Into the Looking-Glass Wood

by Alberto Manguel

  In the case of Conrad, for instance, the “racist” reading of Heart of Darkness is of course possible. And yet I don’t believe it is a useful one. Essentially, at the heart of darkness is not Africa, or the white man’s vision of Africa, or the black savages described in the offensive passage. At the heart of darkness is Kurtz. “His soul was mad,” says Marlow. “Being alone in the wilderness, it had looked within itself and, by heavens! I tell you, it had gone mad. I had—for my sins, I suppose—to go through the ordeal of looking into it myself. No eloquence could have been so withering to one’s belief in mankind as his final burst of sincerity.” The whole point is that Kurtz, and Marlow eventually, and we all, must go through the ordeal of looking into ourselves. And because we live in the world we live in, we won’t do it amidst noble thoughts of human equality, mutual respect, or even love for one another. We have to do it in this cesspool we have created, among cries of murder and revenge. It would be arrogant of me to deny Achebe’s experience as a reader—and the racist passages are there, and belong to and define Kurtz’s world, and the world of Marlow, and of many of Conrad’s admirers—you and I. But whether this does or does not reflect Conrad’s own point of view is something that now only bears discussion in a fine and private place. In the text, the question is not relevant, because Conrad (whoever he was) is not part of the discourse of Heart of Darkness. Those black savages are still the image perceived by the vast majority of our neighbours, by white juries in Los Angeles, by policemen in Toronto, by anti-immigration lobbyists in Australia, by honest citizens in the French countryside. “Do you understand this?” cries Marlow to Kurtz at the end. “Do I not?” is Kurtz’s answer. He later dies, probably believing that he does understand. And Marlow, who remains faithful to Kurtz to the last, “and even beyond,” probably believes it too. He will also die, somewhere outside the novel, believing that great lie of imperialism, that the victimizer is ultimately the victim. What makes Heart of Darkness a great novel—despite what Achebe sees—is that it doesn’t gloss over this horror: not the horror seen by Kurtz but the horror of the entire world, made by the whole of humankind, Europe and Africa both. In that sense, Heart of Darkness seems to me a remarkable denunciation of racism, in which there is no hope within the system as it stands. And whether Conrad believed it or not is irrelevant. A great work of art is always superior to its creator. “There is hope, but not for us,” said Kafka. That could be the epigraph of Heart of Darkness.

  The quotation from The Red Redmaynes asks other questions. First, how did the book’s earliest readers react to this passage? Presumably without surprise or humour. Though a few readers would, perhaps, have felt otherwise, it is extraordinary to think how unremarkable this passage must have seemed to the common reader in the 1920s. But second, for a reader today, what significance does the passage have? Other than to justify the anger of being reduced to what Philipotts calls a “helpmate,” would it not allow us a starting-point to explore the broader literary assumptions of the period? Nineteen twenty-two was the year Joyce published Ulysses. Who is Molly Bloom in relation to our Phillpotts’ Ewig-Weibliche? I leave the question unanswered.… And as far as my readings of both Conrad and Phillpotts are concerned, I must agree with Tzara. I read these scribbles and outside, in the world of dust and bricks, nothing has changed. Injustice is still injustice, as the daily papers tell us.

  And yet.…

  Even though a text itself allows for any number of readings, it is apparent that the groups in power, defined in contrast to the groups they exploit, largely determine the accepted reading. Male over female, white over black, straight over gay, have been the norms for at least the genie’s last three millennia. In recent times, it has been suggested that the texts themselves are to blame. That the creation of texts by other hands, in other voices, will shift the emphasis, and that certain voices, which have been speaking about matters that directly concern the oppressed groups, should voluntarily keep quiet for a while and provide room to those who, among the oppressed, have been denied access.

  This is the American writer Alice Walker:

  What can the white man say to the black woman?

  Only one thing that the black woman might hear.

