All posts tagged imagination

Typhoon by Joseph Conrad (1902)

Cast

As in all Conrad’s narratives, the story focuses on one central protagonist so vividly that it’s easy to overlook the way it describes many others, obviously the rest of the crew on the ship which experiences the typhoon, but a host of others, the crew’s family members back in Blighty. A full cast list includes:

Captain Thomas MacWhirr, son of a petty grocer in Belfast who ran away to sea at 15 and is now captain of the Nan-Shan.

His Dad, a corpulent man, with a gift for sly chaffing, which to the end of his life he exercised in his intercourse with his son, a little pityingly, as if upon a half-witted person.

His Mother, ‘wept very much after his disappearance’ (p.4).

MacWhirr’s wife, Lucy, ‘the daughter of a superior couple who had seen better days’, now Mrs MacWhirr, ‘a pretentious person with a scraggy neck and a disdainful manner’, and in her neighbourhood considered ‘quite superior’. (p.11)

Their daughter, Lydia, a ‘lanky girl, upon the whole… rather ashamed of him’. (p.11)

Their son, Tom, ‘frankly and utterly indifferent in a straightforward, delightful, unaffected way manly boys have’. (p.11)

Young Jukes, chief mate on the Nan-Shan i.e. MacWhirr’s number two, a lively loquacious young man who frets against his captain’s lack of imagination and blunt speech.

Jukes’ friend who he writes his letters to and who is the second officer on a trans-Atlantic liner (p.13).

Mr Solomon Rout, the chief engineer, also known as Long Sol, Old Sol, or Father Rout, to be found smoking his morning cigar over the skylight. As the tallest man on every ship he joins, he is used to stooping to hear the tales of other seamen.

Mrs Rout, ‘a big, high-bosomed, jolly woman of forty’. (p.12)

Mr Rout‘s toothless and venerable mother, quite deaf, who Mrs Rout has to shout at to communicate with. (p.12)

The new curate near Mrs Rout’s home who she confuses when she talks about ‘Solomon’ saying this or that, because he momentarily thinks she’s referring to the Biblical Solomon and doesn’t realise she’s talking about her husband (p.12).

The ship’s steward who secretly reads MacWhirr’s letters home (p.11).

The cook who the steward gossips to about MacWhirr’s letters (p.68).

The elder and younger of the shipbuilders in Dumbarton where the Nan-Shan was built, and who are described discussing the appointment of MacWhirr as captain.

Bates, foreman of the joiners on the shipyard who is told off when MacWhirr identifies faulty locks on the new ship’s doors.

Old Mr Sigg and young Mr Sigg, owners of the firm in Siam which commissioned the Dumbarton shipbuilders to build the Nan-Shan.

The Bu Hin company’s Chinese clerk who attends the voyage to supervise to the 200 coolies who are being shipped back to China.

Harry, the second engineer, who gets cross at Jukes for not moving the stokehold ventilators to maximise the air flow into the stiflingly hot engine room.

Jack Allen, the second officer who fell overboard into an empty coal lighter, broke some bones and was invalided home (p.20/21), leading to the hurried recruitment of…

The second mate, ‘an oldish, shabby little fellow, with bad teeth and no hair on his face’.

The boatswain or boss’n, ‘an ill-favoured, undersized, gruff sailor of fifty, coarsely hairy, short-legged, long-armed, resembling an elderly ape’ (p.36), who has a wife, ‘a fat woman, and two grown-up daughters [who] kept a greengrocer’s shop in the East-end of London (p.45).

Beale, the third engineer, who never says a word.

Hackett, the heroic helmsman who keeps the ship’s direction through the mayhem of the typhoon (p.47).

The donkeyman, ‘a dapper little chap with a dazzling fair skin and a tiny, gingery moustache, worked in a sort of mute transport’ (p.51).

The coolie who threw his head up like a baying hound in the hold.

The bummer, a tall individual with thin legs, a round belly, wearing ‘a soiled suit of blue flannel with a pair of dirty cricketing shoes; a dingy gray moustache drooped from his lip, and daylight could be seen in two places between the rim and the crown of his hat’, who greets the second mate on the quay at Fu-Chau after MacWhirr has sacked him (p.66).

Twenty-nine identifiable characters in total, not counting the unnamed coolies.

Imagination, the enemy

As in Conrad’s other fictions, having a vivid imagination is regarded as a bad thing and the point of the character of MacWhirr and, to some extent, of the entire story, is as a portrait of a man totally bereft of any spark of imagination whatsoever:

Having just enough imagination to carry him through each successive day, and no more, he [Captain MacWhirr] was tranquilly sure of himself; and from the very same cause he was not in the least conceited. It is your imaginative superior who is touchy, overbearing, and difficult to please; but every ship Captain MacWhirr commanded was the floating abode of harmony and peace.

