This is KZSU Stanford.
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
[music]
Does that hit the right note or what?
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One of my favorite chapters in Robert Muziel's novel,
The Man Without Qualities, is called a chapter
that can be skipped by anyone who has no very high opinion of thinking.
The same goes for this radio program in titled opinions.
It can be skipped by anyone who does not have a very high regard for thinking, or for literary analysis,
or for reflective knowledge in general.
Why do we keep this show going?
Because the thoughtlessness of the age has no limit,
and as the darkness gets more thick and more complete all around us.
It's all the more necessary to keep a small fire going around which those of us who need it
can gather for conversation.
Conversation that gets its spark from the logos,
and not from what WB8's called an old bellows full of angry wind.
Those of you in this American Republic of ours, in Anno Domini 2016,
know what an old bellows full of angry wind means.
We'll know angry wind here on entitled opinions, a conversation about Joseph Conrad's coming up.
Stay tuned.
In the destructive element, E. Mers.
Here we are back in this little bark of ours that we can,
and we got sets forth on chartered and uncharted waters.
Never knowing in advance what surprises or adventures lie in store for us.
Today we are heading for the land of Joseph Conrad,
that Polish native who left home at age 17 to become a sailor,
joining the British merchant marine at age 21,
and eventually, after 15 years at sea,
giving up his maritime career to become a full-time writer.
The rest, as they say, is history for Conrad, who spoke English with a heavy Polish accent,
long after he obtained British citizenship in 1886,
would go on to become one of the 20th century's greatest British novelists.
I call him a British novelist because he wrote in English,
and was already a naturalized citizen when he embarked on his first book,
Al Myers-Folly, in the 1890s.
Along with J. A. Baker, Conrad gave us the most radiant English prose of the 20th century.
But in all frankness, I don't consider him an English writer.
There is very little in his sensibility and his prose style that strikes me as English
in the native sense of that term.
He read a lot more in French than he did in English, apparently.
When Conrad collaborated with the British writer, Ford made Oxford,
Ford would often get exasperated saying that Conrad would think and Polish,
rephrase his thought in French, and then translate it finally into English.
That sounds about right to me.
Who knows, in the end, maybe he was a Polish writer.
Late in his life, Conrad like to describe himself as "Pol Catholic and Gentlemen."
Is there something quintessentially Polish about his sensibility, his psyche,
his sublimely evocative prose, and maybe even his metaphysics?
I'm not qualified to answer that question, but fortunately, the guest who joins me in the studio today
is eminently entitled to opine about Conrad's Polish psyche or lack thereof.
Monika Greenleaf is a comparative literature scholar who teaches in the Department of Slavics
and the Department of Comparative Literature here at Stanford.
She is of Polish extraction herself and specializes in Polish and Russian literature.
She is the author of Pushkin and Romantic Fashion and the editor of Russian subjects,
nation empire, and the culture of Russia's Golden Age.
Her forthcoming book is called Amor Fatty, Hal Russian Theatre, Reconcives Time.
She is also published on the Polish poet and essayist Adam Mitzvich.
Monika has been my guest on two previous occasions, once for a show on Nabokov,
and more recently we did a show on Dostoevsky.
Both of them on the list of our all-time favorites, Monika, welcome back to entitled opinions.
Thank you.
Did I pronounce Adam Mitzvich?
Meets Kievich.
Got it.
So, going back to Conrad's self-definition, poll, Catholic, and gentlemen,
I don't know how seriously we should take that.
Conrad claimed to be an atheist after all, but from what you know about him,
did Conrad describe himself accurately when he called himself a poll, and in what sense was he
Polish up until the very end?
That's a really big question, and I wanted to,
oh, by the way, I just wanted to mention the rest is history,
but of course I was thinking the rest is silence, and both of those things are applicable to Joseph Conrad,
because there's a lot of history and a lot of it is really buried in what's practically silence.
That's why he's so interesting to excavate generation after generation.
You're going to be silent about history?
Yes, about the history that left deposits on his sensibility.
And I just wanted to start off by saying that one of the things that helped me understand Conrad
was actually a recent book, "Juvan Essence."
One thing that really stuck in my mind was when you said how old is my mind?
