Something Old

  Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

“THE MIRROR OF THE SEA” by Joseph Conrad (first published 1906; author’s note added 1919 for a collected edition of his works)

On this blog, I have discussed a number of times England’s Polish literary genius Joseph Conrad (1857-1924). You can look up posts on Nostromo, Heart of Darkness, Under Western Eyes, The Secret Agent and Victory. With the possible exception of Victory, all these are among his best-known works.  But in this posting I am examining one of his least-read texts, The Mirror of the Sea, which is not a work of fiction. The Mirror of the Sea was written and published in 1906, during Conrad’s most fruitful period as a novelist. It came between what are regarded as two of his masterpieces, Nostromo and The Secret Agent.

For those who have never read his works, Conrad is reputed to be simply a writer of the sea – and of course he was sometimes that, in novels like Lord Jim, The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ and The Shadow Line; and in novellas like Typhoon and Youth. But the sea was not the setting for most of his novels and the sea is not the main subject of any of the five novels I have so far discussed on this blog, although the sea is a small part of the narrative of some of them. Conrad was a professional seaman for twenty years, between the ages of 16 and 36, working his way up first in the French, then in the English, merchant marine from sailor to Master. He left the sea at 36 and settled down to a literary career, with his first novel appearing when he was 39. It wasn’t until he was nearly fifty that he wrote The Mirror of the Sea, a reflection on his days under sail.

The Mirror of the Sea is and is not an autobiography. It is drawn from Conrad’s memories, certainly, but it is not a chronological account of his life, says nothing about his childhood, family or background, and does not even give the names of fellow-seamen who were his colleagues. (They are disguised discreetly as ‘Captain C-‘, ‘Boatswain B’ – etc.) In the author’s note, which he added for the book’s 1919 reprint, Conrad remarks that some critics were taken aback by this and expected him to reveal more of himself. But Conrad says that what he attempts here is “to lay bare, with the unreserve of a last hour’s confession, the terms of my relation with the sea”. Only in the last quarter of his book does it become more autobiographical in the conventional sense, and at this point it is worth noting that the last three of the book’s 48 shortish chapters are a big diappointment. They end The Mirror of the Sea with the clunk of bathos, for Chapters 46, 47 and 48 are patriotic British bombast about the glories of the Royal Navy and Lord Nelson. Conrad is cosmopolitan enough to tell us that the French and Spanish captains at Trafalgar were jolly decent chaps too. But for the sake of his literary reputation, I hope that Conrad wrote tongue-in-cheek, and as a sop to his British readership, this dreadful conclusion to an otherwise thoughtful book. I will say no more about it.

The Mirror of the Sea is a book about the sea, about how young Conrad reacted to the moods of the sea, and how he fared in different ships. As for the title, the phrase “mirror of the sea” recurs a number of times in the text. “Love and regret go hand in hand in this world of changes swifter than the shifting of the clouds reflected in the mirror of the sea”, says Conrad in Chapter 7. He speaks of one swift sailing ship, saying “her image surely has its glorious place in the mirror of the old sea” in Chapter 12. And in Chapter 26 there is the “blue sky whose immense and unfathomable tenderness, reflected in the mirror of the sea, embraces, possesses, lulls to sleep the ships with white sails.” There are other places in the text where the phrase is used. They all picture the sea as the literal mirror that it is. But there is a subtext here – for a seaman, the sea is the mirror of himself, reflecting his character in the way he reacts to the sea in calm or (more particularly) in storm. For as a professional seaman, Conrad knows that the sea tests every sailor. Each finds out who he really is. This becomes one of the book’s dominant themes.

In his opening ten or so chapters, Conrad moves methodically through maritime matters in what are, in effect, a series of essays – the importance of departures and landfalls; the varying qualities of captains he has known; and the proper use of nautical terms. Sometimes he chastises landlubbers, as when he remarks “Your journalist almost invariably ‘casts’ his anchor. Now an anchor is never cast, and to take a liberty with technical language is a crime” (Chapter 4). An anchor is properly “let go”, not “cast”. He tells us of “the sense of insecurity which is so invaluable to a seaman” (Chapter 5) i.e. a sailor should not be cocksure, as the sea is so variable in its moods; hence a sailor should always be prepared for the worst. With proper contempt as a professional mariner, Conrad looks down on yachting, saying: “Yacht racing is an organised pastime, a function of social idleness ministering to the vanity of certain wealthy inhabitants of [England] nearly as much as to their inborn love of the sea” (Chapter 7) But he relents and admits that yachting requires sailing skill and the art of managing a crew. “To deal with men is as fine an art as to deal with ships - both men and ships live in an unstable element, are subject to subtle and powerful influences, and want to have their merits understood rather than their faults found out.” (Chapter 7). More than once he refers to the sea as “the unstable element”, and as readers of Lord Jim will know, Conrad frequently used this term as a metaphor for the instability of human affairs.

He moves on to some of the perils of seamanship, considering the horror of newspapers’ “Shipping Intelligence”, which tell anxious wives and relatives of seamen about ships first “Overdue” and then “Missing”, which most often means “sunk” (Chapter 16). We learn that in polar seas, even a small ice-floe can be enough to sink a ship (Chapter 17); and we learn what a misery it is for a ship to be stranded on a submerged sandbank (Chapters 20 and 21).

As Conrad always expresses it, ships are feminine and to be loved as such. In Chapter 15 he tells us: “Yes, your ship wants to be humoured with knowledge. You must treat with an understanding consideration the mysteries of her feminine nature, and then she will stand by you faithfully in the unceasing struggle with forces wherein defeat is no shame.” Ships are in their glory when they are on the high seas. When a ship is tied up at docks “you would think a free ship would droop and die like a wild bird put into a dirty cage” (Chapter 32). Stevedores and others are “trampling unconcerned, brutal and hodnailed upon her helpless body” (Chapter 33). Ships “can of themselves minister to our self-esteem by the demand their qualities make of our skill and their shortcomings upon our hardiness and endurance.” (Chapter 35). The obvious inplication here is that ships are like women who have to be protected by men, cherished by men and loved by men – and whose whims have to be considered. I can’t help wondering, too, if there is not another impulse for this anthropomorphising of ships. As the safe body in which men live as they sail across the unstable sea, isn’t a ship a little like an enfolding womb? Truly feminine.

