The Magician of Vienna

by Pitol, Sergio; Henson, George; Bellatin, Mario

  One of Conrad’s fundamental plots is the clash that arises between real life and the simulacrum of life. In Heart of Darkness that contradiction is titanic and extraordinarily somber, in that two adversaries of unequal stature embody it. On the one hand man or, rather, the fragile moral consistency of man and, on the other, the all-powerful, the invulnerable, the majestic nature: the primitive world, the still untamed, the amorphous, the profoundly barbarian and dark with all its snares and temptations.

  The Colombian essayist Ernesto Volkening, in a masterful essay titled Evocación de una sombra [Evocation of a Shadow], points out: “Like every genuine work of art, this novel, one of the few transcendental ones of the century, and, perhaps, the greatest contribution to the secret history of the Western soul in its twilight phase, conserves intact a core of mystery inaccessible to analytical investigation.”

  The beginning of Heart of Darkness is extraordinary for the audacious symmetry that it foreshadows. Marlow, sitting on the deck of a boat anchored on the Thames, awaits the change of the tide in order to set sail. It’s nighttime. A few friends surround him. Suddenly, he begins one of those very long, vague tales to which his friends are surely accustomed. It involves the evocation of the forest that extends along the river where the boat is anchored, nineteen centuries before, when absolute darkness reigned in the land and where, at a particular moment, the legions of Rome arrived. Marlow imagines a young legionary, uprooted from Roman refinements, planted suddenly in a primitive setting; he imagines too the feeling of fear suffered by that young man in the face of the mysterious and primeval life that stirs in the forest and in the heart of man. “There’s no initiation either into such mysteries.” That lad must live in the midst of the incomprehensible and will find in it a fascination that will begin to work on him: the fascination of the abomination. “You know,” Marlow says to his confreres, “imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate.”

  Contained in the evocation of that remote past are all the themes of Heart of Darkness. There is there an imperial power that never ceases to annex new territories, until then inaccessible. Brute force, conquerors, and among them a terrified and sensitive young man, living inside himself a dauntless struggle only to yield in the end before the abomination, a struggle in which hatred for others becomes entwined with hatred of self. Encapsulated in a nutshell, along with the theme of imperial conquest another more distinguishing one is found, that of the fragility of man, his eagerness to link himself to the primeval world, the Adamic yearning that rejects the tenuous layer of civilization around him and sends him out to live barbaric experiences. The history of the Roman youth traced in a few lines foreshadows Kurtz’s destiny, the brilliant youth sent from Belgium nineteen centuries later to the heart of Africa as a harbinger of progress, and his terrible transformation.

  In Conrad’s time the terms imperialism and colonialism were mere technical terms to designate the relationship between the great powers and the rest of the world. The pejorative connotation came later. In English literature, until the First World War, the imperial saga is described in heroic terms. Heart of Darkness, published in 1902, is one of the first desacralizing works of imperial feats, although out of loyalty to England, which had granted him citizenship, he refrains from mentioning English imperialism. It doesn’t matter! During the narrator’s course—because Marlow suddenly passes abruptly from the Roman legionary at the beginning of the millennium to his own experiences in the Congo—his boat as it slides along the African coast passes in front of trading centers called Grand-Bassam or Little Popo, names that seemed to belong to some farce performed before a sinister backdrop…

  Once, I remember, we came upon a man-of-war anchored off the coast. There wasn’t even a shed there, and she was shelling the bush. […] There was a touch of insanity in the proceeding, a sense of lugubrious drollery in the sight; and it was not dissipated by somebody on board assuring me earnestly there was a camp of natives—he called them enemies!—hidden out of sight somewhere. […] We called at some more places with farcical names, where the merry dance of death and trade goes on in a still and earthy atmosphere as of an overheated catacomb; all along the formless coast bordered by dangerous stuff, as if Nature herself had tried to ward off intruders.

