Toward the end of
Conrad’s brief but much-discussed preface to The Nigger of the Narcissus,
he characterizes the artist in an image surely meant to sum up the ideas
presented in the preceding paragraphs.
What ought to be the rhetorical capping of his argument instead confuses
the issues he means to clarify.
Sometimes, stretched at ease in the
shade of a roadside tree, we watch the motions of a labourer in a distant
field, and after a time, begin to wonder languidly as to what the fellow may be
at. We watch the movements of his body, the waving of his arms, we see him bend
down, stand up, hesitate, begin again. It may add to the charm of an idle hour
to be told the purpose of his exertions. If we know he is trying to lift a
stone, to dig a ditch, to uproot a stump, we look with a more real interest at
his efforts; we are disposed to condone the jar of his agitation upon the
restfulness of the landscape; and even, if in a brotherly frame of mind, we may
bring ourselves to forgive his failure. We understood his object, and, after
all, the fellow has tried, and perhaps he had not the strength—and perhaps he
had not the knowledge. We forgive, go on our way—and forget.
Surely the
primary element that links this scene to the consumption of art is the viewer’s
engagement. Anything put within a frame
and hung on a wall will receive attention of a sort altogether different from
that accorded most sensory data. A story
on paper demands attention of a different order than that we accord impressions
incidentally observed in lived experience.
Apart from the narrowed attention required for the contemplation of art,
Conrad’s viewer studying a distant man approaches the status of art in the act’s
lack of any functional end. This thought
experiment is, however, a very imperfect analogue for art which must be judged
on beauty alone, a quality unlikely in an arbitrarily chosen sight. The figure of the worker also deviates from art
in that it lacks intentionality. Whereas
every detail of a work of art is the result of the maker’s choices, the events
of lived experience arise from a confluence of countless and mostly random
causes.
The enigmatic figure Conrad asks his
reader to imagine has a good deal in common with Camus’ image of the absurd in The
Myth of Sisyphus.
Dans certaines heures de lucidité, l'aspect mécanique de
leurs gestes, leur pantomime privée de sens rend stupide tout ce qui les
entoure. Un homme parle au télé phone derrière une cloison vitrée ; on ne
l'entend pas, mais on voit sa mimique sans portée : on se demande pourquoi il
vit.
At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of
their gestures, their pantomime without meaning makes everything about them
stupid. A man speaks on the telephone on
the other side of a glass panel. One
can’t hear him, but one can see his meaningless mime-show. One wonders why he is alive. [my translation]
For Camus and Sartre this vision of
existential humanity triggers self-recognition and “nausea,” while for Conrad
the consequence is entirely different.
His viewer is seeking only to beguile “an idle hour,” and his interest
would be piqued if he were “to be told” apparently by some outside informant,
what the man is doing. Oddly, knowing
the practical end of the labor he is witnessing satisfies Conrad’s viewer. Feeling that he understands the worker’s
“failure,” he is free to “forget” and wander on.
“So,” Conrad says, “it is with the workman
of art.” Yet the sight alone is
insufficient for him, he must have the informant as well, whose word somehow satisfies
and ultimately dissolves his interest, allowing him to proceed then unchanged,
apparently as though the encounter had never occurred. For
one who wishes to be entertained, perhaps the casual tone and easy departure
are appropriate, though the most casual art can be memorable, but what can be
the analogy with learning the nature of the worker’s project? And why must the artist/worker always
fail? And does he really mean to say
that the experience of art leaves one altogether unchanged? The design if the extended metaphor seems
peculiarly inappropriate in view of Conrad’s symphonic mastery of imagery in
his fiction.
Conrad’s central point sheds little light
on these questions. Though often named
as a manifesto of literary impressionism [1], its value assumed due to the
prestige of the fictions of its author, the preface has also been censured by
recent critics, even called an incoherent “hodgepodge” [2]. For most readers, though, the point is quite clear.
Conrad’s summary takes only a single
sentence: “My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written
word to make you hear, to make you feel—it is, before all, to make you see.” Yet this principle scarcely specifies a
specific approach; the same could surely be said of all literary texts. This grand-sounding ambition is really
nothing more than a restatement of the need to direct the reader’s
consciousness on a particular scene, rather like a frame or a spotlight. We are all constantly seeing, hearing, and
feeling. Art requires, though, that
one’s focus be narrower and more conscious than usual. In this broad way, the image of the worker is
similar, though other attributes – the lack of intentionality, the observer’s
wish for an explanation, and the final “failure” and “forgetting” are
irrelevant or misleading.
