Mostly About Stories

The Letters of Joseph Conrad

I read Conrad’s letters because I find him a powerful if at times impenetrable artist. Unlike with other favourites, whose works may be complex but nevertheless generally manage to be at least somewhat clear to the reader, Conrad’s tales often are opaque in both language and content. I wanted to see whether his letters would help clarify matters. Another reason is that Conrad is one of the English language’s most interesting stylists. His tales are dark, gloomy, illuminated only by brief flashes of lightning. I thought that perhaps by going behind the scenes I might discover the system of cogs and wheels that made possible such great works as Nostromo and Heart of Darkness.

Over the course of five hundred pages we get to know Conrad reasonably well. The author, who spent the first half of his life at sea, has few surviving letters from that time, making him as much of a biographical mystery as any of his characters. Instead, we read the letters of Conrad the writer. These are at times touching, as when he writes to his wife, or funny, as when he writes of his critics (“There is even one abandoned creature who says I am a neo-platonist. What on earth is that?”), and at times merely dull. As with Dostoevsky, Conrad spent most of his life without much money and was always asking to borrow some from his friends. I also got almost as fed up of Conrad denying he was a writer of the sea as he got from being accused of it. And as for his gout…

The letters are interesting to people who want to get a feel for how Conrad created his own works. I particularly liked his comment on Lord Jim beingbut “a hash of episodes, little thumbnail sketches of fellows one has rubbed shoulders with and so on”. But they are more interesting for providing clear – for Conrad – statements about how he wrote and what he thought. Such things we might pick up from his work but when laid out here they may still be useful or at the very least interesting. It is around these areas which this piece will be structured, with the result that my comments will be limited. Conrad can speak, or rather write, for himself.

Life

Conrad’s view of the world is often described as pessimistic, even nihilistic. Fate is cruel, merciless, and incomprehensible. This comes across in his letters too, although it is more pronounced earlier on – at the time of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim – than when he was more established as a writer:

“Life knows us not and we do not know life – we don’t know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of to-morrow”

A certain lack of faith in humankind is the keynote. He writes of injustice that the best way to deal with it is to accept it. We might say that he is realistic, rather than pessimistic. It is of no great consequence either way, for a man with a “deep-seated sense of fatality governing this man-inhabited world”.

Our problem, as he sees it, lies in our being conscious of the world. Unlike the brute beasts of the earth, humans are aware of the world’s terrifying valuelessness and suffer all the more for it: “What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it.” This is a view shared by other pessimists like Thomas Ligotti or Arthur Schopenhauer.

How does Conrad fight off this gloom, what does he believe in? Certainly not Christianity – “Christianity is distasteful to me. I am not blind to its services but the absurd oriental fable from which it starts irritates me”. Instead, Conrad clings to traditional values as his ballast: “What I believe in most is responsibilities of conduct.” When spelled out, his values are spoiled by the sense that they are impossible things, lying beyond our reach:

“I respect courage, truth, fidelity, self-restraint and devotion to the ancient ideals of mankind; and am sorry that, like most men, I fail in the practice of these simple virtues.”

We learn of Conrad’s politics, which are fairly sound. He has sympathy for the Africans and other non-white peoples, even though his views would be old-fashioned today, and his views on slavery are a little tainted by his experience growing up in Poland-Ukraine. Mostly, his politics is marked by the same sense of tireless hopelessness as the rest of his views:

“Every cause is tainted: and you reject this one, espouse that other one as if one were evil and the other good while the same evil you hate is in both, but disguised in different words… What you want to reform are not institutions – it is human nature. … Not that I think mankind intrinsically bad. It is only silly and cowardly. Now You know that in cowardice is every evil – especially that cowardice so characteristic of our civilization”.

Work

So much for Conrad the man. Now we must get to Conrad the writer. This was what I enjoyed the most. Conrad comes across in these letters as a thoroughly human writer. He goes from hope (“labouring against an anxious tomorrow, under the stress of an uncertain future, I have been at times consoled, re-assured and uplifted by a finished page”) to despair (“…writing as I did with a constant, haunting fear of being lost in the midst of thickening untruth”), he struggles with English – his third language – but at no point does he give up completely.

