In James’ notebook there exists a note from January 1887. He has just learned that until recently there lived in Florence, together with a more than fifty-year-old niece, a woman who had been Byron’s mistress and later Shelley’s, and had lived to be almost one hundred. A certain Captain Silsbee,32 a great admirer of Shelley, discovered that the old woman possessed letters from his idol and decided to live with her as a boarder with the hope of acquiring the letters. This was the germ of the story. Although The Aspern Papers, all its characters, the deceased poet, the Misses Bordereau, aunt and niece, the literato who wishes to acquire the papers, are Americans, the figure of Aspern recovers many of Byron’s traits. There is, for example, a description of the relentless pursuit to which women subjected the poet, a near copy of the letter in which Byron explained to his wife his relationships with those women whom he did not love but who doggedly pursued him. The erotic stratum that lies in the story’s subsoil allows two couples to rise to the surface: one, the great poet and lover who was Aspern, and the once beautiful Juliana Bordereau, transformed at the moment the narration begins into a kind of mummy whose face he covers in a horrible green shade, about whom “hovered… a perfume of reckless passion, an intimation that she had not been exactly as the respectable young person in general,” and, as a grotesque caricature of the immortal couple whose passion made possible some of the most intense poems in the English language, goes about creating at the same time his copy: that of an epicene narrator “devoid of any amorous tradition”33 and Juliana’s niece, the withered Tita Bordereau, who produced “an effect of irresponsible, incompetent youth which was almost comically at variance with the faded facts of her person. She was not infirm, like her aunt, but she struck me as still more helpless, because her inefficiency was spiritual.”
The novel’s plot is woven from the encounter of the Misses Bordereau with the narrator (framed by Venice in the summer, luminous and radiant, and the claustrophobic interior of a palace in ruins), from the game of skirmishes, ruses, changing positions, challenges and submissions; at its center, radiating power and conferring it on whomever possesses them, are the papers, of which both aunt and niece will successively be the custodians, and the narrator who violates the cloister in which they have separated themselves from the world and who will transform comically, tragically, melodramatically from manipulator into manipulated until meeting his ultimate defeat. The world in which the action occurs is marked by the plenitude of artifice: the cloister of the two old women, the palace in ruins, the greedy exaltation of the protagonist, the city that sinks sumptuously into twilight, all that world is inserted into the tale’s feverish and overwrought prose. The narrator’s hollowness converts the language into a parodic jargon that transforms his stratagems into grotesque simulacra.
She pretended to make light of his genius, and I took no pains to defend him. One doesn’t defend one’s god: one’s god is in himself a defense. Besides, today, after his long comparative obscuration, he hangs high in the heaven of our literature, for all the world to see; he is a part of the light by which we walk.
That is the tone. James’ genius, however, is such that, through the verbal misery inflamed in the void, he is able to convey an intense, profoundly moving, and somber tale. Because, despite the ridiculous logorrhea that conceals it, the language can, at times simply by what it omits, cause us to feel the intense passion that in another era this same palace harbored, and because of the tribulations of the destitute love that the younger of the two old women conceives for the narrator, and, above all else, because of the absolute scorn that James seems to feel for an era, his own, in which all vestige of passion has been eliminated and in which the less scrupulous characters are those who attempt to impose themselves on the world. Only personal dignity, in this case represented by the modest, naïve, and terribly unhappy Tita Bordereau, manages to confront and, at the cost of bitter sacrifices, defeat them.
LANGUAGE IS EVERYTHING. What feat of Napoleon could compare in splendor or permanence to War and Peace, Galdós’ National Episodes, The Charterhouse of Parma, or Goya’s The Disasters of War, works that paradoxically emerged from the same existence of that epic impulse? For a writer language is everything. Even form, structure, all the components of a story, plot, characters, tones, gestuality, revelation, or prophecy, are a product of language. It will always be language that announces the paths to follow. Robert Graves said that the primary obligation of the writer is to work, without granting himself truce, in, from, with, and about the word.
