‘A proposition of geometry is a fair and luminous parallel for a work of art’; Robert Louis Stevenson adopts this provocative position in his 1884 essay, ‘A Humble Remonstrance’,[1] written as a rejoinder to Henry James’s ‘The Art of Fiction’,[2] which had appeared a few months earlier, also in Longman’s Magazine. The terms of the debate place the two authors in friendly contention on either side of an unambiguous literary divide between Realism and Romance, rival camps – though artificial ones – which were drawing battle lines in the 1880s. When James argued for a fiction that captures the flavour of reality so perfectly as to ‘compete with life’, Stevenson leapt on this grand ambition – what he called a ‘projected escalade of heaven’[3] – with much rhetorical verve, adopting a position in diametric opposition to that of James. It is not by its resemblance to life that we may judge the success of a piece of fiction, which is ‘designed and significant’, but rather by its ‘immeasurable difference’. ‘Life,’ he says, ‘is monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant; a work of art, in comparison, is neat, finite, self-contained, rational, flowing and emasculate’.[4]
If we choose to apply this definition of art as a geometrically-bound, neat, well-designed piece of craftsmanship to the genre with which we most associate Stevenson, the Victorian adventure-romance, we will see indeed that such a novel is not concerned with rendering the world of everyday, with a Jamesian ‘solidity of specification’,[5] but rather with the construction of an ideal Other World of daydream, of a well-defined fantasy rather than the chaotic material of life. In another essay, Stevenson specifies how clearly laid-out is the geometric template for such an adventure tale:
[these] stories may be nourished with the realities of life, but their true mark is to satisfy the nameless longings of the reader, and to obey the ideal laws of the day-dream. The right kind of thing should fall out in the right kind of place; the right kind of thing should follow; and not only the characters talk aptly and think naturally, but all the circumstances in a tale answer one to another like notes in music.[6]
This ‘neat, finite’, formulaic adventure tale that Stevenson describes is what he himself, in ‘A Gossip on Romance’, calls the Elementary Novel of Adventure. There seems to be a set formula – ‘the right kind of thing’ – which acts as a recipe for such a novel, and indeed, looking at the productions of many of Stevenson’s contemporaries, one might be forgiven for thinking that there was a near-mathematical template of settings, tropes, clichés and stereotypes constantly recombined to produce an infinite series of boys’ adventure stories – desert islands, buried treasure, plucky English lads, wild beasts, savage natives. However, those who applied this formula were perhaps not aware, as Stevenson was, that they were satisfying ‘nameless longings of the reader’. His awareness of this troubling responsibility makes all the difference. In this article, therefore, I would like to argue that what Stevenson himself wrote, and what Joseph Conrad would write after him, is more complex and less rational than a formulaic genre novel; that there is more in their adventure fiction of Stevenson’s description of life: ‘monstrous, infinite, illogical, abrupt and poignant’ than there is of the neat, finite and self-contained adventure novel that went before them; and that the fantasies that their work deals with operate on a different level from those of the elementary genre texts. Their deviation from the square-rigged template of formulaic adventure geometry, their complex approach to temporality, and the self-awareness of their texts result in a richer, stranger art than that of the classic adventure novel with which Stevenson’s work – though not Conrad’s – is often conflated.
I
believe that is through this treatment of the materials of adventure that we
may make the less than obvious pairing of Stevenson with Conrad, too often
separated at the respective poles of Children’s Literature and High Modernism.
In their subversion of the tropes and conventional shapes of adventure, their
deformations of its regular, linear geometries into strange mapping of unknown
and non-existent territories, we may draw a clear through-line, from Stevenson
to Conrad, in the work that their fiction is effecting on the cultural material
of the end of the Victorian period.
[1] Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A Humble Remonstrance’, Longman’s Magazine, December 1884, reprinted in Memories and Portraits, The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Tusitala Edition, Vol. 29 (London: Heinemann, 1924), p. 136.
[2] Henry James, ‘The Art of Fiction’, Longman’s Magazine, September 1884, reprinted in Partial Portraits (London, New York: Macmillan, 1888).
[3] RLS, ‘Humble’, p. 135.
