The master of slow-burning action.
October 14, 2015 5:38 PM Subscribe
"There’s a long and noble tradition of literary critics misunderstanding Joseph Conrad. Partly that’s because he is such a complicated, dense and fascinating writer. Far more words have been written about him than he ever wrote himself – and not everyone can get it right all the time. Especially when you throw combustible postcolonial issues into the mix." [Sam Jordison - The Guardian]
From Editor Eric's Greatest Literature of All Time: The Authors:
From Editor Eric's Greatest Literature of All Time: The Authors:
"Part of the problem may be that Conrad has been so highly regarded as a Great Author for so long now. It can be hard to approach his writing without a feeling of obligation. This was the case even during Conrad's lifetime. By the time he had written the works considered masterpieces, he had been heralded by critics and other writers as one of the greats, but this hadn't gained him popularity with the reading public. It wasn't until Conrad was in his late fifties, that his lesser novels, like Chance (1913) and Victory (1915), started winning him wide acclaim."
Aha! I knew it had to be you!
posted by GrammarMoses at 6:04 PM on October 14, 2015
posted by GrammarMoses at 6:04 PM on October 14, 2015
Aha! I knew it had to be you!
Eponyobvious?
posted by Fizz at 6:08 PM on October 14, 2015 [5 favorites]
Eponyobvious?
posted by Fizz at 6:08 PM on October 14, 2015 [5 favorites]
It wasn't until Conrad was in his late fifties, that his lesser novels, like Chance (1913) and Victory (1915), started winning him wide acclaim."
It wasn't until I was in my fifties that I could manage to read (and appreciate) anything Conrad wrote. I probably read the short story Secret Sharer because it was obligatory high school reading, but after that I started and gave up on various works, like Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, time after time. Somehow as geezerdom approached, I learned how to read his stuff, which is slowly and with appreciation for every word.
posted by beagle at 6:11 PM on October 14, 2015 [4 favorites]
It wasn't until I was in my fifties that I could manage to read (and appreciate) anything Conrad wrote. I probably read the short story Secret Sharer because it was obligatory high school reading, but after that I started and gave up on various works, like Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, time after time. Somehow as geezerdom approached, I learned how to read his stuff, which is slowly and with appreciation for every word.
posted by beagle at 6:11 PM on October 14, 2015 [4 favorites]
"No one does ponderous quite like Joseph Conrad."
"You may not enjoy it, whatever enjoying a book means to you, but you'll feel better for it in the long run."
So I'm hearing that Joseph Conrad the dead author is not fully awesome, but 3.5 stars, would recommend.
posted by deludingmyself at 6:11 PM on October 14, 2015
"You may not enjoy it, whatever enjoying a book means to you, but you'll feel better for it in the long run."
So I'm hearing that Joseph Conrad the dead author is not fully awesome, but 3.5 stars, would recommend.
posted by deludingmyself at 6:11 PM on October 14, 2015
Life is too short for me to give a shit about racist dead white men. Actually, if life were vastly longer, I still wouldn't. It's not a problem of misunderstanding him.
posted by feralscientist at 6:18 PM on October 14, 2015
posted by feralscientist at 6:18 PM on October 14, 2015
I've been putting together an analysis for my blog about how well famous authors in famous novels follow Elmore Leonard's 10 rules for writing. I just finished Conrad's The Secret Agent. I haven't posted the results yet, my notes aren't with me here, but I'll let you know tomorrow. In general, he did better than Dickens but worse than Stevenson or Hammett.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 6:21 PM on October 14, 2015 [5 favorites]
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 6:21 PM on October 14, 2015 [5 favorites]
Life is too short for me to give a shit about racist dead white men.
Have you read "Heart of Darkness?" One of its central themes is the brutality and depravity of the colonial system. At least that's my memory and lasting impression from when I last read it about 5 or so years ago.
Are you one of those people who want to ban the "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"?
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 6:40 PM on October 14, 2015 [14 favorites]
Have you read "Heart of Darkness?" One of its central themes is the brutality and depravity of the colonial system. At least that's my memory and lasting impression from when I last read it about 5 or so years ago.
Are you one of those people who want to ban the "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn"?
posted by AElfwine Evenstar at 6:40 PM on October 14, 2015 [14 favorites]
I just finished Conrad's The Secret Agent.
