The Damnation of Obadiah, from Tristram Shandy, hand-coloured etching by James Bretherton, 1773

I have been reading and studying Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman for the past couple of months. It’s been a laborious task, and I’m afraid not a happy one.

I’ve read around it and I understand the reasons why Tristram Shandy is considered a classic, but my problems with the book are based entirely on the experience of reading it. Even the book’s admirers admit that it is ‘frustrating’ for the reader.

I’d go further and say that it is literally ‘pointless’. It commits the worst crime that literature is capable of, in that it fails to provide adequate motivation for the reader to turn the page.

Admirers will say that Sterne intended it to be frustrating, as if this makes the frustration acceptable. They will then tell you that Sterne’s achievement with Tristram Shandy represents a revolutionary new approach to fiction and narrative, parodying and satirising the realistic prose style that had come to typify the genre up to that point in history.

But as Thomas Keymer points out in his essay ‘Sterne and the “new species of writing”‘, collected in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: A Casebook (Amazon affiliate link), this adopts a view of the history of the novel that post-dates Sterne’s time of writing. The contemporary situation was not so straight forward, as Keymer explains:

Sterne writes at a time when the conventions of fictional representation, such as they were, remained fluid, ill-defined, and keenly contested. Witness the Richardson-Fielding dispute of the 1740s, which was as much about competing narrative strategies as it was about religion and ethics, or ideologies of gender and class.

The genre of prose fiction was itself still ‘novel’ (hence the name), and to see Tristram Shandy as a satire or comment on the ‘novel’ as genre is a total misunderstanding of its place in literary history. In fact the ‘new species of writing’ referred to is borrowed from an essay written in 1751 about Fielding, not Sterne.

Keymer goes on to question whether Sterne is satirising the modern novel at all in Tristram Shandy:

Why, in this most allusive of works does Sterne never refer explicitly to Richardson or Fielding and why has no modern editor of Tristram Shandy caught Sterne reworking any specific passage from their fiction?

Another critic, J.T. Parnell, points out that ‘he (Sterne) may never have read the ‘novelists’, let alone contemplated a devastating critique of the shortcomings of the emerging genre.’

And Jonathan Lamb chimes in on the debate too:

Such stabilising of Sterne’s text depends on an improbable estimate of the dominance of the novel’s realism, as if it were well enough established by the 1750s for its parody readily to be undertaken and appreciated.

All this undermines the commonly held view today that Sterne is some kind of protomodernist whose work was centuries ahead of its time. It seems clear that this was a time of great experimentation in prose writing, and that Sterne was only one of the experimenters. As it turns out he was the least successful, because the eventual direction that the novel followed was that of Richardson, Fielding and the realists. Sterne himself was harking back, rather than looking forward, his style being a later reinvention of the so-called learned wit of Rabelais, Cervantes and Montaigne.

It is equally misleading to say that Sterne preempted the modern age of literature, influencing Woolf, Joyce and Beckett. While these writers pointed to Sterne as an influence, this was without regard to his true position in the history of literature, but rather to further their own agenda, as Keymer explains:

Woolf was mainly concerned with an ulterior motive in the present: that of coopting Sterne for her ongoing campaign against the bricks-and-mortar realism typified by Galsworthy and Bennett.

Tristram Shandy was an experiment, no doubt, and a radical one. It is essentially an attempt at creating a new kind of prose genre outside of, or parallel to, the emerging genre of the novel. But it is an experiment that ultimately fails.

At least it does for me. I’m sure that Sterne fans will be keen to contend this point of view, so please feel free to add your thoughts in the comments below.

The music of Gounod – a thought form, by Annie Besant

We’re reading a bunch of novels for this month’s Culture Club (Under the Volcano, The Power and the Glory, The Plumed Serpent). I love reading novels, but when studying them I’m invariably irritated by the lack of form.

By ‘form’ I mean literary or artistic form, such as the 14 lines and strict rhyme scheme of a sonnet, or the four-movement structure of a symphony. There are often attempts to bring formal qualities to the novel, such as the 12-book structure of Under the Volcano (meant to recall Homer’s and Virgil’s epics), but these are unique to each work and bound to fail because they are rendered in unstructured prose. (In my view the most successful novelist in this respect is Jane Austen, whose intricate patterning of plot and narrative comes closest to creating a unique novel ‘form’.)

So why is this a flaw? Mainly because it removes one of the most powerful aspects of art forms that do have formal qualities, such as music, poetry and drama: the interplay between form and content.

