Comparision

“SHROUD” John Banville (first published 2002)

“GOOD FAITH” Jane Smiley (first published 2003) 

  

The new novel I looked at this week, Ian Wedde’s The Catastrophe, could reasonably be called satire because its story points to a trend or fashion in the modern world, in part ridicules it and in part admonishes it. But, although it has some light moments, it is not the sort of satire that’s designed to get laughs. Its admonitions have a strongly moral edge. Isn’t satire meant to mend our morals, after all?

For this reason, and this reason alone, it has something in common with two very different good novels I enjoyed reading in the first decade of this century.

Irish novelist John Banville’s Shroud is definitely no comedy, but it does take apart one element of modern thought and lets us see how corrosive it is. This is a moral lesson.

Its main character Axel Vander is an ageing, cynical, world-weary postmodernist literary critic who earns a comfortable living in American universities by teaching the gullible that there is no such thing as the ego, that personality is a delusion, that “the author is dead” and similar deconstructionist dogma.

Then one day Vander gets a nasty shock. A young Irish researcher Cass Cleave has been looking through yellowing files of Second World War-era newspapers from Vander’s native Belgium. She has discovered the opinions that Vander published as a young man. Working for the collaborationist press during Belgium’s occupation by the Nazis, Vander had written pro-Nazi, anti-Jewish criticism. The credibility of his later post-war career would, of course, have evaporated if this had ever been known. Cass Cleave asks Vander if he would like to meet her in Turin to talk this discovery over.

The novel’s initial premise echoes the notorious factual case of the prominent deconstructionist critic Paul de Man, who was posthumously discovered to have had just such a collaborationist background. Naturally Banville does allow us some directly satirical moments. Part of the novel is written in the fussy, pedantic, self-justifying voice of Vander himself. We are allowed to reflect that verbal obfuscation, denial of personality (and personal responsibility) and theories which say an author’s opinions are all irrelevant to the texts the author produces – all are very convenient for people who have something to hide. They are keystones of deconstructionism.

But Shroud goes well beyond satire. In an extraordinary whammy, Banville introduces a plot element that forces us to reassess our reaction to Vander and his motives. By setting the story in Turin, Banville symbolically makes the novel an interrogation of the very concepts of truth and authenticity. (Turin is the home of the shroud which is venerated as an authentic image of Christ but could well be a fake.) He writes convincingly enough to make such an interrogation credible.

One warning about this novel, which I am recommending strongly. Do NOT go on line and read the New York Times review of it. The reviewer praised the novel highly, but also managed to completely ruin it by giving away the crucial twist. This is as mischievous as giving away the culprit in a whodunit.

Much brisker and more direct is the satire of the American novelist Jane Smiley in her Good Faith. Although first published in 2003, it is set in the 1980s and is in part a polemic against the “greed is good” acquisitiveness of that decade.

In upstate rural New York the narrator, Joe Stratford is a reasonably successful real estate agent. He makes fair profits, wheels and deals a little bit, and has to perform such mercy work as coaxing a neurotic builder into actually letting go of the houses he’s built on commission.

Enter smooth-talking developer and deal-spinner Marcus Burns, who says he knows everything about finance-gearing and tax dodging. He used to work for the tax department and declares he hates paying taxes. Marcus is able to dazzle and charm everyone – the city fathers, the local building authority, the builder, the banker and especially Joe. Marcus has this huge property development that’s supposed to attract big-city interest. Marcus is going to make everybody a billion, just so long as they invest with him. Naturally everyone begs to scramble aboard.

You can see where this is going and how the satire is loaded. The irresponsible individual (who hates taxes) is set against the common good. The whole concept of “good faith” – supposedly the cornerstone to all fair bargaining – is undermined in a culture where “the deal” is the Holy Grail, substituting for love, loyalty, family and social concern. Acquisitiveness corrupts and raw unregulated capitalism kills. The message travels far beyond the 1980s.

In case this sound too simplistic and obvious as a piece of satire, there are two things about Good Faith that make it first-rate.

One is the utterly convincing male voice that this woman novelist has created for her narrator Joe. We feel sympathy for the guy even as he staggers from one bad decision to the next.

The other is Jane Smiley’s admirably clear prose, which makes vivid and interesting those precise details of real estate bargaining that would have been tedious in other hands.

The satire of Good Faith is grounded in close observation of reality.

Race and Gender in Othello

Shakespeare’s Othello supports many critical readings, however the most obvious of the readings displayed through Othello are the Feminist reading and the Race reading. Through the Feminist readings, the audience/readers can be informed of the inequality between the sexes; oppressed women and dominant males; in the seventeenth century Venetian era. When viewing Othello in a feminist’s perspective, the audience can also observe the treatments of the three main female characters in the play; Desdemona, Emilia and Bianca.

Although the oppressive treatment of women may be generally accepted in a seventeenth century Venetian society, but modern day feminists believe in the equality between women and men, thus the seventeenth century Venetian society would appear extraordinarily flawed.