Read this during undergrad and it blew my mind. Very relevant. It hits many issues our own society faces, like: espionage, terrorism, politics, nationhood, citizenship, etc. It's a powerful novel.
posted by Fizz at 6:52 PM on October 14, 2015 [3 favorites]
Read this during undergrad and it blew my mind. Very relevant. It hits many issues our own society faces, like: espionage, terrorism, politics, nationhood, citizenship, etc. It's a powerful novel.
posted by Fizz at 6:52 PM on October 14, 2015 [3 favorites]
I just finished Conrad's The Secret Agent.
Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936) is an excellent adaptation of this.
posted by Wolof at 7:01 PM on October 14, 2015 [2 favorites]
Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936) is an excellent adaptation of this.
posted by Wolof at 7:01 PM on October 14, 2015 [2 favorites]
Heart of Darkness is so. fucking. good. When you experience the whole triptych of Heart of Darkness > The Hollow Men > Apocalypse Now, it really encompasses so much of what was wrong with 19th and 20th centuries - the colonialism, the racism, the madness, and the brutality. Especially the brutality. Not that us oh-so-enlightened moderns of the 21st century have solved these issues by any means, but Conrad wrote about their effects in a way that was suitably horrific while also very, very captivating.
There are a lot of dead white writers in "the Canon" that I wouldn't cross the street to meet. Conrad is not one of them.
posted by mosk at 7:08 PM on October 14, 2015 [4 favorites]
There are a lot of dead white writers in "the Canon" that I wouldn't cross the street to meet. Conrad is not one of them.
posted by mosk at 7:08 PM on October 14, 2015 [4 favorites]
Funnily, I was just reading the section about Conrad in WG Sebold's extremely grim Rings of Saturn.
I think Conrad vexes a lot of popular ideas about the 19th century and racial politics. He's not "racist" in the same way that many of his cohort were racist - if you read his papers, there's plenty of letters and personal material about how horrible, tragic and disgusting he finds colonialism in Africa, and how deeply he regrets even his initial, brief involvement with the big Belgian trading company. He admired Roger Casement immensely, and Casement's whole life's work was the exposure of colonial violence and genocide in the Congo and South America and ultimately, fatally, as an organizer of the Easter Rising.
I think Heart of Darkness is a very slippery book. Achebe's essay, to me, doesn't exhaust the novel, although it points to a couple of things - what I think are Conrad's own, insufficiently examined prejudices about Africans and the problem of this type of novel, where it's a white person writing about how bad colonialism is, where it's very easy to have simple and unexamined ideas about colonialism and the actual lives of the colonized. At the same time, I tend to think that Conrad - and Casement, for that matter - didn't have access to the type of thinking and narrative that is so necessary.
To me that is the horrible, horrible thing about history - that there's this huge, grinding slog of effort - and time, and loss, and so many people who die without a chance to do anything - just to get first to the point where Conrad and Casement can speak out as critics of colonialism and then, another huge long grinding slog before there's any understanding that it's the colonized who need to speak. It takes so fucking long before you can even hope that popular opinion will change enough to make any kind of difference, and it take so long to get even well-intentioned people to think with any kind of sophistication about their/our beliefs, and all along people are dying.
I think it's quite reasonable to say that life is too short for Joseph Conrad, though. There are a lot of reasons for individuals to seek out his work, and there's a lot of reasons to read him if you're trying to understand modernity and English literature, but if you're just saying "I want to read important anti-colonial literature for its own sake, for what it shows me about the colonizer and the colonized", yeah, there's certainly books that were written after Conrad (or, like memoirs of the enslaved, written around Conrad's time but not positioned the same way in literary history now or at the time) that do more.
I guess maybe one reason life isn't too short for Conrad, though, would be to understand the formation of white subjectivity. He's a guy from a strange background - the child of two Polish nationalists who were exiled (and who sickened and died) in punishment for their attempts to organize for Polish liberation and he had some rather unappealing ideas about nation, Slavicness, etc. You can see in his experience the way that national identity comes into being through colonialism (because you can see the internal colonization of Europe - Europe was itself colonized by its bigger powers before and then during external colonialism - that's part of what led Casement to try to gain military support from Germany for the Easter Rising, the generations of murder, starvation and exile that formed the Ireland of his time, and ti was the same in Scotland. We don't think of those places as colonized because they're first world nations with health services and tech industry and so on, but it was blood and fire for them as for everywhere else.)