For example, the following lines from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra work on more than one level because of their poetic formal qualities:

….on each side her

Stood pretty-dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,

With divers-coloured fans, whose wind did seem

To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,

And what they undid did.

The rhythm of ‘And what they undid did’ makes us hear and therefore experience the fans flapping in the hot breeze in a way that a pure prose description can’t.

Formal elements in art enhance, contradict, surprise and extend meaning. As Stephen Fry says in his book on poetry, The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet within:

The point I am anxious to make, is that metre is more than just a ti-tum ti-tum: its very regularity and the consequent variations available within it can yield a structure that EXPRESSES MEANING QUITE AS MUCH AS THE WORDS THEMSELVES DO.

To some critics, form  takes on even greater import, perhaps because it alone has the power to ‘express the inexpressible’. This is what Walter Pater was getting at when he said ‘all art constantly aspires to the condition of music’. For a great discussion on this quote see: All art constantly aspires to the condition of music – you don’t say. Nigel Beale’s point in his comment on this post is illuminating:

This post put me in mind of composer Clive in Ian McEwen’s overly contrived Amsterdam:
“Sometimes Clive worked so hard on a piece that he could lose sight of his ultimate purpose – to create this pleasure at once so sensual and abstract, to translate into vibrating air this non-language whose meanings were forever just beyond reach, suspended tantalisingly at a point where emotion and intellect fused.”

Back to the novel then. Why does it lack the formal qualities I’ve described? I think Ian Watt nails this in his book The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding:

When we judge a work in another genre, a recognition of its literary models is often important and sometimes essential; our evaluation depends to a large extent on our analysis of the author’s skill in handling the appropriate formal conventions. On the other hand, it is surely very damaging for a novel to be in any sense an imitation of another literary work: and the reason for this seems to be that since the novelist’s primary task is to convey the impression of fidelity to human experience, attention to any pre-established formal conventions can only endanger his success. What is often felt as the formlessness of the novel, as compared, say, with tragedy or the ode, probably follows from this: the poverty of the novel’s formal conventions would seem to be the price it must pay for its realism.

Jacqueline Bisset as Yvonne in the movie version of Under the Volcano (1984) (Image from www.screenrush.co.uk)

Under the Volcano is our main focus in this month’s Culture Club. In an earlier Penguin Modern Edition (I don’t have a link, as it’s no longer published) the introduction features a very length letter that Lowry wrote in 1946 to Jonathan Cape (the publisher) arguing against suggested cuts. He goes through each of the 12 chapters, and one of the most fascinating revelations is that he regards the death of Yvonne (and how it happens) as central to the novel.

The passage comes at the end of chapter 11, in which Yvonne and Hugh follow the Consul into the forest. Amid the confusion we find dark portents, in Hugh’s song ending with the words ‘prefiere morir prefiere morir’, and the ensuing description of the coming storm:

All at once the rain fell more heavily. A wind like an express train swept through the forest; just ahead lightening struck through the trees with a savage tearing and roar of thunder that shook the earth…

Before his own death, the Consul unleashes fate/destiny – the horse with the number 7 brand that crosses their respective paths throughout the novel and then kills Yvonne while she’s searching in the dark for him, trying to reach him:

Again trying to rise she heard herself scream as the animal turned towards her and upon her. The sky was a sheet of white flame against which the trees and the poised rearing horse were an instant pinioned –

The contrast of their respective ends is clear: Yvonne’s death is a rising up to the stars, whereas Geoffrey’s at the end of the next chapter is a falling down into the volcano/ravine, representing the entrance to the underworld towards which he is drawn throughout the book. According to Lowry himself: ‘a not dissimilar idea appears at the end of one of Julian Green’s books, but my notion came obviously from Faust, where Marguerite is hauled up to heaven on pulleys, while the devil hauls Faust down to hell.’ Both are scenes of burning – Yvonne’s is in the heavens, Geoffrey’s is in the earth:

And leaving the burning dream Yvonne felt herself suddenly gathered upwards and borne towards the stars, through eddies of stars scattering aloft with ever widening circlings like rings on water, among which now appeared, like a flock of diamond birds flying softly and steadily towards Orion, the Pleiades…

See the excellent Hypertextual Companion to Under the Volcano for more details on the references in this chapter and throughout the novel.

Buy the novel here: Under the Volcano (Amazon affiliate link).

