I said yesterday that Almayer’s problem is that he doesn’t understand anybody. It’s really worse than that: he doesn’t understand anyone, and almost everyone is actively plotting against him. Let’s look at the picture of Sambir at the time when the novel opens.

Almayer has been in Sambir some twenty years. His trade completely dried up when Abdullah, an Arab, found the entrance to the river and made an alliance with Lakamba, the current rajah, to oust the old rajah, a friend of Almayer and Lingard. The few possibilities for political change since then haven’t panned out, and there has simply been no trade for Almayer for years. Lingard, who hoped to find gold up the river, has lost his fortune and disappeared, likely dead, in Europe, leaving Almayer alone with his estranged wife. Nina, who had been sent by Lingard to Singapore to be educated, was sent back when she proved more attractive to young men than her guardians’ (white) daughters.

A stranger arrives, a powerful island prince who falls in love with Nina. He provides a way for Almayer to make an alliance with Lakamba and try to get at the gold upriver. While Almayer dreams of the riches to come, though, Dain’s real object is to marry Nina. To that end, Dain has been paying Mrs. Almayer in gold and silver coins, immediately seeing that she is the one really in charge of things. Mrs. Almayer effectively hides Dain and Nina’s affair from Almayer, who has no idea his daughter is planning to do anything other than move with him to the much dreamt of if never before seen Europe. But Nina conceals even more than Mrs. Almayer. Eventually the two fake Dain’s death. Almayer has no way of getting his gold, and a jealous third party tells him his daughter has made off with the prince. The full state of everyone’s treachery is revealed, and there is a powerful climax on the beach, as Almayer helps his daughter leave forever.

All this, to Almayer, is treachery, and trickery, and underhand, dishonest, unethical, deceitful, dishonorable. Almayer is playing by the rules. He honors his marriage vows despite the horrible differences between him and his wife. According to white custom, he is an honorable trader, giving food on credit in times of shortage and expecting debts to be paid off. The villagers, to him, are untrustworthy, sneaky liars.

From their perspective, though, he is simply a fool, and his adherence to Western custom makes him seem irrational and stupid. The extremely adept “statesman” Babalatchi considers him thus:

White men were strong, but very foolish. It was undesirable to fight them, but deception was easy. They were like silly women—they did not know the use of reason, and he was a match for any of them….

Later, the same character explains to Mrs. Almayer that “[a] man knows when to fight and when to tell peaceful lies.”

This isn’t just a run of the mill picture of wily, dishonorable natives outfoxing the upright white man. Almayer is the only European on this river, and he is thus the only one playing by white men’s rules. There is plenty of morality here; the Arabs are very devout, for one thing. But unencumbered by some of Almayer’s cultural rules, the entire rest of the community operates pretty smoothly and successfully. In Batavia or Macassar, among a whole community of Europeans, Almayer’s hold to custom would have mattered, but here it gets him nothing at all. We often simply think of these things as the rules that make civilization possible, but when everyone else has agreed on a slightly different set of rules, that can work too. And your Western system may not do too well at all in those circumstances. The success of morality, in terms of facilitating a decent life for its practitioner, is contingent on the kinds of morality those around him choose to practice.

Like Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s 1895 novel Almayer’s Folly, his first, is about a white man alone up a river. Instead of the Congo River in Africa there is the Pantai in Borneo, and Almayer is no charismatic Kurtz. Conrad’s earlier work is the story of a Dutch trader, born and raised in Batavia, who goes to work in Macassar. There he is adopted by Captain Lingard, the legendary Rajah Laut, most powerful sailor in the land. Lingard invites the young Almayer to marry his adopted daughter, a Malay girl whom he rescued from pirates and sent to a convent.

“And don’t you kick because you’re white!” he shouted, suddenly, not giving the surprised young man the time to say a word. “None of that with me! Nobody will see the colour of your wife’s skin. The dollars are too thick for that, I tell you!”

Almayer doesn’t kick at all, though he does assume it will be “[e]asy enough to dispose of a Malay woman, a slave, after all, to his Eastern mind, convent or no convent, ceremony or no cemerony.” And so the happy couple is installed in Sambir, a village on a river whose entrance is known only to Lingard, giving them a monopoly on trade.

Unfortunately for Almayer, one of the few things his wife understands from her convent studies is that “according to white men’s laws she was going to be Almayer’s companion and not his slave.” Considering herself kidnapped, not rescued, by Lingard, she had been forced to treat him well because she believed him her master. But left alone with Almayer, after they have a child, she turns wild, burning their expensive imported furniture at the cookfire, giving up “the hateful finery of Europe,” and eventually moving out of the main house and into a small hut on the grounds where she sullenly chews betel-nut.