posted by Frowner at 7:10 PM on October 14, 2015 [31 favorites]
I think Conrad vexes a lot of popular ideas about the 19th century and racial politics. He's not "racist" in the same way that many of his cohort were racist - if you read his papers, there's plenty of letters and personal material about how horrible, tragic and disgusting he finds colonialism in Africa, and how deeply he regrets even his initial, brief involvement with the big Belgian trading company. He admired Roger Casement immensely, and Casement's whole life's work was the exposure of colonial violence and genocide in the Congo and South America and ultimately, fatally, as an organizer of the Easter Rising.
I think Heart of Darkness is a very slippery book. Achebe's essay, to me, doesn't exhaust the novel, although it points to a couple of things - what I think are Conrad's own, insufficiently examined prejudices about Africans and the problem of this type of novel, where it's a white person writing about how bad colonialism is, where it's very easy to have simple and unexamined ideas about colonialism and the actual lives of the colonized. At the same time, I tend to think that Conrad - and Casement, for that matter - didn't have access to the type of thinking and narrative that is so necessary.
To me that is the horrible, horrible thing about history - that there's this huge, grinding slog of effort - and time, and loss, and so many people who die without a chance to do anything - just to get first to the point where Conrad and Casement can speak out as critics of colonialism and then, another huge long grinding slog before there's any understanding that it's the colonized who need to speak. It takes so fucking long before you can even hope that popular opinion will change enough to make any kind of difference, and it take so long to get even well-intentioned people to think with any kind of sophistication about their/our beliefs, and all along people are dying.
I think it's quite reasonable to say that life is too short for Joseph Conrad, though. There are a lot of reasons for individuals to seek out his work, and there's a lot of reasons to read him if you're trying to understand modernity and English literature, but if you're just saying "I want to read important anti-colonial literature for its own sake, for what it shows me about the colonizer and the colonized", yeah, there's certainly books that were written after Conrad (or, like memoirs of the enslaved, written around Conrad's time but not positioned the same way in literary history now or at the time) that do more.
I guess maybe one reason life isn't too short for Conrad, though, would be to understand the formation of white subjectivity. He's a guy from a strange background - the child of two Polish nationalists who were exiled (and who sickened and died) in punishment for their attempts to organize for Polish liberation and he had some rather unappealing ideas about nation, Slavicness, etc. You can see in his experience the way that national identity comes into being through colonialism (because you can see the internal colonization of Europe - Europe was itself colonized by its bigger powers before and then during external colonialism - that's part of what led Casement to try to gain military support from Germany for the Easter Rising, the generations of murder, starvation and exile that formed the Ireland of his time, and ti was the same in Scotland. We don't think of those places as colonized because they're first world nations with health services and tech industry and so on, but it was blood and fire for them as for everywhere else.)
posted by Frowner at 7:10 PM on October 14, 2015 [31 favorites]
And I mean, for me the take away from Achebe has always been that works exist in time. Conrad himself may have been a guy with decent anti-colonial politics for who he was, for when he was, for what he knew. His work doesn't do the anti-colonial work that is often attributed to it, precisely because it does do what Achebe says, it dehumanizes, it others, it limits. Conrad gets - and particularly got, as things have changed due to Achebe and writers like him - dropped uncritically into the "perceptive good white anti-colonial" box and then a lot of reading lists are (or especially were) done with that awkward topic.
posted by Frowner at 7:16 PM on October 14, 2015 [8 favorites]
posted by Frowner at 7:16 PM on October 14, 2015 [8 favorites]
I do not hold, nor should anyone, non-contemporary writers to contemporary political or social mores. I mean, how can you? Anyone wanna get a telegram to Conrad in the afterlife to explain how he needs to revise his works to toe the line of a time and perspective he had no experience with?
Heart of Darkness is wrenching, and brilliant, and mind-blowing -- and fuck anyone who doesn't appreciate it on its own damn terms.
posted by gsh at 7:29 PM on October 14, 2015 [9 favorites]
Heart of Darkness is wrenching, and brilliant, and mind-blowing -- and fuck anyone who doesn't appreciate it on its own damn terms.
posted by gsh at 7:29 PM on October 14, 2015 [9 favorites]
Conrad wrote: My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel-- it is, before all, to make you see-- that and no more, and it is everything. My aim as a fiction writer was to render the highest possible justice to the visible universe.