By contrast, neither the winds nor the sea itself are feminised. From Chapter 23 to Chapter 29, Conrad dwells on the influence of prevailing winds. In these chapters he is at his most rhetorical . He personifies the West Wind as the King of the oceans, treating human beings as his petty subjects and playthings; while the East Wind is a conniving villain, who rushes upon ships when they are unprepared. As for the sea: “The ocean has the conscienceless temper of a savage autocrat spoiled by much adulation. He cannot brook the slightest appearance of defiance, and has remained the irreconcilable enemy of ships and men ever since ships and men had the unheard of audacity to go afloat together in the face of his frown.” (Chapter 36) In this same chapter, Conrad says he really became an adult when, as a very junior officer, he understood for the first time the complete indifference of the sea to human life. He was a part of a crew who rowed from a merchantman to rescue nine Danish seamen. The Danes were clinging to a waterlogged ship, almost completely submerged and on the point of dragging them down as it sank. It was, of course, the pitiless sea that had brought them to this state, and that threatened the rescuers with being dragged down too.

Writing in 1906, Conrad is aware that the era of sailing-ships – the era he knew as a sailor in the 1870s and 1880s – is almost over. He is writing of a time now past. “Stevedoring,” he tells us,“which had been a skilled labour, is fast becoming a labour without the skill. The modern steamship with her many holds is not loaded within the sailorlike meaning of the word. She is filled up. Her cargo is not stowed in any sense; it is simply dumped into her through six hatchways, more or less, by twelve winches or so…” (Chapter 13). He is clearly still unfamiliar with modern hoisting machinery to load cargo. And the future looms in modern London docks with “here and there a lonely wooden jetty where petroleum ships discharge their dangerous cargoes, and the oil storage tanks, low and round with slightly domed roofs, peep over the edge of the foreshore, as it were a village of Central African huts imitated in iron.” (Chapter 31) He has a low opinion of those who look after wharves, docks and loading – he refers to them as “renegades” (Chapter 33) in that he sees them as failed sailors.

Along with this goes his near contempt for steamships that are killing the true seamanship of sailing ships. He dwells on the majesty of sail, pushed along simply by the forces of nature (Chapter 10). “Of all ships disabled at sea,” he declares, “a steamship who has lost her propeller is the most helpless. And as she drifts into an unpopulated part of the ocean she may soon become overdue.” (Chapter 18). One of his most pitiful stories is of a steamship which lost its propeller on the run between New Zealand and Cape Horn and which, until being rescued by a whaler, drifted helplessly in places where a sailing ship could have taken advantage of the winds. He says “The machinery, the steel, the fire, the steam have stepped in between the man and the sea. A modern fleet of ships does not so much make use of the sea as exploit a highway.” (Chapter 22) The existence of steam power lessens that existential struggle between man, wind and sea that Conrad relishes. And, on a less important note, he regrets the loss of the old figureheads that used to adorn sailing ships (Chapter 35).

As for the future of navigation, Conrad strikes a prophetic note imagining the type of steel warship, capable of immense destructiveness, that will be developed. (Remember, this was written eight years before the First World War). When inventors have made this come to pass, he says “the bodies of the inventors should [be] blown to pieces by means of their own perfected explosives and improved weapons with extreme publicity as the commonest prudence dictated.” (Chapter 37) This nostrum for ending war has been suggested by many others in the years since then.

As a practitioner of irony, Conrad sometimes displays the art of understatement. Describing a ferocious storm at sea, he writes “I confess that the idea of being suddenly spilt into an infuriated ocean in the midst of uproar affected me always with a sensation of shrinking distaste” (Chapter 9). Personally, I would be absolutely terrified – and I suspect Conrad or any other sane human being would too. He also describes with deep irony the sinking of a leaking ship thus: “The surmise of my maturer years is that, bored by her interminable life, the venerable antiquity was simply yawning with ennui at every seam.” (Chapter 39) Along with the irony, there are some euphemisms which I assume cover the effing and blinding of sailors in distress, typical of literature in Conrad’s times. As a violent sea-storm is going on, a captain and his first mate are arguing, and there is “a little private ship’s storm going on in which you could detect strong language, pronounced in a tone of passion, and exculpatory protestations uttered with every possible inflection of injured innocence” (Chapter 10).

In contrast with the irony and euphemisms, there are the grand apostrophes for which Conrad is sometimes criticised, but which can be very grand indeed. Consider this evocation of the primal nature of the sea: “It seems to me that no man born and truthful to himself could declare that he ever saw the sea looking young as the world looks in spring. But some of us, regarding the ocean with understanding and affection, have seen it old, as if the immemorial ages have been stirred up from the undisturbed bottom of ooze. For it is a gale of wind that makes the sea look old… If you would know the age of the earth, look upon the sea in a storm. The greyness of the whole immense surface, the wind furrows upon the faces of the waves, the great masses of foam , tossed about and waving, like matted white locks, give the sea in a gale an appearance of hoary age, lustreless, dull, without gleams, as though it had been created before light itself.” (Chapter 22)

Although, as I have argued, this is not a conventional autobiography, there are in The Mirror of the Sea vivid personal anecdotes, in Conrad’s reminiscences of the wool-ships that went to and fro between England and Australia (Chapter 33) and one vivid and unexpected chapter on the night young Conrad had to spend being a ship’s night-watchman when the ship was anchored at Sydney’s Circular Quay. He saw from the deck the sights and sounds of young rough Sydneysiders having organised fistfights and other traditional Aussie pastimes.

When he passes to his considerations of the Mediterranean Sea, he at first spends three chapters on the Mediterranean as the cradle of navigation, and the ancient and more modern sea battles that took place there (Chapter 37-39). But the subject of the Mediterranean launches him into the most straightforwardly autobiographical parts of the book – six chapters (Chapters 40 to 45), almost amounting to a novella, on his membership of a syndicate of four young men (the other three were an American, a Corsican and an Englishman) gunrunning for the ultra-conservative pretenders to the Spanish throne, the Carlists. Their venture was on the leaky, unreliable little ship Tremolino and it came to a sticky end. Conrad tells the story with the relaxed irony of an older man looking back at the follies of his youth; and yet at the same time regretting the passing of those days of naïve and idealistic youthfulness. As the whole venture comes to a pathetic end, Conrad reflects bitterly on the older people who fired up these young men to undertake the venture in the first place:  “The whole Royalist gang was in Monte Carlo now, I reckoned. And they appeared to me clear-cut and very small, with affected voices and stiff gestures like a procession of rigid marionettes upon a toy stage.” (Chapter 44) Scholars of Conrad will know that much later, when his literary career was fading, he worked this episode into a novel, The Arrow of Gold, which, as repute tells me (I have never read it), is one of his weakest efforts. And, just to confuse matters, other scholars (such as John Stape in his biography The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad, which sits on my selves) argue that the whole story of gunrunning is a fiction.

