For my next feat, I will attempt to connect Shakespeare to Conrad to Fitzgerald and Cather to mid-century urban horror to twenty-first-century cosmic horror. Edgar Allan Poe will make an appearance, too . . .
If you look hard enough and think hard enough, if you let your mind wander freely, you can make connections among any number of fictional works. So I'll give it away right away and let you know that this isn't much of a feat after all. This is just a brain, an eye, and a memory at work. I'll start with three novels in English published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries . . .
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (1899), My Ántonia by Willa Cather (1918), and The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925) have at least one thing in common, for all three are first-person narratives told by a friend and observer of a great person. Here is Nick Carraway on Jay Gatsby:
If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life, as if he were related to one of those intricate machines that register earthquakes ten thousand miles away. This responsiveness had nothing to do with that flabby impressionability which is dignified under the name of the "creative temperament"--it was an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again. No--Gatsby turned out all right at the end; it is what preyed on Gatsby, what foul dust floated in the wake of his dreams that temporarily closed out my interest in the abortive sorrows and short-winded elations of men. (Chapter 1)
Now Marlow on Kurtz:
"Kurtz discoursed. A voice! a voice! It rang deep to the very last. It survived his strength to hide in the magnificent folds of eloquence the barren darkness of his heart. Oh, he struggled! he struggled! The wastes of his weary brain were haunted by shadowy images now--images of wealth and fame revolving obsequiously round his unextinguishable gift of noble and lofty expression. My Intended, my station, my career, my ideas--these were the subjects for the occasional utterances of elevated sentiments. The shade of the original Kurtz frequented the bedside of the hollow sham, whose fate it was to be buried presently in the mould of primeval earth. But both the diabolic love and the unearthly hate of the mysteries it had penetrated fought for the possession of that soul satiated with primitive emotions, avid of lying fame, of sham distinction, of all the appearances of success and power.
"Sometimes he was contemptibly childish. He desired to have kings meet him at railway-stations on his return from some ghastly Nowhere, where he intended to accomplish great things." (Chapter III)
And finally Jim Burden on Ántonia:
I lay awake for a long while, until the slow-moving moon passed my window on its way up the heavens. I was thinking about Ántonia and her children; about Anna's solicitude for her, Ambrosch's grave affection, Leo's jealous, animal little love. That moment, when they all came tumbling out of the cave into the light, was a sight any man might have come far to see. Ántonia had always been one to leave images in the mind that did not fade--that grew stronger with time. In my memory there was a succession of such pictures, fixed there like the old woodcuts of one's first primer: Ántonia kicking her bare legs against the sides of my pony when we came home in triumph with our snake; Ántonia in her black shawl and fur cap, as she stood by her father's grave in the snowstorm; Ántonia coming in with her work-team along the evening sky-line. She lent herself to immemorial human attitudes which we recognize by instinct as universal and true. I had not been mistaken. She was a battered woman now, not a lovely girl; but she still had that something which fires the imagination, could still stop one's breath for a moment by a look or gesture that somehow revealed the meaning in common things. She had only to stand in the orchard, to put her hand on a little crab tree and look up at the apples, to make you feel the goodness of planting and tending and harvesting at last. All the strong things of her heart came out in her body, that had been so tireless in serving generous emotions. (Book V, Chapter II)
It was no wonder that her sons stood tall and straight. She was a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races.
Whereas Gatsby has "an extraordinary gift for hope," Kurtz would seem a man in despair, or tipping on its edge. Although his is a "gift of noble and lofty expression," his last words are unclear, ambiguous. What does Kurtz mean when he cries, "The horror! The horror!"? Both are men of ambition, though. As a young man, Gatsby embarked upon a program of self-improvement. His ultimate ambition is to capture the heart of a woman. Kurtz's ambitions lie elsewhere. He has his Intended, but he has gone far away from her and never sees her again, dying as he does in Africa. Gatsby is a quintessentially American character, but Kurtz could be as well, at least at a basic level, for he goes away from woman and civilization into the wilderness. As for Ántonia, she is another kind of person altogether, "a rich mine of life, like the founders of early races." Only she among these three characters has children.