That sounds very grand, but it is really very humble. He was interested in rendering justice to the visible universe because it suggested an invisible one.
--From Mystery and Manners, Flannery O'Connor
Who had her own issues with workers on her mother's farm, Andalusia. An issue Alice Walker treated in her work In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, and elsewhere.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 7:36 PM on October 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
That sounds very grand, but it is really very humble. He was interested in rendering justice to the visible universe because it suggested an invisible one.
--From Mystery and Manners, Flannery O'Connor
Who had her own issues with workers on her mother's farm, Andalusia. An issue Alice Walker treated in her work In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens, and elsewhere.
posted by lazycomputerkids at 7:36 PM on October 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
I read "Youth" when I was in Grade 11 or Grade 12. Nobody else in class read it, but for some reason I plowed through and I loved it. Awesome book.
posted by Nevin at 8:40 PM on October 14, 2015
posted by Nevin at 8:40 PM on October 14, 2015
Heart of Darkness is wrenching, and brilliant, and mind-blowing
The image of the French ships shooting cannons into the jungle reminds me a lot of how things have gone - and continue to go - in the Middle East and so on over the past 15 years or so.
posted by Nevin at 8:41 PM on October 14, 2015 [2 favorites]
The image of the French ships shooting cannons into the jungle reminds me a lot of how things have gone - and continue to go - in the Middle East and so on over the past 15 years or so.
posted by Nevin at 8:41 PM on October 14, 2015 [2 favorites]
The Secret Agent is so sad, people. When I began to anticipate what was going to happen, the dread was palpable.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 8:45 PM on October 14, 2015 [5 favorites]
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 8:45 PM on October 14, 2015 [5 favorites]
The Secret Agent is one of my all-time favorite novels. I've read it three or four times now and it never fails to get under my skin.
posted by thivaia at 9:46 PM on October 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by thivaia at 9:46 PM on October 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
I've been trying to get through the first part of Nostromo for years now. I recognize it is skillfully done, and there is a lot of detail and slow, painterly plotting. And it is funny in places, though the humour is more like Quixote than laff out loud.
But it's a hard nut to crack, compared with the seafaring novellas or the colonial disasters.
There's almost too much going on, and maybe I just want that quiet first person describing a single tale.
Anyway, I watched Alien a lot, so that makes up for my inability to read any more Conrad.
posted by clvrmnky at 9:55 PM on October 14, 2015 [3 favorites]
But it's a hard nut to crack, compared with the seafaring novellas or the colonial disasters.
There's almost too much going on, and maybe I just want that quiet first person describing a single tale.
Anyway, I watched Alien a lot, so that makes up for my inability to read any more Conrad.
posted by clvrmnky at 9:55 PM on October 14, 2015 [3 favorites]
I think it's quite reasonable to say that life is too short for Joseph Conrad, though
I mean, Heart of Darkness is not a very long book...
posted by atoxyl at 10:53 PM on October 14, 2015 [2 favorites]
I mean, Heart of Darkness is not a very long book...
posted by atoxyl at 10:53 PM on October 14, 2015 [2 favorites]
Reading Conrad is really different from reading most other stuff to me. It's like my head gets stuffed full of things, more and more details crammed in. It takes a while to get used to it but then it just starts to flow. Even Pynchon, wordy as he is, doesn't develop quite the same dense brainfeel as Conrad does.
posted by Standard Orange at 10:59 PM on October 14, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by Standard Orange at 10:59 PM on October 14, 2015 [2 favorites]
"perceptive good white anti-colonial" hardly but a book that will show you some things about colonial history nonetheless
posted by atoxyl at 11:01 PM on October 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
posted by atoxyl at 11:01 PM on October 14, 2015 [1 favorite]
Conrad himself may have been a guy with decent anti-colonial politics
Conrad himself was Polish and was born and grew up in a country which was partitioned and occupied by the Russians as part of the Russian Empire. He had plenty of first-hand experience with colonialism and Russia's racism against the Polish people.
And also it's remarkable that English was not his mother tongue.
posted by three blind mice at 12:07 AM on October 15, 2015 [2 favorites]
Conrad himself was Polish and was born and grew up in a country which was partitioned and occupied by the Russians as part of the Russian Empire. He had plenty of first-hand experience with colonialism and Russia's racism against the Polish people.
