Book Review: The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, by Maya Jasanoff (2017)

The paperback cover of The Dawn Watch, by Maya Jasanoff. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Maya Jasanoff’s 2017 book The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, is a fascinating examination of Conrad’s major writings. Focusing on Heart of Darkness, Nostromo, Lord Jim, and The Secret Agent, Jasanoff makes the argument that Conrad’s writings contain themes that speak deeply to our own era, as well as Conrad’s.  

Joseph Conrad had a fascinating life: born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski to Polish parents in Berdychiv, in what was then the Russian Empire, and is now part of Ukraine. His parents were staunch Polish nationalists and were sent into exile by the Russian government. Jozef was 7 when his mother died, and just 11 when his father died. Sent to live with his uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski, Jozef dreamed of becoming a sailor, and he joined the French merchant marine at age 16.  

Korzeniowski eventually moved to England and joined the British merchant marine, becoming a British citizen and passing the master mariner examination—the highest examination level—in 1886. It would be nine more years before he published his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, written in English, his third language. It was not much of a change to go from Jozef Konrad to the Anglicized pen name Joseph Conrad.  

Conrad had a unique viewpoint through which to view the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His career in the merchant marine had taken him to Australia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Congo, to name just a few of his journeys. Conrad was better traveled than perhaps any other writer of his era, and his novels were set throughout the world.  

During his lifetime, Conrad’s world was becoming more interconnected. One of the major concerns of his fiction is what happens when different societies and cultures comes into contact with each other. You could argue that Conrad was not sufficiently attuned to indigenous peoples, but it’s clear that he was critical of European imperialism and colonialism.  

The Dawn Watch is a good book, but it’s a little odd. It’s part biography, part literary examination, but it might not be enough of either part to satisfy readers. You’d better make sure you’ve read all four of the major works that Jasanoff discusses, as she will take you through painstakingly detailed plot summaries. Jasanoff spends too much time detailing the plot points, and not enough time analyzing what makes Conrad’s writing great. I suppose that I am the target audience for The Dawn Watch: I’ve read the four books by Conrad, but I haven’t read any biographies of him.  

The narrative is not chronological, which fits with Conrad’s own writings, as they often jump forwards and backwards in time, but in a biography, the non-linear approach is tricky. For example, The Secret Agent is discussed first in the book, when it actually comes last in the chronology of the four major works that Jasanoff discusses.  

Conrad did not write much about his own childhood, which makes sense, given how painful the losses of his parents must have been. While I was reading The Dawn Watch, I happened to page through a novel by Dick Francis, the British mystery writer. Francis wrote in the foreword to the novel that people often speculated about his relationship with his parents, because so often his characters had difficult family lives. Francis wrote that he had a good relationship with his parents and enjoyed a good relationship with his two sons. He wrote, and I’m paraphrasing here, that because he had such good family relationships, he was able to write about dysfunctional families in his fiction. If he would have had bad family relationships, it would have been too painful to write about. That made me think of Conrad: he probably didn’t write about his parents because it would have been difficult.  

Conrad’s sailing career bridged the time between sail and steam, and he clearly preferred the former, which was quickly becoming a relic of the past. Conrad lived his life in a middle zone: the Polish side of him pined for a country that did not exist, and the English part of him perhaps sensed that he would never be “truly” English. Perhaps it was this push and pull that made Conrad such a great writer—he understood the displacement that all of his characters in Nostromo felt, for example.  

Conrad’s trip as a captain up the Congo River in 1890 was awful, and it provided much of the inspiration for Heart of Darkness. After his return to England, Conrad was still plagued by nightmares and poor health. He wrote in a letter: “I am still plunged in densest night and my dreams are only nightmares.” (p.215)  

Jasanoff pinpoints Conrad’s clear vision about the horrors of colonialism and imperialism in this passage: “What made the difference between savagery and civilization, Conrad was saying, transcended skin color; it even transcended place. The issue for Conrad wasn’t that ‘savages’ were inhuman. It was that any human could be a savage.” (p.224-5) This is exactly the point of Heart of Darkness: that Kurtz has been corrupted, not by the Africans, but by power, by the whole corrupt system of colonialism and imperialism.   

The Dawn Watch is a fascinating glimpse into the life and times of Joseph Conrad. After I finished reading The Dawn Watch, I pulled out my old Encyclopedia Britannica to read the entry on Conrad. The end of the first paragraph struck me as a wonderful summation of his talents: “A writer of complex skill and striking insight, but above all of an intensely personal vision, he has been increasingly regarded as one of the greatest English novelists.”