"Who the devil was he? - Conrad tells his story

The most remarkable single chapter of Nostromo is Part III, Chapter 10, about five-sixths of the way in, which in a properly structured novel would be where the action ramps up and races to a thrilling conclusion.  That is exactly what Joseph Conrad does, but in his own perverse way.

At this point, the great action scene in the novel has involved three men on a boat in the dark, keep perfectly still, perfectly quiet, while trying to make out the actions of another boat that is perfectly still and quiet.  The scene is tense and terrifying, but also so static that it is amusing, in retrospect, to think of how exciting it was.  Well, now there ought to be some more action.  There has been a revolution in Sulaco, and the title character, thought to be killed, but no!, has been sent off to the rescue.

In this chapter, the fussy Captain Mitchell takes a guest on a tour of the city.  Conrad has flung the chapter into the future – how far is not clear – so that the Captain is telling his guest about the story that I thought I was going to read in a more direct fashion.  Conrad is deliberately telling, not showing, and the teller only has the most general comprehension of the events he is relating.  Even though it would seem that the Captain knows more than I do, having the privilege of living in the future, he understands less, so that as the blowhard fills me in, the gap between what I know and what he knows expands.  Irony, is what I mean.

Much of Conrad’s previous fiction was narrated by a master ironist, his stand-in Marlow, a story-teller so skilled that his dexterity raised suspicions.  What is Marlow not telling me?  He always seems to know more than I do.  Captain Mitchell is a parody, a pedant and a fool.  He tells too much, and not enough.  As he tells the story – how the hero Nostromo made his way to the allied army, how the revolution was suppressed, and so on – Conrad slips more and more over to the poor sap stuck on the tour along with me:

‘Abominable Pedrito!  Who the devil was he?’ would wonder the distinguished bird of passage hovering on the confines of waking and sleep with resolutely open eyes and a faint but amiable curl upon his lips, from between which stuck out the eighteenth or twentieth cigar of that memorable day.  (III.10)

What a strange sentence.  Pure Conrad.  The “distinguished bird of passage” is the visitor, bored out of his mind, stupefied by tobacco; the abominable Pedrito is a major figure in the revolution but a minor character in the novel, meaning that the distinguished bird is a deliberate substitute for the poor reader who just wants to know if Nostromo made his way back and if the silver mine was dynamited or not and whatever happened to that poor French fop Martin Decoud after the accident with the boat.  No, first, I get Pedrito.  Nothing wrong with asking who the devil he was.

Since Conrad’s narrator is genuinely omnipotent, and is more interested in irony than suspense, before the chapter ends I do get answers to all of my questions, including plenty of detail that no one alive would know, things even Marlow could not tell me.  Conrad never cheats.

I have read a number of other novels like Nostromo, but they were all written later, by people who had read it.

his profound knowledge of men and things - notes on Nostromo

What a relief – I have been reading Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904) – that some novelist finally figured out that 1) stories do not have to be told like a medieval chronicle – “and then, and then” – and 2) that entire scenes – important­ scenes – can simply be skipped.  And there the story is, as intact, as told, as ever.

Henry James had figured this out around the same time as Conrad, as I saw in The Wings of the Dove.  I know, we can think of plenty – well, some – earlier examples. There’s that sequence in Ivanhoe (1820) of parallel chapters, right?  At the siege?  You know.

Nostromo is a bit of a thriller, even a bit of a heist story, so the time jumps could be used for suspense, but are instead generally used for irony.  Conrad moves me forward in one strand of the story so that when he goes back to pick up another strand, I know more than the characters.  This is a form of suspense, I suppose, but the question is what events will erupt when the characters learn what I know.  I bet they’ll be surprised!

The first chapter is hardly something that belongs in a novel at all.  It is more of a geography, but of a fictional town in a fictional country, Costaguana, that has some resemblance to Colombia.  Much of the chapter is about the exact arrangement of the islands in the harbor, some of which can be immediately forgotten, some of which is crucial to understanding the story.  A little inset tale about the ghosts of doomed treasure-hunters foreshadows the plot, but otherwise there are barely people in this chapter.

The second introduces some people, including Captain Mitchell, “’Fussy Joe’ for the commanders of the Company’s Ships, Captain Joseph Mitchell prided himself on his profound knowledge of men and things in the country – cosas de Costaguana” (I.2).

All of the Conrad I have read, aside from The Secret Agent (1907) and “The Secret Sharer” (1908) has been from the fertile period of 1897 to 1902, the time of the southeast Asian seas or his stand-in narrator Marlow or both, in Lord Jim (1900), say.  My understanding is that Conrad had something of an artistic crisis that moved him elsewhere, to the London anarchists of The Secret Agent and here, earlier, to the remote Pacific province of a South American country that he had visited once, twenty-five years earlier, and that he mostly patched together from a couple of books.  He fooled me, at least.  I was convinced.  Some of the extraneous history Conrad includes made me think that that Nostromo was a precursor of The Lord of the Rings.  World-building is what I believe people call this.