  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

  I will remove myself as an obstacle in the path that your children,

  against all odds,

  are making towards the light. I will not assassinate them

  for dreaming dreams and

  offering new visions of how to live. I will cease trying to lead your children,

  for I

  can see I have never understood where I was going.

  I will agree to sit quietly for a

  century or so, and meditate on this.

  This is what the white man can say to the black woman.

  We are listening.

  How can I argue with the poetic logic of Walker’s text? But I would like to make a suggestion. There is no doubt that more oppressed voices should and must be heard. There is no doubt that more Alice Walkers, James Baldwins, Mudrooroos need to come to the surface. But unless there is a whole new breed of readers to take those texts upon themselves, to read in them “new visions of how to live,” not much will change. It is on the readers that we must concentrate, not on the writers, on the readers who will make use of the text and “make something happen.” Unless this education of the reader occurs, no number of new voices will change anything, because they will echo among a deaf crowd. And if these readers learn to seek out, to interpret, to translate, to put texts into a variety of contexts, to transform the texts through multiple layers of reading—if we, readers, train ourselves to do this—then we won’t need any voices to be silenced, because we will be able to make choices. A silenced voice, whether silenced voluntarily or not, never disappears. Its absence becomes enormous, too enormous to ignore. Surely it’s not another absence we want, another vacuum for a hundred or a thousand years, but a period of redress, in which those voices come up and share the audibility that for so long those in power have usurped.

  I am also convinced that hope lies with individuals, and that solutions don’t lie in crowds. One of the greatest triumphs of any oppressor is to convert the oppressed to his methods. A reader need not embrace a writer’s methods, or even those of another reader. A text allows in itself more freedom than we usually think possible, which is why governments are never really keen on literacy, and why it is usually writers and seldom deep-sea divers or stockbrokers who are imprisoned, tortured and killed for political reasons.

  But the story of the genie in the bottle has a counterpart.

  During the military dictatorship in Argentina in the seventies, the poet Juan Gelman, who was then in his mid-forties, was forced to escape to Spain. His son and daughter-in-law, however, were captured by the military, tortured and killed. The daughter-in-law was pregnant. Gelman was informed of all this while in exile in Spain. A year or so later, one of Gelman’s friends met him in Spain, and told him the name of the one man directly responsible for the death of Gelman’s son and daughter-in-law. Gelman decided to return to Argentina and kill him. Friends tried to convince him not to go, but he felt that his life had no more meaning, and that revenge would somehow mitigate the absence or appease the memory of his dead. Gelman returned to Argentina with a false passport, but before he could look for the murderer he was visited by two women. These women, who had been informed of his coming by Gelman’s friends, told him that they belonged to the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, mothers whose children had been “disappeared” by the military and who assembled, week after week, in front of the presidential palace, to show that their sons and daughters had not been forgotten. The women wanted to talk to Gelman. I don’t know what they said to him, but the gist of it was that if Gelman killed the murderer of his son and daughter-in-law, he would in effect become one of “them,” he would in effect betray the memory of both his son and his daughter-in-law. I don’t know what words they used or how the
ir argument was reasoned, but in the end Gelman agreed, and returned to Spain.

  I don’t think I would be capable. If someone did anything to one of my children, I can very easily see myself turning into a murderer, literature or no literature, and I can’t imagine an argument that would dissuade me. But there was an argument. And these women put it forward. And in the case of Gelman, it achieved something better than mere revenge. And that, I believe, is another possible reading.

  VIII

  CERTAIN BOOKS

  “Now I declare that’s too bad!” Humpty Dumpty

  cried, breaking into a sudden passion. “You’ve been

  listening at doors—and behind trees—and down

  chimneys—or you couldn’t have known it!”

  “I haven’t indeed!” Alice said very gently. “It’s in

  a book.”

  Through the Looking-Glass, Chapter VI

  Taking Chesterton at His Word

  Names are everything. I never quarrel with actions.

  My one quarrel is with words.

  That is the reason I hate vulgar realism in literature.

