The Greatness of Conrad's Victory

I have read Joseph Conrad's Victory (1915) five times during the last 60 years, have published two essays and two chapters about it, and want to explain why this underrated novel has had such a powerful aesthetic and emotional hold on me. The influential and usually perceptive Albert Guerard—dutifully followed by his student and disciple Thomas Moser—is wide of the mark in his comments on Victory. Emphasizing its weaknesses and ignoring its strengths, Guerard calls the book "one of the worst novels for which high claims have ever been made by critics of standing: an awkward popular romance built around certain imperfectly dramatized reflections on skepticism, withdrawal, isolation." Contra Guerard, I believe that Victory, though partly a romance inspired by The Tempest, is also deepened and enhanced by economic, historical, military and political themes. The novel has fascinating autobiographical revelations about Conrad's father and wife, and important allusions to coal mining, the Swedish warrior-king Charles XII, the Franco-Prussian War, and nationalistic hatreds. Victory has subtly recurrent patterns, intriguing characters, and daring sexual imagery; the poignant Liebestod is highly allusive, psychologically complex, and deeply moving.

Victory opposes the idyllic portrayal of romantic love in South Sea islands, which had been stamped upon the western imagination by Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson, Pierre Loti, and Paul Gauguin. Instead, it compares the tragic fate of a gallant man and young woman in a tropical paradise to Shakespeare's The Tempest and, rather surprisingly, to Conrad's punitive childhood exile in the wastelands of Russia. But Melville's Typee, despite his portrayal of the dolce far niente life in the Marquesas, also warns about the dangers of violence and death in those distant domains: "Many a petty trader has navigated the Pacific whose course from island to island might be traced by a series of cold-blooded robberies, kidnappings, and murders, the iniquity of which might be considered almost sufficient to send her guilty timbers to the bottom of the sea." Victory is firmly based on reality and on the lawlessness of these colonial outposts. The protagonist Axel Heyst's exile is self-imposed, but his retreat from the world is not safe from predators. He not only loses his money and his friend, but also his lover and his life.

Conrad quotes or alludes to Shakespeare's As You Like It, Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, and Macbeth. But there are even more allusions to The Tempest than Frederick Karl and other critics have noticed. Miranda-Lena is cast away on a remote desert island inhabited by Prospero-Heyst and Caliban-Pedro. Ariel-Wang, Heyst's "familiar attendant," performs a vanishing act as if he had wings. Heyst hears a "tempest of fiddles" from the ladies' orchestra and repeats, Prospero-like, "I am enchanted with these islands… a magic circle." He also echoes the famous lines from The Tempest, "We are such stuff / As dreams are made on" by observing, "There are more spells than your commonplace magicians ever dreamed of."

Heyst's existence on Samburan, a remote, isolated, and primitive place, also recalls Conrad's lonely and hermetic years with his father in Russian exile. After the failure of the Polish revolution and the death of his wife, Apollo Korzeniowski's courage gave way to dejection. In a letter, he wrote a terribly depressing account of his solitary existence with his young son: "Poor child: he does not know what a contemporary playmate is; he looks at the decrepitude of my sadness and who knows if that sight does not make his young heart wrinkled or his awakening soul grizzled." Heyst's father's portrait and possessions, books and ideas, reinforce his spectral presence and emotional influence, his profound mistrust of life, and crippling negation and despair. Like Conrad's mother, who died in exile of tuberculosis, Lena sacrifices her life for the man she loves. Like the Russians who imprisoned Conrad's revolutionary father, Jones and Ricardo persecute and punish their helpless victim.

Conrad begins Victory with a detailed description of the Tropical Belt Coal Company (which resembles the ruined silver...