[4] Ibid., pp. 135-6.
[5] James, op cit., p. 390.
[6] Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘A Gossip on Romance’, Memories and Portraits, The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Tusitala Edition, Vol. 29 (London: Heinemann, 1924), p. 123.
Romance and the Meta-Romance
As mentioned earlier, the 1880s saw a resurgence in interest in the Romance, in contradistinction to the Realist novel, on the part of the literary establishment. If there were indeed two opposing camps, it was rather the proponents of Romance who set up the opposition; there is little sense in James’s ‘The Art of Fiction’ that he sees realist fiction as in any way embattled; indeed, he does not appear to situate himself in a given ‘camp’ or school as regards his writing at all. However, the 1880s saw the establishment of an oppositional idea of Romance writing as potentially serious, literary, and artistic production, in what came to be termed the Romance Revival. The form had, of course, been thriving in the less salubrious corners of the literary world, the penny-press of Gothic shockers, and the didactic, Church-influenced boys’ periodicals, but the Romance was now lifted from this paraliterary purgatory to be given consideration in the more high-brow publications of the time.
Andrew Lang, in his 1887 article ‘Realism and Romance’ conceives of this dichotomy being expressed in a veritable ‘Battle of the Books’ between two opposing currents. ‘Fiction,’ he says, ‘is a shield with two sides, the silver and the golden: the study of manners and character, on one hand; on the other, the description of adventure, the delight of romantic narrative’.[1] While Lang recognises the complementarity of these two aspects of fiction, there was a feeling among its proponents that the Romance Revival was necessary in order to redress an imbalance that had existed for quite some time in English letters, privileging realistic over romantic narrative, what Edmund Gosse called ‘the tyranny of the novel’.[2] George Saintsbury would write, in 1896, that ‘it is certain that for about a quarter of a century, from 1845-1870, not merely the historical novel, but romance generally, did lose general practice and general attention.’[3] Stevenson was more colourful, and more scathing:
English people of the present day are apt, I know not why, to look somewhat down on incident, and reserve their admiration for the clink of teaspoons and the accents of the curate. It is thought clever to write a novel with no story at all, or at least with a very dull one.[4]
This was perhaps true for readers of the Athenaeum, but in fact, as we have seen, the Romance was in rude health for a below-stairs readership, and particularly for the young Victorian boy, the future soldier of Empire. There was a wide circulation for such periodicals as Boys’ Own Paper, which was founded by GA Hutchinson in 1879, and financed by the Religious Tract Society. The adventure tale specifically aimed at the younger reader had perhaps begun with Captain Frederick Marryat, who, after writing novels of shipboard life for adults, turned his attention to stories for, and often featuring, children. His tales of shipwreck, of frontier life, or historical adventure had been vastly successful, and had inspired a host of imitations from the 1840s onwards. Writers such as RM Ballantyne – best known for The Coral Island – GA Henty, Charles Kingsley, or WHG Kingston had launched a thousand plucky young English boys on desert island adventures.
