Heart of Darkness Archives - Mostly About Stories

Making a Mystery – Conrad’s Lord Jim

Lord Jim is the novel where Joseph Conrad’s ingenuity of construction and technique come together most spectacularly in service of creating an atmosphere of mystery. A simple work in story, it tells the tale of a man who, having once lost his honour, cannot live down this fact, and instead chooses always and ever to flee it. Upon this simple foundation Conrad builds a formidable sense of psychological depth for its main character with his prose, so that even as the story becomes no more complex than this, its main character himself never quite comes to bore us.

At the same time, to me the novel is also one of Conrad’s clearest failures. Having created a masterful atmosphere, a wondrous fog of mystery, Conrad shines a torch on it in the later sections of the work and devalues much of the power of the world he had made. Be that as it may, the creation is what is interesting, and it is this that I propose to discuss here today.

A Body as much as a Mind

“He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed a necessity, and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got his living as ship-chandler’s water-clerk he was very popular.”

What an opening! We must really imagine this for a moment. Out of the void of the first page we suddenly have a figure coming straight for us – you want to leap out of the way before it’s too late, like those people encountering the first moving pictures of oncoming trains. With Jim like a “bull” we have a sense of latent violence, of danger. But then “dogged” comes along and contains this opposite: we think of a much smaller animal, so that this initial violence is immediately tempered by uncertainty – is there “nothing aggressive” in it after all? Such initial ambiguities are only heightened by words like “seemed”, “apparently.” Here we have all that we will come to recognise as Jim – an impression and an uncertainty, mixing together. Yet before all this, we have a body. For it is as a body that Conrad creates Jim as a real figure. We see him, from the first sentence, as a physical thing – we know how he walks, where he has been, how he is dressed.

Without such solidity of body, speculating on a personality feels like cheating – it’s as dull as a friend gossiping about someone you do not know. Throughout Lord Jim, Jim himself is a bodily presence just as his mind is an absence. Apart from the first twenty-or-so pages, the novel is narrated by the sailor and gentleman Charles Marlow, whom we might know as the narrator of Heart of Darkness (among other stories). This adds a powerful limitation to the narrative’s range by keeping us behind his eyes, within his knowledge, until this finally becomes stretched unfairly near the end of the work. While Marlow thinks he knows Jim’s heart, he certainly knows him as a presence: “A feeble burst of many voices mingled with the tinkle of silver and glass floated up from the dining-room below; through the open door the outer edge of the light from my candle fell on his back faintly; beyond all was black; he stood on the brink of a vast obscurity, like a lonely figure by the shore of a sombre and hopeless ocean.”

We see Jim here, as a body in the world. Marlow has to see him thus, or he would have nobody to talk about. But we see his back – the physical representation of the distance between his heart and ourselves. At the final time Marlow sees him, we also see Jim as a body without seeing inside him: “The twilight was ebbing fast from the sky above his head, the strip of sand had sunk already under his feet, he himself appeared no bigger than a child—then only a speck, a tiny white speck, that seemed to catch all the light left in a darkened world. . . . And, suddenly, I lost him. . . .” As descriptions, they do a thing that is by no means easy – they frustrate our desire for complete knowledge without being unfair. They say that just as with a real person, we can know Jim as a presence without fully knowing him as a spirit. They force upon us the duty of interpretation – we must try to piece together the scraps of a soul to match this bodily outline.

Interpreting a limited material

This disjunction between revealed body and hidden mind is certainly one way Lord Jim creates its mystery and encourages interpreting it. Another is that it foregrounds interpreting as a general condition of life almost from the very start, through Jim’s time in court. Jim’s great crime, his original sin, is to have been first mate on the “Patna” and to have acted in dereliction of his duty: he abandons its passengers, pilgrims heading to Mecca, together with a few other members of the Patna’s crew, after the ship appears to have sustained critical damage while at sea. “I had jumped… it seems.” Our first view of him through Marlow’s eyes is when he is already in the dock being tried. Jim is trying to “tell honestly the truth of his experience”, while the court is after facts. But the narrator despairs: “as if facts could explain anything!” The contrast of the bureaucratic, fact-finding, courtroom language with the complex descriptions and uncertainties of Jim’s experience is the first clue that interpretation is central to the novel.

Or perhaps not, because Jim himself is an inveterate interpreter too: “He loved these dreams and the success of his imaginary achievements. They were the best parts of life, its secret truth, its hidden reality.” He is, as another character remarks, a “Romantic.” Unlike the other characters, there’s evidence that Jim engages in that most dangerous of occupations – reading. It is for this reason that there’s such a gap between his idea of himself and the cowardly (or human) reality that he demonstrates when tested in the Patna case. It is Jim’s horror at his own self that leads him to constantly flee the positions that Marlow arranges for him in various places around South East Asia, before finally ending up in the remote village of Patusan, far away from anyone who might know his shame at his one staining moment of weakness.