Charles Dickens, author of David Copperfield (1849-1850).

I have said in a previous post that David Copperfield is a defence of the poetic view of life (this was a quote from GK Chesterton). But to clarify, Charles Dickens’s great novel is more than this. It is one of the best examples in literary history of the fine balance between realism and romance.

Before clarifying this point, let me be clear on terms. By ‘realism’ I mean with respect to the realist movement in literature in the 19th century. In this sense it applies to writing that attempts to describe the world as it really is, devoid of fancy or exaggeration.

Realism in the literary sense applies to works of fiction written in prose. It was influenced heavily by the journalistic, documentary style of newspaper and magazine writing in particular. This form of literary realism attempts to reach objective truth through faithful descriptions, for example of real scenes, or a person’s appearance, or aspects of a character.

By ‘romance’ I’m referring to a mode that emphasises or exaggerates specifics without trying to capture the whole. This mode is subjective and is often also called ‘poetic’, because it is the essence of poetry. In a descriptive scene, for example, the poetic mode highlights the significant detail at the expense of a totally realistic description of the scene (see my post on Elizabeth Bishop’s Sandpiper for example).

The other major aspect of the poetic mode is its use of ambiguity. Clearly ambiguity is the very opposite of realism, but the poetic mode commonly uses a range of deliberate ambiguities to shine a light on deeper truths; William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity is the key work on this approach (the complete text can be downloaded at the Internet Archive).

Blending poetic romance and prose realism

The ‘poetic’ and the ‘realist’ mode, then, are antithetical in approach. All fiction uses elements of both to various degrees, but I believe that, at his best, Dickens achieves the perfect balance. David Copperfield is one of his greatest achievements in this respect.

Consider the following description of David’s first sight of his step father’s sister in Chapter 4:

It was Miss Murdstone who was arrived, and a gloomy-looking lady she was; dark, like her brother, whom she greatly resembled in face and voice; and with very heavy eyebrows, nearly meeting over her large nose, as if, being disabled by the wrongs of her sex from wearing whiskers, she had carried them to that account. She brought with her two uncompromising black boxes, with her initials on the lids in hard brass nails. When she paid the coachman she took her money out of a hard steel purse, and she kept the purse in a very jail of a bag which hung upon her arm by a heavy chain, and shut up like a bite. I had never, at that time, seen such a metallic lady altogether as Miss Murdstone was.

The descriptive technique here is based on prosaic realism, but the effect, with its trenchant premonition of David’s forthcoming incarceration, is poetic.

At times the romantic mode emerges through hints of something fantastical, as in this excerpt from Chapter 23:

Doctors’ Commons was approached by a little low archway. Before we had taken many paces down the street beyond it, the noise of the city seemed to melt, as if by magic, into a softened distance. A few dull courts and narrow ways brought us to the sky-lighted offices of Spenlow and Jorkins; in the vestibule of which temple, accessible to pilgrims without the ceremony of knocking, three or four clerks were at work as copyists. One of these, a little dry man, sitting by himself, who wore a stiff brown wig that looked as if it were made of gingerbread, rose to receive my aunt, and show us into Mr Spenlow’s room.

This short passage starts with the realism of a documentary but soon dissolves, as if by a spell, and we seem to be suddenly in another land, one of far off temples and fairytale gingerbread wigs.

Another example can be found in Chapter 47, where David Copperfield and Mr Peggotty follow Martha down to the river in Westminster. In this passage Dickens demonstrates the consummate skill with which he so easily blends fictional strategies. Here he passes from high realism to morbid melodrama  as smoothly as the river that flows through the scene:

The neighbourhood was a dreary one at that time; as oppressive, sad and solitary by night, as any about London. There were neither wharves nor houses on the melancholy waste of road near the great blank Prison. A sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the prison walls. Coarse grass and rank weeds straggled over all the marshy land in the vicinity. In one part, carcases of houses, inauspiciously begun and never finished, rotted away. In another, the ground was cumbered with with rusty iron monsters of steam-boilers, wheels, cranks, pipes, furnaces, paddles, anchors, diving-bells, windmill-sails, and I know not what strange objects, accumulated by some speculator, and grovelling in the dust, underneath which – having sunk into the soil of their own weight in wet weather – they had the appearance of vainly trying to hide themselves. The clash and glare of sundry fiery Works upon the river-side, arose by night to disturb everything except the heavy and unbroken smoke that poured out of their chimneys. Slimy gaps and causeways, winding among old wooden piles, with a sickly substance clinging to the latter, like green hair, and the rags of last year’s handbills offering rewards for drowned men fluttering above high-water mark, led down through the ooze and slush to the ebb-tide. There was a story that one of the pits dug for the dead in the time of the Great Plague was hereabout; and a blighting influence seemed to have proceeded from it over the whole place. Or else it looked as if it had gradually decomposed into that nightmare condition, out of the overflowings of the polluted stream.