I converse with Plato, with Vika, with Socrates, with any number of figures for the last 2,500 years.
So does that make my mind 2,500 years old?
And I exist in that same world where those are the people who are always in my mind.
And so that creates layers and layers of sensibility as well as layers and layers of a palimpsestic mind.
I don't agree with Ford Maddox for the Conrad thought and Polish translated into French, and then into English with the help of his English friends.
No. No.
It depends when you learned a language, what you learned in that language.
He thought certain things very much in English straight English because there was no Polish for it.
It's very important to remember Polish history because, and I'll get to that, because as a country that had been partitioned in 1775 among the three empires, Catherine the Greats-Russia, she was the mastermind, of course, Frederick the Seconds-Prussia and Maria Theresa.
Poland was devoured by empires. It's natural that Conrad would then look for an empire like Britain's that would especially counteract Russia.
For him, to me, the sea is the opposite of being landlocked in Poland, a place where he was very claustrophobic.
And to go out into the sea was to be free, equally free of all the different land masses, all the different empires, and to find your own place there on the boat.
It also, I think a lot of people don't understand that the most cosmopolitan people are the people from small peripheral countries.
And so, the very best educated people are the ones from the small countries.
His cosmopolitanism was just layered deep, not only in him because of his experience, but also in his family.
I agree the provinces tend to be the most cosmopolitan in many ways among at least the intellectuals there.
And sometimes the most provincial people in the ordinary sense of that term are at the absolute center.
I hate to say this to our New York cosmopolitan people in New York.
Listen to me, I'm listening to you as a New York, but some of the most provincial people I've ever met were New Yorkers, because there's nothing outside of New York that matters.
So there's a strange dialectic between cosmopolitanism and the cosmos as such.
And particularly for literary people.
And one of the things that you have to say is that literature is relatively cheap to produce unlike art, architecture, even music.
And so countries like Ireland, which Poland has a great deal in common with, they put all of their talent into being great conversations rather than a dinner table, not being boring, because this is all you've got, this is your art.
And also the fact that Ireland and Poland were both very much implicated in the Roman Catholic culture.
Which is, yes, the peasants are primitive, they believe the more primitive sides of the religion.
But Poland was part of the Renaissance.
Poland was part of that enormous network of scholarly monasteries and so on.
So it actually, one of the things that bothered Conrad was when he was called a Slav, because for the world, Slavs were Russians.
And there is nothing similar about the Russian mentality and the Polish mentality.
One is the Catholic world and the other one is the Greek Orthodox world and they separated in the year 1000 and completely different mentalities.
Did Conrad actually, was he an observant Catholic way, grew up going to mass and did this sacraments in communion?
No, no, his father was a really interesting man, Apollo Kojonyovski, aristocrats and his wife, Evelina.
And they were both socialists, he was fire eating, he was very famous in Poland, he was very literary, he translated Shakespeare and a lot of other things, very polyglot.
And because they actively participated in Polish uprisings against the Russian Tsar and the regime, they were punished and they were severely punished.
Conrad was born in Bedaditjev, which is now in Ukraine.
His family were exiled there for seven years.
They both died of TB there because of the dreadful conditions, essentially concentration conditions.
And Conrad was left in orphan, he was cared for by his uncle, Beroski and who was wealthy.
And I just wanted to stress the theme of treachery in Conrad's psyche.
And it goes very deep because it's not what it seems.
His name was originally Yusuf Teodor, gift of God.
Conrad, and I'll tell you about that, Kojonyovski, which means root.
And Conrad comes from the drama written by Adam Ytzkyevich, his first well-known drama called Conrad Valenrod.
And Conrad Valenrod was about a poll who is in the Russian empire and who creates a double life for himself, where he seems to be a traitor to the Polish cause, but actually is secretly setting things up for a rebellion.
And so he's known as a kind of means and kind of traitor.
Everyone takes him to be a traitor, but he holds his own truth inside and he acts on it.
And this became a very romantic model for trying to live in an empire and keep your own identity, but not just be constantly sent to into Siberia and exile.
And so when they named him, he gave him this name Conrad and then he chose it as his main last name.
That was a big symbolic theme.
He was very loyal to his father.
As I said, his father was a socialist.
He was very left-wing.
He was very interested in the plight of the people.