CONRAD, MARLOW, KURTZ. Joseph Conrad is, it must be said straight away, a brilliant novelist, one of the highest peaks of English literature, and at the same time a writer uncomfortable on that privileged Olympus. He is distinct from his contemporaries, and also from his predecessors, for the tonal opulence of his language, for his treatment of his topics, for the gaze with which he contemplates the world and men. He is a moralist who loathes sermons and moralizing. He is the author of extraordinary works of adventure which become internal experiences, journeys into the depth of night, feats that occur in the most secret folds of the soul. He is a profound expert on the immense map that makes up the British empire, and a witness whose gaze lays bare any colonizing endeavor. He is an “odd one” in the most radical sense of the word. A novelist alien to any school, who enriched English literature with a handful of exceptional novels, among them: Lord Jim, Under Western Eyes, Victory, Nostromo, The Secret Agent, The Shadow Line, and this Heart of Darkness, which in the judgment of some is his magnum opus.
To arrive at Conrad marks one of the unforgettable moments that a reader can record. To return to him is, surely, an experience of greater resonance. It means putting one’s feet, once again, in the shifting sand of wonders, to lose oneself in the numerous layers of meaning that those pages propose, to prostrate oneself before a language constructed by a superb and frantic rhetoric and, when it suits the author, through bursts of corrosive irony. Above all it is to find oneself afresh before the Great Themes, those found in the Greek tragedies, in Dante, in the Elizabethan playwrights, in Cervantes, Milton, and Tolstoy. The work of Conrad is presented to us as monumental, conclusive, and totalizing, and the reader will arrive breathless at the last lines of each one of his novels to discover that what looked to be a solid mausoleum is instead a weave that can be done and undone, that its character is conjectural, that nothing has been conclusive, that the story he has just read can be deciphered in different ways, all, of course, heartrending.
If the reader requires any biographical information, we will tell him that Joseph Conrad was born in the Polish Ukraine with the name of Józef Teodor Konrad Nałęcz-Korzeniowski, in the bosom of a family of the Polish petty nobility, that his father was a nationalist revolutionary who paid for his pro-independence ideals with exile, prison, and death, who abandoned Poland at sixteen, was a merchant marine a good part of his life, changed his name, adopted English nationality, wrote his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, at thirty-eight, and shortly thereafter dedicated his time entirely to literature.
In September 1876, the International Association for the Exploration and Civilization of the Congo held a historic conference in Brussels sponsored by King Leopold of Belgium, the principal shareholder of Congo’s trading companies.34 There, with solemn pomp, the high principles that inspired the exploration of that area of Africa were proclaimed:
To open to civilization the only part of the world where it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness that envelops the entire population is, if I dare say, a crusade worthy of this century of progress.35
Around the same time, a nineteen-year old Polish sailor, signed on to a French ship, was undertaking his second voyage through the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean and touching some ports along the Venezuelan coast, one of which, Puerto Cabello, thirty years later—when the sailor Józef Teodor Konrad Nałęcz-Korzeniowski had ceased to exist, only to be transformed into the English novelist Joseph Conrad—would become Sulaco, the setting for
Nostromo, one of his foundational works.
