Category: British and Irish Literature

Widowhood and Its Narratives – Colm Tóibín’s Nora Webster

Widowhood is a word with its own well-known narratives. The shock of grief sets us up for a story of overcoming that grief. The loss of, in traditional societies and marriages, the guidance and expertise of the husband – who may, for example, have been entirely responsible for his wife’s finances – prepares us for a tale of growth into now-vacant spaces. Should the husband have been bad or later become recognised as such, we can have a story less about overcoming grief and more about becoming the person that the late partner never allowed one to be. Perhaps there might even be a new man – or woman – as confirmation of one’s new life instead of a grief-stricken stasis.

I mention these narratives not to say how the Irish writer Colm Tóibín subverts or ignores them in his novel of 2014 Nora Webster, for he largely does not. After the early death of her husband Maurice in late-sixties Ireland, Nora is visited daily by townsfolk who want to tell her how sorry they are. She grieves, and by the end of the book has largely overcome that grief. She grows a little, and not just into financial responsibility. Maurice does not turn out to be a bastard, but the life that Nora ends up leading does differ from the one they had and might have come to have had in several ways. Tóibín’s prose is every bit as considered and thoughtful as the gentle movements of his story. Conventional, predictable, a critic might say.

I am not sure, setting out on this post, how far I am one of those. Asking a book to be other than it is, is normally just a reflection of one’s own prejudices. What is true is that Nora Webster lives and dies by its details, which is unsurprising given Tóibín’s love of Henry James. It is the more nuanced growth that a reader can chart from such details that really makes the book much more interesting compared to the headline story of a woman getting over the death of her husband. How does she grow, whether this growth is entirely positive or not, and so on.

Maurice Webster took his time dying. During that time his wife nursed him, leaving their four children – Fiona and Aine, Donal and Conor – with relatives or studying elsewhere. For the prioritisation of her husband there’s the faintest suggestion of a reproach from the aunt who had taken in the two boys – “they stayed here. And it was silent. And they thought you might come and you never did.” Nora did not return calls, nor did she visit, and at the start of the book she gives herself another cause for guilt – she rashly sells the family’s holiday home to the first enquirer, even though it held wonderful memories for her children. Soon one more guilt is added – the reminder of a cruelty to a colleague some twenty-five years ago. Nora is not perfect by any means.

Besides guilt, another emotion Nora contends with is shame. One of her children has a stammer (and indeed, it stems from her abandonment during the period she nursed her husband) that she never gets round to organising a speech therapist for. Then there’s the matter of money, or rather her lack of it, which only partly explains why she sells the holiday house and does not organise the speech therapist. She has to accept an offer of employment with a local business she once worked for when still a teenager, for example, and discovers that many people she knows have done better for themselves than she has. “Nora had never heard her sister say the word “fabulously” before.” Her other sister also gets engaged without ever introducing her fiancé to Nora. Other challenges include the memory of a difficult mother, who never encouraged her to develop her musical talents.

Over the course of the book Nora does manage to address some of these emotions, but in many cases her success is limited. Her relationship to her children remains poor and distant throughout. It is his aunt who builds a darkroom for budding photographer Donal, not his mother, to whom he barely even shows his pictures. While relatives encourage (and fund) Donal to study at boarding school or Aine to go for a university in Dublin, Nora does the opposite, trying to cling on to these people without any result except furthering their mutual misunderstandings. It’s a curious marker of the novel’s structure that at the novel’s end she’s left alone with her youngest son, so that even though she has reached a kind of triumph in moving on from Maurice’s death, she has ended up in a situation is approaching desolate.

Still, in any case she has gained independence. Through music, through clothes, through haircuts and hair dyes, Nora finds a new way of representing herself. If early on in the novel her independence consisted of consciously choosing not to help with the dishes while being a guest at her sister’s home, thus going against how she had been taught to behave, later on she shows her personality through buying a record player, learning to sing, and buying some dresses. From a kind of negative freedom – a refusal – she moves to a private, affirmative one, even if it is one that is dependent upon her material conditions improving. (One of the ways time is marked in Nora Webster is the occasional comment that a recent budget has improved the allowance granted by the state to widows like herself.)