In a lot of ways, he was similar to the stefsky.
It does early to stefsky.
He was a socialist at a rebel and eventually arrested and exiled for those very reasons.
He had concentration camp in the stefsky met Polish dissidents.
And at the time, they were the only people he could talk to because they were intellectuals and so on.
And then the stefsky turned on them.
And in all his successive works, he trashed the Poles horribly, made fun of them.
You know, all kinds of stuff.
Why is that?
Probably, well, I mean, it's obvious why.
Because it's that kind of thing that you see all the time now under Putin throwing red meat to the conservatives and to the people who are creating a very simple basic Russian identity, which is we are inside our boundary and everything outside our boundary is the enemy disgusting, you know, evil and so on and funny.
And does stefsky is a very funny writer.
So he, I mean, he just put genius into his comic takedowns, for example, of the two Poles in brother's caramaza.
You know, it's genius, but it's completely infuriating.
And he was always like that.
I mean, he was a complete jingoist.
But that's because he was trying so desperately to make himself Russian when does the efsky was not in any way like the Russianism that he was propagating.
So let me go ahead and get back.
Yes.
So the second part of the treachery is that Conrad felt extremely claustrophobic in Poland.
Now, you have to understand that when a country has been deprived of its physical existence, no land, they were left with nothing but language and they were forbidden to get higher education.
So they were auto-didacts.
And for them to remain cultured was to remain Polish.
And they lived, you know, every family was this fanatical little nest of Polish patriots who kept in touch with the whole world looking for some kind of alliances.
And so Conrad felt extremely claustrophobic in that atmosphere.
I know it well because I was brought up in it, so I know.
And his uncle, so that was the high romantic side of being Polish.
The second side was called positivism.
And it was about learning to be part of the modern world by becoming capitalist, by becoming wealthy, by actually having sort of street smarts and not just being idealists who sacrificed themselves every generation.
His uncle was like that, and he took Conrad under his wing.
And one of the things that comes out of the correspondence is that he constantly horribly belittled Conrad's father, Apollo Kojonyovski.
And so it was really, I have to tell you, it's been tabulated and Conrad constantly uses Shakespeare.
He learned Shakespeare at his father's knee.
But he particularly hamlet.
And it's his father was a translator of...
Yes, his father was a translator of Shakespeare's comedies, which is really interesting.
And Conrad, sorry, walked into his father's office one day and did the unthinkable.
He started reading what was on his desk.
And his father walked in and he thought, oh no.
And his father said, read this out loud.
And he read it out loud.
It was a Polish translation.
He was seven years old.
It was a translation of the two gentlemen from Verona.
And that his father said, you did that pretty well.
Good, now I know what it sounds like.
Notice that that word "Gentlemen" is right there.
When you said "Apoll, a Catholic and a gentleman."
So there was a definite father being loyal to the ghost of the father, but not in form.
But finding a way to be loyal to his father in the rest of his life.
You can't say because certainly, politically Conrad was known as a conservative.
Oh, it's getting...
It was no social.
One can read it.
You know, you know how his eye always goes to the people below and he looks at them really closely.
In all of his imperial, you know, all of the continents that he visited,
he's so much...
I would call a liberation Catholic.
And he has pretty much loathing and disgust for the ruling class.
He does have...
Especially the capitalist class, but he also had a loathing and contempt for socialism.
That's just what happened because of Russia.
Okay.
Because in the Russian Empire it took a very violent turn.
It took a demagogic, you know, and it had to do with what was going on in Russia,
which was really vile.
Was his uncle... His uncle was not socialist.
His uncle was not an executive.
And he was very conservative and he trashed...
He trashed Conrad's father and the whole socialist line, you know,
and sympathizing with the poor people and all of that.
So, and he was the one who gave Conrad money.
He stipe-ended him until Conrad was 30.
And he was generous, and he let him go and be in the merchant Marine because he thought he would learn a lot.
It had to do with positivism, empiricism, having your feet on the ground and really knowing something.
And so he supported that side of Conrad, and he also did not withdraw his support when Conrad decided to become a writer.
And he supported him there as well.
So, it's not that he was united and he was actually a good writer himself.
They were all good writers.
And they had a really interesting correspondence.
