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.
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ReplyDeleteThanks for this note, Donald, it captured some thoughts of mine that I had been struggling to nail down! In response, I would ask for a few more of your thoughts on that transitional context mentioned at the beginning of this post. Obviously Freud had yet to break onto the radar, so how conscious and broadly-shared a ‘psychological’ turn was this? I think you’re right to talk about Conrad and James in these turns, but it might be a little messier a break and perhaps prompted in part with dissatisfaction with that baggy 19th-century monster of the ‘sociological’ novel. (Could Thomas Hardy serve as a counterpoint, perhaps? This is a bit out of my own tastes and reading so I may be speaking nonsense.) A hundred or so pages into “Nostromo”, I’m finding it a rather slippery mix of the sociological and the psychological study: the society of Sulaco and Costaguana itself – great name! – or simply ‘South America’ seems like persons unto themselves, and I’m willing to bet the rest of the novel tracks the uneasy submersion of finely-delineated characters like Gould into the environment, its pressures, and something like resulting stereotypes.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I’ll appeal to your expertise and ask your thoughts on the indirect discourse at play in Conrad’s writing. There’s a prevalent sense of irony in the narration as well, of course, but the lines often seem to blur a bit – and often to pretty funny effect. For instance: “She was always sorry for home-sick people” (pg. 10 in my Everyman’s Library edition) or the “Action is consolatory …” passage (63). Another interesting specter raised by your post is Conrad’s reception of Russian literature; among the whole early twentieth-century vogue for Dostoevsky and co. (think Hemingway via Constance Garnett), he was probably the only one to actually read Russian itself, no?
Don't draw Freud at the use of the word "psychological." The breakthrough in the representation of internal thought and the complex relations of motives and acts begins at least with Dostoevsky's Underground Man. The distinction might seem a bit broad, and it's something that can only be more finely tuned by comparing actual reading experiences. Hardy, for example, doesn't provide the best instance of either the sociological or psychological novel because his interests are more philosophical, in the sense that "personal fate" is a factor.
ReplyDeleteA slippery mix, indeed. I've never seen Conrad work so hard to do the "sociological" before!
Unfortunately, we don't have the same edition, so page comparisons aren't going to be easy; best give chapter numbers.
The prevalent sense of irony in the narration is probably what I consider the most characteristic aspect of Conrad's writing, and it's not simply irony at the characters' or reader's expense, it's an irony about the human condition, something that, to my mind, creates the strongest element of "intrigue" in his novels, for it's hard to say, without reading further, how far his irony will go. But with that kind of reading in mind, one tends to be most struck by the moments when the tone drops a bit and something more "genuine" or almost "unmediated" surfaces. I find it most so far (in Part One) in the descriptions of Gould who, it seems to me, has considerable authorial investment, more than I would've expected.
(as far as I know, Conrad could read Polish, French, and English, so I doubt he read the Russians in the original)
I'd won't indulge myself with meta-comments but quick research shows that Conrad knew a bit of Russian, but likely discounted it fairly early on given the political situation in Poland. (I'd be curious to see if he reviewed any of the Garnett translations, though. Maybe I can find a collected edition soon enough ....)
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