Through a race reading, the audience/readers can witness the discrimination that a character (in this case, Othello) receives due to his non-aristotlean background. In the modern day context, In both readings, the setting can be viewed as flawed. Feminists would agree that the victims of prejudice in the society are women whilst race critics would agree that the victim of the play is Othello.

A race reading would establish Iago, Roderigo and Barbantio as the major racists of the play. It would also establish the Venetian society as one of power loving and prejudice.

For the first few scenes, Othello’s position was clearly that of an outsider. Iago, Roderigo and Barbantio excluded him through their mentioning of him as “the Moor”, “his Moorship”. Via this, the audience can unmistakably observe their racism towards Othello as they notify clearly his background of non-aristocracy.

When Iago and Roderigo informs Barbantio of Desdemona’s marriage with Othello, Iago constantly refers to Othello in terms of animals; “an old black ram is tupping your white ewe” (1.1.97) and “your daughter covered with a Barbary horse”(1.1.125); this undoubtedly illustrate their regard towards Othello as they obviously cannot see the “man” inside Othello, but rather regarded Othello as a “talking animal”.

Barbantio’s is more subtle when prejudicing Othello, the cause of this may be of his higher social class than that of the other two. However, Barbantio is nevertheless still frank with his opinion as he accuses Othello of using witchcraft and black magic in wooing of his daughter. Through this accusation, the readers can clearly define the meaning of this as witchcraft and black magic is often in association with people of African background (such as voodoo). Furthermore, Barbantio expresses his racism through comments such as “to the sooty bosom”, “of a thing as thou”. Barbantio’s comment to Roderigo after his realization of “O, would you had had her!” shows Barbantio’s sudden attitude change towards Roderigo even though he had rejected RoderigoТs offer in marriage multi-times previously.

The majority of the racial prejudices are presented in the first three acts of the play, but by the end of the novel, Emilia also makes a racist remark when she discovers that Othello had killed Desdemona; “O the more angel is she/ and you the blacker devil”; shows that Emilia may also have been racist. Emilia’s racism may not have been displayed previously may be because of her less important social position and because of her love for Desdemona.

The personality and strong character of the female archetypes on Othello can be seen through the Feminist point of view. The three main female characters; Desdemona, Emilia and Bianca; are all affected and oppressed by society in different ways. Desdemona; the faithful wife; and her servant, Emilia are suppressed by the society’s male domination, and its views that women should be owned by men as if they are property. Bianca, on the other hand, has more freedom than of an average woman due to her role as a courtesan. However, she, also is suppressed by the society due to her work as a courtesan. Thus her lower status in society is paid for by her freedom.

The men of Othello are dubious individuals. This can be seen through the main character, Othello, himself. Via Othello, the audience/readers can witness a strong sense of irony, which is displayed through his speeches. In the beginning of the play, Othello claims that he believes in his love for Desdemona and her love for him; “Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see: She has deceived her father, and may thee” – “My life upon her faith!” (1.3.292-294) however, later in the play, he contradicts himself by believing in Iago who, in fact, is the villain of the play. “Damn her, lewd minx! O damn her, damn her!”

The men within Othello regard women as sexual possessions instead of individuals. As Iago and Cassio talk of Bianca, Othello talks of Bianca;s reputed sexual nature for that of Desdemona: “She gives it out that you shall marry her” I marry her! What? A customer!” This is the monkey’s own giving out (4,1,115-127). Thus here shows Othello’s view point upon Desdemona’s whorish sexuality.

In conclusion, each reading of Othello establishes certain values to which assists with the understanding and enjoyment of the play. Through the Race reading; Shakespeare takes advantage of Othello’s background into emphasizing the social boundary of race that many are intolerable to. Through the Feminist reading, the readers are shown the oppressive women in the seventeenth century Venetian society and this can be contrasted with the modern day society where feminists strongly believes in the equality of the genders. These readings gives the readers an understanding through different levels, thus possibly making the play more enjoyable.

Desdemona arose from a row that Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison had with Peter Sellars, the opera director, about Othello. She liked it, he didn’t.

To prove her point Morrison re-imagined Shakespeare’s tragedy from the view of Othello’s wife, inspired by Desdemona’s allusion in Act IV to her mother’s maid Barbary, which in the 17th century meant Africa.

Morrison’s prose-poem is a soulful exploration of Desdemona’s estrangement from her own parents and lifelong enchantment with the continent, based on the songs that the maid supposedly taught her. Sellars has now directed a semi-staged version of it, to which the Malian singer, Rokia Traoré, has contributed a song-cycle. The result, shown as part of the London 2012 Festival at the Barbican, is an unclassifiable entertainment, albeit one highly conscious of its status as “important art” about “important issues”, such as race, gender and Shakespeare.

As Desdemona, Tina Benko is commanding as she recalls her sexual enchantment with Othello and her elopement with his army — Morrison’s depiction of the militarised rape of two women as seen by her is particularly chilling. Traoré, singing as Barbary, has an austere grace. Accompanied by the jewel-like kora and dusty n’goni (two desert stringed instruments), she creates a dolorous ambience. However, both the music and the staging lack dramatic variety, and after two hours, the show’s strength — its hushed intensity — has become its weakness.

You long to remind someone that Shakespeare had jokes in it, too.