Charaterisation, fiction and mythology

There is another sense in which Dickens contrasts realism with romance, and this is in his characterisation.

It is often remarked that many of Dickens’s characters are two dimensional and unchangeable. Examples in David Copperfield include Wilkins Micawber, Uriah Heep, Mr Murdstone and James Steerforth. But to make this a point of criticism is to miss his intention, for as GK Chesterton explains in the chapter on the Pickwick Papers in his fascinating book on Dickens, this side of his work is derived from mythology and folklore rather than a modern conception of fiction:

Dickens was a mythologist rather than a novelist; he was the last of the mythologists, and perhaps the greatest. He did not always manage to make his characters men, but he always managed, at the least, to make them gods. They are creatures like Punch or Father Christmas. They live statically, in a perpetual summer of being themselves.

This is true of some of the characters, but we can’t fail to see the realism of others. We certainly see development and change in David Copperfield himself (this is the whole point of the novel), as well as Little Em’ly, Ham, Aunt Betsey Trotwood, and many others.

We must also take into account the highly realistic scenarios that these characters inhabit. For example, there is far more realism than romance in the sexual relationships described in the novel.

Romantic love never works in David Copperfield; witness the failure of David to really connect with Dora despite his desperately powerful romantic courtship. Likewise Mrs Strong fails to forge a relationship beyond immature attraction with Jack Maldon and Steerforth cannot develop his passion for Little Em’ly into anything lasting or meaningful.

The really successful love relationships in the novel are far more complex and require patience and experience to make them work effectively; for example David’s attachment with Agnes, Peggotty’s marriage to Barkis, and Dr Strong’s eventual reconciliation with and closer understanding of his young wife.

In all these ways, and many more, Dickens blends diverse modes of fiction to create a unique style of story telling. At times they are so fused together that it is difficult to tell where gritty realism ends and fanciful poeticising begins. It is my opinion that Dickens achieves this mysterious alchemy more completely and more successfully than any other prose writer in history.

WC Fields as Mr Micawber in the MGM film of David Copperfield, 1935.

David Copperfield is Charles Dickens’s most autobiographical work (see this short article on auobiographical elements in David Copperfield for some details). If we are to take the main character of David Copperfield as a representative of Dickens himself, we must take seriously his reflections on the nature of that character. There is one point in the novel where he makes a direct assessment of his own qualities, and it occurs in Chapter 42, Mischief:

I will only add, to what I have already written of my perseverance at this time of my life, and of a patient and continuous energy which then began to be matured within me, and which I know to be the strong part of my character, if it have any strength at all, that there, on looking back, I find the source of my success…

My meaning simply is, that whatever I have tried to do in life, I have tried with all my heart to do well; that whatever I have devoted myself to, I have devoted myself to completely; that, in great aims and in small, I have always been thoroughly in earnest. I have never believed it possible that any natural or improved ability can claim immunity from the companionship of the steady, plain, hard-working qualities, and hope to gain its end. There is no such thing as such fulfilment on this earth. Some happy talent, and some fortunate opportunity, may form the two sides of the ladder on which some men mount, but the rounds of that ladder must be made of stuff to stand wear and tear; and there is no substitute for thorough-going, ardent, and sincere earnestness. Never to put one hand to anything, on which I could throw my whole self; and never to affect depreciation of my work, whatever it was; I find, now, to have been my golden rules.

Here we see a strong self portrait of Dickens himself, and we can only be struck by the strength of his self-awareness. GK Chesterton makes a similar assesment of the character of Charles Dickens in his Appreciations and Criticisms:

He sometimes wrote bad work; he sometimes wrote even unimportant work; but he wrote hardly a line which is not full of his own fierce vitality and fancy. If he is dull it is hardly ever because he cannot think of anything; it is because, by some silly excitement or momentary lapse of judgment, he has thought of something that was not worth thinking of. If his joke is feeble, it is as an impromptu joke at an uproarious dinner-table may be feeble; it is no indication of any lack of vitality. The joke is feeble, but it is not a sign of feebleness. Broadly speaking, this is true of Dickens. If his writing is not amusing us, at least it is amusing him. Even when he is tiring he is not tired.

