CONRAD, GREENE, AND THE DYNAMICS OF HETERO-BIOGRAPHY

A hundred years after the author’s death, it is clearer than ever that Conrad’s work has been one of the most intertextually generative literary corpora of the twentieth century, most notably the case of Heart of Darkness with its overwhelming breadth of reach and with dozens of subsequent literary and other texts that respond to it in a variety of ways. Indeed, to judge by the proliferation of intertextual relations alone, the novella may well be read and taught as the Ur-text of the twentieth century. Graham Greene’s prominence among Conrad’s literary interlocutors is evidenced in numerous studies discussing or referring in passing to the affinities between the two writers, and while it is impossible to do justice to the entire scope of these readings in a brief essay, we should note that they have mostly engaged with Greene’s Journey without Maps (1936), an explicit and obvious case-in-point, focusing on issues of colonialism, postcolonialism, and imperial travel writing. 1 The following discussion, however, would take a different direction, focusing on a diary kept by Greene in 1959 during a two-month visit to a leper colony in the Belgian Congo, titled In Search of a Character, and published at about the same time as A Burnt-Out Case, the fictional product of the same journey (1961).