Finally, Nora even eventually turns that independence into an assertiveness. When one of her sons is moved down in class, unfairly in her view, she writes to each of the teachers declaring she will picket the school until the change is reversed. It certainly is independence, but whether it is maturity is another matter. This harms her daughter’s prospects of getting a teaching job and reveals a real thoughtless selfishness about her. When one of the teachers asks her to consider the other parents and children she simply says “I have no interest in the other parents”. She also never truly tries to understand why her son was moved down to begin with.

Maturity is important because one of the threads I most enjoyed in Nora Webster was the treatment of politics in the novel and its relationship to Nora’s changing perspective. Within the novel Nora grows up politically. Her husband was a significant figure within local politics with the Fianna Fáil party, but Nora herself lived in his shadow – I had the impression she hardly would have allowed herself to utter a thought contradicting his, even though the novel makes clear that on church matters she was more progressive than he, for example.

Politics, for a woman at home in a happy enough marriage, can sometimes arrive dulled. For a widow forced to take up work, it’s harder to avoid. Nora’s interest in her widow’s pension makes her aware of the finance minister responsible for her. Her work brings her into contact with the Haves, in the form of the Gibney family, and the Have-Nots, in the form of their workers. By working in the office of the Gibney daughter, Elizabeth, and through an acquaintance with her mother (who married into the family from a background closer to Nora’s), Nora’s position seems to be one aligned with an unassuming, unaware privilege.

Instead, however, Nora comes to shift towards the workers instead. Politics in Nora Webster is “elsewhere” but still available for those with eyes to see. In plain language: it’s on the telly. Just as in Marilynne Robinson’s Home, where the Civil Rights period comes to small town Iowa through a new television, in Nora Webster the early stages of The Troubles come to her through her own. But who notices besides her? At work it is only a lorry driver who responds to the violence of the British in Northern Ireland in an appropriate manner – “The baton charge on Saturday was serious. They were marching for civil rights. They were on their own streets. I am telling you now that is a disgrace”. Nobody else even seems to notice it.

Ultimately, Nora even joins the workers of the Gibneys’ business as they have a meeting to unionise. For Nora, this is an important milestone in her growing independence – “it was the idea that she had made a decision for herself, the idea that she had asked no one’s advice.” But what is interesting is that the narrative reflects a growing unease on Nora’s part. She’s shocked by how negatively the workers speak about the owners, and how positively about a colleague that Nora had not got on well with. Though Nora does end up joining the union, this long central chapter does not end there, but shows the reaction of the Gibneys when they find their employees have suddenly decided to unionise. While Elizabeth reports humorously that one of the brothers is busy complaining about the “Bolsheviks”, the narrative focus briefly lingers upon the head of the family, who “doesn’t want to see the place ever again. He has known some of the staff for forty years and some of them have been with the company even longer. They all stabbed him in the back.”

Industrial action is plenty more complicated than Tóibín can depict it here, but what’s important is Nora’s perspective. She sees the blindness of both the workers and of the owners, which gives her a kind of privileged position of maturity from which she could defuse any tension. I think this sense of clarity could have been explored much more in the book, for it is an area where Tóibín could really have emphasised Nora’s growth without simply falling back into these traditional narratives of overcoming grief or choosing an independent life outside of the memory of one’s husband. Sadly, this local politics is not pursued much further, and as for the country-level topics, Nora’s last word – where she declares that she would get a gun in her house if any of her children were shot at a march – rather suggests that the moral maturity I’ve spoken of is ultimately an illusion.

I think this is the most significant problem with the novel. Nora Webster is the story of a normal woman, quiet, self-effacing, in a time of relative unfreedom. Her opportunities are limited and perhaps we are supposed to praise her for whatever she does choose to do. But this crushing normality – her failures with her family, her mistakes – means that there is little in particular to like or be interested in about her. The opportunities for narratives that are more complex than just overcoming grief – through religion, through organised labour and a new perspective – are hinted at but ultimately never explored. Nora’s difficulties with her family are never resolved. She grows, in the sense of making friends and doing things, but not in the sense of moral growth or resolving deeper problems. We should be happy for her, but that doesn’t mean we should be happy to be with her.