Like Marlow, Jay Gatsby--originally James Gatz--served on board a craft, in his case the yacht of a wealthy man. Nick describes Gatsby as "extravagantly ambitious." Nothing deters him in his pursuit of his dream. Gatz's journey--soon Gatsby's--takes him from North Dakota to the Great Lakes, the West Indies, the Barbary Coast, finally to Long Island. Like Kurtz, he dies afloat. Whereas Kurtz departs from this earth on a boat bearing him downriver, like a latter-day pharaoh, Gatsby's life ends in a bitterly ironic way, in a swimming pool, on a pneumatic mattress. The yacht of his youth is in the distant past. His last craft is the size and dimensions of an open grave.
Marlow makes a different kind of journey. He travels from a great city into the dark heart of Africa, there to find and fetch back Kurtz, like Orpheus after Eurydice. He is his own Charon, or maybe his boat is a new Argo and his adventures in Africa a new argosy told to men on board a different craft, years later, upon the still, darkening waters of the mouth of the Thames. His earlier boat churns up and down river as he looks for Kurtz, then carries him away. The yawl Nellie, named for a woman, comes to rest in the very opening sentence of Heart of Darkness, and Marlow begins his tale, told only to men.
In his journey upriver, Marlow looks upon the deep, green, and wild world on its banks. This is a place mostly untouched by Europeans. In his upriver journey, his boat beats against the current. The journey downriver is easier on the boat but harder on Kurtz its passenger. In the end, he has on his face a look of "an intense and hopeless despair."
At the end of The Great Gatsby, Nick broods upon his own experience in knowing Gatsby:
Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes--a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby's house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.
Marlow has a darker vision, I think, but Nick Carraway's words on the "fresh, green breast of the new world" are something like Marlow's in his encounter with an old and green and dark Africa. The American encounter with the wilderness is hopeful and full of positive awe and wonder. The European encounter--Marlow's and Kurtz's--must be far less so. And then there is the famous closing of The Great Gatsby:
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter--tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther . . . And one fine morning--
So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.
If time is a river without banks, then we can never go ashore and the future is unreachable. The river carries Marlow back to the sea--the point of origin for all of us--and bears Gatsby--all men--into the past. In My Ántonia, there are rivers, riverbanks, and bluffs high above, but these are places for play, or they are part of a great and awesome landscape, or they are rivers to cross: no one in My Ántonia goes lengthwise, up or down a river. And the only sea in Nebraska is a sea of grass. The breath of the prairie wind makes waves across its surface.
In My Ántonia, Jim Burden and Ántonia Shimerda also make their journeys. Jim is from the East, specifically Virginia. Ántonia is from even farther east, from Bohemia. Both arrive in Nebraska--like Jay Gatsby's home state, a place on the Great Plains--as children. Ántonia remains and lives out her life in this place close to the earth. The plants in her landscape are not wild but cultivated, planted and tended, grown and harvested. Her farm is green and is not one of gray ashes. Like Nick Carraway, Jim Burden goes east, to New York City, thus nearly cutting himself off from his past and his friend. The main characters in The Great Gatsby are from the Midwest and the Great Plains, or what was then or before called the Middle Border, as was their creator. Like Jim Burden, Willa Cather was from Virginia but grew up in Nebraska. Like Gatsby, she died in New York, though in the city rather than on the island. Of these three novels, My Ántonia is the most positive and affirmative. In fact, it's one of the most beautiful books I have ever read, one brimming with love and affection. Curiously, the last word in both The Great Gatsby and My Ántonia is "past."
I have written before that someone should look into connections between Edgar Allan Poe and William Shakespeare. I'm not ready just yet to talk about Shakespeare in this essay. Instead I'll make a brief connection between Poe and Conrad. The climactic event in Poe's long short story "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839) is of course the fall of the House of Usher. Towards the end of Heart of Darkness, Marlow goes to visit with Kurtz's unnamed Intended. He tells her a lie about Kurtz and practically flees from her presence, telling the men who are listening to his tale, "It seemed to me that the house would collapse before I could escape, that the heavens would fall upon my head."
