Make the Wrong Choice

“I hadn’t traveled to Kenya to flee a shameful past, and yet, the mysterious mechanisms of connectivity that run the world arrived, as they always do in Conrad, to make sure that I remained part of the world I thought I had left behind”

“No matter how remote Conrad’s characters attempt to go, circumstance always closes in on them. Conrad’s view is uniformly pessimistic: circumstance strikes down the smart and the dumb, the humble and the proud alike.”

“I didn’t recognize the full significance of this, however, until I read, years later, Conrad’s late novel Victory (1915), recently republished by Penguin Classics with a new introduction by John Gray.”

“Once I left Africa, I felt distant enough to examine the particular moral calculus of a Westerner “helping” or simply living, in a position of privilege in another country (far after we should have learned our lesson).”

“My ideas of progress and charity collapsed into the always gruesome reality of mixed results and motivations. I came up against the Conrad conundrum, as though naturally, as though it was the basic truth of the world.”

“What I was as an individual — all my petty strivings and cobbled-together beliefs — were inevitably implicated in and chewed up by a global tournament beyond my control. I was hard pressed to justify the sinister mechanisms of the West even to myself, why had I spread them to Kenya?”

“It seemed to me that in many of Conrad’s novels, even when life is at its most twisted and inscrutable, individual characters emerge to be observed and studied.”

“Through them, the reader can glimpse the larger systems of the globe. Axel Heyst, the protagonist in Victory, however, is an exception. Heyst already knows the world is rigged (he learned this from his father, a disappointed and cynical intellectual). Those who live earnestly have little chance of achieving anything more than those who take up life as a matter of fate and chance.”

“Heyst is not Kurtz from Heart of Darkness; from what we know, he has never been compelled by any belief in Enlightenment progress or divine ordination. He has never undertaken a “great” task. He is both skeptical of progress and disillusioned by the typical ways people choose to live their lives. Heyst has no interest in money or jealousy or anything that would link him to another human being. He takes Conrad’s deterministic, mechanical universe as a given. Thus, Victory becomes a sort of test for how to live in that universe. Initially, Heyst chooses complete avoidance; he will not be implicated in the game at all.”

“Appropriately, Conrad places Heyst in a remote corner of the world — the islands of Java long before they supported resorts on Bali — but the location, in a sense, doesn’t seem to matter. Heyst’s relationship to Java is like a swimmer’s relationship with the walls of the pool, he makes contact only because he must sometimes stop somewhere.”

“Famously tough Conrad sentences are waiting for you at every turn. I can easily quote the climactic moment of Victory verbatim, without risking any spoilers: “Behold the simple Acis kissing the sandals of the nymph, on the way to her lips, all forgetful, while the menacing fife of Polyphemus already sounds close at hand […]” The idea of any human being, at any age, victim to even the stuffiest educational system, uttering such a line is unlikely to say the least. Conrad, on the other hand, drops it right at the moment of urgency and resolution in the novel, as if using an elaborate metaphor comes as naturally as drinking as glass of water.”

“And yet, Victory deepens despite these difficulties, further illuminating how Conrad thinks about human life. Schomberg may be the central villain of the novel, but in a classic play of Conrad ironies, he is basically an ordinary man living according to the norms of the day.”

“Schomberg and his actions can all be explained; he is even banal in his own way, compelled by familiar human vices, like jealousy and lust. When he stalks and harasses Lena, the reader can see his motivations openly: he is unhappy with his marriage, he has nothing in his life but petty power plays and small-time gambles. He games Lena out of petty dissatisfaction and unquenched desire.”

“It is against the background of Schomberg and his banalities that Heyst reveals himself as particularly strange character in the Conrad canon. It is also through Schomberg that Heyst eventually gains an attachment, becoming implicated in the world despite his better judgment, going against the set of rational criteria he has set for himself. When Lena pleads with Heyst to help her, he finds “he could not defend himself from compassion.””

“Victory, then, can be understood in two ways: choosing Lena is the story, and how Heyst chooses Lena is the novel. Love, as a singular ideal, is a genuine enigma in an otherwise determined world. It is something that cannot be chosen yet must be chosen. In Victory, we find this paradox on the far side of the world, in a man who is, or was, attached to nothing.”

“As Terry Eagleton has observed, in Conrad “ideals are as necessary as they are death-dealing,” and there is no clearer confirmation of that than Victory. Eagleton has also articulated a kind of dictum for Conrad’s work: “to know one is deluded is the nearest one can get to clear-sightedness.” We may find a connection there between Conrad and his fan, Didion, who famously wrote about “the stories we tell ourselves to live.” A hero, then, is a person who acts, despite knowing they are doomed.”

“The ending of Victory tests this precept. I won’t tell you how the book ends, but I will say this: there is no relief in Conrad’s world. When there’s hope, when we proceed with confidence, Conrad always lies in wait. The world will find us, no matter how far we go.”