Verdi’s very own capitaz de los cargadores

A few brief thoughts in busy times! An odd scene near the end of the first section that may shed some light on Conrad’s puzzling tone, or at least why he chose an Italian for his titular hero. And it is precisely as a ‘scene’ and set-piece of sorts that it merits comment:

   The dreaded Capataz de Cargadores, magnificent and carelessly public in his amours, flung his arm round her neck and kissed her spluttering lips. A murmur went round.

   “A knife!” he demanded at large, holding her firmly by the shoulder.

   Twenty blades flashed out together in the circle. A young man in holiday attire, bounding in, thrust one in Nostromo’s hand and bounded back into the ranks, very proud of himself. Nostromo had not even looked at him.

    “Stand on my foot,” he commanded the girl, who, suddenly subdued, rose lightly, and when he had her up, encircling her waist, her face near to his, he pressed the knife into her little hand.

    “No, Morenita! You shall not put me to shame,” he said. “You shall have your present; and so that everyone should know who is your lover to-day, you may cut all the silver buttons off my coat.”

    There were shouts of laughter and applause at this witty freak, while the girl passed the keen blade, and the impassive rider jingled in his palm the increasing hoard of silver buttons. He eased her to the ground with both her hands full. After whispering for a while with a very strenuous face, she walked away, staring haughtily, and vanished into the crowd.                         (Everyman, pp. 119-20)

This is surely a scene taken from the world of Verdi’s operas as much as Giorgio Viola, the Garabaldino, sputters along in the wake of his general. But it’s a bravado performance of sprezzatura, a conscious conformation to reputation with a complicit audience. Something deeper might be said about identity here, but I’d like to discuss the odd sort of feedback loop involved here. Shades of Julien Sorel and À bout de soufflé (“Bogie”), there’s a creeping strain of impersonation of popular culture. What happens is some idealized version of reality is taken up again in the real world: that is, an aspiring gangster or lover impersonates a film noir criminal or Casanova gangster modelled upon real-life figures. (A really interesting, much larger example would be the reception of Japonisme in late nineteenth-century Japan, where the Japanese learned what ‘Japanese’ was from French aesthetes.) Fiction and truth get blended, as in the passage above from Conrad, in a way that might only be called ‘ironic’ and is pretty unsettling for all the fun of it. But this also depends on a certain literariness of the characters involved, after all: to take my contention, our capitaz de los cargadores would have to know about popular romances, operatic melodrama, and certain stereotypes either first-hand or culturally, which his background might conceivably supply. (And lest we forget, Italian opera was eminently middle-class fare in the nineteenth-century.) Anyone who’s taken a peek at Conrad’s bodice-ripper Arrow of Gold knows that the author did, anyways.

    (On a tangential note, would it make any difference that Nostromo is from Genoa? It’s a detail emphasized once or twice before. Perhaps another notion or stereotype is at play here.)

    And lastly, couldn’t the figure of Martin Decoud fit this mould himself? Maybe all young journalists do and the figure of a vaguely bohemian Parisian hardly calls for a direct model, either. But regardless, it’s almost more interesting to me that Conrad held back a major character so long as he did in the novel. A certain pacing of character introduction – unwieldy phrase but that’s what it is – carries a certain epic effect, or at least a readerly sense of an expanding world and plot if it’s accomplished gradually enough. And it’s not the same as a slow character development, say; we already have a sense that the Viola girls will become important. For a counter-example then, an author might otherwise quickly introduce six characters or so and let their wheels spin on stage. (There’s a lurking question here of precisely how quickly an author might bring the full cast into the wings, barring those introductory character lists you get with Tolstoy; quantity loops into quality, the same way a character disappearing on page 100 can reappear five hundred pages later and make you feel like years have passed.) Not sure entirely what we might make of this but nevertheless I appreciate the human space coming into focus.

"It did not resemble the carelessness of a condottiere, it was a puritanism of conduct, born of stern enthusiasm like the puritanism of religion"

It’s been a bit difficult falling in with the rhythms of the novel – at least a hundred or so pages in – but I think I’ve begun to realize why. Of course, Conrad’s irony and the jumbled sense of chronology lend themselves to all sorts of fruitful (and sympathetic) confusion on the readers’ part. But I think there’s a larger tension between the sheer level of detail, the building up of a world brick-by brick, and what I can’t help laughing at, the farcical tone approaching Waugh’s Black Mischief with only a more levelling pessimism. For the former, my edition notes a passage from Conrad’s A Personal Record (1912) that might prove useful: writing Nostromo, Conrad relates how he had

like the prophet of old, ‘wrestled with the Lord’ for my creation, for the headlands of the coast, for the darkness of the Placid Gulf, the light on the snows, the clouds in the sky, and for the breath of life that had to be blown into the shapes of men and women, of Latin and Saxon, of Jew and Gentile … The whole world of Costaguana … men, women, headlands, houses, mountains, town, campo (there was not a single brick, stone, or grain of sand of its soil I had not placed in position with my own hands), all the history, geography, politics, finance ….