  In the Brussels Geographical Conference39 of 1876, Leopold II of Belgium delivered a speech in which he said: “To open to civilization the only part of the world where it has not yet penetrated, to pierce the darkness that envelops the entire population is, if I dare say, a crusade worthy of this century of progress.” Conrad believed in his youth in that civilizing endeavor. He did everything within his power to become part of it, and in 1890 he achieved it. It was the most disastrous experience of his life. Later, in an article, “Geography and Some Explorers,” he labeled the Belgian colonial enterprise as “the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience and geographical exploration.”

  The human degradation to which Conrad was a witness in the Congo must be attributed in part to brutal colonial practices but also, and equally importantly, to the unhealthy influence of the jungle. The jungle transforms and maddens whomever sullies it, even with his presence. Hispanic American literature has produced a classic in this regard: The Vortex, by the Colombian José Eustasio Rivera, in which he narrates the unequal struggle between man and inexorable nature. Everything is enormous and majestic, the plants and the animals, except man, who grows increasingly smaller during his contact, before ending up devoured by the jungle. Another Colombian, Álvaro Mutis, in The Snow of the Admiral, places in the mouth of a boat captain these words: “The jungle has an uncontrollable power over those not born there. It makes them irritable and tends to produce a delirium not free of risk.”40

  Kurtz, the mysterious protagonist of Conrad’s novel, infuses the book with his legends and, towards the end, in a brief section, with his apparition and his death. His figure appears fragmented, and the fragments almost never coincide. He tells us he is a harbinger of progress who has been placed in an ivory collection station in the heart of the Congo. A bright young man for whom an extraordinary future is augured in Belgium. He is conceived as a zealously idealistic youth capable of introducing civilization, prosperity, and progress into the most recondite folds of a continent not yet fully known. A crusader of the most noble causes, a fierce caudillo of philanthropy, and, at the same time, the director of a trading-post that has produced the most extraordinary economic results.

  Marlow, who witnesses his end, has been hired as captain of a steamship that must sail between the various trading-posts along the Congo river. The first mission with which he is charged is to find Kurtz, about whose health disturbing rumors are spreading, and, if necessary, to transport him to the coast. The trip is postponed for several months. When the steamship finally picks him up, Kurtz is all but dead. The novel, as I have already said, is permeated almost entirely by Kurtz’s ghost. Some admire him, others abhor him, and always for different and contradictory reasons. To make these fragmentary reports coherent is an impossible task; it is for Marlow, and, of course, for us, his astonished readers.

  Marlow describes for us the effect produced by his observation through his spyglass as the steamship approaches Kurtz’s house, surrounded by stakes adorned with human heads in various states of decomposition. From that moment, we begin to learn more in haphazard fashion, but not too much. For example, that he was revered in the region as a king, worshipped as a god, that he participated in unspeakable rites, cyclopean orgies, presided over by sex and blood. He has lived an experience unimaginable for a European. The Belgian traders who are riding in the boat treat him with hatred, believing that he has gone too far, that his methods have ruined the ivory trade in the district, that he has spoiled the natives, and as a result no one will be able to replace him. Marlow is the only one who feels solidarity with the human waste that can scarcely climb into the boat, due above all to the contempt produce
d by the gang of rapacious predators who envied the fortune that Kurtz amassed, but who would never have dared to live the adventures of such a tormented spirit, who would never know the horror, the drunkenness, the communion with the telluric forces he had known, tasted, and suffered. “I had turned to the wilderness really, not to Mr. Kurtz,” Marlow explains.

  Kurtz, as a Jungian archetype, would embody the role of a rebel angel whose satanic fascination is difficult to resist. From this point of view, the story transforms into a nocturnal journey into the subconscious, a contact with the criminal energies that remain latent in the human being and that civilization has not managed to repress. At times, Marlow identifies with Kurtz in his dream to be able to still integrate into the barbaric, germinal world, and to know intense initiation ceremonies. Something can still be glimpsed, even if the darkness, Marlow seems to believe, never reveals the last sources of the mystery. And there appears the remote substratum of a collective unconscious that from time to time is reactivated: the reencounter with the world known by man millions of years before and now irremediably lost. The desire to return to that initial time, in order to know that the Darkness will avenge whatever transgression that is committed in its realm.

