Year

1995

Text

Type

Publication

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Chronology Entries (2)

#	Year	Text	Linked Data
1	1895-1924	Joseph Conrad und China. Heliéna M. Krenn : The image of the Chinese which Conrad draws in individual works roughly corresponds with the stereotypes found in other writing of the time. His interest in China had various origins. In addition to his childhood reading, which whetted his appetite for the distant and the unknown, there was his father's literary activity, which acquainted him with Victor Hugo, an enthusiastic admirer of the Chinese. Later, his life as a sailor offered chances for personal contact with Chinese individuals. Conrad never reached China. His acquaintance with the Far East was limited to the brief periods he spent in eastern seaports. An important stimulus were England's imperialist policies and increased trade relations with Asia, especially China, in the nineteenth century. A less obvious but more basic and therefore more important explanation for Conrad's sentiment about China can be found in his approach to his creative activity which may well have been affected by Schopenhauer's philosophy and Oriental concepts. If Conrad's creative genius experiences an affinity with China because of the aura of mysteriousness that surrounded that country, her people's self-understanding as constituting the center of civilized humanity, and the potential for good and evil which that vast country then held for Western minds, it also explains the great variety of images of the country and her people in his writings. To be sure, contemporary stereotypes of the Chinese occur in Conrad's work : among the most frequently mentioned occupations are those related to trade and business, food culture, and the earning of money as coolies and 'boys' by any kind of labor, and Conrad's 'Chinaman' wear pigtails, have 'almost' eyes, are 'yellow', speak pidgin English, and several of them smoke opium. Despite this compliance with stereotypes, Conrad presents individualities, traits, and situations that reflect the changing Western opinions of China which, as the reader discovers, resulted from the change of attitudes toward that country and her people at different periods of Western history. The discovery that for Conrad the way of speaking and thinking about the Chinese is a subtle device to reveal character is confirmed when those personalities are considered who hold outspokenly positive views of them. The Chinese are obscure, mysterious, and of a doubtful nature to Westerners, they are in danger of being wrongly seen and misunderstood. The oral mode of presentation of narrative details enables the author to forestall misinterpretations of what is shadowy and enigmatic in his tales by allowing for rival versions to what any one speaker puts forward at any one time. The Chinese are seen through different eyes and from different angles. The reader experiences one utterance as standing against another, recognizes misinterpretations and misrepresentations of the Chinese as welcome means for revealing the characters of those who incur them, and is warned against jumping to rash conclusions. To the degree to which the informative value of whatever is being said about China and the Chinese is recognized as relative to the character of the speaker the likelihood of Conrad's self-identification with those utterances decreases. The mere fact of allowing for alternatives proves Conrad's divergence from the prevailing negative opinions of his time. Likewise, the frequent coupling of disagreeable characters with negative opinions about China and the Chinese can be taken as suggestive of the author's sympathetic attitude toward them.	Person: Conrad, Joseph
2	1915	Conrad, Joseph. Victory [ID D27532]. Pt. 1, chap. 4 His owner had a face like an ancient lemon. He was small and wizened—which was strange, because generally a Chinaman, as he grows in prosperity, puts on inches of girth and stature. To serve a Chinese firm is not so bad. Once they become convinced you deal straight by them, their confidence becomes unlimited. Pt. 3, chap. 1 It was a curious case, inasmuch as the Alfuros, having been frightened by the sudden invasion of Chinamen, had blocked the path over the ridge by felling a few trees, and had kept strictly on their own side. Wang in his native province in China might have been an aggressively, sensitively genial person; but in Samburan he had clothed himself in a mysterious stolidity and did not seem to resent not being spoken to except in single words, at a rate which did not average half a dozen per day. And he gave no more than he got. It is to be presumed that if he suffered he made up for it with the Alfuro woman. He always went back to her at the first fall of dusk, vanishing from the bungalow suddenly at this hour, like a sort of topsy-turvy, day-hunting, Chinese ghost with a white jacket and a pigtail. Presently, giving way to a Chinaman's ruling passion, he could be observed breaking the ground near his hut, between the mighty stumps of felled trees, with a miner's pickaxe. After a time, he discovered a rusty but serviceable spade in one of the empty store-rooms, and it is to be supposed that he got on famously; but nothing of it could be seen, because he went to the trouble of pulling to pieces one of the company's sheds in order to get materials for making a high and very close fence round his patch, as if the growing of vegetables were a patented process, or an awful and holy mystery entrusted to the keeping of his race. Chap. 11 It would be useless, for instance, to tell me that your Chinaman has run off with your money. A man living alone with a Chinaman on an island takes care to conceal property of that kind so well that the devil himself—" Heliéna M. Krenn : The narrator speaks of a 'wonderful intuition' with which the Chinese are gifted. Frequently their detachment affects Westerner as being an expression of sadness and consequently 'sad-eyed' is an often-used modifier. Wang proves his share in the qualities of detachment and ghostlikeness by his ability to 'vanish' and 'materialize' and by his withdrawal into safety when elements enter the scene that present a challenge to action. The positive presentation of despotism is obvious. Its splendor asserts itself in the 'unlimited confidence' that superiors in Chinese firms demonstrate toward subordinates from the West once they have become convinced of the latter's trustworthiness.	Document: Conrad, Joseph. Victory. (London : Methuen, 1915). [Enthält Eintragungen "Chinaman" ; Chinese servant Wang]. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/6378. (ConJ8, Publication) Person: Conrad, Joseph

Cited by (1)

#	Year	Bibliographical Data	Type / Abbreviation	Linked Data
1		Zentralbibliothek Zürich	Organisation / ZB