The other break is the Captain Mitchell character, an anti-Marlow.  In a novel by an ironist, we can guess that anyone who prides himself on his profound knowledge is actually a fool, which makes Captain Mitchell a great recurring narrative device: when Conrad needs someone who does not really understand what is going on, here he is.  Irony ensues.

Patrick Kurp writes that he is currently reading Nostromo for “moral education.”  I wonder what he is learning.  I will likely write one more repetitive post about how events are not quite in order.  That’s what I learned.

"Pass the bottle" - Conrad's narrators narrate ("Youth" & "The Secret Sharer")

“Youth: A Narrative” (1898) and “The Secret Sharer” (1910), by Joseph Conrad, perfect epitomes of Conrad in fact.  Sea stories in the Far East with voluble ship captain narrators.  Although there are degree of volubility.  I was going to write that the narrator of “The Secret Sharer” is not Conrad’s alter ego Marlow but might as well be, but then I thought to read “Youth,” the first appearance of Marlow (“at least I think that is how he spelt his name,” ha ha).  If Marlow had narrated “The Secret Sharer” it would be twice as long.  Marlow is much more digressive.  He performs his stories, like a bard, with a refrain of “Pass the bottle.”

Conrad and Marlow are almost cheating in “Youth,” since it is about a ship with a cargo of coal that catches fire, an adventure that does not need a writer as good as Conrad to make it exciting and original.

“Between the darkness of earth and heaven she was burning fiercely upon a disc of purple sea shot by the blood-red play of gleams; upon a disc of water glittering and sinister.  A high, clear flame, an immense and lonely flame, ascended from the ocean, and from its summit the black smoke poured continuously at the sky. She burned furiously, mournful and imposing like a funeral pile kindled in the night, surrounded by the sea, watched over by the stars. A magnificent death had come like a grace, like a gift, like a reward to that old ship at the end of her laborious days. The surrender of her weary ghost to the keeping of stars and sea was stirring like the sight of a glorious triumph.”

All of this spoken, late at night, “round a mahogany table” to an audience of “a director of companies, an accountant, a lawyer, Marlow, and myself,” all former sailors who knew that when Marlow is ready to tell a story, stop what you are doing – unless what you are doing is getting out the booze – and settle in.

It is not clear whom, if anyone other than himself, the narrator of “The Secret Sharer” is addressing.  He is a captain with his first command who comes across an officer who has fled his own ship because he killed a man during a storm.  The captain ought to arrest the man, but instead makes him a stowaway, hiding him in his cabin.  Much of the text of the story is about the elaborate steps the captain has to take to prevent the discovery of the stowaway.  Finally, the captain endangers his own ship to allow the fugitive to escape.

The narrator does not appear to know why he behaved so strangely, and at such risk to himself and others, why he feels alienated from his own crew, why he was so unthinkingly sympathetic to the fugitive, who he appeared to take as some kind of double.  I suppose the text is the result of the narrator searching his own story for clues.  As in Lord Jim and perhaps Heart of Darkness and possibly even “Youth,” the narrator’s obsessive attention to the story, the significance with which he imbues the story, becomes the real story.  I see why Conrad could not use Marlow here, though.  Marlow is too self-aware.  In “The Secret Sharer,” the narrator seems to be trying to uncover his own secrets.

I do not know what he finds.  I am not such a good reader of Conrad.  File all this away.

The appalling and calm solitudes awaiting the breath of future creations - some Lord Jim puzzles

What’s going on with the narrator in Lord Jim?  It puzzles me.  Not Marlow-the-narrator, but the other one, the semi-invisible, semi-omniscient one.  He has the first four chapters and twenty pages to himself before Marlow appears, his performance already in motion, to circle around the story of what happened to Jim out on that ship, what he did that was so bad, why he acts like it is worse than it was.  I think I basically get what Marlow is up to, at least.

My misreading of Lord Jim is that Marlow stretches a simple martyr complex to unnecessary lengths for his own dramatic reasons – another presentation of the Great Marlow Show.  “You thrilled to the spear attack, you shivered at ‘The horror, the horror’!  Marlow is back with another existential shocker” etc. etc.  I would have to reread the novel to build this up, though.