And so, what is his advice to us humble novices?

On le mot juste:

“No word is adequate. The imagination of the reader should be left free to arouse his feeling.” Instead, what you want is “a picture of a mental state”.

On scepticism and truth:

“The fact is you want more scepticism at the very foundation of your work. Scepticism the tonic of minds, the tonic of life, the agent of truth – the way of art and salvation. In a book you should love the idea and be scrupulously faithful to your conception of life. There lies the honour of the writer, not in the fidelity to his personages.”

On the use of detail for establishing reality, and the truth we must hold to, consciously or not:

“A picture of life is saved from failure by the merciless vividness of detail. Like a dream it must be startling, undeniable, absurd, and appalling… Our captivity within the incomprehensible logic of accident is the only fact of the universe. From that reality flows deception and inspiration, error and faith, egoism and sacrifice, love and hate. That truth fearlessly faced becomes an austere and trusted friend, a companion of victory or a giver of peace. While our struggles to escape from it – either through drink or philanthropy; through a theory or through disbelief – make the comedy and the drama of life. To produce a work of art a man must either know or feel that truth – even without knowing it.”

In short, what he recommends is a fidelity to one’s convictions, to one’s vision of the world (though we should know it before we write):

“Everyone must walk in the light of his own heart’s gospel. No man’s light is good to any of his fellows. That’s my creed – from beginning to end. That’s my view of life – a view that rejects all formulas dogmas and principles of other people’s making. These are only a web of illusions. We are too varied. Another man’s truth is only a dismal lie to me.”

And his other useful advice is to be careful about the creation of mystery:

“Explicitness, my dear fellow, is fatal to the glamour of all artistic work, robbing it of all suggestiveness, destroying all illusion”. Explicitness concerns spelling things out, it does not mean that we must rely on deliberately confusing language. On the contrary, “in letters suggestiveness itself – a great quality – must be obtained by precise expression”. There are a number of times when Conrad advises his friends by doing some close reading on a few of their sentences, and changes them to make them less obvious, but much more powerful suggestive, by adding in a perfect turn of phrase.

Conclusion

However much we may struggle at times with Conrad’s own style, and I know I do, it comes from a particular worldview, and fits that view like a glove. The dark world is depicted with a dark and flickering style. And that is what, to me, makes Conrad so great. For it is a style that has only grown more effective over the years and it is the style that is best suited to our own day, with its ambiguity, its dashed hopes, and its great uncertainty.

For readers who have no sympathy for Conrad’s writing, and for those who do, I end on an amusing quote from him about Nostromo, which he had edited lightly over ten years after it had first been published:

“A paragraph of about ten lines has been taken bodily out, for the simple reason that reading it after ten or twelve years I could find no intelligible meaning in it.”

Who has not felt that with Conrad? But who has not, at the same time, felt that even in the vaguest, the most tenebrous of phrases, there lies a suggestion of the dark forces that, like it or not, bubble underneath our world? He’s alright, Conrad, really.

An Uninformative Post about Kant’s Prolegomena

I find most philosophy sufficiently difficult and insufficiently relevant to my own life that I rarely have any great desire to read it for pleasure. Naturally, there are exceptions. Schopenhauer suits my temperament and is important for demystifying much of the 19^th century’s literature – that he actually is a talented writer too is yet another reason to read him. Nietzsche is inspirational in his own way, though I find him less entertaining than I once did. And all the existentialists are interested in questions about how to live one’s life. This is something that I find rather useful as I am trying to live too.

Then there’s Kant. Kant is a proper philosopher. He never left the area around Königsberg where he lived in East Prussia. And yet he created the most magnificent works through sheer force of will and mind. I can appreciate that. I can also appreciate his influence, which is not just limited to the likes of Kleist, who I dealt with here recently, but also to other people who built upon him, like the aforementioned Schopenhauer, and people like Fichte and Marx and Hegel. Modern philosophy started, probably, with Descartes, but Kant is another contender for the title. He is certainly one of the most influential philosophers of all time. It made sense to read him.