And also it's remarkable that English was not his mother tongue.
posted by three blind mice at 12:07 AM on October 15, 2015 [2 favorites]
Some authors are more suited for people of certain ages. I didn't read Conrad and Hardy until I was in my thirties, and it would have been a waste if I had tried them earlier. Since then I have enjoyed re-reading their novels and gain something more each time. I think it's a waste teaching such complex writers to young people in high school or college, as the students are liable to be turned away from such fare for the remainder of their lives.
posted by Agave at 12:09 AM on October 15, 2015 [3 favorites]
posted by Agave at 12:09 AM on October 15, 2015 [3 favorites]
I do not hold, nor should anyone, non-contemporary writers to contemporary political or social mores.... Heart of Darkness is wrenching, and brilliant, and mind-blowing -- and fuck anyone who doesn't appreciate it on its own damn terms.
I'm sensing a disconnect here. What exactly are Heart of Darkness's "own terms"? Are they the terms by which we judge it to be an objective masterwork, where we pretend that it has no cultural or historical context? Or are they the terms by which we defend it from pesky anti-racist critics, where we shout its context from the rooftops, and anyway given his background, experiences, and upbringing, Joseph Conrad was pretty fly for a white guy?
I mean, I like anime. But that doesn't mean I demand that people watch it if they say they can't stand it. And when someone says it's "pedophilic garbage" or whatever, I can wince and admit that the sexualization of young female characters in anime is an awful problem, while still liking the things that I do like, and either suggesting more accessible, less problematic shows, or inwardly tsktsk-ing that, ah well, it's a shame they're letting themselves miss out on Princess Mononoke, and Cromartie High School, and Revolutionary Girl Utena...
If we are to take seriously the message of Heart of Darkness that colonialism makes monsters of the colonizers, we cannot expect Conrad himself to be exempt from that. If we wish to praise Conrad for being unusually clear-sighted and critical of racism for someone of his time and place, we have to see what we can do to be unusually critical of racism for someone of our own time and place. It doesn't mean you have to burn your copy of Heart of Darkness and beg forgiveness in the public square. It just means listening to the opinions of the marginalized and the silenced, and accepting them as valid.
(And the fact that that's the bar for "unusually critical of racism" shows you how far we have to go...)
posted by J.K. Seazer at 1:17 AM on October 15, 2015 [2 favorites]
I'm sensing a disconnect here. What exactly are Heart of Darkness's "own terms"? Are they the terms by which we judge it to be an objective masterwork, where we pretend that it has no cultural or historical context? Or are they the terms by which we defend it from pesky anti-racist critics, where we shout its context from the rooftops, and anyway given his background, experiences, and upbringing, Joseph Conrad was pretty fly for a white guy?
I mean, I like anime. But that doesn't mean I demand that people watch it if they say they can't stand it. And when someone says it's "pedophilic garbage" or whatever, I can wince and admit that the sexualization of young female characters in anime is an awful problem, while still liking the things that I do like, and either suggesting more accessible, less problematic shows, or inwardly tsktsk-ing that, ah well, it's a shame they're letting themselves miss out on Princess Mononoke, and Cromartie High School, and Revolutionary Girl Utena...
If we are to take seriously the message of Heart of Darkness that colonialism makes monsters of the colonizers, we cannot expect Conrad himself to be exempt from that. If we wish to praise Conrad for being unusually clear-sighted and critical of racism for someone of his time and place, we have to see what we can do to be unusually critical of racism for someone of our own time and place. It doesn't mean you have to burn your copy of Heart of Darkness and beg forgiveness in the public square. It just means listening to the opinions of the marginalized and the silenced, and accepting them as valid.
