"Droll thing life is - that mysterious arrangement of merciless logic for a futile purpose. The most you can hope from it is some knowledge of yourself - that comes too late - a crop of unextinguishable regrets".1
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
Marlow is an untiring narrator, so it is surprising that he throws in a sudden justification at the end of one episode of Lord Jim: "All this happened in much less time than it takes to tell, since I am trying to interpret for you into slow speech the instantaneous effect of visual impressions".2 Indeed. To read Conrad is to agree to this "interpretation", to assume that a few pages of text can be equivalent to a single gesture and a few words (with a certain amount of luck, of course). Why do we enter into this reading contract? Why do we agree to invest our energy and time in wading through the text that is so dense and indolent? Is it a mere cultural obligation to acquaint oneself with a classic?
If one wanted to follow only the last argument, there is no point in reading at all, because the reader would not finish the book at all. Conrad has always worked worse as home assignment or compulsory reading in comparison with other writers. Even Joyce is in a sense 'easier' because one of his aims was to disperse the uniformity of the text through such techniques as, the already proverbial, stream of consciousness. Reading Joyce, we can allow ourselves some fluctuation of attention, because it is already inscribed in the very structure of the content. Conrad, however, is untiring, just like Marlow, and demands the same from his readers.
The award for our efforts, the readerly gain that Conrad presents us with, more than other artists, is doubt elevated to the rank of a revelation. This key term has a crucial meaning in Conrad's universe and connotes not exactly anxiety, but rather a specific mode of self-knowledge; one that assumes a break with certainty, understood as a burden and limitation on perception. The question that I would like to put forward is whether a similar gain awaits the viewer of a film based on Conrad's prose?
"To interpret (...) the instantaneous effect of visual impression". Cinema does not have to interpret anything. Neither, it has any means for that. It is an art of image in which 'visual impressions' are the basic material and means of influence. The subject matter of the book you have in front of you is the clash between the cinema and Conrad, a crossing of the sensitivity of film-makers with that of the writer whose work they decided to adapt for some reasons. There were a lot of adaptations: more than one can remember and see (definitely more than it is worth to see). The chronicler of Conrad's adaptations is, and it has to be{C} admitted, invariably a chronicler of failures and drastic "misunderstandings" (to use a concept presented in the same context by Zygmunt Kaluzynski3). I would like to avoid such a status. Instead of listing titles and keeping score (4:0 for Conrad..., etc.), I prefer a kind of reflection that begins from particular cases and ends with outlining a certain global tendency. This is how I will try to structure my way of reasoning.
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Lord Jim (1900) and Heart of Darkness (1899) are probably the most famous works by Conrad. Certainly, they are the most widely read and commented ones. It turns out that adaptations of these two works constitute the poles of failure and success in transferring the novelist's prose to the screen. Lord Jim (1964) by Richard Brooks is widely considered to be an absolute artistic failure, while the film inspired by Heart of Darkness - bringing the plot to contemporary times - Apocalypse Now (1979) by Francis Ford Coppola, has the status of a masterpiece and one of the true milestones in the history of cinema.
These two films - so different in their tonality, style and renown - focus in themselves, as in a lens, the basic problems that a film-maker encounters while struggling with Conrad's literary material. This is why I chose them for the topic of this introduction.
It is worth to start with a brief polemic, for I do not agree with the thesis commonly put forward - among others by Ewa Mazierska4 and Maria Brzostowiecka5 - that it is a mistake to remain only slavishly bound to the events that construe Conrad's plots, because they are reputedly not the most important elements of his works. It is a too narrowing perception of both these events and their film procession. The best evidence for that is precisely Lord Jim.
Richard Brooks was never a too subtle director. In his films, he strove to build clear, sharp and, most of all, effective oppositions, ones that would constitute a possibly efficient and not too easily exhaustible fuel of a turbulent conflict. It is probably most clearly visible in his Blackboard Jungle (1955), parenthetically a very good film. It can also be discerned in Lord Jim. Through its fallaciousness, Brooks' strategy allows to reach not only one of the key Conrad questions, but also one of the greatest dangers in adapting these questions to the screen.