Old Solomon describes Captain MacWhirr’s honesty as having ‘the heavy obviousness of a lump of clay’ and the captain’s literal-mindedness is reinforced with scores of instances, for example the way he doesn’t get jokes or Jukes’s flights of fantasy. He even dislikes the use of metaphor or simile in speech and tells Jukes off for using them: as when Jukes says the oppressive heavy weather makes him feel as if he had his head tied up in a woollen blanket and MacWhirr asks him when he’s ever had his head tied up in a blanket and why? Or when Jukes jocularly refers to the 200 Chinese coolies as the ‘passengers’ and MacWhirr irritably exclaims:

The Chinamen! Why don’t you speak plainly? Couldn’t tell what you meant. (p.23)

This is a man who speaks with ‘the utmost simplicity of manner and tone’ (p.24). I’ve just come from reading Conrad’s long novel ‘Lord Jim’ which is, arguably, the portrait of a good man undone by his over-active imagination. It’s almost as if Conrad made MacWhirr a conscious study of the extreme opposite.

Would we now think of MacWhirr as having ADHD, the condition which is being diagnosed in ever-growing numbers of people nowadays?

Because at one point this is how Jukes describes him:

He told me once quite simply that he found it very difficult to make out what made people always act so queerly. (p.14)

‘To be silent was natural to him, dark or shine’ (p.29). Maybe some aspects of his character are ‘on the spectrum’, as we say nowadays.

Anyway, within the narrative MacWhirr’s stolid literal-mindedness is deliberately contrasted with his young chief mate, Jukes, a man of quick wit, ‘liveliness of fancy’, fondness for colourful comparisons and inventive figures of speech – all of which MacWhirr deprecates and criticises, much to Jukes’s muttered resentment. Yin and tang. Chalk and cheese. A stark contrast for the purposes of making the narrative more schematic.

So, for example, when the typhoon hits, MacWhirr keeps soldiering stolidly on, making sensible decisions, while Jukes is overcome with panic-fear and wastes all his energy, not managing the situation and its challenges but managing his feverish imagination.

Being very young, he had found the occupation of keeping his heart completely steeled against the worst so engrossing that he had come to feel an overpowering dislike towards any other form of activity whatever. (p.37)

Incommunication

In my reading of Conrad’s other early stories I’ve developed the notion of incommunication to refer to the way so many characters in Conrad can barely communicate with each other.

Mumbling

The number of times the characters murmur, mutter under their breath, look down at their boots, look at the horizon and generally do everything except say what they mean directly to the person they’re talking to.

The second mate made in his throat a noise of an unfriendly nature… (p.20)

Their [the crew’s] grumbling and sighing and muttering worried him [the boatswain] greatly… (p.39)

With his sharp nose, red at the tip, and his thin pinched lips, he always looked as though he were raging inwardly; and he was concise in his speech to the point of rudeness. (p.21)

MacWhirr’s few words

This is notably true of Captain MacWhirr, ‘a man of few words’, (‘He never talks’ complains Jukes), ‘the silent man’, who says nothing unnecessary.

With a temperament neither loquacious nor taciturn he found very little occasion to talk.

Or mutters or mumbles:

This unusual form of address, though mumbled rather than spoken…

But it’s true of other crew members, too, who are endlessly muttering or mumbling under their breath:

‘None of you here shall make a fool of me if I know it,’ he mumbled to himself.

Carried over into letters

Conrad cleverly and rather beautifully takes the time to show how the characters’ ability or inability to express themselves is carried over into the letters they write home to their loved ones, which reflect their characters. Thus the letters MacWhirr writes home to his wife once a month are masterpieces of incommunication, sticking entirely to the banal facts, lacking any colour or expression:

as if the words so long used by so many men were, apart from their shape, worn-out things, and of a faded meaning.

Whereas the letters Old Solomon writes to his wife are full of gossip and comments which his wife reads out loud to his deaf mother.

Mother and curate, deaf and confused

And the episode of the curate, at first sight so arbitrary and random, is in fact a further demonstration of the incommunication theme. What episode? Well, Mrs Rout receives monthly letters from her husband and she enjoys reading them out to Old Solomon’s mother. But because the old lady is deaf, Mrs R has to shout them out loud at the top of her voice – and this is yet another form of incommunication.

The incident of the curate is that, on his first visit to Mrs Rout he is genuinely confused at the talkative woman repeating ‘Solomon says this’ and ‘Solomon says that’, so the curate is worried that she had access to a version of the Bible he didn’t know. It is an instance of comic misinterpretation and confusion, until finally she clarifies that she’s referring to Solomon her husband.

So just this one fairly short digression includes two elements which demonstrate the central theme of incommunication, deafness and misunderstanding.

Foreign

Another form of incommunication is that between people of different languages, such as when Jukes speaks bad pidgen English to the Chinese.

‘No catchee rain down there – savee?’ pointed out Jukes. ‘Suppose all’ee same fine weather, one piecie coolie-man come topside.’

Or when one of the coolies, badly knocked about in their below-decks hold, starts to talk, in a language none of the white characters can begin to understand and so find outlandish and alien.

Suddenly one of the coolies began to speak. The light came and went on his lean, straining face; he threw his head up like a baying hound. From the bunker came the sounds of knocking and the tinkle of some dollars rolling loose; he stretched out his arm, his mouth yawned black, and the incomprehensible guttural hooting sounds, that did not seem to belong to a human language, penetrated Jukes with a strange emotion as if a brute had tried to be eloquent. (p.58)

Maybe Conrad missed a trick by not having any members of the crew be foreign i.e. from another European country, as they are in Lord Jim and other tales (Captain Gustav in Jim; Falk is himself Scandinavian, the German hotel-keeper Schomberg, etc). But maybe he thought that he had a sufficient range of types of incommunication – just among English speakers.

