Bright Book of Life : Novels to Read and Reread (9780525657279)

by Bloom, Harold

  What are the limits of irony in Conrad? For Martin Price, a profoundly Conradian ironist, there are no limits. Price sees both the skepticism and the irony of Lord Jim and yet also perceives its unrelenting romanticism. Both are allowed their full eloquence, and neither can balance or negate the other. Price ranks Nostromo lower, because he sees the irony as triumphant there. Conrad, an astonishing artist, allows the reader to decide. As I age, I abandon my ironies and join Nostromo in his Garibaldi-like romanticism. In Nostromo, it is flawed and corrupt, but what matter? What matters in Conrad is not whether you betray yourself: of course you must and will. Either you betray others or yourself. Those are the Conradian options. Of course, others betray you, but that is of minor interest, another mere irony. Nostromo sells himself for silver and yet betrays nothing except his own authentic splendor.

  In Conrad, you submit to the destructive element, the sea of death: no character in all of Conrad has a Hamlet-like power of mind, unless it be Kurtz, in Heart of Darkness, and he is self-obliterated, pragmatically speaking. Edward Said shrewdly noted Conrad’s persuasive insistence that we can survive, as persons and as writers, only through the agency of our eccentricities. What matters most in Conrad’s view of the human is that each of us is unpredictable.

  An admirer of Conrad is happiest with his five great novels: Lord Jim (1900), Nostromo (1904), The Secret Agent (1907), Under Western Eyes (1911), and Victory (1915). Subtle and tormented narratives, they form an extraordinarily varied achievement, and despite their common features they can make a reader wonder that they all have been composed by the same artist. Endlessly enigmatic as a personality and as a formidable moral character, Conrad pervades his own books, a presence not to be put by, an elusive storyteller who yet seems to write a continuous spiritual autobiography. For me, Conrad’s masterwork is Nostromo, where his perspectives are largest and where his essential originality in the representation of human blindnesses and consequent human affections is at its strongest. Like all overwhelming originalities, Conrad’s ensues in an authentic difficulty, which can be assimilated only very slowly, if at all. Repeated rereadings gradually convince me that Nostromo is anything but a Conradian litany to the virtue he liked to call “fidelity.” The book is tragedy, of a post-Nietzschean sort, despite Conrad’s strong contempt for Nietzsche. Martin Decoud, emptied of all illusions, is self-destroyed because he cannot sustain solitude. Nostromo, perhaps the only persuasive instance of the natural sublime in a twentieth-century hero of fiction, dies “betrayed he hardly knows by what or by whom,” as Conrad says. But this is Conrad at his most knowing, and the novel shows us precisely how Nostromo is betrayed, by himself, and by what is in himself.

  His creator’s description of this central figure as “the Magnificent Capataz, the Man of the People,” breathes a writer’s love for his most surprising act of the imagination. So does a crucial paragraph from the same source, the “Author’s Note” that Conrad added as a preface thirteen years after the initial publication:

  In his firm grip on the earth he inherits, in his improvidence and generosity, in his lavishness with his gifts, in his manly vanity, in the obscure sense of his greatness, and in his faithful devotion with something despairing as well as desperate in its impulses, he is a Man of the People, their very own unenvious force, disdaining to lead but ruling from within. Years afterwards, grown older as the famous Captain Fidanza, with a stake in the country, going about his many affairs followed by respectful glances in the modernized streets of Sulaco, calling on the widow of the cargador, attending the Lodge, listening in unmoved silence to anarchist speeches at the meeting, the enigmatical patron of the new revolutionary agitation, the trusted, the wealthy comrade Fidanza with the knowledge of his moral ruin locked up in his breast, he remains essentially a Man of the People. In his mingled love and scorn of life and in the bewildered conviction of having been betrayed, of dying betrayed he hardly knows by what or by whom, he is still of the People, their undoubted Great Man—with a private history of his own.

  Nostromo is only himself when he can say, with perfect truth: “My name is known from one end of Sulaco to the other. What more can you do for me?”