The description of Patna's drowning in the novel is one of the most intense passages in the whole history of literature. Its strength does not rely on the multiplication of effects, but on their limitation. The four hundred Muslim pilgrims are all deeply asleep and none of them realizes the approaching drowning. A "trying silence of the moment before the crash"6 hangs over the ship, while the sea is calm "as a pond"7. Jim, on the other hand, stands immobile with his "feet (...) glued to the planks"8. Then comes the unfortunate jump which will taint the rest of the protagonist's life. On the visual and story level, this fragment is, so to say, smooth and elegant. The swarm and tumult do not take place onboard Patna, but in the protagonist's heart, to which we have no other access than through intuition. No declarations are being shouted out and, even post-factum, he concludes that in this key moment "he thought nothing"9).
If Brooks had stayed close to this description, he would have created an unforgettable film scene. It is crucial, however, that he departed from it. The main problem of his adaptation is not the overdone faithfulness to Conrad, but exactly this storyline wilfulness. Marlow says of Jim (hypothetically, of course, but very accurately as it seems):
(...) he was afraid of the emergency. His confounded imagination had evoked for him all the horrors of panic, the trampling rush, the pitiful screams, boats swamped (...).10
Meanwhile in Brooks, everything that Jim was 'afraid of' and which, nota bene, is absent from the novel and did not happen at all, really takes place. The "horrors of panic" from Jim's imagination are visualized. Jim participates in the chaos and when he finally stands on the ship's side he is throwing glances to the left and to the right and, at last, decides to jump.
It might seem that what we are dealing with here is, at most, a banal (in its motivation) director's device that is based on investing the scene with a spectacular nature, because the literary version had allegedly too little visual dynamics. Probably it is so, but the great emotional, psychological and (sic!) philosophical implications should not be omitted. By doing so, Brooks, even if it was not conscious, turned the central problem of Conrad's novel inside out.
It is crucial that Brooks' protagonist hesitates. Peter O'Toole is looking to the left and to the right, as if he were considering in his soul two equal ways of behaviour and was to decide which one he will choose in this very second. "Either - or": either heroism or cowardice. A simplified reading of Conrad's novel - repeated in hundreds of abstracts and school lessons - read Jim's tragedy in this way. He is supposedly a man who chose the wrong value and then wants to expiate this "unfortunate" choice.
However, everything is different in Conrad's novel. Jim, repeatedly called a "romantic" by Marlow, a boy who dreamed of heroic deeds, suddenly stands, before Patna's catastrophe, in front of a situation that is absurdly closed for any action. Jim neither can save the ship, nor any of its passengers. He cannot assign any meaning to the disaster by staying onboard. It would be an escape, too, because both eventualities would be the proofs of an absolute helplessness and a visible sign of separation from the reality of which the protagonist so far believed to be a master. Jim does not clash with the question of whether his courage will suffice. He does not clash with any question. There is no question in the same sense as there is no choice. The only thing that remains is a tearing down of the illusory cover, according to which people are masters of their fate and their own selves. "I had jumped... (...) It seems (...)"11, Jim concludes. He did not make a choice - some kind of an instinct made it for him. The penance that Conrad's protagonist enforces on himself is designed to patch up the image that was torn on Patna - an image of oneself as an entity that exerts control over itself and is worth of other people's trust.
Brooks' film tells of something completely different. It is a story of a bad decision and its consequences, as well as a cheerful conclusion about the possibility of overcoming its repercussions. Brooks assumes that there is a possibility of expiating one's guilt, while for Conrad the "guilt'" (in itself problematic) is less important than the tragic condition of the protagonist. The final choice of death from the hand of Doramin even strengthens this condition and does not overcome it. Narrator's irony in the end is acute: "Not in the wildest days of his boyish visions could he have seen the alluring shape of such and extraordinary success!"12 This "extraordinary success", however, has one side effect in the form of loss of trust and failed love towards Jewel, a woman who believed in Jim's faithfulness. This theme was also entirely rebuilt by Brooks. He secured the ending from being bitter by putting in the girl's mouth the expression of a strong faith in the communion of the saints. In the film, during Jim's funeral, Jewel has a radiant smile, while in the book "You felt that nothing you could say would reach the seat of the still and benumbing pain".13
Brooks' film makes us well aware of a basic trap in adapting Conrad. It has a twofold nature. Firstly, one has to remember that the writer's works are constructions thought-out to such an extent that the change of a single, allegedly trivial element entails a reconstruction of the whole ideological message. Secondly, and here we enter a new area of consideration, the photographic nature of the film can both ease and complicate the transmission of certain layers of meaning.
