Outside Literature, by Joseph Conrad
"That prose has only one ideal to attain: the ideal of perfect accuracy"
By
Richard Nordquist In this essay, originally published in 1922, novelist and
master mariner Joseph Conrad (author of Nostromo, Lord Jim, and Heart
of Darkness) considers the merits of a prose style significantly different
from his own. As the title of the periodical suggests, Notices to Mariners
provided (and in fact continues to provide) essential information on matters
related to navigational safety. It's worth keeping in mind that Conrad, who was
born of Polish parents in the Ukraine, did not learn English until he was 20
years old.
Outside Literature
by Joseph Conrad
Having
been prompted by a certain literary suggestion to reflect upon the nature of
Notices to Mariners, I fell to examining some of my old feelings and
impressions which, strictly professional as they were, have yet contributed in
the end toward the existence of a certain amount of literature; or, at any
rate, of pages of prose. The Notices to Mariners are good prose, but I think no critic would
admit them into the body of literature. And it is only as compositions in prose that I believe myself competent to speak of them. And, first,
let me thank God that they do not belong to imaginative literature. It would be
dreadful if they did. An imaginatively written Notice to Mariners would be a
deadly thing. I mean it literally. It would be sure to kill a number of people
before its imaginative quality had been appreciated and suppressed. That their style must be clear and concise, and the punctuation of the ordinary kind,
would not necessarily militate against their being regarded as literature. The maxims of La Rochefoucauld are concise enough. But they open horizons; they
plumb the depths; they make us squirm, shudder, smile in turn; and even
sigh--at times; whereas the prose of the Notices to Mariners do nothing of the
kind.
And
it doesn't. A mariner detected shuddering or sighing over a Notice to Mariners
would simply (to speak in unliterary language) be not fit for his job. All
means of acting on man's spiritual side are forbidden to that prose. In those
compositions which are read as earnestly as anything that ever came from
printing press, all suggestion of Love, of Adventure, of Romance, of
Speculation, of all that decorates and ennobles life, except Responsibility, is
barred. What we expect from them is not suggestion but information of an ideal
accuracy, such as you do not find in the prose of the works on science, which
is mainly imaginative and often solemnly mystifying. That is why some quite
decent men are moved to smile as they read it. But there is no mystification in
the language of truth contained in the Notices to Mariners. You would not want
to smile at them. No decent man would. Even Mr. Punch, to whom as a great
burlesque poet nothing is supposed to be sacred, and who has been seen lately
taking liberties with the explosive atom, would not dream of making fun out of
Notices to Mariners. Mr. Punch knows better. He knows that for an inspired poet
who sees the mystic relations of sublunary matters, Notices to Mariners are
things to be read reverently. They are like declarations of a minutely careful
Providence. They can be imagined as dictated in a quiet voice by the angel who,
in the words of the song, sits aloft to watch over poor Jack. They belong to a
prose which, if certainly not immortal, is revelatory to its own generation.
Addressed
to a special public, limited to a very definite special subject, having no
connection with the intellectual culture of mankind, and yet of some importance
to a civilisation which is founded on the protection of life and property, that
prose has only one ideal to attain, to hold on to: the ideal of perfect
accuracy. You would say that such an ideal unity may easily be captured by a
steady, prosaic mind devoting itself for a few minutes (the Notices to Mariners
are short) every day to the task of composition. Why, yes! But what about
misprints--the bane of authors?
And
then the absences. I mean the absences of mind. It is a fact that the most
pedestrian mind will sometimes take a flight from the office where it works (I
suppose Notices to Mariners are written in some sort of office) towards
subjects of poetic fancy, its children, its lady-love, its glass of beer, and
such other things interesting to its mortal envelope. I often wonder what the
author of Notices to Mariners looks like. I have tried to represent him to
myself as a monk, a man who has renounced the vanities of the world, and for
preference belonging to the Order of Trappists who are bidden to remember
death--memento mori--and nothing else. A sobering thought! Just suppose
the author of Notices to Mariners acquiring convivial habits and sitting down
to write a Notice in that happy frame of mind when nothing matters and one
letter of the alphabet is as good as another. For myself--who am not convivial
in that sense and have written a varied lot of prose with a quite ridiculous
scrupulosity and an absurd seriousness--I don't mind confessing that if I were
told to write a Notice to Mariners I would not pray perhaps--for I have my own
convictions about the abuse of prayer--but I would certainly fast. I would fast
in the evening and get up to write my Notice to Mariners at four o'clock in the
morning for fear of accidents. One letter is so soon written for another--with
fatal results.