But you may... He probably didn't notice this, but in the shadow line, Giles, you know,
who the art narrator finds very annoying.
He describes him as in his heavy uncle-like tones, you know,
and he immediately sends Conrad's, you know, thinking back to his uncle.
Yeah, let me mention for our listeners sake that tonight we are going to have a discussion of this particular novel.
The shadow line, which is a late work of Conrad's written at the beginning of the First World War.
And we're going to get into this later in our show, right?
Yes.
Let me go ahead.
We will very soon.
So, just to finish with what he was Conrad, he became...
You know, like a lot of people, he became more conservative.
He hung out with rich people in England, although most of the time he was dirt poor.
And they constantly commented on him.
And as far as...
And he loved being like all polls, he spoke with a fork tongue, he spoke in double-triple, quadruple layers.
So, when he said a gentleman, a Catholic and a gentleman, he was an aristocrat.
In England, he became, you know, a gentleman, a sort of general gentleman.
Catholic, I'm sure he was using in the original sense of Catholic, meaning all possible, you know,
broad interests, broad affiliations.
And a poll definitely at the end of his life when he visited, you know, before, just before the shadow line,
he visited Poland for the first time.
He was tremendously moved by it.
He was almost trapped there because of World War I.
And when he emerged, he very much became re-witted to his Polish identity and told people about it, wrote people about it.
And so, this is what I want to say about that.
The poll is there within the cosmopolitanism.
And you know how things get stripped down as you, when you get older.
You can either keep doing the same thing, but Conrad did not keep doing the same thing.
He was always exploring the boundaries of his own artistic world.
And the shadow line is a perfect example of that.
He knew that he was the end.
And so I wanted to actually just read the gravestone on his gravestone.
He died August 3rd, 1924.
After several, you know, quite a few years, basically since 1915 or so, of feeling like he was done for,
like nothing good was going to come out of him.
And it was a tremendous effort to write, but he kept doing it.
And some of the last things are very good, including the shadow line.
And the gravestone is a quote from his late and not very good, or not very popular,
"rover."
And the original source of the quote is Spencer's very queen, and it is this.
"Sleep after toil, port after stormy seas, ease after war, death after life does greatly please."
And so, I know we're going to switch over to the shadow line, and I am very curious.
I was curious when you told me why you chose this late novel.
Well, to begin with, that I'm curious, why did you feel that you wanted to read the words on the gravestone?
Because I find that really disappointing, because I find it trite and British and Cucie and unworthy of Conrad.
Okay, that's fine, but I had a different reason for it.
I completely agree that because Conrad always pays attention to the things that are inscribed on,
it's a graveyard near Canterbury.
It's definitely foregrounding his respect of, like this is a respectable gravestone.
It's Victorian.
It is completely conventional. But inside of that, you know, Spencer's very queen was far from it.
It was a poetic revolution in English literature.
And it fits with the idea of palimpsest, that the fairy queen is inside the rover, which is still, you know, about roving and not finding.
And it's about the end of a life. We talked about this, that the shadow line pretty much removes all of the beautiful plush of Conrad's textures, his verbal textures, the veils, and the beauty, the gorgeous, you know, baroque kind of writing, and takes it down to the very bear, you strip down, like the canvas underneath.
And that actually for our ear now makes it seem more modern and so on, because all of that Victorian stuff is gone.
And what touches me about this gravestone is that he wants to follow what life is all the way, even in its decline, even in itself doubt, even in its old age conservatism.
He keeps saying where he is. And the death after life is part, you know, it's that shadow line.
He talks about the shadow line being something that young men have to face, moving from childhood into their very ambitious and wanting to know.
And he says it's so wonderful because he says not to find out who they are as individuals, as romantics, but how they're going to follow in the line of initiation into manhood that so many have trodden before them.
And this gravestone talks about the same easing after war, death after life, does greatly please, that you are easing into the next shadow line that everyone has trodden before.
Before we talk about the shadow line, Monika, can we talk about the effect that Polish romanticism had on Conrad and where you see the traces of that legacy in his prose style?
Yes.
And Harry talked about the Renaissance and Poland actually having much more layers to his literacy. Also because it was part of the Catholic world, everybody knew Latin often Greek as well.
