Is this compromise by which the new music of phrases sprinkles with golden sand the old path of the plot not a lie that sacrifices the truth of experience to the demands of bad tailors? It’s against the latter that Virginia Woolf publishes the manifesto asserting the full rights of modern fiction.1 Her text takes the directly opposite view of critics who, sixty years earlier, had denounced Flaubert’s ‘materialism’. The materialist sin, for them, was to have substituted successions of ‘pictures’ for the organic order of the story. Woolf inverts the argumentation: the true materialists are the partisans of well-made plots and of parts subordinated to the whole. The novelists who embodied this ideal, Arnold Bennett, John Galsworthy or H. G. Wells, are materialists, she said, because they are only interested in bodies and not in the ‘life of the soul’. ‘They write of unimportant things […] they spend immense skill and immense industry making the trivial and the transitory appear the true and the enduring.’ But ‘so much of the enormous labour of proving the solidity, the likeness to life, of the story is not merely labour thrown away but labour misplaced to the extent of obscuring and blotting out the light of the conception’.2 The life of the soul does not resemble these well-sculpted wholes. It is made up of an always changeable shower of sensible events. At each moment of each ordinary day ‘the mind receives a myriad impressions – trivial, fantastic, evanescent or engraved with the sharpness of steel. From all sides they come, an incessant shower of innumerable atoms; and as they fall, as they shape themselves into the life of Monday or Tuesday, the accent falls differently from of old.’ The task of the free writer is thus to ‘record the atoms as they fall upon the mind in the order in which they fall’, to trace ‘the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness’.3 The hurried reader might ask what the difference is between the ‘trivial’ and the ‘evanescent’ of this shower of atoms and the ‘trivial’ and the ‘transitory’ to which old-school novelists sought to give a true and enduring aspect. It’s an easy answer to provide: the difference lies precisely in the way of treating the insignificant and the ephemeral. ‘Materialists’ want solidity. And, concerning fiction, the solid is called the verisimilar: the transformation of the shower of atoms into qualities belonging to identities; the integration of incidents into a recognizable schema of causes and effects. ‘Materialists’ seem constrained ‘by some powerful and unscrupulous tyrant who has him in thrall, to provide a plot, to provide comedy, tragedy, love interest, and an air of probability embalming the whole’.4 Woolf thus overturns the Aristotelian opposition: the logic of verisimilitude is an anti-artistic lie. With regard to the great democracy of sensible atoms, the order of things, things ‘such as they could be’, exercises a tyranny comparable to the Table of Precedence in Whitaker’s Almanack, according to which the Archbishop of Canterbury is followed by the Lord High Chancellor, who is himself followed by the Archbishop of York.5 The truth is in the fall of atoms; it is in the kath’ hekaston. But this is not the insignificant proceedings of successions and repetitions of daily life; it is the great coexistence, the universal life immanent to each aleatory configuration of atoms. It is not a matter of contrasting the singular with the totality, but instead one mode of existence of the whole with another. And it is naturally a totality of an atmospheric type, a diffuse totality made up of discrete particles which are substituted for the organic model of the whole: ‘Life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.’6
Woolf did not invent the image of this luminous halo. She borrowed it from another English-language writer, Joseph Conrad. At the beginning of Heart of Darkness, the narrator in effect indicates what distinguishes Marlow’s stories from the ordinary stories of sailors: ‘to him the meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside, enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.’7 But thus formulated Marlow’s poetics might in fact define the revolution Conrad himself undertook in the domain of fiction: it is not in the linkages of the story that the fictional content is to be sought. This content, which one seeks always on the inside, is to be found outside, ‘around’ the story. The luminous halo is not a diffusion of light from a centre. The central light is there, on the contrary, only to reveal the sensible power of the atmosphere in the midst of which it is plunged. The flame is at the service of the fog, the centre at the service of the periphery. This means that, for this admirer of Flaubert, the luminous halo can no longer be confounded with the gold dust sprinkling the march of the plot. It is the plot that ought to be enveloped in the luminous halo and which has as a task to illuminate it, to illuminate this new fabric of fiction that is the fabric of human experience grasped in its truth.
