Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation

2012-09-08T01:56:00.000-07:00

" Begin at the beginning", said the King gravely, and go on till you come to the end, then stop." ( Lewis Caroll ,Alice in Wonderland) A simple Alice -in -Wonderland statement that connotes and bodies forth the pre-Cinematic era of daguerro type montage- " a kind of alternate to the theatre with various sorts of static, stagey, lengthy tableaus". A leap into the realm of Victorian and early modernist fiction gives a similar 'oeuvre' of beginning, middle and end. The movement away from this scenographic syndrome was painfully slow and needed aThomas Hardy or a Joseph Conrad to give it a cinematic perspective. Joseph Conrad, the writer, was interested in only what he called, the "truth of life". Perhaps, no writer has prepared himself to tell the truth more thoroughly, more conscientiously , than Conrad. It is worth emphasizing that Conrad aimed for nothing less than an imaginative and artistic vision of life. Other views of it-political ,sociological, religious- he repudiated. It was in this obssessive telling of the 'truth', that Conrad's narrative falls back constantly upon the cinematic mode of visually concretized details.

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Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation; Part-2

2012-09-07T20:33:00.000-07:00

In order to concretize visuals with microscopic accuracy and to present the 'whole' truth, Conrad attempted energetically to shun the temptation to use the God-like authorial privelege where the author presides over his self-created world of fiction. To resolve the problem of the author as an omniscient observor Conrad invented surrogates for himself.

The 'Heart of Darkness', undoubtedly, begins with the god-like eye of the 'outside narrator' ,who takes the reader abroad the 'Nellie', a cruising yawl,which swung to her anchor without a flutter of sails and was at rest". The sea-search of the Thames stretched before ...

... us like the beginning of an interminable waterway. In the offing, the sea and the sky were welded together, without a joint and in the luminious space, the tamed sails of the barges drifting up with the tide seemed to stand still in red clusters of cannas sharply peaked with gleams of varnished spirits. A haze rested on the low shores that ran out to sea in vanishing flatness. The air was dark above Gravesend and further back still seemed condensed into a mournful gloom, brooding motionless over the biggest and the greatest town on earth...

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Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation; Part-3

2012-09-06T02:31:00.000-07:00

... The Director of Companies was our Captain and our host..
... On the whole river there was nothing that looked half so nautical. He resembled a pilot which to a seaman is trustworthiness personified...
...The lawyer- the best of old fellows had because of his many years and many virtues, the only cushion on the deck, and was lying on the only rug...
... The Accountant had brought out already a box of dominoes and was toying with them architecturally. Marlow sat cross-legged right aft, leaning against the Mizzen mast. He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion , a straight back, an ascetic aspect and with his arms dropped resembled an idol...(p.5 &p 6)
" Mind", he began again, lifting one arm from from the elbow, the palm of the hand outwards so that with his legs folded before him, he had the pose of a Buddha preaching in European clothes.(p.9&p10) Here , the god-like narrator oversees the scenic details of the Nellie, swaying on the Thames and with a chess-player's accuracy, places the characters on board the Nellie, with thumb-nail sketches tagged on , describing not only, the 'virtual' present but also dipping into the characters' backgrounds and future possibilities.

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Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation; Part-4

2012-06-04T22:37:00.000-07:00

The character of Marlow with his "sunken cheeks" and "yellow complexion"brings to the reader a Marlow who is well-travelled as a seaman and who has suffered on account of nutritional deficiencies common to men who have been sailing for long periods.Marlow is described as an "ascetic", "a Buddha", hinting that the reigns of the narrative action will soon shift to Marlow. And right on cue,from the 'outside narrator', who spans the past, present and future, the ephemeral as well as concrete details , Conrad moves to Marlow,who then takes up the threads of the story and continues the story of the journey up the Congo river in search of the white man's agent-Kurtz. Here Conrad makes use of Marlow's limited perspective, in the manner that the film -director uses the lens of a camera and the various attendant camera angles. " I left in a French steamer, and she called in every blamed port, they have out there, for as far as I could see, the sole purpose of landing soldiers and custom-officers. I watched the coast. Watching the coast as it slips by the ship , is like thinking about an enigma... The edge of a colossal jungle, so dark green as to be almost black, fringed with white surf ran straight like a ruled line, far far away along a blue sea whose glitter was blurred by a creeping mist. (p.18 )... The sun was fierce, the land seem to glisten and drip with steam. Here and there greyish-whitish specks showed up clustered inside the white surf, with a flag flying above them perhaps...Now and then a boat from the shoregave one a momentary contact with reality. It was paddled by black fellows. You could see from afar the white of their eye-balls glistening. they shouted sang; their bodies streaming with perspiration...(p.19)

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Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation; Part-21