The period spanning October 1874, the date of his departure from Poland, to his entry into the English merchant marine, in April 1878, is the darkest of Conrad’s life. From the bits of information we have in that regard—contradictory, fragmentary—stemming from correspondence with relatives, where certain truths are never mentioned, from his threadbare books of memoirs, where he avoids treating intimate matters, published many years later, and from some narrative passages in which he makes use of the personal experience of his youth, we are only able to know that he obtained the consent of his guardian to set out for Marseille and join the French navy; that it was a period of instability; that he traveled a couple of times to Antillean ports; that he ran contraband arms in Spain; that his life was not different from that of any other adolescent sailor residing in Marseille; that his relatives despaired in the face of debts incurred and the alarming news they received from France; and that, at last, a grave nervous depression and a frustrated attempt at suicide brought that period to a close. They are details that we know with such vagueness or so scantily that they tell us nothing really; neither his letters nor his diaries provide clarification. Amid the shadows we can deduce that a good part of the young Pole’s activities transpired on the fringes of propriety and at times of the law. It is not difficult to imagine Conrad’s feeling of exultation, his childhood having slipped away, together with his family, into a rigorous political exile in the frozen regions of the north of Russia, in the Ukrainian plain and in Polish Galicia, when, feeling free for the first time from familial tutelage and police vigilance in a Mediterranean port and, shortly after, coming into contact with the sensuality of the Caribbean and the exotic atmosphere of the Malaysian archipelago, ports, communities, customs—sites so different from those of his childhood, as if they were the landscapes and customs of another universe. Conrad’s life possesses the same intense fascination as the best of his tales. At first glance it would seem that each period forms part of the existence of a different man. As if various persons undertook a common destiny: the exiled son at the bedside of the dying father, the adolescent adventurer enlisted in the French navy, the gunrunner in Spain, the English sailor, the respectable British citizen, and the man of letters, author of one of the most memorable narrative works of English literature. There are certain deep threads that connect those stages; one of them, the permanent state of prostration or nervous irritation (his correspondence provides the image of a person beleaguered from childhood to his last years) and the feeling of loneliness, of “alienness” before the world and in the presence of his fellow man that would never abandon him. One fundamental episode connects very loose ends and crystalizes the scattered bits of information about his personality: his stay in the Congo. In fact, during the year he survived there, he decided soon to quit the navy—he would undertake only two trips to Australia, knowing then that the sea had ceased to interest him—to begin his life as a writer.
Of course, when at nineteen Conrad sailed into Puerto Cabello he could not imagine that it would be transformed later into the setting of one of his novels, Nostromo, nor that he would one day become a great writer. Neither could he guess that his aunt, Margarita Paradowska, who was residing in Brussels, would use her connections to secure a captaincy in the Belgian Limited Company for Trade on the Upper Congo, which might have fit more within his field of possibilities and aspirations.
For a young man capable of imagining and enjoying an adventure, the African continent offered extraordinary prospects. The chronicles of Stanley’s explorations ignited the imagination of a legion of readers. The heart of Africa had at last been reached! Civilization was being introduced into regions that had remained closed, heralding the possibility of enlightening all of mankind. The risks to be taken made the enterprise in itself tempting, and the benefits compensated for any eventual stumbling block. The Congo’s great wealth was not then, like today, uranium, but rather ivory. Europe was opening to navigation one the world’s mightiest rivers, was catechizing tribes, providing the natives with superior languages and customs; as a reward it obtained tons of precious ivory, one of the period’s most supreme luxuries that aspired to fuse morality with aesthetic passion and the passion for wealth.
In 1890, at thirty years of age, Conrad set sail for Africa. He remained one year in the Congo, steering a steamboat on the Kinshasa-Léopoldville route. Upon returning to Europe he was all but a corpse, thanks in part to the tropical fevers and dysentery. But the decisive blow was of a moral sort. The crusade proclaimed by the government of Belgium and the great powers of Europe disguised in Tartuffean fashion the most primitive forms of exploitation. The darkness that King Leopold had mentioned had become total blackness. The man who had enlisted in that crusade for progress was turning with surprising rapidity into a dangerous beast willing to destroy whomever might hinder his immediate enrichment. A testament to that year is Heart of Darkness (1902). Conrad, not unlike the story’s narrator, Marlow, a character who penetrates even the most remote of encampments in the Congo in search of Kurtz, the dreamer, the prophet, the civilizer, goes about discovering within himself that force which is born on contact with barbarism. This experience created in Conrad the conviction that as a human being he is presented with only two options: adhere to evil or stoically endure his unhappiness. Outside of a civilized context, each institution created by man to coexist in harmony—laws, customs, manners, culture, morality—forms a precarious film, quick to tear at the slightest provocation in order to make way for the savage element, primitive, untamed, until finding the darkest depth of human nature. Confronted by nature around him, Kurtz, the protagonist, acknowledges his own, that of a trapped animal.