And then – clunk! – we come to those awful jingoisitc last three chapters of The Mirror of the Sea, which would almost have sunk this ship if what precedes them had not been such an interesting, ruminative set of reflections.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“NOSTROMO – A Tale of the Seaboard” by Joseph Conrad (first published 1904)

If you make it your business to read the works of canonical novelists, you will soon discover one very interesting phenomenon. Often the novel of a particular author, which is esteemed most by the critics or the dedicated fans of that particular novelist, will not be the novel that is most loved by the mass of general readers. General readers of Charles Dickens will read David Copperfield, Nicholas Nickleby, Oliver Twist or A Tale of Two Cities in preference to Bleak House or even Great Expectations, which intellectual Dickensians see as Dickens’ greatest. Online recently I saw a group of Henry James aficionados (of whom I am generally not a member) singing the praises of the later-period James novel The Ambassadors. Most of us non-dedicated James readers would prefer to read Washington Square, The Portrait of a Lady, The Turn of the Screw, The Europeans, The Bostonians or The Aspern Papers. And so too it is with the polyglot Pole, Josef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski (1857-1924), who wrote as Joseph Conrad. As I’ve said a number of times before on this blog (look up posts on Victory, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes and Heart of Darkness), I went through a student phase of being a very committed Conradian. But, as with most general readers of Conrad, it was Lord Jim, The Secret Agent and Heart of Darkness that most attracted me. I’d heard that the best academic critics of Conrad regarded Nostromo as Conrad’s masterpiece; however, I’d also heard that Nostromo was a notoriously difficult novel, as well as being Conrad’s longest. And biographies of Conrad had told me that when Nostromo was first published it was, to the author’s grief, a commercial flop, hardly selling out the first edition and damned with faint praise by reviewers.

So I put off reading it for many years.

When finally I got to read Nostromo, I discovered two things.

First, it really is a masterpiece.

Second, there are good reasons why the general reader tends to shun it.

This is a case where an attempted “plot summary” would be particularly fatuous. In an “Author’s Note” which he added to Nostromo in 1917 (thirteen years after the novel was first published) Joseph Conrad explained the events that were the germ of the novel’s inspiration. In a South American republic, a sailor had been able to take possession of a lighter (a small vessel used for transporting goods) filled with silver ingots, which he secreted and then furtively used over the years as a purse gradually to make himself rich. But if this was the reported action that inspired Conrad and set him writing, it is in no way the heart of the novel. The events concerning a lighter, silver ingots and hidden wealth are confined to the second half of the novel. More central to Nostromo is its panoramic depiction of a whole society. In Nostromo - over which he laboured for two years - Conrad creates the fictitious South American republic of Costaguana, conveying in detail its topography and climate and society and social classes and political tensions. This expansive feat of imagination is what is most praised by sympathetic critics – especially as Conrad had had only a brief, youthful glance at South America (at most, four days ashore in Venezuela many years before he wrote this novel) and understood the continent mainly through extensive reading.

As I experience it, the first quarter of the novel (“The Silver of the Mine”) is like a long, slow establishing shot, introducing us to the land and landscape of Costaguana with much of Conrad’s signature detailed description, especially of the port of Sulaco where most of the action takes place, its hinterland mountains and its gulf of islands, the Golfo Placido. But more importantly, this first part introduces us to the large cast of characters, far larger than the dramatis personae of any other Conrad novel. Though none is caricatured, they can be categorised according to social type.

Representing older-style industrialists, there is the wealthy Costaguanian-born English mine-owner Charles Gould and his wife Emily, usually known as Dona Emilia by the Spanish-speaking characters. Mrs Gould is highly idealised – critics have noted correctly Conrad’s tendency to idealise his sympathetic women characters. Charles Gould has the Concession that allows him to run the San Tome silver mine, which plays such a large part in the narrative. It also means he has many dealings with the English railway magnate, Sir John. Representing the newer breed of exploitative American capitalists there is the millionaire Holroyd. The exiled Italian republican and anti-clerical Giorgio Viola, a “Garibaldino”, lives as a humble store-keeper with his pious church-going wife Teresa and his two daughters Linda and Giselle. At the other end of the political and social spectrum is the old aristocratic Spanish gentleman Don Jose Avellanos, who pines for a more settled political regime and has a much-admired daughter Antonia (she is another idealised woman who, according to one biography, was based on a youthful love of Conrad’s). Some characters are not politically or socially minded, but they represent strongly-embedded values, such as the English Captain Joseph Mitchell, with his attachment to order, regularity and decency as he runs the wharves, the handling of cargoes and the operations of the Oceanic Steam Navigation Company. More saturnine than this man of order is the English Doctor Monygham, widely regarded as a schemer and misanthrope, though at a certain point in the novel (specifically Part 3, Chap. 4) we hear of traumatic events in his past that have made him that way. In his conversations with Mrs Gould, Monygham opposes Charles Gould’s naïve view that material progress alone will bring about improvement in the human condition.  The most problematic character is Martin Decoud, a Costaguanian intellectual who has had a French education, regards himself as a progressive, runs a political newspaper and is filled with ideas for the improvement of the state. But as events in the novel are to prove, there is a hollow, nihilistic core to this man which is eventually very destructive.

Not all of these characters are introduced in the novel’s first part, for Conrad’s leisurely exposition continues in the novel’s second part (“The Isabels” – referring to islands in the gulf) where we also hear of the bandit Hernandez, the clerical interests of the Catholic Church represented by the pliable Father Ramon and the more dedicated and intelligent senior cleric Father Corbelan, local government officials and military figures. It is in this second part that an ongoing revolutionary conflict in Costaguana is outlined. The “Blancos” (i.e. the older, more Hispanic, less “native” possessors) are at odds with the “Monterists”. A president called Ribiera, who himself overthrew a long-serving dictator, is in the process of being overthrown by General Montero, who has taken over Costaguana’s inland capital and is now sending his forces to take Sulaco. Which side other military figures will take (Generals Sotillo and Barrios) hangs in the balance for some time, and there are some betrayals and some horse-trading. To the European and American interests in Sulaco, the big question is who will control the San Tome silver mine, which is the principal source of wealth for the western province in which it lies.

