Flaubert
Pound writes of Mauberley and himself that 'His true Penelope was Flaubert' (173). The same could be said of Conrad. He begins A Personal Record, whose 'aim' is to present 'the feelings and sensations connected with the writing of my first book and with my first contact with the sea'(xxi), with a tribute to the old Norman Master:
Since saints are supposed to look benignantly on humble believers, I indulge in the pleasant fancy that the shade of old Flaubert — who imagined himself to be (amongst other things) a descendent of Vikings — might have hovered with amused interest over the decks of a 2,000-ton steamer called the Adowa, on board of which, gripped by the inclement winter alongside a quay in Rouen, the tenth chapter of 'Almayer's Folly' was begun. With interest, I say, for was not the kind Norman giant with enormous moustaches and a thundering voice the last of the Romantics? Was he not, in his unwordly, almost ascetic, devotion to his art a sort of literary, saint-like hermit? (3)
It is interesting to note how in addition to canonising Flaubert, Conrad 'indulges in the fancy' of vesting him with a sea-connection. Flaubert's main and most important role was to provide Conrad with a model of the novelist as artist and the artist as supreme craftsman. 'A work that aspires, however humbly, to the condition of art should carry its justification in every line' begins Conrad's famous Preface to The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' (xxxix).
This insistence on total accountability, which more or less always has been a given in poetry, was now being applied to prose fiction. Flaubert demanded of the novelist the same kind of attention to detail at every level of the structure as well as to the interrelationship between the elements making up the text that Gautier or Baudelaire were striving for in their poems. This was, of course, an ideal to aspire to rather than, at present at least, an attainable goal. In his famous letter to Louise Colet, written when he was working on Madame Bovary, Flaubert said:
What seems beautiful to me, what I should like to write, is a book about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style, just as the earth, suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for its support; a book which would almost have no subject, or at least in which the subject would be almost invisible, if such a thing is possible. The finest works are those that contain the least matter; the closer expression comes to thought, the closer language comes to coinciding and merging with it, the finer the result. I believe the future of Art lies in this direction. (The Letters 154)
Early on in Madame Bovary we come across a passage where language becomes almost opaque and the mimetic thrust of the writing is at a minimum. It is, of course, the description of Charles Bovary's grotesque hat:
His was one of those composite pieces of headgear in which you may trace features of bearskin, lancer-cap and bowler, night-cap and otterskin: one of those pathetic objects that are deeply expressive in their dumb ugliness, like an idiot's face. An oval splayed out with whale-bone, it started off with three pompons; these were followed by lozenges of velvet and rabbit's fur alternately, separated by a red band, and after that came a kind of bag ending in a polygon of card-board with intricate braiding on it; and from this there hung down like a tassel, at the end of a long, too slender cord, a little sheaf of gold threads. It was a new cap, with a shiny peak. (16)
If not quite a text about nothing, it is writing in which the signified approaches the condition of abstraction. What strikes the reader above all, is the sheer virtuosity of the performance: diction as well as syntax. Moreover, the passage demonstrates that Flaubert's texts are not only meticulously composed, but that they are quintessentially written texts.
The underlying paradigm is written not orally-based discourse. Flaubert was showing the way to such writers as: Proust, Mann, Joyce, Woolf, Nabokov, Beckett, the Barneses – Djuna and Julian. Although Conrad took many technical lessons in the Flaubertian studio, he would not, indeed, probably could not follow the Grande Corniche of Modernism. By temperament, background and in view of his life-experience his artistic orientation was essentially – to use Said's terms – 'secular' rather than 'hermetic'.1
There is a world of difference between Conrad's contention that 'art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect'(Preface to NN xxxix) and Joyce's definition of art as the pursuit of the aesthetic image 'luminously apprehended as selfbounded and selfcontained upon the immeasurable background of space and time which is not it' (230). For Conrad the world remained 'an enigmatical spectacle'(Preface to NN xxxix): 'a spectacle for awe, love, adoration, or hate'(PR 92) , while the more radical followers of Flaubert – late Joyce, Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Jean Ricardou – have turned reality into a text to be analysed, processed and reconfigured.
But even when Conrad is following Flaubert's lessons, he admires and does otherwise. In a literal sense Conrad's denial of the formative influence of Madame Bovary in a letter to Hugh Walpole is a little disingenuous but his overall assessment of the nature of his debt to Flaubert seems accurate enough. He emphasises Flaubert's skill at 'rendering ...concrete things and visual impressions' – a skill he shared and used most effectively. He then continues:
I thought him marvellous in that respect. I don't think I learned anything from him. What he did for me was to open my eyes and arouse my emulation. One can learn something from Balzac, but what could one learn from Flaubert? He compels admiration – about the greatest service one artist can render to another. (7 June 1918; CL6 228)
I shall now try to demonstrate the difference between Conrad's and Flaubert's narrative style by referring to some specific passages. My first example comes from the story 'Prince Roman'. Here in two short paragraphs we have a description of a convoy of Russian soldiers moving through the Polish countryside:
'One afternoon, it happened that the Prince after turning his horse's head for home remarked a low dense cloud of dark dust cutting slantwise a part of the view. He reined in on a knoll and peered. There were slender gleams of steel here and there in that cloud, and it contained moving forms which revealed themselves at last as a long line of peasant carts full of soldiers, moving slowly in double file under the escort of mounted Cossacks.
