Horror, ruin and everlasting remorse. And no help. None. I had fallen amongst a lot of unfriendly lunatics!
(Conrad demonstrates his usual gift for calm understatement)
Thus from question to question I got the whole story.
(Perfect expression of the way a Conrad story is often a piecing together of evidence by the narrator)
‘Falk: A Reminiscence’ is a work of short fiction by Joseph Conrad, 30,499 words long. Conrad completed it in May 1901. Conrad usually placed his stories with magazines for obvious financial reasons (to get paid twice, once by the magazine and then by a book publisher when the story was published in a collection), but he failed to place ‘Falk’ because of its controversial subject matter (see below). So the story first saw the light of day in book form, in ‘Typhoon and Other Stories’, published by William Heinemann in 1903.
Quick summary
Like ‘Heart of Darkness’ and ‘Lord Jim’, ‘Falk’ has a frame narrative which establishes the setting. Like those narratives, it is told after dinner to a group of fellow seaman who can be trusted to understand its technical details and nuances.
Several of us, all more or less connected with the sea, were dining in a small river-hostelry not more than thirty miles from London…
The narrator of the text we read is not the narrator of the story. He is one of the diners, and watches and listens as a different diner tells the tale which makes up the text.
Then one of us, who had not spoken before, a man of over fifty, that had commanded ships for a quarter of a century, looking after the barque now gliding far away, all black on the lustre of the river, said:
‘This reminds me of an absurd episode in my life, now many years ago, when I got first the command of an iron barque, loading then in a certain Eastern seaport. It was also the capital of an Eastern kingdom, lying up a river as might be London lies up this old Thames of ours. No more need be said of the place; for this sort of thing might have happened anywhere where there are ships, skippers, tugboats, and orphan nieces of indescribable splendour. And the absurdity of the episode concerns only me, my enemy Falk, and my friend Hermann.’
This fifty-something man takes us back 20 years or so (to the 1880s) when he was a 29-year-old newly commissioned officer employed by the Dutch East India Company. He had been appointed ex-officio by the British Consul to take charge of a ship after her captain had died suddenly, leaving the ship’s affairs in a complete mess, bills scattered around the messy cabin, important documents for some reason stored in a violin case (p.83).
I was totally inexperienced, greatly ignorant of business, and hopelessly unfit for any sort of command.
The first half of the story leisurely describes this inexperienced young man’s efforts to bring order to a ship which had been left in chaos by his predecessor, who neglected his duties and kept a mistress on shore.
Delayed from sailing the narrator-captain takes to visiting another vessel, the Diana, and gets to know its skipper, Hermann, who has aboard his wife and four children.
Hermann had been trading in the East for three years or more, carrying freights of rice and timber mostly.
Also on Hermann’s ship is his niece, an orphan he’s been looking after for three years. The narrator makes it abundantly clear that this niece is a full-figured, buxom and attractive woman, in terms which are unusually explicit for the usually restrained and aloof Conrad.
The girl was of the sort one necessarily casts eyes at in a sense. She made no noise, but she filled most satisfactorily a good bit of space. (p.104)
Magnificent in her close-fitting print frock she displayed something so commanding in the manifest perfection of her figure that the sun seemed to be rising for her alone. The flood of light brought out the opulence of her form and the vigour of her youth in a glorifying way.
The title character of the story, Captain Christian Falk, is the owner of the only tugboat in the harbour. He is a rash, impetuous, touchy man and behaves with increasing animosity towards the narrator, for no reason the narrator can make out. This climaxes when, one morning before anybody’s up, Falk abruptly attaches his tow cables to Hermann’s ship, the Diana, and tows it out of the shallow harbour, down the river to the estuary mouth, ready to set sail (pages 94 to 96). What makes this odd is that he had promised and contracted to tow the narrator’s ship first, so this is a striking breach of their agreement. And the impetuous haste with which he does it damages quite a bit of the Diana‘s woodwork.