The problem lies in the fact that the appearances of persons and objects entail certain connotations. Marlow repeatedly underlines that Jim's figure is unclear to him. He cannot grasp him in sharp contours. The matter of the film image places us, to speak metaphorically, face to face with a particular individual and his appearance, which is most commonly rooted in our film memory, and from the very beginning provokes us to inscribe meanings into it. The choice of an actor is not only a choice of a certain apparition, but it carries a burden of imagery which is included somewhat automatically by the viewer into the meaning. Peter O'Toole as Jim and Marlon Brando as Kurz (more about Apocalypse Now in a moment) introduce into Brooks' and Coppola's film their own acting past, which is not entirely bereft of consequences for the meaning of the discussed films.
Pauline Kael has brilliantly noticed that O'Toole in Brooks' film has an uncommon problem to confront: he has already played Lord Jim once in Lawrence of Arabia [1962 - M.O.] by David Lean, so he can only repeat himself.14 This acting "repeating'" - unerringly perceived by Kael - immediately grows into the layer of film's meaning and carries the picture even further away from Conrad. The cinematic Jim is tired. He does not have the freshness and rosy cheeks, of which Marlow repeatedly speaks and which are, in juxtaposition with the darkness of his eyes, a visible sign of a tremendous conflict that has possessed his heart.
A similar thing happens with Marlon Brando in the legendary Apocalypse Now, though on different grounds. Coppola's film is not a faithful adaptation - it is set during the war in Vietnam - but the changes made to the original, in contrast to those made by Brooks, were carefully thought out. That is why the film achieved the rank of a masterpiece. However, the presence of Brando and several modifications that I would now like to point out caused the film to have a different meaning from that of Heart of Darkness. It has to be remarked at the very beginning that it is not a betrayal of literary material on Coppola's part, but rather, as Alicja Helman calls it - a "creative departure"15, one that is a proof of a lively dialogue with an eminent text and not its vulgar exploitation.
There is no other actor like Brando who would impersonate so perfectly the variety of ways human experience can follow. His consecutive roles were a certain perverse negation of the previous ones. He was both the embodiment of uncontrollable heterosexual lust (A Streetcar Named Desire, 1951) and a homosexual (Reflections in a Golden Eye, 1967); both a revolutionary rebel (Viva Zapata!, 1952) and Napoleon (Desirée, 1954). The two directors who brilliantly used this variety and drew an existential commentary out of it were Bernardo Bertolucci (in Last Tango in Paris, 1972) and precisely Coppola in Apocalypse Now.
Brando as Kurz - exactly this casting decision that followed the logic described above is a departure from Conrad that is most fraught with consequences. Kurz from Heart of Darkness has a "thin arm", a "bony head that nodded with grotesque jerks" and a "pitiful body" that "emerged as from a winding sheet".16 Brando, on the other hand, is stocky, almost obese, which in the original version of the film was discreetly hidden in golden half-tones, but in the new director's version (premiere in 2001) is visible in broad daylight. Marlow tells in the novella: "I saw him open his mouth wide - it gave him a weirdly voracious aspect, as though he wanted to swallow all the air, all the earth, all the men before him".17 On the other hand, Kurz in Coppola's film looks as if he had already eaten this air, land and crows long ago. He is a satiated man and almost level-headed in his composure which he manifests on all occasions. It could be metaphorically stated that this composure stems from the fact that Brando/Kurz had already been everyone; he has lived through all kinds of experiences, each of them extremely intensely and to the very end, since most of his roles ended in his death. Coppola shows us a man who, through his inner richness and range of knowledge (Frazer's Golden Bough lies on his shelf and he recites Eliot's The Hollow Men), surpasses his environment and accurately names the disease that consumes it in the scene where he ironically comments upon the pro-war articles from "The Times".