'It was like an immense reptile creeping over the fields; its head dipped out of sight in a slight hollow and its tail went on writhing and growing shorter as thought the monster were eating its way slowly into the very heart of the land. (TH 38)
The rhetorical composition of the two paragraphs is significantly different. The first offers a vividly visualised concrete scene; the images are graphic, precise, entirely devoid of figurative language. The second paragraph like an epic simile develops a metaphoric momentum of its own and shifts to a symbolic mode. The paragraphs embody and display the two contrary sides of Conrad's temperament and imagination – for lack of better terms – the realistic and the romantic. He shares this duality with Flaubert.
But, whereas Flaubert worked very hard to separate the two (eventually producing works where either one tendency or the other predominates), Conrad chose to integrate, indeed often to render problematic the distinctions that have been used to discriminate between the two contraries. Obvious instances are the dialectic between Marlow and Kurtz, on the one hand; and Marlow and Jim, on the other. The interaction between the contrasting perspectives produces all kinds of ironic effects and ambiguities.
'You should have heard him say, 'My ivory'. O yes, I heard him. 'My Intended, my ivory, my station, my river, my – ' Everything belonged to him. It made me hold my breath in expectation of hearing the wilderness burst into prodigious laughter that would shake the fixed stars in their places'. (HD 206)
Here, Kurtz's delusional hyperbole is countered and undercut by Marlow's even more hyperbolic irony. By contrast, in Flaubert irony is as a rule more obvious and univocal. Witness the following exchange between Emma and her cooling lover Rodolphe:
'When midnight chimes', she said, 'you are to think of me!' And if he confessed that he had not thought of her, there was a torrent of reproaches, ending always with the eternal question: 'Do you love me?' 'Of course I do!' 'A lot?' ' Certainly!' 'You've never loved anyone else?' 'Did you think I was a virgin?' he exclaimed with a laugh.
Emma continues with rising passion and agitation:
'I am your slave, your concubine. You are my king, my idol – you are good, handsome, intelligent, strong!' He had listened to so many speeches of this kind that they no longer made any impression on him. Emma was like any other mistress; and the charm of novelty, gradually slipping away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion, whose forms and phrases are for ever the same. (Madame Bovary 202-3)
The transition from dialogue to authorial commentary is seamless. A hint of style indirect libre conveying Rodolphe's thoughts in response to Emma's outburst leads to the extradiegetic reflection which, translated into imagistic terms, continues to express the sense of ennui that underlies his cynicism. There is no ambiguity here whatsoever. The reader's responses are carefully directed and controlled at every turn of the narrative. The reader is in effect compelled to recognise the ironic coding of the text.
And here we encounter perhaps the key characteristic and major paradox of Flaubert's novelistic practice: the conjunction of his insistence on impersonality with his ideal of total accountability. Although he eliminates almost completely the obtrusive narrator, so characteristic of earlier fiction, the authoritative function of the extradiegetic narrator is taken over by the various self-interpretative elements embodied in the narrative. Thus in spite of the illusion that in Flaubert's fiction the author is, in Joyce's phrase, 'refined out of existence' (233) in fact authorial intention as embodied in the narrative is as constraining as ever. A supreme example of monologic fiction, Flaubert's writing is the literary corollary of nineteenth-century deterministic monism.
Flaubert's positivistic straight-jacket was clearly inadequate, ill-suited to represent Conrad's complex, fragmented, uncertain, and disordered view of reality. For a multiplicity of reasons both individual and historical, Conrad's world was anything but seamless, nor could his writing be. This is how Frank Kermode describes in his Sense of an Ending the philosophical significance of the year 1900, when Conrad was completing Lord Jim:
In 1900 Nietzsche died; Freud published The Interpretation of Dreams; 1900 was the date of Husserl's Logic, and of Russell's Critical Exposition of the Philosophy of Leibnitz. With an exquisite sense of timing Planck published his quantum hypothesis in the very last days of the century, December 1900. Thus, within a few months, were published works which transformed or transvalued spirituality, the relation of language to knowing, and the very locus of human uncertainty, henceforth to be thought of not as an imperfection of the human apparatus but part of the nature of things, a condition of what we may know. (97)
In Chapter 20 of Lord Jim Conrad gives us with poetic concentration and suggestiveness this new view of the world:
'He [Stein] lit a two-branched candlestick and led the way. We passed through empty dark rooms, escorted by gleams from the lights Stein carried. They glided along the waxed floors, sweeping here and there over the polished surface of the table, leaped upon a fragmentary curve of a piece of furniture, or flashed perpendicularly in and out of distant mirrors, while the forms of two men and the flicker of two flames could be seen for a moment stealing silently across the depths of crystalline void. (215-6)
It is a world of fleeting impressions, of shadows, of distorting perspectives, of incertitude, where, in Marx's celebrated metaphor, 'All that is solid melts into air' (Communist Manifesto 83).