Rather than starting with the Critique of Pure Reason, I decided to read a much smaller work instead – the Prolegomena. Or to give it its full and catchy title, Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic that Could Be Considered a Science. The Prolegomena is a work Kant wrote to make his Critique of Pure Reason more accessible to the masses, (a group to which in this instance I most definitely belong). He was unhappy that people didn’t understand it, especially because he was convinced that what he had written was so absolutely ground-breaking that all previous attempts at metaphysics might as well be thrown away as a result. The Critique have the desired effect – he needed to descend from his ivory tower. And so he wrote this. And I read it.

In German! Yes, I read it. I learned all of those idiotic words like “derive” and “inertia” which spice its pages. And I can confidently say that I understood next to nothing. But I have read it, and that’s an achievement. I had no real intention of understanding the work when I set out. I dutifully noted key points in the margins and did my underlinings, but I was not following Kant’s argument and was not trying to. I am still trying to work out whether or not this was a waste of time.

With any philosophy I am much more interested in its spirit than its contents. By “spirit” I mean the character of the writer lying behind the words. I wanted to receive a vision of the world to add to my collection. I know that Schopenhauer’s philosophy is ridiculous, but I find his pessimistic vision powerful. I know that Nietzsche’s philosophy is likewise brutal and silly, but I sense the force behind his words. As long as I get a feel for the author’s worldview, and one or two of the consequences of it, I do not mind the quality of its foundations. Unfortunately, a casual chat with anybody, including the person that stares at us in the mirror, will reveal that few of us live according to worldviews that are philosophically sound. But still we live.

With Kant I had a sense of extreme rigour. There was no imagination here, but a kind of terrifying devotion to organisation and clarity. He built a philosophy like one builds a machine – Schopenhauer built one like one paints a landscape. Kant’s overwhelming concern for truth, for duty, and for an absence of any form of “Schwärmerei” or muddle-headed dreaming, was inspirational. There was something almost Victorian in his devotion to reject playfulness. His long sentences were designed to evidence the pedigree of his thought, whose ancestry like that of a good dog could be traced back deep into the past. As I have mentioned, I understood nothing here; I only felt. And yet I felt Kant’s mechanical striving to be supremely relevant to the modern world. I do not mean this in a good way. As many commentators (e.g. Theodor Adorno) have discovered, in all this purity and conclusiveness there is something that tolerates no human frailty.

I have never been one to keep myself at night, wondering whether synthetic a priori judgements are possible. I am content to avoid overturning too many philosophical stones. But I appreciate that Kant does. Inspired by Kleist’s Kant Crisis, I often lowered the Prolegomena and stared out in front of myself and told myself that the things I saw I saw not as themselves, but only as they were transformed by my perception, and that I would never be able to know what this or that table or chair really was. Such tasks were sometimes successful, and I would be left with a disorientating sense of the uncanniness of the world we take to be stable. But more usually I was left puzzled and could not quite work out what I should do with the information. I could not understand why I should care.

It is strange to think that Kleist had a breakdown upon learning that we could not know things as themselves. It seems almost funny now. And yet, I wonder what it means, that philosophy could reach the heart of a man with such force as to shake him. This is not the quest for meaning that attacks most of us from time to time. I feel like a doubt in the foundations of the world requires a much more sensitive sensibility, one that I myself probably lack. It is impressive really, to care that much. I feel like these days we are all so jaded that the news that the world is not what it seems wouldn’t mean anything much to us.

Conspiracies, late-capitalist pressures, mass-surveillance, the internet. Whether or not one agrees with them, their growing presence within our world seems to prepare us for Kant’s sceptical, boundary-setting truth – that our knowledge is limited, that some things cannot be known. We already live in a state of conscious ignorance of the foundations of our lives, only this time these foundations are not related to perception of metaphysics or natural law or whatever Kant is actually taking about, but to everything around us that makes being alive possible in this world. (I appreciate that for philosophers, the two are the same thing. Indeed, I also appreciate that if I bothered understanding Kant, I would find more insights than just a scepticism about metaphysics. All this will take time.)

