Myth and the Creation of Character in Conrad’s Nostromo

I’ve just finished Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, a magnificent and great novel if ever there was one. It chronicles several years in the history of the invented Republic of Costaguana in South America, focusing on the seaboard town known as Sulaco as it grows rich and influential thanks to a huge silver mine located there. This mine is the central image of the story, consuming the hearts and minds of every character by offering power and wealth in equal measure and giving the novel many elements taken from traditional myths. What Nostromo does so well is use this mine to become at turns a political novel, a philosophical one, and – most importantly – an adventure one. Using formal inventiveness Conrad is able to create a fictional world every bit as alluring as the silver at its heart.

A photo of Joseph Conrad, author of Nostromo
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), whose Heart of Darkness has been the bane of many schoolchildren, including me. I’m glad I gave him a second chance, because he has fast become one of my favourites.

Here, though, I’d like to gush simply about the formal tricks and turns Conrad uses to introduce and give life to his imagined republic, and to the characters who inhabit it, especially the mysterious and fascinating Nostromo himself. The novel is good enough that I could go on for days, and so I think it’s wise I limit myself to these two connected ideas.

An Introduction to Sulaco: The First Chapter of Nostromo

The first chapter of Nostromo is not, dare I say, particularly punchy. It begins in the matter of fact manner more typical of a history book than of a novel. But therein lies its purpose. It is designed to bring us into the Republic of Costaguana and Sulaco as if they had existed for many years. And this requires a great deal of skill. When we think of a country, we rarely stop there in our minds. We think of the capital, we think of the location, we think of its history and its people. Conrad, in creating a new world, has to do all this in a way that doesn’t come across as being boring; but he also cannot skimp on the descriptions, because then the world will hardly feel real and lived-in then. That is the central challenge for the first chapter and its four or five pages.

“In the time of Spanish rule” – the novel’s opening words – already establish Nostromo as part of history, and a familiar one. We laypeople may not know the specifics of Spanish rule, but we know its approximate time and its approximate extent. It doesn’t seem too unreasonable to add another country to those we know Spain once ruled.

Once the country has been fixed in history it needs to be fixed geographically through a description of the main features around Sulaco itself. But naming a mere rock, such like the peninsula of Azuera, is once again not enough. Conrad must invest objects with history too, and show their relationship to the people. And thus, the barren peninsula, we are told, is associated by the poor of the town with “an obscure instinct of consolation the ideas of evil and wealth” and therefore they “will tell you that it is deadly because of its hidden treasures”. Now we have not merely a rock, but a people revealed through their attitude towards it.

Conrad goes on, very briefly, to tell the story of this peninsula – which is never visited during the events of Nostromo. That is, how two foreigners went out with the goal of finding the treasure apparently lurking there but disappeared without a trace. Again, we have the people’s view of things – “the two gringos, spectral and alive, are believed to be dwelling to this day amongst the rocks, under the fatal spell of their success”. Magic and mystery live within the language of this part of the novel, and these stories-within-the-story of Nostromo add to the fairy-tale like quality of the novel. Ideas and events seem doomed to repeat. Perhaps, indeed, they are fated to.

A photo of Panama, showing trees and a peninsula
A view of Panama, whose scenery is similar to that of the Republic of Costaguana in Nostromo. Picture from Erandly [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

The rest of the first chapter continues to add to this mythic representation of Sulaco and its history. A rogue cloud is described as “burst[ing] suddenly into flame and crash[ing] like a sinister pirate-ship of the air” – an ominous description if ever there was one. Meanwhile, using phrases like “as the saying is”, Conrad is able to create even the idiomatic language itself of the local populace. There is no weak point, it seems to me, in all of this – the world feels real and lived-in. The attitude of the locals is built up piecemeal through each new geographical location and its associations, so that by the end of the chapter, without a single man or woman being named, the reader has the sense of a them as pious folk, superstitious and hostile towards foreigners and their wealth. We already know their speech; we even know their myths.