Anyway, in Conrad’s usual circumlocutory manner it takes some time for the basic fact of the story to come out which is that – Falk is in love with Hermann’s niece and thinks the narrator is a rival for her affections. His irrational animosity to the narrator is based on the completely erroneous idea that the narrator is in love with her, too.
When Falk confronts the narrator with this accusation, over a drink and a game of cards in Schomberg’s hotel, the latter has to tactfully explain that he visits the Diana so often, not to woo the niece, but because he is young and a little lonely and enjoys the reassuring domestic atmosphere aboard the Diana, what with the homely wife and Hermann’s little children. He enjoys being waited on, eating well and then sharing a pipe and a chat with old Captain Hermann (p.87) – the buxom niece is neither here nor there.
Thus the air is finally cleared between the two ‘rivals’ and Falk abates his hostility. The narrator goes so far as to say he will help Falk’s suit and talk to Hermann, mediating as a go-between.
All this has taken up about two-thirds of the story, and it’s only in the final pages that the core of the thing is revealed. Because Falk, from misconceived notions of honour and chivalry, in a visit to Hermann, with the whole family present, insists on making his big confession: years ago, when marooned on a stranded ship, he murdered a man and then took part in dismembering, cooking and eating his body. He is a cannibal.
‘Imagine to yourselves,’ he said in his ordinary voice, ‘that I have eaten man.’
Conrad’s telling of Falk’s telling of the story of the marooned ship goes into very great detail, with descriptions of all the key crew aboard the doomed ship and a gruelling account of how the ship’s crew ran low on water, and ran completely out of food, till the crew resorted to boiling boot leather and then eating wood.
But as you can imagine, Falk’s confession has a devastating impact on everyone present and has aftershocks on all the characters. Having confessed, Falk sees the Hermann family’s reaction, thinks he has blown his suit, makes his excuses and leaves, leaving the narrator and Hermann to talk through this staggering revelation.
But, to cut a long story short, it turns out the niece doesn’t mind, insists she wants the match to go ahead, and Hermann is talked into it for financial reasons. (He wants to return home to Europe, taking his family with him; the niece would have required a room of her own and thus doubled the fare; marrying her off to Falk solves his legal responsibility for her and saves a tidy bit of money, p.144.) The next day the narrator sees the ‘happy couple’ standing on deck together.
They met in sunshine abreast of the mainmast. He held her hands and looked down at them, and she looked up at him with her candid and unseeing glance. It seemed to me they had come together as if attracted, drawn and guided to each other by a mysterious influence. They were a complete couple. In her grey frock, palpitating with life, generous of form, olympian and simple, she was indeed the siren to fascinate that dark navigator, this ruthless lover of the five senses. From afar I seemed to feel the masculine strength with which he grasped those hands she had extended to him with a womanly swiftness. (p.144)
So they get married. The novel ends with a comic touch which is also a comment on the nature of stories, particularly in Conrad’s community of yarning, gossiping seamen i.e. how they get embellished, simplified and turned into legends. When he returns to the (unnamed) port, five years later, the narrator discovers he is n ow part of a much-told tale, about ‘a certain Falk, owner of a tug, who had won his wife at cards from the captain of an English ship’ (p.145).
Clever, deft and funny, it is one of Conrad’s very rare happy endings.
Primitive
‘Heart of Darkness’ is famous for the mood it creates of travelling back in time to the primitive barbaric origins of humanity (in the heart of Africa) and, in a striking passage at the end, for projecting this barbarism onto the London where its narrator, Marlow, is telling his yarn, a London which had also been, as he puts it, one of the dark places of the earth.
Anyway, it’s notable that this story too juxtaposes the comfortable after-dinner setting – posh chaps enjoying a cigar and a yarn – with the sense of their primitive ancestors looming, as it were, over their shoulders.