The language of facts

All this inept and clumsy communication stands in start contrast to the world of facts, which, unlike human utterances with all their metaphor and ambiguity, speak to people like MacWhirr in a clear and precise language.

There were matters of duty, of course – directions, orders, and so on; but the past being to his mind done with, and the future not there yet, the more general actualities of the day required no comment – because facts can speak for themselves with overwhelming precision.

The China seas north and south are narrow seas. They are seas full of every-day, eloquent facts, such as islands, sand-banks, reefs, swift and changeable currents – tangled facts that nevertheless speak to a seaman in clear and definite language.

This interpretation is, of course, inflected by the presence of MacWhirr in the sense that Conrad makes us see the world of facts through MacWhirr’s mind, ‘faithful to facts, which alone his consciousness reflected’. If it had been Marlow narrating all this is would have been riven with ambiguities and puzzlement. The entire tone and, in a sense, the worldview of ‘Typhoon’ is set by the bluff stolidity of its central figure so it is his natural world of readily ascertainable facts, which the narrator refers to…

Language shredded by the typhoon

Having been sensitised by all this to the way men communicate (or not) you notice that the arrival of the storm compounds the already-existing communication problems.

The voices of the lost group reached him after the manner of men’s voices in a gale, in shreds and fragments of forlorn shouting snatched past the ear.

And this is then dramatised, as the wind and rain become tumultuous, by Juke’s fragmented attempts to speak to MacWhirr:

All at once Jukes appeared at his side, yelling, with his head down.
‘Watch—put in—wheelhouse shutters—glass—afraid—blow in.’
Jukes heard his commander upbraiding.
‘This—come—anything—warning—call me.’
He tried to explain, with the uproar pressing on his lips.
‘Light air—remained—bridge—sudden—north-east—could turn—thought—you—sure—hear.’

We pride ourselves on being the animal with language, the animal which speaks, but in practice – the story suggests – it is a gift we misuse and abuse as we struggle to convey even the simplest things to each other.

The speaking-tube

Another variation on the theme of speaking and communication is the speaking-tube which connects the bridge with the engine room. In the middle of the storm this acquires a genuine real-world importance as engineer Rout tries to speak to the captain on the bridge but this, also, is a very flawed medium because – at several vital moments – either Rout or the captain are distracted and end up shouting down the tube with no reply, fearing the worst.

In this way the speaking-tube becomes yet another symbol of the vital importance of human speech, of communication, and yet its terrible fragility.

The violent sea

MacWhirr’s lack of imagination and calm unruffled, largely silent mode of life is not only contrasted with Young Jukes (on the human level) but, on a more cosmic level, with the life of the sea itself and this is what the story is about: the man of few words and no imagination for the first time in his life confronting ‘the wrath and fury of the passionate sea’ (p.14).

The typhoon as intensification of normal levels of incommunication

I suppose the typhoon can be seen either as the opposite of the everyday, a grand assault on norms of people’s communications so that they have to put their mouths next to the auditor’s ear and yell their heads off to be heard.

Or, it could be seen as more of an intensification of the normal world. The typhoon represents, on some level, the reality we live in, the storm of confusion and miscommunication which dogs all our lives, with the mask of the everyday stripped away.

Plot summary

So, having established the quite sizeable cast and the central themes of the text, it’s relatively easy to summarise the ‘plot’.

If the story is based on the time Conrad spent working as the chief mate on the Highland Forest under a Captain John McWhir (as most biographers think), then the voyage is set in 1887.

Captain MacWhirr sets off in the Nan-Shan, a British-built steamer flying the Siamese flag, to sail north to the Chinese treaty port of Fu-chau, with some cargo in her lower holds and two hundred Chinese coolies returning to their village homes in the province of Fo-kien, on the fore-deck. They run into a typhoon, the name given to a tropical cyclone in the northwestern part of the Pacific Ocean.

Although MacWhirr’s bluff, unimaginativeness has up till then been criticised by other members of the crew – notably lively young Jukes and the chief engineer Solomon Rout – his refusal to give in to the typhoon or change course, somehow masters the storm and sees the ship safely through it, resulting in the grudging admiration of the senior crew members.

And MacWhirr’s mastery comes to be symbolised by the sound of his steady emotionless voice. Thus when the storm hits the ship, MacWhirr and Jukes are both on the bridge and these temperamental opposites find themselves clinging to each other for dear life. And while the (over) imaginative Jukes repeatedly thinks the ship is doomed, is breaking up, they’re all going to die and so on, while he is cowering in terror, it is the quiet solidity of MacWhirr’s voice which saves him.