And as Nostromo progresses we return to these places in thought or in action, and even the figures of speech find themselves being used. The novel itself is the vindication of its first chapter, proving the reality of all that Conrad initially describes. The two parts buttress and justify each other.

An Invaluable Fellow – The Creation of Nostromo the Man

The best of Conrad’s characters embody the fragility of our understanding that came with modernism and the modern sensibility – people like Lord Jim and Kurtz, characters seen through Marlow’s eyes in glimpses, as though they are walking deep in fog. Nostromo creates its titular character in a way that takes its cue from Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim while moving beyond them. Nostromo himself, oddly enough, scarcely appears in the novel’s first two hundred pages, but we feel his presence throughout. While other characters, such as the stoic Charles Gould, owner of Sulaco’s San Tomé mine, are all focused on the creation of wealth, Nostromo himself stands out by his focus, instead, on his reputation. And in light of this, the lack of his appearance until the middle of the novel makes perfect sense – his reputation precedes him. We come to “know” him before we meet him.

But at the same time, we feel a sense of uncertainty in our knowledge of Nostromo. We come to know the facts – he is an Italian, raised in Genoa, who now is the captain of the longshoremen in Sulaco’s harbour – long before we meet the man, but we are keenly aware that they are inadequate for getting a true measure of him. When we do see Nostromo he appears in the epic mode, rather than as a normal character – his language is curt and full of an almost inhuman confidence. When he talks with one character who is mourning the fact that his son never lived past childhood Nostromo simply says “If he had been like me he would have been a man.”

His figure is also highly symbolic. For example, there is the silver-grey mare that he rides, which connects him with the mine while also making him preternaturally fast. He appears like a vengeful spirit without clear goals of his own – he lacks any kind of internality, at least in the novel’s first hundred pages or so, where his confidence and pride overcome any hint of reflexivity. At the closing moments of Part First he is present at a night-time celebration among the locals which even has more than a hint of the Dionysian about it, with “the barbarous and imposing noise of the big drum” that draws him in. There, he is confronted by a lover who demands a gift, and Nostromo, carelessly powerful, cuts off the silver buttons of his very own coat to give to her. His self-mastery is frightening and alluring.

A picture of the Panama Canal being built. Exploitation of resources doesn't come without exploitation of the people too. Conrad nudges us at times to ask if it is worth it.
The Panama Canal under construction. During Nostromo we see the Republic of Costaguana become highly developed due to its silver mine and European and American investment. But Conrad is keen to show that all of this change is not without its cost. He nudges us to consider the human consequences of all this “progress”.

The use of names is another area where Nostromo casts an epic shadow. By giving him countless names and epithets Conrad shows the multifaceted nature of his character. Even the very name “Nostromo” is not his own, but the name by which the English residents of Sulaco call him. We don’t even hear his actual name, Giovanni Fidenza, until near the book’s end. As a result, we receive the impression, yet again, that we are only scratching the surface of who he is. A great many people trust him as “a perfectly incorruptible fellow”, but others know him as “the generous, the terrible, the inconstant Capataz de Cargadores”. Who is he really?

This situation is further muddied when certain epithets, such as “incorruptible” are used not without a hint of irony – but only at times, so that we never know how much the irony reflects truth, or distracts from it. Early on in the book we are told of a character that “so far, she too was under the spell” of Nostromo’s reputation. Is the “so far” a warning, or a red herring? Does “spell” refer to something that is backed up by the rest of the story, or is it the mark of an evil man and sorcerer? I certainly shan’t reveal the truth here – I just want to indicate the range of methods by which Conrad fashions the character of Nostromo while leaving him nonetheless a mystery for us to piece together.

We see Nostromo as gestures, and we hear him more through reported speech than through his own mouth. Conrad gives us masses of information but never enough of the man to make sense of them. To my mind at least, it is a fascinating way of showing how modernism disrupted our notions of certainty and character. Conrad can’t tell us who Nostromo is, but his characters all get the chance to have a go. Yet each explanation seems to contradict the next one, leaving us even more confused than when we started out. And yet we know that under all of these explanations there must be a man. The challenge in reading Nostromo partially becomes trying to locate this man and understand who he is and what it is that drives him.