In a certain sense, this novel is too long for what is ultimately just that standard narrative I named at the blog post’s start. It has that Chekhovian atmosphere of quiet failure about it, emphasised by that final image of Nora alone with her youngest son, in an emptied nest that is as much her own responsibility as that of her husband’s cancer. Too long in such a world is painful, rather than edifying. There were some very good moments – the final chapter is haunting (literally) and superb – but all this is not enough to unflatten for me what is ultimately a rather smooth book. I’m pained to write this since the whole reason I read Nora Webster was because, during a period of poor utilization at work, I watched quite a lot of Tóibín’s interviews and thought he was a lovely and very interesting fellow. I’m sure he is.

Temperamentally, however, I just didn’t like his book. Alas.

The Devil, Perhaps – James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner

When I was a young teen, I attempted to make an agreement with God, which has given me a low hum of anxiety ever since. This is for the simple reason that I broke it, first in spirit and then eventually in practice. Now, I have no evidence that God did indeed agree to any deal, nor that He would exact the punishment I determined for myself for the breach. (Nor even that He exists to begin with.) Regardless, one consequence of the above is that since then my own innate sense of guilt has been bolstered by the feeling that I am well and truly metaphysically screwed, and that there may be no way out of the trap I both laid myself, and myself fell into, like an overconfident Mephistopheles. Bother though these feelings be, from them I do at least have an enhanced appreciation for tales involving the Faust myth and the idea of a soul eternally sold for earthly powers.

It is a long time since I’ve read such an interesting take on the whole topic as James Hogg’s 1824 novel The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. The “justified sinner” of the title is a young man who is convinced that he is one of God’s elect, and thus removed from all moral rules – a position known as antinomianism. It’s in line with some interpretations of Calvinism / the Reformed Church, the faith popular in Scotland at the time. With such convictions, the central character begins a string of unreasonable murders while yet believing himself every bit God’s chosen son.

Based on this description, we might be tempted to dismiss the work as a bit of fun and nothing more. Arguing against a position few of us hold from an unpopular faith, its relevance to us today can only be so great. Even if we extend the central idea concerning morality to bring into play other contexts where we might declare ourselves above its rules, often without being aware of it, such as in the case of radical politics, it still does not seem something meriting a whole novel.

Why then does Hogg succeed? He succeeds because his work is much more complicated than this simple description suggests. A Justified Sinner has a fascinating split structure, with the same tale told twice from different perspectives, a blurring of fact and fiction, and a curious interplay of brazen obviousness and paralysing ambiguity. More than just an argument against extremism, it emerges as a work soaked in the anxieties of an age where the promised clarity of the Enlightenment was being challenged by the ambiguities of experience as people actually lived it.

The Story

The story goes something like this. The Laird of Dalcastle, George Colwan, inherits the family seat in Scotland in 1687. He marries a young woman of strong Calvinist convictions, who spends a single night with him before being so disgusted that she sets herself up in a different part of the estate, with only her friend, the priest Robert Wringham, for company. She gives birth to two sons, one certainly George’s and who takes his name, and one of more uncertain parentage, who is banished alongside her to live with Wringham, and takes the name Robert after him. Once older, the boys come into contact with one another, and in mysterious circumstances, George is murdered. His father dies of heartbreak, and Robert, born in wedlock and hence legitimate, takes over. Some time later, one of the elder George’s former lovers discovers young Robert and an accomplice to have been responsible for the murders and ties the new Laird up, only for him to flee just as the law is making its way to Dalcastle.

Anti-Antinomianism, then and now

The view of Christianity advanced by John Calvin, in Scotland and elsewhere, also known as Reformed Christianity, is easy for outsiders to criticise. It considers humans inherently sinful and that ascension to heaven is available to only a certain few, the “elect”. Importantly, however, election itself has nothing to do with moral merit or good works. It’s a choice God made at the beginning of time, so to speak, and you can’t convince Him otherwise. That means that if you are outside of the elect, or feel you are, you are basically trapped in despair. This idea is illustrated with terrible power by Jack Boughton, in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead novels, who is convinced of his depravity and powerlessness to stop sinning. The result is that he continues to sin and loath himself, even though, as a human being, Robinson shows him to be as deserving of love as anyone. Perhaps Calvinism’s best popular defender these days is Robinson herself – her non-fiction explores Calvin’s legacy with greater depth and seriousness than I could. (Or indeed, than does Hogg here.)