2008-10-18T03:28:00.000-07:00

In this his work is very similarto the cinematic approach adopted by Howard Hawks,in his films ,( be it,Road to Glory, 1926, Rio Bravo,Air Force etc) . Hawk's protagonist, like Conrad's central character exhibits the same thematic preoccupation , the same recurringmotifs, incidents, the same visual style and tempo, so much so that we Could actually construct a species of Hawksian and Conradian protagonists. Hawk's heroes are cattlemen, fishermen, racing drivers, hunters habituated to danger and living apart from society, actually cut-off from it by dense forests, sea, snow, desert etc. Hawk's heroes pride themselves on their professionalism. The heroes who exclude others from their elite on the basis of "how good is he" are themselves excluded from society, exiled to the African bush or Arctic.They are , however, cruelly stunted and there are moments when they turn against the world and unleash upon it destruction and brutality.. For them 'Nihilism' is no more than being in danger of losing your life and often they regress back to childhood or savagery. And so we have Kurtz and Nostromo excuded by the society as symbolized by the Congo river and the sea respectively Both are stunted in their desire for more ivory and the desire to be thought well of. And both like Hawk's protagonists revert to savagery and nihilistic concept of life. They are both professionally competent. Captain Mitchell describes Nostromo as " a fellow in a thousand, who at the head this time of the company's lightermen, hels the jetty against the rush of the 'rabble" . He was the man who could deliver Sulaco from the clutches of Sotillo by bringing Barrios. And yet he has about him an "aloofness" and was therefore the "more to be feared" . And yet he is clearly disfigured by his need to "well-spoken of" and by his moral corruption when he realizes " I am nothing. Nothing to anyone" In his death he achieves the quiet heroism of a man who " died without a word or a moan after an hour of immobility broken by short shudders testifying to the most atrocious sufferings" Conrad with his conscious exploration of unconsciously penetrated space , with his juxtaposition of various immutable and unrelated perspectives according to a pre-determined concept is a montage writer. It would not be far wrong to say that Conrad with his visual constructionshas brought cinema to its present organic embodiment of a single idea conception. Part of the Dream Weave Walk 1999-2010

Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation; Part-20

2008-10-16T03:25:00.000-07:00

An analysis of Conrad's cinematic mode of regard would perhaps be incomplete without a quick look at the various cinematic devices used by Conrad, and picked up by the contemporary or more modern film- directors.First and foremost are the use of arresting visuals, piling visual detail upon the reader in the manner of a cinematic choreographer.: Tints of purple , gold and crimson were mirrored in the clear water of the harbour. A long tongue of land, straight as a wall with the grass-grown ruins of the fort making a sort of rounded green mound....The great mass of cloud filling the head of the gulf had long red smears amongst its convoluted folds of grey and black as of a floating mantle stained with blood...the glassy bands of water along the horizon gave out a fiery red glow , as if fire and water had mingled together in the vast bed of the ocean...(p.347) These rivetting visuals have not been sketched per se but have a bearing upon the thematic scheme of the novel. The red stains in the folds of the cloud thus refer to not only the blood bath during the revolution but also point to the death of Decoud and the imminent death of Nostromo.Second is the use of parallel montage, a cinematographic methodology used first by Sergei Eisenstein in his movie 'The Birth of the Nation', where he presented two perspectives , at the same point in time but from varying vantage points. For instance in Chapter 7 of The Lighthouse we have a vignette of the trio Charles Gould, Emilia Gould and Dr Monygham discussing the lossof the silver entrusted to Nostromo and Decoud and dr Monygham's refrain that if the silver had been available it would have earned a reprieve from Sotillo : If you had all the silver here', the doctor said ' or even if it had been known to be at the mine you could have bribed Sotillo to throw off his recent Monterism. You could have induced him either to go away in his steamer or even to join you....( p. 345) This reference to moral corruption is stretched further by a simultaneous vignette of Nostromo who emerges from sleep, after safely returning from the Great Isabel and allows us to look ahead to the death of Nostromo who has sold his soul to the Mephistophlean silver : Nostromo woke up from a fourteen hours sleep, and arose full length from his lair in the long grass. He stood knee-deep amongst the whispering undulations of the green blades with the lost air of a man just born into the world....he threw back his head, flung his arms open and stretched himself with a slow twist of the wasist and a leisurely growling yawn of the white teeth...Then in the suddenly steadied glance fixed upon nothing from under a thoughtful yawn appeared the man.(p.347). Conrad, like the various 'auteur' artists insisted on revealing a core of meaning and thematic motifs. His work goes beyond the realm of mere performance and transposes the text into a semantic dimension. In this his work is very similarto the cinematic approach adopted by Howard Hawks,in his films ,( be it,Road to Glory, 1926, Rio Bravo,Air Force etc).

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Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation; Part-19

