ABSTRACT
Joseph Conrad’s art of writing nature is consistently physiological, but addressed to the human participation in the physics of the external scene. Both tales portray the irruptive power of nature though both, unusually for Conrad, have a conventionally “happy ending”. As so often in Conrad, light transforms substance—successively imaged as “the rocks,” “the forms of islets,” “the islets”—into shapes conceived by eyes squinting into the fierce sunlight: pinnacles, spires, ruins, beehives, mole-hills, haystacks and ivy-clad towers. In the novels of Conrad, Nature is first, Man second”. A concept of nature remains fundamental to Conrad’s capacity to write this world. “Falk” is very precisely about the encounter with what is “human” in nature. And “nature,” like so much in “Falk” for so much of its length, is approached indirectly, for, as the narrator says of the eponymous central figure, “Natural forces are not quarrelsome”.
