Joseph Conrad Archives - Mostly About Stories

Joseph Conrad’s anti-Russian novel: Under Western Eyes

Under Western Eyes was written by Joseph Conrad in 1911, after one unsuccessful revolution in Russia and before the rather more successful ones of 1917. It is a political novel, exploring the fates of revolutionaries abroad, while also displaying Conrad’s characteristic preoccupations with the conflicts of the human soul. When I read it for the first time, about four years ago, I did not like it. Its descriptions of Saint Petersburg were unrecognisable to anyone who had been there, but worse was Conrad’s virulent hatred of the Russian people and state, which in spite of assertions to the contrary in his author’s note, are neither well hidden nor very fair.

On a second reading, I now feel a little more understanding towards Conrad’s hate. I also have met various people whom we could call the Russian revolutionaries of our own day, including one friend who after a campaign against him involving physical beatings and bricks through windows was given 24 hours by the police to leave Russia or else his entire family would be charged with fabricated crimes. My personal experiences have also made me a little more sympathetic, including an incident one morning where the secret services raided my flat, throwing me against the wall and pinning me while masked men with machineguns and balaclavas conducted a search for something that wasn’t there and never had been (stolen cash).

Conrad’s novel talks a lot about the impulses we have to mysticise Russia: “that propensity of lifting every problem from the plane of the understandable by means of some sort of mystic expression is very Russian.” The problem is that the novel itself serves this mysticising impulse. Ultimately, Russia is not a special country. It is just a country with shoddy institutions and a consolidated media landscape which allowed autocratic rule to flourish in the early 21^st century and reach a point where it was unchallengeable, even though the man in charge has lost his mind. Russia has sufficient democratic traditions to build upon, as some of the revolutionaries of the 19^th century such as Alexander Herzen knew, but the informational control effected by the ruling powers has emphasised the more idiotic parts of Russia’s history – its sense of a special path, its victimisation and difference from everyone else. The result is that it is now indeed doing something unthinkable, insane, and uniquely awful in our day.

The story of Under Western Eyes concerns one Razumov (his name comes from the Russian for “reason”). An average student with no family, he dreams of winning a silver medal and establishing himself in a world where connections are everything. One evening, after the assassination of a member of Russia’s autocratic state apparatus, Razumov discovers in his rooms one Victor Haldin, who confesses to the murder. He asks for Razumov’s help in escaping the authorities and leaving Russia to join his family in Switzerland. Razumov, who has no revolutionary sympathies, first attempts to save Haldin, and then decides to betray him.

We next encounter Razumov in Geneva, where he meets Haldin’s sister Nathalie, and her mother. We also meet several other revolutionaries, encamped nearby, and the teacher of languages who narrates our story. To them, Razumov appears as Haldin’s successful accomplice, and he is welcomed in spite of his taciturnity and occasional outbursts of anger. In a letter to Nathalie Victor had described Razumov as one of those “unstained, lofty, and solitary existences.” He is the only friend he had ever mentioned, and this allows Nathalie to create a Razumov that blinds her to the real one.

But she is not the only one. Under Western Eyes is fundamentally about seeing – it’s in the title, after all – and what we cannot see. The characters are constantly making miscalculations and misjudgements. The first is Victor Haldin himself. He comes to Razumov, having come to believe that the latter’s quiet nature indicates his revolutionary sympathies – “There is a solidity about your character which cannot exist without courage.” It is not so. Razumov himself, like certain people I know in Russia, had believed that he could exist under autocracy without picking a side. That he could pursue his silver medal in peace. But as soon as Haldin enters his door, Razumov is forced to decide what he stands for. His illusions of the way his world is run are immediately knocked down.

When Razumov arrives in Geneva, Nathalie mentions her brother’s name to him and sees how “this distressed him. He was quite overcome.” She assumes it is affection for her brother and has no idea that it is rather guilt at being his Judas. When talking with Sophie Antonovna, another revolutionary, Razumov once again reveals something of his internal conflicts, to which she asks: “What is it? Self-reproach, or what? It’s absurd. You couldn’t have gone and given yourself up because your comrade was taken.”

