Short Stories by Joseph Conrad

The reviewer has picked three specific stories,namely- Amy Foster,The Informer and The Idiots.I will restrict myself to them too.
Amy Foster- The plot is one of story within a story,a literally tool Conrad often used.Amy's story is being described to the narrator by Kennedy,a Doctor friend.The main reviewer has given the storyline of the book.I am just interested in how this novel fits in his larger oeuvre.Amy's love is Yanko Goorall who is based on Conrad himself.
Like Yanko, Conrad too is a Pole living in England, far from his native land.The book is believed to reflect Conrad's own social alienation in English society.We again find the setting of a seaboard forming the backdrop of the plot.The two things that stand out are distinctive narrative technique and the anti-heroic characters.
The cause of Amy's going away is almost ludicrous and leads to the tragic end of the novel.

The Informer-Mr X to say the least is a fascinating figure.The distinctions between him and the author becomes grey as the novel progresses.The main story is again of a love affair between the woman who owned the hideout and her comrade.The story is told by Mr. X to the author,so again a story within a story.The end is tragic with Sevrin being found out as a mole in their anarchist group.

The Idiots:Perhaps the most tragic of the three short stories,in this case the driver narrates the story to the author.The misfortunes of the family are unnatural and it is unable to cope with them.Of all the three this is most direct in its criticism of the society.If not for the ridicule and the social conventions the idiot children might not have suffered as much as they do.


General Characteristics of Conrad's works - Most of his works have elements of realism,romanticism and adventure.His works and narrative modes are a precursor to the modernist literary movement.The narration is in omniscient third person narrative and story telling forms a major part of his narrative.

Ravi Prakash
2007CE10449

PS-The writers that i got to review were Kafka(austrian wrote in german),Hermann Hesse(german wrote in german) and Conrad(polish who couldnt speak fluent english till very late in his career).And till now the only thing i admired about central-eastern europe was their women.Well music too.

Mini Review of Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

Siddhartha, by Hermann Hesse, is a novel of spiritual striving set in ancient India.In the novel, Siddhartha, a young man living at the time of Buddha, undertakes a spiritual journey to "enlighten" himself.As such the novel is not much of literature and more of a book on theology,philosophy and psychoanalysis.Initially i was rather dimissive of the book for it seemed to me an exotic account of a foreigner in awe of ancient indian wisdom in general and buddhism in particular.Though the earnestness of his enterprise and the simplicity and honesty of the text is disarming.

The general plot is as follows : Siddhartha grows up with his friend Govinda in a small village in India.He rejects ancient hindu teachings and restlessly decides to go out and explore the world for himself.He and Govinda, both lead lives as wandering Samanas, self-exiles of society living in self-denial.After three years, Siddhartha grows weary of this ascetic life, too and meet Buddha,the enlightened one.While Govinda stays with Buddha,Siddhartha firther continues in this journey and now engages in hedonism.This reminds us of Stephen who vacillated from one extreme to another.To have the woman of his desire he acquires wealth and grows old living a worldly life.He remains in Samsara(world) for many years, until, struck by his mortality, he notices how old he has become. Driven to the point of suicide he meets Govinda again who has not changed at all.Then slowly the realization dawns on him.Only after living a life of self-denial and then experiencing sins for himself does Siddhartha finally find wisdom about the world and he realizes that the world is simply a recurring cycle.His own son grows up and leaves him to go on and find himself.He understands that noone can liberate anyone .After a few years, old Govinda appears again, wishing to learn from Siddhartha's wisdom. Govinda has remained unchanged, a devout disciple of Buddha, for he has not experienced the world like Siddhartha. Siddhartha's smile and face have finally become much like that of the Buddha, although he had never been Buddha's disciple. Govinda has been devout, faithful, and subservient while Siddhartha led a life of sin before coming to peace. The progression in Siddhartha's life is contrasted against the stagnation in Govinda's.

To someone like me the book did appear a bit of a cliche.The crux of the book's philosophy is that the salvation isn't in denial but acceptance of the world.This is very much similar to the ancient indian wisdom of four stages of human life of Brahmcharya,Grihastha,Vannprastha and Sanyasa.Govinda's mistake was in denying this cyclic way of life.
All in all it's an easy,lucid reading but nothing original or surprising comes along to someone with the slightest knowledge of the "hindu way of life".