In his essays on Romance, Stevenson appears to affiliate himself with a tradition opposed to Realistic fiction; in the paratextual poem, ‘To the Hesitating Purchaser’[5] with which he begins Treasure Island, it is into this tradition, specifically, that he consciously inscribes himself, invoking the names of Ballantyne, Kingston, and James Fenimore Cooper explicitly. The poem begins as follows, enumerating the inevitable tropes of the boys’ adventure novel:
If sailor tales to sailor tunes,
Storm and adventure, heat and cold,
If schooners, islands, and maroons
And Buccaneers and buried Gold,
And all the old romance, retold,
Exactly in the ancient way,
Can please, as me they pleased of old,
The wiser youngsters of today…
Although today Treasure Island is often perceived as the epitome of the boys’ adventure novel, it was clear to contemporary literary readers that this was not just ‘the old romance, retold exactly in the ancient way’, but something new, and something closer to untidy, unpredictable life. A reviewer in The Graphic puts it succinctly:
Needless to say, there is no resemblance between Mr Stevenson and any other boys’ writer … [his characters] are all creations, living, lying, swearing, murderous miscreants, as different from the sailors of Marryat and Ballantyne as any suit of clothes from a breathing man.[6]
However, Jim Hawkins, the young protagonist of Treasure Island, is himself obviously a reader of the Elementary Novel of Adventure, as evidenced by the fantasy of his future travels that he entertains before they take place, elaborated around the map of the island and the projected expedition with Doctor Livesey and Squire Trelawney. He luxuriates in ‘sea-dreams and the most charming anticipations of strange islands and adventures’, in which the imagined island is ‘thick with savages, with whom we fought, and sometimes full of dangerous animals that hunted us’. He is, of course, to be disillusioned. The ideal fantasy of adventure, following the well-defined rules of the genre, is to be overturned; the initial daydream is, he says, never ‘so strange and tragic as our actual adventures’.[7]
Jim Hawkins then, has his ideas of adventure, which are strictly in line with ‘the old romance’, shattered by actual events. Another Jim, Conrad’s Lord Jim, is even more explicitly presented to us as a consumer of naïve adventure stories. It is, famously, a ‘course of light holiday literature’ which reveals to him his ‘vocation for the sea’.[8] Projecting himself into the fantasy, he ‘sees himself’ engaging in a catalogue of the familiar tropes of boys’ adventure stories, very similar to Jim Hawkins’s daydream, or to Stevenson’s evocation in ‘To the Hesitating Purchaser’:
… saving people from sinking ships, cutting away masts in a hurricane, swimming through a surf with a line; or as a lonely castaway, barefooted and half-naked, walking on uncovered reefs in search of shellfish to stave off starvation. He confronted savages on tropical shores, quelled mutinies on the high seas, and in a small boat upon the ocean kept up the hearts of despairing men – always an example of devotion to duty, and as unflinching as a hero in a book.[9]
Unlike
this unflinching hero of the naïve imperial romance, who often conforms to the
‘image of the adventurer as a non-bookish, practical man’,[10]
these young boys are dreamers rather than doers, readers of adventure, rather than actual adventurers themselves. They
themselves are naïve, but the texts which contain them are conscious of the
action of adventure-romance on the young imagination; they operate a mise en abyme of the form. The
elementary adventure text is present within these texts as a source of fantasy,
and indeed of potentially dangerous delusions. When the naïve Romance is
confronted in the fiction of Stevenson and Conrad with bitter experience, the
work that these novels are doing becomes a sort of Meta-Romance, operating on
an altogether different level from the formulaic adventure story. These are
books not only conscious of the fantasy that adventure material is made to
bear, but concerned not with prolonging that fantasy, but rather the moment of
its undoing.
[1] Andrew Lang, ‘Realism and Romance’, Contemporary Review, July-December 1887, pp. 684.
[2] Edmund Gosse, ‘The Tyranny of the Novel’, National Review, April 1892.
[3] George Saintsbury, A History of Nineteenth Century Literature (London: Macmillan, 1896), p. 337.
[4] RLS, ‘Gossip’, p. 124.
[5] Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island (1883), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. xxx.
[6] Unsigned review, The Graphic, 15 December 1883, xxxviii, p. 599, quoted in Paul Maixner (ed.), Robert Louis Stevenson: the Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), pp. 140-41.
[7] RLS, Treasure Island, p. 36.
[8] Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1900), (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p. 11.
[9] Ibidem.
[10] Andrea White, Joseph Conrad and the Adventure Tradition: Constructing and Deconstructing the Imperial Subject, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 6.
Subverting the Geometry of Adventure
As well as this awareness of the fantasy of adventure, both Stevenson and Conrad submit the material of adventure-romance to distortions, subversions, turning it to ironic and almost parodic ends. Whereas Stevenson’s adventure narratives remain playful and fast-moving, and often remain readable within the form, Conrad pursues a more melancholic, reflective, dark confrontation between adventure fantasy and harsh experience.
