I believe there were many of us who turned to Conrad driven by a recidivist taste for adventure-stories—but not just for adventure stories, also for those authors for whom adventures are only a pretext for saying something original about man, while the exotic events and countries serve to underline more clearly man’s relationship with the world. On one bookshelf of my ideal library Conrad’s place is next to the aery Stevenson, who is nevertheless almost his opposite in terms of his life and his literary style. And yet on more than one occasion I have been tempted to move him onto another shelf, one less accessible for me, the one containing analytical, psychological novelists, the Jameses and Prousts, those who tirelessly recover every crumb of sensation we have experienced. Or maybe even alongside those who are more or less aesthetes maudits, like Poe, full of displaced passions; always presuming that Conrad’s dark anxieties about an absurd universe do not consign him to the shelf (not yet properly ordered or finally selected) containing the ‘writers of the crisis of modernism’.
Instead I have always kept him close to hand, alongside Stendhal, who is so unlike him, and Nievo, who has nothing in common with him at all. For the fact is that though I never believed in a lot of what he wrote, I have always believed that he was a good captain, and that he brought into his stories that element which is so difficult to write about: the sense of integration with the world that comes from a practical existence, the sense of how man fulfils himself in the things he does, in the moral implicit in his work, that ideal of always being able to cope, whether on the deck of a sailing ship or on the page of a book.
This is the moral substance of Conrad’s fiction. And I am happy to discover that it is also there, in its pure form, in a work of non-fiction, The Mirror of the Sea, a collection of pieces on maritime topics: the techniques of mooring and setting sail, anchors, sails, cargo weights and so on. (The Mirror of the Sea has been translated into Italian—for the first time, I believe, and in beautiful Italian prose—by Piero Jahier, who must have had enormous fun, as well as agonising difficulty, translating all those nautical terms: it appears in volumes 10-11 of the complete works being published by Bompiani, which also contains the magnificent tales of ’Twixt Land and Sea, which has already appeared in the same translation in Einaudi’s Universale series.)
Who else but Conrad in these pieces has ever been able to write about the tools of his trade with such technical precision, such passionate enthusiasm, and in such an unrhetorical, unpretentious way? Rhetoric only comes out at the end with his exaltation of British naval supremacy, and his reevocation of Nelson and Trafalgar, but this also highlights a practical and polemical basis to these essays, which is always present when Conrad discusses the sea and ships, just when one thinks he is absorbed in contemplation of metaphysical profundities: he constantly stressed his regret for the passing of the ethos of the age of sailing ships, always rehearsed the myth of the British Navy whose age was now on the wane.
This was a typically English polemic, because Conrad was English, chose to be English and succeeded: if he is not situated in an English social context, if one considers him merely an ‘illustrious visitor’ in that literature, as Virginia Woolf defined him, one cannot give an exact historical definition of the man. That he was born in Poland, called Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzieniowski, and possessed a ‘Slav soul’ and a complex about abandoning his native land, and resembled Dostoevsky despite hating him for nationalistic reasons, are facts on which much has been written but which are not really of much interest to us. Conrad decided to enter the British Merchant Marine at the age of twenty, and English literature at the age of twenty-seven. He did not assimilate the family traditions of English society, nor its culture or religion (he was always averse to the latter); but he integrated with English society through the Merchant Navy, and made it his own past, the place where he felt mentally at home, and had nothing but contempt for whatever seemed to him contrary to that ethos. It was that quintessentially English personage, the gentleman captain, that he wanted to represent in his own life and in his creative works, though in widely differing incarnations, ranging from the heroic, romantic, quixotic and exaggerated to the over-ambitious, flawed and tragic. From Mac Whirr, the impassive captain in Typhoon, to the protagonist of Lord Jim who tries to escape being obsessed by a single act of cowardice.