This is such an important facet of Dickens the writer that it should be front of mind during any attempt to appreciate or criticise his work.

John O Jordan has noted that earlier critics identified signs of weakness in Dickens’s work in his ‘sprawling melodramatic plots, larger-than-life characters (and) verbal extravagance’. These qualities will particularly strike the modern reader, but to fully understand Dickens we have to grasp these as fundamental aspects of his writing. In fact, as Chesterton asserts in his book on Charles Dickens (1906) (which TS Eliot called ‘the best on that author that has ever been written’) this is the whole point of Dickens’s work, and especially David Copperfield:

David Copperfield is the great answer of a great romancer to the realists. David says in effect: “What! you say that the Dickens tales are too purple really to have happened! Why, this is what happened to me, and it seemed the most purple of all. You say that the Dickens heroes are too handsome and triumphant! Why, no prince or paladin in Ariosto was ever so handsome and triumphant as the Head Boy seemed to me walking before me in the sun. You say the Dickens villains are too black! Why, there was no ink in the devil’s ink-stand black enough for my own stepfather when I had to live in the same house with him. The facts are quite the other way to what you suppose. This life of grey studies and half tones, the absence of which you regret in Dickens, is only life as it is looked at. This life of heroes and villains is life as it is lived. The life a man knows best is exactly the life he finds most full of fierce certainties and battles between good and ill—his own. Oh, yes, the life we do not care about may easily be a psychological comedy. Other people’s lives may easily be human documents. But a man’s own life is always a melodrama.

In this sense David Copperfield is a ‘defence of the poetic view of life’, and characters like Mr Micawber ‘an immense assertion of the truth that the way to live is to exaggerate everything’.

I can’t end this article without quoting Chesterton once more, in what appears to me the last word in Dickensian criticism:

This is the excuse for all that indeterminate and rambling and sometimes sentimental criticism of which Dickens, more than any one else, is the victim, of which I fear that I for one have made him the victim in this place. When I was a boy I could not understand why the Dickensians worried so wearily about Dickens, about where he went to school and where he ate his dinners, about how he wore his trousers and when he cut his hair. I used to wonder why they did not write something that I could read about a man like Micawber. But I have come to the conclusion that this almost hysterical worship of the man, combined with a comparatively feeble criticism on his works, is just and natural. Dickens was a man like ourselves; we can see where he went wrong, and study him without being stunned or getting the sunstroke. But Micawber is not a man; Micawber is the superman. We can only walk round and round him wondering what we shall say. All the critics of Dickens, when all is said and done, have only walked round and round Micawber wondering what they should say. I am myself at this moment walking round and round Micawber wondering what I shall say. And I have not found out yet.

John Crace presents the digested read of Heart of Darkness.

John Crace’s column in the Guardian, The Digested Read, presents a satirical look at great literary works by summarising them in less than 10 minutes. Here he tackles Heart of Darkness. Sample quote:

‘Pray tell me his last words,’ the intended murmured. My heart trembled. She was only a woman, and therefore too dim to be told of the moral depravities of the heart of darkness.

Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad.

In his critical text The Great Tradition F.R. Leavis is interested in Conrad’s use of the English language, in light of it being his third, possibly fourth language, after Polish, French and Russian. He recounts a conversation on the subject:

‘I remember remarking to Andre Chevrillon how surprising a choice it was on Conrad’s part to write in English, especially seeing he was so clearly a student of the French masters. And I remember the reply, to the effect that it wasn’t at all surprising, since Conrad’s work couldn’t have been written in French. M. Chevrillon, with the authority of a perfect bilingual, went on to explain in terms of the characteristics of the two languages why it had to be English. Conrad’s themes and interests demanded the concreteness and action – the dramatic energy – of English.’

This is true so far as it goes, but in reading Heart of Darkness, it soon becomes evident that there is another aspect of the English language that fascinates Conrad, which is quite opposite to ‘the concreteness and action’ described by Chevrillon. This is its capacity for ambiguity. Indeed, one strong theme of Heart of Darkness is how language can deceive, and how inadequate it can be for expressing ‘the significantly unfamiliar’.