It
happened to me many years ago to endanger the course of my humble career at sea
simply by writing the letter W instead of the letter E at the
bottom of a page full of figures. It was an examination and I ought to have
been plucked mercilessly. But in consideration, I believe, of all my other
answers being correct, I was handed that azimuth paper back by the examiner's
assistant, with the calm remark, "You have fourteen minutes yet." I
looked at the face of the clock; it was round like the moon, white as a ghost,
unfeeling, idiotic. I sat down under it with the conviction of the crushing
materiality of time, and calling in my mind the assistant examiner a sarcastic
brute. For no man could have gone over all those figures in fourteen minutes. I
hope my exasperated consternation at this check could not be detected. It was
funny even to myself. Then, just at the moment when my sinking heart had
touched bottom, I saw the error staring at me, enormous, gross, palpable. I
traced hastily a capital E over the W, and went back to the desk
with my sheet of blue paper in a still shaky hand. The assistant hardly glanced
at it before he let it drop, and I saw then that in my lack of comprehension it
was I who had been an unqualified brute. For in his remark about the fourteen
minutes he had clearly tried to give me a hint. He was a charming young man,
obviously poor, with an intelligent, as if suffering, face. Not exactly sickly
but delicate. A sea voyage would have done him good. But it was I who went to
sea--this time bound to Calcutta.
And
it was in Calcutta, a few months afterwards, that one morning my captain on
going ashore saw me busy about the decks and beckoned to me in that way
ship-masters have, or used to have. I mean ship-masters who commanded their
ships from truck to keelson as it were, technically and spiritually, in motion
and at rest, and through every moment of their life, when the seaman's calling
was by the mere force of its conditions more vocational than it can be at the
present day. My ship-master had that way of beckoning. What way? Well--all I
can say of it is that one dropped everything. I can't describe it better. So I
dropped whatever I was doing and he said: "You will find a Notice on the
captain table. Go in and enter it on the proper Admiralty sheet. Do it
now." Which I hastened to do.
That
examination, the issue of which had hung on a capital letter, had caused me to
be officially certified as fit to undertake that particular duty; and ever
since then my familiarity with Notices to Mariners, which are not literature,
went on growing through a course of years, up to the moment when stepping
ashore for the last time I lost all touch with the most trusted kind of printed
prose. Henceforth I had to begin (while totally unprovided with Notices to
Authors) to write prose myself; and the pains I took with it only my Maker
knows! And yet I never learned to trust it. I can't trust it to this day. We
who write prose which is not that of the Notices to Mariners are forgotten by
Providence. No angel watches us at our toil. A dreadful doubt hangs over the
whole achievement of literature; I mean that of its greatest and its humblest
men. Wasn't it "Papa Augier" who, being given a copy of Hamlet,
glanced through it expertly and then dropped it with the dry remark. "Vouse
appelez ça une pièce, vous?" ["You call that a
play?"] The whole tragedy of art lies in the nut-shell of this terrifying
anecdote. But it never will occur to anybody to question the prosaic force of
the author of Notices to Mariners, which are not literature, and his fidelity
to his honourable ideal--the ideal of perfect accuracy.
"Outside Literature" by Joseph Conrad originally appeared in
the Manchester
Guardian (December 4, 1922) and was reprinted in Last Essays (1926).
http://grammar.about.com/od/essaysonstyle/a/outsideliteraturestyle_2.htm
Nenhum comentário:
Postar um comentário