Conclusion

The depths given to Nostromo are great, but there are many other characters in the novel who are fascinating in their own way, from taciturn Englishman Charles Gould, the owner of the mine, to the indignant General Montero whose decision to start a revolution forms the key conflict of the book. It isn’t just the characters of Nostromo that make the novel great, but also its exciting plot, filled with tricks and turns including even buried treasure. Conrad lures us in with the promise of adventure, and then reveals something far more complex lying under the novel’s surface – a modern myth, yes, but also a highly political novel, and a brutally sad story of our common exploitation of the South American nations, long after formal colonialism had ended. It’s a really cool book, and thoroughly recommended. Even though I only managed to finish it the third time through…

An interesting comparison to Nostromo would probably be Salvatore Satta’s novel, The Day of Judgement, which I talk about here. Both novels explore the changes in sleepy rural society around the beginning of the twentieth century, and how far we should consider our notion of “progress” to be a positive thing.

Did you enjoy Nostromo as much as I did? Did Conrad’s style derange you rather than dazzle? Why not leave a comment below

Theodor Storm’s Aquis Submersus and the German Novella

Theodor Storm’s Aquis Submersus is a novella that shows the potentially dangerous consequences of going against society in the pursuit of love. But first and foremost, it is a story, and that’s what makes it fun to read. I’d like to make the case for that “fun” factor today, while still providing a summary of the plot and an analysis of what makes the story interesting from an “I’m going to have to write an essay on this for uni” perspective.

Theodor Storm and the Novella

The German word “Novelle” can be easily translated as “novella”, but you lose a lot of cultural associations that way. Theodor Storm, whose work is as cool as his name, was a master at the art of writing novellas and also one of the genre’s great theorists. He explained the power of the novella by connecting it to tragic drama when he said “the novella is the sister of drama”. Unlike a novel, which is typically (experimental works discounted) burdened by a large cast of characters and multiple subplots, the novella in 19th century Germany is lean and focused on a single plotline and a few characters, much like a traditional tragic drama. And unlike a short story, the novella has enough time to develop its characters and plots from fleeting impressions and moments into something with a complex plot that can grab and hold our attention.

A photo of Theodor Storm
Theodor Storm

Storm himself was born in 1817 and lived out most of his life in what is now northern Germany but during his lifetime changed from Danish to German hands. He wrote novellas and some beautiful poems, almost all of them taking his coastal homeland for their setting. This already puts him in stark contrast to the earlier German Romantics, who seemed to forget that Germany had sea as well as mountains and forests. His most famous works are Immensee and The Rider on the White Horse (Der Schimmelreiter), though Aquis Submersus is not far behind.

Storm’s tales are symbolic and often feature magic, which shows the influence of fairy tales. In their heavy symbolism Storm’s tales also conform to Paul Heyse’s Falcon Theory (Falkentheorie), which states that novellas ought to have a symbolic leitmotif that repeats throughout the work like a spine. We’ll see how this works out in Aquis Submersus.

Telling a Story – Framing the Narrative in Aquis Submersus

The thing that I like about Aquis Submersus, and Storm’s work in general, is that it has an unmistakable and yet undefinable quality of being a story to it. What does that word mean? Walter Benjamin did his best to explain what a story was in contrast to a novel. But for me, Storm’s stories feel like the sort of tales that are told by the fireside in some cold and dreary cottage. They are designed to bring mystery and wonder into a merciless world. They remind me of my own childhood, growing up in the far north of Scotland. The Rider on the White Horse even begins with that very idea – the narrator, a young boy, is told one layer of that story’s frame narrative by his grandmother, while he is playing around with an old newspaper in front of the fireplace in their cottage.