And so, although I have not been convinced of anything to do with metaphysics, I haven’t come away from the Prolegomena empty-handed. I have a sense of Kant’s spirit, and a sense of how that spirit might manifest itself in our modern world. Does that justify trudging through a hundred and fifty pages of dense German? Alas, the answer lies beyond the limits of pure reason.

A Few Thoughts on Kleist’s Style

Heinrich von Kleist is one of the most extraordinary German writers of an age when German writing was already shaping world literature. However, it took a long time for the world to get used to him. Goethe famously snubbed him, and Kleist’s biography tends to be haunted by its ending – he died in a suicide pact at age 34. Before that death, however, he managed to produce a small body of work – his complete works, including letters, fits snuggle into a single two-thousand-page volume – which time has only elevated in stature.

For Kleist did not fit in within his world. Stefan Zweig, the early-twentieth-century Austrian writer, wrote a book entitled Hölderlin, Kleist, and Nietzsche: The Struggle with the Daemon, which suggests something of his character and his kindred spirits. Kleist’s writing, which I have long struggled to get into, has at last opened itself up to me. I have conquered his dreadfully long and torturous German sentences for the first time, and now I am able to see for myself what the fuss is all about.

Kleist wrote dramas, and he wrote short stories, and he wrote a couple of interesting philosophical essays and journalistic pieces too. This post will focus on the short stories. At Cambridge I read Penthesilea, his tragedy involving Achilles and the eponymous Amazonian queen, but I could not understand it. Last month I read The Broken Jug and The Schroffenstein Family, both of which are early dramas which had moments of cleverness but were nevertheless a little contrived. I will read his more mature dramas, including Penthesilea again, in due course. But it is his short stories – eight of them, all written near the end of his life, that have motivated me to write today. For they are really something special.

In addition to his suicide pact, everyone likes to mention that poor Kleist had a rather significant mental breakdown in 1801. This is what scholars like to term the “Kant Crisis”. Kleist had been reading the aforementioned German philosopher and had accidentally broken down the foundations of his own world. It happens. Kleist learned from Kant that we are unable to penetrate through our sensory perception of the world to things as they really are. As he explained it to a friend, it’s as though everyone is wearing tinted glasses – our world is distorted, but we cannot know how, and we cannot know what the real world is actually like. Objective truth becomes impossible; at least Kleist saw it that way. Connections to others are fleeting, trust is impossible. Our world is only misunderstanding heaped upon misunderstanding. All this broke Kleist the man but it made Kleist the writer.

Style

Deceitful Reportage in Michael Kohlhaas

So what is this writer? Awful, is one way of describing him. His stories are made up of long, winding sentences, that occasionally bring German grammar up to its limits. These long sentences fit into paragraphs that go on for pages at a time. This does not make for easy reading. The two previous times I read Kleist’s prose, at school and then at my first year at university, I was crushed by it. The language was too complex, the syntax and lexis arcane. I had a feeling that I’d like Kleist, but I couldn’t reach him. Perhaps if he’d been born fifty years later, I thought, he’d have learned how to use speech marks and add a new paragraph here and there, as so often do his translators.

And yet these sentences and these paragraphs serve a purpose. “Michael Kohlhaas”, the longest novella, has the subtitle “from an old chronicle”. It tries, consciously, to be a kind of reportage. Kohlhaas, a real figure from the age of Luther, is blown up by Kleist into a titanic figure. A horse dealer who is wronged by an aristocrat, Kohlhaas burns the man’s castle to the ground and goes around pillaging half of Germany, just to get a kind of justice. Kleist pretends that the work is history, referring to “the chronicles whose comparison allows us to write this tale”. But the tale has little to do with the historical Kohlhaas, and Kleist’s approach seems designed more to derail our idea of history as something clear-cut and definite. The narrator informs us at one point that the sources disagree, and decides that he cannot really say what happened. At another point he mentions an emotion in Kohlhaas’s heart but refuses to say what it is. We are left with an allegedly objective document that falls apart.

