The Art of Failure

Conrad's Fiction

Suresh Raval

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780367862558
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000040401
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

Originally published in 1986, this is a powerful and original book. It offers textual interpretation of Conrad's major work and articulates the subtlety and richness of his treatment of social-political institutions and of the forces that complicate and distort private and public life.

Suresh Raval argues that the social-personal relations in Conrad's fiction cannot be conceived apart from their existence in the political life of a community; but at the same time they cannot be accommodated institutionally. The author's concern is with the problematic status of the self under various perspectives: experience and understanding (Heart of Darkness), an ethical ideal (Lord Jim), history (Nostromo), ideology (The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes), scepticism (Victory). What the self is remains ambiguous and elusive. Conrad's fiction is concerned with exhibiting the failure of language, but always as a result of an immense effort of language itself. As language undoes itself in the act of seeking utterance, so Conrad's fictional mode – romance – turns into the opposite of itself as it unfolds. Raval demonstrates that incompatible alternatives – intention and action, thought and experience, the individual and the social, the logical and the contingent – are entangled with each other, and how this entanglement works in the fiction.

Raval's exploration of Conrad's scepticism shows why Conrad cannot be characterized as a political conservative or radical without distorting the complexity and seriousness of his reflection on society. For his scepticism is the product not just of intelligence but of intelligence conscious of its limitations, and is thus able to make a devastating critique of the nihilism sometimes attributed to Conrad by critics. Only those who think that morality has to have a secure single foundation if it is to be real are pushed into regarding Conrad's scepticism as a form of nihilism.

Professor Raval's important study brings philosophical and literary interests to bear on Conrad's major fiction and illuminates those aspects of his art which have puzzled and fascinated his readers. It will be deservedly valued by those studying and teaching modern literature.

Chapter One

Marlow and the Experience of Storytelling: Heart of Darkness

While The Nigger of the “Narcissus” is largely a celebration of work in which the discontents of civilization are held in check through action informed by courage and discipline, Heart of Darkness questions the sustaining assumptions of civilization. The novel, as I shall try to show, reworks the constitutive features of both allegory and the traditional act of storytelling—a reworking that makes accessible to language a monstrous dimension of experience, though language itself lacks the self-confidence necessary to enact a drama of affirmation. Indeed, I shall suggest that the novel’s importance is in its disclosing the ideal of affirmation to be an aberrant expectation, dear to the genre of romance.

The modernist quality of Heart of Darkness inheres, of course, in its subversion of the paradigm of romance. The famous Congo river, discovered by Livingstone and explored by Stanley, serves as a symbolic element in this modernist allegory of imperialism. Unlike his contemporary romancers of the imperialist Holy Grail—Stevenson, Rider Haggard, and Jules Verne among others—Conrad divests the river of its recognizable historical outposts.¹ I want to focus on certain important features of Marlow’s journey, ending after Kurtz’s death with his own return home and his meeting with the Intended, in order to explore his judgment of the Congo experience. I mean to explain why Marlow’s judgment, not reducible to the recovery—or the nostalgia for recovery—of a lost moral essence, inheres in the relation of his story to his mode of storytelling. If Marlow’s judgment, woven into the texture of the story he tells, doesn’t have the shattering precision of Kurtz’s final cry, it nevertheless shares the anguish and despair our reading of Kurtz’s final moments will disclose.

I

Except for two brief interruptions, the narrator who opens Heart of Darkness disappears after making an intriguing remark about Marlow’s mode of storytelling, and reappears at the end to conclude his verbatim transcription of Marlow’s story. His retrospective remark deserves to be considered in a later context where Marlow’s telling of the story and the understanding he acquires will reflect light on the first narrator’s remark. For now the beginning of Marlow’s narrative calls for some reflection. “And this also has been one of the dark places on the earth” (48). This is Marlow’s first statement in Heart of Darkness, and the history it evokes resonates with metaphysical implications. The use of also here adumbrates a genealogy which, though obscure at first, suggests the complex entanglements of the past with the present, entanglements to be explained in the rest of Marlow’s prologue. But the prologue, as we shall see, cannot explain them; it can only complicate the desire for explanation. It will require the whole force of the story for the enigmatic first sentence to lose its “alienating” quality and to appropriate for its “impropriety” a proper meaning. That Marlow utters the sentence with an air of obsessiveness suggests that it leads to the heart of his experience.

Marlow’s prologue is a compound of history and metaphysics. His thoughts go back to the early Romans nearly two thousand years ago. If history is construed, as Marlow seems to construe it, as pervasive darkness with isolated moments of light, the early Romans are not remote but are our contemporaries, for “darkness was here yesterday”. There follows a classic Marlovian encapsulation: the Roman invaders are “dying like flies” (49) in a land where there is “precious little to eat fit for a civilized man, nothing but Thames water to drink” (49). Taken in its retrospective context, this statement is quite uncanny. Did the ancient Romans behave like the pilgrims, like so many barbarians gone crazy, unable to show restraint or withstand the ordeals of the climate? Or did they, like the cannibals in Marlow’s boat, show restraint and resist the savage impulses gnawing within? Marlow can provide no answer here, though we must look to his own words for clues. Marlow, perhaps in a sudden access of good feeling, says: “They were men enough to face the darkness” (49). This seemingly positive statement remains vague in its implications, and it goads one into asking more questions. How did they face the darkness? Were they vanquished by it? The confident assertiveness of Marlow’s words seem to suggest they were not. For what does facing the darkness mean? Did they perhaps surrender themselves to the wilderness? Were they like Kurtz, or like the pilgrims, or like Marlow himself? We cannot be certain, though Marlow utters his statement with certainty.

