B. Traven and Joseph Conrad: Ideological Contrasts

Sacido Romero 1 B. Traven and Joseph Conrad: Ideological Contrasts. Jorge Sacido Romero University of Santiago de Compostela I. Traven and Conrad. In his outstanding biography of B. Traven, Karl S. Guthke reproduces a note dated September 2, 1925 in which the author announces the completion of The Death Ship. This piece titled “Birth Notice!” is considered by Traven’s biographer as “the richest document on the genesis” of the novel and on the significance that this work had “in the author’s ‘inner’ biography.” (Guthke 1991, 235) In a tone of extreme exhilaration and selfconfidence, Traven tells whom was most likely the actual addressee of the note, John Schikowski –editor of Vörwarts, the magazine in which the first part of The Cotton-Pickers had appeared– that The Death Ship “is a tale of the sea. I only know the one book of Joseph Conrad that you sent me. In light of that book I am judging six other books by Conrad. And I feel confident enough to say that with my novel I have so outdone six other Conrad’s books that Conrad will be seen as a teller of old wives’ tales. It was my intention to dedicate the book to him with the words: In memoriam of J. C. the great writer of fairy tales. He always writes only about the captains and similar fine fellows and if he tells of the crew, they appear as characters and chorus members of an opera. But here, for once the crew itself does the talking. And it does not merely speak, it roars. And I’ll tell you this much: lightning appears on the horizon and one can hear the first sounds of the trumpets signalling the final setting of accounts between servants and masters. For the time being they are only tuning up for the big concert. […] The Pickers is no more than a puppet show compared with this dance of the galley slaves rattling their chains.” (Quoted in Guthke 1991, 236) In this long passage Traven claims enthusiastically to have written a story that heralds a new epoch in which the oppressors and the oppressed will confront each other in a way that would bring about emancipation, freedom and justice. The particular battlefront in which Traven engages in this fight is, of course, that of literature. In The Death Ship he Sacido Romero 2 presumably takes the side of the oppressed (i.e., the crew of the ship) and aims at dismantling the usual representation of the crew in stories of the sea: as a group of men doing their work as mere infrastructure. In Traven’s view, Joseph Conrad stands out among the popular writers that had contributed the most to promote this negative picture of the crew.1 Conrad, who had died the previous year, was not only a great literary artist, he was also one of the most popular writers of sea fiction, particularly in the United States of America. Whether in retrospect or not, Conrad became Traven’s main target: that is, the author whose presentation of the ship as social organisation had to be deconstructed, to be “outdone,” as he assertively proclaims. In the English version of The Death Ship published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1934, the first-person narrator, Gerry Gales, launches an attack against an unnamed writer of the sea. Before Guthke’s publication of “Birth Notice!” in B. Traven: The Life Behind the Legends – which leaves little space for doubt–, critics like Michael L. Baumann (1976) had put forth the thesis that it is Joseph Conrad whom Gales has in mind in his deprecatory remark.2 The first-person narrator of The Death Ship starts out his indictment by criticising those stories or plays in which plain sailors are portrayed as indolent lovers with nothing to do all day. He, then, goes on to point his finger at Conrad, completing Traven’s description of Conrad’s representation of the crew in the following manner: Even that heavenly, that highly praised, that greatest sea-story writer of all time knew how to write well only about brave skippers, dishonored lords, unearthly gentlemen of the sea, and of the ports, the islands, and the seacoasts; but the crew is always cowardly, always near mutiny, lazy, rotten, stinking, without any higher ideals or fine ambitions. (Traven 1991, 135-36) 1 In Chapter 5 of B. Traven: An Introduction, Michael L. Baumann cites playwright Eugene O’Neil’s The Hairy Ape as another target of Traven’s attack for the brutalised, animalistic character of the crew member this play features. On the pole opposite to that occupied by Conrad and O’Neill, Baumann locates Richard Henry Dana’s 1840 Two Years Before the Mast, a work that must have awakened Traven’s sympathies because of the author’s explicit desire to let the crew speak for once and for his denunciation of the adventurous and romantic view of sea-life offered in novels and tales. In one of the interviews that journalist Judy Stone had with Traven (disguised as Hal Croves), the latter said the following about The Death Ship: “’Many have said that it beats all the Conrad sea stories.’” (1977, 62. Emphasis added) 2 I am acquainted