This is only the first of Almayer’s disappointments. The dollars never do get thick enough to blot out the color of Mrs. Almayer’s skin, and worse, they never could have made husband and wife understand anything at all about each other. Lingard doesn’t even know the woman after spending years doting on her. And the light of Almayer’s life, his daugher Nina, presents him with just as much of a problem—though he does see her as white and a part of himself, and therefore doesn’t even realize the gap.

She had little belief and no sympathy for her father’s dreams; but the savage ravings of her mother chanced to strike a responsive chord, deep down somewhere in her despairing heart; and she dreamed dreams of her own with the persistent absorption of a captive thinking of liberty within the walls of his prison cell.

Almayer is a bit like Dowell, in that he doesn’t really understand anybody, and often looks like a fool because of it. But he’s pigheaded, sometimes aware of his ignorance and angry about it, but more often stubbornly blind in a way lacking any of Dowell’s charm. He’s also not a very good man. But his story is still sad.

Almayer’s Folly, and Conrad’s next novel An Outcast of the Islands, are both told in the third-person limited voice. Conrad changes those limits as the thread of the story passes from one character to another, and while many of the later more sophisticated techniques of literary impressionism are missing, this gives the work a prismatic quality. Each turn of the narrative filters the story through a new perceiver. Not only do we witness action when by Nina’s side that we would have missed with Almayer, the narrative assigns those actions different meanings. A speech that is sniveling to one set of ears is clever to another; a deceitful man is wise; an inexplicable act is justified. An excellent first novel, even if not as sophisticated as his later work. Minor Conrad is better than major ___.

One effect of Conrad’s literary impressionism is that Marlow, where he is the narrator, tells us much more than he actually says. I alluded to this the other day in reference to gaps in the text that can only be filled by a sympathetic reader. You have to know a lot, or at least be familiar with a lot, to put together much of what Marlow says into a fuller story.

Take, from the start, Marlow’s refusal to name the Company, the River, the sepulchral city. For a reader not terribly familiar with geography, it might not be clear that he’s traveling up the Congo. For one not terribly familiar with history, the identity of Brussels and the Belgian Congo might have been similarly unclear. How about the “vast amount of red” Marlow sees on a map, the sign “that some real work is done in there?” That one seems like it should be easier, at least in theory, but there is an effort required in piecing together many of these details. Of course, there is a significance in the fact that Marlow doesn’t name these things—the sepulchral city is more than just Brussels—but it still presupposes a certain knowledge base, a certain sympathy, and a certain level of historico-cultural awareness.

Of course, Conrad is very good at what he does, and that often means this process of understanding is invisible. After all, it’s supposed to mimic a more naturalistic way of telling stories, and it does. Here’s Marlow’s description of the first river station he stops at, 30 miles from the sea:

“At last we opened a reach. A rocky cliff appeared, mounds of turned-up earth by the shore, houses on a hill, others with iron roofs, amongst a waste of excavations, or hanging to the declivity. A continuous noise of the rapids above hovered over this scene of inhabited devastation. A lot of people, mostly black and naked, moved about like ants. A jetty projected into the river. A blinding sunlight drowned all this at times in a sudden recrudescence of glare. ‘There’s your Company’s station,’ said the Swede, pointing to three wooden barrack-like structures on the rocky slope. ‘I will send your things up. Four boxes did you say? So. Farewell.’

“I came upon a boiler wallowing in the grass, then found a path leading up the hill. It turned aside for the boulders, and also for an undersized railway-truck lying there on its back with its wheels in the air. One was off. The thing looked as dead as the carcass of some animal. I came upon more pieces of decaying machinery, a stack of rusty rails. To the left a clump of trees made a shady spot, where dark things seemed to stir feebly. I blinked, the path was steep. A horn tooted to the right, and I saw the black people run. A heavy and dull detonation shook the ground, a puff of smoke came out of the cliff, and that was all. No change appeared on the face of the rock. They were building a railway. The cliff was not in the way or anything; but this objectless blasting was all the work going on.”

How many readers hesitate over “this scene of inhabited devastation”? That is a serious question; I really do not know. This is all Marlow actually says: excavations are evident in an inhabited area; there is devatation; people move about; two pieces of heavy equipment are lying in the grass; machinery is rusting nearby; and men are working at blasting away a cliff that doesn’t need blasting. The boiler and the railway-truck, do people wonder why they are so out of place? Has there been some kind of natural disaster, tearing up earth and tossing earthly goods willy-nilly around the riverbank? And why is this “objectless blasting” going on—who would do such a thing?