Again he heard that voice, forced and ringing feebly, but with a penetrating effect of quietness in the enormous discord of noises, as if sent out from some remote spot of peace beyond the black wastes of the gale; again he heard a man’s voice – the frail and indomitable sound that can be made to carry an infinity of thought, resolution and purpose… (p.33)

And Jukes heard the voice of his commander hardly any louder than before, but nearer, as though, starting to march athwart the prodigious rush of the hurricane, it had approached him, bearing that strange effect of quietness like the serene glow of a halo. (p.34)

He heard with amazement the frail and resisting voice in his ear, the dwarf sound, unconquered in the giant tumult. (p.35)

And presently the voice returned again, half submerged in the vast crashes, like a ship battling against the waves of an ocean… small, lonely and unmoved, a stranger to the visions of hope or fear… (p.35)

Presently a small voice shoved aside the shouting hurricane quietly. ‘You, Jukes? – Well?’ (p.52)

After the initial descriptions of the devastating impact of the typhoon on the ship, the main action or event is that the bosun arrives on the seaswept bridge to tell MacWhirr there’s trouble in the ‘tween-deck where the Chinese are sheltering. So MacWhirr orders Jukes to go below decks to check things out and the narrative follows (a reluctant) Jukes on his journey down into the swaying, black, dangerous bowels of the ship where he discovers the Chinese being thrown all over the place, that some of their luggage has burst open and leaked silver dollars everywhere which they’re now fighting over. So Jukes gets some of the crew to storm the hold and calm the Chinese down (not without cuffs and blows) before establishing lifelines running across it for them to hold onto and then gathering up the silver in order to prevent fights.

During his belowdecks odyssey Jukes also arrives in the engine room, thus giving Conrad the opportunity to describe the heroic leadership of Mr Rout and the work of the stokers, stripped to the waist to keep shovelling coal into the furnaces to keep the engines running. Jukes’ odyssey allows Conrad to give a kind of schematic diagram of the working of the crew in extremis.

The storm descriptions

All the things I’ve listed are perhaps less obvious to the average reader than what most people remember, which is its super-vivid descriptions of the ship, sea and sky in the buildup to, and then the experience of, the thundering typhoon. There are 1) straightforward descriptions:

The darkness palpitated down upon all this, and then the real thing came at last.
It was something formidable and swift, like the sudden smashing of a vial of wrath. It seemed to explode all round the ship with an overpowering concussion and a rush of great waters, as if an immense dam had been blown up to windward. In an instant the men lost touch of each other. This is the disintegrating power of a great wind: it isolates one from one’s kind. An earthquake, a landslip, an avalanche, overtake a man incidentally, as it were – without passion. A furious gale attacks him like a personal enemy, tries to grasp his limbs, fastens upon his mind, seeks to rout his very spirit out of him.
Jukes was driven away from his commander. He fancied himself whirled a great distance through the air. Everything disappeared – even, for a moment, his power of thinking… (p.30)

And:

The gale howled and scuffled about gigantically in the darkness, as though the entire world were one black gully. At certain moments the air streamed against the ship as if sucked through a tunnel with a concentrated solid force of impact that seemed to lift her clean out of the water and keep her up for an instant with only a quiver running through her from end to end.

And:

The Nan-Shan was being looted by the storm with a senseless, destructive fury: trysails torn out of the extra gaskets, double-lashed awnings blown away, bridge swept clean, weather-cloths burst, rails twisted, light-screens smashed – and two of the boats had gone already. They had gone unheard and unseen, melting, as it were, in the shock and smother of the wave. (p.32)

Science fiction

And then 2) there are millenarian visions, when Conrad invokes the powers of the entire universe or sees things on a cosmic scale, when he reaches a kind of science fiction intensity:

At its setting the sun had a diminished diameter and an expiring brown, rayless glow, as if millions of centuries elapsing since the morning had brought it near its end. (p.19)

And:

An outburst of unchained fury, a vicious rush of the wind absolutely steadied the ship; she rocked only, quick and light like a child’s cradle, for a terrific moment of suspense, while the whole atmosphere, as it seemed, streamed furiously past her, roaring away from the tenebrous earth. (p.43)

Is there a touch of H.G. Wells in these descriptions, the sense of all normal human values and experiences far exceeded by the extremity of the storm? This next passage reminded me of ‘The Island of Doctor Moreau’:

And then a hand gripped his thigh… and he felt himself pawed all over. It was the boatswain. Jukes recognized these hands, so thick and enormous that they seemed to belong to some new species of man. (p.36)

Did Wells’s inhuman horrors strike a chord in Conrad’s imagination? At other times the cosmic viewpoint adopts a semi-religious tone:

The Nan-Shan… had about her the worn, weary air of ships coming from the far ends of the world – and indeed with truth, for in her short passage she had been very far; sighting, verily, even the coast of the Great Beyond, whence no ship ever returns to give up her crew to the dust of the earth. (p.66)

It’s only a ship caught in a storm but like the stories of his ship’s chandlers and sea captains and business agents in the jungle, Conrad makes it into an allegory of all humanity and the entire universe.

The great ellipsis and part 2

The twenty pages or so which describe the storm in such blistering intensity in fact only describe the first half of the storm. There is a lull or intermission when the ship breaks into the centre of the typhoon, things calm down and they can hear themselves speak, but there is, of course, then to follow the second part of the storm and this is where Conrad makes his Big Artistic Decision which is… not to depict it. Once, he decides, is enough, and so the ship is just heading into the second part of the typhoon and MacWhirr mutters to himself, ‘I wouldn’t like to lose her’ when this section of the text (which is divided into six parts) abruptly ends with one short, bald sentence.

He was spared that annoyance.