This is Shakespeare reimagined from the viewpoint of one of his great tragic heroines, but now with an audaciously new setting, the afterworld, and an African perspective. The stage is in half-darkness and littered with glass, like an African graveyard, and the performers are dressed in white, with their shadows looming on a screen behind the stage. Desdemona, powerfully and sensitively played by Tina Benko, is able to discuss in death the issues she never raises before her murder in Shakespeare's Othello, and the woman to whom she unburdens her thoughts is her mother's African maid Barbary, intensely played by the Malian singer Rokia Traoré, who also sings a set of compelling songs, interwoven with the spoken narratives.

Written by Toni Morrison and directed by Peter Sellars, this multimedia project was inspired by the fourth act of Othello, in which Desdemona, facing death, sings Willow Song, taught to her by Barbary. It's a device that allows an exploration of Desdemona's fascination with Africa, for monologues on women, love, race, relationships and war, for discussions in the afterlife with Othello himself, and between the mothers of Othello and Desdemona – with Benko providing all the voices.

Traoré's songs (with lyrics translated on the screen) are crucial to the drama. She has enjoyed a remarkable summer, performing three sets of wildly different new material in the past month, and the new songs reflected her acoustic Epic of Soundiata, with reminders of how Desdemona's story might have been told in Africa in Shakespeare's day.

As on that project, backing was provided by Mamadyba Camara on kora and Mamah Diabaté on n'goni, along with two singers from her Fondation Passerelle. Her music, of course, included a new treatment of Willow Song, along with a blues-influenced piece on which Traoré played guitar, leading to the final uneasy reconciliation between Desdemona and Othello in the afterlife. This is a remarkable, challenging and bravely original work.

What do a reliquary set with the gouged-out eyeball of a Catholic priest, foot-high platform shoes, and a narwhal tusk have in common? The perhaps surprising answer is that they are all things that would have been known to the audience that packed the Globe Theater to see the plays of William Shakespeare 400 years ago.

Today, they are among the objects that have been gathered together at the British Museum for its magnificent new exhibition Shakespeare—Staging the World, which aims to present the world as the playgoers of London circa 1612 would have experienced it. The silver reliquary containing the right eye of the Jesuit priest Blessed Father Edward Oldcorne, which was collected at his execution at Worcester in 1606, brings a gruesome layer of resonance to the famous lines from Lear when Gloucester is blinded by Cornwall, “Out vile jelly! Where is thy lustre now?” Today this scene is a ghoulish coup de theatre; in 1612, it would have been a moment alive with the frisson of contemporary politics.

Gouged-out eyeballs were not exactly an everyday occurrence, but they were an unavoidable fact of life for the playgoers who flocked across London Bridge to Southwark, then the theatrical and red-light district of the capital. The playhouse, the “Magic O,” was a place where in the absence of newspapers, let alone the Internet, the populace could make sense of the brave new world around them.

For, as the exhibition richly demonstrates, the London that the theatergoers of 1612 would have known was a city trying to make sense of issues like race relations, national identity, sexual politics, and religious tolerance; themes that feel startlingly contemporary to the modern visitor. Take the issue of national identity—in 1612, England was under the rule of James I, who was also the King of Scotland. The exhibition features designs made in 1604 for a Union Flag of Great Britain to symbolize the union of the two countries through the king. The idea of Britain as one united nation was explored by Shakespeare in the famous speech made by John of Gaunt on his deathbed in Richard II: “This fortress built by nature for herself/Against infection and the hand of war/This happy of men, this little world/This precious stone set in a silver sea.” And later in Cymbeline, Cloten says, “Britain’s/A world by itself.” An audience that was coming to terms with the idea of a Scottish king on the English throne might well have been reassured by watching the idea of Britain being played out on the stage as a historic and noble concept. Who knows what contemporary Scottish visitors, who are looking forward to a referendum about independence in 2014, will feel?

The Lyte Jewel (left); Richard III (Courtesy of the British Museum(left); Courtesy of Society of Antiquaries of London-British Museum)

A whole section of the exhibition is dedicated to Venice. There is no evidence that Shakespeare ever left his native country, but he set his plays all over the known world, using Venice in particular—with its maritime trade, multicultural population, and questionable morals—as, the curators assert, “a reflection to Londoners of their own desires and fears, their own future.” For Jacobean Londoners, Venice was a city of easy virtue. The exhibition has a print from 1578 that shows a gondola with a closed canopy; the viewer can lift the flap to reveal a couple canoodling underneath. Although Venice was famous for its courtesans, it was not easy to distinguish them by their dress from wives. Both sets of women wore the sky-high chopines, or platform shoes, in which they were expected to walk and even dance. The pair featured here would make the most dedicated Louboutin wearer wince. Othello is tortured by Iago about the fuzzy line between vice and virtue trod by Venetian wives, whose “best conscience/Is not to leave undone, but kept unknown.”

