Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation; Part-21

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

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).

Part of the Dream Weave Walk 1999-2010

Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation; Part-19

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.

Part of the Dream Weave Walk 1999-2010

Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation; Part-18

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

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

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.

Part of the Dream Weave Walk 1999-2010

Joseph Conrad: A Credo of Visualisation; Part-15

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 .

Part of the Dream Weave Walk 1999-2010