When Leavis comes to tackle Heart of Darkness in the chapter on Conrad in The Great Tradition, he concedes that this novella is ‘by common consent one of Conrad’s best things’, but then spends a great part of his discussion criticising its use of language.

His criticism of Heart of Darkness is consistent with his earlier characterisation of English as a language of action. After quoting at length some passages that demonstrate ‘Conrad’s art at its best’ (passages that describe action), he then goes on to focus on a perceived weakness of the text:

‘There are, however, places in Heart of Darkness where we become aware of comment as an interposition, and worse, as an intrusion, at times an exasperating one. Hadn’t he, we find ourselves asking, overworked “inscrutable”, “inconceivable”, “unspeakable” and that kind of word already? – yet still they recur. Is anything added to the oppressive mysteriousness of the Congo by such sentences as: “It was the stillness of an implacable force brooding over an inscrutable intention” -?’

Leavis insists that the ‘effect is not to magnify but rather to muffle’. But here he misses the point. For it seems to me clear that Conrad’s intention is exactly that – to make us aware of the inadequacy of these type of words. The intrusion is deliberate, and is not meant to clarify his meaning, but the opposite – to expose the impotence of language. It’s at the points where Conrad most wants to drive home the hollowness at the core of language itself that he uses this refined and sophisticated language, four- and five-syllable words such as those given as examples by Leavis: ‘inscrutable’, ‘inexorable’, inconceivable’, ‘implacable’.

Poetic Language in Heart of Darkness

We must also be aware of Conrad’s use of reptition. Whenever the language in Heart of Darkness becomes at once more sophisticated and ambiguous, the phrases he uses resound and act as a kind of ‘motif’ throughout the text. This is a genuinely poetic use of language, not in the sense of poetic evocation, but in the sense that language is made to draw attention to itself. The repetition, much like the function of rhyme, allieration, assonance, and so on, brings our attention to the words themselves, and gives us a heightened sensitivity to their function. In Heart of Darkness, the really radical point of this is to expose their lack of meaning.

For example, take the fact that in the first three pages he reiterates the word ‘brooding’ five times, sometimes in succeeding paragraphs, and always related to the word ‘gloom’, with which it creates a resounding poetic assonance:

• ‘The air was dark above Gravesend, and farther back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest, and the greatest, town on earth.’
• ‘It was difficult to realize his work was not out there in the luminous estuary, but behind him, within the brooding gloom’.
• ‘Only the gloom to the west, brooding over the upper reaches, became more sombre every minute, as if angered by the approach of the sun.’
• ‘And at last, in its curved and imperceptible fall, the sun sank low, and from glowing white changed to a dull red without rays and without heat, as if about to out suddenly, stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men.’
• ‘And farther west on the upper reaches the place of the monstrous town was still marked ominously on the sky, a brooding gloom in sunshine, a lurid glare under the stars.’

We have all, I’m sure, had the experience of repeating the same word incessantly to the point where we lose its meaning and it becomes merely a sound, and this is part of Conrad’s intention here.

Language and Deception

The theme of the capacity of language to deceive has been commented on by many critics. Kurtz was ‘just a word to me’, says Marlow. He talks of his disappointment when he believes he will not meet Kurtz, and says:

‘I made the strange discovery that I had never imagined him as doing, you know, but as discoursing. I didn’t say to myself,  “Now I will never see him’”, or “Now I will never shake him by the hand,” but, “Now I will never hear him.” The man presented himself as a voice.’

As Marlow continues to explore this disappointment, the same stretching of language we’ve seen earlier is used to heighten our awareness of its emptiness – polysyllabic words like ‘inestimable’ and ‘impalpable’ return – while Marlow’s own language staggers before falling into impotence:

‘I was cut to the quick at the idea of having lost the inestimable privilege of listening to the gifted Kurtz. Of course I was wrong. The privilege was waiting for me. Oh yes, I heard more than enough. And I was right too. A voice. He was very little more than a voice. And I heard – him – it – this voice – other voices – all of them were so little more than voices – and the memory of that time itself lingers around me, impalpable, like a dying vibration of one immense jabber, silly, atrocious, sordid, savage, or simply mean, without any kind of sense. Voices, voices – even the girl herself – now -’

Conrad has deliberately forced the reader to share Marlow’s frustrations with the ‘immense jabber’, and the ‘silly’ words. Indeed, F.R. Leavis’s frustrations with the language are exactly of the sort intended by the author. The use of the word ‘impalpable’ in this very sentence is not there for its meaning – it’s there because it exposes its own lack of meaning. We have, as Leavis points out, already had a great deal of this word at certain points throughout the story, and when it reappears, the repitition strikes us and its emptiness is reinforced.