When Shakespeare wrote a play about a Moor of Venice he was writing for an audience that was just beginning to have contact with sub-Saharan Africans. The curator of the exhibition, Dora Thornton, and Jonathan Bate, a consultant on the exhibition, estimate that London had around 900 black Africans in a population of 200,000 (a percentage that is not far off from today’s London), many of whom lived in the “suburbs” like Southwark, which contained the playhouses. Although many of these were slaves, there was no law against intermarriage, so the union of Othello, the Moor of Venice, to the fair (white) Desdemona was not unthinkable. The exhibition includes some objects that show a developing aesthetic of black beauty—there is a magnificent marble bust of a black African by the French-Italian sculptor Nicolas Cordier dating from 1610, and an elaborate silver gilt cup made in the shape of a Moor’s head from 1602.

CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE NOVEL

“CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE NOVEL” David Lodge (first published 2002)

It’s one thing for me to voice some misgivings about the reductive tendencies of postmodern criticism, but it’s quite another to direct you towards the type of criticism I find more congenial. So, after a postmodern Something New, allow me to acquaint you with a book of fine criticism as this week’s Something Old.

First published nine years ago, David Lodge’s Consciousness and the Novel is not the work of somebody who is ignorant of current critical modes. As well as being a prolific novelist - and therefore somebody who knows the craft of writing from the inside – Lodge is a formidable critic who has, among other books, produced a tome on structuralism. He is not a reactionary. But, unlike too many postmodernists, he does know how to write limpid and lucid prose. His criticism is eminently understandable. 

  

Cognitive neuro-scientists and researchers into artificial intelligence are very concerned with the problem of human consciousness. Do we actually know what consciousness is? Can we describe it in scientific terms? And could it some day be replicated artificially?

As one scientist quoted by Lodge said “virtually nothing worth reading has been written about consciousness” by scientists. Insights into consciousness tend to be the province of imaginative literature.

It’s this interface of science and the craft of fiction that is the starting point for David Lodge’s 90-page essay that give this volume its title. It was originally delivered as a series of lectures on an American campus The essay concerns the way consciousness is presented in the modern novel. By examining different styles of narration in modernist and postmodernist works, Lodge comes to grips with how novelists imagine, conceive and describe consciousness.

It is an illuminating and very accessible piece of criticism and has the distinct merit of condensing, for non-specialist readers, some of the more abstruse current literary theory.

The other 200 pages of this book are taken up with ten reprints of pieces Lodge originally wrote for the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement etc. Lodge is always a fair, well-informed and commonsensical critic, and there are insights in every piece.

The best of the reprints is a longish essay on movie adaptations of Henry James’ novels. It is a model of precise, pointed criticism. Lodge’s main contention is the fairly obvious one that, no matter how careful the adaptation may be, movies trade in surfaces and have difficulty accessing the psychological layers of a densely written novel. (This come close to my crack, in an earlier blog, of movie adaptations of classics being akin to Classics Illustrated comics). Regrettably, in discussing Jane Campion’s film version of Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady, Lodge identifies her as an “Australian” director, but I don’t think this compromises his very sensible argument.

I do not want to talk this book up too much. Sometimes, in the reprints, the strain of the jobbing critic peeps through. In Lodge’s piece on Philip Roth, there’s a tension between his admiration for Roth’s technique and his distaste for Roth’s world view. His admiring account of Evelyn Waugh’s early comic novels is little more than a set of annotated plot summaries. I’m not sure his efficient review of Jane Smiley’s brief biography of Dickens was really worth reprinting, although it does say some tart things about the cult of author-as-celebrity. The book ends with a magazine interview with Lodge himself about one of his own novels.

Yet, despite the perishable topicality of some pieces, this is still vivid and informed criticism which respects the form, respects the canon, and does allow the work to be overwhelmed by its context.

VICTORY

“VICTORY” by Joseph Conrad (first published 1915)

Once upon a time – nearly forty years ago – I thought Joseph Conrad was the Greatest Novelist Who Ever Lived. This was before I went through the phase of thinking Honore de Balzac the Greatest Novelist Who Ever Lived. Later still I had my Nadine Gordimer period. Then I at last gave up on the whole silly idea of nominating somebody as Greatest Novelist Who Ever Lived although, naturally, Don Quixote remains the Greatest Novel Even Written. 

Anyway, my Conrad phase occurred when I was aged 21 and doing an M.A. course on the Modern Novel. I gobbled up Conrad’s novels and novellas eagerly, confident that the English-writing Pole totally outclassed other authors featured on the course – the English-writing American Henry James, the English-writing Irishman James Joyce, the gibberish-writing Englishman D.H.Lawrence and the mandarin-writing Englishwoman Virginia Woolf. Lord Jim, Heart of Darkness, Under Western Eyes, Typhoon, Youth, The Shadow Line and short stories like An Outpost of Progress and The Secret Sharer – down they went smoothly, feeding my taste for hard-headed realism mixed with exoticism and lashings of descriptive melancholy. My favourite student memory is of sitting in the uni caff all afternoon, consuming The Secret Agent at one sitting and missing a couple of lectures because I couldn’t put it down. A brilliant, devious, well-crafted novel where every phrase counts.

But even as I idolised Conrad, there was one of his novels on our course that I just didn’t get. To put it more bluntly, I thought it was damned silly.