Lord Jim goes from being a captain to being a merchant: and here we find an even wider range of Europeans trafficking in the Tropics and ending up as outcasts there. These too were types Conrad had known during his naval experience in the Malaysian archipelago. The aristocratic etiquette of the maritime officer and the degradation of the failed adventurers are the two poles between which his human sympathies oscillate.
This fascination for pariahs, vagabonds and madmen is also evident in a writer far removed from Conrad, but more or less a contemporary, Maksim Gorki. And it is curious to note that an interest in this kind of humanity, so steeped in irrational, decadent complacency (an interest that was shared by a whole epoch of world literature, down to Knut Hamsun and Sherwood Anderson) was the terrain in which the British conservative as much as the revolutionary Russian found the roots of their robust and rigorous conception of man.
This has brought us round to the question of Conrad’s political ideas, of his fiercely reactionary spirit. Of course at the root of such an exaggerated, obsessive horror for revolution and revolutionaries (which led him to write whole novels against anarchists, without ever having known one, not even by sight) lay his upbringing as an aristocratic, land-owning Pole, and the milieu in which he lived as a young man in Marseilles, amidst Spanish monarchist exiles and American ex-slavers, shipping contraband arms for Don Carlos. But it is only by situating him in the English context that we can recognise in his stance a key historical configuration similar to Marx’s Balzac and Lenin’s Tolstoy.
Conrad lived through a period of transition for British capitalism and colonialism: the transition from sail to steam. His world of heroes was based on the culture of the small shipowners’ sailing ships, a world of rational clarity, of discipline at work, of courage and duty as opposed to the sordid spirit of profit. The new fleet of steamships owned by huge companies seemed to him squalid and worthless, like the captain and the officers of the ‘Patna’ who push Lord Jim into betraying himself. So, whoever still dreams of the old virtues either becomes a kind of Don Quixote, or surrenders, dragged down to the other pole of humanity in Conrad: the human relics, the unscrupulous commercial agents, the bureaucratic, colonial outcasts, all of Europe’s human dregs which were starting to fester in the colonies, and whom Conrad contrasts with the old romantic merchant-adventurers like his own Tom Lingard.
In the novel Victory, which takes place on a desert island, there is a fierce game of chase, which involves the unarmed, Quixote character Heyst, the squalid desperadoes, and the battling woman Lena, who accepts the struggle against evil, is eventually killed, but achieves a moral triumph over the chaos of the world.
For the fact is that in the midst of that aura of dissolution which often hovers over Conrad’s pages, his faith in man’s strengths never falters. Though far removed from any philosophical rigour, Conrad sensed that crucial moment in bourgeois thought when optimistic rationalism shed its final illusions and a welter of irrationalism and mysticism was unleashed on the world. Conrad saw the universe as something dark and hostile, but against it he marshalled the forces of man, his moral order, his courage. Faced with a black, chaotic avalanche raining down on him, and a conception of the world which was laden with mystery and despair, Conrad’s atheistic humanism holds the line and digs in, like Mac Whirr in the middle of the typhoon. He was an incorrigible reactionary, but today his lesson can only be fully understood by those who have faith in the forces of man, and faith in those men who recognise their own nobility in the work they do, and who know that that ‘principle of fidelity’ which he held dear cannot be applied solely to the past.
[1954]
Pasternak and the Revolu
tion*
Halfway through the twentieth century the great Russian nineteenth-century novel has come back to haunt us, like King Hamlet’s ghost. That is the feeling that Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1957) arouses in us, his first European readers. The reaction is a literary one, then, not a political one. Yet the term ‘literary’ is still not adequate. It is in the relationship between the reader and the book that something really happens: we fling ourselves into reading with the hunger for questions that typified our early reading, in fact just like when we first tackled the Russian classics, and we were not looking for this or that type of ‘literature’, but an explicit and general discussion of life, capable of putting the particular in direct relation to the universal, and of containing the future in its portrayal of the past. In the hope that it can tell us something about the future we rush towards this novel which has come back from the grave, but the shade of Hamlet’s father, as we know, wants to intervene in today’s problems, though always wanting to relate them back to the time when he was alive, to what happened before, to the past. Our encounter with Doctor Zhivago, which has been so dramatic and emotional, is similarly tinged with dissatisfaction and disagreement. At last, a book with which we can argue! But at times, right in the middle of a dialogue, we notice that each of us is talking about something different. It is difficult to talk with our fathers.
