Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation

" Begin at the beginning", said the King gravely, and go on till you come to the end, then stop." ( Lewis Caroll ,Alice in Wonderland) A simple Alice -in -Wonderland statement that connotes and bodies forth the pre-Cinematic era of daguerro type montage- " a kind of alternate to the theatre with various sorts of static, stagey, lengthy tableaus". A leap into the realm of Victorian and early modernist fiction gives a similar 'oeuvre' of beginning, middle and end. The movement away from this scenographic syndrome was painfully slow and needed aThomas Hardy or a Joseph Conrad to give it a cinematic perspective. Joseph Conrad, the writer, was interested in only what he called, the "truth of life". Perhaps, no writer has prepared himself to tell the truth more thoroughly, more conscientiously , than Conrad. It is worth emphasizing that Conrad aimed for nothing less than an imaginative and artistic vision of life. Other views of it-political ,sociological, religious- he repudiated. It was in this obssessive telling of the 'truth', that Conrad's narrative falls back constantly upon the cinematic mode of visually concretized details.

Part of the Dream Weave Walk 1999-2007