The conjectural bit of psycho-biography that follows Marlow’s statement may provide some clue. The ancient Roman who came here had “to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable”. This incomprehensible “has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination—you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate” (49). The ancient Roman might be taken for an emblematic figure of Kurtz, though from the perspective of a naive reading of the story we do not quite know what to make of the knot of feelings attributed to the Roman; the feelings compel our anticipation and interest, but do not yield up their meaning. They set up, as it were, a strange framework of questioning and meditation within which Marlow’s story might unfold. And they suggest, in their ambiguity, the complex feelings that impel Marlow to tell his story. The prologue is integral to the story, and its modes of assertion and ambivalence prefigure those of the story to follow.

Marlow’s disturbing remarks are followed by a sudden reassuring remark that “none of us would feel exactly like this” (50). He says his listeners are protected from the Roman’s shattering experience because they and their contemporary British/European society are devoted to the blessed ideal of efficiency. This remark seems not to be meant ironically; otherwise it could have nothing reassuring about it. Yet the miracle that the ideal performs, of protecting one from a primal, ego-shattering experience, is surely too great for it to perform. Consequently, Marlow hastily revises his short Roman history, attributing monstrosities to the ancient Romans from which, presumably, the (British) colonists are free. The Romans’ brute force, “robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind” (50)—a rapid summary, one might say, of Spengler’s account of modern history—set them apart from the colonists, whose activities are ostensibly redeemed by “an unselfish belief in the idea” (51). But Marlow’s earlier observation has already erased the difference he labors here to articulate: “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much” (50 —51).This brief statement contains the whole force of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals; as Marlow puts it: “your strength is just an accident arising from the weakness of others” (50). The idea of conquest, whether Roman or British, loses its romantic halo; it is no better than a criminal wresting of possessions and freedom from those who happen to be weak.

Marlow’s prologue, then, returns us to his opening statement: “And this also has been one of the dark places on the earth.” Yet the prologue is marked by gestures of reassurance. Marlow, for instance, says: “We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday” (49). “Darkness” presumably means barbarity, greed, violence, brutality, savagery, and the “flicker” means the temporary prevalence of civilized values. Yet if there is no real difference between the conquering Romans and the colonizing Europeans what grounds are there for us to believe that “we”, Marlow and his listeners, have overcome the human proclivity to evil? The pessimism and despair of this question pervade the prologue, which is the product of Marlow’s long reflection on his journey to the Congo.

Moreover, Marlow’s phrase “an unselfish belief in the idea” occurs in an ambiguous context: “An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretence but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea—something you can set up, and bow down before and offer a sacrifice to . . .” (51). The ellipsis is Marlow’s, making us wonder about his judgment of the “idea”. His words provide no clarification, though we may adumbrate it in terms of the ideal of efficiency, as it is understood by a developed civilization; and since his words occur amid the forebodings of the prologue the “idea” cannot have resoundingly moral implications. There is no real possibility of clarification, even on the basis of a reflective reading of the entire story; the idea is part of a strictly formal gesture of reassurance, and the remarks made in the course of the gesture disrupt any serenity the gesture would seem to offer. Yet the idea is not without substance; the meaning one may ascribe to it, however, is not normally associated with deliberate belief or high principle or moral tenacity. Thus the gesture is finally a corrosive and ironic caricature of the idea’s supposed positive force. One only need think for a moment of “an unselfish belief in the idea” in terms of an attitude that makes one “set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to . . .” and ask if this suggests much difference between prehistoric man in the wilderness and the civilized European. The power of Marlow’s expression derives from the evocation of a sincere feeling reaching a moment of corrosive parody; his words break off because of his pained consciousness that the parody reveals the desecration of the idea. And his words perhaps explain his posture of a meditative Buddha with which he both opens and closes his narrative.

The prologue thus frames and provides interpretive clues for Marlow’s story, though it does not determine how we will understand the events he describes. It has, however, a recursive interest which will become important when we ponder, for instance, Marlow’s conversation with Kurtz’s Intended. The detached tone of the prologue, its amalgam of assertion and ambivalence, of bluff confidence and evasive vagueness, and its striations of contradictory meanings possess a significance hard to grasp without effort.

