81 Years Apart: the Importance of Literary Eras in Conrad’s and Coetzee’s Writings

Written English literature dates back to the times of the epic tale Beowulf well over a thousand years ago. However, times change rapidly and so must the literature that depicts them. Fiction, while by definition being imaginary or made up, still depicts the attitudes of the time period it is written in, whether or not this time period is the same as that in which the story itself takes place. And it is amazing how much difference 81 years can make.

Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (first published in three parts 1899) and J. M. Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians (published 81 years later in 1980) are at some basic level quite similar works of literature. They both involve a protagonist narrator their readers trust and like; they both involve an antagonist whom serves as a foil to the protagonist and whom their readers come to distrust and dislike; and they both involve the clash between a “civilized” society and a “barbaric” one. However, Conrad’s story is mostly concerned with the horrible effect the uncivilized Africa has on Kurtz, while as Coetzee’s is mostly concerned with the unfair practices the Empire exercises on the “barbarians.” Therefore, these two apparently similar writings have very different plots and storylines. Douglas Kerr explains this concept excellently in his essay “Three Ways of Going Wrong: Kipling, Conrad, Coetzee” when he says, “arguably the greatest change, in the shift from a colonial to a postcolonial discourse, is the most obvious: the shift in perspective from the lawman to the outlaw.” It is the difference of attitude, even of point of view, due to the eras in which the two works were written, that creates the main difference between Conrad’s and Coetzee’s stories.

The stories could even easily have been flipped. Had Coetzee been writing at the turn of the nineteenth century, he could have easily written a novel about a small town on the frontier between the civilized Empire and the uncivilized barbarians, that would have been mostly concerned with the struggles of the Magistrate and Colonel Joll in this foreign environment and how this horrible experience changed them. Similarly, had Conrad been writing in the early 1980s, he would have likely written a story about the unjust ways in which the actually calm and civilized Africans were treated by Kurtz as seen through the eyes of Marlow. (Of course these story inversions neglect such “negligible” facts as the nonexistence of European colonial rule of the vast majority of Africa in 1980).

However, Joseph Conrad died a full 16 years before J. M. Coetzee was born and they did not write the two inverted stories I have just created. They wrote Heart of Darkness and Waiting for the Barbarians, respectively, and they wrote what they wrote because of the eras in which they lived. Their writings reflect these eras, and whether or not the established beliefs of our current era resonate with their attitudes, they are excellent representations of the beliefs of the past. (512)