A Midlife Crisis Novel – Martin Walser’s Runaway Horse / Ein Fliehendes Pferd

Based on the way I was taught German, it was hard to avoid the manifestly silly impression that Germany is made up entirely of old people and people “with a migration background”. This novella, Runaway Horse (Ein Fliehendes Pferd), by the German author Martin Walser, does admittedly deal with the first of these groups, so at least my knowledge of Germany’s aging society was not entirely wasted. As societies everywhere are aging, I suppose we simply have to get used to the increasing ubiquity of the midlife crisis novel. This one, from 1978, considers the effects of meeting someone whose life choices are completely different to our own not quite too late for us to turn things around if we decided theirs were actually better.

The novella follows closely a schoolteacher, Helmut Halm, and his wife Sabine as they enjoy a holiday on Lake Constance. There, an old schoolfellow of Helmut, Klaus Buch, likewise on holiday with his own much younger wife Helene, encounters them one day. This sets the stage for a clash of values, because the two couples, in particular the two male figures, have very different ideas of life. Both, however, are middle aged and having to consider the shapes of their lives, both what has passed and what is to come.

The Halms are bourgeois. Helmut has brought a five-volume set of Kierkegaard’s diaries with him on holiday, and he and his wife can think of nothing better to do of an evening than drink wine and smoke. He is detached from the world, “his dream became to be unreachable”. There’s a sense that he enjoys the irony of the difference between his inner world, which filters the novella’s action, and the perception of him that others have. The Halms as a pair do not represent passivity so much as a resignation from the ambition of trying to sit at the centre of the world. Gladly on the margins, they enjoy what life has to offer them – good food, good wines, predictable holidays (they have been visiting Lake Constance for eleven years), and the life of the mind.

Klaus Buch and his wife are the opposite. Successful writers, they seem all action and good health. They avoid sugar, only drink water, and are always out running. They embody that German passion for aktiv holidays and the great outdoors. Several of the book’s set pieces take place on the boat that Klaus sails, or else in nature. If the Halms have given up on participation in life in their middle age, Klaus Buch resolutely refuses the same course. He memorably describes having “had to part with [his first wife] because he did not want, like a plant, to keep growing in a pot that was too small for him.” His new wife Helene, eighteen years younger, serves to keep him younger.

Seeing Helmut and Sabine at a café, Klaus and Helene decide to join them (and ruin their holiday). Helmut remembers next to nothing about the past, which in Klaus Buch’s telling becomes “more alive than the present”, and where Helmut was a considerably more impressive a figure than he has now become. (“Klaus Buch said… how happy he was to see that Helmut was no petit bourgeois. / Helmut thought: if there is anything I am, it’s a petit bourgeois”) Thus begins a story of incredible awkwardness, of sailing trips, hikes, and dinners, as Klaus Buch explains who Helmut was and how amazing he was, and Helmut is forced to keep up a kind of mute pretence that it was indeed so.

One of the elements of ein Fliehendes Pferd’s formal mastery is that this is all that the story works with, this opposition of worldviews and two couples. There literally are only these four characters with speaking roles – Helmut and Sabine, Klaus and Helene. Yet the whole thing becomes rich through an intensity of language created out of its apparent simplicity. The word “adventure” is repeated like a mark of shame for Helmut, whose life lacks so much of it. Likewise, the mineral water that the Buchs drink versus the wines of the Halms are obvious symbols of their two attitudes to life. “You don’t like me anymore, eh?” Klaus says to his wife so many times that eventually it becomes more performance than affection, and then there are the references to “flight” or “trotting” that mark Helmut’s own thoughts, as the fleeing horse of the title.

By being so normal in content – a fairly standard lakeside holiday – the text elevates what it does say into something almost mythical. Everything becomes intense and symbolic. The German here relies heavily on reported speech, which is its own grammatical construction in the language, requiring no “he said” or similar verbs to keep us aware that we are deep within someone else’s words (and world). Like in Thomas Bernhard, we are immersed in another’s world for pages at a time, but unlike in Bernhard, (with the possible exception of Correction), we are shifting from consciousness to consciousness as they battle. First Klaus Buch will speak for pages, with us trapped in his vision, then Helmut will go home with Sabine, and spend a few pages musing in his own mind. Finally, near the novella’s end we get to see a little of Helene’s thoughts too.