Marlow’s listeners know the answers to all these questions, of course, as do I, and of course many, many other readers of Heart of Darkness. It is perfectly possible that some others do not. The novella would be difficult for them to understand. It would be something like if A Clockwork Orange didn’t just replace words for words in its fairly simple code, but words for entire sentences.

And while the average reader may not have trouble with the broad strokes of passages like this, there are still plenty of other ways to bring more or less understanding to the text. There could be finer points about colonization, or about the meaning of an item of clothing, or, as is so often the case, a brief description of a character that is supposed to point to a whole person, a whole class of people even. Later, nearing the station:

“When near the buildings I met a white man, in such an unexpected elegance of get-up that in the first moment I took him for a sort of vision. I saw a high starched collar, white cuffs, a light alpaca jacket, snowy trousers, a clean necktie, and varnished boots. No hat. Hair parted, brushed, oiled, under a green-lined parasol held in a big white hand. He was amazing, and had a penholder behind his ear.

“I shook hands with this miracle, and I learned he was the Company’s chief accountant, and that all the book-keeping was done at this station. He had come out for a moment, he said, ‘to get a breath of fresh air.’ The expression sounded wonderfully odd, with its suggestion of sedentary desk-life. I wouldn’t have mentioned the fellow to you at all, only it was from his lips that I first heard the name of the man who is so indissolubly connected with the memories of that time. Moreover, I respected the fellow. Yes; I respected his collars, his vast cuffs, his brushed hair. His appearance was certainly that of a hairdresser’s dummy; but in the great demoralization of the land he kept up his appearance. That’s backbone. His starched collars and got-up shirt-fronts were achievements of character. He had been out nearly three years; and, later, I could not help asking him how he managed to sport such linen. He had just the faintest blush, and said modestly, ‘I’ve been teaching one of the native women about the station. It was difficult. She had a distaste for the work.’ Thus this man had verily accomplished something. And he was devoted to his books, which were in apple-pie order.”

What do you think about this man? What does Marlow think about him? What does Conrad think about him? How do you know you’re right about your answers to any of those questions?

I realize, of course, that plenty of literature requires background knowledge for full understanding, and that it can include things like understanding when a character is dressed properly or well or badly or that sort of thing. But typically, in earlier work, that information was left out simply because it would have seemed obvious to readers. Conrad and Marlow are doing something stronger, more active. Count how many times Marlow interjects “you know” into the story he is telling his colleagues. He is sitting on the deck of a ship telling them a story; he knows who they are and he knows, broadly, what they know. He can say, “You are sympathetic listeners, and I am going to assume we share a common pool of understanding and feeling. You know.”

Unlike in The Good Soldier, where Dowell is explicitly writing his story down and has no real audience, in Heart of Darkness Marlow is spinning his yarn out loud to a definite audience. There is a narrator in the frame, a first-person narrator who is relaxing on the deck of the Nellie with four colleagues, all of whom know each other well, including Marlow. As Marlow begins his tale, the narrator describes him:

He was the only man of us who still ‘followed the sea’. The worst that could be said of him was that he did not represent his class. He was a seaman, but he was a wanderer too, while most seamen lead, if one may so express it, a sedentary life. Their minds are of the stay-at-home order, and their home is always with them—the ship; and so is their country—the sea. One ship is very much like another, and the sea is always the same. In the immutability of their surroundings the foreign shores, the foreign faces, the changing immensity of life, glide past, veiled not by a sense of mystery but by a slightly disdainful ignorance; for there is nothing mysterious to a seaman unless it be the sea itself, which is the mistress of his existence and as inscrutable as Destiny. For the rest, after his hours of work, a casual stroll or a casual spree on shore suffices to unfold for him the secret of a whole continent, and generally he finds the secret not worth knowing. The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.

Here the narrator does an admirable job of preparing us for Marlow’s tale. There are two important things about Marlow revealed here. First, his interests differ from those of the typical seaman, going far beyond the sea only, and the coasts, and his understanding is deep enough to know he cannot understand something from only a “casual stroll.” For Marlow, even months upcountry are not enough to “unfold for him the secret of a whole continent.” They are enough for him to begin to know that secret, but only enough to know how mysterious it is. This is the content part of Marlow’s yarn.

The narrator also prepares us for the form of Marlow’s yarn. Marlow’s impressionistic method of narration imparts a tale the same way “a glow brings out a haze.” His meaning will be seen as through a veil, because he sees it through a veil, and he tells his listeners exactly what he sees.