2008-10-13T03:22:00.000-07:00

Language, cannot normally have separate signs to cover the concept of a thing's 'becoming', or the concept of a thing's 'having become' .This is because one is a present participle and the other is a past participle. To escape this problem, Conrad divined a method in which past, present and future co-habit in the 'presentness' of the reader's or audience's experience. In handling of time flux, past and present lose their identity as discrete sections of time. The present becomes 'specious' because on second glance, it is seen as fused with the past, obliterating the line between them. And so the reader experiences the revolution in the present, the courtship which was prior to the revolution also in the present and the successful attempt to revive the San Tome mine also in the present.Infact, the author takes this'co-expressibility of past and present' much further in his description of Martin Decoud's death. In Chapter 10 , of 'The Lighthouse', is a description of how Don Martin's boat is spied by Nostromo on board the transport of General Barrios, within in an 'hour's steaming of Sulaco' Nostromo's eyes were the first to catch,broad on the bow, the tiny elusive dark speck, which alone with the forms of the Three Isabels right ahead, appeared on the flat, shimmering emptiness of the gulf...At a nod of consent from Barrios the transport swept out of her course, passing near enough to ascertain that no one manned the little cockle-shell. It was merely a common small boat gone adrift with her oars in her. But Nostromo, to whose mind Decoud had been insistently present for days, had long before recognized with excitement the dinghy of the lighter...Nostromo had leaped overboard; and his black head bobbed up far away already from the ship...(p.408) With vigorous and skillful effort, he clambered over the stern. the very boat! No doubt of it; no doubt whatever. It was the dinghy of the lighter No 3- the dinghy left with Martin Decoud on the Great Isabel so that he should have some means to help himself...The Capataz made a minute examination...All he discovered was a brown stain on the gunwale abreast of the thwart...(p.409) Later in this chapter is a description of Martin Decoud's death seemingly from his own perspective which in actual fact should have emerged prior to Nostomo's speculation about his death as delineated in p.415 and 416 of the novel. Conrad is here faced with the presentness of consciousness and also the obliteration of the discrete character of past and present.. He has worked out a methodology of creating an experience in which we are caught by a perpetual present permeated by the past as in Cinema. As Sturt in Psychology of Time states: One of the reasons for the feeling of pastness is that we are familiar with the things or events that we recognize as past.But it remains true that this feeling of familiarity is a present experience and therefore, logically should not arouse a concept of the past. On the other hand a present impression (or memory) of something which is past is different from a present imoression of something which is present but familiar from the past...11.

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Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation; Part-18

2008-10-10T03:17:00.000-07:00

and the dusk and the 'darkness descending upon the line of the horizon'. Similarly, Martin Decoud's exile on the Isabels to guard the silver of the San Tome mine is perceieved as endless by the "brilliant son decoud", "spoilt darling of the family" and the "journalist of Sulaco" but is measured against actual time of days and of night and day. He spent the night open -eyed and when the day broke he ate something with the same indifference...Decoud lost all belief in the reality of his action past and to come. On the fifth day an immense melancholy descended upon him palpably. He resolved not to give himself upto these people in Sulaco...sleeplessness had robbed his will of all energy, for he had not slept seven hours in seven days...On the tenth day, after a night spent without even dozing off once, the solitude appeared like a great void, and the silence of the gulf like a tense thin cord to which he hung suspended by both hands. Only towards the evening, in the comparitive relief of coolness , he began to wish that this cord would snap...the sun was two hours above the horizon when he got up, gaunt, dirty, white-faced and looked at it with his red-rimmed eyes...The dawn from behind the mountains put a gleam into his unwinking eyes...drew the revolver, cocked it, brought it forward pointing at his breast, pulled the trigger...'It is done', he stammered out, in a sudden flow of blood...(p.412,413&414) So Decoud's open-eyed vigil is measured in terms of 'fifth day', 'tenth day', in terms of the sun which was 'two hours above the horizon' and 'the evening' which arrived with 'its relief of coolness'. The psychological time is here seen as merging with psychological time. In his handling of time or more particularly time-flux Conrad, achieved another first for a novelist. Language, consisting as it does of bounded discrete units cannot satisfactorily represent the unbounded and continuous .

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Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation; Part-17

2008-10-07T03:15:00.000-07:00

The second section ,again by its very heading places importace upon the 'Isabels' and the action throughout either heading towards the Iabels or is situated on them with Nostromo and Decoud philosophizing about life and its rewards. The third section is hinged around the silver ingots hidden on the Big Isabel and the Lighthouse that eventually lights up the moral downfall and death of Nostromo and the unrequited love and death of Linda Viola. To enhance the cinematic mode of regard, Conrad makes use of two time frames in his novel. One is the chronological time which exists on two primary levels: the chronological duration of the reading of the novel/watching of the film which should be 3 to 5 hours, the chronological span of narrative events which could be a few days, several years or a decade.Nostromo takes us through 5 to 6 hours of reading time but through several years of living in Sulaco, which could perhaps be judged in terms of the growth of Linda & Giselle Viola who are merely 12 to 13 years at the start of the novel and are mature women by the end of the novel. But, unlike traditional novelists, the time frame for Conrad is not a medium consisting of simply consecutive units with a forward moving linear form of expression that is subject to the three characteristics of time- transience, sequence and irrversibility. Conrad, instead moves back and forth in time with ease. The novel starts with a revolution at Sulaco , goes back to the courtship days of Emilia and Charles Gould, travels back to Sulaco and their successful attempt to revive the San Tome mine and returns to Sulaco burning with patriotic fever in the midst of a revolution. The novelist , thus takes us through time by moving from one point in space to another, a method described by Panofsky as the 'dynamization of space'. Conrad in his novels also uses psychological time, which distends or compresses in consciousness and presents itself in a continuous flux. But unlike the traditional novelists, he handles the psychological time cinematically by measuring it against chronological time. And so he describes Nostromo on the Isabels: For a long time he gazed on , then let the parted bushes spring back and crossing over to the other side of the fort, surveyed the vast emptiness of the gulf. the darkness of the sky had descended to the horizon, enveloping the whole gulf, the islets and the lover of Antonio alone with the trea -sureon the Great Isabel...(p.349). Here the 'gaze' and its time span is measured against the 'sun high in the sky'