As this complex psychological and political scene is laid out, it is Joseph Conrad’s acute analyses of characters that most hold the attention. Conrad was critical and sceptical without being a cynic. However negative he may appear to be about some of his own characters, he is never dismissive of them. Of the director of the mine Charles Gould, he notes “Action is consolatory. It is the enemy of thought and the friend of flattering illusions. Only in the conduct of our action can we find the sense of mastery over the Fates.” (Part 1, Chap. 6) He is, in effect, showing Gould to be a man who can find himself only in the “illusion” (one of Conrad’s favourite words) that he is in charge of affairs, when in reality he is dominated by circumstances beyond his control (including the remembered influence of his father). The American investor and millionaire Holroyd is described as having “the temperament of a Puritan and an insatiable imagination of conquest.” (Part 1, Chap. 6), a succinct description of the evangelical zeal with which markets are pursued and developed in an expansive capitalist economy.

Captain Mitchell is very much a minor character, yet he is analysed with the same care as the more essential characters. Late in the novel, the stuffy Mitchell’s character is dramatised when he is threatened by revolutionary soldiers, but faces up to them impeturbably and insists that they return to him his presentation pocket watch, which they have filched. Conrad remarks: “The old sailor, with all his small weaknesses and absurdities, was constitutionally incapable of entertaining for any length of time a fear of his personal safety. It was not so much firmness of soul as the lack of a certain kind of imagination… that sort of imagination which adds the blind terror of bodily suffering and of death… to all the other apprehensions on which the sense of one’s existence is based.” (Part 3, Chap. 2) The secret of Mitchell’s steadfastness is his lack of imagination. This is like a negative image of Conrad’s Lord Jim who, when a storm struck his ship, had too much imagination, deserted his post and became a coward. Not having an imagination may be the key to physical courage.

Upon Martin Decoud, Conrad makes many judgements. We are warned well before the novel’s mid-point that Decoud had “a Frenchified – but most un-French – cosmopolitanism, in reality a mere barren indifferentism posing as intellectual superiority.” (Part 2, Chap. 3) There is something of the dandy and the dilettante to this man who believes himself to be a progressive liberal. Most tellingly, Decoud has no real sense of solidarity with his fellow human beings (that “fidelity” about which Conrad often wrote). Late in the novel, Decoud suffers a complete moral collapse [I will not give the plot details] when he is left, in solitude, to his own mental resources and without other people to impress and influence: “He had recognised no other virtue than intelligence, and had erected passions into duties. Both his intelligence and his passion were swallowed up easily in the great unbroken solitude of waiting without faith…. His sadness was the sadness of a sceptical mind. He beheld the universe as a succession of incomprehensible images… all exertion seemed senseless.” (Part 3, Chap. 10) I should add, however, that many commentators (notably C. B. Cox) have noted how much Conrad identifies with Decoud’s scepticism, which may represent an element of Conrad’s own psyche that he himself rigorously suppressed.

I could quote similarly penetrating comments on many other characters in this novel but I have so far, deliberately, delayed mentioning the novel’s eponymous character. The fact is, Conrad himself delays presenting Nostromo as a rounded character. For the first half of the novel Nostromo is presented in long shot only, as it were, almost as a character of legend. We know early on that he is Genoese, that he is a trusted “Capataz de Cargadores” (foreman of the dock-workers who unload cargoes), and that wealthy employers such as Charles Gould and middlemen such as Captain Mitchell rely on him to keep the workers un-rebellious. He is respected by workingmen and admired by women. We also learn that Gian’ Battista is his given name, while Nostromo is only a nickname: “The camp-master was the Italian sailor whom all the Europeans in Sulaco, following Captain Mitchell’s mispronunciation, were in the habit of calling Nostromo.” (Part 1, Chap. 5) Only very late in the novel do we learn that his real name is Fidanza – though Conradians are quick to remind us that the name “Nostromo” serves a thematic purpose as it is very similar to the Italian nostro uomo (“our man” – what Captain Mitchell was probably trying to say), making Nostromo, in his potential and his flaws, a representative of us all, like the way the narrator of Lord Jim refers to Jim as “one of us”.  Even so, for the first half of the novel, Nostromo is presented solely as a public figure, spectacular and picturesque, as in the following passage:

“The bright colours of a Mexican serape twisted on the cantle, the enormous silver buttons down the seam of the trousers, the snowy linen, a silk sash with embroidered ends, the silver plates on headstall and saddle, proclaimed the unapproachable style of the famous Capataz de Cargadores – a Mediterranean sailor – got up with more finished splendour than any well-to-do young ranchero had ever displayed on a high holiday.” (Part 1, Chap. 8)

Only towards the end of Part 2, and then in the long third (and final) part of the novel (“The Lighthouse”) do we begin to see Nostromo in close-up, have his moral character analysed, and accept him as a rounded human being. In the long Chapter 7 of Part 2, Nostromo and Decoud are together at sea on the small lighter that is carrying silver ingots away from potential capture by revolutionary rebels. In this chapter the tone of the novel changes considerably. It is as if, stripped of other human company, the real selves of both Nostromo and Decoud are revealed. Decoud remains the opportunist with dreams of leadership. In contrast, Nostromo has a strong sense of his duty to others. We already know this from earlier in the novel when we hear of his service to his employers and his care for the workmen he commands. But, though he himself is an unbeliever and an anti-clerical, we now hear of his pangs of conscience about his failure to summon a priest for a dying woman (Teresa Viola, the “Garibaldino” Giorgio Viola’s wife). Unlike Decoud, he understands that he has to keep promises, live in solidarity with others and observe “fidelity”.

Conrad makes his analysis of Nostromo particularly layered, because Nostromo is characterised mainly through the words and observations of the very flawed Decoud. The dilettante’s view is that Nostromo is driven by vanity and the desire for public approval: “Decoud, incorrigible in his scepticism, reflected, not cynically, but with general satisfaction, that this man was made incorruptible by his enormous vanity, that finest form of egoism which can take on the aspect of every virtue.” (Part 2, Chap. 7) Decoud has no concept of what Nostromo, who is in no way an intellectual, would probably call “honour”.

The morality of this novel is indeed complex, and not as simplistic as the dichotomy of opportunism and “honour” that I have suggested here. Nostromo is a sympathetic character and does emerge as the human embodiment of a fraught historical and political situation. BUT (remember we are reading Conrad here) where this character goes – in the closing sections of the novel which I will not relate here, as you might want to discover them for yourself – is not exactly where you expect him to go. Conrad’s scepticism leads him to question even a man of probity and “honour”, and to tell us that even such a man can be radically flawed. He is indeed representative of us – nostro uomo, “one of us”. It could be that his “honour”, his desire to be admired by others and have a sound public reputation, is indeed a form of vanity.

As one nears the novel’s end, one also questions how much Nostromo has been “used” by other less scrupulous people. In keeping the stevedores and longshoremen in order, has he merely been underpinning an unjust economic order? Is personal “honour” something that can be exploited? Indeed, has Conrad deliberately led us to thorough disillusion in this man, who could be seen as anti-hero rather than hero?