As Marlow begins to get on with the tale he will tell that night, the narrator explains that “we knew we were fated, before the ebb began to run, to hear about one of Marlow’s inconclusive experiences.” Inconclusive! Not only is Marlow’s tale inconclusive, but its listeners know it will be beforehand because that is the only kind of tale Marlow tells—the only kind he is capable of telling, because inconclusive experiences are the only kind he’s capable of having. He has just come off saying of the Belgian Congo:

They grabbed what they could get for the sake of what was to be got. It was just robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale, and men going at it blind—as is very proper for those who tackle a darkness. 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. What redeems it is the idea only. 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…

Those ellipses are Marlow’s. They will come back, again and again, as he is forced to trail off rather than conclude. In Cedric Watts’s excellent rebuttal of Achebe, “‘A Bloody Racist’: About Achebe’s View of Conrad,” he cautions against readings that would turn Marlow’s inconclusive story full of paradoxes into a simple series of binary contradictions that add up to nothing—or rather, to an overarching epistemological skepticism. Instead, we must follow “the direction taken by the major ironies as the tale unfolds. That recurrent pattern (assurance sought, apparently offered, then undermined) becomes more evident as we read on.” The above quote from Marlow is used as part of an example. After first musing that “efficiency” could justify imperialism, but recalling the efficiency of the Romans at violence, he considers the possibility of this “unselfish idea.” And he trails off here as he remembers one who did have such an idea—Kurtz—and how that turned out. But the constant undermining doesn’t leave us with nothing. As Watts notes, “Conrad’s moral and political indignations are too substantial” for that.

I have a feeling, based mostly on assumptions and a conversation on the subject with the consumption partner, that many readers of Heart of Darkness come away from the novella with a different idea than me about Mr. Kurtz, the man who has successfully sent back so much ivory from the interior and who must be rescued by Marlow, dying on the journey back to the river’s mouth.

Achebe said, in a discussion around the lecture/essay I posted about yesterday, that in Heart of Darkness, “[t]he Africans are the rudimentaries, and then on top are the good whites.” What good whites would those be? There is, as far as I can see, only one that is even halfway good, and that’s Marlow. Upon which the CP suggested to me that perhaps for some, Kurtz is indeed good—or at least, well-intentioned, somehow. Take, for example, the clear incompetence of the whites downriver, compared with Kurtz who does send down that ivory.

In fact it is that very competence, and how he comes by it, that makes Kurtz so much worse than all the others. We get the first hints of this in regards to Marlow, back in Belgium. In procuring for him the post as steamer-captain, Marlow’s aunt apparently represented him as “an exceptional and gifted creature,” and this means he is now regarded as

one of the Workers, with a capital—you know. Something like an emissary of light, something like a lower sort of apostle. There had been a lot of such rot let loose in print and talk just about that time, and the excellent woman, living right in the rush of all that humbug, got carried off her feet. She talked about “weaning those ignorant millions from their horrid ways,” till, upon my word, she made me quite uncomfortable. I ventured to hint that the Company was run for profit.

Thirty miles up the mouth of the river, it is from an agent whose “starched collars and got-up shirt fronts were achievements of character” that Marlow first hears of Kurtz:

“In the interior you will no doubt meet Mr Kurtz.” On my asking who Mr Kurtz was, he said he was a first-class agent; and seeing my disappointment at this information, he added slowly, laying down his pen, “He is a very remarkable person.” Further questions elicited from him that Mr Kurtz was at present in charge of a trading post, a very important one, in the true ivory-country, at “the very bottom of there. Sends in as much ivory as all the others put together…”

Next, at the Central Station, where it’s considered “quite correct” that the steamer Marlow is to captain has sunk, Marlow learns Kurtz is rumored to be ill. “Ah! So they talk of him down there,” the agent says on hearing Marlow already knows the name. “Then he began again, assuring me Mr Kurtz was the best agent he had, an exceptional man, of the greatest important to the Company; therefore I could understand his anxiety.”

At Central Station, Marlow finds himself being curiously pumped for information of his own, of which he has of course none. Here he sees Kurtz’s painting, the first sign that the man who is sending down all the ivory is about more than just profit, prompting him to ask, once more, “who is this Mr Kurtz?”

“He is a prodigy,” he said at last. “He is an emissary of pity and science and progress, and devil knows what else. We want,” he began to declaim suddenly, “for the guidance of the cause entrusted to us by Europe, so to speak, higher intelligence, wide sympathies, a singleness of purpose.” “Who says that?” I asked. “Lots of them,” he replied. “Some even write that; and so he comes here, a special being, as you ought to know. …You are of the new gang—the gang of virtue.”