Aquis Submersus also uses a frame narrative. The unnamed outer layer narrator begins by describing his childhood visits to the house of the village priest, where he and the pastor’s son play outside in the grass by a pond. But they also sometimes investigate the church itself, which is an old building that the narrator says “excited my fantasies”. Inside that building there is a painting of a young, drowned boy, and underneath it there are the letters “C. P. A. S.”. Like any good 19th century lad, the narrator knows Latin and quickly determines that A. S. is “aquis submersus” – died from drowning. But he and his friend struggle to work out C. P. – giving the readers their first mystery. The narrator suggests it means “culpa patris” – “through the father’s guilt” – but the priest himself doesn’t know and can’t confirm the narrator’s suspicions.

Years go by, and the narrator finds himself attracted by an old house in his town. When he goes in he discovers another painting by the same artist, once more showing the drowned boy. When he asks about the painting the house’s inhabitants say it belonged to a member of the family from long ago, and offer to show him the belongings of the painter. These turn out to be, in the words of the owner, “just some old scribblings; there’s nothing of value in them”. But our narrator is overjoyed, and in his eagerness to learn what secrets lie within these books he doesn’t even leave the house but reads them right in that very room. And it is here that the main story begins.

The significance of the frame narrative device is here that it heightens the feeling that what we are reading is just a story. It mimics the format by which we ourselves here stories in the real world – organically and often through chance occurrences, so that we build ourselves a narrative out of the separate pieces. Just like the narrator we learn about a mystery, and then only gradually do we see it resolved. The fact that we have a resolution, the fact that the narrator stumbles upon the books – these are unrealistic, perhaps, but we accept them as we accept the corner-cutting and rearranging that takes place every time an old story is recounted. We know that not everything we hear is to be believed, but we want to hear anyway, and decide for ourselves what is real and what may well be fiction.

The Plot – “Just some old scribblings”

The story of Aquis Submersus concerns an orphan, Johannes, who finds financial support from a family of German nobles. The son of the family, the appropriately named Wulf, resents Johannes because he is receiving what Wulf considers his inheritance. It gets even worse when Johannes falls in love with Wulf’s sister, Katherina – a love that, in the middle of the 17th century when the novella takes place, cannot be legitimised through marriage due to the differences between their classes.

Time passes and Johannes leaves to become a well-known painter in Holland. When he returns, five years after his last meeting with the family, he finds that “the good times have passed”. As he approaches the family’s castle he is attacked by Wulf’s new bulldogs, and he also learns that the father has died, leaving the hostility of Wulf towards him without check. But there is another tragedy approaching – Katherina is preparing to be given away in marriage, likely to a neighbour, Kurt, who is noted for his brutality. As if to rub salt into the wound, Wulf demands Johannes paint his sister’s picture before she goes, so that her memory will always be in the house.

Johannes paints Katherina in a room filled with old paintings of her relatives, including one woman who reminds him of Katherina’s mother while also terrifying him. It turns out that the picture is of an ancient relative who cursed her own daughter, leading to the daughter’s death in a pond nearby. The reason was that the daughter didn’t want to marry the person chosen for her – and Katherina admits that she feels the curse is on her too. But there is a way out, and Katherina gives Johannes a letter to pass on to an aunt who might be able to spirit her away. Unfortunately, though, it seems that Kurt has put spies out, because when Johannes returns, the task complete, Wulf and Kurt together set the dogs on him, and Johannes is only able to escape by sneaking into Katherina’s window and spending the night with her.

The next day he must move on, expecting never to see her again. But a few years later he finds himself tasked with painting a priest in a local village, and he heads out there. The priest’s son is a small boy, also called Johannes, and at first his mother is unknown. But a series of events lead to Johannes the painter learning the identity of the mother, and thus begins the novella’s tragic conclusion.