The ruination of the Halm’s holiday is less significant than the shaking of their world, once Klaus and his wife step onto the scene. With their enthusiasm, zest, pep, or however you want to call it, the Buchs are dangerous. Klaus talks a lot about sex – Helmut and his wife don’t even do it anymore. (“How often do you bang your wife, eh?” Being one of the more crass things Klaus says when he and Helmut are alone.) At first Helmut is just grumpy, but gradually he realises there is real danger here. He quite likes Helene, whose breasts he keeps stealing furtive glances at, just as he realises Sabine quite likes Klaus. There’s no risk that either of the Buchs is interested in an affair, but there is a risk that just by being there they reveal the weaknesses of the Halms’ lives. Beauty and energy always have their attractions.

For me they certainly do. At first, it was hard not to prefer Klaus, with all that inner drive. Perhaps he will get Helmut out running and ditching the fags and booze, I thought. Sure, Klaus is annoying, but he’s not wrong to be living life the way he was. (Just as Helmut wasn’t wrong either, just less exciting to read about). When Klaus quite literally leaps onto a wild horse dangerously attempting to flee a field, it’s an obvious representation of him saving the moping Helmut. Why seem and be passive, I thought, as Helmut does, when you can be?

It may be true that Klaus undermines himself by seeming something of a parasite. He claims he needs Helene to remain physically young, just as he eventually admits he needs Helmut to remain mentally young. However, ultimately, when he and Helmut go on a sailing trip alone and the weather becomes stormy, the overall impression is that Klaus is a heroic, Nietzschean (a name mentioned in the text) figure, while Helmut is a coward who wants to go home. As the weather worsens, Klaus “laughed and danced towards the mast”, truly Dionysiac. Then, moments later, the waves catch him and he is lost overboard, leaving Helmut to make his way back to shore however he can. So much for the other’s worldview, eh, triumphantly though it is lived even at the end.

The final chapter of the novella provides the necessary correction to our idea of Klaus. Helene joins Helmut and Sabine the next day and she decides to drink as much wine as she can with the other woman. Now, for the first time, the dominant consciousness of the novella is not Klaus or Helmut’s, but rather Helene’s, as she presents the private version of her husband. In this portrayal, Klaus is obsessed with his writing while utterly unsuccessful at it, controlling towards his wife (he practically tries to turn her into his daughter and literary inheritor), and a total “fantasist.” While readers go through ein Fliehendes Pferd thinking that it is Helmut who loves the distance between his inner world and appearance, ultimately Klaus seems the one who lives this disjuncture. Until they saw Helmut and Sabine, Helene says, Klaus talked about his idea of living far more than actually living it.

While all this is going on, Helmut himself is wracked with guilt over Klaus’s death, even though he bears no responsibility for it. He doesn’t drink with the women, and before Helene had turned up he had actually gone with Sabine to get activewear so they can change their lives. In other words, taken as a clash of ideologies, it appears that Klaus, dying, had won.

But then he actually turns up, having miraculously survived the storm at sea in something like a tragicomic moment of brilliance, and drags away Helene back into the hell of her life with him. Sabine and Helmut throw off their sports clothes and light up new cigarettes. It’s a very strange ending, insofar as it leaves us right back where we began. This connects the story to the novella’s epigraph from Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, where Kierkegaard, behind one of his typical masks, asks whether we could write a story between clashing worldviews where an “event” is not used to provide the grounds for the victory of one or the other of them. Because the story ends up right back at the beginning, with the Halms and the Buchs separated, and neither pairing having changed their views, we can say that Walser has delivered just that.

The problem is that nobody likes reading a story only to get back to the beginning. Even if the externals are the same as before, many cyclical stories imply a kind of internal revaluation of things. But here we have two worldviews that clash, are bruised, but then reconfirmed on each side. There’s not really a sense that anyone has learned anything. The novella has this obsessive normality to it – you can sit on a bench at a national park, like I did yesterday in my part of Germany, and imagine the whole thing playing out among the middle aged couples you see walking past with their dogs – and then at the last moment Walser delivers Klaus incredibly from the jaws of death. It’s quite silly.