To take a significant example of the way both authors set in motion the familiar tropes of adventure in a reflexive, self-conscious manner, we can consider their treatment of that foundational adventure scenario, the shipwreck on a desert island, in the manner of Robinson Crusoe. In Kidnapped, Stevenson transposes this trope from the tropics to a barren Scottish island. David Balfour, surviving the wreck of the Covenant, is overtly conscious of the literary background to his plight: ‘In the all the books I have read of people cast away, they had either their pockets full of tools, or a chest of things would have been thrown on the beach along with them.’[1] David, however, has only a pocketful of money, which is gradually leaking out through a hole. He is thus ‘seeding’ the island with treasure, a Treasure Island in reverse, and a sly wink at adventure conventions Stevenson himself had already employed! After signal failure to build shelters, discover safe food sources, or do any of the other things the resourceful castaway is expected to do, in a final irony David is made to understand, through his encounter with Gaelic-speaking ‘natives’, that he is in fact on a tidal islet, and that it is perfectly possible to wade to the mainland at low tide.
We can usefully compare Stevenson’s deployment of the ‘cast away’ trope with Conrad’s treatment of the same in Nostromo, in which he pushes beyond comedic irony to bleak ironic despair. Martin Decoud, abandoned on the Great Isabel, does not even struggle to survive, but rather ‘loses all belief in the reality of action past and to come’.[2] In his intense existential melancholy and isolation, he begins to doubt the solidity of his own existence, rather than pursuing those eminently practical and solid means of survival – food, shelter, warmth – with which a Robinson Crusoe would immediately set about providing himself. He commits suicide, shooting himself and plunging into the Placid Gulf, weighed down with silver ingots from the treasure that he and his co-conspirator came to the island not to seek, but rather to hide. ‘Swallowed up in the immense indifference of things’, he has failed to become the heroic protagonist of adventure, a lone man struggling with hostile nature; rather, nature is too vast, too indifferent to concern itself with insignificant man. His fall, like that of Brueghel’s Icarus, goes unnoticed; the waters of the Placid Gulf, impassive, cover him without a trace. We have strayed far from the heroic narrative of elementary adventure.
The
very concept of the indomitable adventure hero is subverted by both Stevenson
and Conrad. Their protagonists, while at times aspiring to resemble
Ballantyne’s plucky boys or Cooper’s resourceful frontiersmen, are in fact
distinguished rather by their lack of
dynamism, and their unwillingness to act. As Edwin Eigner remarks, ‘the first
and last thing to note about Stevenson’s characters is that they usually fail
in life. There is scarcely a full-blooded success among them.’[3]
Conrad’s protagonists too, from Almayer and Willems, to Jim and Verloc, or Axel
Heyst in Victory, are almost all
characterised by their hesitations, their failures, their lack of courage,
their inability to live up to their fantasies. We see the same pattern in such
Stevenson protagonists as Henry Durie in The
Master of Ballantrae or Herrick in The
Ebb Tide.
[1] Robert Louis Stevenson, Kidnapped (1886), (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2006), p.118.
[2] Joseph Conrad, Nostromo (1904), (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002), p. 303.
[3] Edwin M. Eigner, Robert Louis Stevenson and Romantic Tradition (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966) p.47.
The Temporality of Adventure
Having considered these ways in which Stevenson and Conrad subverted and complicated the formula of the traditional elementary adventure, I would like now to consider the fantasy that is carried within the genre, and examine it both in its naïve and Meta-Romance forms in terms of how temporality interacts with fantasy. In doing so, I draw on the work of Linda Williams concerning genre entertainment and the temporality of the fantasy-work effected by it, in her essay ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess’.[1] I would like to concentrate here on Williams’s insightful attribution of particular temporalities to the fantasies that she identifies and attributes to popular entertainment genres. Although her work primarily addresses film, I believe that we may usefully read the association between the ‘body genres’ she discusses – pornography, horror, and melodrama – and the notion of ecstasy and rapture, onto nineteenth century popular entertainment fiction. Of course, the elements of pornography, horror, and melodrama existed within that fiction, and the link between such corporeal phenomena as the ‘sensation novel’, the ‘shilling shocker’, the ‘crawler’ and bodily sensation argues for a mapping of the idea of ‘body genre’ onto the paraliterature of periodicals and the penny-press of the nineteenth century. By analogy with the three genres discussed in Williams’s essay, what temporality and associated fantasy might we identify, therefore, for the adventure novel, both in its elementary form, and in the more sophisticated form practised by Stevenson and Conrad?