The sense of the story is in what surrounds it, that is to say, the milieu of meaning, the milieu of actions. And, of course, the milieu of meaning is itself devoid of meaning, the centre of actions is itself inactive – not because nothing happens in it but because what happens in it is no longer conceptualizable or recountable as a succession of necessary or probable actions. Conrad was the first to give a theoretical status to this tendencial indistinction between the action and its ‘preparation’, whose artisan Flaubert was astonished to be. He was able to do so, of course, because in the interval separating his stories of seas of the Orient from the Flaubert’s stories of provincial mores, the properties of the new fictional fabric had become the elements of a philosophy of life. The abolition of the separation between active humans and passive humans had been incorporated into the equal respiration of the phrases of the new prose. But this equality of phrases, weaving the uniform web of perceptions and actions, of thoughts and adventures, also came to be transformed. It became the philosophical belief in the vanity of thoughts that believe they are freely elaborating their ends and of actions that believe they are following the straight line of their realization. And captain Conrad, returned from the seas and from the mirages of adventures that promise their names and their outlines on maps, himself took up the nihilist belief in that vanity. To a socialist friend concerned with improving the lot of a humanity now known to be condemned to perish from the cold, he affirms both the expressions of that belief in the vanity of human actions and the words that turn it into a vanity itself: ‘If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence. In a dispassionate view the ardour for reform, improvement for virtue, for knowledge, and even for beauty is only a vain sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of one’s clothes in a community of blind men. Life knows us not and we do not know life – we don’t even know our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow – only the string of my platitudes seems to have no end.’8
But these philosophical commonplaces, which were in the atmosphere of the times, can acquire a wholly other power if one takes them seriously, if one no longer treats them as philosophemes suitable for nourishing after-dinner conversations but instead as forms structuring a fictional space, if one shows in actu this indistinction between knowledge and ignorance, between action and passion, real and dream. That the real is not distinct from dream is something that can be read in two ways. After-dinner philosophers will conclude from it that life is but a dream, without this conclusion upsetting their digestion. But the novelist will draw a completely different consequence: if the real and dream are of the same substance, this means that there is but the real. It is on the basis of this identity that it is possible to understand the famous preface of The Nigger of the Narcissus, a novel devoted to an episode taken from the ‘obscure lives of a few individuals out of all the disregarded multitude of the bewildered, the simple and the voiceless’.9 The artist, it is written here, is not like the thinker or the man of science. These latter ‘speak authoritatively to our common sense, to our intelligence, to our desire of peace or to our desire of unrest; not seldom to our prejudices, sometimes to our fears, often to our egoism – but always to our credulity’.10 But the same cannot be said of the artist. The artist does not address our credulity, any more than our egoism, ambitions, fears or prejudices.
This inversion of roles, placing credulity on the side of science, may seem surprising. Its logic is nonetheless clear: the thinker and the man of science address themselves to minds that assess the chances there are for thought and desire to intervene in the external world, to minds that are concerned with order or with disorder, to minds that are fearful or superstitious and need reassuring about the world’s reality and about the aptitude of thought to attain its goals in it. They address themselves to positive minds, who need to believe because they need to plot the paths of the possible on the map of the real. The artist, for his part, is a sceptic, which does not mean he believes in nothing, or that he asks of his audience the favour of a ‘suspension of disbelief’. Far more radically, he suspends the reasons themselves for belief, those that oblige us to distinguish the probabilities of verisimilitude in the mixed fabric of thought and acts which makes up the consistency of experience. Scepticism with regard to all operations of distinction goes hand-in-hand with a solidarity with all lives whose reality itself is condemned to indecision as to what is real and what dreamt, to what is knowable and what unknowable. Scepticism thus understood is ‘the tonic of minds, the tonic of life, the agent of truth – the way of art and salvation’.11
But this non-discriminating affinity does not simply define the ethics of the artist. It determines the very texture of his work, the appearance of new fiction. That dreams and acts are seized in the same sensible fabric, and that the grasping of things ‘as they are’ is itself a matter for words,12 means that the veridical writer deals with the real alone, with ‘things as they are’ and never with things ‘as they could be’. The critique of a colleague’s work furnished Conrad with the occasion to exclude from the domain of fiction the category of the possible that founds representational poetics: ‘everything in it is quite true and even obtrusively possible – but not a single episode, event, thought, word; not a single pang of joy or sorrow is inevitable. The end is an outrage on the reader’s intelligence not because the squire’s daughter marries the sergeant but because she marries that sergeant. It would be just as logical to say she married a crossing sweeper or the King of