The idea of stasis or stagnation is one that I think does make for interesting literature, and the topic of how our decisions shape our lives, including from middle age onwards, can never not be important to people who have to deal with questions like that during their own time on earth far more than they have to consider, for example, how they would react if they woke up one morning and discovered they were a bug. But I find Walser’s treatment of his topic here, his sudden renunciation of the exploration of the ideas, a little sad in the end. To go back entirely to where we began as perfectly as Ein Fliehendes Pferd does, (whose last words are the novella’s first words), at least when trying to tell this story, all seems to say the story was not worth telling to begin with.

It’s a sharp contrast with the obvious mastery of the nuts and bolts of writing which Walser displays, from his careful use of symbols to his powerful portrayals of contrasting consciousnesses in the narration, and does leave a bit of a bitter taste in the mouth. I am glad it was only a novella.  

Violence as Answer – Yukio Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea

The really frightening thing about violence is how close it is to magic. If it were not, perhaps nobody would ever think of committing its acts. Violence is taboo and unacceptable to the orderly and their world, but their rejection gives it mystique. It becomes in this light a kind of portal from one world to another – from the boring, polite, controlled world, into something more raw and seemingly more real. This is what we might say to ourselves as we prepare our fists for the first blow. As a group action, violence also binds us together in complicity – guilt, even if we openly reject it, shimmers behind our thoughts and connects us to others it shadows. By a single act we have placed ourselves outside the world, while binding ourselves together in a secret confraternity. That is the power of violence, its magic, its temptation and its horror.

The Japanese writer Yukio Mishima’s short novel, The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, (literally Afternoon tow, but John Nathan’s title is so beautiful I’m sure even Mishima would not have objected to it), has violence at its heart and violence as its source of meaning. Just as Mishima himself, trained in iron discipline by his father and connected by blood to the pre-Meiji Emperors through his grandmother, seemed to have violence at his own heart. In 1970, sick of the loss of values in post-war Japanese society as it succumbed to cultural Westernisation, he attempted a military coup with a few followers, then committed seppuku, disembowelling himself before having a loyal friend decapitate him. Before this, he wrote books. To judge from The Sailor Who Fell From Grace with the Sea, angry, violent books. And utterly brilliant ones.

I knew a little of Mishima and his writing before I started. Themes involving bodies, beauty, and shame were on my mind. What I was not prepared for was the sheer intensity of his work, the absolute authorial stamp on the prose regardless of what it narrates. From the first chapter alone, I knew I had entered an entirely new world. Noboru, a boy of thirteen, discovers a peephole between his bedroom and his mother Fusako’s. He observes her as she undresses alone, his father having died five years earlier, with intense curiosity. But it is not until they have a sailor round for the evening, and his mother takes him to bed, that Noboru is rewarded with a secret initiation into the world of adults.

Everything here is intensity, extremity, and taboo. Also light and shadow. It’s interesting to see Tanizaki’s comments on light from In Praise of Shadows given body here, with the extraordinary attention Mishima pays to the light in his scenes, in particular, the effect of moonlight enchanting a scene. Noboru’s unerotic excitement of the voyeurism of observing his mother is mixed with humiliation at the thought of her having been observed by the occupying American soldiers once there in the house. Pleasure and pain are joined in a single action – pressing one’s eye to the peephole. That is one world. When Noboru instead looks at the room through the door as normal, he finds it “drab and familiar”. This is the other one. Enchantment and taboo intensity, or emptiness. Noboru, at thirteen, knows exactly which one he wants.

Noboru loves the sea, its intensity and mystery, and he is attracted to the sailor, Ryuji, as its representative. The ocean also gives the boy the central images he uses to imagine his place in the world: “a large iron anchor withstanding the corrosion of the sea and scornful of the barnacles and oysters that harass the hulls of ships, sinking polished and indifferent through heaps of broken glass, toothless combs, bottle caps, and prophylactics into the mud at harbour bottom – that was how he liked to imagine his heart.” Yet though he tries to steel his heart, Noboru is a boy. He idolises Ryuji, who even looks like he’s stepped out of the waves, from the first meeting. And when he sees Ryuji and his mother coupling, it’s like he has witnessed the moment of the earth’s transfiguration. He determines to protect the illusion at all costs.

