Overview
Victory is a psychological realism novel written by Joseph Conrad (Josef Teodor Konrad Nahjcz Korzeniowski, 1857-1924). It is set in the East Indies in the early twentieth century. The novel was first published in 1915.
The characters in Victory include Axel Heyst, Lena, Mr. Schomberg, Mr. Jones and several others. Axel Heyst is the idealist who befriends Lena. Mr Schomberg is a hotel owner. Mr. Jones and Martin Ricardo are gamblers, and Pedro is their servant. Davidson is a sea captain while Wang is Eleyst’s servant.
Plot Summary of Victory
After the Tropical Belt Coal Company went into liquidation, Axel Heyst continued to live at the No. 1 coaling station on Samburan. Strange in his manners and desires, he was a legend among the islanders; they called him a Utopist. The coal company had come into existence after Heyst had met an Englishman named Morrison in a Portuguese seaport, where the man was about to lose his trading ship, Capricorn, because of an unpaid debt. Heyst had been sympathetic and had offered him a loan. Because Heyst was anxious to keep his generosity a secret and Morrison eager to conceal his shaky finances, the two men pledged secrecy, with the understanding that Heyst would thereafter have a share of the Capricorn’s shipping business.
Schomberg, the owner of a hotel in Sourabaya, heard of the partnership and discovered that Heyst maintained some kind of hold over Morrison. Morrison established the coal company and then died in England. After that, Schomberg, who hated Heyst, constructed a mysterious kind of villainy around him and was gleeful when the coal company liquidated.
After Axel Heyst retired from the human society of the islands, Davidson, a ship’s captain, came upon him living alone on Samburan. Worrying over Heyst’s welfare, Davidson adopted the habit of sailing ten miles out of his way around the north side of Samburan in case Heyst were in need of aid. At one point, Davidson brought Heyst to Sourabaya, where he stayed at Schomberg’s hotel.
Later, Davidson heard bits of a story that Heyst had run off with a girl who was at the hotel with a troupe of entertainers. He was baffled that the shy, quiet Heyst would take a girl back to Samburan with him. Mrs. Schomberg had pitied the girl and had helped Heyst escape with her. The affair caused quite a bit of gossip on the island because it concerned Heyst.
When Heyst came to the hotel, he had been unaware of Schomberg’s hatred. The entertainers were not very attractive to Heyst’s fastidious mind, but one girl wearing white muslin seemed younger than the others. Noticing her distress at being ordered to join a guest at a table, Heyst was prompted by the same instinct that had led him to help Morrison. He invited the girl to sit with him.
The girl, Lena, told Heyst about herself. Growing up in England, her father had taught her to play the violin. After his death, she had joined the group of entertainers with whom she now worked. Schomberg had been stalking her ever since the troupe had come to the hotel. The contrast between Heyst and the other men she had met was enough to cause the girl to be attracted to her new friend, and she welcomed his promise of help. After Heyst had taken Lena away, Schomberg’s hatred was tremendous.
Three strangers then came to Schomberg’s hotel: Mr. Jones, Martin Ricardo, and a beastlike, hairy creature whom they called Pedro. Before long, these men had transformed Schomberg’s hotel into a professional gambling house. Schomberg’s obsession for Lena was increased by his belief that, if he had her at his side, he could rid his hotel of the gamblers.
One afternoon, Ricardo told Schomberg that he had been employed on a yacht where he was first attracted by Jones’s polished manners. The two had stolen the captain’s cash box and jumped the ship. Later, Pedro became attached to them.
Schomberg decided that these thieves might leave his hotel if he could arouse their greed by the prospect of richer plunder. He offhandedly told the men of Heyst’s alleged wealth and mentioned that Heyst lived on a lonely island with a girl and a hoard of money. Together, Ricardo and Schomberg began to plan their pillage of the island on which Heyst lived.
On his island, Heyst had lived with his Chinese servant, Wang, until Lena joined him. She told him that he had saved her from more than misery and despair. Heyst told her the story of his own background. His father had been a cynical, domineering man whom he disliked. After his death, Heyst had drifted, searching for some meaning in life, a meaning never glimpsed until he met Lena.
One evening, Wang announced that he had seen a boat drifting offshore; Heyst went to investigate. He discovered Ricardo, Jones, and the beastlike Pedro perishing of thirst in a boat moored beside a small jetty. Heyst helped the men to shore and took them to an abandoned bungalow for temporary quarters. That night, Heyst found that his gun was missing from his desk; Wang, frightened, had taken it. Meanwhile, Ricardo and Jones speculated about locating Heyst’s money.
Early in the morning, Ricardo stole into Heyst’s bungalow and saw Lena combing her hair. He jumped at her hungrily, but she was able to defend herself. When the struggle was over and the repulsed man saw that she raised no outcry, his admiration for her increased. She asked him what the men wanted on the island.
Surprised that they had come for money which she knew Heyst did not possess, she was determined to protect Heyst from Schomberg’s evil plan. She loved Heyst and knew she could repay his kindness by leading Ricardo and his partners on to their destruction.
Observing Ricardo’s attack on Lena, Wang had decided to withdraw from this confusion of white people’s affairs; he fled to the forest. When Heyst reported the loss of his servant to Jones and Ricardo, they offered him the service of Pedro. Because their manner made it impossible for him to refuse, Lena and Heyst knew that they were lost. Davidson would not sail past the island for three more weeks. Their only weapon had been stolen, and they were left defenseless. When Heyst mentioned their helpless position without any weapon of defense, Lena recalled that, during their scuffle, she had glimpsed the knife Ricardo wore under his trouser leg.