There are many examples of this use of language to elaborate the themes of the novella, but perhaps the most germane to its most dominant theme is the nature of Kurtz’s report for the International Society for the Supression of Savage Customs. Marlow tells us that Kurtz’s paper was ‘vibrating with eloquence’, and ‘the peroration was magnificent’ – sophisticated language to describe sophisticated language. But the striking thing is the hurried scrawl at the end: “Exterminate all the brutes!” Quite apart from the sentiment behind this scrawl, there is its choice of words. ‘Exterminate’ is itself one of those polysyllabic, sophisticated  words, and its use here suggests the ultimate horror that Conrad has to impart to us; which is that, far from reverting to savagery, Kurtz has embraced it. Marlow has told us this horrifying truth about humanity in direct words earlier in Heart of Darkness:

‘It was unearthly and the men were… No they were not inhuman. Well you know, that was the worst of it – the suspicion of their not being inhuman.’

As Thomas Osborne says in his excellent essay ‘Conrad’s Darkness’:

‘Barbarism is not a lapsed state or a state that is, in an evolutionary sense, prior to civilization. It is not the product of degeneration. It is rather that civilization seems to be only the name we give to our temporary, fragile sheltering from barbarism and darkness – a fragility that is protected only in the most mundane of things, in work, in collective life.’

And, we might add, in words. If Kurtz was in a lapsed state of barbarism he would have scrawled ‘Kill all the brutes’ at the foot of his paper – if he remained capable of writing at all. The word ‘exterminate’ is a chilling reminder that the civilizing impulse, and the language that accompanies it, is still very much a part of the transformed Kurtz. This is the real horror, the real darkness at the heart of this story.

Update

Since writing this post, I read an essay entitled The Failure of the Imagination (1965) by James Guetti (published in Casebook Series: Heart of Darkness, Nostromo and Under Western Eyes). Although coming at the novel from a different angle, parts of the essay cover similar ground to that covered in my post above, and (I think) helps to support its case. Here’s a quote:

Language has meaning, in Heart of Darkness, in terms of the exteriors of experience – the coast of a wilderness, the surface of a river, a man’s appearance and his voice – and this meaning can exist as a reality so long as one remains ignorant, deliberately or otherwise, of all that lies beyond these exteriors, of what language cannot penetrate. For with the intimation that there is something beyond verbal and, indeed, the intellectual capacities, comes the realisation that language is fiction. And if we desire to discover a reality greater than that of words, we are confronted not with the truth within, but with the real disparity between the gimmickry of the human mind and this truth. Because Marlow wishes to know more than surfaces, the reality of surfaces is destroyed. His knowledge of reality may now exist only as his knowledge of the unbridgeable separation between the world of man’s disciplined imagination and that something or nothing to which this world is assumed to relate.

Constance Garnett translated and published 13 volumes of Chekhov stories between the years 1916 and 1922. This site, 201 Stories by Anton Chekhov, presents all 201 stories in the order of their publication in Russia.  Found via: Open Culture.

The Guardian Unlimited Book section has a story on a new program of Penguin books, MyPenguin. The selection of novels sport ‘naked’ covers, enabling you to add your own designs. To promote the series Penguin has commissioned popular musicians to design the cover for a novel of their choice, and Beck, the American singer/songwriter, has tackled Le Grand Meaulnes. From the article:

Beck’s illustration, of the French novel Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain Fournier, follows his DIY art project for his latest album, The Information.

His book effort takes the form of a line drawing of two boys, perhaps the book’s two main characters, Le Grand Meaulnes and Francois Seurel. The title is picked out in magazine photograph cutouts of the faces of young men.

Beck said of the Penguin project, in which each paperback will come with a blank cover for readers to customise: “The idea is to provide something that calls for interactivity. Cover art and all the paraphernalia that comes with albums have always been really important to me. I’m one of the people who need a visual crutch for music.”

Here’s the result, along with Ryan Adams’s design for Dracula:

The original article is at the Guardian Unlimited: Musicians provide literary cover versions.

This is a short edit from the documentary Jack Kerouac, King of the Beats. Here Kerouac is interviewed about his novel On The Road, and reads from the final page of the book.

Click here to view the embedded video.