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Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation; Part-16

2008-10-03T03:13:00.000-07:00

Conrad, in the manner of Pudovkin of the 'Film Technique' fame believed that the picture of words sketched by the author was dead material unless it was assembled among a number of separate objects and presented as a part of a synthesis of different and separate visual images, which endow it with filmic life. In continuation of this 'synthesis' approach and arising from it was Conrad's open dissent with the Bazin view that priority must be given to representation of reality over dramatic structures. In Bazin's view, Only the impartiality of the lens can clear the object of habit and prejudice, of all the mental fog with which our perception blurs it, and present it afresh for our attention and thereby for our affection. In a photograph , the natural image of the world we don't know how to see, nature finally imitates not just art but the artist himself...11... Conrad, moved away from the 'realist' view of cinema to the 'montage' view which was designed to demonstrate an attitude rather than to show an event- the attitude being projected through the various perceptions of the various characters from different vantage points.Thus, Conrad, constantly isolated objects/ static pictures from the backround, made them significant and forced them to take on a significance of the artist's own creation. Conrad, believed , like Kracauer, that in fiction as in cinema, editing was important since it was by this concept of editing or arranging shots in a particular manner that a single meaning on various actions and phenomenon. He believed : " Natural objects are surrounded with afringe of meanings, liable to touch of various moods , emotions, runs of inarticulate thoughts...A film shot does not come into its own unless it incorporates raw material with its multiple meanings or what Lucien Seve calls the " anonymous state of reality"12. Like Kracuer and like Sergei Eisenstein then, Conrad moved to a structural cohesion achieved through a narrative stance that goes beyond mere photographic reproduction to the cinematic realm of 'montage'. The very structure of the novel is strengthened by the significance that the author gives to the three sections of the novel.The first section by its very heading 'Silver of the mine' bestows significance to the San Tome' mine's Charles Gould, the senor Administrator, Emilia Gould, the first lady of Sulaco', Captain Mitchell & Capataz of Carvagadores. It also looks ahead to the corrupting influence of this silver that kills the Capataz and grips the lives of Charles and Emilia in the death-dance of the soul.

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Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation; Part-15

2008-09-30T03:09:00.000-07:00

So the reader is left to grapple alone, with the world created, with the nature and the quality of the speaker and ofcourse with its ultimate meaning. This narrative stance approach then not only creates an immediacy of effect but an intensification of the illusion of reality. And more than that it creates the impression that any given story was somehow telling itself and simultaneously guiding and and controlling the reader's response by restricting the narrator's knowledge so that the reader is never privy to what is beyond him. In theory, Conrad's strategy is to isolate and freeze his material for our scrutiny : To snatch in a moment of courage , from the remorseless rush of time, a passing phase of life, is only the beginning of the task. The task approached in tenderness and faith is to hold up unquestionably without choice and without fear, the rescued fragments before all eyes in the light of a sincere mood. In practice, however, Conrad draws assorted details in the context of a narrative line, which like a good movie editor he controls in terms of sequence, duration and tempo. The result is often to establish lines of movement within an overall composition. He did not pull for the narrow strand where he had landed with Decoud and afterwards alone on his first visit to the treasure.. He made for the beach at the other end and walked up the regular and gentle slope of the wedge-shaped island.Giorgio Viola whom he saw from afar, sitting on a bench under the far wall of the cottage lifted his arm slightly to his loud hail. He walked up. ' It's good here; said the old man, in his austere far-away manner. Nostromo nodded, then after a short silence 'You saw my schooner pass in not two hours ago? Do you know why I am here before , so to speak, my anchor has bitten into the ground of this post of Sulaco ?...I have come to ask you for...A sudden dread came upon the fearless and incorruptible Nostromo. He dared not utter the name in his mind..."For my wife...His heart was beating fast...He(Giorgio) got up slowly. His beard unclipped since Teresa's death, thick snow-white covered his powerful chest. He turned his head to the door and called out in his strong voice: Linda. Her answer came sharp and faint from within; and the appalled Nostromo stood up too, but remained mute gazing at the door He was afraid. he was not afraid of being refused the girl he loved...He was afraid of being forbidden the island. He was afraid and said nothing ...(p 438) So here we see Conrad, creating movement effectively through the ordering of a succession of pictures - the mute Nostromo, the austere Giorgio with his unclipped beard, the sharp Linda. These images take us back to Teresa's death to the imminent corruption of Nostromo and forward to the death-vice of corruption which entangles Nostromo in its San Tome curse .