Even Conrad devotees know that some Conrad novels are for devotees only (such as the complex Nostromo) and some are not up to scratch (lame efforts like Chance and The Rescue). Victory, however, was supposed to be one of his mature masterpieces, and was written up as such in the critical essays to which we were directed.

Why, then, did I find Victory forced and unconvincing, with an improbable plot straight-jacketed into heavy-handed symbolism? Why did I trudge through pages of opaque dialogue with an unclear idea of what the characters were really talking about? Why were characters’ motivations always unclear? It was the one Conrad novel I found myself actively disliking.

Two or three years ago, I decided to revisit it, to test whether my first reactions were merely those of an immature kid who didn’t recognise subtlety when he saw it. For the first time in about 36 years, I re-read Victory.

This time, I will give you a synopsis.

For reasons which are never clearly elucidated, but which may have something to do with his upbringing by an over-idealistic father, the middle-aged Swede Axel Heyst has withdrawn from humanity. He was in charge of a coal-mining enterprise on an island in the Malay archipelago. When the enterprise went bust he decided to stay on the island, alone except for a Chinese man, Wang, who has married a local Malay woman.

On one of his rare visits to a settlement where there are a number of Europeans, Heyst stays at the hotel run by the gross German Wilhelm Schomberg. Visiting and playing there is a women’s orchestra. The women are clearly encouraged to be “friendly” to male members of their audience. Heyst rescues one young woman, Lena, who is unwilling to be part of this enterprise. He takes her back to his island.

This causes the envy and wrath of Schomberg who had his own lustful eyes on Lena, in spite of his having a (browbeaten) wife of his own.

A trio of ruffians come to stay at Schomberg’s hotel, the “gentleman” Mr.Jones, who detests women, his “secretary” Martin Ricardo and the brutish, ape-like Pedro. Schomberg spies into their affairs, deduces that they mean him no good and suspects that they may wish to rob him or do him violence. Still smarting over the loss of Lena, and having come to half-believe the stories he himself has made up about Heyst, Schomberg decides to divert the trio. To Ricardo, he spins a long yarn about Heyst, how he swindled people, and how he must have a fortune. He gives Ricardo sailing directions to reach Heyst’s island.

Heyst and Lena live together on the island, and seem to have found a sort of accommodation which isn’t quite love, although Lena wishes it was.

When the trio of ruffians arrive, parched and sunburnt after their voyage, Heyst keeps Lena out of sight, protecting her from these intruders. At no point do the trio openly declare their intentions, but as they become established they are a sinister presence on the island, and Heyst knows they mean him no good. He plans to protect himself, but two things go wrong. First, he discovers that Wang has stolen his revolver and retreated to the hills with his Malay wife, thus disarming him. Second, although Heyst doesn’t know it, Ricardo discovers the presence of Lena and clearly thinks that he will be able to seduce her.

The climax comes when Jones at last makes clear to Heyst the robbery he intends. Armed with a revolver, Jones marches Heyst over to Heyst’s bungalow, where he expects to find Ricardo rifling through Heyst’s effects. Instead, he finds Ricardo with Lena (who has disobeyed Heyst’s advice to stay hidden in the jungle, and has returned to be with him). Jones goes berserk at the sight of a woman and fires, wounding Ricardo and mortally wounding Lena who, as she dies, believes she has achieved some sort of “victory” over death by showing her love in trying to protect Heyst.

In the hasty wrap-up Ricardo dies, Pedro is shot dead by Wang, Jones (apparently) commits suicide by drowning, and Heyst himself is burnt to death when his bungalow is fired. All this is reported to “civilisation” by the captain, Davidson, who has kept a friendly eye on Heyst whenever he passed the island, and who turns up in time to witness the last of these tragic events.

The world has intruded on Heyst and destroyed him; but then no man can really be an island.

Whose “victory” is it? The only character with whom the word is associated is Lena, but Heyst does not share her faith, so the title of the novel could be heavily ironic. Then again, it could be a “victory” to recognise that one cannot retreat from humanity, no matter how destructive human society may be.

Thus my synopsis which, like all synopses, telescopes things unfairly but does give the general outline.

Coming back to Conrad after all those years, I could see still some of the things that delighted me as a student. The vivid, sweltery tropical descriptions, of course. The sense of moral seediness and menace. Some dramatic moments that stand out in relief – when Schomberg’s wife rifles through the trio’s belongings while her husband keeps watch; or the arrival of the sinister trio on the island, nearly dead and croaking in their open boat.

And yet reading it as an adult I was more alert to what Conrad avoided talking about, or euphemised, in keeping with his times. Presumably the “orchestra” to which Lena is attached is a sort of travelling brothel. Mr.Jones’s hatred of women is pathological. We are three or four times told that he has somehow “defied convention” in a previous life, so we are presumably meant to infer that he is not only misogynist but also homosexual. This being the case, his “secretary” Ricardo becomes his piece of rough trade; and his violent reaction when he finds Ricardo with Lena declares a sense of sexual betrayal.

