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.

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.

Notes on the Modern period - 1 - chronology of the modern

In a course I teach, we have explored – over the past few weeks – some of the main “features” of the modern period. [Over the years, I’ve offered this course in various forms at both Cleveland State and now at Case Western Reserve University. The current version involves less reading and more writing for the students in one of CWRU’s “university seminars,” part of the school’s 'seminar approach to general education sequence' (“sages”).]

We first discussed a list of possible features of the modern, as follows: Autonomy, independence of vantage point and structure of thought. And the related feature of abstraction, both as subject and as abstract form and structure. Primistivism (again as both form and content) or openness to immediacy of the “moment” – also, stripped-down objectivity. As in the above contradiction between “abstraction” and the “moment,” there is a recurrent quality of paradox, contradiction, or ambiguity. A commitment to realism signals the ethos of confrontation, the critique of society from both right and left, and the interest in judging the entire course of Western civilization leading to the modern period. Destabilization of received convention; negation, and/or rebellion, and subversive freedom. The quality of paradox relates to a pervasive perspectivism, relativity/relativism, with an accompanying risk of nihilism. In general, there is an openness to change and experiment across the arts, the natural sciences, and the new social sciences – yielding new forms, concepts, approaches, and achievements. Paradigm shift. A transfiguring unity of being and vision is sought in the face of change and collapse (with the fullness of experience yielding a death of the ordinary self). The modern is beset by a sense of cultural mourning and belatedness.

We then went on to examine a chronology of the modern, which of course has a fascination in and of itself (partly for what it includes and excludes). It began with the early start of Rousseau’s Social Contract in 1762 and ended with 1945 and the end of World War II. The students repeatedly commented on the paradoxical combination of destruction and achievement apparent in many of its items (for an obvious example, the American Civil War’s abolition of slavery yet its massive toll in casualties partly resulting from the increased modernization of warfare – and generally the increasing human toll of war from the Civil War to World War II).

Many comments focused on the remarkably fast pace of technological achievement in the century before 1945 (a natural focus for some of the students at the former Case Institute of Technology). Examples of those achievements include: 1873 Remington’s typewriter; 1879 Edison’s phonograph and incandescent light bulb (and the electrification of cities in later decades); 1882 Koch’s discovery of the TB bacillus but, also, the development of the machine gun; 1885 Pasteur’s Rabies vaccine, the discovery of radio waves, and the development of the internal combustion engine; 1887 Daimler’s automobile; 1890 the Kodak camera and the completion of the Eiffel Tower; 1891 the first subway in London opens; 1892 Lorenz’s electron theory; 1893 the Ford auto assembly line; 1894 the gramophone disc; 1895 Roentgen discovers x-rays, Lumiere invents the movie camera, and Marconi develops the wireless radio; 1898 the Curies isolate radium; 1903 the Wright Brothers create the first airplane; 1905 Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity; 1909 the typhus vaccine developed; 1912 the isotope theory developed; 1915 Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity; 1923 television and insulin developed, and skyscrapers begin to shape the New York skyline; 1925 the Copenhagen hypothesis of quantum physics; 1927-8 Penicillin, missiles, sound movies; 1936-9 jet engine, radar, computer; 1945 the U.S. uses atomic weapons in war.

Here are some of the other details from the chronology:

Enlightenment conceptions of individual rights: 1762 Rousseau’s Social Contract; 1776 Jefferson et al’s Declaration of Independence; 1789 French Revolution’s “Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity” followed by the Terror and the Napoleonic Wars (until Waterloo in 1915); the Godwins (husband and wife) on political and women’s rights.

Romantic ideas of subjectivity and beauty: 1794 and following - Blakes’s poetry (the first gas lights in Britain, even as speech and assembly are suppressed repeatedly in the following decades); 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads; plus the following, which I’ll discuss more soon: 1807 Hegel’s Phenomenology of the Spirit and 1819 Keats’ Odes.

Realist efforts and their complement in Aestheticism: 1833 Britain’s Reform Bills and, in 1836 on the eve of Victoria becoming queen, its abolition of slavery; 1848 abortive revolutions in Europe and Marx’s Communist Manifesto; 1851 the Great Exhibition of Science and Industry at the “Crystal Palace” in London (responded to with horror by Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man in 1857, the year of Baudelaire’s “Flowers of Evil”); 1859 Darwin’s Origin of the Species; 1861-65 the American Civil War, with its uncounted civilian toll and 620,000 soldiers dead in four years; 1865 Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend and Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde; 1866 Britain’s second Reform Bill; 1871 the unification of Germany and the Franco-Prussian War with its 200,000 solders dead in one year, and also George Eliot’s Middlemarch and the founding of Newnham College for Women in Cambridge, U.K.; 1872-3 Pater’s “Conclusion” to The Renaissance and Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy; also in the 1870s the first Impressionist exhibition, the poems of Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarmé, and Ibsen’s Ghosts; 1881 Henry James’ Portrait of A Lady; 1884 Twain’s Huckleberry Finn; 1895 Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, plus Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest as well as his imprisonment for the “issue” of his homosexuality; and finally 1900 Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams; 1902 Britain’s expanded Education Act and Gide’s The Immoralist; 1903 G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica, Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folks, and Simmel’s The Metropolis.

The modern period from 1905 (with Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity) to 1945: 1907 Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon and Matisse’s Fauve period; 1909-11 London’s First Post-Impressionist Exhibition, Bartok’s First String Quarete, and Shoenberg’s Second String Quartet; 1913 Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Proust’s Swann’s Way, and Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers; 1914 D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and Wyndham Lewis’ Blast; 1914-18 World War I with uncounted millions of civilian casualties and 10 million soldiers dead (and in 1918-19 a similar number of deaths from influenza); 1915 – the year of Einstein’s General Theory – Lawrence’s Women in Love suppressed; Joyce’s A Portrait, Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and Jung’s Psychology of the Unconscious; 1917 Lenin’s Russian Revolution; 1919-20 Pound’s Mauberly, Weimar cabaret and Bauhaus, Duchamp’s Mona Lisa and Dadaism, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and in America Women’s suffrage; 1922 Joyce’s Ulysses, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land; 1924 Kafka’s The Trial, Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Breton’ Surrealist Manifesto, and Forster’s A Passage to India; 1925 Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, Heminway’s in our time, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and in 1927 Heidegger’s Being and Time and in Britain, Women’s suffrage; 1929 the Great Depression begins, Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, and Brecht/Weill’s operas; 1930s Hitler comes to power, Stalin’s purges, the Spanish Civil War, and 1939-45 World War II with its scores of millions of civilian casualties, its 25 million soldiers dead, the Holocaust, and Atomic weapons first used in war. 1945 postmodernism begins.

Then the class turned to some precursors of the modern, including Kate Chopin “The Story of an Hour,” excerpts from Whitman, Emily Dickinson’s “After Great Pain,” Baudelaire’s “To the Reader,” Verlaine’s “The Art of Poetry,” and a paragraph on self-consciousness by Hegel. Those will be the subject of my next post.