And so there have been, you know, linguistic studies about this Polish is quite different from other Slavic languages because there's this big Latin substrate, the grammar, the knowledge of the poetry, the inversions, you know, there's a lot.
And it's the very structured, very rich muscular grammar.
And it has utterly different syntax and the thinking that goes with it from Russian, which is all participle nesting, you know, and things like that.
And so the Polish romantic poets were extremely well educated in that kind of Catholic sort of school.
And they had, I mean, scavit, for example, had the most fabulously muscular, masculine, vivid way of grabbing a subject.
It was not wispy at all. It was really Renaissancey. And it also had a Miltonian feeling.
But the real command of diction, of really strong decisive diction, which is English, it's easy. You've got a lot of monosyllables, you know, and so on.
And Polish, you have no monosyllables. You have nothing but these wavy lines, but he did it.
And his pantadé was just, you know, his great epic about life in Lithuania, Conrad Valenra.
And Jadé, his probably his greatest dramatic work, is about Slavic connection with ancestral voices.
It's actually very eerie and it would be great in Africa. It's meant to be performed in Africa.
And so there's this real sense of that palimpsestic drawing on many, many voices and synthesizing them in a great style.
And that's what we have in Conrad. I mean, scavit is just, you know, the great example of that.
And then also that meets scavit went to Paris and became like the speaker for things Polish and for things Slavic in Paris.
And then there's Swavatski and Krashensky who wrote great epic poems, which were sort of explored the more philosophical and actually not wispy but subtle symbolists, they're proto-symbolists.
And so there's that other type of Polish diction and Polish mentality, which yes is metaphysical. It's not Catholic. It's mystical.
And so those various threads all involved.
And you think they're important for Conrad?
Completely important, and he said so. He said so. I mean, and he ended up actually switching over to Swavatski who was also my mother's favorite.
He was reading a lot of French authors, however, I think even more than the British authors.
And then, I think that's the first part of the book that I've ever read.
And I think that's the first part of the book that I've read.
And so I think that's the first part of the book that I've read.
And I think that's the first part of the book that I've read.
And so I think that's the first part of the book that I've read.
Join, quote.
Yes, yes.
Yes, yes, yes.
But see, and just in that short one, he merged.
And he, those moments are the tellest man moments.
It's not that he thought of it in Polish.
No, he thought of it instantly in Shakespearean.
And it meant a whole merging of sensibility for him in just a few words.
What were you going to say about the Moz used?
Yes.
The Moz used for our listeners is a aesthetic of finding always the right word as the kind of prime directive for the novelist.
No?
Yes.
And the poet, what did you want to say about the Moz used?
OK, I wanted to actually cite or have you cite a few lines from the preface to a personal record.
Conrad's late work, which is an incredibly interesting insight into his entire body of work.
So Conrad writes, "You perceive the force of a word.
He who wants to persuade should put his trust not in the right argument but in the right word.
The power of sound has always been greater than the power of sense.
I don't say this by way of disparagement.
It is better for mankind to be impressionable than reflective.
Nothing humanely great, great, I mean as affecting a whole massive lives has come from a
reflection.
On the other hand, you cannot fail to see the power of mere words.
Such words as glory, for instance, or pity.
I won't mention anymore.
They are not far to seek, shouted with perseverance, with ardor, with conviction these two by their sound alone,
have set whole nations in motion and upheaval and a be heaved the dry hard ground on which
rests our whole social fabric.
There is virtue for you if you like.
Of course, the accent must be attended to the right accent.
That is very important.
The capacious lung, the thundering or the tender vocal cords don't talk to me of your
Archimedes lever."
Yeah, such a great, such a great passage.
And you see him there, he is talking about Loomo's juice, getting it right, but then he
turns it into the slogan, "Eering Mo'jost," words like, "Glory and pity," that are shouted
out by French politicians and so on.
But also have a deep meaning for him, and you could say they are at the bottom of all
of his huge social, his enormous social fabrics.
And he's talking about his own accent.
Everybody commented after reading his beautiful prose on hearing his dreadful Polish accent
Virginia Woolf made it very memorable.
And then she says, "And then I open his writing and it's so beautiful."
She says, "I lose interest sometimes in the plots, the adventures, but I always stop at
passages that are so beautiful and they become like tuning forks for me."