The sea is everywhere in this work. Its constant presence is marked most obviously by the horns of ships as they go past Tokyo, and it is visible through Fusako’s window too. Another motif is that of daydreaming and illusion. In the first two chapters following them Ryuji and Fusako both daydream. While going about their days Ryuji remembers his visit to a brothel in Hong Kong, and Fusako thinks back to her first meeting with him from the perspective of a few days afterwards. Violence, shame, and sex are also everywhere, and often linked, as in the half-naked bodies of the stevedores that Fusako watches as they labour, subjecting themselves to the danger of their dockside work. Even more subtly though, through the way that even tree roots can look like “tumid black blood vessels”, Mishima never lets readers relax from their immersion in his vision.

What we actually have is a story of lost illusions, and the terrible attempt to recover them. Fusako, Noboru’s mother, is lonely and gladly falls in love with the sailor Ryuji. Noboru’s idolisation of the man from the sea changes to horror and disgust when Ryuji demonstrates his kind-heartedness and joviality by falling in love in return, rather than representing the boy’s frosty ideal. All this might leave us without tragedy were Noboru not part of a secret group of boys, led by “the chief”, who have their own philosophy and a willingness to put it into practice.

This philosophy is one of “absolute dispassion”, which really means a refusal of all good-will and a “matchless inhumanity”. The children believe that through adopting a posture of cynicism towards the world they might become its masters. They complete the freezing of their hearts through the joint murder of a kitten – a scene so gruesome I don’t think I would ever willingly read it again, even though, in another sense, it’s just a child’s version of the murder that binds the revolutionaries of Dostoevsky’s Demons and every bit as stupid as it.

The idea is not the world. Noboru struggles to force his heart into hardness, convincing himself that he will gain “power over existence” through this bondage of violence. Uneasily, however, he retains his boyish love for ships and the sea. He teeters, perhaps, between the boyish excitement of adventure, and the equally boyish idea that cruelty equates to manliness. When Ryuji lets him down by becoming soft, the balance is lost, and in the end, it’s almost his own self that Noboru wishes to punish.

Ryuji himself is closer to Noboru than the latter realises. With his aloofness and belief in the “Grand Cause” and glory, Ryuji too is in love with illusory ideas. Yet after several years at sea, he has already begun to lose his belief that in his life upon the waves there lies real magic. He’s glad of his love for Fusako, and the chance to enjoy the much sweeter illusion of love, which after all may not be an illusion at all. In other words, Ryuji seems a symbol of that inevitable disillusionment and mellowing that comes with a little age.

The children cannot tolerate this. All they lack is Ryuji’s experience, which would tell them that they cannot maintain their vision of the world forever. Instead, shaken by his betrayal of the authentic, dispassionate, sailor’s life, they decide on punishment – “the deed essential to filling the emptiness of the world.” Some novels show their protagonists lose their illusions willingly, typically replacing cold ideas of the world with the warmth of emotions, as Bazarov does in Fathers and Sons. What makes The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea so powerful is that Mishima does not let the children lose their illusions. He offers them a way out – one brutal, horrible, but in its way even magical. There is no moral here – no sense that violence is not, in fact, the answer.

It’s a problem I have thought about a lot. Often, when depression strikes, it’s for me as if the world has been emptied of its meaning, just as it is for Noboru after Ryuji’s unwitting “betrayal”. One of the ways that I have thought about that void I enter is that while I cannot pull myself out of it I may yet be able to save others from it. The meaning of meaninglessness becomes preventing others from falling into it, whatever the cost. Taken this way, the only thing that matters is the preservation of illusion. Some time ago I wrote a story about an occupying army, cut off from the rest of its people, which is forced into increasingly violent acts in order to maintain to its own soldiers the illusion that it is there on foreign soil with good purpose. It was an exploration of this idea, which is obviously poisonous – there is a point where the actions taken to maintain an illusion are so extreme that it is better to allow for illusions to die.