  Conrad invents a South American country, Costaguana, whose richest province is called Occidental and which has a port city, Sulaco. We can surmise that Conrad had Colombia in mind. Charles Gould, born in Costaguana though of English descent, is the owner of the silver mine near Sulaco. Weary of the country’s turmoil, he backs the dictator Ribiera, but the silver provokes a series of rebellions, including one led by a General Montero, who closes in on Sulaco. Gould, anxious to save his silver, orders the “Capataz de Cargadores” (chief longshoreman) Nostromo to rescue the ingots by taking them upon the water for eventual sale abroad.

  Giovanni Battista Fidanza, Nostromo’s actual name (in Italian “Nostromo” signifies a boatswain, yet some think it is a play upon the Italian nostro uomo or “our man”), is trusted by everyone in Sulaco. Accompanied by Martin Decoud, journalist and flâneur, Nostromo sails a lighter out of the harbor, but that night it collides with a vessel carrying rebel forces. The silver is salvaged by grounding the lighter on the island of Great Isabel, which is uninhabited. The magnificent Capataz swims back to shore, abandoning Decoud to guard the silver. Surpassing himself, Nostromo rides over mountains to bring in the army that will save the newly independent state of Sulaco. Poor Decoud, unable to bear solitude, rides a lifeboat to sea, weighs his body down with four ingots, shoots himself, and goes down into the water.

  Nostromo is left alone with his guilty secret as to the fate of the treasure. He begins to believe that his heroic exploits have been for nothing, and he is baffled by the disappearance of Decoud and the four ingots of silver. When a lighthouse is constructed on Great Isabel, Nostromo employs his influence to have his friend, the widowed Garibaldino Giorgio Viola, made the lighthouse keeper. In love with Giselle, Viola’s younger daughter, the magnificent Capataz in turn is loved by the older daughter, Linda, to whom he is betrothed. Unfortunately, one dark night, as Nostromo attempts to nab more ingots, he is shot and killed by old Viola, under the impression that the interloper is a stranger.

  Nostromo’s triumph, though he cannot know it, is that an image of his authenticity survives, an image so powerful as to persuade both Conrad and the perceptive reader that even the self-betrayed hero retains an aesthetic dignity that renders his death partly tragic rather than sordid. Poor Decoud, for all his brilliance, dies a nihilistic death, disappearing “without a trace, swallowed up in the immense indifference of things.” Nostromo, after his death, receives an aesthetic tribute beyond all irony, in the superb close of the novel:

  Linda’s black figure detached itself upright on the light of the lantern with her arms raised above her head as though she were going to throw herself over.

  “It is I who loved you,” she whispered, with a face as set and white as marble in the moonlight. “I! Only I! She will forget thee, killed miserably for her pretty face. I cannot understand. I cannot understand. But I shall never forget thee. Never!”

  She stood silent and still, collecting her strength to throw all her fidelity, her pain, bewilderment, and despair into one great cry.

  “Never! Gian’ Battista!”

  Dr. Monygham, pulling round in the police-galley, heard the name pass over his head. It was another of Nostromo’s triumphs, the greatest, the most enviable, the most sinister of all. In that true cry of undying passion that seemed to ring aloud from Punta Mala to Azuera and away to the bright line of the horizon, overhung by a big white cloud shining like a mass of solid silver, the genius of the magnificent Capataz de Cargadores dominated the dark gulf containing his conquests of treasure and love.

  The limits of Joseph Conrad’s irony, as Martin Price indicated, cannot be known. Is that “magnificent” ironic or romantic? What are we to make of the progression: the greatest, the most enviable, the most sinister of a
ll? Does “sinister” mean “disturbing,” or is it heraldic, what Ursula K. Le Guin called “the left hand of darkness”? Conrad abandons the question to the reader’s share. I am troubled when I reread Heart of Darkness and cannot decipher Marlow’s or Conrad’s obscurantism. There seems a vacuum in that heart, a misty mid-region I rebel against inheriting. I remember a paragraph at the close of the chapter on Nostromo in the poet Aaron Fogel’s book Coercion to Speak: Conrad’s Poetics of Dialogue (1985):