  OSCAR WILDE,

  The Picture of Dorian Gray

  READING CHESTERTON, we are overwhelmed by a remarkable sense of happiness. His prose is the opposite of academic: it is joyful. Words bounce and spark lights off one another as if a clockwork toy had suddenly come to life, clicking and whirring with common sense, that most surprising of marvels. Language was to him a construction box with which to build toy theatres and toy weapons and, as Christopher Morley has noted, “his play upon words often led to a genuine play upon thoughts.” There is something rich and detailed, colourful and noisy in his writing. So-called English sobriety didn’t suit him, neither in dress (his vast floating cloak, his battered pudding-pot hat and gnomic pince-nez made him look like a pantomime figure) nor in words (he kept worrying and teasing a sentence until it unfolded like a flowering vine, branching off in several directions with tropical gusto, blooming into several ideas at once). He wrote and read with the passion a glutton brings to eating and drinking, but probably with more enjoyment, and the sufferings of the scribbler bent over Mallarmé’s blank page never seem to have been his, nor the anguish of the scholar surrounded by ancient tomes. Reading a book was for Chesterton rather a physical than an intellectual act. Father John O’Connor, the model for his Father Brown, said that when Chesterton read a book “he turned it inside out, dog-eared it, pencilled it, sat on it, took it to bed and rolled on it, and got up again and spilled tea on it—if he were sufficiently interested.” And he wrote with equal brio, overflowing his seat at a beer-stained table in a smoky café on Fleet Street. One of the Italian waiters there described him like this: “He very clever man. He sit and laugh. And then he write. And then he laugh at what he write.”

  From his first collection of essays, The Defendant, published in 1901 when Chesterton was 27, he appeared to be a man in a constant state of wonder: not a solemn, meditative state in which the mind sluggishly unravelled an idea across ruled pages and through numbered ledgers, but a state in which the mind flitted about, attracted here and distracted there, joyful and constantly surprised. “What was wonderful about childhood,” Chesterton wrote in his Autobiography, “is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world. What gives me this shock is almost anything I really recall; not the things I should think most worth recalling.” This was a gift he seems to have possessed throughout his life. Everything he “really” recalled became worthy of meditation. No subject seemed beyond his reach, if not his interest. Whatever the question, and however serious, Chesterton refused to be solemn, especially when being serious. In a letter to his wife-to-be, Frances Blogg, earnestly discussing the nature of domesticity, he wrote:

  My idea … is to make a house really allegoric: really explain its own essential meaning. Mystical or ancient sayings should be inscribed on every object, the more prosaic the object the better. “Hast thou sent Rain upon the Earth?” should be inscribed on the Umbrella-Stand: perhaps on the Umbrella. “Even the Hairs of your Head are all numbered” would give tremendous significance to one’s hairbrushes: the words about “living water” would reveal the music and sanctity of the sink: while “Our God is a consuming Fire” might be written over the kitchen-grate, to assist the mystical musings of the cook.

  Because what mattered to him were the connections and reactions between facts, not the facts themselves, accuracy—in the documentary sense of the word—was of no importance to him. He had no patience with what he called the “fairness of intellect” that made him despair of an earnest man’s soul. He understood that nothing much changed in his reflections on French history if he discovered that Napoleon had been born in 1768 instead of 1769—or at least that the exact year was not as important to Chesterton as the general’s shortness of height and of temper, upon either of which he could reflect with enjoyment and profit. In his amusing biography of Robert Browning, written for the very serious series “English Men of Letters,” not only did he misquote the poet himself, but he even invented a line for one of Browning’s most famous poems, “Mr. Sludge the Medium.” When Chesterton’s Dickens appeared, George Bernard Shaw wrote him a long letter listing a whole pack of howlers. Chesterton was unmoved, and in recent years, one of Dickens’s latest biographers, Peter Ackroyd, hailed Chesterton, in spite of such errors, as the finest of Dickensian critics.