And there is another major consideration. Despite the novel’s title, is Nostromo really the novel’s protagonist? All indications are that Joseph Conrad himself saw “the silver of the mine” as the unifying force in the novel rather than any human character. In one major sense, the novel pivots on how its leading characters – the industrialist Gould, the intellectual Decoud, and the man-of-the-people Nostromo – react to, or are corrupted and deformed by, the silver. Silver is the novel’s “material fact” and Conrad makes sure silver is somehow mentioned as often as possible. Nearly every description of Nostromo himself includes the word “silver”.

One other way of considering this novel is as purely political commentary. As in (the later) The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes and (the earlier) Heart of Darkness, Conrad is in large part concerned with issues of politics, the use of violence, colonialism and economic exploitation. There are passages in the novel that could almost be said to be prophetic, in that they anticipate major destructive trends in 20^th century history. To European and North American non-indigenous interests, Costaguana is an under-developed country just waiting to be modernised, and its conflicts are merely the incoherent eruptions of a failed state. The peasants on the hinterland Campo live with “oppression, inefficiency, fatuous methods, treachery, and savage brutality”(Part 1, Chap. 8). When that very unreliable narrator Martin Decoud discusses the situation of the “Blancos” and the “Monterists” with Mrs Gould, he says of his country “We convulsed a continent for our independence only to become the passive prey of a democratic parody, the helpless victims of scoundrels and cut-throats, our institutions a mockery, our laws a farce.” (Part 2, Chap. 4) The independent states of South America are the shattered remains of the old Spanish Empire, which have never settled to true statehood. The old (Spanish) imperialism is now in the process of being replaced by the new (capitalist) imperialism. In a letter, Decoud gives his view of the millionaire American investor Holroyd: “as long as the treasure flowed north, without a break, that utter sentimentalist, Holroyd, would not drop his idea of introducing, not only justice, industry, peace to the benighted continents, but also that pet dream of his of a purer form of Christianity.” (Part 2, Chap. 7) Mrs Gould has already remarked of Holroyd that “his sense of religion… was shocked and disgusted at the tawdriness of the dressed-up saints in the cathedral… But it seemed to me that he looked upon his own God as a sort of influential partner, who gets his share of profits in the endowment of churches. That’s a sort of idolatry. He told me he endowed churches every year…” (Part 1, Chap.6) One immediately thinks of the United States’ interventions – for its own profit – in Central and South America throughout the 20^th century, and vigorous American attempts to Protestantize South America, Protestantism (with its individualisation of Christianity) being far more amenable to capitalism and the profit motive than the more collectivist Catholicism.

Festering in the Costaguanian revolution are ideas that would later exert huge influence in the world. Pedrito Montero, one of the “revolutionaries” trying to overthrow the “Blanco” regime, believes “that the highest expression of democracy was Caesarism: the imperial rule based upon the direct popular vote. Caesarism was conservative. It was strong. It recognised the legitimate needs of democracy which requires orders, titles and distinctions. They would be showered on deserving men. Caesarism was peace. It was progressive. It secured the prosperity of the country….. Look at what the Second Empire had done for France…” (Part 3, Chap. 7) As more than one historian has observed, Napoleon III, head of France’s Second Empire, was really the prototype of modern dictatorship – the populist who operated behind a veneer of democracy and made great play of appealing to the “people”, especially through referenda. In many respects, he was the curtain-raiser for Fascism, which is really what Pedrito Montano aspires to. Roll on Juan Peron and a few dozen other South American despots with a populist appeal.

If economic imperialism eats up exploited states, it also corrupts, morally, the exploiters. This, surely, is one of the main points of Heart of Darkness, especially in its depiction of Kurtz. In Nostromo, Mrs Gould eventually realises that economic imperialism has morally destroyed Charles Gould: “she saw clearly … the San Tome mine possessing, consuming, burning up the life of the last of the Costaguana Goulds; mastering the energetic spirit of the son as it had mastered the lamentable weakness of the father.” (Part 3, Chap. 11) To control such an asset is to be controlled by it, as the silver mine is the “material fact” that corrupts a society.

Yanqui imperialism, proto-Fascism and the moral corruption of economic exploitation are all perceived in Nostromo; and so are the very methods by which imperial exploitation works. To “solve” the problem of Costaguana’s revolution, Martin Decoud comes up with the idea of the “separation of the whole Occidental Province from the rest of the unquiet body… The richest, the most fertile part of this land may be saved from anarchy.” (Part 2, Chap. 6) In other words, that part of Costaguana which has the richest resources may – for the convenience of those who wish to exploit it – be separated from the (less resource-rich) rest of the country. This is the political plan that, with American backing, is carried through in Nostromo; reminding one at once of Britain’s later separation of oil-rich Kuwait from the rest of Mesopotamia (now Iraq). Conrad had a more immediate model for this manoeuvre when he wrote Nostromo, however. The year before the novel was published, the United States broke treaties it had made with Colombia and openly backed rebels who set up the breakaway state of Panama, from which the United States extracted the “Canal Zone”, enabling it to control the Panama Canal. It is noteworthy that in 2007 the young Colombian novelist Juan Gabriel Vasquez wrote a novel, The Secret History of Costaguana, which basically indicts Joseph Conrad for fictionalising these real events, and substituting a silver mine for a canal. Despite this, reference books tell me that Nostromo is now widely read and admired in Latin America for its political acumen, even if Latin American readers are bemused by the way the descriptive details of the novel sometimes jumble together cultural and ethnogaphic details from a number of different (real) Latin American countries.

Descriptiveness, penetrating psychological insights and an important political subtext – these features of Nostromo could be said to characterise all Conrad’s best work. So could the novel’s narrative technique. We are again in the Conradian territory of a “cloud of witnesses” and a number of unreliable narrators. I have on my shelf a simple “reader’s guide” to Conrad’s works published in the 1950s, in which one Oliver Warner claims of Nostromo that it is a straightforward third-person narrative and that  “No narrator or intermediary distracts from the directness of what he [Conrad] narrates.” Nonsense! In the first place place, although the novel is indeed written in the apparently omniscient third-person, we switch from viewpoint to viewpoint as Conrad analyses many characters’ thoughts and impulses. Then there is the fact that other voices do take over much of the narrative. In Part 2, Chapter 7 we have the text of a very long letter written by Martin Decoud, basically giving his cynical view of how political events are developing. Conrad also often uses the device of long, expository conversations, again giving a character’s viewpoint. In Part 3, Chapter 10, it is Captain Mitchell’s inane and conventional conversation which tells us what the outcome of Costaguana’s “revolution” has been. In Part 3, Chapter 11 we learn of developments in Nostromo’s life through a long conversation which Dr Moynigham has with Mrs Gould. We also note that (as, most obviously, in The Secret Agent), the order of events in the novel is not strictly chronological. Some outcomes made plain early in the novel are not fully explicated until much later. To give one bizarre example of a shuffling of events – in Part 3, Chapter 8, there is a painful scene where Nostromo and Dr Monygham converse in the presence of the corpse of a minor character (the trader of hides, Hirsch) who has been tortured and hanged by revolutionary soldiers. Only in the following chapter, Part 3, Chapter 9, do we have the narrative of Hirsch’s death.