Drama’s Sister – Tragedy in Aquis Submersus

The mother is none other than Katherina. Kurt has married someone else, leaving Wulf to dispose of his sister by leaving her with the priest – a good and kind man. Since Katherina was pregnant – with Johannes’ own child – the man’s decision to marry her saved her from ignominy and shame. But when Johannes sees her again, all thoughts of the public and their potential reactions go out of the window. She is outside with her child when Johannes catches her, and though she says she wants to keep the young boy – he’s only about four – in sight, Johannes refuses to let her go. He has waited too long. There is a moment of bliss between the two old lovers, and then it is shattered with a cry. The child has drowned, and the priest, now returned from work and knowing the full story, doesn’t let Johannes see the result.

These moments towards the end of the book demonstrate the way that Aquis Submersus is very much a tragic work extracted from the same vein as tragic theatre. A crescendo of happiness – what we might consider to be well-earned by the travails of both characters – is destroyed in a way that seems at first completely unfair. But when we ask ourselves why such suffering has taken place, explanations do appear. With each of the great tragic figures in literature, there are reasons for their fates.

But what makes Aquis Submersus exciting from an interpretive perspective – not just in essays, but when you listen to the story by the fireside – is that there is no one dominant explanation. Does Johannes’ child die because of his father’s impatience and selfishness? Or does he die because Johannes is going against society and God by trying to be with someone from a different social class? As one of the servants in the castle says early on in the story, “we ought to stay wherever the Lord God has chosen to set us down”. Is it a kind of hubris for him to want to be with Katherina? And why does Katherina have to suffer, when she tried to escape Johannes and watch over the boy? And why must the boy himself die? Unanswered questions like these form the tragic component of Aquis Submersus, where fate itself is inscrutable.

The Leitmotifs and Symbols of Aquis Submersus

Aquis Submersus is a highly symbolic work in addition to being a tragic one. Throughout the story objects and images repeat in the same way that a leitmotif repeats in certain types of music. Two prominent symbols are the castle and its grounds, and paintings. The castle and grounds are first introduced in the outer section of the frame narrative. There, they are completely in disrepair and the hedgerows are empty and “ghostly”. What we see in the inner narrative is the decline to this point play out. At first, while the father of the family is alive, things are well, but by the time he and the older servants are dead Wulf becomes isolated there. It is only by using the lush vegetation of the castle walls that Johannes is able to spend the night with Katerina. But with her banishment the place grows barren and infertile.

A picture of a German castle
A German castle, perhaps like the one of Aquis Submersus

Our first introduction to the central story of Aquis Submersus comes through a painting. The inscription is the source of the mystery – clearly there was a reason to commemorate the death of a child, but what? The idea that paintings are a source of memory continues when Johannes is tasked with painting Katherina prior to her departure from her family’s home. But the memories located in paintings, it soon becomes clear, aren’t always positive. The initial painting serves as a warning about the dangers of all-consuming love, while the portrait of the distant ancestor works to bring knowledge and memory of past misdeeds down through the generations as a curse. Johannes’ own career as a painter is marked by a desire to become famous because then the class barriers between him and Katerina will be no more. But in painting his dead son, Johannes finally performs an act of redemption.

There are other symbols too, such as birds and the water of the very title. But these two above should give an idea of how Storm weaves symbolism into the narrative and uses it to reinforce central themes. The castle comes right from traditional medieval works and their ideas of chastity, while paintings and their recorded images have always had occasional negative undertones, as if it is not an image but a soul that is trapped within them. Some things, of course, it is better not to remember. A painting keeps us from moving on.

Conclusion

I read Aquis Submersus both because I knew it was on my reading list for next year and because I’ve read and enjoyed Storm’s stories before. I was glad that this one didn’t disappoint. As with all of these German novellas, the formal aspects of Aquis Submersus are pretty interesting, letting you talk about various novella-theories and also how the story fits into Benjamin’s conception of storytelling too. But more importantly, the tale is fun because of the story itself, which is suspenseful and exciting. And at only eighty-or-so pages, it’s hard not to recommend it.

For more Storm, I have a summary of Immensee here. I’ve also translated some of Storm’s poetry, which you can read here.