Razumov himself notes that he has “the gift of inspiring confidence.” But of course, he too works at creating himself and cultivating these mistakes in others. While dealing with one revolutionary we read how “he remembered another detail and dropped it before her.” He uses what others know – the newspaper details of the crime, and secret letters that have reached the others, to tell them what they want to hear, while keeping himself from lying outright. They all believe him, some willingly, some after a little persuasion, but all do in the end.

The overall effect of this is to make an argument about the revolutionaries themselves – namely, that they are a bunch of incompetents. Conrad fits neatly into the tradition crafted by Chernyshevsky, Dostoevsky, and Turgenev, which deals with revolutionaries, and he lies on the more cynical, dismissive end. His conservatism is similar to that of Dostoevsky in particular, which is funny because Conrad couldn’t stand the Russian. Peter Ivanovitch is a noted “feminist” whom Conrad demonises by showing how mean he is to a female servant. Various others are ridiculed by showing how dependent they are on money siphoned from the owner of the chateau where they all meet.

This is not new to us. Such irony we have encountered many times before, most obviously in Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons. The key revolutionary there, Bazarov, says one thing and eventually, after he falls in love, does another. At first, he demands the negation of emotions and the total reliance upon rationality and logic, and then he starts throwing around such ridiculous words as “feelings”. This irony was Turgenev’s secret weapon. It allowed him to create a novel which, when it came out, divided both conservative and liberal Russians – with both accusing him of being too soft towards the “other side”.

Conrad’s has two main problems in Under Western Eyes, at least when we look at it against the backdrop of its Russian forebears. The first is that it could never divide opinion in the way that Turgenev’s novel does. This book is obviously anti-Russian. The revolutionaries and the state are both stupid, mean, and petty. Or, as Conrad writes in the author’s note, Russian history is just a cycle of “senseless desperation provoked by senseless tyranny.” There are no sympathetic characters, except perhaps Nathalie Haldin. Even she appears out-of-touch and naïve. Razumov himself reads like a thing that an algorithm would churn out after having been forced to read Dostoevsky, over and over. He says cynical, spiteful, angry things without any real interest in them.

Sympathy is by common consent the thing that makes Russian literature most special. Conrad has no sympathy. He does not like his characters. He does not have any time for their views. And that leads to the novel’s second big artistic weakness – it really has very little to do with ideas. Nobody actually shares any interesting views on the rights of women or the future organisation of Russia. People are happy enough to advocate for a life of action and revolt over passivity, but that’s as far as we go. There are no debates, there is no passion. The only idea that really gets any airing is that Russia is a poisoned land, “where virtues themselves fester into crimes in the cynicism of oppression and revolt” and that autocracy is bad.

The attack on autocracy is made with some effectiveness. When at the end of the novel’s first part Councillor Mikulin, Razumov’s point of contact among the elite, asks Razumov where he will go next – “where to?” – it is positively chilling. We all know at this point that even though he has done something that benefits the state, he has also given up what little freedom he has had. Such relative subtleties are more effective than the constant complaints about autocracy, which quite frankly we do not need. Russian autocracy is/was awful – we do not need convincing. But learning about the way that it exerts its hold upon an individual is much more interesting for those of us with “Western Eyes.”

Razumov goes to Geneva as a servant of his state, and there his life unravels. The stories he is forced to tell about himself are insufficient to solidify his identity. In the end, it all collapses. To see the revolution from the side of an informer was new to me, and that is perhaps the most interesting thing about the novel. But the novel’s complex structure, namely a dramatization of Razumov’s journal by the teacher of languages, means that much of his soul is hidden from us. When we catch glimpses of it, it is suitably unattractive. “It was myself, after all, whom I have betrayed most badly.” Such words are ridiculous for a man whose actions lead to two deaths. So too are his excuses and justifications: “I was possessed!”

Taken as a whole, in its refusal to engage with the ideas of the revolutionaries, or even portray them, the novel comes across as somewhat empty. In some sense, amusingly, it conforms to its own ideas about how little those of the West can understand Russia. But this will not do. Russia is comprehensible, it just requires time and effort. It is not special, just extremely poorly run. An orientalising impulse serves no purpose other than to excuse and legitimise the actions of the people who control the place. And legitimisation is the last thing that these people deserve. All in all, the novel is just okay. In this at least in my opinion, four years later, has not changed.

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 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.