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Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation; Part-14

2008-09-28T03:06:00.000-07:00

Here the character enters into a relationship with the speaker or the implied author standing behind him and our response to Nostromo, our belief in his courage and bravery, in his devotion to duty is also determined by our response to Captain Mitchell who prided himself on his profound knowledge of men and things in the country and was "really very communicative under his air of pompous reserve". Then the vantage point shifts in the manner of a camera angle and the reader sees Nostromo, through the eyes of Martin Decoud, as he writes his long detailed letter to his sister : " I realise something impassive and careless in the tone , characteristic of the Genoese sailor, who like me has come casually here to be drawn into the events for which his scepticism as well as mine seems to entertain a sort of passive contempt. The only thing he seems to care for, as far as I have been able to discover, is to be well spoken of. An ambition fit for noble souls but also a profitable one for an exceptionally inte- -lligent scoundrel...'I suppose Don Martin ,he began , in a thoughtful speculative tone, 'that the senior administrator of San Tome will reward me some day , if I save his silver? ...This, soeur cherie, is my companion in the great escape for the sake of the great cause. He is more naive than shrewd, more masterful than crafty, more generous with his personality than the people who make use of him are with their money...(p. ). So here we have a view-point about Nostromo not totally without scepticism which prepares us for the final moral corruption of Giani Battista, 'the incorruptible'. It not only shapes our view of the Capataz but also tempers our view of Don Martin who calls Montero a gran bestia every second day in the 'Porvenir' and is in search of "effective truth"for which there is no room in politics or journalism". Thus , Conrad , the story teller, never quite admits to creating a fiction , in the manner of his pre-Victorian predecessors , " inviting the reader as they often did to sit down with them, as it were, by the fire, joining them in a game of let's pretend".9. Nor does he claim omniscience- that god-like knowledge that allowed the likes of a Fielding or a Thackeray, to know everything about everyone, to take us anywhere at all at any time, they wished, to pop in and out of the minds' of the character .

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Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation; Part-13

2008-09-25T03:04:00.000-07:00

Conrad, thus attached great importance to visual perspective for he believed that a thoroughly concretized art does not impose the subjective opinion of the author upon the world as a gospel truth. And so we have Conrad describing the revolution in Sulaco from the perspective of Nostromo, whose presence permeates the entire novel, either in terms of physical presence or in constant references to him. Conrad's 'narrative stance'- the relation that is in which the teller stands to his tale as well as the character and nature of the teller himself- makes his novels cinematic rather than simply fictional narratives. So, he presents his stories through the restricted vantage point of a character and centres the action in the individual's perception and makes him serve, if not precisely as the narrator, atleast as the window of consciousness, through which the reader would then perceive the fictional world laid out before them. And, so in the manner of Kurtz, the character of Nostromo, the 'Capataz' " who is much of a man" is presented rom the vantage points of various characters. Captain Mitchell describes Nostromo as the 'deliverer of Sulaco' : " A crazy mob Sir, does not discriminate . Under providence, we owed our presence to my Capataz de Cargadores, as they called him in the town, a man who when I discovered his value Sir, was just the bos'n of an Italian ship, a big Genoese ship...He left her on account of some very respectable friends he had made here but also I suppose to better himself....I engaged him to be the foreman of our litterman and caretaker of our jetty. That's all that he was. But without him Senor Ribiera would have been a dead man. Nostromo Sir, a man absolutely above reproach became the terror of the thieves in town... the sight of his black whiskers and white teeth was enough for them. They quailed before him, Sir. That's what the force of character will do for you.(p.46).

Part of the Dream Weave Walk 1999-2010

Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation; Part-12

2008-09-21T03:01:00.000-07:00

Conrad's cinematic vision is encompassed by his pithy dictum- potent power of the written word lies in making us hear, feel and above all see".8. Conrad's epistemology , in his book 'Nostromo', can be found at the meeting point of the senses(primarily visual), emotions , imagination, will and the external world. Joining external matter and subjective vision , the image and the eye, in metaphoric constructions is the process by which he enacts his aesthetics, his characters enact their lives and readers enact their involvement in aesthetic creation.. The protean movement of the visualized structure- image into icon, framed images, disrupted images, relation between images- together with the more concrete cinematic techniques bring Conrad incredibly closer to the cinematic vision. Conrad in 'Nostromo' has not totally shrugged free of the pre-Victorian mores where the novelist effected a god-like stance and leaped about in time and space offering all kinds of insights and hindsights. And so we have a bird's eye-view of the 'town of Sulaco', situated in the Republic of Costaguana. : Sulaco had found an inviolable sanctuary from the temptations of a trading world in the solemn hush of the deep Golfo Placido as if within an enormous semi-circular and unroofed temple open to the ocean , with its walls of lofty mountains hung with the mourning draperies of clouds...On one side of this broad curve in the straight seaboard of the Republic of Costaguana, the last spur of the coast range forms an insignificant cape whose name is Punta Mala...On the other side what seems to be an isolated patch of blue mist floats lightly on the glare of the horizon. This is the peninsula of Azuera, a wild chaos of sharp rocks and stony levels cut about by vertical ravines...(p.39) However, from time to time, Conrad erases the presence of the omnipresent God and substitutes it with the perspective of a character : All morning Nostromo had kept his eye from afar on the Casa Viola, even in the thick of the hottest scrimmage near the Custom House. " If I see smoke rising over there", he thought to himself, " they are lost"...He shouted, set after them one shot from his revolver and galloped upto the cafe window. He had an idea that old Giorgio would choose that part of the house for a refuge...( p ) Although ,throughout the novel, Corad moves between the eye of the God that imagines itself as both physically present in the scene and at the same time out of and above it, holding all visual perspective simultaneously, he replaces wherever possible, the voice and presence of a god-like novelist with the 'seeing' eye of man