The court interprets in search of facts, Jim interprets in search of heroism, but Marlow does his own interpreting too. Marlow sits and tells a story after dinner. It is dark, but the other figures create the sense of a community, a class, of which Marlow is both merely a representative and a critical voice. Marlow’s interest in Jim comes from his recognition of Jim as also “one of us” – a phrase repeated, over and over, in the novel. “Perhaps, unconsciously, I hoped I would find that something, some profound and redeeming cause, some merciful explanation, some convincing shadow of an excuse.” Jim is a gentleman, well-bred, well-spoken, and in a trust-based world like that of shipping, he has not only disappointed himself, he has also shamed his people – Marlow included.

The sense that Jim’s crime is touches all within this group is emphasised by the way that Marlow lets others speak of it and share their own view of it. There’s a Captain Brierly, whose passages in chapter VI are a perfect story in themselves. This man, who has the proven heroism of having saved lives at sea to his name, is part of the three men judging Jim’s case. “Why are we tormenting that young chap?” He asks Marlow between sessions. Jim’s guilt so challenges his world that Brierly jumps overboard a few weeks after the trial is concluded. There is also a Frenchman that Marlow meets in Sydney, who was crew of a gunboat that discovered the Patna, floating aimlessly with its white crew absconded. Hence the story that Jim tells is added to, changed, challenged, by the others that Marlow encounters.

The most interesting, from the perspective of the narrative, is the character of Chester, a West Australian who plans a scheme for extracting a significant amount of guano in a dangerous region of the ocean. He correctly identifies Jim as someone down on his luck who may see the offer of a risky and remunerative trip to the to a guano island as a way out, and tries to persuade Marlow over to his view. It does not work – Marlow has taken it upon himself to sort Jim’s destiny out, perhaps in the hope of saving his whole people the shame. Angry, Chester retorts: “Oh! You are devilish smart… but you are like the rest of them. Too much in the clouds. See what you will do with him.”

Two things are interesting in this moment. The first is that it is an attack on our narrator. Marlow is an active participant in Lord Jim, not a passive spinner of yarns. He catches Jim immediately after the trial, helps him get jobs across South East Asia. We expect him to be benevolent, and he is not maliciously “unreliable” in the way that some narrators are. We might recognise that his own interest is driven by a murky set of elements, including his desire that Jim not let “us” down, but we largely trust him. By having Marlow be challenged so directly, readers now also have to judge him not just as a narrator, but as an actor too. In other words, through challenging Marlow, Conrad makes it clear to readers that they should be engaging in judging him too. We must interpret our interpreter.

The second interesting thing here is that it is a clear example of a branching path in the story. Conrad is a writer we generally associate with a deterministic view of life, of dark fates leading to inevitable demises. Marlow’s judgement of Chester is correct – the expedition to the guano island most likely leads to the deaths of everyone involved following the passage through the region of a hurricane – but that means it is fatal, but not fatalistic. For once Conrad seems to be suggesting there was another option for his story. That every moment contains a choice is a truism. That Jim made the choice to jump and that this has cursed his life is a central fact of Lord Jim. But what Jim does afterwards is up to him, though his character naturally plays a significant role in determining what he does.

We cannot choose without a sense of options, and here we have an option provided directly – Jim could follow Marlow’s advice, or he could follow Chester’s idea. The story could be otherwise – it is open. By doing this, perhaps unintentionally, Conrad is furthering the idea of being critical towards Marlow. If Marlow were merely good or bad we might give him no further thought, but if there’s an alternative offered, readers can actively consider which one is best. It is another impulse towards involvement, created through Conrad’s technique.

Further makers of mystery

I have read almost everything in Conrad’s major works now, have read his letters, have re-read much, including Lord Jim itself. Some aspects of his style are now more transparent to me than they would be to someone encountering him for the first time. He is extremely reliant on tripartite descriptions, on weighing down nouns with barnacle-like adjectives, on abusing the thesaurus for synonyms for “unclear”. He brings in a view of a fallen world not subtly, but through countless references to devilry, the infernal, and downward movement. In the same way he suggests a rigidity of destiny through his regular references to fate. His primary sources of reference are biblical. At least some of the turgidity of his prose comes from the heaviness of the adjectives and the occasional bad English (words or phrases directly translated French or Polish). When read with the right frame of mind, however, all these features of his language become another source of atmospheric murk and hence of mystery.