And the narrative cuts away to the sixth and final part, cutting to a few days later when the Nan-Shan finally steams into Fu-chau, severely damaged but still going. Its docking causes a stir but is dramatised by Conrad solely in terms of the ratty second mate, having been fired by MacWhirr, coming ashore and venting all his resentment on the first seedy water rat or ‘bummer’ he encounters, who invites him for a drink.

But most of this last six pages cuts right away from the ship and the Far East altogether, to describe the reactions of the recipients of letters from MacWhirr and Rout and Jukes, letters each describing the storm in different ways, which are received by the different wives (and chum) according to their character.

1) Hoity toity Mrs MacWhirr barely bothers to read it, skimming past the description of the storm and slighting on the only bit that interests her, her husband’s threat to come home soon and see her and the children. Oh why does he want to do that, she complains, not for the first time. And the letter which only briefly describes desperate men risking their lives at sea for pitiful pay ends with an account of Mrs MacWhirr taking her lanky daughter out shopping and greeting other wives in the street.

2) Then Conrad describes Mrs Rout reading out Old Solomon’s letter to his ancient mother and being peeved that Old Sol says the captain did a very clever thing during the typhoon but doesn’t specify what. She is irritated.

3) Then Conrad describes the reception of Juke’s letter by his chum aboard the Atlantic Ocean liner, who goes on to share it with his crew mates and Conrad summarises it for us. It takes four pages and is a quite elaborate coda. Basically Jukes was terrified that the way they sent the Chinese coolies belowdecks and then waded into break them up when they were fighting and then took away all the loose dollars they could find, would have made the Chinese riotous and angry. He worried a lot about what would happen when they finally docked and the mutinous Chinese might demand a public enquiry or a trial and so on, worrying that, as the man who made the decision, he’d be the one in the firing line.

Jukes had only barely gone to bed after 30 hours straight on deck when he’s woken up and told the captain is opening the hatch and letting the Chinese on deck. Terrified there’ll be a riot, Jukes leaps into his clothes and orders one of the crew to distribute rifles, joining eight or so armed crew on the bridge.

It is here that Captain MacWhirr ridicules this stupid over-reaction and tells Jukes to have the rifles locked away immediately before someone gets harmed. Instead he works with the Chinese interpreter from Bu Hin to explain to the coolies that they were locked below for their own safety (witness the damage they can all see on deck), that the lifelines were installed for their own safety, and that all the money the crew could find was confiscated to stop them fighting. Now MacWhirr proposes totalling up all the dollars they confiscated and dividing it up equally and fairly between the Chinese. To Jukes’ astonishment they all agree to this plan as they know that the alternatives are worse: 1) if asked, each of them would exaggerate the sum they’re owed, 2) if MacWhirr hands the hoard over to a Chinese official in the port, it will simply disappear.

To Jukes’ astonishment the Chinese are quite happy with this plan, and it must be the ‘clever decision’ that Rout mentioned in his letter to his wife but didn’t go into details about.

It is also, of course, demonstrates the gulf between over-imaginative Jukes (terrified there’s going to be a riot and so arming the crew in a way that might have led to accidental gunfire which might in fact have triggered a riot) and calm, phlegmatic and unimaginative MacWhirr, who with no mental effort, simply does the right thing.

The last page of this complex text entirely quotes Juke’s letter and the very last sentence of it is deeply ironic as we see Jukes completely misinterpret the character of MacWhirr and the high quality of his leadership decision, paranoidly thinking the captain only did it to avoid the fuss of a public enquiry whereas MacWhirr obviously just thought it was the fair thing to do:

‘This certainly is coming as near as can be to keeping the thing quiet for the benefit of all concerned. What’s your opinion, you pampered mail-boat swell? The old chief says that this was plainly the only thing that could be done. The skipper remarked to me the other day, “There are things you find nothing about in books.” I think that he got out of it very well for such a stupid man.’ (p.74)

But it is Jukes, of course, who is the stupid man.

UnEnglish phrasing

Sometimes Conrad’s bending of the English language, most of the time extremely enjoyable and rewarding, ends up snapping it. These occasions are enjoyable in their own way, for their incongruity:

Yet the uninteresting lives of men so entirely given to the actuality of the bare existence have their mysterious side.

Unbounded wonder was the intellectual meaning of his eye, while incredulity was seated in his whole countenance. (p.25)

29,750 words.

Credit

Typhoon by Joseph Conrad was first published in the Pall Mall Magazine in 1902. Page references are to the Oxford World’s Classics paperback edition, revised and republished in 2008.

Related links

Conrad reviews

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All Strange Away by Samuel Beckett (1964)

But sudden gleam that whatever words given to let fall soundless in the dark that if no sound better none, all right, try sound and if no better say quite speechless, imagine sound and not till then all that black hair toss back into the corner baring face as about to when this happened.

All Strange Away is a powerful short prose text by Samuel Beckett first published in English in 1964. I thought it would be another monologue by a decrepit old man crawling to the end, but although that is the general tone, it is something slightly different. It seems to be the monologue of someone arguing with themselves about how to imagine the scene and the character he’s trying to describe. What scene and what character? Well, there’s the challenge.

Light off and let him be, on the stool, talking to himself in the last person, murmuring, no sound, Now where is he, no, Now he is here. Sitting, standing, walking, kneeling, crawling, lying, creeping, in the dark and in the light, try all.