All of these ‘low’ genres, including the adventure novel, are formulaic structures that are criticised in that they are ‘improbable, that they lack psychological complexity and narrative closure, and that they are repetitious.’ However, according to Williams, these criticisms ‘become moot as evaluation if such features are intrinsic to their engagement with fantasy.’ She continues: ‘Fantasies are not, as is sometimes thought, wish-fulfilling linear narratives of mastery and control leading to closure and the attainment of desire. They are marked, rather, by the prolongation of desire, and by the lack of fixed position with respect to the objects and events fantasised.’[2] The playing out of these fantasies in the genres she deals with are associated with particular temporalities: briefly, in horror – as in much Gothic romance – perceived threat to a young female’s virginity plays into a temporal structure of ‘not being ready’; the genre is marked by a temporality of ‘too early’, both in the threat of sexual violence to a young protagonist and the shock of surprise when the unnatural irrupts. Sexual desire exhibited is punished, and sexual difference is explained by various castration fantasies. In melodrama, we explore the pathos of the fantasy of the quest to return to and discover the origin of the self in Freudian family romance, which is frustrated by loss, death of a loved one, a failed love affair; the meeting with the other takes place ‘too late’, and resolution is often deferred to death-bed reconciliations. Pornography, on the other hand, ‘attempts to posit the utopian fantasy of perfect temporal coincidence: a subject and an object (or seducer and seduced)’ who meet one another ‘on time!’ and ‘now!’ in a state of ‘perfect arousal and perfect mutual desire.’[3]
How then, following this model, might we read the elementary novel of adventure? What is the fantasy, and where might we situate the ecstasy or rapture of this genre? I would like to argue that the integral fantasy of this type of escapist literature is that, precisely, of ‘escape’ from everyday life, but also perhaps escape from maturity, from knowledge of sexual difference, and from these very things as dangers to the boyish, immature self. The paradigm here would be that of Peter Pan, and his Lost Boys, never growing up and endlessly deferring maturity through their inhabitation of Never-Never Land. This is a literature of ‘hair’s breadth escapes’ from danger, which are also avoidances of confrontation with the Other, with the truth of sexual difference. This danger is always averted at the last minute, and so we might perhaps identify the temporality of this fantasy as ‘in the nick of time’. It is highly significant that in his discussion of this novel of elementary adventure, Stevenson identified the ecstatic moment of ‘rapture’ associated with the genre’s fantasy, as follows: ‘In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves.’[4]
Again, we see Stevenson’s awareness of the operation of fantasy within the naïve adventure romance, which prompts the question of how this fantasy, and its associated temporality, might be reconfigured in the Meta-Romance literature that contains within it an awareness of the operation of the genre on a fundamental level. It is useful here to consider the etymology of the word adventure, derived from the Latin ad venire, that which is to come. In showing us their young protagonists, such as the two Jims, fantasising about the adventure that is to come, we can identify a treatment in Stevenson and Conrad of the fantasy of anticipation. We can see how the elementary adventure novel also caters to this fantasy, particularly in its quality of seriality; a series of adventures featuring perhaps the same, or in any case utterly similar, forever-youthful protagonists, in which there is always another book or instalment to read, always new adventures in different exotic settings, in which danger is always averted at the last moment, and escape from the everyday, and the world of the adult, is guaranteed.
The Meta-Romance, then, with its novels about adventure, deals with the confrontation of this fantasy of escape with reality, with the frustration of the fantasy, and with the sense of deep loss that comes with experience of the adult world, at the same time engaging in a nostalgic celebration or mourning of the wide world of innocent adventure that has disappeared. Thus, Stevenson and Conrad, in their treatment of the material of adventure, engage a complex temporality of retrospection.