  Heart of Darkness is a tale that holds a boundless mystery. There from its literary power is born. We can be sure that this book will maintain an impenetrable core that will forever be defended. Each generation will try to reveal it. In this exists the perennial youth of the novel.

  THE DELETERIOUS PORTION. I searched in a book of letters written by Joseph Conrad that I read many years ago for some comments on the deleterious effects that money produces on society and on the individual, and I couldn’t find them. I was almost sure that I had transcribed them in my diaries; but they were not there. Suddenly, as I opened one of my notebooks at random, I came upon a few lines from April 20, 2000. Bogotá: “This morning I visited an exhibit on German travelers in Colombia. On a panel I read: ‘The search for gold is for Europeans an illness that verges on insanity.’ Signed Humboldt.”

  AT SWIM-TWO-BIRDS. On June 2, 1939, Jorge Luis Borges, so un-predisposed to become excited about literary styles and news, published in the magazine El Hogar, in Buenos Aires, an essay titled “When Fiction Lives in Fiction,” where he commented on a book by a young Irish author that had recently appeared in London:

  I have enumerated many verbal labyrinths, but none so complex as the recent book by Flann O’Brien, At Swim-Two-Birds. A student in Dublin writes a novel about the proprietor of a Dublin public house, who writes a novel about the habitués of his pub (among them, the student), who in their turn write novels in which proprietor and student figure along with other writers of novels about other novelists. The book consists of the extremely diverse manuscripts of these real or imagined persons, copiously annotated by the student. At Swim-Two-Birds is not only a labyrinth; it is a discussion of the many ways to conceive of the Irish novel and a repertory of exercises in prose and verse which illustrate or parody all the styles of Ireland. The magisterial influence of Joyce (also an architect of labyrinths, also a literary Proteus) is undeniable, but not disproportionate in this manifold book.41

  Borges could not know then that he was one of only two-hundred-and-forty-four readers who for more or less twenty years would cross the threshold of that exceptional work. In the same way, the author of that intricate verbal labyrinth would for his entire life be unaware of the enthusiasm that his book had stirred in a distant reader in Buenos Aires, whose name he perhaps never managed to know.

  Flann O’Brien was an Irish novelist born in 1911 and died in 1966, whose real name was Brian O’Nolan, and who used the pseudonym Myles na Gopaleen in journalism, an activity that consumed him almost all his adult life, and also his tranquility and his energy, and which made him widely popular in his native country. With less regularity, less interest, and greater disregard, he also hid behind the names John James Dol, George Knowland, Brother Barnabas, Stephen Blakesley, and Lir O’Connor.

  As Flann O’Brien, he wrote two masterpieces: At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman; a novel written in Gaelic, An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth), a sort of requiem in a whisper for a language on the verge of extinction, and for the last inhabitants who still speak it, descendants of warrior kings and talented poets, degraded to a condition in which the difference between their life and that of pigs whose breeding sustained them was scarcely perceptible; as well as two minor novels written in his waning years, The Hard Life and The Dalkey Archive, and the play Faustus Kelley.

  He was a personality with three faces: a public functionary, an avant-garde novelist known only by a tiny handful of enthusiasts, and the author a popular column in Dublin’s most important newspaper. Journalism ended up invading his creative faculties, by making him famous and unhappy, by turning him into a creation of his pseudonym. His genuine needs of discretion and anonymity were demolished. A man who wears so many masks and denies the relationship between his persona and the multiple names that hide it aspires necessarily to live in a cell, located, if possible, in the middle of the desert. It troubled him, but he was unable, or for some reason refused, to renounce the popularity of Myles na Gopaleen, a name that his readers began to associate with him and that little by little managed to replace his real one. The triumphant conquest of Myles na Gopaleen over Flann O’Brien, and over Brien O’Nolan, ultimately destroyed him.