‘Try all’ seems to be the operative phrase. The narrator, or writer, tries a series of attempts to get down what it is he is trying to convey, imagining various trials or situations or conditions to subject his (fictional) protagonist to. Shall he drag his character out of his frowsy deathbed and off to some place to die in?

Out of the door and down the road in the old hat and coat like after the war, no, not that again.

‘Not that again.’ In the very same sentences where he’s making the suggestions, he refutes them, realises their hopelessness, negates his suggestions even as he makes them. Above all acknowledges the element of hopeless repetition, with the word ‘again’:

A place, that again. Never another question. A place, then someone in it, that again…

OK, a place, let’s start with conceiving a place, what will it be like? He imagines a place five foot square but six foot high – ‘just room to stand and revolve…floor like bleached dirt’ – the light comes on, the character is on a stool, talking in ‘the last person’, light on, takes off coat, no he’s naked, leave it on, he speaks but makes no sound, black sheets of paper gummed to the walls but they, also, reflect the pitiless glare. He has a black shroud on, this character, when the light goes on he gets down on his hands and knees searching for pins in this box, the the light goes off and he still searches, for years this goes on, he clutches the shroud round him till it rots to black ‘flitters’.

The long sentences made up of fragmented clauses are so pared-back that all kinds of syntactic arrangements between the fragments are possible or implied. Used to reading normal, fully-worded, consecutive prose, the reader keeps finding themself completing Beckett’s fragments and sentences, which has two results: 1. it makes the sentences and passages (if you let them, if you’re in the mood) feel incredibly dynamic, packed and overflowing with implications 2. which explains the eerie combination of a frustrating and yet deeply addictive reading experience.

As he was, in the dark any length, then the light when it flows still it ebbs any length, then again, so on, sitting, standing, walking, kneeling, crawling, lying, creeping, all any length, no paper, no pins, no candle, no matches, never were, talking to himself no sound in the last person any length, five foot square, six high, all white when light at full, no way in, none out.

What does he look like, the imagined protagonist?

Imagine eyes burnt ashen blue and lashes gone, lifetime of unseeing glaring, jammed open, one lightning wince per minute on earth, try that.

On the walls are eight pictures, two per wall, light on, no, say one per wall, pictures of who?

Sex

And here we come to another common characteristic of these mid-period Beckett pieces, which is sex. Many of these plays or narratives get so far and then… Beckett seems to run out of ideas and resorts to male-female love, to admittedly pathetic decrepit parodies of romantic love, but love nonetheless.

I’m thinking in particular of the way that, from all the possible memories of his young self and his former life, Krapp in Krapp’s Last Tape ends up settling on just one golden memory, of himself lying in a field with his hand on his true love’s breast.

Same here. Something very weird and abstract abruptly plunges into the all-too-inevitable subject of love, romance, women and sex. In this case the woman is named Emma and Beckett also indulges his fondness, evinced in many of his texts, for the crudest swearwords. These are the pictures on the wall of the protagonist’s cell.

First face alone, lovely beyond words, leave it at that, then deasil breasts alone, then thighs and cunt alone, then arse and hole alone, all lovely beyond words.See how he crouches down and back to see, back of head against face when eyes on cunt, against breasts when on hole, and vice versa, all most clear. So in this soft and mild, crouched down and back with hands on knees to hold himself together, say deasil first from face through hole then back through face, murmuring, Imagine him kissing, caressing, licking, sucking, fucking and buggering all this stuff, no sound.

Charming, as that great literary critic, my mother, would have said. The Beckett Companion summarises this material as ‘The story recalls love-making with “Emma” but the memory is fading’, but that’s not accurate, is it? That sugars the pill and makes it sound more bourgeois and respectable than what is actually written, which is crude and graphic and basic, and deliberately so.

Imagine him kissing, caressing, licking, sucking, fucking and buggering all this stuff, no sound.

Human geometry

Another Beckett element comes into play which is his love of geometry. If you read the plays rather than watching the productions, you’ll know that as the 1950s turned into the 1960s, Beckett’s works became more and more festooned with very detailed stage directions about heights and sizes and angles and positions and movements of the human participants, at the same time as the ‘characters’ or human participants in the works are steadily deprived of names and given letters or numbers. For example, take the way the two characters in Act Without Words II are simply labelled A and B, or the ‘characters’ in Play are labelled M, W1 and W2, combined with the very precise instructions for every element of the onstage action, complete with diagrams which contain numbers, angles, positions and durations.

In this piece the main ‘character’ never has a name but his movements are mapped out in a mockery of a geometry problem:

Call floor angles deasil a, b, c and d and ceiling likewise e, f, g and h, say Jolly at b and Draeger at d, lean him for rest with feet at a and head at g, in dark and light, eyes glaring, murmuring…

(‘Deasil’, by the way, is a Gaelic word which means ‘in the direction of the sun’s apparent course, considered as lucky; clockwise.’ Jolly and Draeger are the names of posters on the walls of the cell, at least until these are replaced in the narrator’s imagination by pictures of Emma’s orifices.)

The misplaced, obsessive precision is carried over into the description of the positioning of the protagonist vis-a-vis the big posters of Emma and her body parts: if there’s one picture on each wall, then, in order to enjoy sight of one, in such a small prison cell, the character must have his head pressed back against another. And Beckett carefully goes through the four possible positions, as is his obsessive wont.

