Heavy Lifters...

... are not usually my cup of tea.

I have been thinking back over all the literary giants who populated my adolescence.

While friends from school went off to run their own businesses or marry or study horticulture, I spent several years with Eliot (both T.S. and George), Conrad, and... worst of all... the moanbags from the early days of the English canon.

Frankly, like Woody Allen, if I had my life to live over again, there is one thing I would not do. I would not read Beowulf... and certainly not, as was part of the English course, in the original as a painstaking close reading of text.

In fact, Joseph Conrad was light-weight in comparison. Once the narrative of "Lord Jim" was grasped (that took at least four readings of the first 60 pages, since I am slow of wit and cannot follow a story-line to save my life, all was, literally, plain sailing. The mangrove swamps of South East Asia, which I mistakenly thought I would never get to see, seemed a magical place where danger and excitement played out in some primitive way that suited my state of mind at the time.

Chinua Achebe had not written his influential essay at the time. To have accused Conrad of racism would have seemed as short-sighted as calling Shakespeare anti-Semitic. The finely honed literary essays we were expected to produce had no place for name-calling. In fact, the description of the French Lieutenant in "Lord Jim" could be called "culturally coloured", if one were looking for evidence of bias. But since the sea-faring world that Conrad documents has so many characters from so many ethnic-backgrounds, real and (in the case of "Nostromo") imaginary, I was not much in a position to take umbrage.

My teacher assured us that "Conrad could not do women". They did seem a bit inert, either knitting (as at the beginning of "Heart of Darknessss") or wailing and buttoned up emotionally (in "Lord Jim") or, probably justifiably, homicidal in the later works. I took it all on the chin at the time and really loved the romantic glow that hangs over much of "Nostromo" before all falls apart.

In fact, the women in Conrad's universe did not seem to be much different from the average Meath housewife of my childhood... practical and giving, quick to understand unless driven beyond the bounds of respectability, in which case they were not to be budged. Something of the Greek chorus seems to shine through...

So, rather than grapple with the PC brigade, who are now re-writing works of literary art, expurging words that do not suit contemporary politics, angrily denouncing writers who spent their lives trying to make sense of the human condition, I'll stick to my little guns and address plot, character and motivation for the time being. Freud was big during the late 'sixties and his influence in my chosen writer's work seems more interesting to me.

I may as well get cross about all the writers who wrote about the Irish as gombeens, as go on the attack in relation to how Joseph Conrad depicts the Congo.

More anon...