with the fact that at least another eminent Travenologist, Rolf Recknagel, stated that the object of Gales’s indictment is Joseph Conrad and his stories of the sea in B. Traven: Beiträge zur Biografie, 3rd ed., Leipzig, Verlag Philipp Reclam, 1982. My source of information is Keune (1987, 86). Sacido Romero 3 In an argument in which Traven and Gales are at once identified with and distinguished from each other in a rather unsystematic way, Michael Baumann criticises the author for being unfair to Conrad’s portrait of the crew. “This passage,” Baumann writes in reference to the one in The Death Ship, “does deliberate injustice to Conrad, who did write about courageous, ordinary sailors, for example in The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus.’” (1976, 94) But, the fact is that The Nigger of the “Narcissus: A Tale of the Sea” (orig. pub. 1897) –the one novel by Conrad in which the crew is given greater prominence than in any other work of the Polish-born author– stages a process of political conflict between masters (captain and officers) and slaves (the deck-hands) that is only precariously solved at the end through some degree of ideological closure. I would go farther than Baumann –who refers to the Conrad novel as one example of the truly courageous Conradian sailor– to state that The Nigger of the “Narcissus” is most probably “the one book of Joseph Conrad” that Traven confessed was the “only” one he knew at the time he wrote the “Birth Notice!”. Anyone familiar with the Conradian canon could make a case in favour of other works as possible candidates for this “one book.” One could easily highlight particular passages in the text of The Death Ship that seem to echo or to respond to what Conrad had written in Lord Jim (1900), in any of the pieces that make up the volume Youth: A Narrative; and Two Other Stories (1902), in “Typhoon” (1902), in “Falk” (1903), in “The Secret Sharer” (1910), in The Shadow Line (1917), or, even, in non-fiction works such as The Mirror of the Sea (1906), A Personal Record (1912), or Notes on Life and Letters (1921).3 Yet, in these works the crew is 3 At the beginning of the novel, Gales comments on the contrast between the seaman under sails and the deck-hand who works on board steamers, a recurrent topic in The Mirror of the Sea. (Traven 1991, 4; Conrad 1946a, 30-31, 38 and 73-73). In the latter work, Conrad insists on the fact that each ship is different, that its has its individuality. (1946a, 28-29, 56, 58). In The Death Ship, Gales endows the Yorikke with a “mind,” a “soul,” a “sprit” and a particular “behavior.” (Traven 1991, 107) Moreover, Gales’s description of the death ship as “crazy” and the episode in which the Yorikke disobeyed her master, “scratched off against the quay,” “kicked at her stern like an old hussy trying to dance the rhumba” and “began swaying like a drunken society lion trying to avoid the lamp-posts” chimes in with Conrad’s reference to “a certain 1000-ton barque of my acquaintance [which] on what particular occasion refused to answer her helm” and to another ship that “had the reputation of killing somebody every voyage she made.” (Traven 1991, 105, 112; Conrad 1946a (29, 58) Conrad’s more comprehensive fictional presentation of a ship that misbehaves is “The Brute” (1906). On the other hand, Jim in Lord Jim and young Marlow in “Youth” are perfect fictional examples of the “many fine youngsters who fell for those stories [romances of adventure at sea]and believed them true” that Gales speaks Sacido Romero 4 either a slightly felt presence, or is totally absent from the narrative discourse, the latter being most often the case. II. The Nigger of the “Narcissus.” Directly in “Birth Notice!,” or indirectly through Gales, the descriptive features that Traven ascribes to the Conradian crew are to a certain extent applicable to the plain sailors of the Narcissus; it is only the way of lumping them together in sweeping statements such as those quoted above that is unfair, or, better still, wrong: a misreading on Traven’s part.4 Sometimes the crew act as an obedient chorus of unambitious individuals singing to the about. (Traven 1991, 4; Conrad 1946b, 5-6 and 20; Conrad 1946c, 12). Furthermore, the character of Stanislav in The Death Ship bears some resemblances with Jim and with Conrad, himself. In Chapter 39 of the novel, Gales provides information about Stanilslav’s background and the reason way he decided to become a sailor when still very young. His parents wanted him to become a tailor, but a “couple of imitation of Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, sold at a dime apiece, and another couple of hundred sea-stories and pirateyarns, had ambushed his spirit, and he ran away from home, landing in Stettin, one of the greatest German ports in the Baltic Sea.” (Traven 1991, 240) In Chapter 1 of Lord Jim we read: “Jim was one of five sons [living in his father’s parsonage in the English countryside], and when after a course of light holiday literature his vocation