Monomatapa. Everything is possible – but the note of truth is not in the possibility of things but in their inevitability. Inevitability is the only certitude; it is the very essence of life – as it is of dreams. A picture of life is saved from failure by the merciless vividness of details. Like a dream it must be startling, undeniable, absurd and appalling. Like a dream it may be ludicrous or tragic and like a dream pitiless and inevitable; a thing monstrous or sweet from which you cannot escape. Our captivity within the incomprehensible logic of accident is the only fact of the universe. From that reality ensues disappointment and inspiration, error and faith, egoism and sacrifice, love and hate. That truth fearlessly faced becomes an austere and trusted friend, a companion of victory or a giver of peace. While our struggles to escape from it – either through drink or philanthropy; through a theory or through disbelief – make the comedy and the drama of life. To produce a work of art a man must either know or feel that truth – even without knowing it.’13
There is only the real, that is to say a set of conditions – natural as much as social – whose ultimate connection escapes all mastery, as well as humans that turn this real into both the place of their daily bread and the theatre of their illusions – illusions that are themselves perfectly ‘real’ since they alone furnish humans with the reasons to live and act in this real. The stories that Conrad tells all pertain to a same fundamental schema: they are always born of an appearance, an illusion, a mistake. Lord Jim narrates the miserable fate of an individual dream of heroism, Heart of Darkness that of the great civilizing lie of the colonial enterprise. Nostromo is the portrait of a man who accepts to be paid solely in looks of admiration. Under Western Eyes develops the consequences of an optical illusion: in the reserved air of a student who dreams only of academic medals, revolutionaries persist in seeing the depth of thought of a soul complicit in their grand designs. But the story, we know, is only there to illuminate that which is all around, the sensible fabric within which the ‘illusions’ are produced and in which they have to produce their effects: a perfectly real milieu as a stage on which desires have to change themselves into acts, perfectly spectral at the level of the infinity of atomic connections that constitute the place and moment of the act, and those that weave the present of the subject whose act it is. In this milieu the story supplies the names of characters, places and situations. But it is from these properties that we must draw the necessity that assembles them into a fiction. This assembly can therefore no longer be a linkage in which actions transform situations and thus create the conditions for other situations and other actions. Conrad dismisses this logic by refusing to have the divisions of Lord Jim named chapters. A chapter of a novel makes the ‘story’ advance, but the milieu of the story does not advance. It is made up of beaches of light and mist each one of which is in the present. For it is only in the present of a scene that the clarity of the detail is assured – the detail alone is suitable to attesting that life is what there is and not the representation of a ‘possible’ story. The clarity of the detail is the texture of the inevitable: it is the decomposition of a situation and an action into the multiplicity of sensible events, which composes this situation’s and action’s perceptible reality; but it is also the limit placed on this decomposition, the punctuation of the encounter with the inconceivable that prevents this set of sensible events from constituting the rationality of a situation and sufficient reason of an action. Hence, the most famous scene of Conrad’s most famous novel, the episode of abandoning the Patna in Lord Jim. The episode is made up of a multiplicity of sensible states and incidents that transform, first, the theatre of a possible action into a scene of passivity, before such passivity finishes with an act that itself exists only in the past. The story describes by turns: the great peace of the motionless sky and sea that sustain Jim’s heroic dreams of action; the quarrel between the fleshy captain and the parched mechanic that confirms his feeling of being foreign to all that can happen in this world of mediocre individuals; the material collision of the ship’s meeting with an unidentified obstacle; the sight, in the beam of a flashlight, of a hold submerged in water and a loose, rusty plaque that tells of the unavoidable shipwreck; the vain calculations of ways to save eight hundred passengers with seven lifeboats, leading to the passive resolution to wait calmly for the ineluctable end rather than trigger pointless panic; a look over the mass of bodies asleep on the bridge and heads that rise and fall in a jumble of crates, winches and fans; a black cloud engulfing the sky; a blow delivered by mistake for a pilgrim who simply asked for water for his son; a blow unexpectedly received from the mechanic who mistook him for a negro; the ridiculous and odious spectacle of the captain and the mechanics getting entangled in their impatience to undo a lifeboat to save themselves; the fall of one of the fugitives suffering a heart attack; the grating noise of the davits starting to turn and free the lifeboat; a jolt that seems to come from the bridge and climb the length of Jim’s back into his skull; the rustle of the wind, a cry of pain, a jerky leg, the murmuring of voices, the fugitives’ calls to someone they are unaware is dead: a set of noises and sights that befall Jim and that come to an end with a bleat, a howl and a grunt, which create the call of the chasm into which he throws himself, or rather is thrown, thus taking the place of the accomplice that those voices were calling, and also doing what he should have done in another circumstance, in which the apprentice sailor’s mistake was not to have jumped at the right moment.