Part of the Dream Weave Walk 1999-2010

Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation; Part-11

2008-09-19T02:52:00.000-07:00

As Pasolini in The Cinema Of Poetry , says : The author constructs a character- speaking if need be in an invented language- which allows him to express his particular inter- -pretation of the world...When a writer "relives" the discourse of one of his characters, he steeps himself not only in his psychology but also in his language: free indirect discourse is therefore always linguistically different from the language of the writer...This implies that the "free indirect subjectivity" in cinema is endowed with a very flexibile stylistic possibility that it also liberates the 'expressive' possibility stifled by traditional narrative connection, by a sort of return to their origins...It is this 'free indirect subjective' which establishes the possible tradition of a "technical language of poetry" in cinema. 7. And it is in the use of this cinema of poetry that Joseph Conrad moves from the scenographic/thetre based narrative of the pre-Victorian era with its multitude of immediate details to the perspectivistic and cinematic selection of details that blossomed into the cinematic mode of regard during the Victorian and early modernistic era. This cinematic mode of regard is further strengthened by Conrad's use of opposing images, which are woven into the very intricate pattern of 'Heart of Darkness'. "The black figure" of the native woman, the savage, " waving long black arms" contrasts with the refined anaemic paleness of Kurtz's Intended who came forward " all in black with a pale head" and room seemed to have grown darker ,as if all the sad light of the cloudy evening had taken refuge in her forehead". Thus there are things that are dark and things that are light. There also things that are dark and things that are white. Moreover, many of the things that are light or white are surrounded by darkness. For, instance we have the candle held by Kurtz's Intended in his painting of her.We also have many a thing that at first glance belong to the dark or black side of things but manage to partake of light and whiteness.Kurtz's jungle bride is described as glittering and flashing and Marlow often notices the white eyes or teeth of the black natives or a bit of white cloth around a black man's neck. Along the same lines Europe was described as a place of light and enlightenment while Africa was generally thought of as a place of darkness and savagery. Moreover , the book begins at sunset on the bright Thames and moves into a night so dark that the men on the Nellie can't see each other. Apart, from the obvious imagery of 'black and white' it also brings to mind the image of the supremacy of the white power of Europe,holding sway over the blacks of the African continent.So 'Heart of Darkness' also becomes a statement of what Conrad thought of as the truth of the world . Along with opposed images such as these, is a more complicated opposition between things that are inside or within and things that are outside- things that are at the heart or centre and things that are at the periphery. We travel from the 'outer station to the 'inner station' to the heart of darkness and outward again , just as we travel from the "outside narrator" to Marlow and to Kurtz. Thus Conrad through the use of opposing images and rivetting visuals intervenes upon reality, sectioning it into several autonomous pieces, like pictures and strings them together to make a synchronized whole which is mimetically true to the vocation of naturalism and realism.

Part of the Dream Weave Walk 1999-2010

Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation; Part-10

2008-09-16T02:49:00.000-07:00

Here we see ,Conrad, not only giving us a visually detailed and arresting picture but also showing his mastery in the dexterous use of 'im-signs' or image signs(term used by Pasolini)who believed that the linguistic and grammatical domain of the film-maker is constituted by images and that every image-sign was constituted of actions, dreams memories etc). Conrad in adherence to Pasolini's theory uses the im-signs for a dual purpose- for an objective as well as a subjective projection. In the image of the native woman the objectivity of the " striped and fringed cloth", of the " brass leggings" and the " brass wire gauntlets" is inseparably bound with the subjective point-of-view of " the seaman" Marlow who perceieves "something ominous and stately" in the " tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow"...

The subjective intervention ,infact, comes at a primary stage, insofar as the primary choice of possible images is quite necessarily subjective. This dual dance of objectivity and subjectivity of im-signs is translated linguistically and stylistically by Conrad in his handling of narrative. So Conrad makes use of the cinematic concept of "direct discourse"(Glossary -which as per Pier Pasolini corresponds to the subjective shot where the author puts himsef aside and allows his characters to speak for themselves) synonomous with a "subjective shot" as well as " free indirect disclosure", (where the author penetrates the very soul and psyche of the character) synonomous with objectivity. In the direct discourse, Conrad puts himself aside and allows his characters to speak. As Marlow speaks to us throughout the narrative of the 'Heart of Darkness': " Next day I left that station at last, with a caravan of sixty men for a two-hundred mile tramp...No use telling you much about that. Paths paths everywhere; a stamped in network of paths spreading over the empty land, through long grass, through burnt grass, through thickets, down and up chilly ravines, up and down stony hills ablaze with heat;...and nobody not a hut...On the fifteenth day, I came in sight of the big river again, and hobbled into the Central Station. It was on a backwater surrounded by scrub and forest, with a pretty border of smelly mud on one side and on three other sides enclosed by a crazy fence of rushes"...(p35 )*. So , here we see, Conrad ,the author effacing his subjectivity , his opinion about the plot and characters of the novel. The perspective throughout is that of Marlow 'the seaman' and not of Joseph Conrad, the author. However, the author alternates between the 'subjective' linguistic stylization and 'objective' stylization. In the 'objective' stylization, the author penetrates entirely into the spirit of his character, of whom he adopts not only the psychology but also the language. A characteristic of such a stylistic discourse is that the author cannot abstract from them a certain psychological consciousness of the milieu he is evoking: the social condition of the character determines his language. And so we have Marlow "the seaman", the "wanderer" using 'nautical' terms like "offing", "Bon Voyage"and the more technical " chain to be hauled in short" or " trip the anchor", so as to reproduce and relive the language of his social ethos.