(And the fact that that's the bar for "unusually critical of racism" shows you how far we have to go...)
posted by J.K. Seazer at 1:17 AM on October 15, 2015 [2 favorites]
Heart of Darkness has a deeply expressionist quality to it -- the 'monstrousness' of Africa is not or at the very least not only an objective quality of the place, but a projection of the colonizers who have themselves become monstrous. That's true not just of Kurtz but of the narrator Marlow, who has within him the capacity to become Kurtz and indeed the implication is that he is already sliding toward that fate. The entire narrative voice is soaked in revulsion toward Africa but that is also and simultaneously revulsion toward the process of colonization and what it does to the colonizers. It is certainly racist by the standards of modern multi-culturalism, but modern multi-culturalism presumes and takes for granted certain colonialist processes by which a globalized modernity has dissolved indigenous cultures all over the world and then peoples from every race and society mingle freely in multi-cultural societies. Colonialism is supposed to be transcended because everyone mingles on an equal basis today but the historical preconditions of globalized multiculturalism very much do involve colonialist violence, and Heart of Darkness is written out of that period and that time. That doesn't make it out of date or antiquated, because those violent processes can and do continue to exist with other objects and in other ways.
posted by zipadee at 4:41 AM on October 15, 2015 [8 favorites]
posted by zipadee at 4:41 AM on October 15, 2015 [8 favorites]
It doesn't mean you have to burn your copy of Heart of Darkness and beg forgiveness in the public square. It just means listening to the opinions of the marginalized and the silenced, and accepting them as valid.
That's a much different argument than "Life is too short for me to give a shit about racist dead white men." Achebe's essay is certainly right in pointing out that Heart of Darkness views the Africans as little more than scenery for the Europeans, and that reading Heart of Darkness will not give you any significant understanding of Africa or it's experience with European colonialism. The book is limited to the perspective of European men in the role of oppressor. But it does a masterful job of looking at the world through that filter, and occasionally at looking at the filter itself.
Yes, other voices should be heard, and they will likely marginalize something else for the sake of their perspective--choices must be made on what a story is going to emphasize.
posted by cardboard at 5:56 AM on October 15, 2015 [5 favorites]
That's a much different argument than "Life is too short for me to give a shit about racist dead white men." Achebe's essay is certainly right in pointing out that Heart of Darkness views the Africans as little more than scenery for the Europeans, and that reading Heart of Darkness will not give you any significant understanding of Africa or it's experience with European colonialism. The book is limited to the perspective of European men in the role of oppressor. But it does a masterful job of looking at the world through that filter, and occasionally at looking at the filter itself.
Yes, other voices should be heard, and they will likely marginalize something else for the sake of their perspective--choices must be made on what a story is going to emphasize.
posted by cardboard at 5:56 AM on October 15, 2015 [5 favorites]
If we are to take seriously the message of Heart of Darkness that colonialism makes monsters of the colonizers, we cannot expect Conrad himself to be exempt from that.
I think a synthesis of the following two comments puts it well...
gsh: I do not hold, nor should anyone, non-contemporary writers to contemporary political or social mores....
Frowner: At the same time, I tend to think that Conrad - and Casement, for that matter - didn't have access to the type of thinking and narrative that is so necessary.
A lot knee-jerk criticism of "canon" is essentially an ethical repudiation of works based on contemporary judgment of authors' beliefs, from which flows the imperative that any literary value or insight expressed by the works must be discarded as ethically or veraciously suspect.
This standard, taken to its logical end, can abide no canon. Historical figures, except the immediate progenitors of the prevailing orthodoxy, are villains and their works suspect.
Fortunately, I think most people are more thoughtful about the past and its characters. How can one not be, absent the delusion that we stand at the end of history?
Great comment, Frowner.
posted by echocollate at 6:16 AM on October 15, 2015 [2 favorites]
I think a synthesis of the following two comments puts it well...
gsh: I do not hold, nor should anyone, non-contemporary writers to contemporary political or social mores....
Frowner: At the same time, I tend to think that Conrad - and Casement, for that matter - didn't have access to the type of thinking and narrative that is so necessary.
A lot knee-jerk criticism of "canon" is essentially an ethical repudiation of works based on contemporary judgment of authors' beliefs, from which flows the imperative that any literary value or insight expressed by the works must be discarded as ethically or veraciously suspect.
This standard, taken to its logical end, can abide no canon. Historical figures, except the immediate progenitors of the prevailing orthodoxy, are villains and their works suspect.
Fortunately, I think most people are more thoughtful about the past and its characters. How can one not be, absent the delusion that we stand at the end of history?
Great comment, Frowner.
posted by echocollate at 6:16 AM on October 15, 2015 [2 favorites]
I had mentioned that I had been writing up an analysis of Conrad's The Secret Agent (along with others) to see how well they followed Elmore Leonard's writing guidelines. Here is the post and here is the post on nineteenth century authors.