The wooden dining-room stuck out over the mud of the shore like a lacustrine dwelling; the planks of the floor seemed rotten; a decrepit old waiter tottered pathetically to and fro before an antediluvian and worm-eaten sideboard; the chipped plates might have been disinterred from some kitchen midden near an inhabited lake; and the chops recalled times more ancient still. They brought forcibly to one’s mind the night of ages when the primeval man, evolving the first rudiments of cookery from his dim consciousness, scorched lumps of flesh at a fire of sticks in the company of other good fellows; then, gorged and happy, sat him back among the gnawed bones to tell his artless tales of experience – the tales of hunger and hunt – and of women, perhaps! (p.77)
1) It’s an effective, imaginative trope in its own right but also very current at the time, the late-Victorian early-Edwardian era, in a civilisation ever-more aware of the gulf between its own haves and have-nots, and the yawning gulf between the West and the native inhabitants of so many of its colonised countries. The note of barbarism reminds me of the H.G. Wells of The Time Machine and The island of Dr Moreau.
2) But the description also, of course, neatly sets up the central event of the story, which is an act of desperate cannibalism, a reversion to primitive bestial pre-civilised behaviour.
Cosmic
Mention of Wells lets me slip in here an example of what I call the cosmic note in Conrad, the handful of moments in every story where he zooms out from his specific characters to make some comparison with the world, the solar system, the universe.
I don’t mean to say she was statuesque. She was too generously alive; but she could have stood for an allegoric statue of the Earth. I don’t mean the worn-out earth of our possession, but a young Earth, a virginal planet undisturbed by the vision of a future teeming with the monstrous forms of life and death, clamorous with the cruel battles of hunger and thought. (p.82)
Totemic figure
Heart of Darkness is a long study of the mesmeric figure of Mr Kurtz who the narrator approaches from multiple angles, gets various third-party opinions about, talks to at multiple moments, but whose mystery he never penetrates.
‘Lord Jim’ is a long study of the mesmeric figure of Jim who the narrator approaches from multiple angles, gets various third-party opinions about, talks to at multiple moments, but whose mystery he never penetrates.
Falk is a (not-so-long) study of the puzzling figure of Falk who the narrator approaches from multiple angles, talks to at multiple moments, gets various third-party opinions about, offers to help, but whose mystery he never penetrates.
He remained still for a time in the dark – silent; almost invisible. (p.130)
Spot the pattern? All Conrad’s themes – incommunication, the mystery of other people, the wafer thin line between civilisation and barbarism, between sanity and madness – he discovered early on were best achieved by an unrelenting focus on one, central, symbolic and mysterious figure.
The large and variegated cast
As usual what starts out seeming like it will be a fairly straightforward story concerning a handful of characters, ends up becoming very complex and referring to a large number of secondary characters:
– The 50-something captain-narrator, ‘a man of over fifty, that had commanded ships for a quarter of a century’.
– His crew – a mate, second mate, a Chinaman.
– Captain Hermann, German, a ‘Schiff-fuhrer or ship-conductor’, skipper of the Diana out of Bremen, ‘the simple, heavy appearance of a well-to-do farmer, combined with the good-natured shrewdness of a small shopkeeper. With his shaven chin, round limbs, and heavy eyelids he did not look like a toiler, and even less like an adventurer of the sea.’
– His wife Mrs Hermann, ‘an engaging, stout housewife… [wearing] baggy blue dresses with white dots… Her voice was pleasant, she had a serene brow, smooth bands of very fair hair, and a good-humoured expression of the eyes. She was motherly and moderately talkative.’
– Their four children – Lena, Gustav, Carl, Nicholas the baby.
– Hermann’s (unnamed) niece, 19, who they’ve carried about with them for 3 years, a figure of ‘much bodily magnificence’, ‘You could not call her good-looking. It was something much more impressive. The simplicity of her apparel, the opulence of her form, her imposing stature, and the extraordinary sense of vigorous life that seemed to emanate from her like a perfume exhaled by a flower, made her beautiful with a beauty of a rustic and olympian order. To watch her reaching up to the clothes-line with both arms raised high above her head, caused you to fall a musing in a strain of pagan piety.’