Stevenson’s novels, it has been remarked, can be read on two distinct levels, by children and by adults. As Meredith remarked, Treasure Island is ‘the best of boys’ books, and a book to make one a boy again’:[5] for Henry James, ‘it is a boys’ book, in the sense that it embodies a boys’ vision of the extraordinary’, but for the ‘weary mind of experience’, it is a chance to see ‘not only the ideal fable, but […] the young reader himself and his state of mind.’[6] This lends Stevenson’s fiction a complex, self-conscious quality, an almost voyeuristic nostalgia, as the adult picking up Treasure Island reads into the text his own youthful reading, sees himself, within the book, ‘a boy again’, in a mise en abyme of the reading subject.
Conrad, however, actively argues against a reading of his novels as adventure. Romance, he agrees, belongs to the past, but unlike for Stevenson, Conrad’s Romance is inaccessible. His aim is to write a serious fiction for ‘a humanity that has outgrown the stage of fairy tales, realistic, romantic, or even epic’[7] (note that even realism is a fairy tale for him!). He continues: ‘the successive generations still artlessly demand to be amazed, moved, and amused’; for Conrad, there is a constant struggle between a fascination for the materials of adventure, a desire for popularity, and a disdain for both, a will-to-rejection. In another essay, he says that ‘adventure by itself is but a phantom, a dubious shape without a heart.’ He imagines the figure of the adventurer not in the flush of youth, but as a retrospective survivor: ‘I have noticed that the majority of mere lovers of adventure are mightily careful of their skin; and the proof of it is that so many of them manage to keep it whole to an advanced age. You find them in mysterious nooks of islands and continents, mostly red-nosed and watery-eyed, and not even amusingly boastful.’[8] This then, is what happens to those Lost Boys who would refuse to grow up, when time and experience finally catch up with them.
Conrad interrogates the value of adventure, and claims to disdain it, but at the same time there is an insistence in his fiction on the moment of transition between youthful, carefree yearning after adventure and the harsh reality of adulthood. The Shadow Line denotes exactly this border-crossing:
Only the young have such moments. I don’t mean the very young. No. The very young have, properly speaking, no moments. It is the privilege of early youth to live in advance of its days in all the beautiful continuity of hope which knows no pauses and no introspection.
One closes behind one the little gate of mere boyishness – and enters an enchanted garden. Its very shades glow with promise. Every turn of the path has its seduction … Yes. One goes on. And the time, too, goes on – till one perceives ahead a shadow-line warning one that the region of early youth, too, must be left behind.[9]
This is our key to the temporality of the Meta-Romance. The moment in question is that when we awake into temporality itself, out of the long, timeless dream of youth, the moment we become aware of time moving on, of life passing by. It is the awakening of a consciousness of mortality. This is a moment predicated not on a fantasy, but rather on the death of the fantasy of immortality, of invulnerability, of eternal youth.
In the Conradian and Stevensonian adventure novel, we are not dealing, however, with a simple ‘coming-of-age’ story. Both authors place their fictions within narratives recounted, spoken, written as testament, papers deposited or sent, confessions and yards spun. This retrospective positioning allows a nostalgic, doubled reading, where the escapist fantasy of eternal youth is actually figured within the narrative as a told tale, a written account, a book read. And so we have both the evocation of the world of adventure, the res adventura alw ays about to arrive, and the mourning of its loss, of the impossibility of a return to the paradise of adventure. This poignant figuring of a lost paradise within the pages of the written adventure narrative is powerfully evoked in Lord Jim, when the privileged reader within the text opens the bundle of papers containing the end of Marlow’s narrative:
The light of his shaded reading-lamp slept
like a sheltered pool, his footfalls made no sound on the carpet, his wandering
days were over. No more horizons as boundless as hope, no more twilights within
the forests as solemn as temples, in the hot quest of the Ever-undiscovered
Country over the hill, across the stream, beyond the wave. The hour was
striking! No more! No more! – but the opened packet under the lamp brought back
the sounds, the visions, the very savour of the past – a multitude of fading
faces, a tumult of low voices, dying away upon the shores of distant seas under
a passionate and unconsoling sunshine. He sighed and sat down to read.[10]
[1] Linda Williams, ‘Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess’, Film Quarterly, 44, 1991.
[2] Williams, p. 10.
[3] Ibid., p. 11.
[4] RLS, ‘Gossip’, p. 119.
[5] George Meredith, quoted in Maixner, p. 17.