I was more aware, too, of Conrad’s racial assumptions – the disgusting and exploitative German is to be expected from this Polish writer, and would have gone down a treat with English readers when the novel first appeared during the First World War. The odd reference to “buck niggers” would have been common usage at the time. But it is Wang, the Chinese who plays a pivotal part in the story, who is most subject to racial stereotyping. Conrad would have us believe that the psychology of a Chinese is something so remote from European comprehension that it can lead Wang to act in ways which are convenient for Conrad’s plot (disarming Heyst), but otherwise highly unlikely. While I do not agree with their criticisms, it is easy to see why followers of Edward Said and literary critics of colonialism have said very harsh things about Conrad in the last forty years. His despatches from empire are interpreted as endorsements of imperialism and Euro-centrism.

What weighs heaviest on this novel, however, is its overt symbolism. Heyst on his island being man isolated from society in a personal Eden [the novel is subtitled “An Island Tale”]; the nearby volcano (likened to his glowing cigar end) being the passion that might be aroused; the entrance of Lena being the coming of Eve and trouble into Heyst’s Eden; and Jones, Ricardo and Pedro perhaps being the World, the Flesh and the Devil.

Things happen because it is symbolically right that they happen – that Heyst is disarmed when the intruders come; that Lena ignores his instructions and comes back to relieve Ricardo of the knife he is wielding [pointlessly, because Jones has a revolver] etc. etc. Things do not happen because they are either probable or in keeping with the characters as they have been drawn.

This goes for the dialogue, too. Characters do not say what they would be likely to say, even given the dramatisation a novel entails. Instead they speak in abstract philosophy, or talk around things without actually addressing them. Possibly fastidious Heyst might speak this way, but not Lena and not the three criminals.

In the end, then, I felt on re-reading Victory after 36 years that I was not only reading the same novel, but reacting to it in the same way as I had when I was a student. Symbolism leads credibility by the nose as Conrad preaches that no man is an island, but that the world is still the “destructive element”.

Perhaps I have been vindicated in my student view. I notice that in more recent critiques of Conrad, Victory has been down-graded and now appears to be regarded as one of Conrad’s lesser novels. For example I was delighted to discover that in his survey Ten Great Writers (Penguin, 1989), the reliable Malcolm Bradbury chooses to illustrate Conrad’s genius by an analysis of The Secret Agent, and doesn’t even mention Victory. The recent Conrad biographer John Stape, in The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad (Heinemann, 2007), mentions Victory only to tell us how hard Conrad found it to write, and how it may reflect some of his reactions to those homosexuals he met in his years as a seaman. There’s also the fact that, in her recent selection of Frank Sargeson’s letters, Sarah Shieff includes one letter Sargeson wrote to William Plomer in 1958 after Plomer had written an introduction to an Oxford Classics reprint of Victory. Sargeson says “I’ve never been able to make my mind up about Conrad” and then adds of this particular novel “I’m worried that the careful plausibility of the beginning goes down the drain as the melodrama begins to go really into action.” Misanthropic and vindictive old sod though Sargeson was, I’d have to agree with him on that one; though I do wonder how he and Plomer – who were both closeted homosexuals – really reacted to the novel’s negative and sinister portrait of its homosexual character.

On the other hand, and much to my surprise, I came across an interview in the Spring 2006 issue of The Paris Review in which the American novelist Joan Didion said (God bless her) that Henry James and D.H.Lawrence irritated her on every level; but then went on to say that she re-reads Conrad’s Victory (“maybe my favourite book in the world”) whenever she is about to start a novel because she regards it as a masterpiece of narration – the whole story being told at third-hand by somebody (Davidson) detached from the novel’s events. In other words, she sees it as a strong case of the “unreliable narrator” (just as Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness are), but pushed so far that we understand its events are as much a fabrication of the fictional narrator as its viewpoint is. I have also recently come across a respectful reference to Victory in the New Zealand anthropologist Michael Jackson’s memoir Road Markings (Rosa Mira Press, 2012)

So what do I know? Maybe Joan Didion’s reaction shows the eccentricity of the talented. Maybe Michael Jackson’s fleeting reference was an aberration. Or maybe I’ve just proven that I have a tin ear for fine prose.

The Horror! The Horror!

THE JOURNAL OF A VOYAGE TO LISBON

“THE JOURNAL OF A VOYAGE TO LISBON” by Henry Fielding (first published 1755)

Reading Jane Bowron’s vivid dispatches from an earthquake puts me in mind of somebody else writing vividly about uncomfortable things. An earthquake doesn’t come into it, but that was only because of hair’s-breadth timing.

About six years ago I decided I had neglected one of the eighteenth century masters, Henry Fielding (1707-1754), so I set about reading my way methodically through all of his works that are still regularly in print – the three novels Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones and Amelia; the satire Jonathan Wild the Great; the mock-heroic play Tom Thumb or The Tragedy of Tragedies; and the travel book (really worked up from Fielding’s diary notes) Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon. This travel-book was first published posthumously in 1755. Fielding died in Lisbon in 1754 and is buried there. Ironically, this was just the year before Lisbon was struck by the huge earthquake that set Voltaire and others thinking about the nature of divine providence, and whether God’s will can be read into physical events. Fiona Farrell references it in her The Broken Book.