Ravi Prakash
2007CE10449

The Trial by Franz Kafka :A Review

Der Process : Merriam Webster uses the term Kafkaesque for events "marked by a senseless, disorienting, often surreal complexity and distortion." Beyond the literary realm it has come to mean occurrences and situations that are incomprehensibly complex, bizarre,illogical even grotesque.Kafka's corpus,though modest in number,with many incomplete works, has been considered highly original.When scurtinised in the context of various schools of thought it has been variously labeled as instances of modernism,magic realism, existentialism, absurdism, marxism,anarchism,fabulism,in various measures.Kundera( a modern Czech writer) considers him as a predecessor of Felini,Marquez,Fuentes,Rushdie.The standard and most well recognised image of his works is of a protagonist,alienated and frustrated against the modern society and its overbearing institutions.The ensuing struggle,its certain futility and the protagonist's awareness of this fact only serves to make the situation more stark and hopeless.Kafka was a pioneer of this very modernist image.

The Trial,first published in 1925,in German,is a dystopian,fragmentary(the novel was published posthumously and the chapters were somewhat incomplete and in random order)account of the life of a man named Josef K..The book follows his arrest,the eponymous and rather unconventional trial which continues all along the novel only to end with the protagonist's "assisted suicide".We are taken through an year in K's life,from his thirtieth to thiry-first birthday.The protagonist wakes up one morning to find he is being held under a trial for unexplained reasons,that he is under arrest but can go about living his normal life,that the trial will most probably end in him being pronounced guilty.The not-so-melodramatic response of the protagonist to all this is baffling and perhaps allude to the haunting realization that he was on the brink of breakdown inspite of the trial.

There is an abrupt start which launches the reader into the novels story.There is no building up in that sense.The novel begins with an accpetance of trial.“Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning” .His reaction is one of docility and outrage after initial suspicion that it was all a farce.He submits to authority even though it is dubious.The fact that he never comes to know of what he is accused of should invoke outrage in the reader and the character but it doesnt.Though some of it can be attributed to "suspension of disbelief".He engages with the law enforcing machinery and by that he lends them the authority they impose on him.

There is an ambiguity in the meaning of the text.It has some qualities of revealed truth but in general it is unresolvable and serves as a mirror for sectarian reading.On one and most obvious level it is a satire of the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy of Kafka's times.It is also a premonition of the totalitarian regimes to come ,that Kafka never lived to see and their Orwellian ways.. The German title, Der Prozess, connotes both a "trial" and a "process".This inevitable chain of events and definite consequences that have been set in motion and cannot be brought to halt is both eerie and terror inducing.

There is a grey line of uncertainty between dream and reality and marks the book's surreal nature.Is it all happening, or is it a dream? And if it is a dream, what larger purpose does it serve? Many passages are just typical of strange dreams that come to us, say when K. is looking for the investigation place, he find the courtroom in th emost improbable of places.

K.is never bothered about finding what he is accused of. He probably simply assumes that having lived a certain number of years and being involved in a worldly job he must have done something wrong in the nature of the crime.The book asks questions about conventional wisdom on legality,crime and justice too.

Humor in the book:The struggles that K goes through are in a way fictitious.This becomes humorous when considered how people invent struggles to add "meaning" to their life.

K's demise at the end of the novel is baffling.Did he give up , or was that a final act of free will? Did he succumb to the authority or make a final deliberate escape?More literally,Is suicide a way out and if that,how moral is it?This asks question of existentialism and "absense of God".

Parables:The novel has been read as a parable containing another parable "Before the Law".The meaning and the relationship between them is open to intepertration.And in that sense the novel becomes much more than an expression of impending disaster of over-bureaucratisation.

Some short descriptions about Kafka's work that I found and liked on the internet:

1 Wikipedia quotes "Because Franz Kafka has become the poster boy for twentieth-century alienation and disoriented anxiety, his work is often introduced in the context of Kafka's own experience of alienation. A Czech in the Austro-Hungarian empire, a German-speaker among Czechs, a Jew among German-speakers, a disbeliever among Jews; alienated from his pragmatic and overbearing father, from his bureaucratic job, from the opposite sex; caught between a desire to live in literature and to live a normal bourgeois life; acutely and lucidly self-critical; physically vulnerable--Kafka nowhere found a comfortable fit."