What a contrast with the novella! It is a feature of Conrad (and constitutes somehow his mystery) that both Coppola in Apocalypse Now and Nicholas Roeg in his television adaptation of Heart of Darkness (1994) did not trust the silence of the original. Conrad's Kurz does not have much to say. He is not like Brando, or the almost seductive John Malkovich from Roeg, a wandering and wisdom-preaching perverse philosopher, but rather, to summon Marlow once more - "an animated image of death"18. Both adaptations (the second one being invariably under the influence of the first) have made out of Heart of Darkness a story of a meeting between a rational man with a sophist who is difficult to battle in discussion, but whose last words ('The horror! The horror!'19) have an overtone alien to Conrad. Under Coppola, Kurz speaks of the "horror" even earlier, convincing that a man has to fraternize with it in order to overcome in himself the fatal temptation of "judgment". "And you must make a friend of horror", he says to captain Willard, who is the film equivalent of Marlow. "The horror!" on Brando's lips in the scene of Kurz's death sounds very calmly and familiarly, without containing the power of a sudden universal revelation.
However, this word was exactly the kind of a revelation in Conrad! Let us notice that once more, as in the case of Brooks' film, we are dealing here with a minor change made by the director that suddenly reverses the meaning contained in the original. Conrad's Kurz is not occupied with philosophical debates, because he is completely disconnected from philosophy, just like from everything else except himself and his power. "There was nothing either above or below him, and I knew it. He had kicked himself loose of the earth"20, says Marlow. In this context the last cry "The horror! The horror!" has to be seen just as Marlow presents it - as a sudden, though short lasting resurrection of conscience. Kurz suddenly recognizes that his "kicking himself loose" was an illusion. He did not transgress the condition of a man sentenced to doubt. This is why Marlow describes his last cry as a victory: "It was an affirmation, a moral victory paid for by innumerable defeats, by abominable terrors, by abominable satisfactions. But it was a victory!"21
These considerations may seem to be too subtle for an introductory chapter to a book on Conrad's adaptations. However, the single thing I wanted to prove and make visible from the very beginning is that the reader has to bear in mind, when reading further texts contained in this publication, the immense bulk of consequences that the manipulation with Conrad's originals entails with itself. They are not always disastrous. In the beginning I wrote about the readerly effort necessary to persistent reading - I hope that at this point it is clearly visible why this effort pays off. Conrad was equally subtle with his style and his moral intuitions - none of these elements can be closed down in the frame of stiff definitions.
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When one watches Conrad's adaptations one after another, it becomes clear how often the "misunderstandings" described by Kaluzynski occur. One needs to bear in mind, however, that next to them (seldom, but still) there are - so to say - meetings; moments when the picture is in harmony with Conrad's intuition and helps to throw light on the novel read long ago. These "meetings with Conrad" can come in the least expected moment. Personally, I do not think that anyone managed to approach the writer nearer than Hitchcock in Sabotage (1936), despite the fact that the film almost completely rebuilds the action of the novel (but only some of its questions). Hitchcock knew what to transform, what to leave and what to add, in order to transfer into the language of the cinema the terrifying discovery of Mrs. Verloc, a woman who suddenly perceives the murderous streak in her own daily life and in herself. The scene where the heroin (Sylvia Sidney), still shocked with the news of her brother's death sits in front of a cinema screen and laughs, with her eyes full of tears, on a Disney cartoon, just to stupefy from fright in view of the cruelty present in her (and, through analogy, in the whole world), touches the core of Conrad's issues. Again, just as in Lord Jim, "drapings of illusion burn"22, to use a beautiful expression by Lévinas. The individual once more stands before a shocking and, up to now unsuspected, truth about the world.