Now there’s undoubtedly a remarkable level of detail and what might be called landscaping, all belonging in part to what’s been called a fictional ‘surplus’ seeming somehow truer to life. (Curiously enough, I personally find that the more Conrad delineates the picture, the harder it is for me to visualize it but perhaps that’s a paradox of my own tastes and faults.) But it seems like an awful expenditure of talent and energy for throw-aways such as the account of the bandit Hernandez and his adversary, the Fiscal of Tonoro “kicked all over the body and rowelled with sharp spurs about the neck and face because of the great sensitiveness of his military colleague” (Everyman edition, pg. 101). I’m enjoying the book too much to call it overwritten; yet the dark humor of the story (e.g. the hackneyed sort of Italian interlude à la James) and Conrad’s style (e.g. the repetition of “letters to Don José Avellanos, his maternal uncle”, pg. 103) nearly undercut all these grand descriptions of mountains and even his psychological hair-pin turns. How do you reconcile these two currents of reality and farce, the former of the world and the latter banana republics? As a simple matter of reading, I feel like little spurts of speed separate what amount to set-pieces of a sort, however masterful. It’s a bit disorientating, really; in part, even sententiousness would make more sense. (See “The material apparatus of perfected civilisation ….”, pg. 90).

On something of a related note, Donald, I’d ask your opinion on the purposes of elaborate, ‘geographical’ descriptions like those of the novel’s opening. This kind of landscaping always seems to reflect some symbolist significance (like I mentioned in my first post) or lay the physical stage for later events. In the Goulds’ study, for instance, all those firearms are laid about on shelves just begging to be used. (Shades of Hedda Gabler!) But if you’re keeping the description broad enough – say covering a mountain range – and the reader feels there can’t be much more at stake than invoking sheer physical beauty, is that enough? Of course it is, I believe, but still I have a niggling feeling that I’m either missing something or this book could be about a hundred pages shorter. Until it takes off for me, I’m beginning to fear Nostromo might call for even cursory rereadings chapter-by-chapter. This is certainly a difficult world to enter.

Preparatory to Nostromo

Conrad, to me, represents the transition from the novel of sociological complexity that flourished in the nineteenth century—where the focus is on the individual in society—to the psychological complexity of the twentieth-century novel—where the focus is on the interiority of the individual.  In simplest terms, the move from the effort to recreate objective reality, and to chart the latter’s effects through the experiences of persons in certain walks of life, making certain efforts—usually to rise and/or to marry well, sometimes to find a better or more passionate match than the one already existing—to the move to recreate subjective reality—how persons actually experience the world inside their own minds.

As a writer, Conrad had great strengths in both areas.  Not as psychological as Henry James or as deliberative about the stream-of-consciousness as the modernists would be, he yet had a way of suggesting the subjective coloring that the world receives from the views and prejudices and assumptions of the onlooker.  But he seems to me, in those novels of his I’m familiar with, to want to follow the imperative of the sociological novel and present his characters within a specific milieu that will define them.  What I recall of  Lord Jim is that the central character, as might be the case in any novel, is caught up in a drama in which he must try to prove himself, but in this novel Conrad, through his narrator Marlow, insists on the unknowableness of the individual: the facts of what Jim did in different circumstances can be told (and, as with most of Conrad’s books, the elements of the story itself make for a great yarn), but what it meant to Jim and what it felt like to be him are matters that Conrad makes thematically relevant.  Psychology, the actual interiority of the individual, cannot be known via the facts about a person (where born, when, what status, what occupation, etc.) nor can “the whole truth” be determined externally to events.

This position creates a challenge to the idea of a narrator’s omniscience—part of the value of using Marlow is that he is a teller who slants his tale a certain way and much of the “impressionism” of Conrad’s style comes from that: language used to suggest or seduce, to make subjective mood dominate over objective circumstance.  In Heart of Darkness, the deliberate vagueness of certain recurring, evocative phrases causes the entire tale to have a portentous meaning.  The mood of forboding and of “darkness” contrasts strikingly with the many indelible moments of detail that show a mundane bureaucracy up against a great unknown.  In Lord Jim, the story is more potentially tragic or heroic in a conventional way, but Conrad’s willingness to explore character indirectly, through varied perspectives (though without quite the deliberate breakdown of narrational authority that his friend and collaborator Ford achieves in The Good Soldier), keeps the novel from simply being a romantic tale of one man trying to overcome his past.  Like Ford, Conrad is influenced by James and by the Russians and manifests those influences in some of the most un-English novels in British literature.  Which is to say that his novels come closer to being able to be set among those of the Russians than any other British novelist of this period.