He returns to Europe a changed man, as had happened to Chekhov upon his return from Sakhalin Island, which he had visited to know the penal colonies of the Russian police. Both came face to face with hell and descended into its most tenebrous circles. It was impossible to return from those experiences as they had been when they left home. Conrad would confess in a letter that until the moment of his journey to the Congo he had lived in full unconsciousness, and that only in Africa had his understanding of the human being been born. Chekhov, in another letter, expresses himself in an almost identical way.
Absent any kind of sentimentalism—what’s more, with exemplary dignity and stoicism—Conrad reveals for us in his novels the tragic character of human destiny, adding that any moral victory signifies at the same time a material defeat. The Conradian hero triumphs over his adversaries by ripping himself to pieces or by allowing some despicable being to rip him to pieces. His reward, his victory, consists in having remained faithful to himself and to a handful of principles that for him embody the truth. Never does he allow himself to be tempted by a lie nor by vulgarity; as a consequence, he is always an easy target for the petty remarks of human rabble, the middling class, that petty and raucous mob that lives life sustained by fallacy, opportunism, submission, emptiness, tricks, social swindling, venality, and the fashionable.
Three paragraphs taken from Conrad’s correspondence exemplify the connection between his literary and moral convictions:
1.A work of art is very seldom limited to one exclusive meaning and not necessarily tending to a definite conclusion. […] And this for the reason that the nearer it approaches art, the more it acquires a symbolic character. […] All the great creations of literature have been symbolic, and in that way have gained in complexity, in power, in depth and beauty.
2.But as a matter of fact all my concern has been with the “ideal” value of things, events and people. That and nothing else. […] But in truth it is the ideal values of facts and human actions that have impressed themselves on my artistic activity.36 […] Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills. It rests notably, among others, on the idea of Fidelity.
3.Crime is a necessary condition of organi
zed existence. Society is fundamentally criminal.37 […] [The maturity of a society, its moral cleanliness, the elimination of elements criminal in their makeup, can only be the work of the individual. However remote its realization may seem, I believe in the nation as a group of people and not of masses.]38
A novel by Conrad is, in its most visible aspect, an action story, fraught with adventures, situated in exotic settings, at times truly savage. What’s normal in that kind of story is to tell the story in a linear fashion, with an uninterrupted chronology, and make it flow chapter after chapter until the denouement. But for Conrad that would have been a crass vulgarity. He was able to begin the tale in the middle of the story or even begin it shortly before the final climax, in short, wherever he felt like it, and make the story move in a complicated chronological zigzag, managing to fix the reader’s interest precisely in that twisting labyrinth, in the narrative’s ambiguity, in the plot’s slow crawl through the cracks of a temporal order that he has made an effort to destroy. The continuous digressions, those that allow the characters to reflect on morality or other attendant themes, instead of retarding the tale’s dramatic rhythm, strengthen its intensity and charge the novel with a vigorous capacity of suggestion. What seemed a blurry sketch transforms into a mysterious story, where instead of certainties there are conjectures; in short, an enigma that can be interpreted in different ways. That, among other attributes, characterizes the narrative art of Joseph Conrad.
But so that this tortuous narrative threat is able to reach its plenitude, Conrad had to invent Marlow, his alter ego, the character to whom he entrusts the story’s narration. Marlow, like his creator, is a man of the sea, a gentleman, a person with his own ideas and a human curiosity at war with any closed manifestation of morality. All of those qualities and his personal concept of tolerance make him the perfect refractor of reality, for the benefit of Conrad, his creator, and ours, his readers. Marlow is the witness who recounts to us the precise circumstances of an event as he was the man who was really there when the action took place. He appears as the narrator in several novels, in Youth, Lord Jim, Chance; but in Heart of Darkness he surpasses his testimonial quality to transform into an actor in the story, an active protagonist upon whom the work’s structure and plot depend.
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