Even the systems that the great ghost uses to arouse our emotions are those of his own time. Hardly ten pages into the novel, one character is already grappling with the mystery of death, man’s purpose in life and the nature of Christ. But the surprising thing is that the appropriate climate for sustaining such weighty topics has already been created, and the reader is plunged back into that notion of Russian literature as something totally bound up with explicit exploration of the big questions, a notion which in recent decades we have tended to set aside, ever since, that is, we stopped considering Dostoevsky as Russian literature’s central figure but more as a gigantic outsider.
This first impression does not stay with us for long. To come towards us, the ghost knows full well how to find the battlements we most like to stalk: chose of objective narrative, full of facts and persons and things, from which the reader can extract a philosophy only bit by bit, at great personal labour and risk; not those of novelised intellectual debate. This vein of earnest philosophising certainly courses throughout the book, but the vastness of the world which is portrayed in it is able to support much more than this. And the principal tenet of Pasternak’s thought—that Nature and History do not belong to two different orders but form a continuum in which human lives find themselves immersed and by which they are determined—can be articulated better through narration than through theoretical propositions. In this way these reflections become one with the broad canvas of all the humanity and nature in the novel, they do not dominate or suffocate it. The result is that, as happens with all genuine storytellers, the book’s meaning is not to be sought in the sum of the ideas enunciated but in the totality of its images and sensations, in the flavour of life, in its silences. And all the ideological proliferations, these discussions which constantly flare up and die down, about nature and history, the individual and politics, religion and poetry, as though resuming old conversations with friends long gone, create a deep echo chamber for the strictly humble events the characters undergo, and come forth (to adopt a beautiful image used by Pasternak for the revolution) ‘like a sigh which has been held back too long’. Pasternak has breathed into his whole novel a desire for the kind of novel which no longer exists.
And yet we could say, paradoxically, that no book is more typical of the USSR than Doctor Zhivago. Where else could it have been written except in a country in which girls still wear pigtails? Those boys and girls of the start of the century, Yura, Misha Gordon and Tonja, who form a triumvirate ‘based on an apologia for purity’, probably also have the same fresh, distant faces as the Young Communists that we met so often on our delegation visits. On those visits we often saw the Soviet people’s enormous reserves of energy, which had been spared the dizzying strains (the pointless phases of fashion, but also the urge for new discoveries, trials and truths) experienced by Western consciences in the last forty years (in culture, the arts, morale, and way of life), and we wondered what fruit would come forth from their constant and exclusive concentration on their own classics if it were ever confronted with a lesson in reality which was as harsh, solemn and historically new as ever could be. This book by Pasternak is a first response to that question. It is not a young man’s response, which was more what we expected, but that of an elderly man of letters, which is all the more significant, perhaps, because it shows us the unexpected direction taken by Pasternak on his interior journey in his long period of silence. This last survivor of the Westernising, avant-garde poets of the 1920s has not detonated in the ‘thaw’ a display of stylistic fireworks long held in reserve; after the end of the dialogue with the international avant-garde, which had been the natural space for his poetry, he too has spent the years reconsidering the nineteenth-century classics of his own country, and he too has been directing his gaze at the unsurpassable Tolstoy. However, his reading of Tolstoy is quite different from the official literary line, which all too easily pointed to him as the canonical model. And he has also reread his own years of experience in a different way from the official line. What emerges from this is a book far removed from the rehashed nineteenth-century fiction which is ‘socialist realism’, but it is also, unfortunately, the most harshly negative book as regards socialist humanism. Do we have to repeat that stylistic choices do not come about by chance? that if the avant-garde Pasternak concerned himself with the problems of the revolution, the Tolstoyan Pasternak could not but turn to a nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary past? But this too would be only a biased judgment. Doctor Zhivago is and is not a nineteenth-century novel written today, just as it is and is not a book of nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary period.
