Euripides on the consolations of alcoholism

When mortals drink their fill of wine,
The sufferings of our unhappy race
Are banished, each day's troubles are
Forgotten in sleep.

"Under Western Eyes" Joseph Conrad

The real adventure of modernism is in the discourse. Ostensibly the plot of the novel goes like this: (warning: plot spoiler ahead) Razumov, a young student with his heart set on a career in the Russian civil service, is roped into becoming a reluctant revolutionary by Haldin, who takes refuge with Razumov just after the former has assassinated a minister. Razumov betrays Haldin, shopping him to the police. Haldin is arrested and hanged. Razumov is then recruited as a spy for the police and sent on a mission to Geneva to infiltrate the Russian community in exile there who are plotting against the system in Russia. He does so and falls in love with Haldin’ s sister. Tormented by remorse at having betrayed her brother, he writes her a documentary confessional, and then confesses himself to the revolutionary group, who take their revenge by making him deaf. Razumov then falls under a tram and is crippled for life. Broken and deaf, he returns to Russia to live in obscurity.

This plot allows several themes and ideas to be developed. The gap between true self and appearance, and the (mis)interpretation of others’ actions, which is the main Conradian project (c.f. this from Lord Jim : It is when we try to grapple with another man’s intimate need that we perceive how incomprehensible, wavering and misty are the beings that share with us the sight of the stars and the warmth of the sun. It is as if loneliness were a hard and absolute condition of existence; the envelope on which our eyes are fixed melts before the outstretched hand, and there remains only the capricious, unconsolable and elusive spirit that no eye can follow, no hand can grasp.)
Razumov’s reticence is a manifestation of his misanthropy and secret ambition to do well within the system, as he has no family to help him advance in the world. However, his silence and independence are interpreted by his fellow students and revolutionaries as being the mark of a man of revolutionary character, hence Haldin’s initial trusting of him. This is taken to a historical level, as Razumov rages against a history that has hijacked his plans for the future, and his destiny. This is a very Russian idea which permeates the work of Akhmatova, for instance.

The central character is remarkably drawn: a soul in torment indeed: as lonely in the world as a man swimming in the deep sea. Over the whole of the first part broods the spirit of Dostoevsky. Every one of Razumov’s intentions is misunderstood, despite his efforts to remain isolated and therefore -he assumes- safe from being misunderstood and even involved in others’ lives. It is his very isolation which draws him deeper into the revolutionary plot. His extreme egoism is his downfall, an idea that we see also in Lord Jim, and the novel is permeated by the familiar Conradian nihilism, given a Russian twist: The man who says he has no illusions, has at least that one.

Conrad exercises a remarkable prescience about the nature of revolution and revolutionaries: A violent revolution falls into the hands of narrow minded fanatics and of tyrannical hypocrites at first. Afterwards comes the turn of all the pretentious intellectual failures of the time. Stalin’s superstitious awe of genius like Pasternak, Schostakovich and Tsvetayeva is understandable considered in this light: Stalin as a pretentious intellectual failure and knowing it! The revolutionaries in the novel are a typical gallery of Conradian grotesques, some of them dripping with evil and menace –Nikita, who deafens Razumov -another example of prescient naming. They are all composites of real revolutionaries who can be spotted if one goes in for that sort of thing.

Another theme is the occult. The novel is steeped too in the occult: Sofia Antonovna and Madame De S__ bring to mind Blavatsky and Besant. This metaphysical aspect of the novel is deepened by Conrad’s use of Gothic and Romance to add a creepy resonance to the text. Natalia Haldin’s arrival at the Château Borel has all the hallmarks of the young virgin’s arrival at the vampire’s lair, and there are several echoes of the Bluebeard myth: with Miss Haldin in the hallway of the Chateau, and she and the English schoolteacher searching in the top floor of the hotel for Peter Ivanovitch. The weird figure of the downtrodden amanuensis who appears out of nowhere like one of the weird sisters in Macbeth and who later takes care of Razumov has witch like qualities, especially in her relationship to the cat. All of this is set into relief by a constant emphasis on the banality and the boring respectability of the city.

The Occult and the Revolution, those two primary preoccupations of the early 20th Century, and both of them concerned with alternative modes of reality –the domain of fiction in other words- make this a novel of its time.

But the real adventure lies in the discourse, as the story is told by an elderly English teacher of languages who is the friend of Mrs. Haldin and Natalia, with whom he is secretly - and rather abashedly, given their age difference- in love. His tale is based on the secret dairy of Razumov, which Razumov gives to Natalia just before his fatal confession, and which Natalia has passed on to the narrator.