Marlow is nothing of the sort; this is a misunderstanding based on his aunt’s recommendation of him to the Company. But the conversation about Kurtz goes on, revealing him as a “‘universal genius,’ but even a genius would find it easier to work with ‘adequate tools—intelligent men.’” When Marlow begins to fear he will not make it up the river before Kurtz is dead, he realizes that it’s talking to the man he will miss most:

The man presented himself as a voice. Not of course that I did not connect him with some sort of action. Hadn’t I been told in all the tones of jealousy and admiration that he had collected, bartered, swindled, or stolen more ivory than all the other agents together? That was not the point. The point was in his being a gifted creature, and that of all his gifts the one that stood out pre-eminently, that carried with it a sense of real presence, was his ability to talk, his words—the gift of expression, the bewildering, the illuminating, the most exalted and the most contemptible, the pulsating stream of light, or the deceitful flow from the heart of an impenetrable darkness.

That voice wrote a pamphlet, for the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs, “a beautiful piece of writing” that “soared and took [Marlow] with him,” with a postscript “scrawled evidently much later,” that read only: “Exterminate the brutes!”

Marlow says he has “remained loyal to Kurtz,” because “[h]e had something to say” and “[h]e said it.” But a journalist who calls on Marlow after Kurtz’s death really nails it, noting that Kurtz should have been a politician, “on the popular side,” “a splendid leader of an extreme party,” charming, electric, and persuasive as he was. And the Intended insists, in the face of Marlow’s despair, on Kurtz’s greatness. What a loss he is “[t]o the world”! “It is impossible that all this should be lost—that such a life should be sacrified to leave nothing—but sorrow. You know what vast plans he had.”

These plans, though, so well thought of by the Company, by his Intended, by the educated, progressive folk back in Europe, what did they amount to? A series of heads on pikes surrounding his house, for one thing.

[T]he manager said afterwards that Mr Kurtz’s methods had ruined the district. I have no opinion on that point, but I want you clearly to understand that there was nothing exactly profitable in these heads being there. They only showed that Mr Kurtz lacked restraint in the gratification of his various lusts, that there was something wanting in him—some small matter which, when the pressing need arose, could not be found under his magnificent eloquence.

After setting out so much of the case about Kurtz, let me take that statement as something of a key. There are, we can say, two broad types of men in the Company: those who simply want to enrich themselves at the expense of the natives and their country, and those who want to do this in the name of something much greater, progress and civilization. The latter is certainly more in vogue; Kurtz and, hilariously, Marlow, are the up-and-comers, and it actually appears their methods also bring in greater riches. But it’s these very ideas that leave Kurtz crying out about “the horror” on his death-bed.

Kurtz’s project depends on a belief in the perfectability of humans. His project for de-savage-ifying the natives rests clearly on this idea—which he’s just as clearly had to abandon by the time he gets to his post-script. And the whole way he intends to run the Inner Station depends on his own “magnificence” and ability to carry out whatever it is he sets out to do. Kurtz is a precursor to the technocrats Tietjens disdains in Parade’s End, all his “ideas” amounting to nothing more than hubris about his abilities and capability to act as a kind of supernatural god-king to the natives. As long as the right people are in charge—and certainly Kurtz is the right people—why shouldn’t the Belgians be able to run the Congo just fine, like ivory-producing, cannibalism-abandoning clockwork?

That “something wanting in him—some small matter which…could not be found under his magnificent eloquence” is simply superhuman infallibility, and “the horror” is his need to come to terms not only with the failure of his own station and his own pamphlet and his own life, but with the whole idea that smart people with ideas can fix the problems of the world with eloquent talking.

But I have a feeling that many people focus on Marlow’s wry statement about “nothing exactly profitable in these heads being there,” as an indictment of the Company’s complicity in the whole affair along the Congo. Certainly the company does not come off well in any way, but what Kurtz has done takes more than ivory-lust; it takes the self-regard of the progressive for his abilities to understand his fellow humans and use that understanding to mold them to his will.

Chinua Achebe says of Kurtz that he “should have heeded that warning [that Africa is to be avoided] and the prowling horror in his heart would have kept its place, chained to its lair. But he foolishly exposed himself to the wild irresistible allure of the jungle and lo! the darkness found him out.” But Kurtz is not a “wayward child of civilization”; he is the child of civilization, the next rung in the ladder. Warned away from Africa, he would have found plenty of “others” needing civilizing among whites I am sure.

I’ve avoided really writing about Conrad so many times because I find it difficult, and I’ve been avoiding it again for several weeks now. But I’m just going to have to dive into it, since anyone who’s been watching my sidebar or my tweets knows I’m making my way through too many of his works to ignore right now.