In October 1941, Unknown Worlds published a story by Fritz Leiber, Jr., called "Smoke Ghost." This story is justly famous among fans of fantasy and horror. I don't care much for the ever-finer dividing of genre fiction into evermore minute sub-genres and sub-sub-genres, but I feel okay about calling "Smoke Ghost" an example of urban horror. Here is a passage describing the urban landscape through which the main character, Catesby Wran, moves:
It had all begun on the elevated. There was a particular little sea of roofs he had grown into the habit of glancing at just as the packed car carrying him homeward lurched around a turn. A dingy, melancholy little world of tar-paper, tarred gravel, and smoky brick. Rusty tin chimneys with odd conical hats suggested abandoned listening posts. There was a washed-out advertisement of some ancient patent medicine on the nearest wall. Superficially it was like ten thousand other drab city roofs. But he always saw it around dusk, either in the smoky half-light, or tinged with red by the flat rays of a dirty sunset, or covered by ghostly wind-blown white sheets of rain-splash, or patched with blackish snow; and it seemed unusually bleak and suggestive, almost beautifully ugly, though in no sense picturesque; dreary, but meaningful. Unconsciously it came to symbolize for Catesby Wran certain disagreeable aspects of the frustrated, frightened century in which he lived, the jangled century of hate and heavy industry and total wars. The quick, daily glance into the half darkness became an integral part of his life. Oddly, he never saw it in the morning, for it was then his habit to sit on the other side of the car, his head buried in the paper.
And now here are the opening paragraphs of Chapter 2 of The Great Gatsby, published sixteen years before:
About half way between West Egg and New York the motor-road hastily joins the railroad and runs beside it for a quarter of a mile, so as to shrink away from a certain desolate area of land. This is a valley of ashes--a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens where ashes take the forms of houses and chimneys and rising smoke and finally, with a transcendent effort, of men who move dimly and already crumbling through the powdery air. Occasionally a line of grey cars crawls along an invisible track, gives out a ghastly creak and comes to rest, and immediately the ash-grey men swarm up with leaden spades and stir up an impenetrable cloud which screens their obscure operations from your sight.
But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg are blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistent nose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.
Note the descriptions of advertisements in both. This is the America of the twentieth century.
(Is Catesby an intentional echo or eye rhyme of Gatsby?)
My second-to-last connection is between Shakespeare and Conrad. This is actually not a connection I have made. I'm just following the lead of Richard Meek of the University of Hull, who, on a website called Borrowers & Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation, wrote an essay called "'Nothing like the image and horror of it': King Lear and Heart of Darkness." You can read his essay by clicking here. I don't know Shakespeare well enough to have recognized the influence of King Lear upon Heart of Darkness when I read Conrad's novel, but even I can see that when somebody writes several nevers in a row, he's probably echoing Shakespeare, and that very thing happens when Marlow goes to meet with Kurtz's Intended, who says: "'I cannot believe that I shall never see him again, that nobody will see him again, never, never, never.'"
I wrote about Conrad and Heart of Darkness recently because I was looking into a possible connection between the author, his novel, and the cosmic horror of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. I didn't find anything conclusive. I don't think Kurtz's final cry is about horror in a cosmic sense. I think his thoughts are elsewhere. But if Heart of Darkness was influenced by King Lear, then there is this:
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| "King Lear -- '. . . Shakespeare staring cosmic horror in the face and refusing to back off,'" a quote from Matt Wolf, "London-Based Theater Critic," in an advertisement for a performance of King Lear, from the Muskegon (Michigan) Chronicle, May 16, 1999, whole page number 77. |
A final note: The Great Gatsby is now one hundred years old. More than a few people have written on the book and its anniversary. I have read two otherwise good online essays on it, but both mention our current president, and I wonder why. Is that really necessary? Better yet, will it age well? The answers, I think, are no and most definitely not. Anyway, I hope this essay gives everyone enough to read for a while. It might be some time before I write again.
Original text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley