A Journey with Maps: Cartography in the Works of Joseph Conrad

Abstract

This thesis demonstrates how Joseph Conrad’s prose style was influenced by his professional experience as a sailor. By doing so, this thesis proposes a new approach to reading and mapping Conrad’s fiction with maps that spatialize the cartographic experience of the fictional narrative rather than its geographic boundaries. Even though most editions of Conrad’s fiction have a map to go with the text, very few maps ever break from the dogmatic process of marking the places of Conrad’s fiction in our world’s geography. This geographic spatialization of Conrad’s fiction (i.e., reading Heart of Darkness with a map of the Congo river), however crucial to understanding the very real geographic and historical basis for many of Conrad’s stories, also limits our reading of Conrad’s fiction to this one spatiality. Using Linda Hutcheon’s The Theory of Adaptation (2006) and by juxtaposing a number of alternative maps and adaptations of Heart of Darkness and Almayer’s Folly, I demonstrate how the process of adaptation maps these stories beyond their geographical bounds in ways that facilitate a richer understanding of their phenomenological and spatial dynamics. These alternative maps include Conrad’s “Up-River Book”, his notebook from navigating the Congo river; British Admiralty charts and their textual supplements; and film adaptations, such as Chantal Akerman’s La Folie Almayer (2011) and Rob Lemkin’s African Apocalypse (2020). Alongside these media, I refer to Michel de Certeau’s concepts of “space” and “place” in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984), Frances Yates’ theory of architectural mnemonics in The Art of Memory (1969), and more recent theory about literary cartography. Using this interdisciplinary framework, this thesis demonstrates how nautical navigation presents a cartographic perspective of fictional world-building that is uniquely phenomenological. Conrad’s texts are prime examples of how books can be mapped differently, and how as readers we can work to be more conscious of the effects that maps have in shaping our cognition of the texts we read.