Then there is the narrator himself. A man who refers to “the poor Kohlhaas” and only a moment later heaps insults upon him, the narrator provides no ballast. Though occasionally he appears to see into Kohlhaas’s heart, just as often he makes us see only a gesture, or a facial expression. As with some of my favourite books – Tolstoy’s Hadji Murat and Conrad’s Nostromo – Kleist presents us with a mysterious central character who we look upon, but rarely into.

The story further displays a defiance of objective truth by being filled with rumours – where is Kohlhaas and his band of rebels? – and mistakes. The justice system, supposedly on Kohlhaas’s side, and supposedly designed to help us reach Truth, proves hopelessly corrupt due to the influence of the aristocrats (mockery is made of the justice system in The Broken Jug as well). We repeatedly get the impression that around Kohlhaas are forces that he cannot understand and cannot predict, whether they are the scheming aristocrats or bandits using his name to further their own ends. In this, Kohlhaas becomes a kind of microcosm of humankind’s place in a not-fully-knowable universe, and a surprisingly modern work.

God and Perspective in “Saint Cecilia or the Power of Music”, “The Foundling”, and “The Earthquake in Chile”

“Michael Kohlhaas” uses a documentary style that ultimately undermines itself. Elsewhere, Kleist explores the importance of perspective in questions of truth. “Saint Cecilia or the Power of Music”, is a shorter story that is quite enigmatic. Four brothers arrive in Aachen with the intention of destroying some religious images – the time is at the height of Protestant fervour. They gather together a band of men and head to their target church, but during the mass, instead of giving the signal to attack, the brothers are overcome by the power of music. They begin to pray, and pray, and pray. They are brought to a madhouse, and there they stay, living out a long and somewhat strange life. The music that they heard was played by a nun that was apparently sick, but had miraculously recovered in time to perform. However, it later transpires that she was sick after all, and that her replacement’s identity is unknown.

What exactly has happened? We encounter much of the story through the eyes of the brothers’ mother, who travels six years later to Aachen in search of them. From one of the band of rabble-rousers she learns one version of the story, from the abbess another – and from other inhabitants of the town, still more versions. Nothing is clear, from who played the music to what happened to the brothers. We encounter a truth that has been shattered beyond repair, something Kleist makes clear by using numbers. We cannot reach the truth of a story where there were both definitely three hundred and one hundred rebels at the ready – we can only select a version that makes most sense to us.

And what does it mean that the brothers were converted? Is it an act of God? Perhaps, but we cannot be sure. They are catatonic, capable only of repetitious prayer. Although they appear to be happy, this is not the sign of a benevolent God – certainly not the kind of God that most of us look for. The boys’ mother is converted to Catholicism at the story’s end, but it’s a conversion that seems slightly absurd to us – we cannot understand her. We know what she experienced, of course, because we read about it – but we do not know how she interpreted it or how it touched her core.

God lies at the heart of Kleist’s most exciting works. Does he exist, and what is he like if he does exist? Kleist’s style reflects a refusal, a brutal refusal, to answer these questions. In “Saint Cecilia” we see an apparent act of God, but one that only makes God seem stranger than what we’ve been led to expect – it disorientates us. In “The Foundling”, another extraordinary story, a merchant takes in an orphan after his son dies and raises him as his own. And in return for all this unconditional, Christian kindness, he is treated with an almost satanic cruelty. It does not make sense. It challenges that Christian-moral firmament upon which our worldview rested in Kleist’s day, and still mostly rests in our own day. The tragic conclusion of “The Earthquake in Chile” takes place in and outside a church, but it is brutally violent and fit only for an old-testament God in one of His worst moods.

Conclusion

Any good story has an element of ambiguity, but Kleist’s ambiguity seeps through to his very formal approach to problems. We see events and characters from multiple angles, in a style that appears to be factual, but all this does not take us any closer to resolving our issues. On the contrary, it makes them even more acute. We have a God who seems to exist, but rather than providing a bedrock upon which to build a certain surety, Kleist uses his God to make us even more confused about what we think of as truth.

I admit that the style is frustratingly dense at times, and the sentences need attacking with a hacksaw, but if one can get over these hurdles, they will find in Kleist a writer who is very much worth reading. He is a figure who is disquieting in the extreme and strikingly contemporary. More posts on him to follow.