Photo: Joseph Conrad.
Under the cover of darkness (part two): Jonathan Wooding takes a further look at Joseph Conrad
‘No magical interventions, no triumphant conclusions, just a still small voice.’
Quakers who know the scriptures may well remember what happened when Job, from the land of Uz, took it upon himself to rage against the raging elements and question the probity of God’s ways: ‘the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind, and said: Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge? Gird up now thy loins like a man; for I will demand of thee, and answer thou me.’
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924), ancient mariner and novelist, dares, once or twice, in his tempestuous fiction, to confront the whirlwinds and typhoons, and make his unsettling peace, as we all must, with the matter of pitiless matter. In the well-nigh documentary tale, Typhoon (1903), the whirlwind is present in the name of the ship’s captain: ‘the unheroically matter-of-fact Captain MacWhirr’. And it happens to be MacWhirr’s voice that saves the day, in fact: that ‘frail and indomitable sound that can be made to carry an infinity of thought, resolution and purpose’, a voice ‘forced and ringing feeble, but with a penetrating effect of quietness in the enormous discord of noises, as if sent out from some remote spot of peace beyond the black wastes of the gale’. This is beyond belief perhaps, but I take it for granted that something so ‘frail and indomitable’ is very much what is required during the recurrent wastes, emptiness, and open seas, of any Meeting for Worship. Come to think of it, that’s our Religious Society’s bottom line, isn’t it? No magical interventions, no triumphant conclusions, just a still small voice, a ‘frail and indomitable sound that can be made to carry an infinity of thought, resolution and purpose.’
In the course of my lifetime I’ve seen Joseph Conrad conscripted to various causes – the atheistical, the nihilistic, the demonic, the existentialist – but the effect of his prose on me has been of the same order as that of the ineluctable Book of Job, with its world-shattering poetry, its encounter with atrocity and horror, and its audacious voicing of the divine silence.
Who was Joseph Conrad? He has been much lauded, much defamed. The author Chinua Achebe declared his Heart of Darkness (1899) ‘an offensive and totally deplorable book’. A recent biography by Maya Jasanoff questions why we should be interested in ‘this dead white man, perpetually depressed, incorrigibly cynical, alarmingly prejudiced by the standards of today’. But no less a writer than EM Forster (author of those striking depictions of Quaker sensibility in characters such Mrs Wilcox (Howard’s End, 1910) and Mrs Moore (A Passage to India, 1924)), was one of Conrad’s friends. He called him ‘an austere character, by whose side most of our contemporary writers appear obsequious’. Forster also makes the significant observation that ‘we need not try to write [Conrad] down philosophically, because there is, in this particular direction, nothing to write. No creed, in fact. Only opinions … held under the semblance of eternity, girt with the sea, crowned with the stars’. This disposition – creedless, self-effacing, attendant on the silent heavens – is certainly not unfamiliar to Friends.
In Conrad’s third novel he writes, through the lens of a participating and conventional narrator, of a character with whom the author (Conrad) clearly identifies. James Wait, from a formerly enslaved St Kitts (Conrad was from a Polish family disinherited by the Czarist Empire), is a ‘lonely being. He has no chums’. Wait is not portrayed as a victim, though he suffers racial abuse, but he is, peculiarly, something of an ‘impostor’, perhaps a malingerer – he won’t do his fair share of work on board as he is ill, though in denial that he is dying from consumption. Conrad felt, too, that his being a writer was something of an imposture. In The Shadow-Line: A confession (1917), written while his son was on the western front, he tells of ‘the artificial superiority of a man of pen and ink to the men who grapple with realities outside the consecrated walls of official buildings’. Nevertheless, James Wait has Othello’s charisma: ‘He was naturally scornful, unaffectedly condescending, as if from his height of six foot three he had surveyed all the vastness of human folly and had made up his mind not to be too hard on it.’ And he is at the heart of growing enlightenment for his shipmates; through their fascination with his plight they learn ‘of courage, of endurance, and of the unexpressed faith, of the unspoken loyalty that knits together a ship’s company’. That unexpressed faith, that unspoken loyalty – these things are significant, aren’t they, in the Quaker playbook? And, are these really the sentiments of a misanthrope, a cynical atheist, a nihilist? They are sentiments which arise from the steady contemplation of silence, of mystery, of dying and death. The narrator of the tale finally salutes his shipmates: ‘Haven’t we, together and upon the immortal sea, wrung out a meaning from our sinful lives?’
‘These things are significant, aren’t they, in the Quaker playbook?’
It is worth comparing this death, James Wait’s death, with that of Kurtz, the immeasurably corrupted representative of European culture in Conrad’s most famous novel, The Heart of Darkness. Kurtz’s iconic death is the one which has passed into contemporary folklore and, with its appalled glimpse into a realm of spiritual nothingness, has provided grim succour to those of atheist persuasion, and a kind of affront to anyone with religious pretensions.
But these are not just nautical yarns of exotic derring-do, carrying a simple message or meaning ‘which lies within the shell of a cracked nut’ (as we are told before Marlow, the tale’s narrator, begins his imaginative journey up the Congo River). No, to Marlow, ‘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’. Like any parable then, with its specific context, this narrative in itself is ‘inconclusive’. But we are mysteriously reconciled with, or fortified against, uncertainties and difference. So, when Kurtz speaks his dying words – ‘a cry that was no more than a breath: “The horror! The horror!”’ – we are satisfied not that Conrad has simply exposed the whole religious and heavenly enterprise as a sham, but that, contextually, the Christianised imperialistic project is fundamentally hollow and cruel at the core. More vanquished potency, than indomitable frailty, it would seem.
What’s more, Marlow insists, post-traumatically, that Kurtz’s judgement – ‘a judgment upon the adventures of his soul on this earth’ – is in itself a redeeming insight: ‘the expression of some sort of belief; it had candour, it had conviction, it had a vibrating note of revolt in its whisper, it had the appalling face of a glimpsed truth’. Despite what has been made of Kurtz’s cry in the post-God era, Conrad’s intentions were clearly not to desecrate, blaspheme or commit sacrilege against anything other than a rapacious mercantile culture. For Marlow, Kurtz’s final realisation is ‘an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats’. Is this ‘that of God’, perhaps, in the worst of people?