II

It is not surprising that Marlow doesn’t find the experience he is about to relate ‘Very clear”, though, as he says, “the experience seemed to throw a kind of light” (51). Almost from the beginning of his journey Marlow speaks of gradually losing his hold on reality. As he and his companions penetrate “deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness”, Marlow invests the journey with peculiar power:

We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet . . . The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us—who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly apalled; as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember, because we were travelling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign—and no memories. (95–96)

Marlow here feels befuddled because he confronts a moment of experience which allows for no decipherable meaning. Understanding requires a cultural context in which “praying” might be “welcoming” or “cursing”. But here the slippage of response from “cursing” to “praying” to “welcoming” leaves the mind utterly bewildered. Memory, too, is helpless when confronted with things it cannot interpret. And hence Marlow’s feeling that the past as well as the future are there in the mind of man:

The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were— No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly to one. They howled and leaped, and spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit to yourself that there was in you just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible frankness of that noise, a dim suspicion of there being a meaning in it which you—you so remote from the night of the first ages—could comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of anything—because everything is in it, all the past as well as all the future. What was there after all? Joy, fear, sorrow, devotion, valour, rage—who can tell?—but truth—truth stripped of its cloak of time. (96–97)

In this celebrated passage Marlow, while remaining in the present, plunges into a psychic-genealogical past, a past which offers hints about that which he has a moment before considered indecipherable. The behavior of the natives, for all its ostensible savagery, seems human to Marlow, and awakens him to his bond with them, which his civilization cannot conceal. His conjectural history of savage life in prehistoric England now seems to be derived from an ironic perception which has sprung from that sudden wrenching of his self from its culture into a wilderness fraught with unidentifiable passions.

The emergence of meaning in the wilderness is a moral recognition of one’s essential identity with that which seems to Marlow savage and alienating. But his sense of kinship with the natives cannot help him decipher the passions let loose in the wilderness. Understanding at this level would be possible only for someone who already belongs to the community which Marlow rightly considers alien. Marlow sees the natives in their otherness but also in their humanity, which he identifies with his own. To the pilgrims, though, Marlow’s response would be as alien as the natives’. But Marlow’s perceptual acuity here does not amount to cultural relativism, since relativism, while professing both respect for cultural diversity and hostility to dogmatic absolutes, underlines the essential truthfulness of all or at least many perspectives. Marlow’s narrative thus questions cultural relativism, moving from demystification to an ironic characterization which allows for both despair and morality. His ironic mode of perception resists any strictly existentialist perspective, just as it resists any strictly ethical, historical, or Marxist perspective.²

Despite his sense of kinship with the natives, Marlow is aware that he is separate from them. This awareness allows him his gesture of moral self-assertion even after his profession of kinship: “For good or evil mine is the speech that cannot be silenced” (97). Marlow seems here to hold out the possibility of moral certitude. His contemporary European culture appears to him to have engendered sepulchral cities characterized by exalted idealism and moral indifference; his moral certitude does not derive from the values of the sepulchral cities, but from the stability and strength gained from his own fidelity to the tradition of work. The necessity of work, says Marlow, prevented him from joining the natives “for a howl and a dance” (97). It is work that helped him to keep his “hold on the redeeming facts of life” (75) in the Congo, and for Marlow it appears to afford the only possibility of finding oneself (85).

Thus Marlow does, for a moment, seem to idealize work; he is thrilled to discover, for instance, Towson’s manual of navigation An Inquiry into Some Points of Seamanship. Yet he fails to see, for all the book’s alleged practicality and its accounts of navigational errors and altered courses, that it is in fact an instrument in the service of colonization. His blindness must be construed as the result of his pleasure when he learns about Kurtz’s dedication to work. And it underlies his remark, after discovering the truth about Kurtz: “I am not prepared to affirm that Kurtz was exactly worth the life we lost in getting to him . . . [the helmsman] had done something, he had steered” (119).

Marlow’s insistence on the value of work, however, is not unqualified. He realizes that, while work can be liberating, it may also conceal one’s real relation to one’s surroundings. The chief accountant, whom Marlow meets after his unexpected entry upon the scene of disease and death, values his work in a disconcerting and degenerate fashion. He appears to Marlow “a sort of vision” (67) as he comes out “to get a breath of fresh air” (68). In this landscape of man-made destitution and misery, the accountant is a distorted form of humanity, meticulously busy keeping his books, coming out for a breath of fresh air when his work has driven him into a stupor. The accountant hates the natives because their tumult distracts him in making correct entries; his unreflective devotion to work has dehumanized him. Similarly, the manager, another votary for work, “originated nothing” but “could keep the routine going” (74). Marlow wonders what sustains such a man and surmises, “Perhaps there was nothing within him” (74).

Work, then, does not provide the moral coordinates that give life stability and definition beyond the immediate moment. Indeed, work may be redeeming precisely in so far as it conceals reality: “When you have to attend . . . to the mere incidents of the surface, the reality—the reality, I tell you—fades. The inner truth is hidden—luckily, luckily. But I felt it all the same; I felt often its mysterious stillness watching me at my monkey tricks” (93–94). But the refusal to l...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One Marlow and the Experience of Storytelling: Heart of Darkness
• Chapter Two Narrative and Authority: Lord Jim
• Chapter Three The Politics of History: Nostromo
• Chapter Four Irony and Morality: The Secret Agent
• Chapter Five Ideology and the Self: Under Western Eyes
• Chapter Six Skepticism and Experience: Victory
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Index