Some preliminary thoughts on Conrad

I thought it would be interesting to put down some thoughts on Conrad before tackling Nostromo, if for no other reason than to see how Donald’s and my impressions might change during the novel. (I’m particularly interested to hear what he thinks of teaching Conrad, though that’s very much up to him.) But beforehand, I should state my acquaintance with his works. I read Heart of Darkness in high school, as I imagine is a common experience; it’s odd to think of it as a ‘safe’ canonical work, but perhaps Chinua Achebe’s one essay has something to do with that and raises the question of reading it against the whole post-colonial grain. Beyond that, I’ve also read “The Secret Sharer”, “An Outpost of Progress” (along with Kipling’s “The Man Who Would Be King”), Lord Jim, Under Western Eyes (taught as a ‘high modernist’ text), and a few scattered letters and essays of Conrad’s.

I find Conrad’s canonical status especially interesting given how higher it remains in Britain (or at least Oxford) than in America, and how mixed it is here. Normally authors rather than works, I think, enter canons: that is, a career somehow validates all the work even if, really, we’d rather not read the juvenilia presaging ‘late style’ and similar nonsense. That said, we’ve likely all read Heart of Darkness; how many of us have read Under Western Eyes, The Secret Agent, Victory, Chance, “Typhoon” or – and perhaps for some glaring reasons – The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ though? So something interesting is at play, maybe something more than the ‘better-known-than-read’ phenomenon à la D.H. Lawrence, John Dos Passos, & co. I’d wonder myself if it doesn’t have something to do with the timing of Conrad’s career straddling two centuries – ‘transitional’ figures always seem hard to place – and whether he doesn’t quite fit into any movement, school, &c. There may be a bit of a Leavis-ite reaction after a ‘premature’ entrance into syllabi: Conrad as some great arbiter of morals is not someone I’d be immediately drawn to, for instance. Hell, I’d put those novels right next to Harriet Beecher Stowe for ‘sociological interest’ …. But that does a disservice to the guy.

I think of Conrad as an ‘impressionist’ and, above all else, as a conscious, foreign stylist of the language. The preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ has a lot to do with these ideas. There Conrad writes (among sundry other interesting things): “All art ... appeals primarily to the senses, and the artistic aim when expressing itself in written words must also make its appeal through the senses.” Therefore, he continues, “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all to make you see!” (Author’s italics). What do I picture when I hear Conrad’s name, then? Sunsets on a coast, murky light at night, shadows in a jungle – a hazy sort of late nineteenth-century symbolism, really, that even carries on to the plot even to the cost of ready characterization. (Can any of us picture Marlowe’s face? And Nostromo is a character study, no?) Conrad put it better himself: “Fiction—if it at all aspires to be art—appeals to temperament. And it truth it must be, like painting, like music, like all art, the appeal of one temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments whose subtle and resistless power endows passing events with their true meaning, and creates the moral, the emotional atmosphere of the place and time.”

Where Conrad slips past landscaping and imagery, I wonder whether there’s not something of a world beyond the margins. That is, the sense we have as readers of a larger world only excerpted on the page (or more crudely some diagrammed backstory pinned to the author’s study, so he can make sense of characters’ histories prior to the novel and so on. Where’s an appendix when we need one!). I always thought Malraux was great at this foreboding, overwhelming sense of complexity. Reading La condition humaine, I think we sympathize with the characters because even we – no matter how attentive – cannot make sense of what we don’t know or what is denied to our knowledge. Empson’s points on the span of literature – say, Shakespeare’s dual plots intimately connecting court and roadside inn – might be helpful too, as the sheer disparity lends us to think that the interlocked fictional events somehow encompass everything ‘in-between’ (i.e. the world) as well. As long as we cover the president and the foot-soldier, in other words, we’re clear. Of course, the author may be as technically ignorant as ourselves of what’s precisely happening on the wings but there are interesting and deliberate ways to manipulate and use this feeling. ‘Atmosphere’ and ‘history’ catch at it but only just.

    A more interesting point comes through this detour, I hope. Conrad of course knew several languages, and I believe he came to English as his third and fairly late as well. His prose always reminds me of a certain charming insecurity of talented polyglots, the need to get things right while wrestling with English’s awesome depot of synonyms, adjectives, and connotations. But this does not necessarily mean purple prose; rather, it’s the difference between ‘sunset’ and ‘the sun slipping down’. (Perhaps this is the ‘genius’ of the language? I’m thinking of Beckett’s decision to write in French and certain long German words; but it does well to remember every language has its complex terms which seem exotic or overwhelmingly complex in translation.) With it comes a sense of demonstrating mastery and command of the language: consider Nabokov or (perhaps more appealingly) Isak Dinesen. There’s an ungainly if effective style that piles on the adjectives, lingers on the senses, surprises us native-speakers with odd little apt phrases, and stumbles a bit qualifying psychology. And what follows is precisely ‘atmosphere’ and a corollary, almost accidental strangeness that only increases with the struggle regardless of the narrative structure or different voices. You can’t win against this python, nor yet is this necessarily a deliberate choice. It’s not like Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt (alienation effect), an emphasis of texts as texts, or other post-modern hijinks. And all sorts of interesting rhetorical questions emerge and counter-examples like Faulkner, so maybe I’m not quite getting at it.

    And there I am. The following posts should hew closer to the text, but I’ll be starting from these reflections. More to come and excited to start! ~ John