Picture of a castle comes from KlausFoehl and is used under [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]

Sympathy, Sadness, and Disappointment in Dostoevsky’s The Double

It was through Dostoevsky that I first came to Russian literature, after a winter reading The Brothers Karamazov that changed my world and the course of my life. And for a while he was my favourite writer and the only person I could say I’d read nearly everything of. But once my own Russian skills were good enough to read him in the original, the disappointment was crushing. In English, with the kind help of a translator or, in some cases, two, Dostoevsky’s Russian can be hammered into a vaguely readable shape. But in the original, there is no such help, and the truth of it is that Dostoevsky is among the worst stylists ever to be elevated to the Canon. Random words, commas, ellipses – Dostoevsky’s writing in The Double is as mad as his subject matter, the mysterious (apparent) duplication of a civil servant.

A drawing of Fyodor Dostoevsky while he was younger.
A young Fyodor Dostoevsky. The Double was written and published in 1846 – before Dostoevsky suffered the imprisonment and exile that changed his life and made him the author we know today

The Double is not Dostoevsky’s best book, by any stretch, unless you’re Vladimir Nabokov (and he’s not the best judge anyway). It was also written before his mock-execution and years of imprisonment which led to the spiritual conversation that we have to thank for his mature work. Still, it’s on my Cambridge reading list because it’s shamelessly derivative of Gogol’s Petersburg Tales, which I’ve looked at here (“The Nose”) and here (“Notes of a Madman” and “Nevsky Prospekt”). Though Dostoevsky is very much influenced by Gogol – “We all come out from Gogol’s ‘Overcoat’” is a famous quote attributed to him – The Double is also Dostoevsky’s own work, and bears his own stamps too. In this case it doesn’t make for a good book, but it does at least make for an interesting one.

Translations from the Russian are my own.

A Brief and Rough Summary of the Plot

The Double tells the story of a few days in the life of one Yakov Petrovich Golyadkin, a poor civil servant in early 19th century Saint Petersburg. On the day the story begins he decides to spend most of his savings on hiring a fancy carriage and a serious livery for his servant Petrushka, all so that he might look better off than he actually is. He then visits his new doctor, who he had already visited earlier that week for an unspecified illness. This doctor suggests that Golyadkin, who is introverted and has paranoia – even within the first chapter he feels he’s being watched – go out and socialize and thus prevent himself having a breakdown. Golyadkin, however, doesn’t leave until he has gone on an unprovoked rant about the “enemies” who conspire against him.

The extravagant spending is because Golyadkin is going, that evening, to the birthday party of Klara, the daughter of a more senior civil servant. But when he arrives, he is unable to enter the main hall – he’s too scared, and ends up just watching from a hiding spot until someone approaches and his cover is blown. He goes up to Klara, but finds himself tongue-tied, and she is led away from him – it is not the first time he’s bothered her. Ashamed, Golyadkin heads home in a snowstorm, and it is only then – a third of the way through The Double – that we actually meet the double himself, also called Golyadkin, first glimpsed as a figure in the night. Both of them are heading to Golyadkin’s house, and the hero offers to let the other Golyadkin stay over.

The next day at work Golyadkin begins to feel a great deal of confusion, because he is the only person who recognises the double as being his double, in name and figure. Every other worker doesn’t notice the complete copying of him. That evening Golyadkin and the double, who appears meek and embarrassed, have a long and heartfelt chat over tea – though only Golyadkin senior appears to actually speak at length – and then they go to bed, having sworn eternal brotherhood. But by the next day things are going terribly wrong for the kind-hearted Golyadkin. At work he finds the double is finding all sorts of official favour, and all of his old colleagues are turning against him. And what is worst of all, the double himself scarcely acknowledges the kindness that Golyadkin had rendered him the night before. Isolated, Golyadkin leaves in shame.