This immediately raises several questions, the most important of which seems to me to be the question of why the narrator interposes himself as the intermediary between us and Razumov? Why can we not simply read the diary ourselves? What has been excised? What has been compressed, elided, glossed over? The narrator occasionally gives us direct quotes from the diary, but they are never enough, until right before the end, when perhaps it too late. Any clues we are given as to Razumov’s state of mind as he goes through these events are foregrounded by the narrator with such devices as: Razumov says he felt, Razumov wrote that he felt…, but more often this distancing device fades into the background and we are presented with Razumov’s internal life in the same way as any other 19th Century realist novel: through the omniscience of the narrator. Is the English teacher simply another manifestation of Conrad’s obsession with the origin of narrative omniscience that we find in all his books –the tale within a tale?
On the other hand, this device allows the enactment in the reader’s own mind of the main theme of the novel: the interpretation of other people’s actions.

In part 3 when Razumov is in Geneva and behaving strangely, laughing ironically and giving tortured glances, and the discourse is hinting at some secret he has, the reader is saying knowingly to himself: ah yes, that’s because he is tormented by the secret remorse of having betrayed Haldin, the revolutionaries’ hero, and he is terrified that they will find out. It is only in part 4 that we learn the real secret, that Razumov has in fact been sent on a mission as spy, and we realize that our previous interpretation of his actions has been false. This allows the novel also to maintain its suspense, as different motivations are revealed in turn.

This enactment of a theme, rather than just describing a theme, is one of the main characteristics, in my opinion, of the perfect work of art: one in which the work of art itself contains the key by which it is to be understood.

The profession of the narrator allows Conrad to also indulge in another book-length jaundiced outburst against literature and the contemplative life as opposed to the life of action: Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality. We mediate and interpret reality through words, and their slippery nature sometimes leads us to misinterpret with fatal consequences.

The events concerning Russians are mediated to us through a Western observer, and the difference between us Westerners and them Russians is constantly highlighted as an interpretative difficulty by the narrator. For the resenters this is no doubt another example of Conrad’s Orientalism: Razumov is not allowed to speak for himself, but must be interpreted and presented and understood by a Westerner with more authorial authority: We are not allowed to read his diary directly. However, as always, the artist has the last laugh. The plot is observed and presented under Western eyes indeed, and the text is studded with very subtle references to eyes, until the end, when Razumov is deafened and the focus switches to ears. Another symbol of interpretive difficulty.

Brodsky on language and consciousness

I feel my very self's at stake when I don't have an interlocuter. It is in words alone that I partake of life. They need a witness and an heir.

Mozart to God

Herr, es gescheh dein Wille, bei Tag - und meiner in der Nacht!

Lord, thy will be done, by day - and mine by night!

"Carpenter's Gothic" William Gaddis

Stupidity’s the deliberate cultivation of ignorance, that’s what we’ve got here.

I’ll tell you something, revelation’s the last refuge ignorance finds from reason. Revealed truth is the one weapon stupidity’s got against intelligence, and that’s what the whole damned thing is all about.

I’ll tell you something right now. The greatest source of anger is fear, the greatest source of hatred is anger, and the greatest source of it all is this mindless revealed religion anywhere you look. Sikhs killing Hindus, Hindus killing Moslems, Druse killing Maronites, Jews killing Arabs, Arabs killing Christians and Christians killing each other.

In 1985 when this book was written, it must have seemed funnier than it is today, when most of the lunacy it describes and posits as funny has become a central fact in the output of the daily news. Gaddis describes with the prescience of all great artists the future battleground for the American soul.

The plot is complex, involving the CIA, missionaries in Africa acting as cover for commercial interests on a mining concession on a stretch of land believed to contain ore, a corrupt US Senator using the missionary as a front for his own seed company to get in on the mining deal, a failed and bitter geologist who discovered the ore years ago, a Vietnam war veteran, acting as media consultant to the missionary, and his wife, an heiress to a South African mining magnate’s fortune, which fortune is locked into 23 law suits, and her kid brother. Also sundry lawyers, a French speaking Haitian maid, a childhood friend, a secret service man, an ex-wife and a whole cast of minor characters and disembodied voices who appear on the telephone.
Like many 19th century novels, all these elements of the plot are brought together by one coincidence: the Vietnam vet and his wife have rented the house they are living in – a wooden Carpenter’s Gothic house in upstate New York- through an agent, from the old geologist. He shows up half way through the book to sort through some papers he keeps in a locked room and becomes the wife’s lover. Gradually, the disparate elements of the plot are revealed and everything becomes connected.
The action focuses on only a few of the characters: the marriage between Paul and Liz, Liz’s relationship with the geologist McCandless, and her brother. The marriage is a wreck; Paul is a passive aggressive who bullies and perhaps even beats his wife. Her loneliness is palpable, and she is the central protagonist of the tale.

All the action is set in the one house, with only glimpses of the outside world, which appears dark and threatening: the neighbourhood kids seem to be watching the house, the doves and pigeons appear to be a threat, crows circle menacingly, and the autumnal landscape is full of death and decay. It’s Halloween. Like Hawthorn’s House of Seven Gables, and Poe’s gothic fantasies, the house is a strong presence in the novel, brooding, isolated and dark.


