Conrad's Under Western Eyes and Silence, continued (first section is an 11-2010 post):

Here's the continuation of the November 2010 post containing the start of my essay, which was published in Slavic and Eastern European Journal (issue 45:2, pp. 231-242).

The deepest terror exhibited and forecast by Under Western Eyes’ images of terrorism, autocracy, and the struggle to endure in Russian life is that, under circumstances of total simulation and dissimulation, truth disappears into silence, and reality undergoes an absolute erasure and substitution. Here we enter the region of Conrad's "néant," of negation. Conrad's readers are themselves made to experience a version of this negation, for the self-reflexive effect of the British professor's unreliable narration is to place them in the position of questioning the Western assumptions embedded in the text as a document written in English.

The resulting self-conscious and paradoxical perspectivism destabilizes our reading which depends on the Western professor's on-going narrative even when, for example, we realize that the compassion and perception he refuses to most of the Russians are what their struggle with erasure and suffering requires and embodies. "I suppose one must be a Russian to understand Russian simplicity, a terrible corroding simplicity in which mystic phrases clothe a naive and hopeless cynicism," he writes even about the Russian with whom he sympathizes the most, Natalia Haldin (76).

The concept of Russian cynicism helps us again to observe how a motif is made to break down in the novel, and reveal instability and negation. On one side is the Professor's condescension for Natalia's "naive and hopeless cynicism" - his snide "key-word" for his chronicle (49). On the other, we find the protagonist Razumov's paradoxical formulation, contorted by fear and despair, of Russian suffering: '''Stoicism! That's a pose ... We are Russians, that is - children; that is - sincere; that is - cynical, if you like. But that's not a pose!'" (147). Further, there is the revolutionary Sophia Antonovna's comment that "'women, children, and revolutionists hate irony, which is the negation of all saving instincts, of all faith, of all devotion, of all action'" (197). The novel's ironic questioning of irony is as brilliantly dislocating as it is compelling, for these carefully designed structural collisions and negations prompt readers to become as morally alert and delving as possible.

Found everywhere on this vertiginous landscape of dislocation is the primary mechanism of communication at work within a totalizing system and practiced even by Conrad's central, English narrator: that is, "interrogation" – detached, reductive, and imposing, for example, the Englishman's censure and sentimentality on the interrogated. Interrogation in his case is a metaphor to characterize the British professor's point of view on "things Russian," but in Conrad's vision of Russian life interrogation is more than metaphoric. It is at the core of experience itself, and most of the novel's key scenes involve acts of interrogation: the revolutionist Haldin's testing of Razumov and then the Intelligence bureaucrat Mikulin's questioning of both of them, the myriad interrogations of Razumov by the Geneva Russians - the Haldins, Sophia Antonovna, not to mention Peter Ivanovich - and finally Razumov's own self-interrogation in his Dostoyevskian journal.

Why is the intrusion and inquisition of interrogation essential in a totalized society like the Russian autocracy? It is the tool that allows the Intelligence apparatus (the brain of a totalitarian body politic) to confront the silence - and shape the speech - of the totalized Russian society presented by Conrad. The passive, impervious, even moribund nature of this body politic informs the recurrent image of a body - drunk, dead, or asleep - suspended in a vast frozen waste, and this image of groundless suspension in a frozen blank white void applies above all to Razumov. Silence is the meaning of these many encompassing images of being frozen alive, and is the focus of Conrad's interrogation of Russia and, finally, of language itself. The haunted fatality of this vision is confirmed by its echoing of Adam Mickiewicz's classic Polish critique of Russia eighty years earlier, the "Digression" in Forefather's Eve of 1832; Czeslaw Milosz writes that Conrad "seems to repeat its contents line for line in . . . Under Western Eyes" (225)

Silence is a signal characteristic of the frozen Russian wastes here. The novel's images of suspended corpses are silent, and as well the holders of power - Prince K, Councilor Mikulin, etc. - mumble or are silent; the key words in their sentences are ellipses, erasures, silences. The "truths" of Razumov's story are silenced, and by the end of the novel his world is literally silence: his eardrums are shattered by the counterspy Nikita’s gun. This final silence of Razumov's world merely makes manifest its actual condition: all previous hearing and speech have been invalidated by lies, within himself and within the world he inhabited; both the official story or history and his personal version are compounded of falsifications. The brunt and import of the novel's interrogation, then, reveal that language capable of uttering meaning is silenced in the Geneva of the revolutionaries, the Petersburg of the autocracy, and indeed the Europe of modernity.