For Hogg in his novel, the interest in Calvinism is in this idea of the elect and their relation to other obligations. If one is elected, then under certain interpretations of Calvinism, one can really do whatever one wants – because God chose you for election anyway, knowing this. The practical tension that the younger Robert faces is that he has “doubts, that, chosen as he knew he was from all eternity, still it might be possible for him to commit acts that would exclude him from the limits of the covenant.” Unfortunately, he has an accomplice or double or devil for a guide – a being calling itself Gil-Martin. As we learn in the second section of A Justified Sinner, this man is ready and waiting to convince Robert to kill whenever he starts with his worries again. If one is serving God, and one must be as one of the elect, then one can do anything one deems necessary because one can be sure it will be in God’s own service. Including, of course, murder.

It is tempting to laugh at such ideas, which are not the standard view in Calvinism, but we encounter people setting themselves outside of consistent moral rules almost every day. Religions are full of hypocrites, but so too are the irreligious, whose behaviour is conditioned by considerations of purity, something we see all too often in our decaying political discourse, especially on the internet. As soon as we learn someone is outside of our political group, we excuse ourselves of the responsibility of treating them as fully human and with the kindness and consideration we would someone of our own group. We dismiss them, denigrate them. Heaven forbid we should encounter them online, for we will then go through their entire post history to find something that gives them away as an enemy. In A Justified Sinner, there is a direct parallel in young Robert asking the older Robert about the spiritual qualities of a man he plans to murder to find the “gotcha” that proves it’s right to end his life.

The Novel’s Criticism of Antinomianism

If the criticism of antinomianism were only the dead that dot the novel’s pages, A Justified Sinner would be preaching to the converted, as I imagine the majority of its readers have never seriously contemplated murdering anyone. Yet the novel does much more than that in arguments against extremism, which does much to extend its interest today. The first way it does this is its emphasis on human fallibility through the courts and the priests, because for all young Robert’s interest in heavenly justice, the novel he inhabits is much more concerned with justice of an earthly sort. Among other situations, young Robert and George end up in court after a fight, there’s an investigation into George’s murder, and the elder George’s lover must disclaim knowledge of some stolen goods to save another woman’s life.

Each of these situations puts a crack in our idea of justice as a kind of idol. In the first, “the sheriff was a Whig,” and we hear that though it is “well known how differently the people of the present day, in Scotland, view the cases of their own party-men, and those of opposite political principles”, the situation at the time of the narrative was still worse. In the second case, the wrong man, a friend of George’s, is convicted of his murder, with contrary evidence being discounted, while in the third case, the pursuit of legal truth has to be neglected for the pursuit of moral truth and the discovery of Robert’s true purposes.

In a similar way, the treatment of religious discourse is such that we come to doubt the reliability of those who represent it. The priest Robert is a nasty man, more ready to “doom all that were aliens from God to destruction” than to wish them well, for example. And whenever the younger Robert doubts his obligation to murder, Gil-Martin always has a counterargument using scripture to get him back on track. Jesus himself came “with a sword”, so why shouldn’t young Robert? Alas, the Bible, being a big book, provides plenty of opportunities for crafting a more violent set of obligations upon Christians than we prefer to see these days.

One final point that is as obvious to me as it is impossible to consider for the younger Robert – how on earth does someone know they are one of the elect? In the younger Robert’s case, the only evidence is that his own probable father declares he is. But how can the priest be sure? We need not doubt the idea of election or the religious truth of Calvinism to doubt that it is practically possible to establish who is elected, and who is not. If we can’t trust authorities we have to trust our own consciences. This seems to be what A Justified Sinner is getting at, morally. Even young Robert, led astray by the devil, has one of those.

Narration and the Search for Truth

A Justified Sinner thus makes an argument against extremism first through its murders, then through its demonstration of the fallibility of scriptural interpretation and court justice. But where the book is most fascinating is at a still more fundamental level – the level of narration and structure themselves. This is because the entire book’s structure is itself an argument about the elusiveness of truth and hence an argument for moderation and carefulness.

A Justified Sinner is broken up into two main parts, with a final section tying them together. The first version of the story is “the editor’s narrative”, and details the version of the story that they could find from “history” and “tradition”. As a narrative, it covers the Story section earlier in this post. The narrator is largely a background presence, but his judgement against “the rage of fanaticism” of the events comes forth above all in his language. This is hard to miss – A Justified Sinner is at times anything but a subtle book. Young Robert is like a “demon”, a “devilish-looking youth” with a “malignant eye”. The narrator never says outright that either Robert or his familiar are devils, but they may as well do.