In The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea we have such an action. Except that we do not have a sense that it goes too far. Because every character in the novel is absorbed in their own illusions, it’s hard to blame the children for trying to maintain their own. More pertinently, in the novel’s closing moments, as Ryuji reflects on his time at sea after giving it up for domestic life with Noboru and Fusako, he actually begins to miss it once again. In other words, at the precise moment when the children are ready to sacrifice him for the preservation of illusion he himself has retreated from reality back into that same illusion of seafaring greatness, as if to say that the children were right all along that there was nothing worthwhile in his coming ashore.

We could probably pick through the novel finding hints of Mishima’s fascism, but perhaps a better way of thinking about it is that the story presents a scenario where violence, illusion, shame and beauty come together to offer a vision of a world where the horror of the novel’s contents is justified and correct. Like any great work of literature it presents a worldview in a way that is compelling. More than that, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea concerns that classic literary deity – dignity. But not mere dignity for individuals. Instead, the novel concerns the dignity of ideas we might today dismiss out of hand. It is here, in this moonlit world of cruelty and shifting dreams, that we see a way of life that once was so tantalising for so many, and may yet become so again. A cult of beauty, death, and glory.

It’s really quite cool stuff to read, so long as we keep our heads screwed on. We need the knowledge of this world to better combat it in our own, but it is a testament to Mishima’s dark strength that he makes the ideas so tempting too.

A few weeks after posting this I find myself feeling I might have argued a little too sympathetically for violence, which is not my view at all. I think what’s interesting with The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea is that it creates this illusion that violence really can be right and meaningful, when it isn’t if you actually think about it. The sailor might believe that he was wrong to return to land, but as soon as the boys start murdering him he’ll cry out in great pain and want more than anything to be returned to safety – he won’t be thinking about the significance of their actions.

Likewise I feel like I read somewhere that Mishima botched his suicide and was in agony throughout it – even he, I imagined, realised ideas were far less mystical or meaningful when they caused you physical pain. And so many of those whose attempts at taking their own life fail talk of the regret they felt, for example, while falling. Violence makes magic until the last moment, but I can’t help but feel that this last moment is really the only one that counts. It’s certainly the only one, when we cry out for the pain to end, whose plea I can wholeheartedly get behind.

Conrad’s Defeat – Victory

Back in the days when critics still puzzled over such questions, there was some debate over whether Victory was Joseph Conrad’s first bad novel or his last great novel. To me the matter is clear: Victory is a failure. Some of the problems with it are simple, but the more interesting issues with it lie within its overall thematic approach and are worth elaborating to understand how to avoid them. Since Victory is still a work by a talented writer, it’s hard to cut off those pieces of the novel that make it not work because they are all interconnected. The themes are embedded in the characters and embedded further in the structure and in the prose itself. Still, broadly speaking, my problems with it concern the narration, the characters peopling the story, and the treatment of the ideas within it.

The Story, approximately

Victory takes place in Southeast Asia, a region that the Joseph Conrad knew well from his time serving on ships there, and sits alongside his other works set in the region, in particular Lord Jim, which even shares with Victory the character of the hotel keeper Schomberg. Today’s novel primarily concerns a gentleman Swede, Axel Heyst, who is a drifter out of personal philosophical convictions handed down from his father, a professional philosopher. Specifically, Heyst drifts as his “defence against life.” Scorning attachment, he wanders inoffensively around the islands of Southeast Asia, before helping an down-and-out acquaintance with some money to get him out of a tight spot and causing thereby the bother that sets the novel going.

To repay the kindness, the friend sets Heyst up to manage a coal mining operation on a small island. The friend then dies away in England and the operation fails to generate the required returns, with the result that Heyst is left alone with great stores of food and a single Chinese servant. It would seem he never has to return to society except occasionally to pick up some hard currency, but he does at one point end up at a dodgy hotel owned by one Schomberg, coincidentally at a time when there are some female musicians visiting. Heyst finds out that a young English girl is among them and on seeing her tormented, rescues her and takes her to his island. Schomberg, who has also fallen in love with the girl, named alternately Alma or Lena, later has two rather sinister guests, Ricardo and Mr Jones, whom he convinces to pay Heyst a visit and rob him, telling them tall tales of Heyst’s vast riches. The criminals arrive, and eventually there is a confrontation and a tragedy.