So far I've looked at Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, Dashiell Hammett and Thomas Harris. For those authors with works in the public domain it was easy to download and count specific items. However with The Maltese Falcon and The Silence of the Lambs, I hand-counted from my printed books. While it was not difficult to scan a page for exclamation marks, I doubt I found all of the instances of "suddenly." Does someone have these two books on Kindle and could tell me how often suddenly appears? (I might bring this to AskMeFi)
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 6:56 AM on October 15, 2015 [2 favorites]
So far I've looked at Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Joseph Conrad, Dashiell Hammett and Thomas Harris. For those authors with works in the public domain it was easy to download and count specific items. However with The Maltese Falcon and The Silence of the Lambs, I hand-counted from my printed books. While it was not difficult to scan a page for exclamation marks, I doubt I found all of the instances of "suddenly." Does someone have these two books on Kindle and could tell me how often suddenly appears? (I might bring this to AskMeFi)
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 6:56 AM on October 15, 2015 [2 favorites]
I think it's useful to point out in this discussion the vast distinction between wanting to critique an author (or any kind of artist), and wanting to throw them into the dustbin. Those who want to defend the value of Conrad (I'm one of them) aren't trying to make him invulnerable to criticism; a conversation about an infallible paragon is a boring and pointless one. It's much better to have a discussion about why Conrad's perspective on racism and colonialism is flawed/problematic. But it's pointless to say, as feralscientist did way upthread, "well this is just old dead white racist trash, who cares?" We're not talking about Mein Kampf, here. That's the kind of attitude that makes people feel the need to defend Conrad (or any old dead author whose perspective is kind of fucked-up by modern standards (pretty much all of them)).
posted by zchyrs at 7:01 AM on October 15, 2015 [5 favorites]
posted by zchyrs at 7:01 AM on October 15, 2015 [5 favorites]
> but if you're just saying "I want to read important anti-colonial literature for its own sake, for what it shows me about the colonizer and the colonized"
...then you don't actually care about literature.
posted by languagehat at 8:49 AM on October 15, 2015 [6 favorites]
...then you don't actually care about literature.
posted by languagehat at 8:49 AM on October 15, 2015 [6 favorites]
F. R. Leavis said "The great English novelists are Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad." [That's two women, a Pole and an American!] I've read most of Conrad, and he's a fully awesome great writer. When I finished "Lord Jim" I wanted to stop people on the street and tell them to read it. "Victory" left me exhilarated for a week. I don't want to live in a world that doesn't include Joseph Conrad's novels.
posted by acrasis at 4:12 PM on October 15, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by acrasis at 4:12 PM on October 15, 2015 [2 favorites]
Echocollate: ...knee-jerk criticism of "canon" is essentially an ethical repudiation of works based on contemporary judgment of authors' beliefs, from which flows the imperative that any literary value or insight expressed by the works must be discarded as ethically or veraciously suspect...This standard, taken to its logical end, can abide no canon. Historical figures, except the immediate progenitors of the prevailing orthodoxy, are villains and their works suspect.
I've been involved in a similar discussion with an online writing group I'm involved with, concerning To Kill A Mockingbird. One person took apart Atticus Finch as a paternalist making himself feel better by defendin' the po' black folk. It's not that he was entirely wrong, but I was upset by his implication that TKAM is a lesser work because of it instead of a document of its time and place, of the mid-1930s in the deep south as remembered and recorded by a white woman sitting smack-dab in the middle of the civil rights movement.
You put it much better than I was able to.
posted by lhauser at 4:32 PM on October 15, 2015
I've been involved in a similar discussion with an online writing group I'm involved with, concerning To Kill A Mockingbird. One person took apart Atticus Finch as a paternalist making himself feel better by defendin' the po' black folk. It's not that he was entirely wrong, but I was upset by his implication that TKAM is a lesser work because of it instead of a document of its time and place, of the mid-1930s in the deep south as remembered and recorded by a white woman sitting smack-dab in the middle of the civil rights movement.
You put it much better than I was able to.
posted by lhauser at 4:32 PM on October 15, 2015
« Older Let them fight | Ohm... Ohm.... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by Fizz at 5:44 PM on October 14, 2015 [3 favorites]