The interrogatory rhetoric - of the nearly mute aristocrats and of the strategically mumbling Intelligence chief in Russia - plays at a silence which invites the interrogated to fill the gaps, to accede to and participate in a totalized societal speech. What the society evokes is, then, not only passivity and imperviousness, but also a sort of participation taking the peculiar form, however, of confession. Though, as we saw, Conrad was highly critical of Dostoevsky, this novel has characters who echo Crime and Punishment; and of course Razumov's confessional journal represents a development of the novel genre modeled by Dostoevsky, not least in Notes from Underground. Mikulin's interrogation of Razumov draws from him what is desired, confession, collusion, and betrayal, but in a Dostoyevskian confessional form which the interrogating apparatus does not expect and cannot decipher. Against the interrogating rhetoric of the totalized Slavic society, this "Slavic" English novel pits an alternative equally characteristic of Slavic culture - a confessional rhetoric based in a sort of silence.

Totalitarian speech, in sum, ironically and unstably calls forth the upwelling confessional speech it requires, but in a hybrid form undecipherable to it. In a further irony, the opacity of Razumov's confession complicates and reinforces what we have noted is the ironic doubleness of his character, making him simultaneously a haunted Petersburg hero of Eastern genre and origin and a coldly "English" rational Western temperament, though the latter recedes by novel's end. Finally, the novel's narrative structure ironically juxtaposes Razumov's Dostoyevskian confession with the British professor's narration and "translation" of that narrative. A Slavic literary form, then, is paired against and interacts with a more traditional, conventionally Western version of the novel genre, and a mutually deconstructive tension results, measuring Eastern and Western rhetoric against each other.

I'll post the conclusion of this essay next week. 

Here are Amazon links to Conrad's novel and to Dostoyevsky's two works cited above: Under Western Eyes (Penguin Classics) and Crime and Punishment (Penguin Classics)  and Notes from Underground and The Double (Penguin Classics).

Notes on the modern period - 19 - Conrad in the twentieth century (part three)

I hope you will take a look at the links here describing my new political novel about Israel, Acts of Terror and Contrition: A Nuclear Fable (or follow that Amazon link to read/explore and “search inside the book”).

In this post, I want to place Conrad in the context of the century just past. There’s a fine book by Ian Watt about the novelist's relationship to the previous century, the nineteenth, in which he was born and became an adult, and to the movements in art which came to fruition in the 1870s and 1880s – that is impressionism (exemplified by Monet’s or Renoir’s paintings) and symbolism (embodied in Mallarme’s poetry). Clearly these two wondrous movements relate to Conrad’s ability to capture the atmosphere and symbolic resonance of characters’ minds and their settings. But Conrad’s willingness to portray the extremity of reality and finally his hardness of mind, which exposes and strips away hypocrisy, situate him as a novelist who inhabits and confronts the twentieth century, with its corrosive rationalizations justifying millions upon millions of deaths.

Conrad’s most powerful characters dramatize and embody those exploitative, murderous rationalizations: for example, Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Charles Gould in Nostromo, and the ensemble of Russian autocrats, functionaries, and revolutionaries in Under Western Eyes. There are also the less society-encompassing exemplars of these delusions: Lord Jim himself is an example. And there are the behind-the-scenes perpetrators – Holyrod in Nostromo, Mr. Verloc and Mr. Vladimir in The Secret Agent, the Manager in Heart of Darkness, and Stein in Lord Jim. As well, there are the fellow-travelers, detached yet enabling participants: Nostromo in Nostromo (even the passive Decoud there), the Assistant Commissioner and his entourage in The Secret Agent, or the deeply skeptical Heyst in Victory. These last are also observers who witness the atrocious events, the suffering of characters, and the delusions of Kurtz and the other enactors of inflated, rapacious dreams. Marlow is the model for such witnesses.