But what if the floor of the cell is hot, almost punishingly hot, and the character wants to lie on it in the most effective way. Hmm. I’m glad you asked, because there are, quite clearly, a number of precise permutations which we shall now go through in sequence:

Sit, knees drawn up, trunk best bowed, head between knees, arms round knees to hold all together. And even lie, arse to knees say diagonal ac, feet say at d, head on left cheek at b. Price to pay and highest lying more flesh touching glowing ground. But say not glowing enough to burn and turning over, see how that works. Arse to knees, say bd, feet say at c, head on right cheek at a. Then arse to knees say again ac, but feet at b and head on left cheek at d. Then arse to knees say again bd, but feet at a and head on right cheek at c. So on other four possibilities when begin again…

‘See how that works’ could be the motto of the piece, indeed of many of Beckett’s prose pieces, like Molloy working out how to suck his stones most efficiently, or any number of the obsessively detailed permutations of physical activity described in Watt.

Emma imprisoned

Then abruptly the narrator/writer says, what if it isn’t the male character in the cell at all, but the lovely Emma?

and how crouching down and back she turns murmuring, Fancy her being all kissed, licked, sucked, fucked and so on by all that, no sound, hands on knees to hold herself together.

‘Fancy her being all kissed, licked, sucked, fucked and so on’ is not something I would summarise, as the Beckett companion does, as ‘The story recalls love-making with “Emma”‘.

Apart from being mildly titillating what these passages do most is remind you how, back in the day, the so-called the avant-garde was addicted to sexual explicitness, as if saying cunt broke taboos, pushed boundaries, subverted bourgeois society.

But what happens when sex is everywhere, we live in a world of multiple, fluid genders and endless pornography of every possible permutation is available at the click of a button on the internet?

In the world of 2020, reading the jolly boundary-breaking swearwords of the 1950s and 60s avant-garde is like watching your Dad try to dance to rave music. Or it is looking back at a simpler world where writers wore jackets and thin black ties for their interviews with plummy BBC interviewers, politely discussing ‘the role of obscenity in literature’, all available now, 60 years later, in spotty, flickery black and white on YouTube.

And thus this text’s strange, haunting combination of anatomical explicitness with geometric precision.

Any length, in dark and light, then topple left, arse to knees say db, feet say at c, head on left cheek at a, left breast puckered in the dust…

The deathless imagination

By this stage, we have the sense that the opening sentence –’Imagination dead imagine’ – can be interpreted as: ‘We might well be in a situation where the imagination is dead, but unfortunately we can’t stop imagining; imagining may well be a bankrupt activity, belonging to the old bourgeois world, before the Holocaust before the atom bombs and yet, no matter how much we despise and reject it and try to move beyond it, that old human instinct to imagine things, to conceive and speak and describe them, seems to be unquenchable. Well, alright, if this is the case, if the old bourgeois forms and imaginings are dead and bankrupt but we don’t appear to be able to stop imagining, then let’s imagine this, let’s test and experiment with imagination reduced to its most minimal amount possible, let’s imagine a cell five foot square and six foot high’ – and off we go…

The entire narrative may give the superficial impression of rambling, but is carefully crafted to convey the feeling of a mind, a writer, trying to reject imagination, rise above imagination, trying to do something new, but continually trapped back into the old tropes and gestures, considering them, then rejecting them, starting again, ‘imagine’ really meaning ‘consider this option, what about this one? No? how about this one…’:

  • imagine light
  • imagine what needed
  • imagine candles and matches
  • imagine eyes burnt ashen blue
  • imagine him kissing
  • imagine lifetime
  • imagine a common housefly
  • imagine hands
  • imagine later, something soft
  • imagine other murmurs
  • imagine turning over

and then the punchline of all these imaginings, the one that contains the title phrase:

  • imagine all strange away

Clearly, imagination is not dead, but works, continues, struggles on, despite the writer’s best efforts to deny or reject it, he cannot evade the ‘so great need of words’. We all need words, words is all we have, even in the last extremities. And so the text continues despite itself, despite its best intentions otherwise, goes on to consider other aspects and approaches to the problem, which include:

– frequent references to the lights in the box cell coming up then fading out, so that the carefully timed duration of these fadings or ‘ebbings’ strongly suggesting stage directions as per Beckett’s countless plays

– suddenly the invocation of names takes a Catholic turn with mention of Mary, Jesus, God and other proper names to be spoken in any combination required, which segues into similar consideration of Greek philosophers (preferably with name of place of birth attached to make you look intelligent and well read)

– and in the piece’s final page the small space that ‘Emma’ was confined in (the man who featured in the early part has vanished) becomes slowly smaller and smaller, forcing her to bend and contort tighter and tighter, the geometric points of her body more and more compacted, until (it doesn’t say this) she must be crushed altogether in the tiny two-foot cuboid

Beckett in 2020

I can see why many people would be utterly repelled by this apparently endless, unpunctuated, pretentious rambling, but I find it utterly entrancing, just as I found The Unnameable by far the strongest of the three Beckett novels precisely because it has most completely abandoned any attempt at character, structure, plot or dialogue in order to become something else completely, something utterly new.