I could not finish an analysis of this great novel without mention of the dominant mood of melancholy that it creates – a typically Conradian melancholy. Much of it depends on Conrad’s underlying sense of the vanity of human wishes and the small impact of human effort upon a vast and indifferent universe. When I read such a sentence as “Men ploughed with wooden ploughs and yoked oxen, small in a boundless expanse, as if attacking immensity itself.” (Part 1, Chap. 6); I am at once reminded of Conrad’s image of the French warship shooting into the immensity of the African continent in Heart of Darkness. Both images suggest an ultimate pointlessness to human endeavour. Where Nostromo is concerned, this relates also to the novel’s political ideas. Conrad was no Utopian. He did not believe that revolutions, changes of government or progressive ideas would alter the essential human condition. One plausible reading of Nostromo is that it tells us plans concocted even with the best of intentions will go astray; that (as T.S.Eliot put it) “history at all times draws / the strangest consequence from remotest cause”; or (as Allen Curnow put it) “to make out our tomorrow from its motives / Is pure guessing, yesterday’s were so mixed”. Of course this view of history is highly inimical to Marxists, who live with the delusion that a comprehensible and progressive pattern may be discerned in history. For this very reason, at least some Marxist critics (such as Arnold Kettle) have produced negative and very reductionist critiques of Nostromo, berating Conrad for using the term “material interests” rather than “imperialism” and claiming that he is avoiding a real analysis of Costaguana’s situation. Given that the novel is one of the clearest indictments of imperialism in the language, it is hard to see much merit in this claim.

But now we come to a major problem with this novel. In an earlier posting on Conrad’s Victory, I quoted Frank Sargeson’s observation “I’ve never been able to make my mind up about Conrad … I’m worried that the careful plausibility of the beginning goes down the drain as the melodrama begins to go really into action.”

For me, this opinion is especially valid for the closing chapters of Nostromo. Once again, carefully avoiding making a synopsis [you may want to discover how it turns out for yourself], I understand fully the carefully-wrought symbolism of the lighthouse and the hidden treasure. But the last thirty-or-so pages of the novel plunge us into irredeemable melodrama of a very old-fashioned sort. This is true even when we know that (according to Conrad’s 1917 preface) these pages incorporate the anecdote that was Conrad’s first inspiration – the grit in the oyster that made the pearl. Please understand my audacity in stating this. After all, the revered critic Walter Allen said in his The English Novel (as quoted on the back cover of my old Penguin copy of Nostromo), that, of Conrad’s novels “Nostromo is undoubtedly the finest; a good case could be made out for considering it the greatest novel in English of this century. It represents a remarkable extension of Conrad’s genius”. Apparently F. Scott Fitzgerald once said he would rather have written Nostromo than any of his own works or any other novel he could think of. Those who admire this as a truly great novel are many – and I am one of them.

But there is still that clunk of melodrama in the novel’s ending.

To revert to what I said at the beginning of this notice, however, it is not the melodrama that is likely to have put off the general reader. It is the very depth and density of the novel’s portrait of its fictitious South American republic. It is the leisurely way in which the novel unfolds - the very delayed fuse before the final explosions – and the time sequence that deliberately defies chronology. This is not a novel that can be hurried over and it is not a novel that presents a straightforward and simplified morality. In other words, masterpiece or not, it is not the sort of novel to attract the mass readership. And it is approximately seven times as long as Heart of Darkness.

Eccentric and largely silly footnotes: Three mildly interesting things related to Nostromo.

(1.) When I was a senior schoolboy, I had an English teacher of very firm views (the Marist Brother Stephen Coll) who disliked the works of Joseph Conrad (this was before I had read any of Conrad’s novels), and singled out Nostromo as being “boring”. But he did make the interesting observation that Conrad, as a Pole, very occasionally muddled up English idioms. My teacher said Conrad would sometimes say things like “black long shadow” rather than “long black shadow”. I think I found the sentence to which my teacher was referring in Nostromo: “The front of the house threw off a black long rectangle of shadow” (Part 1, Chap. 4) – although frankly I have rarely found this literary genius making similar “mistakes”. I am, however, reminded that English was at least Conrad’s third language (after Polish and French – and probably Russian) when Conrad refers to “the lecture of the letters”  (Part 1, Chap. 6), where he is clearly using “lecture” in the French sense of “reading”. I am also surprised to find this 1904 novel using one word which I thought had been a more recent coinage: “Charles Gould…. had shown himself to be a real hustler” (Part 1, Chap. 6)

(2.) I admit that when he nods, Conrad can go all purty in his descriptions, as when (in one of the novel’s most vivid and iconic sequences) Decoud and Nostromo are together at sea in the small lighter.  “A great recrudescence of obscurity embraced the boat” (Part 2, Chap. 7), says Conrad. I think he means “The boat became invisible in yet more darkness”.

(3.) Nostromo, being totally unfilmable, has had the good fortune never to be made as a film for the cinema, although the English director David Lean did spend years pondering a film adaptation (at different times collaborating on scripts with Christopher Hampton and Robert Bolt). What resulted was what the IMBd website calls “probably one of the most celebrated scripts never to be filmed” because, for a huge variety of reasons, the film was never made. What was made by other people (in 1996-97) was a 4-part TV series, with a limp and unpersuasive Claudio Amendola as Nostromo, Lothaire Bluteau as Martin Decoud, Claudia Cardinale as Teresa Viola and English stalwarts such as Colin Firth as Charles Gould, Albert Finney as Dr Monygham and Paul Brooke as Captain Mitchell. Gentle reader, if you want a bare synopsis of the novel’s external action, then this series is adequate. But that is all it is. If you want to taste Conrad’s ideas and style, then the TV series is ridiculous.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“HEART OF DARKNESS” by Joseph Conrad (first published in three parts in Blackwood’s Magazine, 1899; slightly revised when republished in book form in Youth – A Narrative; and Two Other Stories, 1902)

 

            The tale of my relationship with Joseph Conrad’s works is now wearisome to your eyes, as I have already alluded to it three times on this blog (see posts on Under Western Eyes, The Secret Agent and Victory). I will therefore not repeat it.