In 1753 Fielding, a chief magistrate, was exhausted from the strenuous business of putting down criminal gangs in London. He was suffering from gout and the dropsy (for which he was often “tapped” by surgeons to relieve him of fluid) and from other ailments as well. He was advised to seek warmer climes for his health.

In mid-1754 (summer), he and his (second) wife and some servants paid passage to Lisbon on board the Queen of Portugal commanded by Captain Veal. This short travel book is exactly what its title says – the journal of a voyage TO Lisbon, for, after the slow journey down the Thames, the ship was “wind-bound” for many weeks and so confined to English waters and ports. The captain was certain he was somehow “bewitched”, but as Fielding remarks “the most absolute power of a captain of a ship is very contemptible in the wind’s eye”.

Fielding narrates what happened on this part of the voyage and what thoughts occurred to him. Only in the last few pages does the wind pick up and push the ship across the Bay of Biscay to reach Portugal. The book could more properly be called Journal of A Voyage off the South Coast of England. The whole experience was very uncomfortable for Fielding, who was a very sick man, and he notes that “some of the most amusing pages, if, indeed, there be any that deserve that name, were possibly the production of the most disagreeable hours that ever haunted the author.”

In his preface, Fielding sets out what his idea of a travel book is. It cannot be a mere description of places visited and things seen, for these are usually already known to readers and have been often described. Likewise, it cannot be a chronicle of all the things that happen to travellers, most of which are trivial and commonplace. Rather, it should concentrate on the thoughts and reflections that occur to the traveller on his journey; and it should aim to instruct while entertaining.

It is clear that, while it may have been “worked up” afterwards with publication in view, this book really did begin as daily jottings. Fielding discourses on the best means of dealing with organised crime in London, on trade, on the eating habits of city and country people, on how the poor could be fed, on the story of Circe and Ulysses as a fable of men turned swinish in pubs etc. etc. Indeed, these reflections make up the greatest part of the book and can be difficult reading –in some cases because of their topicality and in other cases because of Fielding’s circumlocutious style.

But there are the anecdotes of things that happened and, as always, these are far and away more memorable than the reflections. Mrs.Fielding suffers horribly from toothache. She is given laudanum as a palliative and they have extreme difficulty finding a surgeon to draw the tooth. By his own account, Fielding’s own humour is often sour – probably the result of his ill health. He grumbles at length about the awful landlady Mrs.Francis at Rye, and the very poor hospitality she offers, and the inflated prices she charges, at her hostelry. He takes a disliking to the captain’s youngish relative, an undistinguished military officer who makes a visit aboard. At one point he argues with the captain himself over the use of his cabin, and threatens to quit the ship. In the last pages there are complaints about the officiousness of Portuguese customs men. Clearly the dropsy and gout weren’t conducive to good humour.

Offsetting this, though, there are some delightful tales – the wonderful meal they arranged for themselves and ate with gusto when Mrs.Francis supplied them with nothing worthwhile. How sublime it was, in the Bay of Biscay, to see the sun on one side sinking into the sea and a full moon arising on the other. The story of how the captain made the ship halt, and got a sailor to swim to the rescue, when one of his pet kittens fell overboard. (Alas, the story has a sad sequel - the kitten is accidentally suffocated under cushions in the captain’s cabin, and the captain, though he is a rough and hearty fellow, is inconsolable with grief.)

In the end, the book is not particularly instructive; but it does amuse, and my pen was kept busy jotting down some of Fielding’s wittier observation in my notebook.

From Fielding’s preface there is his dismissal of the idea that travel-books should concern themselves with physical descriptions of places:- “If the customs and manners of men were everywhere the same, there would be no office so dull as that of a traveller, for the difference of hills, valleys, rivers, in short the various views in which we may see the face of the earth, would scarce afford him a pleasure worthy of his labour; and surely it would give him very little opportunity of communicating any kind of entertainment or improvement to others.”

From the entry of 26 June 1754 there is his pained reflection on being carried, sick, aboard the ship: “In this condition I ran the gauntlope (so I think I may justly call it) through rows of sailors and watermen, few of whom failed to pay their compliments to me by all manner of insults and jests on my misery. No man who knew me will think I conceived any personal resentment at this behaviour; but it was a lively picture of that cruelty and inhumanity in the nature of men which I have often contemplated with concern, and which leads the mind into a train of very uncomfortable and melancholy thoughts.”

On 3 July 1754 he gives his views on those scavengers who pick up flotsam and jetsam from the shore without considering the fate of those who have been shipwrecked or drowned: “To say the truth, whether it be that men who live on the seashore are of an amphibious kind, and do not entirely partake of human nature, or whatever else may be the reason, they are so far from taking any share in the distresses of mankind, or of being moved with any compassion for them, that they look upon them as blessings showered down upon them from above, and which the more they improve to their own use, the greater is their gratitude and piety.”

