In this paper I discuss the three political novels of Joseph Conrad – Nostromo, Under Western Eyes and The Secret Agent – along with one novel written together with Ford Madox Ford – The Inheritors. As well as analysing their literary structure, I examine the social and political visions that emerge from these novels.
In my opinion, several elements in these texts show similarities to classical utopias such as Thomas More’s Utopia, Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis or Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun. It would seem that the fictional reality which is presented in Conrad’s novels can be understood as being a symbolic reference to utopian worlds, together with their geography, history and principle characters.
However, this is not to say that the meaning of Conrad’s novels is simply a continuation of utopian texts. To begin with, as none of these novels can be taken completely at face value – given Conrad’s irony and narratorial distance – a definitive identification of the social and political ideas which are to be found in them is no easy task. Moreover, some elements in these novels display a convergence of anti-utopian or dystopian visions, though the vogue for negative utopias only really began in the second decade of the twentieth century.
To conclude, we may say that – read in this context – Conrad’s political novels can be interpreted as being both a positive and a negative vision of social development. They may also have had an influence on some later utopian or dystopian texts.