The ‘impressionist’ label readily tacked onto this type of story ought not mislead us. The problem is not to put together the whole of the picture by small strokes placed close together. The course of sensible events reveals, on the contrary, the impossibility of the picture coming to an end. It could only do so at the cost of attaining the ultimate truth of the real, that is, its indistinction with dream. Ultimate reality is identical to the song of sirens. To escape from it, one can only tie oneself to the mast like Ulysses, circumscribe one’s gaze and one’s acts to the circle of minor things to do be done, such as Marlow’s caulking the leaky pipes of the boat heading up the Congo to resist the calls of bewitching dances from the shore, or such as Captain MacWhirr in Typhoon, who even prohibits the figurative use of language. But to one turned from this care of minor things by dreams of heroism, all that remains is to sink with Jim into the ocean of the inconceivable. Here is what distinguishes Jim’s leap from the surrendering of Emma’s hand. Flaubert built his atmospheric scene in concentric circles. From the distant choir of flocks, including orators and villagers, the wind brings the scattered tumult of sensible events into the centre where it is synthesized in the whirlwind of individual sensations leading one hand to surrender to another. The atmospheric dynamic of sensible accidents is thus inserted into the logic of the plot by accomplishing at once Emma’s sentimental dreams and Rodolphe’s prosaic calculations. This could be done since sensations were made thoughts and thoughts were made acts, in accordance with the modality of wish-fulfilment, or possibility. In Conrad, the totalization of sensible events is resolved only in the mode of the identity of the real and dream. And it is in accordance with this modality of the pure, irrational succession of real dream sequences that Jim jumps into the lifeboat, in an act that belies at once his heroic dreams, the mundane calculations of his companions and the positive rationality of facts awaited by the judges. Jim’s jump belongs only to the order of the real, not to that of the possible. The great nebula of sensible states unfold only to mark the cut of the inconceivable that separates it definitively from the possible linkages of narrative action.