The character of Marlow possesses an extraordinary astuteness about other humans; for a character that comes into existence in the last years of Queen Victoria’s reign, he is far in advance of the late Victorian gentleman he ought to be (and who sometimes manifests himself in occasional defensiveness and compensating behavior). Conrad creates him as the teller of the novel’s story, and his flaws and his courageous sensitivity both situate the reader so that we become aware of what is at issue in the very act of speaking, of narrating (our critical awareness about the narrator’s perspective is intensified also by Conrad’s frequent use of multiple narrative viewpoints); the Conradian self-consciousness stirred in us about how to speak the truth is a crucial feature of the novelist’s modernity. Marlow’s own advance into modernity is a matter of two qualities of his mind, two capacities which Conrad describes in other contexts: One is the ability ‘to see the truth,’ to keep his eyes open in the face of extremity; the arc of plot and revelation in Heart of Darkness depends on the intensity of Marlow’s commitment to the truth. Marlow’s second gift is what Conrad called the “sympathetic imagination” – that is, he is able to intuit and empathize with the mental state of another human being, to establish a sort of ad-hoc community of two humans struggling with what tortures the mind of the other, of a Kurtz, of Lord Jim, and of lesser characters. And what possesses the mind of one haunts the mind of the witness; as Marlow is made to say, “Since I had peeped over the edge myself, I understand better his stare [into the abyss]….It is his extremity I seemed to have lived through.” Before the existential void, he makes the moral choice of solidarity with Kurtz who faces and voices “the horror” of his own imperial enterprise, with its deluded rationalizations of his rapacious violence.

In Nostromo, the imperialist Charles Gould has his witness in his wife, Mrs. Emilia Gould, and she too faces the abyss of what she calls “material interests.” In Conrad’s novels, women often bear both of Marlow’s gifts; Mrs. Gould sees the truth of what the silver mine has done to the lives of owner and worker, of master and servant, alike, and she is haunted by the self-conscious realization of the void the mine creates in the vast world of the novel, which is narrated from a wide range of narrative viewpoints. Mrs. Gould also possesses a sympathetic imagination, which draws the pained souls of Gould’s world to her, the intellectuals and the desperate aristocrats, the deluded movers and shakers and the enabling underlings. And she is left with a deep sense of the imperial void, absorbing the Latin American nation in the midst of celebrating still another revolution. Even an endangered sense of justice or a provisional community in Conrad’s vision must draw upon the capacities of a Marlow or of an Emilia Gould.

These remarks are too compressed, but hopefully they begin to give an impression of Conrad’s works. My intention is finally to write a book titled Conrad in the Twentieth Century and Other Essays. But in my next post, I’ll move on to another focus.

[Here are links to these extraordinary novels, on Amazon.com: Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin), Heart of Darkness (Penguin Classics), Under Western Eyes, Lord Jim: A Tale, The Secret Agent: A Simple Tale (Penguin Classics), and Victory (Penguin Classics).]

Notes on the modern period - 17 - on Conrad in the twentieth century (part one)

Before I turn to Conrad, I want again to mention the short novel I’ve just published, a political novella about Israel during an international crisis. As I’ve mentioned, I have revised it over the years (with two agents’ help, it was nearly accepted for publication a couple of times), and I’ve now made it available newly revised through Amazon’s free publishing arm, Createspace. With its nuclear theme inside something of a thriller structure as well as its portrait of three generations of Israelis, the difficult political questions it raises sadly remain relevant. The title is Acts of Terror and Contrition: A Nuclear Fable (that’s the Amazon link), and it’s accompanied by eight stories of mine about America in the 80s (i.e., during the Reagan years through the fall of the Berlin Wall). I’m glad that it’s now available to people who might find it moving and stimulating.

The issue of the novel’s relationship to the most harrowing problems in society is, of course, central to Joseph Conrad’s novels. As he engages his (and our) world’s excesses and political extremities, the governing approach or aesthetic of his fiction marks his novels as a product of the twentieth century. Each of Conrad’s narratives embodies and projects, for one thing, the core modernist strategy of perspectivism, which is finally a process of unfolding multiple points of view in a sort of counterpoint of voices. Views and voices mix and collide, altering one another, and this continual (simultaneously spatial and temporal) altering and unfolding is for Conrad a key to the process of understanding reality; finally it is a way of being. His own identity and experience embodies just those qualities so central to his imagination. The sense of his being an alien in British society and of being repeatedly fragmented by his experience and by his society’s fate: all of this is built into his life history – in childhood as a colonial subject of Russian rule in Poland, as a self-exile from Poland at 17 to Marseilles, as a Francophile who adopted English as a merchant marine and then as a writer, finally as a British citizen.