– Schomberg, a brawny, hairy Alsatian, ‘proprietor of the smaller of the two hotels in the place’, where everyone meets to drink and gossip. This character appears in ‘Lord Jim’. Conrad liked having characters occur in different narratives, the prime example being the storyteller Charles Marlow who narrates Heart of Darkness, Youth and Lord Jim.
– Mrs Schomberg who cooks and helps in her husband’s hotel.
– Captain Christian Falk, Scandinavian (the narrator can’t remember whether he was Danish or Norwegian, p.88), skipper of the only tug on the river, ‘a very trim white craft of 150 tons or more, as elegantly neat as a yacht.’
He had her manned by the cheekiest gang of lascars I ever did see, whom he allowed to bawl at you insolently, and, once fast, he plucked you out of your berth as if he did not care what he smashed. Eighteen miles down the river you had to go behind him, and then three more along the coast to where a group of uninhabited rocky islets enclosed a sheltered anchorage. There you would have to lie at single anchor with your naked spars showing to seaward over these barren fragments of land scattered upon a very intensely blue sea. (p.
– Falk had previously wooed a Miss Vanlo, a very ladylike girl who came out from Britain to keep house for her brother, played the piano to entertain Falk, but was sickly and died.
– Fred Vanlo, brother of the ill-fated Miss Vanlo, ‘who had an engineering shop for small repairs by the water side’.
– Old Mr Siegers, ‘the father, the old gentleman who retired from business on a fortune and got buried at sea going home’, invested in Falk’s business.
– Young Mr Siegers, ditto (p.101).
– Gambril, elderly seaman on the narrator’s ship. He also appears in ‘The Shadow Line’.
– Johnson, ‘formerly captain of a country ship, but now spliced to a country wife and gone utterly to the bad’, ‘sallow of face, grizzled, unshaven, muddy on elbows and back; where the seams of his serge coat yawned you could see his white nakedness’.
– Mrs Johnson, ‘the big native woman, with bare brown legs as thick as bedposts’.
– The Consulate’s constable, an ex-sergeant-major of a regiment of Hussars (p.109).
Plus the separate set of characters in the cannibal’s tale (see below).
The cannibal’s tale
Only towards the end, in the last major passage of the text, does Falk tell his story to the narrator, having himself rowed out to the narrator’s ship expressly for the purpose (pages 133 to 142). It happened ten years back, when he sailed as first mate on the first ship sent by his native town to the South Seas, the Borgmester Dahl. One fine day the propeller dropped off, they lost power and drifted away from the main sea lanes, becoming less and less likely to be spotted and rescued. At first they ration the food but then it gives out and they are reduced to eating leather or chewing wood.
The narrator subjects Falk’s account to characteristically Conradian analysis, invoking the basic needs of bare, forked humanity.
He wanted to live. He had always wanted to live. So we all do – but in us the instinct serves a complex conception, and in him this instinct existed alone. There is in such simple development a gigantic force, and like the pathos of a child’s naive and uncontrolled desire.
This extended passage goes into lots of detail. It could be excerpted from the rest of the tale as a description of the harrowing effects of starving at ease. Falk quickly paints the characters of the main crewmen, the obstinate captain, the chief engineer and so on. And doesn’t stint on the characteristically Conradian hyperbole and his favourite vocabulary of human extremes.
It is, of course, no ordinary accident, but one which leads to the ship drifting helplessly out of the usual shipping lanes as the men slowly starved and descended into despair…
Consternation and despair possessed the remaining ship’s company, till the apathy of utter hopelessness re-asserted its sway. That day a fireman committed suicide, running up on deck with his throat cut from ear to ear, to the horror of all hands.
The captain jumps overboard. they boil their boots to eat, skeletons aboard the carcass of a ship. More men commit suicide jumping over. Falk tries to grab and prevent a few but is haunted by the lost look in their eyes, but he resolves not to die.
His heart revolted against the horror of death, and he said to himself that he would struggle for every precious minute of his life.
