"Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality": A Possible Source for Under Western Eyes

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• “Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality”: A Possible Source for Under Western Eyes
• Alan Procter (bio)

The third sentence of Under Western Eyes, in the words of Conrad’s Russian-literate narrator, reads, “Words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.” In the four parts of the novel that follow, this startling claim gets manifest support in significant ways, just one of which is the lies uttered by various characters in their pursuits of various troubling, self-justified, delusional versions of unreality. But the subordinate tag to his claim, “as is well known,” in those four following parts lapses, the fame uncorroborated, as if its source in the mind of the narrator, like his very acquisition of words themselves, lay too deep to be resurrected.

In quite another book, a recent study of the poetry of the Russian Arsenii Tarkovsky, Kitty Hunter Blair, in commenting on a line of Tarkovsky’s poetry, makes reference to an echoed line in a poem of a century earlier, a “much-quoted line” (23). The poem is the brief “Silentium,” its author Feodor Tiuchev (1803–73; also spelled Fyodor Tyutchev). Blair renders the relevant lines from “Silentium” as “a thought once spoken is a lie” (23). Similarly, Charles Tomlinson translates the lines: “Utter your thoughts / They flow in lies” (lns. 9–10). If among literate Russians the line has been much quoted, then the narrator’s claim to its fame is justified, just as his recollection of the line itself is faithful.

It is possible, then, to conjecture that Conrad’s own Russian experience included this poem, thereafter perhaps lying deep within him until it resulted here in his narrator’s instinctive unreflective, unelaborated, unidentified recall of it. If so, then a paradox ensues, for Tiuchev’s poem reckons on words to proclaim the primacy of that wordlessness, of inexpression that he so cherished, the “reality” of the narrator’s third sentence of Under Western Eyes. Such cherished reality for Conrad’s characters seems to exist outside the boundaries of their word-filled lives within which they place themselves, or find themselves. Foremost among them, the protagonist and Tekla brave the costs of seeking release from the great foes of reality. In writing his novel, unique as it was in the severity of costs to his own well-being, Conrad may have been seeking for himself a similar release, his silentium. [End Page 179]

Alan Procter

ALAN PROCTER is an independent scholar. Following a degree in English language and literature in 1958 from the University of Toronto, he engaged for thirty-some years with teenagers and literature in Toronto suburban-school classrooms, and now continues to enjoy the worth of others’ writing.

WORKS CITED

Blair, Kitty Hunter. Poetry and Film: Artistic Kinship between Arsenii and Andrei Tarkovsky. Tate, 2014.

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Tiuchev, Feodor. “Silentium.” Translated by Charles Tomlinson, Russian Poets, edited by Peter Washington, Everyman, 2009, p. 45.

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