The end of art for Conrad is truth. “Art,” he defines 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.” With sufficient attention, he says, any scene
will do. “There is not a place of
splendour or a dark corner of the earth that does not deserve, if only a
passing glance of wonder and pity.” The
reason for this radical equality is that, due to the interpenetration of one
thing with another, the whole is in theory deducible from any part. Whatever the object under view, a deep enough
consideration will reveal “the subtle but invincible conviction of solidarity
that knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, to the solidarity in
dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear,
which binds men to each other, which binds together all humanity—the dead to
the living and the living to the unborn.”
The uniquely human character of art is the basis for the listing of
emotional reactions rather than sensory “impressions.” Yet, as the last phrase suggests, time
vanishes in the face of Truth, though this sublime vision is available only to “the
deserving and the fortunate,” among whose number his readers are likely to
count themselves, for what reader would identify as one “of the bewildered, the
simple and the voiceless”?
Encouraged then by membership in Conrad’s
elect, the reader may anticipate a range of exhilarating emotions (“all you
demand”) as reward, and may experience as well “that glimpse of truth for which
you have forgotten to ask.” We seem to
have come very little distance from Augustine’s acceptance of literary usages
when employed for the proper end, that is to say, as an aid toward the salvation
that accompanies enlightenment.
One could hardly call this spiritual
business impressionism. When Blake sought
to convey his own visionary excitement, he wrote “When the Sun rises do you not
see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an Innumerable
company of the Heavenly host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God” [3]. Here the bright circle is surely the viewer’s
likely impression, while the second is the contrivance of art. Though the language has changed with God’s
eclipse in the later nineteenth century, Conrad is promising his readers
nothing less than a finger on the pulse of the cosmos.
Apart from Conrad’s own obscurities and
those added by careless readers, the picture of art of the Preface is
defective. Conrad’s posture is
encouraged by his self-dramatization. He
is capable of assuming the posture of a Byronic hero, venturing on dangerous
seas of the mind. For him art is born
from distress, from those contemplative moments when “the artist descends
within himself, and [creates] in that lonely region of stress and strife” [4]. While it is undeniable that some artists have
wrought wonders while working in personal agony, the fact has only incidental
relevance to their creations. For Conrad,
though, the poet must be a dramatic figure who dares to “snatch in a moment of
courage, from the remorseless rush of time” a “rescued fragment” of reality. Surely great works and satisfying visions,
attractive to others, may arise either with or without such psychic tumult? Conrad slights the Apollonian, the classical,
the craftsman-like side of art in order to emphasize personal drama and himself
as an aesthetic adventurer.
He has little to say about the central
role of beauty. Perhaps the most
succinct definition of art is “objects whose purpose is their beauty,” and
beauty is pleasure in a thing for its own sake without functional end. Still, he is not unaware of the importance
of style. “It is only through complete,
unswerving devotion to the perfect blending of form and substance . . . only
through an unremitting never-discouraged care for the shape and ring of
sentences”
The most critical failing of Conrad’s
image of the laborer is the lack of intersubjectivity. The distant figure is not performing and has
no awareness of the onlooker. In that
way it fails to correspond to Conrad’s own description of “all art” as an “appeal
of one temperament to all the other innumerable temperaments whose subtle and
resistless power endows passing events with their true meaning.” Surely Conrad is on secure ground when he
notes that “such an appeal to be effective must be an impression conveyed
through the senses,” but, apart from being based on sensory data, it must also
be intentionally constructed and not, like a sunset, a sea shell, or the great
novelist’s worker glimpsed in a distant field, simply a bit of lived
experience. Not everything that is
beautiful is art, though all art aspires to beauty.
2. For David
Goldknopf’s devastating critique, see The Life of the Novel, 81-83. See also Ian Watt, “Conrad's Preface to
"The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'," NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction,
Vol. 7, No. 2 (Winter, 1974).
3. In “A Vision of
the Last Judgment” Blake was modeling his comments on those of John Dennis’s
“The Grounds of Criticism” (1704): “[T]he Sun mention’d in ordinary
Conversation, gives the Idea of a round flat shining Body, of about two foot
diameter. But the Sun occurring to us in Meditation, gives the Idea of a vast
and glorious Body, and the top of all the visible Creation, and the brightest
material Image of the Divinity.” (The Critical Works of John Dennis, ed.
Edward Niles Hooker [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1939-43], I, 338-39).
4. Surely his phrase
here consciously echoes “Sturm und Drang.”
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