But I will say that when I first read the novella Heart of Darkness as an Honours student, nearly 45 years ago, the storm over Joseph Conrad’s supposed racism had not yet broken. Of course as students we discussed what the novella had to say about Europe and Africa and imperialism and colonialism, but we never called the work “racist”. We understood that the author, writing over seventy years before our time, sometimes used racial epithets that would no longer be acceptable. We understood that he of course depicted things from a European point of view. But as to the matter the work being “racist” – this never occurred to us.

Then, in the mid-1970s, the distinguished Nigerian author Chinua Achebe delivered a lecture (the first of many, in fact) decrying Heart of Darkness as “racist” and even calling Conrad a “thoroughgoing racist”. This was not, said Achebe, only because the novella denigrated Africans – though Achebe did object to the number of times the word “nigger” was used. Rather, it was because it privileged a European viewpoint and reduced Africans to (largely) mute characters in the background. Yes, said Achebe, Conrad did see colonialism and imperialism as destructive forces, but he saw them as morally destroying Europeans. What is the story, after all, but a journey to meet a white man who has (probably) gone insane and been corrupted by his imperialist role? But surely, said Achebe, this was a small thing compared with what imperialists were doing to those Africans whom Conrad did not allow to speak for themselves. 

It is now impossible for Heart of Darkness to be discussed without its “racism” being mentioned, even by those critics who defend it from the charge.

So, 45 years after first reading it, I sat down to read Heart of Darkness again last month, although this time with the specific purpose of testing how “racist” it was.

Let me therefore set aside some of those things that often arise in discusssions of this work.

I’m not discussing Conrad’s framing device and the narrative voice he chooses – sure, it’s told by Charlie Marlow whom we could see as the archtypal “unreliable narrator” if we so pleased. But as we are told that, when he tells his story, Marlow sits “in the pose of a Buddha preaching in European clothes” and “in the pose of a meditating Buddha” (i.e. he is meant to be seen as a teaching sage); and as his story reflects much of what Conrad experienced in the Congo in 1890; I see little point in interpreting Marlow’s viewpoint as being all that different from the author’s own viewpoint.

Nor will I set about commenting on Conrad’s lushly descriptive, allusive, evocative prose (which hostile critics see as evasive and indulging in “blur words”). By being non-specific about so much, Conrad creates an air of mystery and bafflement – this, I think, is intended to impress upon (European) readers the alienness and otherness of Africa. We are entering the “heart of darkness”. But, before I am reminded of something so obvious, I am aware that the novel’s symbolism makes the heart of darkness the (universal) human heart and the terms “dark” and “darkness” (repeated and repeated throughout the work) are applied as much to Europe and Europeans as to Africa and Africans.

Finally, I am not going to unload upon you one of my verbose plot summaries. You already know the story’s simple outline. The experienced sailor Marlow takes a position with a (presumably Belgian) company which trades in ivory and other African riches. He undertakes to captain a steamer up an African river (presumably in the Congo) to make contact with the legendary trader Kurtz, who has been incommunicado for too long. Marlow travels from a Company Station (i.e. trading post) to a Central Station to (Kurtz’s) Inner Station, allowing some critics to see this as replicating a journey to the underworld, or Hell. En route he meets and interacts with a number of (European) characters. For all Marlow’s commentary – and the very occasional interruptions of those who are supposedly listening to him - this is essentially the linear story of a journey. What I think is often overlooked is the extent to which it is a story of disillusion. Marlow expects to find adventure and the prestige of  “exploration” in his journey. Instead he finds himself working for a sordid and exploitative company. Marlow expects to captain efficiently the river steamer. Instead, somebody else has managed to wreck it in the river shallows, and it takes months for Marlow to salvage it and get it river-worthy once again. Then there is the disppointment – or at least bafflement – of finally meeting the fabled Kurtz. What I believe is the novel’s anti-climax is prepared by the voice of the young Russian who, in the novel’s third section, tells Marlow much about Kurtz before Marlow meets Kurtz.

But setting aside style, narrative voice and plot, let me draw up the balance sheet of racism.

To pick up Achebe’s point, I counted the word “nigger” being used ten times in the text, usually in a context that does not imply contempt but simply casual (European) colloquialism of the day. I noted that in the novella’s second section, it would be very easy to take great offence at the episode when Marlow’s steamer is caught in the fog, and is being attacked with arrows and spears from the shore. Marlow notes that some of his African crew are cannibals, one of whom suggests that they should deal with the attackers by eating them. This is the only time an African character speaks in the novella, except when the “manager’s boy” reports “Mistah Kurtz – he dead” (the line later appropriated by T.S.Eliot). Africans are usually displayed as exotica – the stately and gaudily-dressed woman at Kurtz’s station – or as savages – the dancing and whooping and shouting primitives on the river-bank – or as a source of menace – the dark or unseen eyes peering through the foliage at the passing steamer. Then there is the matter of Kurtz being worshipped by Africans as a god on “a high seat among the devils of the land” and of his presiding “at certain midnight dances ending with unspeakable rites which … were offered up to… Mr Kurtz himself.” What are these “unspeakable rites”? This is one of those moments where Conrad goes allusive and vague – but he seems to be referring to either cannibalism or human sacrifice (or both). The fact that Kurtz participates in this could suggest that his madness or degeneracy comes from his having “gone native”. This concept is reinforced then Marlow later observes Kurtz crawling on all fours and observes that “the heavy, mute spell of the wilderness” and the pounding of drums and a fire’s flames awakened in Kurtz “forgotten and brutal instincts” which “beguiled his unlawful soul beyond the bounds of permitted aspirations”. In other words he, a European, has reverted to being a barbarous African.

Given all this, it is easy to see Achebe’s point.