His unimpressed description of the captain’s military nephew is a serious put-down for any fool who laughs at his own lame jokes: “The character to which he had an indisputable title was that of a merry fellow; so very merry was he that he laughed at everything he said, and always before he spoke. Possibly, indeed, he often laughed at what he did not utter, for every speech began with a laugh, though it did not always end with a jest.”

Then there is a grave, almost sermonic, consideration of the matter of income:

“Men do not become rich by what they get but by what they keep. He who is worth no more than his annual wages or salary, spends the whole; he will be always a beggar let his income be what it will, and so will be his family when he dies. This we see daily to be the case of ecclesiastics, who during their lives are extremely well provided for, only because they desire to maintain the honour of the cloth by living like gentlemen, which would, perhaps, be better maintained by living unlike them.”

Fielding could be crotchety and certainly gives vent to some of his insular prejudices, particularly when dealing with funny foreigners and Catholics. But his writing rises above this and Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon is one of those books that comforts us at least a little by its account of somebody else’s discomfort. Dare I invoke Schadenfreude? 

Wordsworth Preface to the Lyrical Ballads

Wordsworth Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, 1800, 1802, 1815.

The chief aim in the composition of poems in the Lyrical Ballads has been to choose ‘incidents and situations from common life’ and to relate them in a selection of language really used by men, and at the same time throw over them a colouring of imagination, whereby the ordinary things would be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect. WW insists that if the subject is properly chosen, it will naturally lead the poet to feelings whose appropriate expression will have dignity, beauty and metaphorical vitality.

He has chosen ‘incidents and situations from common life’ as subjects of his poetry for the following reasons: in humble and rustic life feelings are freely and frankly expressed for these are simple, the manners of the rustics are not sophisticated and hence are more conducive to an understanding of human nature, in rustic life, human passions are connected to nature and so they are more noble and permanent.

He has used the language of the rustics because such men hourly communicate with the best objects of nature from which the best part of language is derived, and because of their low rank in society, they are less under the influence of social vanity. They convey their feelings in a simple and unelaborated language. Such language is far more philosophical than the arbitrary language used by the poets of the day.

The theme which dominates most of Wordsworth’s criticism, and which he pursues most consistently is his argument against poetic diction. The immediate object of his attack was the ‘gaudiness and inane phraseology’ and the ‘vague, glossy and unfeeling language’ of contemporary poets. Wordsworth is arguing against the idea of ‘poetic diction’ current throughout the 18th c, the idea that some modes of diction were best avoided in poetry, but that other modes were especially suitable. He argues that to separate poetry from ordinary speech is to separate it from human life. Poets confer honour neither on themselves or their works by using a sophisticated diction. In fact it alienates human sympathy. Simple rural people are less restrained and artificial in their feelings and their utterance, and those feelings are at one with their environment. Expanding his apologia for his rejection of poetic diction, he says that there neither is, nor be any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition, and repeats that the language of poetry should as far as possible be ‘a selection of the language really spoken by men’. If true taste and feeling are applied to the process of selection then what results will be firmly distinguished from the ‘vulgarity and meanness of ordinary life’ and if meter is ‘superadded’ then it will be even better. Acc to WW, metre is not essential to poetry, but it is an additional source of pleasure.

What is a poet? Acc to WW, a poet is a man speaking to men. He is endowed with more lively sensibility

has greater knowledge of human nature a more comprehensive soul greater zest for life, greater powers of communication

A poet communicates not only personally felt emotions but also emotions he has not directly experienced. Role of Poetry: Poetry is not a matter of mere amusement and idle pleasure; it is a much noble and higher pleasure. It is the most philosophic of all writings: its object is truth, not individual and local, but general and operative. It is the image of man and nature. For Ww, the poet’s specialty is the interaction between man and his environment, the complexities of pleasures and pain that arise therefrom, and the deep sympathies by which they are interrelated. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge…It is by virtue of this sublime concept of the poet that WW decries verbal artifices and vague ornamentation in poetic expressions.

Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings recollected in tranquility. In WW’s poems, feelings are more important than action and situation.

Views on metre: WW justifies the use of meter. Metre is regular and uniform, while poetic diction is arbitrary and capricious. The rules of metre are fixed, while there are no rules for poetic diction. WW has used metre for the following reasons: it is an additional source of pleasure, in using metre he has followed tradition, metre has restraining and tempering effect on the flow of emotion and passion, it softens the painful and pathetic, it has a distancing effect, it imparts grace and dignity to the lighter emotions, provides an element of contrast, and the perception of similarity in dissimilarity.

Poetic process; four stages through which poetic composition takes place a) observation, b) recollection, c) contemplation, d) imaginative excitement of the emotions which were experienced earlier.

Criticism of WW’s ideas by Coleridge

Language so selected and purified will no longer be rustic language. WW permits the use of metre, and this means a particular order and arrangement of words. If metre is to be used in poetry it will be not same as the language of prose. The use of metre is as artificial as poetic diction, if one is allowed why not the other? Coleridge objects to the use of the word ‘real’- every man’s language differs according to his individuality and the class to which he belongs. In that case can one language be less real than the other. As man advances from the primitive stage, his thoughts and expressions have also advanced, he has acquired new ideas and concepts, these cannot be adequately expressed in rustic language.