From the bloody years of the Russian and Soviet avant-garde, Pasternak has conserved their aspiration towards the future, the emotional questioning on how history is made; and he has written a book which, like a late fruit from a great tradition which has now ended, reaches us at the end of its lonely itinerary and manages to be a book contemporary with the more important works of modern Western literature, to which it gives an implicit assent.
In fact I believe that today a book structured ‘as in the nineteenth century’, containing a plot covering many years, with huge descriptions of society, must of necessity lead to a nostalgic, conservative vision. This is one of the many reasons why I disagree with Lukács: his theory of ‘perspectives’ can be turned back against his own favourite genre. I believe that it is no accident that our age is the age of the short story, or short novel, of autobiographical testimony. Today a genuinely modern narrative can only bring its poetic charge to bear on the times (whatever they be) in which we live, showing their worth as a decisive and infinitely significant moment. It therefore has to be ‘in the present’, with a plot that takes place before our eyes, unified in time and action as in Greek tragedy. And conversely whoever wants today to write the novel of ‘an epoch’, unless this is pure rhetoric, ends up writing a book whose poetic tension weighs on ‘the past’.1 Pasternak does the same, but not quite: his position as regards history is not so easy to reduce to such simple definitions; and his is not an ‘old-fashioned’ novel.
As far as technique goes, to situate Doctor Zhivago ‘before’ the twentieth-century deconstruction of the novel does not make sense. There are two major ways of deconstructing it, and they are both present in Pasternak’s book. The first is to fragment realistic objectivity into an immediacy of sensations or into an impalpable dust-cloud of memory; the second is to make the plot technique part of the plot itself, so that it is considered in its own right, like a geometric outline, which then leads to parody, and to the ludic ‘novel within the novel’. Pasternak takes this playin
g with the ‘novelistic’ to its ultimate consequences: he constructs a plot of continual coincidences, across all of Russia and Siberia, in which about fifteen characters do nothing but bump into each other, as though they were the only ones there, like Charlemagne’s knights in the abstract geography of Renaissance chivalric poems. Is this just the writer having fun? It is meant to be something more, at the outset; it is intended to represent the network of destinies which bind us without our knowing, the disintegration of history into a complex mingling of human stories. ‘They were all together, close by, and some did not know the others, others never got to know each other, and some things remained for ever unknown, while others waited for the next opportunity, the next meeting before coming to fruition’ (Italian tr., p.157; English tr., p. 113). But the emotion aroused by this discovery does not last long: and the constant series of coincidences in the end merely shows the author’s consciousness of his conventional use of the novel form.
Given this convention, and its overall structure, Pasternak enjoys total freedom in writing the book. Some parts he sketches in fully, others he leaves only in outline. At times a minute chronicler of the days and months, at others suddenly changing gear, he covers several years in a few lines: for instance, in the epilogue, where in twenty pages of great density and vigour, he runs before our eyes the epoch of ‘purges’ and the Second World War. Similarly, amongst the characters there are some whom he constantly flits over, not bothering to give us a deeper knowledge of them: even Zhivago’s wife, Tonya, is in this category. In short, this is an ‘impressionistic’ type of narrative. Impressionistic even in psychology: Pasternak refuses to give us a precise justification for his characters’ behaviour. For instance, why is the conjugal harmony between Lara and Antipov suddenly shattered, and he finds no other way out except to leave for the front? Pasternak says many things about it, but none is either sufficient or necessary: what counts is the general impression of contrast between the two characters. He is not interested in psychology, character, situations, but in something more general and direct: life. Pasternak’s prose is simply a continuation of his verse.
Why Read the Classics? Page 20