Next begins a flurry of letter writing, miscommunications – Golyadkin struggles to say anything in plain language and has various annoying verbal tics – and brief but painful meetings with the double. Nightmares keep Golyadkin from sleeping, but the next day he “discovers” in his pocket a letter from Klara, where she claims that only he can save her from her family, and that he must meet her outside her house at around 2am that day. Buoyant, Golyadkin has another meeting with his double, then eventually winds up outside Klara’s house, where a grand ball is ongoing. Though he tries again to hide, he is discovered, and his double comes and asks him to come inside. There he meets the doctor again, and is whisked away into the night, heading for an asylum.

Dostoevsky’s Touch – Sympathy in The Double

What Gogol manages in forty or so pages Dostoevsky needs almost two hundred in The Double for, and the reason for this, charitably speaking, is that Dostoevsky cares about Golyadkin, and wishes we did too. That is to say, the extra pages are all designed to make him deserve our sympathy, and have absolutely nothing to do with Dostoevsky’s uncontrollable verbiage… In considering Golyadkin as sympathetically portrayed, it’s best to compare him with Gogol’s best known Petersburg hero, Akaky Akakievich Bashmachkin of “The Overcoat”. In that story, there is a moment where poor Akaky Akakievich is being teased by his coworkers, only for one of them to have a sudden epiphany, in which they recognise for the first time that Akaky Akakievich is their “brother”. But this is just one moment, and for the rest of the story Akaky Akakievich is more the butt of a joke than sympathetic.

Dostoevsky takes us much more into poor Golyadkin’s head. We may not learn about his family, but we learn about the state of his soul. We are taken around endless laps of his repetitive thinking, eavesdrop on conversations he hopes will happen but never do, and hear again and again his various tics, notably the Russian “deskat’”, which means “well,” or “I guess” or nothing really whatsoever. By taking us into his head, we also get a better sense of the challenges he faces in life. When Akaky Akakievich has melon rinds thrown at him we can’t help but laugh, but in The Double we are too close to Golyadkin to idly watch as he suffers. His anxiety becomes, strangely, ours, just as his enemies become our own. And when his madness takes over we feel we’re mad too.

A painting of Nikolai Gogol
Nikolai Gogol, whose influence is found throughout The Double. His Petersburg Tales are in my view much more fun to read than Dostoevsky’s novel, but that’s not to say The Double doesn’t have things going for it. Dostoevsky’s sympathy for Golyadkin is one such thing. Gogol didn’t care as much.

Gogol’s Influence – Varieties of Madness

The Double is marked by strangeness right from the very first page, where Golyadkin’s room seems oddly filled with red and green objects. I read green as indicating envy here – for not only does it mark valuable objects, it notably is the colour of the briefcase belonging to Golyadkin’s superior which the double carries around important documents in. Golyadkin’s envy, perhaps, turns the case green. The Double also enjoys focusing on time. Golyadkin is always asking what time it is, but much as with Gogol’s Madman in the story of the same name his grasp of time soon collapses. Once he has received his letter from Klara and is standing outside in the snow, waiting for her, he has a moment of crisis:

“And what was more, maybe it was the case that the letter was written yesterday, and that it just didn’t reach me on time, and it didn’t reach me precisely because Petrushka – and what a rogue he is! – got into a mix. Or perhaps it was written tomorrow, which is to say, that I… that tomorrow I will need to have done everything, that is to say I should be waiting with the carriage then…”

The letter, of course, is also imagined, for it disappears from Golyadkin’s pockets as soon as he’s read it, much as with the “letters” exchanged between the dogs of “Notes of a Madman”. We also have Gogol to thank for the linguistic madness of Golyadkin – the way, that is, that he just keeps talking and talking, yet can never seem to convey anything akin to sense to those who are listening. I suppose it is similar to one whose brain is being destroyed by dementia or cancer and can no longer realise that what they are saying has no meaning.  