And then he also is talking about British accents.
Every accent that he ever encountered in his seafaring days in Britain, it's Henry Higgins
and they say, "Whether you've heard or not heard, whether it will be heard as comic,
pretentious, overblown."
And so he has a very fine and ironic, you know, discuision about intonation, accent,
the music of language.
I want to make you hear.
He says, "I want to make you see, not think."
Although he does plenty of that too.
The funny thing about a personal record is that it's not so much a biography, autobiography.
It's about how he came to write all Myers-Folly.
And how he began with the line, the thing that really stood out for him was how he was
going to end it.
It was going to be Nina saying the sun was setting at last.
And then he talks about how all these voices, all these people around him kept interrupting
his process of writing for many years.
And so it's all about the interruptions of his conception, of his inspiration.
And then finally getting to that line when he wrote it the very end in an all-nighter,
where he finally finishes this many-year project.
And so it really tells you how the fabric of the world looking through the port hole
is certain moment.
Somebody's saying something, someone at a table gets woven into the synthesis that's
being created.
And then I suddenly realized Nina was saying the sun was setting at last.
Well his mother was named Evelina.
And that's a very common thing to make a significant woman have a rhyming alter ego.
And it made me think about what, you know, because there's a lot of stuff now these
days about his being a homosexual and so on.
He lost his mother very early the same way that Tolstoy did.
And you know, psychoanalytic sort of jargon when the mother disappears early she becomes
the ideal and no woman can ever, ever compete with her.
And so anyway, I like the thought that he is basically that idea was the end world is ending.
Nina says last the sun was setting at last and that has this tremendous resonance for
Conrad, the end of his emotional world in some way.
And then having to go out one of the things that he said is you have to leave in order
to show how you love, just staying there is not going to show your love.
And you read this as autobiographical in relation to Poland.
In relation to the feeling of claustrophobia and Poland and why any poll who wanted to do
something great had to leave Poland in order to be able to do it.
Everything was too constricted.
And whether it's Marie Curie, you know, Chopin, Miskievich, you had to leave.
And the whole idea was to make Poland disappear.
And so you had to get out and then express that tremendously complex sensibility out there
in the world.
Do you know of any Polish writers who resemble Conrad as a writer at all?
Yes, Gombroevich, the comparison has been made the great modernist writer Gombroevich,
who also was...
Was he emulating Conrad?
He probably wouldn't say so, but he was proudly from the provinces.
He was very anti-Polish actually for the same reasons.
But in that way, very Polish, very perverse.
And he went to emigrated to Latin America, had a wild life, you know, wrote tremendously
cosmopolitan, funny and layered books.
And yeah, there's a lot in common.
Conrad ended up despairing about the political future of Poland, right?
And despairing about the world.
Yes, but especially that he gave up hope that Poland was really ever going to get it together.
No, it's not.
Please don't think it's about getting it together.
It was actually, it didn't exist.
Yeah.
And, you know, sadly, actually Poland was freed.
He died in 1924, so it had been freed for two years at that point.
So who knows?
Yeah.
And an amazing golden age in that interwar period.
So I don't really have a sense of what would be the Polish psyche of which Conrad's psyche
would be a declension.
You're talking about the stratification, the palimpsestic, the fact that he was haunted
by a plurality of voices, that he would incorporate all these different voices that he
would hear around him.
And they were, it was like a symphony, but also extremely visual.
He had an unbelievable ability to do a kind of phenomenological exploration of any environment
no matter how tiny, no matter how huge.
And certainly in an novel like Lord Jim, you get the multiple narrative voices.
In fact, whole proliferation of these voices.
And that's part of his modernistic style.
And he was very on the cutting edge of a certain kind of literary modernism in that period.
The book that was 1900.
Yeah, yeah, that was early on.
And most of his really experimental writing was early on rather than the later stuff becomes
more conventional.
For example, the shadow line is not experimental at all in that way.
It's kind of mono, it's a mono narrative.
The line on Conrad among critics is that he really didn't write any great works after
1911 that he had spent himself, exhausted himself, under Western eyes might be the last
one.
And that perhaps some people like Ian Watt are ex-colleague of a here at Stanford, one of
the great Conrad scholars believes that the shadow line is a late masterpiece.