Yet there is the fact that Conrad is merciless in dealing with his European characters even if, unlike the African ones, they get to speak. And (amazingly for a book written in 1899), Heart of Darkness is a novel that attacks the concept of empire-building. Very early in the story, Marlow says “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking of it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look at it too much.” Marlow is very sceptical of the European idea that imperialism was a “civilising mission”. When his aunt talks about the company Marlow is going to serve “weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways”, Marlow “ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit.” In other words, the “civilising mission” was the fig-leaf imperialism wore to cover its real purpose of grabbing resources and wealth. On his sea voyage to Africa, Marlow contrasts Africans paddling a canoe with a French warship. The “black fellows” had “bone, muscle, a wild vitality, an intense energy of movement that was as natural and true as the surf along their coast. They wanted no excuse for being there.” By contrast, the French warship is shooting desultorily into a shore settlement of Africans. “In the empty immensity of earth, sky, and water, there she was, incomprehensible, firing into a continent.” The clear implication is that the Africans belong there, but the Europeans don’t (and their mission is probably futile anyway). Encountering thereafter Africans in a chain-gang (effectively having been enslaved by Europeans), Marlow speaks of his realization that he is becoming acquainted with “a flabby, pretending, weak-eyed devil of a rapacious and pitiless folly” (i.e. the European mission in Africa). There is the encounter with a suicidal Swede. There is the fastidious clerk in his neat, pressed clothes. Both are completely incongruous in Africa. A group of Europeans who call themselves the Eldorado Exploring Expedition are “reckless without hardihood, greedy without audacity, and cruel without courage” with “no more moral purpose… than there is in burglars breaking into a safe”.

In his real condemnations of European imperialism, there are some moments that are very ambiguous. In one sequence, Marlow refers to one of his African crewmen as an “improved specimen” who had been trained to tend a boiler by Europeans, but who as like “a dog in a parody of breeches and a feather hat, walking on his hind legs. A few months of training had done for that really fine chap”. The clear meaning here is that it would have been better for Europeans to leave this man alone and let him lead his African life – but Achebe pounces on this description and (perhaps correctly) sees it as showing a dismissive and condescending view of Africans, as well as underestimating Africans’ understanding of new technology.

Yet Conrad frequently equates European and African. When Marlow describes an area that has been depopulated when Africans fled before European invaders, he reflects “Well, if a lot of mysterious niggers armed with all kinds of fearful weapons suddenly took to travelling on the road between Deal and Gravesend, catching the yokels right and left to carry heavy loads for them, I fancy every farm and cottage thereabouts would get empty very soon”. And on the very next page Marlow remarks on the sound of drums in the night, “a sound weird, appealing, suggestive and wild – and perhaps with as profound a meaning as the sound of bells in a Christian country.”

This brings us to one of the overarching images in the novel – the reminder, at both beginning and end, that England (and by extension all of Europe) was once one of the “dark places in the world” too. The River Thames, where Marlow tells his story, is like the River Congo. Marlow spends some pages reflecting on the Roman conquerors who once had to deal with “savages” in what is now England.  The clear implication is that Africans now are going through the same experience of imperialism that Europeans once went through, and the “heart of darkness” is the universal human condition and not a geographical place in Africa. There is a cycle in history of depraved violence, conquest and empire-making to which all human races are prone. Perhaps it is his realisation of this universal human condition that leads Kurtz to his final cry “The horror! The horror!” He himself has never been morally or intellectually superior to the Africans who worshipped him. To “Exterminate all the brutes” (as he earlier advocated) would be to exterminate himself.

In its universalism, this idea is profoundly anti-racist. Conrad’s novella undermines the moral rationale upon which, when he was writing, European imperialism was still based. He rubs this point in with the coda to the novel, in which Marlow lies to Kurtz’s fiancee back in Europe, in effect telling her that Kurtz died a noble death. He gives her an illusion to cherish… like the illusions of racial superiority that provide a rationale for imperialism. It is only by such illusions that Europeans can think imperialism is a just and righteous thing.

And yet, after having argued all this, I cannot entirely negate Achebe’s argument. For Achebe would say that, even by seeing Africans as only now going through what Europeans went through thousands of years ago, Conrad is still promoting a myth of cultural superiority and therefore seeing Africans as more primitive. And there are all those demeaning depictions of Africans in the novel to deal with.

I cannot easily resolve this argument. As a work of literature, I still believe Heart of Darkness is profound, saying much about how we can be deluded, and how fragile our hold on a moral life is. I would fear that any student who was taught that Conrad is merely a “racist” would therefore be discouraged from reading his works, and would miss out on one of the most seminal of early-modernist writers. My thought here is very similar to a view John Newton expressed in Hard Frost (published in 2017), his survey of New Zealand nationalist writers in the 1930s: “It is entirely too easy to reduce nationalist writing to those attitudes and assumptions that we no longer find sympathetic, and then to sheet home those values to individual authors as if this somehow exempted us from reading these writers thoughtfully.” (pp.25-26). I do not believe we are exempted from reading Heart of Darkness thoughtfully. I believe Heart of Darkness is much, much more than an exercise in xenophobia. But like all great works of literature, it requires close reading and should stimulate vigorous discussion.

Cinematic footnote: Heart of Darkness has never been filmed successfully, and the reason is obvious. So much depends on the voice of the narrator and his vocabulary. And the novella is essentially a series of encounters, leading to Marlow’s meeting with Kurtz, rather than a plot in the conventional sense. It is well-known that, hoping to make a splash when he first came to Hollywood, the 25-year-old Orson Welles planned to film Heart of Darkness and a screenplay was developed – but the project was abandoned and Welles went on to make his splash with Citizen Kane instead. It is also well-known that John Milius’ screenplay for Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) took Heart of Darkness as one of its chief models. Its story, set in the Vietnam War, has Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) travelling up a river to meet – and assassinate - Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando). Other than the odd allusion, though, it is not Conrad. Nicholas Roeg, in 1993, made a TV movie out of Heart of Darkness, with Tim Roth as Marlow and John Malkovitch as Kurtz, but it has been little seen and was generally panned by critics.

Rather odd footnote: There have been many other novels that have echoed Heart of Darkness’s despairing view of Western interventions in sub-Saharan Africa, but the most recent novel to do so must be Paul Theroux’s The Lower River (first published in 2012) wherein an American in his 60s, having cut ties with family and friends, decides to travel back to Malawi, where he was happy as a young Peace Corps teacher in the 1960s (as was Paul Theroux). He fondly remembers the optimism of the remote village in which he worked, the sense of real progress in the school that he helped run, and the confident 1960s hope that Africa was developing peacefully into modern – and hopefully democratic - states. Instead, after forty years, he finds corrupt bribe-driven government, a derelict school, a population reverting to the most authoritarian tribalism, villages of abandoned and feral chidren whose parents have died of AIDS, a collapse of infrastructure and a people more dependent on handouts from Westerners than they were in the days of imperial and colonial rule. I will not go into the details of Theroux’s plot (which is a hair-raising one to say the least). But, while no subscriber to Arcadian dreams of blissful primitivism, one of Theroux’s implicit themes is that it might have been better if Westerners had never intervened in sub-Saharan Africa in the first place. Perhaps that is part of what Conrad is saying in Heart of Darkness, too.