A writer’s legacy is a complex matter, and Conrad’s particularly so, influenced as he was by various factors that included being born a Pole, his career as a merchant seaman, and his becoming a British national. Yet a literary legacy is not fixed, but alters over time, as critics and researchers make further discoveries and advance new thinking. This has been all the more the case with Conrad’s Malay fiction, set largely on the periphery of a Dutch colonial possession unfamiliar to many then as now.
A further dimension in considering Conrad’s legacy is his consciousness of the particular relationship that existed between his urge to write and those about whom he wrote. In A Personal Record he wrote of “that spirit of piety toward all things human” to describe the spirit that governed what was in effect a sense of responsibility toward his subjects, defining as a form of reverence his moral responsibility in writing about his fellow human beings.
This essay looks at two individuals who have especially illuminated Conrad’s legacy, both the legacy that he created and that which he received. Harold Gray was a chance visitor and enquirer in Tanjung Redeb, while the Indonesian scholar, G. J. Resink, not only explored and explained more than had been previously understood of Conrad’s legacy, including Conrad’s sources, but validated the faithfulness and accuracy of Conrad’s representation of Malay life. The essay will also examine something of Conrad’s defence of humanity regardless of colour or creed, and his pioneering redirection of seeing eastern civilization from a Eurocentric point of view to seeing it from an Asianor Indo-centric viewpoint.