Shadow line being written in 1915, I think it was comes out.
And yet it's one of the few after 1911 that people that might be a candidate for another
great career.
Also, the secret share is late as well.
That's right before it's a short story.
The shadow line is an autobiography.
He calls it in the subtitle.
And he wrote it, I think he was inspired by his son Boris.
A young, I think he was only 17 or 18 years old in listing to go to war in the First
World War.
And he wrote the story of his first command.
It's very much based on his experience of receiving his first, and I think only command
as a captain on a ship, the Otago.
And of course, it was not a felicitous experience because many of the crew were infected
with tropical fever.
They had malaria.
He set out to see hoping that the sea would-- and the fresh air would cure all that.
But in fact, what happens is that there is this terrible kind of lull, a windless two
weeks of just immobility on the sea where the health of the crew gets worse and worse,
and they're kind of wasting away.
And the Conrad is under this intense crisis of pressure, and he's imagining a kind of ghost
ship that had been found on the sea where all the crew were kind of dead on there.
And it's an ordeal.
And he goes to it, and he describes that ordeal in a rather straightforward manner for
his previous style of writing for sure, and calls it the shadow line to-- as marking the difference
between youth and this initiation into maturity.
But I know you have a lot to say about that, so I'd like to invite you to say why you think
he was written in this monologic style.
I don't know if that's the right word, but you know what I mean.
Yes, I do.
Well I already talked somewhat about it.
If you think about Beethoven's like quartets, the stripping down in age, sometimes things
get really big and fluffy, and sometimes they get very stripped down.
And then there's this quotation here from Henry James.
One finds it in the midst of all-- sorry.
One finds it in the midst of all this warfare as hard to apply one's words as to endure
one's thoughts.
The war has used up words.
They have weakened.
They have deteriorated like motor card tires.
They have like millions of other things, been more over strained and knocked about and
voided of the happy semblance during the last six months than in all the long ages before.
This is 1915 that he's writing.
And we are now confronted with the depreciation of all our terms or otherwise speaking
with a loss of expression through increase of limpness that may well make us wonder what
ghosts will be left to walk.
Great.
Where does that come from?
This comes from Henry James's first interview, New York Times Magazine, 21st March
1915, page 4.
It is in the Cambridge edition of Joseph Conrad, the Shadow Line.
It's a very moving quote.
It is.
And of course in our own day and age we're experiencing the same thing for different
reasons which is the devaluation and depreciation of the power of words to resound as
Conrad believed that they do in that passage that we read from a personal record where
our basic words like glory, sacrifice or freedom here in America we these words are constantly
being cheaply invoked and they have just been worn down of their power to mean.
Yes, good, yes, exactly.
And so you believe that in the face of that kind of depreciation of the power of the word
that the writer becomes minimalist, not minimalistic but pairs it down and becomes reduct.
Yes, and it's really, I think it's really important in our age of sort of interest in repetition,
Nietzsche and eternal recurrence, eternal return that he calls it autobiographical.
That doesn't mean that it's only about that early autobiographical moment.
He's all about palimpsest.
It means that that moment, the early moment and this late, possibly last moment of writing
are overlapped on each other.
And in between are the great novels, the conquest and so on.
But at this point with World War I, you know, it's son, but not only son, he always had
a vision of masses of people suffering.
And so the people on the boat and the hold, the sailors who could have been full of resentment
and so on actually are wasting away and you're aware of them because he very briefly
mentions that they're even thinner, that they're closer hanging, the cheekbones, the
eye sockets.
And it's kind of like the moon, the scream.
And so he doesn't have to say a lot, it just has to be these little glimpses that
and you're always aware of it down in the hold of any kind of a passage.
You know, whether it's the middle passage, you know, all of the different, you know,
she's seafaring passages.
And so they're completely wasted away.
And yet at the same time in the moment of emergency, which is when finally there's a breakthrough
and there's going to be a storm, a squall, they managed to do at least the minimum in order
to save the ship from disaster.
Yes.
And in that sense, I think that the end of the shadow line is anything but heroic in the
sense of triumphalistic, but that it's through the weakness and the be humbling, that
is when people can come together with a certain kind of solidarity in the recognition of
our own frailties.