And I’m going to have to start, it looks like, with that most ticklish of works, Heart of Darkness. I was inspired to re-read the novella in the exact same way I was inspired to re-read The Good Soldier just days earlier. In the case of the latter, I had read a blog post on the novel complaining of how horrid, conceited, and arrogant Ford was, evidenced by how horrid, conceited, and arrogant Dowell was, by a reader who, to boot, thought Dowell was actually making up all the business about Florence not being a heart patient. Someone is wrong on the internet! In the case of the former, I had been talking in person with someone who had picked Conrad up again after a long separation, and was enjoying it “in spite of his casual racism.” Ah, that! So I decided to do a bit of questing, knowing especially that these two authors must not be confused with their narrators. (Don’t you just hate Nabokov for being an ephebophile? No, don’t tell me—I know people really do.)

I had remembered the novella, based on my first reading, as rather anti-colonialist, and found it even more so this time. I think there are superficial qualities of the novella that can appear racist, in addition to the fact that you could call basically anything pre-Civil Rights movement “racist”: Some Europeans find mystery and destruction in the dark, inscrutable wilds around the Congo River, as the natives, “savages,” look on and whirl their black limbs in dance. Africa is the metaphor for the “heart of darkness” in all of us, and so forth. To choose metaphors of this nature is now widely considered inappropriate, or at best, highly questionable. But overall, Heart of Darkness is not really about Africa.

Achebe roundly rejects this defense of the novella in his essay, based on a lecture, “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’”:

Students of Heart of Darkness will often tell you that Conrad is concerned not so much with Africa as with the deterioration of one European mind caused by solitude and sickness. They will point out to you that Conrad is, if anything, less charitable to the Europeans in the story than he is to the natives, that the point of the story is to ridicule Europe’s civilizing mission in Africa. A Conrad student informed me in Scotland that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz.

Which is partly the point. Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind?

Anything can be “merely a setting.” A personal distate for the necessary reduction—and it is a reduction—that must take place for anything to be used as a prop or setting may well be enough to make a reader hate a novel, and the response may be quite appropriate—“this is too important to me for me to countenance it treated as a side issue.” But Achebe can’t decide what Conrad’s book was about, or should have been about, and it’s really just not about Africans. Further, the idea that Africa and its people have been thus reduced “for the break-up of one petty European mind” belies, I believe, a misreading of Kurtz (more on that tomorrow).

Achebe also rejects the notion that he is misreading Conrad entirely by attributing explicitly to Conrad everything that must in fact be attributed to Marlow:

Certainly Conrad appears to go to considerable pains to set up layers of insulation between himself and the moral universe of his history. He has, for example, a narrator behind a narrator. The primary narrator is Marlow but his account is given to us through the filter of a second, shadowy person. But if Conrad’s intention is to draw a cordon sanitaire between himself and the moral and psychological malaise of his narrator his care seems to me totally wasted because he neglects to hint however subtly or tentatively at an alternative frame of reference by which we may judge the actions and opinions of his characters. It would not have been beyond Conrad’s power to make that provision if he had thought it necessary. Marlow seems to me to enjoy Conrad’s complete confidence—a feeling reinforced by the close similarities between their two careers.

I would agree that Marlow does “enjoy Conrad’s…confidence” to a large degree, certainly to a larger degree than, say, Dowell does Ford’s. But there is a difference between the cordon sanitaire and the use of Marlow as the much-needed perceiver for Conrad’s project in literary impressionism. I believe several of Achebe’s other complaints are really against this whole mode of storytelling, as opposed to more traditional methods of realism that don’t rely on a medium like Marlow, howevermuch like Conrad himself he may be. For example:

In the final consideration [Conrad's] method amounts to no more than a steady, ponderous, fake-ritualistic repetition of two antithetical sentences, one about silence and the other about frenzy. We can inspect samples of this on pages 36 and 37 of the present edition: a) it was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention and b) The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. Of course there is a judicious change of adjective from time to time, so that instead of inscrutable, for example, you might have unspeakable, even plain mysterious, etc., etc.

The eagle-eyed English critic F. R. Leavis drew attention long ago to Conrad’s “adjectival insistence upon inexpressible and incomprehensible mystery.” That insistence must not be dismissed lightly, as many Conrad critics have tended to do, as a mere stylistic flaw; for it raises serious questions of artistic good faith. When a writer while pretending to record scenes, incidents and their impact is in reality engaged in inducing hypnotic stupor in his readers through a bombardment of emotive words and other forms of trickery much more has to be at stake than stylistic felicity. Generally normal readers are well armed to detect and resist such under-hand activity. But Conrad chose his subject well—one which was guaranteed not to put him in conflict with the psychological predisposition of his readers or raise the need for him to contend with their resistance. He chose the role of purveyor of comforting myths.