From his birth in 1857, Conrad’s life dramatically embodies the modernist concerns with dangerous excess and with the implacable collision of perspectives. His father, Apollo, reminds Bernard Meyer, who is one of Conrad’s biographers, of Balzac’s comment that if you point out a precipice to a Pole, he will immediately throw himself over, dressed in full regimental regalia. Apollo – a member of the landed gentry, proudly bearing the Nalcesz coat-of-arms – was a member of the Polish National Committee opposed to Russian rule over Poland. A literary and political writer and a translator of French and English literature, Apollo named his son Konrad, after the hero of a nineteenth-century Polish national epic hero. When Conrad was four, he almost died of pneumonia as his parents took him with them into Russian exile, which was Apollo’s punishment for his political opposition to Russian rule. In a remote town, north of Moscow, young Conrad – he was then seven – watched his mother die of tuberculosis; she was also of the landed gentry, but her family was grounded, practical, and disapproving of her marriage. At the age of 11, Conrad moved back to Poland with his ill and dying father, permitted finally to return; after Apollo’s death, the boy was made to walk at the head of the large patriotic funeral procession.

For the next six years, Conrad – initiated into trauma, resilient yet sensitive to disconnection – was raised by his mother’s practical brother, Uncle Tadeuz, in Krakow where he was tutored in his mid-teens (and visited the French-speaking part of Switzerland with his tutor, who reported to Tadeuz that the adolescent Conrad was “an incorrigible Don Quixote”). The Uncle feared that Apollo was influencing his son from the grave, and yet at the age of 16, Conrad was given permission (and funds) to go to Marseilles in order to apprentice as a French merchant marine. This was in 1874, a year in France not unlike 1974 in America – a time of profound disillusionment and realism about the government and the disastrous 1871 Franco-Prussian War. Over the next two years, in his late teens, Conrad shipped to Martenique and to Venezuela, illegally ran guns to Carlist revolutionaries in Spain, squandered most of his money, experienced a disastrous love affair, and attempted suicide by shooting himself in the chest (but missing his heart). The French immigration office understandably cancelled his sailor’s license.

Conrad traveled to England, enlisted in the British merchant Marines, and began his sixteen-year career rising in the ranks to Captain and becoming a naturalized British subject in 1887. He served as Captain of the Roi de Belges, going up the Congo River in 1890, and his experiences during that voyage became part of the basis of Heart of Darkness, written in 1900. His literary career began however when, he says, he was docked in Rouen harbor and started writing Almayer’s Folly in the flyleaf pages of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, the proto-modern masterpiece of stark realism and exacting style about Emma Bovary’s needy and out-sized ego (Conrad admired Flaubert and especially Maupassant, for they had “the courage to state the hardest truths”). This first novel is about a sort of Pere Goriot, that is, a King Lear-like father, who struggles to protect and control his daughters; already here, Conrad is exploring the creation of a consuming, larger-than-life character, who – tragicomic though he is – threatens to crack open the structure of his family and society. In 1894, when Conrad was thirty-seven, the novel was accepted for publication; also that year, Uncle Tadeuz died, and Conrad formally ended his sea career (which had already been curtailed by his illness after his trip up the Congo four years earlier). He settled in London and married his typist Jessie George in 1896. Mrs. Conrad’s memoir is a suggestive source in documenting the neurasthenic agony of writing for him.

Conrad sometimes buckled under the pressure of writing, for he consistently set himself the hardest tasks as a novelist. The modernist audacity and ambition of his works during the first decade of the twentieth century exacted a great toll, and after the completion of Under Western Eyes in 1910-11, he suffered a serious breakdown. In that work, he summonses the courage to return in imagination to the scene of his earliest traumatic experience of political oppression and extremity and to write a novel about Russian autocracy, modeled in part on Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (Conrad uses elements of that novel, despite his antipathy toward the Russian novelist). The essay “Autocracy and War” like Conrad’s 1911 novel presents a vision of existence as combat between an inhuman nothingness or “néant” (embodied for Conrad by the political oppression of the Russian Tsar and by Bismarck in Germany) and the capacity to sustain compassion and empathy (the “sympathetic imagination” toward others, on which human community is based and which is often sustained, he writes, by women); Under Western Eyes portrays a group of such women who variously struggle to help each other and the protagonist Razumov to endure oppression’s negation of the human. Thomas Mann greatly admired the novel, particularly for its juxtaposition of narrators and its metafictional perspectivism: Razumov’s journal of being buffeted by the forces of oppression (and his own internalization of them) is “translated from the Russian” by a well-meaning, sentimental and somewhat blinkered English “professor,” who provides his Western reading of the harrowing Eastern tale. The novel is that rare work of art, Mann writes, capable of bridging the divide between and synthesizing the implacably opposed entities of East and West in Europe.

In my next post, I’ll try to indicate other instances of the courage and modernist audacity of conception at work in Conrad’s perspectivist novels and, also, to explain his rendering of the modern novel’s characteristic “gigantism” and particularly the revelatory excess of self-absorption and megalomania in some of Conrad's most compelling characters.