The carpenter is the only other man of mettle, who’s kept his spirits up. Falk likes him, they form a kind of unspoken bond (as so many men do in Conrad) but one day, as he’s bending over the remaining water butt, he hears the carpenter sneaking up behind to brain him with a crowbar. Falk leaps out the way, punches him to the deck then barricades himself in his cabin. He has a revolver and the porthole of his cabin is next to the the only barrel of freshwater, in other words, if he can stay awake, he can nab the carpenter as he tries to sneak a drink. Next morning, after a tussle, Falk shoots the carpenter dead.
Starved spectres of men crawl out from their hiding places and they butcher and eat the carpenter. Even then, most of them died as the starving weeks dragged on. In the end only three others were rescued with him when the ship was finally spotted and rescued.
And, as usual, in Conrad’s hands the central figure of this harrowing tale assumes symbolic proportions, comes to stand for some kind of cosmic principle.
He had survived! I saw him before me as though preserved for a witness to the mighty truth of an unerring and eternal principle. (p.142)
And not just Falk. Earlier we heard the narrator comparing Hermann’s unnamed niece to a Greek goddess, stirring pagan thoughts. Now, having turned the cannibal Falk into the embodiment of the deep human will to survive and endure, he sees how these two emblematic figures are destined for each other.
She was eminently fitted to interpret for him its feminine side. And in her own way, and with her own profusion of sensuous charms, she also seemed to illustrate the eternal truth of an unerring principle. (p.142)
Falk’s build
Falk defeated the carpenter and survived, and is now such a fierce antagonist because he is big and strong; he has an odd head and face but his body is massive.
The wind swayed the lights so that his sunburnt face, whiskered to the eyes, seemed to successively flicker crimson at me and to go out. I saw the extraordinary breadth of the high cheek-bones, the perpendicular style of the features, the massive forehead, steep like a cliff, denuded at the top, largely uncovered at the temples. The fact is I had never before seen him without his hat; but now, as if my fervour had made him hot, he had taken it off and laid it gently on the floor. Something peculiar in the shape and setting of his yellow eyes gave them the provoking silent intensity which characterised his glance. But the face was thin, furrowed, worn; I discovered that through the bush of his hair, as you may detect the gnarled shape of a tree trunk lost in a dense undergrowth. These overgrown cheeks were sunken. It was an anchorite’s bony head fitted with a Capuchin’s beard and adjusted to a herculean body. I don’t mean athletic. Hercules, I take it, was not an athlete. He was a strong man, susceptible to female charms, and not afraid of dirt. And thus with Falk, who was a strong man. He was extremely strong.
‘Herculean.’ Hercules being, of course, a figure from Greek legend and thus fitting in with the classical hints dropped throughout the text – the niece’s pagan statuesque figure, the name of Hermann’s ship being Diana, use of the adjective pagan and other sneaky little references.
I saw the modest, sleek glory of the tawny head, and the full, grey shape of the girlish print frock she filled so perfectly, so satisfactorily, with the seduction of unfaltering curves—a very nymph of Diana the Huntress. (p.122)
The sirens sing and lure to death, but this one had been weeping silently as if for the pity of his life. She was the tender and voiceless siren of this appalling navigator…
As to Falk’s size and strength, the narrator speculates:
But maybe women liked it. Seen in that light he was well worth taming, and I suppose every woman at the bottom of her heart considers herself as a tamer of strange beasts.
As the feminist saint Sylvia Plath wrote:
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
The world in a story
One of the marvellous things about Conrad’s fictions is the effort he takes to describe not just the key protagonists, but to depict the entire world in which they move. Having such an extensive cast in every story helps achieve this, but so does a passage like this which tries to paint the wider society the characters move in.