The Flaubertian compromise that subjugated the true description of sensible states to the artifice of causal fiction is thus no longer tenable. The description of sensible moments can no longer sprinkle the plot’s path with its golden dust. It imposes a temporal construction that bursts asunder the normal temporality of progression of stories. Justifying his refusal to transform the breaks in the story into chapters, Conrad told his editor that all there is, is one episode. A single present is all there is. This present itself is of course woven from the encounter between the occasional hazards of circumstances, obsessive past fears and future anticipations inhabiting heads, in which the chimera pushing one to act is not separate from the positive reasons for action; and this past-present does not cease to haunt all the remainder of the story. But precisely these articulations of past, present and future, which ordered the time of fiction as a progression, have themselves gone over into a regime of coexistence. They are now internal to each present. This is also why this present itself is given through several narrative presents, each averred by the precision of the ‘detail’, such as in the court where this cloud of sensible events is judged in terms of positive facts and responsibility by a judge with his head inclined slightly on the shoulder, a first assessor with a thin horseshoe beard and a second drumming with his fingertips on a blotting-pad, while some flowers wither in a vase by the side of an inkstand;14 in the front gallery of a dining-room where Jim tells his story to Marlow, seated at small octagon tables lit by candles burning in glass globes, in one of these cosy wicker armchairs separated by clumps of stiff-leaved plants, amidst the forest of red-shafted columns that sift out the sheen of the dark and glittering night, in which the riding lights of ships wink from afar.15 The role of stories, and of stories about stories, in Conrad’s great novels has nothing to do with any perspectivist relativism. It is a matter, on the contrary, of assuring the absolute truth of a present by renewing the mode of its presence. This is why Conrad reintroduces the function of the narrator that his master, Flaubert, made disappear during the first chapter of his first novel. And he does not hesitate to multiply the more or less plausible ‘encounters’ of the fictional narrator with the actors or witnesses of events. The plausible, precisely, is not his concern. The narrator’s task is to ward off the distance that objective narration always institutes with this truth, and which the ‘detail’ alone guarantees. Lord Jim thus multiplies the presents that diffuse the book’s sole ‘event’. Nostromo builds a multiplicity of circles that work to cut and broaden the initial circle of a caricature event – a revolution by colonels in a South American republic – that is first perceived through the variations of noise and effects of light that the riot of the outside triggers inside a well-barricaded restaurant. Each of these circles serves to introduce the history of new characters involved in the situation. But each of these stories is attested only by the singularity of a vision and a noise. Hence the attesting of the decision that the young Charles Gould makes to recover the mine, whose silver is at the centre of the story, occurs through being made on a Tuscan Road at the hour of evening when the shadows of the chestnut trees, poplars and farm buildings lengthen, at the sound of a bell whose thin sound appears to set into the air the throbbing pulse of the setting sun.16 And the development of the mine’s activities is even evoked through the gaze directed, upon the hour of the shift change, at Indian boys leaning idly against lines of cradle wagons standing empty, screeners and ore-breakers squatted on their heels smoking long cigars, motionless wooden shoots slanting over the edge of the tunnel plateau and the noise of torrents mixed with the rumbling of turbines and stamps pounding on the plateau below.17 Insistence on the details decidedly proves to be something entirely different to a ‘reality effect’, a tautological assertion replacing lost verisimilitude. It is rather an active destruction of this verisimilitude, a revolution in the ontology of fiction, which eliminates the gap itself between the real and the dream and substitutes the temporality of coexistences for the order of possible chains. But the ‘merciless liveliness of the detail’ is not simply the interminable journey through all the co-presences making up a situation. It is also the mark of what subtracts this situation from all mastery to make it the theatre of an ‘adventure’, that is to say, a random and inevitable encounter between a desiring and chimerical being and a reality whose synthesis escapes all calculation of causes and effects. It is the mark of the inevitable, which at any moment can bring the thinkable to tip over into the unthinkable, calculable danger into inconceivable horror and the chimeras of honour, justice or progress into the simple assumption of horror. The inevitability of the detail is the mark of these limit situations, emblematized by Jim’s leap into the boat of infamy or Marlow’s climb up to the place where the missionary of Western Enlightenment is in his death throes, and has become the most ferocious of ivory pillagers and the object of idolatory worship. Such situations are at the limit of the recountable, but they are also what is alone worthy of recounting and, at the same time, what can only be recounted, that is to say, transmitted by a voice that makes its own speech one with the experience of those men who had reached the limit of their chimera.