2 Milan Kundera who is sort of a modern day Kafka himself says "Do you realize that people don't know how to read Kafka simply because they want to decipher him? Instead of letting themselves be carried away by his unequaled imagination, they look for allegories — and come up with nothing but clichés: life is absurd (or it is not absurd), God is beyond reach (or within reach), etc. You can understand nothing about art, particularly modern art, if you do not understand that imagination is a value in itself."

Why should you read Kafka?I have refrained from telling the story of the novel because as such the plot isn't that intricate or layered and secondly I'd like you to read and find it out for yourself.And the lack of melodrama and the all encompassing hopelessness is something that any modern reader will be able to connect to and sympathise with.

By Ravi Prakash
2007CE10449

Conrad short stories

In "Amy Foster", Joseph Conrad has written a great story that shows the different types of love felt between Amy and Yanko.
An unnamed narrator recalls a time several years earlier, when he was staying with his friend Kennedy, a country doctor in the English coastal village of Colebrook, near Brenzett. One day as he accompanied the doctor on his afternoon rounds, they came upon a dull-looking woman named Amy Foster, who was hanging out her wash. Kennedy asked after her son's health. As he continued his rounds, he told the narrator about this woman's recent life.
Although Kennedy agreed that the woman looked passive and inert, he confided that this same woman once had enough imagination to fall in love. The oldest child of a large family, Amy was put into the service of the Smiths, the tenant family at New Barns Farm, where she worked for four years. Meanwhile, she occasionally made the three-mile walk to her family's cottage to help with their chores. As Kennedy explained, Amy seemed satisfied with this drab life until she unexpectedly fell in love.
After the narrator and Kennedy passed a sullen group of men trudging along the road, Kennedy resumed his story, this time telling about a man who used to walk the village paths with such a jaunty, upright bearing that Kennedy thought he might be a woodland creature. The man was an emigrant from central Europe who had been on his way to America when his ship went down near the coast. He could speak no English, but Kennedy guessed that he had boarded the ship in Hamburg, Germany. When the castaway first appeared in Brenzett, his wild language and appearance shocked the town. Taking him for a gypsy, the milk-cart driver lashed him with his whip and boys pelted him with stones. The man ran to New Barns Farm, where he frightened Mrs. Smith. Amy Foster, however, responded with kindness. Though Mr. Smith thought that the man's wild appearance and indecipherable speech proved that he was a lunatic, Amy implored the Smiths not to hurt him.
Several months later, reports of the shipwreck appeared in newspapers. The emigration agents were exposed as confidence men who had cheated people out of land and money. Townsfolk speculated that the German may have floated ashore on a wooden chicken coop. At New Barns, he showed his appreciation for Amy's kindness by tearfully kissing her hand. The castaway's nightly thoughts returned to Amy Foster, who had treated him kindly. Eventually, the stranger learned a few words of English. One day he rescued Swaffer's infant grandchild from a pond into which she had fallen.
Yanko began his courtship of Amy with a present of a green satin ribbon, and he persisted in spite of the warnings and threats of the townspeople. After Yanko asked for Amy's hand, Mr. Swaffer gave them a cottage and an acre of land—the same land that Kennedy and the narrator passed during their rounds—in gratitude for saving his granddaughter from drowning.
After Amy bore Yanko's son, Yanko told Kennedy about problems that he was having with Amy. One day, for example, she took their boy from his arms when he was singing to him in his own language. She also stopped him from teaching the boy how to pray in his own language. Yanko still believed that Amy had a good heart, but Kennedy wondered if the differences between them would eventually ruin their marriage.
After breaking off this story, Kennedy said that the next time he saw Yanko, the man had serious lung trouble brought on by a harsh winter. When Kennedy treated Yanko, he was lying on a couch downstairs, suffering from fever and muttering in his native tongue. Kennedy asked Amy to move Yanko upstairs to get him away from the drafty door, but she refused. Kennedy saw fear in her eyes but had to leave to treat his other patients. That night Yanko's fever worsened. Perhaps thinking he was speaking in English, he demanded water, but Amy could not understand him. As his demands increased in intensity, she took her child to her family's farm three miles away.
The tragedy of Yanko Goorall probes the modernist theme of isolation and alienation. This idea also figures prominently in Joseph Conrad's major works. Yanko is an unwilling loner whose free and easy nature undergoes repeated assaults until even the only person who has offered him love abandons him at the moment of his greatest need. His first ordeal was physical confinement in crowded trains, the boxlike berths aboard a ship, and the dungeon like lodge at New Barns.
Kennedy senses, however, that Yanko's most painful ordeal is his verbal and psychological confinement. He notes that “an overwhelming loneliness seemed to fall from the leaden sky of that winter without sunshine. He could talk to no one, and had no hope of ever understanding anybody.” The story repeatedly contrasts Yanko's nobility with the prejudice and insensibility of the townspeople, whose rejection intensifies his feelings of estrangement. Amy's father, for example, opposed Yanko's marriage partly because he heard him mutter to himself in his native language. Told by Kennedy that Yanko was dead, the father responded with indifference: “I don’t know that it isn’t for the best.”