Just as Conrad’s prose makes the mystery, so too does his use of languages. The Frenchman mentioned earlier speaks partly in French, just as the central figure among Marlow’s advisors, Stein, speaks in an English brutalised into something half-German: “It is not good for you to find you cannot make your dream come true, for the reason that you not strong enough are, or not clever enough. Ja!” His advice for Jim: “In the destructive element immerse… that was the way. To follow the dream, and again to follow the dream…” The idea of this blog post has been that Conrad builds a mystery in the novel by showering us in interpretations and forcing interpretation upon us. Such phrases as these from Stein, comprehensible yet not quite clear, serve this purpose also. They are not only memorable for their unique phrasing, they are also just vague enough to force us into reflection. What exactly does this mean?

The actual language of the novel, the light and dark, the fog, all of the adjectives, is perhaps less interesting once you have read enough of it. It creates a mood of mystery, rather than being itself mysterious. “The views he let me have of himself were like those glimpses through the shifting rents in a thick fog.” Like the images of Jim with his back turned, or pacing, or whatever, they tell us we cannot know him – but we, stubborn, if we are in a good mood and are willing to give the story its due, try regardless.

Conclusion

The story its due… Well, Jim’s first half is up there with Heart of Darkness, and indeed the two works were written near-simultaneously, but as soon as the action moves to Patusan and Jim becomes a kind of ruler there, everything falls apart in my eyes. (And in that of many critics.) Conrad’s characterisation of the native population is less well done than of the Europeans, Marlow’s narration becomes more reliant on what he has not witnessed, which simplifies the interpretative layering, and an external figure is introduced to resolve Jim’s ambiguities by bringing the story to a violent and silly, however real the sources are, conclusion.

On the final page Marlow asks: “Is he satisfied—quite, now, I wonder?” But this would be just as appropriate a remark to be made as Marlow retreats from Patusan after his one and only visit, watching Jim shrinking by the shore… some hundred pages before the novel actually ends. To me, Lord Jim is not a “Romance”. It is a mystery of a single man’s soul. Therefore, what deepens that mystery improves the book, while what takes it away diminishes it. The last third of the novel is therefore its unravelling and could be removed without harm.

Still, the ravelling is brilliant. When Lord Jim is at its best every word, every sentence, serves to create a sense of depth and mystery around its central character. It’s humbling, and shocking, how simple the story actually is. A man jumps from a boat, mistakenly thinking it is sinking. He is tried and banned from working as a sailor again. A fellow gentleman aids him in finding new work, which he flees each time his past is remembered. Eventually he ends up on an island where nobody knows his past, and he gets the chance to recreate himself. This works, for a time, until a figure from the outside world comes to break the illusion.

It’s a story we could tell in thirty pages, not three hundred. Even psychologically, Jim is not that complicated. But we see him as from a chair in a dark room, with his back to us as he stares into a moonlit night, and Conrad creates thereby something more than a man – a symbol, a mystery, a ghost to haunt us. Regardless of whether we ultimately like the work, in terms of the writing there is so much deserving of wonder.

The Nihilistic Storytelling of Far Cry 2

Among other things, a good story is one that is effective. It aims at an effect and then employs various tools at its medium’s disposal to achieve it. I tend to see stories as reflecting a creator’s worldview, as making a certain argument about how we should see the world. I agree with the Soviet critic Mikhail Bakhtin, however, that there are certain times when a given work can reflect multiple worldviews, but these are rarer cases. Either way, a work is an argument about a worldview, whether with itself, or with the reader, or both. And a good work attempts to argue well.

Some stories are simply better told in certain mediums. Fiction has a great many limitations, just as much as do film or television, while also having its own advantages. The potential for videogames to tell good stories – and indeed, stories that can only be told well as videogames – has been overshadowed by the way that unfortunately most games don’t end up telling particularly impressive stories. Videogames are generally popular entertainment, and that’s absolutely fine. Like a good Marvel movie, there are a huge number of highly effective simple and fun games where committing acts of violence is pleasurable and “good” triumphs over “evil”. I enjoy playing those games as much as I enjoy watching Marvel’s offerings. And they sell like hotcakes.

But there are serious games – ones that strive for every bit as much moral complexity as do good works of literature, with every bit as much flair and depth. The best games combine an awareness of the medium’s limitations with a sense of its potential. Games suffer from an unavoidable problem – they have what is known as “gameplay”: the moments where the player is in control. The need to provide gameplay is generally what kills the effectiveness of a game’s story, rather than harmonising with it. This is particularly the case with shooting games.