  He had begun writing at school; by the time he was twenty, without a break and hardly a change of style, he was contributing articles about almost anything to a number of London magazines such as The Bookman and The Speaker. (Though in his Autobiography he mentions beginning at the Academy in 1895, there are no traces of his reviews in that magazine that year; later the Academy peevishly wrote that Chesterton’s books were “always and inevitably a bore.”) About these early talents he was characteristically dismissive: “Having entirely failed to learn how to draw or paint, I tossed off easily enough some criticisms of the weaker points of Rubens or the misdirected talents of Tintoretto. I had discovered the easiest of all professions, which I have pursued ever since.”

  His views of society were anti-aristocratic and vaguely akin to those of the former British Liberal Party: he believed in honest shopkeepers, decent poor and corrupt rich whom he saw as greedy camels lumbering towards the twinkling eye of a needle. He vigorously attacked the arrogance of those who in the name of superior funds, blood or education dictated to the “lower classes” (meaning “humanity minus ourselves”) in an effort to reform their lives. He made fun of the censoring judges who wanted to brand cheap adventure novels as “criminal and degrading”: “This is magisterial theory,” he noted, “and this is rubbish.” He thumbed his nose at the egotism and aloofness of the rich: “Among the Very Rich you will never find a really generous man, even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away.” He pointed fingers at the philanthropic politicians who believed they knew better than the people what was good for the people: This belief, he wrote, is “the most poisonous of all the political wrongs that rot out the entrails of the world.” And he summed up all these high and mighty characters as citizens of nations going mad. “They have grown used to their own unreason; chaos is their cosmos; and the whirlwind is the breath of their nostrils. These nations are really in danger of going off their heads en masse-, of becoming one vast vision of imbecility, with toppling cities and crazy country-sides, all dotted with industrious lunatics.” Then, with a Chestertonian flourish, he threw down his j’accuse: “One of these countries is modern England.”

  In his essays, as in his fictions, this vigorous sense of social justice propels the story. His fictions, extensions of his essays, consist of neatly constructed plots that begin with a mysterious horror and an unnatural ticking, and end (all but the masterful Man Who Was Thursday) with a reasonable resolution that somehow, in its very simplicity, heightens the suspected
horror. His essays themselves tell stories in which most of the characters, except perhaps the author himself, are mere sketches, cogs in the memorable plot. With Borges, Chesterton could say of his writings: “They are not, they don’t attempt to be, psychological.” What matters are the arguments and words bringing the story into being through the devices of a personal rhetoric, and the clicking together of episodes into an exquisite and logical arch, held aloft merely through the perfect joining of its parts. In Chesterton’s writings, emotion and reason—those artificially separated Siamese twins—are again one. For instance: the emotion provoked by the sight, in a London court of justice, of a woman who has “neglected her children” is perfectly expressed in its riposte, “and who looked as if someone or something had neglected her.” Or the anger provoked by two policeman questioning him for playing with a knife in the woods, and then letting him go because he was a guest at a rich man’s house, leads him to conclude: “The inference seems painfully clear: either it is not a proof of infamy to throw a knife about in a lonely wood, or else it is a proof of innocence to know a rich man” This is not merely clever: this feels true, to sense and to sound.

  In the ancient dispute between content and form, or sense and sound, Chesterton stood halfway. He only partly followed the Duchess, who had admonished Alice: “Take care of the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves.” Sense, Chesterton believed, could, if properly sought, exploit the effects of sound and rise unbidden from the clashing of rhetorical cymbals—from oxymoron and paradox, from hyperbole and metonymy. Chesterton was more inclined to agree with Pope, who once compared the followers of mere sound to those who attend church “not for the doctrine, but the music there” (An Essay on Criticism, 1771). Chesterton loved the music of words, but realized their limited ability to signify: whatever doctrine they might announce must needs be incomplete, haphazard glimmers rather than flashes of truth. In his study of the painter Watts he wrote: