Conrad, Two Pair; German, Three Of A Kind

So Conrad was once a sailor, Peter E. Firchow wrote. "Half a lifetime" on the sea - "wandering the world in ships... often sharing close quarters with people from a wide variety of national and ethnic backgrounds ('Race, Ethnicity, Nationality, Empire,' P. 237)." Conrad laying down two pair against a German's three of a kind, Conrad and Egyptians sitting starry-eyed with lyre and folk tales, Conrad and "Cheers!" to a table of Indians, Italians, and Iranians - "half a lifetime, practically (P. 237)." And in that floating world of a ship, oceans and oceans away from his school chums, Conrad assimilated to the ways of foreign company - he must have. We've already seen how he feels about isolation in a mystery environment - see Mr. Kurtz in the Congo, see even Marlow in the Congo. Each, unlike the Chief Accountant who still wore his starched collars, lost a part of his identity when faced with mystery, foreign lands, and foreign peoples. Conrad didn't want that, and so surely took up the German's card game, the Egyptians' campfire sing-a-longs, and traded rounds of ale for more rounds of ale with the other sailors.

I imagine this life of Conrad at sea while reflecting on our debate today in class - whether Conrad is a racist for his descriptions of the native people of the Congo. Taking Firchow's emphasis placed on Conrad's life at sea shared with those of other ethnicities, I think, as posited above, Conrad must have known one or two "native" persons - but even if he didn't, he knew people unlike him. He was cultured and well-traveled - not two traits often associated with racists. Arguably, and I argue, usually racist views - as we think of the term today, not as Firchow goes to great length to say the 19th century thought of the term - are held against those we don't know. Instead of viewing Conrad's descriptions of "savage" Africans as evidence of his racism, we should see instead his intention behind depicting a "prehistoric earth" and "unknown planet (Norton Anthology 8th Edition, P. 2710):" to provide a backdrop of the unknown, of jungle thick and foggy rivers, in which the European mind must keep its wits. Like other Modernists, Conrad desired to understand the mind, and his psychological dive of a novel, Heart of Darkness, is one attempt to identify the necessary social and civil constructs for sanity. "It seemed somehow to throw a kind of light on everything about me - and into my thoughts," Marlow said at the beginning of his tale when describing his Congo trek. What follows after that introduction is Conrad throwing a light on the mind of man - universal man - in a savage, uncivilized land, not him turning his lamp of a writing pen to illuminate an inferior race.