It is fascinating to trace these "meeting points" between cinema and Conrad. The picturesque nature of The Duellists (1977) by Ridley Scott and The Shadow Line (1976) by Andrzej Wajda; the inner sensuality of the heroin in Gabrielle (2005) by Patrice Chéreau; an almost tangible sketching of a London night in The Secret Agent (1996) by Christopher Hampton (one that Conrad described as "composed of soot and drops of water"23). All of these films and many others have their disadvantages and merits; they are rarely masterpieces, but a persistent strive to square up to the difficult literary material, which also takes place on the part of the viewer who is acquainted with the originals. That what we find in these "meeting points" is the purest Conrad gold I mentioned in the beginning: the doubt.
Conrad's doubt is placed halfway between despair and indifference. The ultimate sign of the former is madness, while the latter - death. Certainty is related in Conrad with a stubborn attachment to mistake and escape from self-knowledge. Doubt is therefore not a disease, but a cure which, and here lies its paradoxical nature, does not make one resistant to pain, but resistant to the inability to feel it. The Secret Agent may be a most distinct example of it, because in the figure of Verloc Conrad described the bulk of evil that can be born out of a complete moral indolence and immersion in certainty; a closure to all possible questions. "But Mr Verloc was not in the least conscious of having got rusty"24, ironically states the narrator. This moral rust causes Verloc not to feel like having done something evil, even after having led his brother-in-law to death. He is certain of himself and blames only the circumstances. Meanwhile, his wife Winnie is definitely thrown off her former certainty about the husband, world and herself, which results in pain and dilemma. This very pain and dilemma that Winnie feels and which Marlow observes in the protagonists of his stories are real life, or life in truth. Even if it comes, as in Winnie's case, for a few hours, or, like in Kurz's case, for a few seconds before death.
Filmography:
- Apocalypse Now (USA 1979, Francis Ford Coppola)
- Desirée (USA 1954, Henry Koster)
- Gabrielle (France/Italy/Germany 2005, Patrice Chéreau)
- Heart of Darkness (USA 1994, Nicholas Roeg)
- Lawrence of Arabia (Great Britain 1962, David Lean)
- Lord Jim (Great Britain 1964, Richard Brooks)
- Last Tango in Paris ("Ultimo tango a Parigi", Italy/France1972, Bernardo Bertolucci)
- The Duellists (Great Britain 1977, Ridley Scott)
- The Shadow Line (Smuga cienia, Poland/ Great Britain 1976, Andrzej Wajda)
- Blackboard Jungle (USA 1955, Richard Brooks)
- Sabotage (Great Britain 1936, Alfred Hitchcock)
- The Secret Agent (Great Britain 1996, Christopher Hampton)
- A Streetcar Named Desire (USA 1951, Elia Kazan)
- Viva Zapata! (USA 1952, Elia Kazan)
- Reflections in a Golden Eye (USA 1967, John Huston)
Footnotes:
1. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1994) 100. [Hereafter abbreviated to HD with the page number - M.O.]; 2. Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1994) 42. [Hereafter abbreviated to LJ with the page number - M.O.]; 3. Cf. Ewa Mazierska, "Joseph Conrad i kino", "Tworczosc" (1991, No. 11-12): 175. For help in reaching this and many other press materials, I would like to thank here the invaluable Magdalena Podsiadlo; 4. Ibid.; 5. Cf. Maria Brzostowiecka, "Spotkanie z Conradem", "Ekran" (1975, No. 45): 11; 6. LJ 72; 7. LJ 74; 8. LJ 85; 9. LJ 79; 10. LJ 71; 11. LJ 88; 12. LJ 313; 13. LJ 262; 14. Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies (New York: Owl Books, 1991) 434; 15. Cf. Alicja Helman, Tworcza zdrada. Filmowe adaptacje literatury (Poznan: Ars Nova, 1997); 16. HD 85; 17. HD 85-86; 18. HD 85; 19. HD 100; 20. HD 95; 21. HD 101; 22. Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, transl. A. Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne Univeristy Press, 1969) 21; 23. Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1994) 152; 24. Ibid. 51.