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 - 18 - Conrad in the twentieth century (part two)

There are certain large-scale and demanding modernist masterworks that render society’s organizing edifices as they loom over and crush human lives. Among these works is Conrad’s longest novel, Nostromo (1904), which forces the English-speaking reader to face the great weight of imperial entitlement at work in the very language and form of the English novel. The Polish-British novelist’s courage in writing that work is not only a function of the writing itself – facing the blank page and creating there a world in language; his courage involves his difficult, even precarious situation as a writer, quadruply displaced (Russian exile, then the return to Poland, the years in France, and finally the arrival in Britain – though first there is service on British Merchant ships and only after 1894 permanent residence in England).

Earlier I discussed Under Western Eyes (published in 1911), in which Conrad portrays the harrowing site of his childhood exile in Russia, and in Heart of Darkness there is the courage of a European writer in 1900 confronting Europe’s pervasive imperialist megalomania. And as I mentioned, in Nostromo it was risk-taking and courageous in 1904 for him to focus his most ambitious novel on the experience of a British imperialist and his wife; Conrad was a foreigner and naturalized citizen undertaking to reveal some of the most difficult truths about his adopted British homeland. A similar risk is implicit in his 1907 novel, The Secret Agent, which exposes London’s political underworld of radicals, agent provocateurs, and police.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, Conrad develops a vision of British life as the site of social, ethical, and personal self-deceptions and collisions, and in doing so he employs the destabilizing strategy of perspectivism, of presenting the “truth” of a story not as singular, but as a multiplicity of truths narrated from differing points of view. Both the content and the ‘contrapuntal’ form of his vision achieve what Conrad describes as a “somber” and “sinister” impact; in the preface to Heart of Darkness, he writes, “the somber theme had to be given a sinister resonance, a tonality of its own, a continued vibration that, I hoped, would hand in the air and dwell on the ear after the last note had been struck.” (The “sinister resonance” in Conrad’s fiction is analyzed more fully in the first chapter of my Fullness of Dissonance: Modern Fiction and the Aesthetics of Music.)

That “sinister resonance” is in part a matter of Conrad's use of a certain psychological realism, which presents each character’s stream of inner perception in order to render the most difficult truths about him or her, and each internal monologue or self-disclosing dialogue does not exist in isolation, but is in ‘counterpoint’ with other characters’ monologues and dialogue. As well, like still another character, there is Conrad’s evocative and symbolic use of the external atmosphere of setting, which his characters internalize – whether it is the experience of going upriver in the Congo darkness or exploring the anarchic, sun-drenched streets of a disintegrating Latin American city or negotiating London’s dim settings, whether seedy or sumptuous.

A continuously destabilizing turbulence emerges from the perspectivism of Conrad’s multiple viewpoints and settings, and their colliding views and truths give the reader the often dizzying responsibility of deciphering and judging Kurtz, Charles Gould, Verloc, Razumov, and Conrad’s other haunting and powerful creations. In this way the novels’ modernist perspectivism magnifies the power and capaciousness of its core characters. The result is a version of the modernist “gigantism” I’d discussed in an earlier post, a breadth of self-consciousness and power. Particularly his core characters are possessed by a consuming self-consciousness and self-absorption, yielding enormous force yet blinding them to the damage done by their egotism and megalomania (Nostromo and Decoud are amateurs of self-consciousness and egotism compared to the imperial master of rationalized exploitation and brutality, Charles Gould. And of course colossal Kurtz bestrides them all.) In my final post on Conrad, I’ll try to detail the perspectivism and “gigantism” of Conrad’s presentation of these compelling and revelatory characters.