“Ludonarrative dissonance” is the name that game designer Clint Hocking used to describe the problem. You play a game, with occasional cinematic intervals – cutscenes – where the story is expanded without player control. The dissonance that Hocking describes is when the impressions produced by the two parts – what the player controls as they play, and what they do not – contradict one another. In a shooting game one regularly massacres entire armies. At the end of a mission the game will then inject a little story, expecting us to care about some comrade who has fallen or some love interest we fight for. This really does not work. The character cannot be like that – not the one we have controlled thus far – they are coldblooded and soulless as we are while we control them. Their gameplay has ensured they must be like that. The cutscene feels like cheating, emotional manipulation. That’s because it generally is.

A similar problem exists in superhero movies – our heroes cannot feel okay from all that killing, not inside their heads at any rate. But the mental health effects of regularly murdering hundreds never crop up – in part, perhaps, because the heroes tend to kill aliens or other superpowered villains. When we do not kill a part of that whole to which we belong – humankind – there’s less possibility for reflection. In videogames these issues are harder to displace partly because of the obvious contradiction between what we do and what the game does for us (as cutscenes), partly because our enemies are people just as much as they are monsters, and partly because games have a particular talent at getting us to identify with and connect with our player characters. We control them, after all.

Games at their most interesting find a way of combining the stories they want to tell with the gameplay they use to tell it. And there is perhaps no better example of this than Ubisoft’s Far Cry 2.

Far Cry 2

As it happens, Clint Hocking was the creative director and scriptwriter for Far Cry 2, a videogame published by Ubisoft in 2008 and one which plays interestingly with these ideas of ludonarrative dissonance. Or rather, a game which refuses to play at all.

The game is set in Unnamed African Country, during a period of civil war sometime before the present day. The player is one of a selection of mercenaries from various countries with a history of armed conflict. Their goal is to hunt down the arms dealer known as The Jackal, whose guns have made the collapse of the country possible. Through working with the warlords of the two opposing factions, the player gradually accumulates titbits of information about The Jackal, until eventually they are in a position to locate him. On the side, the player interacts with other mercenaries, an underground movement attempting to help citizens escape the country, and a reporter trying to gather information on The Jackal for the world outside. There is nothing more to the story. Using an array of weapons, the player indiscriminately kills people to progress through the world.

Indeed, the plot is even more barebones than my description suggests. The supposed titbits about The Jackal which the player wants to get from the warlords never really materialise – instead, the player simply becomes a tool for their war against each other and, indirectly, the country itself. Whereas other games give missions with a sense of purpose, Far Cry 2 seems deliberately not to. We destroy oil pipelines, blow up bridges, cut off food and medical supplies to the vulnerable population. Most of the missions involve some sort of war crime. This is not standard territory for games – at least, they always try to gloss over the war crimes! Far Cry 2 doesn’t care – that’s what is so impressive. It doesn’t even condemn them – it’s less immoral than amoral. The feeling is less of a naughty pleasure in doing bad than a weary disappointment at the impossibility of doing good.

Progress for the player consists in unlocking new weapons. Since the plot doesn’t really go forward the only sense of change is the player’s increased ability to murder. We have to ask ourselves what the value of all this is. We follow the game’s suggestions, doing missions, expanding our arsenal. But instead of stopping the war, we only make it worse. The game’s second act finds us in a new province in the country, where a ceasefire has been agreed between the factions. Our first mission there consists of breaking down the ceasefire by ourselves bringing a new shipment of weapons into the province’s capital. We must become an arms dealer to kill an arms dealer – the logic somehow isn’t quite there.

The characters are empty too, amoral freaks. They are simply warlords and underlings. Overheard dialogue consists of characters planning their next murders and nothing besides. In addition to the arms deliveries, we help assassinate the warlords so that their deputies can take power. But there is nothing of consequence that comes from this except another mission to do, another hundred men to kill. We lose our hope in positive change. Our actions at every turn are denied value, significance, meaning. Our choices consist of determining the order we do missions, and our precise approach once the mission begins – do we light a fire with a flamethrower, use a sniper rifle from a distance, or go in on a truck, guns blazing? The game is mechanically sound – it’s a pleasure to engage in such destruction and we want more. The physics for fire in particular were well ahead of their time.

Our desire for killing is at least compensated in most games by a sense that we are doing the right thing. We are saving the world from aliens or fighting for those that we love. Far Cry 2 offers nothing of the sort. It offers only the possibility of sating our bloodlust without any kind of soothing of the pangs of conscience that same bloodlust might be connected to. Another brilliant game of that era, Spec Ops: The Line, problematizes the player’s desire for violence by having the main character become increasingly unhinged as the game progresses, visibly rejoicing in the killing of his enemies. Far Cry 2 is a first-person-shooter, so we see through our character’s eyes. We do not hear them – they do not speak. Silence – the eerie absence of any decent justification for our actions – is the tool by which the game works upon us.