But can this revolution in the ontology of fiction remove the ultimate obligation to give the story a beginning, a middle and an end? Conrad’s critics, who generally complain that he supplied a ‘character study’ instead of the action expected, also readily lament that he transformed this or that situation, which at most contained adequate material for a novella, into a whole novel. Conrad himself presents the terms of the problem better. What merits being told can no longer be the undertaking of people seeking power, wealth or glory. It is singular and unpredictable moments in which the brilliance of a chimera encountering the unmasterable element of a situation comes to tear a hole in the routine of existence. It is ‘the intensity of life, that light of glamour created in the shock of trifles, as amazing as the glow of sparks struck from a cold stone’.18 Conrad places the evocation of this splendour in the mouth of Marlow, the narrator, who only mentions it himself in order to mark the impossibility of transmitting it to positive men, for whom listening to a story or reading a novel will only ever be a recreational activity for after dinner. The new story, the story that has revoked the reasons of verisimilitude, will always be at the limits of the transmissible and the intransmissible – and this is also one of the functions of this narrator, reintroduced by Conrad into fiction. Addressing his fictional audience, this mediator is tasked with underlining the limit between what can and what cannot be transmitted. But the distance that his character invokes quite clearly affects the novelist’s task: how is one to order these presents of light and darkness, each of which is like a serpent curling in on itself, in the form of a story advancing toward an end? These encounters of accidents of life with the chimera which make living possible are without final word: ‘there is never the time to say our last word – the last word of our love, of our desire, faith … truths.’19 To say the ultimate truth would be to do what the novelist has prohibited himself from doing: taking the role of the thinker who directs himself at the reader’s ‘credulity’, when all he has to do is direct himself at his unconditioned sympathy for all humans who feel the joys and sufferings of their chimera. Neither Jim, Almayer nor Nostromo will proffer a last word. Kurtz, as we know, does state one – a word that says it all: ‘horror’. But this saying-all cannot end the novel without betraying its principle, without addressing the ‘credulity’ that renders fiction pointless and that fiction renders futile.
There is no good ending. And yet the novel must have one. Is its only choice thus one between artifice and lie? The artifice is the deus ex machina that arrives from outside to put an end to a chimerical story that has no reason to stop. It is Brown the adventurer, who seems to disembark at Patusan only in order to provoke the spiral of murders that will claim Jim as a victim; it’s the story of love and amorous jealousy between two sisters that arises unexpectedly at the end of Nostromo merely to provoke the case of mistaken identity as part of which a noble father fires a gunshot that claims the hero who was not the real target. But there is something even worse than the awkwardly grafted artifice designed to bring the interminable fiction to a close. There is the lie that denies its very principle. Such is, at the end of Heart of Darkness, Marlow’s lie. His entire climb up to the Congo was like an inversion of the official fiction: that of the Western man’s civilizing mission to abolish barbarous customs. By way of civilizing mission, Marlow saw a procession of chained-up Blacks, with iron collars round their necks, carrying materials up a sloping path for a needless railway; he smelt the odour of stupid rapaciousness and the dreams of ivory floating among idle Whites wandering with their long batons around these lost stations, which were supposed to be centres of human improvement; he perceived, at the bend in the river, the call formed, as though from the depths of the ages, by ‘a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage’.20 At the end of the track, he found skulls and crossbones adorning the fences of the missionary of progress who’d become the object of an idolatory cult and who exploited this cult to organize raids and appropriate all the country’s ivory for himself. Marlow read on his report, vibrating with humanitarian eloquence, these simple words scribbled in the margins ‘exterminate all the brutes’ and he noted its last word: ‘horror’. In returning Marlow merely had to carry out one last mission: go and see the fiancée who had held the sublime image of the civilizing hero in her heart and fulfil her last request: repeat to her the last words of this great soul, this talisman who helps her live. Marlow hears the very echo of the noises of his distant voyage in the low voice of the young woman: ‘the ripple of the river, the soughing of the trees swayed by the wind, the murmurs of the crowds, the faint ring of incomprehensible words cried from afar, the whisper of a voice speaking from beyond the threshold of an eternal darkness.’21 Yet the words consonant with that rumour of ‘savagery’, Kurtz’s last words, are not the ones he will pronounce, but instead those the fiancée awaits: ‘The last word he pronounced was – your name.’ This word of the lying end of itself revokes the voyage that went to the true heart of the lie. The matter is not resolved by considering it as a concern not to drive to despair a soul in need of illusion. What is involved is the very possibility that the story tells the truth about the lie. The great scene of the sea and sky, of illusion and chasm on which Conrad shone the halo of obscure light is so far from the subdued light and the habits of thought specific to the places in which the stories are recounted that the very distance obliges one to lie in order to end the story and again to subtract the truth of sensible moments from the false tyranny of stories.