In terms of theme, really there are two points of interest. The first is the treatment of illusions and deception, and the second is the nature of Heyst himself. While he may not have given his work its title, as did Nostromo or Lord Jim in their works, Victory is very much about Heyst’s psychology. So it is perhaps here that it makes sense to begin.

Heyst and the treatment of mystery in character

Conrad is known for his formal experimentation, where chronology is jumbled and narrators are there beside us framing events. This is an approach that is brilliantly suited to character studies because layering perspectives and confusing chronologies force readers to think their own way through biases to any facts they can find underneath. The former in particular also adds a brilliant reality to Conrad’s work. Heart of Darkness or Lord Jim are literally Marlow telling a story, with us a listener on the boat or at the club, and with his uncertainties and discoveries mirroring our own. Kurtz in the former work is mysterious not only because he only skulks onto the scene for a few pages, but because we hear him first through people Marlow meets on his way up the Congo river, then through Marlow himself. Like Marlow, we need to work out what meaning lurks behind appearances.

Of Heart of Darkness we could state simply that Kurtz is a colonial administrator who went mad and lost his “civilization” from being too long in Central Africa, but this is brutal. It leaves the reader uninvolved, because the story comes straight to her, and because there is no mystery left after it is spelled out thus. Even to enter Kurtz’s consciousness for an extended period would destroy the work. What little we hear from him, (“exterminate all the brutes”), gains its power by its isolation, like flashes in the dark. Too much light and we would not care.

Even without actually considering Heyst’s personality, Victory ruins the mystery. What’s upsetting is the novel has a strong beginning section, adopting a similar approach to many of Conrad’s other works. We have a narrator, living in the area the novel describes, who hears of Heyst through other people, such as the sailor Davidson and Schomberg. “I met a man once… to whom Heyst exclaimed” is a common construction in his telling and a thing of joy to me as a lover of Conrad. We build up Heyst from without, not within. Each thing he says, each thing that is said about him, deepens the mystery, because there is contradiction piled upon contradiction, yet without there ever being the suggestion that Heyst is not a real person underneath the crust of others’ comments. As with Kurtz, we try to find Heyst, deduce him from limited evidence, scraps of phrases. It’s exciting.

But as soon as we finish the first part of the novel, the narrator changes. We have omniscience, inhabiting the consciousness of the various characters, Heyst included. Mysteries disappear or at least fade when we see the ambiguities of character from within as conflict, rather than from without as evidence of complexity. If Heyst’s mysterious personality is the sustaining question of the book, this shift in narrative destroys things.

There are arguments against this. We might say that there are scenes that cannot be witnessed but must be reported, but this is a weak argument. Literature has always found tolerable workarounds, such as the obsession with timely eavesdropping in the early 19th century. Lord Jim, for another example, has quite a significant narrative shift once Jim settles on dry land upriver and Marlow no longer witnesses everything first hand, and while I preferred the first part of the book, Conrad lets Marlow retain a privileged narrative position as the person all information passes through before reaching the reader, even if he no longer sees as much with his own eyes.

Another argument is that such reporting does not sustain a long book – the listeners would have fallen asleep before Marlow got out of the jungle in Heart of Darkness, to say nothing of Lord Jim’s length. My answer here is that Victory is far too long to begin with. It would have worked much better as the short story it began its life as, where mysteries remained rather than being bleached by overexposure to the light of the page. But this is also because I did not find the ideas worth 300+ pages either.

Sad Ideas – Pessimism

That Conrad himself was a pessimist I know from his letters and the accumulation of impressions from his other works, but you’d be hard pressed to miss this fact in Victory either. Heyst comments that “the world is a bad dog”, considers “the illusion of human fellowship on earth”, and contemplates how he is “hurt by the sight of his own life.” A few pages later he notes that “if you begin to think you will be unhappy.” A little after that he notes that “Man on this earth is an unforeseen accident which does not stand close investigation”. I will not give further quotes, but there are plenty. Some of them are quite memorable, but the important thing is that Heyst is Schopenhauer’s representative on earth.