for the sea had declared itself, he was sent at once to a ‘training-ship for officers of the merchant marine.’” (1946b, 5) A Pole like Stanislav, Conrad escaped from the landlocked Russian province of Ukraine with the intention of becoming a sailor. As in the case of Stanislav and Jim, Conrad’s impulse to go to the sea derived from his readings as he recalls in A Personal Record (1946a, 35-37, 72) In this work he cites Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea as his “first introduction to the sea in literature”. (Conrad 1946a, 72) In “Tales of the Sea” –an article originally published in 1898 in Outlook and later collected in Notes on Life and Letters– Conrad reviews the sea-stories of “two authors of fiction” that more than any other “influenced so many lives and gave to so many the initial impulse towards a glorious or a useful career.” (1949, 56) One is Marryat and the other is James Fenimore Cooper, who unlike the former “wrote of the sea with true artistic instinct.” (Conrad 1949, 55) Much of Stanislav Koslovski reminds one of the life of Konrad Korzienowski. In connection with Lord Jim, I do not want to fail to comment on Judy Stone’s interview with Hal Croves (Traven) reproduced in her 1977 book The Mystery of B. Traven. The first thing Croves/Traven said when Stone asked him what he felt about Conrad was: “’I like Lord Jim’.” (1977, 63) Though we must take this statement cum grano salis, it seems that Traven did not include Lord Jim among Conrad’s “old wives’ tales.” I want to propose the hypothesis that Traven (through Croves) may be speaking the truth in declaring his preference for Lord Jim. Why did this novel find Traven’s approval? For at least two reasons. On the one hand, Lord Jim is exemplary of the tragic effects that popular romances may have on the young, as Gales argues at the beginning of The Death Ship. Conrad portrays Jim’s identification with the hero in the book of adventures and his desire to live the life he had read about as a state of persistent intoxication, so that the effects of reading popular stories –“light holiday literature,” as the narrator calls it– becomes a major theme of the novel. (Conrad 1946b, 5) Yet, on the other, Jim’s experience among non-whites in the so-called Patusan-half of the novel probably commended itself to Traven as a correlate of the Mexican Indian community which (so critics argue) constituted for Traven a balanced and humane alternative to capitalist European society where bureaucratic authority had become omnipotent and omnipresent. 4 I use the word “misreading” on purpose to suggest that Conrad might have been for Traven a source of what Harold Bloom called “anxiety of influence” in his 1973 book by the same title. Traven’s mixed feelings towards Conrad’s oeuvre –a greater artist and a writer of old wives’ tales– fit well into Bloom’s description of the Oedipal conflict between the poet that tries to makes his way (as Traven did when he published The Death Ship) as an artist and his literary father, whose influence is denied. The ambivalent nature of Traven’s hostile assessment of Conrad’s sea fiction bespeaks a conflict between his desire for artistic self-engendering and the conscious or unconscious sense of his indebtedness to a poetic father. (See Bloom 1973, 5-14) Sacido Romero 5 tune of the master (Captain Allistoun), doing their work about the deck like Hegelian slaves whose humanity is not even recognised, yet who do risk their lives in heavy seas for the sake of the master’s prestige.5 Yet, at other times, under the influence of the uncanny moribund nigger, James Wait, and of the labour agitator, Donkin, they show signs of resistance to authority, laze around, and come, as Gales says, “near mutiny.” What is perhaps the most prominent technical feature to found in Conrad’s novel is the shifts in narrative voice. There is throughout much of the text an alternation of thirdperson and first-person plural (“we”) that is resolved in the concluding passages of the novel in a final change to the first-person singular (“I”), which is the voice of an unnamed crew member bidding farewell to his chums. Interestingly, the third-person gives voice to a view of the ship as a harmonious, conflict-free, even, idyllic social organisation that we may call, following Terry Eagleton, “organic”. (1976, 103n4) Although in passing, Eagleton does explicitly refer to the Conradian ship as “an organic community which, with a hierarchy of stable functions, curtails subversive individualism and the anarchic imagination”, and which allows officers alone to test their individuality. (1976, 133) In the following passage the third-person narrator speaks about Captain Allistoun’s desire for public recognition and about his view on the men as subhuman beings. The narrator represents the ship as a harmonious realm where each member acts according to his function: He [Captain Allistoun] had commanded the Narcissus since she was built. He loved his ship, and drove her unmercifully; for his secret ambition