Basically, Conrad’s whole chosen mode of narration here is characterized as an “under-hand” method useful only for “purvey[ing]…comforting myths.” Whereas of course he and Ford would argue that this is simply the most realistic way to tell a story, that the repetition of these adjectives is not a stylistic flaw but key to the intended progression d’effet. This is “trickery” in the very way that writing a novel is trickery. Similarly, the question of when and how the black characters in the novella are given language versus only grunts depends on Marlow’s perceptions. Conrad engineers all this, but can Marlow be expected to understand what is actually going on among the natives? There is simply no omniscient third-person narrator to make the story “even.”

Then again, readings like Achebe’s show a major weakness in exactly the kind of impressionism that Conrad and Ford were working to develop. As I noted last week, Arthur Mizener explains the issue in “Ford, Dowell, and the Sex Instinct”: “[w]e can know how to take a dramatized narrator only if we share the author’s values. The author cannot tell the reader what these are; each reader must guess; and what each reader usually guesses is that the author has the same values he has.” Certainly Achebe doesn’t assume Conrad shares his same values, and he probably doesn’t. But the method can leave such a reader floating with difficulty through the dramatized narrator’s story. There are so many gaps between what the text actually says and what Marlow is getting across to his listeners, and these can only be filled in by the sympathetic reader.

Here, for example, I think Achebe misunderstands Marlow on some level—whom he calls, insistently, Conrad:

Having shown us Africa in the mass, Conrad then zeros in, half a page later, on a specific example, giving us one of his rare descriptions of an African who is not just limbs or rolling eyes:

And between whiles I had to look after the savage who was fireman. He was an improved specimen; he could fire up a vertical boiler. He was there below me and, upon my word, to look at him was as edifying as seeing 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. He squinted at the steam-gauge and at the water-gauge with an evident effort of intrepidity—and he had filed his teeth too, the poor devil, and the wool of his pate shaved into queer patterns, and three ornamental scars on each of his cheeks. He ought to have been clapping his hands and stamping his feet on the bank, instead of which he was hard at work, a thrall to strange witchcraft, full of improving knowledge.

As everybody knows, Conrad is a romantic on the side. He might not exactly admire savages clapping their hands and stamping their feet but they have at least the merit of being in their place, unlike this dog in a parody of breeches. For Conrad things being in their place is of the utmost importance.

Achebe hits on something with this “being in their place” idea, but not, I think, what he actually claims. The problem with this fireman is that he is not in his place because he has been meddled with by idiot colonials, who don’t know what they are doing, who are hopelessly incompetent, who are engaged in an immoral and vastly wasteful project, and who have harmed this man and his innate dignity by turning him into this parody of a European. In turn, the reason it matters that the black cannibals rowing their own canoes under their own power are “in their place” is that their place is theirs by rights, and for them to be out of it means someone has taken them out of it, taken their native human dignity, and made a mockery of it in the service of a ridiculous idea of “improving” them. The irony fairly oozes out of that passage from Marlow and it’s certainly not because the fireman is, shall we say, “uppity.”

One final quote from Achebe for today:

For reasons which can certainly use close psychological inquiry the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa. If Europe, advancing in civilization, could cast a backward glance periodically at Africa trapped in primordial barbarity it could say with faith and feeling: There go I but for the grace of God.

Is Heart of Darkness a reassurance for Europe, or a warning? Not the warning Achebe gives here, though, but the warning that the skin of civilization is paper-thin and getting thinner just as it tries to “advance.” This brings me to a good stopping point before tomorrow’s post, which will address Kurtz. Though there is relatively little in Achebe’s essay about Kurtz, I believe he misreads him, and I suspect many contemporary readers do as well—at least, according to me.

I admit it is absurd to be concerned with the morals of one’s ship-chandler, if ever so well connected, but his personality had stamped itself upon my first day in harbour, in the way you know.

Or at least, in the way I know. This is the narrator of Joseph Conrad’s novella A Smile of Fortune, lamenting his minor obsession with Jacobus, a ship-chandler on a Pacific island. Told by his company to seek out a Jacobus to refit his ship, the narrator, a captain, is surprised to find the man aboard his ship the first morning it’s in harbor, bearing a delicious breakfast to win the captain’s business with. This is all highly irregular, and there is something a bit off about Jacobus. But the narrator tries to ignore these issues as trivial and begins to conduct his business with Jacobus.

Before long, the captain finds out that his Jacobus is actually the brother of the one recommended by the company, and considered throughout the island rather a scandalous character. He has a daughter hidden away at home, the product of an ill-starred romance with a circus performer who abandoned them both. The other Jacobus is “good,” and the two haven’t spoken in years. But when the captain finally does meet the good brother, he is far more scandalized: this Jacobus has an unacknowledged, illegitimate mixed-race son working for him, whom he beats.