Perhaps the most amazing thing about the novel is the fact that all this is told in dialogue. All the action is revealed through what the characters say to each other. The bulk of the discourse is dialogue, or monologue. Gaddis’s dialogue is not like other writers’. He uses French (or Joycean) punctuation, which makes it hard to know when the dialogue stops and the narrative voice takes over. The speech of the characters is very realistic, that is to say, highly fragmented, with constant backtracking, unresolved sentences, fragments, repetitions of insignificant words, interruptions of new thoughts, limited vocabulary range and no punctuation. It’s as if Gaddis has studied conversational exchanges from a linguistic perspective and incorporated the latest research on the nature of conversation. It’s quite unlike the ordered, literary dialogue ‘spoken’ by other writers’ characters.

What narrative voice there is, and there is really not that much, is restricted to short paragraphs, usually at the beginning and end of chapters, and in the spaces between scenes before another character arrives. The narrative voice is sketchy, using very limited vocabulary, strings of Hemingwayesque prepositional phrases that seem to meander without structure. It is restricted to descriptions of the scenery outside the house only, and to descriptions of very mundane actions: putting on the kettle to make tea, and the clink of the whisky bottle on the glass (there’s an awful lot of hard drinking and smoking). There is no authorial commentary. There is no free indirect discourse, and we are never told what the characters are thinking, only given their speech. It reminds me of David Mamet, Greek tragedy, and E.M Forster: “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”

Gaddis’s focus on dialogue, his trademark, has a number of significant ramifications. First, it gives the novel the concentration of drama. The action is in the words, and indeed words become actions: the dichotomy between word and deed is abolished. Gaddis is immensely skilful at revealing character and situation through dialogue, and in this he shares the stage with the greatest dramatists, Shakespeare, Pirandello, Arthur Miller, and Sophocles. Secondly, it forefronts the nature of writing, and constantly jolts the reader into staying awake, rather like Brecht’s ferfremdungseffekt. We are never far way from the realisation that we cannot really see these characters, that they are verbal constructs only.

In Gore Vidal’s metafiction Duluth, one of the characters makes a speech towards the end of the novel, in which she says: “We are simply formulations of words. We do not live. We are interchangeable, we go on, and we go on. From narrative to narrative, whether in serial form, or in those abstract verbal constructions so beloved by the French and by boola-boola Yale…” In literature there are no ‘characters’, only verbal constructions. It makes no sense to engage in Freudian criticism, then, as the characters are not real people. (Duh!) Freudian criticism only detracts from the real job of criticism, which is political, in its deepest sense. What is happening with our society? What is happening when people’s ability to think is determined/restricted by their vocabulary? What is happening when their vocabulary is taken over by the mad discourse of revealed religion. What happens to the culture when people become prisoners of their own convictions (convicts)?

The complex plot allows Gaddis to deal with a whole host of themes, not least of which is the argument of evolution versus creationism, which in 1985 must have seemed absurd, and rich comic ground: parody of a small crazy minority. In McCandless's long rant against revealed religion, and in many of his dialogues, in the monologues of Paul as he reads from the paper and discusses his projects with Liz, the text is peppered with the empty platitudes of Christianity the cross of Jesus going on before ever unto darkest Africa to harvest those washed in the blood of Jesus. It’s a parody, but at the same time, also rather sinister, washed in the blood of Jesus…. This of course allows Gaddis some rather delicious irony. At one point Liz picks up the phone to try to get through to her husband, who is working for the redneck Bible-belt Reverend Ude, but the number he has given her is for the Lord’s hotline…

The central irony is the retreat of science in the face of revealed religion. McCandless was involved in a court case in a place called Smackover, where creationists argued for equal teaching time in the curriculum for Genesis and evolution. They won, and McCandless bitterly quotes some of their text books:

Some people believe that evolution explains the diversity of organisms on the earth. Some people do not believe in evolution These people believe that the various types of organisms were created as they appear. …Another hypothesis about the creation of the universe with all its life forms is special creation, which gives God the critical role in creation. In some school systems it is mandated that the evolution and the special creation theories be taught side by side. This seems a healthy attitude in view of the tenuous nature of the hypothesis…. Find their geology text books, you look up geologic era? Fossil remains? Nothing. Palaeontology? The word itself is gone. It’s just disappeared.

In his poem Dover Beach, Mathew Arnold describes the withdrawal of religion in the face of the new geological science revealing the real age of the earth as incontrovertible fact. The poem describes the uncertainty faced by the mid-Victorians consequent on the loss of religious conviction, and the fear and doubt caused by the fact that man is revealed as alone in the world without God:
And we are here as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,/Where ignorant armies clash by night.
In Gaddis, writing at the first glimmerings of the twilight of Western Civilisation, this situation is reversed: the fear and the doubt comes from the withdrawal of scientific certainty in the face of the rising tide of the stupidity of revealed religion. For McCandless the geologist, the ignorant are the religious right, the creationists.

The symbol of this emptiness caused by the retreat of science in the face of faith is the old man who appears each day outside the house to sweep the leaves, in a futile display of purpose. Watch him trying to pretend there’s some damned reason to get up in the morning…