We explored together on that afternoon an infinity of infamous grog shops, gambling dens, opium dens. We walked up narrow lanes where our gharry – a tiny box of a thing on wheels, attached to a jibbing Burmah pony – could by no means have passed. The constable seemed to be on terms of scornful intimacy with Maltese, with Eurasians, with Chinamen, with Klings, and with the sweepers attached to a temple, with whom he talked at the gate. We interviewed also through a grating in a mud wall closing a blind alley an immensely corpulent Italian, who, the ex-sergeant-major remarked to me perfunctorily, had ‘killed another man last year’. Thereupon he addressed him as ‘Antonio’ and ‘Old Buck’, though that bloated carcase, apparently more than half filling the sort of cell wherein it sat, recalled rather a fat pig in a stye. Familiar and never unbending, the sergeant chucked – absolutely chucked – under the chin a horribly wrinkled and shrivelled old hag propped on a stick, who had volunteered some sort of information: and with the same stolid face he kept up an animated conversation with the groups of swathed brown women, who sat smoking cheroots on the door-steps of a long range of clay hovels. We got out of the gharry and clambered into dwellings airy like packing crates, or descended into places sinister like cellars.
The usual Conrad hyperbole
Even in a relatively light-hearted story Conrad can’t help himself resorting to notions like madness, misery, terror, horror, despair, imbecility and so on. It’s second nature to him, these are the concepts and words which come readiest to his pen.
I was glad to make any escape on board that Bremen Diana. There apparently no whisper of the world’s iniquities had ever penetrated. And yet she lived upon the wide sea: and the sea tragic and comic, the sea with its horrors and its peculiar scandals, the sea peopled by men and ruled by iron necessity is indubitably a part of the world.
There was a sense of lurking gruesome horror somewhere in my mind, and it was mingled with clear and grotesque images
He stood up; he flung himself down headlong; he tried to tear the cushion with his teeth; and again hugging it fiercely to his face he let himself fall on the couch. The whole ship seemed to feel the shock of his despair.
Conrad knows his tendency to rush straight to the extremities of human experience is his biggest weakness and throws in a pre-emptive mention of it
‘What is it you said I was last night? You know,’ he [Hermann] asked after some preliminary talk. “Too – too – I don’t know. A very funny word.’
Squeamish?’ I suggested.
‘Yes. What does it mean?’
‘That you exaggerate things – to yourself. Without inquiry, and so on.’ (p.143)
He’s aware he does it but he can’t stop. His stories are made out of exaggeration, extremity and hyperbole. A cannibal!
Puzzlement
The hyperbole is an obvious quality that many readers comment on. But having just read ‘Lord Jim’, ”Typhoon’ and ‘The End of the Tether’, I’ve realised that deeper and more important than it, the core Conrad quality, is the way his characters, and in particular his narrators, are continually puzzled and bewildered by everything, and especially all other human beings. They are hopelessly bewildered by other people’s behaviour.
His manner was usually odd it is true, and I certainly did not pay much attention to it; but that sort of obscure intention, which seemed to lurk in his nonchalance like a wary old carp in a pond, had never before come so near the surface. (p.92)
I remember only that there was, on that evening, enough point in his behaviour to make me, after he had fled, wonder audibly what he might mean. To this Hermann, crossing his legs with a swing and settling himself viciously away from me in his chair, said: ‘That fellow don’t know himself what he means.’ (p.93)
Hermann seemed to be requesting an answer of some sort from her; his whole body swayed. She remained mute and perfectly still; at last his agitation gained her; she put the palms of her hands together, her full lips parted, no sound came. His voice scolded shrilly, his arms went like a windmill – suddenly he shook a thick fist at her. She burst out into loud sobs. He seemed stupefied.
She shook her head back at me negatively, I wonder why to this day.
His tales tend to focus around one person, a man – Almayer, Willems, Karain, Kurtz, Jim, Falk – and the text mostly consists of very lengthy and puzzled speculations about this man’s character and behaviour.
The narrators often cajole their auditors by asking rhetorical questions which demonstrate how the narrator not only doesn’t understand what’s going on, or understand the nature of the central protagonist, but just as often doesn’t understand himself, throwing out speculations and asking his auditors to agree:
How shall I express it? what else could it be?