In the meantime, Omniscient Conrad.  Here’s how he writes (Jim is on the deck of a cargo ship which for some reason is full of passengers to Mecca):

The thin gold shaving of the moon floating slowly downwards had lost itself on the darkened surface of the waters, and the eternity beyond the sky seemed to come down nearer to the earth, with the augmented glitter of the stars, with the more profound sombreness in the lustre of the half-transparent dome covering the flat disc of an opaque sea.  The ship moved so smoothly that her onward motion was imperceptible to the senses of men, as though she had been a crowded planet speeding through the dark spaces of ether behind the swarm of suns, in the appalling and calm solitudes awaiting the breath of future creations.  'Hot is no name for it down below,' said a voice.  (Ch. 3)

This narrator mostly simulates a Flaubert-like objectivity, but he bursts into these adjective-packed passages, the kind of thing lazy reviewers now call “luminous.”  Jim is on deck, and the first sentence may attach itself to his point of view – perhaps he was looking at the moon, or is feeling the pressure of the stars.  The second sentence, though, is explicitly not Jim’s or anyone’s.  The motion is imperceptible, available only to the disembodied author and his lucky reader.

The more I look at the line, the less it seems to mean.  The ship is crowded, so the planet it resembles is likewise.  But it the planet is in a strange place – behind the stars – and not just in any old empty space but one where Yahweh moves over the waters.  For a line, Conrad creates a mythological space, but the voice that dispels it is not a demon from the underworld but just the ship’s second engineer.

I wonder what imagery or reference I am missing later in the book that should bring me back to this point and others like it, these little glimpses into the Cosmic.  Perhaps they are just flourishes, Conrad flexing his poetic impulse, giving me some enjoyably flavorful and chewy sentences.  But more likely they mean something.

I’ll do an entire week of this with some book.  Day 1: What does this mean?  Day 2:  How about this?  And so on.  Not all that different from what I usually do.

Three dirty owls - Conrad and Kipling, compared and contrasted

I read Lord Jim (1899-1900) a couple of weeks ago – when was I in France – a month ago.  Conrad’s novel  has a lot of surface similarities to Captains Courageous which I thought would make for a facile post.  I am sure I meant to type “fascinating.”  For example, they were published around the same time, and they are both seafaring novels.  Probably a lot of other similarities.

Or differences.  The core of the Conrad book is an episode in which Jim, older than fifteen but still untested, behaves shamefully during an emergency at sea.  His great desire is to be a hero, and instead he finds himself to be a coward.  That covers about half of the novel; the rest tells of Jim’s attempt, perhaps successful, perhaps not, to efface his humiliation.  I likely had Lord Jim in mind while reading Captains Courageous.  Because Kipling is writing a boys’ book, he will form his hero’s character until the boy demonstrates his heroism in the climax, saving the cod fishers from pirates, for example – the notorious Newfoundland Pirates, led by the bloodthirsty Captain Cod – while the adult novel begins with the emergency and explores its consequences.

I can see how that could make up a little post.

I won’t write it, though, because, leafing through Lord Jim, I find myself distracted by other things.  Like this:

“’They sat in the stern shoulder to shoulder, with the skipper in the middle, like three dirty owls, and stared at me,’ I heard him say with an intention of hate that distilled a corrosive virtue into the commonplace words like a drop of powerful poison falling into a glass of water; but my thoughts dwelt upon that sunrise.  I could imagine under the pellucid emptiness of the sky these four men imprisoned in the solitude of the sea, the lonely sun, regardless of the speck of life, ascending the clear curve of the heaven as if to gaze ardently from a greater height at his own splendour reflected in the still ocean.” (Ch. 10)

I tell you, that passage if nothing else is written.  Conrad wrote the heck out of it.  I find it hard to tear myself from the “three dirty owls” – that really took me by surprise.  Conrad’s prose is full of surprises.  I am not sure that particular simile is a likely one coming from this character (Jim in disgrace) in this situation (telling how he was adrift on the Indian Ocean), but I do not care much about that.  I can see them there, as if in an Edward Lear poem.  “Jim and three owls went to sea. \ Jim was clean, the owls dir-tee.”

I direct attention to the extra quotation marks.  The owls belong to Jim, but the poison and “pellucid” and ardent gaze and splendor are all Marlow, Conrad’s favorite distancing mechanism, who is supposedly saying all of this and hundreds more pages much like it in a single nighttime story-telling session, which is also not exactly likely, although I buy it, completely.  If you hear that Marlow is telling a story, do not hit the hammock early.  Stay for the whole story, even if you have to get up early the next day.

Bibliographing nicole wrote about Lord Jim a long time ago.  She covers Marlow more sensibly.  Here’s the great similarity between the Conrad and Kipling novels:  the telling in both is more interesting than the substance, but Conrad’s telling is far more complex, and is in fact part of the subject of the novel.

I see, in nicole’s comments, a pretty decent parody of Javier Marías which has my name on it, although I do not remember writing it.