion of the right kind of oil. Let us use this – for instance – celestial oil and the machine will start to embroider a most beautiful design in purple and gold.” Will it? Alas no. You cannot by any special lubrication make embroidery with a knitting machine. And the most withering thought is that the infamous thing has made itself; made itself without thought, without conscience, without foresight, without eyes, without heart. It is a tragic accident – and it has happened. You can’t interfere with it. The last drop of bitterness is in the suspicion that you can’t even smash it. In virtue of that truth one and immortal which lurks in the force that made it spring into existence it is what it is – and it is indestructible. It knits us in and knits us out. It has knitted time, space, pain, death, corruption, de- spair and all the illusions – and nothing matters. (20 December 1897, 1969: 56–57) In such circumstances, free will is an illusion, each individual is a puppet of the universe and there appears to be no commonly acknowledged frame of refer- ence as values seem groundless. As Sewall describes the late nineteenth century: Traditional certainties (in this instance the Christian revelation and ethic joined with the optimistic formulations of the Enlightenment and of the Romantics) failed to accommo- date individual experience; and the failure was seen as not mere personal disorientation, to be expressed in melancholy lyrics, but as a fault at the very heart of things, recalling the original terror and bringing the nature of man once more into dark question.
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