The story is about an unfortunate family who has seen some of the most tragic incidents in time. In this story a concept of idiot child has been introduced. Its a condition in which child is inert to every feeling and sensation. The child doesn’t recognize its own parents, or develops any skills or intelligence. The family is an agrarian family which feeds itself from the crops it is able to sell. Jean is the only son in the family. He grows young and marries a beautiful woman Susan. In the beginning everyone is happy about the communion of the two but tragedy soon strikes. Their first children are twins and soon the couple realizes that both of them are idiot. They don’t cry, aren't playful and dont indulge in any other activity what so ever. Susan is humiliated in the society and is nicknamed the idiot mother. Jean is tense not only about the fact that his children are idiot but more so about the fact that his agricultural lands would fall into somebody elses hands as his own children weren't capable of working as farmers. Jean and Susan subsequently decide to have another child. It was a boy and he also turned out to be idiot. The muteness in the activities of the idiot children is brought out tellingly in the story. The grief is generally accompanied by enormous ridicule from the society. Seeing this Jean who is an atheist converts. Jean still doesn't lose hope and tries for another child. This time its a girl, and Jean is able to reconcile himself that he might be able to marry her to a sound and able-bodied man who would then take care of his fields. But the girl is also an idiot. Jean is enraged and questions the very womanhood of Susan and how was she able to keep producing children who were stupid. Susan is put through enormous stress and torture until a time when she is not able to take it anymore. One day Jean once again physically assaults his wife but this time in reaction his wife thrusts a pair scissors into Jeans throat, He falls on the floor and dies. Tragedy follows yet again when ghost of her deceased husband haunts her and she horrified gets herself in a tricky situation and dies in an accident, The story is basically about grief and also that how if one doesn't stand up to the situation fate has to offer it can become a cause of his own peril. Also its a bad example of parenting because it seems that they both give up on their children as soon as they see signs of them being idiot. The story also ends in a sad not when the children are transferred to their grandparents who then selves are finding hard to get by in their life, and the plot is given to some random catholic who is unrelated to the family.

The story runs in the background of anarchism against established social order that existed in Europe in 18th century and of the revolutionary activities that were taking place at that time.

The author writes about a man, very tastefully named Mr. X, who collects a very rare and exquisite form of collectables - temperaments and behavior of extremely well known, famous and wealthy people, people who are respected in their fields of work, rather almost every one who is worth knowing for their work. The author himself is Chinese porcelain collector. But in the course of the novel the author writes about the enigmatic persona of this Mr. X in a way that it makes you wonder whether the author himself has started to play the role of Mr. X by writing the story about his acquaintance Mr. X (as Mr. X was supposed to be man who would notice the personalities of people he met).

Mr. X was also a revolutionary writer, writer of anarchism, essentially an anarchist himself. On their last encounter Mr. X recounts a breath-taking incident in his life as a revolutionary activist. Mr. X was asked to visit London once by his revolutionary friends as many of the plans that had been hatched in their London head office had gone wrong, awry and police had smoothly arrested and intercepted the revolutionist movements. It was suspected that there was a mole in the London chapter of revolutionary activities.