  This idea of ownership as forced possession, something inherited against one’s will, like existence itself, both resembles and diverges from Harold Bloom’s concept of poetic “influence.” In The Prelude Wordsworth uses the term inquisition to describe his examination of himself for possible themes. As in Borges’ reference to literature as “other inquisitions,” the irony is infinite. Conrad, as his own work progressed, seems however to have turned, or to have tried to turn, partly away from the infinite ironic romance of self-inquisition (represented by the romantically compelled speaker Marlow) toward the representation, during the period of the political novels, of limited, external, crude forced dialogues in the world. There is the hint of a suspicion that it might be a bad defense, a bad infinity, to always internalize the format of coercion to speak as poetic will. Poetics, in Bloomian romanticism, may be the denial, by internalization, of the Oedipal order of forced dialogue in the outside world—the translation of inquisition into an inner feeling of compulsion to quarrel with a forebear or with oneself. In any case, Conrad turned from infinite self-inquisition to emphasize “objective” political scenes in which the enslaved, colonized, or dependent individual is made to speak, to own, to respond. In Bloom’s signally moving personal terms, Gould’s inheritance of the silver mine from his defeated father symbolizes Conrad’s inheritance, from his own father and his “fathers,” of Polish poetic dependency, Polish tragic “silence,” Polish poetic minority in the greater world. And this is, to say the least, a viable reading. But Conrad’s description of historical struggles for independence via dependent means is certainly also meant as a representation of actual political struggle by colonials against outside influences. This is one of the self-critical questions Conrad’s later political novels direct, not always successfully, against his early work. He becomes convinced that the compulsion to speak does not always come from within, and that the political aspect of coercion to speak is at times disguised by inner agony.

  Quarreling with a precursor or with oneself to me seems a prelude to the greater inquisition: the influence of a writer’s mind upon itself. In his political novels—Nostromo, The Secret Agent, Under Western Eyes—Conrad increasingly will not allow his characters any freedom except their own eccentricities. They are overdetermined not only by their place in the economic and social order, but by their personalities that become fatalities. Giovanni Battista Fidanza, perpetually insecure despite his renown, dies as a sacrifice to his own sense of glory. Martin Decoud slays himself because solitude is made unbearable by his inward vacuity.

  CHAPTER 30

  The Secret Agent (1907)

  JOSEPH CONRAD

  THREE YEARS LATER, in The Secret Agent, something like a new Conrad came into being, an almost invisible narrator of a London recalling the dark agonies of Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend (1865). A generation had greatly altered London. Conrad deeply admired Dickens. On the surface they have little in common, but they dream some of the same metropolitan nightmares. London crime, for Dickens, was violent and sometimes familial. Conrad lived in an age of anarchist outrage against repressive and exploiting regimes.

  As with so many political terms, anarchism tended to have a negative aura, as used by its enemies. The Greek anarchos means the absence of authority, which in itself was initially a Roman concept with the meaning, as interpreted by Hannah Arendt, of augmenting the foundations of civil society.

  Anarchist assassinations became frequent and sensational around the turn of the century. President Carnot of France was slain in 1894; in 1901, President William McKinley of the United States was shot to death. There were other such events, but Joseph Conrad’s inspiration for The Secret Agent came from the weird attempt to bomb the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in 1894. The would-be bomber, a French anarchist, merely blew himself up.

  Conrad had a lifelong aversion to most things Russian, highly understandable in a Polish exile. Like Henry James, he made an exception for Turgenev, and, again like James, enormously undervalued Tolstoy. Though hostile to the tormented Dostoevsky, he could not quite escape the effect of Crime and Punishment and Demons.

  The Secret Agent has the subtitle A Simple Tale. That may or may not be ironic. Winnie Verloc’s life and death are hardly simple. An attractive working-class young woman whose father kept a pub, she married the older and grossly obese Adolf Verloc for the sake of her old mother and for her younger brother, Stevie, who appears to be autistic. He is immensely sensitive to the suffering of animals and, except for the love of his sister, is totally isolated.