  He encountered intractable enemies, without knowing how to defeat them. The principle ones were: the personal frustration produced by the failure of his first novel and the unanimous rejection by editors of the second, The Third Policeman; the cultural and moral rickets and the isolation of the Ireland of his time; the unyielding pressure placed on him by his journalistic fame, and an unquenchable fondness for alcohol, which eventually turned into a terrifying disease. A recent illustrated biography by Peter Costello and Peter Van de Kamp reveals the evolution that his appearance suffered from his time as a student to shortly before his death. The face of the diabolic cherub of his university youth determined to devour the world is transformed, first, into a plump and flabby moon on the body of a pudgy civil servant, and evolves later into a weave of the frazzled and pathetic features of his final years, a face that combines the expressions of victim with that of executioner, a living image of guilt and disarray, and of resignation. His last photographs recall the faces of those psychopaths that startle us from time to time in the crime pages of tabloids, surprised by the camera at the very moment of their arrest or en route to the gallows: the receding and menacing forehead, the skin that we imagine to be grey or blueish, the careless manner in which the tie clings to a dirty and unbuttoned collar. In a recent and splendid essay, Gianni Celati compares the image of O’Brien to that of certain characters from the films of Carné. I suppose he is referring to that haze that fluctuates between sainthood and crime.

  The constant game of disguises, the inordinate proliferation of pseudonyms, the taste for concealment, the final outrageous mythomania, make it nearly impossible to pinpoint all the fundamental periods of O’Brien’s life. It is known with certainty that as soon as he graduated from the University of Dublin with a brilliant thesis on ancient Gaelic lyric, he began to write At Swim-Two-Birds, and that he used the pseudonym Flann O’Brien to publish it because he was on the verge of entering Public Service, whose functions seemed incompatible to him with the unbridled tone he had employed in the novel, the authorship of which he even denied on a few occasions. He was fortunate that the manuscript fell into the hands of Graham Greene, a reader for the publishing house Longmans. His reader report secured its publication. “It is in the line of Tristram Shandy and Ulysses: Its amazing spirits do not disguise the seriousness of the attempt to present, simultaneously as it were, all the literary traditions of Ireland.”

  The novel sold two hundred and forty four copies. A couple of years later, the publisher’s warehouses burned during a bombing. Longmans decided not to republish the book. The readers might have been
few, but some among them were exceptional: Borges, in Buenos Aires; and among those in the English language, Samuel Beckett, who immediately ferried a copy to Joyce, who wrote: “That’s a real writer, with a true comic spirt. A really funny book,” and Dylan Thomas, who, for his part, wrote: “This novel places O’Brien on the frontline of contemporary literature.”

  Despite these pronouncements, Longmans rejected in 1940 O’Brien’s next novel, The Third Policeman, considering it bizarre. The publisher advised the author to write something more ordinary, closer and more acceptable to the common public. O’Brien offered his book to other publishers; they all rejected it with more or less similar arguments. Finally, he decided to tell his friends that he had lost the manuscript in a tavern, and he refused to talk about the matter again. The Third Policeman was published posthumously.

  Our century seems to take pleasure in repeating cyclically that strange comedy of errors that stirs between certain authors and an unreceptive public. The cases of Robert Musil, Hermann Broch, Malcolm Lowry, Joseph Roth are examples of writers who have needed an upheaval in literary taste, which happened twenty-five or thirty years after their death, in order for the magnitude of works like The Man Without Qualities, The S, Under the Volcano, The Radetzky March, At Swim-Two-Birds, and The Third Policeman to be added to the list of those fundamental novels of our time that have been rediscovered belatedly.