As a footnote, the narrator thinks women are particularly impenetrable, which may be taken as a sexist thought. But really ‘they’ are only a bit more imponderable than all the men in the story:
It was impossible to make out women. Mrs. Hermann was the only one he pretended to understand.
In a nutshell, nothing is clear. This is another meaning of the comic ending where the narrator finds out that his rivalry with Falk has been turned into a legend. At the time everything is hopelessly confused and afterwards people turn the howling confusion of life into simple stories to comfort and amuse themselves.
Inarticulacy
Intimately connected with the inability to understand other human beings is the continual failure to communicate with each other demonstrated by all the characters, in a hundred ways, large and small.
His speech was not transparently clear. He was one of those men who seem to live, feel, suffer in a sort of mental twilight.
Schomberg tapped his manly breast. I sat half stunned by his irrelevant babble.
Falk had a low, nervous laugh. His cool, negligent undertone had no inflexions, but the strength of a powerful emotion made him ramble in his speech.
I heard Hermann’s voice declaiming in the cabin, and I went in. I could not at first make out a single word, but Mrs. Hermann, who, attracted by the noise, had come in some time before, with an expression of surprise and mild disapproval, depicted broadly on her face, was giving now all the signs of profound, helpless agitation.
And in fact the point of the entire story is a clumsy, maladroit communication. After a very long buildup, after all manner of confusions and misunderstandings – not least Falk’s eccentric decision to tow Hermann’s ship not the narrator’s, without telling either of them, leaving them both astonished – the bombshell at the heart of the story is delivered in one simple sentence:
‘I have eaten man.’
Leaving the narrator faint and Hermann dazed. It’s not only a dazzling revelation in its subject matter but also in that it is an extremely rare instance of someone speaking a simple blunt truth. All that foreplay leading up to this blunt admission!
More than coping with the horror, terror, imbecility etc etc which Conrad says he sees at the heart of human existence, the real subject of his fictions is the difficulty of making sense of the world and, above all, of other people.
Remembering the things one reads of it was difficult to realise the true meaning of his answers. I ought to have seen at once – but I did not; so difficult is it for our minds, remembering so much, instructed so much, informed of so much, to get in touch with the real actuality at our elbow.
The language barrier
His pronunciation of English was so extravagant that I can’t even attempt to reproduce it. For instance, he said ‘Fferie strantch.’ (p.107)
It is of course important that two of the three central figures in the story (narrator, Hermann, Falk) are not British, are not native English speakers. Hermann is German and Falk is Scandinavian and they are both described as struggling to express themselves in English (why are they talking English at all?). When they speak their own languages the narrator, confused already about what’s going on, struggles to understand.
At the sight of Falk, stepping over the gangway, the excellent man would begin to mumble and chew between his teeth something that sounded like German swear-words. However, as I’ve said, I’m not familiar with the language, and Hermann’s soft, round-eyed countenance remained unchanged. (p.90)
And although the narrator is described as a pukka Englishman he is, of course the mouthpiece of Józef Korzeniowski who, although all the literary guides tell you is one of the glories of early 20th century English literature, nonetheless doesn’t write English like an Englishman at all.
The English Edwardian novelists are H.G. Wells, E.M. Forster, John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, who are concerned with the micro distinctions of England’s class system and Edwardian scandals, or the suave Somerset Maugham or entertaining Saki or Kipling in his Sussex fairies mode – none of them describe anything like Conrad’s reports back from a universe of horror and moral collapse, none of them have his dramatically florid way with the language which he himself experienced at one remove and had so many of his characters struggle and fail to master.
Silence
The most complete lack of conventional communication is, of course, silence and it is no accident that the woman at the heart of the story, who the men gravitate around like the sun at the centre of her little solar system of men, the niece, never speaks. I wonder if Conrad had her saying this or that, maybe chatting to the narrator on his visits to the Diana etc – but then realised that she became a vastly more potent and symbolic presence if she said nothing, nothing at all.
Books & Boots 