And somewhere within this all there is a religious madness too. Dostoevsky takes from Gogol a number of small untranslatable signs indicating the presence of the devil through the whole text – for example, in both the Russian word for “black” (chyorniy) and for “four” (“chetyre”) there are most of the letters for the Russian word “Chyort”, meaning a devil. Meanwhile, Golyadkin sees himself a heroic figure, a saviour (like Christ) in contrast to the evil double, who he calls “Judas” and “treacherous” several times. And this ties in with the theme of sympathy too, for we alone pity Golyadkin in his delusion while the rest of society casts him out as a lunatic. Unfortunately for Golyadkin, his own truth and view of things is not one he, linguistically, is capable of sharing, and as language fails him ever more, his delusions only get worse and worse.

Modernity in The Double

But the thing that I’ve found most interesting, reading through The Double this time round, is the way that it predicts a lot of the tensions and difficulties faced by the average office worker (and, I should add, the average student) in this day and age. I do not mean that Golyadkin has to deal with the printer not working so much as the challenges of a hostile bureaucracy, inexplicable social codes and endless humiliating grovelling before his superiors, and so on. His anxiety is in a large part the anxiety of one suffering from imposter syndrome – he’s frightened that people are watching him – and, indeed, one of the things that the double does to further unhinge him is tell Golyadkin that his paperwork is covered with stains (and thus embarrassing). The double himself appears to embody Golyadkin’s fears of his own inadequacy – he is popular, talkative, and successful.

But he is also young. In the narrative he is often referred to as Golyadkin-the-younger, and the way he completely replaces – including in the minds of his former friends – Golyadkin-the-elder I think expresses a frightening (for some) truth of the modern workplace – that loyalty and time count for less than they once used to, and that now all that matters is being talented at sucking-up and appearing to be organised. What Golyadkin-the-elder witnesses is a collapse of his worldview, as the simple values of working hard by which he had lived are proved inadequate for reaching his goal – Klara and positive attention from his superiors. Reality as he had understood it thus collapses, and with it Golyadkin’s sanity does too.

In connection with this I also can’t help but find that Golyadkin’s attachment to his work, as is the case with Gogol’s protagonists, is a major reason for the ease of his collapse. We find a man with “no life”, someone without real friends, who sees love as a miraculous escape, fall into madness the moment he is rejected by that love and his accompanying delusions about the value of his labours shatter. I suppose Golyadkin and these other characters serve as warnings to those of us who invest too much of ourselves into one thing, because the moment those hopes and dreams fail, our entire identity can too. So there’s certainly room for a Marxist critique around here.

A copy of my Russian version of the Double
My Russian copy of The Double. I wanted to enjoy this book as much as I’d enjoyed Gogol’s stories in the original. But, man, Dostoevsky’s style just doesn’t make for fun reading.

Conclusion – Problems and “Problems” in The Double

Some problems within a work can make it interesting for the critics who come afterwards, keen to carve out an interpretation of their own using its ambiguities; other problems make the work unenjoyable and leave people unwilling to pick it up again once they’ve finished. The Double has plenty of the former type, but a disappointing number of the latter sort too. It is far too long, for one thing – Gogol could pack into stories of thirty or forty pages what Dostoevsky has managed here in nearly two hundred. And then there is the language… I’ve read this in English, I’ve read this in Russian, and at neither time have I enjoyed it. Repetitions, confusions, illogic – madness does not make for fun reading.

I can forgive Dostoevsky’s style when it is conveying passionate belief, whether Ivan Karamazov’s or Ippolit’s or Raskolnikov’s – there, it seems to represent a kind of unrestrained self-belief worth admiring. But here Golyadkin is pitiable only. It’s hard to enjoy the way the text makes us aware of that. Still, there’s lots of cool stuff going on, which at the very least mean it shouldn’t be too painful to write an essay on The Double. My feeling now that I’ve been through the whole of the so-called Petersburg Tales is that one of the most interesting things uniting them is their early hostility to industrialisation and bureaucratization in Russia. All of these protagonists, working dead-end jobs under abstruse rules and regulations, eerily prophecy the challenges many of us face in the modern workplace and university. It’s hard not to feel there’s a bit of Golyadkin in all of us.