Mr. X understood the predicament in which he was in as soon as he reached there. Because not only was it important to find the mole in the organization but it was also important not to create an atmosphere of suspicion and down the motivation and raging enthusiasm of some of the true activists working from there.

The hideout was a pretty ideal place for activities. It was in a rather well known and respected street. The hideout was the house of a government official, or rather it was house of his daughter and son, a perfect cover for such a place. When Mr. X went there he met the owner of the house (daughter). She was a woman, who would put a great effort into exerting her own individuality, but then that was the case for every woman, but this woman was not afraid to go to extreme measures to be a part of the anarchist movement and yet make herself visible and do things in her own way. She had a comrade Sevrin and the person in-charge of the entire London operation was Horne, a true revolutionist. It was very clear that she was in love with Sevrin by the intense and earnest conversations that they would indulge themselves into. Mr. X planned a sham police raid into the hideout and it was expected that the mole would chicken out or at least show less adverse reactions and maintain calm. During the course of the raid Mr. X is not able to find out the real mole, all the revolutionists tried to escape and adopted extreme ways of running away, a few of them even threatened to blow up the entire building and just as the operation was about to go bust, the daughter owning the house came in and Sevrin ordered the sham police to take woman out of the house to safety and then continue their raid, effectively exposing him as the mole. When he was exposed he admitted to his real identity of being a police spy, and as it turned it was his love for the woman that lead his guard down and forced him out. Even so till the end he remained anti-revolutionist and maintained full conviction in his cause.

The story turned out to be a love story which had everything in it, secrets, love, deceit and tragedy. But Mr X had completed his job, which was where he ended his story. The author never met Mr. X ever again but admired the man as someone who was unique, firm and a rare jewel for his ideology, beliefs, experience and intelligence.

Abhishek Bhatnagar

2007EE10314

Comment on Brave New World

i just love this 4-liner from the book

Orgy-Porgy, Ford and fun,

Kiss the girls and make them One.

Boys at one with girls at peace;

Orgy-porgy gives release.

Brave New World takes us into the imaginarium of Aldous Huxley, the descendant of Thomas Henry Huxley or better known as Darwin's Bulldog. Brave New World is Huxley's take on the future of humanity, its purpose and ofcourse the meaning of it all. Huxley has his contemporaries , Orwell foremost among them; men who see the world governed, crafted and defined by science. Perhaps that is the reason people tend to label Huxley's works as Science Fiction. I would disagree. Huxley's work are as realist as the world is real, concentrating on issues most essential to humanity- role of scientific development and what it means to be human. How is that Science Fiction?

I won't go about enumerating the various characters and the development of the story, the reviewer has done a good job of it. My attention instead was drawn to the intricacies of the social system envisioned in the book by Huxley. For there is something charming yet grotesque, something brilliant yet disdainful in the segregation of humans into epsilons, alphas, betas etc. All this makes one think about the Universal principle of Human equality ? Man has long boasted that humans are equal and each man has the power over his own fate. From the time since we are born to the time of death, how free are we exactly ? Can one hope to control whether his parents are rich or poor ? Criminals on the run or god fearing men ? That ofcourse is just one facet of it.

Ever since man has learned to think intelligently( i mean since the advent of philosophers) the question has always raged – Where is the human race headed ? What about the principles of human development ? these questions and their answers have changed with the changing conditions of living whether it is feudalism, capitalism and communism. However the only unchanging sacred principle of humanity has been- The Equality of all human beings. Human beings cannot be equal. They are different in their ability, the brain, intelligence, behaviour etc. In any form of society those most hardworking and intelligent or superior to others in some form rise to the top and dominate. Indeed Karl Marx himself has quoted examples of this- Human civilization started by living in equal groups, which then led slowly to chiefs of groups, to kings, to popes, and now to industrialists(or politicians which is pretty much the same thing). As history shows this has always been the case and will continue to be the case. Quoting Marx- Human history is but a history of class struggles.