Early on in the game’s second act, after we have restarted the civil war, we find ourselves in the mercenary bar outside of the city which serves as a kind of safe haven for the player. I left it and began walking towards my next mission location. As I did so, I noticed on my map markings suggesting nearby buildings. Outside of the cities, such markings indicate a guard outpost in Far Cry 2. By killing the men, I would gain data for my map about the local area, and possibly find some rough (blood) diamonds, which are used as the game’s currency. I approached over a hill, my assault rifle at the ready.

But there was nothing, nobody, there. Instead, there were rows and rows of graves. Fresh, hasty, wooden crosses marked the places where men and women were buried. I had arrived at a sacred place with the intent to kill and a weapon in my hand. I discovered that I was, to all intents and purposes, a monster. And the game in that moment forced me to confront that terrible fact. This is environmental storytelling at its very best – and environmental storytelling is what makes games very special as a medium for telling stories. I had stumbled upon this for myself – I was in control, and so I was responsible. Just as I had killed hundreds of people without thinking, now I was made to feel that. And all of this in complete silence.

The Jackal, our arms dealer, meets us occasionally, whenever we are otherwise incapacitated. He gives speeches and mocks us. He quotes Nietzsche, but unlike when angsty teens butcher the philosopher, The Jackal’s willingness to quote maxims about the world’s violence and valuelessness are far more poignant. The Jackal has power, and he has adopted a terrible worldview to justify using it in the most horrific ways. Never mind that Nietzsche spends most of his books specifically arguing against the suggestion that there is nothing in life beyond increasing one’s power in the sense of violence and control over others. What matters is that the game presents us with a character who believes something – with a voice, however horrific, that seems to have thought behind it. And a voice, well made, is a worldview and an argument for that worldview.

At the end of the game the player ends up working with The Jackal. The Jackal talks a lot about disease and contagion. He sees the violence his weapons have made possible as something inevitable in the world and not his responsibility. He thinks it is something that must be isolated and exterminated. Together with the player he works to get the last of the refugees out of the country, with both of player and Jackal dying in the process. With the refugees free, all that remains is for the soldiers left behind to shoot each other until nobody is left and peace can once again dawn.

Far Cry 2 presents The Jackal as an antagonist, but the game does nothing to challenge his worldview. Instead, it draws the player into it, making them complicit in the same acts of brutal and pointless violence that The Jackal is supposedly responsible for, and no different from all the soldiers and warlords supplied by him. We kill for little reason – there’s no reward except (blood) diamonds, which can only be exchanged for weapons. The Jackal’s own weapons. The missions neither bring us tangibly closer to stopping him, nor tangibly closer to resolving the civil war.

Occasionally, in a loading screen, we get a feel for what the character thinks – our only suggestion of any kind of interiority on their part. But what we read only reinforces the game’s suggestion about the world. Here’s an example: “It wasn’t so long ago that this was another one of those dirty little wars that barely rated a sidebar. There was an arms embargo in place, and everyone back home could just cluck their tongues and plan their next tax-deductible donation…” Instead of trying to give us a likeable player character, the game gives us a mercenary – in other words, someone who doesn’t care. And since the player’s character doesn’t care or find any value in the world, we – the player – cannot find that value either, try as we might.

There is no ludonarrative dissonance in Far Cry 2 because the meaningless violence of the player’s actions is the game’s argument about the world. The world (of this kind of civil war), it suggests, is valueless and brutal. There is nothing to hold on to. There is no good, and the only pleasure comes in destruction. It’s an argument that is compellingly made because the player feels it. For we only play the game because the destruction is good – the game strips away any other worthy motivations from us.

We may disagree with the picture of the world that the game proposes – I certainly would like to – but that is to miss the point. There are two reasons for thinking, as I have for so many years, about Far Cry 2 – the first is that it is a fascinating example of how games can harmonise the stories they want to tell along with the tools they employ to tell them. The other reason is that as I wrote at the beginning, any piece of art is an argument about the world, and I think a responsible human being should engage with as many well-put arguments as possible. Far Cry 2’s argument, like those we find in Joseph Conrad (a key influence on the game) or Cormac McCarthy, is disagreeable but it is not bad. Unfortunately, it often explains the world all too well…

Anyway, I finally finished the game earlier this year, after a great many failed attempts, and I thought it deserved the piece.

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 being but “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.