The captain doesn’t much enjoy having to stand up to the talk of the town by doing business with the first Jacobus, but he does. And in the process he ends up even more obsessed with this Jacobus’s daughter, Alice. She’s mysterious and antisocial and strangely irresistible. “I felt myself growing attached to her by the bond of an irrealisable desire, for I kept my head—quite,” he tells us—or himself. But he’s right that the desire is irrealisable.

Both these quotes come from the heart of what I would call the “Conrad intelligent nonintellectual narrator.” Freya of the Seven Isles has one too. The Secret Sharer has a particularly amazing example. The captain is thoughtful, introspective, down-to-earth, extremely rational while still being subject to heavy emotion. Salley Vickers describes him in her foreword to the Hesperus edition of the novella (the last Hesperus in the house!) as “a man of depth and philosphical temperament, the kind of man Conrad loves to write about: something of a loner, though clearly a man of sensibility and social polish, who looks at life with a wry and often wary eye.”

It’s safe to say these characters are at least half the reason I read and love Conrad, and A Smile of Fortune is a good read, though not one of his best. And the captain isn’t the only good character; the main Jacobus and his daughter are compelling. And it’s as if the whole island has a deep psychological effect on the captain. He is changed during his time in port here.

Twenty years after Stevenson’s Falesá, Joseph Conrad published Freya of the Seven Isles, centered on the more civilized—or, better, more trafficked—islands of the East Indies. Its narrator is spurred by a letter from a friend still in the Eastern islands to reminisce about old Nelson, more properly called Nielsen but vaguely posing as an Englishman. Nelson set up a house and small tobacco farm in an isolated spot at least nominally controlled by the Dutch and once he was fairly settled he invited his daughter Freya to join him.

Freya is young, beautiful, blonde, and rather spectacular as a person and as a woman. Conrad foreshadows if not inspires Jane Campion in the narrator’s first encounter with Freya, before she even arrives:

As the first and most important preparation for that event the old fellow ordered from his Singapore agent a Steyn and Ebhart’s “upright grand.” I was then commanding a little steamer in the island trade, and it fell to my lot to take it out to him, so I know something of Freya’s “upright grand.” We landed the enormous packing-case wtih difficulty on a flat piece of rock amongst some bushes, nearly knocking the bottom out of one of my boats in the course of that nautical operation. Then, all my crew assisting, engineers and firemen included, by the exercise of much anxious ingenuity, and by means of rollers, levers, tackles, and inclined planes of soaped planks, toiling in the sun like ancient Egyptians at the building of a pyramid, we got it as far as the house and up on to the edge of the west verandah—which was the actual drawing-room of the bungalow. …It was certainly the heaviest movable object on that islet since the creation of the world. The volume of sound it gave out in that bungalow (which acted as a sounding-board) was really astonishing. It thundered sweetly right over the sea.

Bringing a feminizing influence to these islands has the appearance of civilization, with all its attendant difficulties and the impressiveness of masculine strength and human resourcefulness. But it’s the thunder—sweet as it may be—that Freya, as a woman, really brings.

The narrator becomes quite good friends with Freya and understands her in a way the other characters do not. Her suitor is Jasper Allen, a brash young man with a lovely little brig called the Bonito. He and Freya plan to run away together on it when she comes of age. But the Dutch Lieutenant Heemskirk, captain of a steamer, also has his eye on the young woman. Freya’s father, unaware of her feelings of love for Jasper and disdain for Heemskirk, is most concerned with avoiding entanglements with the Dutch authorities and so encourages the friendly visits of the steamer captain. Allen and Heemskirk clash quietly and fruitlessly until a final ineradicable break that Freya both causes and handles beautifully.

Heemskirk succeeds in dashing the hopes of the young couple by dashing Allen’s beautiful brig on a reef. Again, only the narrator can understand what’s really happened. Allen is a broken man not simply because his ship is lost, but because his whole future life and love was predicated on that ship. Freya doesn’t simply succumb to tropical illness; even years later the narrator must shout at her father, now back in London and an old and broken man himself, that she died for love.

The novella is an ode to Freya, lauded for being so “sensible” but in the end inscrutable to so many around her. Does Conrad get women right here? For me, in a surprising way perhaps, he does. Freya makes the island bungalow into a home; she maintains lines of communication and conversation between men; she loves genuinely but with a grounded core that the excitable Jasper Allen doesn’t have. She reigns over this domain of the seven isles but has a better idea than anyone how slight is her power to attain her goals. “Upon my word you are wonderful,” the narrator tells her, and she is never more so than when she stands on her verandah throwing kisses across the water to Jasper, then thundering out furious chords from her upright grand in Heemskirk’s unloveable wake.