Part of the Dream Weave Walk 1999-2010

Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation; Part-9

2008-09-14T02:46:00.000-07:00

Perhaps, these broken images presented to the reader are per se meaningless but these are interwoven by Conrad into a complex synchronizing varied view-points. His narrative is thus, an interweaving of various perspectives to make a syntactic whole which is shared alike by author and reader. And it is in this 'editing' that we arrive at the most cruicial likeness between the the language of the fiction writer and the language of the cinematic director : their very special capacity to create characters and actions and to situate them in time and place and ultimately then to bring us into fictional worlds. The novel may indeed be as Jean Mitry claims, " a narrative which organizes into a world; the film a world that organizes into a narrative". 5.Nevertheless, in both instances , narrative and world are created. Conrad, in his attempt to become an expert perspectivist in the manner of a film director has throughout made use of a "system of narration that unites the power of words with he potentially even greater power of the images they aim to create, it might even be considered a natural next step in literature's evolution- a form that Flaubert and Dickens and other writers had somehow envisioned in their mind's eye." 6. And so we find the linguistic and grammatical domain of Conrad, constituted by images which are visually concrete. Let us look at the image " the wild and gorgeous apparition of a woman" created by Conrad : ' She walked with measured steps, draped in striped and fringed cloths, treading the earth proudly, with a slight jingle and flash of barbarous instruments. She carried her head held high, her hair was done in the shape of a helmet; she had brass leggings to her knees, brass wire gauntlets upto her elbow, a crimson spot on her tawny cheek, innumerable necklaces of glass beads on her neck , bizarre things ,charms, gifts of witch-men that hung about her and glittered and trembled at every step, ...She was savage and superb, wild-eyed and magnificient; there was something ominous and stately in her deliberate progress...(p 88) She came abreast of the steamer , stood still and faced us. Her long shadow fell to the water's edge. Her face had a tragic and fierce aspect of wild sorrow...A whole minute passed and then she made a step forward. There was a low jingle, a glint of yellow metal, a sway of fringed draperies and she stopped as if her heart failed her...Suddenly she opened her bared arms and threw them up rigid above her head, as though in an uncontrolloble desire to touch the sky...She turned away slowly, walked on following the bank,and passed into the bushes to the left. Once only her eyes gleamed back at us in the dusk of the thicket before she disappeared...(p.87 )

Part of the Dream Weave Walk 1999-2010

Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation; Part-8

2008-09-12T02:43:00.000-07:00

There is then the reference to Kurtz by one of the 'pilgrims'- the 'brickmaster' of the 'outer station': " He is a prodigy", he said at last. "He is an emissary of pity and science and progress and devil knows what else..." Yes, today he is the chief of the best station,next year he will be assistant manager, two years more and ...but I daresay you know what he will be in two years' time" ...(p.36) And then there are the accolades of the harlequinn : "He had", he informed me proudly, " managed to nurse Kurtz through two illnesses, but " as a rule Kurtz wandered alone, far into the depths of the forest..."what was he doing? Exploring or what?" ,I asked. " Oh yes ofcourse he had discovered lots of villages, a lake too" , he did not know exactly in which direction- but mostly his expeditions had been for ivory. " But, he had no goods to trade by that time", I objected. "There is a good lot of cartridges left even yet", he answered, looking away. "To speak plainly, he raided the country", he said...." Kurtz got the tribe to follow him, did he?", I suggested. He fidgeted a little. " They adored him", he said.......... "I don't mind telling you, he wanted to shoot me one day"."Shoot You", I Cried. "What for?" " Well I had a small lot of ivory, the chief of that village, near my house gave me. Well ,he wanted it and would'nt hear reason. He declared he would shoot me unless, I gave him the ivory and then cleared out of the country because he could do so and had a fancy for it, and there was nothing on earth to prevent him killing whom he jolly well pleased...p.80) In thus stringing various perspectives to define or sketch a character for the reader, we see an observed object/ subject and an observor in time and space who imposes his own neutrality or subjectivity on the observed object or thing. In Kurtz's description we have the neutrality of the Accountant who gives credit to Kurtz for his ivory collecting expeditions, we have the prejudice of the ambitious and envious 'pilgrim' who dislikes Kurtz for his enterprise and closeness to the top bosses of the company. And we have the irony-charged blind adoration of the harlequinn who " wo'nt judge Kurtz".