That night, Ricardo came to the bungalow for dinner with Heyst and Lena. During the evening, Ricardo indicated that Jones wanted Heyst to visit him. Before he left, Heyst insisted that Pedro be sent out of the way, and Ricardo ordered the brute to go down to the jetty.
After Heyst had gone, Lena allowed Ricardo to make love to her so that she could take possession of his knife. Meanwhile, Heyst mentioned Lena’s presence to Jones. Jones, who suffered a pathological hatred for women, had not even known of Lena’s existence. Heyst convinced him that Schomberg had lied about the existence of a cache of money on the island to get rid of the gamblers and to inflict revenge upon Heyst, a revenge that Schomberg was too cowardly to inflict himself. Enraged by what he considered a conspiracy on the part of Ricardo and Schomberg, Jones suggested that they go to Heyst’s bungalow.
Meanwhile, Lena had taken Ricardo’s knife. As the two men entered the bungalow, Jones fired over Heyst’s shoulder, and the bullet pierced Lena’s breast. Ricardo sprang through the doorway. Jones followed his partner outside and shot him in the darkness.
Heyst carried Lena to the bed, and, as she lay there, deathly pale in the candlelight, she demanded the knife, her symbol of victory. She died as Heyst took her in his arms, speaking, for the first time, words that came from the depths of his heart.
Analysis of Victory
It is tempting but potentially incorrect to see Victory as a melodramatic morality play in which good battles evil and love wins in the end. For one thing, all the kind and compassionate characters are killed by story’s end.
If death is “the wages of sin,” then Conrad seems to be suggesting that death is the wages of virtue and loyalty as well—hardly the makings of a very convincing morality play. Joseph Conrad is a master of relating ambiguous motives and moral choices. In other stories, such as Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1900), The Secret Agent (1906), and The Secret Sharer (1910), the propriety of an action is all too often based on one’s point of view, and Conrad’s narrative techniques frequently make the moral parameters of an event very unclear.
In Victory, for example, much of Heyst’s story is told by, or at least seen through, the eyes of Davidson. This distancing technique, whereby one slowly learns the truth of a story, makes it impossible to read Victory as a simple commentary on love, embodied in Lena and represented by the otherwise ineffectual Heyst. These two are present in a world that is dominated by scoundrels like Ricardo and Schomberg, brutes like Pedro, and unredeemably sinister figures like “plain Mr. Jones.” A sentimental and allegorical reading will render meaning, but that meaning will not admit the moral complexities which Conrad has built into Victory through the characterization of his protagonist, Axel Heyst.
Those complexities are best represented in Heyst’s relationship not so much with his father, as with his father’s ideas. The younger Heyst has been “passing through life without suffering . . . invulnerable because elusive,” having made himself strictly a spectator, an astute but aloof observer of the human scene. Surely, this is Conrad’s Heyst, and, despite a critical tradition to the contrary, this Heyst is no Christ figure; if anything, he is more of an Antichrist, a person convinced after the fiasco of his involvement with Morrison that “all action is bound to be harmful . . . devilish. That is why this world is evil upon the whole.” He will tell the stunned Davidson, who could never fathom the real reason behind Heyst’s beliefs, “now I have done with observation, too.”
When Conrad reveals how much the elder Heyst’s ideas had shaped his son, his point becomes clear. Heyst’s father had been “the most uneasy soul that civilization had ever fashioned to its ends of disillusion and regret . . . unhappy in a way unknown to mediocre souls,” the narrator reveals early on, and Heyst himself will later confess to Lena, “after listening to him, I could not take my soul down into the street to fight there. I started off to wander about, an independent spectator—if that is possible.” This is the very point Conrad is making; this isolated observation is not possible. So Heyst, self-described as “a man of universal scorn and unbelief,” is, rather than a positive foil to Jones’s evil, very much the same kind of character as Mr. Jones, for both imagine that there is no worthwhile human action. The only difference is, instead of taking advantage of people as Jones and his sort do, Heyst has removed himself from all human company, too scornful, disdainful, and disillusioned to be bothered—but too much a gentleman to say so.
It is no more possible, however, for Heyst to avoid the dilemma of making a moral choice than it is for anyone else, and it is not a melodramatic touch on Conrad’s part, given the extent to which he has established and exposed Heyst’s philosophical underpinnings, to present love as the force that draws Heyst not only out of his isolation but out of his inaction as well. That the choice ends tragically is hardly proof that Heyst’s earlier detached cynicism was the more correct attitude. For the real lesson that he learns from the experience, as Davidson later reports, is “woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love — and to put its trust in life!” For Heyst, the tragedy is that he has learned this too late. Because this bold statement of Victory comes at the end of Conrad’s long process of meticulously working out the details of this philosophical and ethical struggle, he earns the right to be so bold.
Victory is not a melodrama, or a morality play, or a psychological thriller, but it is, in the best sense of the phrase, a philosophical novel that explores the theme of human moral involvement in an indifferent, if not outrightly absurd, universe. Conrad achieves this in an entertainingly suspenseful story that does not preach, but does state its case in clear and obvious terms expressing Conrad’s view that action is always morally ambiguous, even though humans beings are always called upon to act.
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