Many critics and readers take Beckett’s works to be masterpieces of nihilism, on a par with the Writing Year Zero extremity of European existentialism or the post-holocaust figurines of Alberto Giacometti. I think I read them in a completely different way. I come to them as a citizen of the year 2020, when humanity hasn’t changed at all, but we have invented even more media – the internet, email, text alerts, social media and all kinds of other channels – with which to bombard ourselves with text and meanings.

Anyone with a mobile device gets bombarded with updates and texts and emails and notifications, telling us to read this guidance, look at this powerpoint, check this spreadsheet, inviting us to like each other’s holiday photos or be outraged at this or that public figure’s latest example of everyday sexism or racism or misogyny or whatever.

The framework of digital media we have erected around ourselves amounts, in my opinion, to a high-tech cage, a prison of thumpingly obvious meanings within which most people find it reassuring to dwell, venting their woke or reactionary views via twitter, sharing their makeup secrets via Instagram and so on, a vast mental prisonhouse of conformity created by its billions of users and consumers.

That’s what 2020 feels like to me. And so Beckett’s oeuvre, his increasingly brief, abstract plays, the surprising number of short prose pieces he produced on the same minimalist themes, all these attempts to float free of narrative and logic seem to me to be wonderfully liberating, freeing the mind of anyone who really engages with them from the prisonhouse of contemporary meaning, the degraded discourse of shouty politics or trashy consumerism which literally billions of people have chosen to plug into their brains and to dominate their imaginations.

I don’t find Beckett’s works ‘difficult’. Just read a piece like this out loud, slowly, savouring the jumps, the gaps in syntax and logic which require you to fill them in, or are the record of someone who has gone beyond needing them and whose journey beyond meaning takes you with it, into an entirely new linguistic space.

Either way they’re exercises in escaping the tyranny of the sensible, the common sensical, the flat trite empty mindless twaddle pumped out by the modern media machine in all directions, 24/7.

Such then the sound roughly and if no clearer so then all the storm unspoken and the silence unbroken unless sound of light and dark or at the moments of change a sound of flow thirty seconds till full then silence any length till sound of ebb thirty seconds till black then silence any length, that might repay hearing and she hearing open then her eyes to lightening or darkening greys and not close them then to keep them closed till next sound of change till full light or dark, that might well be imagined.

When he wrote them, Beckett’s pieces may have been designed to shock the bourgeois world of cocktail parties and lounge suits by their a) aggressive bleakness b) geometrical denial of human individuality and b) resort to crude swearwords. Now, 60 years later, I find their teasing meanings, their reassuring repetitions, the recurring tropes and strategies, oddly comforting.

I like the spare abstract empty prose which his box of tricks generates. I enjoy reading such ‘white’ prose, almost entirely empty of content and amounting to a fabric of teasing repetitions, snatches and fragments. It makes a refreshing change from the oppressive tyranny of forced, shallow, angry 100% obvious meaning which dominates the modern world.

In the second half of the piece, titled Diagram, the text whirls and twirls a number of fragments, clearly intending to create a kind of poetry through the repetition of the image of black hair falling across white skin, interspersing some kind of fragment of a memory of lying in a hammock in the sun, and maybe distant repeated snatches of sobbing… This is the last sentence:

Henceforth no other sounds than these and never were that is than sop to mind faint sighing sound for tremor of sorrow at faint memory of a lying side by side and fancy murmured dead.

Which is an example of the way that Beckett’s supposedly dehumanised, anti-humanistic anti-plays and anti-narratives often end up conveying, albeit in an unorthodox way, a melancholy sense of time fleeting and human loss which is surprisingly straightforward and sentimental. He may be well aware that they are ‘sops to mind’, but that doesn’t stop these moments sticking in the memory because they are so very much what ‘traditional’ literature, especially poetry, is meant to be and do, from the Latin poets’ lachrymae rerum to Wordsworth musing by Tintern Abbey.

Personally, I find it more bracing to focus on the deliberately anti-human elements, the geometrical formulae, the detailed, complex and entirely arbitrary stage directions which mimic, in their heartless elaborateness, the elaborate heartlessness which (presumably) Beckett saw as the essence of human existence.

When Irish eyes are smiling…

And, lastly, never forget that there’s quite a lot of sly humour buried away behind the grim fragments and the struggle to speak, to express anything, in Beckett’s texts. Behind the elaborate machinery of despair, there’s always a sly twinkle in his beady Irish eyes. Here’s a description of ‘Emma’, increasingly contorted as the space she is crammed into becomes ever smaller.

Last look oh not farewell but last for now on right side tripled up and wedged in half the room head against wall at a and arse against wall at C and knees against wall AB an inch or so from head and feet against wall be an inch or so from arse.

‘An inch or so from arse’. Quite.

Related link

Samuel Beckett’s works

An asterisk indicates that a work was included in the Beckett on Film project, which set out to make films of all 19 of Beckett’s stage plays using leading actors and directors. The set of 19 films was released in 2002 and most of them can be watched on YouTube.

The Second World War 1939 to 1945

*Waiting For Godot 1953 Play

Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature 1969

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by Simon on December 21, 2020  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on December 21, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/12/21/all-strange-away-samuel-beckett/