Part of the Dream Weave Walk 1999-2010

Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation; Part-7

2008-09-12T02:39:00.000-07:00

Conrad as I have already mentioned, forsakes his authorial privelege of imposing his own philosophy upon the colonial and post-colonial era. To strengthen this cinematic technique, he also attempts to structurally concretize the narrative which in turn strengthens his theory of visual concretization and subsequent perspectivistic approach so dear to all cinema experts. An analysis of the form of the "Heart of Darkness" shows the strength of its cinematic approach. For one thing , he divides the novella into three distinct sections, the first taking the reader up the Congo to the 'outer station', the second taking the reader through the experiences of the 'inner station' and the third section taking the reader through the experience of the depravity, inhuman corruption and savagery of Kurtz who had " kicked himself loose of the earth.....had kicked the very earth to pieces". This pattern of threes, is further elaborated in the narrative structure, where Conrad reverts back to the 'outside narrator' only thrice in his novel- once in Section I, twice in Section II and not at all in Section III of the novel. In Section III, his renunciation of the omniscient author/Outside narrator is complete. In his form, infact, Conrad makes use of the Russian doll effect where every traditional Russian doll opened up into another doll inside till you are down to a nubbin of a thing. At the centre of the narrative of 'Heart of Darkness' we have the story of Kurtz, around that the story of Marlow, around that the story of the 'outside narrator' and around that still another story of the reader sharing the experience of the book. So as in a movie with various perspectives dependent upon various camera angles we have a story within a story, a perspective within a perspective, a narrator within a narrator. In keeping with his cinematic leanings, even the characterization of Kurtz is achieved with cinematic elan. Kurtz's characteristics are at no point in the novel described by the god-like narrator but are strung together as the truncated perspectives of the various characters that form the warp and weave of the structural narrative. The first thumb-nail sketch of Kurtz comes from the Accountant of the 'outer station' with his "starched collars" and " got-up shirt fronts". The eye of the 'accountant-seer' describes Kurtz as : One day he remarked without lifting his head " In the interior you will no doubt meet Mr Kurtz."On my asking who Mr Kurtz was , he said he was a first-class agent and seeing my disappointment at this information , he added slowly laying down his pen , " He is a very remarkable person". Further questions elicited from him that Mr Kurtz was at present in charge of a trading post, a very important one , in the true ivory country, at the very bottom of there...sends in as much ivory as all the others put together...(p.27).

Part of the Dream Weave Walk 1999-2010

Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation; Part-6

2007-10-19T22:43:00.000-07:00

When the sun rose there was a white fog, very warm and clammy and more blinding than the night. At eight or nine perhaps, it lifted, as a shutter lifts. We had a glimpse of the towering multitude of trees, of the immense matted jungle, with the blazing little ball of the sun hanging over it- all perfectly still- and then the white shutter came down again, smoothly as if sliding on greases grooves...(p.55) What we could see was just the steamer we were on, her outlines blurred as though she had been on the point of dissolving and a misty strip of water, perhaps two feet broad, around her-and that was all...(p.57) Heart of Darkness , is infact, a kind of little world in itself. As a writer, with cinematic leanings, Conrad attempts to make the reader enter into the experience it contains " to sit on the deck of the Nellie as night comes on and listen to the story Marlow has to tell; to be curious with Marlow about Mr Kurtz ;to smell dead hippo and hear the drumbeat of the natives and sense the implacable vastness of the wildness, with all its multitude of claims upon his". In doing so Conrad becomes one with Norman Holland's concept of 'interiorization Of exposition' where the author and the reader, the director and the audience share one experience, one world. Conrad " seeks to lead his readers to an experience of the 'heart of darkness' -it is not to shed the light of reason on itor to analyze and define it in some abstract way- but rather to recreate in all its fulness ,his experience of darkness in our feelings, our sensibilities, our own dark and mysterious hearts". In order to create an experience, a world, a journey, not to the "centre of the continent" but to the " centre of the earth",

Part of the Dream Weave Walk 1999-2007

Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation; Part-5

2007-10-19T22:42:00.000-07:00

It is Marlow " the only man who still followed the sea" who situates us in the "tinpot" on The Congo, cruising along the tropical forest of the "Dark Continent".It is from Marlow that we learn that the steamer is making its slow journey up the Congo river as it is calling on every "blamed port".It is by the very same character that we are provided with our first introduction to the tropical forest which is so "dark green ,that it is almost black" and also to the inhabitants of this strange land. Joseph Conrad , has used all his cinematic skills to make the transition from the omniscient narrator to the limited perspective of the human eye. It is Marlow ,the 'seaman' who takes us to the 'outer station' with its "objectless blasting" and its " deathlike indifference of unhappy savages" a slight clinking behind me made me turn my head: Six black men advanced in a file, toiling up the path they walked erect and slow, balancing small baskets full of earth on their heads and the clink kept time with their footsteps. Black rags were wound round their lions, and the short ends behind, waggled to and fro , like tails. I could see every rib, the joints of their limbs were like knots in a rope; each had an iron collar on his neck , and all were connected together with a chain, whose bights swung between them rhythmically clinking...(p. 22) Here, the cinematic narrator , juxtaposes the " blinding sunlight" and "the puff of smoke" with the " black shapes crouched" and "half-effaced within the dim light", bringing out in a detailed vignette the fate of the the blacks ,whose "sunken eyes looked up enormous and vacant" at the camera eye looking on.From the 'outer station' , Marlow takes the reader to the 'inner station', to Kurtz. To situate the reader at the 'inner station', Conrad uses what the cinematic experts call the 'establishing shot', which situates the audience at a certain point in space and time before launching into the plot. Towards the evening of the second day, we judged ourselves about 8 miles from Kurtz's station .

Part of the Dream Weave Walk 1999-2007