was to make her accomplish some day a brilliantly quick passage which would be mentioned in nautical papers. […] He, the ruler of that minute world, seldom descended from the Olympian heights of his poop. Below him –at his feet, so to speak– common mortals lead their busy and insignificant lives. […] The men working about the deck were healthy and contented–as most seamen are, when once well out to sea. The true peace of God begins at any spot a thousand miles from the nearest land; and when He sends there the messengers of His might it is not in terrible wrath against crime, 5 My source for the master-slave dialectic is “Part III: The Struggle for Recognition” of Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History and The Last Man (1992, 142-208) Sacido Romero 6 presumption, and folly, but paternally, to chasten simple hearts–ignorant hearts that know nothing of life, and beat undisturbed by envy or greed. (Conrad 1950, 30-31) From this perspective, from this gaze, everything falls into place, each one behaves in the normal, normative way: that is, according the norm. The plain sailors are naïve men who have no ambitions, are perfectly happy in carrying out their job as simple working force, as the unconscious limbs of this organic, corporate body. The captain’s gaze is attuned to that of the third person in his view of the crew. To go on with the bodily metaphor, the captain is like the mind, the headquarters of the body giving orders and enforcing the law through his officers, the nerve system. On the other hand, the first-person plural “we” is the voice of the crew. As such, it wavers between obedience and resistance. The crew is given a voice that is pronominally distinguished from that which voices the perspective of the ship as a conflict-free corporate body. This latter, “organic” view is what Slavoj Žižek calls “the fundamental ideological fantasy” in his 1989 book The Sublime Object of Ideology, a landmark in the restoration of the critique of ideology after its abandonment by postmodernist thinkers. (126) Society as a whole does never exist, it is always traversed by antagonisms that do not allow it to be completed, to be unified. It is the function of ideology to construct a fantasy of its completeness by displacing and condensing –that is, by “projecting”– social antagonisms onto an object that, though a real part of the social organisation, is nevertheless considered an external object that threatens its harmony and, therefore, is regarded with hostility. The clearest example Žižek finds of the latter is the Jew, particularly in Nazi Germany. The Jew is the embodiment of the society’s negativity, “of the impossibility,” Žižek writes, “which prevents the society from achieving its full identity as a closed, homogeneous totality.” (1989, 127) To liberate themselves, normative subjects must break free from the fantasy of harmonious totality by recognising in the features attributed to the projected object of ideology “the truth about themselves.” (Žižek 1989, 128) The projected object is the Sacido Romero 7 symptom of what goes wrong within the system, of its inherent antagonisms, of its lack of unity. It is an excess, an excrescence secreted by the social body that spoils its completeness and, like pus, threatens to infect the organism and provoke its disintegration. Žižek points to the way out of this fantasy by recalling Jacques Lacan’s prescription “identify with a symptom”: “To ‘identify with a symptom’ means to recognise in the ‘excesses,’ in the disruptions of the ‘normal’ way of things, the key offering access to its true functioning.” (1989, 128) Who, then, plays the role of the projected object of ideology in the Narcissus? The same object onto which Victorian and late-Victorian Britain projected many its fears about the disintegration of the sound social fabric that it tried restlessly to stave off through numerous reforms: i.e., the labour leader that may bring about revolution. In the homogenous, organic “normal” version of state of affairs on board the Narcissus, Donkin is characterised as a lazy, amphibious figure clad in rags that goes about raising his voice against the oppressors and trying to talk the crew into rebellion against authority. As pointed out, the we-narrator voices the predicament of the crew: the dialectic between, on the one hand, a tendency to remain subjected to the dominant structure by sacrificing their individuality and the recognition of their worth to the master ,and, on the other, a drive to having their humanity and their value recognised, a desire whose satisfaction must be repressed to preserve the unity of the social fabric (i.e., the must go un working as unthinking, unambitious slaves). In the gale, when the Narcissus was rounding the Cape of Good Hope on her homeward voyage from Bombay, the men worked hard on deck, watched over closely by the officers and the captain. The we-narrator gives expression the crew’s feelings throughout: “Our heart went out to the old man [the captain] when he