Never has the fatality of Conrad’s work been so obvious; never has it also been so unearned. Heyst’s father was a moody philosopher, so Heyst is a moody person. That’s it. The book, except for its ending, provides no arguments for its pessimism within itself, which turns Heyst’s pronouncements into mere preaching. The pessimism is delivered in phrases rather than in the brute facts of narrative, facts which are always more philosophically convincing than the words of prominent characters. There is a moment when Heyst literally reads his own father’s philosophical works and all I could think as a reader was how unbearably self-indulgent this was. And I say this as someone inclined to pessimistic utterances and self-indulgent writings myself.

So what if one person is pessimistic, or indeed the narrative overall, we might say. Well, when Heyst’s only company for most of the book is an ill-educated girl, there can be no reasonable argument articulated against his views. His voice dominates. This both destroys the mystery (see the section above) but also destroys the curiosity of his ideas, which are never challenged or refined by the work because ultimately Conrad more or less agrees with them.

Bad Ideas – Delusions and Scepticism

Related to the problem of pessimism is that of scepticism and illusion. As with the treatment of pessimism, this is altogether too direct. Every single character is laughably deluded. Lena lives in romantic delusions. Ricardo and Mr Jones think there is silver on the island when there is nothing. Schomberg refuses to realise that he has lost Lena and is in the depths of middle age rather than a strapping young man. Heyst believes he can live without a connection with the world – “he who forms a tie is lost”. Around Heyst there are many rumours, which would have made him more interesting if it were not too obvious, because of the narration, what was true and what false about them. When Ricardo and Mr Jones arrive at the island, Ricardo has to mislead Mr Jones about the presence of Lena, because the other man is terrified of women. And so on. Nobody has a clue about anything whatsoever.

We can say that illusions lead to the novel’s tragedy, which is true. But the problem is that the illusions are relentless, like the pessimism. Conrad seems to say that everyone is a fool, and there’s no hope for any of us. To say all are deluded is also not a thematically rich idea. Nobody really progresses into knowledge, which means that this sense of mistakenness is constant throughout the work, and the work seems ultimately flat. Again, this is not suitable for such a long work. If all illusions lead to tragedy, there’s no weighing up, for example, of different kind of illusions, of the sort which might be more interesting. Is Heyst’s illusion that he should live alone any more harmful that Lena’s illusion that life is a romance novel? Conrad really doesn’t have an answer, only a shrug.

In this way, the two central ideas of the novel – that things are bad, and everyone is deluded, are all too simple and quickly grow stale. There’s neither challenge nor depth to them, and that won’t do.

Other Characters, Other Problems

Of course, the novel does more than this, but not as much more as I think we would wish. Ricardo and Mr Jones are described in Conrad’s typical way for hellish apparitions, with words like “phosphorescent” linking them to that Other Place, and they function as a kind of example of fate. We could conceivably get some paragraphs out of comparing Mr Jones, an exiled gentleman wandering the world and committing crimes, with Heyst, another wanderer but for different reasons. But Jones barely speaks, and because he is not central, any mystery we might build with him along the lines we do with Kurtz is lost from this lack of focus. He remains too fuzzy. Ricardo, on the other hand, speaks too much. He immediately admits to the vaguely respectable hotel owner Schomberg that he and Jones are criminals and gives a long speech about their motivations – something I found hard to believe and all too convenient from a plot perspective.

Wang, the Chinese servant, speaks broken English and his only personality is to be able to “materialize” in various places. Ricardo and Jones also have a servant, Pedro, who is a feral beast because he’s from South America. Both these characterisations I also did not like – not only because they are racist, but because there’s no depth to them, nor any coherence or complexity, especially in Pedro’s case. Pedro joined Ricardo and Jones because… they murdered his brother? Come on.

Conclusions

The problem is that Victory has all the ingredients for a great work. If it were a third of the length and followed a similar formal approach to Heart of Darkness throughout, it would lose nothing in depth, and gain infinitely in effectiveness. Instead, Conrad’s musings on philosophy are boring without action to body them, action which this novel has precious little of. His villains stretch credulity and the overwhelming sense that everyone is deluded is too simple and too dreary to hold our attention for long. It’s a shame, but at least I can say I’m glad I read Victory because I can now better see the achievements in characterisation and form that Conrad achieved elsewhere.