  Verloc is a secret agent for the Russians and is ordered by Mr. Vladimir of their embassy to carry out a bombing of the Greenwich Observatory, in order to shock the English government and people into a more severe crackdown upon anarchists. The London group headed by Verloc includes Michaelis; Comrade Alexander Ossipon, who lives by seducing lower-class women; the veteran terrorist Karl Yundt; and, most remarkably, the quite scary creature known as “the Professor,” who is gifted at explosives. The Professor walks around London, fierce with hatred, and invulnerable, because the police realize that he is a walking bomb and can at any time explode himself and take with him a number of passing citizens.

  Verloc receives a bomb from the Professor, gives it to Stevie, and points him toward the Observatory. After the explosion, the remnants of Stevie have to be gathered by shovels. When Winnie realizes Verloc’s enormity, she takes action without reflection:

  She started forward at once, as if she were still a loyal woman bound to that man by an unbroken contract. Her right hand skimmed slightly the end of the table, and when she had passed on towards the sofa the carving knife had vanished without the slightest sound from the side of the dish. Mr. Verloc heard the creaky plank in the floor, and was content. He waited. Mrs. Verloc was coming. As if the homeless soul of Stevie had flown for shelter straight to the breast of his sister, guardian and protector, the resemblance of her face with that of her brother grew at every step, even to the droop of the lower lip, even to the slight divergence of the eyes. But Mr. Verloc did not see that. He was lying on his back and staring upwards. He saw partly on the ceiling and partly on the wall the moving shadow of an arm with a clenched hand holding a carving knife. It flickered up and down. Its movements were leisurely. They were leisurely enough for Mr. Verloc to recognise the limb and the weapon.

  They were leisurely enough for him to take in the full meaning of the portent, and to taste the flavour of death rising in his gorge. His wife had gone raving mad—murdering mad. They were leisurely enough for the first paralysing effect of this discovery to pass away before a resolute determination to come out victorious from the ghastly struggle with that armed lunatic. They were leisurely enough for Mr. Verloc to elaborate a plan of defence involving a dash behind the table, and the felling of the woman to the ground with a heavy wooden chair. But they were not leisurely enough to allow Mr. Verloc the time to move either hand or foot. The knife was already planted in his breast. It met no resistance on its way. Hazard has such accuracies. Into that plunging blow, delivered over the side of the couch, Mrs. Verloc had put all the inheritance of her immemorial and obscure descent, the simple ferocity of the age of caverns, and the unbalanced nervous fury of the age of bar-rooms. Mr. Verloc, the Secret Agent, turning slightly on his side with the force of the blow, expired without stirring a limb, in the muttered sound of the word ‘Don’t’ by way of protest.

  Mrs. Verloc had let go the knife, and h
er extraordinary resemblance to her late brother had faded, had become very ordinary now. She drew a deep breath, the first easy breath since Chief Inspector Heat had exhibited to her the labelled piece of Stevie’s overcoat. She leaned forward on her folded arms over the side of the sofa. She adopted that easy attitude not in order to watch or gloat over the body of Mr. Verloc, but because of the undulatory and swinging movements of the parlour, which for some time behaved as though it were at sea in a tempest. She was giddy but calm. She had become a free woman with a perfection of freedom which left her nothing to desire and absolutely nothing to do, since Stevie’s urgent claim on her devotion no longer existed. Mrs. Verloc, who thought in images, was not troubled now by visions, because she did not think at all. And she did not move. She was a woman enjoying her complete irresponsibility and endless leisure, almost in the manner of a corpse. She did not move, she did not think. Neither did the mortal envelope of the late Mr. Verloc reposing on the sofa. Except for the fact that Mrs. Verloc breathed these two would have been perfectly in accord: that accord of prudent reserve without superfluous words, and sparing of signs, which had been the foundation of their respectable home life. For it had been respectable, covering by a decent reticence the problems that may arise in the practice of a secret profession and the commerce of shady wares. To the last its decorum had remained undisturbed by unseemly shrieks and other misplaced sincerities of conduct. And after the striking of the blow, this respectability was continued in immobility and silence.

  Even for Conrad, this is remarkable writing. Winnie transmutes into Atropos, oldest and most inevitable of the Three Fates. Style becomes implacable: “Hazard has such accuracies.” If this is the voice of Joseph Conrad, it has undergone a Shakespearean withdrawal into an enigmatic reserve.