In my view human development will continue to be a story of class struggles. The quest for human equality is wrong and unjustified. Rather what we must aim for is equality of opportunity to all. That’s precisely why communalism failed. Huxley’s social order is an interesting take on world dominance. To be truthful, to me, Huxley’s take is perhaps the only way to achieve a stable society.

I did wish to discuss the differences between Huxley and Orwell, but I am sure that I have far exceeded the limitations of a comment. This cartoon strip should suffice :

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=135828

Sukrit

2008TT10709

arbiit.wordpress.com

PS: Sorry for putting up this comment on the main site , I was having difficulty in adding the comment to the review.

The Trial , Franz Kafka- Mini review

‘The Trial’ written by Franz Kafka, published in 1925 is proclaimed to be one of his best works. The novel was actually published by his friend and editor Max Brod. Kafka due to his personal problems had started to lose confidence in his ability as writer and therefore asked that his books (ones yet to be released, that is in their incomplete form) be destroyed. But Max Brod gave it some final touches and published the incomplete novel posthumously.

Kafka faced many difficulties in life, and maybe had the opinion that life had not been fair to him. The novel also has a similar theme. The book has been written in a lucid and concise way, which is something seen in almost all of Kafka’s books. The book does appear to have a lot of loose ends which is expected as the novel is incomplete.

The protagonist of the story is Josef K, a punctilious man working in a bank. He has a superiority complex and considers himself above ‘lesser’ people like the warders. This attitude of his is shown throughout the novel. The story begins when on his thirtieth birthday he is arrested by two warders for committing a ‘crime’ which is not revealed (not even to him).The book is also intended as a satire against the corrupt bureaucrats. The warders claim to know nothing beside the fact that he was arrested and asked to report in front of a magistrate.

The rest of the novel covers his meeting with the bureaucrats, who have already decided the verdict to be passed even before his trial. This is aptly put by Titorelli, a painter for the court when K decides to meet him for advice. He says the verdict is decided beforehand, and only thing which he could do was delay the sentence. K meets up with the magistrate quite a few times, and the magistrate’s opinion of him keeps getting worse.

The rest of the novel covers his attempts to get an acquittal. The novel, mostly at the end seems to be incomplete. The novel is melancholic which is justified given K’s situation. The plot of the novel is loose and uninteresting, though the style in which it is presented is good.

C.V.Ambarish

2009PH10713

P.S. - I was supposed to comment on this book , but the review has not yet been posted, so have given a mini review

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

Written by Joseph Conrad, the “Heart of Darkness” stands as one of the best British novels of all times. Published in 1902, the story is set in the center of what is known as the ‘dark continent’. The book, written in poetic style, is a deep study of human psychology and the darkness that emerges from tyrannical power. Many critics have categorized it as a racist literature for setting Africa as a representative of darkness and evil. We see the story through the eyes of the protagonist, Marlow who tells his fellow passengers about the great deal of time he had spent in Africa while sailing through Thames. He was called upon to pilot a trip down the river Congo in search of an ivory agent Kurtz who had disappeared without a trace. He goes to Congo with a vision to civilize the savage cannibals but as he explores the ‘dark’ land he discovers the corruption and bestiality and the real cannibals. Kurtz, who appears very late in the story has a great influence over the protagonist. In the course of his stay in Congo Kurtz is transformed from a ‘civilized’ European to something far more frightening.
Conrad has used symbolism as the central theme of the novel. The river symbolizes heart, which just like human spirit always moving and unpredictable. Darkness represents evil and dread as well as “color of skin”. The style of Conrad’s writing (narrator telling the story of another man telling his story) helps the reader to experience the darkness himself and get a closer look at Marlow’s Journey. Conrad has openly opposed imperialism when he says-“The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion and a slightly flatter nose than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much”. The driving force behind the novel might be the sense of guilt as Conrad worked six months in Congo in 1980. Millions of Congolese were slaughtered to generate revenue for Belgian king Leopold II.
This musical metaphor has many levels of interpretations-from racist to attack against colonialism to largely psychological. Someone can look at it as a tale of human weakness against wilderness. According to me this is a great psychoanalysis of human mind who find its roots in savagery. The animal lies within us. All it takes to wake it up is a little push…

-Abhishek Raj