Heart of Darkness breaks into two. There is the reportage about the Congo, totally accurate, as we now know: Conrad scholarship has been able to identify almost everyone in that story. And there is the fiction, which in the context is like fiction, about Kurtz, the ivory agent who allows himself to become a kind of savage African god. The idea of Kurtz, when it is stated, seems good: he will show “what particular region of the first ages a man’s untrammelled feet may take him into by way of solitude.” Beguiling words, but they are abstract; and the idea, deliberately worked out, remains an applied idea. Conrad’s attitude to fiction—not as something of itself, but as a varnish on fact—is revealed by his comment on the story. “It is experience pushed a little (and only very little) beyond the actual facts of the case for the perfectly legitimate, I believe, purpose of bringing it home to the minds and bosoms of the reader.”
Mystery—it is the Conradian word. But there is no mystery in the work itself, the things imagined; mystery remains a concept of the writer’s. The theme of passion and the abyss recurs in Conrad, but there is nothing in his work like the evening scene in Ibsen’s Ghosts: the lamp being lit, the champagne being called for, light and champagne only underlining the blight of that house, a blight that at first seems external and arbitrary and is then seen to come from within. There is no scene like that, which takes us beyond what we witness and becomes a symbol for aspects of our own experience. There is nothing—still on the theme of blight—like “The Withered Arm,” Hardy’s story of rejection and revenge and the dereliction of the innocent, which goes beyond the country tale of magic on which it was based. Conrad is too particular and concrete a writer for that; he sticks too close to the facts; if he had meditated on those stories he might have turned them into case histories.
With writers like Ibsen and Hardy, fantasy answers impulses and needs they might not have been able to state. The truths of that fantasy we have to work out, or translate, for ourselves. With Conrad the process is reversed. We almost begin with the truths—portable truths, as it were, that can sometimes be rendered as aphorisms—and work through to their demonstration. The method was forced on him by the special circumstances that made him a writer. To understand the difficulties of this method, the extraordinary qualities of intelligence and sympathy it required, and the exercise of what he described as the “poetic faculty,” we should try and look at the problem from Conrad’s point of view. There is an early story which enables us to do just that.
The story is “The Return,” which was written at the same time as “Karain.” It is set in London and, interestingly, its two characters are English. Alvan Hervey is a City man. He is “tall, well set-up, good-looking and healthy; and his clear pale face had under its commonplace refinement that slight tinge of overbearing brutality which is given by the possession of only partly difficult accomplishments; by excelling in games, or in the art of making money; by the easy mastery over animals and over needy men.” And it is already clear that this is less a portrait than an aphorism and an idea about the middle class.
We follow Hervey home one evening. We go up to his dressing room, gaslit, with a butterfly-shaped flame coming out of the mouth of a bronze dragon. The room is full of mirrors and it is suddenly satisfactorily full of middle-class Alvan Herveys. But there is a letter on his wife’s dressing table: she has left him. We follow Hervey then through every detail of his middle-class reaction: shock, nausea, humiliation, anger, sadness: paragraph after ordered paragraph, page after page. And, wonderfully, by his sheer analytical intelligence Conrad holds us.
Someone is then heard to enter the house. It is Hervey’s wife: she has not, after all, had the courage to leave. What follows now is even more impressive. We move step by step with Hervey, from the feeling of relief and triumph and the wish to punish, to the conviction that the woman, a stranger after five years of marriage, “had in her hands an indispensable gift which nothing else on earth could give.” So Hervey arrives at the “irresistible belief in an enigma … the conviction that within his reach and passing away from him was the very secret of existence—its certitude, immaterial and precious.” He wants then to “compel the surrender of the gift.” He tells his wife he loves her; but the shoddy words only awaken her indignation, her contempt for the “materialism” of men, and her anger at her own self-deception. Up to this point the story works. Now it fades away. Hervey remembers that his wife has not had the courage to leave; he feels that she doesn’t have the “gift” which he now needs. And it is he who leaves and doesn’t return.
Mysterious words are repeated in this story—”enigma,” “certitude, immaterial and precious.” But there is no real narrative and no real mystery. Another writer might have charted a course of events. For Conrad, though, the drama and the truth lay not in events but in the analysis: identifying the stages of consciousness through which a passionless man might move to the recognition of the importance of passion. It was the most difficult way of handling the subject; and Conrad suffered during the writing of the eighty-page story. He wrote to Edward Garnett: “It has embittered five months of my life.” Such a labour; and yet, in spite of the intelligence and real perceptions, in spite of the cinematic details—the mirrors, the bronze dragon breathing fire—”The Return” remains less a story than an imaginative essay. A truth, as Conrad sees it, has been analysed. But the people remain abstractions.
And that gives another clue. The vision of middle-class people as being all alike, all consciously passionless, delightful and materialist, so that even marriage is like a conspiracy—that is the satirical vision of the outsider. The year before, when he was suffering with The Rescue, Conrad had written to Garnett: “Other writers have some starting point. Something to catch hold of … They lean on dialect—or on tradition—or on history—or on the prejudice or fad of the hour; they trade upon some tie or conviction of their time—or upon the absence of these things—which they can abuse or praise. But at any rate they know something to begin with—while I don’t. I have had some impressions, some sensations—in my time … And it’s all faded.”
It is the complaint of a writer who is missing a society, and is beginning to understand that fantasy or imagination can move more freely within a closed and ordered world. Conrad’s experience was too scattered; he knew many societies by their externals, but he knew none in depth. His human comprehension was complete. But when he set “The Return” in London he was immediately circumscribed. He couldn’t risk much; he couldn’t exceed his knowledge. A writer’s disadvantage, when the work is done, can appear as advantages. “The Return” takes us behind the scenes early on, as it were, and gives us some idea of the necessary oddity of the work, and the prodigious labour that lay behind the novels which still stand as a meditation on our world.
It is interesting to reflect on writers’ myths. With Conrad there is the imperialist myth of the man of honour, the stylist of the sea. It misses the best of Conrad, but it at least reflects the work. The myths of great writers usually have to do with their work rather than their lives. More and more today, writers’ myths are about the writers themselves; the work has become less obtrusive. The great societies that produced the great novels of the past have cracked. Writing has become more private and more privately glamorous. The novel as a form no longer carries conviction. Experimentation, not aimed at the real difficulties, has corrupted response; and there is a great confusion in the minds of readers and writers about the purpose of the novel. The novelist, like the painter, no longer recognizes his interpretive function; he seeks to go beyond it; and his audience diminishes. And so the world we inhabit, which is always new, goes by unexamined, made ordinary by the camera, unmeditated on; and there is no one to awaken the sense of true wonder. That is perhaps a fair definition of the novelist’s purpose, in all ages.
Conrad died fifty years ago. In those fifty years his work has penetrated to many corners of the world which he saw as dark. It is a subject for Conradian meditation; it tells us some
thing about our new world. Perhaps it doesn’t matter what we say about Conrad; it is enough that he is discussed. You will remember that for Marlow in Heart of Darkness, “the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of those misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.”
About The Author
V. S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, to which his grandfather had come from India, but he has lived most of his life in London. His fifteen books—eight of them novels— have been accorded great critical acclaim and several of today’s distinguished literary prizes, among them England’s Booker Prize.
Notes
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The priest was killed two years later, in 1974, by unknown gunmen, and for a few days had poster fame as a Peronist martyr.
The Return of Eva Perón, With the Killings in Trinidad Page 21