[6] Henry James, ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’, Century Magazine, April 1888, xxxv, 869-879, quoted in Maixner, p. 306.
[7] Joseph Conrad, ‘John Galsworthy’, Last Essays (1926), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 186.
[8] Joseph Conrad, ‘Well Done’, Notes on Life and Letters (1921), (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 150.
[9] Joseph Conrad, The Shadow Line (1917), (London : JM Dent, 1945), p. 211.
[10] Conrad, Lord Jim, p. 254.
From Geography to Geometry
There remains the question of how we might map the complex temporality of this troubled, nostalgic adventure novel onto physical space, to explore the potential geography of that “Ever-undiscovered Country”. What manner of geometry might we employ to measure such a land? We know that Stevenson’s Treasure Island sprang originally from an experiment in unreal geography, a map that he drew to amuse his step-son, Lloyd Osbourne, on a rainy Scottish holiday, of a fantastic and impossible island to which he affixed fanciful names, such as Spyglass Hill and Skeleton Island, and finally, with a flourish “Treasure Island”. But the original map was lost, as all our impossible lost paradises are, and Stevenson and his father then went back through the text, looking out all the geometric clues, the measurements and sightings, latitudes and manoeuvres of ships around the theoretical island, and recreated, from the book, the traces of the island once again, to provide a new illustration for the book’s frontispiece.
Conrad too, in Heart of Darkness, is concerned with the mapping of imaginary spaces, of escaping from the known geography of the world into the ideal geometry of the undiscovered countries, the blank spaces of the maps, the lands that are yet to come.
Now when I was a little chap I had a passion for maps. I would look for hours at South America, or Africa, or Australia, and lose myself in all the glories of exploration. At that time there were many blank spaces on the earth, and when I saw one that looked particularly inviting on a map (but they all look that) I would put my finger on it and say ‘When I grow up I will go there’.[1]
These blank spaces, the tabula rasa of ideal geometry, are not to last, however. As the lines of mapping and exploration encroach on the boy’s fantasy, the Heart of Africa has been invaded;
… by this time it was not a blank space any more. It had got filled since my boyhood with rivers and lakes and names. It had ceased to be a blank space of delightful mystery – a white patch for a boy to dream gloriously over. It had become a place of darkness. But there was in it one river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depths of the land.[2]
Perhaps this curve could be our new figure for a geometry of adventure: a function that plots a curving line that draws near that undiscovered country, but approaches it asymptotically, never quite reaching the shadow-line of its border, that final barrier that is always res adventura, yet to come; the crossing into the indescribable, the unknowable.
So we realise, perhaps, that the only real ideal geometry, another privileged moment of the adventure novel, is the figure of the ship, becalmed, in the open sea, centre-point of the vast circumference of the horizon, waiting anxiously to sight the land of the Ever-undiscovered Country where adventure is, possibly, finally to be found.
For the elementary and naïve adventure novel, Stevenson’s ‘proposition of geometry’ is indeed a ‘fair and luminous parallel for a work of art’, as those same formulae, the ‘old romance, retold, exactly in the ancient way’, are reapplied once more, to a ‘neat, finite, rational’ shape cut to an old pattern, what Conrad calls ‘the commonplace surface of words: of the old, old words, worn thin, defaced by ages of careless use.’[3]
But these Meta-Romances, meditations on the
fleeting, evanescent quality of that moment of suspension, the embarkation for
adventure, that were written by Stevenson and Conrad, with their double
temporality of youth and age, of anticipation and retrospection, their
ever-escaping geometry, twisting and bending the familiar shapes of adventure
into ever new, ever unfolding maps of impossible islands … these will remain
with us, as places of our own youth to revisit, as ever-undiscovered countries
just beyond the next wave, or over the next hill.
[1] Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1899), (New York: Bantam Dell, 2004), p. 10.
[2] Ibidem.
[3] Joseph Conrad, ‘Preface’ to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’ (1897, first edition to include the Preface, 1914), (London: JM Dent, 1945), pp. 4-5.
Mark Devlin
Mythopoetic Cultural Anthropologist Bard
Tour Guide, Translator, Father of Two