It’s not an ambiguous book, might be our conclusion from the first part of the work. But then the second section, the “Confessions”, begins, and things become a lot stranger. For here, the narrator is young Robert himself. He is convinced that he is guilty of no evil at all, and that what he did he did “in the faith of the promises, and justification by grace.” Through his condemnation of his brother (“ungodly and reprobate”) and father, and his black and white thinking, Robert’s narration provides a mirroring of the editor’s while relating many of the same events. Both, in their biases, cannot be true reflections of the world. By making the biases so obvious, it seems in fact that the text wants to make clear that neither is a true reflection.

The book does more than place two unambiguous texts against one another, for in Robert’s telling there’s also the problem of Gil-Martin. This creature, who has the ability to shapeshift, meets young Robert on the very morning when the priest has declared him one of the elect. The text allows a certain amount of uncertainty about who Gil-Martin really is, indeed whether he really exists at all beyond Robert’s mind: “I was a being incomprehensible to myself. Either I had a second self, who transacted business in my likeness, or else my body was at times possessed by a spirit over which it had no control, and of whose actions my own soul was wholly unconscious”.  

The overall result is that the narration is both real and unreal, both obvious and totally obfuscated at different moments. Robert is the subjectivity that becomes increasingly deranged, while the narrator is the attempt at objectivity that never quite works in spite of its best efforts. A Justified Sinner even contains a real letter from Hogg himself and features him as a minor character. It seems real, but it is so far from containing a simple truth that the only argument we can get from the text is that things will never be as certain as we want them to be. This, in turn, becomes an argument for moderation.

A Romantic Reaction

This line of method and argumentation also places A Justified Sinner within the context of other Romantic works. While the bulk of the novel is set in the early years of the 18th century and deals, indirectly, with a climate of significant religious tensions in Scotland at the time, its real thematic interests are Romantic. Specifically, they are anti-Enlightenment.

A Justified Sinner shares with writers like the German E.T.A. Hoffmann an engagement with the strangeness of perception. In Hoffmann’s Sandmann, a work full of looking-glasses and different perspectives – in this case, an epistolary section and a more impersonal narrative section – there is also a man who goes mad and acts violently out of a personal conviction. The anxiety as a whole likely leads back to a mixture of Kant and the Terror in France, where, in the latter case, the idea that all could be made rational led only to the guillotine. In A Justified Sinner, we have the sensible young George, who tries to reason with his brother and make peace with him, pitted against the thoroughly irrational Robert.

There are dark forces in the subconscious, and in the world itself. This was one key Romantic idea, as was the idea of the sublimity of subjective vision of the sort that Robert’s attitude embodies. In A Justified Sinner, the forces of unreason are stronger – first because Robert kills George, and then because he is driven mad himself. (More mad than mere murder). “Unreason”, though, has perhaps more negativity than what we really see here. What the novel suggests is just that there are forces beyond reason at play in the world, for good and for ill. The former is not too obvious unless we consider the work as a whole. In the final section, we return to the editor’s narrative to hear how he came across Robert’s Confessions. These were, we learn, miraculously preserved alongside his body in the grave of his eventual suicide.

In other words, God has intervened to bring us the anti-extremist message of this work. There’s a further irony, a further mystery. If God did do this, then perhaps the younger Robert was right all along – his life was serving God in an indirect way, because through A Justified Sinner we receive a text that reminds us of our obligations to follow His commandments. Whether this is the right interpretation, we shall never know – as with the rest of the book, it’s shrouded in the fog of mystery.

Conclusion

It’s by no means a perfect work, is Hogg’s. The language and characterisation, in particular, is at times so poor that I myself could have written it. (I learned since that Hogg had a thing against editing his works owing to a belief that he was a genius – I have taken this to heart as a warning). But the ideas here, the innovations of structure and narrative, make this a fine work to study, all the same. Plus, as a Scot myself who has barely read a thing by his fellow countrymen, it was a good place to start. Any other recommendations beyond Burns are welcome in the comments.

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.