Very good weaknesses.
And you started off with that immersion and disaster that you actually have to go down
into the disaster.
It's a line from Lord Jim.
Yes.
And that's so early too.
It's meant to bring back the beginnings.
So I just wanted to complete that idea which is that in some ways it's a call to Europe
to know that it's going into World War I as a disaster and that they're going to be,
you know, it's like you knew that they were going to be all in the trenches, skeletons
in the trenches, and that they were going to have to go through this in order to, you
know, to come out at the end.
It's amazing how Prussian in a certain sense the whole lukalmpla which is a place.
Yes.
This dead calm and immobility of the ship on the sea seems so uncannily, prescient of
being immobilized in the trenches.
That was a war where there was no movement.
It was just being stuck, stuck, stuck with disaster, striking every day and not being able
to move either advanced more than a kilometer.
It's so futuristic the way he sensed that that's the direction it was going as in so
many of his novels.
But I just wanted to say one last thing that he says there's that moment he says I was
no good.
And you could say that, you know, yes of course, but also that at the end of his life he's
been doubting his own work now for about 10 years.
He thinks that it's not only are his new things no good but that his past things were
no good.
And this last piece of writing also is in some way to explore that idea of not being good
and then to pull out after all this thread-bear piece of writing that's just the thing
you need for that moment.
In the book, in the drama he is self-doubt is very profound and convincing and there's
a moment where he's threatened really to succumb to a total paralysis and not get out
on deck at the most critical moment and ransom who is this chief's tour is the one who
gently urges him to get back on deck and it seems to be an acknowledgement that you need
the help of others.
And that is through the sort of solidarity that others can provide in those moments that
even if you're not good enough because I think under other circumstances that inner weakness
that inner insecurity could have gotten the better of him.
But it was thanks to external circumstances not the self overcoming its own weaknesses
of its own sort of autonomy.
And therefore the ship becomes a, I don't want to call it an allegory is not that at all
but the ship becomes emblematic of how people depend on each other.
Our interdependence is the only thing that will save us.
Yes.
An acknowledgement of it.
Yes.
But it's confessional and autobiographical because I think he had a profound self-doubt
is in his life, in his early life.
And when he took that first command he actually in that crisis didn't know if he would be
equal to the challenge.
But there's that other thing about him that even though he was an defeat aristocrat,
he was touchy at a bad time, and he was super insecure as any poverty-stricken immigrant
is coming into richer societies.
He had to prove himself every second of every day.
But he was so adventurous.
He wanted to do these things that would test him and break him and just see what would
be left and that's what he did constantly.
And he wasn't, I feel like he wasn't afraid to fail.
You know, I keep thinking about Beckett, you know, fail better.
And you could look at his works as just cases of exploring, trying really big things
and maybe their parts that are fate, you know, tedious, that can be criticized.
But he didn't just stop, you know.
Well you don't for someone who had been in, I don't know how many shipwrecks, I think,
eight of them.
There was three or eight, remembering the eight.
The shape.
But one way or another, someone who has gone through these moments of extraordinary intensity
and of emergency, where everything, in life and death, is at that very edge.
I think you can become addicted to that form of intensity.
You're completely right.
And if you just think it starts with the psyche of a child who's orphaned incredibly
early, essentially in a concentration camp sort of environment.
And then has to actually, you know, provide the energy, that sort of afterlife surge
of energy for the future.
And you're completely right.
And we had to go from crisis to crisis to activate that feeling of being on the edge and
making one more effort.
Great.
Well, Monika, we have to wrap this show up and then husband our energies for what I hope
is going to be a very interesting discussion of the shadow line tonight in the context of
another look, the book club.
You were at the Werner Herzog event in the winter.
We actually aired that as a special episode of entitled "Pinnys the Audio Version of it."
And tonight is going to conclude this year's another look get together at the book club
and we're going to be following up our thoughts about the shadow line tonight.
So I want to thank you again for coming on to entitled "Pinnys," remind our audience we've
been speaking with Professor Monika Greenleaf from the departments of Slavics and Comparative
Literature here at Stanford and I am Robert Harrison for entitled "Pinnys State Tuned."
We'll be with you next week.
Bye bye.
Bye.
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