pressed her hard so as to make her hold her own, hold to every inch gained to winward; when he made her, under reefed sails, leap obliquely at enormous waves.” (Conrad 1950, 51) This is very illustrative of the slave mentality: they renounce the recognition of their own merit to feed the master’s desire for prestige that demands their hard and silent work. Sacido Romero 8 The long episode in which the ship went round the Cape and was righted northward is punctuated by the orders that the captain and his officers give to the crew who obey and give up any thought of their individuality. “They abandoned themselves,” says the thirdperson narrator referring to the crew. (Conrad 1950, 91) Yet, when the ship started her straight course homeward to London, the crew’s attitude changed from one of “normative” subjection and obedient adherence to the captain’s desire and authority to one of consciousness of their own worth. The we-narrator verbalises the crew’s pride and mutual recognition of their merit at their success in having taken the ship safely through the gale, while affirming the officers’ and the captain’s worthlessness: We boasted of our pluck, of our capacity for work, of our energy. We remembered honourable episodes: our devotion, our indomitable perseverance –and were proud of them as though they had been the outcome of our unaided impulses. We remembered our danger, our toil […] We decried our officers –who had done nothing– and listened to the fascinating Donkin. (Conrad 1950, 100. Emphases added) This passage marks a move away from the mentality of the slave and opens for the crew the possibility of achieving what Žižek once called “a kind of ‘de-alienation’.” (1989, 122) Dokin’s vindicating and rebellious discourse verbalises their awares of the true functioning of the ship’s social organisation, of the unfairness of their subjection, and of their legitimacy to demand more recognition for their merits. That the members of the crew have mixed feelings towards Donkin –the latter object of both fascination and abomination– is an index of their predicament: a pull back to normative subjection (hence abomination as exemplary of the typical hostility towards the projected object of ideology) and a thrust forward towards liberation. Moreover, the crew’s resistance to Donkin’s discourse is the common resistance to accept the symptom –through which repressed unconscious wishes speak– as part of themselves: the resistance, that is, “to identify with a symptom.” And so the we-narrator tells us: He talked with ardour, despised and irrefutable. His picturesque and filthy loquacity flowed like a trouble stream from a poisoned source. […] We Sacido Romero 9 abominated the creature and could not deny the luminous truth of his contentions. It was all so obvious. We were indubitably good men; our deserts were great and our pay small. Through our exertions we had saved the ship and the skipper would get the credit for it. […] We were oppressed by the injustice of the world, surprised to perceive how long we had lived under its burden without realising our unfortunate state, annoyed by the uneasy suspicion of our discerning stupidity. (Conrad 1950, 101-02) Nevertheless, when the crew confronts the captain at the end of Chapter 4, the latter in a composed and courageous manner –typical of the Hegelian master who risks his life to preserve his privileged position– asks them point blank: “’What do you want?’” (Conrad 1950, 133) The crew does not know what to answer and go back to work silently. “And suddenly,” the third-person narrator tells us, “al the simple words they knew seemed to be lost for ever in the immensity of their vague and burning desire. They knew what they wanted, but they could not find anything worth saying.” (Conrad 1950, 134) The novel closes with the I-narrator’s farewell to the crew of the Narcissus. From a position of distance this former member of the crew is ideologically attuned to the discourse of the third-person narrator. He idealises in retrospect the untroubled and contented life led by the crew of the Narcissus and so reinforces the normative view of the ship’s social organisation as a corporate body. In this way, the I-narrator praises Old Singleton, the only deck-hand unaffected by the crew’s rebellious aspirations and the one who “had never given a thought to his mortal self.” (Conrad 1950, 99) Concomitantly, Donkin is castigated for leading a worthless life as a labour organizer: “Singleton has no doubt taken with him the long record of his faithful work into the peaceful depths of an hospitable sea. And Donkin, who never did a decent day’s work in his life, no doubt earns his living by discoursing with filthy eloquence upon the right of labour to live.” (Conrad 1950, 172) Sacido Romero 16 Works Cited Baumann, Michael L. 1976. B. Traven: An Introduction. Albuquerque, New Mexico: U of New Mexico P. Bloom, Harold. 1973. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford UP. 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